Blood Men (2 page)

“Payment for the kiss,” she whispers, and winks at me.

“I should have made you pancakes. They’d have cost you more.”

Our cat, Mogo, gets under Jodie’s feet before jumping up on the table and staring at me. Mogo is a tabby with way too much personality and nowhere near enough patience. I sometimes think he has similar thoughts to what my dad must have had all those years ago. He never eats when I feed him, and he always waits for Jodie to take care of him. He never hangs around me or wants me to pat him either—but cats never approach me—there’s something about me that they don’t like. Dogs too.

We finish up breakfast and get our gear together. Jodie has her briefcase, Sam her backpack, I have a satchel, and it’s time to go. It’s eight thirty and the Paul Simon song is stuck in my head and heading outside is like walking into a wall of heat. It’s Jodie’s turn to drop Sam at school. There are kisses all around and hugs, then car doors closing and engines turning over and we leave in different directions. The inside of my car is an oven. Neighbors wave while getting their own kids off to school, others out walking before the day gets too hot, some working in the garden. The houses in the neighborhood have recycling bins parked out front, the week’s trash all ready to be picked up and emptied, green bins with yellow lids lining the streets. On the way into town I pass vans on the side of the road with trailers—people in collapsible chairs reading magazines while selling Christmas trees and Christmas lilies.

The central city is bordered away from the suburbs by four long avenues creating a giant box, within it a network of parallel streets made up in a checkerboard style, the buildings planted among them blending into one of two types—ugly ones built a hundred years ago, and slightly less ugly ones built in the years since. Most of the scenery could be picked up and spliced into a Sherlock Holmes novel without anybody noticing much difference, except for Holmes himself, who would wonder why Baker Street had suddenly turned from a loitering ground for pickpockets and heroin addicts to one of gang members and glue sniffers.

The drive-time routines are slipping out of whack as the city crawls toward Christmas, the traffic is thicker than yesterday, but
not as thick as it will be tomorrow. There are a few early-morning—or perhaps ultra-late-night—hookers on the corners in town; their lifeless eyes follow me as I drive past, fake smiles on their faces, the makeup smudged and worn after a long night, their clothes short and scented with exhaust fumes and spent exhaustion. I’ve never seen anybody pull over and pick one up at this time of the morning—it would be like screwing something out of
Dawn of the Dead
. I wonder if they take the holidays off, whether Christmas is a merry time for them, whether they go home and slip into Santa hats and listen to carols and put up decorations.

I turn on the radio and have to flick through four stations until I can find a pair of DJs who aren’t laughing at the tired old sex jokes DJs have been making for the last twenty years. The station I settle on mentions it’s already twenty-seven degrees and is only going to get hotter; reminds us all that water restrictions are in place, that global warming is coming, and that Christmas is only seven days away and counting.

I strike nearly every red light on the way into town, people sitting in their cars cooking as the temperature rises. It takes me twenty-five minutes to get to the parking building, having survived all the Christchurch Christmas road rage. I drive up to the eighth floor, negotiating the narrow ramps as they wind upward between floors, some drivers taking them more carefully than I do, others treating it as a racecourse. I take the stairs down, breaking into a sweat, and pass a homeless man named Henry at the base of the stairs who tells me I’m a saint after I give him a couple of bucks. Henry has a Bible in his hand so maybe he really does have a keen eye for that kind of thing, or maybe it’s coming from the bottle of cheap vodka in his other hand. From there it’s only a two-minute walk to work. The sidewalks are full of grim-looking people all resigned to the day ahead, in office buildings, retail outlets, or sleeping under park benches. Some of them are waiting for Christmas, some of them excited, some of them probably not even aware of its approach. The sun keeps climbing. There is blue sky in every direction and the overwhelming sense we won’t be seeing any more clouds this year.

The accountant firm employs almost fifty people, and is one of the bigger and certainly more expensive ones in town—its prestige made obvious by the important-sounding partner names—Goodwin, Devereux & Barclay—and prominent location watching down over the city. It’s in one of the more modern Christchurch buildings, sharing it mostly with lawyers and insurance firms. Our company takes up the top three floors of fifteen—the biggest firm in the building. The foyer is throwing out cold air and people are lining up for the elevator. I take the stairs where the air smells stale and break into even more of a sweat.

