The Blue Religion

Friday Night Luck by Edward D. Hoch

It happened on a Friday, which had always been a bad day for Will Blackstone. Ever since college, he’d had a habit of relaxing at week’s end with a few drinks or a joint. It had lost him a pretty good job and more than one girlfriend. Sadie Murray was finally interested enough to stick by him, and it was she who got him the job at Techno-Bio, a firm whose specialty was cleaning up the remains at particularly messy crime scenes.

He liked the work, and it brought him into contact with a number of city detectives. One night over coffee, after a double-suicide cleanup, a detective named Tim Press told him he’d make a good cop. “I passed the exam once but didn’t make the cut,” Will told him.

“Why don’t you volunteer a few hours with the police auxiliary?” Press suggested. “We got two men in our squad started out as auxiliary cops. It looks good on your record, gives you an in.”

It sounded worth a try. Soon Will was putting in ten hours a week as an auxiliary, wearing a basic uniform and badge that were impressive even if they didn’t quite look like the real thing. Santos, head of the clean-up crew, kidded him about it. “You big Dick Tracy guy now!”

“Hardly! They’ve got me on park patrol. Last weekend I stopped some kids from throwing stones at the ducks.”

He’d been on the auxiliary force for three months, working Friday evenings and weekends in addition to his regular job. Sadie was pleased that he’d stuck with it and that he was thinking again about taking the police department exam. “You passed it last time, Will,” she told him. “And you’ve done well with the auxiliary. That should help.”

It would have helped, if it hadn’t been for that damned Friday. It was toward the end of the summer, on one of those rainy August weekends that seem to tell you autumn is just around the corner. No one came to the park on evenings like this. Sitting in his car, he’d found a half-smoked joint in his jacket pocket and decided to finish it. He’d just lit up when his supervisor came by.

Will tried to palm the joint, but its odor lingered in the car. “What’s that I smell, Blackstone?” the supervisor asked. He was a grizzly old man named Cranston who went by the rule book.

“I… I guess I – ”

“Are you smoking pot while on duty?”

“I had maybe one puff.”

“That’s one too many. You know the rules. Finish your shift tonight and then turn in your badge. You’re finished with the auxiliaries.”

“Yes, sir.” He flicked the butt out the car window into a puddle.

WILL DIDN’T TELL Sadie about the incident right away. He just said he was off for the weekend because they were overstaffed. He simply didn’t go in the next day and didn’t turn in the silver badge he’d come to admire. He kept it in his pocket when he went to work on Monday, half-thinking Cranston would be on the phone at any moment, demanding its return. But the police auxiliary was a volunteer organization and more loosely managed than the Force itself. The week passed without his hearing a thing.

That Saturday night he told Sadie Murray he’d quit the police auxiliary. “Why?” she asked. “I thought you wanted to get on the Force someday.”

“I did, I still do. But there are other ways to go about it. This way wasn’t getting me anywhere, and it was keeping us apart on weekends.”

“Your career is the important thing right now, Will. You don’t want to spend your life scraping brains off wallpaper.”

He was sorry he’d told her about some of Techno-Bio’s messier jobs. “I won’t be there forever,” he promised.

But the following Monday he was back again, working with Santos and the rest of the crew on an uptown apartment where an elderly woman and all her cats had passed away without notice several weeks earlier. Usually the routine was about the same. They entered the home or apartment dressed in biohazard suits until they could establish the extent of the cleanup. With luck, it might be confined to a tile bathroom, where the job was relatively easy.

The next few days passed uneventfully. The police auxiliary still hadn’t asked for their badge back, and the cleanups were messy but manageable. It was on another Friday – that damned day! – when the crew reached a Chestnut Street loft and found a nightmare of blood and guts covering the walls and floor.

“What happened here?” Santos asked the detective in charge. It was Sergeant Rafferty, and they all knew him.

“A mess is what happened, and we still haven’t straightened it all out,” Rafferty told them. “We had one body, a known drug dealer named Hashid, shot several times. But there’s a large quantity of blood from a second person whose body wasn’t found, as much as two or three quarts. The medical examiner doubts he could have left this loft alive after losing half the blood in his body.”

