Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (2 page)

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TREMENDUM

“Bargain-basement tracheotomy,” Deputy Coroner Bernard Smith remarked, shining a penlight into the gaping throat wound and studying it through lowered bifocals. “Windpipe’s sawed halfway through. Carotid arteries’re severed. Sternomastoid muscles, too.”

“Meaning?” Lieutenant Nolan Grobowski asked.

“Meaning I don’t think he’s gonna make it.”

Nolan chuckled grimly. Even from about five feet away, Nolan could see that the wound—only an hour or so old—was showing signs of decay. The dead man’s smell was nasty, too—the stench of raw, freshly cut meat and the mixed stink of feces and urine made the plush and well-lit hotel corridor smell incongruously like an outhouse.

Smith shined the penlight into the victim’s eyes, and Nolan could see that they had already flattened slightly—their fluid apparently had begun to drain. Nolan made a note ...

“2:56
a.m.
The stiff is wilting a little.”

Nolan always wrote down whatever entered his head while on the job, no matter how seemingly trivial, redundant, or absurd. Even though the local Hollywood detectives had surely taken notes, he would need his own records. And even photographs sometimes couldn’t be counted on for crucial details. Besides, note taking was one of the few really natural things to do at a homicide scene. It kept one’s hands busy.

“So how’re you calling this one, Smitty?” asked Nolan’s partner, Sergeant Clayton Saunders, who was gingerly stalking the area with a tape measure.

The gray-haired, pudgy deputy coroner sat back on his haunches.

“Reckon it’d be natural causes,” Smitty said. “Maybe just plain old age.”

“Could he’ve choked on a chicken bone?” Clayton asked. The black detective finished his measuring and turned to study the bloodstain on the wall.

“Possibly, just possibly,” Smitty said. “He might have stuck his finger in a wall socket, too.”

“What about suicide?” Nolan asked.

“Get serious, Nol,” Smitty said, padding puppy dog-like around the body on his hands and knees. “Why would a guy that rich off himself?”

“Hell, we’re talking about one of America’s champion cutthroat buccaneers, here,” Nolan said. “Think of the guilt he must have been toting around. Here’s what happened. About one thirty-five this morning, G. K. Judson’s corporate sins caught up with him. He couldn’t live with himself for one more minute. So he took a big butcher knife out of his suitcase, walked down the hotel hallway to the elevator, rode it two floors down, stepped out into the corridor here, and sliced himself open.”

“Possible,” Smitty mused. “But what happened to the knife?”

“That
is
a problem,” Nolan grumbled.

Clayton considered a moment and said, “That’s obvious. Judson handed it to some passerby during his dying moments. He said, ‘Keep this. It’ll be worth a lot of money one of these days.’”

Smitty smiled. “Pretty compelling, guys. Still, there ought to be a suicide note.”

“Looks to me like he was trying to write one on the wall over here,” Clayton said.

Nolan went over and stared at the bloody blotch on the ornate white wall. It looked like paint slung from a moving brush.

“Read it to me,” Smitty requested.

“I’ve never gotten the hang of the language,” Nolan said.

Clayton glanced at him, but said nothing.

Nolan flipped back to his previous notebook page and checked over his rough sketch and his jotted descriptions of the space: the two pairs of elevators facing each other across the corridor; the mirrored wall at the corridor’s end; the white, raised sun designs between each of the elevators; the slashing bloodstain that lay across one of the suns …

Nolan now drew a hasty little sketch of the blotch, indicating the large slash of red across the sun, smaller splatters on the rays, and a few isolated droplets extending across the raised leafy designs.

Pseudostylishness and gore. Not your typical homicide scene.

At about one-forty-five, the body of G. K. Judson, CEO of Chicago-based Apex Airlines, had been discovered by a waiter delivering a very early breakfast. Immediately after phoning the police, the waiter had dutifully taken it upon himself to call the L. A.
Times,
several alternative newspapers, and a fair assortment of television and radio stations. The local patrolmen and detectives arrived in time to find the body engulfed by piranha-like flashbulbs and videocams. The cops had finally gotten the crowd of gawkers and reporters out of the way and directed down the nearby stairwells to other elevators. When it had become clear that the case was going to be a major media event, Nolan and Clayton were called in from Homicide Special Section.

