“Self, thy name is sedentary,” is about all I had to say, and only to me obviously, as I sat with Professor Bartender, with Andrew and Penelope in the watering hole mid-afternoon, recovering. The surface of the table supported the Professor’s glass of wine and his pack of cigarettes; Andrew’s beef dip and his fries accessory; my tall coffee and Penelope’s tea with honey. The door opened, letting the bright sun sweep in like the fireball from an exploding tank of gas. Even worse, two emissaries from the world of the living set upon us, a black man wearing a suit, and a white woman decked in slacks and a blouse. The Professor asked them, “Can I help you?”
“Do you work here?” the woman asked back.
“I do.”
“My name,” stated the woman, “is Detective Gunderson, and this is Detective Peel. Did any of you folks hear about the deceased man found in the alley behind the hotel next door?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Yep,” said the Professor.
“Yes,” Penelope told her.
“I guess you think somebody else deceased him,” Andrew conjectured.
“That's right,” answered Detective Peel. “Which is why I need to ask if any of you remembers seeing anyone suspicious in the vicinity?”
“Ummm…everybody,” I said.
“How about suspicious activity then?”
“Fill in your own punch line, “Andrew answered.
“So nothing out of the ordinary,” followed Detective Peel, “from what is usually going on; nothing alarming enough to take notice of?”
“It’s not the safest place in the world,” the Professor told him, “but I don't know of anybody who saw anything ominous going on that could somehow be related to a man getting killed. I have to be down here everyday, so I assure you, I'd like to be helpful in any way I can.”
Detective Peel took a piece of paper out of a folder, and held it over the table so that we all could see it. “Anyone recognize him? This isn't a great photograph...it's a Xerox of a driver's license. But does anybody recall seeing this man here, in the bar, next door, or anywhere in the neighborhood?” All of the heads at the table nodded, “No.”
“Never seen him,” said the Professor.
“No,” I told him.
“Uh uh,” Penelope said.
“Nope,” answered Andrew.
“Any of you live in the hotel next door?” Detective Gunderson intervened.
“I confess,” I said.
“Me too,” Andrew sang like a canary.
“I don’t. I just run this place,” the Professor told her.
“Well that’s suspicious on both counts,” I pointed out.
“I live there too,” Penelope said. “And I have an extremely suspicious activity I can report; suspicious to me at least.”
“What happened?” Detective Gunderson asked.
“I was walking home from a job last night...I'm a musician...and about two blocks from here some maniac I see walking up a side street comes within a hair of grabbing me and doing something or the other. I let him have it first.”
“What do you mean?” pressed Detective Gunderson. “I mean, what made you think he was going to harm you, and what did you do to him first?”
“I could sense that he was following me and I used my guitar case to knock the ever-loving piss out of that creepy motherfucker. I wasn't about to wait to see how it turned out. I don't give the benefit of the doubt at three in the morning on an empty street. And he looked like a creepy dude when I saw him walking up the street.”
Detective Peel jumped in. “So you approached him with your guitar case, and then...what?”
“I didn't approach him with shit. I stopped for a second and put down the guitar, then got up swinging. For some strange reason, he just happened to be about three inches from my neck when I turned around.”
“You hit him with the guitar case?” Detective Gunderson sought to confirm.
“You’re goddamn right I did.”
“And that stopped him?”
“He was lying on the ground.”
“Then what?” Detective Gunderson continued.
“I kicked him in the nuts, then ran like hell.”
“I've heard,” I offered, “that that's a very effective crime prevention measure.”
“I believe it is,” said Detective Gunderson. “What did this man look like?”
“A big guy wearing a cowboy hat and a black shirt. Not much hair on his head...shaved maybe. Ugly fucker.”
“If he was wearing a hat,” Detective Gunderson asked, “how did you see how much hair was on his head?”
“His hat fell off when my guitar case hit him at ninety miles an hour.”
“Oh.” Both she and Detective Peel scribbled in their notebooks for a little while. Then Detective Gunderson took a card out from under her belt and handed it to the Professor, but looked at all of us of when she spoke.
“If you hear of anything, or remember something, contact either one of us, alright?”
“Sure thing,” the Professor assured her.
“Okay,” Andrew avowed.
