“Same answer—you try to find him, and I’ll try to engage the guy. Somehow…”
Pulling the front door fully open and seeing no one in the entryway, Mitch nodded once, giving me another quick, reassuring smile, then indicating that I should follow him in. “You’re awful ballsy,” he whispered with a small laugh, “for a God damned criminal psychologist. Anybody ever tell you that?”
“Not with a similarly polite intent, Mitch,” I answered, also very quietly. And then I closed the door gently behind us, and we stood in the darkness of the building’s front hall.
{iv.}
It was easy to see why the latest victim in the case had been found in that particular location: the warren-like series of apartments had clearly been uninhabited for a long time, and the place bore all the sights and smells of a shooting gallery and crack house. There had been a time, during my earliest professional years in New York City, when my job had made similar visits to such places common; but the administrations of Rudy Giuliani and his successor, Michael Bloomberg, had driven all such establishments, as well as far more benign houses of ill repute, first to the outlying areas of the city, and then very nearly out of existence (or at least far underground), all to facilitate the most extreme gentrification. And the heavy-handed police policies of profiling, stop-and-frisk, and “overwhelming force” that had underlain all this social cleansing had been the metropolis’ main and most pernicious export to other American cities.
These tactics were in evidence even in a town like Fraser, particularly on the county seat’s north side; but the expected gentrification was not. Thus the building in which we were standing, redolent as it was of human urine and excrement, of sweat and suffering, and littered everywhere with well-used, blood- and drug-encrusted needles and pipes, was something of a return to my own past; and not, although it may sound strange, an altogether unpleasant one. For it reminded me of a time when my native city had made room for not only all races but all classes and aspirations, and was truly cosmopolitan. This sense of something like nostalgia eased my nerves considerably, as I walked behind Mitch; and even when he told me to wait in the hall so that he could check the first of four ground-floor apartments, the doors of which had been removed completely, I waited, not with dread, but considering what life in my home city might yet be like, if its citizens had not bought so thoroughly into the politics of fear peddled by Giuliani and Bloomberg, particularly in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
“You’re awfully chipper,” Mitch said quietly, returning from his run-through of the first apartment. “For a guy who’s just put himself seriously on the line, in a lot more ways than one.”
“Just recalling old times, Mitch,” I whispered, following him to the next apartment.
“Oh, yeah?” he murmured, as we reached the second entrance. “The glory days, eh?”
“Something like that,” I replied. “But—”
I was cut off, and Mitch’s progress was halted, when we both poked our heads into the second apartment, and an unmistakable stench hit us hard: the smell of human decomposition.
“That tears it,” Mitch said, keeping the Glock at the ready but pulling out a handkerchief with his left hand, which he placed over his mouth and nose. I had no such aid, but it didn’t really matter: this was a stink with which I was very familiar, and I adjusted to it quickly.
“Better get that Colt out,” Mitch told me before moving further into the apartment. When I signaled that I already had, he nodded approval. “Looks like this may be the place.”
I decided to follow him in without chambering a round in my gun, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that I did not share his opinion about the apartment. “Maybe” was all I would concede. “But it doesn’t really fit, does it, Mitch? Our guy hasn’t made any violent moves, yet; and even if he has done something to Weaver, not even that fat bastard’s body could start to smell this bad so soon.”
McCarron could not help chuckling into his handkerchief. “Yeah, I don’t guess it could. Plus the smell’s pretty confined—didn’t hit us until we reached the apartment door. Any idea what that means?”
“Latter stages of decay,” I answered. “Confined to one room in the apartment, I’d say, which must reek to high hell—but only enough of it gets out, under or around some door, to make its way as far as the apartment entrance. How big is this place?”
“They’re all laid out the same,” Mitch replied. “Kind of four-square around the stairs. The last one had two bedrooms, one bath. But all the doors were either gone or left open with the knobs removed, probably by the owner, who was trying to avoid exactly this kind of thing.”
“But, Mitch—” I pointed all around us. “The doorways in here are open, too.”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “All but one…” And then he nodded toward the far end of what I took to be the living room, in which I saw, beyond the sort of old, stained pieces of furniture typical of such joints, a short hallway, with one doorway at its start; and that one door was indeed closed. “It’s the bathroom,” he said, girding himself. “Okay—you wanna stay here?”
“No,” I answered. “I am, as you pointed out, the one who got us into this. If the kid has actually been dead for a while, well—that means a certain amount to the timeline of the case. And I am a doctor, Mitch. It’s not as though dead bodies hold some sort of dark power over me.”
“Some might,” he replied, walking toward the door. “Doctor or not…”
When we reached the bathroom door, the darkness caused Mitch to get a small Streamlight Stinger flashlight out, and, gripping it in his right hand as he continued to cover his nose and mouth, he prepared to open the door. “Just stand down the hall a little, will you, Doc?” he said; and when I made the move, he took a deep breath, put his handkerchief away, then used the fist that held the light to support his pistol hand. With his heavy boot, he knocked at the door; but no answer came, so he reached down to try the knob, which was locked. “State Police!” he called out, without drawing a breath. “Open up!” Still no answer; and so, resuming his cross-fisted posture, he raised a leg, kicked the light door in fairly easily, and entered.
