The Ambitious City (4 page)

Williams was leaning across the front seat from the driver’s side when MacNeice returned. “A Borsalino hat, a map of New York State and, best of all, the ownership, buried in the glove compartment,” he called. “If it’s his car, he’s not Charlie Greene, he’s Chaim Greenblatt.”

“So Greene was his stage name,” MacNeice said.

“Yeah, I guess so. Chas or Chaim—easy choice to make, especially in those days.”

Richardson had cut off the tie and cut away what was left of the shirt, trousers and boxers, which were still intact. Before them was a skeleton, partly covered by what looked like white leather, and inside, bits of blackened, dried meat.

“Remarkable,” Richardson said.

“How so?”

“Well, I would have expected bones, but flesh … and innards in any form”—she pointed with the end of the shears to the black mass inside the pelvis—“well, that’s truly amazing. That trunk was an air-tight tomb.”

“It was.”

“She’s in slightly better shape.” Richardson nodded towards the remains of the girl. “An interesting study for Sheilagh Thomas, the medical anthropologist at Brant.”

MacNeice reached for his notepad, and then realized it was in his jacket.

“Not to worry, Detective, I’ll call her for you. Let me open the dress, and then, unless you have something else for me, I’ve got work to do back at the lab.”

“Just the round columns, Doctor.” On cue, the tent cover opened and Ellis appeared, with a huge man carrying a jackhammer over his shoulder as effortlessly as a teenager carries a baseball bat. MacNeice pointed in the direction of the two farthest columns and said, “We’ll do the two at the end first.” Ellis kept looking back at the scene unfolding around the Packard, while the man carrying the jackhammer appeared completely disinterested. MacNeice went back to Richardson, who was kneeling, shears in hand.

“She had lovely panties on. Pity to cut them,” she said.

“Not the way she thought they’d come off when she put them on,” MacNeice said under his breath. As Richardson cut, lacy fragments fell into the pelvis, where blackened ropelike masses lay. Next she cut the brittle straps of the bra and leaned closer.
“Thirty-four B. You can see the tag through the ribcage.”

“When did they start sizing brassieres?”

“That’s a good question. I have no idea.”

“What’s that around her neck?”

“A locket. I’ll leave that to you. It’s in the shape of a heart. Sweet. That mass lying on the bottom of the dress …”

“Yes?”

“Her heart. The clumps on either side that look like large dried teabags, those are her lungs. Not much else to talk about, I’m afraid, though Dr. Thomas will no doubt be fascinated by both of them.”

I
NTRODUCED SIMPLY AS
August, the Lithuanian with the solemn eyes wheeled the jackhammer generator into place next to the first column. He handed MacNeice a thick black marker. “You, show me where to cut.”

MacNeice took the marker and made a line straight across the middle of the column. August flipped up the operating panel on the generator, put on his goggles and helmet and waved to MacNeice and Ellis. “Stand back. When I stop hammer, you can come.”

“Do you want my helmet, detective?” Ellis asked.

“I’ll be fine, thank you.” They walked fifteen feet away and watched as August attached the power cord. As the jackhammer rattled noisily to life, MacNeice resisted the urge to put his hands over his ears. August made the first incision, holding the hammer at chest height.

“Incredible, eh? He uses it like a scalpel,” Ellis shouted over the din.

MacNeice smiled briefly and nodded.

A minute later, August pulled away the jackhammer and let it idle. He waved to MacNeice to come forward. To his eye, there was nothing to be seen in the concrete but more concrete. “Nothing there?”

“Yes, something there,” August said, pointing to the column.

“How can you tell?”

“Too soft, not right. Come out like angel cake. You want send lady away?”

“Oh no, she’s here to see this. Don’t worry, that’s her job.”

“Bad job,” he said, looking at Richardson. “Okay, stay back. I work both sides.”

If they weren’t so clearly horrific, some scenes could be hysterically funny. The sight of a large male torso suspended between two jagged sections of concrete—legs protruding from Bermuda shorts buried in one end, head and shoulders in the other—sent Montile Williams into peals of laughter, which faded quickly when he caught the whiff of decomposition.