They had fought their way through a crowd to get to the area the uniformed cops had roped off. By that time, the likelihood of the crime team finding anything useful had diminished to near zero. A half-hearted attempt had been made to look for fingerprints, and fingerprint powder still clung to a brass plate encasing a pair of elevator buttons. That part had been a joke, of course, revealing only an indecipherable jumble. The same was true of the door leading to the escape stairs. Too many people routinely passed through a place like that for fibers or fingerprints to mean much.

The uniforms were now standing at the edge of the scene, dutifully and conspicuously keeping their hands in their pockets in accord with Nolan’s ritual demand that they not touch anything.

The pudgy forensics doctor huffed and groaned a little as he brushed his hands off on his trouser legs and rose to his feet.

“Well, gentlemen,” Smitty said, “I sure hate to go out on a limb with some crazy-assed hypothesis, but my guess is it was murder. Guess that’s good news for you guys. When folks stop doing each other in, you’ll be looking for work.”

“I could do with a change,” Nolan said. “I’ve been following the want ads for months.”

“Yeah, and I’ll bet there’s a lotta work out there for an over-the-hill jerk who’s done nothing his whole adult life ’cept go poking around other people’s business.”

“Hey, I’m not looking for a job for
you,
Smitty.”

“Very funny. You’re too fast for me, Nol.”

“Doesn’t take a Ferrari.”

“You could never go civilian. You love this stuff. Who could help but love it?”

“Okay, let’s call it murder for a moment, just to be goofy,” Nolan said. “Who was the perp?”

“Hey, you’re the homicide dicks,” Smitty said. “Don’t ask me to do your job for you. I can tell you one thing, though. The motive wasn’t robbery.”

Smitty stooped over and raised up the victim’s left hand. He carefully removed a ring with a substantial diamond. Then he took a glittering gold Rolex from the wrist.

“Hell, those watches cost more than my car’s worth,” Clayton observed, as Smitty took the items off the corpse, dropped them into a plastic bag, and handed them to Nolan.

“That kind of cash’d sure help with Molly’s college tuition.”

“Stop begging,” Smitty scolded.

“Let’s have a look at his wallet.”

“Just make sure you turn it in the way you found it.”

Smitty slid the wallet across the floor. Nolan stooped to pick it up. He opened it, and a batch of glittering, multicolored, metallic-embossed credit cards tumbled out, accordion-fashion. Nolan thumbed through the wallet. It hardly contained anything except credit cards—just enough cash to give the hotel staff rudimentary tips.

“No pictures of his wife and kids.”

“And no portraits of Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer or the Dalai Lama, either,” Clayton added, looking over Nolan’s shoulder. “Plastic can sure take up a lot of room in your life,”

Part of Smitty’s team was now unfolding the black body bag. The doctor hovered over them, admonishing them fussily about every move, treating the corpse like an artistic treasure. Nolan was reminded of the career-loving gravedigger in
Hamlet.
Whenever Nolan worked a homicide scene with Smitty, he more than half expected the man to whip out an extra skull for proud display. Smitty never looked happier than when he was hovering over a dead body.

As for himself, Nolan could feel his own face frozen into a joyless expression. He didn’t find his own wisecracks amusing, and he didn’t really imagine anyone else did, either.

So why do I do it?

The clichéd explanation was that cops told jokes around murder scenes to keep themselves sane. Nolan sometimes suspected that that was a pretty flimsy rationalization.

Maybe we tell jokes to hide the fact that we’ve already lost it.

Nolan watched as Smitty’s team manipulated the body, folding its arms and generally preparing it for the bag. The corpse was remarkably pliable. It almost seemed to shift consciously and give here and there to assist the team. Corpses at this stage were really quite cooperative—like well-behaved pets.

A word crossed Nolan’s mind …

Tremendum.

