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CHAPTER 2

Monday, September 18

On the salary of a junior police detective in a town of thirty-five thousand—even a police detective with a nice little legacy of lands and money, the latter going into making the former more livable—Dave Clayton cut corners where he could. This morning he was at the yearly health fair in the Friends’ Meeting House, where flu shots cost less than anywhere else. He was also running late for duty, thanks to uncooperative traffic lights.

“Hey!” he announced, marching in behind his identification card. “Police detective here.”

“Detective!” a neat, gray-haired lady in blue tunic and trousers greeted him. “Is there any trouble?”

“None at all, M.,” he answered, turning the volume down on his baritone voice. Why did people always jump to that assumption? “Just hoping I can get my flu shot and still make it to work on time.”

“Of course. Are you investigating that dreadful murder right here in Forest Green?”

“We’ve always got a lot on our plate, M. But, yes, that one’ll be taking precedence until we’ve got the killer in custody.” Which might be a lot sooner if the Old Woman wasn’t quite so tender about risking miscarriages of justice; but Dave kept that thought to himself. Solidarity before the public.

“Right this way, Detective.” The gray-haired lady led him straight to the head of the line, nodding out apologies on the way. “Here you are, Detective. Nurse Whitcomb, can you take this police detective next?”

The nurse giving out flu shots glanced up from patting an adhesive mini-bandage on the arm of a little girl about nine or ten. “Surely, M. Esteridge. Right away.” Handing the little girl a cookie, she shooed her off the chair and beckoned to Dave. “Next.”

Quite a beauty, Nurse Whitcomb—Nurse Julie Whitcomb, he saw by her name badge. Black hair braided up on top of her head behind the white nurse’s cap, green eyes with just the merest suggestion of epicanthic folds and Butterscotch skin to match, straight nose, luscious red lips, long neck…

“Smooth or rough, Handsome Detective?” Nurse Julie Whitcomb teased him as he took his seat on the folding chair and rolled up his sleeve. “You don’t look like a man who’s afraid of needles.”

“I’m not. But make it smooth, anyway.”

The time he got studying her bosom while she bent over his arm, imagining what lay beneath that neat nurse’s collar and smooth white tunic, was all too brief. “Finished,” she announced.

“You were smooth! I never felt a thing.”

“Comes with long practice. How about a Bugs Bunny bandage?”

“Hey, what happened to ‘Handsome’? Now you think I look like a Bugs Bunny type?”

“Oh, in features you’re more a Cary Grant type. But with that mischievous twinkle in your eye…” She flicked her tongue out between those fleshy red lips just long enough for him to appreciate its pinkness. “Whoops!” she went on. “All out of Bugs Bunny. Take a Dizzy Duck instead.” She slapped one on his arm and told him, “Now roll down your sleeve and head on out, Handsome Detective. Other people are waiting.”

“The name’s Dave. David Clayton. You in the phone book?”

“How else can I make myself available?” She gave him a wink and a shove on the back. “Ciao, Detective Dave Clayton.”

He thought it was a joke. He was sure it had to have been just a joke. Nurses didn’t have to take any extra work on the side. And even if one did, she surely wouldn’t broadcast it to a pollydeck? Would she? It had to have been just flirtatious banter.

He was going to phone her tonight. Make good and sure.

Maybe that was what she wanted to make sure he’d do.

Nice thought.

* * * *

Moonlighting with local yearbooks, night Desk Officer Holly Davenport had come up with thirty-six possible matches for the corpse’s face. Even thirty-six was an impressive job of weeding down, and might easily have missed the one they needed. His character, his psychomystique, the millions of big and little things that had made him unique in the world when he was alive—all had vanished after death into a corpse that could have belonged to almost any one of a quarter of the young male population in the country. Age probably between twenty and thirty, medium build, black hair, hazel eyes, probably good-looking in a generic kind of way when he was animated and happy, teeth distinctive only to the dental records.

Dentists. That was the place they’d start this morning, as soon as Clayton got in. Meanwhile, Sergeant Lestrade set Officers Little Bird and Vergucchi, reassigned to this case full time, at work with the telephone directory, phoning every family they could find for the young men on Officer Davenport’s list. Then Lestrade sat down to make her own list: the dentists in town.

Little Bird and Vergucchi had found a dozen families and crossed them all off—either the young men were safely accounted for or else they had moved out of state some time ago—by the time Clayton strolled in humming.

