Virtually Dead

Chapter Two

Michael had been at home when the call came in, sitting on the terrace with a beer watching the moonlight shattering into a million fragments on the rippled surface of the ocean. He had been lost in his usual fog of depression, not thinking much about anything. It was a murder, they said, and he welcomed the interruption, the chance to focus his mind away from himself, even if it took another man’s death to do it.

The southern California air was still warm, blood temperature, barely registering on the skin. Michael wore a simple pair of dark pants and a grey polo shirt with its Newport Beach CSI logo. He parked in the street below the house, which stood on the hill behind the coast highway, with a view out over the marina toward the peninsula. It was a big house, set on an outcrop of bedrock. Tall palms around it shifted gently in the breeze coming off the ocean. He heard the crackle of police radios. A uniformed officer stood by the open door of one of the patrol cars, and nodded as Michael hefted his tripod over his shoulder and swung his camera bag out of the trunk. “Nice night,” he said, untroubled by the presence of death. He had seen it all before.

“Sure.” Michael returned the nod, and loped past the white transport van that would take the body back to the Orange County Coroner’s Office for autopsy. It was pulled in behind a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria and what Michael recognised as the Deputy Coroner’s car.

His colleagues’ white Forensic Science Services van was parked a little further up the hill.

Michael climbed the steps to the front door, stopping for a moment to take in the view. The lights of Newport arced round the bay below, the arm of the peninsula crooked protectively around the harbour and the islands that dotted its dark waters. Moonlight caught the peaks of the distant Catalina Island on this clearest of spring nights, the air infused with the heady scents of bougainvillea and honeysuckle. The view was almost as good, Michael thought, as the one that Mora had bequeathed him. The officer at the door felt compelled to comment. “I guess it takes a lot of money to buy a view like this.”

Michael nodded. “It does.” He stooped to pull on plastic shoe covers and snap on a pair of latex gloves. “How is it in there?”

“Messy.”

He was not exaggerating. Michael followed his directions down the hall to a large study room with French windows that slid open on to a terrace that looked out on the view. Two burly gentlemen in suits, with gloved hands and a folded gurney, stood just outside the door waiting to take the body away. A large, corpulent man lay half on his side, propped in a semi-seated position by the debris of a chair that had shattered beneath his falling weight. His bald head was tipped back at a peculiar angle, eyes wide and staring into eternity. His goateed jaw hung slack, mouth open, tongue protruding slightly. There were three small bullet wounds in his chest, and three large exit wounds in his back, blood spattered in random patterns over the wall behind him, like some avant garde fresco. It had drained from his upper body through the open wounds, soaked the back of his white shirt and the cream sheepskin rug beneath him.

Michael immediately smelled the peppermint of the candies that habitually rattled around the mouth of the Deputy Coroner when he was working. Nothing had changed in Michael’s three years away. Just one week back, and it felt to him like he’d never been gone. The DC had always claimed that sucking on a mint helped his concentration. And the saliva generated by the candy now slurred his words as he looked up from where he was crouched over the body. He waved a driver’s licence that he had carefully extracted from the back pocket of the dead man’s pants. “Photo ID matches. It’s our man alright.”

“Our man being who, exactly?” All the faces in the room turned toward Michael. There were a couple of homicide detectives dressed like extras from Central Casting. Ricky Schultz was fat and balding. Luis Angeloz, sometimes known as LA, was tall, thin, and pinched. Together they were known to everyone in the department as Laurel and Hardy. Then there was Janey Amat, with her straight, blue slacks and plastic covered sneakers and a flimsy black Newport Beach CSI issue jacket over a white tee-shirt. Her brown hair was pulled back in a hastily gathered ponytail, a white surgical mask hiding the lower half of a pale face devoid of make-up, tortoiseshell glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. She could hardly have made herself less attractive. Michael knew that she had all but given up in that department.

Her face lit up when she saw him. “Hey, Mike. Sorry for the home call. Jimmy’s off sick.” She turned back toward the dead man’s desk, where she was tape-lifting a set of prints from its polished mahogany surface.

“His name is Arnold Smitts,” the DC said, answering Michael’s question. “Owner of the property.” He was still crouched over him, leaning one hand on his gun belt, as if he thought the dead man might rise up any minute to attack him.

