Authors: J. A. Kerley
“If it comes up. He mention anything about feeling crummy?”
“Haven’t heard a word. At least he’s not ordering a load of pizzas.”
I went to the elevator, parked upstairs, and pressed the button to bring it down. Nothing. I jabbed at it like flicking bumpers on a pinball machine.
“The elevator’s not working,” I called to Jonathan. “Gary turn it off?”
He walked over and looked at the panel beside the Up/Down buttons. “No. There’d be a red light on.”
I mashed the key a half-dozen more times. The damn thing was dead. I needed some answers to questions sparked by my brother and was going to get them this morning.
“Is there another way up?”
Jonathan nodded to the rear. “Back stairs. They’re real tight. And kinda cluttered cuz we use them for storage.”
He pointed to a door near the back. I walked over and yanked it open, seeing steps jammed with boxes.
“Gary!” I yelled up the dark staircase. “GARY!”
No response. I pictured him on the toilet and eating cold pizza, the door closed until I left. His return to fatty foods and huge calories had probably given him diarrhea, food exiting as fast as it entered.
I was turning for the front door when a thud shook the floor above.
“What the fuck?” Jonathan said.
I knew it was five hundred pounds going down. I ran back to the tight staircase, grabbed the handrails and jumped boxes, tripping, kicking them down the steps. Comic books spilled everywhere.
“Call 911, Jonathan,” I yelled, dread clutching my heart. “Then get up here.”
I kicked some boxes from my way, jumped over others. I tripped, fell back a few steps, retook them. The door at the top was locked and I stood on the shallow platform and pounded the door with my fist.
“GARY … TALK TO ME. GARY!”
Nada. The door was old and wood and solid. I grabbed the stair rails and catapulted my body into it, getting nowhere, the steel lock-pin deep in the casement. I considered shooting out the lock, but had no idea where Gary was in the room. I kicked the door, which only knocked me backward, falling halfway down the steps, cartons tumbling after me.
Jonathan finished his call and stared wide-mouthed. “Tools?” I said. “Hammer? Axe? I need something heavy.”
He bolted to the back door, opened it and bent to pick up something in the alley. He came in holding a heavy masonry brick, the veins popping out in his skinny arms.
“We use it to prop open the door for deliveries,” he panted.
I grabbed ten pounds of cast concrete and re-climbed the stairs. The knob fell away on the third blow, the lockset broke loose on the fifth. I pushed through the door. There, beside his bed, was Gary Ocampo, sprawled face-down on the carpet, wearing blue pajamas, one slipper on his foot, the other still under the bed, like he’d been trying to get dressed. The buttocks area of the fabric was stained with stool. I felt his neck and thought I detected a faint heartbeat.
“Gary!” I yelled, slapping his fat cheek. “Wake up, bud. Stay with me.”
His only response was a quiver of lip and a white froth that fell from his open mouth to the floor. I turned to see Jonathan in the room, eyes wide in terror. “Help me get him turned over,” I said.
It was like trying to flip a beanbag chair filled with pudding. “Grab his arm,” I said to Jonathan, “Let’s see if we can leverage him over.”
The kid slipped under Gary’s arm and I wrestled beneath a huge leg, bracing my heels on the floor. “Count of three,” I said. “Lift and push. One … two …”
On three we threw everything into it, Jonathan grunting with effort, veins protruding on his forehead as I stood with Gary’s leg over my shoulder and simultaneously pushed forward.
Gary Ocampo rolled over, Jonathan falling across his chest as I tripped and fell across his legs. But Gary was on his back. I checked his pulse again, nothing this time.
“Come on, Gary,” I said, hearing sirens in the distance. “Think of Carnevale.”
I told Jonathan to bring the medic up the staircase, then started rescue breathing on Gary Ocampo.
A minute later the paramedics came through the door, man and woman, cases in hand. The guy was new to me but I knew the woman, Teresa Bardazon, as one of Ziggy’s on-and-off girlfriends.
I stood and she saw me first. “What you got, Carso—” the eyes fell went to Gary. “Jeee-sus, he’s huge. Heart attack?”
“No idea. Light, reedy pulse, getting lighter. No breath response.”
With choreographed precision the pair put an air bag over Gary mouth and nostrils, the guy squeezing air into his lungs. But that needed a pumping heart to move the oxygen to the brain.“We gotta get him to a hospital quick,” Bardazon said, eyeing the elevator. “The four of us can get him in there.”
