Triple Play, page 6
part #1 of Jake Hines Series
The Chief shook his head, grinning. “Anyway! I told Les, I don’t wanna hear you tell me that Amy Nguyen can’t shoot. I said you been an FTO nine years, and you even taught Hisey to use deodorant and quit picking his nose, you can sure as hell teach this intelligent motivated woman to fire a Glock.”
“Les probably ought to take another look at Hisey,” I said, “he scratches his crotch and hums now.”
“Yeah, well,” McCafferty grimaced and switched gears. “So, you had some fireworks when the wife came to identify the body, I hear.”
“She was next of kin,” I said defensively, “what choice did I have?”
“Did I say you did wrong? Just want you to realize I had several calls already. Her mother and all the neighbor ladies are up in arms about her gettin’ shocked like that. And of course the newspaper’s been out there, and the TV station’s talking to them now, so expect big stories tonight. They’ve got all the facts on the mutilation now, and they’re making the most of it. You got anything besides the ID?
“Not really, but how about that ID? Got it off the fingerprints the first day, how often does that happen? But listen, I been wanting to ask you. Whaddya think, Frank, of the odds of a guy wearing a softball uniform with nothing on underneath?”
“Under one of them stretch suits? You mean no jockstrap or–”
“Or jockey shorts or even a fig leaf, Frank. Exactly. Nothing but skin under that uniform. You ever know anybody to play like that? Also, Frank, this sounds crazy but Pokey says there’s lividity in the bottoms of his feet. Like he stood up after he was dead.”
“You’re right, it sounds crazy. And playing softball in a stretch uniform with no underwear is out of the question, at least in Rutherford. But then, Jesus, everything about this case is off the wall. What about that picture we found on the body, anything on that yet?”
“No prints. My records search hasn’t arrived yet. I want to detail a team to go house-to-house around the park today, see if anybody saw anything, okay?”
“Sure, I told you, all the help you need, just ask.”
“Good. Well, I need to make about a thousand phone calls, Frank, so…?”
“Right. Keep me posted.”
It was slow going. Nobody on the team lists knew Jim Wahler. Reluctantly, after procrastinating for an hour, I called his wife, who gave me the address of Wahler’s one-room efficiency, and then suddenly, fiercely, insisted on being present while I searched it.
She brought along her sister, Candy, a big, startling girl in skin-tight purple Spandex pants, with black-rimmed eyes, brown lipstick and teased hair. The two stood, thick-limbed and glowering, while the building’s owner opened the room. A couple of pairs of pants and half a dozen frayed shirts hung in the shallow closet, some rancid socks were strewn around the floor. There was no wallet, no money, nothing of any value.
Tammy’s didn’t try to hide her disappointment. She kept turning over the few pitiful relics of her husband’s life, looking for salvage. The worthless contents of the room seemed to chafe against the wounds she was already nursing.
“Look at this!” she said, shaking a couple of ratty pairs of boxer shorts at her sister, “nothing but junk!” Candy watched her morosely, clucking sympathetically and shaking her towering hair-do.
I secured the place with a “Crime Scene” lock, and called in a request for a technician to come out and dust for prints. The owner protested she was already losing the two months’ rent that Wahler had owed her, and I promised she could have her property back tomorrow.
“I need to ask you some questions,” I told Tammy. “You suppose you and your sister could follow me down to the station?”
“Well…” She looked away evasively. “My baby’s pretty fussy today, I shouldn’t be gone too long.”
“I could follow you to your house,” I said, “if that would be better.”
“This isn’t a very good time,” she said, “can’t it wait?”
“It’ll only take a few minutes,” I said, but I could feel her hostility rising, and I didn’t want to risk another outburst. Finally I plopped my spiral notebook on top of my car, and interviewed her right there on the sidewalk, under her sister’s baleful eye.
I didn’t get much. Yesterday’s hysterics had burned off the shock of her husband’s murder, and whatever lingering affection she might have felt for him seemed to have gone with it. Now she was grimly concentrated on survival for herself and her child. She had leftover grudges about his cheating ways, vague suspicions about who he might have spent her child support money on, but little real knowledge of his habits or whereabouts for the last year. She couldn’t come up with the name of a known girlfriend, or even a close male crony.
