A Long Time Dead Page 19

  “I don’t remember them making a suspect out of you.”

  “No, but they will, now that his body has turned up.”

  What the hell. She had a right to know.

  “Don’t tell the cops I told you,” I said, sitting forward, “but that body wasn’t your husband.”

  Her eyes popped. “What?”

  “The hand belonged to him,” I said, and filled her in.

  She put the cigarette-in-holder in a tray and got up and began to pace. Then she planted herself before me and asked, “Could he still be alive?”

  “Do you want him to be?”

  Her eyes and nostrils flared. “Yes! I love him. You don’t have to believe me, but a young woman can love an older man. It is possible.”

  What was it Velda said? Daddy issues.

  “You wanted to hire me for something,” I said, gesturing for her to sit back down.

  She did, both legs on the floor now, sitting on the edge of a couch cushion with hands clasped in her lap. “I wanted you to look into his murder. I wanted you to clear me. But what does this mean, his hand being found next to that … that thing?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll be honest with you, kid. I was going to look into it for nothing.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not good for business for Mike Hammer to find corpses on the roadside and just go on about his merry way. Certain things are expected of me.”

  She smiled a little. “Like certain things are expected of a woman who looks like me?”

  “Time was,” I said with a wistful sigh, “somebody who looks like you was a ‘girl.’ Now it’s politically incorrect. Now you’re a woman. And you’ll need to be.”

  “Why?”

  I stood. “Because I don’t figure there’s any way this can turn out in a good way for you. Or your husband. Especially your husband.”

  She rose. “If Victor is dead, and you clear me, that would be a good thing. A good thing worth ten thousand dollars from me to you.”

  Thirty years ago, hell, twenty years ago, I might have negotiated for a different kind of payment. And even now thoughts stirred—she liked older men, she knew how to keep them satisfied. In my mind, all that red satin was a puddle and all that luminous skin was in my arms, in my hands. …

  “Ten grand will be fine,” I said. “It’ll go a long way toward my retirement.”

  I sat across from Sergeant Mal Tooney in a booth in a diner about five miles from where I’d found Victor King’s hand next to that ghastly pile.

  “I’m glad to meet with you, Mr. Hammer,” he said. “Because I am concerned.”

  The heavyset cop had a cup of black coffee in front of him, but hadn’t touched it. He was in uniform, his cap off, exposing his dying hair. By way of contrast, his eyebrows were wild, shaggy patches.

  I had called Tooney from the office this morning, before taking the meeting with Mrs. King, to ask him to check up on the absent Melodie Anderson. I’d already tried the TV station and she hadn’t shown up for work. Neither had her cameraman. Calls from the station manager to both had come up bupkus. I asked Tooney to look into it.

  That was this morning in New York. This was that afternoon, upstate.

  “I checked both the Anderson woman’s house and this Jason kid’s apartment,” he said. “Talked to neighbors, got the super to let me in the kid’s place. No sign of either of them.”

  “They were in a TV station van.”

  “Yes, and it’s still signed out to them. Both their cars are in the station’s parking lot. Listen, this could be bad.”

  “Yeah. Can you rally the troops?”

  “Not for twenty-four hours I can’t. They aren’t missing persons yet. But considering what we … what you … found yesterday? I just have a bad, sick feeling.”

  A waitress came over and refilled my coffee, which made Tooney remember his. He sipped it.

  “Sarge,” I said, “I know for a fact Melodie Anderson was running down leads on this thing. She told me so. I think she may have been on to something—she didn’t show for a meeting with me last night.”

  “She really could be in trouble.”

  “She could be dead,” I said. I stirred sweetener and Half-and-Half in. “She mentioned something about grave robberies in this neck of the woods.”

  He frowned and the shaggy eyebrows met, making one big caterpillar. “That goes back a while. There was a string of ’em, but the latest was over a year ago. Why, you think what you found was a dug-up corpse?”

  “No. That was fresh meat.”

  An old gal in the booth behind Tooney turned and gave me a dirty look.

  “And the lab reports,” I went on, giving her a wink, “didn’t mention anything like embalming procedures having been done. But the Anderson girl had a hunch there was a connection, so any leads she was chasing down could have had something to do with that.”

  “Well, it was young women’s corpses,” he said, “exclusively. I just figured it was some nut who liked to have sex with dead bodies. What do they call those guys?”

  The gal and her companion, another biddy, huffed and got up and left. They may have been disgusted with us, but they sure finished their food first.

  “Necrophiliacs,” I said.

  Tooney’s shaggy eyebrows were in two pieces again and climbing up his forehead. “You know, we had this report … screwy report … from some kids a while back. Maybe … three months ago?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, I never took it too seriously. They were just high school kids who were hanging out at a local cemetery at midnight, drinking and fooling around. That’s a place where kids do that, sometimes, just a quiet place where they can party.”

  “Who’s to complain?”

  “Right. Only, the cemetery did complain, and I went over there in a squad and we rounded up half a dozen kids, and they were pretty high.”

  “Liquor or dope?”

