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Mix murder, word processing, temping, taxes, gay sex, New York City, taxes and murder and gay sex and taxes and murder, bring to a hard boil, and what do you get?
This.
When a colleague is murdered in cold blood, tough-guy word processor and private detective Chak Charon investigates--and soon finds himself out of a job, abducted from his apartment, and audited to within an inch of his life. Pursued by a vicious IRS agent (who, it turns out, does not even brush his teeth properly), Charon takes refuge in a Chinatown boarding house and proceeds to discover a dirty little secret: that the Internal Revenue Service is developing a computer virus designed to scavenge the private financial data of unsuspecting citizens.
Meet the sullen fast-food clerk who has trouble filling special orders ... the department supervisor whose every gesture is by-the-book ... the socially-conscious housemates of Grubgeous Street ... the sulky, seductive hustler ... the other sulky, seductive hustler ... the power-lusting bureaucrat ... the software-slinging private eye who won't take "Get lost!" for an answer. (202 pages, trade paperback; see below for an excerpt.)
“A madcap look into the world of the IRS. Start with a rough, tough hard-boiled detective novel, add three cups of conspiracy theory, three more of income tax avoidance, a heavy dose of caricaturization, and a dash of mescaline.... Here is a fast, easy read. The good guy is good (if a little odd). The bad guys are very bad (and even odder). Justice triumphs (more or less).”
—John Michaels, doingfreedom.com
“A compelling, un-put-downable tour de farce. David Blade just might be the avatar of a new generation. Generation (X+Y)1/3+N.”
—David M. Brown
Order your copy of The Case of the Cockamamie Killer by David Blade for $10.95 plus $3.00 shipping and handling. Books are shipped within two business days, by USPS priority mail, within the U.S. only. (To arrange for discounted bulk purchases, or for shipment overseas, please contact the publisher at BrowdixPress@gmail.com.)
from THE CASE OF THE COCKAMAMIE KILLER
by David Blade
[ENTER]
HE WAS SHUFFLING stuff around. Stacking, restacking, shifting the stacks. Picking things up and dropping them.
Once in a while he opened and slammed a drawer without really inspecting the contents, then made another stab at rummaging through the papers, law books, folders and half-eaten sandwiches on the desk. Only the laptop computer and a stray floppy disk remained unmolested in a privileged corner. From atop a dusty bookcase near the door a bronze bust of Tom Paine wrinkled its nose at the mess. Or maybe it was the vague fetor of squirrel fart and stale peanut butter that was offensive.
The man moaned. “Christ. Oh Christ. Gotta ... find this ... oh Je-e-sus ... how did I ... ever-get-into-this ... God damn ... God ... damn ... it....”
Noodles of dirty-blond hair dangled from his balding pate as sweat leaked into his eyes and nostrils. What a bitch. What a goddamn...
The wristwatch and the wall clock and the alarm clock near the cot in the corner were all reporting the same information.
He picked up the phone, punched a speed-dial button.
“Yeah, hiya ... ah, no, running a little late. Look. Did our messenger come? ... ah ... we’re getting something that’s gotta go down to Word Processing, A-S-A-P ... to Chak, I definitely want Chak Charon for the job, and that’s very very ... no no no, now, now ... wait ... wait ... I am stressing this to you now, okay ... and do you remember what we said it meant when I stress things? ... so just give it straight to Chak and emphasize as to how it’s, you know, super important ... yessss ... it was picked up thirty or forty minutes ago, so you’re about to get it or it’s already in the box ... okay ... just do me a little favor and keep an eye out for it, can you do that? ... I know you are, I know you are. But just ... don’t take a break or anything, just be waiting for it, then take it straight to WP. Take it and hand it right to Chak ASAP, and that’s very important.... All right, I gotta go.... No, I’ll check all that later. Let’s focus on the package. It will come in and, you know, it’ll be a cassette, cassette type thing we have with riders all the time, just get it to Chak. Call it Rider D if you like. Have him do it right away, big rush job. Okay? Good, gotta go. So just wait for it and get the thing to Chak, that’s all I want you to do. Forget everything else. Should be there already, actually, so look in the box.”
He checked the watch. “Okay, gotta go. Receive package, get to Chak, tell him start ASAP, you know, the cassette, and that’s it. It’s a Chak Special. Okay? Chak Special. Don’t give it to anybody else. Gotta go ... I will, I sure will ... all right ... bye bye.” He stood still a moment, hand on phone. A fly buzzed, circling the desk, calculating the safest route to a crumb of Twinkie.
He sagged and swiveled. Should have been right there. Should have been. The chair stopped spinning and he dug a heel into the carpet to get it going again.
Suddenly there it was--where he had put it. Okay. Forget about it. Forget it. Grab it, go. Go. Go. Go.
The chair slowed down again. When it stopped spinning this time the man in the chair was facing the door as the door swung open and another man walked in.
Man with a gun.
“Pay your taxes,” hissed the gunman, squeezing the trigger, then squeezing it again. His victim didn’t reply.
The visitor paused.
