Fun House

31

He can’t.

And if Ceepak can’t do it, neither can anybody else.

Batman keeps sliding off and flopping down to the parking-lot asphalt.

Eric Hunley is enjoying the show. Laughing. Saying “Dude!” a lot.

First, Ceepak has to figure out how to steady the torso of Batman’s body while he bends down to wrap the duct tape around his booties to secure them to the footposts. He finally figures out he has to pre-tear the tape strips, line them up on his sleeve, and then hoist the “dead body” up into its sitting position.

I start chuckling the third or fourth time Ceepak tries to steady Batman’s head with his left hand while making a very graceful, almost balletic, backwards move that sends his right leg swinging up and over the motorcycle seat so he can hop on.

When he lets go of the head to quickly reach down and grab for both of Batman’s wrists for the waist embrace, the stuffed superhero slumps into a spine-bending tumble off the back of the bike. Ceepak would have to be the Flash to strap Batman in.

And not even the Flash could do it with a real dead body.

A couple cars cruising past the Mussel Beach Motel toot their horns. They’re enjoying the show, too.

“So,” I say, when Ceepak finally gives up, “you think Paulie was killed by two people?”

“At least,” he says.

“But you don’t think it was Soozy and …” I do a subtle head jab toward Eric Hunley, who’s hunkered down near the rear wheel of his Harley because he volunteered to clean up the gummy duct tape residue Ceepak’s experiment left all over his rear footposts.

“Highly doubtful,” says Ceepak. “Neither of them, to the best of my knowledge, is a skilled enough marksman to pull off the single-shot execution technique described by the CSI ballistics expert.”

Yeah. Hunley would probably point to his pistol and say “Yo, dude, check it out” before firing his first round.

“What about Skeletor?” I ask. “Thomas Hess. Was that a team killing, too?”

“Most likely. The assassination technique was the same. Also, transporting Hess’s body from wherever he was slain to the lifeguard chair would, once again, take at least two people to pull off.”

I glance back at the motel.

“So, one guy killed Paulie, most likely right after he climbed into Mandy’s Mustang on the back street behind her place, when Paulie out of camera range.…”

Ceepak nods.

“The killer then, what, got in the car and drove it over here and waited for his partner on the motorcycle to show up?”

“Such is my supposition,” says Ceepak. “Undoubtedly, they were in radio or cell phone contact, coordinating their movements, keeping to a predetermined timeline.”

“Okay. So that first door opening that Becca heard, that’s the shooter-driver getting out of the Mustang …”

“Roger that.”

“… and the second door is them hauling Paulie’s body out the passenger-side door.”

“So it would seem,” says Ceepak. “The driver-shooter then helps the motorcyclist secure Mr. Braciole’s body to the back of his bike.”

“And walks away.”

“Or walks to a second car he has parked somewhere down the street.”

“And Becca is up on the sundeck after that guy is already gone, when the second guy is getting ready to take off on his Harley.”

“Such would be my conjecture.”

Ceepak’s conjecture gets an unanticipated assist when our radios start buzzing with a call from Bill Botzong.

“You boys been around back lately?” he asks.

“Negative,” says Ceepak. “We’ve been conducting an experiment in the front parking lot.”

“Well, you might want to go visit Detective Wilson. Her luminol test paid off, big-time.”

Luminol is a chemical used by forensic investigators-on TV and in real life-to detect trace amounts of blood left at crime scenes, even ones that have been wiped down. It reacts with the iron found in hemoglobin, which, I guess, is the globby hemo stuff in blood. When the luminol spray hits what they call “an activating oxidant,” it emits a faint blue glow that lasts about thirty seconds, which is why the CSI folks always roll video or snap photographs when they spray it on.

“Did the trace evidence show a smear pattern across the seats and/or headrests, as if Mr. Braciole’s body had been shoved from the driver side over to the passenger side of the car?”

We have radio silence for a couple seconds.

“Yeah,” Botzong finally comes back. “How’d you know?”

“Danny and I have hypothesized that Mr. Braciole was murdered by, at the minimum, a pair of very skilled, perhaps professional, killers, one of whom shot Braciole as he sat behind the steering wheel and then pushed his body out of the way in order to drive the Mustang here to the Mussel Beach Motel, where he was joined by his accomplice on the motorcycle.”

Yeah. That’s what I was hypothesizing. Except I had Soozy K cast as the “very skilled” trigger person, Eric Hunley on the motor scooter, and hadn’t actually worked out all that shoving stuff.

“Well,” says Botzong, “it fits. So now what?”

“I think we need to re-focus on The Creed,” says Ceepak. “They would have the means and manpower. We can assume finding two skilled hit men in their ranks would be quite easy.”

They also had the motive. Both Paulie and Skeletor were screwing with The Creed’s very lucrative drug-distribution empire. Attracting too much attention. Making their pharmaceutical operations as well known as those drugs they sell on the evening news that might help you quit smoking if you don’t kill yourself first.

Exasperation leaks out of the tinny radio speaker. “My friends up in the Narcotics and Organized Crime Bureau have been trying to crack The Creed for years. They don’t like to talk to strangers. And the last guy we almost got undercover almost got dead first.”

“Danny and I will work the one angle open to us,” says Ceepak.

“Hess’s brother?”

“Roger that,” says Ceepak. “He has a vested interest in seeing that justice is done, no matter the consequences for his Creed brethren.”

Looks like we’re heading back to the All American Snack Shack to talk to Gabe Hess.

This is a good thing.

It’s been a long day. We haven’t even taken a lunch break.

Some deep-fried Pepsi Balls would definitely hit the spot.