After a few seconds, I heard him say, “Hunh. Nobody here,” in a muffled tone that indicated he had replaced his handkerchief over his face. His light was still flashing about the room, however, so I started to move toward it—
But I had only gotten about a step and a half before I heard the sound of plastic on porcelain, and then Mitch recoiled from the bathroom in a burst. He slammed against the far side of the hall, dropping his flashlight in the process; yet it was clear that no blow had struck him, that only his own legs had been responsible for the violent retreat. Moving forward and picking up his light with my cane hand, I held it to his face. Mitch’s thin brown eyes had grown very large and slightly bloodshot, and his mouth gaped in a way that made a mockery of his usual thin-lipped stoicism. But he had not lost all sense of himself. His eyeballs soon rotated and focused on me, without his body moving, and he murmured, in genuine dread yet with all due command, “Do not go in there…”
“Take it easy, Mitch,” I said, turning toward the bathroom; for the insatiable and dangerous curiosity of cats is only one characteristic that has always made me feel something more than akin to their species. “After all,” I went on, stepping toward the door, “as I told you, I’m a doctor, what in hell can be so bad…?”
I had entered the bathroom with the flashlight before he could get the words “Trajan—no!” out of his mouth; and yet there seemed little reason for his alarm. The small chamber—which contained a sink, toilet, and small tub with shower—was bare of any embellishment, and bare, too, of any blood; there was no reason for it to be giving off such a stench. And yet it was. It did not take long to realize that the reek was coming from the toilet; and as I turned toward it, moving to pick up its closed lid, I said to McCarron, “Oh, I get it, Mitch—we’ve got somebody’s severed limb blocking up the toilet, right? Maybe an organ of s
ome kind? Well, it’s not anything I haven’t—” At which point, I opened the lid.
It had sometimes been my lot, in New York City, to do double duty at crime scenes by determining causes of death, times of death, things of that variety, when a medical examiner simply could not get there fast enough; and I fancied that I had, during my years in what had once been, after all, the greatest and most roiling metropolis in the world, seen a good deal of just how foul human beings can be to each other. I had inspected the body of a Mafia informant who had been killed by securing him to a wall in a tenement and coating his body with a highly sulfurous cheese, after which rats gnawed off his face, ears, genitals, and toes before he finally died; I had seen a member of a Mexican drug gang whose head had been systematically sectioned in a butcher’s meat slicer; and I had seen women violated before and after death in so many ways that they defied counting or description. In addition, I had been present at the death scene of many a child, both before and during my professional life; though never an infant. Never an infant…And, although it took several seconds, I did eventually grasp that such was precisely what lay in the bowl of the toilet before me. What made the scene especially confusing was that the child was half in and half out of the water: he had been shoved in headfirst, his soft pate stopping up the toilet’s exit almost completely; and down to about the chest, he was protected (if such is the right word) by that same liquid. But from chest to toes, he was out of the water; and that half of his body had suffered far more severe deterioration and verminous violation. The look of terror and confusion that had been on the baby’s face as it drowned, however…that, unfortunately, was still very evident, despite all the devastation: and this was plainly what Mitch had reacted to so violently.
All of these details entered my brain before any thought to be horrified arrived; when the latter came, however, it didn’t take the form that Mitch’s had. I simply closed the lid of the toilet and stepped back into the hallway, pulling the door—its latch bolt and lip obliterated by Mitch’s kick—as far closed as I could. I returned to the head of Troop G, who was gathering himself by turning his Stetson uneasily in his hands.
“You, uh—” he began quietly, trying hard to form a sentence as he neatened the hat’s brim. “You seemed to—to take it pretty easily.”
“No—I didn’t, Mitch,” I said. “Just a different form of the same reaction. That’s all.”
He nodded, still without looking up at me. “Any idea what might have happened?”
“If you’re asking if there’s some connection to our case,” I said, wishing that—for his sake, if not my own—I could be more demonstrative in my behavior, “then no. Certainly not to our present business, at any rate. As for what actually happened—plainly, the child was an unwanted complication. It doesn’t take babies very long to drown; whoever was responsible likely slipped him in and closed the lid, then sat on it for the few necessary seconds.”
“God damn it, Trajan,” Mitch said, putting his hat back on his head as his voice gathered renewed force. “We’re talking about a baby, not one of your exotic animals! Could you at least sound like you give a shit?”
“I could,” I said, “but it would be obvious to you that I was forcing it. It’s just different…life experiences, Mitch. I’ve seen a lot of ugliness, one way or another. And I’ve seen a lot of very young people die.”
He nodded, almost apologetically. “You mean—with your cancer, and all.”
“And all—that’s right, Mitch,” I said. “Try not to take it the wrong way. I’m just as outraged by it as you are, and I’ll have some of the same horrible thoughts. Just not right now. We’ve got other things we’ve got to deal with.” He nodded again, as if to tell me he was sorry for his outburst. “You about ready?” I asked.
He grunted out a mirthless laugh, and we started back through the apartment. “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?”
