Superbia 3 (6 page)

Reynaldo turned the corpse over and held it down while the coroner bent over it and grabbed it by the wrists,
forcing them down from Jessie's face and into a downward position.  He always expected to hear things creaking and breaking inside the limbs, or to see them snap back into place, but they never did.  Reynaldo curled his nose and looked away, trying not to show his revulsion at the sudden waft of putrid odor coming from the body.  A long stream of bloody yellow snot spilled out of the nostrils, streaming down Jessie's face and into his open mouth. 

"
They sure do get stinky when you move them around," Limos said.  "How you holding up?"

"I'm fine," Reynaldo said quickly.  "I love this.  It's nothing to me."

"Mr. Big Shot Future Detective, yeah?"

"I only wish there was some bug activity. 
Some skin slippage.  That would make my day."

Limos
shook his head and chuckled, "I'll make sure I call you the next time we get a ninety-year-old-lady who dies in the summer and nobody finds her for a month.  You can be my assistant."

"Please do."

Limos set his camera down in his bag and came up with a small tool kit.  He undid the latches and removed an empty syringe, then bent down over the corpse and peeled its eyelids open.  "New policy says we leave the body if it's not suspicious, unless the family requests an autopsy.  Otherwise we do the toxicology here."

Reynaldo was about to ask him what that meant when the coroner jabbed the tip of the needle deep into the white flesh of
Jessie's eyeball and pulled back the stopper.  The eye deflated like a wrinkled raisin as the syringe filled up with cloudy fluid.  Limos looked back at Reynaldo and winked.  "That's one."

He capped the syringe and dropped it into a secure container
to seal it.  "Time for number two.  This one's everybody's favorite.  The big finish."  He tugged Jessie's underwear down to expose his genitals and drove the needle down hard above the young man's groin. Bright yellow urine filled up the syringe's chamber and Limos said, "That's fresh from the tap, right there."  

Reynaldo looked down at the body,
thinking that only hours before it was a human being and now nothing more than a slab of rotting meat.  "Frank always says there is no dignity in death." 

Limos
yanked the syringe free and dropped it into a separate container.  "Yeah, nothing says dignity like a needle to the dick.  Speaking of Frank, where is everybody today?"

"I'm working
solo so they can all go pay last respects to Chief Erinnyes."

"Wouldn't you have to have first respects for that fat fuck in order to pay last ones?"

Their eyes met briefly and Reynaldo said, "I wouldn't know.  I just work here, sir."

Limos
smiled widely and laughed, "That's good, kid.  You never know who you're talking to.  Keep that up and one day you might be a big shot detective after all."

Pincher's
mother shifted nervously on the couch as they exited the bedroom, dragging on a cigarette with at least an inch of ash at the tip that dangled over her fingers like a fishing rod.  Reynaldo said, "Mrs. Pincher, I am taking your son's phone.  I believe it contains evidence of who delivered the drugs to him."

"
Take whatever you want," she said.  "But where's his ACCESS card?"

"
Sorry?"

"His ACCESS card.  Did he have it on him?"

"It's on his dresser," Reynaldo said.  "Why do you need it?"

"He owed me money," she said.  "He was supposed to take it out today."

And since he's dead, who will know?
Reynaldo thought scornfully. 

"
Can I say goodbye to him now?" she said.

"Be my guest,"
Limos said.  "Also, you'll need to call a funeral director to come pick him up."

Mrs. Pincher
ignored him as she lumbered to her feet and slunk past the two of them.  Moans bellowed out of her mouth before she even reached the room, turning into guttural things that welled up from the basement of her soul the moment she entered the room.  Reynaldo went to lower his head out of respect, only to lift it in horror as Mrs. Pincher wrapped her arms around Jessie's body and rolled into the mattress with him.   

She buried her face in
his its wet, gooey hair as she cried, arms wrapped around Jessie's stiff, cold body, clamping it tight.  Her fingers stroked his snot-smeared face and neck and she kissed him over and over. 

Limos
leaned in next to Reynaldo and whispered, "Now
that
is some shit I've never seen before."

Reynaldo
covered his mouth with his hand and muttered, "God Almighty, it's getting all over her."

"I know. 
That is freaking awesome!"

The phone rang and rang, but Frank wouldn't answer.  Reynaldo hung up and texted him again,
telling him to call right away.  In a moment of desperation, he scrolled through his phone to find Aprille's number and almost called her, but couldn't bring himself to do it.  The only thing she was good for lately was turning things over to her high-and-mighty FBI friends, especially that Special Agent
pendejo
Dez Dolos.  No thanks.

He ran the name Moses and
the cellphone number through their computer system every way he could think of, but there was nothing.  That was no surprise.  Their PD was surrounded by five different police departments all within a few miles of one another, all with different computerized databases that did not share information.  To try and find the one that might have had contact with his particular subject was less than futile. 

The easy thing to do, of course, would be to text Moses from Jessie Pincher's phone and arrange a meet.  That way, he could just bag him on the spot.  Unfortunately, that was also illegal.  It pissed Reynaldo off to no end that the bad guys were free to make it up as they went along and the good guys had to keep tap dancing around bullshit rules decided by some judge.  He looked at Moses' phone number and sighed.  He could always just cold call him
from a blocked number.  "Hello?  Is this Moses?  You don't know me, but I'd like to purchase a large quantity of your finest heroin.  Let's meet around seven, okay?  By the way, can you please give me your full name, address, and social security number?" Sure.  Why not?

