Jul 14

Jul 14 Guns, Gams, Ghosts and Gangsters

Guns, Gams, Ghosts and Gangsters - book excerpt

The Lovely Irene

So, in a nutshell, this is what went down. See if you can figure it out.

The body was found sitting upright on a toilet bowl, slumped over onto one of the metal walls of the toilet booth, very much dead. Apparently due to the blade of a very large knife sticking out of the man’s chest. The guy was in his mid-thirties, an accountant at a large bank, unmarried, who was said by friends and relatives to be a very nice man without an enemy in the world.

Well, you know—there seemed to be something wrong with that picture.

Sitting on the tile floor to the right of the toilet bowl was a large leather briefcase: untouched and very heavy. On the small coat rack on the back of the toilet stall door was a heavy but expensive looking trench coat still partially wet from the downpour raging outside like a madman’s nightmare. When the body was discovered an hour prior, the building’s security officer swore there was a set of wet tracks leading into the men’s room and straight to the stall the dead man now occupied. Just one set of tracks.

A quick scan of the building’s security cameras clearly showed the deceased stepping out of the elevator and into the building’s lobby. Three different cameras in the lobby showed the victim walking across the wide lobby floor, briefcase in one hand, a wet trench coat in the other, as he headed for the Men’s Room. Then the victim walked into the restroom and never came out. No one else entered the restroom until about thirty minutes after the deceased, when the security officer, who was making his nightly rounds, walked into the restroom and found the dead man.

Now, here’s the interesting twist. There was no blood. No suspects. No way for a killer to enter and/or exit the scene of the crime without being recorded on the cameras. Maybe this comes as a shock to you, bubba, but stick the blade of a long knife into a man’s chest and there’s blood everywhere. But not this time. Not one drop of blood anywhere. Including in the dead man.

When our little, gum-chewing forensics specialist Joe Weiser told us about no blood in the body and no blood to be found in the entire men’s room, I had to grin, shove hands into my trousers’ pockets, and turn to one side and stare at my partner. Frank Morales, for those who are uninformed, is a Neanderthal. Well, not really a Neanderthal. But the guy looks like what one would think a modern Neanderthal might look like. A jaw made of bone so thick he could chew reinforced concrete for a snack, no neck to speak of, with the brightest looking carrot-colored red hair that absolutely refused to be combed. His overall body shape was that of a cement block, albeit one that stood about six feet four. Big, tough, and strong. One’s natural inclination is to think someone that good looking had to be as dumb as a bag of marbles. But, oh brother, would they ever be wrong.

He eyed me with his dark browns, made a sour looking face, and rumbled like a badly tuned Russian reactor.

“I hate shit like this. Hurts my head. I think I’ll go to the car and eat some tacos. Call me if you need me.”

He turned and began walking away. Not toward our car parked out by the curb in the driving rain but towards the inside of the office building. Grinning, I knew he was heading back to the security office to review the tapes again. I turned and walked back to the men’s room for a second peek.

Now ask yourself this. How the hell does a guy step out of an elevator, walk across an empty lobby of a very large office building at two in the morning on a rainy Sunday, enter a men’s room, and get a heavy looking butcher’s knife rammed into the middle of his chest. By himself. No one is in the men’s room waiting for him. No one leaves the men’s room after the deed is done. Is this a murder? Or a fairly gruesome suicide? Glancing into the stall I had to hand it to the guy. If this was a suicide, the bastard was committed in ending it if he shoved the knife into his heart all by his lonesome.

But I didn’t think it was suicide. People usually don’t kill themselves like that. Especially a successful, happy-go-lucky guy like that.

I went over the men’s room again diligently. Looking for something, anything, Frank and I could have missed the first time around. Forensics had come and gone, finding nothing out of the ordinary. I had this nagging little voice in the back of my head telling me we were overlooking something. Something small. Something obvious. But something important. But that was the problem. I hadn’t a clue what it could be. Frustrated, I walked out of the men’s room, strolled across the empty lobby with its polished, black tile floors, and came to a halt in front of the bank of elevators sitting in silence all in a row. Specifically, I stood in front of the one the dead man used just before he checked out. Permanently.

Pushing the ‘up’ button the black doors of the elevator opened with a vague hissing sound and I stepped in. The doors slid closed behind me and everything went silent. Forensics had been all over the elevator. There were about a million different prints lifted off the controls, the hand rail circling the interior of the car, and off the doors themselves. It would take weeks to sort through them all. Turning, I punched in ‘10’ and felt the elevator car lurch into motion and begin its ascent. Why ’10,’ you ask? The tenth floor was where our dead guy worked. Big accounting office. Lots of number crunchers working there. Everybody gone, of course, over the weekend. So why was our man here in the building at two in the morning on a Sunday?

Dunno.

