A man I once knew
After my third pass around the block, I was ten minutes late, just as I wanted to be. I could see the four of them standing in the yard. Each of them was as green as Mississippi, and each on carried a .44 caliber handgun. This had the makings of a disaster. I pulled up to curb, behind a row of blue and whites, and immediately the young trainees, sporting their blue jackets with big yellow F.B.I. letters, stepped toward the car. I suddenly wanted to remove my jacket. These guys were foaming at the bits to investigate the crime scene. I had let them froth a bit by taking a stroll around the block. Next time they won't be fifteen minutes early. I take my time. I crush out my half-smoked menthol cigarette and slowly, nonchalantly, climb out of my white Crown Victoria. The four trainees were cheesing now. They wore big, eager, grins. They might as well have had Mickey Mouse ears on. I try to remember how I got this babysitting job. Then I try to forget, as a rush of horrible memories from two weeks ago wash over me. One of the hayseeds brings me back by introducing himself. He seemed nice enough, a stout looking black man with intelligence in his eyes. The others followed suit and we all headed for the house, where the BHPD decorated with long strips of foreboding yellow tape. We walked right around it.
As we enter the foyer of the cavernous home, I see the green horns really come alive. But among a room full of blue-collar flatfoots, they were F.B.I. That means something, or at least it used to. This house is stunning. Marble floors and expensive looking furniture paved the way ahead of us. Out on the street, with me, they are the dirt sniffers. It has a huge foyer, with long curving staircases and a glistening chandelier hanging from the ceiling. Ahead we could see a fabulous sitting area. This place reeked of money; paintings on walls and vases on mahogany end table, all of them worth more than my car, covered every wall and filled every corner. It is hard to believe that this is the "poorer" side of town. If Beverly Hills had a slum, this was it. But a half a million dollars couldn't buy most houses on this street. The cadets were impressed, so I couldn't be.
I hooked up with Lieutenant Druzell, a nice balding man with a good, clean reputation, and got the low down on the crime scene. It all seemed very typical and mundane to me. Rich guy, probably with dirty hands (criminally speaking), a thug with a .38 special and what do you get? A chalk line on the carpet and a stack of paperwork. This one turned on my though. It floored me when I saw that the owner of the house, and also the victim, was my old buddy named Stuart Trent. Stu and I went to the same high school. We played on the same sorry baseball team.
Stu was an incredible artist, and a rich kid. That made him a perfect target for bullies. I was a longer and a pure thug. I would fight my own shadow over a ham sandwich. We became friends mainly out of need. He needed a bodyguard and I needed somebody who could stand to talk to me. I was pretty tough to get along with back then. And, in his own way, Stu had trouble making friends; with guys any way. He had little trouble with the ladies. I had to stick on several occasions because of a girl.
My moment of disbelief ended when I realized that my entourage had wondered off. It made me sick how they tore apart the crime scene. They touched and fondled things that, though they weren't mine, seemed personal to me. I scolded them and cussed them a little for jumping ahead of me, secretly cursing them for being so clumsy with my buddy's things.
I took point and the rookies took notes. The house screamed Stuart's name. Thousands of books lined the walls of the study. Tomes of every sort were neatly filed away. It looked like a library. The books were sorted by subject, then author. Hours and hours had gone into their selection. They looked like little families on the shelves, since books of like topic were so close together. The desk in the den was spotless. An empty soup can, rather out of place among the expensive furnishings, contained No. 2 Berol Merado pencils, Stu's favorites. A small stack of maybe a hundred sheets of thick fibered, off-white, sketch paper sat beside the can. Only one sheet lay apart from the rest and it bore the image of a half-drawn comic book superhero of some sort.
The living room was more than I could bear. The blood trail and the eventual tapeline, outlining the last place on earth that Stu took a breath, chilled me. I had seen plenty of corpses, many brutally murdered. The last one flashed back to me briefly. I saw the body of a young black teenage boy being zipped up in a body bag. The flashback nauseates me. Nothing I had seen prepared me for Stu's scene. I was glad that the body had already been loaded up.
I wasn't in the mood to toy with the trainees anymore. I pointed out some obvious things that they needed to know about staking out a scene, and then I dispatched them to several different parts of the investigation that I thought they could handle. I fled the living room and passed through the bedroom, into the master bath.
The bathroom hit me pretty hard. Had Stu changed so little in fifteen years? His medicine cabinet was chocked full of health and beauty stuff. He was such a preppy. He had gel, hair spray and mousse. I found a little kit with tools to remove hair, one tool for each part of the body with hair I think. There was a half-used jar of face cleanser stacked on top of a full jar. The bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet made me think of Stu's million-dollar smile. There was floss of all sizes and flavors. He even had super-floss. His empty retainer case was there too. I bet he was wearing the retainer when he was shot. My quest isn't about finding clues now. It is about a trip down memory lane and a painful collage of my friend's short life.
Many pieces of artwork, mostly original comic art, and some of it his, hung on his bedroom walls. These pictures weren't decoration, these were inspiration. I went back through the house to find the young scrappers in an argument about the proper use of an evidence collection tool. I let them be. Stu's fridge was full of fresh vegetables. Crisp carrots, bushy broccoli and full lettuce seemed to dominate the bottom of the fridge. The top shelf was completely filled with a dozen bottles of mineral water and a couple of nice, dark beers. There was nothing on the middle shelf. The pantry was likewise barren, save for a few healthy snacks.
I stood in the kitchen with my hands resting on the bar, peering through the living room out the sliding glass doors. Something shiny caught my eye and I walked past the trainees, who were still arguing, and picked it up. It was the handle part of a small broken key. The sliding door was broken, and stood as the obvious point of entry for the perp, but this key made me wonder. I checked the outside of the sliding door to find what I thought I might. The other have of the small broken, bronze, key stuck in the lock. The killer had a key.
My mind swirled with thoughts and emotions as my inner demons battled each other. Two weeks ago, I pumped five slugs into the chest of a fifteen-year-old boy. He emptied an MP-5 machine pistol at my partner and me. You hear about things like that ruining a man. It's one thing to drop a hardened criminal, whose life was worthless. But when you kill a kid, it's different. Indeed, I was more empty and confused than I had ever been. I figured that the two weeks of light detail I had been assigned would help. But as time passed, I began to feel like I would never want to return to action. A dark, foreboding, fear had settled in and taken hold. But I couldn't afford to hide anymore. Stu needed me. Stu's death was more than a case. It was my chance at redemption. I put aside the friend in me and brought the detective back into the picture. I had the key filed for evidence and split the scene, leaving the F.B.I. hopefuls to comb the house again.
As I sped out of the wealthy neighborhood, and onto the expressway, I let the exhilaration of my job overtake me. I felt like I was over my trauma of a few weeks ago, or at least far enough ahead of it to do my job. I couldn't help but thank Stu. While I wasn't able to save his life, his death might have saved mine.