Superbia 3 (21 page)

"Hey," Frank said, knocking lightly on the doorframe.  "Long time, no see."

"I know!" Dez said, a little too excitedly.  He waved for Frank to come into the office, but didn't get out of his chair.  "How the hell are you?"

"Pretty good.  How's business?"

"Busy as usual.  You know how that goes."  Dez was bent forward in his seat, both arms lying flat across his desk, his entire body an arrow aimed directly at Frank.  "So what brings you down here?"

Frank looked over his shoulder at the open door and jerked his head at it.  Dez said, "Sure, no problem," and Frank got up to close it shut before he sat down.  "Uh oh," Dez said with a large smile.  "This sounds serious.  Am I in trouble?"

"Not that I know of," Frank said with a light chuckle.  It was clear there was no real warmth between the two of them, and all of this was just empty gestures of congeniality.  He took a deep breath and said, "You know I've never asked for this before, but we've got a kind of special case up my way.  The kind of thing that we could use a little…extra help persuading someone with, you know what I mean?"

Dez kept his expression purposely blank.  "A case?"

"Yeah.  A child pornographer who works in town, and we need these codes from him before ICE will help us out.  We have reached an absolute dead end, and you know I wouldn't ask this under any other circumstance."

"So…."

"So, I was thinking that maybe our friend could have a chat with him."

"Our friend?"

"Yeah."

"Which one of our friends, Frank?"

"The one with the big front teeth and large fluffy ears."

Dez looked at Frank's neck and chest, trying to see the bulge of any recording devices that might be strapped to him.  Modern recording devices were the size of key fobs and could be dangled from a necklace
, so there was no real way to know how Frank was recording him, but it didn't matter.  The important thing was that Dez knew it.  Dez started at Frank and said, "A bunny rabbit?"

"Yeah," Frank said slowly.  "The one who lives in the warehouse."

Dez suddenly slapped the table and let out a manic laugh, clutching his sides and squealing until he could barely breathe.  "Oh shit," he wheezed, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes.  "God damn, you should see your face.  Listen, if you need our help with something, it's no problem.  We'll be glad to give you any assistance you require.  I'll send my boys up there and we'll review your case file and put some surveillance on this asshole, muy pronto.  If it's something the Task Force can take off your hands, you know we'll be glad to do it."

"But what about−"

"Listen, I've got to get going," Dez said.  "I have to meet someone.  Is it okay if I call you later on in the week to set up a time for us to swing by?" 

Dez was already through the door and hurrying down the hall before Frank could answer.  Frank turned around in his chair and watched Dez barrel through the exit toward the stairs, thinking,
What the hell just happened?

The landing door slammed shut above him and Dez was halfway down the flight of stairs toward the parking garage before he whipped out his phone and called Skip.  "You're not going to fucking believe this.  Frank O'Ryan is the snitch.  He just tried to get me on a wire talking about the Rabbit."

"You're shitting me
!" Skip said.
"Wasn't his dad the original?"

"It doesn't fucking matter now.  We've gotta deal with him fast."

Skip paused long enough to weight that out in his mind. 
"Let's meet up and figure out our next move."

"My thoughts exactly," Dez said.  He ended the call and stuffed his phone back in his pocket, stopping to look through the dirty parking garage window, scanning the lot for
any cars backed into parking spaces or white guys wearing baseball hats slunk low in their seats, insistently ignoring him.  In other words, a surveillance detail.

It was late afternoon and the sun squatted directly over their heads with no trees or buildings to provide cover.  The freshly asphalted road reflected the light and conducted heat through the oily rock mash up into the soles of their boots.  Several cops stood huddled under the lifted rear gate of a marked SUV, sweating through their electric green, reflective safety vests.  They stared at the small box inside the SUV, hoping it didn't beep. 

It did.

"Fifty-seven!" Corporal Donoschik hollered out triumphantly.  He raced into the roadway and started flapping his arms up and down in wide circles, waving for the car coming down the hill to stop.

Please run him over,
Reynaldo thought.

"You!" Donoschik shouted at the driver, his finger aimed through the air like he could zap them through the windshield.  "Pull over!"

The driver, an older woman wearing her seatbelt slowly turned her steering wheel to the right to pull into the church parking lot where the police officers' vehicles were parked.  "You!" Donoschik called out to Reynaldo, signaling him in the exact way he'd done to the offending drivers. 

Reynaldo sighed and carried his metal ticket case over to the woman's driver's side window and said, "Good afternoon, ma'am.  I'm Officer Francisco and we're doing a traffic safety detail today.  Unfortunately you were clocked going over the posted speed
limit of forty-five miles an hour."

"How fast was I going, Officer?" she said.