He walked to the desk and with gloved hands flipped through the piles, finally settling on a manila folder and a little leather address book. He searched the laptop’s hard drive, copied the files he wanted to a blank diskette, and deleted the originals from the drive. Then he ran a program to scrub any echoes of the stolen files, as well as any trace of its own presence. He yawned.
He saw the diskette leaning against the laptop and plugged it into the drive. The disk had only one file. He chuckled when the mundane contents swam on screen.
“Sure. Let them work with that,” he sneered. He thumbed the EJECT button and slipped the disk into his pocket, leaving the text on the monitor.
Then the man with the gun left.
A few moments later he came back, grabbed the bust of Paine, and swung it crashing down on the skull of the dead man. Bone and brain jelly spilled onto the carpet, followed by the crumpled corpse. The intruder stepped back a little. Fired another shot. He let the bust drop onto a coffee table, not noticing that the sweep of his leg had jerked a cord from its socket. A flash of lightning lit up the room. There was a crumble of thunder.
The intruder spat on the corpse and gave it the finger.
Then he left again.
[CONTROL]
[ 1. ]
IT WAS A RAINY day like any other rainy day. Hard gobs of it pounding the weary pavement of the city. Horns blaring. Drivers and pedestrians cursing. Chinese and Columbian street vendors hawking plastic-spoked umbrellas. Punks on bikes and roller blades.
And mud. Mud splattering against panty hose and pant cuffs. Splattering and sticking. Then drying up and cracking into dust, later, when the rain ended or the people with the wet clothes went inside somewhere to dry off--and to forget about the rain.
Until the next time.
Charon was late and he was wet. His plan: grab a burger and get back to the office.
He entered the fast-food joint, went to the counter. Nodded to the clerk. Ordered. Plain burger, small fries, small vanilla shake. Clear, simple, sequential. Little easy words that should have gone down like cream puffs. But didn’t.
Didn’t at all.
“Plain with nothing on it?”
Charon nodded. He smiled. “Yep!” He was gracious, friendly, full of warmth and encouragement, the best friend of any counter clerk. He touched his fingertips to the edge of the counter as insignion of the easy sociability of his spirit. “Just not a ketchup-and-mustard man, I guess.”
The clerk just rolled her eyes and turned frigid.
Charon did some inferring. Seemed the gal’s down time was being interrupted by a time-consuming variation on the normal order. Yeah, seemed he was out to get her. He could sense the resentment welling up in her like steam from a geyser over a bed of magma on a hot summer afternoon in the last week of Armageddon on laundry day with the dryer on high.
“Plain?” she asked again, lower lip jutting in sullen promontory. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. Maybe what Charon really wanted was one of the soggy, gunk-slathered, pickled, already-available burgers squatting in one of the aluminum racks under the fluorescent warmers. “Nothing on it?”
Charon ran it by her again, monotone, right between the lidded orbs on either side of her nose. “Plain with nothing on it, that’s right. Just the burger and the bun please.”
“Yeah, well, I gotta make sure, people says plain and they want jes’ ketchup or sumpin’.”
“Uh, okay, plain. That’s a go for plain. No ketchup, no mustard, no pickles. Just the burger and the bun. Place the burger on one half of the bun and then place the other half of the bun on top of the burger. That’s it. No condiments. Thanks.”
“You ain’t gotta be nasty. GIMME A PLAIN.” “You say plain?” somebody in the back groaned. “Yeah! HAMBURGER PUH-LA-UH-HAY-A-A-A-AAAIN. And no condoms.” She stabbed the red button for PLAIN on the register, then cranked her peepers back to Charon, collar level, knot-of-the-tie level. Except Charon never wore a tie. “Whaddya wanna drink?” The sigh, then.
“Small vanilla shake.”
“I think we outta shake. Jerry...”
“Yee-uh?”
“We got any shake left?”
Jerry copped a gander at the milkshake machine, dredging his memory for spare RNA fragments. “Outta vanilla strawberry” was the report.
“Outta vanilla strawberry,” relayed the gal, as if Charon should already have known.
“Chocolate then.”
“Large medium small.”
“Small.”
“Fries with that?”
“Small fries.”
“Small medium large.”
“Small fries.”
“Small chocolate shake, small fries, and plain burger nothing on it. Anything else...?”
“No, that’s fine.”
“Would you like a apple pie to go with that sir?”
“Not unless I can get it à la mode.”
“Well we don’t got it like that.”
“Guess I’ll pass then.”
“For-here-to-go.”
“To go. Thanks. Appreciate it.”
The clerk sighed, downtrodden, and poked the remaining requisite three or four buttons on the register with an oppressed and heavy heart.
After a while she started scrounging around for a paper bag.
[ 2. ]
Alice Blimpkin was pudgy, freckled, ill at ease, not terribly bright, perpetually harried, perpetually uncertain how best to juggle the variegated stream of obligations inherent in secretarial life. Charon was hunched at his cubicle, munching, when she scurried into the department with her mop of frayed red hair and her frayed brown sweater with the buttons and buttonholes out of alignment. There was a vector attached to her kinetics and it was pointed right at Charon.
She lumbered over to him.
“Hi Chak, how are ya, just the guy I need to see, got a job for ya. Has to go out A-SAP.” She uttered the acronym like it was her own word she had invented just a little while ago. “A-SAP, okay?”
