Tilt-a-Whirl

CHAPTER FIVE

Dr. Sandra McDaniels is the Chief Crime Scene Investigator for the state's Major Crimes Unit. She's also a genius. At least that's what Ceepak says.

“The lady wrote the book.”

He means it.

Ceepak studied her textbooks in criminology college and keeps one of her field manuals tucked into the little map pocket on his side of the Ford. Sandra McDaniels solved the famous Ocean Town Slasher case that almost closed down the casinos eight years back. She figured it all out with carpet fibers and fruit flies.

“Forensic entomology,” Ceepak told me.

McDaniels studied temperature readings to calculate the hatch time for fruit fly eggs found on a corpse, and that helped her pinpoint the time of death, and that sealed the Slasher's fate by blowing his alibi.

Don't ask me how. McDaniels is the one who wrote the book, not me.

Unfortunately, Dr. McDaniels is at her annual family reunion in Arizona, which is like three or four thousand miles away on the wrong side of the country to do us any good.

So we pull somebody else.

Somebody we can hear stomping around on the Tilt-A-Whirl platform.

“Hello?” a voice hollers. “Hello?” Then the guy hocks a loogie. “Where the fuck are you guys?”

We're busy back in the bushes, examining the needles and boot prints. You know how pine trees drop a carpet of brown needles in the fall? There's a tree back here that sheds hypodermics. They're everywhere.

Ceepak told me the Timberland imprints I found back here match some muddy prints he noticed up on the platform. It hasn't rained in a couple days, but there's a puddle where they roll the trash bin in and out. The water comes from a broken lawn-sprinkler head that doesn't flick around like it's supposed to (otherwise the bushes ringing the walkway wouldn't look so dead): It just dribbles and makes a nice big puddle for mosquito eggs and bootprints.

We hear a radio squawk on the other side of the shrubs. “Sea Haven? Come in. This is MCU. Who the fuck did you idiots post out here?”

“At the crime scene?”

I recognize our dispatcher's voice coming out of the guy's radio. It's the only way I do recognize her voice-squeezed through a tinny speaker.

“Yes, the fucking crime scene. Jesus. I told you I'm with MCU.”

“Officer Ceepak should be there now,” the dispatcher says.

“Well, guess what? He isn't!”

“Back here!” Ceepak calls out. “Just a second.”

“Take your fucking time,” the guy says sarcastically. “I got all fucking day.” We hear the thud of metal hitting plastic, like he just tossed his walkie-talkie into one of the twirling turtles.

Ceepak picks up one last dirty syringe with his tweezers. There's blood in it, like a junkie pulled out on the plunger right after he pushed in. I didn't write the book, but I gotta figure a tube with somebody's blood sample in it should give you some mighty fine DNA.

“Officer Ceepak?” Grumpy is yelling now. “What the fuck are you doing in the bushes? Taking a fucking dump?”

“On my way,” Ceepak says. He gestures for me to take one more digital photograph of the drug den. I do.

“Good work, Danny,” he whispers. I can tell he means it. He'd probably rub my hair like a proud papa if I wasn't wearing my cap.

We walk out from behind the big plywood Clyde.

There's this fat guy with a droopy moustache sitting up in a Tilt-A-Whirl car, the one next to the one with Hart's body in it. He's chowing down on some kind of breakfast sandwich wrapped in bright yellow tissue paper-our first clue about what made him an overweight walrus.

“You Ceepak?” he says to me.

“No.”

“I'm Ceepak. John Ceepak.”

“Lieutenant Saul Slominsky, Major Crime Unit. Can you believe my shitty luck? I just pulled into Burger King when I caught this call.”

He takes another jumbo bite and orange stuff squishes out both sides of the bread. I think it's a sausage, egg and cheese Croissan'wich, because he keeps wiping his greasy paws on his belly and there's some spongy egg stuff snagged in the whiskers under his nose.

“I can't sit down inside and eat a civilized breakfast, I gotta hit the goddam drive-thru and there's this total asshole in front of me who acts like he doesn't know what the fuck Burger King serves for breakfast. Like it's some kind of complicated menu and he needs to study it and take his fucking time. So I hop out of my car, show him my shield, and tell him to make up his fucking mind and move along. Asshole.”

Slominsky takes a triumphant whopper of a bite, snaring half of what's left of the sandwich.

He gestures over his shoulder with the thumb that's not busy with breakfast.

“The rest of my crew is hauling their shit out of their vans.” I guess Saul Slominsky's mother never told him not to swear with a mouth full of food. “Thanks for hanging the tape. We'll take it from here.”

Slominsky. The name finally rings a bell.

I've heard stories about this guy.

Ceepak hasn't, because he's new on the job and Slominsky never wrote a book.

In fact, Slobbinsky (which is what everybody calls him when he's not around) had the book thrown at him a few years back on account of his bad table manners. He blew the State's whole case in a major murder trial by dribbling sauerkraut from a Reuben sandwich all over a fingerprint card.

“Hey, you're the guys who made me work on my fucking lunch hour,” was his defense. But his uncle or cousin or best friend from grade school or something was a big shot in the governor's office so, instead of canning him, they gave Slobbinsky a slap on the wrist and an air-conditioned job pushing papers around his desk. Judging by his gut, the papers don't weigh enough to give him much of a workout.

