Читать книгу Pumpkin Eater - Jeffrey Round - Страница 7

The Rue Morgue

Still wearing his dressing gown, Dan stepped onto the back patio, coffee in one hand and newspaper in the other. The sun was bright; the air hung heavy with humidity. It already felt more like 35 Celsius than the mere 29 degrees the forecasters were predicting. Another hot one.

The paper carried an update about a sporadic series of garage fires in the city. They’d carried on through the summer. Just when you thought they were over, another popped up. Always garages, always in the middle of the night, but so far no injuries. Someone wanted to give the residents a good scare. Or maybe they simply wanted to add to the city’s growing pains, tossing panic alongside transit confusion and the cacophony of languages as different cultures were set side by side. Let the city go up in flames, Dan thought. There were more pressing issues afoot.

He sipped from his mug and mulled over the events of the previous evening. The images presented themselves in chilling precision, from leaving his house to finally driving away from the slaughterhouse nearly two hours later, along with everything else that happened

in between.

A knock interrupted his reveries. He opened the door to find an eager young courier beaming at him like there was no tomorrow and he loved his job delivering packages to strangers more than anything else on earth. At least there’s one happy person in the world this morning, Dan thought. He signed the electronic pad and looked at the envelope. It was the file he’d ordered on Darryl Hillary.

He pulled open the tetra-pack and glanced quickly over the contents. It was a thin file. Was that all a man’s life added up to when all was said and done? He set it on the hallway shelf to peruse later, if he still needed to — which he was beginning to doubt — and went back out to the porch.

He was holding off, but the call had to be made. The hardest part of his job was letting a client know of the death of a loved one. Dan’s task was to locate people who had gone missing, not guarantee them safe passage home, especially if they were already dead before he came looking. He also knew the possibility of death must have occurred to most, if not all of the clients who hired him. There had to be long, dark nights when the knock never came at the door, when the phone failed to ring or the letter didn’t fall into the post box. There had to be empty hours sitting and wondering: What if…? At some point you would have to sit back and ask yourself: Was my missing mother, father, sister, brother, husband, wife or child still out there? It had to occur to them.

There were plenty of times when Dan wondered how much of what his clients told him was the truth. All of it? Half? Or just the bare minimum they felt he needed to track someone down? What wasn’t he being told by the obese, balding man covered in tattoos

asking him to find his wife? What was the story behind the anorexic-looking mother wanting him to

locate her teenage daughter? Often the tales were notably devoid of personal details. Darryl Hillary’s severed ear, for instance. What did it signify? Had Hillary overheard something that cost him his life? Could the missing ear be a warning to future snitches to think twice before opening their mouths? What had he known? On the other hand, it might be the trademark of a gang slaying, a mutilation branding this as the work of a particular group anxious to leave their mark in more ways than one. Then again, the guy was hardly gang member material. His sister had said he was a pothead, but he was also a poet. That didn’t spell anger and violence, unless his poetry turned in the realm of gangster rappers.

Behind all this, Dan’s greatest fear was that he might inadvertently return someone to a scenario that would lead to further harm on the missing person’s part. What if the reason for running away was to escape abuse? What if restoring someone to his or her family led to suicide or murder? What if, what if, and again what if? These were the questions that haunted him.

Dan knew he wasn’t the only one with such thoughts weighing heavily on him. Similar doubts clouded the minds of some of the best police officers he’d met and worked with. They lived with the knowledge that locating a missing person in time could mean the difference between life and death. All too often the crucial hours slipped by because of negligence of one sort or another. Paperwork not done in time, messages not forwarded, subtler clues overlooked in favour of more obvious ones that led nowhere. Sometimes an outdated photograph meant a face wouldn’t be recognized immediately. Or it might be the neighbour not questioned soon enough to prevent a twelve-year-old from being suffocated and stuffed into a green garbage bag inside a refrigerator in a rooming house on the street where she’d vanished a week earlier. It was the stuff of nightmares come alive: lions prowling in the streets, tanks rolling down hills into your village. There was always a fear that the one thing overlooked, the simplest effort not made, or the question left unasked meant someone would die or that a killer would escape. That was not far off the truth.

He’d talked to such cops. “There is no such thing as closure,” they’d told him. “You can dehumanize things on the surface, but not deep down. You want to cut off the feelings, but you can’t.” They talked of vics and perps, not real people. They obsessed over physical details and tried to forget the names and faces, but their own faces marked them as haunted. Dan saw it. “You have to detach yourself,” they told him. “You have to look at things objectively.” But not one ever told him they’d been successful at it.