MacNeice could see that Ellis was upset by what he considered disrespectful behaviour, so he asked him to leave. The fact was, Ellis had no place being there anyway.

“Like popping out of cake,” August said. “You want me do top or bottom? Or go to next column?”

“Do the feet now, then the head. Ellis said you can use that like a scalpel—well, now’s the time. Once we’ve freed him, we’ll move on to the next one.”

August was soon carving around the legs, and again the concrete broke away easily from the body. One, then the other leg dropped, causing the whole torso to sag. It was difficult to tell if this was a fat man with skinny legs or a slim man whose torso had expanded from the terrible gases and decay bottled up within. Judging by the lack of stress on the Bermuda shorts, he assumed it was the former, but the smell suggested that both theories could be accurate.

Great chunks of concrete now littered the surface of the dock.

MacNeice heard Williams choke back another laugh. He turned to him, warning, “Don’t start, not again.” He took out his camera and shot several frames. Looking over to Richardson, he asked, “How long do you think he’s been in there?”

“Not long—a year, maybe more. I’m not going to do an autopsy here, MacNeice. Let me get him to the lab.”

“If there’s a body in that other column, we’ll take them to the morgue in the fish truck.”

August started the jackhammer, then etched a controlled line lengthwise up the body. On his second pass, the right side gave way, revealing a chest, shoulder, arms and part of the neck. He continued to etch and drill, and in minutes the body was lying flat on the cart. August brushed away the larger fragments, put down the jackhammer and went to reposition the generator near the other round column.

There was a large-calibre entry wound in the forehead of a tall, fat man in his mid- to late fifties. He wore a yellow shirt, stained black with gore, atop jungle-patterned Bermuda shorts. A rope was attached to his arms, looping around his wrists and tethered to his neck before extending above his head, presumably to hold him in place while the concrete was poured. His tongue, like a large bubble of brown chewing gum, filled the space between the lips of his open mouth.

“Know him?” Williams asked, looking down at the face.

“No, but I don’t think he was a dentist,” MacNeice said, taking several more images, full-body and close-up.

“Meaning?” Richardson asked.

“Meaning he looks like central casting’s ideal for a heavy.”

Richardson put down her bag and was soon measuring the size of the entry wound—.44 calibre—and inspecting the mouth, eyes and ears. “My guess, eighteen months.”

“You want to draw next one?” August asked as MacNeice and Williams approached the remaining column.

“No, do it just as you did the first,” MacNeice said.

“Thanks to the city for the air conditioning, boss, but if there’s another one in there, I need to get something to cover my nose.” Williams said. The terrible stench had drained all the humour out of him. August looked back at MacNeice. “I do other two later. Need to eat lunch away from here.”

“Thank you, August. And please don’t talk about what you’ve seen.”

“Not interested in this. Not healthy talk.” He lowered his goggles and started the hammer.

The second body hadn’t fared as well as the first. The man was wearing a black T-shirt and slacks; judging by the long black hair and lanky body, he appeared to be a man in his thirties. His face had been removed back to the ears—sheared off. No forehead, eyes, nose, mouth or chin; even the interior of his skull had been emptied. The rope used to suspend him for pouring the concrete was attached to his arms from behind, which had forced his shoulders so far forward they’d dislocated. The hands and feet had also been removed, and the flesh on the inside of both forearms had been sliced off down to the bone.

“Tattoos?” Williams said.

“Probably. An identifier, like the face and hands.” MacNeice turned to Richardson, who was retrieving a large magnifying glass from her case. “Odd—they didn’t mind us identifying the first one but they don’t want us to know who this was.”

“We’ll do what we can with what we’ve got.” Richardson studied the arm and then lifted it up to study the severing wound at the wrist. “An electric knife.”

Williams’s head snapped towards her.

“A double-bladed carving knife, like you would use on a large turkey. Serrated blades that saw back and forth at high speed. I
think he was bled clean before he was inserted into the tube. The other one, not.”

“Butchered with his clothes on,” Williams said.

MacNeice started taking photos, recording the mutilation in detail as well as wider shots of the remains.

“If I can interrupt, gentlemen, I’d best be getting back. I don’t have a car—Junior dropped me—but I’m open to suggestions.”

