Читать книгу Picasso Blues - Lee Lamothe - Страница 12

The task force brainiacs filed in in their power suits, carrying folders and briefing sheets and wearing masks as if they were real cops who actually went out among the public. In the array of chairs only one cop, a tall string-bean black guy from the duty desk, wore his mask on his face. The others, under their chins, on the backs of their heads, over their hair. One guy had it hanging over his crotch like a jockstrap, with a happy face on it.

Ray Tate heard feet shuffling behind him. Chairs squeaked as bodies dropped into them with exhaustion. Someone snored. Someone groaned. He smelled medicated soap and cheap drugstore colognes used to mask, or at least thin out, the sweat of double shifts in closed cars on surveillance jobs and gun-and-runs. As plastic lids were popped or ripped behind him, he smelled coffee. There, too, were girlish scents: emollients, shampoo, cheap perfumes. He felt a stirring and wished he’d gone up to the Projects, mauled the files of the overnight homicides, and found the girl cop with a clothespin on her cute nose. The thought of another night painting and drinking and smoking and waiting for morning depressed him.

As the brainiacs huddled at the front of the room, someone a few rows in front of him expounded on night-vision scopes as a tool to stop the migrants. “We anchor some barges out in the river, put some dead-eye musketeers on them with HKs and night scopes. A snakehead comes over the river with a load of Chinamen, pliinkkkk, we cooks his rices for him.”

“Nice, Tim. Except we don’t got night scopes. We don’t got HKs. We don’t got barges. We don’t got anchors.”

Someone else said, “The loony mayor got us nice new bicycle lanes up and down Martyrs’ Hill, though. The loony mayor got us bicycle racks on front of the new buses. The loony mayor got us ...”

A breathtaking blonde clerk in a short skirt swayed across the front of the podium and opened a brown envelope. She tacked a photo of the latest victim to an easel and there was instant silence. The clerk stared at the photograph for a moment, made a choked sound, then quickly walked away with her head down. The victim’s face was misshapen, her lips were ballooned, one eye was gone in a purple explosion above her left cheek. Her nose lay sideways on her right cheekbone. Ray Tate thought of nothing so much as the fractured mirror of a Picasso painting. Tubes ran from her nostrils and a thick piece of plastic was taped to the corner of her mouth.

Beside him, Brian Comartin muttered, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, that poor little girl. Ah, Jesus Fucking Christ.” He took a shaky breath and seemed near tears. “I’m gonna kill this guy.”

Ray Tate put a hand on his shoulder and wondered if he was looking at his own near future, a fat globe in upper middle age, not sure if he could carry the water any longer, living out a ghost life in the cavernous headquarters with a slide rule in his ankle holster.

The chief of detectives took to the podium. Reluctantly, he slipped his mask down. He gazed over the slumping, yawning troops in their rumpled clothes and couldn’t keep the disdain off his face. “Okay, everybody wake up, have ears. We’re keeping this one shrink-wrapped, nothing outside this room. We’ve got three dead women and we’ve got this one found unconscious today. All were beaten. No sex assault, no robbery that we can figure out. Today’s survivor and one of the other dead three were found by the riverbank. The other two were at various locations downtown.

“The highlights are, as I said, all young female African-Americans, all beaten to pulp, no weapon used that we can tell, no apparent robbery, no molestation. So, no apparent motive. Which means we might be looking at the racial aspect as the connector. We like the Volunteers for this. They’re out all over town in their stupid red caps, and down by the river. They’re very, very viable.

“The current victim might be our breakout. She was found this morning when some boaters were walking along the river. Her prints aren’t on file. She’s not a missing.

“So, today’s vic remains unidentified. She had no ID, just some house keys, locks unknown. The good news is she’s alive. Bad news, she’s comatose, possible severe brain injury, so when she wakes up she might give us something to go on, or she might start reciting Willie Nelson lyrics in Swahili.” He smirked, shrugging in a boys-to-boys grin, and when he saw he was facing grim rows of iron faces staring at the victim and not at him, he cleared his throat. “Okay, anyway, we can’t wait to find out. We’re going to take this one apart.” The Chief of Ds looked around the room. “The folks who found her said it sounded like she was asking about her dog, Harris, or something. If she was walking her dog on the banks, probably she lived in the area. If she doesn’t live in the area, she drove, so a team of cadets from the academy will start doing licence tags on the surrounding streets, looking for something that hasn’t moved in two days. Maybe look for abandoned bicycles. They’ll also work the vets and clinics in the area, talk to dog walkers. Someone knows her, someone knows the dog, Harris. With a little police work we should be able to put a house around her.

