Black Cat Mystery Magazine #10

THE LAST GASP-1

THE LAST GASPH.K. SLADE

Senior Detective Ambrose Broyhill kicked open the door of his unmarked, and the sticky summer heat poured in like swamp water. Instantly, his shirt stuck to his skin, and he felt his eyebrows catch an errant drop of sweat.

“Humph,” he grunted as he hefted his great bulk out of the car. The old detective thought, This is a younger man’s game. And normally it was, but with three gang-related shootings already that morning, the most senior member of the homicide squad was the only investigator free to respond.

Bright yellow crime scene tape sagged under the summer heat. A single patrol officer manned the perimeter, a rookie the same age as Broyhill’s grandson. That, even more than Broyhill’s personal presence, spoke to just how thinly stretched they were.

A murder scene like this should have a dozen cops, he thought and mopped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. It’s getting scary how few of us are left.

“Just you?” he asked the young officer. Broyhill nearly had to shout to be heard over the yapping dog in the next-door neighbor’s garage. The kid stepped out of his shady spot on the porch and squinted at the glare of the midmorning sun.

“Um, no sir, Detective Broyhill. Officer Hampton is in the house with the body. And the suspect.”

Broyhill raised an eyebrow but didn’t waste time hassling the kid. Did his voice actually crack? Better to just get inside and talk to Friday. Protocol said an officer shouldn’t be by herself with a murder suspect, but Officer Friday Hampton grew up under the tutelage of her father, the great Tony Hampton. The young prodigy knew what she was about.

Death had a smell, and after thirty years on the job, Broyhill was a connoisseur. He knew the stink of a victim who had defecated themselves in their last moments of terror, knew how different it was from the putrid stench of a week-old corpse. The tiny house smelled, if not fresh, almost as if nothing were wrong at all. If it hadn’t been for the body lying face up in the middle of the room, he’d have bet money his skillset wouldn’t be needed.

“What do you got, Friday?” he asked the weary patrol officer standing between the corpse and the handcuffed man slouching on the couch.

“I am glad to see you, Detective,” the young woman said. The relief in her voice spilled out like water topping a flooded dam. “I didn’t think they were going to be able to send anybody, and I don’t know if I’m up to a full murder investigation all on my lonesome.”

Broyhill was used to that, used to other people setting their problems on his shoulders. He’d been lucky so far, lucky to hold up under the strain for the better part of three decades. In his secret heart of hearts, though, he longed for the day when he wouldn’t have to carry that burden, wouldn’t have to be the dead’s final hope for justice. Until the young bucks learned the ropes, he thought, I have to stay with it.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” he told Friday and put her at ease with a nod.

The detective took notice of the changes in the young woman since the last time he’d seen her. Leaner, wearier, generally more … seasoned. “The way I hear it, you’re a regular crimefighter. Why don’t you tell me what you know, and we’ll take it from there?”

She pointed to the man sitting on the couch. “This is Sebastian. His English is worse than my Spanish, and I don’t speak any Spanish. I wouldn’t even know his name except that I found a Honduran ID on him. No wants or warrants. No record at all. The odds of him being a legal immigrant are fifty to one against. He’s the only person here besides you, me, and the room-temperature fella on the floor over there.”

The man on the couch raised his head at the sound of his name, but nothing in his demeanor nor in his expression indicated he’d understood another word they’d said.

Friday pointed behind Broyhill to the cracked doorframe. “I had to kick the door when I saw the body through the front window. The whole house was locked tight.”

“Translator?” Broyhill asked.

Friday shook her head, her tight braid barely moving. “Gomez is tied up at the hospital on that shooting. Rodriguez is at the jail. You see how it is out there.”

As if to accentuate her point, her radio blared an emergency tone as the dispatcher announced an armed robbery in progress. Clearly frustrated at not being able to respond, Friday frowned and dialed down the volume to a low murmur.

Broyhill had the man on the couch lean forward so he could look at his hands and asked, “What about that corporal on your squad? What’s her name? Sommarriba?”

“She quit two months ago. Couldn’t take the nights and weekends anymore. Went to work for a bank.”

And the thin blue line grows thinner, Broyhill said to himself, then squashed the thought before it reached his face. These young officers don’t need to see an old man like me wallowing. Already enough despair going around.

He studied the house. Cheaply built and worn around the edges, but for all that, neat. The couch and the coffee table looked second-hand, the room’s single floor lamp one of the cheap Walmart models. Oddly, almost uniquely, the room didn’t have a television. In its place hung a framed portrait of the Virgin Mary.

Something yellow/green beneath the couch caught Broyhill’s attention. He bent down to retrieve it, a maneuver complicated by both his paunch and his concern that the suspect might try to kick him. Luckily, neither was an issue this time. Broyhill pulled a tennis ball from under the couch, its felt matted and dirty. He held it up for Sebastian to examine. The man shook his head, either denying ownership of the ball or simply not understanding the situation.

“What brought you here in the first place?” Broyhill asked Friday and tossed the tennis ball to her.

She snatched it out of the air, looked at it, and tossed back. “Nine-one-one hang up. You know, the type that turns out to be nothing a hundred times out of a hundred? I guess it’s only ninety-nine times out of a hundred, now.”

