Triple Play, page 12
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
“Seven too early? Gonna take a little time.”
“Seven’s fine.” He meant it. The last time Frank slept in was probably during the Kennedy administration. “Jake? You talked to the FBI yet?”
“Not exactly. BCA is searching their records for me. It’s one of the things we have to decide about, calling in the FBI If this really is a serial killer, we’ll want all the help we can get, right?”
“Sure. And I like to initiate the action from here, you know. Not have them call us.” St. Paul sent the Feds down to take over a kidnapping case from Frank, a couple of years ago. They were pretty condescending. I guess it still smarts.
“I know. Let’s decide in the morning.” I paid my tab and drove out to 24th Street, where Jay was watching for me through the sidelight by his front door; he’d been closed for ten minutes. He turned the key in the lock, handed out my pictures without a word, and locked up again immediately. I glanced at the prints, at curbside, just enough to insure they were adequate. I wanted to save first impressions till I was in my office in good light.
I was still a little early, so I decided on a fresh-air fix. I parked three blocks from the lab, and strolled the rest of the way through the fragrant late-May dusk. Fat was sizzling on a backyard barbeque somewhere, a dog barked aimlessly, two cars full of adolescents paused in an intersection to yell at each other and then speed away, leaving rubber. Five pre-teen boys on rollerblades blithely defied death on the parking ramp behind Security Bank. A pair of lovers nuzzled along the sidewalk past Methodist Hospital, oblivious to everything but passion. Spring had turned all our tickers up.
The lab parking lot was empty when I walked into it; I stood by the door a couple of minutes, till Pokey pulled in and parked.
“Need to ask you something,” I said, when he walked up to me.
“Oh?” He got three syllables into it, expressing everything from, “I should hope so,” to “This should be a pip.”
“This morning at the park? When I showed you what was behind the mask? I got the impression maybe you’d seen that before.”
“Ah, yah.” He sighed. “Plenty times. Sorry to say. That stuff happening in Bosnia last year, on TV every night, everybody yelling outrage, outrage? Is nothing new, Jake.” His foxy little face, half-lit by the glow from a street lamp, looked rueful and weary. He shrugged and twisted his neck around, like somebody trying to get out of a yoke. “Never expected to see it here, though. In this nice, peaceful town…” He shook his head. “Very surprising.” He stared off into the lilacs at the edge of the parking lot for a couple of minutes, his lips working. Then he added, “Is usually where there’s war, you know? Two sides, or three or four, they get plenty of hate going. People get convinced they got grievance, other side is evil, then they violate their dead that way.”
“Okay,” I said, leaning toward him, hurrying now because I saw the BCA van pulling in, “But what does it say, Pokey? What’s the message?”
“Message?” he stared at me a minute, then nodded approvingly. “Ah. Well. Lotta times, you’re right, Jake, genital mutilation is response to rape. Like, maybe, one side overruns a place, rapes a bunch of the women, other side takes town back or captures some of the troops, they’ll cut off their cocks and stick ‘em down their throats like that. To say, ‘Here, you so proud of this pecker, chew on it a while.’ Is biggest possible injury to give back for worst possible insult, yah?”
“Uh-huh. So you’re saying…revenge.”
“Well, yah, revenge or…hate, anyway, to say dirty dog, you lower than a pig…people don’t do terrible things like that just for fun of it. Or not where I come from, anyway,” he made a sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh, “who knows why American would do it? Is big strange country, lotsa possibilities I guess.” We watched the BCA crew beginning to unload their baskets of goodies. Pokey sighed again, more cheerfully this time.
“Is sure cute, that long yellow braid, huh?” he mused. Trudy looked up and waved at us, and Pokey hustled over, saying, “My goodness, Trudy, so many pieces! Here, let me help you with that. Here, come on, Jake, help Trudy carry all this heavy stuff.”
“Glad to see you,” I said, and dropped one of her bags. Old Jake, all smooth moves and original lines.
She began handing me zippered nylon camera bags, saying, “Oh, aren’t you nice! Oh, are you sure you can carry one more?” as if I was King Kong clambering up the Empire State Building on her behalf. She was wearing a pink sweater that fit really well.