That was a word Nolan’s one-time mentor, Syd Harper, had used. Nolan wasn’t sure whether it was an actual clinical term or just one of “Crazy” Syd’s numerous coinages, but it had always struck him as a useful word. It described that uniquely self-conscious, uniquely human horror and awe at the sight of a corpse—
any
corpse, even that of a total stranger. It was the ghastly mortal comprehension of the fact of death—and the awareness that death came to all.

Animals couldn’t feel it.

Experienced cops couldn’t either.

Nolan certainly didn’t feel any tremendum right at the moment. As far as he could tell, he didn’t feel much of anything.

It was supposed to be that way, of course. You were supposed to get inured to it. Nolan could remember a time when he could still feel it, though—particularly the first time. It was at the scene of a three-car accident on a New Year’s Eve some fifteen years ago, back when Nolan was still a rookie. Four dead teenagers were stretched on the pavement awaiting body bags. There had been another collision, fortunately minor, between two drivers who couldn’t keep their eyes off the wreckage.

Nolan had looked at those drivers and realized that they felt it, too. At that moment, he had understood that it wasn’t grim curiosity that slowed those cars. It was a kind of religious terror that seized even the most determined atheist. It was tremendum.

As Smitty’s team delicately hoisted the body into the bag, Nolan contemplated his own lack of terror and awe …

He had been through a time of terror, and also of mourning.

It wasn’t very long ago.

But had he mourned enough?

Had he
felt
enough? Could a cop feel enough?

“At times like now,” Smitty mused elegiacally, “I’m reminded of the words of the poet: ‘To die, to be really dead—that must be glorious!’”

“Nice,” Nolan said.

“Thank you,” Smitty replied.

“Who was the poet?” Clayton asked.

“Dracula,” Smitty told him.

The body bag was closed with a noisy zip.

*

Marianne Hedison approached the house through its elegant formal gardens. Morning sunlight washed across the scene, accentuating the stucco texture of the facade and giving it a yellowish tint. She briefly considered exchanging the bright sunlight for a dusky twilight or even a midnight full moon, just to observe the variation. But then she thought better of it.

Trivialities. Better stick to business.

She moved directly across the terrace and up to the front door. She peered through a leaded glass window, a contemporary design through which she could vaguely glimpse a cheerfully lit interior. She laughed slightly at her fleeting impulse to ring the doorbell.

Who do you expect to find at home?

The door swung open, and she moved into a stately entryway with an upstairs gallery looming above her along three walls. There was not a stick of furniture in the place or a painting on any of the walls. An eerie feeling of cavernous space swept over her.

How
large
an unfurnished house always seems!

For a moment, she thought she heard the sound of an orchestra echoing through the empty space, slow and gentle but punctuated by an odd discord.

Rossini again. Why can’t I forget that tune?

Marianne focused her attention on the room, shaking her head to make the music go away.

It didn’t.

She thought about ascending the stairs on her left in order to gaze over the majestic room from the gallery. But it seemed best to poke around downstairs a bit first. She passed on into the empty living room with its monumental fireplace, then into the vast dining room.

She noticed that she was holding her breath.

Each time she turned a corner, she half expected to see someone there.

Someone dangerous.

Utterly ridiculous.

Swinging around to view the empty room, she saw nothing. But she thought she heard violin bows clacking, slapping percussively against the wood of the instruments.

You’re like a little kid who’s stayed up past her bedtime watching horror films on TV.

Marianne passed through another doorway into a bare kitchen. She turned back and forth, studying its whole length. It was long, narrow, and cramped in comparison to the rooms she had just passed through.

I told them this space was too tight when we went over the floor plans. Who could do any major entertaining from a kitchen like this?

After a few deft movements of Marianne’s fingers, the wall that connected to the dining room glided silently backward, carrying its counter space and cabinets along with it, broadening the whole area by exactly four feet. Marianne studied the enhanced kitchen space with satisfaction.

There. And that doesn’t hurt the next room—it’s still huge.

Just to try the idea out, she caused a work island to pop into view in the middle of the kitchen floor. She effortlessly changed the shape of the island and rotated it a little until it sat at a pleasing diagonal. There was plenty of room to walk around it on all sides.

Still, an adjustment like this demanded a formality. She moved her computer mouse to the desk accessory list, selected “Mail,” and typed a message in the space that appeared: