The Detective

First Look at a New Novel

When Larry Starczek heard about the murder of Gus Leonidis, he was in bed with a prosecutor named Muriel Wynn, who had just told him she was getting serious with somebody else.

"Dan Quayle," she answered when he demanded to know who. "He fell for my spelling."

Irked, Larry agitated one foot through the clothing on the hotel carpeting in search of his briefs. When his toe brushed his beeper, the beeper was vibrating.

"Bad stuff," he said to Muriel after he got off the phone. "They found him and two customers in his freezer dead of gunshot wounds." He shook out his trousers and told her he had to go. The commander wanted all hands on deck.

Tiny and dark, Muriel was sitting up straight on the stiff hotel linen, still without a stitch.

He asked her again who the guy was.

"I mean, I just want to move on," Muriel answered. "I think this other thing—I think it may go somewhere. I might even get married."

"Married!"

"Hell, Larry, it's not a disease. You're married."

"Eh," he answered. Five years ago he had married for the second time, because it made sense. Nancy Marini, a good-hearted nurse, was easy on the eyes, kind and well disposed toward his boys. But as Nancy had pointed out several times recently, he'd never said goodbye to any of the stuff that had led his first marriage to ruin, the catting around or the fact that his principal adult relationship was with the dead bodies he scraped off the street. Marriage number two was just about past tense, but even with Muriel, Larry preferred to keep his problems to himself.

It was Fourth of July weekend, and the Hotel Gresham, in the early afternoon, was strangely silent. The manager owed Larry for a few situations he'd handled—guests who wouldn't leave, a pro who was working the lounge. He made sure Larry got a room for a few hours whenever he asked. As Muriel drifted past him for the mirror, he grabbed her from behind and did a brief grind, his lips close to the short black curls by her ear.

"Is your new beau as much fun as I am?"

"Larry, this isn't the National Fuck-Offs where you just got eliminated. We've always had a good time."

Combat defined their relations. He enjoyed it maybe more than the sex. They had met in law school, seven years earlier, when both had started at night. Muriel became a star and transferred to the day division. Larry had decided to quit even before he won custody of his sons, because he didn't have the right reasons to be there. He was trying to bolster himself after his divorce, to stay out of the taverns, even to improve the opinions of his parents and brothers, who saw police work as somewhat below him.

While Muriel finished batting powder over her summer freckles, Larry flipped on the radio. The news stations all had the murders by now, but Greer, the commander, had clamped down on the details.

"Doin' Gus," Larry said. "Somebody's gotta sizzle for that, don't you figure?"

The compact snapped closed and Muriel agreed with a sad smile.

"Everybody dug Gus," she said.

•

Augustus Leonidis had owned the restaurant called Paradise for more than 30 years. The North End neighborhood had gone to ruin around him shortly after he opened, when its final bulwark against decline, the small in-city airport called DuSable Field, had been abandoned by the major airlines in the early Sixties because its runways were too short to land jets. Yet Gus, full of brash immigrant opdmism, had refused to move. He was a patriot of a lost kind. What area was "bad" if it was in America?

Despite the surroundings, Gus' business had prospered, due both to the eastbound exit from U.S. 843 directly across from his front door and his legendary breakfasts, of which the signature item was a baked omelette that arrived at the table the size of a balloon. Paradise was a renowned Kindle County crossroads, where everyone was enthusiastically welcomed by the garrulous proprietor. He'd been called Good Gus for so long that nobody remembered exactly why—whether it was the freebies for unfortunates, his civic activities or his effusive, upbeat style. Over the years, he was steadily named in the Tribune's annual poll as one of Kindle County's favorite citizens.

Out on the street, when Larry arrived, the cops from the patrol division had done their best to make themselves important, parking their black-and-whites across the avenue with the light bars spinning atop the vehicles. Various vagrants and solid citizens had been attracted. It was July and nobody was wearing much of anything, since the old apartment buildings nearby didn't have the wiring to support air-conditioning. At the curb, several TV news vans preparing for broadcast had raised their antennae, which looked like enlarged kitchen tools.

He flipped his tin at the two uniforms near the door. Inside, on the left, three civilians were seated together on the bench of a booth—a black man in an apron, a wrung-out woman in a beige housedress and a younger guy with rounded shoulders and an earring big enough to be visible to Larry from 30 feet. The three seemed to be in their own universe, isolated from the whirl of police activity around them. Employees or family, Larry figured, either waiting to be questioned or to ask questions of their own.

