Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) (2 page)

“Detective McDeiss told me I could ask you nicely,” said Armbruster, “but that if you said no, I was authorized to brain you with a nightstick and drag you by the cuff of your pants.”

“Cuffs on a tuxedo? McDeiss’s idea of style is no style.”

“So you know him.”

“Yeah, I know him. Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, at least there’s that.” I downed the drink, felt sweetness fill my nostrils as the bubbles massaged my throat, and handed the glass off to some councilman’s wife who had gotten too close to our little scene. I leaned toward her and whispered in her ear and watched her face collapse in shock.

“All righty then,” I said to the detective. “Lead on, Macduff.”

“The name’s Armbruster,” said the detective.

“Close enough.”

As I followed Detective Armbruster out of the ballroom, the uniforms trailing after us, I tried to make it look like I was an important personage being called to some important duty, but from the looks sent my way everyone could see through my facade.

Whatever jig I had been dancing was up. Whatever could go wrong had. Because McDeiss was a homicide detective, which meant somebody was dead and they thought I had something to do with it.

And it turned out they were right.

CHAPTER 3

RED CARPET

T
he squat female uniform sat next to me in the back of the police cruiser, keeping her gaze forward, as if I had a horrible mole on my face and she was trying not to stare. Detective Armbruster peered out the passenger-side window while the uniform who was driving relayed our position on the radio.

“Hold the son of a bitch at the tape until I get there,” crackled a voice over the speaker. The voice was thick and hoarse, and I recognized it from its utter unpleasantness.

“The big bear’s in a mood,” said the driver, looking at me in the rearview.

“Isn’t he always?” I said.

“True. But tonight he seems to have a hard-on for you. When he bellowed your name, he sounded like he had been gutshot. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.”

“You couldn’t handle my shoes.”

I spotted the woman looking at my little bows. When she glanced up and caught me catching her, she said, “Really?”

“Quite the shindig you was at, hey?” said the driver.

“If you like those things,” I said.

“Cash bar?”

“Open.”

“Sweet.”

“Where exactly are we going again?”

No response.

“If you won’t tell me where we’re going,” I said, “could you at least tell me what this is all about?”

“No,” said Armbruster.

“You just can’t drag me out of the stinking Governor’s Ball without telling me anything. I have rights.”

“You have the right to shut up.”

“What about at least telling me who was murdered?”

“Here’s the thing, Carl,” said Armbruster, turning around and giving me the glare—you know the glare, the one they teach at the police academy and test for on the detective examination, the hard-eyed squint that makes you feel all of two feet tall. “We were hoping you could tell us.”

We ended up on Twentieth Street, not far from my office. A pair of cop cars with their flashing red-and-blues narrowed the northbound traffic to one lane. A pair of police officers kept a small crowd on the civilian side of the double band of yellow tape stretched across the mouth of a narrow alleyway. As I was escorted to the tape, I saw an old beater sitting in the alley. Set up beyond the car was a rack of arc lights focused against a brick wall, giving the crime scene, with its bright, washed-out colors, its clutch of neck-craning onlookers, its uniformed police acting like ushers at Grauman’s, the feel of a movie set, which seemed about right. It was the same heightened sense of reality I felt at the Governor’s Ball. It’s all confused these days, news and fashion, crime and entertainment and politics, it’s all of one piece. In my tuxedo, it felt like I was on the red carpet.

“Keep him here,” said Armbruster to the two cops before he ducked beneath the tape. I watched as he headed around the old parked car and toward a hulking man in a plaid jacket and a porkpie hat, standing with his back to us under the lights.

“The Governor’s Ball,” said the tall cop. “I should get myself invited to a party like that. I always appreciate an open bar. They got it made, those stinking politicians. Maybe after a few more years on the force, I’ll run for something myself.”

“A pork chop?” said the woman.

Detective Armbruster approached the hulking figure and started talking. The hulking figure stayed motionless as the detective gestured toward me.

“A council seat or something,” said the tall cop. “I mean, you want to make money, that’s the way to make money. And their pensions—forget about it—they make ours look like little pink piggy banks filled with nickels.”

“What makes you think you could get elected?” said the woman.