"Fifty-seven."

"Oh, my goodness," she said, covering her mouth.  "I'm so sorry.  I always try to be so careful, but coming down that big hill, I guess I went too fast.  My
son is going to kill me.  He's a Philadelphia police Lieutenant."

Reynaldo turned and shot a look over his shoulder at Corporal Donoschik.  The Corporal was standing at the side of the road, arms folded, waiting impatiently for more cars.  "Hang on one second, ma'am," Reynaldo said.  He walked over to Donoschik and said, "This lady is the
mother of a police officer."

"No breaks," Donoschik said.

"But, how about a written warning?"

"No.  Breaks."

Reynaldo lowered his head and walked back to the woman.  She had her driver's license, registration card and insurance card waiting for him.  She smiled when she handed him the cards and he hadn't even asked.  Reynaldo took the cards and quickly jotted her information down on the ticket.  The Corporal had issued each man fifteen pre-written tickets with the location and date and speed machine information already written on it.  They were all under orders to not leave until all of their tickets were issued. 

"Listen," Reynaldo said softly as he tore the woman's copy of the ticket off and handed it to her.  "Tell your
son that I cannot give warnings today, as much as I'd like to.  If you look on the back, it explains how to request a hearing."

"A hearing for what?" she said.  "I was speeding."

"I know, but what I'd like you to do is pay very careful attention to the part that says to plead not guilty and request a hearing."

"But I am guilty," she said.

Reynaldo sighed and leaned down into the window to point at the part that he wanted her to read, "A speeding ticket carries points and a fine.  Your insurance will go up.  Please just talk to your son and tell him that I said I am sorry, and that I showed you what this says right here.  He will explain the rest to you."

The woman clearly didn't understand what he was trying to tell her as she took her copy of the ticket from him and said, "Okay, officer.  Listen, you be safe standing out here in the sun like this.  Do you want me to bring you some water?  I can stop at the store and be back in five minutes."

"No, ma'am," Reynaldo said.  "Just drive safe and remember what I said, all right?"

She waved to him and said good
bye, and as she pulled back onto the street, he wrote down her license plate number and drew a star next to it to remind himself if he ever saw her again.  He imagined that she wouldn't.  He imagined that she'd be too embarrassed to tell her son and simply pay the ticket. 

Donoschik's voice suddenly cracked like a teenage boy as he
whooped, "Seventy-Eight!"

He leapt into the roadway, jumping up and down and waving his arms like a cheerleader or a double-dutch dancer, but the car
's wheels locked up and it skidded to a stop in the road.  Gray tiresmoke twirled into the air from the stretch of rubber along the virgin roadway, but even as Donoschik ran to yank the driver out of the door, it opened on its own and the driver leapt out, shouting, "Help!  Help!  There's a dead body!"

Donoschik seemed immune to the words as he grabbed the man by the arm and twisted, trying to force his face down onto the hood of his car, screaming, "You trying to run me over, you piece of shit?"

"No!  I saw you all over here and ran to get help!  There's a dead body down the street!  I didn't even see you standing in the road.  That's why I locked up my−ow, shit!−brakes!"

Reynaldo put his hands down on the hood of the car and said, "Where's the body?"

"Sitting in a car off to the side of the road.  I pulled over to text my girlfriend and saw him there.  He's blue."

"Let him up," Reynaldo said. 

Donoschik scowled at him, still clutching the man's arm in a tight lock. 

"Let him go so he can show me the body."

Donoschik pushed the man away and hiked up his bright leather belt, "You're still getting cites."

"What
the hell's a cite?"

"
Cites!
  One for speeding and one for reckless driving.  I'm going to bury you under points, mister."

"No you're not," Reynaldo whispered.  "Come on and show me where the body is.  I'll get all his info at the scene and you can file your
cites
," Reynaldo said to the Corporal.

Donoschik looked at the man and then back at Reynaldo and said, "How many tickets do you have left?"

"Seven."

The Corporal looked past Reynaldo at the other men, still huddled under the canopy and said, "Who has less
than seven tickets left?"

All of them raised their hand. 

"Who wants to go deal with a dead body?" Reynaldo said.

All of the hands dropped. 

Reynaldo turned to Donoschik and said, "I know how to do this.  There won't be any problems if you let me handle it." 

"Fine," Donoschik said.  "Just go take care of it and get back up here to finish up your
detail."

Reynaldo
scurried across the parking lot toward his car and jumped in, throwing his lights on to stop the cars coming toward the speed trap and leaving them on as he followed the man back down the road.  He hoped it slowed everyone down and kept them slow enough to pass by Donoschik and his underlings unscathed. 

