Gray Matter (3 page)

She learned that a thirty-five-year-old white male named George Burton, occupation pianist, had been found dead in his Central West End apartment. The body was decapitated by a sharp instrument such as a meat cleaver, and the head was not in the apartment. The skin of his back was carved (probably before death, according to the medical examiner’s report) into a kind of bas-relief portrait of a dog. A passable three-dimensional effect was achieved by stripping the skin away to make the low portions. The victim was tied straddling a chair backwards, presumably so that the killer could carve the bas-relief on his back. Blood was found on the chair and carpet, along with a puzzling set of four indentations in the carpet. The indentations were positioned as though the killer had pulled up a chair to sit next to the victim, but none of the chairs in the apartment matched the pattern of indentations.

Long after the call, she lay awake worrying whether she had done the right thing for herself and for Thomas, replaying hurtful scenes between herself and her ex-husband Steven, and mulling over the basic facts of the murder that Wall had given her on the phone. She had a good imagination, and she was awake most of the night.

A
HOT SHOWER FOLLOWED BY
an icy rinse raised PJ’s spirits in the morning. Her clothes, hung in the bathroom the night before, also benefited from the steamy environment. Now instead of being completely mashed and wrinkled from the suitcase, they merely looked like she had worn them for a hard twelve hour workday. As if to make up for their appearance, she spent extra time with her hair and even dabbed on lipstick. As she closed her makeup case, she noticed in the mirror that the chestnut hair that rested easily on her shoulders had already curled up in spite of her efforts to curl it under. There were lines at the corners of her gray eyes—
smile crinkles, surely, not that nasty kind—
and more than a few gray hairs mixed with the chestnut.

Thomas, under strict orders not to leave the motel room, was marshaling his supplies for the day: magazines, books, snacks, and the TV remote control. In spite of the current difficulties in their relationship, she trusted him when he promised that he would stay in the room. As soon as she could get a chance, she would look for a place to live, probably a rental home, and get him registered in school. If she was lucky and found a place right away, he could finish out the last three weeks or so before summer vacation. She blew him a kiss, which evoked a typical twelve-year-old’s response of revulsion, and drove to work.

It was a good thing that she had gotten an early start. The volume of traffic took her by surprise. She spent a good twenty minutes just crossing over the Missouri River from St. Charles into St. Louis County, listening to a morning talk show on the radio, inching forward in traffic on I-70, then the Innerbelt I-170, and finally Highway 40. She bit her lip nervously while driving, and there was nothing left of her lipstick by the time she pulled into the crowded lot at the Headquarters building on Clark Avenue downtown.

PJ had never been in a police station, even a neighborhood district office. Before her divorce, she would have been comfortable in a new situation. She had a professional poise and confidence which radiated to others and buoyed them through difficult situations. She was, after all, a trained psychologist and a pioneer in the use of computers in simulation studies. She had published several articles in prestigious journals, presented papers at conferences, and participated in seminars. But when your husband suddenly decides he loves another woman, it does something to your confidence. She knew that she had enough inner strength to pull through eventually, but her self-esteem was still struggling with the blow, and some days were better than others. She tried to put her doubts aside and concentrate on meeting her CHIP teammate, Detective Leo Schultz.

The two of them pressed into PJ’s tiny office as Wall, standing in the doorway, brought PJ up to date. The office was a former utility room which PJ suspected was still being used as one until about ten minutes before her arrival. The wooden desk was scarred with knife marks and marred with cigarette burns. Her swivel chair was green vinyl—thankfully no rips—and the metal arms were burnished by years of contact with elbows and palms. The ceiling fixture was a fluorescent rectangle which hummed and occasionally blinked, like a person with an unpredictable nervous tic. She couldn’t help comparing her new office to the one she had occupied in Denver: sleek, spacious, and sunlit.

PJ was not a tall woman. She was just short enough that retrieving items from the top shelves of kitchen cabinets was a problem. Many times she had simply knocked an item off with a long-handled spoon and caught it before it hit the floor. When she sat in her chair, trying to establish that important first impression as a confident professional, she first tilted back so far that she thought she was going to go over, and then, righting herself, discovered that her feet dangled three inches off the floor.