These bustling, over-exuberant tough guys and gals were all live-wired inside. Scarred by what they’d seen, their emotions caught in a precarious tightrope over an abyss, they walked and sometimes they fell. Like Constable Brian Lawrie, who left the force ten days after pulling the body of Sharin’ Keenan Morningstar from the refrigerator of a rooming house in the Annex. For him it was “one crime scene too many,” after being struck by how shiny her hair was when he found her stuffed in that garbage bag. Or his partner, Detective Mike Pedley, who followed the trail of her killer for years, always feeling himself just one step behind until he threw himself under the wheels of a subway train at Rosedale Station on an otherwise bright, upbeat sunny day.

Dan knew the men and women who worked on child murder cases were a breed apart, to use a cliché still deserved in many ways. “It’s the living you have to worry about, not the dead,” they said, if only to convince themselves. They referred to human remains as “trash” in an effort to make it less hurtful. “No offence intended to the deceased,” they said. “We just can’t take it personally.” Dan understood. It was the language they used, but it was slight as far as armour went. He thought about the boy he’d been, the one who grew up tortured because he didn’t know what to feel on hearing of his own mother’s death, hating himself because at four he’d been calculating the advantages he might gain in sympathy from others rather than feeling sorry for her. There was always that particular brand of torture.

Dan’s other great fear was of making the opposite kind of mistake. Of declaring the wrong person dead or, worse, speaking too soon and declaring the wrong person still alive. His gut instinct told him he’d found Darryl Hillary rather than some other unfortunate as he stared up at the body hanging from a meat hook, but logic told him not to jump to conclusions. In this case it might simply mean delaying the delivery of bad news another day, if bad news it turned out to be. One more day for Darryl Hillary’s sister to live in hope. Was that such a bad thing? Sometimes not seeing was believing. Often, the relatives of victims preferred not to learn the truth, to go on believing their loved one was still in the land of the living even when all the evidence, forensic and otherwise, told a different story.

He took a last sip of coffee and looked down at his phone, his thumb rolling through the listings till he found the number for Darlene Hillary.

She picked up on the first ring.

“Ms. Hillary?”

“Darlene, yes.”

“It’s Dan Sharp.”

He heard a sharp intake of breath. “You found Darryl?”

“I don’t know yet. That’s why I’m calling.”

The voice turned hard. “What does that mean?”

“It means the man I found hasn’t been identified yet.”

“I don’t understand. Oh, you mean he’s ...”

Dan felt the weariness overtake him. “A body has been found, but no identification has been made.”

“He’s dead then.”

The voice sounded like a sack of wet cement hitting the ground. Dan sensed the instinctive clenching, the withdrawal that occurred when the news was bad. She was remarkably contained.

“I prefer not to jump to conclusions. We don’t know for sure, so there’s still reason to hope.” He paused to let that sink in. “I was wondering if you would know the name of Darryl’s dentist. I’d like to get his dental records to see if we can rule out the possibility that it is your brother.”

There was a hesitation. “I’m sorry, I can’t think straight. You want to know Darryl’s dentist’s name?”

“Yes, if you know it.”

“I don’t think he had one. Not in Toronto.”

A total recluse, Dan thought.

“What about before that? A childhood dentist maybe?”

“There was a dentist in Timmins. We both went to him. But that was years ago.”

“The records could still help us.”

She was suddenly suspicious. “Who is ‘us’?”

“The Toronto police.” He pulled his dressing gown tighter.

Another pause. “I don’t know if he’s still alive. The dentist, I mean.”

“It’s worth a try,” Dan said, shielding his face from the sun with his hand.

“Just a minute and I’ll see if I can find my old address book.”

He heard her shuffling off. He sipped his coffee and waited. She returned in less than a minute.

“I have it here,” she said. “I keep everything.”

As she relayed the information in a halting voice, Dan wrote down the particulars.

“I’m sorry I have to ask,” he said, “but you mentioned that Darryl smoked drugs. As far as you know, does your brother have drug debts?”

“I don’t think he has anything like that. I know he liked to smoke marijuana once in a while, but I don’t think he was mixed up in anything like that.”

He thanked her and hung up then called directory assistance in Timmins. The operator was unable to locate the dentist in question. She offered to look back several years till she found the name. Not much to do, Dan concluded, accepting her offer to help. The answer came quickly enough: the number had been delisted ten years previously.