The man
stepped on his brakes and rolled down his window, pointing off the road at a small gravel driveway that led to nowhere.  Reynaldo saw a red Audi with bright chrome wheels parked there, pulled in so it was facing the woods.  The car looked familiar, but he couldn't place it.  He walked around the car, reading and re-reading the license plate, knowing they were supposed to mean something to him, but not knowing what. 

He
approached the driver's side door slowly and reached for the door handle, only to see a young man inside, slumped over wearing a tank-top and orange pajama pants.  A needle was sticking out of Paul Moses's inner left arm, dangling like a fishing rod held precariously by an inch of blued skin.

"You dumb son of a bitch," Reynaldo muttered. 
 

Moses's
body had purpled and stiffened and even un-stiffened in the time he'd been sitting there.  It had long since released the gastric fluids and dirty brown water from its bowels.  There were maggots swimming in Moses's open eyes, the shape and color of rice.  Rice that fed on decay and eventually, Reynaldo knew, turned into flies. 

He held his breath and opened the door, stepping back in case any bugs within fled the confines of the car.  He walked around the car, opening each door, letting the cross-breeze carry the stench of death into the woods.  The motorist was still sitting by his car on the road, afraid to approach and said, "Was I right?  Is he dead?"

"Oh, he's dead," Reynaldo said. 

"How long has he been there?"

"At least a day or two, if not more."

"How the hell didn't anybody see him?" 

Reynaldo shrugged, "He was pulled in.  People driving past probably wouldn't notice."

The man was silent for a while, looking up and down the road
as the cars drove past.  "When I was sixteen, I pulled into a park with my girlfriend at twelve thirty.  She started going down on me for the first time in my life, and right before I was about to finish, a goddamn cop pulled up and asked us what we were doing there.  She was so embarrassed she never did it again." 

"That sucks," Reynaldo chuckled. 

"Tell me about it.  We've been married five years.  My point is, weren't there any cops working last night?"

Reynaldo looked down the hill at the cars braking suddenly when they saw the group of police officers standing by the side of the road.  "I know they were running a traffic detail last night.  The night before that too."

"Jesus, is that all you guys do anymore?"

Bill Limos slid his hands inside thick purple rubber glove and said, "Did you see any dope bags?"

"Not yet," Reynaldo told the Deputy Coroner.  "To be honest, I wanted to get the body out of the car before I started looking around.  He stinks too bad." 

Limos nodded sympathetically and said, "Come on back to my car for a second."  As they walked, Limos said, "Back in the day, guys told you to put Vicks vapor rub on your upper lip because it blocked out the smell.  That's bullshit.  All Vicks does is open up your sinuses and give you a bigger whiff of whatever you're smelling.  Honestly, I think it was just something the homicide detectives told other people to fuck with them.  There's tricks, though.  If you ever get inside a house and it's bad, you burn coffee grounds.  That neutralizes the stink.  Of course, if it's real grotesque, don't be an idiot.  Get a respirator from the fire company.  And always carry a baseball hat."

"Why?" Reynaldo said.

"Because if somebody blows their head off, their brains are gonna be dripping down from the ceiling.  First time you get somebody's frontal lobe
plops down on top of your head, you're gonna remember it."

"Okay," Reynaldo said.  "So do you have any tricks for this scene?"

"This guy's not even that bad," Limos said.  "At least he didn't start to swell up yet.  You leave them sit long enough, all the gases inside them start to inflate like a balloon and before long, they pop.  Poppers and drowners, those are the absolute fucking worst.  You ever pull a dead body out of the water after it's been in there awhile, you're gonna puke up everything you ate since the Fifth Grade." As Limos spoke he removed a rectangular tin from his car's glove compartment and opened the lid to remove two long cigars.  He popped one of them in his mouth and handed the other to Reynaldo.  "Do you smoke?"

"No."

"Well you can either smoke that or break it in half and stuff the ends into your nostrils, whatever you prefer.  Works about as well either way."

Reynaldo bit the end of the cigar off with his teeth and put it in his mouth, spitting out the loose strings of tobacco leaf that stuck to his tongue and lips.  He lit the cigar like Bill showed him to, sucking on the cigar as he held it to the flame until it began to smoke on its own.  "If you stop smoking it, it will go out.  It's not like cigarettes.  You could light a cigarette and lay it on the ground and all the chemicals and shit will burn it down to the filter.  Not a cigar.  Some little old man in Honduras rolled this bad boy up with his crippled, arthritic hands.  Take the time to appreciate it.  But don't smoke it too fast or you'll feel like you just did angel dust.  Ok, you ready to get this body?"

Reynaldo twirled the cigar around and around to get the fiery end even and said, "I'm ready."