A Taste of Old Revenge

CHAPTER ONE A stale breeze played through the dead man’s hair. An unwanted breeze. A breeze filled with malaise. The old man was slumped across the open cavity of an accounts ledger, his face squashed between the pages of a thick accounting book. The body looked remarkably like a piece of trash carelessly tossed onto an old kitchen table. Or maybe like a discarded broken doll long forgotten by the one who had once loved it. As I bent down for a closer inspection, I could see a clearly defined hole in the back of the old man's hairless cranium. There was remarkably little blood. What little blood had seeped out had created a tiny rivulet down the man’s neck and formed a dark puddle about the size of a man’s palm on the brown pages of the accounting book. The blood was not fresh. Inspecting the wound, I got the impression of precision. A surgeon’s frugality of effort. Or a craftsman’s sure touch in a grisly occupation. Standing up and frowning, another impression occurred to me. Premeditation. Coldly calculated and flawlessly executed. And who said a murder had to be messy? The dead man's arms were pushed across the table on either side of the oversized open book. Between the fingers of the corpse's right hand was the butt of a cigarette, with ash about two inches long still clinging precariously to the filter. In front of the ledger was an ashtray almost overflowing with the discarded flotsam usually associated with a heavy smoker. There was a distinct blue haze of cigarette smoke hanging in midair above the corpse's head and the room smelled of old tobacco and sweat. Added to the mixture was the sweet aroma of automotive body putty. Above the dead man's head was a single light fixture swinging slightly in the breeze. Creating a surreal film noir touch to the crime scene. The fixture hung from the ceiling on a long and frayed electrical wire. As it swung in a rhythmic pendulum motion, the oscillating light created oddly contorted shadows that danced a frenetic but silent mime across the walls and floor like some madman's macabre nightmare. It wasn't much of an office. In the middle of the room was an old kitchen table, three office chairs, and the dead man. To one side was a dilapidated old sofa so threadbare I could see the springs were about to pop out and give the next person who sat down on it an intimate surprise. In one corner was a set of three six-drawer filing cabinets. The floor was old green tiles worn through to the bare wood in front of the single door, which opened toward the steep stairs. The stairs led down from the office to the main garage floor below. A garage which, for me, held paradise. Below, in the dim half-light of a cavern, the cement floor was filled with classic cars from about six different decades and a dozen different countries. It was the cold steel setting on the garage floor that kept singing alluring charms to me. I wanted to forget about the body. Bodies, in my line of occupation, I see almost on a daily basis. But the sensual curving lines of a black ‘29 SSK Mercedes in the far corner of the shop, and the seemingly plain-looking dark red ‘40 Ford two-door coupé, captured my full attention. In the middle of the floor was a ‘52 Buick convertible with its top down, painted pale blue, with brand new white vinyl interior. The Buick's huge chrome grill gleamed in a lustful display of American excess. The paint was so fresh and the white interior so new I would have sworn it had just rolled off the assembly line. I was like some buck-toothed, pimply faced kid with a pocket full of money, standing in a Buick dealer's showroom and aching to buy my first new car. Sitting next to the Buick was a ‘64 Chevrolet Corvette coupé stripped down to the bare plastic body and sitting on four rather solid looking floor jacks. The doors were off, the windows were out, and it was devoid of an interior. Some artisan was carefully patching the nicks and scratches on the ‘Vette's plastic body with the delicate touch of a brain surgeon. It was covered with a coating of red primer and waiting for its first coat of paint. There was a tool bench beside the car's gutted remains and on it were an air hose and a paint gun. At some point during the next two or three days, I thought to myself, someone in this city was going to be the proud owner of an immaculately restored ‘Vette. And dammit, it wasn’t going to be me. Also on the garage floor was a brown ‘29 Lincoln sedan, a red '58 MG two-seater, and a massive looking black '41 Cadillac two-door sedan. All of them were in various states of disassembly, with the cement floor around each car littered with discarded body panels and disassembled engine parts. But the jewel in this crown lay underneath an old tarp in a corner of the shop. It was a perfectly restored ‘49 Jaguar XK-120 in British Racing Green. I have to admit when I took a look at this one, I felt sick in the stomach. Looking at that car, holding the tarp over my