“An accountant.” Hardy scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“Expensive pad for an accountant.” Michael looked around the room. Everything about it spoke of money, from the leather-tooled writing desk to the ox-blood captain’s chair and the mahogany shelves that groaned under the weight of a collector’s fortune in first-edition early twentieth-century law books. Three thousand dollars worth of eight-cores standard Mac Pro computer stood on the desktop, next to a thirty-inch Apple cinema screen. The monitor displayed a landscape of rolling green fields with scattered trees sloping down to a tranquil ocean and the unfamiliar logo of a pale green open-palmed hand.

“No ordinary accountant.” Laurel was expanding on his partner’s cryptic description of the victim’s status. “A real high flyer, Smitts. Known to us. Suspected of having connections to the mob.”

Hardy said, “And you can bet your life the feds’ll have a file yea thick on him.” He looked at Michael. “Didn’t interrupt your dinner, did we? Lobster and champagne up in Corona del Mar?”

“I don’t drink champagne.” Michael turned away to take his Nikon from its case.

“You’re all cash and no class, Mike. Don’t tell me you wash down your caviar with beer.”

“Give it a rest, fat boy.” Janey gave the detective a look that would have turned milk sour. “Judging from your waistline the only thing you wash down with your beer is more beer.”

Hardy grinned. “Women like something to put their arms around.”

“Yeh, well my preference would be an arm tight around your throat.”

Laurel chuckled. “He said women, Janey. You don’t qualify.”

“Hey, guys, can we focus here, please?” The DC removed a blood-stained wallet from the shirt pocket and opened it carefully. Inside, a photograph behind a plastic window revealed two teenage girls smiling for the camera. “His kids, I guess. Do we know if he’s still married?”

“Divorced,” Laurel said. “Ten years ago. His girlfriend said she’d been with him for the last three.”

The DC looked up. “She still here?”

“She was nauseous. Shock. Sat alone with the body for fifteen minutes before the patrol car arrived. Incoherent by the time we got here. They’ve taken her off somewhere to sedate her. There was no point in even trying to take a statement right now.”

Michael attached a flash strobe to the hotshoe on his camera and pulled on a surgical mask before stepping into the room to start photographing the body. He moved methodically around it, first taking wide shots, then moving in tighter for detailed close-ups of the wounds, front and back, the face, the blood on the carpet, the blood spatter on the walls.

And then the room itself, officers stepping out of the way to clear his shots.

When he had finished, the DC called the two sombre employees of the body transport company waiting in the hall, and they stepped in to manoeuvre the corpse into a white zippered body bag and lift it onto their gurney.

Michael leaned on the bookcase and watched Janey dusting for prints. “Anything interesting, Miss Amat?”

She shrugged. “Nah. No weapon. No obvious calling cards. We’ll have to bag the rug and a few bits and pieces. Plenty of prints, but they’re probably mostly his and hers. We’ll do an inch-by-inch once we’ve cleared the room.” She glanced at him, and held him fondly in her gaze for a moment. “Howya doing, Mike?”

“Better for seeing you, Janey.”

She grinned. “Yeh, that’ll be right. The only time guys are happy to see me is when I’m heading out the door.”

“That’s just cos you’ve got such a cute ass.”

“Hah! Mid-thirties and sagging. I don’t think so, Mike.”

“Hey, any guy would be glad to get his hands on your butt.”

“Yeh? So how come I haven’t met any of them?” She grinned and cocked a provocative eyebrow in his direction. “Unless, of course, you’re offering.”

He grinned. “I’m more of a tit man myself.”

“Damn! And I don’t have much in that department.” She cupped what little she had in each hand, pulled a face and turned back to her dusting. “Speaking of large breasts, what’s happening with that girl from Huntington Beach who was after your body?”

Michael’s face clouded slightly, and he tried to sound casual. “Nah. Wouldn’t have worked, Janey.”

She turned a frown in his direction. “You mean, you never put hands on her butt either?”

He shrugged. “I figure they put the implants in the wrong place. I thought I had big hands, too. But never could get them around it.”

He turned away then, his smile fading, and stared out through the French windows at the ocean view. He hadn’t laid hands on anyone in a long time and couldn’t imagine that he ever could again.