A Taste of Old Revenge

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A Taste of Old Revenge - book excerpt

Chapter 1

A stale breeze played through the dead man’s hair.

An unwanted breeze.

A breeze filled with malaise.

The old man was slumped across the open cavity of an accounts ledger, his face squashed between the pages of a thick accounting book. The body looked remarkably like a piece of trash carelessly tossed onto an old kitchen table. Or maybe like a discarded broken doll long forgotten by the one who had once loved it. As I bent down for a closer inspection, I could see a clearly defined hole in the back of the old man's hairless cranium. There was remarkably little blood. What little blood had seeped out had created a tiny rivulet down the man’s neck and formed a dark puddle about the size of a man’s palm on the brown pages of the accounting book. The blood was not fresh.

Inspecting the wound, I got the impression of precision. A surgeon’s frugality of effort. Or a craftsman’s sure touch in a grisly occupation. Standing up and frowning, another impression occurred to me.

Premeditation. Coldly calculated and flawlessly executed.

And who said a murder had to be messy?

The dead man's arms were pushed across the table on either side of the oversized open book. Between the fingers of the corpse's right hand was the butt of a cigarette, with ash about two inches long still clinging precariously to the filter. In front of the ledger was an ashtray almost overflowing with the discarded flotsam usually associated with a heavy smoker. There was a distinct blue haze of cigarette smoke hanging in midair above the corpse's head and the room smelled of old tobacco and sweat. Added to the mixture was the sweet aroma of automotive body putty.

Above the dead man's head was a single light fixture swinging slightly in the breeze. Creating a surreal film noir touch to the crime scene.

The fixture hung from the ceiling on a long and frayed electrical wire. As it swung in a rhythmic pendulum motion, the oscillating light created oddly contorted shadows that danced a frenetic but silent mime across the walls and floor like some madman's macabre nightmare. It wasn't much of an office. In the middle of the room was an old kitchen table, three office chairs, and the dead man. To one side was a dilapidated old sofa so threadbare I could see the springs were about to pop out and give the next person who sat down on it an intimate surprise. In one corner was a set of three six-drawer filing cabinets. The floor was old green tiles worn through to the bare wood in front of the single door, which opened toward the steep stairs. The stairs led down from the office to the main garage floor below.

A garage which, for me, held paradise.

Below, in the dim half-light of a cavern, the cement floor was filled with classic cars from about six different decades and a dozen different countries. It was the cold steel setting on the garage floor that kept singing alluring charms to me. I wanted to forget about the body. Bodies, in my line of occupation, I see almost on a daily basis. But the sensual curving lines of a black ‘29 SSK Mercedes in the far corner of the shop, and the seemingly plain-looking dark red ‘40 Ford two-door coupé, captured my full attention. In the middle of the floor was a ‘52 Buick convertible with its top down, painted pale blue, with brand new white vinyl interior. The Buick's huge chrome grill gleamed in a lustful display of American excess. The paint was so fresh and the white interior so new I would have sworn it had just rolled off the assembly line.

I was like some buck-toothed, pimply faced kid with a pocket full of money, standing in a Buick dealer's showroom and aching to buy my first new car.

Sitting next to the Buick was a ‘64 Chevrolet Corvette coupé stripped down to the bare plastic body and sitting on four rather solid looking floor jacks. The doors were off, the windows were out, and it was devoid of an interior. Some artisan was carefully patching the nicks and scratches on the ‘Vette's plastic body with the delicate touch of a brain surgeon. It was covered with a coating of red primer and waiting for its first coat of paint. There was a tool bench beside the car's gutted remains and on it were an air hose and a paint gun. At some point during the next two or three days, I thought to myself, someone in this city was going to be the proud owner of an immaculately restored ‘Vette.

And dammit, it wasn’t going to be me.

Also on the garage floor was a brown ‘29 Lincoln sedan, a red '58 MG two-seater, and a massive looking black '41 Cadillac two-door sedan. All of them were in various states of disassembly, with the cement floor around each car littered with discarded body panels and disassembled engine parts.

But the jewel in this crown lay underneath an old tarp in a corner of the shop. It was a perfectly restored ‘49 Jaguar XK-120 in British Racing Green. I have to admit when I took a look at this one, I felt sick in the stomach. Looking at that car, holding the tarp over my head as I gazed upon its sensual curves of cool metal, the sight brought back a lot of memories. As a kid living on the farm, the dream of someday owning an XK-120 and touring over back country highways from one end of the country to the next, constantly drifted into my thoughts. Even now, more than fifty years after rolling off the showroom floor, it looked like it could go like hell and scare the bejesus out of every motorcycle cop in the country.

