The Big Nowhere Read Free

from the wounds; he smeared the samples on slides and made a speculative jump that Doc Layman would have crucified him for:
    The killer used an animal or animals in the postmortem abuse of his victim.
    Danny looked at the dead man’s penis; saw unmistakable human teeth marks on the glans, what Layman called “homicidal affection,” working for laughs in a classroom packed with ambitious off-duty cops. He knew he should check the underside and scrotum, saw Ralph Carty watching him and did it, getting no additional mutilations. Carty cackled, “Hung like a cashew”; Danny said, “Shut the fuck up.”
    Carty shrugged and went back to his Screenworld . Danny turned the corpse onto its back and gasped.
    Deep, razor-sharp cuts, dozens of them crisscrossing the back and shoulders from every angle, wood splinters matted into the narrow strips of caked blood.
    Danny stared, juxtaposing the front and backside mutilations, trying to put them together. Cold sweat was soaking his shirt cuffs, making his hands twitch. Then a gruff voice. “Carty, who is this guy? What’s he doing here?”
    Danny turned around, putting a pacify-the-locals grin on; he saw a fat man in a soiled white smock and party hat with “1950” in green spangles. “Deputy Upshaw. You’re Dr. Katz?”
    The fat man started to stick out his hand, then let it drop. “What are you doing with that cadaver? And by what authority do you come in here and disrupt my workload?”
    Carty was shrinking into the background, making with supplicating eyes. Danny said, “I caught the squeal and wanted to prep the body myself. I’m qualified, and I lied and told Ralphy you said it was kosher.”
    Dr. Katz said, “Get out of here, Deputy Upshaw.”
    Danny said, “Happy New Year.”
    Ralph Carty said, “It’s the truth, Doc—if I’m lyin’, I’m flyin’.”
    Danny packed up his evidence kit, wavering on a destination: canvassing Allegro Street or home, sleep and dreams: Kathy Hudgens, Buddy Jastrow, the blood house on a Kern County back road. Walking out to the loading dock, he looked back. Ralph Carty was splitting his bribe money with the doctor in the rhinestone party hat.

Chapter Two
    Lieutenant Mal Considine was looking at a photograph of his wife and son, trying not to think of Buchenwald.
    It was just after 8:00 A.M.; Mal was in his cubicle at the DA’s Criminal Investigation Bureau, coming off a fitful sleep fueled by too much Scotch. His trouser legs were covered with confetti; the roundheeled squadroom steno had smeared kisses on his door, bracketing EXECUTIVE OFFICER in Max Factor’s Crimson Decadence. The City Hall sixth floor looked like a trampled parade ground; Ellis Loew had just awakened him with a phone call: meet him and “someone else” at the Pacific Dining Car in half an hour. And he’d left Celeste and Stefan at home alone to ring in 1950—because he knew his wife would turn the occasion into a war.
    Mal picked up the phone and dialed the house. Celeste answered on the third ring—“Yes? Who is this that is calling?”—her bum phrasing a giveaway that she’d been speaking Czech to Stefan.
    “It’s me. I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be a few more hours.”
    “The blonde is making demands, Herr Lieutenant?”
    “There’s no blonde, Celeste. You know there’s no blonde, and you know I always sleep at the Hall after the New Year’s—”
    “How do you say in English—rotkopf? Redhead? Kleine rot-kopf scheisser schtupper—”
    “Speak English, goddamn it! Don’t pull this with me!”
    Celeste laughed: the stage chortles that cut through her foreign-language routine and always made him crazy. “Put my son on, goddamn it!”
    Silence, then Celeste Heisteke Considine’s standard punch line: “He’s not your son, Malcolm. His father was Jan Heisteke, and Stefan knows it. You are my benefactor and my husband, and the boy is eleven and must know that his heritage is not amerikanisch police talk and baseball