“I’m on lunch,” Charon muttered between mouthfuls. He waved the burger to illustrate. Colleagues in contiguous cubicles typed a lot of keys and stared at monitors.
Blimpkin looked at Charon, looked around, looked back at him, looked at her watch, looked at Charon, looked lost. The panic ratcheted up, up, up.
“But ... but we’ve got to get this out, Chak. Mr. Jagglin just called me about it, special, a little while ago....” She jerked a glance at her watch. “I know you’re on lunch...”
“Get Al or Suzette. We’re not that busy.”
“We’re pretty busy,” said Al, really peering now at his monitor.
“Busy,” said Suzette, blowing at her nails, then tapping a dozen keys in rapid succession. Cora and Malcolm snapped diskettes into their computer drives. Quincy Wimble muttered something that you could not understand what he said and fed a sheet of labels into the printer.
“Jesus, I’m busy,” said Joseppe.
One thing about Blimpkin, she was great at hovering. No way to get rid of her and you could feel the perspiration slithering from her armpit down the bra strap and down, down, down the crepe flank of her arm and into the unsuspecting runnels of the keyboard.
“Well ... but Jeff wants you in particular specifically. Said it’s a Chak Special. He was very clear about that. Those were his words exactly. Chak Special. I mean, you know, Jeff says you’re the only one who could handle it ... and ... and ... it’s only the few changes....” Charon shook his head, tackled the rest of the burger. Belched. Blimpkin inched toward him, holding out the document, her agonized eyes glistening, strudel green blouse straining under the sweater, frizzy lumpy-bouffant moldy-orange-rind hair looming and teetering toward him, enhanced by the authentic aroma of her armpits. Yes. Maybe he would do it. She proffered the document with a blend of hope, dread and desperation.
Charon took it, took a look. “A few changes plus the tape with the rider,” wheedled Blimpkin. “It’s just that it’s kind of a rush....”
He skimmed it. The text was twelve-point Times-Roman font with standard Helvetica headings. Double-spaced.
But that’s where the clarity, the easy part of it ended. The blue-penciling was scrambled. Some of the proposed edits were messy, barely legible. Many of the instructions lacked adequate specificity. And there were all the usual requests for miracles: “Make it fit.” “Massage this a little.” “Keep all this on one page but make look nice.” “See Appendix F, Table 2.” Right. Charon would be lucky to find any appendices at all, let alone an Appendix F featuring the referenced table. Nobody could beat Jeff Jagglin when it came to omitting bits and pieces of things, then rushing over with the missing material at the last minute as the client was waiting for the document by a fax machine.
Plus there was that rider Blimpkin was talking about. On the cassette. Dictation. Uh oh.
Jagglin crapped out when it came to dictation. He was a real mumbler. As if he were talking to himself. As if he were not even aware of being recorded for later playback.
Nor was Jeff one to think things through on a clause-by-clause basis before he started yapping, either. There were always lots of mid-sentence reversals and fumblings. Lots of loops within loops within loops. Lots of sub-grammatical mountain-climbing capped by muttering anti-climax--and a void.
It stunk. Stunk on ice.
“You see, he’s penciled in his changes and--”
“Yeah. Yeah, I see.” Charon flipped through the rest of the document. Hefted the cassette. “When do you need it?”
“A-SAP,” she iterated. She licked her chops. “Mr. Jagglin called me about it himself, says he wants you to get to it just as soon as possible. Just as soon as you possibly, possibly can. He really stressed that. Especially the rider. Rider D. And had to be you. Only you Chak. Gotta be.”
“Uh huh.” Looked like the cassette was not quite rewound all the way. Or maybe the other side had the dictation. “Is this thing rewound or--”
“Uh ... rewound? I’m not sure. But he said--”
“All right.”
“He said it was absolutely top priority--”
“Okay, don’t sweat it.” Charon felt like grabbing a fry so he did.
“Great.” She looked at Charon and looked at the french fry and back at Charon again.
“I’ll call you when it’s ready,” said Charon. “Want a fry?”
“Great.” She checked her watch. “Great. Don’t forget about the rider. That’s super important.”
“No problem.”
She left.
Ed Beckerman, department supervisor for the shift, buzzed Charon up to the front desk. “Are you still on lunch?” he asked.
“Not really.”
Then Beckerman slid over a plastic job sleeve with that certain precise motion with which Beckerman performed any routine action, the same every time, same angles, lines, degree of exertion, same automatic pattern of conveyance, without joy or aversion, just pure mechanical functionality, like somebody like a robot, like somebody like a machine.
“This is for Brubaker. He wants it by two in the morning. Can you do the overtime?”
Charon picked up the sleeve. “I guess. But what about this Jagglin thing? That’s also a rush, apparently.”
Beckerman said in his toneless, prefabricated manner: “Do the Brubaker and then if you have time finish with the other, or else hand it off. But get the Brubaker out. That’s the priority.” He then attended to some piece of paper as if Charon were no longer there and what was on the paper was just very extremely important.
Charon returned to his cubicle and hooked up the Dictaphone. He plugged it in.
Hard.