“The elevator’s dead,” I said.
The male medic, a powerful-looking guy named Ted, ran to the elevator and pushed
Down
a dozen times before realizing I was right. Bardazon tore open Gary’s pajama top and pressed a stethoscope to his pale flesh. “I’m not getting anything.” She balled her fist and slammed his chest, setting the huge breasts and belly into quivering motion.
“The fat’s like a shock absorber.”
I knelt and pounded Ocampo’s chest like John Henry throwing his sledge, except Henry’s hammer didn’t sink into the rail. Bardazon leaned in with the scope again. Shook her head,
nothing.
“Last resort,” she said, scrabbling though the med bag, stripping the wrapper from a wicked-looking syringe, the thick needle longer than my index finger. She looked between Gary and the needle.
“It won’t sink deep enough,” she said, meaning it wouldn’t reach his heart with the jump-start of adrenalin. “It won’t clear the adipose tissue.”
Ocampo was turning blue, starving for oxygen, cells dying in his brain. I ran a fingernail over Gary’s breast like the point of a knife.
“What if we …”
Bardazon understood, grubbing through the bag and coming up with a bottle and a wrapped scalpel. “But we gotta be fast.”
I poured topical antiseptic over Ocampo’s chest. Bardazon leaned in with the scalpel and made a deep slice in the fat above Gary Ocampo’s stilled heart.
“Pull it open, Carson,” she said.
I took a deep breath and opened the wound, seeing the thick cushion of gelatinous yellow fat growing red with blood. “Farther,” Bardazon whispered. “Rip it open if you have to.”
I put my weight into spreading the inflicted wound, opening it down to the fascia and musculature above the cardiac cavity, giving the needle access. Bardazon lifted the syringe above her head, whispered
three-two-one
and plunged the needle into Gary Ocampo’s heart.
I put my hand to his neck. “It’s started!”
Bardazon leaned in with the scope. “Go baby … tick you MUTHAFUCKA!”
I retreated to dial the FCLE’s Resources Division, semi-retired agents who could put FCLE agents in touch with any expertise needed, from snake handlers to the electronics pro who’d help me save a young girl last year. We had to get Gary Ocampo to an emergency room and it was either get the lift running or knock down a wall.
The RD folks said they had their “elevator consultant” on the way, a guy who’d retired after thirty-six years with Otis. I turned to Bardazon. The former light in her eyes was replaced with resignation as she set the scope back in the bag.
My eyes gave her a
what’s up?
look.
“He’s gone, Carson,” she said. “The heart stopped and that was it.”
“What?” You always hope you heard it wrong.
“He’s dead, bud.”
I felt lightheaded, outside of myself, in a dream. Bardazon rose on stress-weary knees, using Ocampo’s body to push herself standing. “There might have been a chance, Carson. There’s an ER five minutes away at Mercy North. But with the elevator on the fritz and the stairs so tight …”
“Yeah,” I said, staring into space.
Bardazon and the other medic, Ted Fuselli, called for a special gurney. Ten minutes later I answered the door to a black guy about the size of Harry Nautilus. His name was Washburn Kincaid, and he was one of the FCLE’s elevator pros. I sat and waited until he summoned me to an open box beside the furnace/AC unit, a grouping of thick cables running to the panel.
“You know what this is, don’t you?” Kincaid said.
“Sure, a breaker box.”
“Controls power to the electrical systems. A short or overload happens, the breaker shuts off the juice and that circuit goes down.”
I looked at what was simply a larger box than the one in my home: a dozen or so switches all canted to the right. In the case of a short or overload, the breaker closed down the circuit and the switch flicked to the left to indicate a problem. Fix the problem, reset the switch, power continues.
“They all look fine to me,” I said, seeing an opening at the bottom of the panel, a rectangle half the size of standard brick. “What goes down there?” I asked. “At the bottom?”
“That’s the space for a larger breaker, two-twenty volts.” Kincaid tapped a switch assembly to the right of the hole. “Like this one, which protects the furnace and AC circuit. But one breaker is missing.”
“Someone pulled the entire unit?” I said.
“Not hard, Detective. They pop out for replacement or repair.”
I closed my eyes. “The breaker for the elevator, right?”
