“You Mayhew?”
I didn’t recognize the young cop who addressed me as I approached the opened warehouse entrance. His being framed in the light from inside didn’t help. But then again, at two in the morning I’d have trouble recognizing my own mother if she were three feet in front of me.
I stopped and looked at him. Maybe for a moment too long.
He extended his arm to block me from going in.
“Crime scene.”
I craned my neck to look into the interior of the warehouse. Pretty clean and empty looking. But that was because it was so neat; crates were politely stacked up against the walls, pallets stacked in corners neater than they are usually left. Except that in one corner a pile of crates sat in an island of splintered planks and spilled contents. Textiles; couldn’t tell if they were finished clothes or just bolts of fabrics. Around the messy island hovered two klieg lights and a handful of cops and detectives.
I couldn’t make out the faces or frames of any of my friends in the force. But then again, none would call me “friend” without a sarcastic snort.
I looked back at the cop blocking me, eye to eye. “No shit.”
His face scrunched, trying to figure if he should say anything, but I whipped out my cigarette case and flicked it open in front of him. As a cop, he should have reacted faster to a mug like me flashing a piece of metal under his nose. Hell, as a man, he should have. He was maybe 25, his face marred with pocks – and had that squirrely hard look of a boy whose father and grandfather and big brothers were cops, who grew up with the absolute knowledge he would be a cop and knocking heads too.
He tried to look at me suspiciously. Too dumb or too full of himself to know I saw right through him. He decided to take a cig, and muttered his thanks.
I took one for myself, and pulled out my lighter. Lit his, then mine, then held the lighter up into the light pouring from inside the warehouse. Etched in its side was “PCT. 14 PRIDE”. And burnished into its thinner edge was an irregular darkened notch.
“Sergeant McGinty gave this to me,” I said, which wasn’t quite the truth. “And this here—" my thumb rubbed the notch, “Guadalcanal...” Which wasn’t at all the truth.
But it made the kid give me a little respect.
“But you are Mayhew?”
I nodded seriously. “Lieutenant Pepperson asked for me?”
“I don’t know, sir. Just that I was asked to keep an eye out for a Ron Mayhew.”
“Clivelaw?” I asked, referring to the lieutenant’s de facto second. Some called him Pepperson's 'wife'.
“Both of 'em are here...”
He called into the warehouse for another young cop, probably a beat too, to come over and escort me in.
“Thank you,” the thin blue doorman said to me as I stepped past him, holding up the cigarette. Maybe in three years, or five, the memory of that cigarette and the lighter’s imaginary war story would get me an insider’s name from him, or keep him from pulling his trigger finger next time we ran up against each other.
Having stood in the doorway, it didn’t take me more than a moment to adjust to the full lights inside, both the new long buzzing tubes hanging from the ceiling, and the kliegs staring into the island of fabric in the far right corner. Our clicking footfalls on the cement, echoing, turned a couple of investigators’ heads.
One was Pepperson. He always stood tall and straight in an impeccable uniform like a movie cop, and in his fifties was a forced but not false debonair. Old ladies swooned when he showed up at their door.
“Ron,” he said flatly as he said as he strode toward me.
“Pepper. At 2:00 in the morning?”
When he reached me there was an awkward moment when you would have expected us to shake hands.
He looked at my escort and cranked his head, and the young cop continued over to the crime scene.
Although Lieutenant Pepperson was not more than a couple inched taller than me, he looked down at me. His lips pursed, the undersides of his cheekbones sucked in, and his mouth dropped into a frown. He had a big face.
“Ron…”
Was it someone I knew, lying there in the middle of the broken crates and their contents and cops and kliegs? I got a cold feeling, imagining it might have been Paula or Trish, or my dentist, or my asinine brother. Except for my brother, I could only imagine the most unbelievably strange and convoluted circumstances that would get any of them here. A recent client? For the past four months, only businessmen or their wives fearful their spouse is cheating – parking outside downtown hotels with a camera, by now getting complicated with the doormen and concierges recognizing me and my license plate. I was in the middle of negotiations with a prospect, a convoluted case involving road guardrails disguised as pig iron, or vice versa, that was, to be honest, a couple fingers over my head.
Eventually I said, “Just tell me. Or did you call me down to identify?”
“Already ID’ed.”
I ran my hand over my face. I hadn’t thought to brush my teeth after the call woke me up. And my hair was sitting wrong under my fedora. Hell, I just felt gummy and tired and shitty all over. Even on the adrenaline that did not feel good at all.
“Should I be sitting down?” Something in Pepperson’s attitude wasn’t right, and my question came out sounding sarcastic.
“No place to sit,” he said, and he was right.
He jerked his head. “Come here.”
He led me over to the pile. A shambled pyramid of what had been maybe nine crates, incongruous with the other crates and pallets that were stacked neatly against the walls of the mostly empty warehouse; a few of the crates had been pried or smashed open, and bolts of dark cloth, denim for overalls it looked like, had been spilled out. The island was casting a pair of crazy lumpy shadows from the two kliegs. Splinters and slats of bare wood scattered the spilled fabric.
And in the middle was the body.
The cops and detectives backed away, as if I were someone special – which was not the way cops usually acted when I was around. One of them cursed under his breath, another gasped like a woman.
Lying on his back, it was a man maybe in his early 40's. He had had a hardened face, too hard to be handsome, that had now lost its edge with the whiteness and puffing already setting in. A few hours dead. He was wearing an ordinary outfit: navy blue suit and brown tie, tan trench coat, a fedora spilled on the denim four feet away from his head. And beneath his head, behind his slightly opened and stupid looking mouth and his two eyes that he might have had shut when he died or were finally closed for him by a thoughful officer, dried blood blackened the virgin blue fabric. I knew my turning stomach recognized him, but my mind didn’t.
Pepperson’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I jumped.
“Sorry,” he said. But I couldn’t tell if he was sorry for who I saw or for startling me like that.
“I don’t… know him…”
“You don’t?”
“No…” I felt like a little boy for some reason, and I hated it.
“We pulled the wallet." He gave a strangely inelegant cough, and inelegantly tightened his grip on my shoulder.
“Ron, you don’t recognize him--?"
"No."
"Ron, that’s you.”