The room was airless, had rusty circles on the linoleum floor, and smelled of old wet mops. Since there was no heat or air conditioning vent, the only way to get air circulation was to open the door, which subjected the occupants to the noise and bustle of the men’s room directly across the hall.

PJ shut out the disconcerting surroundings and listened attentively as Wall gave the details, some of which she already knew from their phone conversation. On the wall directly in front of her was a blackboard, mounted hastily and crookedly, which had two photographs taped to it. One showed a smiling mid-thirties man, handsome and dressed in evening wear, standing in front of an audience, arms spread wide to scoop in their appreciative applause. The other was a graphic shot of a headless corpse, tied upright in a chair and pitifully unable to shield its fatal disfigurement from the camera. The pictures showed the same man, before and after the handiwork of a person who could only be loosely classified as human. She pulled her eyes from the photos, but her gaze kept wandering back whenever it lacked discipline.

Her mind raced with ideas for computer simulation, not only of the crime scene itself but a re-enactment of the crime. She wondered how her teammate would take to high-tech detective work.

Leo Schultz was, she estimated, in his mid-fifties and clearly an indifferent dresser. He was a large man, tall and thick through the waist, whose ill-fitting clothes suggested that he had put on weight. The cramped office seemed intolerably filled with his presence. His arms and legs, which at one time had been hard and muscular, were now rounded, plumped like hot dogs that swelled when they cooked. The ceiling light reflected from a bald spot on the crown of his head. The reflection seemed brighter than the actual radiance accounted for, as if the bald spot drew in light rays from a disproportionate volume of space and bounced them back. Most of his hair was clipped short and hugged his head, except for a few long grayish-brown strands which he combed over the thinning area at the front. Even though he was thirty or forty pounds too heavy, his face was long and thin, with cheeks that used to be firm but now sagged a little, and a prominent nose that towered above the rest of the landscape. His skin was wrinkled, with lines drawn like a road map around his eyes and mouth. He had either spent a lot of time in the sun or he was a heavy smoker; either could account for those wrinkles. PJ took a deep breath, but couldn’t detect any smoke odor. His eyes were deep brown, what could be an attractive and warm feature, but on him seemed misplaced, as though a puppy’s eyes had somehow gotten on the face of a rhino. He sat tipped back in a ridiculously small folding chair, sullenly doodling in a notebook during the briefing. It seemed clear to PJ that Schultz was unhappy, but she was unable to tell whether it was because of her, the pilot computer project, or a generally negative approach to life.

Probably all three,
she thought.

“I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” Wall said. He closed the office door and left, abruptly cutting off the noise from the bathroom and the hallway traffic.

She almost chuckled at Schultz’s reaction to that. He lowered his chair and his face took on a trapped look which he concealed almost immediately, but not quickly enough for a psychologist to miss it. PJ deliberately let the silence stretch out in the stuffy room. She wanted Schultz to make the opening gambit.

Two full minutes later, she acknowledged that he had won round one. Apparently the detective was no stranger to awkward silences.

“Well,” she said pleasantly, “would you rather I call you Leo or Schultz or Detective?”

“My friends call me Schultz. But let’s keep this strictly professional. You can call me Leo.”

My, my,
she thought.

“Look, lady, let’s get a few things straight right from the start. I took this assignment so I could get back out on the street where I belong. If that means I have to work with a shrink and a glorified adding machine, then that’s what I’ll do, see? But there’s working with and there’s working
with,
if you get my meaning.”

“Yes, I certainly…”

“And while we’re talking ground rules, let me make it clear that you’re going to leave all the detective work to me. That’s me.
Detective
Leo. There’s a reason I’ve got that title and you don’t. You keep your pretty little nose buried in that computer and we’ll get along just fine.”

“Are you done? Could I possibly get in a word now?”

Schultz settled back magnanimously. “Yeah, go ahead.”