“When we were back at that zoo, Mitch,” I replied, as we passed through the front doorframe, “it was.” I sighed once, as we pulled up by the building’s stairway. “Don’t ask me to explain it. I claim to understand only some few parts of the criminal mind—not why the hell anybody else does anything.”
We both chuckled a little bit, at that; but our relief was short-lived. From somewhere in the darkness of the building—above us, I soon realized—a voice sounded:
“I ain’t no goddamn criminal,” it said: quietly, but with an enormous amount of anxiety. Handing Mitch back his Streamlight, I got behind him as he resumed his defensive posture. He pointed the Glock and the light up the stairs, at the top of which was the thin figure of a black male, his eyes glaring: obviously athletic, he seemed ready to leap down upon us.
“State Police!” Mitch called out. “Are you the one who’s holding Dr. Weaver?”
“I—ain’t—armed,” the voice from the shadowy figure said, as steadily as he could. He sounded younger than I’d expected: certainly no older than eighteen or so, I guessed. “And if you mean the fat guy, I ain’t holdin’ his ass.” He glanced about, his voice a bit frantic. “Aw, man, it was all supposed to be easy…But then—” He seemed to come back to the point: “Look, when the cops came, I just wanted to try to explain to somebody what was really happenin’, here—and then, shit, outta nowhere more cops than I ever seen show up, and they start yellin’ about how I gotta come out with my hands up, and that fat fuck just ran away into the apartment, I couldn’t get him to leave!” Even in the shadows of the upper floor, I could see his hands go to his head, and rub the sides of it hard. “It was all supposed to be easy; mother-fucker—easy!”
“What was?” I said, stepping in front of the flashlight so that he could see me, and prompting Mitch to try to hold me back, unsuccessfully. “What was supposed to be easy?”
“Who the fuck’re you?” came the nervous reply.
“I’m a doctor,” I told him evenly. “Trying to make sure everyone’s all right—and I think there’s a dead boy around here, somewhere. Am I right?”
It took several seconds, but he finally answered, sniffing back tears: “Yeah—he’s up here. You wanna see him, I guess.”
“I do,” I answered. “And I’d like to talk to you about him, if that’s possible.”
“Not much I can tell you,” he answered. “I just brung him here—supposed to be easy…”
“All right, then.” I took the first step up, making my cane very obvious, so that he might feel less threatened. “We’ll talk about you. But how about sending the fat guy down to my friend, here—then they’ll leave, and we’ll work something out. That sound all right?”
His head began to nod, and more tears were sniffed back. “I just hope he’ll come out…” Then he signaled into the darkness beyond, at which point what seemed the utterly tremendous silhouette of Ernest Weaver appeared: and my impression that the figure with whom I’d been speaking could not have been much more than a youth himself was confirmed.
As I started up and Weaver started down, Mitch warned, “Trajan…”
“It’s all right, Mitch,” I said, pausing to turn back toward the beam of the flashlight. “We’re just going to talk. You take care of Weaver, just as you heard.”
“I’m gonna get him out to the others,” Mitch replied, “then get right back here.”
“Fine, Mitch. Good.” I turned and started up once again; and it wasn’t long before I passed the disheveled, descending figure of Weaver, who was covered in the malodorous sweat of fear. Half of his oily hair was on end, and his shirttails were out; but he passed me by with what I imagined he thought great dignity, saying only, “Doctor,” with a nod and no eye contact.
“Doctor,” I answered, amused and amazed by his appearance and manner; and then I added, with a small smile, “There’s a pair of golden arches right down the street…”
“Indeed? Thank you!” he replied in a daze, marching on and then out of the building with Mitch; after which, I turned and stared up into the void at the top of the stairs.
/> “Come on up,” the voice said, its speaker now utterly indistinguishable from the darkness. “I got a candle…in there. Where the kid is. But it’s still pretty dark…”
{v.}
His name, by a peculiarly fortunate turn of fate, was Latrell, a fact that he offered as I reached the top of the stairs and my eyes began adjusting to the darkness. Upon further learning that he had just turned eighteen, I did some quick math, and asked if he had been named after the basketball player Latrell Sprewell, whose career would have been just at its height when the young man was born. His long, panicked, but nonetheless handsome features eased their tension a bit, at that, and he told me that indeed he had: his mother had evidently had quite a crush on the volatile Sprewell, and since there had been no father in the picture to argue her choice, she had been free to bestow the name.
“You seen him play, ever?” Latrell asked, sweat still dripping from his face; for it was much hotter on the second floor, and, though the change in subject had calmed him a bit, he knew that Dr. Weaver’s departure had not diminished the police presence outside.
“I did,” I replied genially. “For the Knicks, during the ’99 finals.”
“My moms always said that was his best season,” Latrell revealed, starting to smile.
“She was right—first eight-seed team ever to make it that far.”
“Yeah,” he said, rather proudly, as if Sprewell had actually been his father. “I play ball myself,” he went on; but then he wiped his face with one shoulder strap of the plain black jersey, piped in green, that he was wearing, and, staring down farther at his long, baggy black shorts and his black Nike Air Jordan Retros, he stamped one foot in annoyance. “But I guess you kinda figured that out,” he added, plainly feeling that he’d made himself look stupid.