An Exaggerated Murder: A Novel Read online

  “Maximus, tell me it’s lucrative.”

  “Not … lucrative,” Max said, pausing to find the most accurate word, “but … guaranteed.”

  “Just a sec.”

  Trike coughed violently for fifteen seconds; coughs like mountaintop-removal mining.

  “Sorry,” he said after catching his breath, “lungs still adjusting to life without tar. Anyway, seems a good time to tell you the reward money for the last case fell through.”

  “The money … you’re kidding.”

  “You think coughing like that left me enough energy to kid?”

  “How can they do that?”

  Trike shrugged. “Apparently they sneaked some unwritten must-find-her-alive clause into the contract.”

  “All about closure until it’s time to sign a check.”

  “Nah, Maxilicious. They’re just rich fucks and this is how you get to be and get to remain a rich fuck.”

  “Lawyer provide … advice?”

  “Lawyer provided this exact advice: ‘Though you find yourself in a very actionable position, there is no guarantee you would win the case, and should you lose, you would not only be out the reward money, you’d most likely have to cover their expenses and court fees as well, and—this is where it really gets bad—would very likely be subject to a counter-suit.’ ”

  “So if we were rich enough … we could afford to recover the money we earned.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Max grunted. “You gotta go to the Joyce House—”

  “Reclusive billionaire vanishes in the middle of the night, baffling the police?”

  “Did I hear … a question mark?” Max asked.

  “Trying to be humble. Did it work?”

  “No. Butler found a bloodstain in the study … Yeah, Joyce is gone. Police want you to investigate.”

  “Must be a Harlem sunset with a Harrod accent to get me called in morning of.”

  “Yeah, they implied … that.”

  “Standard consulting contract?”

  “Standard consulting contract.”

  “Well, then M—” Another coughing fit cut Trike off. He spit five-sevenths of a teaspoon of lung butter into the wastebasket.

  “And this is for your health.”

  “If we are to trust the Surgeon General of these United States of America—and if we have reached a point in our lives when we can no longer trust the Surgeon General of these United States of America then greater tragedies are building their own catastrophic momentum—then for the last eight years I have filled my body with toxins, and thus it is only expected and logical for my body to go through a violent purging process.”

  “Sure. The Man with the Facts said it was urgent.”

  “Well, Max, it looks like we’ll be eating this week.”

  “You’ve been known to drink the checks.”

  “Fear not, Max. Two grateful clients have recently expressed their gratitude with booze.”

  “Not fearing. Anyway, the address—”

  “Was mentioned in a fluff newspaper piece on restoring Victorian houses, three years, two months, three weeks, and four days ago. I’ll meet you at the office when I’m done at the scene.”

  “See you then, boss.”

  Trike hung up and tossed the phone onto the nightstand. While there, his hand opened the drawer and rummaged for cigarettes. It emerged clutching nicotine patches.

  A portion of his brain imagined how wonderful and perfect and awesome a cigarette would be, how thoroughly it would rouse his sluggish brain from the warm folds of sleep to the urgent intellectual challenges facing him this morn, how definitively it would drive away the clinging specters of dreams and sleep without dreams, allowing the tasks and responsibilities of waking life to stand at attention before him, how completely it would propel his motion from the bedroom to the kitchen for coffee to the bathroom to shower away the stubborn stuck-on bits of sleepish muss—

  “No!”

  Trike slammed his fist on the nightstand.

  “If I can tell a Russian mobster sticking a gun in my face his mother’s morning-after borscht was bland, I can not smoke a fucking cigarette.”

  He snatched open a patch and slapped it on his bicep.

  He dragged his ass out of bed as if the daylight fit him for a Chicago overcoat. He rooted around for clothes that didn’t smell too bad and found a pair of gray slacks, a black button-up cotton shirt, and the quiet red tie he believed matched everything. He spread the outfit on the bed and gave it a quick vodka spritz. Then he got socks, underwear, and an undershirt from the bureau.