After he’d gone and the crew got to work, Santos said, “It is too much blood here. I feel death.”

“He could have had a friend who carried him away,” Will suggested.

“No elevator. Steep stairs and no blood on them. Why bother if he’s dead or dying?”

“His identity may implicate others.”

“Ha! Dick Tracy!” They’d been working most of the day on the loft, scrubbing and spraying, when Sergeant Rafferty returned, this time with the loft’s owner, Carlos Palmeto, a stocky man of about fifty who’d recently made a name for himself by converting a couple of loft buildings into upscale apartments for the gentry. His pale features were not particularly Hispanic, despite his name. As he walked through the areas they’d already scrubbed, running his fingers over some surfaces like an inspector general, Will felt that he was more interested in welcoming his next tenant than in mourning the past one. “Hashid was a loser from the start,” he told the detective. “More money than brains. I should have figured there were drugs involved.”

“Your statement says you were at the doctor’s about the time of the killing.”

The landlord nodded. “Near as I can tell. I have to see Doc Soloman twice a week for a phlebotomy. I stopped by here after the doctor’s and found this mess.”

“We’ve identified the other man through his DNA. We keep a file on convicted felons now. His name is Gutman, Samuel Gutman. Do you know him?”

Palmeto shook his head. “A lot of these people I know by sight, but the name means nothing to me.” He shifted his large frame as if trying to get comfortable in his leather jacket. “What was his felony?”

“He stole a large quantity of prescription drugs five years ago from a nursing home where he worked. He served fifteen months and was on probation for a year. Right now he’s missing from his apartment, and I expect we’ll find his body sooner or later.”

After Palmeto and the detective left, the Techno-Bio crew finished the cleanup. They were in the final phase, checking out the bathroom, when Will peered beneath the old claw-foot tub and spotted something the police had missed. It was a little black address book leaning against the black tile that circled the bottom of the wall. He wasn’t surprised that they’d missed it, if they even bothered to look beneath the tub.

The wisest thing would have been to turn the address book over to Sergeant Rafferty or Santos. But he might not see Rafferty again for a month or more, and Santos would only kid him about being Dick Tracy. He slipped it into his pocket and said nothing. Later, at his apartment, he opened it and glanced through the names and addresses. Apparently it had belonged to Hashid, the man who’d rented the loft and died there. Will flipped to the G page and found several crossed-out addresses and phone numbers for Samuel Gutman, the man who was missing. The only number not crossed out was marked “cell.” He took a chance and punched in the number on his own cell phone. He heard a blast of music he vaguely recognized, plus the sound of male and female voices. “What’s up?” a man’s voice asked.

“Is this Gutman?” Will asked.

The voice didn’t answer, and after a few seconds the connection was broken. To Will’s ear, the music sounded like a jazz combo called the Lucky Spots who played at an East Side club named Schuster’s.

SADIE WAS OFF with some girlfriends that night, and he decided there was no harm in checking Schuster’s. He occasionally dropped in there anyway, and there was a good chance he could spot the man with Gutman’s cell phone. Before he left the apartment, he pocketed the police auxiliary badge that he’d failed to turn in. Maybe it would come in handy, and if he held his thumb over the word “Auxiliary,” it looked fairly authentic.

Schuster’s was always crowded on a Friday evening, when young (and not so young) singles were drawn there from the nearby office buildings. Will could hear the jazzy sounds of the Lucky Spots before he was through the door, and he was certain that that was the music he’d heard on the cell phone. The bar was crowded, three-deep in some spots, with every table taken. He managed to get close enough to order a beer, glancing around for someone he knew. Finally he stood against one wall, out of the flow of traffic, and tried to spot the man he sought. It occurred to Will that the man might have departed in the time it took for him to get there. He reached into his pocket for the cell phone and entered six of the seven numbers on Gutman’s phone. Then he made his way into the thick of the crowd, about halfway to the bandstand. Moving between the booths and the tables, he pressed the final number on his cell phone.

