Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

“Ease down, pal! Ease down!”

Ease down, hell. The cops were all over me, securing my wrists with plastic cuffs while I struggled against them. I was halfway through most of the words your mother told you she’d wash your mouth out with soap if she ever heard you say them again when I heard a new voice.

“Stimpson! Who is this man!”

Stimpson was the first cop I had confronted. “Just some jerk who wouldn’t take no for an answer, Lieutenant,” he said. “We asked him to leave, but he’s decided he wanted to-”

“Did you bother to ask him his name first?” I tried to look up, but the riot baton continued to force my head down toward the brick sidewalk. “Sir, can you tell me your name?”

“Rosen,” I managed to gasp. “Gerry Rosen. I’m with the Big Muddy -”

“Shit. Let him up, D’Angelo.” The grip on my arms relaxed a little. “I said, let him up,” the lieutenant demanded. “That’s the man I called down here, for chrissake.”

“Yes sir.” D’Angelo hesitated, then let go of my arm and grabbed me beneath my arms to gently lift me off my knees. As he produced a pair of scissors and cut off the handcuffs, the rest of the cops who had encircled me took a powder, their batons and tasers sliding back into belt loops and holsters.

My savior was a tall, gaunt plainclothes cop in his late thirties. He wore a calf-length raincoat and a wide-brimmed fedora, and a cigarette dangled from thin lips in a pockmarked face that looked as if it had once suffered from chronic acne. He brushed past Stimpson and thrust out his hand.

“Michael Farrentino, homicide division,” he said by way of formal introduction. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Rosen. Sorry about the rough treatment.”

I ignored both the hand and the apology. “You said you found my friend in here,” I said, my voice rough as I massaged my chafed wrists. “Where is he?”

I started to push past him, heading for the door again. “Hey, whoa … hold on. Just wait a moment.” Farrentino stepped in front of me as he reached up with both hands to grab my shoulders. “Just let me ask you a couple of questions first-”

“Fuck that,” I snapped. “Where’s John?”

We stared each other eye to eye for another moment, then Farrentino’s hands fell from my shoulders. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and flicked it into the street. “Okay, have it your way,” he murmured. “Follow me.”

To my surprise, he didn’t escort me directly into the bar. Instead he led me past the front door and about twenty feet farther down the sidewalk, past a high brick wall, until we reached the narrow iron gate that led into Clancy’s open-air beer garden. Two more cops were guarding the red tape-marked CRIME SCENE DO NOT PASS-that had been stretched across the open gate. They moved aside as Farrentino ducked under it, then held it up for me so I could pass through.

Many of St. Louis’s saloons have biergartens, a fine old tradition that the city’s first settlers brought with them from Germany during the 1800s. Even though this particular beer garden now sported an Irish name, it resided behind a three-story building and was just old enough to have a real garden. Picnic tables and iron chairs were arranged between small Dutch elms and brick planters; from the number of half-empty beer bottles and plastic cups left abandoned on the table, it seemed as if there had been a fair number of people in Clancy’s beer garden before the law had arrived in large numbers.

But the scene of the crime wasn’t down here; instead, it was an enclosed balcony on the second floor in the rear of the building. I could see a number of people clustered around the corner of the balcony overlooking the street; portable camera lights had been rigged on tripods around the wooden balustrade, and they were all aimed down at something on the porch floor, but I couldn’t see what it was.

Farrentino silently led me up the weathered pinewood stairs to the balcony. More cops, a couple of bored-looking paramedics with a stretcher, two more plainclothes homicide dicks-Farrentino led me through the crowd as they parted for us, until we reached the end of the balcony and I got a chance to see what all the fuss was about.

The body sprawled across the porch floor was definitely that of John Tiernan. His trench coat, his tie, even his patent-leather shoes: I had seen him wearing those clothes only a few hours earlier. But it took me a few moments to recognize his face.

That was because it looked as if someone had taken a white-hot fireplace poker and had shoved it into his skull, straight through the center of his forehead.

The black moment had come for John so quickly that his eyes were wide open, seeing only those things dead men can see.

When I was through vomiting over the rail, Farrentino led me back downstairs to the beer garden. He sat me down at a picnic table out of sight from the balcony, gave me a handkerchief so I could dry my mouth, and left me alone for a couple of minutes; when he came back, he had a shot glass of bourbon in one hand and a beer chaser in the other. The dubious benefits of having a murder committed at a bar.

I belted back the shot of bourbon, ignoring the chaser. The liquor burned down my gullet and into my stomach; I gasped and for a moment my guts rebelled, but the booze stayed down, and after a moment there was quietude of a sort. I slumped back in the chair and tried not to think of the horror I had just seen.

“Ready to talk?” Farrentino asked, not unkindly. I nodded my head; he pulled out a palmtop and flipped it open. “Is that John Tiernan? Can you give me a positive identification?”

I slowly nodded my head. Farrentino waited patiently for a verbal reply. “Yeah … yeah, that’s John,” I said. “I’m sure that’s him.”

“Okay.” The homicide detective made an entry in his computer. “I know that was rough on you, Mr. Rosen, but we had to be sure. We’ve got to call his family next, and even though we got his driver’s license from his wallet, I wanted to have someone else identify him before I put out a call to his wife. You were convenient and … well, I hope you understand.”

I nodded. Poor Sandy. I was glad that she hadn’t seen him like this. “Thanks, Officer. Do you want me to call her?”

“No, I’d just as soon do it myself.” Farrentino pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to me. I shook my head, he took the cigarette for himself, lighting it from the bottom of the pack. “I hate to say it, but I’ve gotten used to this part of the job,” he went on. “I think it’d be better if she got the news from me instead of you. Me, she can hate for the rest of her life and it won’t matter much, but if she hears it from you …”

“Yeah, okay. I understand.”

He shrugged as he exhaled blue smoke. “So … when was the last time you saw the deceased?”

I actually had to think about it; all of a sudden, it seemed as if days instead of hours had passed since I had last seen John alive. “Around six, six-thirty, I think. We were closing down the office for the day.”

“Uh-huh.” Farrentino typed another note in his PT. “Do you have any idea where he was going?”

I became wary. Sure, I knew where John was going, and why … but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tell these things to Farrentino. “He said he was coming down here, but I’m not really sure what he was doing.”

Farrentino continued to make notes. “You knew he was coming here,” he said, “but you don’t know why? Maybe he was just going out for a few drinks. That’s what most people do when they go to a bar after work.”

“Uh … yeah. That’s what he was doing-”

“Except when I talked to the bartender, he told me that Mr. Tiernan hardly ordered anything the whole time he was here. He remembers him buying one beer when he arrived at …”