“That’s new, that’s the fresh stuff. A Homicide team is setting up. We’ve got forensics down at the latest crime stage. The Volunteers were out last night patrolling for migrant boats and they left some beer bottles and other printable debris along the riverbank. That’s at the lab. We’re doing canvassing. Intelligence is doing workups on the main players in the Volunteers and you’ll be given targets first thing tomorrow. It’ll mean double shifts, hard luck, kids, but there’s nothing I can do about it. We’re all maxing out, we’re all beat, we suck it up. You guys are the enforcement arm of this thing. Don’t worry about the investigative side. Concentrate the eyeballs on the Volunteers.” He looked pleased with himself, a man in command. His cheeks were closely shaven, his eyes were clear, and he wore the power authority suit of the brass, a deep blue three-piece over a snowy shirt and solid blue tie that wouldn’t strobe in television lights. “Questions, suggestions, obs, so far?”

A woman called, “We putting out a public notice? People should know there’s a public danger. Especially black women.”

“We’re working around to it, Marty. We don’t want to spook the Volunteers before we take them down.” He looked around. “Anyone else? Got obs, ideas, questions?”

“No, Chief. No, man.” The same woman called, again, sounding distraught. “We have to notify. We didn’t do it back in ’04 and that guy got more women before we got him. City’s still paying the lawsuit by the families of those victims.”

“I know, Marty, I know. We’re working something out. Anyone else?”

“Yeah, Chief, I got some obs.” A bow-legged, red-headed gunslinger from the robbery squad stood up. His Montreal Canadiens jacket was slung over the back of his chair, he wore a double brace of semi-automatics in a worn shoulder rig, and the handle of a compact revolver jutted from the back of his blue jeans. He wore his mask backwards on the back of his neck with OH FUCK OFF scrawled on it in grease pen. “I observe I’m fucking whipped. We been going around the clock, some of us, for more than a week with this understaffing bullshit and doing gun-and-runs and I further observe, Chief, that except for sleeping in my car, I haven’t slept at all. I observe, Chief, also that with the plague out there we’re down about forty percent street manpower and I further observe, with respect, this whole fucking thing is a dog’s breakfast and we’re the fucking dog.” The gunslinger wasn’t big but he was wiry and coiled with frustration and exhaustion. He’d put three roving French-Canadian bandits toes-up during a single bank robbery. The holdup squad up in Montreal had sent him the hockey jacket. Except for Ray Tate, who’d done a trifecta, although not all at one time, he was the only other gunman on the force who’d wiped three shadows off the wall.

“Okay, Steve, okay. Noted.” The Chief of Ds looked around for raised hands. “Anybody else?”

The ginger gunslinger remained standing and continued as if the Chief of Ds hadn’t said anything. “And I further observe, Chief, that you and that Chinaman police chief and that fucking mayor all showed up this morning on the TV looking pretty snappy, like you’d been at a restful spa for a week or two, napping flat out on your back like human beings, then getting all barbered up for the cameras. You tired, Chief? You get your beauty rest last fucking night when I was sitting in the Brickworks pissing in a paper cup? Observe me that one.”

“Ah, ah, also noted.” The Chief of Ds licked his lips. He wasn’t going to tangle with a gunslinger with three notches on his gun butt. He looked around and focused on the tall masked black detective seconded from the duty desk. “Marcus, questions, obs?”

The tall detective stood up and reluctantly slipped down his mask. “What are we supposed to do about OT? I got about a hundred overtime hours in and —”

Someone yelled, “Sit down, you fucking ass meatball.”

Someone called, “You do-dick motherfucker.”

The tall detective turned, “Hey, I know it’s tough this girl’s in a coma, but, hey, I’m not, and my family’s gotta eat, right?”

A woman’s voice from behind Ray Tate shouted, “Sit down, you fucking duty-desk hump-assed motherfucker.”

There were hoots and hisses.

Another woman charger yelled, “Yeah, have some fucking respect, you fucking double douche.”

The black detective said to the Chief of Ds, “What the fuck was she doing, Chief, going out alone, down by the river? At night? How stupid was she?”