Jimmy protested, from behind his own mountain of equipment, “Jeez, guys, what is this, sex discrimination?” and Pokey assured him, “Damn betcha, better believe it.” Then, relenting, he handed me a couple more of Trudy’s bags and picked up some of Jimmy’s stuff. We all staggered toward the glass doors which, suddenly illuminated as we moved toward them, revealed Dr. Stuart with his hand on the switch, with two immaculate white-coated assistants beside him in the shining hall.
Jimmy threw a fit when he learned that the two local doctors had gone ahead with an autopsy on the brain and internal organs without him.
“This will compromise all my findings!” he wailed. “I’ll be dealing with second-hand information!”
Dr. Stuart stared him down, cold and sharp as ice. “All our findings are fully documented, signed off by Dr. Pokornoskovic and me, as well as one or more of my assistants. And they’re certainly more valid than if we’d waited till you got here, Mr. Chang.” All glinty and gray behind his squeaky-clean glasses, he put a tiny emphasis on the word “mister,” that made Trudy Hanson look up from her camera, then go back to shooting pictures wearing a tiny smile.
Pokey was helping her take pictures of the victim’s neck. He wanted to be sure she showed the thin line left by the garrotte, but it was difficult because of the fat rolls. Once they agreed they’d done the best they could with the outside of the neck, they spent a long time positioning lights to show the broken hyoid bone.
Jimmy began taking blood and tissue samples, looking aggrieved. Then Stuart told him about the Wahler body being gone, and the need to get DNA material from what was probably a week-old penis. The two of them became absorbed in arcanum about molecular decomposition. I couldn’t follow where their whirlwind of Latin and initials led them, but it was fun to watch the pursuit of truth melting the frost off their relationship.
Trudy finished fingerprinting and got ready to haul all her gear back outside.
“Let me help you,” I said. “You really ought to have a little burro that you bring along in the back of that van.”
She giggled. “Jimmy and I have been thinking about a robot,” she said. “Sort of R2D2 with maybe eight arms.”
“One could be a snow shovel,” I suggested.
“Well, right, and one a clothespin, for evidence bags,” she said, “and there could be one with ten fingers to hold both our coffee cups, we thought.” Back inside, she began asking Jimmy, “These ready to go? How about this?” and we made another trip to the parking lot, enlarging the task list for the robot as we worked. Trudy wanted to free up two hands for fingerprinting, and I suggested we make one arm end in a hand with a telephone receiver, and program his chip to handle routine calls. He could cluck sympathetically to people whose stolen items had not been found, and assure anxious callers that a capable staff was working on the crime and we would keep the public fully informed. I did a demo call between R2D2 and Millicent Porter. By the time we had the van loaded, we were having quite a jolly time. We got back inside the lab just as the doctors were getting ready to put the body away.
“So now,” I said quickly, “shouldn’t we all go some place for coffee, before we send this poor girl back out on the road to drive all the way to St. Paul in the dark?”
Jimmy Chang started looking at his watch, his prim little over-achiever’s mouth open to protest that there was no time for that. But Pokey stifled his disapproval, throwing a convivial arm over Jimmy’s slender shoulders and shouting, “Damn tootin’! All finished with blood and guts, time for dessert, yah?” He herded everybody out to the parking lot, loaded Chang into his car and got Stuart to agree to follow him, and told me to meet him at Charlie’s. I helped Trudy tenderly into my car, a somewhat ludicrous gesture to make toward a paid-up member of the Teamsters’ Union, but it felt good. She was too good a driver for me to try any funny detours, but I made the two blocks to the restaurant as slow as I could.
It was past eleven o’clock, and we were all on the edge of exhaustion, I guess, so that as soon as we sat down and relaxed, we began to get giddy over trifles. Jimmy insisted he just wanted a cup of tea, but when Pokey insisted he should keep his strength up, he went apeshit and ordered Black Forest cake a la mode. After that we all competed to try to find the most sumptuous desserts on the menu, piling one wretched excess on top of another. I got a sundae so large it came in a soup bowl, with five different sauces and chopped nuts. Even Jason Stuart unbent; he asked for decaffeinated coffee with his cheesecake and then said, “Oh, hell, gimme the real stuff,” and we gave him a deafening round of applause.
