Gerald Davis: A Murder Too Personal

This insufferable son of a bitch was starting to get on my nerves. I gave him a sour grin. “You better go back and reread your Cliff Notes on Nietzsche. His Superman was a man of integrity, considerate to his inferiors-not some money-grubbing stock jobber.”

His mouth opened but he didn’t make a sound.

I stood and said, “Don’t trouble yourself to show me out. I’ll find my way.”

I dropped the paper bag on Gene Black’s desk in his office next to the squadroom. “Here’s a six-pack for you,” I said.

He squinted up at me. “You gotta be out of your fuckin’ mind. They’re tighter than a nun’s asshole around here,” he rasped. “You want me to lose my pension? Me with five years till retirement?”

“Calm down, officer. Don’t get your balls in an uproar.” I took out a bottle of Perrier, opened it and put it in front of him.

He grunted. “Perrier water?” He pronounced the final R. “What’re you? Some kind of faggot?”

“Drink it,” I said. “Good for your beer belly. No calories.”

He took a swig and grimaced.

“Wadda ya want?” he asked.

“About my ex. What did you find?”

He nodded and rolled his swivel chair over to a file cabinet without getting up. He took out a file and rolled back to where I was sitting on the edge of his desk. Without looking at me, he thumbed through the contents and said, “You’re not looking through this. You can’t see it, so don’t even ask me.”

“What happened to Mr. Personality?”

“Who?”

“Your partner, Forgash.”

“Shit.” He shook his head. “I’m trying my damnedest to get him transferred to Tremont Avenue. That sombitch is driving me up the wall. You know what they say about oil and water.”

“I thought you two got along like ham and eggs.”

He wrinkled his brow. His face was one of those that always had a dark shadow, even when he’d just shaved.

“More like a cobra and a mongoose,” he said as he leafed through the file.

I surveyed the squadroom. The nineteenth was pretty quiet today. The place was mostly empty except for a couple of cops talking on the phone or typing reports. One cop with his feet up on his desk was tossing wadded-up balls of paper into a wastepaper basket.

“Did you see the story on Channel five? About your wife.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I didn’t feel like watching.” The local TV news shows had pounced on the story and were featuring its most gruesome aspects with unalloyed delight.

The Post had carried the story on page four. “Wall Street Beauty Shot Dead.” I guess the headline had an element of human interest in monosyllables.

Black looked up from the file. “We don’t have anything good yet, Rogan. Apartment ransacked, valuables missing, no forced entry. It was a nine-millimeter slug caught her in the back of the head.”

“Anybody hear the shot?”

He shook his head. “No one we can find. You figure it. I personally searched her place for two hours-couldn’t find as damn thing. No footprints, tracked in dirt, hair…” He rubbed his chin. “There were fingerprints, but nothing unusual. Michael Chisolm, he was her boyfriend…her sister…”

“What about Chisolm?” I asked.

“What about him?”

“He shoot her?”

Black shrugged. “Find me a motive. He was her boyfriend. He was entitled to be in her apartment.”

He took a long look at me and shook his head. “Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Way I figure it, push-in job. Some punk stops her outside on the street, pulls a gun, makes her open the door and let him in, kills her, takes the loot and splits.”

“What was her position when she was shot?”

“She was sitting.”

“That make sense to you?” I asked.

“You got something better?”

“Let me see the photos.”

He held up his hand. “You sure you wanna see them? It’s pretty rough.”

“Sure,” I said. I’d seen death before. Both friend and enemy. You never get used to it, but after a while it doesn’t seem so awesome.

Black scrutinized the photos one by one before he handed them over to me, as if he were censoring them. His face was twisted like he’d just smelled something bad.

I realized I was holding my breath as I looked at the pictures. I exhaled slowly. They were rough all right.

Alicia lay spread-eagled on her stomach, the left side of her head blown away, her legs awkwardly askew. You could see the hands on her watch, even the thin second hand. The watch showed twelve thirty-seven, the time the crime photographer took the shot.

It’s different when you see someone you know. Someone you remember eating, talking, sleeping. There was this finality.

The photos were exceptionally sharp. Brightly lit. I could see the jagged edge of her skull and the pattern of blood on the rug.

“There’s one more thing,” Black said.

“What?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“What are you going to save it for? Christmas Eve?”

“Her tongue was cut out and stuck into her vagina.”

“Jesus,” I said. I recognized it. I’d seen it before. It was a crude inversion of what Charlie did to our boys in Viet Nam.

That was about all I could take. I felt like someone had been beating my chest with a baseball bat for half an hour.

“You seen enough?” Black asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”

The hallway stunk of fish and cabbage. The floor was covered with cracked linoleum that curled up at the edges. The linoleum had long ago lost whatever color it once had. The wallpaper was a puke green from the turn of the century. From behind closed doors came the dreary sounds of domestic life, muffled curses, children crying, women screaming, TV blaring.

Typical New York Saturday night.

The apartment building was on Eleventh, not far from the New School. It was a five-story walk-up located in a neighborhood “in transition” as the bureaucrats delicately put it. That meant it was rapidly sinking into a cesspool.

4H was at the end of the corridor. The sound of loud rock and the smell of pot came from behind the door. I jabbed the bell.

Nothing happened. I rang the bell three, four, five times. It looked like nobody was going to open the door. Finally, I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. I pushed the door open slowly.

A man in a plaid bathrobe stood there and looked out through me. He had a black bushy full-face beard, dark hair pulled back in a pony tail and a round gold earring in his left ear.

“Dr. Garbarini?” I shouted over the racket.

He opened his eyes as if he was surprised to see me.

“My name is Rogan. I called you this afternoon.”

He stared at me vacantly.

“I’m Alicia’s husband…ex-husband.”

He blinked for the first time. “Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Of course you are. Come in, come in. I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

He stepped to the side to let me in. The whole apartment was dark. He led me into the living room. The place was lit by three thick candles that gave off a whiff of bayberry or some other kind of sickly sweet scent. On top of that there was incense burning on a low table in the middle of the room.

My eyes needed some time to adjust to the dark. I had trouble hearing Garbarini over the music. It sounded like Procol Harum or Iron Butterfly or one of those acid groups from the sixties, the kind of endless rock we used to play in the hooches while we drank ourselves into oblivion.

Garbarini waved me to some pillows on the floor. I was still wearing a suit and wasn’t too pleased with myself for not changing. Not too cool looking like an executive when you’re trying to gain the confidence of a band of unreconstructed hippies. Or just maybe they were too stoned to even notice.