Even with the noise, he heard it ring, about ten feet behind him in one of the booths. He casually turned in that direction, leaving the phone in his pocket. A young woman with a reddish-brown ponytail held the phone to her ear and tried to get a response. “Hello? Is anyone there?” Finally she muttered something he couldn’t catch and returned the phone to her purse. She was seated with two men, but neither of them had claimed the cell phone. Still, it was a man who had answered earlier.

After another twenty minutes, the men finished their beers and stood up to leave. Will feared that she might leave with them, but she didn’t. One, a balding man quite a bit older than she, said, “Good night, Glenda.”

She remained alone in the booth, and Will walked over. “Mind if I join you?” he asked, holding up his beer. “There are no free tables.”

“All right,” she replied, barely glancing in his direction. Instead she took a cigarette from her purse and started to light it.

He slid into the booth. “There’s no smoking here,” he reminded her.

She looked up and studied his face, her eyes just a bit blurry from drink. “What are you, a cop?”

“That’s right.” He showed her the badge, carefully covering the “Auxiliary” part.

“Christ, I sure get all the winners! Am I under arrest?”

“Not as long as you don’t light that cigarette.”

She squinted at him. “Are you here for business or pleasure?”

“Business at the moment. You’re Glenda, right?”

“That’s me.”

“Got a last name? I’m Will Blackstone.”

“Glenda Briggs. What do you want, Will Blackstone?”

He shifted in the booth, thinking she’d have a nice smile if it wasn’t for a chipped tooth on the right side. “I’m looking for Samuel Gutman. I think you know him.”

She shook her head. “Never heard of him.”

“You have his cell phone in your purse.”

Her eyes widened with something like fear. “I don’t – ”

“Just tell me the truth, and nothing will happen to you.”

She considered the possibilities. Finally she said, “A man I was drinking with earlier gave it to me. It rang while he had it and he answered, but then he hung up and gave me the phone. He said I could make calls with it but couldn’t receive any.”

“What’s his name?”

“Gus something. I don’t know his last name.”

“You’re sure it was Gus and not Gut, short for Gutman?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“What did he look like?”

“Ordinary-looking, nothing special.”

Will was suddenly aware that he had no idea what the dead or missing Samuel Gutman looked like. “Where can I reach you if I have more questions?”

“I can give you this cell phone number.”

“I already have that,” he said. “How about your home phone?”

“I… I’m staying with someone right now. You couldn’t call me there.”

“Can I meet you here tomorrow night? Around seven?”

“I guess so,” she conceded.

“Good. I’ll be looking for you, Glenda. Don’t let me down.”

ON SATURDAY MORNING, Sadie appeared at his place before ten o’clock, as she often did on weekends. They’d been a couple for nearly a year, and he knew she was good for him. But this Saturday, he saw at once that something was wrong. Her usual sunny face was clouded over, and she didn’t even have a morning kiss for him. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

She brushed the dark hair back from her eyes. “Will, one of my girlfriends called to say she saw you in Schuster’s last night with another woman.”

Talk about his Friday night luck! Now he’d have to tell her everything. “It’s just a misunderstanding. I didn’t even know the girl. I was just questioning her.”

“About what? How much she charges?”

“My God, what do you think I am? Don’t you trust me by now? I was questioning her about a murder.”

“You do detective work for Techno-Bio now?”

“No, it’s… Look, when I quit the police auxiliary, I never turned in my badge. I still have it. I’ve been following up on a supposed double murder.”

“You’re impersonating a police officer?”

“Not really. I just wanted to get some information out of this woman.”

“Will, that’s a criminal offense! Are you trying to get yourself arrested?”

He told her the whole story then, about how he’d found the overlooked address book while cleaning the bathroom at the loft. And ringing the missing man’s cell phone number only to hear Schuster’s familiar jazz combo. Then ringing it again to spot this woman, Glenda Briggs, with the phone. “I’m meeting her tonight, just for a few minutes,” he admitted. “I need to get a picture of Gutman that she might be able to identify.”