He nodded. “As soon as it got pulled, the elevator went to its safest mode. In other words, it shut off. Powerless. Totally dead.”
Gary Ocampo had been murdered.
Kincaid bridged the circuit and the elevator was operational. The bus arrived and the heavy-duty gurney went upstairs. Three minutes later it returned bearing a huge body under a sheet, no one having XXX-Large body bags. Jonathan followed the medics from the elevator, sniffling and wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
Bardazon stopped and turned to me. “Sorry it had to go down like this, Carson. The stairway was just too narrow.”
“Yeah,” I nodded, looking out the window and seeing Longo and Rasmussen pulling in. “Excuse me,” I said.
I was in the street seconds later, the pair of surveillance cops wide-eyed at seeing me striding toward them with my fists clenched. Their eyes widened further when I kicked the mirror off their cruiser. I was trying to yank the locked door open when the two medics and Kincaid wrestled me back to the shop.
An hour later I entered the pathology department, knowing it was going to be an unhappy occasion. I flicked a wave at the woman behind the counter, thirtyish, attractive, and another of Gershwin’s occasional companions.
“Where’s Ziggy?” she said.
I patted my pockets like he was in there somewhere. She laughed, good, because I needed to hear a laugh before my next stop. I bypassed Morningstar’s almost-former office, now just a desk and a chair and a single brown box, continuing to suite six, the one with the outsize autopsy table. They had another on order, corpulent bodies becoming so common.
I entered to see a gowned Vivian almost hidden behind the rise of Gary Ocampo’s mountainous belly. Because of the situation, his autopsy had gone to the top of the list. He was naked, hands at his sides, eyes closed. The slice over his heart gaped like a leering mouth, yellow fat puffing out like the mouth was chewing.
I’m sorry,” Vivian said, pulling a tray of instruments to her side. “I know you liked him and were trying to help him.”
I shrugged, not liking to talk about failures. “Anything in the screens?”
“A huge dosage of black locust in his blood.” She nodded at the body. “I just finished the visual. No needle punctures like Prestwick.”
“Oral, then?”
She nodded. “The forensics team is checking every item in the living area as a possible source.” She picked up a scalpel. “I’m starting now. Are you staying?”
I went to sit a chair against the wall. I’m not sure why, but I felt I owed it to Gary to be here. The task took almost three hours, slowed by the necessity of removing quivering blocks of yellow adipose tissue.
When she finished, a trio of assistants moved the remains to a cooler compartment. It hit me that next of kin was usually notified regarding disposition of the body. The only next of kin was Donnie, who was our killer, a thought that took a minute to shake from my head.
Morningstar hit the locker room and slipped from the surgical wardrobe, and I followed her down the hall toward a meeting room.
“I took the liberty of running the case by our new shining star,” she said as we approached. We stepped through the door. “Dr Davanelle, I have someone you should meet … if you haven’t already, that is.”
Ava was seated with a stack of manuals and forms before her. We both performed eyes-wide amazement. “Dr Davanelle,” I said, reaching to take both her hands in mine. “What a surprise!”
Morningstar smiled. “I wondered if you two had met. Dr Davanelle’s resumé mentioned working in Mobile for a few months.”
“It was a long time ago,” Ava said. “But Detective Ryder and I were together on a couple of cases.”
“Interesting ones, if I recall, Dr Davanelle,” I said.
A wisp of smile, but only if you knew Ava.
“Yes, I think they were.”
“Looks like the Ryder–Davanelle alliance is back at work,” Vivian said, her words carrying more weight than she’d ever know. “A pity it reopens with such an ugly case.”
I crossed my arms and leaned the wall. “Any thoughts, Dr Davanelle?”
“I gotta get my post-mortem recording logged in,” Viv said. She gave me an unpurred purr, but only if you knew Vivian. “Nice seeing you again, Detective Ryder.”
I nodded politely as she headed door-ward. “Likewise, Dr Morningstar.”
Though our relationship was not strictly verboten by official rules, working the same cases was frowned on. But Vivian had almost made it to the end of her pathology career before taking up with a colleague. We figured when she was a month or so gone we’d – presto! – seem to discover one another.
A pair of young lab techs were across the hall discussing a case, in earshot and preventing Ava and I from overt appearances of familiarity. I pulled out a chair and sat. Despite our strange history we were at work, we had a case to solve, and – despite her background – Ava was an extremely bright and talented person.