head as I gazed upon its sensual curves of cool metal, the sight brought back a lot of memories. As a kid living on the farm, the dream of someday owning an XK-120 and touring over back country highways from one end of the country to the next, constantly drifted into my thoughts. Even now, more than fifty years after rolling off the showroom floor, it looked like it could go like hell and scare the bejesus out of every motorcycle cop in the country. But all I could do was admire it and shake my head. Reluctantly, I dropped the covering and slipped back into the practiced routine of investigating a murder. Climbing the rickety stairs, I kept glancing over my shoulder and grinning in sheer admiration at what sat silently on the floor behind me. But walking into the office and blending into the blue banks of haze floating over the body brought me back to the situation at hand. The city pays me to be a homicide detective. Not an art critic. Too bad. In front of the ragged looking wooden office chair the corpse was slumped in was the empty brass casing of a .22 caliber long rifle cartridge. Frank Morales, my partner, was kneeling beside it and pushing it around with the eraser of a pencil when I walked into the room. He looked up at me when I walked in, grinned, and began clucking like a hen as he started shaking his head. “This doesn't look promising, Tonto,” he said, still grinning and shaking his head, “this doesn't look promising at all.” I pushed my hands into the pockets of my trench coat and smirked. “I suppose you're gonna tell me it’s my turn to grouse through the pig pen.” Frank grinned and nodded his head as he looked up and winked. “You got it, partner. This is our third stiff and it looks like a stinker. I'll play along as the dumb sidekick and do the paperwork. But you've got the brains to figure this one out. And buddy, I got a feeling it ain't gonna be easy.” He stood up, still grinning, and dropped the pencil into his shirt pocket before looking back at the body. Frank is about the same height as I am but roughly a foot wider and eighty pounds heavier. He has a head shaped in ninety-degree angles, and a nose which is, more or less, spread across his face like someone spreading butter across a piece of bread. He has beady brown eyes, and a chin which is made of reinforced concrete. And no neck. Yeah, that’s right, no neck. Just a head and a set of shoulders about the size of a cement mixer. How he swivels his head from side to side I’ve never figured out. He's not fat but he is large and solid. He's not slow, which surprises a lot of people. His reflexes are dangerously fast, and he has two hams for fists which can punch the lights out of an aroused gorilla. He claims he's dumb. But don’t believe it, brother. I know his IQ is somewhere around the same numbers the scales in my bathroom say I weigh, and he’s got more college degrees than I’ve got fingers. Some people collect comic books as a hobby. Hell, I collect muscle cars and first-edition, signed books. Frank collects college degrees. He wears clothes like most nine-year-old kids wear a coating of mud after a summer shower. God only knows if he's ever ironed a shirt. But don’t for a moment underestimate the guy. You do and you’ll pay for it in the end. And me? Just an ex-jock who almost had a chance to play in the NFL. A dream which almost came true. But now, like so many things, just water under the bridge. Now I am a detective, like Frank, in the South Side Division. I live in a warehouse where I collect my cars and work on them in my spare time. The ground floor is the garage. The second floor is like an oversized loft I’ve converted into a decent habitat. And get this. I did the work myself. No help. No contractors. Hell, I’m as surprised as you are. I actually have a talent for working with a hammer and saw. And I’m not bad at wallpapering and plastering. If this gig at being a cop doesn’t work out, who knows? I might start a home remodeling business. Frank and I have been partners for a long time. Long enough to know when to argue and when not to. When Frank grinned like that, and had that twinkle in his eyes, I knew there was no use arguing. “The guy's name is Abraham Polanski. He is…was… the owner of Polanski's Garage. Specializing in restorations. His driver's license says he’s really old. And buddy, if you'll look at his right forearm, you'll see something interesting.” I took a step closer to the body and looked at the outstretched right arm. Just above the wrist was a tattoo. A long list of numbers, nearly faded out completely from years of hard work and being in the sun. But it was there. “h*******t survivor,” I said, looking back at Frank. “Looks it,” nodded my bullet-headed friend. “And does the last name ring any bells?” I mumbled the last name over a couple of times as I reached up and loosened the knot on my tie and quickly glanced at my watch. It was a quarter past one in the morning. Frank and I had been working