MacNeice told Williams to give Richardson his keys and to follow in the fish truck when they got the bodies loaded. The pathologist packed up and without another word left the tent. MacNeice patted the pockets of the cadaver’s pants and noted that he had no ID either. They cut two sections from the tarp, wrapped each body as carefully as possible and laid them in the near-freezing fish truck. As Zaminsky opened the tent to let the truck out, MacNeice’s phone rang. Stepping out the north-end door to the bay, he inhaled deeply for the first time in a while.

“MacNeice,” he said, watching a lake freighter make its way slowly through the canal, gulls circling in its wake, hoping to find something churned up by the props.

“What have you got?” the mayor asked.

“Two recent homicides in the round columns. If we’re true to form, there’ll be two more in the square columns, but they’ll be much older. Dr. Sheilagh Thomas from the university will be here to collect those, and two from the trunk of the car.”

“Christ, it’s a cast of thousands. Can I get time before this blows up?”

“No. LeBlanc’s Fish just left with the two freshest. It’ll soon be out of the bag, if it isn’t already. Just stay ahead of it. Don’t try to massage it.”

“Or sugarcoat it.” The mayor was getting the picture.

“There’s no sugarcoating these guys. One has a huge hole in his forehead and the other doesn’t have a forehead—or a face, hands
or feet. Richardson guesses they’ve been down there roughly eighteen months. Isn’t that when you started pitching this project?” He was looking down at the broken surface of the dock, marvelling at the tiny flowering plants growing through cracks in the concrete.

“Jesus, yes. Okay, try to keep a lid on it for a day or so.”

MacNeice put the phone back in his pocket and looked for the freighter, but it was gone. He thought about what would happen if the cops stopped Williams—in LeBlanc’s truck, with two corpses instead of lake trout in the freezer. It made him smile as he entered the tent again. The air conditioners seemed to be whining, struggling to rid the place of the heavy smell of rotting men. As he walked over to get his jacket, he glanced back at the two bodies on the tarp. Asleep, deeply asleep.

Outside, MacNeice walked to the edge of the dock. The vertical drop made him feel nauseated, and the two-by-four construction barrier gave him very little confidence that he wouldn’t fall in. All activity below had ceased; there were a few large puddles, but otherwise the dock was more or less dry and flat. Grey gulls were spiralling downward and landing on the rough slate floor, where they walked about searching for food. It suddenly occurred to him what a massive volume of space this was. From there it didn’t take long before he was wondering how much concrete it would take to build the new Museum of the Great Lakes.

As he was leaving, he told Zaminsky that it was okay to admit a Dr. Sheilagh Thomas and August the jackhammer man, but no one else. If there were issues, he was to call at once. MacNeice handed him a card. “By the way, who called in your firm?”

“We’re brought in by the insurers of this project. We were told that security had to be trusted. We can be trusted.”

“I don’t doubt it. Keep it tight.”

“Word.” It looked as if Zaminsky would go for a high-five, but he settled for a handshake.

D
RIVING WEST ALONG
King Street, MacNeice realized he was famished and headed to Marcello’s. Stopped at a light, he took out the black CD wallet and flipped through the leaves till he found the Brahms piano concerto. It was Kate’s favourite. He kept it near him for a myriad of reasons, and today it had the right mood, a river of melody that never failed to carry him somewhere else. Music was a gift—he had given her jazz, she had given him classical, and both remained a safe haven and neutral territory.

Pulling into the parking space behind the restaurant, he turned off the engine and waited as the piano made its entrance. MacNeice left the car and went inside, the music lingering in his head.

“Calamari and pasta pomodoro,” he said, when Marcello came to take his order. “Tell me something, March, strictly between us. When an Italian mobster kills someone, is it normal, or even conceivable, that they’d remove the face, hands and feet before sinking him in concrete?”

“Some Italians would. Calabrians, no. We prefer a shot to the head and then just walk away. You want Shiraz or something lighter to go with the calamari? I’ll order them grilled, not
fritti
—you okay with that?”

“Grilled’s fine and Shiraz will do.”

“Yeah, so in my town, San Giorgio, there are white circles. Yeah, you see them around in every kind of place—outside the bakery, city hall, the police station, the church—wherever.”