Chris Grabenstein: Tilt-a-Whirl

I'm thinking about this stuff because I don't want to think about what's waiting for me down at the Tilt-A-Whirl.

Reginald Hart's dead body.

One of our guys, Sergeant Dominic Santucci, had snapped off the padlock on Playland's front gate with this humongous wire-cutter tool, so I didn't have to scale the fence. He's stationed at the gate to wait for the state police and the medical examiner and “the meat wagon,” as he called it. Santucci's a hardass and wants everybody to know it.

I walk down the pathway. Past the Sunnyside Clyde garbage cans where you stuff your trash into Mr. Sunbeam's wide-open mouth. Past Pirate Pete's Pretzels. Past the Sea Dragon, past the Water Balloon Pistols, past the Knock ’Em Down.

Down to the Tilt-A-Whirl and my first dead body.

I've heard stories about how cops love to initiate rookies; love to bust a gut laughing while they watch the new guy lose his cookies when he sees his first fresh corpse. Santucci was cracking gum and smirking when he let me in the gate.

“What'd you eat for breakfast, kid?” he asked. “Never mind. Don't tell me. We'll see soon enough.”

Then he laughed his Dominic-the-Donkey laugh and cracked his gum some more.

I come to the entrance to the Tilt-A-Whirl, wishing there was a long line ahead of me.

There isn't. And I'm tall enough to ride this ride.

“Ceepak?”

“In here,” he says. “Careful where you step, Danny.”

I'm sweating. My mouth is dry but sticky.

Ceepak meets me on the pathway.

“Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“I know you've never done this before. Never seen a dead body. But you don't have to act brave. Not for me, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He steps aside.

Behind him, I can see a blue-faced man slumped in a green plastic seat. His eyes are wide open. His mouth, too. His shirt is splotched with red paintballs, only they aren't paintballs-they're bursts of blood.

“This way,” Ceepak says.

He grabs my elbow and hustles me back up the path, over to these bushes on the other side of the main walkway, over near an ice cream cart.

I puke.

Ceepak props me up when my knees go wobbly.

If he wasn't there, I think I would fall face-first into my own vomit.

“Her name is Ashley.”

Five minutes later, I'm doing like Ceepak suggested. I'm staying “emotionally detached.” This isn't a dead guy, this is evidence. I'll save my emotions for later, for when we're hunting down the rat bastard who did this.

“Ashley?” I say, my voice cracking a little.

“Roger that.”

Ceepak holds up his clue: a letter-block ID bracelet.

“It was snagged on a bolt.” He points inside the Tilt-A-Whirl car.

“Great,” I croak. “Good.” My voice sounds steadier.

“You're doing fine, Danny.”

I nod.

My thighs aren't quivering any more, so I step back and study the Turtle-Twirl Tilt-A-Whirl.

I think Sunnyside Clyde had this ride custom-made. Either that, or he bought it second-hand from Sea World. The seven cars are molded to look like giant green turtles sitting up on their haunches. Rounded fiberglass shells form the car backs; funny-face turtle heads jut out up top, making a little canopy.

“She sat on the right-hand side,” Ceepak says. I nod. I think Ceepak just needs to say what he's thinking out loud so he'll remember it later.

He's wearing lint-free gloves so he won't contaminate any evidence. He keeps the gloves tucked into the upper-right hip pocket of his cargo pants. Ceepak brought a box of these gloves to the station back in June and suggested that everybody “keep a pair handy.”

Yeah. Right. Like any of the guys were going to wear sweaty gloves in the middle of the summer. I took a pair just because I knew Ceepak was watching. I think they're still in my sock drawer.

Ceepak paces around the turtle. He starts mumbling.

“‘That tilt-a-whirl down on the south beach drag, I got on it last night and my shirt got caught….’”

He's sort of half-singing, half-muttering a snippet from Bruce Springsteen's 4th of July, Asbury Park. Today's the tenth of July, but I think the karaoke routine helps Ceepak think.

“Interesting.” He's looking at the safety bar on the car. It's up.

“What?”

“Blood spray.”

I look at the metal bar. I see red dots clustered in the area in front of Reginald Hart's slumped body like somebody flicked a wet paintbrush at it. The guy's body is riddled with bullets. I count five, six before I'm almost ready to run to the bushes again.

Ceepak is sniffing the air.

“Checking for transient evidence,” he says. “Smells don't last.”

“When do you think … you know?”

“Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. Of course, I'm merely speculating based on observable rigor mortis….”

Ceepak leans inside the car and sniffs again, about six inches from the dead guy's head. I look the other way.

“Vanilla, patchouli, sandalwood,” he says. “Fascinating.”

“What?”

“Young Ashley purchases her perfume from Victoria's Secret. Or….”

“Someone else was out here?” I catch on quick.

“We need the yellow tape. Digital camera. My crime-scene kit.”

I stand there nodding, assuming that's what I'm supposed to do.

“They're in the Explorer. Cargo hold?”

“Great. I'll go get 'em.” Like I said, I catch on quick.

“Danny?”

“Yes, sir?”

“See if Cosgrove can cut loose some troops. We need to seal the site, cordon off the area. Streetside. Beachside.”

“Right.”

“And Danny?”

“Yeah.”

“Don't walk there. Could be latent evidence underfoot.” He points to the center of the asphalt trail winding from the Tilt-A-Whirl back to the main pedestrian pathway. “We go out the way we came in.”

“Yes, sir.”

I look down to see if we left any footprints on our earlier run for the shrubs. We didn't, so I improvise, gingerly lifting my legs and tiptoeing like I'm some kind of sneaky stork.

While I hustle up to our vehicle, I remember how the Tilt-A-Whirl used to be my favorite ride-back before I discovered the fried food group and swore off any ride that involved stomach-churning centrifugal force.

But when I was a kid, I loved how the Tilt-A-Whirl could surprise you. How it spun you around one way and the next time you hit the exact same spot, it spun you around some way completely different. Sometimes the cars would stutter between moves; sometimes they'd start swinging in one direction, then shift to another. You never knew what to expect next.

I remember this day in math class.

We'd all seen Jurassic Park hundreds of times and were asking for an explanation of the “Chaos Theory” Jeff Goldblum's mathematician character kept yammering about when he really should have been keeping an eye peeled for dinosaurs. Our teacher quoted this article by a guy named Ivars Peterson and told us about the Tilt-A-Whirl and its geometry of a circular platform with cars that pivot freely along a track of hills and how, if the operator keeps the whole thing going at the proper speed of 6.5 revolutions per minute, it's practically impossible to predict what will happen next as you spin around and around and around.

The teacher called it “mind-jangling unpredictability.” Chaos Theory in action, for two tickets a ride.

When I return with the gear and a couple rolls of “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape, Ceepak points at a wallet lying on the Tilt-A-Whirl platform.

“It's Hart's.”

He takes the digital camera and starts snapping pictures. Tons of them. Like our Reginald is the cover boy for Grisly Crime Scene Magazine.

The wind starts kicking up.

“Wind might contaminate the evidence,” Ceepak says. He retrieves a pair of surgical-looking tweezers from his crime-scene attaché case and bends down to pick up the wallet. There's a driver's license lying near it. He picks that up too.