“I will,” I said.
“Sure,” Penelope added.
“Okay. Thanks,” Detective Peel told us, “for your cooperation.”
“Thanks,” Detective Gunderson seconded, as the two of them turned and headed for the door, and crossed back out of the darkness and over into the light.
“I can do without that,” the Professor said as soon as they were gone.
“Do without the Five-O coming around, or without the murder?” Andrew asked.
“Let’s be really outlandish and say both.”
Our teatime fell apart when the Professor got up in order to wait on newly arrived customers, Andrew left to take a nap, and Penelope departed for an eyeballing spree at Amoeba Records. We’d all heard about the dead man earlier in the day, when the homicide police, and a howling and flashing convoy of rollers besieged the alley and areas thereabout. Flogging myself with understatement, I said to me, “ I think I’ve got some time on my hands.” What I came up with for an afternoon time-fritter was a walk around the neighborhood and a Lew Archer-like questioning of neighbors about the dearly departed, who’d departed directly from our alley. It would spare me the suspense of waiting for some unlikely ever to be reported official word of an almost certain never to be pursued case, and its non-existent resolution. The cops really couldn’t give two illegal searches and seizures about one more al fresco stiff in this neck of the woods. Besides which, I needed the air and the exercise…not that I’d necessarily be breathing genuine air in this burg. But it would give my respiratory system something to practice on. For whatever reason, the notion sprang into my head that in order to embark on this kind of detecting work I needed to have a name for myself, a nom de dick so to speak. So I christened myself, Peeko Pacifiko.
Before I proceeded further I got my flask out of my pocket and took a blast. Pulling open the door, I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes and dove headfirst into the sunshine. Squinting in both directions I observed my first potential witness, the man always selling oranges on the corner at the intersection. I assumed there was nothing in the investigatory manual advising against taking them as you encounter them. After the minimal exfoliation of shoe leather used getting to the corner, I politely waited until the light had changed, and the man’s prospective customers were speeding under the green light. Given the alcoholic potency of my breath, and the solar temperature of a steaming concrete sidewalk I worried the man might go up in flames before my eyes when I opened my mouth. Disregarding the danger, I asked him first, “You were out here yesterday selling oranges weren’t you?”
“No,” he answered.
I’d seen him out here myself. But taking the difference in our respective first languages into account, I put the question to him another way.
“Were you selling oranges yesterday afternoon, and last night during rush hour here at this same interse
ction where you’re selling them now?”
“No,” he said flatly. My intended second question was to ask him if he’d seen a man looking particularly out of place or in distress yesterday afternoon or night, and I felt that strategically the first question verifying his actual presence here where he could actually have been a witness should be answered first. On the other hand, there was no law dictating I could not jump ahead to the second question if I wished. Still, if the man DID claim to have seen what I was asking him if he had seen, while denying he had been here to see it, I was dubious about the value of the informant’s information. Acting on a brainstorm, injecting an innovative compromise into the investigatory technique, I questioned the man in a third way, one with the potential to cleverly entrap him.
“Yesterday afternoon and night, when you were out here at this intersection selling oranges, did you happen to see a man who seemed particularly out of place, lost, or in any kind of distress?”
“No,” he said. The light changed to red and he ventured out to practice his salesmanship on the captive audience in a line of parked cars. I judged it the better part of investigatory instinct to know when to give it up. And I told myself it wasn’t a dogged man, but a stupid man who persists when the sun is much too hot and way too bright. Even Sam Spade drove up the occasional cul-de-sac, and Philip Marlowe encountered his share of liars, and impenetrable morons.
I rounded the corner, used a crosswalk at mid-block, then proceeded to walk on the shady side of the street. I began to feel a little a bit of worry about the ultimate size of the pool of genuine potential witnesses. Maybe no one had seen a thing. With no specific knowledge of where the victim had been, one person had as good a chance to see something as any other, meaning the only method ensuring a comprehensive canvassing of potential witnesses was to question every living Christian soul in the neighborhood, the thought of which thrust me to the brink of running at Mach One back to the bar.