When we had reached satiety and were dipping our napkins in our water glasses to sluice off some of the sticky places, Pokey asked idly into a sudden silence, “The baseball games these local guys play, they pretty good? Like paid guys on TV?”
“Well…if you’re asking about the guys we’ve been talking to this week, Pokey,” I said, “they don’t play baseball. They play softball.”
“Aah. Is much different?”
“Sure. They use a bigger ball, a little softer than a baseball, and a smaller field. And the pitcher throws underhand.”
“Used to be a damn good game, though,” Dr. Stuart said, “when it was past-pitch. But all that changed in the late sixties, early seventies, when the new rules came in. Slow-pitch softball is for wusses,” Jason Stuart said firmly.
“Oh, well, now,” Jimmy said, “I don’t know about that. I belonged to a slow-pitch league in Minneapolis for a couple of years and we had some darn good players.”
“Three balls, two strikes, quit after the seventh inning if the time’s up? Pitiful,” Stuart said, his face a mask of contempt. It was fun watching him get excited. “They just changed everything to make it easier for the women’s teams, if you ask me.”
“Oh, sure,” Trudy said, “now we’re going to blame it on the women.”
“Don’t take no insults, sweetheart,” Pokey said, “give him who-for.”
“You mean what-for,” I said.
“He does?” Jimmy asked. “How can you be sure?” Was the moon full? Jimmy Chang had made a joke!
“Now fast pitch,” Stuart said, undeterred, “we used to have some really hairy contests, Pokey. Wish you could have seen the game in those days. An underhand pitcher can throw a ball so fast you can’t see it, sometimes. And when somebody really connects with a bat to a ball going a hundred miles an hour, Holy Moses, that baby will travel.”
“What position did you play?” I asked him. I was really interested; it was hard to imagine this tightly-wrapped guy ever playing anything. Besides, I wanted to keep him talking. I was sitting next to Trudy in the crowded booth; she had wonderful soft places, and smelled good.
“Second base, usually. Or shortstop. I liked second base best because you get to do two jobs really, you know, cover the base and the infield both. Plenty of action. I made two outs of a triple play, once,” he announced, smiling dreamily at the memory.
“Really? I’ve always dreamed of being in on a triple play,” I said. “Runners on what, first and second?”
“Yup. The batter hit a line drive right to me. Really burned it in, damn near knocked me down. But I caught it, so that put the hitter out, of course. Then, well, runners can’t lead off, you know, in softball, the way they can in baseball,” he explained to Pokey, who was already beginning to look like a man who’d heard more than he ever needed to know about this subject. “But they can start to run as soon as the pitcher throws the ball, and of course both of those guys did, that day. I tagged the second base runner before he could get back. Actually,” he said, staring into the middle distance, galvanized by a memory that must be over thirty years old, “I coulda had the whole thing unassisted, if I’d been sure…The first base runner had run a little too far. By the time he got himself turned around and headed back to first, I had the other runner out, and I could have caught him, I was fast in those days. But the coach and everybody on the team started yelling ‘Throw it, throw it!’ so I did, and the first baseman got credit for the third out.” He shook his head mournfully.
“Even so, you must have felt terrific,” Jimmy said. “Did you win the game?”
“Huh?” It took Dr. Stuart a few seconds to get back to us. “I don’t know. I don’t remember anything else about that game, just that one play.”
“You ever play on a team?” I asked Trudy. I didn’t care what she answered. I just wanted to keep on sitting the way we were.
She shook her head vigorously. “I don’t like team sports. I like to go at my own pace, skiing, swimming, that kind of stuff.”
That gave Jimmy Chang the chance he’d been waiting for, to look at his watch and say, “Listen, we better go at our own pace back to St. Paul before it gets any later, huh?” Something ought to be done about Jimmy Chang’s unremitting work ethic, I decided. The poor lad was headed for burn-out, and taking this delightful young woman with him. We all started pushing chairs back and groping for the check, till Pokey announced he had already paid it.
