“Hey, Larry, can you believe this stuff?” said Detective Griffin. “Listen. These idiots were screwing on a subway track in New York and like, what do you expect, but the train runs over them. Now their lawyer’s suing the Transit Authority. Can you believe that? Lawyers are such pigs.”
“How you doing, Doug?” Slocum asked the detective. “You look beat.”
“I’m fresh off last out,” said Griffin. “All night at a crime scene. Nothing new. The perp’s wife was squawking at him about his drug use, so he shoots her, takes her upstairs, and shoots her again just to be sure. Sells the gun for a hundred bucks, buys more crack, and sets himself up downstairs, smoking, watching TV, eating takeout Chinese while the wife is up there bleeding. Took her three days to die.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That’s brutal.”
Detective Griffin stood, hiked up his pants, and groaned. “Shit like that happens every day. Look, I got to take a dump.”
“I’ll watch him,” said Slocum.
“What about those crack vials they found on Bissonette?” I asked after Griffin had left.
“Ruffing says they found them every night in the bathrooms.”
“At a high-class joint like Bissonette’s?”
“The drug doesn’t care how much money you got,” he said. “But Bissonette wasn’t using or selling. His blood was clean and the vials were empty, but had traces of the drug in them. Sellers don’t keep the vials, they go with the drug.”
“What’s this second box?” I asked.
“Stuff from Bissonette’s apartment. Check it out, you’ll love it.”
I opened the box and suddenly understood why Bissonette was such a favorite of the fans. At least some of the fans. What I pulled out of that box was enough to make Hugh Hefner blush. There were all manner of sex toys, appropriately bagged and numbered. There were shackles and ropes and dildos of varied lengths and widths and surfaces, there were vibrators, there were belts of leather and underpants of leather, there were strange harnesses, there were sadistic metal instruments that looked like something out of an alien dentist’s office. Not bagged were the videos and sex magazines and photographs from a Polaroid camera.
“Our Mr. Bissonette got around,” I said.
“Anyone you recognize?” asked Slocum.
“Not likely,” I said, though I did review the photographs one by one. They were blurred and the shots were off center; the camera had been set above and behind the bed and obviously operated by remote control. They were all of a well-built man, ponytailed, with the familiar ballplayer’s face, having sex with women, sometimes just one, sometimes more than one. In many the heads of the women were obscured, showing only long legs, thin arms, bustiers, a tangle of swollen body parts. And in some there were other men.
“Didn’t know he was a switch hitter, did you,” said Slocum.
“It wasn’t on his baseball card,” I said, still looking through the photographs. One caught my eye, a long pale woman with dark hair stretching her body across his, her back arched, her thin butt riding high as Bissonette worked from below. She was reaching back with her arm and squeezing his balls. There was something familiar, tasty about the woman.
“Maybe it was a jealous husband who did him in,” I suggested.
“Give it up, Carl,” said Slocum. “No jealous husband here. The murderer was too careful for a crime of passion. Besides, we have the IDs.”
Quickly I shuffled the photos so it wouldn’t look like I was concentrating too long on any one. In my shuffling I brought back the picture of the long pale woman. This time I saw it clearly, what I had missed before. I shuffled the pictures again and put them back.
“If you take away Ruffing’s testimony,” I said, “all you got is a black limousine and some guy about Concannon’s height.”
“And if you take away the Atlantic we could walk to London. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have eyewitness identifications, we have two convictions here.”
“What’s this?” I said as I pulled out the final object in the carton, a wooden box the size of a head, painted black with Chinese designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“That’s his love chest,” said Slocum. “Open with care.”
Slowly I lifted the lid.
“Jesus,” I said. “He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as hell prepared.”
Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally’s and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars’ worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino’s name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a glass tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words “Property Receipt” on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one glassine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.
I lifted up the property receipt. “Now why didn’t the feds tell us about this?”
“It’s not relevant,” said Slocum.
“It’s not Brady?” Brady v. Maryland was a Supreme Court case that required the prosecution to turn over any evidence that would tend to exculpate a defendant. “It seems to me that knowing the victim was a drug user could show that the crime was drug related.”
“His blood was clean and he had no drug priors or drug history. You know what that little bag was?” said Slocum, gesturing to the property receipt. “That was his last chance aphrodisiac. Any hunter in this town knows enough to pack some coke if he’s really looking. If all else fails, you’ll always pull in something with free jam.”
“What about these casino chips without a name, just a wild boar’s head?”
Slocum shrugged. “Maybe some casino out of the area.”
“Seems to me there are a lot of maybes about this guy.”
“What’s not a maybe,” he said, “is that he’s dead.”
Detective Griffin waddled back in and dropped into his chair.
“I got to get to court,” said Slocum. “But hurry it up, Carl, so we can get the detective some sleep.”
“Just a few more minutes,” I said.
I started going through the documents as quickly as I could, checking for anything I didn’t already have, when I caught Griffin dozing off into his paper. His neck drooped, his head dropped lower, then lower still, until he snapped it up and looked at me with surprise on his face.
“Tough shift?”
“Up all night and then Slocum drags me in for this,” said the detective.
“Want me to get you some coffee?” I asked sweetly.
“No, just hurry it up, all right?”
I continued going through the papers, all the time keeping an eye on Detective Griffin as he kept a tired eye on me. He blinked a couple of times and then opened his eyes wide. His neck again began to droop and slowly his head fell off to the side until his cheek rested on his shoulder.
Out of the love chest I quickly grabbed one of the boar’s head casino chips and one of the condoms for good measure, stuffing both into my inside suit pocket. Then I took hold of the pictures and shuffled back to the photograph of the long pale woman. It wasn’t only the body that I recognized. On her arm, the same arm that was reaching back to get a solid hold on Zack Bissonette’s testicles, were two thick gold bracelets, stamped with runes and encrusted with diamonds. I considered taking that picture, too, taking it to protect her, but thought I might need it in Slocum’s possession if things turned out like I now suspected they might.