Hanging Time

19

Hey, Mike, whatcha got?” Fernando Ducci, known as Duke, finished the last of a Snickers bar and tossed the wrapper into his wastebasket. At eleven o’clock in the morning, it was his third candy bar of the day. He wore a blue shirt with a white collar of the kind Captain Higgins liked, the sleeves rolled all the way down and buttoned. His dark blue tie was Italian silk. There was no shoulder holster on his person. Duke did not like to carry. He kept his gun in his locker. With his smooth round face and thick black hair, he looked more like an aging choirboy than a cop in the hair and fiber section of the police labs.

“Stuff from the M.E.’s office.” Mike Sanchez dropped the brown cardboard box on Ducci’s desk.

Ducci looked past him toward the door. “Hey, where’s the pretty one? She avoiding me, or what?”

“She’s out.”

“I’m hurt. I want the stuff from her. We like continuity around here.”

“Yeah, well, I’m continuity. I could have just let them put this shit on the shelf and forgotten it like everybody else. You’re always saying you want everything in the beginning. Well, here’s everything.”

“Ah, well.” Ducci tapped on the box. “Hey, go ahead, keep me guessing. What case are we talking about?”

“Same as yesterday. Boutique thing.”

“Oh, and here I thought something else came up. Shit, why can’t you guys get your act together and give it all to me at once?” He knew damn well why they couldn’t, but liked to annoy.

Ducci was a man who hadn’t gone outside for the last twenty years. He had a slide collection of every kind of dirt, asphalt, stone, fiber, head hair, pubic hair, leaf, pine cone, bird feather, tree bark, grass he’d ever come across. He’d analyzed so many things from so many cases, working over the years in so many departments in the labs, he now believed he could tell what park a grass stain on a pair of pants came from, and what activity the wearer was engaged in when he got it. Some people said he had a bit of an ego problem.

Before Mike tossed the box on it, Ducci’s desk had already been piled high with folders, odds and ends, boxes of slides, relics of various sorts. Now it was definitely overburdened. Ducci looked around for another place to dump the box, debated putting it on Bryan’s desk for a little while just to piss him off when he came in. Right next to his in the long, narrow room with windows across the other side, Bryan’s desk was clear.

Ducci thought Bryan was a real asshole, kept everything so goddamned neat, no one could ever find anything he worked on. Ducci was the brilliant one, and Bryan was always complaining, saying he couldn’t work in the same room with such a pig. Judy, who was a scientist and not a cop, was the mediating agent on the hair and fiber team. But she wasn’t there. She was on vacation in a canoe somewhere in Wisconsin.

Mike pointed at Ducci’s other chair. It had a pile of papers with a skull on top of it. Some of the teeth in the skull were missing. The ones remaining indicated quite a lot of tooth decay and no visits to an orthodontist.

“Mind if I sit down?” he asked.

“Hey, no problem.”

Ducci stepped around some debris from another case he was working and removed the pile of stuff from the chair. He placed it on the empty chair in front of Bryan’s desk. Bryan used the phone in there, but most of the time he worked in another lab. Hair and Fiber had three desks and three sets of shelves in it, all facing the wall opposite the windows. The tile walls and floor were sea green.

In the old days, when there were fewer people in the police labs, there had been just one desk to an office. Now with three, it was hard to get around, hard to make calls, hard to think. And even with three, they didn’t have anywhere near enough people for the workload.

Ducci had a whole lot of complaints about the system. Every case in the city that had hair and fiber evidence came through this lab. Coordination between detectives and the scientists was not so great. A lot of things got messed up. Ducci had fantasies of a different setup, police labs with only scientists and absolutely no police at all.

He himself was a cop who had found his calling by accident in college. After six years of writing parking tickets and getting two degrees at night, he discovered he liked science. When he was asked if he wanted to go into the labs, he jumped at the chance. Though of exactly the same mold, his office mate, Francis X. Bryan, was not, Ducci believed, cut of the same high-quality cloth as himself. Bryan wore his gun all the time and was still more cop than scientist. Ducci had fantasies of forcing him back to the streets, where he had started as a foot patrolman. Now he scowled at Sanchez, thinking of Francis.

“Want some coffee? Tastes like shit, but it’s better than nothing.”

“No thanks, I’ve tasted it.” Sanchez sank into the cleared chair.