All right ... all right, Beckerman ... you’re telling me to skip the Jagglin and go to the Brubaker, and you’re the guy in charge, but dammit, first I’m going to find out what’s on that tape. What’s in that rider. Blimpkin deserves that much. So does Jagglin.
He slipped on the headphones. Out in the hall, voices.
“And here ... is the Word Processing Department, where you will be submitting the lengthier documents your secretaries don’t have time for....” Poor saps. So happy to have reached the shimmering plateau of Oliver Shimpkin Baker Dimple & Cromwell, Esquires, right out of law school. So happy.
Charon rammed the cassette into the machine. He pressed the PLAY button and crunched the pedal to start the Dictaphone rolling.
Static. A blank gap, the kind you get at the beginning of a lot of cassettes. Then--Jagglin.
Yeah. It was Jagglin all right. Jagglin in spades. Only he wasn’t mumbling.
Not this time.
This time every syllable was clear as a bell fresh off the assembly line, clear and polished and bright, only a little bit on the shrill side, and cracked, the way a voice goes when the chocolate pudding is too hot, the kind of pudding with ugly burnt crust. Ugly and mean.
“Okay Chak. How ya doing. Hey look, look. Look, I don’t know if this is going to reach you, but if it does, it means I’m--but if they get me, that’s it, that’s it, I’m done for ... but somebody has to know, somebody. And I figure, you’re a private eye, right? A gumshoe? When you’re not word processing? Something like that? Because I can’t tell the cops, no sir, not in this crazy world of ours, but if you get this--I mean if I don’t make it--I want you to know that--”
And then another gap, a crackle, and there was nothing else on the tape.
Nothing at all!
[ 3. ]
There are two kinds of dames. Smart dames and dumb dames.
Alice Blimpkin was one of the dumb ones.
Charon gave her his gaze. She was fiddling with something or other on the desk.
“Alice ... listen to me Alice ... when did Jeff give you this job? What about the cassette, when did you get that?”
“Is there something the matter with it?” She kept it up with the fiddling.
“Where’s Jeff now? When did he call?”
“Well, he was home when he called. I think eleven-thirty or so. You hadn’t yet arrived for your shift,” she said reproachfully. She carved a speck of dirt with a thumbnail.
“What did Jeff tell you? I mean, when he called. What did he say?”
“He--why, what’s the matter with the tape? Something wrong with it?”
Charon grabbed her shoulders. “I don’t have time for this, Alice! What did he say?--tell me what he goddamn said!”
“You’re ... hurting ... me...! I--I don’t know, oh God, Chak, please, don’t look at me like that”--like this--“I’m trying, okay, let me try to remember, remember what he said, said there’s a rider, rider, you know, Rider D, that you needed for the job, needed to get that, get that to you as soon as possible ... that you were the person to do the job, nobody else, only you Chak, you’re the only one who could handle the editorial changes just the way he likes ’em...”
“Never mind about the editorial part of it now. What about the tape? The tape with the rider?”
“The tape ... he phoned about eleven thirty, yes, and then I guess it was about ten minutes later the messenger showed up.” She massaged her neck and shoulders. Charon felt sick.
“Messenger? Messenger? What messenger? Answer me, Alice: what messenger??!!”
The tears started trickling. Charon wanted to smack her.
“Didn’t ... didn’t ... didn’t I mention the messenger? Oh God. Jeff said a messenger would be coming with the tape, with the rider! The rider would be on the tape. And he, he-he-he, he, he showed up a few minutes later ... the messenger did, I mean ... you know, with the cassette. Or maybe it was already in the box. He came before the call or just after the call. Something. I ... it’s a little confusing....”
“All right, Alice, try to exert some minimal level of emotional self-discipline here. Did the messenger give you a receipt of some kind? Did you have to sign anything? What else did he say, and what else did Jeff say when he called? Did he mention what case?”
“Uh ... he’s got so many matters right now, and ... well, I don’t know ... there’s never any receipt....”
“Come on!!”
“Oh God I--I--I--what’s this all about, why are you so--”
“What else did he say when he called? What about the messenger, what outfit was it? Regular corporate service?”
“Black blond guy. It was just a little package, you know, with the cassette. Little bubble package like a million others. Just the cassette, no note, nothing. A little microcassette with the rider. In one of those little bubble packages ... I just ... threw it away. Flemco Messengers or something. Dimko, Jemko, Bipko or something. We’ve used them before.”
He scratched his chin. “All right. Never mind about the cassette for a moment. What about the job? How long had the job been in its present form prior to the arrival of the cassette? Was Jeff waiting on anything else, edits or anything, or was the rider all that he needed? Think Alice. Think.”
“The job had been ready for two weeks!” she squeaked. Her eyes darted around but she was seeing only murky damp space disturbed by an occasional ripple of movement, like a goldfish trapped in a puddle of mucus. “It was on his desk! He--he was just holding onto it, waiting for the go-ahead from one of the other partners I think.”
“And the editing? Had all the editing been done?”
“The editing was done. It was done I tell you! If he made any more additions I wasn’t aware of them. It was just sitting on his desk. The editing wasn’t an issue. I mean, it was the rider. He was waiting for the rider, I guess.” She buried her head in her arms, haloed by that frizzy reddish hair of hers that made you wanna puke.