for more than twelve hours. He was tired. I was tired. I had a feeling Abraham Polanski probably was damn tired as well. “Polanski, Polanski.” I kept repeating slowly. And then it hit me, “Aaron Polanski, the lawyer.” “The one and the same.” Frank nodded, grinning. “Daddy?” I asked, using a finger to point at the corpse. “It's not his younger brother.” I made a face and shook my head in disgust. Aaron Polanski was a high-price lawyer who did criminal work for only those who could afford it. His law offices were on top of a building overlooking the cliffs of the Brown River where it collided with the Little Brown. He and his partners had the entire floor. His connections ran from the river docks all the way up to the state house. He was a lawyer who liked to rub shoulders with the powerful and influential. He knew what real power felt like and he wore the mantle of the Chosen Few with a deft ease. However, into this power broker's life a deep measure of tragedy was about to come barging in, and it would fall on our shoulders to go over and tell him his father had been murdered. “There's something else I thought you might find interesting,” Frank said, grinning again, as he lifted a hand up and motioned with his index finger to follow him. We went down the creaking and swaying old stairs to the garage floor. As I followed Frank across the floor past the powder blue Buick, I ran my hand over the cold steel of its right rear fender lovingly, then went on to the back of the garage. On the other side of the '64 Corvette Frank knelt down and pulled out of his shirt pocket his ubiquitous pencil. “See? A footprint. Fresh. I think it was our killer.” On the cement floor was the clear print of a man's shoe outlined in what appeared to be automotive oil. It was between the 'Vette and the MG and hard to see, but it was the only footprint on an otherwise scrupulously clean shop floor. Kneeling to get a closer look at it I felt the sharp breath of the winter's frigid air slap me in the face. “Yeah, I felt it too when I found this,” Frank said, looking at me and nodding. “It's coming from a broken windowpane over there on that wall.” We stood up and walked over to the window. I crunched on glass as I stepped up to the window for a closer look. It was a large window with all the panes of glass painted in with a thick coat of green paint. On the other side of the window an alley ran down past the building for the entire block. The wind was as cold as anything coming off an Arctic tundra, filled with snow, and not indicating it was going to get any friendlier. Braving the wind, I stepped closer to look at the busted windowpane. “There's a piece of thread sticking in the window, Frank. See?” Frank stepped up, bent forward, and squinted to see in the gloom. He saw it, grunted, then stepped back and out of the wind. “The guy must've bashed in the window, opened it, then slid in and walked across the garage.” I nodded as I stepped back and looked down at the broken glass. Roughly ten long pieces of glass littered the clean floor. “Where did he step into the oil?” “Huh?” “That footprint you showed me. He stepped into a puddle of oil somewhere. Where?” Frank looked at me with an expressionless face then shrugged and turned to start hunting for the oil spill. As he moved off into the middle of the garage, I turned to look at the window. A quick glance was enough to reveal that someone had reached in, unlocked the window, then yanked the window up and climbed in. The window had not been opened for years and several layers of paint covering the seams where window met wall created a perfect cement. But even in the gloom of half-light I could see someone with powerful muscles had managed to slide the window open. Frank came back over to where I was and shrugged. He could find no oil spill on the garage floor. I could understand that part. Old man Polanski obviously was a man who had been a stickler for keeping the place clean. The office upstairs might look run like the nightly digs of a back-alley wino. But the work area, and especially the concrete garage floor, was clean enough to have a surgical unit in use. So, there it was. If the garage floor was clean enough to eat off of where did the killer get the oil on his shoes? “Let's take another look at that print,” we both said at the same time. Somehow, we both got our bodies between the 'Vette and the MG. Kneeling, we kept gazing at the print for some time before either of us spoke. “It looks like oil,” Frank muttered, scowling as he stuck a finger into the outer edge of the black stuff and lifted it up to take a delicate whiff. “But it ain't.” “It's not?” “No. Smells different. And it doesn't feel like oil. Or at least not automotive oil.” Hearing a noise behind me, I turned and looked over my shoulder to see Officer Sancho Rodriguez shivering visibly from the cold outside. He and his partner, Arthur Simpson, were the first two to respond to the report of gunshots. They had