Sadie sighed in exasperation. “Look, call that detective you’re friendly with, Tim Press. Tell him the whole story. And turn in that badge before you get in real trouble!”

“Sadie – ”

“Will you do that for me?”

“I’ll call him Monday morning,” he promised.

“Not Monday. Today!”

“All right.” He went to the phone, figuring there was a better-than-even chance Press would be off duty on a Saturday morning.

But the familiar voice answered, “Detective Press, Homicide.”

“Tim, this is Will Blackstone. How are you doing?”

“Fine, Will. What can I do for you?” The words were friendly enough, but there might have been a certain coolness to his voice.

“Could I come see you this morning? It’s a long story, but I’ll make it short.”

“Come on down. I should be here till noon unless we get a call.”

He hung up and told Sadie he was on his way to meet Tim Press. She smiled and kissed him. “Now you’re being sensible.”

Will remembered Sadie’s words when he sat across the desk from Press in the squad room, but he also remembered the badge in his pocket and his scheduled meeting with Glenda Briggs that evening. He simply could not abandon the case when he might be on the verge of uncovering important information.

“What can I do for you, Will?” the detective asked.

“You know I work on cleanups at Techno-Bio. This week we’ve been cleaning up a loft following what appears to be a double homicide, only there was just one body found.”

Tim Press nodded. “Sergeant Rafferty’s case. We’ve talked about it.”

“He told me the DNA identified the second victim as a convicted felon named Samuel Gutman. I may have a lead on whether he’s dead or alive, but I need a mug shot for a witness to identify.”

Tim Press frowned. “You got any information, you should turn it over to Sergeant Rafferty.”

“I will as soon as I’m sure of it. I just need a mug shot of him.”

“Look, Will, I think you’ve got great potential if you don’t screw up.” He looked away and then back again. “Cranston tells me he fired your ass from the auxiliary for smoking pot on duty.”

“That was a terrible mistake. It’ll never happen again.”

Press sighed and went over to the next desk to rummage through a case folder. He found a mug shot and ran it through their copy machine. “You got one more chance, Will, that’s all. If you find out anything, you call me or Rafferty at once. Don’t go playing cop on your own.”

Will looked at the copy of the mug shot. It showed a white man with black hair and a beard. Without the hair, there was no telling what he looked like. “This is Gutman?”

“That’s what he looked like when he was arrested five years ago.”

Will put it in his pocket. “Thanks, Detective.” He left the squad room without mentioning the badge in his pocket. He could only hope that when Glenda Briggs saw the photo, it might trigger a memory.

That evening he arrived at Schuster’s at quarter to seven, to be certain of not missing her. The place was already filling up, with one group of diners waiting for a table. He ordered a beer and stood at the bar. By five after seven she hadn’t appeared, and he had a chilly feeling that she’d never intended to. But he had to give her a half hour, at least. It was ten after seven when he heard the ambulance siren approaching down the street. A customer came in to say that a woman had been hit by a car.

Will left his beer and hurried outside. He could see the flashing red lights in the next block, where a crowd had already gathered. He fought his way through until a police officer stopped him. “What happened here?” he asked.

“Hit-and-run driver. Step back, please.”

He caught just a glimpse of her bloodied face before the ambulance technician shook his head and pulled the sheet over it. Her lips were pulled back in a final grimace of pain, and he could see that chipped tooth on the right side. Glenda Briggs wouldn’t be meeting him tonight.

ON SUNDAY HE told Sadie about it, because there was no concealing his state of agitation over the woman’s death. “I showed her the badge, let her think I was a detective, and now she’s dead because of it.”

“Don’t be foolish, Will. Traffic accidents happen in this city every day. Have you told Detective Press about it?”

“Not yet. I need a few more days. That woman – I dreamed about her last night.”

“Maybe if I went away, you’d start dreaming of me.”

“Sadie, please – ”

“Will, you’ve got to snap out of this. You’re not a real detective, and you never will be, at the rate you’re going. Forget about that woman, turn in the badge, and get on with your life.”