Lestrade tapped her fingernail against the bowl of her cherrywood pipe. Like three-fourths of the floaters who used to carry pipes a dozen years ago when it was the big craze, Lestrade’s had never known tobacco. Of all the substitute flavors that were still available, she preferred anise.

“Well, Detective,” she greeted him sourly. “Finding murder something to hum about these days?”

He blanked his face at once. “No, Sergeant, sorry. It wasn’t the case I was humming about. It was the nurse who just gave me the smoothest flu shot a floater could ask for.”

“And you made it to work anyway, a mere —” She glanced at the clock—“seven minutes late. Impressive. I don’t even want to know,” she added, cutting him off with a wave of her pipe stem. “You like this one that much, save her for when you get off duty. And I had my flu shot a week ago.” She stood up, pocketing her list. “Don’t bother sitting down, either. We’re out to pick up some dentists for body identification.”

Holy martyred Silverstairs! Lestrade hated getting people in to identify dead bodies. Whether it was a mere formality or, like now, a necessity.

With the third dentist, they struck paydirt. Dr. Marvella O’Connor stood there a good hundred and twenty seconds, staring down at the face Lotus Blossom Lee had arranged with the expertise of her former life as a mortician’s assistant, once Doc Grumeister was through with his so-called examination. “I’m not sure…” the dentist said at last. “It could be… They look so different, don’t they? When they’re dead.”

Even when it had been a peaceful, natural death. Both detectives nodded sympathetically.

“And then, if it is…You understand, I would’ve known him only as a patient…” Dr. O’Connor stretched her hands out toward the mouth, hesitated, glanced first at Lestrade and then at Clayton. “Do you mind, Detectives? That is, I wouldn’t be…corrupting the evidence, or anything?”

“Whatever you need to help us identify him, Doctor,” Lestrade replied.

The dentist touched the lips, jerked her hands back from the shock of dead flesh, reached again and, using just her fingertips, eased the mouth open for a look inside. “Ahh!” she breathed. She turned her head to look from a slightly different angle. “Ahh! Yes…yes, I’ve worked on these teeth. I remember the gap between his upper left lateral incisor and cuspid—tiny, but distinctive. And I put that big filling in the lower right second molar just a few weeks ago. Thought…I thought it’d last him for years. I remember the day he got it, he was talking about maybe getting a real tattoo, if he could figure out a design that’d work for both his Hallowe’en costume this year and the rest of his…life…afterwards. Yes…what was—is?—was?—his name? Sorry, I’ve got so many patients…Jack… No, Harry…Harry Jackson…Harry Carter Jackson! Oh, dammit to hell, Harry Jackson!”

“Thank you, Dr. O’Connor,” Lestrade told her gently. “We’ll have to check your dental records for our official books. But when we catch whoever did this, it’ll be largely thanks to you. If they still watch us from…whatever name you give it…Harry must be cheering for you now.”

“Sergeant Lestrade… They said on the news…it was torture? Not just murder, but…”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Lestrade replied, swearing the news media out in her mind. “Long as his body lay leaching out in the water, all those marks could just as well have been made post-mortem.”

Thank the Lady the damn media had at least cooperated far enough to keep that tattoo out of the news. A secret Lestrade refused to break now. Not even to draw back the white sheet and get the dentist’s opinion whether or not it could have been the one the late M. Jackson had talked about maybe getting.

Somehow, she didn’t think it was.

* * * *

The body definitely identified, next thing Lestrade did was make a call to Chris Grunewald back in Chicago. Chris was out of town. Some kind of forensic examiners’ conference in Denver, followed by a few vacation days to visit a brother in Chillicothe. Try again Thursday.

All right. Body into coldest possible storage for a little longer before it could be released for burial. Another unwelcome job for the family. Who had to be told right now. The “formality” identification.

Of everything Lestrade hated about her workline, this part was the worst. She’d cheated a little by trying to sneak in her call to Chris first. No more excuses to put off notifying the family.

They had a nice house in the Joliet Park area. Turned out the late M. Harry Jackson had been re-alighting at his old home nest while he sent out feelers for a position that could use his brand new Ph.D. in Astrophysics.