Her husband, she repeated more than once, had been a screw-up. He drank some, smoked a lot of pot, was hell to wake up in the morning. He was chronically late for work, grabbed every excuse to call in sick, and was, consequently, often unemployed. When he worked, it was usually in construction trades. She gave me the names of two contractors and a lumberyard.
They had been married three years. Of his record of juvenile crime, she seemed completely ignorant but not very surprised. She denied knowing of any crimes he might have committed since their marriage, though. He had never played softball while she knew him. She could not remember his mother’s address, but promised to look it up and phone it to the station.
“If you find any money,” she said, regarding me narrowly, ” it’s legally mine, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I shrugged. “We haven’t found a wallet so it’s still possible that’ll turn up…”
“Uh-huh. Or if one of the companies where he worked had an insurance policy or like that. Or…” Her whole thick body began to shake, suddenly, and her face puffed up and got pink and feverish-looking. “It seems like there oughta be something,” she protested, sounding choked.
“Mrs. Wahler, did you call the number on the card I left with you yesterday? Do you still have the card? Here,”–I gave another one to Candy–”you know, Crime Victims’ Services will co-ordinate other agencies you need for financial help, and medical care for your baby and…you help her make that call, will you?” I asked her sister, who took the card but glared at it suspiciously. Life had evidently taught Candy to beware of taking paper from strangers.
It was clearly not a good time to ask Tammy The Question, but I had to do it before we started down the slippery slope of hysterics again. I took a deep breath and said, “One thing, Mrs. Wahler, I do have to ask you, for the record, where were you Monday night from, say, about nine o’clock till midnight?”
Her head came up and her brown eyes blazed indignantly through the tears that stood in them. “Me? You want to know where I was? I’ll tell you where I was, Mr. Smartass, I was home taking care of my baby where I belonged, where that no-good husband of mine has never been since his son was born, that’s where I was, and you can ask anybody, ask my Mom, I talked to her on the phone, ask Candy here, she stopped by, because she knew I’d be alone like he’s always left me, that filthy liar…” Enormous tears spouted out of her eyes; they rolled off her chin and the end of her nose, spattering her blouse. Her voice rose to a keening lament choked with incomprehensible phrases, knots of impotent rage. Tammy was in a lot of trouble. The sonofabitch had died and left her with no place to put her anger.
I wrote, “Mother and sister will support her alibi for the hours surrounding the murder.”
Candy put an arm around her and glared at me. “Boy, men are such damn bastards,” she said. I stood looking back at her helplessly, not knowing what to say. I closed my notebook and said, “Well, thanks, Mrs. Wahler, if you think of anything else here’s my card…”
Neither one of them would take it. They left me standing there like a dork, with my card-holding hand outstretched, while Candy, hugging Tammy close to her, slid into their battered sedan from the passenger’s side, and drove noisily away on bald tires.
A fat FedEx package was waiting in my office when I got back. I cleared everything else off my desk, switched on the overhead lights, and laid out Trudy Hanson’s pictures in rows. I had to get accustomed to the gore and calamity all over again. Crime scenes never seem to photograph quite the way I remember them. In the color shots, the bright lights of the camera rendered the blood-soaked clothes and body in brighter shades than I had ever seen at the park; the victim’s face, especially, looked much redder.
There was a second set, of black and white glossies. With the sharp highlights and deep shadows that artificial lighting cast, those pictures were shocking in a new way. Black-and-white crime scene photos have an innate sordidness about them, a context they bring with them, I guess, from old tabloid front pages. And the voyeurism of the camera heightened the gross obscenity of the way Wahler’s body had been mutilated and then posed.
I peered at them till my eyes watered, walked to the window and gazed out for a few minutes, went back to my desk and stared again. After ten more minutes I shook my head, gathered the pictures in a pile, went down the hall for a cup of coffee, and came back and scrutinized each picture again under a magnifying glass. In a couple of the black and white shots, I thought I could see faint ridges that could arguably be the edges of wheel marks near the body. Otherwise there was nothing, factually, in the whole stack that I hadn’t noticed before.