The crime scene was being processed by dozens of people—at least six techs, in their khaki shirts, were dusting for prints—but the atmosphere was notably subdued. Detective Commander Harold Greer had set up in Gus' tiny office behind the kitchen, and the team of detectives he'd called in was assembling there. Gus, unexpectedly, was tidy. Above the desk was a Byzantine cross, a girlie calendar from a food wholesaler and pictures of Gus' family taken, Larry surmised, on a return trip to Greece. The photos, showing a wife, two daughters and a son, had to be 15 years old, but that was the time Gus, like most guys in Larry's experience, wanted to remember, when he was really pulling the sleigh, building a business, raising a family. The wife, smiling and looking fetching in a rumpled bathing suit, was the same poor wretch who was sitting by the door.

Greer was on the phone, holding one finger in his ear as he explained the status of things to somebody from the mayor's office, while the detectives around the room watched him. Larry went over to Dan Lipranzer for the lowdown. Lip, who had the slicked-back do of a Fifties juvenile delinquent, was, as usual, by himself in a corner. Lipranzer always appeared cold, even in July, drawn in on himself like a molting bird. He'd been the first dick on the scene and had interviewed the night manager, Rafael.

According to what the night manager had told Lipranzer, Gus had come in to pick up the cash and send his employees home right before midnight on Wednesday, July 3. Each worker received $100 from the register. As they were about to post the closed sign, Luisa Remardi, who worked for Trans-National as a ticket agent, had walked in. She was a regular, and Gus, who had a thing for every female customer, sent Rafael, the fry cook and the bus-boy on their way and took over the kitchen himself. Sometime in the next hour or two, Gus, Luisa and a third person had been murdered. The last victim was a white in his late 30s, tentatively ID'd as Paul Judson, based both on a run of the plates of one of the cars still absorbing the July sun in Gus' lot and the previous day's missing-person report from his wife. Mrs. Judson said Paul had been scheduled to arrive July 4 on the 12:10 A.M. at DuSable Field.

Rafael had returned to reopen at 4:30 in the morning. He hadn't thought much of the disorder he found, assuming that once Gus got rid of his patrons, he'd walked out quickly rather than turn away new customers. Near five o'clock, Mrs. Leonidis, Athena, phoned in distress because Gus hadn't shown up the day before at their cabin near Skageon. Searching around, Rafael noticed Gus' Cadillac still in the lot and began to worry that the trail of blood near the register wasn't from thawing meat Gus had dragged upstairs to the kitchen. When the fry cook arrived, they called the cops and, after some debate, finally pulled the handle on the freezer in the basement on the chance someone was still alive. Nobody was.

It was close to 3:30 P.M. when Greer put down the phone and announced to the 12 detectives he'd summoned that it was time to get started. Despite the heat, near 90, Greer had worn a wool sports coat and tie, realizing he was destined for TV. He had a clipboard and began announcing assignments so each cop would know his or her angle (continued on page 190)The Detective(continued from page 96) while examining the scene. Greer was going to run the case as a task force, receiving all reports himself. That would sound impressive to the reporters, but Larry knew the result would be six detective teams bumping into each other, covering the same leads and missing others. A week from now, Greer, for all his good intentions, would have to start dealing with everything else piling up on his desk, and the dicks, like cats, would wander away.

Larry tried to make his face plaster when Greer announced he was teamed with Wilma Amos. Wilma was your basic affirmative-action item whose highest and best use was probably as a hat rack. Worse, it meant Larry wasn't getting anywhere near the lead on this case. Instead, Wilma and he were delegated to background on the female vic, Luisa Remardi.

"Guided tour," Greer said and walked out through the kitchen. He was an impressive guy to most people, a good-size, well-spoken black man, calm and orderly. Larry didn't mind Greer—he was less of a politician than most of the ranking officers on the force, and he was able, one in the small cadre of officers Larry thought of as being as smart as he was.

The techs had taped off a path and Greer instructed the dicks to go single file and keep their hands in their pockets. Somebody with a degree in criminology would say Greer was a lunatic for taking a dozen extra people through a crime scene. It risked contamination, and even if everybody wore toe shoes, a defense lawyer would make the viewing sound like Hannibal's trip over the Alps with elephants. But Greer knew no investigator would feel like he owned a case unless he had surveyed the scene. Even bloodhounds had to have the real scent.

"Working theories," he said. Greer was standing behind the cash register, which rested on a plate-glass case with angled shelves that held stale cigars and candy bars. On the exterior, bright purple fingerprint lifts stood out like decorations. "Theory number one, which is pretty solid: This is an armed robbery gone bad. The cash register is empty, the bag for the bank deposit is gone and each victim has no watch, wallet or jewelry.

"Second theory: Today I'm saying a single perpetrator. That's soft," Greer said, "but I'm liking it more and more. The bullets we've recovered all look like .38 rounds, same bunter marks. One shooter, almost for sure. Could be accomplices, but it doesn't seem to play that way.