He’d just clapped his cellphone closed when it rang again. He saw the name Hillary on his screen.

“He has a gold cap,” she declared without preamble. “I just thought of it. It’s on one of the lower front teeth. You can’t really see it much except when he smiles. I hope that helps you.”

“Yes, it’s a great help,” Dan said, trying to picture the dangling monster smiling at him. It was an eerie thought. Or maybe the gold tooth had been removed along with the left ear. Perhaps it was a psychopathic gold prospector the police should be looking for. “With any luck, it should tell us what we need to know. Thank you very much.”

He finished his coffee without any further interruptions then went inside to dress.

The Centre of Forensic Sciences on Grosvenor Street was the largest laboratory of its kind in Canada. At any given moment, it employed more than two hundred and fifty personnel. Its slogan was Scientia pro justicia: “Science for justice.” Working neither for the law nor against it, the centre was supposed to be as impartial as death. At any rate, that was its claim.

Dan closed his eyes and leaned his head against the coolness of a wall. His stomach, no longer grateful for the late-night Wendy’s combo, had been rumbling for the past hour, demanding breakfast while the rest of him just wanted to go back to sleep. In the main-floor bathroom, he rinsed his face with cool water and surveyed the rugged landscape that constituted his features: jagged nose, brooding eyes under dark brows, broad cheekbones, and powerful chin. A red sickle ran from below the right eye up to his temple, arresting the viewer’s gaze before granting permission to go further. It was a lasting gift from his father for coming home from school late when Dan was ten.

He pulled on the paper towels. At first they refused to give way before giving way far too easily and flooding the floor with brown sheets folded in half. He stooped to pick them up and left them on the counter for the next person who came along, presuming that person wouldn’t be too picky about his drying towels. After all, you never knew where they’d been.

He came back out and sat in reception. A clock ticked at the far end of the hall. Somnolent, hypnotic, it was a reminder to the living of what no longer existed for the dead arrayed for viewing one floor below. He stared at it, his gaze blanking dully before the numbers registered.

Time.

Clock.

Morning.

He’d left the slaughterhouse seven hours ago. Three hours before that he’d been passing a quiet night with Trevor and Ked until it got interrupted. Was it not ironic to be sitting in the hallway of the Toronto morgue waiting to meet a corpse after spending the evening watching The Exorcist?

He stood and paced. Sitting was out of the question if he wanted to stay awake. A green brochure on a magazine stand caught his eye. He scanned the shiny chrome tables on the cover, turned the page and browsed the paragraphs outlining the manufacturer’s specifications for modular mortuaries. He’d never heard of such things.

Fascinated, he read the jaunty, upbeat descriptions of “stand-alone, self-contained plant rooms” that would prove “ideal for any contemporary disaster situation.” The rooms in the images were pristine. No bodies under sheets, no trails of blood or dismembered limbs lying on the floor. No doctors and nurses running around with worn expressions as the body count from the latest suicide bombing or train wreck piled up, proving just how far from ideal any contemporary disaster situation was likely to be.

Dan had visited dozens of morgues over his fifteen-year career. Like cemeteries, he found them to be lack-

lustre places, as opposed to the creepy television portrayals with their atmosphere of incipient doom. Hospitals were far more threatening to his peace of mind.

He’d once looked up the meaning of “morgue,” intrigued by its similarity to the French mort or “dead.” Surprisingly, the words were unrelated. It meant “to look at solemnly.” Even more surprising were the associated synonyms of condescension, disdain, and pride. An unusual usage, Dan thought as he read on, only to learn that in its original form a morgue was a room in a prison where jailers studied the newly convicted to help identify them in future. It was only later, in the fifteenth century, that the word came to designate a room used for cold storage of bodies.

Not to be outdone, the ever-colourful Brits came up with their own euphemisms: “Rose Cottage” and “Rainbow Room,” which allowed doctors to discuss such matters freely in front of worried patients.

In one of the first detective stories, Edgar Allan Poe had written famously of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Since then, few had bettered his creative ingenuity. Without realizing it, he’d established a number of crime fiction conventions, including that of the eccentric but brilliant problem solver, an ineffectual police force, and what was to become known as the “locked room mystery.” That single work changed

the course of literary history, though its author thought

little of it other than to say he felt its popularity stemmed from being “something in a new key.” Novelty

or not, it earned him a substantial fee of $56 on publication in 1841, adding a further brick in the wall of Poe’s literary immortality. That, of course, was after a lifetime of financial hardship, but before being murdered at forty and defamed posthumously by his literary executor. Was his reputation as a great writer any consolation to him now?