“Waiting...? What do you mean?”
“Some approval he needed to get, oh I don’t know. You know how it is. He didn’t talk about it much. He was always so busy, running here, running there. Running everywhere.”
Charon frowned. “Running. Ever running. Did he leave phone numbers? What if he had to be reached in an emergency?”
“There was--one time--when he had to go to the dentist--”
“Never mind about the dentist, chrissakes. Frickin’ dentist. Jesus, do you think I care about the dentist? Don’t you have some kind of calendar or appointment book for him?”
She yanked at the Chia-pet hair and it bunched like a squished marshmallow with too many air pockets and not enough bounce. “He didn’t work like that. It was just, I’ve gotta go, I’ve gotta go, gotta go. Like that. In a rush. He didn’t give me names and numbers. Can you--can you understand, Chak? It wasn’t part of my duties to handle appointments or remind him of meetings. He took care of all that himself. He wasn’t like other attorneys, who coordinate everything through their secretaries. He handled his own schedule, insisted on that. And yet, it wasn’t as if he were so incredibly organized, himself.”
Someone down the hall gave them a look. Charon took the volume down a couple pegs.
“Okay. Well, what about his own records then? How did he note his appointments?”
“Oh, there was a little thing he carried around with him, what do you call it--”
“Daytimer. Electronic organizer. Notebook.”
“Maybe. And then in his computer.”
“Got his password?”
“I don’t think so. Well, yes, it must be here somewhere. No wait a minute, I don’t. I never had to go into his system.”
“Hmmm. If I remember correctly, and I do, Jeff has a habit of scribbling things down on little pieces of paper. How does he keep track of all those pieces of paper? Is that information kept elsewhere as well? Is there any kind of storage unit in which he retains the little pieces of paper? Some kind of bin or receptacle?”
“I don’t know. He’s got that thing he carries around with him, but I think it just has names and addresses.”
“All right. Tell me the conversation from this morning. What did he say to you? Exactly.”
“It was, it was, ‘Hello Alice’....”
“Okay, okay. Pick up the pace a little. Then what?”
She closed her eyes, concentrating. “ ‘There’s a messenger on the way, he’s going to be bringing a cassette’--”
“Go on.”
“ ‘Cassette for the rider.’ ”
“Um. Okay. Go on.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, continue with your narrative of the conversation.”
“That was it really. He did stress it was urgent to get the tape to you as soon as possible ... you know, make sure you got it ... the rest of my work wasn’t important right now, he said. It was how he stressed things when there’s some special importance attached to it. Just wait for the messenger and get it to you. You in particular. Chak Special. Had to be you.”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Okay. The tape or the whole job?”
“Well--”
“Did he mention the job at all, the document, or was he talking just about the cassette? I mean in this particular conversation?”
“Well, I just assumed it went with the job--”
“Just assumed? Just assumed? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He said it was important that you be the one to transcribe the rider--”
“To what end?”
“To ... get it done ... you know....” She blinked at him.
“Jesus Christ, Alice. To integrate it with an edit of a document he hadn’t even as yet instructed you to send to WP? Where’s your thinking cap? Let me ask you something. When Jeff was on the phone with you this morning, did he even mention the document that you handed to me twenty minutes ago, a document that by your own reckoning had been sitting around for two weeks like a lump on a log? Is there anything at all on his desk or in his files to which this so-called Rider D could be relevant?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know! What else could it have been? Is there any reference to a Rider D in the document I gave you?”
Only one way to find out.
Charon would have to take another look at the document and see if there were any such rider indicated!
Also, he decided to give Jagglin a call at his apartment.
[ 4. ]
If Charon had an electron for every time Finnegan had given him the finger it would add up to a big fat spark. Maybe even a bolt.
“Get it to the lab and get it analyzed,” Finnegan instucted one of his men. “And geez, label it properly, will ya, Hennesey?”
Hennesey sealed the sample, slapped a label on it and scribbled with a felt tip. “Okay, label-a-roonie on that sucker.”
“You still here, Charon?” snarled Finnegan.
“Yes,” said Charon.
Charon had hopped on a subway as soon as he heard the news from the cop at the other end of the line. The scene when he arrived at the apartment wasn’t very pretty.
But murder is never pretty.
Sergeant Michael Finnegan--bald, pot-bellied, grizzle-faced and grumpy--growled gruffly.
“Yeah, well, maybe I don’t want you to be here any more, see? Maybe I want ya out. Get it? Out! That-a-way!” The finger was gone and now it was the thumb in evidence, pointing to the door.
“Maybe I get it and maybe I don’t,” Charon said. “But one thing I do know is that Jeff Jagglin was a co-worker of mine and that I am a citizen of the United States of America. I am a citizen of the United States and as such I am entitled to exercise my certain inalienable rights, among them being the right, liberty, and prerogative to practice my chosen profession to the best of my ability and by whatever legitimate means and in whatever appropriate venue--”
“Not on my time and not on my turf! Yikes-a-mighty!” Finnegan purpled. “Why is it, Charon, that every time a dead body shows up you show up with it! Just once I wish you and it were the same thing!”