"Gus was killed right here, behind the register, going for the phone, from the looks of it. One shot to the left rear of the cranium. Based on a preliminary exam, police pathologist Painless Kumagi is saying three to six feet, which means the triggerman was right near the cash register. Armed robbery gone bad," Greer repeated. From his inside pocket, he removed a sleek silver pen and pointed out the blood, a large pool dried on the dirty linoleum and spatters on the green wall phone. Then he continued.

"Once our shooter takes down Gus, he has a serious problem because there are two customers in the restaurant. This is where we go from a felony murder to brutal and heinous." The words were terms of art—"brutal and heinous" murders qualified, in this state, for capital punishment. "Instead of running for the door like your average punk, our guy decides to go after the witnesses. Ms. Remardi is killed right here, single shot through the abdomen."

Greer had stepped down 20 feet to a booth opposite the front door in the original section of the restaurant. When Gus bought the place, long before he expanded into the storefronts to the east and west, it must have had a medieval theme. Two rows of booths, composed of heavy dark planks lumpy from layers of urethane, were joined at the center panel. At each corner, a square coat stand rose like a turret.

"Looks a lot like Ms. Remardi decided her best chance was to go for the gun. We have bruises on her arms and hands, one finger is broken. But that didn't work out for her. The fabric on her uniform around the wound is burned and the tissue is stippled, so the shot is point-blank. Judging from the exit wound, Painless is saying prelim that the bullet passed through her liver and aorta, so she's dead in a few minutes."

The slug had been removed by the techs from the center panel. An uneven ring of dried blood showed up where the wood had shattered, exposing the raw pine underneath. That meant Luisa had died sitting up. A coffee cup, with a bright half-moon of her lipstick, still rested on the table along with an ashtray full of butts.

"If she's looking at an accomplice, it doesn't make much sense that she's fighting. So that's another reason we're figuring this was a one-man show." Under the table, where Greer pointed, a dinner plate streaked with steak sauce had shattered in the struggle. An inch of beef lay amid the fragments of crockery, as well as half a pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter.

"Mr. Judson was eating back in the corner by the window. Rafael cleaned up a plate, a glass and a Seven-Up can from that table this morning. On the right side of Mr. Judson's suit there's a line of dust, suggesting he was probably under the table, maybe hiding from the gunfire. But the shooter found him.

'Judging from the shoe prints in the blood and the drag pattern, and the distribution of the postmortem lividity on Gus and Luisa's corpses, Mr. Judson was forced at gunpoint to haul both bodies into the freezer in the basement."

Greer led his detectives, like a grade school class, past the counter and through a narrow doorway. The stairway was lit by a single bulb, beneath which the group clumped down the wooden stairs. In the brick cellar, they found a significant encampment. Three-wheeled stretchers awaited the bodies, which had not yet been removed because they were frozen. Painless had several tests and measurements to perform before he would allow the corpses to thaw. As the group approached, Larry could hear Painless' sharp, accented voice issuing commands to his staff.

Using the pen, Greer opened the food locker wide. Judson's body was right there, one leg in the doorway. Greer pointed out his shoes, both soles brown with blood. The tread patterns matched the prints in the trails upstairs. In their rubber gloves, Painless and his team were working on the far side of the freezer.

"After Mr. Judson pulled the bodies into the food locker, he was bound with an electrical cord, gagged with a dish towel and shot execution-style in the back of the head." Harold's silver pen glided through the air like a missile, indicating each point of interest. The force of the shot had driven Judson over on his side.

"And then, I guess to celebrate, our hero sodomized Ms. Remardi's body." One of the pathologists moved aside, fully revealing Luisa Remardi's remains. Following the preliminary exam, they'd repositioned her as she'd been found, bent facedown over a stack of 50-pound bags of frozen french fries. Above the waist, she was clad in Trans-National's rust-colored uniform. The exit wound in her back had made a neat little tear in the fabric, almost as if she'd merely snagged the vest, and the halo of blood Larry had seen vaguely imprinted on the side of the booth upstairs was enlarged there, darkening the fabric like tie-dye. Her matching skirt and her red panties had been jacked down to her ankles and, beneath the starched tails of her white blouse, the melonish rounds of her buttocks were hiked in the air, penetrated by the dark ellipses of her anal sphincter, which had been distended at the time of her death. Somebody had worked her over—there was redness, meaning, if Harold was correct, this had occurred right after her death, while a vital reaction was still possible.

"Rape kit is negative, but you find the top of a condom wrapper here in her drawers, and what appears to be a lubricant track around the anus." At Greer's instruction, a younger pathologist directed a flashlight to illustrate the last point. The gel had failed to evaporate in the cold. Rapists these days worried about AIDS—and had heard of DNA. There was no accomplice here, Larry thought. Not if that was the story. Necrophiliacs and backdoor boys don't perform for an audience. Even creeps have shame.

