He took the handkerchief that was covering the mouthpiece and hung up the phone, and pulling the brim of his fedora low over his forehead he quickly walked away from the phone kiosk. Keeping to the shadows he hurried towards the car, parked two blocks away in an unlit alleyway. His breathing was ragged by the time he made it back; he was unsure whether it was the brisk walk, or that disturbing scene that he had just witnessed, was causing his labored breathing and that tight feeling in his chest. All he did know was that his life had become a whole lot more complicated in the past twenty-four hours. The awful feeling that things were rapidly running out of control on him, jangled his already frayed nerves. A frightened voice in the midst of the panic that filled his head told him to drive away as fast as he could and don’t come back.
His hands were trembling so hard that the match he held quenched and he had to light two more before he managed to spark the cigarette into life, he inhaled deeply and held the acrid smoke in his lungs until his chest burned and his heartbeat like a bass drum. The act of slowing exhaling the smoke seemed to dispel some of the anxiety with it, and by the time he lit the second cigarette, he felt calmer. It took some effort but he finally managed to silence the myriad of voices in his head, which bombarded his mind with questions he could not answer, at least in his present state. Calm down and take this one step at a time, he kept repeating this mantra until he drove everything else from his mind. When the radio squawked into life, his heart almost stopped. “Jumper reported on Sycamore Avenue, will any cars in the vicinity please attend.” This was what he had been waiting for, but suddenly Costello was rooted to the spot in fear.
The radio crackled as a cruiser reported in the fact that they were available to attend, Costello forced himself to react to the call and reported to the dispatcher that he would attend. However he waited another twenty minutes before driving the short distance to Conan’s apartment, even then he drove slowly praying that he would not be the first to arrive. The sight of flashing lights from the cruiser went some way to make him a little less anxious. He parked the car and watched a uniform roll out the crime scene tape, as he approached the scene he could make out a pool of something darker on the pavement, by the bundle of clothes that was once his partner. It was not the first time Costello had come across a fatality from falling from a height, but he never remembered it being this traumatic. The nearer he got to the spot the quicker his heartbeat, and his mouth felt as dry as a saltbox. The uniform that was cordoning off the area threw him the evil eye, and when Costello flashed his badge the cop just shrugged his shoulders in a show of indifference. The second cop stood over the body but made no effort to even determine whether he was dead or not, Costello already knew why.
The short glimpse he took of his partner before fleeing the scene earlier had left him in no doubt that he was stone dead. Conan’s head was a flat shape and speckles of brain matter, and bone splinters were spread around it like a halo. The second cop did not even bother to give a cursory glance at the badge Costello held aloft, preferring to just turn on his heels and walk away. “He is all yours Detective” he muttered over his shoulder without even looking at Costello. He would have much preferred to have gone through Conan’s pockets and the apartment when he was alone, but he would have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if he was spotted. So he had called it in, anonymously, and this way he would not draw attention to himself by turning up in answer to the radio call. He took a furtive look over his shoulder to see if the cops were watching him, but they were leaning on the patrol car smoking and gazing in the opposite direction.
For the briefest of moments, he wondered how anyone could be that indifferent to things like this, but the irony of this thought was not lost on him, he was every bit as cold and callous as the men in uniform. Except for this one and that was only because he knew the guy, but not only that, it was the fact Conan’s sudden demise could mean a whole lot of bother for him. In the distance, he heard the sound of approaching sirens, and he knew that within minutes the place would be swarming with cops and medical people. Kneeling over the body of his partner he was slightly disturbed that he felt nothing for the man, it was just one more mess that needed cleaning up. The sirens had stopped once the driver had seen the flashing light on the cruiser parked at the scene, but the place was now lit up like a fairground. Costello quickly searched Conan’s pocket, the guy’s wallet carried a little too much cash for the job he was in. But the only thing that interested Costello was the keys to the apartment.
