Zombie Pulp

2

An hour later, after a hot cup of Joe and a hotter shower, I pulled on my rags and went uptown to the townhouse residence of the district attorney, Bobby Tanner. He was a good egg for a prosecutor. He’d hired me numerous times to do background checks on cases he was working on. We were tight. Bobby’s family had money like geese have feathers: he could’ve stuffed mattresses with it. Bobby had attended some ivy league college, but had decided to go into public service much to the chagrin of his people who wanted him to join some upscale whiteshoe firm on Fifth.

But that was the kind of boy Bobby was: honest, decent, principles so high you would’ve needed a ladder to climb over them. Problem was, Bobby didn’t have anything anymore.

Bobby was dead.

His living room was crawling with cops and coroner’s people. They were thick as eels swimming upstream. Tommy and I were standing over in the corner next to a bookshelf, smoking, not saying a hell of a lot. Bobby wasn’t just another stiff, he was our friend.

The condition of the body was eating at us…much the way someone else had been eating at Bobby. He’d been partially devoured, you see. Most of the flesh had been stripped from his face and throat. His belly had been ripped apart. His head had been opened like a can of soup and sucked clean. His left arm was missing beneath the elbow. This time, the killer hadn’t used any tools, the coroner informed us, he’d used teeth and nails.

“I know what you’re gonna say,” Tommy said to me, “but there can’t possibly be a connection between Quigg and this.”

“And why not?”

“Because he’s dead.”

“He’s also missing,” I pointed out.

“That don’t buy beans,” Tommy said.

And maybe it didn’t. I started thinking about Quigg. It was something I dearly wanted to put out of my head forever. But now it all came back like a bad rash. The same old questions that I never could answer, but ones that I knew were important. Somehow. “I’m still wondering about Quigg,” I said. “What did we really know about him?”

Tommy just stared at me. His was a big fellow, went an easy three-hundred plus, was built like something that could’ve pulled a beer wagon for a living. He wasn’t pretty. He was balding, his face a roadmap of Death Valley, a cigar butt shoved in the corner of his mouth. Maybe not campaign poster material, but effective as hell. Only reason he hadn’t brought in Quigg himself was that Quigg, though under suspicion, was connected like the water works.

“He was a sick sonofabitch,” Tommy said. “He ate goddamn people and now he’s dead. And don’t start with any of that ‘cult’ bullshit with me again. I’m not in the mood.”

It had been my pet theory. You see, Quigg, although technically employed by City College as a professor of anthropology and folklore, had been on the last leg of a five-year leave of absence at the time of his arrest. According to the college, he had been gathering information for some paper he was writing. He spent two years in Haiti, another in Ecuador, and two more hopping around Asia and the Middle East. I’d never been able to connect up any of that unless he had learned how to be a cannibal from some jungle tribe. But I knew there was a connection. I could feel it like a fat man can feel cool air blowing up through a hole in the seat of his pants.

But the cult angle?

One of the few witnesses to the murders claimed he saw not just a lone man leaving the crime scene, but a group of people. And when I was following Quigg around he was always in the company of three or four others. And that night I found him doing his thing…well, I could’ve sworn I heard footsteps running off as I approached. Many of them. I hadn’t bothered following because I’d thought I had my man.

But were there others?

Was Quigg operating alone?

Somehow, I started to see a connection here. Whatever Quigg was part of, maybe it was still in operation. But why Bobby? Why a high-profile victim like the district attorney? It made no real sense…or maybe it made all the sense in the world.

“I’ll be in touch,” I told Tommy, heading towards the door.

“Where the hell you going?”

“Following a hunch,” I said.

Tommy looked at me. “I don’t give a rat’s hairy ass how you spend your free time, Vince, but don’t get yourself in trouble. You know how you are. When you get going, things happen.”

“Things?”

“You know what I mean. Try and keep the body count low, will ya?”

But I was already out the door.