And I stopped him. “No, Richard, no I’m not going to take back those nice shiny new shoes. They look very comfortable, and they’re yours. In exchange for the big knife.”
He smiled weakly, like a child who knows he’s done wrong, is truly abject about it, but is grateful for being let off with just a reprimand.
When he came back, Napoli was carrying “the big knife.” I’d expected a grav-knife or a butterfly, something street standard. This was a rusty machete. A big, wide-bladed, cut-down-the-sugar-cane machete. The blood that was dried on the blade, all the way up to the handle, was — for certain — some of the same that had been, until recently, billeted in the carotid artery of that old man.
I took the machete gingerly. Napoli had tied a string around the base of the haft, to preserve Richard’s — and any others’ — prints. I lowered the killing weapon to the table using only the string noose. Then I went back to questioning Richard.
He’d thought he could sell it for some sneaky pete. That’s all there was to it. The shoes, because he needed them; and the knife, because it had been left lying there next to the body.
He tried to tell me the story a dozen different ways, but it was always the same. Taking a leak, seeing the green light, running away, coming back and taking the old man’s shoes (and socks, as it turned out), swiping the machete while the three women bawled and screamed.
And he went on. For some long while. I gave him a five dollar bill, and told him to get a good dinner over at The Pantry. I’m not ready for this line of work. It’s only eleven years; I’m not ready.
Days or weeks or millennia later, or maybe it only seemed as quick as that, I was back at the Precinct. I turned the big knife over to Forensics. My feet hurt, and there was a patina of Post-Its all over my desk. and faxes. and memos enough to choke a Coke machine. But the only urgent one was from the M. E. So I handed all the others off to Napoli, and told him to get them squared away, while I went downtown and had a chat with Dear Old Doc Death, our coroner. The Boss saw me heading out, and he put those two fingers in his mouth and whistled me to a halt, and yelled across the squadroom, “Have you eaten?”
“Since what time?” I answered.
“Since ever. Go get some dinner.”
“I got to go downtown to see Dear Old Doc Death.”
“Jacobs,” he said, without room for argument, “do as I tell you.” I said, yessir, and I went to The Pantry and had a T-bone. Richard of the green light was there, having a meal. He looked happy in his new shoes. I felt a lot better about the universe after that. In your heart of hearts, you think a Richard kind of rummy is going to stoke up on some sweet lucy or a tankard of muscatel, and so you just don’t dip into the wallet for somebody like that. But every once in a sometime they fool you. This Richard was eating well, so I told the guy behind the cash register not to take his money, that I was paying for it, and Richard could maybe have a second meal, or buy a hat, or get a life. It was easier, after that, to go downtown.
“Not only has his throat been cut literally from ear to ear practically excising his head from his neck, not only was the rip strong and deep enough to sever the carotid, the jugular and the trachea — we’re talking someone with heavy-duty power! — but I put his age at something over a hundred, maybe a hundred and two, a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred fifty, there’s no way of judging something like this, I’ve never seen anything like it in all my years; but I have to tell you that this one-hundred-and-two-year-old corpse, this old man lying here all blue and empty, this old man… is pregnant.”
Dear Old Doc Death had hair growing out of his ears. He had a gimp on his starboard side. He did tend to drool and spit a mite when he was deep in conversation or silent communication with (I supposed) the spirits of the departed. But he was an award-winning sawbones. He could smell decay before the milk went sour, before the rot started to manifest itself. If he said this headless horseman was over a hundred years old, I might wrinkle my brow — and have to lave myself with vitamin E moisturizer later that night — but I’d make book he was dead on. Not a good choice of phrase, dead on. Right. I’d bet he was right. Correct.
“What’re we talking here, Doc, some kind of artificial insemination?”
He shook his head. “No, not that easy.” He breathed heavily, as if he didn’t want to move forward with the story. But I caught a whiff of dinner-breath, anyway. Then he spoke very softly, sort of motioning me in closer. Fettucine Alfredo. “Look, Francine, I’ve been at this forever. But with all I’ve seen, all I’ve known of the variety of the human condition. never anything like this. The man has two complete sets of internal organs. Two hearts. Two livers, kidneys, alimentary canals, sixteen sinuses, two complete nervous systems — interlocked and twisting around each other like some insane roller coasters — and one of those sets is female, and the other is male. What we have here is — ”
“Hermaphrodite?”
“No, goddamit!” He actually snapped at me. “Not some freak of nature, not some flunked transvestism exercise. What I’m describing to you, Francine, is two complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carcass. And the woman in there is about three months’ gone with child. I’d say it would have been a perfectly normal — but how am I to know, really — a perfectly normal little girl. Now, all three of them are dead.”
We talked for a lot longer. It never got any clearer. It never got any easier to believe. If it had come from anyone but Dear Old Doc Death, I’d’ve had the teller of the tale wrapped in the big Band-Aid. But who could doubt a man with that much moss coming out of his earholes?
One of the supermodels was Hypatia. Like Iman or Paulina or Vandela. One name. Maybe before the advent of blusher she was something additional, something Polish or Trinidadian, but to eyes that rested on glossy pages of fashion magazines, she was one name. Hypatia.
Candor: I wanted to kill her. No one of the same sex is supposed to look that good after wallowing in an alley, on her knees, in the rain and garbage, amid blood and failure.
“Care to tell me about it?”
She stared back at me across a vast, windy emptiness. I sighed softly. Just once, lord, I thought, just once give me Edna St. Vincent Millay to interrogate, and not Betty Boop.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. Gently. I almost believed she didn’t have a clue.
“Well, how about this for a place to begin: you are a pretty famous celebrity, make many hundreds of thousands of dollars just to smile at a camera for a few hours, and you’re wearing a Halston suit I’d price at maybe six-five or seven thousand dollars. And you were on Skid Row, outside the Midnight Mission — where the name Donna Karan has never been spoken — kneeling in a pool of blood spilled by an old, old man, and you’re crying as if you’d lost your one great love.”
“I did.”
The other two were equally as helpful. Camilla DelFerro was brave, but barely coherent. She was so whacked, she kept mixing her genders, sometimes calling him “her.” Angie Rose just kept bawling. They were no help. They just kept claiming they’d loved the old guy, that they couldn’t go on without him, and that if they could be permitted, if it wasn’t an inconvenience, they would all three like to be buried with him. Dead or alive, our option. Whacked; we’re talking whacked here.
And they mentioned, in passing, the green light.