Sadie was right – traffic accidents happened every day. Glenda Briggs’s death rated only a couple of paragraphs on an inside page. She’d been thirty-one years old and a medical technician, and police were seeking leads on the vehicle that killed her. Something clicked in Will’s memory. The missing Samuel Gutman had gone to prison for stealing drugs from a nursing home where he worked. Was it possible that Glenda had worked at the same place and met him there?

On Monday after work, he decided to research Gutman’s past. He couldn’t go back to Tim Press for more information without revealing his connection with the dead woman, so he went instead to the public library, winding through microfilms of five-year-old daily papers until he found the article on Gutman’s conviction. He’d been employed at the Shady Lark Nursing Home in one of the suburbs. During Tuesday’s lunch hour, Will changed into a suit and tie, telling Santos he might be a bit late getting back.

He drove out to Shady Lark, a sprawling single-story building that housed about fifty patients. He showed his badge and asked to see the administrator. After a brief wait, he was ushered into an office, where a man in a white coat was going over some spreadsheets. “I’m Frank Caster. What can I do for you, Detective?” he asked.

“I’m working on a case involving Samuel Gutman, an employee of yours who was convicted five years ago of stealing drugs.”

The man nodded. “That was before my time here, but I know the details.”

“Right now we’re investigating the death of a medical technician named Glenda Briggs. I need to know if she was ever employed here by you, as a nurse, as a technician, or in any other capacity. Especially if she was employed while Samuel Gutman was working here.”

Caster went to a file drawer and flipped through a number of folders. “Well, she wasn’t here while he was. I’ll check before and after.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

Caster completed the computer search with a shake of his head. “No one named Glenda Briggs ever worked here. I even checked for any Glendas, thinking Briggs could be a married name. But we’ve had no Glendas at all here. I guess it’s not too common a name anymore.”

“Thanks for checking,” Will said, hiding his disappointment.

He always saw Sadie on Wednesdays, and against his better judgment, he again started talking about the investigation. “I thought that was over, Will. You promised me – ”

“I know. But I can’t help feeling I’m responsible for her death. I think Gutman is still alive. I think he answered the cell phone at Schuster’s when I called his number. Then he gave the phone to Glenda to get rid of it. Later, when I traced it to her and questioned her, she lied about it. She said she was staying with someone, and I’m betting that someone was Gutman. When she told him a detective had traced the phone to her, he panicked. She was on her way to meet me last Saturday when he ran her down with his car.”

“If he lost all that blood in the shooting, how could he be out drinking at Schuster’s just a few days later?”

It was a good question, and he didn’t have the answer. It’s just that nothing else seemed to make sense. He was sorry he’d brought it up, and glad when the conversation shifted to other topics. It was only when he took her home after midnight that she said, “Forget that badge, Will. You’re not a cop. Leave it to them.”

On Thursday afternoon, he and Santos were working together in a West Side garage that had been used by a religious cult for the ritual slaughter of animals. “I would prefer a good clean gunshot victim to this,” Santos complained. “Isn’t that right, Dick Tracy?”

“I don’t like it any better than you do.”

They were wearing gloves and biohazard suits, but somehow, in digging up the animal remains, a hidden razor blade sliced through the arm of Santos’s suit. It wasn’t a deep cut, but he was bleeding, and Will worried about an infection. “You’d better see a doctor,” he said. “I’ll finish up here.”

“Hell, leave it till tomorrow. We’re only a block from Dr. Soloman’s office. That might be easier than going to emergency for a little thing like this.”

“I’ll go with you,” Will said. It seemed the least he could do.

They waited in the office for nearly an hour before the doctor could squeeze Santos in between other patients. Finally he came out with a small bandage and some pills to fight possible infection. “How you feeling?” Will asked.

“I’m fine. Let’s go have a beer.”

“Can you drink with that medication?”

Santos snorted. “I’ll drink first, before I start taking it.”

Will didn’t want to go to Schuster’s, so he steered them to a nearby neighborhood bar. Over beers, he said, “We’ll have to finish that job tomorrow.”

