Cold Frame (15 page)

Blame it on the terrorists. Proclaim that the DMX had been so effective and such a deterrent to the bad guys that they'd attacked it. That would neutralize Harris and his allies, and then allow him to repopulate the DMX with people he could trust to carry this mortal fight to the enemy as only the program could.

He smiled. He amazed himself sometimes. The scale of it! Why the hell not?

*   *   *

Av and Howie took their seats in the darkened room behind a one-way glass pane. The interview room had a single, rectangular table and four chairs. One for the perp, one for his lawyer on one side, and two for the detectives on the other side. There was audiovisual equipment high up on a shelf overlooking the entire room. The interviewee in question was a gangbanger from an Anacostia neighborhood so riven with drug and gang violence that it had once been one of the unofficial no-go zones within the MPD. Anacostia had become a lot safer since those days, but the area, just east of the Anacostia River, could not shake its rep as an urban free-fire zone. The banger's name was Lavon Jerome Tiles, otherwise known as “Gooey” Tiles. He'd been found, gun in hand, stoned out of his mind in an alley, where he was sitting on the still-warm corpse of another gangbanger. When asked why he was sitting on a dead body, Gooey stated that he'd been cold. No longer in the loving grip of his opiate of choice, Gooey now refused to say anything and was demanding his public defender.

Said public defender had come and gone. He'd told Gooey in no uncertain terms that he was to pay strict attention to that “remain silent” part of the Miranda warning, and since he wasn't going to say anything, the lawyer could then leave to tend to his three other charges, who were actually going to be in court. Gooey responded that he was down with that, no problem. That's when the Seventh District guys had asked for Miz Brown.

Wong Daddy and Miz Brown came into the interview room and shut the door behind them. Brown was wearing a sport coat, white shirt with tie, and dark slacks. Wong had a tent of some kind over his upper half, shiny black nylon warm-up suit pants, and size twenty-something sandals. Brown carried a leather folder filled with forms. Wong carried a yard-long piece of what looked like a two-by-six pine board. Gooey, maintaining his supercool pose, refused to look at either of them, and even yawned. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and his wrists were handcuffed through a ring under the table. If he'd noticed the board, he gave no sign of it.

Brown introduced himself, pointed out that the conversation was being filmed and recorded, and proceeded to read Gooey his Miranda, after which he attempted to get the suspect to sign forms acknowledging his Miranda and the bit about the filming.

“Ain't sayin' shit, ain't signin' shit,” Gooey pronounced. “Thass it, yo.”

Brown then spoke to the camera, asking that the record show the suspect refused to sign the admin forms. Back in the viewing room, two of the Seventh District detectives had come in to watch. Av asked one of them what the “Gooey” was all about. He was told he really didn't want to know the answer to that. Av didn't press it.

“Will you please state your full name?” Brown asked.

The suspect stared at the wall and said nothing, his expression saying, what part of shit don't you understand?

“Do you understand why you're here for questioning?”

No response. Brown stood up and began to pace on his side of the table. He cleared his throat and looked down at the floor for a moment.

“Here we go,” Howie said in the darkroom. By now, two more guys had come in to watch.

Brown turned to the camera and began to lecture it. “The problem here,” Brown began, “seems to be that the suspect does not appear to understand the significance of his current refusal to engage the police authorities in a meaningful discussion about the modalities of what certainly appears to be a murder committed by the suspect who stated that the reason he was found with and actually on top of the victim was that he was suffering from thermal exposure to cold, which, in all truth, wasn't that extreme but which, admittedly, might induce a person of limited intellect to establish close physical proximity in order to make himself more comfortable following what was obviously a serious altercation, which, from the evidence at hand, probably involved the subject in the role of shooter, seeing as the gun used in the shooting was within physical proximity of the subject, who…”

“Jesus,” Av whispered. “When's he come up for air?”

Howie just grinned. “He just getting started. Keep an eye on Gooey and Wong.”

Gooey had been trying hard to pretend that nothing was going on, but the waterfall of sincerely concerned words coming from Miz Brown was making his eyes water.

