Michelangelo_s Notebook

35

Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad stood in the middle of Colonel George Gatty’s living room staring at the body, spitted like a side of beef on the brown leather couch. Whoever’d done the ugly old man in had really outdone himself. According to Assistant M.E. Bandar Singh, twenty-three inches of cold steel had been shoved down the old man’s throat, the point poking through his perineum, which meant it had come out somewhere between his withered old nuts and his puckered asshole.

Putkin the criminalist said that accounted for the smell; on the way through the razor sharp sword had sliced through half a dozen major organs, the stomach wall and both intestines. They knew it was a Nazi sword because of the big swastika between the talons of the silver eagle that made up the hilt. The worst part of it was that everything was there to see. Gatty had been murdered in his dressing gown and every inch of his old wizened body was splayed out in public. Flashbulbs popped as Putkin and his cronies measured and tested. A fucking Hollywood premiere for the dead.

Billy Boyd came rolling up to him, notebook clutched in his beefy hand. “So I guess this fits with the other one?”

“And the call we got from Deputy Dawg in Alabama.” Delaney shook his head. “I never knew Alabama even had a coastline.”

“Me neither,” said Boyd. “I thought it was, you know, landlocked.”

“Not that it has anything to do with the dead guy.”

“This one?”

“The one in Alabama.”

“But there’s got to be a connection, right?” Boyd didn’t seem too sure.

“Art creep gets a knife shoved down his throat on Fifth Avenue, the guy in Alabama is some kind of big-time art collector and gets stabbed with an Absolut bottle and the colonel here gets taken out by some kind of Nazi Vlad the Impaler? Yeah, Billy, I’d say there’s just the tiniest chance of a connection.”

“Who’s Vlad the Impaler?”

“A guy on Wide World of Wrestling.” Delaney sighed. “Go talk to Singh, Billy. Get me a time of death if you can.”

“Sure, Loo.”

Delaney didn’t really need the confirmation. From the way he was dressed it was obvious he’d been in bed or on his way when he’d been killed, which made the TOD sometime last night. The man’s butler, a man named Bertram Throens had an apartment in the basement with his wife, the colonel’s cook, and neither one of them had heard anything out of line.

Like with Crawley, the guy from the museum, there were going to be lots of suspects. In the museum guy’s case there were about five hundred of them at the reception being held on the main floor and by the looks of things here the colonel’s late-night caller had probably come with the supposed intention of selling the old man the sword that was used to kill him.

They’d already found the leather-bound, silk-lined presentation case in the front hall. Delaney knew about as much German as he did Gaelic but the names Rommel and Adolf Hitler had jumped out at him. At a guess, the detective assumed there would have been real money involved, and real interest on the part of the colonel. By the look of the house he was a serious collector, so maybe seeing people late at night in his bathrobe wouldn’t have been that much out of the ordinary. Interviewing the Swiss butler had led him to the same conclusion: the colonel often had late-night visitors.

Delaney sighed and tried not to breathe too deeply as the meat wagon boys lifted the body onto a snap-down morgue gurney. The real question nibbling away at the edge of his thoughts was the strange connection between all of this and the beautiful redhead that seemed to be at the center of events. And that led to the even bigger question-Just what had happened to Fiona Ryan, and where exactly was she?