Inside the busted and half-burned restaurant was what looked to all the world like a biblical hell hole. Kevin entered and picked through the vastness of the murder wreckage with kid gloves. He wore the usual latex garments to protect both himself and the criminal virginity of the victims and their evidence clusters. Kevin never knew what he was going to find, but he knew exactly what he could screw up with his own DNA and fingerprints at a crime scene. Murder one-o-one. Keep it neat, photogenic, and clean as a whistle. In other words, as his daddy used to put it so distinctly while guzzling from his rot gut gin glass, “Son, don’t shit where you eat. Always treat a crime scene like a pretty lady. Whatever you do at one, keep it tidy, son, and don’t disturb it.” The words weren’t exactly the same. Perhaps they didn’t really fit into the historical puzzle, but the gist of what his dad had said to him was quite similar.
The Coroner, Chen Yong, from forensics had shown up. He was a Chinaman. Yong was always filled with humorous aphorisms about anything and everything that had to do with how far he’d gotten with his whores the night before and how, “she went for it, and I gave it,” and all of the usual sundry descriptions of what he described as his yellow meat tube, how the ladies craved it, and its exact whereabouts.
“You put that thing in too many places where it doesn’t belong, and soon it will be leaving you for someone who treats it better, Chen. Best to restrain Jimmie Ding Dong at times, if you know what I mean,” Detective Steve Branch told him.
“Ha ha! You so funny, Missah Detective,” Chen said in his worst pigeon English. “Me just come off ship and girls all over body! Ha. Ha. Me no want disappoint white girl, Missah Stevie. They too stupid. They no know what no mean.”
Kevin and Steve had to hand it to him. Chen knew better than most Yanks how to bullshit his way through a policeman’s left nut without touching a single metallic tooth on his zipper. The detective watched the Chinaman bagging and photographing one body after the other while mentally playing with everyone’s mind. Chen might be an asshole, but Branch liked him a lot, because he had a way about him that was hilarious, forbidden, and rife with irregularities. Chen Yong was a glaring misfit. That was the way Branch and most people in the department liked it.
“Me no see reason for this mess, Chen. Maybe you make me see it pretty as daylight.”
“You make fun,” Chen giggled. “Then I kick balls. Delay crime report. Mess with mind.”
Steve winked at Chen. They both loved mocking each other. It passed the time of day.
As blood dripped from fingertips and across crime scene floors, so flowed the endless bullshit shop talk from Chen Yong’s blathering lips whose words spewed from somewhere within his personal shanty of sexual innuendos.
What the heck. It passed the time.
Kevin wondered how much was real and how much was a cover up for Chen’s always hidden two incher which he’d always been so clever never to show. A guy with so many tales of conquest had to have a reason. To be honest no one really wanted to know. The fried chicken was greasy no matter where you ate it in this city.
It took four days to work the crime scene. They could have spent four years. That’s how big the place was. “So many bodies, so little time,” Steve Branch mused out loud as he surveyed the huge mess inside. Less than eighteen hours of bending and grabbing and the place was beginning to stink like three day old fish left uncovered in the family’s waste can and begging to be tossed. Finally, they gave up and bagged the booty. Time to put it all on ice.
Branch looked at the bloodied face of a little girl. Her forehead showed an entry wound. The back of her head was nearly gone where the bullet exited with her brain matter attached. She couldn’t be older than three or four years. “I’m sorry, dear,” Steve said to her. “I think you deserved far better than this, and if I had been here, I would have done my best to save you, honey. God bless.” He stood up to leave. Then, he returned for a few moments, bent down, and caressed the kid’s shoulder. “I love you, baby,” he said. “Know that I care about you, dear, because I really do.”
Then, he turned and made his way out of the crime scene.