Mystery Tribune / Issue Nº13

Left-Footed Angels-1

Left-Footed Angelsby Reed Farrel Coleman

The baby, her baby, was dead. These days that counted as a big so what, a sneeze, a blink, a fart. Less. Death was coming for us all. Nothing revelatory in that. The difference being that now we knew the date it would arrive, give or take. As she sat there across from me, mascara tears making a mess of her face, I thought about the myriad shows on the History Channel and Nat Geo concerning the end of the world. Apocalypse 101. They got it wrong. No Four Horsemen. No asteroid nor comet. Not a plague. Not nuclear winter. The final f**k you! was courtesy of the earth herself, ridding her skin of the crawling fleas of which I was one.

I didn’t bother asking her about the county medical examiner’s verdict. When everyone’s going to die of the same cause, the COD of a single infant is rendered as moot as keeping count of left-footed angels. But some people, like the woman across the desk, paid for independent autopsies. Paid? Bartered more likely. As the hours passed, money was decreasingly valuable. Might as well have tried to pay with a pocketful of angels, left-footed, pin dancing or otherwise. She seemed to have read my mind and slid a rectangle of tri-folded papers across the desktop. I scanned the pages like I was actually reading or cared.

“You can see for yourself, Detective Connor, the doctor says—”

“Call me Ish.”

She tilted her head at me like a confused puppy, an angry one. “What? Are you really trying to be funny?”

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t actually sorry, but said it anyway. “I’m not a detective, not anymore.”

That much was true. I’d been on the job for seventeen years, Brooklyn South Homicide for the last six of those. Since Red Sunday four years ago, I had been reassigned twice. Both times with a move farther away from the coast. Each time as one force was dissolved and melded into another. First, there was Binghamton and the blending of the NYPD with the state police. Then came the move to Cincinnati and the creation of the Federal Inland Police Department. That assignment was a relatively brief one. By then the center could no longer hold. Things fell apart, my marriage included. So when the orders came for us to move to Chicago from the federal employee housing camp set up on the grounds of the old GE jet engine plant in Evendale, I put in my papers with the FIPD. Jillian put in her papers with me. She went west somewhere. I went back east as far as the Atlantic allowed. This was around the time that “Surfin’ USA” was banned from radio airplay.

“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t actually sorry, but said it anyway. “I’m not a detective, not anymore.”

“Not that,” she said, tears dried. “I know you’re not a detective. I’ve been to every law enforcement agency this side of the Hudson. If any of them had acted, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

“What then?”

“Ish. What kind of a name is that?”

I laughed my first genuine laugh in months. “I’m half Irish, half Jewish. Ish. I get guilt coming and going, institutional and personal. Though it says Rob on the door, my given name is Ruben.”

She smiled with half her mouth. It had been my experience that women discussing their murdered babies don’t do whole-mouth smiles even when you’re being clever. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, neither stunning nor ugly, Mary Johnson was as generic as her name. An unremarkable flower on a wallpaper print with a thousand of the same flower. I found it odd that I cared about her appearance. While so many other things had fallen away, I wondered why beauty should still be meaningful to me. She smelled of too sweet perfume and of a week without a shower. Not uncommon these days. I actually couldn’t be sure it wasn’t me who needed bathing.

Half-smile gone, she said, “I’m here because I have nowhere else to go, Ish.”

There might have been a time when a comment like that about being a desperate last resort might’ve wounded my pride. But dying men can’t afford the luxury of pride and like the rest of us, all I wanted was some form of hope. i***t! Good detectives, the smart ones, let themselves get the hope beat out of them early on. My father’s Irish side didn’t allow for that. Besides, what else was there to do but work? Marking the days off on the calendar didn’t seem like much of an option. I looked back down at the independent coroner’s report. “James died over a year ago, is that right, Mrs. Johnson?”

“James was murdered.”

I read through the report in earnest and I let her stew. Silence made people uncomfortable, an interrogator’s most effective tool. It was pure torture now, especially when the death clock is ticking. It motivates unspoken, one-sided deal making with the Almighty abandoner.

“I don’t recognize the doctor’s name, but his post mortem seems thorough.”

It was that, but his conclusion was inconclusive. COD: Undetermined of possibly suspicious origin. It smacked of giving the client what the client wanted to hear. She’s convinced the baby was murdered. That’s what she wants to believe here. So, while I can’t declare it a homicide, I can give her dark hope.

“What did it cost you, Dr. Ellington’s examination?” I asked.

She squirmed in her chair, face reddening beneath the mascara streaks. That was answer enough. As I suspected, it had cost her more than money, probably much more.

“Never mind. Doesn’t matter. What is it you want from me, exactly?”

Any confusion or embarrassment in her was converted to anger. “Are you f*****g kidding me?” she raged. “I want you to find who killed my son?”

Of course she did, but that’s not why she was here. No one who came to me now was here exclusively for the reason they claimed. She was here for the same reason I was there sitting across from her. She needed to have a cause, a purpose to blot out the ticking of the clock. Then I said something that I was immediately sorry for saying.

“I’ll find the killer. I promise.”

That elicited a reaction I cannot get out of my head. The rage went out of her with impossible speed, her posture rejiggering itself. She wiped away the stains on her cheeks and rolled a coat of fire red lipstick on her mouth. She lifted her sweater over her head to expose a pair of beautifully shaped breasts as easily as she had shaken my hand. Her n*****s were large and a surprising deep brown. She tossed the sweater and undid the snap on her jeans.