“Every time...? Aren’t you just a little bit exaggerating?”
“Out! Out I tell you! Out out out!”
Charon’s glance took in every grisly square millimeter of the tableau. The crumpled, blood-caked corpse. The soiled, busted bust of Thomas Paine on the coffee table. The scruffiness of the place. The stink of squirrel fart and death.
But mostly the corpse. Mostly the dead body. That was the angle with most of the curves.
Jagglin had been shot and shot hard, three times, right through the heart, the first two bullets delivered as he was relaxing in the swivel desk chair in the southwest corner of the cramped den of his lower-east-side twelfth-story apartment. Killer must have been just a few feet away, and facing the victim, when he pulled the trigger. Couldn’t have been otherwise. Not the way the fifty-percent cotton, fifty-percent nylon of the pale green silk shirt was punctured. Not the way the bullets had churned through the chest and said goodbye at the spine at just that particular angle, same angle as the line of churned stuffing of the cheap chair back. Bullet wounds don’t lie and wrinkles and dried blood don’t either. They just sit around waiting for somebody to come along and draw the necessary inferences.
That last shot had been different, though. Different angle, different trajectory. The cops had dug the slug out of the floor board. The murderer must have bashed the body with the bust, then fired again after the victim was already dead and the body had piled onto the carpet. Weird. Superfluous.
But weird, superfluous things sometimes ended up being quite germane when it came to murder.
Germane as hell.
Charon didn’t like it, the way destiny dealt things sometimes. The victim had not deserved this death. Jeff Jagglin might have been a fumblebum, but he was a harmless fumblebum, just one more over-worked tax attorney who mumbled when he should have articulated, slogging away at a job that maybe he didn’t like very much but which he did his best at just the same.
Another thing Charon didn’t like was the way Jagglin looked so relaxed there, rigor-mortised in a pool of his own blood, as if he were at a picnic or something.
Murder is no picnic.
Especially when you’re the guy getting murdered.
The cops were snapping photos and scrounging in the fridge for clues and lamb chops, but they were missing something. The laptop. The laptop computer on the dead man’s desk, liquid crystal display starting to fade, fast. Even from a bunch of distance away Charon’s eyeballs told him the gizmo had about two minutes at most of battery power remaining. To a veteran private detective and word processor like Charon, the situation spelled trouble with a Courier “T.”
He approached Finnegan.
“Je-e-e-sus...! You still here, Charon?” bellowed the gangrenous officiator.
“Yes. Now I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, Sergeant, but in this instance I feel it’s incumbent upon me to offer a suggestion, take it or leave it but just give it a little consideration: which is to have one of your men look around for a wall socket, and then, when he finds it, to plug in that cord. And then there’s something you might wanna try with something called a menu key combination or an icon button on the laptop to which the cord is connected, so as to save the data about to disappear from the screen. Because I don’t know what kind of software Jagglin was using or whether the data was appropriately backed up to the hard drive--and you never know with these applications whether the backup features are functioning properly--but point is, if it wasn’t saved ... well, maybe it would be worth knowing what Jagglin was working on just before he got whacked. Think about it, Sergeant. Because if Jagglin didn’t save the most recently edited text, then in another two and a half minutes, maybe three, it could be lost, lost for good. And I don’t think we can take that chance. Especially not if any part of that text turns out to be a clue--perhaps a crucial clue--to the killer’s identity.”
Finnegan might have been a crusty, by-the-book son of a bitch, but he was no slouch, nor one to procrastinate unduly. He was plenty peeved at the flatfoot’s presence and the free advice did diddley to lube his humor--but he followed it, just the way Charon gave it to him, and all the way down the line. He walked over and plugged in the machine.
Charon studied the display over Finnegan’s shoulder.
1 ctn. egg (large)
2 bread
1 milk
1 spaghetti sauce
plane ticket, 1-w
“Hey, Grabski! Check under the sofa!” spouted Finnegan.
Poor Jeff. Musing about a grocery list when he was about to be murdered? What a lousy way to go.
Charon tried to think, his brain scrunching up like a rubber ball in a rubber-ball-scrunching contest.
Didn’t add up. It was two plus two all right but it kept coming up fractions no matter how you did the arithmetic. What the heck was Jagglin doing in his apartment when he was killed the afternoon of the day of the messengering of the tape some indeterminate amount of time after it had been recorded and who else would have known about it, if anyone had, and what had happened to the message? Thing is, even a fuzz-brain like Jagglin would have re-recorded a communication as urgent as this one appeared to be if his dictation had been disrupted in mid-recording, rather than submit a ragged and incomplete tape.
Another thing that bugged Charon was the sheer mundanity of perusing a grocery list in the penultimate moment of doom. It was so freaking quotidian. And macabre.
Macabre as hell.
Charon surreptitiously copied the file onto a floppy disk that he happened to have in his back pocket and slipped the disk back into that very same pocket.
“And another thing, Sergeant.”
Finnegan gave him a look.
“That spittle on the victim’s collar. Could be the murderer’s spittle. You might want to bag a sample and hold onto it. Because who knows. Maybe it will match the spittle of one of your future murder suspects. Eh?”
Time to pay a little visit to the Zippo Messengering Service.