“… for the purposes of establishing a logical reconstruction of the events in question, it is of course necessary to have input from all parties to the incident whenever that is possible, however, with one party to the incident deceased, and the other indulging in a display of puerile intransigence because he believes that if he talks to the police, he will be branded as a snitch, even though there is no way anyone can know that he spoke with the police, unless, of course, the police decide to put that word out onto the street, in which case…”

That last bit made Gooey turn his head, showing the observers that, despite his seeming nonchalant attitude, he had been listening to Brown's barrage. Then Wong put the board down on the table with an audible clack and began to stare at it. As Brown droned on in sentences lasting five minutes each, Wong swiveled his massive head to look at Gooey, and then back to the board. Gooey was sitting up a little straighter in his chair, his professional slouch being undermined by whatever his own imagination was telling him about Wong and the possibilities presented by that board.

“… evidence which includes but is not limited to the gun itself, fingerprints on the gun, gunshot residue on the hands of the subject here present, a ballistics match between the bullets that killed the deceased individual and the bullets in said gun, the time of day, the attendant meteorological conditions, and…”

In the background, just below the threshold of Brown's monologue, Av could now hear a keening sound. It wasn't especially threatening, although he had heard a dog once make that sound just before a dogfight started. Wong was stroking the board now, inspecting it inch by inch and then looking over at Gooey for just a second before resuming his intense study of the board, its grain structure, its weight and heft, how well his hand could span it, how heavy it was, and then back at Gooey.

That worthy had now picked up on the keening sound and deduced that it was coming from Wong's direction. Miz Brown never once let up, not even to take a deep breath, but kept the torrent of words coming, one after another, all somewhat relevant to the issue at hand, but not necessarily following in any sort of logical order. The guys behind Av and Howie in the darkroom were laughing quietly as they watched the show through the one-way and saw Gooey's increasing concern over Wong and his board.

“I got a ten-spot sez Gooey sings within five minutes,” one of the detectives announced quietly.

“I'll cover that,” his partner said. “I say four minutes.”

“… past behaviors are an important indication of the suspect's predilection for violence and an even better indicator for future antisocial behaviors that fall into the category of extreme violence such as the case at hand, and…”

“Yo,” Gooey said, raising his hand.

Miz Brown fell silent. He put his left hand in his coat pocket. Av saw the little red lights go out on the recorders. Brown raised his eyebrows at Gooey.

“'Sup with de slope and dat board?” Gooey asked.

Wong stopped his ministrations and fixed Gooey with a baleful glare. “Slope?” he asked, in full Kurosawa samurai voice.
“Slope?”

Gooey started waving his right hand as if trying to make Wong vanish. “Want my shap, man,” he demanded, speaking to Miz Brown. He looked sideways at Wong. “Dis fucker's crazy, yo.”

“‘Shap'?” Av asked.

“As in Shapiro—O.J.'s lawyer,” Howie said. “Homeboy wants his lawyer
in
there.”

Wong sat up straight and started to inflate his torso. Gooey tried to be brave but his enlarging eyes betrayed him. Wong slowly picked up the pine board, made some more of the keening noises, and then, using just his hands, twisted the board in half, lengthwise, and slammed the two pieces triumphantly down on the table with a sound like a gunshot. Gooey jumped. Everyone in the darkroom also jumped.

Gooey was trying to back up in his chair, but it was bolted to the floor and his hands were still chained to that ring in the table.

Wong began speaking in the unknown dialect, growling out the words with lots of facial emphasis.

“Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey!” Gooey shouted. “Muh-fucah's losing it here. Gimme me outa here.”

Wong stopped his growling, took in a long breath, let it out, and then brought one of the pieces of the board up to his mouth like an ear of corn, opened his mouth wide to give Gooey a good look at all those teeth, and then took a huge, splintering bite. He started chewing it, staring at Gooey the whole time. The detective behind Av in the darkroom did lose it, covering his mouth as he bent double with laughter.

Gooey, however, was not amused. Gooey was scared shitless.

Wong spat out an entire mouthful of pine pulp, growled some more, and looked over at Miz Brown.