Dan settled in for a long wait. Every once in a while someone in a uniform came through the hall and tossed him a sympathetic smile, telling him it would be just another few minutes, before disappearing down the corridor and around a corner that hid the aftermath of who knew what disasters, ideal or otherwise?

At ten thirty, a technician came by. He did a double take and turned back to Dan.

“Hey, sexy. Fancy meeting you here.”

Dan looked up and smiled. “Howard. How are you?”

“Missing being in your loving arms, but otherwise doing very well. How are things? How is, um — Kedrick?”

“Good memory. We’re both well, thanks. It’s been a while.”

“It has, hasn’t it?” A spurt of embarrassment showed on Howard’s face. “Sorry about that last time we were together. I guess I was a little jealous or something.”

Dan shook his head. “Don’t mention it.”

“Did the beer stains come out of your jacket?”

Dan smiled. “Pretty much. So how did you come to be working in the city morgue? Didn’t you use to work in film?”

Howard made a face. “Precisely. I used to do hair and make-up, but I find this far less stressful.”

“Are you kidding?”

Howard gave him a rueful look. “Have you ever worked with actors?”

“Thankfully, no.”

Howard checked his clipboard. “Say, you’re not waiting for unit three, are you? The murder vic from the slaughterhouse?”

Dan nodded, suddenly alert. “That’s me.”

“Come on down the hall. They’re nearly finished,” Howard told him. “I can probably sneak you in if we’re quiet.”

“I think you said something like that the last time we saw each other,” Dan said with a wink.

“Still a cheeky boy.”

Dan followed him to a set of double doors with a red light blinking overhead. Howard turned the knob and peered through the crack. He waved Dan in after him.

The body lay on a table, covered by a sheet up to the shoulders, leaving the head exposed. From across the room, Dan could make out the severed ear base, the dried blood turned black and grimy.

There were three men in the room. The first, clearly

a morgue attendant, carried a clipboard loosely under his arm. The second was the fleshy cop from the slaughterhouse last night. Probably continuity, Dan decided. He would have stayed with the body until the autopsy was completed to provide a continuity of evidence. In other words, so that no one could sneak in and fiddle about with the remains. Once that was done, the body would be sealed in a bag and left undisturbed till it was released to family. The other officer was new. He was smooth-faced and boyish, almost pretty. He’d have had a hard time in the training academy, Dan thought. Probably needed to prove himself at all times. His longish hair was slicked back Latino-style. Definitely not a regulation haircut.

Both cops were consulting sheets, making marks as the coroner told them his findings. They were as unlikely a pair as Jack Spratt and his lean-hating wife, the one small-framed and tidy, the other oversized and as unkempt as they came. The lumpy officer looked as though he’d never learned to tuck in his shirttails or iron his trousers. Even his boots were scuffed, the laces loosely tied.

“We’re almost finished,” said the morgue attendant, glancing over at Dan and Howard. “You can come in.”

The two cops glanced over with disdain, reminding Dan of the original meaning of the word “morgue.” Toronto cops had a reputation for being arrogant. To a degree it was deserved, but not by all. Dan had heard that small town cops resented them for making them all look bad. He’d met his share of cops. For the most part, he could take or leave them. Many were just ordinary folks off the beat, but some had a hardened attitude, as though they felt hard done by and ready to take it out on anybody who gave them cause. As if somebody had forced them to enter the ranks.

Apart from his size, the larger cop was nondescript. If he had the nerve for it, he’d probably be successful working undercover. He could take on any disguise with that doughboy face, potbelly, and stooped shoulders. With minimal effort, he might easily be mistaken for a truck driver, construction worker, or even a biker.

The other barely looked old enough to be a cop.

He was chewing gum, making loud smacking noises. His small stature emphasized his cocky attitude, as though he needed to make up in presence what he lacked in size. His eyes were green. Envy, zealotry, hard to tell. He had a girl’s nose and pouting lips. His hair, thick and honey-blonde, was the kind that seldom made it to middle age without receding, usually along with a sagging middle.

The larger cop said something to his partner, who turned to regard Dan with greater interest.

“You the one that found him?” he threw out.

“Yes, I am.”

