Marine Corpse (15 page)

I took the seat. He put the sandwich down on the waxed paper, wiped both hands on his shirt, and drew his forearm across his mouth. He nodded his head twice, as if he were confirming something we both knew. “Another friend of yours, huh?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, I’m sorry.” He gazed up at the ceiling. He was embarrassed, I realized. He was not comfortable expressing sympathy. I liked him that much more for trying. “You don’t really get used to it,” he said, still focused on some spot over my head. “Listen. Let me tell you about this one we had last winter.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he didn’t have to bother trying to make me feel better, but he wasn’t looking at me. “Got a call from the T cop down at the car yard, where they store all the trains. Big maze of tracks there, and all them cars either waiting to be repaired or beyond repair. Those they cannibalize. Use ’em for parts. Very popular place with the bums. They try to get into the cars to stay warm. There’s a big chain link fence around it, and they have a patrolman on duty. But, to tell the truth, nobody minds too much if the bums get in.”

Santis picked up his sandwich, regarded it with distaste, and put it back down. “Anyway, this must’ve been around five or six in the morning. It was just getting light. Cold as a bitch, I remember. The T cop had found this stiff laying on the tracks. Frozen, he was, just like your friend there…”

“Stu Carver.”

“Right. Carver. Well, this one wasn’t that old, either. Dressed up like a Marine, he was. Had the khaki coat, pants, and the high boots. Even had that olive drab underwear the Marines wear. Reason we knew that right off was that his pants were down around his knees, and so were his shorts. Laying right there on the tracks, bare-ass. So we stand around staring at the stiff and freezing our own asses off, wishing we had some hot coffee, until the ME gets there. It didn’t look like any homicide to me, and I wasn’t that happy about being there at all. On the other hand, it didn’t look like the Marine had just pulled down his drawers so he could lay down on the tracks to take a nap. Hard to figure just what did happen. Anyways, the ME finally gets there. He’s a grouchy old bastard. Who wouldn’t be, you have to get up at that hour to run down to the car yard to look at a dead body? He scootches down beside the body and puts his face up real close to the dead Marine’s poor shriveled-up cock, then he chuckles, which he hardly ever does, and stands up. He says to us, ‘Guess what happened?’”

Santis cocked his head and moved his eyes from the ceiling to my face. “Well, guess what happened?”

“I don’t have any idea,” I said.

“What happened was, the Marine, probably half crocked on wine, lets down his drawers to take a leak. Sends off a big stream of piss—right onto the third rail. Zap! About a billion volts of live electricity shoot up his urine to his pecker. The ME said the poor bastard never knew what hit him. Deader’n a mackerel—fried mackerel, I guess—before he hit the ground.”

Santis grinned expectantly at me, and I nodded my dubious appreciation. “Anyway, the thing is, a lot of these old people—and some of them not so old—die in Boston in the winter. That’s all I’m trying to say. So if I don’t come across, well, sympathetic, see…”

“I understand. Thank you.”

He seemed relieved. He broke a piece of cheese off his sandwich and shoved it into his mouth. “So, Mr. Coyne. Whaddya think, anyway? About this new one, I mean.”

I shrugged. “I guess I think that the person who killed Stu Carver probably killed Altoona. I imagine you already had that thought.”

He curled his lip back and picked at his teeth with his thumbnail. “Yup. I already had that thought. We gotta try and figure out if there’s some other connection, know what I mean?”

“A motive.”

“Right. Now, since you knew both of them, I guess they knew each other. True?”

“Yes. They did.”

“Just from being bums together, or what?”

“They were special friends,” I said. “As a matter of fact, they were special men. They weren’t just your average, run-of-the-mill bums.”

“I’m a slow learner, Mr. Coyne, so you’re going to have to run that past me slowly.”

So I did. I explained to Santis about Stu Carver’s project, and how Altoona delivered the notebooks to me every week, and how I had gotten to know the old man. I told him of my recent visit to the mission and described Altoona’s bizarre behavior.

“What’d you go there for, anyway?” he interrupted. “Just a social call?”

“Well, partly. I hadn’t seen him since Stu’s death. I wanted to see how he was.”

“And?”

“Like I told you, not good. He’d had some sort of psychotic episode. He was out of touch. Not the same man at all.”

“Why else did you go there?”

“To see if he knew anything about more notebooks, or any other material Stu had written that we didn’t have.”