The state police only let Slobbinsky loose in the field when everybody else is on vacation and things should be slow.

Like the second week of July.

“Lieutenant,” Ceepak says, “you might want to finish your meal outside the primary area of evidentiary value.”

Slominsky snorts at Ceepak.

“What?”

“Maybe you should finish your sandwich somewhere else?”

“You're the new guy, hunh?”

He wipes his hands on his pant legs. Burger King must've been short on napkins this morning.

“They call you Dudley Do-Right. You're the fucking Boy Scout … just back from Iraq? Dudley Fucking Do-Right?”

“I wouldn't know what people call me, sir.”

“Well, what kind of fucking cop are you? You need to keep your ear to the ground, son-cultivate your snitches, know what's going down, who's saying what behind your back.”

Slominsky crumbles up his BK wrapper and tosses it at one of those sun-faced garbage cans a few feet from the Tilt-A-Whirl ticket booth. It's a long shot and, of course, he misses. He stands up and flicks the crumbs off the front of his shirt. I swear to God, one flake flies off his chest and lands on Reginald Hart's face-right on the tip of the dead guy's nose. It gets stuck there in the drying blood.

Ceepak is seething. I can see his ear tips turning red.

“Lieutenant, I must protest …”

“No. The only thing you must do is get your ass off my crime scene.”

The rest of the Crime Scene Investigation team is proceeding single-file down the Tilt-A-Whirl pathway, trying to step where the guy in front of them stepped, just like Ceepak told me to do. There's about six of them. They all have on gloves (like Ceepak's) and hairnets and surgical masks and white Tyvek jumpsuits that make them look like walking FedEx envelopes. You can tell the State Boys are pros, even if their boss for the day isn't. They shoot looks to Ceepak and me that say they have to work with this bozo if they want to pick up their paychecks come Friday.

“What the fuck are you guys doing? Single file, Indian-style? Jesus, we'll be here all fucking day. Spread out. Get to work. I told Fox I'd have something for them by noon.”

Great. Slominsky alerted the media. The circus is coming to town.

Ceepak pulls on a fresh pair of gloves.

“If you don't mind, Lieutenant, I'd like to examine a few more-”

“Buzz off, Boy Scout. This is the State's crime scene now.”

“I understand, but-”

“You were in the Army, right?”

“Right.”

“You know about obeying orders? Chain of command? Shit like that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Return to fucking base, soldier.”

Slominsky wipes the last bit of egg off his chin with his sleeve. He sees the wallet lying open on the platform and bends over to pick it up.

“Somebody drop this?”

His greasy paw prints smear all over the leather, covering up any fingerprints that might be on the dead man's wallet-like, oh, I don't know, the shooter's?

Ceepak looks like somebody just kneed him in the nuts.

“You might want to put that down, sir,” says one of the CSI guys from behind his white mask. “Could be evidence.”

“Jesus, fellas-relax. We've got an eyewitness! The little girl saw everything. All we need to crack this case is a halfway decent sketch artist.”

“Shelly's with the girl now,” says another techie, a guy on his hands and knees studying the same boot prints Ceepak studied earlier.

“See?” Slominsky smiles at Ceepak and me. “The big boys are in town. This case is almost closed. We'll flash the sketch all over TV and have this thing wrapped up before lunch. Hey, goody-two-shoes?”

I think he's talking to Ceepak.

“Is there any decent clam chowder down here? I like the Manhattan stuff better than the white stuff….”

“Yes,” Ceepak says calmly. I can see he's mastering his emotions like he's taught himself to do instead of telling the blowhard to go fuck himself, which is, basically, what I've taught myself to do. “I am given to understand there are numerous chowder options available on the island.”

“Good. Because two fucking Croissan'wiches won't hold me for long.”

Slominsky struts over to the dead body.

“So this is Reginald Hart, hunh? Stayed at one of his casinos down in Ocean Town once. The Fantasia? Place had class. Real class. Marble tile in the toilets. Shit like that.”

Slominsky raises Hart's left arm, and lets it drop.

“Yep,” he says, “I'd say this guy is officially, one-hundred-percent dead. Where's the goddamn Medical Examiner?”

“On his way,” somebody says.

“Guess we better figure out a time of death. I'd say it was sometime this morning. How about you guys?”

None of the CSI team says anything. They're busy, trying to do their jobs fast-before Slominsky screws things up even worse.

“Okay. Good. This morning. That's what I'll say until we come up with something better.”

He sees Ceepak staring at him.

“You still here? Jesus-go home. You did your good deed for the day. You told me about the chowder.”

Ceepak is quiet for a second. Then he starts unsnapping his cargo-pants pockets.

“We found some items earlier,” he says, handing his paper evidence envelopes over to one of the white suits. “Wind started blowing….”

“Recalibrating the crime scene,” the CSI guy says, letting Ceepak know he did the right thing.

“You picked shit up?” Slominsky yells. “Jesus H. Christ! Fucking local yokels….”

“We recorded original conditions and positions,” Ceepak says. He slips the data card out of our digital camera and hands that over, too.

“You might want to check back there,” Ceepak points to the big Sunnyside Clyde sign. “Danny?”

He snaps his head to the side to let me know it's time to go. We walk out, watching where we step, as if it still matters.

Like I said, John Ceepak plays by the rules.

Even when the rules suck.