“Missing persons investigator, I understand?”

“Correct,” Dan said. He could almost hear him thinking, Wannabe cop.

The officer turned away as though he couldn’t possibly be of further interest.

“I have some information that might help identify the victim,” Dan offered.

Both officers turned to him.

“What would that be, sir?” asked the larger one.

“I spoke with my client this morning. The man I’m searching for — Darryl Hillary — has a gold-capped lower incisor.”

“Well, you’re too late. We already know who this guy is,” replied the younger officer with more than a hint of surliness. “We got his fingerprints on file.”

Dan was aware of the competitiveness police officers felt around him. He wasn’t a cop, yet he often found himself working in their presumed territory.

“Might I ask if this is the person I’m searching for then?”

The blonde cop smirked in a humourless way. “Ask all you want, but it’s none of your business, sir.”

Dan felt his anger igniting. There was more than one way to say “fuck you” to an arrogant prick who took his authority too seriously. As far as Dan was concerned, cops were just one more form of civil servant. They could stand to be a lot more civil to the taxpayers who hired them.

He turned to the coroner and held out his hand.

“Dan Sharp.”

“Tim Johnson.”

“Good to meet you, Tim. Did you notice a gold-capped incisor?”

“Yes, I did.”

The attendant smiled and turned up the dead man’s lip with a gloved hand. There for all the world to see was the gold cap. Dan got the feeling that Tim was relieved to be talking to someone who didn’t look down on him. He also seemed more than happy to upstage this little martinet.

Howard stood looking down at the body with its missing ear and badly beaten face.

“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Who did this? It’ll take more than a little lipstick and mascara to make this one presentable.”

The younger officer eyed him then turned back to his partner. “Fucking queers,” he muttered under his breath.

“Yeah, we’re everywhere,” Dan said, scowling.

The cop looked him over, taking note of his boxer’s physique. “You’re kidding me,” he said, with a look of surprise. “You one of them too?”

“Spare me your hang-ups,” Dan said.

The cop shook his head in disgust then turned to his partner. He nodded at the corpse. “First this perv and now queers. I think we’re done here.”

Dan’s ears twigged at the word: perv. What did they know about Hillary that he didn’t?

Once the officers left, the coroner nodded ruefully. “Not the most pleasant of chaps. They’re not all like that, mind, but some of the younger ones need to be taken down a peg or two.”

“You’re welcome to try,” Dan said. “I won’t tackle them. They get away with far too much now, from what I hear.”

Tim smiled. “And by the way, they mentioned the name, so yes, I’m happy to confirm that this is your man. Or perhaps I should say I’m sorry to confirm this is your man, depending on your outlook.”

He pointed to the form on his clipboard where the name Darryl Hillary was printed next to the line identifying the deceased. They all looked down at the body, as though it might contradict them.

“Cause of death was strangling,” said the coroner, pointing out purple ligature marks around the neck that Dan hadn’t seen in the darkened slaughterhouse interior.

“So someone strong then,” Dan noted.

“I’d say so. Or possibly more than one person. He was killed after being beaten. He was tormented first, quite methodically. I can assure you that considerable pain was inflicted before he died.” He pointed to the face. “He suffered a broken nose and a bashed-in left cheekbone, both probably the result of being hit with a metal pipe or bar of some sort. It would have to have been exceptionally painful. The missing ear may have been sliced off while he was alive.” He looked at Dan. “It’s hard to say. If it was, then he died soon after. Strangling was the coup de grâce. I’d say this man knew he was going to die. And he probably welcomed it.”

“So cruelty was part of the killer’s intention,” Dan said.

“Undoubtedly. But as to its purpose, I can’t say. Someone may have been trying to extract information or maybe they just wanted him to suffer.”

“Was the ear retrieved?”

“I gather it wasn’t found on the premises, so whoever killed him may be a souvenir collector.”

“That’s a gruesome thought,” Dan said.

The coroner nodded. “Howard was correct in saying he’s going to have a hard time making Mr. Hillary presentable for the family.” He looked over at Howard. “But Howard is one of the best. I have absolute faith in his work.”

The coroner pulled the cover over Darryl Hillary’s chest and face, reducing him to a lump beneath a sheet.

Dan shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for your time and your candour.”

“You’re welcome.”

Howard followed Dan out into the hallway. “Catch a coffee with me?” he asked. “I promise not to throw it at you.”

Dan smiled. “Why not?”