“Decided I better show some appreciation,” he said grandly, “getting all this extra business from department, and then lessons about baseball free gratis on top.”
“Softball, Pokey, geez, pay attention, willya? Softball,” I said. But he wasn’t listening. He was winking at Trudy, who rewarded him with a conspiratorial giggle that made his wrinkles blush.
8
✜
Saturday morning’s blazing dawn looked like the backdrop for a tourism brochure featuring happy, whiskery guys in fishing boats. I thought longingly about the river as I drove downtown, and took another long wistful sniff of lilac-scented morning before I went inside. Once I reached the seasonless fluorescent-lighted dead air of the second floor, though, distractions faded and the job started cranking me up. I made a fresh pot of coffee, filled my mug to the brim, and began organizing the material I wanted to show Frank.
Rutherford PD occupies the whole second floor of the Municipal Building. The office space downstairs is split between the City and County, and when they’re closed, on weekends and holidays, RPD has the building to itself. So one compensation for working on Saturday is the quiet, private feel my office has on those days. With the door closed door between me and the hustle at the duty desk, and not a peep coming up from the tax assessor’s office below, Saturday morning is Concentration City.
I spread my LaPlante pictures out, turned on all the lights in the room, and stared at them for ten minutes. In a couple of the shots, I convinced myself I could see a couple of fragmented wheel prints in the sand near the body; I put those prints on top, to show Frank. I was rearranging the Wahler prints when Frank stuck his head in, said, “Let’s use my office,” and went on down the hall.
Oh, hell! It was only twenty minutes to seven! Why was he here so early? I felt like one of the three little pigs: can’t get ahead of that damn wolf. I wanted a few more minutes to consider the FBI option, and ponder my growing list of riddles. But I could feel him in there, drumming on his desk, staring at the door, and I didn’t want him to start off impatient. I took down my three-ring binders, stacked the pictures and printout and steno pad on top, and muscled the armload out the door.
The hall was filled with the clamor of night duty squads checking out. Vince Greeley fell into step with me, saying, “Hey, Jake! Whaddya think of this crazy week? Aside from the crazy hours and the crazy phone calls and the crazy killers, it’s not a bad week, huh?”
“Hey, no sweat,” I said, “I’m gonna have enough vacation time piled up to go to Papua New Guinea for a month.”
“Pa-who-a New-what’s-a? You better get a new travel agent, pal, you’re way out of the mainstream. Boy,” he jabbered along down the hall with me, gregarious as most cops are at the end of a night shift, glad to leave the lonely dark behind, “people are really up in arms about these killings, aren’t they? My neighbors are all over me, you’d think I whacked these guys myself personally. They keep grabbing me every time I go out to get in my car, saying, ‘What about this, Vince, we gonna be safe in our beds here or what?’ I told my wife, I think I better figure out some way to go to the grocery store in-cog-nee-toe.”
“Uh-huh. Vince? Question I’ve been wanting to ask you. You ever see Wahler and LaPlante together? Were they friends, that you know of?”
“Not that I knew,” Greeley said, “Best I can remember, Jake, I never laid eyes on James Wahler till I found him dead. But Frenchy LaPlante, you could just about count on him being at most of the Rutherford games, and around the players’ hangouts after. He kind of hero-worshipped athletes, liked to be around ‘em and talk to ‘em.”
“But there was no connection between the two men that you know of, till they turned up dead in the same uniform?”
“Guess it is the same uniform, isn’t it? What team’s it belong to, by the way?”
“I still don’t know. Doesn’t quite match any of the schools. None of the City League players that I’ve talked to have identified it. And there’s no name on it, so…”
Vince laughed and punched my shoulder. “Life’s a bitch and then you die, right? Hang in there, buddy.” He headed for the lockers.
“Could I ask Harley, you think? He still around?” I called after him. Vince turned at the door of the locker room and said, “Mundt took a personal day last night. He’s got this weekend off and he’s helping his brother build a garage. I worked with Bailey last night.” He crossed his eyes and pantomimed shooting himself in the ear, “I been listening to no-good-wife complaints for eight hours.” I laughed and hurried on down the hall.