[ 5. ]
The cigar-chewing, iron-lipped chubbins in plaid-and-paisley at Zippo Messengering across the street from Bagel and Donut Emporium was much too busy with phones and scribbling job specs on little pieces of paper to hand off to lean-looking guys in Spandex and diving suits to possibly spare a moment for Chak Charon.
“Excuse me. Excuse me ... sir ... may I ask you....”
Continued to be ignored.
“Excuse me, sir, maybe I didn’t introduce myself adequately--”
“You introduced yourself swell, chump,” allowed the dispatcher, not bothering to glance in Charon’s insignificant direction. “Now why dontcha make like a get-lost-meister and lemme do my bidness heah.”
Derisive chuckles bounced around the room.
Wise guy, eh?
“Wise guy, eh?” Charon snatched the phone out of the intersection of the fatty’s paw and jaw and crunched it into the cradle. “Okay, buddy boy. I tried it the easy way, the way of civility and mutual respect. I said excuse me. I said pretty please with sugar on top and would you like a maraschino cherry with it and maybe a little whipped topping and chocolate sauce. Isn’t getting me anywhere though, is it? So let’s try it another way. Because I’ve got a murder on my hands, okay, pal? Murder. Know what murder is? I’ll give you a definition. The cessation of a human life by malignant means. Let me tell you about murder, fella. Let me spell it out for you. It’s when you get killed and somebody wanted you dead, death by conscious intent, not by accident, not somebody spraying you with a water pistol and he just didn’t know it happened to be loaded with hydrochloric acid, nor any natural cause like old age or a falling rock; not anything like that, no sir--but an act of planned and purposeful malevolence. It’s about evil, buster. About three bullets through the heart, boom-boom-boom, while a guy is spell-checking a grocery list. Thirty-seven years old. A guy who maybe didn’t articulate very well when he was dictating but who did other things better, who had hopes and dreams and friends, and a family, and a future. Only now he’s dead. As dead as it is possible to be. Name of Jeff Jagglin.”
“Never heard a da guy.” The dispatcher shrugged, chomping the stogie, and handed off another order to a messenger who patted his water bottle and strode Visigothically into the street.
“Well, you need to make it your business to hear of him. Tell you why. There was a package delivered on his behalf by a guy from your company to the law firm of Oliver Shimpkin Baker Dimple & Cromwell, Esquires, early yesterday. Maybe ten thirty a.m., maybe eleven or eleven thirty. The data pertaining to that delivery could be relevant to my investigation. Could be highly relevant. Therefore, I’d like to speak to the individual who made that delivery and inquire about the circumstances of that delivery. I’d like to and I’m going to. And if you don’t or can’t oblige me there’s a guy I know who might be able to get more out of you than I can. Works for an organization the initials of which are NYPD; in the traffic division.”
“Like that, eh?”
“Like that.”
The dispatcher rammed a chit onto a spindle. “Look heah, mister. We stick to the rules, mostly, ’cept when we got a rush job. I’m running a bidness heah. You don’t gotta go threatening me with the coppers.”
“Tell it to the law.”
“Lessee....” He pulled a shoe box toward him and leafed through the stubs. “Ollie. Yuh. Where’s Ollie, sweeties? Yeah, we had a delivery. That’s right ... yeah, yeah, sure ... to Cromwell downtown. No biggie.”
“Okay. Where was the package picked up?”
“Where’s Ollie? He out on a job, Joe?”
“Fuck do I know,” replied Joe, leaning against the wall, one foot stuck on the stucco. “Fuckin’ shit man, fuckin’ fuckety fuck fuck, you know. Fuck. Ollie fuckin’ fuck fuck all the fuckin’ time wid dat, cuz fuck, he don’t give a fuck. It’s a fuckin’ fuck fuck, yo.... Wanna fuck with the motha-fuckin’ fucker, fuck it ... cuz fuckin’ fuck fuck fuckety fuck fuck.”
“Thanks for the information.”
The fucker in question was slouched in a back room perusing a girlie magazine, playing poker, and chewing a sandwich that seemed to have a lot of extra mayonnaise. Three other mean-looking biker dudes were lounging at the same little card table. Ollie was the big black blond one with all the muscles swimming around.
“Hello. My name is Chak Charon,” said Charon. “I’m here to talk to Ollie.”
“Who’re you,” muttered Ollie through the meat and mayonnaise.
“Chak Charon. Funny thing is, I thought I said that already.”
“Who’re you,” said Ollie.
“Chak Charon. Funny thing is, thought I just said that again.” Charon grabbed the girlie magazine and gave it a quick perusal. “And these breasts aren’t even all that alluring.” He tossed the magazine aside.
The others chortled. Waited for the reaction.
“Okay, faggot, I’m focused on ya. Whatcha want?”
“Wanna know about a delivery you made the other day, Ollie; yesterday. Yesterday in the morning somewhere between 9:20 a.m. and 11:45 a.m. Going to the office of a guy name of Jeff Jagglin, at the firm of Oliver Shimpkin Baker Dimple & Cromwell, Esquires.”
Ollie glared and flexed his muscles in reverse alphabetical order. “Yeah, well, I make a lot of deliveries.”