“What’s so hard about it? Shake a few hands, kiss a few babies, tell them anything but the truth. You tell the truth, you’re screwed, but anything else is fair game. Lower taxes, better schools, more police. And once you get in, Boot, let me tell you, it’s like a license to steal. One for you, and ten for me.”

“You couldn’t get elected bathroom attendant.”

The hulking man handed something to Armbruster, turned around, and headed toward us. With his forward slouch, the jut of his hat, and the angle of the lights, his face was a fierce smudge of shadow.

“I don’t know about that,” said the tall man. “I was talking to this guy the other day at the bar—”

“A cop?”

“No, you know, just a guy. Big fat fellow with a name like a rock, some politico or something. And he told me I got possibilities.”

“Was he drunk?” asked Boot.

“Drunk enough to do the buying. And right there at the bar, he told me I could go places. He told me I had the common touch. How do you like that?”

“Is there anything more common than the common touch?” said Boot.

“It got me thinking, you know. What do those guys got that I don’t got?”

“You mean other than a clue?” said Boot.

The hulking man came closer and then stopped about ten feet away from us as the red and blue lights washed across his face in waves, exposing his sour, mashed features. He was staring up at me from beneath his great protruding brow.

“Hey, Cinderella,” rasped McDeiss.

“You talking to me?” I said.

“Who else you see dressed like they’re in some stinking fairy tale? Get the hell over here.”

I looked at the two cops standing beside me, still jabbering back and forth.

“You guys ought to find yourselves a room and get it over with,” I said before ducking below the tape, heading to the bright lights of the crime scene, and being hit in the face with a stench that sent me staggering.

It smells sweet and coppery, like a rotting ham-and-cheese on toast, smothered with foul. It’s hard to describe but easy to recognize, because deep in the rat’s tail of our brain stem we have evolved a revulsion to it that sparks a chain reaction right into our guts. It affects us like no other aroma in the world; Limburger cheese may set us to gagging, but the cloying scent of human death coats our nostrils, and clings to the backs of our throats, and drives its inevitable nausea straight to our souls.

Or maybe it was the sight of McDeiss that was roiling my stomach.

“Whoa there, Carl,” growled McDeiss, catching me midstagger and saving me from an embarrassing face-first dive. “Take it easy there, boy.”

I looked behind me. “Damn crack in the asphalt.”

“I understand,” he said, and I suspected he did.

Detective McDeiss was a bear of a man, with catcher’s mitts for hands, a face like a boiled potato, and a taste for ugly in sport coats and hats. We had worked more than a few cases together, on opposite sides, and he had made it clear that he didn’t like me much and trusted me even less. But while we hadn’t become pals, I liked to think we had developed a mutual respect, though maybe it was only that he respected my utter shamelessness and I respected that he could pound the stuffing out of me if I ever pulled a big enough turkey out of my ass.

“How was the bash?” said McDeiss.

“You yanked me out before I had a chance to find out.”

“I did you a favor. Stinking flock of vultures.”

“I think I saw your chief there.”

From where I stood now, I could see where the arc lights were aiming, at something covered with a bright-blue tarp, slumped against a brick wall. I turned away from the thing and toward the crowd, but it didn’t help with the smell. “How’d you find me anyway?”

“Your phone.”

“I didn’t get a call.”

“I didn’t say I called. Just a few weeks ago you were scouring the courthouse for pity cases and now here you are, fresh from hobnobbing with the elite, wearing a full-blown monkey suit. Who did you kill to rise so quickly?”

“Is that an official query from the Homicide Division?”

“That tux a rental?”

“Detective, please. I have standards.”

“I know you do, and I know what they are. You go to the party right from your office?”

“I went home first, but not from the office. I was at a meeting.”

“When did it end?”

“About five thirty.”

“Where and with who?”

“It was about a legal matter. That’s all I can say.”

“And then you went home to change?”

“That’s right.”

“Anyone see you there?”

“There hasn’t been much of a crowd in my apartment since I sent away the Chinese acrobats. Do I need an alibi, Detective? Do I need a lawyer?”

“You tell me.”

“I always advise my clients to say nothing without a lawyer.”

“That’s because all your scum clients are guilty as sin.”

“Let’s not let the truth get in the way of things.”

