Darwin's Blade (32 page)

“I can be there in about thirty minutes in this traffic,” said Dar. “If I absolutely have to.” It was a shitty neighborhood and he had images of his Toyota Land Cruiser being stolen and the Bloods or Crips suddenly gaining .50-caliber semi-auto firepower.

“You have to,” said Lawrence. “If you haven't eaten, don't.”

I
t had been three hours since the “accident” and they had not extricated Paulie Satchel's body yet. After one quick look, Dar understood why.

Darwin had never given much thought as to how hamburgers were stamped out—he knew that they arrived frozen and preshaped at all of the franchise burger places—but now he saw that Hampton Quality Preprocessing was the place. It was a large, clean, new plant in a crowded, dirty, old industrial neighborhood.

Dar showed his credentials to the people demanding it. Lawrence had already been at the scene earlier and led him on a five-cent tour through the plant. “Loading docks for the beef to arrive, that room's where it's cut and separated, grinding room there, this area's where the extruded raw hamburger is put on a five-foot-wide stainless-steel conveyor belt that runs through the wall into the stamping room.”

The stamping room was where Paulie Satchel—the one possible witness to Attorney Jorgé Murphy Esposito's final moments—was entangled in the machinery.

Besides a medical examiner finishing some paperwork in one corner, there were two plainclothes detectives there—Dar knew Detective Eric Van Orden—and five other men wearing white coats over their business suits and surgical masks over their faces. Lawrence introduced them as three executive representatives of Hampton Preprocessing International, headquartered in Chicago, and two of their own insurance investigators.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in one of our plants, anywhere, never,” said one of the men behind the masks. “Ever.”

Dar nodded and he, Lawrence, and Detective Van Orden stepped closer to the body. What made the scene especially grisly—besides the fact that Paulie Satchel had been squeezed headfirst through a three-inch maw of a hamburger press—was the river of raw hamburger meat, no longer so fresh, that surrounded his sprawled body like a river current of raw flesh.

“He's been working here for three months under the name of Paul Drake,” said Detective Van Orden.

“Perry Mason's chief investigator on the old shows,” said Dar.

“Yeah,” agreed the cop. “Satchel was a little weasel with a lot of TV-watching time on his hands between liability claims. He always got some shit job to tide him over until the insurance checks arrived. We've got aliases on him as Joe Cartwright, Richard Kimble, Matt Dillon, Rob Petry, and Wire Palladin.”

“Wire Palladin?” said Lawrence.

Van Orden gave a twitch of a smile. “Yeah, remember Richard Boone in the old
Palladin
series? The gunfighter all in black?”

“Sure,” said Lawrence. “Palladin, Palladin, where do you roam…” he sang.

“Well,” said Van Orden, “the card that the gunfighter used to hand out on the show read ‘Wire Palladin, San Francisco.' Paulie was never exactly rocket-scientist material. He must've thought that Wire was Palladin's first name.”

Lawrence gave the headless, armless body a reproving glance. “Everybody knows that Palladin didn't have a first name,” he said to the corpse.

One of the company insurance men came over and began to speak urgently through his mask. “We know of you, Dr. Minor…know your work…and we don't know who has called you in on this, but you should know right now that although this plant was highly automated—Mr. Drake should have been the only person in the room at the time of the accident—there are at least eight mechanical safeguards against such an accident occurring while the employee was cleaning the input orifice of the stamping container.”

“He was cleaning the stamping container?” said Dar.

“It was on his schedule for early this afternoon, when the acccident occurred,” said Van Orden.

“Eight safeguards,” repeated the insurance man. “As soon as that T-eleven restraining grate was lifted, the entire line was programmed to automatically shut down.”

Dar ignored the split infinitive and said, “How about the other seven…safeguards?”

“No way that he could stop the line and lift that gate and open the compression claws to clean the stamping container without the failsafe devices shutting it down,” said a company executive who had joined the insurance man. “You can imagine our shock when we found all of these built-in safeguards either bypassed or eliminated from the machinery.”

