Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

There were three young women down on their knees, weeping and flailing toward the darkening sky. It was going to rain, a brick-mean rain. Bag ladies in an alley like that, yeah, no big surprise. but these weren’t gap-toothed old scraggy harridans. I recognized two of them from commercials; I think the precise term is supermodel. Their voices outshone the traffic hissing past the alley mouth. They were obviously very broken up at the demise of this old bum.

We strung the yellow tape; and we started assembling whatever was going to pass for witnesses; and then, without any further notice, the sky ruptured and in an instant we were all drenched. The old man’s blood sluiced away in seconds, and the alley was that slick, pretty, shiny black again. So much for ambient clues.

We moved inside.

The smell of Lysol and sour mash was charming. I remember once, when I was a little kid, I shinnied up an old maple tree and found a bird nest that had recently been occupied by, I don’t know, maybe robins, maybe crows, or something, and it had a smell that was both nasty and disturbing. The inside of the room they let us use for our interrogation smelled not much the same, but it had the same two qualities: nasty, and unsettling.

“Lieutenant,” one of the uniforms said, behind me; and I turned and answered, “Yeah?” Not the way I usually speak, but this was about as weird a venue, as troubling a set of circumstances as any I’d handled since I’d been promoted to Homicide. “Uh, excuse me, Lieutenant, but what do you want us to do with these three ladies?”

I looked over at them, huddling near the door, and for a moment I hated them. They were taller than I, they were prettier than I, they were certainly wealthier than I, they had no hips and their asses were smaller than mine, and they dressed a lot better. I won’t compare cup size: at least I had them beat in that capacity.

“Keep them from talking to each other, but be easy with ‘em. I think they’re famous, and we’ve got enough problems in the Department this week.” I was talking, of course, about the serial hooker-slayer who had been leaving bits of unrecognizable meat all over town for the preceding six months. Then I went to work. Bird nest smell. Not nice.

The first half dozen were either too wetbrain or demented even to grasp what I was asking them. Clearly, none of them had been out in that alley. But someone had been; the old man probably didn’t cut his own throat. I’d say definitely, not even possibly.

The first bit of remark that bore any relation to a lead, was the ramble of a guy in his thirties, broke-down like the rest of them, but apparently not as long in the life as his peers. He had been an aerospace worker, laid off at Boeing a few years earlier in one of the periodic “downsizing” ploys.

His name was Richard. He mumbled his last name and I wrote it on my pad, but I paid less attention than I might’ve, had he been a real suspect, when he said, “Wull, I seen the green light.”

“Green light?”

“Richard. Muh name’s Richard.”

“Yeah, I got that part. You said ‘a green light.’ “

“Uh-huh. It was a light, out there, with him, y’know the dead guy?”

I said, yeah, I know the dead guy. “And there was this light. And it was green.”

“Uh-huh.”

I contemplated a career in orthodonture, as I was already pulling teeth. “Well, look, Richard, you can be of great help to us in solving this murder, if you could just tell me exactly what you saw. Out there. In the alley. The green light. Okay?”

He nodded, the poor sonofabitch; and I confess I felt my heart go out to him. He actually was doing the best he could, and I didn’t want to push him any more fiercely than common decency would permit. It is probably toasty warm inclinations of a similar sort that will forever block me from becoming one of the Bosses. Oh, well, Lieutenant is a perfectly decent rank to die with.

“I wuz, er, uh…” I read embarrassment.

“Go ahead, Richard, just tell me. Don’t be embarrassed.”

“Wull, I wuz takin’ a leak out back. Around the corner in the alley, but back around the corner, y’know? Back behind where the dumpsters are. An’ I wasn’t watchin’ nothin’ else but my own business, an’ I heard these girls singing and laughin’, and I wuz ‘fraid they might come over ‘round the corner an’ see me wit’ my di. with my pants unzipped. ”

“The green light, Richard? Remember: the green light?”

“Uh-huh, I wuz gettin’ to that. I zipped up so fast I kinda wet myself, an’ I turned around to the back over there, an’ all of a sudden there was this green light, big green light, an’ I heard the girls screamin’ and there was some kinda music, I guess it wuz, an’ then allmigawd it was really loud, the girls’ screamin’, an’ I ducked outta there, and went around the dumpsters onna other side, and went over to the fence an’ crawled over and come back to the Mission, b’cuz I din’t want to get involved, cuz. ”

He stopped talking. I had dropped my pencil. I bent to pick it up where it had rolled, next to his right foot. I saw his shoes. When I straightened, I looked him in the eye and said, “But you went out there afterward, didn’t you, Richard?”

“Nuh- uh ?!” He shook his head violently, but I was looking him right in the eye.

“Before the police came, you went out again, didn’t you, Richard?”

His lower lip started to tremble. I felt sorry as hell for the poor slob. He was somebody’s son, somebody’s brother, maybe even somebody’s husband, once upon a layoff; and he was soaked to the skin with cheap wine; and he was scared.

“C’mon, Richard… I know you went back, so you might as well tell me what else you remember.”

He murmured something so softly, and with such embarrassment, that I had to ask him gently to repeat: “I found the big knife.”

“And you took it?”

“Yes’m.”

“When you took his shoes.”

“Yes’m.”

“And anything else?”

“No’mum. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right, Richard. Now I want you to go and get me the big knife, and bring it right straight back to this room, and give it to me. I’ll have one of the officers go with you.”

“Yes’m.”

I called for Napoli, and told him to take Richard out to the common room, to retrieve “the big knife”. As they started for the door of the smelly little room, Richard turned back to me and started to say, “You gonna take. ”

And I stopped him. “No, Richard, no I’m not going to take back those nice shiny new shoes. They look very comfortable, and they’re yours. In exchange for the big knife.”

He smiled weakly, like a child who knows he’s done wrong, is truly abject about it, but is grateful for being let off with just a reprimand.

When he came back, Napoli was carrying “the big knife.” I’d expected a grav-knife or a butterfly, something street standard. This was a rusty machete. A big, wide-bladed, cut-down-the-sugar-cane machete. The blood that was dried on the blade, all the way up to the handle, was — for certain — some of the same that had been, until recently, billeted in the carotid artery of that old man.

I took the machete gingerly. Napoli had tied a string around the base of the haft, to preserve Richard’s — and any others’ — prints. I lowered the killing weapon to the table using only the string noose. Then I went back to questioning Richard.

He’d thought he could sell it for some sneaky pete. That’s all there was to it. The shoes, because he needed them; and the knife, because it had been left lying there next to the body.

He tried to tell me the story a dozen different ways, but it was always the same. Taking a leak, seeing the green light, running away, coming back and taking the old man’s shoes (and socks, as it turned out), swiping the machete while the three women bawled and screamed.