  He staggered to the kitchen and took a pitcher of coffee out of the fridge and with him to the bathroom. He showered, leaning out to guzzle from the pitcher. After the shower—and twenty-five ounces of coffee—he brushed his teeth, dressed, and returned the pitcher to the kitchen.

  On his way out, he slipped into a pair of army surplus boots and put on his trench coat. He set a gray fedora on his head, as if vodka-spritzed clothes were a “look” that sustained a “finishing touch.”

  “Missing billionaire,” he mused as he closed the door, “just might make some bills go away.”

  THE CONCEALED DUMBWAITER

  Depending on the absorbency of the carpet, the bloodstain in the study required between 1.9 and 2.3 pints of blood, a range not insignificant to the blood’s original owner. The picture window looking onto the back lawn was nailed shut and had been nailed shut since renovation created it. The circumnavigating bookshelves were floor-to-ceiling; however, the books on the top two shelves, each bearing a single letter on its spine, as if the letter were its title, were fake, which became reasonable when no ladder, step-stool, or other top-two-shelves-accessing apparatus was observed. In the last three days, the real mahogany executive desk had been moved three inches to the northwest, which just had to be way more effort than it was worth. The two-pen stand on the desk and its pens were decorative. The energy-saver lightbulb in the banker’s lamp on the desk was out, pairing the also-out energy-saver lightbulb in the art noveau floor lamp next to the Queen Anne wing chair. And you’d think with that chair and that lamp, the matching ottoman would have shown more wear. Trike walked slowly and precisely around the room, gathered 327 more distinct observations in his sixty-three-second circuit, and concluded that the utilizer of this study knew the space was ideal for real work, even if she was not entirely sure what real work should be done.

  The lead detective was shouting in Trike’s ear as he walked.

  “Listen, Mr. Augustine, I don’t know who decided it was shit-in-my-cereal day at the office and called you here, but let me be as clear as a fucking bell banging against your shit head—”

  Trike noticed what little weight Horn-Rims had managed to lose in his face had ended up in his gut.

  “This is my fucking case—”

  Horn-Rims’s maroon tie was new.

  “So as long as it’s my fucking case, I tell you where you go—”

  A desperate gift from a family member who knew the only thing Horn-Rims really ever asked for was a little justice in this sick world.

  “I tell you who you get to talk to—”

  A previous gift, maybe last year, should have been perfect, but somehow it didn’t work out. And Horn-Rims don’t do entertainment. Unless you call rooting for the Mets entertainment.

  “And what you get to see—”

  “Do me three favors,” Trike interrupted, “shut up so I can detect, re-gift that treadmill your sons got you last year to your brother, because you’re never going to use it and he could stand to shed a few pounds, and send The Man with the Facts over so I can move this tea party past the crumpets course.”

  Horn-Rims took a deep breath through his nose. You could hear his ulcer pulsing.

  He said, “Look, if you were half as smart as you think you are, you’d know there’s some fucked-up shit going on to get you called in on the first day of an investigation, and just walk your freakish brain and your arro
gant asshole right out of here and leave this to the people who don’t get to choose which cases they solve.” He looked about to say more, but instead, nodded The Man with the Facts over and left.

  A small part of Trike’s brain wondered if Horn-Rims spent any of his early career yelling at The Old-Timer. He caught his hands digging for cigarettes in his trench-coat pocket.

  The Man with the Facts appeared at Trike’s left shoulder and recited into his ear: “Joyce was reported missing this morning at seven forty-two a.m. The Butler entered the study to bring Joyce breakfast. The Butler lives off-premises, address available upon request pending approval from the supervising detective. According to The Butler, it was not unusual for Joyce to sleep in his study, and if so, The Butler would bring breakfast to Joyce there. The Butler knew Joyce had slept in the study the preceding night because on those nights Joyce does not wake up in time to get the newspaper from the mailbox before The Butler does and on the morning in question The Butler found the newspaper in the mailbox. The Butler saw the bloodstain immediately upon entering, set the breakfast tray down, and called the police from the phone in the adjacent hallway. No signs of forced entry or struggle. No forensic evidence besides the blood has been found yet, though we are waiting for the results of initial fingerprinting. The house is faced by only one neighboring domicile, a little white house across the street that has been abandoned for eight years. None of the nearest neighbors reported any kind of disturbance in the night or early morning. Interviews are being conducted. Family, friends, acquaintances, and business partners are being questioned, though we could not locate a single friend who’d had any meaningful contact with Joyce in the last five years. Witness are being sought. The house is being thoroughly investigated.”

