Show of Evil

Two

Stenner pulled around in a tight circle and headed back towards the city.

'Go to Butterfly's,' Vail said. 'I'm starving.'

'Not open yet.'

'Go to the back door.'

Vail laid his head against the headrest and closed his eyes, thinking about Stenner, so stingy with language. Soon after Stenner had joined the bunch, he and Vail had driven to a small town to take a deposition. An hour and a half up and an hour and a half back. As he had got out, Vail had leaned back through the car window and said, 'Abel, we just drove for three hours and you said exactly twelve words, two of which were "hello" and "goodbye",' to which Stenner had replied, 'I'm sorry. Next time I'll be more succinct.' He had said it without a smile or a trace of humour. Later, Vail had realized he was serious.

They drove for fifteen minutes in silence, then: 'We're going to end up with this one,' Stenner said as they neared the city.

'Always do,' Vail said without opening his eyes.

'Very messy.'

'Most homicides are.'

Not another word was spoken until Stenner turned down the alley behind Butterfly's and stopped. While he propped the OFFICIAL CAR, DISTRICT ATTORNEY'S OFFICE placard against the inside of the windshield, Vail rapped on the door. It opened a crack and a scruffy-looking stranger, who was about six-three with machine-moulded muscles, peered out.

'We ain't open yet.'

'It's Martin Vail. We'll wait inside.'

'Vail?'

'New in town?' Stenner said from behind Vail.

'Yeah.'

'This man is the DA. We'll wait inside.'

'Oh. Righto. You betcha.'

'Assistant DA,' Vail corrected as they entered the steamy kitchen.

'I'm the new bartender,' the stranger said.

'What's your name?'

'Louis. But you can call me Lou.'

'Glad to meet you, Lou,' Vail said, and shook his hand. Vail and Stenner walked through the kitchen. It was a fairly large room with stainless-steel stoves and ovens and a large walk-in refrigerator with a thermal glass door. Bobby Wo, the Chinese cook, was slicing an onion so quickly, his hand was a blur. Chock, chock, chock, chock. Vail stopped to check the 'Special of the Day' pot.

'Shit on a shingle,' Wo said without slowing down.

'That's three times a week,' Vail complained.

'Tell the lady.' Chock, chock, chock, chock, chock.

'Quit bellyachin',' a growl for a voice said from across the room. Butterfly, who was anything but at five-four and two hundred and fifty pounds, entered the kitchen. 'There was a special on chipped beef, okay?'

'Know what I've been thinking about, Butterfly? Crepes.'

'Crepes?'

'You know, those little French pancakes, thin with—'

'A short stack,' she yelled to Bobby. 'How about you, General?'

'Major,' Stenner said. 'The usual.'

'Two soft-boiled, three and a half minutes, dry toast, burned bacon,' she yelled.

'Coffee ready?' Vail asked.

'If it wasn't, I wouldn't be this damn pleasant,' she snarled, and shuffled away on flat feet encased in ancient men's leather slippers. Vail and Stenner drew their own coffee and sat at their usual round table in the rear of the place. The morning papers were already stacked on the table.

'I'm thinking about this,' Stenner said.

Vail smiled. Of course he was. Stenner was always thinking.

'You mean, Why the dump?' Vail asked without looking up from the paper.

'No, I mean, Who are these people? How long have they been in there? Doesn't somebody miss them?'

'Disposing of them in the city dump, that's rather ironic.'

'Obvious when you think about it.'

'At least they're biodegradable,' Vail said, continuing to sip his coffee and read the paper.

Stenner stared down into his coffee cup for several seconds, then said, 'I don't think it's a pattern job. It doesn't feel right.'

'We know anything about these people?'

'We have two men and a woman. All ages, sizes, and shapes. A redhead, a blonde, a bald man with a glass eye.'

'Maybe it is a pattern kill. Maybe… they're all from the same neighbourhood, work in the same building, eat at the same restaurant…' Vail shrugged. He turned to the editorial pages.

'My intuition tells me this is not a pattern kill.'

