Anonymous Rex (11 page)

I’ve heard of stranger things.

On the other hand, McBride’s life is all laid out in public record—newspapers, magazines, the works. At least, the last fifteen years of his life; before then, there is a gaping void, but that’s not surprising. Most articles about the deceased dino mention that he and his wife were originally from Kansas, but none of them elaborated on his life there other than to say he was orphaned at an early age and was raised by a family friend. At some point, he met his lovely wife Judith, they moved to New York, entered the social and business scene, built up a Fortune 500 company specializing in bonds, acquisitions, and the occasional hotspot nightclub, and Wham! a mogul is born. From there on in it’s all society pages and financial records, both of which have the capacity to bore me to tears within minutes.

I’m heading out of the Records Room at City Hall, eager to grab a quick bite of dinner at one of New York’s luxurious falafel carts, when I come across a set of stairs leading down to the county morgue. I know this place—know it too well, perhaps. Nine months ago, this was the spot of my first altercation with the denizens of New York. I suppose I made some sort of habit out of pestering the coroner’s assistant for information on Ernie’s death, though all I ever got for my trouble was a rude rebuff and a roughing up by the security guards. I believe there were some threats involved, and perhaps a physical altercation of some sort. And though the exact details of those days are hazy—that was around the time when I began the One True Binge, and my body was filled with so much basil I was practically a walking greenhouse—I’m straighter now than I was then. Only two sprigs of the stuff today, and one teaspoon of oregano, and I’m ready to ask pertinent, probing questions in a nonthreatening manner.

“No, no, no—not you again—” whimpers the coroner’s assistant, backing away as I stroll through the swinging double doors of the morgue. “I’ll call the guards, so help me, I’ll do it.”

“Good to see you,” I say, holding my hands out in an open, peaceful gesture that works best with canines and some of your dumber humans. No significant odors coming my way, which means this kid’s
no dino—with this kind of fear, the kind that’s turning his frail body into a mini-earthquake, any one of our kind would be shooting off pheromones like a schnauzer in heat.

“You’ve got—I’ve got a number to call, I can have you thrown out—”

“Am I hurting you?”

“Don’t—please—”

I slow down, spell it out for him: “Am—I—hurting—you?”

“No.”

“No, I’m not,” I say. “Am I threatening you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Correct. And I won’t. I’m here on official business this time, up and up.” I take out the TruTel identification card that I snatched off a receptionist’s desk and toss it to the assistant. He falters backward, as if I’ve just lobbed a grenade in his direction, but eventually he leans over the desk and stares at the card, fingers hovering just above the surface. He seems mollified. Petulant, but mollified.

“You broke my nose,” he says. “They had to reset it.”

“It looks better,” I lie. I can’t remember what the old one looked like.

“My girlfriend likes it. She says it makes me look tough.”

“Very tough.” I certainly don’t recall a skirmish involving enough force to break bones, but anything can happen on a basil bender. “No rough stuff this time. Promise. To be honest, I’m looking for your boss again. He can’t still be on a vacation.” Last time, he split town after Ernie died and stayed split until well after I was thrown out of New York.

“No … but he’s very busy.”

“As are we all. Please, tell him that a private detective would like a few moments of his time, nothing more.” I’m trying to be as polite as possible, and the effort is making my teeth itch.

The assistant mulls it over for a while, then wordlessly turns and disappears into a door behind the counter. I’d like to snoop around, open a few file cabinets, but the door swings open once again, as the coroner—bloodstained smock, formaldehyde scent mixing with what must be a natural odor of polished pine and chili paste—steps into the lobby.

“I got a suicide pact back there, three kids up at City College who
decided to off themselves by sucking down a couple gallons of JD. It ain’t pretty, and it’s a rush job.”

“I’ll speak to the point, then. My name’s Vincent Rubio—”

“I know who you are. You’re the guy who roughed up Wally last January.” Wally looks on from across the room, cringing when his name is mentioned. “Sometimes the kid needs a pop in the head, but I like to be the one doing the popping, you understand?”

“Understood,” I answer. “And I’ve apologized for that. What I’m looking for now are the reports on Raymond McBride and Ernie Watson, both deceased approximately nine months ago. I understand you performed both autopsies—”

“I thought the case was closed.”