  The Man with the Facts started to leave. Trike stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Do me a favor before you go,” Trike said. “Pass this on to your supervising officer.”

  Trike stepped over the bloodstain to the desk and nudged one of the pens in the decorative stand down. A section of the bookcase on the western wall swung open, revealing a steel door with six key and two combination locks. The cops groaned, cursed, shook their heads.

  “You guys open that and get back to me,” Trike said as he left the room. “I’ll be setting an educational example by walking around with my eyes open.” Trike’s hand jumped toward his pocket again. The exact moment he would have lit up under the NO SMOKING sign.

  In the hallway, he observed the portrait of Joyce, depicting Joyce wearing a Latin Quarter hat and holding an ashplant.

  Trike started with all the purposeful rooms—kitchen, bedroom, living room, bathrooms—but a mansion that big with one resident is going to have a lot of rooms without inherent purpose. Having the right number of knives said something important about you, but so did filling a space that didn’t dictate its own use. And Joyce was saying something with all those other rooms. Something in the voice of a museum curator. Or a lunatic. Or a lunatic curator.

  They were organized around a precise decorative system. Every room had a central table with an archaeological magazine featuring a cover story about Troy on display. Every room had some kind of nautical picture on the wall, including a cruise brochure, a magazine illustration, several hotel art watercolors, and a disconcertingly accurate copy of the stolen Rembrandt. Every room had an image of a three-masted ship. Every room had a minotaur figurine.

  There were also objects idiosyncratic to their room: a tray of Stuart coins, a cracked looking glass, a faded 1860 print of Heenan boxing Sayers, a heavily annotated paperback edition of Hamlet, an ashtray with “THE SENSE OF BEAUTY LED ME HERE” written on it, a hard plastic name tag with a pin-style clasp for “The Name Achilles Bore Among the Women,” and a pocket map of Dublin.

  Those, plus thousands more observations stored in case subsequent information engendered relevance, led Trike to hypothesize an explanation for the rooms: “Might just take the whole Joyce thing a little too seriously.” Trike found his hands again doing things done when hands held cigarettes.

  Three cops were sounding a hallway wall outside the last sitting room Trike had inspected. He paused. His right hand covered his mouth. He remembered all the distinct faces he’d seen at the house. Twenty-five. Way more cops than he’d seen at any other crime scene.

  “Excuse me, fellas,” Trike said. “Can I bend your ear for a sec?”

  The oldest one barely gave Trike a look. “HR said we don’t have to put up with any of your shit, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Yes, you’re sounding the wall for passages and hiding spots, the gaps, crevices, and hollow spaces that catch the silt of order and law eroding into chaos and crime; those repositories of guilt-ridden secrets in potential in every three-dimensional structure; the flaws in every surface that give to life both its endless procession of problems and sorrows and everything that makes those problems and sorrows worth dealing with; and why, why would you be searching for secrets in a hallway wall two stories from the study? Well, if you asked, me I’d say it’s because none of you has any fucking clue what’s going on, which is doubly, nay, triply tragic because you’ve already missed the concealed dumbwaiter, but, despite your aggressive absence of cooperation, I’m just going to ask my question anyway. Why are so many of you here?”

  “We’re being thorough,” one of them offered.

  Trike walked to the wall they had just finished sounding and pressed a concealed button. A panel slid down revealing a dumbwaiter.

  “Well, that’s one answer,” Trike said. “I’d leave you with a ‘let me know if you find anything, I’ll be investigating the attic,’ but that would be embarrassing for all of us.”

  He pulled down the attic stairs.

  “Attic’s empty,” one of the cops said.