'A hunch, huh?'

'A hunch is a wild guess. Intuition comes from experience.'

'Oh.'

Stenner stared at Vail for a moment, took a sip of coffee, and went on: 'They usually don't hide bodies. They leave them out where they can be found. Part of the thing.'

Vail ignored him.

'So what are the options?' Stenner went on. 'Three people in the landfill. Can we assume they're not there by accident?'

Vail did not look up from the paper. 'I'll give you that.'

'A burial ground?'

'For whom?'

'People who have been disposed of.'

'Murder for pay?'

'In the Thirties, Murder Incorporated buried their leftovers in a swamp in New Jersey. Dozens of them.'

Breakfast came and the conversation ended abruptly for fifteen minutes. Stenner carefully crunched up his bacon and sprinkled it into the eggs and stirred them together, then spooned the mixture onto his toast before attacking the meal with knife and fork. When he was finished, he wiped his lips with a paper napkin and finished his coffee.

'Eckling will screw it up as usual. He's looking for a quick break.'

Vail laughed. 'Sure he is. The heat's on him. This thing is going to make the national news. It's too bizarre not to.'

He finished and leaned back in his chair. 'Maybe it's a disposal service,' he ventured. 'You know? You kill your mother-in-law, make a phone call, they come pick up the baggage and dump it for you.'

'You seem to be taking this very lightly,' said Stenner. 'Maybe these are people caught up in some kind of gang war - maybe upscale gangs - the ones who go to church, wear ties.' He paused for a moment and added. 'Contribute to politicians.'

'Now there's a discomforting thought,' Vail said.

'It's a discomforting thing.'

'Abel, we have a lot on our plate. Eckling has a week before we get involved. Let's give him the week.'

'I just want to be ready.'

'I'm sure you will be,' Vail said.

Stenner thought a moment more, then said, 'Wonder what the Judge would've thought?'

For a few moments, Vail was lost in time, waiting for the Judge to stroll jauntily through the door with the New York Times under his arm, dressed in tweeds with a carnation in his lapel, greeting the gang sardonically before settling in for breakfast, reading, and talking law.

The Judge had had four loves: his wife, Jenny, Martin Vail, the law, and horse racing. But he had nearly been destroyed by two tragedies. His beloved Jenny, a demure Southern lady to whom he had been married for thirty-seven years, had been terminally injured in a car accident, lingering in a coma for a month before dying. The second tragedy was of his own design. To allay his grief, he had turned to a lifelong love of the ponies and had lost thirty thousand dollars to the bookies in a single month. His reputation on the bench literally lay in the palms of bookmakers. He had been saved by the devotion and respect of defence counsels, prosecutors, cops, newspaper reporters, law clerks, librarians, and politicians, all of whom respected his fairness and wisdom on the bench. They had contributed everything from dollar bills to four-figure donations and settled his debts. The Judge had quit cold turkey.

When he retired, he spent his days either as Vail's devil's advocate on cases or in the back of Wall Eye McGinty's horse parlour, which looked like the office of an uptown brokerage with a travelling neon board quoting changing odds, scratches, and those other bits of information that would be a foreign language to most humans. He always sat at the back of the room in the easy chair he himself had provided, legs crossed, his legendary black book in his lap, twirling his Montblanc pen in his fingers and studying McGinty's electronic tote board as he considered his next play.

That book! The Judge placed imaginary bets each day, keeping elaborate records of every race, track, jockey and horse in the game, using wisdom, insight, and a staggering knowledge of statistics to run a ten-year winning streak that was recorded in the thick leather journal, a book so feared by the bookmakers that they had once banded together and offered him six figures if he would burn it. He refused but never gave tips or shared his vast knowledge of the game to anyone else. The Judge had amassed an imaginary fortune of over two million dollars, all of it on paper.

So he would spend his mornings in Butterfly's, challenging young lawyers, and his afternoons at Wall Eye McGinty's lush emporium for horse players.