But pondering the pictures had changed how I felt about the crime. On Sunday night, in the dark, the grotesquely mutilated body had seemed like the work of a madman running amok. Now, looking at the softball bat so carefully posed where the missing genitals had been, and the Polaroid picture pinned to the pocket of the suit, I started to believe I was looking at the result of a carefully planned crime, one that had been done to make a point. The arrangement of the body wasn’t at all accidental, that much was clear. The more I stared at it, the more I thought I could see a message, like a note written in code on the ground. Somebody had used James Wahler’s body to say – what?
I was going through them all again with my magnifying glass when Mabel plopped a thick fan-fold of flimsy paper in front of me, saying, “Here, Sherlock, hot off the fax.”
After a long conversation with a database searcher at BCA, I had requested records of mutilation crimes, in Minnesota and the five surrounding states, in the last three years. All database searches are composed of a series of frustrating compromises: cast your net too wide, and the search will yield so much it’s unwieldy; place too many conditions in your query, and you’ll come up almost empty. Computers are wonderful storage bins, but they still don’t make intuitive leaps. This search, I saw from the size of the paper stack, had yielded plenty of shocking events. Now my task would be to eliminate the ones that had no features resembling my case, and follow up on the ones that seemed similar.
Putting the pictures aside, I forced myself to read through the whole horrifying list, marking with orange highlighter the few cases that were in any way comparable to the one I was working on. Everything on the list included mutilation, described with devastating accuracy. None concerned softball paraphernalia.
By six-thirty I had a raging headache and a whole new view of the possibilities of depravity. I carried home a small pizza and a large bottle of zinfandel, drank wine in front of the TV set until the picture skewed hopelessly out of focus, and groped my way to bed.
I woke at four a.m. feeling liverish and threatened. I stumbled to the bathroom, peed with my eyes closed, hurried back to bed and plunged deep under the covers, determined to sleep another two hours. After fifteen minutes of twitching I gave it up, and got in the shower. Standing under the hot water, I began composing kinky combinations for BCA to use in an all-states search: try sports equipment/genitalia; photography/sex/softball; how about parks/penises with mutilation/memorabilia?
Squeaky clean but critically low on energy, I drove to an all-night truck-stop on the highway, and ordered thousands of calories’ worth of sausage, fried eggs, muffins and milk. Except for a couple of burly cross-country movers at the counter, and a boothful of hilarious drunks trying to sober up on scrambled eggs, I had the bleak pre-dawn grittiness of the place to myself. It seemed like a good chance to read press accounts of the Jim Wahler murder, so I went outside and got the Rutherford paper from the rack in front.
“Mutilation” seemed a much ruder word on the front page of our normally sedate local newspaper than it did in department records. The picture under the headline was even more shocking, to me; it showed Jim and Tammy together, smiling radiantly. It must have been a wedding or engagement photo, probably the only likeness she had of him. A big, current photo on the lower half of the page showed Tammy holding her sad-looking son. She had put on make-up, and Candy must have helped her with her hair.
The stories occupied almost the entire front page, and were substantially correct as far as they went. I was pleased to see there was still no mention of the picture pinned to the uniform. A feature story, under a subhead, about law enforcement efforts in the case, included a small picture of Frank talking to reporters. He photographs a little fatter than he is, but it wasn’t a bad-looking picture; he was wearing his basic hold-the-fort look. At least they hadn’t caught him smiling. Rutherford people watch a lot of TV during the long winters, and like the rest of America they’ve become concerned, lately, about the eroding social values they see on the box. As a result they’re looking for the gravest decorum in law enforcement personnel, and judges who hand down maximum sentences. Rutherford citizens are not impressed by Rutherford’s low crime rate; they think it should be zero.
