Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“Stand by!” the patrolman kept telling the guy. “Stand by!”

Lamont Wingate peeled the plastic sheets off the bodies with a sense of mounting gloom. After fifteen years experience with the Homicide Task Force, he didn’t harbor inflated hopes about the kind of cases he was going to get called out to, but after the battered vagrant he’d been hoping for something slightly more coherent, something that might fool you into thinking for a couple of minutes that the world made sense, even if the sense it made wasn’t particularly good news.

But this was just another random act of violence, a mugging gone wrong or a racial confrontation that got out of hand. At first Lamont thought the white guys must have been looking for trouble, coming into the ’hood that time of night. Then he spotted the copy of The Watchtower , and the open suitcase with a stack of pamphlets on “Eternal Life-An Offer You Can’t Refuse” and similar subjects. That could explain it. Fundies from out of town, maybe even out of state, might not have realized what they were letting themselves in for by coming around here after dark.

But what about the small-bore revolver the dead white was clutching? Since when did Jehovah’s Witnesses go around strapped? And if you were going to pack heat for protection, why not take something that would do the job, like the nine the black guy had dropped? The 9mm hadn’t been fired and no knife had been found, so there must have been at least one other person involved, maybe two.

Lamont bent down and went through the black youth’s pockets. They yielded a packet of gum, a set of keys, some loose change, a small plastic bag containing a number of pills, a billfold with thirty-seven dollars and a driver’s license in the name Vernon Kemp. The tabs were most likely moon rock, the cocktail of heroin and crack that was currently in favor with the wolf packs. If they’d beamed up before they went patroling, that would account for a lot.

He walked over to the squad car, opened the door marked “Buckle Up Atlanta” and ran the name Vernon Kemp past the computer. While he waited to hear the result, he patted down the white guy. This didn’t take long. Except for a few loose bills and coins, maybe ten dollars in all, his pockets were completely empty. Lamont was still digesting that when HQ got back to him with details of Vernon Kemp’s record: one conviction for assault, one for possession, plus eight arrests where charges were not brought. Six months skid-bid in all. Kemp was known to have links with a gang called the Jams, who controlled most of the drug trade on the west side of Capitol Avenue.

So far, despite a few anomalies like the God-botherer’s pistol, it was pretty much the kind of thing that Wingate had expected. It was only when he looked through the contents of the suitcase that it started to get weird. He thought these would be as predictable as Vernon Kemp’s background, but he was wrong. Underneath the upper layer of pamphlets and a Bible lay a box of ammunition, a Sony camcorder, a roll of duct tape and five sets of handcuffs.

This made it look more like a dirt-on-dirt hit, what cops called a twofer: two dead assholes for the price of one. Whatever these guys had been aiming to do with that stuff, they were not only ofay but very definitely not OK. And sure as hell not jamming for Jehovah, either.

Lamont’s beeper went again, a drive-by at Central and Glenn, by the interstate exit. He told them he’d get over there ASAP and headed off to get a few statements to pad out the file. This being Pittsburgh, he didn’t expect a whole lot of cooperation, and he wasn’t disappointed. The only thing all the witnesses agreed on was that no Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to their door that evening. Apart from that, the stories varied wildly. Some people even denied hearing shots, although the burner that punched that crater in the white guy’s chest must have been a pound at the very least, and there was no way you weren’t going to hear anything that size going off right outside the house. Others admitted hearing shots-estimates varied from one to a dozen-but with a single exception no one had seen anything except Oprah .

The exception was Donna Grifton, an elderly woman living alone at 322 Carson. It was she who had called 911 in the first place.

“I heard some kind of noise in the street,” she told Lamont. “Like a car door slamming, something like that. I’d been expecting my niece to come and visit, thought maybe it was her. I was on my way over to see when I heard this other sound, real loud. I knew that weren’t no car door. I heard guns before, and this was a gun all right.”

Lamont nodded.

“And what did you see?”

“Hardly nothing. Time I got across to the windowlight, it was over. The gun went off again, and then I heered some kind of hollering. Only thing I see’d was the three of them laying there up the street. That’s when I called.”

Back at the scene, the garrulous drunk was still trying to tell his story to the beleaguered patrolman. Lamont Wingate felt the senseless shame he always did when a person of color started acting up. He knew this was dumb, a kind of Uncle Tom reflex, but he went over anyway and told the bum to quit acting the fool or he’d “bust him under statute triple four seven one A.” There was no such statute, but Lamont had never known the threat of invoking it to fail. It was that “A” that got to them, he reckoned.

But this particular citizen seemed unimpressed.

“I ain’t acting no fool,” he protested civilly. “I’m just trying to explain to this here police what happened here tonight.”

“The hell he was!” the patrolman retorted. “What the sorry son of a bitch’s been trying to do is tell me his entire life history since he got up this morning.”

“That is an arrant untruth,” the drunk replied in a hurt tone. “I may have been a mite circumstantial, but you got to understand I got liquor goggles on. Yet I see life not darkly, through a glass, but whole and entire. Everything is connected, so where to begin?”

He turned to Lamont Wingate.

“You law?” he said.

Lamont nodded.

“I saw the whole thing,” the drunk said with an air of bravado.

“Name?” said Lamont, getting out his notebook.

“Ulysses Grant.”

“Right! And I’m Robert E. Lee.”

The drunk produced a laminated card from his pocket and handed it to Lamont. It was a library pass made out in the name of Ulysses Grant. Lamont inspected it briefly, then handed it back.

“Where do you live, Mr. Grant?”

“Everywhere! In each creature and plant, and every human being that draws breath, as we all do, Mr. Lee. But I stay in that house right there.”

He made a gesture taking in half the street. Lamont sighed.

“OK, what did you see? No, let me rephrase that. What do you have to tell me about what happened tonight? That might be of interest to a body who don’t presently have the benefit of them goggles you mentioned, that is.”

Ulysses Grant frowned at him.

“Let me try and draw my mind up to these Lilliputian proportions. Damn, but it’s difficult! Makes me feel all dizzy-headed. OK. Whitey one enters left, seen from my box up there on the rise. Moons along the street like he’s subject to pull a car clout, something. Enter whitey two, stage right. Spies number one and comes over like he’s seen a ghost, which I have on many occasions experienced myself, the spirits of the dead rising sometimes as thick as steam from a street grate, and not surprising when the soil beneath our feet is stained its fine rich tint with the blood of our ancestors, Mr. Lee.”

Lamont Wingate tapped his notebook with the tip of his pen.

“I was on a cruise schedule, Mr. Grant, I could stand here and listen to you all night. As it is, you don’t cut to the chase, I’ll have to carry you downtown, hand you over to someone with the leisure to do your fine rhetoric the justice it surely deserves.”