  “Some of both. Anyway, there were enough of ’em that we had to call for a van. And while we were waiting, they started in on, ‘What are you giving us a bad time for? Why don’t you round up that Looney Tunes?’ I said, ‘What Looney Tunes?’ And these kids claimed that they sneaked up on this guy who was dancing around naked in the moonlight.”

  “Okay. You have my interest, Sarge.”

  “The guy was dancing to some kind of classical music on an old cassette player, and just doing some wild, crazy dance in and around the tombstones. Throwing his arms up and around. Reckless abandon, like.”

  “Naked.”

  “Well, that’s what they said, at first. But two of the kids said he wasn’t naked. That he was naked under some kind of … skin.”

  “Skin?”

  “Like he skinned somebody and stitched it up into some kind of crazy, awful outfit.”

  “A human skin.”

  “That’s what two of the kids said, Mr. Hammer. And not just a human skin.”

  “Huh?”

  “A woman’s skin.”

  And now the people in the booth behind me left, too.

  What sort of leads would Melodie Anderson and her cameraman be following up?

  That cemetery maybe? But the manager of the Life Transition Center at Greenwood Memorial said Melodie Anderson hadn’t come around yesterday afternoon.

  “Or if she did,” he said, in the mellow baritone of a preacher, which probably came in handy dealing with the bereaved, “we failed to make contact. An internment had my full attention into the early evening.”

  I was sitting across from the shrunken little guy in a small modern office off a much larger showroom of cremation urns and coffins, bronze markers, and granite memorials. It was like a ghoulish gift shop here at the Life Transition Center. I’d helped my share of miscreants make their life transitions, but I didn’t feel at home.r />
  The manager’s desk was neat and so was he, no mortician black for this character, just earth tones, like the copper sweater and tan shirt with burnt-orange tie. His eyes were sleepy and brown in a face shaped like an acorn squash.

  I asked, “Have there been any other reports of this crazy guy dancing around in the moonlight?”

  He pursed his lips in a skeptical smile. “Mr. Hammer, a man of your experience should hardly take seriously some wild tale concocted by drunken little twerps.”

  And then he was off on a bitch fest about how much trouble these local kids caused, partying on his grounds.

  “Your night watchman,” I said, “hasn’t reported anything similar to what those kids said?”

  “Mr. Hammer, we don’t have a night watchman. A security company makes regular rounds after hours. We’re just another business on their schedule.”

  “A patrol vehicle?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Regular rounds?”

  “I believe so.”

  “So somebody could time those trips and take advantage to disturb one of your graves, or put on a bare-ass dance recital.”

  He shrugged his lack of concern. “The last grave disturbance was over a year ago.” Then the sleepy eyes woke up. “But those damn kids are drinking and getting high and fornicating, every time I turn around!”

  I tried to remember the last time I heard “fornicating” used in conversation, and couldn’t.

  “Maybe they’ve learned to time those trips, too,” I suggested.

  He had no opinion.

  I thanked him and soon had made a transition out into a fall afternoon turned crisp and cold. Perfect weather for football.

  Or Halloween.

  I was in my car, pulled off the side of the road about where I had yesterday. No Pat Chambers to discuss things with this time. Just me and some thoughts, tumblers turning but refusing to unlock their secret. What kind of leads had that lovely reporter tracked, if she hadn’t tried the cemetery?

  Somebody had carried, not dragged, that mangled body through the nearby woods. Who might have seen that? A hunter? Maybe a farmer, on a nearby spread? Melodie might have tooled that TV station van around to the nearest side road and stopped to knock on farmhouse doors. This was harvest time, though, and she might find nobody home.

  Or maybe she did find somebody home.

  I had another two hours of daylight, but I got the pocket flash from the glove compartment and dropped it in my suitcoat pocket, just in case. I was going exploring and how long I’d be and where I’d wind up, who could say?

  And like any good jungle explorer, I had an elephant gun along—the Colt .45 automatic variety, designed for military use a long time ago.

  Starting where the chewed-up body had been dumped, I found a nearby spot in the bushes that provided something of a path. If those sorry remains had been in plastic or otherwise wrapped, there would be no blood trail to follow. But the brush was thick enough that you could see where someone had moved through, snapping twigs underfoot and branches on either side. Only a few minutes later, I was in the trees, where crushed leaves on the forest floor marked recent passage.

  Had a madman walked naked through these trees with a package of human meat wrapped up in a tidy bundle? Or had he been clothed—perhaps in the skin of the very victim whose mangled remains he meant to discard?

  But he was doing more than just discarding those remains. That was the one thing I had figured out. That hand, from a previous victim, was left with what had been a living, breathing woman by a killer sophisticated enough to know that the papers were full of efforts to find that previous victim. But that killer was not sophisticated enough to realize things like DNA tests and other laboratory forensics could determine that the hand and the corpse did not go together.

  That made an awful, terrible sense, but it did not explain where the rest of victim number one had gone to—the man who belonged to that hand.

  My client’s husband—Victor King.

  It was about ten minutes from the roadside to the end of the trees. Now I found myself at the edge of a harvested corn field, like a scarecrow who had wandered off his beat. To the right, I could make out the tops of a farmhouse, a silo, a barn. Walking along between where the line of trees stopped and the field began, I made my way there.

  The farmhouse was probably one hundred years old but wore a facelift of siding that dated back maybe twenty. The English-style gabled barn was gray weathered wood but sturdy-looking. The silo was by far the newest of the structures. No sign of farm animals, though I spotted a new-­looking tractor and a sizeable thresher and other well-maintained equipment near the harvested field that stretched everywhere. No cars were visible on the gravel apron around the house nor was there any sign of activity. A driveway angled through the trees to a gravel road that would give access to the highway.

  This appeared to be a normal, small, prosperous working farm.

  I figured maybe I would just go knock on the door, but that was when I noticed something in the thicket just off the gravel apron—something metallic that glinted off the dying sun. I went over and had a look, peeling back leafy branches, some thorny, to do so.

  The TV station van was tucked back there. Not parked—hidden away. All its doors were locked. I looked in the windows to see if I could spot any blood or sign of struggle, or even a body.

  Nothing.

  Through the van’s rear windows I could make out valuable video production equipment. Somehow I didn’t think Melodie Anderson and her camera guy Jason were in that house doing an interview about the struggle of the small family farmer in the face of corporate farming.

  Dusk had turned the landscape a cool blue, lending it an unreality, and the idyllic nature of the farm seemed worthy of a sentimental print you might buy in a mall frame shop. Yet I could feel something wrong, a feeling admittedly fueled by the discovery of that van, but also a prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck that came from years of dealing with dangerous situations.

  With no sign of a vehicle, nobody seemed to be home. My suitcoat hanging open for easy access to the .45, I decided to find out. I knocked on the front door and rang the bell. Nothing.

  I did the same in back. Again, nothing.

  Over at the barn, the big doors were padlocked shut; looking in the windows did no good—they were wire-and-glass jobs that didn’t reveal anything in the dark space.

  Returning to the house, I tried the back and it was locked. But I could see the door wasn’t completely closed—the wood was warped enough to make it stick, and the lock hadn’t caught. A shoulder easily pushed my way in, no harm done.

  The kitchen was clean, probably remodeled in the ’70s. The refrigerator was empty but for milk and beer and some cold cuts. The wastebasket revealed fast-food sacks and Chinese restaurant cartons. Somebody here existed on carry out, only this kitchen had none of the slovenly aftermath that often accompanied that lifestyle.

  As I prowled the place with my .45 in hand, slow, careful, listening for any sound that wasn’t made by me, I found rooms that were so clean, nobody seemed to live here. The TV in the living room was circa the ’70s or ’80s, and none of the furniture looked any newer, though a baby grand seemed much older. A fireplace had a bearskin rug in front of it, and on the mantle were framed photographs of a jug-eared buck-toothed boy posing alternately with his mother and father.

  Mom would pose with the boy, seated next to him or standing nearby, with the funny-looking kid playing various musical instruments—a violin, a flute, and that baby grand. Mom had given him the big cow eyes, but she was otherwise very attractive—handsome, like they used to say.

  The pictures with his father, who had bequeathed the kid those jug ears, were all posed outside in hunting jackets and full gear, often holding up dead ducks and geese and pheasants by the webbed feet, sometimes bending over
dead deer and even the late bear I was standing on now.

  Over the mantle was a huge photograph of the family that immediately reminded me of the one of Victor King and his current trophy wife—Mother was seated and Dad had an arm around the upper chair, with a smile of ownership. Two things made the photo creepy—first, it was not a color shot, rather one of those pastel hand-colored jobs; and second, the boy at about age seven was sitting on his mama’s lap.

  Somebody had a seriously screwed-up upbringing.

  If Melodie and her camera guy were being held hostage here, the basement seemed a good place to check. But it turned out to be one big space, empty of anything but a washer and drier setup that was the only item in this house that didn’t seem to date back a couple decades.

  Upstairs I found bedrooms, and from the look of the rooms, one was Daddy’s, one was Mommy’s, and another Baby Boy’s. Daddy’s was as much a den as a bedroom with a heavily antlered deer’s head and some mounted fish and various hunting prints. Several bookcases, too, running to Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. Mommy had a very feminine room, all blues and pinks and frills, including floral wallpaper and a four-poster bed. In her closet were clothes dating to the ’80s.

  Neither room smelled musty. The clothing had a freshly laundered scent. No moth balls at work up here. Somebody was maintaining these two shrines.

  What about Baby Boy’s room?

  Well, it was as messy as the rest of the house was neat. A clutter of magazines, books, VHS tapes, DVDs and video games covered the floor. A small but new-looking TV was on a stand with electronic gear below—not ’70s and ’80s vintage. Time had moved on in this space, but in a messy way. This was a hoarder’s hideaway with pictures of naked women from men’s magazines Scotch-taped to wallpapered walls. He’d have to crawl over junk to get to the single, small unmade bed, which was red and black and in the shape of a racing car. A laptop computer shared his night stand with magazines (Popular Mechanics, Hustler), several soda cans, and a box of Kleenex.

  I poked in the dresser and saw neatness again, stacked and freshly laundered work shirts and jeans, including overalls. Jockey shorts and t-shirts were outnumbered by pairs of longjohns. Then I looked in the closet.