But I began walking the empty hallway of the tenth floor, curiously eyeing all the empty—and locked—offices. The hall lights were turned low. Shadows played across the walls. It was as quiet as a monk’s cubby hole. Don’t know what I was looking for. Didn’t expect to find anything. Actually, I was kinda shuffling around like a lost deer, that nagging voice in the back of my head getting louder and louder. I couldn’t figure out what it was that was bothering me. I combed the tenth floor, then descended to the ninth and did the same ambling shuffle, before dropping down to the eighth.

On the eighth, I found a couple of items that caught my eye.

The first thing was the shine on the highly polished tile floor. Even in the dim light of the empty floor the shine was instantly visible and just as impressive. This was the Markle Building on Hesston and Seventh Street. Ten floors of solid black and chrome from sidewalk to roofline. Black glass everywhere with long columns of chrome steel in vertical slashes for contrast. A stunning architectural feast to the eyes. The interior floors were black tile, kept to a glistening polished sheen.

The moment I stepped out of the elevator I noticed the floor. Maintenance had just finished polishing the tile. It was plain as day. There wasn’t a scuffle, or footprint, or even a particle of dust anywhere on the floor from the elevator doors out for maybe twenty or thirty feet. But past the first two set of offices was a door which led into the building’s stairwell. That’s where I observed curiosity number one. The unmistakable wobbly tracks of someone pushing a heavy four-wheeled cart over the floor and stopping in front of the stairwell door. You know the kind of cart I’m talking about. The kind where you load up boxes and crates and push it from one place to another. The kind used mostly in office buildings to cart around bags of mail and other things.

In the dim light, I noticed the tracks hugging close to the wall and disappearing off into the shadows. Curious, I followed the tracks, and that’s when I saw it. The bright and colorful neon lights of a building from across the street flashing through the glass walls of the Markle Building, continuing on through the clear glass interior wall of a set of law offices and playing across the black tile of the floor in a long, narrow band of multicolored light. And there it was. About the size of a new pencil eraser. A bump of congealed blood.

Kneeling, balancing myself on the balls of my feet in the darkness of the hall, I stared at the lump of blood for a second or two. And then I looked up and at the doorway from where the cart’s tracks originated from. It was a set of double glass doors with large gold lettering splashed across the glass announcing who was inside.

Schumer & Schumer Investments.

And it hit me. That nagging voice. I knew what it was trying to tell me. The dead man’s rain coat. The tapes showed our dead man stepping out of the elevator holding his damp raincoat draped over one arm. A damp raincoat. Not a soaked to the bone—“Yes, I have been swimming in a ‘fracken monsoon,”—kind of wet coat. Just damp. As if he had already been in the building for a while before riding the elevator down to this death. Schumer & Schumer’s assigned parking stalls were on the top floor of the parking garage next door. The investment firm also had its own private entrance, which connected their offices directly to the parking building.

Standing up, I stepped over the lump of blood and approached the glass doors of the investment firm. They were locked. I stepped back, frowning. I jumped slightly when the cellphone inside my sport coat suddenly went off.

“Yes?”

“Get down to the security office, flatfoot. I’ve got something to show you.”

I stretched a half-grin across my lips. Frank calling me a flatfoot was funny. Especially if you ever saw his feet. Flatfoot is also a rub for uniformed police officers, which we both had been earlier in our careers.

“Got something to tell you as well, dear,” I said, smiling wider, “but do me a favor. Find the building supe and tell him to come up to the eighth floor and unlock the offices of Schumer & Schumer. We need to look inside.”

A couple of minutes later I stepped into the crowded clutter of a small office in the basement used by the building’s security staff. One wall was filled with computer monitors. One wall was filled with shelves full of various video tapes, boxes of digital equipment, and training tapes. A third wall was lined with metal storage cabinets with the names of various security employees withsticky labels on them. There was a desk, an office chair, and more computer screens in the middle of the room. Frank was standing by the wall of computer screens with a remote clicker in one hand, studying a monitor closely.

“Whatta ya got?” I asked, closing the office door behind me.

“Whatta you got?” he grunted.

I told him about the eighth floor, the cart tracks, the blood sample, and my theory about our dead guy and his rain coat. He grunted and nodded his head.

“That explains why I haven’t found a tape of our guy returning. I’ve got an image of him leaving Friday night around a quarter to seven. But haven’t a clue as to when he came back to the office. But I did find something else. You’ll want to see it.”

He lifted the clicker in his hand, aimed it at one monitor, and clicked it. Instantly the images of the lobby from some earlier time began rapidly rewinding.

“Watch.”

I watched.

Frank clicked the clicker in his hand again and the rewinding stopped. Images began flowing normally. An empty lobby in the early morning, and then traffic—lots of traffic. Men and women in work clothes and carpenters, plumbers, and electricians coming in and filling the lobby and going in and out of both the women's and the men’s restrooms.