His third joy was matching wits with Marty Vail. It was more than a challenge, it was a test of his forty-five years on both sides of the bar. His forays and collaborations with Vail provided an excitement unmatched by his horse playing. They would bet silver dollars arguing points of law, sliding the coins back and forth across the table as each scored a victory. After almost fifteen years, the Judge was exactly twenty-two cartwheels ahead of Vail.

A gangster client of Vail's, HeyHey Pinero, had once called the Judge swanky. 'A most swanky guy,' he had said, and it was the perfect way to describe the Judge.

A most swanky guy.

And then age and the turbulent past caught up with the old jurist. At eighty-one, a series of strokes felled him. He had survived his third stroke, but it left him arthritic and frail, unable to cook for himself or even scrounge up a snack. Ravaged by insomnia and elusive memories and trapped in his memory-drenched house, he stared out of the windows at passing traffic or dozed in front of the TV set every day until one of the regulars came by, helped him get dressed, and carried his frail bone-flesh body to the car and from there to Wall Eye McGinty's horse parlour, where the players greeted him with almost reverential solicitude. McGinty, charitable bookie that he was, always drove the Judge home when the parlour closed.

Someone came every day. Vail, his paralegal executive secretary, the incomparable Naomi, Stenner, or one of Vail's young staff lawyers. And on days when everyone seemed bogged down with other things, Vail would send a cop over to perform the duty. On those days, McGinty met the officer at the door so as not to make him uncomfortable, no questions asked. After all, McGinty's betting parlour had existed in the same place for more than twenty years. The cops would hardly have been surprised had they got to peek through the door.

Six days a week the Judge doped the horses and entered his picks in the new encyclopedia-size black book.

On the seventh day, the Judge rested. Collapsed in his wheelchair, his atrophied legs tucked under a blanket, dressed as nattily as his palsied hands and weakened eyes would permit in a tweed jacket and grey flannels, he sat in his garden, facing the sun, his eyes shielded behind black sunglasses, and tanned the grey tint of old age from paper-thin flesh.

Age had robbed him of everything but pride.

So, on a warm Sunday morning in June two years before, dressed in his nattiest outfit, the Judge sat in the garden, spoke softly to the long gone Jenny about their life together and his life without her, and told her he could no longer go on. Then he put the business end of .38 special in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

He left behind a simple note for Vail, who had watched as the detectives did their work, then rode the ambulance to the morgue with the man who was as much a father to him as anyone had ever been. When he had overseen the cruel journey, he walked out behind the hospital, sat on a bench, and wept uncontrollably for more than an hour. Stenner had stood a hundred yards away, watching over, but not wanting to impose on, his boss. Finally Vail had opened the note.

Dear Martin:

I liked you better on defence, but you're a great prosecutor. I love you as a son. You always made me proud to know you. My mind is slipping away. We all know it, right? Haven't picked a winner in weeks. Can't even eat a bagel anymore. Need I say more, my brash and brilliant friend? I won't ask for your forgiveness - nothing to forgive. Invest in Disaway, third race at Del Mar tomorrow. Buy a round for the gang on me with the proceeds.

Farewell, dear friend,

The Judge

Twenty-two silver dollars had weighted down the note. The tip had parlayed the twenty-two cartwheels into nine hundred and seventy-four dollars.

It had been one hell of a party.

'He's not coming, Martin,' Stenner said, breaking his reverie. Vail snapped around towards him, aware that he had been staring at the door revisiting the past.

'Mind reader,' Vail said.

'I sometimes have a moment…' Stenner started but never finished the sentence.

'I'm sure we all do from time to time,' Vail said, turning back to his paper.

To Vail, on that chilly morning, the landfill case was a curiosity, an annoyance, something else to clutter up the already crowded agenda of the district attorney's office. In fact, the landfill mystery would lead to something much bigger. Something far more terrifying than the decomposed bodies in the city dump. Something that would force Martin Vail to come to terms with his past.

A name that had haunted Vail for ten years would soon creep back into his mind.

The name was Aaron Stampler.