We stared at each other in a game of blink to decide which of us was going to volunteer something of interest first. I actually didn’t know anything of interest, so I had the upper hand. As I stood there marinating in the stench, I wondered if the reek of death was going to sink into the fabric and ruin my tuxedo. Maybe that explained McDeiss’s horrid sport coats; garments that ugly are easy to toss.

“We have a corpse without any ID,” said McDeiss, finally. “No license, no phone, no shoes.”

“No shoes?”

“No shoes.”

“There’s nothing like a good pair of shoes.”

“We need an identification.”

“And you think I can help.”

“We do.”

“Why?”

“That’s confidential for the moment.”

“How bad is it?”

“I’ve seen worse.”

“Have I seen worse?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh.”

“And if you have to throw up, make sure it goes in your pocket and not on my crime scene.”

What is it about dead people? We can pass scores of live humans without a second thought, with nary even a first. Whole universes collide about us, each thick with history and insight and wondrous perversion, uncharted territories ripe for exploration, and we barely notice. We are surrounded by the living, and amidst the crowds we think about them as much as fish think about water. But then we come face-to-face with the dead, and our breath catches. Something in the dead stills our unending internal monologue. Something in the dead has its call on us all. Now, standing there as the tarp was about to be pulled away, I would have thought I’d be silently contemplating the mysteries of life and mortality and the void, but I wasn’t. I suppose such questions are better left for those moments when vomit isn’t surging up your throat.

“Easy now, Carl,” said McDeiss as he put a hand on my shoulder and nodded to Detective Armbruster.

Armbruster leaned down, reached for the corner of the tarp, looked up at me with a filthy little smile on his face. “You ready?”

“No.”

I stood between the bright lights and the thing beneath the slick blue oilcloth, my shadow ominous on the brick wall where the lifeless thing leaned. I shrugged off McDeiss’s hand and stepped forward, into a puddle I hadn’t noticed. The smell was stronger than what had assaulted me before, fresher, almost predatory.

A snake uncoiled in my gut as Armbruster pulled away the tarp.

CHAPTER 4

MEET THE PRESS

A
moment later I was leaning against the old car in the alley, throwing up in great heaving spasms.

“Did you recognize her?” said McDeiss when I’d reached a lull. He was wisely standing behind me.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, wiped the back of my hand on my black pants. “There wasn’t much to recognize.”

“They killed her with some sort of tool, apparently a hammer, and then kept going.”

“Did you find the weapon?”

“No. Whoever did this cleaned the field up nicely.”

“That was considerate of them. And no one saw anything or heard anything?”

“The car abandoned in the alley blocked it off from any onlookers, giving our killer enough privacy to slam away.”

“Why would somebody do that to her face?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. You recognize her?”

I had caught a glimpse of what remained of her features before I turned, just a glimpse, but it was enough. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing, and the missing pieces were an eye and a cheek and the left side of the forehead. But what remained was specific enough for me to guess the picture on the box top. Yes, I had known the woman. I had just that day sat down in a bar with the woman
.
And in some pathetic part of my brain I’d believed that I had helped the woman in ways large and small, and I had felt so smugly good about doing it.

“Her name was Jessica Barnes,” I said, still searching for a draft of clean air. “She lived out in Lancaster.”

“How did you know her?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“What the hell, Carl?”

“It’s privileged.”

“We have a woman with half her face bashed to pulp and a killer on the loose and you’re talking about privilege?”

“I met with Ms. Barnes this afternoon on behalf of a client. I had a confidential discussion with her. That’s all I can say.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“Detective.”

“Did you give her money?”

“Don’t.”

“How much?”

“I can’t.”

“Do you want to see Ms. Barnes again to refresh your memory? Do you want me to shove your ugly face into what is left of hers?”

“I have to go.”

“Back to the ball?”

“Sure, why not?”

McDeiss sighed. It was a loud, emphatic sigh, world-weary and well practiced, a sigh of resignation to all the stupid lawyers in the world, of which I was just the latest to cross his path.

“You make my kidneys hurt,” he said finally. “We found an empty manila envelope at the scene with the outline of a stack of something that matched the size of a brick of money. If it was full when she left you, then we have a possible robbery motive. Be clever enough not to tell me what you talked about or why. Just tell me this—was there money in the envelope when she left you?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“I’ve told you all I can.”

“Was it enough money for someone to kill her for it?”

“Kids are killed for pocket change.”