“There’s not much left, so long as we avoid razor blades.” He touched the bandage on his arm. “That Soloman is pretty good.”

Will took a sip of beer. “I’ve never been to him.”

“You know that woman who was killed by the hit-and-run? She worked in his office. They’re all pretty broken up about it.”

“Really?” Will downed the rest of his beer and said, “I’ve got to get going. See you in the morning.”

But he didn’t go anywhere. He spent an hour walking alone. This time he knew he could break the case, if only he could fit all the pieces together.

THEY FINISHED THE garage job early Friday afternoon, and Santos went off to see what was on tap for Monday. Will phoned Sadie to tell her he couldn’t see her till later. “There’s something I have to do first.”

“Are you still trying to play detective, Will?”

“I’m not playing. I think I’ve solved this case. I have to go back up to the loft where Hashid was killed.”

“If you won’t stop this right now, I’m calling Detective Press,” she told him. “Maybe he can knock some sense into you.” She hung up before he could reply.

He made his way across town to the loft on Chestnut Street. From the road, he could see lights and assumed that Palmeto’s people were sprucing up the place for the next tenant. He made his way up the two flights of stairs to the apartment. A painter was just leaving with his brushes and cans, and Carlos Palmeto himself was giving the job a final inspection.

“Hello,” he said when he saw Will. “You’re one of Santos’s crew, aren’t you?”

“That’s right. Will Blackstone. I helped clean up after the murders.”

“Terrible thing! It might take me a year to rent this place again.”

Will moved a few steps closer. “I’ve taken a special interest in this case, especially since Glenda Briggs was killed.”

Palmeto frowned. “Is that a name I should know?”

“Let me tell you a story. A man named Samuel Gutman is convicted of stealing drugs from a nursing home and sent off to prison. When he gets out, he decides to start a new life and is quite successful at it, probably using a name off a cemetery tombstone to get a social security card and other false identification. But his former life still exists. He needs to kill off his former self, and he hits upon an ingenious method of doing just that. He wants Hashid out of here anyway because of his drug dealing, so he kills him and splashes around a couple of quarts of his own blood, knowing the police would have a DNA match to identify him. His Gutman identity vanishes completely, and the police are satisfied he’s dead even though they don’t have a body.”

“How would he get a couple of quarts of his own blood without killing himself?” Palmeto asked.

“Simple. He goes to the doctor’s office twice a week for a phlebotomy, removing a pint of blood each time because it contains too much iron. The procedure is performed by a nurse technician named Glenda Briggs, who gives him the blood instead of disposing of it in the usual manner. When I discovered she worked for your doctor, the whole thing fell into place.”

“You think you can prove a crazy story like that?”

“Of course I can. The blood at the murder scene will show a high concentration of iron, and your DNA will identify you as Samuel Gutman. You never looked Hispanic in the first place. The doctor’s record will show that Glenda Briggs performed your phlebotomy twice a week. And I suspect the police will find evidence on your car linking it to her hit-and-run death. Once she told you I’d traced the cell phone to her, you had to kill her before she talked to me again.”

“She said it was a detective who questioned her, and she was scared she’d be sent to prison.”

Will showed his badge. “I’m taking you in, Gutman. Maybe Hashid deserved to die, but not Glenda Briggs.”

He nodded. “I’ll get my jacket.”

It’s as easy as that, Will thought. He never saw the gun until Gutman fired and he felt the bullet tear into his chest.

HE DIDN’T KNOW how long he’d been unconscious. He awoke in a hospital room, with Tim Press and Sadie at his side. “You’re going to be all right,” Sadie assured him.

“She phoned to tell me you were going to the loft,” Press said. “I was coming up the stairs when I heard the shot. I got him before he could finish you off.”

“That badge – ”

“We’ll talk about that later.”

Sadie touched his arm where an IV tube was attached. “The doctor says the bullet went right through without hitting a vital organ. He says you were awfully lucky.”

Will tried to smile. “Maybe my Friday night luck is changing at last.”