“For the girl’s project, huh?”

“Right.”

“Did he seem afraid? Any reason to think he felt endangered?”

I flapped my hands. “He was just too crazy for me to tell.”

“What about common acquaintances?”

“You mean someone who knew them both? I expect the priest, Father Barrone, could help you more there.”

“Yeah, I asked him. He mentioned you. Anybody else?”

I shrugged. “Just the priest, and the doctor, there, Dr. Vance. And whoever else might have hung around the mission.”

“And you.” Santis picked up a stray piece of lettuce from the waxed paper and pushed it into his mouth with his forefinger.

“Well, we already said that. Sure. And me. Does that make me a suspect or something?”

“I haven’t got any suspects right now. That makes everybody a suspect. Don’t worry about it.”

“I mean,” I said, “are you interrogating me, or are we just discussing this thing? Either one is okay with me, I guess, but I would like to know.”

“We’re discussing it, that’s all. I don’t think you killed these guys with an icepick, Mr. Coyne. I mean, you could have. Stranger things have happened, you know? But you can probably account for yourself on New Year’s Eve, not to mention two nights ago, and I don’t see any sense of even asking you about it right now.” He grinned at me. “Do you?”

“Is that a question?”

He shrugged. “Well, okay, then. It’s a question.”

“No. There’s no sense of even asking me.”

He smiled broadly. “See?”

“Well, good,” I said. I tapped a Winston from my pack and lit it. “What can you tell me about Altoona’s death?”

“More than you can tell me, I guess. There’s a parking garage down there near the hospital. You know, you can walk in right off the street. Lots of nooks and crannies where the junkies like to go to get a hit, and the kids sometimes sneak in looking for unlocked cars to climb into so they can get laid. The winos go in there, too. Good place to get out of the wind, curl up on a back seat with their bottle. That’s where they found him.”

“In a car?”

“No. He was lying there under the front bumper of a parked car. Guy saw him when he backed out of his parking space, told the attendant, who phoned us.” He rubbed his forehead with his fist. “We got nothing on either of these, Mr. Coyne. I’m willing to bet that it was the same guy, using the same weapon. But that don’t take much brains. Otherwise, we’re right back where we were with the first one.”

“Are you aware that there’s a federal agent looking into Stu Carver’s death?”

Santis nodded. “Yeah. Whatsisname. Becker, there. Yeah, we talked a while ago. I dunno. He didn’t seem all that interested, tell you the truth. I got the idea it was just a loose end or something, like he was going through the motions. Those Feds, they got bigger fish to fry.”

“Do you think this second murder changes that?”

He scratched his chest. “If anything, it seems to me I’ve been on the right track.”

“You mean a serial killer.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what those newspaper people like Mickey Gillis call ’em, don’t they? Somebody who gets their jollies out of sticking icepicks into the brains of old drunks. So they keep doing it. Yeah.”

“And the fact that the two victims knew each other is just a coincidence, then.”

“Well, it’s not exactly a coincidence. They both hung around the same part of town, they both went out alone, they both tended to get loaded, they both looked like bums.”

I nodded. “I see what you mean. Have you been able to identify Altoona?”

“You mean get his real name, next of kin, that sort of thing? Not yet. We sent his prints to Washington. See what they come up with. Meantime, his body’s with Welfare.”

“He once told me he had been in a state mental hospital.”

“What state?”

I smiled. “He didn’t say. Pennsylvania, maybe. He came from Altoona, he told me.”

“That’s where he got his name. Makes sense. We could try down there. Can’t do everything, though. You gotta understand, there’s a limit.”

“Sure.”

“We get lots of unidentified bodies. There’s only so much we can do.”

“I understand.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “You didn’t find anything on him?”

“You mean to identify him with? No. There wasn’t anything. The preliminary report from the ME said, you know, male Caucasian about sixty years old, etcetera, etcetera, apparent cause of death—puncture wound in left ear. He had nothing in his pockets, I know.”

“Would you mind if we went over what you found on Stu Carver again?”

“Why?”

“Don’t you have his file handy?”

Santis sighed. “Why not? Hang on.”

He pushed himself away from his desk, stood up, then reached down to pick up the remains of his sandwich. He took a big two-fisted bite, put it back down, wiped his hands on his pants, and left the room.

He returned in a minute. “You got something in mind?” he said, easing himself back into his chair.

