Pure Instinct

20

The Old Remorse Bar amp; Grill was alive with off-duty cops as early as three P.M. when the rotation between day and night duty was made. It was here that war stories were told and old wounds were, if not healed, layered with an alcoholic balm or two, or three. Cops coming on often stopped in before their watch to catch a glimpse of old partners and friends from the day watch and grab a Coke, a burger and cheese fries along with the latest dirt bubbling from the precinct, while guys going off duty loaded up on gin, whiskey and rye.

The precinct today was abuzz with the news of the quite feminine super-sleuth psychic detective who was going to do Alex Sincebaugh's job for him, put a burr under Big Ben deYampert's butt, get the old “Heart File” up and “pumping” like never before (some of the clowns now humming the musical theme of Entertainment Tonight).

“ Maybe do a triple byyyy-pass!”

“ Tug at the ol' heartstrings.”

“ Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.”

“ Get the ticker tickin'!” someone openly shouted, bringing a round of laughs to a table.

The debate was raging when Sincebaugh entered. He'd long since become sick of guys in the department slipping little heart-shaped candies into his drinks, on the seat of his car and elsewhere; he'd grown accustomed to the childish pranks, from crude drawings of hearts with arrows through them to some yokel's idea of heartfelt poeticisms written on the bathroom walls both here and at the precinct. He'd become almost desensitized to the callous and hard-hearted black humor revolving around the Hearts case like onerous flies about raw meat left on a backyard barbecue.

He'd heard the joke making the rounds, all about the Achy-Breaky Heart NOPD-fashion, and now he caught the drift of the conversation long before everyone was silenced by the whisper-wave that had begun to spread through the semi-darkened room, news that Sincebaugh had entered.

“ It'll take some kind of voodoo witch to locate a devil like that bloody heart-eatin' bastard…”

“ She's a voodoo princess, all right… some looker.”

“ Sincebaugh's a fool. Wouldn't mind if she did a little psychic readin' on me.”

“ Aren't you worried, Malloy, that she'll find out you can't get it up?”

“ Fuck you, Bennett.”

“ Been a real kick in the nuts for Alex, though.”

“ Newsies are havin' a field day with this.”

“ Psychics-woooooooo-here in New Orleans- wooooooo-so, what else is new?”

“ This one's no ten-buck swami with a crystal ball. She's damned good.”

“ She's no back-alley palm reader's what I hear.”

Then total silence as everybody realized that the lieutenant had entered and stepped to the bar. “Give me a beer and make me a ham on rye, will you, Stubby?” Alex ordered more than asked. “I'll be at my desk.” He indicated his usual back booth, but before he left the bar, he turned and said to the assembled cops, “You people have any idea what the fuck you're talking about? Do you?”

A guy named Bennett, who'd gotten smashed here the night before and had been talked into singing “I left my heart in the Mississippi,” stuttered and replied, “Hey, Alex… it's only talk, man. Guys blowin' off steam.”

Alex targeted Bennett, locking him into place with a cold stare as he said, “Psychics may be of use when somebody's pet Persian cat is missing or when a dog is the only eyewitness, so you need someone to communicate with the dog. It's fine if a jewelry store wants to hire a psychic and post a sign saying this store is under psychic surveillance. I got no problem with that. But read your goddamned criminal investigation and interrogation manual, Bennett. It's a popular fallacy to think that a clairvoyant can give valuable information with respect to a homicide investigation. They've got no damned business in a homicide investigation.”

No one disputed the lieutenant. He stood there, wanting someone to dare disagree. Bennett just went back to his drink.

This only made Alex more determined and angry. He began to pace about the bar in nervous-tiger fashion, the others watching out of the sides of their eyes for him to make the next move.

He settled himself against the bar and said, “Fact is, these so-called psychic people just arouse the hopes of the family members, and to justify the dollar/man-hours to follow up on a bunch of empty leads… well, enough said.”

“ Well, Lieutenant,” said one young officer, “seems to me, you're telling it to the wrong crowd.”

“ Yeah,” agreed a second, taking some courage.

“ Why don't you tell it to the captain?” suggested Bennett.

“ Carl Landry knows how I fuckin' feel. No matter how sincere a so-called psychic may be, the actual hits she makes are usually due to some bit of information she was previously exposed to.”

Still no one disputed him. God, he thought, I'd really like to throw a punch at Bennett. That'd feel great. Instead, he continued to shout his opinion. “These psychic detectives are con men, or con women, even if sometimes they don't recognize their own con. They're cunning people with photogenic memories and steel-trap minds, no doubt. Their lucky guesses are far from lucky guesses. They use open-ended thinking, seeing multiple end points to a case, just like any good detective, but the bozos who're taken in by them confer on them this incredibly wide margin for error that no cop is afforded ever.” “You ever work with psychics before. Lieutenant?” asked Stubby from behind the bar, listening intently, curious “Where's that ham sandwich?” Alex sharply countered.

