Josh Roseman - The Clockwork Russian and Other Stories

I open my mouth, and Tom poises his pen expectantly, but I close it without saying anything, half-turning toward the display case. “Can I see the body now?”

“Come on, John, I know you know something!”

“Maybe I do. But you know that I was the best weapons man Seattle Police ever had, and if there’s clues to be had from that side, you know I’ll find them faster and better than anyone else.”

I wait, staring at Tom, until he finally sighs and points. “Go on back. Just watch for Courtland; he’s not thrilled that you’re here.”

“Feeling’s mutual.” I go around the case and step through the door. There’s a back room that looks much like my cellar, although if Pyotr Leonovich possessed the kind of weapons I do, he wasn’t showing them off. I glance at his workbench, at his tools, but everything seems in order. The next door leads to a small, cozy living room, with a kitchen beyond and a narrow staircase that makes me wonder how Pyotr Leonovich made it up there any way but sideways. There’s another open door on the ground floor, though, and that leads to the bedroom.

“Hey!” Courtland moves to block my path; he’s big, but I’m quick, and I slip past him. He overbalances, and I can tell the other two officers want to laugh, but they know better. “Bach, get the hell outta here!”

“O’Leary sent me back,” I say, standing in a corner, looking at the room. “He wants me to take a look.”

Courtland swears loudly, colorfully, and stomps away. The other two visibly relax. “Mr. Bach,” says the younger officer in greeting. I’ve met him before; his name’s Thompson.

“Mr. Bach.” The other officer, closer to my age, holds out his hand. I shake it. “Fred Waters,” he says. “I’ve heard about you.”

“And you still shake my hand?”

Waters clicks his tongue. “There hasn’t been a true investigator on the force in years, and the notes from the man I replaced spoke highly of your skill.” He gets out of my way. “I’ve tried to keep Courtland from contaminating the scene, but the man’s a bear.”

I make a small sympathetic noise. “The price of doing business. What do you have so far?”

Waters waves toward Pyotr Leonovich’s body. I follow him and we squat beside the corpse. The wounds are easy to spot; Pyotr Leonovich was killed wearing only his long-johns. His chest has two ragged holes in it. “Pretty certain cause of death is gunshot wounds to each lung.”

“Drowned in his own blood,” I say. Thompson gulps loudly. “If you can’t handle it, there’s no shame in that.”

“He’s right,” Waters says. “Go on, see if O’Leary can use you. If anyone asks, there were too many people in the room.”

“Thanks,” Thompson says with another swallow, then makes his retreat.

“Been in combat, then?” I ask Waters.

He shrugs. “I was in the Great War,” he tells me. “Compared to that, this is nothing. You?”

“I’m a Negro who spent five years in the south before my grandfather moved me and my brother to Chicago. Whatever Mr. Lincoln said, some people still shoot men with skin like mine.”

Waters declines to comment on that. He slides a kit out of his pocket and opens it, then pulls out a short probe with a tiny electrical generator on the end. “I’m going to take out one of the bullets, unless there’s something else you need to see.”

“Do you have helios?” Waters nods, so I take out my handkerchief and wipe it across one of the wounds. The blood is dried, but I rub the cloth between my fingers instead of simply looking at it. “Too gritty for blood alone. He was shot at close range.”

“How did you—”

“It depends on the gun,” I say. “The newer models, they use more powder to make the bullet more accurate. Had the killer used a single-shot pistol, or even a rifle, then I couldn’t say for sure, but with this I know it was a handgun. Probably not Russian-made.”

Waters snorts as he clicks the generator, which sparks to life. “Plenty of those around.”

“Have one myself, back at the house.”

He holds the probe over the wound high in Pyotr Leonovich’s right chest area, and the bullet snaps out, pinging where it meets the probe. “What do you carry?”

I sweep back the left side of my coat. “Electric. I don’t see the point in wasting life. Saw enough of that on the force.”

“That’s the God’s truth,” Waters says. He takes a small metal tray out of his kit and drops the bullet onto it, then puts the probe away. “What do you think?”

The bullet’s got blood on it, and other things I’d rather not think about. “Nothing special about it. Just a bullet.”

“Which means we cross off half the suspect list. Not Russian, not Native, not any of the little gangs.” Waters tips the tray, the bullet falling into a small paper envelope, which he tucks in his side pocket. “He doesn’t look scared.”

“He was a big man,” I say. “Until the gun came out, he probably thought he could outmuscle them.”

“Even a big man can’t take on an army by himself, not without a Tommy gun.”

I point to the foot of the bed. “Look there.” We get up and take a few steps away from the body. “Can’t make out the details, but the rug is dingy there. The rest of the room is very, very clean, as befits a man who works with tiny machines.”

“You would know?” Waters asks.

“I’ve done my share, and I work with clockmakers from time to time.”

“If you have that gun, that’s the truth.”

I don’t correct him; he doesn’t need to know that I built most of the mechanism myself. “I’ve never met a clockmaker who leaves dirt. If Pyotr Leonovich had known his rug was dirty, he’d have taken it up for the washing. Someone didn’t wipe his feet on the way in.”

“That accounts for one person,” Waters says. “How can you be sure there was more than one?”

I take a half-dollar out of my pocket. “Watch.” I give it a good overhand throw toward the window; it pings on the glass and drops to the floor. I retrieve it and hand it to Waters. “Give it your best shot.”

He throws — not great form, but well enough. I take the coin back and put it away. “I’m two inches taller than you. My throw had a higher arc than yours, even allowing for differences in the way we pitch coins.”

“So?”

“The wound on the right is higher than the one on the left, so much that a marksman who made the heart-shot on the left wouldn’t have let his gun kick quite that high. If you look at the other bullet, it won’t tell you anything more, but I can tell you that there were two men, two guns, and they shot Pyotr Leonovich as he was coming back from the toilet.”

Waters puts his hands on his hips. “How the hell can you be sure?”

I chuck my thumb to one side. “Next door. My friend Ishmael’s restaurant. He has his toilet upstairs, uses a gravity flush, same as me. You can check up the steps if you want, but—”

A heavy clunk and the soft sound of rushing water makes anything else I have to say irrelevant. Heavy footsteps clump down the stairs, along with cursing. “Go on up, Bach,” Courtland says from the hallway. “See what you can sniff out, huh?”

Waters rolls his eyes as Courtland departs, but I just shake my head. “It only gets better from here on out.”

“I’ve been here all of three months and already that man makes me want to leave. How the hell does he end up on so many serious crimes?”

“Believe it or not,” I say, “he used to not be a half-bad officer.”

“So what happened?”

I shrug. “Me.”

Waters wisely doesn’t press the issue; I follow him out to the shop, where Thompson is flipping through the ledger book. I see Courtland through the front windows, leaning on a lamppost. Tom is making notes. “You can call the coroner now, Tom,” Waters says. “I think we’ve got what we need.”