PJ gathered what dignity she could while sitting in a chair with her feet off the floor, like a child sitting at the teacher’s desk. Well, it was her desk, however humble and worn. Besides, she had dealt with hostility and sexism before, and her favorite response was to squelch it unmercifully.

“Detective, you may have noticed when we were introduced that I was
Doctor
Gray, not just plain old Penelope. There’s a reason I have that title and you don’t. The reason is that I’m a highly trained professional in my own field and I’ve been hired to head CHIP. That is why we are meeting in my
office,
not at your
desk.
Make no mistake about who’s in charge here.” She tapped her chest with her finger.

“I…”

“One moment, Detective, I’m not finished. Ordinarily, I would prefer us to work companionably as teammates. We can be more productive that way. But I can see that’s going to be a problem here. So I put it to you: work on CHIP on my terms, or get the hell off the project. Today. Now.”

“Christ, lady, don’t get your ass in an uproar.”

“My name isn’t
lady,
and the condition of my posterior is far too personal to be of concern to you. My friends call me PJ, but you can call me Penelope. Or just plain Boss.”

Schultz wasn’t down for the count. He leaned forward and put his elbows on her desk. “You ever arrest a perp and get your ribs knocked in? You ever sit in an interrogation room with a creep who’d just as soon slit your throat as eat? You ever walk into a dark alley and get that tingle in your spine waiting for the knife?”

PJ folded her hands on the desk. “No.”

“My point exactly.”

“Have you ever,” PJ responded, “tried to talk a guy down from a PCP high and gotten your nose broken for your effort? Have you ever had a woman slit her wrists in the bathroom in your office? Have you ever held a dead baby in your arms who was battered to death by a man under your care?”

Schultz pursed his lips. “No.”

“Well, I have, Detective. I may not be an expert in investigative techniques and I may have done marketing studies for consumer products and I may have been born with a vagina rather than a penis, but I have done all those things.” PJ felt her breath coming faster and took a deep breath to calm herself. “In addition, I happen to know a little something about the criminal mind.”

“Shit, can’t we come to some agreement here? I think we got one of those storms in a teapot going here.”

“That’s tempest in a teacup.” They sat for a moment, glaring at each other. This time Schultz broke the silence.

“Maybe we can start this over. It seems to me we’ve both got a lot on the line here, but let’s not forget what our jobs are. We’re talking about catching some creep that sliced up a man and chopped off his head. We’re talking about putting that creep in jail and sending the key to Mars.”

“I’m ready to focus on that task as soon as you are.” It wasn’t much of a peace offering, but his hadn’t been much of one either.

“Well then,” Schultz said. It was as close to a concession as Schultz was going to get, and PJ realized that. She decided it was time to be gracious.

“Well then, we need to set some priorities,” she said. “I’ll take a look at the computer equipment later in the day, but right now we need some more facts. We need to visit the scene of the crime.” Too late, PJ realized how trite that sounded.

“Yeah, Doc, that’s usually a good start for an investigation.”

PJ sighed. “Come on, Leo, knock it off. I know I set myself up for that one. What I meant was that I need a lot of data about the victim’s apartment. Measurements. Furniture. Everything.”

“Why?”

“In order to recreate the apartment, and the murder within the apartment, on the computer.”

“You lost me there, but I’ll rustle up a tape measure.”

“Eager to please, eh?”

Schultz grinned a grin that sparked an uneasy feeling in PJ. If she had met a stranger in a bar and he had grinned at her like that, she would have beaten a path to the exit.

“Always, Doc, always.”

When he left, PJ was suddenly overwhelmed with the whole situation: the divorce; her son’s emotions; the new job; her tiny, smelly office; the graphic details of the murder; her confrontation with Leo; the photos on her wall; the prospect of visiting the murder scene; even her wrinkled clothes. Tears brimming in her eyes, she fled her office. In a stall in the ladies’ room, which stank of smoke in spite of the sign pasted on the door which said “Do not smoke in this bathroom!!!,” PJ Gray, polished professional woman, psychologist, and computer expert, took stock of her first morning on the job. It had one bright spot—she felt she had held her own with Leo—but on the whole was not an auspicious beginning.