“I can blow you over here or would you rather f**k me on your desk? I don’t like the floor. I never liked the floor even with my ex.”

“Stop it!” I ran around from behind the desk, grabbed her sweater, and draped it over her breasts. “Get dressed, for chrissakes!”

“What am I, not your type?” She laughed a sneering laugh, threw the sweater on the chair, and dropped to her knees. She took the zipper tab of my pants between her fingers and pulled. “I’m the best at this. Every man I’ve ever been with says so. They say so because I like it. It’s better when the woman likes it. I like it a lot. I like how men taste. Just let me.”

I slapped her hand away, grabbed her under the armpits, and pulled her to her feet. She broke down again and her voice took on that panicked, truly desperate quality that was finger nails on the blackboard.

“What do you want from me? What do you want me to do? Do you want to f**k me in the—”

I shook her. I shook her hard, so hard she gasped. Eyes wide, she looked genuinely frightened that I might hurt her.

“I don’t want anything from you but details. Now please sit back down and tell me everything.” I repeated my empty promise. “I’ll find the killer.”

This close to the encroaching coastline the salt smell of the sea was strong. I pretended it was okay to smell the ocean this far into Pennsylvania in spite of the fact that it would one day soon fill my lungs and turn me into fish food. I planned to be dead long before that. In Evendale the air stank of sulfur from lava fissures that had ruined shopping mall parking lots and high school football fields. Tiny at first, local annoyances, curiosities. Since the Big Shift, their flows had rendered whole areas of the plain states and the western-most edges of the Midwest uninhabitable. No one stood in awe of Old Faithful anymore, not even the bison. I haven’t gotten the sulfur stink fully out of my nostrils and doubt I ever will. Ever! Ever once implied an amorphous amount of time. Now it had a sell by date.

The address Mary Johnson gave me for Dr. Morris Ellington was in southwestern New Jersey, a well-to-do town of old Victorians and new McMansions situated at the border of the evacuation zone. In another month, it would be inside the zone. When that day came residents would be able to taste the salt air on their tongues and hear the waves at night. By then no one would be there to taste the sea or hear the waves crashing. Most residents were already gone.

The streets were ghost-town empty. I half expected balls of tumbleweed to roll past the front end of my old Crown Vic. It was the romantic in me. The Ford was something I’d bartered for in lieu of a piece of my pension. The rest of the deal was a lump-sum payment for a tenth of its value and an automatic-weapons permit. As D-Day approached, the value of the car and the permit were worth more than the money, especially in BEZ and EZ towns.

The people were gone, but not the insects, squirrels, possums, raccoons, and songbirds, nor the creatures that fed on them. Evacuation orders meant no pets, no exceptions. Something caught my eye on the overgrown lawn of an abandoned Queen Anne Victorian. The whimsical house was covered in rows of fish scale and scalloped siding painted in fairyland purple, pumpkin orange, and forest green. I stopped the Crown Vic and watched as a Rottweiler and a Doberman played snarling tug of war with the bloodied carcass of a huge rabbit that had had its survival instinct bred out of it. Nature red in tooth and claw indeed. The dogs fell backwards on their haunches as the rabbit’s torso ripped apart in a red spray. Unhinged pieces of intestine spewed out onto the lawn. The dogs ran to eat their hard-won meals far away from the inevitable scavengers to come. And come they did. First on scene were two cats, an alley-cat tom and a sleek, blue point Siamese. They were too busy hissing at one another to stop a red-tailed hawk from swooping in and snatching a chunk of the rabbit’s guts. The intestines wriggled like a pale snake clutched in the hawk’s talons as it flew to the top of a nearby telephone pole and began tearing at the raw meat with its beak. Then there were the crows. I heard the chorus cawing, mocking me, before I saw them. A thousand black-feathered ovals in the trees, waiting. For exactly what I didn’t pretend to know. I put the car in drive.

I might’ve called Ellington instead of making the trip, but what else did I have to do? Besides, telephone poles in BEZs were useful only to birds of prey. The government cut off phone service to these areas, cell and landline, to help encourage residents inland and to make the roundup of the inevitable stragglers less dangerous for the FIPD.

Ellington’s beautiful Tudor style home was on a two-acre lot surrounded by overgrown hedges and stone walls. The semi-circular driveway up to the house was littered with a carpet of dried leaves, twigs, and windblown debris. The leaf litter was alive with chittering critters scattering in all directions away from the Ford’s tires. The front door looked like the kind that was used only for parties and formal occasions, so I veered off toward the four-car garage and the side entrance.

I donned my Phillies cap—when in Rome ... No one wanted to see a Mets cap here—grabbed the M4 off the passenger seat, slung it over my shoulder, and went to the door. I knocked and waited, looking up at the perpetually gray skies. I wondered if I would ever see the sun before I pulled the plug. Ever. There was that word again. Scientists agreed on the big things, but busied themselves bickering about minor s**t like whether or not we’d seen the last of the sun. Between the volcanic ash and magma-heated oceans, most of the science community was pretty firm on the sun being as much a part of our pasts as T. rexes and Caribbean vacations. The islands were already underwater.