The detective sighed and pointed to the mass of machinery and maze of circuitry inside the opened stamping-press panel. “This wasn't new,” he said. “Paulie was too stupid to bypass these things, and the murderer certainly didn't spend hours tinkering with the machinery before starting the press on Paulie.”

The company man and the insurance man took a horrified step back when they heard the word
murderer.
Perhaps it was the first time the detective had used it.

Lawrence pointed to the Rube Goldberg rewiring. “This has been like this for years,” he said. “The fail-safes obviously slowed down the process too much, so they just bypassed all this crap and had the operator—Paulie in this case—shut off the power back there.” Lawrence pointed to a huge red button at the far end of the line. “And then he could clean the stamping press entrance five times as fast and they could get back to production.”

“Can someone turn the line and the press back on from
outside
this room?” asked Dar.

The five company people shook their masked heads so vigorously that sweat actually flew through the air.

“And Paulie was supposed to be working alone?” said Dar.

“He was working alone today,” said Van Orden. “Signed in at one
P.M.
as usual. Would have ended his shift at nine.”

“Other workers been interviewed?” said Dar.

Van Orden nodded. “The line shut down at the usual time when Paulie cleaned the press. There are only five other workers in the building…it really is highly automated…and four of them were all outside together, taking a smoke break, when the…event…occurred.”

“What about the fifth man?” asked Dar.

“He was working in the back room there and has a perfect alibi,” said Lawrence.

“None of these guys saw anyone enter the building,” said Dar.

“Of course not,” said Van Orden. “That would make our job too easy, wouldn't it? But there are three other doors where someone could have come in from the opposite street side or the alley without being seen. None of them were locked.”

Dar turned and looked at the river of raw hamburger and the big red button at the head of the line. “So all the killer had to do was push that button.”

Lawrence folded his arms. “But you notice where the button is by the door. Even with Paulie's head lowered and close to the press, he would have heard and seen a person entering the room. Yet he stayed near the press.”

“Either someone made him stay there,” said Van Orden, “or…”

“Or he knew the person and trusted him,” said Dar.

Lawrence pointed to the slit where Paulie's body was still embedded; there were only about three inches of space between the steel runway and the serrated maw of the press entrance. Paulie's shoulders were visibly compressed into that tiny area. Hamburger had flowed by on either side. It looked like an obscene cartoon.

“This would have been a slow death, Dar,” said Lawrence. “Whoever it was who started the line did so when just Paulie's fingers were in the press entrance. But you see these sort of flippers on the side…They mash the line of raw hamburger into the maw.”

“So Paulie wasn't stamped all at once?” said Dar, seeing the real horror of the death fully for the first time.

“These guys who built the machine estimate that it must have taken about ten minutes for him to be dragged in—and stuffed in by those two big hydraulic compression claws—far enough for his body to jam the works,” said Detective Van Orden. “First his fingers, then hands, then both arms…”

“With hamburger flowing around him and past him and getting stamped into patties with him the whole time,” said Lawrence.

Not for the first time, Dar wished that he did not possess such a visual imagination. “He must have screamed himself hoarse,” he said.

Van Orden nodded. “But the machinery was still on in other parts of the factory—it's damned loud in the rendering and sorting room—and four of the other five guys were out front smoking. The fifth guy was out back on the stacking and loading deck, and we interviewed the trucker who was with him. Neither of them heard anything over the diesel engine of the truck running and the other noise back there.”

“And then, finally, Paulie's head would have been pulled in,” said Lawrence. “The last few minutes would have been silent.”

All five of the company people had backed as far away as they could at this point. Dar felt like taking pity on them and telling them that Paulie Satchel had no family—no one to sue them. He had been a lonely little weasel of a small-time con artist. Now he was…hamburger.

The flies were beginning to buzz en masse.

“Let's go out this door to the alley,” suggested Detective Van Orden. “Get some air.”

“Is there any question that this is a wrongful death?” asked Dar when the three of them stood in the relatively fresh air of the alley.