But all I could do was admire it and shake my head. Reluctantly, I dropped the covering and slipped back into the practiced routine of investigating a murder. Climbing the rickety stairs, I kept glancing over my shoulder and grinning in sheer admiration at what sat silently on the floor behind me. But walking into the office and blending into the blue banks of haze floating over the body brought me back to the situation at hand. The city pays me to be a homicide detective. Not an art critic.

Too bad.

In front of the ragged looking wooden office chair the corpse was slumped in was the empty brass casing of a .22 caliber long rifle cartridge. Frank Morales, my partner, was kneeling beside it and pushing it around with the eraser of a pencil when I walked into the room. He looked up at me when I walked in, grinned, and began clucking like a hen as he started shaking his head.

“This doesn't look promising, Tonto,” he said, still grinning and shaking his head, “this doesn't look promising at all.”

I pushed my hands into the pockets of my trench coat and smirked.

“I suppose you're gonna tell me it’s my turn to grouse through the pig pen.”

Frank grinned and nodded his head as he looked up and winked.

“You got it, partner. This is our third stiff and it looks like a stinker. I'll play along as the dumb sidekick and do the paperwork. But you've got the brains to figure this one out. And buddy, I got a feeling it ain't gonna be easy.”

He stood up, still grinning, and dropped the pencil into his shirt pocket before looking back at the body. Frank is about the same height as I am but roughly a foot wider and eighty pounds heavier. He has a head shaped in ninety-degree angles, and a nose which is, more or less, spread across his face like someone spreading butter across a piece of bread. He has beady brown eyes, and a chin which is made of reinforced concrete. And no neck. Yeah, that’s right, no neck. Just a head and a set of shoulders about the size of a cement mixer. How he swivels his head from side to side I’ve never figured out. He's not fat but he is large and solid. He's not slow, which surprises a lot of people. His reflexes are dangerously fast, and he has two hams for fists which can punch the lights out of an aroused gorilla. He claims he's dumb. But don’t believe it, brother. I know his IQ is somewhere around the same numbers the scales in my bathroom say I weigh, and he’s got more college degrees than I’ve got fingers. Some people collect comic books as a hobby. Hell, I collect muscle cars and first-edition, signed books. Frank collects college degrees. He wears clothes like most nine-year-old kids wear a coating of mud after a summer shower. God only knows if he's ever ironed a shirt. But don’t for a moment underestimate the guy. You do and you’ll pay for it in the end.

And me? Just an ex-jock who almost had a chance to play in the NFL. A dream which almost came true. But now, like so many things, just water under the bridge. Now I am a detective, like Frank, in the South Side Division. I live in a warehouse where I collect my cars and work on them in my spare time. The ground floor is the garage. The second floor is like an oversized loft I’ve converted into a decent habitat. And get this. I did the work myself. No help. No contractors. Hell, I’m as surprised as you are. I actually have a talent for working with a hammer and saw. And I’m not bad at wallpapering and plastering. If this gig at being a cop doesn’t work out, who knows? I might start a home remodeling business.

Frank and I have been partners for a long time. Long enough to know when to argue and when not to. When Frank grinned like that, and had that twinkle in his eyes, I knew there was no use arguing.

“The guy's name is Abraham Polanski. He is…was… the owner of Polanski's Garage. Specializing in restorations. His driver's license says he’s really old. And buddy, if you'll look at his right forearm, you'll see something interesting.”

I took a step closer to the body and looked at the outstretched right arm. Just above the wrist was a tattoo. A long list of numbers, nearly faded out completely from years of hard work and being in the sun. But it was there.

“Holocaust survivor,” I said, looking back at Frank.

“Looks it,” nodded my bullet-headed friend. “And does the last name ring any bells?”

I mumbled the last name over a couple of times as I reached up and loosened the knot on my tie and quickly glanced at my watch. It was a quarter past one in the morning. Frank and I had been working for more than twelve hours. He was tired. I was tired. I had a feeling Abraham Polanski probably was damn tired as well.

“Polanski, Polanski.” I kept repeating slowly. And then it hit me, “Aaron Polanski, the lawyer.”

“The one and the same.” Frank nodded, grinning.

“Daddy?” I asked, using a finger to point at the corpse.

“It's not his younger brother.”

I made a face and shook my head in disgust. Aaron Polanski was a high-price lawyer who did criminal work for only those who could afford it. His law offices were on top of a building overlooking the cliffs of the Brown River where it collided with the Little Brown. He and his partners had the entire floor. His connections ran from the river docks all the way up to the state house. He was a lawyer who liked to rub shoulders with the powerful and influential. He knew what real power felt like and he wore the mantle of the Chosen Few with a deft ease.

However, into this power broker's life a deep measure of tragedy was about to come barging in, and it would fall on our shoulders to go over and tell him his father had been murdered.

“There's something else I thought you might find interesting,” Frank said, grinning again, as he lifted a hand up and motioned with his index finger to follow him.