“It was.”

“It
was
?”

“It is. This is unrelated.”

The coroner takes a glance at Wally, at the ceiling, at the floor. Decision time. Finally, he motions for me to follow him. We head through the cadaver room and back to his office, a utilitarian space sporting only a small desk, a chair, and three large file cabinets. I stand at the doorway as he unlocks one of the cabinets, blocking its contents from my view. “Close the door, would ya?” he asks, and I dutifully do so. “Don’t want the kid to listen in. Like a son to me, but a mammal’s still a mammal, if you get my drift.”

Two file folders sit on the desk, and the coroner—Dr. Kevin Nadel, from the nameplate on the door—flips through them rapidly. “McBride. Right, it’s the same thing I gave everyone else. I counted twenty-eight gunshot wounds to the body, in a number of different places.” Small blue spots mark the surface of a smooth human outline, random polka dots spread across the head, the torso, the legs, seemingly without pattern.

I point to a series of numbers scribbled on the autopsy report. “What do those marks mean?”

“Ammunition caliber. Four of the shots were approximately twenty-two-caliber-sized, eight were from a forty-five, three buckshot wounds from a shotgun, two were from a nine-millimeter, and eleven are similar to wounds consistent with an automatic machine gun of some sort.”

“Wait a second,” I say. “You mean to tell me that McBride was
shot twenty-eight different times with five different weapons? That’s insane.”

“What’s insane is not my business. They bring me dead guys, I open ’em up and take a peek and tell ’em what I find.” He removes a photograph from the folder and hands it over.

It’s McBride, all right, but much less alive than he usually seems in the tabloids. There he is, lying on the floor of his office, splayed out in a spread eagle, and though it’s a black-and-white picture, I can make out the individual bloodstains on the floor, on the seat, on the walls. Wounds dot McBride’s body, and much like Nadel is saying, they are of varying shapes and sizes, though all look to be projectile-based. A gunshot wound is a gunshot wound, and despite the different ammo sizes, they tend to look alike in these types of pics. I’ve seen more than my share of similar ones, believe me.

I hand the photo back. “Go on.”

“As for your second body … I don’t recall the case personally, but my notes here say I came to a conclusion that Mr. Watson’s death was of an accidental nature, caused by massive head trauma consistent with an auto collision.”

“And you have no reason to doubt that?” I ask.

“Should I? As I understand it, there were witnesses on the street who saw the collision. Hit-and-run, I believe.”

I say, “I knew Ernie. Mr. Watson. He wasn’t the type to—it didn’t make any sense, him getting it like that—”

“That’s why they call them accidents, Mr. Rubio.”

No argument to that, though even after nine long months of investigation, perspiration, and exasperation, Ernie’s death still sits strange in my belly. “This is important to me,” I tell the coroner. “It’s not just business. This man—he was my partner. He was my friend.”

“I understand …”

“If you’re worried about talking to me—”

“I’m not—”

“But if you are, if you’re worried for your safety, I can protect you. I can put you in a safe place.” This isn’t complete crap on my part—TruTel has been known to foot the bill for safe houses if a witness is willing to come forth with information that might bust a case wide open.

And for a moment, it seems like Dr. Nadel is about to say something else. His lips part, he leans forward, and a shine comes to his eyes, the gleam that’s always there just before a witness decides to lay it all out for me—and then … nothing. “I can’t help you any more,” he says, eyes downcast. The folders are summarily replaced in the file cabinets and locked up tight. “I’m sorry.”

I show myself out.

On those occasions when my brain ceases to function properly—whether I’m daydreaming, sleep-deprived, or, as more recently is the case, drunk off some noxious herb, the rest of my body is more than glad to assume command and direct me wherever it thinks I need to go. Which, I imagine, is how I wind up in Alphabet City, an area of Manhattan near Greenwich Village that is neither quite as trendy nor beneficial to one’s health. After I leave the morgue I find myself thinking about McBride, thinking about Burke—thinking about Ernie—and suddenly I’m on autopilot, my feet landing me just outside a dark building with crumbling plaster and a paint-chipped façade. Ah, a familiar locale.