“Yes, Detective?” Brown said, in a so-very-sincere voice.

“Dry,” Wong said, spitting out some more splinters and wiping his mouth. “Needs blood.”

“What?!”
Gooey yelled. He started pulling on his cuffs, frantically trying to leave the scene. As best Av could tell, if he had to leave his hands behind, that was going to be okay with Gooey.

Wong took another bite out of the board and chewed dramatically, growling and spitting at the same time, splinters and spittle flying everywhere, while never taking his eyes off Gooey, who was visibly about to piss his pants.

“Blood?” Miz Brown said. “Really?
Blood
would help? How much blood?”

The detective behind Av got up and left the darkroom, unable to contain himself any longer. Av heard him tell someone outside in the hall how much he loved this job.

Wong Daddy sprayed an entire mouthful of pine pulp and splinters in Gooey's direction, licked his lips, and then turned to Brown and pointed at Gooey. “Blood?” he asked. Then he clacked his huge teeth in Gooey's direction. Av saw the little red lights come back on.

The teeth-clacking apparently did it. Gooey started babbling: “Awright,
aw-right
! Yeah, I whacked de mothafucka, he be dissin' my lady, yo? Had it comin', nine ways, aw-right? God-
damn
! Y'all get dat crazy muh-fucka outa here, I'll talk to y'all. God-
damn
! He gonna bite? Yeah—lookat dat mothafucka—he gonna bite!”

Wong, moving just out of the camera's view, began foaming at the mouth and making barking sounds. Miz Brown encouraged Wong to take a break, go get some water, forget about blood, it being salty and no help for a mouthful of splinters. Wong hesitated, got up, made some truly ghastly noises, faked one last move toward Gooey that made him squeak, and then left the room.

Miz Brown removed his hand from his coat pocket and asked Gooey if they could start over. Gooey nodded enthusiastically as Wong slunk out of the room, still spitting splinters and making growling noises. Av saw money changing hands out in the hallway.

Fucking beautiful.

*   *   *

Back at headquarters, Av asked Wong how he managed chewing a mouthful of pine splinters.

“It's not pine,” Wong explained, “it's balsa, duded up to look like pine. Presplit, coated in a little olive oil, so I didn't really need any blood.”

Av grinned. “And the foaming at the mouth?”

“Oh, that?” Wong said. “I can do that shit on demand.” He proceeded to demonstrate that ability just as a messenger came into the room with a priority intradepartment envelope. The messenger, a probationer, took one look at foaming Wong, dropped the envelope, and backed hurriedly out of the room in absolute horror.

“Wong, for Chrissake,” Howie protested. He retrieved the envelope, looked at the addressee block, and gave it to Av. He opened it, looked at it, and then pronounced: “OCME speaks.”

Av remembered the fairy godmother's assurances that the medical examiner would
not,
in fact, speak—to them. He scanned the results, looking for the conclusions block. “Hoo-aah,” he said quietly. Second District's got themselves a possible homicide.

“Yeah?” Howie said.

“Victim died from aconitine poisoning, based on preliminary analysis.”

“What's that shit?” Wong asked, wiping the foam off his mouth.

“Prolly what you been eatin',” Howie observed. “Foamin' like that.”

“According to this,” Av said, “it's a toxin produced by a plant called the
Aconitum,
or monkshood, which makes aconitine by terpenoid biosynthesis from mevalonic acid that polymerizes subsequent to phosphorylation.”

“Everyone knows that,” Wong said. “So then what happens?”

Av read some more of the pharmacological report, hoping to encounter some recognizable English. “Here it is,” he said, finally. “It stops the big muscles of the body by attacking the neuron channels that make 'em expand and contract. We're talking heart, lungs, skeletal muscle paralysis, here. Floods the brain with calcium and sodium, which is apparently not good, either. They're sending some samples to the Bureau's lab, because some of what happened didn't quite make sense, such as, how fast it killed him.”

“But he didn't eat anything,” Howie reminded everyone.

“Didn't eat anything
in
the restaurant,” Av said. “But before he got there? Had himself a veggie fit, maybe? Munched on a monkshood plant by the sidewalk?”