At my desk at sunup, feeling keen and virtuous, I got out a new, bright blue, three-ring binder, pasted a neat white label across the spine and labeled it, “Wahler.” I turned on my word processor and began transcribing my notes. I wrote the whole story of the investigation in chronological order. Then I broke down the same information into tabbed sections, marked, “Autopsy,” “Data Search,” “Fingerprints,” “Interviews,” “Photos.” By the time the day shift began coming to work, I had a fattening file of perfectly typed information, organized so I could find everything in it with no hesitation. Unfortunately, I thought as I positioned the blue notebook neatly on the upper left corner of my desk, the whole damn thing adds up to zippo. I was no closer to knowing who killed Jim Wahler, or why, than when I first saw him propped on the ground.
I called St. Paul, to put in an early request for a database search, and was pleased to find Tom Eckert, my favorite geek, already at his desk. I told him about my “message” hunch. Message killings, Tom said, often involved some aspect of religion gone over the top, a cult thing that had gotten out of hand. Did I want to look for some of those?
“Um. Maybe,” I said. “Let me run a couple other ideas past you before we decide.” I gave him the list of queries I’d composed in the shower; he selected a sampling and agreed to try them, as well as cults.
“Am I limiting it too much?” I asked him.
“Believe me,” he said, “in an all-states search, this’ll be more than you want to read through.”
He agreed to forward my request for further information on the three cases I had highlighted off yesterday’s list. They were not very similar to my case, but they each had one or two elements in common with mine, and I wanted more information about the victims’ clothing and cause of death before I eliminated them completely. In the absence of substantive clues, I was following scanty leads.
Yesterday’s interviews of the householders living around the park had yielded one lead. I decided it would save time to combine the follow-up call on that person with interviews of Wahler’s employers. Carrying my spiral notebook and list of addresses, I went down and found my car, got in it and opened all the windows. The temperature card under the clock at the bank said seventy-four degrees. Fat robins were picking worms out of lawns, and a woodpecker was attacking the light pole behind the library. The smell of lilacs hung thick and intoxicating over everything.
Sometimes, on late-May mornings in Rutherford, you can almost hear the grass grow. For a short couple of weeks, the weather probably affects our portion of the gross national product; no matter what you’re supposed to be doing, part of you wants to sit still and feel spring happen. The lush fertility of ideal weather, working its magic on six feet of black earth, can simply destroy your determination to rush around being useful. I stretched luxuriously, and made up my mind to go fishing on Sunday without fail.
Dialing up Minnesota Public Radio, I got a classical music program, turned the volume to medium, and drove, without rushing, toward my first address. I don’t really know squat about classical music, but I like the sounds. It’s one of those things I’ve decided to learn more about as soon as life slows down a little; it’s on The List. Most working Americans have a list like mine, I think; we all intend to read more about the Civil War, or take pottery classes or learn to tell the major composers apart. One of the women on the night support team is always planning to read the Russian novelists, and I dated a girl last winter who was making a list of books about Madagascar. She didn’t check them out of libraries or buy any of them, just kept a growing list that she intended to read as soon as she got time. I haven’t made a whole lot of progress on my own list, so far, but I enjoy adding to it. I figure it’s going to be a better retirement project than building birdhouses in the garage.
Neil’s Lumber had changed hands since Jim Wahler worked there, and the old records were gone with the previous owner. A sweetly smiling red-haired girl ran the office for the new owner; she wore one of those loose cotton sleeveless shifts that show another cotton garment, like a sports bra, underneath. Her pale, round arms emerged from their wonderland of double cotton, like the right answer to a question I hadn’t realized I’d been asking. I watched the thin gold chain she wore around her neck move with the pulse in her throat, while I asked her many careful questions about where those pesky old records might have gone. By the time we concluded she was not going to be able to help me, she had already helped me so much that I was only just able to get the door open, and I departed Neil’s lumberyard aglow with youth and vigor. The next two names were small contractors who had to be traced to their job sites, following sparse clues to poorly marked locations. On a different day it might have been a nightmare job, but in this perfect weather it was like a delightful paper chase, with quirky directions and large, interesting machines for added ploys.