I work on the thirteenth floor, where the view isn’t as good as the bosses’ above, but better than the lawyers’ below. I go through the early-morning hellos with a few people once I reach my floor, which takes longer this time of the year because people always seem to want to know what everybody else is doing for Christmas. The ones who ask the most seem to be the people with great plans.

Most of us are lucky enough to have our own office—with a few using cubicles. I’m one of the lucky ones, plus my office is at the end of a corridor that doesn’t get a lot of foot traffic. It’s here I deal with taxes and not so much with people. I dump my satchel on my desk and slump in my seat and pull my already damp shirt away from my body. My office is big enough to fit a desk and a person sitting either side of it and not much more. Most spare wall space on the entire floor is covered in school drawings the parents have brought in from their kids—crayon-purple Christmas trees and dogs with seven legs reminding us all we’d rather be somewhere else but here—and my office is the same. I stare at a couple of the drawings Sam has done, taking a few minutes to cool down before throwing myself into the file I’ve been working on—the firm has been hired by a bottled water company, McClintoch Spring Water, searching for tax breaks. It’s a company whose advertising campaign used images of Jesus to make it a lot of money last year.

I meet Jodie for lunch at twelve thirty outside a café down The Strip, a line of café/bars that double as nightclubs at night, with indoor-outdoor flow and tables spilling out onto the sidewalks. I’m called “sir” because I’m almost thirty years old, but if I came here
tonight I’d probably get asked to leave for being too old. The cafés are all at about 90 percent full, some people turning red in the sun, others sitting in the shade of giant umbrellas, the smell of food and cologne thickening the air. The waitresses are all wearing tight black T-shirts. Most of them have their hair pulled back in ponytails that bounce as they walk. On the other side of the road the Avon River is almost at a standstill, bugs attracted by the smell of stagnant river weed and a dead eel floating along belly-up.

We talk while we eat, the only subject the new house we’re trying to buy. Jodie picks at a chicken salad which is probably only chicken in name; she can’t seem to find any meat in it. I work at a plate of nachos, the food okay, not great, but priced as if it were the best in the city. Maybe we’re paying a premium to stare at the waitresses in their T-shirts.

The new house will have a spare room big enough for me to put a pool table in, and Jodie wants some aerobic equipment. We’ll probably use neither, but the fun part at this stage is the dreaming. A new house will be exciting for Sam too. But before that we still have to get through the excitement of Christmas. Sam is the perfect age for Christmas—she still believes in Santa.

The waitress comes by when both our mouths are full and asks how the meal is and neither of us can answer. She seems to take that as a good sign and moves on to the next table. It’s probably only a couple of degrees away from hitting thirty-five and the waitress is ready to melt into a fleshy puddle when one o’clock rolls around, the umbrellas in danger of catching alight. We pay the bill, and the waitress gives us the smile of the damned.

It’s only a five-minute walk to the bank. One side of the road is warm in the shade, the other almost white hot. The sidewalks are covered in melted chewing gum and teenagers on skateboards wearing loose clothes with hoodies, perfecting the rapist image kids these days love and clothes designers are making millions off. I wonder how hot it has to get before they take their hoodies off. We get stopped every hundred meters or so by people trying to convince us to sign up to save the whales, save the environment, solve world hunger. There’s tinsel hanging from streetlights and
building frontages, decorated trees and fake snow on the window-display floors, plastic Santas and reindeer everywhere. People are rushing about on their lunch breaks trying to squeeze in some shopping, some carrying packages and gifts, others wearing lost looks on their faces.

The bank is pretty much slap bang in the middle of town, a tall building with the ground floor for the public and on the other floors—nobody really knows. It has air-conditioning and about fifty potted plants and a security guard who keeps glancing at his watch. We end up arriving early and are led to a group of comfortable chairs to kill time in. Nobody offers us anything to drink. There are racks full of banking brochures on the wall next to us, plenty of posters advertising interest rates; young families with new homes and new kids and big smiles is the image of choice—which is fine with us. But once you’ve seen one poster there isn’t much more to look at: just more floating and fixed interest rate packages and more smiles from people thrilled to be a slave to their mortgage. There are percentage symbols plastered everywhere.

Then, at thirteen minutes past one—two minutes until our appointment with the mortgage consultant—six men carrying shotguns walk calmly through the door.

Crime is escalating. Domestic abuse, adolescent street racers running down innocent pedestrians, people stealing and killing—this is the norm in Christchurch, everyday acts happening in an everyday city. Crime escalates like every other statistic, like inflation, cost of living, it ebbs and flows along with gas prices and the real estate market. Same with the murder rate—it can’t be plotted and predicted on a graph, but it stays in line with other crime, a statistic, a percentage.

But this . . .

He’s not even sure what this is.

Detective Inspector Schroder brings the car to a stop. There are two unmarked patrol cars blocking off the entrance to the alleyway but he can still see the body beyond it. Detective Landry is leaning against one of the cars, jotting down notes and pausing occasionally to cough into his hand as the medical examiner conveys the details with as many hand gestures as he does words. Schroder gets out of
the car and walks over.

“Hell of a show, Carl,” Landry says.

“And you figured I’d want to come take a look.”

“Well, sure I did. I thought you could use the fresh air.”

“Some air. It must be forty degrees out here.”

“These nor’west winds—don’t know what it is, but they make the crazy even crazier,” Sheldon, the medical examiner, sighs, before taking off his glasses and wiping them with the tail of his shirt. “Don’t discount it,” he adds, “I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”

“So what have we got?” Schroder asks, stepping into the alleyway. The body doesn’t look any better than it did from behind his steering wheel. Landry and the ME follow him.

Blood has puddled around the dead man, creating a perimeter of about a meter that Schroder can’t cross without contaminating the scene; the footprints already in it are from Sheldon. The victim’s limbs are all twisted up, especially the legs—the left one has bent forward and snapped somewhere in the knee joint so the ankle is tucked up against the front of the groin.

The guy has three suction cups attached to him—one strapped on each hand, the third secured around his right knee. The fourth is resting on the ground about half a meter from the body, the strap broken in the fall.

The alleyway is cooler than the street, and in complete shade, but the top nine storeys of the ten-storey building are in direct sunlight. Even in this heat the alleyway smells damp. There are recycling bins lining one of the walls, broken wooden pallets and cardboard boxes lining the other. Christchurch alleyways are always full of something—just normally not bodies. He looks up, shielding his eyes against the bright reflection from the windows, then back down at the dead man’s face. A guy with big Vegas-style Elvis sideburns and busted-up features and head wounds that have leaked all over the cracked tarmac.

“See, told you it was a show,” Landry says. “Ain’t much for us to do except wrap Batman up in a bag and take him to the morgue.”

“I think he was trying to be more like Spiderman,” Schroder
says.

“Either way, the fact he’s naked except for a trench coat tells us he’s a piece of crap.”

“Maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? For all we know he was on his way to rape somebody,” Landry says. “Dressed like this—he certainly wasn’t trying to watch cable TV for free. I’m thinking he got what he deserved.”

Schroder nods. Still, if he was planning on peeking into somebody’s apartment—surely there was an easier way.

They all turn as one as the media vans begin their assault on the scene, all pulling up at the same time. The cameramen and reporters climb out and move around the barriers to get closer. Police constables push them back. Cameras are hoisted up onto shoulders and the sun glints off the lenses.

“And the show gets an audience,” Landry says.

“We should cover him up,” Schroder says, glancing up at the other tall buildings surrounding them. Landry is right—this is a hell of a show. People are standing in the windows, all staring down and pointing, their faces full of excitement. The reporters scan the buildings for better vantage points to invade the dead man’s privacy from. A constable comes over and goes about covering the victim, a white sheet of canvas hiding the view away from the public. Not all the blood has dried and some of it seeps into the material.