Lenny Bartulin - Death by the Book

Edward Kass was bent forward over the kitchen table. His head rested on an open notebook and a few loose pages spread out before him. A couple of pens were there too, a cheap blue Bic and a fancy black fountain, as well as a pencil lying next to a sharpener and a small, dirty cube of rubber. His arms were crossed over his lap, hands resting palm up on each thigh. Kass looked as though he had fallen asleep — almost childlike, innocent and oblivious. Maybe he had dozed off while grinding a gear or two over the final wording of a sentence. Painful as that might have been, Jack doubted it was the cause of the hole in the side of his head.

He stepped closer to the body. Just in front of the dead man, covered in blood, a piece of paper with a line that had survived the bullet’s aftermath. It read: the waters rise around me.

On the kitchen floor lay another body. Jack recognised that one, too. The thin man was lying on his stomach, arms tucked in under his chest, and his legs splayed a little, one leg bent awkwardly with the foot in against the knee of the other. His head was turned to the side, eyes open, blank, staring across the floor at the wall opposite: or at the void he had not long before fallen into. A bullet had darkened his back with blood that seemed as black as sump oil. It had seeped out around him and circled the top half of his body: a halo of thick, paint-like blood, rich and red against the off-white linoleum patterned with curlicues of gold and silver covering the floor. Jack had been looking forward to catching up with the guy again, telling him that attacking people with knives in their place of business was not a very nice thing to do. That playing with sharp objects and starting fires would ultimately only get him into trouble. But it looked like he already knew.

If Ian Durst remembered Jack from the other Friday, when he had thrown a fist and some BMW keys into Jack’s stomach, he did not let on. He stood at the entrance to the kitchen, heavy-shouldered like he was suffering a hangover, pointing out details with one hand, while the gun hung limply in the other. That was where he had seen the intruder. That was where they had struggled, there where the chair lay knocked over. That was where the gun had fallen and then slid up against the sink cupboards for him to grab. He said how the guy had tried to knee him in the balls, scratch his eyes, even bite his nose. He went on like that for a while. Lots of details. Ian Durst seemed to be blessed with a photographic memory. Maybe disgraced former gynaecologists were good at remembering things.

Jack listened and looked around the kitchen. He was wary and nervous and kept glancing at Durst’s gun hand to make sure his finger did not creep up and hug the trigger, accidentally or otherwise. Adrenaline could do funny things to nerve-endings, even after you had calmed down.

Durst said: “I had to get out from under him after the gun went off.”

Jack watched him pull a face. His thin, leathery lips stretched tightly across his Royal Doulton teeth.

“He looks small but he weighed a ton. I had to kind of slide out. Dead weight, all right.”

“So how did he get in?” asked Jack.

“Don’t know. Must’ve picked the lock. The door was open when I got here.”

“Pity you didn’t get here earlier.”

“Yeah,” said Durst. “Pity.” The fringe of his sweptback hair had fallen down over his forehead in two thick, Superman-like curls. He pushed them back up with his free hand, letting it rest on top of his head.

Jack looked at Edward Kass again. He could identify a little of the man he had seen in the photo on the net: long face, thick lips, strong straight nose. The hair was grey of course, though still there, the ears larger, the eyebrows like wild tufts of bleached grass growing out of a crack in a wall. He was not so gaunt in old age, or as dark. Whatever had been on his mind, only the eyes could confirm, and they were now shut. Forever. His poetry would never be so definitive.

The dead poet was wearing a blue cardigan, an orange-and-black-checked flannelette shirt, faded black pants with folded-up cuffs and red tartan slippers. House clothes. Blood dripped onto the left slipper from the edge of the table: Jack could hear it now in the dark silence of the room, the soaked slipper, the thick thwap … thwap … thwap of slowly congealing blood dropping down, almost in slow motion. Jack had never seen a dead body before. He never thought his first time would be a double.

He looked over at the man on the floor. Shiny, silver-grey tracksuit and what looked like brand new black Adidas sneakers with gleaming white stripes. Tough-guy-in-the-money, break-and-enter clothes.

“Do you know him?” asked Durst.

Jack turned too quickly: his neck jarred and made him grimace. Ian Durst did not notice. He was staring down at the body on the floor as well — casually, half interested, like the dead man was just a hooked fish gone stiff on a jetty.

“No,” said Jack. The question annoyed him. “Do you?”

Durst shrugged and shook his head. “Just one of those faces, I suppose. Makes you think you’ve seen it before. Don’t you think?”

Jack frowned. His heartbeat changed up a gear. “Not really.”

Ian Durst locked his clear baby-blue eyes onto Jack’s hazel-brown ones. Then he glanced down at the gun in his hand, but without moving his head too much. He checked it out from a couple of angles, turning it a little this way and then the other. He had an almost smug look on his face. A grin dimpled his cheek but was gone before it could be accused of anything. He looked up again, his face now hard and dark and vaguely threatening.

Jack held the stare. Said nothing. Neither did Durst.

Celia’s shaken voice was heard from the lounge room. “The police are here.”

Jack half expected to see Peterson among the blue uniforms searching the apartment for clues. He was relieved not to. Instead, a Detective Sergeant Keith Glendenning was the man in charge. Under his creased grey suit he possessed maybe half a personality. Everything else about him was pretty average, too: height, width, looks and shoes. Jack wondered about his abilities. Glendenning walked with a heavy gait, slowly and sadly, like a man who might have carried a bucket and mop for a living instead of a badge and a gun. He was probably only in his forties but looked a decade older around the eyes. They crowded in together above a nose the size of a small ham. He kept glancing at a mobile phone in his right hand, as if hoping it would ring — but it never did. Not even a text message. The disappointment on his face came and went swiftly. Jack could see it was well practised.

He gave a statement to a couple of police officers first. They asked him to come into the main bedroom. It was dark with stained timber and heavy brown drapes. The double bed was made, the polished wood-veneer closet closed, the rugs on the floor perfectly aligned: there was nothing out of place, not even a pair of old pyjamas thrown over the tall-backed chair set against the wall. Kass must have been an obsessive-compulsive it was so neat in there. One of the officers wrote down what Jack said, the other prompted him. Neither looked him in the eye, once. Cops had a way of making Jack feel that whatever he said was a lie. It must have been a trick they learnt at police school: How to dredge your suspect’s guilt, no matter if it’s from when he was five and stole a chocolate bar from the corner shop . After they had finished, he read through the script and signed.

Then Detective Sergeant Keith Glendenning had his turn. There were flakes of dandruff on his shoulders. In a steady, bored voice he asked a lot of questions. One of them was whether Jack knew either of the dead men.