Two-thirds of the way down the block that followed, the old woman who sat daily in front of her used furniture store was situated in her customary place in the green recliner leaned against the storefront. Using a tack similar to, but slightly varied from the earlier modus operandi, I said, “I was wondering if you happened to see an average looking white guy around here yesterday afternoon or night, who looked like he might be lost, or having trouble of some kind?”
“All white guys look average to me,” she said with a straight face. After about fifteen seconds she added, “You…you look really average…and really white.” At my expense, the woman laughed herself into a coughing fit.
It was sometime around this point that I realized my curiosity had evaporated with my precious bodily fluids; that I’d had as much exercise as my lungs could undergo before collapsing; that I remembered the expected, and only remuneration for this walking gig was kicks; when the sudden conclusion arrived in my head fully formed that this line of work simply didn’t suit me. I told myself that without a doubt this job should be left to professionals. If they blew it, it wouldn’t be the first time professionals in this country or beyond didn’t earn their pay; or that the work didn’t comport with the pedigree. But these broad societal problems could not fairly be laid on one man’s doorstep. So I graciously withdrew from the case and returned to the bar.
A few days later I was waiting for a take-out coffee in front of the cash register at the famous Vermin Are Us Diner, as we of that unfortunate locale liked to refer to it, when I noticed Detective Peel sitting alone in a booth. He appeared to be in the latter stages of a premeditated assault on a California Omelet and a Caesar salad. He remembered me when I presented myself, and he asked me to have a seat.
“How’s the case?” I wanted to know. “The man who washed up dead in the alley? I assume that’s why you’re hanging around here still. Either that or you fell in love with Bess,” and I nodded toward the lady with the hairnet behind the counter.
“Bess is a honey, but yeah, it’s the homicide that has me here.”
“Made any arrests?”
“None related to the citizen found in the alley, no.”
“Still no idea what happened to the guy?”
“We know exactly what happened to the guy. Somebody put a dent in his head and it killed him.”
“Which somebody was that?”
“We don’t know that part,” he told me with a grin.
“Think you will?”
“Anything’s possible.”
“Does that mean you still might find it out?”
“He or she or they could come down to the station and turn themselves in,” he said.
“Much chance of that?”
“Anything’s possible.” He put down the fork for a second and took a swig of his iced-tea.
“On the outside chance it doesn’t happen that way, and you’re no longer actively looking, how else would you find out?”
“You’d be surprised how many of these thimble-brained perpetrators blab their heads off. A lot of times when they do, we hear about it and bring them in.”
“There are,” I assured him, “some less than intellectually gifted blabber mouths in the immediate vicinity.”
“I’m aware. I’ve been around here a couple of days.”
“Can’t tell me what you were able to shovel up…tell a civilian?”
“I can tell you,” he shrugged. “What is it you want to know?”
“Well you have to wonder what the guy was doing down here.”
“We know that. He ran out of gas.”
“Makes sense.”
“We found out a thing or two,” he said. He pulled a ring notebook off the seat and laid it on the table. “I just finished up my notes, and a draft of my report.”
“So how do you know he ran out of gas?”
He spread the notebook open with his thumbs, scanning a page then whipsawing over to the next. “I got a witness who saw the man standing in the street beside his SUV right down from your hotel. He was standing there talking on a cell phone.”
“But how do you know he ran out of gas?”
“We know it because at some point later on the car registered to the decedent got whupped on and was badly vandalized. Somebody called in an abandoned or inoperable vehicle, and the patrolman had it towed to city garage. Tank was dry as a bone.”
“Where’d the guy go?”
“We don’t know exactly where he went right after that, but we know why.”
“Why?”
“Witness said some bangers in another SUV pulled up beside him, and him and them exchanged some words. Man was seen hauling tail, with the bangers riding along in the SUV...behind him…or beside him I think.” He flipped a page, and scanned for a second. “Witness heard bangers yelling something like,” and Peel looked down and read from the page, “like ‘Run pasty…pasty, pasty, run.”
I chuckled and said, “Sometimes running’s your best shot.”
“Sure ‘nuff,” he agreed.
The waitress brought me over my coffee in the Styrofoam cup, and slapped the check down like a blackjack dealer throwing a Queen to a man with a count of twelve. Peel was staring up front, where a fry cook with a remote control in hand was frozen into a zombie’s daze by a televangelist selling salvation from the television atop a freezer.
“Any chance,” Peel pleaded with the waitress,” we could get a breather from Jesus?”
“Jesus,” she yelled toward the front. The fry cook snapped his head around. “Could ya change the channel?” the waitress shouted at him. “That’s annoying to the customers and it’s annoying to me.” The fry cook looked down at the remote and started a steady march from channel to channel.
“His name is Jesus?” I said with a laugh.
“His name is Jesus,” she answered, slightly rolling her eyes in a signal of overall exasperation with what one detected to be the incessant drolleries besetting her life.
“Gracias,” D
etective Peel thanked her.
“Glad to. Religion is the opiate of the masses,” she proclaimed to us, confirming suspicions she once had lived in a commune.
A wooly-headed man with small black-framed glasses turned to me from the booth adjacent and said, nodding up front toward the visage of Newt Gingrich now staring out from the television set, “There’s a scene in a film by a British director named Lindsay Anderson, showing a wall in a run-down section of London with a scrawl of graffiti on it that reads ‘Revolution is the opiate of the intellectuals’.”
“I know,” I told him, “I saw it. O’ Lucky Man. Love that film.”
“LA,” said Detective Peel, wagging his head.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked me.
“I’m good,” I said.
“Now look what we’ve got,” alerted Detective Peel, nodding his head forward, where Oliver North was squeezing off his ammunition on MSNBC.
“This is going to be even worse than Jesus,” the man in the next booth said. “He’s getting ready to take telephone calls from viewers.”
“Opining is the opiate of the right-wing masses,” I warned. About then, Jesus fell into another trance in front of Dr. Phil and the channel remained stationary.
Detective Peel leaned slightly forward on his elbows. “Opium is the opiate of the opium addict,” he said to me across the table, “which is the opiate of most concern to people who work in my line.”
“I imagine it would be,” I acceded. Peel had pushed his plate away, and was sipping his tea.
“So this man runs out of gas down here,” I resumed, turning my back on Jesus, the waitress, and the cineaste in the next booth, “is out on the street yapping on a cell phone, and then gets chased around by some local mooks.”
“According to a person who said she witnessed it, yeah.”
“That it?”
He pulled the open notebook toward him and let his eyes scurry across the pages. “Two ladies sitting on a stoop, who were sitting on the same stoop the night our boy was loose in the neighborhood saw him jostle the door of the pharmacy next door. They said he was on a cellphone then, too. They told him the place was closed, and asked if they could help him, but he shushed them and pointed at his phone.”
“Huh.”
“Then…okay, here…man who works at a gas station next to a liquor store said he saw the guy in the picture, the picture of the decedent I showed him…you saw it…standing in the door of…he was actually blocking the entrance to the store while talking on his cellphone,” Peel related. The detective looked up from the pages. “The guy was moving around. I’m guessing he couldn’t find his way back to the car, and couldn’t give anybody directions to where the car was, since he didn’t really know himself. No money was found in his wallet, so if he wasn’t robbed…his credit cards and driver’s license were in there…that would explain why he didn’t call a cab. That’s assuming he didn’t have anybody else who could come and give him a lift right at the moment.”
“You get the feeling the dead guy was Mr. Talkative before he was dead.”
He smiled. “Yeah.”
“What else?”
“Just a sec.” Peel reached out and got the attention of the waitress when she passed.
“What can I get for you?” she asked.
“A slice of pecan pie would hit the spot.”
“You got it,” she said.
Peel had returned to flipping and scouring notebook pages when the waitress returned with a huge brown slab of pie. Peel slid the notebook across the table to me and said, “Here, why don’t you just read it for yourself,” then picked up the fork and started to dig.
I found the notes he’d made after talking to the man working at the gas station next to the liquor store. Down a little from there, began a large block of writing that continued over to the following page. After that, there was another section under the heading: Final Report. I jumped back to the words, “small neighborhood market,” in the previous section, and began to skip along reading from there:
“…owner of market states customer brought bottle of Fiji Water up to counter. Owner asked thirty-something white man if that would be all. Customer asked the owner if he could ask the owner a question. Owner said go ahead. Man said something like, ‘If you were looking for a street, somewhere in this neighborhood, a street that gets you right to the freeway eventually, which way from here would you walk to get there?’ The owner told him to keep going on the way he was going, south. Told him he was only two blocks away from where he needed to be. The owner asked the man if he was planning to take a walk on the freeway. Customer answered that he was hoping to find his car he’d had to abandon. Owner asked him how come he hadn’t known what street he was on. All man said was that everything had happened really fast. Owner asked the man why he didn’t call a taxi to drive him around looking for his car. Man said something about his girlfriend in San Francisco having his ATM card. Owner unsure whether man meant she was a visitor in San Francisco or lived in San Francisco. Not clear myself. Man told owner that his checkbook was in his car and that he was short of cash. Said he’d been talking to a friend of his on his cellphone, but his friend was on a “shoot,” and couldn’t help him out for a little while. Customer thanked owner for assistance. Owner says that while putting money for Fiji Water into the register, he told the man that if it weren’t for having to mind the store he’d help the customer look for his car. Says when he was giving the man change, the man’s cellphone started to ring. Customer answered phone and started talking. Owner advised customer he would prefer if customer did not use telephone inside store. Owner says man put his finger to his lip and made a “Shhh” sound. Owner says he asked the man again to please go outside while talking on a cellphone. Owner says the man then held up the palm of his hand to make the “Stop,” sign, signaling the owner to stop talking. Owner says he pointed to the door and told the customer, ‘Outside.’ Owner says man abruptly stopped talking and said something to the owner along the lines of, ‘This is pretty goddamned important,” and mentioned something concerning how much money was being spent on the “shoot” his friend was on, the cost of the time, how much people were getting paid an hour, that sort of thing. Owner told man again he didn’t want the cellphone used inside the store, and told the customer it was extremely rude of him to do so. Owner said he noticed about that time, what he presumed to be two men whose bodies and hats he saw standing behind a large rack of potato chips.
At this point I stopped, turned the notebook on its side, and read the notation that had been written in the margin of the page:
“Lab confirmed today DNA from blood on cellphone matches decedent.”
I asked Peel, “You found a cellphone?”
“Yes we did.”
“Where?”
“In the dumpster in the alley where the body was.”
“Pew.”
“Uh huh.”
“There was blood on it?”
“Somebody found another objectionable way to use a cellphone.”
“Yeah, I guess they did. Who found it?”
“You’re looking at him.”
“That means you climbed right in there?”
“That’s what it means.”
I made a face evincing extreme disgust.
“I’m always wondering,” Peel confided, “how come nobody ever disposes of a weapon in a big bakery case of Krispy Kremes...or maybe in a woman's lingerie drawer. Always a fucking heap of trash in some stinky-ass, godforsaken alley.”
“You’d think the guy could have just left it on the ground.” I said. “He did his murder; why make somebody have to get down into that world of funk just to retrieve the weapon? He knows you’re going to find it anyhow if he’s leaving it so close to a guy with a bloody head.”
“Perpetrators aren’t especially considerate. It’s one of the more unpleasant lessons of this otherwise rewarding vocation,”
Detective Peel told me soberly.
I continued reading on through the remainder of the notes:
Owner says customer talking on cellphone said to person he was having conversation with, something like, ‘You wouldn’t believe this shit…this anal store clerk.’ Owner says customer ended conversation with person on cellphone. Customer said to owner, as owner remembers it, ‘Christ, what’s the big deal?’ Owner told the man he’d tried to ask him politely not to use the phone inside the store because that was his policy. Customer said, ‘Jesus,’ or ‘Jesus Christ,’ and angrily left the market. Owner says he followed the man out onto the sidewalk and watched him walking up the street. Owner says when he returned to the market two men shoplifting potato chips went running past him out of the store, going in the same direction as the customer who’d been talking on his cellphone. Owner gave chase for a minute, but gave up.
When I reached the end, I continued down, and quickly read the Final Report in its entirety, the report being comprised almost completely of the preceding notes, with the occasional addition of a related observation or a snatch of analysis. At the end, which was the enumeration of the most common sense speculations on the person or persons who might have been responsible for cellphoning the man senseless, and finally pulse-less, there was the slightest bit more writing. There was a line that read:
The Vic-
Beneath that was one final, three-word notation:
What an asshole!