been out in the alley looking for clues, and as I stood up and turned to face the shivering, blue-lipped young officer. I could not help but grin. The kid was standing in a puddle of water from the snow melting off his heavy wind slicker. “Can you talk, or do we need to use a blow torch to thaw you out?” Sancho grinned and then visibly began shaking violently as the warmth of the building began to bring feeling back into his thin frame. “Naw, I'm all right. But… but I thought you might want to see something Artie found outside.” “Okay, where is it and we'll go take a look see,” Frank grunted, but lifted a finger up to point at the rookie patrol officer. “But you keep that little ass of yours inside until the blood begins flowing again. We'll send Artie in as well.” We found Artie Simpson outside in the alley and beside the garage window. Artie, like his partner, was shivering in the cold, arms clasped around his chest, standing in a snowbank deep enough to graze the lower end of his kneecaps. Like his partner, Artie was tall and thin and not built to be wandering about in deep snow with a thirty mile an hour wind howling down the empty alley. We hurried over to him just as he pointed to the brick wall and the window. “Look at the right side of the window!” he yelled over the howling wind and blowing snow. “I think it's a bullet hole and a splatter of blood!” We nodded, told him to get inside and get some hot coffee, and call headquarters to see when the forensic team would arrive. He nodded gratefully and hurried away as we stepped up to the wall for a closer look. He was right. It was a bullet hole and there was a rather large splash of blood and flesh on the brick. The bullet had not penetrated through the brick. But it had left a sizable gash in the old stone. There was enough blood covering the wall to indicate someone had been on the receiving end before it had touched the wall. We both grunted, looked at each other, then turned to look at the alley. Twenty feet down from the window we found another s***h of blood on the bricks. But this time it was a long arching streak of dark crimson smeared across the cold stone. It looked like the signature of a man who, at one point, had leaned against the wall to get some strength back after being wounded, but due to the loss of blood had slid to one side when he lost consciousness. In the snow beside the scarlet s***h was a set of wide and deep tracks which indicated the victim had collapsed to his knees before struggling back to his feet. Beside the footprints were large round holes where the victim's blood had splattered into the dirty snow. Hot blood melting the grimy gray-white sludge clear to the pavement. Also in the alley was a set of tire tracks. They were relatively fresh, and from the way they cut into the deep snow, it looked as if the vehicle had flown down through the alley at high speed. “Someone tried to run the guy over?” Frank asked, looking at me skeptically. “Or maybe someone trying to get away from something he shouldn't have seen.” “Who'd have an honest right to be in this alley at that time in the morning? Naw. I think someone tried to run over the poor bastard who caught it. Jesus, the guy's lost so much blood he's got to be around here somewhere. Probably covered with snow by now.” “Let's go back into the garage. We'll ask for another squad car to come down and give us a hand. We also need to check the walls in the alley for more bullet holes.” It was beginning to snow again. It gave that feeling it was going to snow all night and not let up. As we trudged back through the thick goop to the garage's back door, I paused to look at the ugly gouge in the brick where the bullet had struck. It had to have been a big caliber. Maybe a .357 magnum or a 9-millimeter. Who was the second victim? The murderer of the old guy? Where was the second victim's body? Surely no one could lose the amount of blood covering the walls of the old building and still live. Why had the old concentration camp survivor been murdered? Nothing had been apparently stolen from the garage. And why use a .22 caliber? That was a kind of weapon a professional hit man might use. Or a government agent. It was not the choice of weapon for the local gangs in this neighborhood. Why was the old man sitting in his office, alone, at this time of the night when he got popped? I wouldn't know for sure until the medical examiner did the autopsy, but I had a feeling the first murder went down about two hours ago. That would make it about 11:00 p.m. Did the old man work that late often? Was he expecting someone? And why kill the killer? And… Jesus. I shook my head to clear the questions out and then hurriedly followed Frank into the warmth of the garage and closed the door behind me. There were just too many goddamn questions. Just too many questions. If I didn't step back and just allow the investigation to go about its normal routine I'd go nuts. As if I wasn't already nuts.