The Jackson-Carters had thought their second-born was overnighting with a young lady downtown. They hadn’t started worrying until news of the murder hit the media. Another hour without at least a phone call from Harry, and they’d have called the police station themselves.

People reacted in different ways. Harry’s mother turned white, left her husband to ask the usual questions of shock and disbelief and “no possible mistake?” and walked slowly out of the room. To return in a little under ten minutes, carrying a thick book that could have been from Ward and Roebuck but turned out to be a sample book of tattoo designs.

She looked back and forth a couple of times between Lestrade and Clayton before handing her burden to the junior partner. “Just last Wednesday,” she told them numbly, “he borrowed this from a local tattoo artist. I don’t know which one. We…we’ve always been tolerant about it, it’s so popular what else do you do? but never really interested, nobody else in the family. Except Linda, who got a tasteful little rose last year. Along with the rest of her graduating class. Harry thought he had narrowed it down to Egghead McJones, the solar system as an atom, or…or…”

Linda Jackson of the tasteful rose tattoo supplied, “Or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script.”

“Or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script. I think he may have decided, forgotten to take the catalog back. It should go back now. This catalog. Harry was always so careful to get his library materials back on time. This should go back, too. I’m sorry, I don’t know which…body artist. Somebody local. I know it’s somebody local.”

They thanked the family, explained about releasing the body as soon as they could…it might be two or three weeks, maybe even as long as a month, but it was absolutely necessary for them to keep it until it could get a second examination. Not necessarily a full autopsy, no, and everything would be kept as integral as possible, but these things needed a second opinion, and it’d be much better if they kept the body now instead of having to exhume it later. Meanwhile, could they have one or two recent photos of Harry?

And, very sorry about this, M.’s, but some member of the family would need to come in to make the formal identification.

Some families liked to hold memorial services right away, even if full interment had to wait.

While Lestrade took her turn driving, Dave sat silently for a couple of miles through city traffic, the sample book in his lap. She knew he didn’t like informing the survivors any better than she did. Any polly who liked that duty, wasn’t fit to serve as a polly.

At last, halfway to the station, Dave said, “Egghead McJones, the solar system as an atom, or ‘Love and Peace’ in Elvish script.” Her peripheral vision caught his slow headshake. “Nope. I can’t connect any of those with the one he actually has.”

“I can’t either, Dave,” said Lestrade. “I can’t, either.”

* * * *

Chicago had a body artist on every corner, but Forest Green had four to serve the whole town and surrounding area. Tattoos were usually permanent, and people had only so much skin area to cover, no matter how popular good body art might be among about forty percent of the population. And then, there were some groups, like rolegamers, who as often as not preferred the paint-on or peel-off versions, so as to change their body art with the scenario.

Three of the town’s body artists were as legitimate as their business. Only two of the fifty-five Reformed States had ever outlawed tattoos—Rhode Island, which probably did it to be quaint, and Texacali, which probably did it to give her tattoo enthusiasts the thrill of mild and harmless lawbreaking.

Lestrade hated having that kind of law on the books. Helped blunt the force of the real laws, the laws every society needed. The law against murder, for one. The law against what had been done to Harry Carter Jackson.

Come to think of it, about the only thing Rosemary Lestrade liked about her workline was getting to clear the occasional innocent party.

Sydney Naismith was known only to his clients and the police. Thirty-eight years ago, when he was starting up in Toronto, he’d been a little too careless about sterilizing his needles, and tattoos had gotten infected. Three people needed hospitalization, one of them died, and Naismith ended up blacklisted for life by the International Association of Body Artists.

Lestrade had decided to tackle Naismith first.

Moving farther and farther down the ladder as his hair got thinner and grayer, he had sunk into a one and a half room basement apartment in what Forest Green liked to think of as its slum district: four square blocks that any self-disrespecting skid row in Chicago or New York would have labeled lower middle-class without a second thought. His bed was a fold-up, his kitchenette was on the street side of his living room, and…

“Where are you hiding the equipment now, M. Naismith? Lestrade asked him, more curious than anything else.

“We know you haven’t gone out of business,” Clayton added. “We ran one of our regulars in just last week, with a new flower on her ankle in your distinctive lack of style.”

