The Mayor of Lexington Avenue

Two

“Get all those people back. Send them home if you can. And I don’t want anyone in here except who I tell to come in.” The barking voice belonged to Sergeant Wesley Brume of the Bass Creek police. He was standing at the door of Lucy Ochoa’s trailer. The place was alive with cops and people from the neighborhood. Murders didn’t happen every day in Bass Creek.

They had gotten the call at six that evening. One of Lucy’s co-workers, Brenda Carrero, had stopped by on her way home to check on Lucy because she hadn’t shown up for work that day. That was highly unusual for Lucy. Her job was to keep track of the pickers’ attendance and their count, so she was pretty fastidious herself about calling in if she was sick or had to miss work. Brenda had knocked for several minutes but there was no answer. She shouted Lucy’s name. Still nothing. Maybe it was the neighborhood dogs sniffing around the trailer or maybe it was the flies, she really couldn’t explain it, but for some strange reason she tried the door. It was open. A whiff of something putrid hit her as she stepped inside, like maybe a rodent had crawled under the trailer and died.

“Lucy?” Brenda called in a quiet, worried voice as she peered into the kitchen, then walked hesitantly through the living room and back towards the bedroom. What she saw next burned into her brain forever, an image that would haunt her nightmare-plagued sleep for months.

Lucy’s bed was crimson. And propped in the middle, lying on her back as if on display, was Lucy. Mechanically, Brenda focused first on the source of the blood, the gaping hole across the throat where flesh and tissue had been sliced clean through. Her eyes moved next to Lucy’s face. The poor girl appeared to have died screaming.

When her mind registered what her eyes had taken in, Brenda Carrero started screaming herself. She ran out of the trailer as if death itself were chasing her, stumbling down the street until a neighbor, Hector Aviles, stopped her.

“What, what? What are you yelling for? Calm down!” Brenda tried to pull away but she couldn’t, so she tried to get it out of her-away from her.

“She’s dead! She’s dead! Blood everywhere. Oh my God! Lucy!” She was screaming and flailing her arms against Hector’s efforts to hold her and calm her down. Then she sank to the ground, whimpering and muttering Lucy’s name over and over again. Hector’s wife had rushed out of their trailer when she heard the commotion and now bent down to Brenda, whispering to her softly, “It’s all right, it’s all right” She looked up with worried eyes at her husband, who set off at a trot down the street towards Lucy’s trailer. His jog slowed to a walk and then he stopped, staring blankly at the trailer’s open door, and the dogs sniffing at the entrance.

The police force of Bass Creek numbered seven officers in total, including the chief. There was no homicide division, just two detectives: Del Shorter, who was assigned to collect forensic evidence, and Sergeant Wesley Brume, who was assigned to direct him in that endeavor. Brume ran the show at every crime scene.

There were several constants in Wesley Brume’s life. He had always been short and fat, and he had lived his whole life in Bass Creek. The only time he had ever left the town for an extended period was when he joined the Marines for four years after high school. In high school, Wes never conformed to the limitations nature had imposed on him. He tried out for the football, basketball and baseball teams, never getting past the first cut. But his determination was monumental. Whether attempting to throw a block, make a layup, or hit a curveball, Wes gave it his all, heaving and grunting as he missed each time. His classmates were so amused by the noise he made in his efforts to become an athlete that they called him “the Grunt.” It was meant to be derisive and funny, but Wes wore it as a badge of honor and aspired to be just what he was labeled, a “grunt” in the marines.

He served two years in Vietnam, receiving a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for bravery. When he came home, the police department was the perfect fit for him. Wes had learned that if you carried a gun and were not afraid to shoot or be shot at, you could command respect even if you were short and fat.

Although many of the citizens of Bass Creek were poor and there was a large transient population, there wasn’t a great deal of crime-a smattering of robberies, burglaries, drugs and domestic stuff. Most of the department’s time was spent catching speeders racing for the new bridge and the big cities beyond. In his twenty-two years on the force, Wes had only investigated seven murders, and in five of those cases, the identity and whereabouts of the murdering husband were hardly a mystery.

Nonetheless, Wes and Del were well versed in forensic techniques, having been all too eager to spend the taxpayers’ money on any and every seminar addressing the subject, whether it was in San Francisco or Scotland Yard. Unfortunately, book training was no substitute for experience.

When the two men walked into Lucy’s trailer and saw her corpse immersed in her own blood, Del’s first reaction was to follow Brenda Carrero down the street. The throng of locals outside nixed that option, so his second choice was to head for the john and puke his guts out. The Grunt held his ground. He’d seen worse in ’Nam.

After Del emerged chalk-faced, they started their investigation, donning their plastic gloves. Contamination had been drilled into their heads by the experts. Wes sent two uniforms to canvass the neighborhood and find out if any of the neighbors had seen or heard anything unusual in the last few days. At that point, they had no idea when the death had occurred.

“Write down everything they tell you verbatim,” Wes told them, mimicking the words of one of his seminar teachers. “You never know what might be important.”

Next, Del took pictures-pictures of the body, the bedroom, every inch of the trailer. They searched for evidence of a break-in or robbery but found nothing. The house was in perfect order except for the body and the blood on and around the bed, and a bloodstain on the living room carpet. Wes walked around the body looking for obvious clues like a knife or footprints or handprints in the blood, but there was nothing he could see with the naked eye. He didn’t want to touch the corpse. Let the coroner handle that, he told himself. It was Del who searched the garbage and found the broken mug with bloodstains on the glass. It was the only clue they had besides the bloodstain on the carpet and, of course, the blood on and around Lucy’s corpse.

Harry Tuthill, the coroner, arrived a half hour later. Harry had been the medical examiner of Cobb County for twenty-five years, but even he was overcome at the sight of Lucy’s body.

“Holy Jesus!” he exclaimed to Wes. “Who the hell would do something like this?”

“I don’t know, Doc. We’ve got nothing.” Harry had relaxed by then-it never took him long-and he considered it time to break the tension with a little humor.

“Let me see, I’d say death was caused by a knife wound to the throat.”

“No shit, Doc. Tell me something I don’t know.”

Harry gave up. He hated working with dumb cops.