Eric Van Orden actually laughed. “No…I know about your investigation into the scissors-lift accident and so forth, but there's no doubt that this is going to be pursued by Homicide.”

“Why are all the company people allowed to hover around a crime scene?” Dar asked the detective. “I mean, I understand giving the insurance guys some access, but…”

Van Orden looked at Lawrence. “You didn't tell him about the lawsuit problem?”

Lawrence shook his head.

“Paulie doesn't have any friend or family,” said Dar. “I doubt there will be a suit.”

Van Orden was shaking his head while giving that ironic cop smile. “No, no, we're talking about a class-action lawsuit here, Dar.”

Dar did not understand.

“The hamburger line runs to the stacking room back here. The last guy sorts the patties onto trays with wax paper, then slides the trays into a stacked carrier—”

“Oh, damn,” said Dar, seeing where this was going.

“—and then they slide the racked carriers into a freezer truck…one truck every two hours…for fresh and efficient delivery.”

“You interviewed the driver,” said Dar. “That meant a delivery truck was here. The patties were loaded after…Jesus, did he drive off with them?”

“Twenty carriers of four hundred patties each,” said Van Orden. “Eight thousand patties.”

“They were delivered to Burger Biggies all over the metro area,” Lawrence said glumly. Burger Biggy was a client of Stewart Investigations. Usually the claims against the chain were no more serious than the usual obvious slip-and-falls, although there was one nasty case in which a woman sued for half a million dollars because she was raped while in her car in the drive-through waiting for her order.

“How many of the patties had part of…contained bits of…” began Dar.

Both Lawrence and the detective shrugged.

“That's what the company guys are trying to determine,” said Van Orden.

“I assume there's been a recall,” said Dar.

“It's under way as we speak,” said Lawrence.

Dar skipped dinner that Tuesday evening and went to bed early. The next morning he was at the Justice Center at 7:30
A.M.
only to find Syd hard at work in her basement office. He was not surprised.

Syd asked, “How was your camping trip? I wish I could have gone along.”

Dar felt a tingle of the pleasant sexual tension he had felt earlier around the chief investigator. Then he made himself remember the easiness—almost visible intimacy—between Syd and Tom Santana, and throttled back his stupid, adolescent imagination.

“You wouldn't have liked it,” he said. “It rained.” He tossed the three FBI dossiers on her desk and said, “I've finished reading these, and wondered if you could give them back to Special Agent Warren when you see him.”

Syd shrugged. “Sure. I'm sorry there's not more in those reports on Yaponchik and Zuker.”

“The photographs of them helped,” said Dar.

Syd did a slow double take. “Photographs? You mean that useless Polaroid of the Afghanistan sniper platoon? I couldn't make anything out.”

“No,” said Dar, picking up the CIA dossier, “I mean
these
photographs.” He opened the folder to the photos from his stakeout, which he'd inserted.

Syd looked at the close-ups. “Holy shit. I don't remember…” She stopped and squinted at Dar. “Wait a minute.”

Dar had not played poker since the Marines, so he gave Syd his best chess face.

“You realize, Dr. Minor, that any illegal surveillance photographs entered into evidence would be reason enough for the defense to have the indictments—much less a verdict—thrown out.” She had not stated it as a question.

Dar looked puzzled. “What do you mean? You think the CIA photos were taken illegally?”

Still squinting, she looked again at the grainy close-ups of Yaponchik and Zuker. Dar had used the same font as the CIA had used to label each photograph before photocopying them several generations to get the fuzzy look he wanted.

Syd looked at him for a minute, bit her lip, looked at the photos again, and said, “Well, it's always possible that I missed these, I guess. We'll get these in circulation right away. For all the grain, they're good photographs. Those CIA boys know their business.”

Dar waited.

“Yaponchik, the older KGB guy, looks like someone…” she mused.

“Max von Sydow?” said Dar.

Syd shook her head. “No, no. Maximilian Schell. I've always thought that Maximilian Schell looked sexy, in a dangerous, sinister sort of way.”