  “Dumbwaiter,” Trike said, ascending.

  The attic was empty.

  It was the size of the entire footprint of the house and it was empty. Except for the paths shuffled by preceding investigators, the layer of dust on the floor was uniform. It made you whisper.

  “Too uniform,” Trike whispered.

  He followed the tracks of the cops and sure enough, except for where they walked, the dust was uniform within millimeters. Decades of dust spread evenly.

  “That’s impossible,” Trike thought.

  He stopped and watched the dust slowly float in the light of the one window. He focused on one square foot of light and counted out a minute. Then he extrapolated the amount of dust movement that could reasonably occur in a minute and concluded that there was no less than three days and no more than nine days of redistribution present in the dust as he saw it. His hands were tapping together like a cigarette were there.

  There was no point to an empty attic.

  Trike said out loud to himself, “The intended effects of this arranged situation are threefold. First fold, some doniker-driver of a cop walks up here, says to himself, ‘Why the fuck have an empty attic?’ and leaves. Second fold, a cop with some blood in his brain says, ‘This is some weird shit, keeping an attic empty for decades.’ In fold three, we find a cop who actually uses the blood in his brain and he or she says, ‘Hey, Mac or Marcy, take a good look at the dust. This place was designed to look empty.’ And in the unconsidered fourth fold, I arrive, observe, and say this to court: ‘Dust never settles evenly, nothing that settles settles evenly, so if someone wanted to make this look like it hadn’t been used in decades it would have been more convincing and required less effort to just throw dust around and open the window for a day. Instead, the action of spreading, and thus of construction, is revealed by its own precision. May it please the court, Your Honor, whoever did this wanted it to look synthetic.’ The astute judge would then ask, ‘But why the fuck would someone want to make the attic obviously, synthetically empty?’ ”

  Trike inspected the single latticed octagonal window that looked onto the front lawn, the street, and the abandoned little white house across the street.
He noticed nothing of note about it. He walked back to the stairs, stepping in his footprints. At the top of the stairs he looked back. “Maybe it fits with the Ulysses stuff in all the rooms,” he thought, “but I don’t see the reference.”

  On his way down, he made sure the right amount of space was between the attic floor and the ceiling below. There was. But with the right tools you could hide a body anywhere.

  Trike went to the study to check on the door. Instead of a locksmith, a battering ram, and an opening, there were three FBI agents. Horn-Rims stormed out. The Man with the Facts appeared at Trike’s shoulder.

  He whispered into Trike’s ear, “FBI agents appeared exactly thirty-seven-point-two minutes after the call to the locksmith was placed and one-point-four minutes after the locksmith had started on the door, and instructed us that whatever may or may not be on the other side of the door was beyond our jurisdiction and we were to cease all further investigation into the door and what may or may not lie on the other side of it. Horn-Rims also instructed me to tell you, quote, ‘That asshole deserves whatever the fuck this is. Let him talk to whoever he wants and see whatever he wants. He can name an ulcer after me,’ end quote.”

  Trike’s right hand covered his mouth while he imagined what could be on the other side of the aforementioned door. Secret passage. Reclusive billionaire. Federal agents. Barely enough data to suspect.

  He said to The Man with the Facts, “Give me The Butler’s address, I’d like to talk to him myself. Then send me the full report.”

  “The report, as it stands, will arrive via bike messenger between three p.m. and five p.m. today. Here is The Butler’s address.” The Man with the Facts handed Trike a piece of paper. “I am requesting,” The Man with the Facts continued, “that you pass along an informal greeting from me to Max when you next encounter him.”

  “Will do, my man, will do,” Trike said.

  THE FUCKING NEWS TRUCKS

  As Trike headed down the walkway, he partitioned just enough consciousness to exterior awareness to keep from walking into the street. The rest was organizing the Joyce House data into his detecting structure. That part of his brain was a sorting conveyor belt shaking bits of data into their appropriate memory boxes; direct evidence, one remove, tangential, milieu, and the surrounding area of the crime, because one could never be sure what subsequent revelations might create a need for.