“So?” Ducci rubbed his stomach as if he were some kind of Buddha, or had acid indigestion. “So tell me about this little present. What is it?”

“Take a guess. You got everything from the scene yesterday. This is the stuff from the body. You should thank me. Not everybody would go over there first thing in the morning and bring it to you.”

“True.” Many detectives didn’t have the time or temperament to collect evidence and take it through the obstacle course correctly so that when the time came to go to court the case would hold. Sanchez did. So did his girlfriend, April Woo. “Stick around.”

Ducci opened the flaps on the box. A printed dress with wild purple and red flowers all over it, not even bagged, spilled out.

“Shit, what’d they do, toss it around the table, guessin’ what mighta happened?” He noted the label, size fourteen, and shook his head. “How many people touch this?”

Mike shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. Four, maybe five.”

Ducci sifted through the rest of the stuff, all paper bags meticulously labeled. He looked at some of the labels—Long red hair found on skirt of dress. Makeup from victim’s face. Fiber taken from bruise marks on victim’s neck. Victim’s ring, with fibers caught on prongs.

Very, very occasionally Ducci personally went to a crime scene if it was really important, or the morgue, to check out the marks and bruises on a body for himself. But he never dealt with the wet stuff. That was for the serology people.

“You got a cause of death yet?”

“The report’s coming later today.”

“Okay, so what’ve we got here?”

Sanchez filled him in on what they had on the case so far. Not much.

“I’d like to see the autopsy report and the crime-scene sketches and photos,” Ducci said, happy to be in on the ground floor for once. Most detectives didn’t even tell him what the case involved or what he was looking for. “Don’t keep me in the dark.”

“Fine.”

Ducci sat back, satisfied, and patted his stomach some more. Pleased as he was, this was about as far as he wanted to go with the case at this point. He examined Sanchez and frowned. “Where you been anyway? You look fried.”

“Mexico. Went for a week.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, lots of sun. What about you? You look like you haven’t seen the light of day all summer.”

In the last weeks of August, Ducci’s unlined face was still winter pale. His shiny black hair, untainted with gray, sat like a burnished crown on his head. He shrugged. He didn’t like more of the light of day than came through the window. “You go with your girlfriend?”

“Who might that be?” Sanchez’s frown appeared crooked because not all of his right eyebrow had grown back where the scar was. It made him look more quizzical than he had before. Ducci knew the plastic doctor had told Sanchez he could fix it, but Sanchez didn’t seem eager to buy.

“Hey, I thought you and pretty one were a known quantity,” Ducci said.

“No way, man. You know the Chinese.”

Ducci shook his head. There were lots of Asians of all kinds as well as Indians in the labs. But no, he really didn’t know the Chinese.

“Inscrutable,” Mike said.

“What’s that, some kinda disease?” He laughed, holding his stomach.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“So, what did you go for?” Ducci changed the subject. He had a minute before getting back to the microscope. He was working on twelve pubic hairs from twelve different people found on the bedspread of a well-known hotel where a guest had raped a maid. Serology said they had identified almost as many different semen stains. Seemed like a lot of people were in too much of a hurry to turn back the covers.

“Hey, why all the questions?” Mike demanded.

“Just being friendly. You’re pretty inscrutable yourself.” Ducci was sure Mike and April had something going. So what was the big deal? “You don’t want to tell me about Mexico, that’s fine.”

“I went to see my ex-wife, happy now?”

Mike looked so unhappy about that, Ducci didn’t think he should let it go. “Want to tell me about it?”

“No,” Mike burst out angrily. He glanced at the skull on the chair, shaking his head. “She wanted to say good-bye, okay? She’s dying. Cancer. You happy now?”

“Oh.” Ducci’s face softened. Lot of times he went too far and felt like a real jerk. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I always ask people a lot of questions, guess it goes with the territory.”

He pulled a Snickers bar out of the center drawer of his desk, held it out to Mike as a peace offering.

Mike looked at it as if it were a dead animal he wouldn’t touch under any circumstances. “No thanks. Can’t afford the calories.”

“So? Neither can I. Never stopped me, never will.”

“Yeah, well, sign for this, will you, and I’ll get that other stuff to you as soon as I can.” Mike shifted the papers with the skull on top back to Ducci’s chair while Ducci signed for the box and its contents.

As Mike went out the door, Duke shrugged and opened the candy wrapper.