Greer covered a few procedural orders, then headed upstairs. Larry remained in the freezer and asked Painless if he could look around.

"Don't touch," the doctor told him. Painless had worked on the force for two decades and knew to a moral certainty that the next cop was dumber than the one before.

•

Larry was the first to say he was a little witchy about the entire process of investigation, but he wasn't alone. Half the murder dicks he knew confessed, after a couple of whiskeys, to occasionally feeling the guiding presence of ghosts. He couldn't claim to understand it, but evil on this scale seemed to offset some kind of cosmic discord. For whatever it was worth, he often started with an instant of solemn communion with the victims.

He stood over Gus for a minute. Not counting gangbangers, who were suspects one day and murdered the next, it was rare for Larry to be acquainted with a vic. He hadn't known Gus well, except for enjoying his wild immigrant routine and the omelettes, always on the house. But Gus had that gift, like a good teacher or priest—he could connect. You felt him. I'm right here with you, compadre, Larry thought.

The gunshot had penetrated the occipital plane at the back of Gus' skull, blowing away tissue and bone. Positioned as he'd been found, Gus' face was laid out on a box of beef patties, his mouth open. Dead fish. They all looked like dead fish.

As always, at this moment, Larry was intensely aware of himself. This was his profession. Murder. Like everybody else, he thought about buying a new garden hose and the line on tomorrow's hockey match and how he could get to both boys' soccer games. But at some point every day, he snuck into the mossy cave of murder, to the moist thrilling darkness of the idea.

He had nothing to apologize for. Murder was part of the human condition. And society existed to restrain it. To Larry, the only job more important than his was a mother's. Read some anthropology, he always told civilians who asked. All those skeletons unearthed with the stone ax still right in the hole? You think this just started? Everyone has murder in him. Larry had killed. In Nam. One day, during his brief time on patrol, he'd tossed a grenade down a tunnel and watched the ground give way and two bodies go flying through the air, one screaming, the other probably out cold, with an expression you could only call profound. So this is it, the guy was thinking—he might as well have held up a sign. Larry still saw that look all the time. He beheld it on Gus' face now, the largest thing in life—death—and it filled Larry on each occasion with the exacting, breathless emotion of one of those perfect realist paintings you'd see in a museum—Hopper or Wyeth. That thing: This is it.

That was the end for the victims, the instant of surrender. But few gave up willingly. With death so imminent and unexpected, every human being was reduced to terror and desire—the desire to continue and the inexpressible anguish that she or he would not. No one, Larry believed, could the with dignity in these circumstances. Paul Judson, heaped by the doorway, surely hadn't. He was your vanilla suburbanite, a mild-looking guy just starting to lose his blond hair, which was as fine as corn silk. He was probably the kind never to show much emotion. But he had now. On his knees, Larry could see salt tracks in the corner of his eyes. Paul had died, as Larry would, crying for his life.

Finally, Larry went to Luisa Remardi, who, as his responsibility, required the greatest attention. Her blood had stained the huge bags on which her body was heaped, but she'd died upstairs. Ripped apart by the bullet like a building in a bomb blast, the devastated arteries and organs had spurted out the blood the stupid heart had kept pumping.

When the pathologists Ok'd it, Larry climbed over the levee of bags to see her face. Luisa was pretty, soft under the chin but with lovely, high cheekbones. Bright highlights were streaked into her dark hair, and even though she worked the midnight shift, she'd applied lots of makeup, doing an elaborate job around her large brown eyes. She was one of those Italian chicks—Larry had known plenty—spreading out as she reached her early 30s, but not yet ready to stop thinking of herself as hot stuff.

You're my girl now, Luisa, Larry thought. I'm gonna take care of you.

Upstairs, he stopped at a table where an evidence tech, a kid named Brown, was inventorying the discarded contents of Luisa's purse, which had been spread on the floor near the door.

"Anything?" he asked.

"Address book." With his gloves, Brown turned the pages for Larry.

"Beautiful handwriting," Larry noted. The rest was the usual mess—house keys, receipts, some mints. Under Luisa's checkbook cover, Brown pointed out two lubricated condoms in the same maroon wrapper as the one in her panties. What did that mean, Larry wondered, besides the fact that Luisa got around? Maybe the guy found these as he was looking through her handbag for her wallet, and he got turned on.

But no one would ever reconstruct the events exactly. Larry had learned that. The past was the past, always eluding the full grasp of memory or the best forensic techniques. And it didn't matter. The essential information had reached the present: Three people had died. Without dignity. In terror. And some cruel fuck had exulted in his power each time he pulled the trigger.

Standing by the spot where Luisa had been murdered, Larry closed his eyes to transmit one more time. He was certain that somewhere, probably not far away, a man had just experienced a painful twitch in his heart.

I'm coming for you, motherfucker, Larry told him.