“Not really. I’m still interested in trying to find out if there were other notebooks. And I guess I’m just curious.”

“You mean, us cops ain’t doing our job?”

“I didn’t say that.”

He peered at me. “We ain’t, you know. There’s practically zero priority on this case. I dunno, maybe now that there’s another one….”

“I would think that might get people mobilized.”

He laughed. “Mobilized. Yeah. That’s the word for it. That’s what Mickey Gillis keeps saying. We ain’t mobilized to fight street crime. So we ain’t mobilized, and you’re gonna solve the mystery for us, huh, Mr. Coyne? Hey, let me tell you something.”

I held up both hands. “You don’t have to.”

“I’m gonna anyway. The Carver case was dead. I admit it. We had nothing to go on. Now maybe it won’t be dead anymore. That’s not a promise, mind you. More like a prediction. But we still got people like the Gillis broad breathing down our neck on that assassination thing. You see the paper yesterday?”

“Sure.”

“You see that broad’s column? Just thinking about it makes me want to puke my sandwich all over my desk. Big chunks of salami and provolone and onions and hot peppers…”

“Hey!” I said.

Santis cocked his head and grinned at me. “Gillis is blaming us, for Christ’s sake. For letting the spic get close to whatsisname, the State Department guy, Lampley, and for the little spic getting killed so we couldn’t figure out who hired him. Like that. I figure about once a month for the next year or so she’s gonna write a column about that one. Shit, that ain’t even our jurisdiction. Don’t make no difference to her. I sure as hell don’t want her hearing about this one.”

“What about that file?”

“Yeah. I’m not supposed to let you see it. Want me to read it to you?”

“I imagine it’s pretty technical.”

“Oh, absolutely. Uses words like ‘alleged’ and ‘perpetrator,’ shit like that.” He lifted his eyebrows.

“Maybe you can just answer a couple questions.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s an autopsy report, right?”

He nodded.

“And the wound in the ear, did the Medical Examiner specifically say it was an icepick?”

He grinned. “Not exactly. They don’t talk that way. Hang on. Okay. ‘Thin, round, rigid, pointed instrument approximately ten centimeters in length’—that’s a little over four inches, Mr. Coyne—‘consistent with an icepick.’ That’s how MEs write, see. We’ll just call it an icepick. Caused massive hemorrhaging in the brain. Similar to a stroke. Quick, painless, actually. He describes the route the thing took going into his brain. Wanna hear?”

“No, that’s all right,” I said quickly. “Did they verify that Stu had been drinking?”

“Yup. Right here. It says, ‘BAC point-two-four. Residue of Scotch whiskey in stomach lining.’”

“Scotch, huh? They can tell that sort of thing?”

Santis shrugged.

“Do those men, those bums, generally drink Scotch?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“What’s BAC mean?” I said.

“BAC. Blood alcohol content. A point-two-four means falling down, throwing up, passing out drunk, or close to it. Put it this way, Mr. Coyne: a point-one is legally drunk. In Maine, a teenager with a point-oh-five can be charged with drunk driving. A point-four is a coma. Point-five is dead. A guy the size of your friend Carver—he was what, about one-forty?—he’d have to take eight or ten shots in the space of an hour or so to get that loaded.”

“He could do that,” I said. “I don’t suppose they can tell what brand of Scotch someone’s been drinking, can they?”

“Maybe they can. This one didn’t.”

“Okay. They found a matchbook on him, I recall.”

“So?”

“Well, was it old or new? Had it been used? Did it have anything written on it?”

He stared at me for a moment. “Those ain’t bad questions, you know that?”

I shrugged.

He peered at the papers in the file. “Here we go. Hm. It doesn’t say whether it was old or new, or if any matches were missing. I assume if something was written on it, it would say so here. I suppose I could try to find out. It was from a place called the Sow’s Ear. You ever hear of it?”

“No. Sounds tacky.”

“It’s a dive, all right. Uptown a ways, on Washington Street, a little bit this side of the Combat Zone. You thinking Carver was there?”

“He might’ve been, huh?”

Santis thrust out his lower lip and nodded. “Yup. He might’ve.” Then he took another bite of his sandwich. “Not that it matters much,” he mumbled, his mouth full. “Though we shoulda checked it out, I guess,” he added. “If we weren’t so goddam tied up around here.”