New Hope for the Dead Read Free

that could serve as a second living room, with glass jalousies on three sides. The back lawn sloped gently to the square milky lake. A sliding glass door led from the master bedroom to the Florida room, and across the hall from the larger bedroom was the spartan room occupied by the dead Gerald Hickey.
    Mrs. Hickey’s bedroom held a round, unmade king-sized bed, with a half-dozen pillows and an array of long-legged nineteenth-century dolls. There was a pink silk chaise longue, a maple highboy with a matching dresser and vanity table, and a backless settee. The vanity table, with threemirrors, was littered with unguents, cold creams, and other cosmetics. The round bed was a tangle of crumpled Laura Ashley sheets in a floral pattern not observed in nature, with a wadded lavender nightgown-and-peignoir combination at the foot of the bed.
    Sanchez picked up one of the long-legged dolls. Hoke sniffed the anima of the owner—Patou’s Joy, perspiration, cold cream, bath powder, soap, and stale cigarette smoke.
    “You ever notice,” he said, “how a woman’s room always smells like the inside of her purse?”
    “Nope.” Sanchez dropped the doll on the bed. “But I’ve noticed that a man’s bedroom smells like a YMCA locker room.”
    “When were you”—Hoke started to say “inside a man’s bedroom” but caught himself—”inside the Y locker room?”
    “When I was on patrol, a long time ago. Some kid claimed he’d been raped in the shower.” She shrugged. “But nothing ever came of the investigation. No doubt someone cornholed him, but we figured he claimed rape because the other kid wouldn’t pay him. It became a juvenile matter, and I was never called to court.”
    “How long were you on the street?”
    “Just a little over three months. Then I spent a year guarding manholes all day so Southern Bell could hook up wires under the street. Then, because I was bilingual, they made me a dispatcher. Seven years listening to problems and doing nothing about them.”
    “Okay … let’s take a look at the body. You can tell me what to do about it.” Hoke closed the door to the master bedroom and they crossed the hallway.
    Jerry Hickey, with his teeth bared in a frozen grin, was supine on a narrow cot. Except for his urine-stained blue-and-white shorts, he was naked. His arms hugged his sides, with the fingers extended, like the hands of a skinny soldier lying at attention. His feet were dirty, and his toenailshadn’t been clipped in months. His eyes were closed. Hoke rolled back the left eyelid with a thumb. The iris was blue.
    On a round Samsonite bridge table next to the bed there were three sealed plasticene bags of white powder and shooting paraphernalia—a Bic lighter, a silver spoon, and an empty hypodermic needle with the plunger closed. There was the butt of a hand-rolled cigarette in an ashtray, and three tightly rolled balls of blue tinfoil. Hoke put the butt, the tinfoil balls, and the square packets of powder into a Baggie, which he stuffed into the left-hand pocket of his poplin leisure-suit jacket. The right-hand pocket was lined with glove leather and already held several loose rounds of .38 tracer ammunition, his pack of short Kools, three packages of book matches, and two hard-boiled eggs in Reynolds wrap.
    Hoke stepped back a pace and nodded to Ellita Sanchez. There was a knotted bandana tied around the dead man’s upper left arm. She examined the arm without loosening the crude tourniquet and looked at the scabs on his arm. “Here’s a large hole,” she said, “but the other track marks look older.”
    “Sometimes they shoot up in the balls.”
    “You mean the scrotum, not in the balls.” Sanchez, with some difficulty, pulled down the stained boxer shorts and lifted the man’s testicles. There were a half-dozen scabs on the scrotum.
    “This malnourished male,” she said, “about eighteen or nineteen, is definitely a habitual user.” She pointed to a row of splotchy red marks on