William Lashner - Bitter Truth

“What happened?” I asked one of the onlookers, an old man, thin and grizzled with suspenders and a black beret.

“Cain’t you smell it?” said the old man.

I took a sniff. The dirty stink of burned gasoline and something sickly sweet beneath it. “I’m not sure.”

“They burned a car, is what they did,” he said, “and they was some fool still in it when they did it. Now he ain’t but bar-be-cue.”

“Pleasant,” I said over the quiet guffaws that rose around us. I edged past him toward the yellow tape and called a uniformed cop over.

“I’m here to see McDeiss,” I said. “He asked me to come on down.”

The cop gestured his head to the group of cops under the highway and lifted the tape. Like a boxer sliding into the ring I slipped beneath the yellow ribbon and headed across Front Street.

It was clammy and cool beneath the highway and the stink I had smelled from across the street hung heavy as a fog. The smoldering shape was a car, dark and wet, with its trunk unlatched, and I could make out some red beneath the carbon black. It had been a convertible and the fire had devoured the canvas top so it looked a sporty thing, that flame-savaged car. A Porsche, a red Porsche, and I started getting some idea of who it was who might have been bar-be-cued.

McDeiss was off to the side, in front of the skating rink, interviewing a kid, taking notes as the kid talked. I waited for him to finish. When he sent the kid running off down Front Street, he turned and saw me standing there. “Carl,” he said with a smile. “Glad you could make it. Welcome to the party.”

“A real hot spot,” I said.

“We got the call about an hour and a half ago,” said McDeiss, walking back to the burned-out hulk of the Porsche. I trailed hesitantly behind him. “A car was burning underneath the highway. The uniform guys showed up and called the fire guys. The fire guys showed up and sprayed down the flames. When they popped open the trunk to make sure everything was out the fire guys saw what was inside and called us.”

“And since you guys are the homicide guys, I guess we know what was in the trunk.”

“You want to see?”

“I think not.”

“Come on, Carl, take a look. It’ll do you good.”

He reached back and took hold of my arm and started pulling me toward the burned Porsche, toward the rear, with the trunk lid ominously open, toward whatever lay singed and dead inside.

“I really don’t think so,” I said.

“I know a great restaurant just a block up on Front,” said McDeiss, pulling me ever closer. The open trunk loomed now not ten feet away. “ La Vigna. Maybe after our visit you can take me out for lunch.”

“I’m quickly losing my appetite.”

“You should know what you’re dealing with here, Carl, before we talk,” said McDeiss.

We were slipping around the side of the car now, McDeiss moving quickly, yanking me along. “I get the idea.”

“Take a look,” he said, and then he spun me around so that I almost fell into whatever it was that was in that trunk.

“Arrgh,” I let out softly, closing my eyes as my stomach heaved.

A few of the cops standing around the car laughed among themselves.

“Take a good look,” said McDeiss.

I took a breath and smelled that nauseating smell and my eyes gagged open, ready to spy whatever was there in the trunk.

It was empty. Well not exactly empty. There was the charred remains of the carpet, and strange pools of incinerated liquid, and miscellaneous car-type tools lying around, and the smell, sickening and strangely sweet, like a marinated beef rib left way too long on the grill, but the main event, the body, was gone. In its place was an outline drawn in chalk, an outline of a man on his side, a somewhat corpulent man, with his arms bound behind his body and his knees drawn tight to his chest.

“The ambulance guys already took him to the morgue,” said McDeiss.

“You’re a bastard,” I said, stepping away from the car.

He opened his pad and started reading. “Male, mid-thirties, average height, mildly obese, hair dark brown, eyes indeterminate because they burst in the heat. His hands were tied behind him, his legs were bound together, a gag was stuffed in his mouth. There were no evident wounds, so he apparently burned to death, though the coroner will be more specific. His pants were pulled down and we found the remnants of legal tender deep inside his asshole, specifically a five, a ten, and two ones.” McDeiss closed his pad and looked at me. “That’s seventeen dollars, Carl, a paltry sum, denoting a notable lack of respect for the victim.”

“What am I doing here?”

“You ever see this Porsche before?”

I shook my head.

“It’s registered to an Edward Shaw. It was Mr. Shaw who was in the trunk. And the funny thing is, this Edward Shaw is the brother of Jacqueline Shaw, the woman whose death you were asking me about just a few weeks ago. So what I want to know, Carl, is what the hell is going on here?”

I looked at McDeiss and then back at the burned wreck of a German luxury sports car. “It looks,” I said slowly, “like someone is killing Reddmans.”

“Who exactly?”

“If I knew that I’d already be rich.”

“We notified the house but we’re still looking for the other two siblings, Robert and Caroline. Any idea where they are?”

“None.”

“So, if you don’t know who’s going after the Shaws, what do you know?”

Normally, in my position as a criminal defense attorney, I preferred to share absolutely nothing more than I was forced to share with the cops. We’re on opposite sides, with the exact opposite goals, and since knowledge is power I tried to keep as much power as I could for myself. But I wasn’t facing McDeiss now as a criminal defense attorney. I was looking for a third of any recovery for wrongful death against the person responsible for Jacqueline’s murder and now, most likely, for Eddie Shaw’s murder too. Nothing would be better than to have the cops find the guy and convict him and leave his assets dangling for me to snatch down with my teeth. There were things he couldn’t know, things about my client Peter Cressi and his boss Earl Dante, about my role as innocent bystander in the hit attempt on the Schuylkill Expressway, about Raffaello’s plan to turn over the city’s underworld to his nemesis. But anything I learned in my investigation of Jacqueline’s death, I figured, I could turn over to him, including what I had learned from Eddie’s wife. Telling all I knew to McDeiss might just make my job of getting what I could out of the Reddman fortune that much easier.

“You said that place La Vigna is pretty good,” I said.

“Sure,” said McDeiss, “if you like Northern Italian.”

“They have veal?”

“Scallopini pounded thin as my paycheck, drenched with the first pressings of virgin olives and fresh lemon.”

I wasn’t really hungry for veal. In reality, at that moment, surrounded by that saccharine fog of death, I feared I couldn’t keep down even a swallow of Pepto-Bismol. But McDeiss, I figured, was one to sharpen his appetite even as the fresh scent of death lingered in his nostrils. I took him for the type to eat a hoagie in the morgue while an autopsy of an old and bloated corpse was being performed and enjoy every mouthful, so long as the prosciutto was imported and the provolone fresh. It was to my advantage to talk to McDeiss and there was no better enticement for McDeiss to listen, I had learned, than a good meal. Except this time, it had to seem like he was pumping me.

“Well then, why don’t we try it out?” I said. “I could go for a little veal. But if you want to hear what I’ve found out, let’s say this time you spring for the check.”