Charon nodded. A corner of his mouth arched, then flatlined. “This one was different. You made it to the law firm of Oliver Shimpkin Baker Dimple & Cromwell, Partners in Law. You made it to the office of a guy named Jeff Jagglin, a guy who’s dead now. Stone dead. That mean anything to you ... Ollie?”
“Ain’t my business.” Ollie leaned back a little and looked blasé.
“Sure it is. --‘Ain’t’ is an illegitimate contraction, by the way. But never mind that now.-- My point is, you made a delivery to this guy’s office. A cassette. Do you know about that by any chance?” Charon was being relaxed and equanimitous about it.
“Man, I get a job, I get a package, I take it somewhere, I drop it. That’s it. Ain’t no big thang.”
“Uh huh.”
“Sorry about your friend, but I didn’t axe him.”
Charon nodded. “I see. Well, what about traffic? Traffic a little bit of a crunch in this town? Kind of tough getting around?”
“Traffic...?” The others tittered uncertainly. “Sure man, roads always be tight. This ain’t Peoria. --Isn’t.”
“Uh huh. So ... I wouldn’t be too far off if I were to infer that, as a busy and pretty hard-driving biker operating in busy and congested avenues, you now and then violate a few traffic regulations, here and there, every once in a while? Hmm? Maybe cut in front of cars, pedestrians, and so forth, when the traffic light isn’t quite on your side? That sort of thing?” Charon was casual, even sympathetic.
“Yeah. So what.”
“Ever cut in front of a pedestrian?”
“If they got it coming.”
“Ever run a red light?”
“Right.”
“Reckless swerving?”
“Reckless swerve my ass,” drawled Ollie. The others laughed.
“Let me think about it.”
“Yeah, well don’t think too long baby, cuz I ain’t gonna wait forever. --Isn’t.”
Hoots and howls.
Charon got grim. “Okay, let’s cut the cute stuff. Let me remind you, sir, a man is dead. Name of Jagglin. Jeff Jagglin. You delivered a job to his office. So I want to know the circumstances. Now I can ask the questions or somebody else can ask them, initials of NYPD, traffic division. Because let me tell you what I think, Ollie. I think you are reckless. Reckless as hell.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Ever see or talk to Jagglin?”
“Didn’t talk to no man. Just get the package, drop the package.”
“You just get the job and do it. That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“They call that the Nuremburg Defense.”
“I isn’t gassin’ anybody.”
“Where’d you pick up the job?”
“Hobie gots the stub. Check that.”
Charon glanced at the chit from the fat man. “Oh. Okay. So you picked up the package at Rockefeller Center? Which office? Doesn’t say the office.”
“Man, it was an office. They say, go to ‘such-and-such’ office. I’m right there when he gets the call so Hobie don’t write it down, see? I don’t remember that crap.”
“Well, what kind of office was it?”
“Blow me.”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha,” the other guys said.
“Office. Type. Now.”
“You know. An office. Look, doofus, I got jobs to do--”
“Uh, the jobs can wait.”
“Hey Mack ... it’s like a short-order cook, Mack. You don’t write the shit down, so you forget it. I’m supposed to remember you like extra pickles?”
“Ha ha ha,” said the others.
“Lemme tell you something, Ollie. I hate pickles. They’re green and they’re slimy and they stink like hell. So don’t talk to me about pickles. Let’s leave pickles entirely out of this. And the name is Chak, not Mack. Now what about the floor? Was it a high floor? Low floor? Mezzanine? Basement? Did you sign in at the lobby?”
Ollie pondered. “Maybe ... come think of it, wasn’t in the building at all. Yeah, yeah, okay. There be a water fountain yea high in some kinda courtyard with flags all around and Hobie tell me I gotta look for some guy in a chartreuse shirt, gonna be standing by some water fountain. He be gonna be giving me the package....”
Chartreuse shirt. Jagglin owned a chartreuse shirt!
“Chartreuse, eh?” The others laughed at the sissy sound of the word as pronounced by Charon.
“Yeah,” affirmed Ollie.
Chartreuse as hell!
[ 6. ]
Her eyes were liquid pools of panic. Her mouth was a maw of misgiving. Her nostrils were naves of nausea. Her hair was just a gelatinous heap.
“No, Chak, no,” she said. “No....”
“Alice, I just wanted to...”
“Chak, please, please go away. Please.” She lurched backward, clunked her head against the wall. Somebody with a mail cart wheeled past and tossed a bundle into a tray. Bundle of mail.
“Look, Alice. Maybe I was a little too hard on you earlier--”
The phone rang. Blimpkin rocked forward.
“Mu-muh-Mr. Jagglin’s office, good afternoon. No, I’m, I’m so s-so sorry, but I must refer you to his ass-- ass-- ass-- associate, Ms. Kremblowsky. Let me--transfer you.” She transferred the call and hung up. Then drooped like a popped balloon that hadn’t been all that full of gas to begin with.
“Now please, please go away,” she said. “Please just leave me alone, leave me alone in peace.”
“There can’t be any peace now, Alice. Now that there’s been a murder...”
And then--
[That's it. To find out what happens next, gotta buy the book.]
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