The Worm Hole is a bar-cum-nightclub on Avenue D, owned by Gino and Alan Conti, a couple of Allosaurs who have been known to do some work for the dino Mafia. The front room of the bar is run primarily for mammals, as far as I know, and there’s always a steady stream of pitiful clientele, professional drinkers who start tossing it back at noon and don’t pass out until nine the next morning.

But past the seedy rest rooms with the
DON’T PISS ON THE SEAT
signs, behind a false wall covered in graffiti, through a metal door barred with two dead bolts, a chain latch, and a Brontosaur named Skeech, is one of the finest dino bars this side of the Hudson, a joint where a chap can score any sort of vice, herbal or otherwise. I believe I spent a good deal of foggy time here toward the end of my last New York trip, though as I walk inside and take a seat, I realize that I don’t recognize a soul in the place. Most are guised up, indistinguishable from mammals on the face of it, but a few brave souls have bared their natural heads and teeth, possibly as a warning to others to stay away and leave them alone.

“Basil, two leaves,” I tell the waitress, a Diplodocus who’s cut herself a slit down the back of her guise so that her tail sticks out, waving lazily behind her on the floor, sweeping aside the dirt like a broom. The combination of human guise and dino tail is both alluring and forbidden, and, as such, enticing to most of the drugged-out patrons who frequent the bar this time of night. As she passes a group of Raptors, they cackle and reach out to stroke her bare hide, but a slight flick of the tail, a warning whap! with the tip, sends the boys skittering back to their best behavior.

“Vincent? Holy fucking shit, is that Vincent Rubio?” A female, clearly surprised and pleased to see me. Footsteps, and a shadow falls over the table. I convince my head to look up.

“Jesus Christ, it is!” she crows, and even if it weren’t for the constant cursing, I would have recognized Glenda Wetzel by her scent, a pleasant mixture of carnations and old baseball gloves. Glenda’s a great gal, and it’s not that I don’t want to see her; it’s that right now, I’m not all that interested in seeing anybody.

“Hey Glen,” I reply, standing up for the embrace, falling right back into the seat. I motion for her to do likewise.

She pulls out a chair and sits before I get a chance to offer. “Shit, it’s been, what … a year?”

“Nine months.”

“Nine months … goddamn. You look good.”

“I don’t.” I’m not in the mood to play make-believe.

“Okay, you don’t. But you smell really friggin’ good, I’ll tell you that much.”

We play with idle chitchat until the basil arrives—Glenda giving me worried, sidelong glances as I munch both leaves at once, ingesting the compound in wholesale amounts—and Glenda orders up a half teaspoon of crushed thyme.

“Thyme never did much for me,” I say.

“Me neither,” she admits. “But everybody’s gotta cultivate some habit.”

Glenda’s a fellow private investigator, a working stiff shelling out her time for J&T Enterprises, TruTel’s sister office here in Manhattan. Her boss, Jorgenson, is Teitelbaum’s direct analogue, right down to the high blood pressure and subpar social skills. The folks at J&T
were the ones who initially investigated the McBride matter for the New York Metropolitan Council, snapping off those infamous photos that were passed around our own Southern California Council meeting like centerfolds in a junior-high locker room. I can still see them now—McBride, in guise, actively mating with a human female, and, from the look on his costumed face, enjoying it immensely. The woman’s face had been obscured by a technical photographic process known as Blacking It Out with a permanent Marker, but body language served to display her emotions quite clearly.

“Shit,” says Glenda, easily the most foul-mouthed Hadrosaur I’ve ever met, “I can’t believe this … I mean with the last time …”

“I know.”

“… after the cops had you thrown on that plane back to LA—”

“Let’s not relive it, okay, Glen?”

She nods, abashed. “Right. Right.” And her eyes light up again. “Goddamn, it’s good to see you! What shitbag you staying in?”

“The Plaza,” I tell her, giving my eyebrows a raise. I have yet to check in or make an actual reservation, but I’m sure I can swing a room.

“Look at this guy, he got an expense account, eh?”

“For as long as it lasts.” The basil is starting to hit me now, and my nostrils flare out of their own accord. Mood elevating, spirits rising. Glenda’s pheromones invade my senses, and I wonder why I never before asked the lady out. She’s a Hadrosaur, true, and they’re not usually my type, but … “Gosh,” I gush, “you really smell good. Healthy. Real … real healthy.”