The man on the couch rocked to one side, presumably to alleviate the discomfort of sitting on the lumpy couch for so long, but his eyes never left his own feet. Broyhill waved the tennis ball at him.

“I suppose there is a good reason Sebastian here isn’t in the back seat of your patrol car?”

Friday shrugged, her body armor rising up like a turtle’s shell to touch her angular chin. “If I book him, guilty or not, they’re going to deport him, and I have this thing about not arresting innocent people. If I can be one-hundred percent honest with you, detective, I just don’t think he’s our killer.”

That caught Broyhill’s attention. A gut feeling wasn’t proof, but only the most arrogant of detectives ignored a street cop’s instincts, especially when she’d been on scene for an hour longer than him.

“Why’s that?” he asked as he continued his examination of the crime scene.

“Too calm. I woke him up when I broke down the door, I’d sure of it. He didn’t try to run or fight, he just let me cuff him. He didn’t seem surprised by the body, though. More sad, if I had to put a name to it.”

Broyhill stepped over to the body in question. Hispanic male, mid-twenties, five feet five inches, one hundred thirty pounds. The dead man lay flat on his back on the scratched and dented hardwood floors of the living room, almost as if he’d been laid out for a funeral. A two-inch incision marred the dead center of his bare chest, right on his sternum. His feet, also bare, stretched out across the transition to the kitchen. The toenails were trimmed, but his soles bore the hard callouses of a laborer. The ones on his hands formed a matching set. Other than the obvious wound to his chest, Broyhill couldn’t find a single injury. There wasn’t even much blood. Barely a trickle.

“No defensive wounds at all,” he said aloud.

“I noticed that,” Friday agreed, coming to stand beside him. “The murder weapon is that giant-horking-knife on the kitchen floor. I can’t imagine someone sticking him like that without him wanting to do something about it. It’s almost like the murderer found him sleeping. Even then, you’d think he’d jolt awake, right? It’s a head scratcher.”

Broyhill wandered into the kitchen. Most of the cabinets had doors, but not all. The counters practically sagged under the weight of rice, two-liter sodas, and prepackaged meals bought in bulk from the shopping club down the street. The appliances looked older than the officer outside, the dents and dings touched up with housepaint wherever the white enamel had cracked. The refrigerator, sitting just inside the kitchen, had a coin-sized dent that was too new to have received the paint treatment but hadn’t yet rusted. The old Frigidaire hummed and clanked as the compressor fan glanced off something internally.

The knife in question lay on the warped vinyl flooring, a non-serrated, full-tang carving knife. Two sets of nuts and bolts held its aftermarket wooden handle together, still-wet blood covering the final four-inches of its ten-inch blade. Broyhill looked back at the seemingly fatal wound on the decedent.

“Right?” Friday said, reading his thoughts. “The amount of force it would take to drive Frankenstein’s meat cleaver though this guy’s chest plate like that … somebody was motivated. Or had a running start.”

Broyhill had his suspicions. The facts were already beginning to coalesce into a blurry picture, but he knew better than to let his suspicions steer the investigation. That’s what facts were for. So many young investigators confused the two.

“Your old man enjoying retirement?” he asked Friday. “Is his knee still bothering him?”

His old friend’s daughter stood silhouetted in the dusty sunlight streaming through the plastic blinds, her hands hooked into the neck of her vest to let some of the heat out. “No, the knee doesn’t bother him at all anymore,” she said. “He passed away back in January.”

Broyhill stopped in tracks, and some of his strength drained away. “I just saw him at Christmas. He only retired a year ago. What happened?”

“Heart attack. It’s been tough, but I can’t say it was a total surprise. No exercise, bad food, smoked for half his life … and you know how much he lived this job. I think when he stopped being a cop, he lost his purpose for getting up every day.”

That hit home. Broyhill wanted to say something, to tell her how much he thought of her old man. Before he could get the words out, Friday’s radio crackled to life, stealing the moment. A multiple vehicle crash on the far side of town and no one to answer.

Broyhill cleared his throat. Words weren’t going to do a damn thing. The best he could do was help Tony’s daughter wrap up this mess and maybe teach her a thing or two.

“I guess we better see if we can figure this out so you can get back in the fight,” he said. “Step into the bedrooms and tell me what you notice. I’ll keep an eye on our friend Sebastian here.”

Friday squinted at him suspiciously. “Anything in particular you want me to look for?”

It was such a patrol officer way of thinking. Tell me what to do and how to do it. They needed a process to follow. A good investigator, however, looked at the world differently. “The opposite,” he told her. “Forget about whatever you think happened here and just see what catches your eye.”

Friday shrugged and set off on her task. Broyhill stood in the middle of the living room and let his mind wander back to his younger days. He should have been focused on the task at hand, but more and more he found that he didn’t have as much of a say in where his mind went as he did when he was young and full of piss and vinegar.

This house was just down the road from the Sunny Acres Trailer Park where, twenty-five years ago, the South Side Rolling Twenties had spent half a year terrorizing the residents. He and Tony Hampton had rolled hard and heavy trying to catch the punks before someone got hurt. It hadn’t been enough. After the old man turned up in the park beaten half to death, the two young cops had spent a cold, miserable night standing in the rain, wrapped in their black rubber slickers and the type of inky darkness only found in truly poor neighborhoods.