Still, Moses wasn't a common name. 
Most likely, it was a nickname.  Reynaldo logged into the Commonwealth's driver license database and typed MOSES into the search bar and sat back.  Just seventeen names popped up in response. 

Reynaldo scrolled down through the page, discounting all of the old people and ones who lived out of the area.  He found
a black male in Philly named Moses, and he looked right.  He even had a prior arrest for Possession with Intent to Distribute Narcotics.  Reynaldo pressed print and waited for the machine to spit out a freshly inked copy of Avante R. Moses's last mugshot.  As he waited for the picture to print, he saw that the last person listed on the driver's license search was a smiling white kid named Paul Moses.  The kid in the picture looked Ivy League college bound.  He even had a button up shirt with one of those stupid crocodiles embroidered on it.  The only thing was, Paul Moses lived on Bluebell Street, less than a mile away from Jessie Pincher's apartment.

Reynaldo grabbed Avante Moses'
s picture and held it up to the screen, comparing the two photographs.  There was no question.  One of them was a drug dealer and one of them was a geeky suburban kid who probably wore sandals and jeans and worked at the mall.  "Right?" he said to himself. 

He clicked on Paul Moses'
s criminal history and frowned.  An arrest for underage drinking.  One for simple possession.  "That's just for weed.  Every kid smokes weed out here."

He looked back at Avante Moses'
s rap sheet and saw that the Possession with Intent arrest was from two years ago, but that the charges had been nolle prossed.  Philly was famous for slapping heavy charges on people that they couldn't substantiate in court.  Half of the rap sheets Reynaldo saw out of the city were later withdrawn. 

On the other hand,
Paul Moses's possession charge not only stuck, but he'd done two weeks in jail for it and spent a year on county probation. 
Heavy duty sentence for a Simple Possession charge for a kid with no priors,
Reynaldo thought.  Most white kids in that area bargained a first time Simple Possession charge into a non-traffic citation or community service.  Nobody went to jail off that.  "Unless it was plead down from something else," he said to himself.  He crumpled up the paperwork for Avante Moses and threw it in the trash.

"Hot damn,
papi," he said aloud.  "Now you're thinking like a detective." 

Bluebell Street was in the kind of neighborhood Reynaldo saw himself living in once he reached full salary.  Their current police contract started them in the
low-forties and offered incremental bumps in pay every six months.  In four years, officers reached the top of the pay scale and clocked a smooth seventy-five g's.  By the time Reynaldo maxed out, they'd be into a new contract and probably be making more money.  Brian Boxer might be a dull bore, but he knew how to negotiate a new contract.  It was the reason the PBA put up with him all those years.

That was p
lenty of cash to get him into a house on a place like Bluebell Street,
Reynaldo thought.  Big, single house with a two-car garage and a nice lawn.  He'd put a pool table in the den along with a fully stocked bar.  Outside, a deck with patio furniture and fire pit, and most importantly, a bamboo hot tub he kept running all year round.  He pictured Marissa from the ambulance corps stretched out in that Jacuzzi wearing a small black bikini.  No.  Wearing nothing at all.

A tricked out
red Audi was sitting in Moses's driveway. It's windows tinted limo-black and bright chrome wheels severely out of place with the minivans and SUV's in the neighborhood.  Reynaldo picked up his car radio and said, "Seventeen-ten to County."

"Go ahead,"
the radio crackled in response.

"Prepare to copy a phone number."  He
read Moses's cellphone number into the microphone and said, "Ask him to step outside.  I have a question about his vehicle."  Reynaldo waited a minute before driving up to the front of the house, directly behind the Audi.  He stood by his car with his arms folded, watching the front of the house. 

Someone peeked out through the blinds in an upstairs bedroom
, holding the phone to his ear.  Reynaldo waved at him and told him to come downstairs.  Less than a minute later, the front door opened and a much scragglier, scummier-than-his-driver's-license-picture Paul Moses came out onto the porch. 
So you're not just a dealer, my friend.  You're a junkie too,
Reynaldo thought. 

"Can I help you?" Moses said.

"Is this your car, sir?"

"Yeah."

"Were you at the mall earlier today?  They asked us to check because someone said it might have been involved in an accident."

"The mall?  I wasn't anywhere near the mall."

"Do you have any damage to the front bumper?"

"No. 
Didn't you already look at it?"

Reynaldo
headed up the driveway, "I wanted to ask first because it wouldn't be right for me to go on your property and just start looking around."

"That's cool
, man, I appreciate it," Moses said.  "But I didn't get in any accident and I was nowhere's near the mall."

Reynaldo looked at the car and
nodded, "No damage.  Looks like it was bad information."

"How'd you get my
phone number anyway?"

"
The officer investigating the crash gave it to me.  Did his PD have it on file, maybe?"

"I have no idea.  You cops got all that Patriot Act shit now, so probably."

"I know, right?" Reynaldo said.  "Okay, so thank you for your time."

"Take it easy.  Hey, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"If somebody borrows something from you, like a lawn mower, and says they're going to sell it and give you the money, but then they don't, is that a crime?"