“Yo,” a woman’s voice from the back of the room said. “Whoa the fuck up.”

The tall black detective turned his head and looked into the rows behind him. “You think she’s bright, this one, Marty? The river? At night? She’s a dumb enough to be a kiddie cop.”

A uniformed black woman from the Youth Services team launched herself through two rows of chairs, her shoulder taking him in the kidney, sacking him as if he were a daydreaming quarterback. Both went down. Chairs clattered and skittered across the tile floor. The Chief of Ds stepped away from the podium and pulled up his mask as though he didn’t want to be polluted by the scent of sudden cop violence.

“Ten bucks on the chick, Picasso,” Comartin said to Ray Tate. “You think she likes iambic pentameter?”

Ray Tate laughed. He watched the Chief of Ds and the task force leaders look at one another. The woman from Youth sat on the detective’s chest, her knees pinning his arms down, rocking it to him first-class with a measured metronome of thoughtful lefts and rights. It was bloody, there were teeth. It sounded like meat. “No bet.”

Four buff heavies from the door squad casually stepped into it. It took three of them to move the youth officer off the duty-desk hump. She really didn’t want to leave the job unfinished. Ray Tate could tell the doormen just loved the black woman, they were talking softly to her, calling her Marty, patting her over to make sure she wasn’t injured. She was swearing and heaving. The fourth doorman slung the limp detective over his shoulder and headed for the door, whistling.

The chairs were marshalled up; the room buzzed with laughter and comments. The Chief of Ds banged the side of his fist on the podium. “Not a fucking word of this gets out. I see any of this in the media, everybody in this fucking room is riding a pencil until you retire.” He shook his head. “Fuck sakes.”

The chief hammer from Homicide whispered into the Chief of Ds’ ear. The hammer’s name was Bob Hogarth but he was called Hambone. A legend was that on his first murder, a hubby-on-wife bludgeoning with no weapon found and the husband bobbing and weaving pretty good, he’d tracked back a lengthy grocery list from two days previous and saw a frozen ham bought on sale. He got a warrant for the undisposed garbage and the contents of the house, detailing refrigerators, freezers, and other receptacles where frozen meat might be contained. After the search turned up the hambone in the garbage, he introduced himself to the husband. “Detective Robert Hogarth, of the … Hamicide Squad.” “Fuck,” the husband blurted, slumping.

The Chief of Ds stepped back. Hambone Hogarth had a different kind of weight: his team was four for four on taking down cop killers dead. No one who’d ever killed a city cop on his watch was alive and doing time. He was smart and he knew cops: he had no mask, his suit was rumpled, he had bed-head, and he hadn’t shaved. He’d been seen in the streets, knocking doors, visiting victims’ families personally because he had a lot of manpower off sick. He lit off a whistle. “Okay, kids, the program’s over. Decision of the judges? Unanimous. Marty Frost gets the title, she goes to the welterweight finals.”

Another round of applause and whistles and the task force began seating themselves.

“Aw riiii,” Hogarth said, and the room quietened. “We’re getting some help. State’s sending us some bodies. We got some auxiliaries, some kids from the academy. There’ll be teams listed up on the board tomorrow. Everyone report here, seven a.m. We’ll have all the prints from the bottles back, and we’ll have a roster up, once we see how many bodies are getting borrowed to us. We’ll keep up Volunteers surveillance by day, catch them for anything, traffic, spitting on the sidewalk, public mopery. But we bring ’em in and sweat them for the murders.” He looked around. “If the girl wakes up and fingers the mayor as the guy, we can all go home, done the good job. Until then ...” He simpered, “We thuuuck it up.”

There was scattered laughter. One charger in the back said, in a high-pitched voice and a lisp, “But what about the moneys ... The over-thime? ... I needs a Bra-thill-ian waxing, I gots ex-penthess.”

Another said, “Keep the money, dude. Just pair me up with that cool chick over there behind Ray Tate. Where you from, honey?”

And Djuna Brown said, “Paris, bongo. I be from beatnik life.”

Ray Tate felt her light, fragrant hand on his shoulder and a soaring in his chest. But he made his face bland, twisted in his chair and looked at her deadpan.

For a moment her heart dropped. He’d forgotten her, moved on.

Then Comartin said, “Fuck, Picasso, that looks like the chick you sketched this morning.”

Djuna Brown smiled.