“ Gettin' it…”

“ Whataya mean, wide margin?” Bennett asked of him.

“ Psychic says!” Alex mimicked the famous host of Family Feud. “ 'I scccccc a bodyyyyy… a bodyyyyy of water… yes, water… near the body.' So figure it out.”

“ You mean like a lake?”

“ A lake, the Atlantic fucking Ocean, a roadside puddle, a doggie dish with mosquito eggs germinating in it, or maybe a mailbox with the name Walters, Waters or Pond on it, or maybe a goddamned billboard with the words Aqua Velva printed across it, and since aqua is Latin for water and the sign just happens to be fifty feet from the body, or a hundred, or five hundred, the psychic is right on. What the hell does 'near the body' mean in exact feet, Bennett? You got any idea?”

There was some laughter at this.

Alex kept on talking. “It's anybody guess, but you can bet that somewhere in the vicinity of a body you'll find some water somewhere, somehow, and 'cause the psychic says it's so, it's called a psychic hit! Same goes for when the con man calls for a large tree near the body or a whole damned forest. How large is large, and maybe a billboard has a plantation oak pictured across it, so that'll do just as well as a large tree, or the subdivision being advertised is Oak Lawn Lake, so you get two hits with one psychic stone-an oak tree and a goddamned lake!”

More laughter filled the bar, and a few cops hoisted their glasses in a toast of agreement and cheer.

“ It's not mystical so much as it is the law of truly large numbers. So every goddamn year there are thousands of cops nationwide hunting down missing persons who can be found near water and a large tree. No big surprise when some place a psychic actually locates a dead or alive, every year or so.”

“ What about the ones who're really good, Lieutenant? You know, the psychics who've repeatedly been right over and over?” asked one female cop from a booth across the room.

“ They're better at it, smarter, more cunning. 'I see a body, near an old church… a windmill… a road sign.' You know how many damned old churches and waterwheels are out there? These guys, they shotgun information, scatter it about rapid-fire, all generalized until they see some naive cop like you, Bennett, raise an eyebrow, and then they lock on, knowing what you know. They play twenty questions with you and they win every time.”

“ You've worked with 'em before, haven't you, Lieutenant?” asked Kellerman, who was way off his turf for some reason.

“ I have, and without useful results. Bastard says to us, 'You'll find the boy in a shallow grave.' Christ, stands to reason! I mean, if you murder some little kid, you don't go out and buy a coffin and dig a six-foot grave, now do you? Besides, how many murderers you know carry a shovel around with them. Ever try to dig a grave with your bare hands?”

This brought on another bout of laughter while some people were leaving and others entered. Sincebaugh, allowing all his pent-up frustration over the case to bubble over, kept on talking. “Meanwhile, a lot of wasted time, wrong leads, raised hopes, all for nothing except the almighty dollar, the taxpayers' money, which goes direct to the psychic.”

“ No wonder you're not too happy with this.” It was one of the Internal Affairs guys he'd met at the diner where he'd jumped the gun on the two would-be robbers. He hadn't seen him where he'd been sitting in a booth with a couple of other cops, one being the other IAD officer. “You're talking about the Tommy Harkness case a couple years ago?''

Jesus, these assholes 've been climbing around in my file for days, Alex thought “Sleight-of-mouth, that's all this voodoo crap's about, trust me,” he said aloud.

“ Clever, cunning, able to outwit men and leap tall buildings at a single bound; sounds like maybe you're a little afraid of her, Alex,” quipped Kellerman, a man Alex's size and build.

“ Sandwich is up,” shouted the man behind the counter.

Sincebaugh, frowning at Kellerman, now with exactly the right face to punch standing before him, knew he could do nothing, not with IAD men in a nearby booth just waiting for him to do something stupid.

It was all so much like a setup, he began to feel a creeping paranoia come over him. He turned to Stubby, paid for his drink and sandwich and took in a deep breath of air. He was trying desperately to peel back the layers; not only did the onion here stink, but layers of it had to be carefully stripped and pared away to find all the underlying meaning.

When he turned, he had control of himself. He'd once been told by Big Ben that if you felt paranoia down to your bones in a given situation, you probably had good reason to be paranoid, that sometimes paranoia was the healthiest response, the first warning bell on the bullshit detector.

“ I'm not afraid of any goddamned spoon-bender, and maybe now I've said enough on the subject.” He stepped away from the bar, went to his booth and began to slowly consume his meal. Others in the bar sensed his need not only to be alone, but to be left alone over the matter of both the Heart case and the new guns in town, particularly the psychic gun.

