Robert Bennett - The Company Man

Hayes let loose a long string of swears. They must have been louder than he intended because the nurse recoiled slightly. Then she asked, “Is there anything you need?”

“A fucking cigarette,” he told her. She made a soundless sigh and walked away.

He lay in bed for a few more minutes before the curtain opened again and Garvey sidled in. He looked at Hayes’s head and grimaced.

“Your bedside manners are terrible,” said Hayes.

“Not so loud,” said Garvey. “Can you hear me?”

“Somewhat. Where am I? The Hamilton?”

“Yeah. You’ve been here nearly a day. You should get good treatment, they know me here. They’ll be surprised I’m not here to see some weasel or a denner with five rounds in his legs.”

“Cigarette?” asked Hayes hopefully.

Garvey reached in his pocket and took two out of his tin. First he lit Hayes’s, then his own.

“What’s going on?” Hayes asked, exhaling. “Where’s Samantha? Is she all right?”

Garvey was silent a while, thinking. Then he said, “She’s fine. That’s what they told me, at least. I missed her. They let her out before you, about a day ago.” He coughed. “You had some sort of… I don’t know. It looked like you were in a coma. It wasn’t the ear thing. You were attacked, you know, but Samantha didn’t see you catch any blows to the head. Did you fall and hit it on something?”

“I fell. Didn’t hit it on anything. I think…”

“Think what?”

That it was almost like an attack, thought Hayes, but he waved the question away. “Never mind. What was that thing? That thing we saw?”

Garvey pulled up a chair. He sat down beside Hayes and pulled his tie loose and took off his hat. “Why don’t you tell me what happened.”

Hayes described it, word for word. From Peggy in the jewelry shop to when they saw the twitching thing walking toward them in the street. He even described the attack he’d had, the sense of grief and sadness and fury that brought him to his knees. Garvey nodded along, his face growing wearier and wearier as he listened. At the end he said, “You shouldn’t have gone there. Once you had the name and address you should have come straight to me.”

“I should have,” Hayes said. “Probably. Yes.”

“You should have given me everything you had on Skiller the second you knew anything.”

“I was trying to help.”

“Damn it, Hayes,” he said angrily. “We could have jumped on this. I could have jumped on this. Time matters in these things, damn you.”

Hayes frowned as he looked Garvey over. The skin under his eyes was dark, like little smears of coal. His hair was oily and unbrushed and his collar was a faint yellow.

“What’s going on?” Hayes asked. “What’s wrong?”

Garvey sighed again and rubbed his face. Then he stood and took off his coat, moving slowly and unsteadily. He sat back down and stared into the linens on the bed and said, “It’s surfaced.”

“What has?”

“Our killer,” he said. “There’s been two more murders. In a jailhouse this time. Northeastern District Jailhouse.”

“Oh, God,” said Hayes, and lay back.

“Yeah. In Newton.”

It had happened two nights ago, he said. The very night Hayes and Samantha had been attacked outside Skiller’s tenement. He had gotten the call at three in the morning, just as the aching swirls of a hangover were beginning to settle in. He had woken and pulled on whichever clothes he could find, not knowing he’d be wearing them for the next forty hours, and dragged himself down to Newton, where a crowd was already forming.

Charles Denton and Michael Huffy. Two scummy little tennie weasels from deep in Dockland. Both had a long record of breaking and entering and one charge of assault. Put most of an ice pick in a cornerstore shopkeeper who had walked in on them filching cigarettes. Spent a few years in the Hill, got out for good behavior. That night they’d hopped a trolley down to Newton for the high and righteous purpose of throwing rocks and bottles at the cars and passersby, chivalrous gentlemen indeed. Then they were caught, roughed up a little after they stoutly resisted arrest, and tossed in the drunk tank at around midnight.

That was the last anyone ever saw of them. By two-thirty a.m. they were dead and no longer recognizable. Only way to tell it was them was from the front desk log books.

Garvey had walked into the jailhouse to find it was in a shape similar to that of the Bridgedale trolley. Two of the on-duty officers were completely deaf, a third partially. Garvey had followed the trail of destruction back to where the jail cell was blown in. This time a paperweight had been used to hammer off the lock. Inside had been the two winners of the evening, the lucky boys who had gone out looking to hassle some townies and instead had gotten a few worlds of hurt for their troubles.

A tin plate had been the weapon of choice for the occasion. Used the edge like an axe and bent the damn thing like it had been chewed up by a machine. Huffy and Denton didn’t have much in the way of faces afterwards, just the backs and bases of their skulls and a bit of their ears, just a bit. Garvey probably would never forget the moment when he had been slowly walking up the hall to the jail cell, making a note of each of the items found disturbed along the way, and had spotted something twinkling and golden and squatted to look carefully at the object before realizing it was a golden tooth, still stuck in the remains of most of a man’s jaw, a quarter-inch of lip smiling right below its shine.

Garvey had kept hope at first, which was dumb of him. Huffy and Denton both had unsavory records, but nothing in the way of legitimate employment. Just some idiots who had never developed brains past the delinquent days of seventeen or so. But then he had spoken to some known associates of the fellows and learned with a sinking heart that why yes, they had recently found steady work, and where else but at the McNaughton Vulcanization Plant as loaders? And most certainly, they had come into contact with the burgeoning union movement, and had become reformed, passionate men, suddenly reinvigorated and moralized upon realizing the strife of the lower classes.

“No tattoo, though,” said Garvey to Hayes. “So that’s something. Or maybe it’s nothing, at this hour I don’t know shit.”

“So the policemen in the jail didn’t see anything?”

“Same thing as the conductor. They heard a noise, blacked out. Woke up an indeterminate time later to find the place in ruins. Whatever it was, it tore the jailhouse up something fierce.” He sniffed. “There was one more thing, though. There was blood on the outside of the cell door that was broken into.”

“Not Huffy’s or Denton’s?”

“I don’t think so. Wouldn’t make sense, from that angle. I think he or she or whatever the fuck it is hurt themselves. I sent a few uniforms out to hospitals to see if there were any strange injuries. Something on the hand, probably. Nothing, of course. This bastard case won’t go down that easy, it was dumb of me to think it would.”

“How’s the public handling it?”

“Bad. Bad as hell. We’re under fire and no doubt about it. No one’s paying attention to the deafened officers, no one cares if the two bodies once lived a lifetime of sheer fucking stupidity. No, they just see two union men, dead in Newton, slaughtered under police supervision. Jesus Christ, sometimes I wish America would just shit this city into the ocean and be done with it. Harry Mills over at The Freedom is screaming his head off about it.”

“Oh, Lord.”

“Yeah. Saying it’s the beginnings of a blood feud, says that every man in a pair of brogans can barely expect to sleep well tonight. Someone found out that the two men were beaten before their incarceration. Well, of course they got beaten, Denton tried to bite off a patrolman’s fingers. They were lucky they weren’t here in the Hammy, with you. Not that they’re lucky now or anything. But that doesn’t matter. People are throwing rocks at officers out there. Shouting at us as we walk by. The Freedom isn’t alone, Benby in The Times is starting to question us, and the goddamn mayor is starting to listen. Or starting to pretend he’s listening, everyone fucking knows he’s funded by, hell, I don’t know, some suit at the Nail. They say McNaughton’s figured out a way to murder people from miles away. Murder whoever they want.” He looked sideways at Hayes. “They say McNaughton has a monster working for it.”