“Yes, they are.”

“This was more,” I said. “Are we done here?”

“I suppose that’s all we’re going to get out of you tonight, but we are not done, not by a long shot.”

“How did you know to call me?”

McDeiss gave me the up-and-down, like he was examining a dead shark hanging on a fishing pier. “Look at you, frilled up like a little girl’s doll. You best take care of yourself, Carl. You’re swimming with the nasty now.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Not against them, you can’t. You’re out of your league.”

“You don’t know my league, Detective.”

“It’s a shame about the shoes.”

“Hers?” I said, glancing at the tarp.

“Yours.”

I looked down. My shiny tuxedo slippers were smeared with filth, the bows slopped with vomit and blood. “They’ll clean up.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He turned away dismissively, like only a cop can, and headed back to his corpse.

I stood there for a moment, thinking about the sense I’d had earlier that night of having found my place in the world. I thought about the dead woman whom I had tried to help, and the now-missing money I had tried to give her. And I thought about what I was going to do about it all.

Sometimes a man’s got to take a stand. Sometimes a man has to yank away the curtain of deceit and reveal the truth of things. Sometimes a man needs to step out of his own little prison of greed and desire and do what he knows to be right. And that’s when I decided, right then and there, what to do about the murder of Jessica Barnes.

Nothing. I was going to do nothing.

I wasn’t some savior out to salve some deep public wound, I wasn’t some knight errant out to right some grievous wrong. I was in a different game now, the political game, in which every sap was out for himself. See what I mean when I said politics was right up my stinking alley? I couldn’t have been more of a natural if my last name had been Kennedy or Bush.

Warmed by my decision to let the investigation into the murder of Jessica Barnes flow on without my involvement or interference, I flipped up the collar of my jacket, jammed my hands deep into its pockets, and headed out of the alley. I was just ducking beneath the tape, trying hard to appear as incognito as the tuxedo allowed, when a flash of something hit my face.

“Victor Carl, what a pleasant surprise.”

Through the miasma of my light-burned vision, I searched for the owner of this hiss of a voice, and felt my stomach plummet even further when I found it. Short and pug-like, with bad hair, bad teeth, and rubbery brown orthopedic shoes, he was as unimpressive a specimen as could be found outside of a microscopic slide.

“What are you doing here, Sloane?” I said to the political reporter for the
Philadelphia Daily News
. “This isn’t your usual beat.”

“It surely wasn’t until you showed up. Smile.” He raised his camera. Flash flash.

“Take another picture and you’ll be digging that camera out of your dentures.”

“When I heard the call on my radio, I was just sitting at home, twiddling my thumbs.”

“Twiddling something.”

“I thought I ought to check it out, for the good of the public. They do have the right to know. And then, imagine my delight when you showed up. Hard work is so rarely rewarded. Who’s dead?”

“No one you need worry about.”

“I’m not worried, just curious.”

“About what?”

“About why the police called Congressman DeMathis’s bagman to a murder scene.”

“He’s here? Where?”

“Don’t get cute, Carl, you don’t have the face for it. What’s the connection between DeMathis and the victim?”

I took a step forward and wagged a finger. “Careful what you print, Sloane, or we’ll sue you and your paper both into a barrel.”

“I’m a reporter for a print newspaper; what could you do to us that the iPad hasn’t already done?”

“Then I’ll cut off your dick, and stick it up your ass.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Just get it right.”

“Oh, Victor, I always strive to get it right.”

“Then tell it true. I’m nobody’s bagman.”

“You’re not?”

“No.”

“Then what exactly are you?”

I didn’t answer. Instead I gave the ink-stained wretch a threatening sneer, which I fear came off more like a fit of gas, before heading south on Twentieth Street, away from Sloane’s camera, away from McDeiss, from the dead woman, from the whole stinking ball of mess. And all I had was Sloane’s final question ringing in my ears.

Knock knock. Who’s there?

That’s the way every good story begins, and the joke was on me, because I didn’t anymore have an answer. Something foul had washed over me, or I had fallen into a pit, or I had fallen into my future, I couldn’t yet tell. All I knew for certain, other than that I wouldn’t come out unscathed, was how it started and where.

It started for me in the criminal courts building in Philadelphia, at the lowest moment of my lowly career.