Still, he wondered who'd sicced IAD on him, and what connection the young vultures had with Kellerman. Did they have something on Kellerman to force him all the way over here from his precinct to get into a confrontation with Alex, provoke a fight and ultimately send Alex on an undeniably long vacation, maybe land him on the police shrink's list of incorrigibles? If so, Kellerman wasn't trying very hard. At least, not yet anyway.

Through the door bounded Ben deYampert, his hands filled with the files they'd talked about going over. Both men knew they could get next to nothing done at the desk with the phone ringing constantly, so they'd agreed to meet here for something to eat and to glance over some of the documentation on the Hearts crimes. He waved Ben over, and Ben almost made it before Kellerman got in his face with a crude joke he'd heard about the Hearts cases, something to do with the missing organs having been crammed up the anal canals of each of the gay victims and Frank Wardlaw not wanting to get his hands dirty searching there. Ben shoved past Kellerman, ignoring him, but Alex could see the purple anger in his partner's eyes.

Stubby called out for Ben's lunch order.

“ Send those guys over some artichoke hearts on me, Stubby,” shouted Kellerman, drawing a little nervous laughter around the darkened bar and grill.

“ Lame-o, real lame-o, Kellerman. Set me up with one of your famous pig barbecues, Stubby,” Ben replied before squeezing into the booth opposite Alex.

“ This place is crawling with paranoia, pal,” Alex warned him.

“ Is-zat right?” Ben gave an appreciative smile and a wink. “What'd I miss?”

“ You missed the IAD guys at the other booth.”

“ Didn't see 'em, no… but I wondered what Kellerman was doing so far off his stomping grounds this time a day.”

“ He and his squeaky partner Bennett've been doing their level best to pick a fight. I think they're hoping I'll throw the first punch.”

“ Setup?”

“ Yeah, and it almost worked.”

“ Restraint, Alex… restraint in the Old Remorse,” replied Ben in a balladeer's voice, finishing in his best imitation of Andy Rooney with, “I… like… that… So, how'd it go in the morgue?”

“ I was thrown out.”

“ Thrown out of the morgue?”

“ Carl got pissed.” Alex looked across at his friend and partner, a growing smile coming over him until both men laughed heartily, causing others in the bar to wonder what was being said between them.

After a few minutes, the IAD boys left. Not long after Kellerman motioned Bennett to the door and they too disappeared, leaving the place in a pleasant stillness, people at the various tables talking animatedly now among themselves. No one was disappointed that IAD had vacated their watering hole, leaving it the sacrosanct place that it was.

“ You think they bugged the booth?” asked Ben. “No, I don't think so.”

“ But they were here before you arrived?”

“ Yeah, they were.”

Ben was equal in his suspicions. He called Stubby over to their booth with a conspiratorial grunt and a large, curling finger. “Anybody use this booth today before us?”

“ Nobody.”

“ You lie to me. Stubby, and I swear you'll be too damned short to be called Stubby ever again, understood?”

“ I'm telling you, nobody was in here before you guys, not today, not in this booth, no.”

“ Whataya mean, not today?”

“ I don't know… couple of guys were in here last night asking questions, or so Wanda told me. Wanda said they asked when you guys come in here and where you usually sat.”

“ Christ, they did bug the damned booth.”

“ Find it.”

Stubby had come over with a bowl of soup which neither of them had ordered. He now placed it on the table, and he dropped a small metal device into the soup, the device sinking like a lead weight. “Not to worry, gentlemen, not in my place. Enjoy the soup, Ben. It's on the house. And as for you, Lieutenant Sincebaugh, you haven't been in touch with your old man for weeks. He's worried about you.”

“ How the hell would you know, Stubby?”

“ He's on the phone over here.” Stubby indicated with a curt motion of his head. “We had a nice, long chat. Great guy from what I could gather. Got some idea you're in over your head with this Hearts case thing.”

“ Oh, please…”

“ He's like any father… just worried about your health. Go on, talk to 'im.”

“ Whataya saying, Stubby? He's still on the line, holding forme?”

“ Yeah, now go talk to the man.”

Frowning, Alex slid from the booth and located the phone behind the bar. He talked amiably with his father for a long time, the old man allowing him the freedom to get a few things off his chest, and Alex felt good at having had his father to use as a sounding board. Before hanging up, he promised to come by and see his dad at the first available opportunity. His father agreed with everything he said about the Department's putting a psychic on the case.

“ You take some time off and we'll go fishing, like the old days, son. Don't let the bastards wear you down, Alex” were his father's last, reassuring words.

Alex almost allowed his paranoia to kick in again when he cradled the phone back into place. If that asshole Meade could touch IAD and guys like Kellerman and Bennett, then why not put Alex's father on his case? When was the last time his father had asked him to go fishing?