“Art. That’s why they call it ‘body art,’ Detective, and I don’t like you blighting it just because you don’t understand it. That’s why I ever got into the business in the first place. To practice art. Then one effing mistake and they try to kick me out for life. You don’t bottle art up, Sergeant Hatchet Face.” (Lestrade noticed with wry amusement that Naismith had slid from her junior partner to herself without a pause.) “Or it eats you alive from inside out,” he went on. “Like it says in the Gospel of Thomas, if you let out what’s inside, it’ll save you. If you don’t, it’ll destroy you. I’m an artist, pollies. You want the tools of my art, get yourselves a warrant and search the place. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour. Take you longer to get the warrant than it’d take for me to give this dump a whole new paint job, floor to ceiling, maybe put in new wood trim, too.”

“I see you still like to go on talking half an hour after making your point,” Lestrade told him. “As it happens, today we aren’t interested in ferreting you out for the benefit of IABA.”

“You’re safe enough in this town,” Clayton added, “until whatever you let out of you destroys somebody else.”

“That was thirty-eight years ago, Pollydeck.”

“Make it another thirty-eight, and we’ll get you into a museum,” said Clayton. “And don’t call Sergeant Lestrade ‘Hatchet Face.’ Here.” He produced the sample book. “This yours?”

Naismith took it, riffled through it, shook his head. “Nope. Looks likes what’s-his-name’s style. Where’d you get it?”

“Turned in at our Lost and Found,” Clayton lied easily.

“Well, better try my…colleagues.” Naismith said the last word like an insult. “Especially…what’s-his-name, the one lording it off uptown.”

“Okay, Detective Clayton,” said Lestrade. “Show him the design.”

They hadn’t brought a photograph of the tattoo. A photograph would show part of the dead body. So they’d brought a tracing made from a photograph, using a pencil almost the same shade of blue.

Naismith glanced at the tracing and said, “Looks like one of those effing stamps.”

“Took a whole lot of time weighing that decision, didn’t you?” Clayton asked him.

“How much time you think it takes to recognize a piece of mass-market crap?”

Lestrade took over again, and deliberately used a term she guessed he wouldn’t like, just to feel him out a little more. “And you can tell how it’s punched in from a tracing?”

“Why’d any self-respecting body artist take the time to really tattoo anything that’s going to end up looking like one more piece of mass-market crap? These stamps, you can call them ‘punching,’ if you want. I’d call it worse. But don’t you ever say ‘punching’ when you’re talking about real tattooing. You want respect from me, Pollydecks, you give my art some respect, too.”

“I take it,” Lestrade commented, “you wouldn’t be caught dead using one of these tattoo stamps?”

“Call that respect, Sergeant Hatchet Face? Leonardo ever use rubber stamps in his pictures?”

“Stop calling her —” Dave began, but she caught his eye and shook her head. Let it pass, hot beaver. It isn’t that important.

“Then let me put it to you very respectfully,” she went on to Naismith, more sternly than respectfully, “you wouldn’t make one of these stamps even if somebody requested one? Offered you a lot of money for it? You wouldn’t see it as a challenge?”

“I’d see it as an insult. Like I hear you insulting me, Sergeant Hatchet Face.” Naismith glanced around at his third-hand furnishings and the pitiful stock of generic canned goods in his open shelves. “But if I ever did make an effing stamp for the money, even if I ever thought getting the equipment to make it would be halfway worth the expense, you can bet it’d have a lot more style than this piece of crap.” He took another glance at the tracing and thrust it back at Clayton. “It’d be something you could almost mistake for art. It wouldn’t be crap.”

Lestrade signaled her partner with a nod.

He held out the two photos they had gotten from the victim’s family. “Ever see this floater before?”

Naismith grunted and examined the first photo. Shuffled the second one out on top and examined it as well. Finally shook his head. “Guess I could’ve seen him around town. Yeah, I get out and around town sometimes. Never been in here to buy any tattoos from me, if that’s what you’re getting at. Why, what kind of rap you trying to pin on him?”

“Missing person. Just asking everyone we see. Routine. Well, thank you, M. Naismith.” Queen Hatchet Face deliberately bestowing mercy on a peasant. “I think that’s all. For today. We’ll see ourselves out.” Standing in the middle of the room, they were all of two steps from the door. Where did Naismith put his clients, whenever he had any?

Once outside, Dave smoothed the tracing out and studied it. “Doesn’t look all that bad to me.”

“Lady save us from the artistic temperament,” said Sergeant Lestrade. “Let’s hope the others are practical business people.”