Costello stood next to the body until the police photographer arrived; it was a different guy than last night, so before he took any pictures Costello informed him that the dead man was a detective. The guy did not seem impressed and just shrugged, before starting to click the shutter. Costello moved off and made his way to the patrol car, where he informed the cops of the dead man’s identity and asked them to contact Lieutenant Casey. As soon as the cop moved to call it in, Costello made his way into the apartment block. The first thing that struck him as he looked around the apartment with the lights on, was just how neat and tidy the place was. It was not what he would have expected from a man like Jack Conan, half the time the guy did not even bother to shave or brush his hair. The walls were covered with framed photographs of what he guessed to be Conan’s family, this discovery only served to make the situation feel even more bizarre.
If he liked to keep momentous of a past life, Conan was not much for gathering personal stuff. His wardrobe contained a couple of suits, some slacks and shirts and an assortment of ties. They were all the same make and cut, the only difference was the color and even that was a choice between navy blue or black, the shirts were plain white or plaid. His socks and underwear were neatly folded in the drawer of the bedside locker. Nothing to hint at what exactly Conan had gotten himself into, not even an address book. Costello broke off from the search as he heard voices approaching; he took one last look around the place before walking to the window and staring out. He was still watching the activity below when Casey and another guy he did not recognize walked in, one look at Casey’s face told him that he was far from happy with the situation.
Casey left without even bothering to introduce the man he was with, but not before making sure a uniformed cop was present to see Costello lock up. A last look around the apartment suddenly made him stop in the process of pulling out the door behind him, a single faded patch in the center of a wall full of photographs. Conan or someone else had removed a framed picture leaving the faded patch to identify where it had been, for some reason Costello believed it was removed very recently. Costello could not determine exactly why he felt the missing photograph was significant, but for some reason, he suddenly felt extremely anxious again. The body bag containing his ex-partner was being loaded in the rear of a coroners van by the time he reached the street; he was almost at the car when the two men approached him. He did not know them but he recognized one of them as a detective form uptown, this thing was getting stranger by the minute. “Keys for the apartment Costello?” One of the men Barked and put his hand out, the tone of his voice did not leave much room for argument. The guy just snapped the keys from his hand, and with a condescending smirk he turned on his heels.
Costello drove aimlessly around the streets his head filled with questions he could not answer, but the thing he kept coming back to was Jack Conan’s last words. “We are all just puppets, and the guys that pull the strings are really high up”. Those words had a chilling effect on him; it was an extremely disturbing feeling to realize that the enemy you sought may just be a superior officer. Costello found himself outside the all-night coffee shop he had taken the hooker to on the previous night; his mind felt as it was about to explode and the craving for the whiskey bottle was overpowering. Eventually, he forced himself to go inside, more so to escape the torture of his solitary thoughts, than any particular craving for coffee.
The bored waitress plonked the coffee in front of him and sauntered away without even making eye contact. The sprinkling of customers that were inside seemed to be all lost in their own thoughts, and he wondered just how many of them felt as disturbed as he did at this moment. Conan’s last bit of conversation continued to play a loop in his head until he felt as if he was inside his head, everything about his last words pointed to bad news for Costello. There was no way he could look at this rationally in his present state of mind, so he reached for the abandoned newspaper on the seat beside him. He needed something or anything to silence the voices in his head, it was a three-day-old copy of the local rag but he forced himself to leaf through the pages. The moment he set eyes on the photograph his heart skipped a beat, suddenly things started to fall into place.
The article covered the launch of a new police initiative to deal with runaway children that poured into the city in ever greater numbers; the photograph was taken at the main railway station. It showed a group of smiling people, pictured alongside a bulletin board depicting contact numbers for organizations and police departments that help runaways. Lieutenant Casey stood next to the man who had accompanied him to Conan’s apartment earlier that evening, the name below listed him as John Murray assistant police commissioner. In the background an even more disturbing sight was Jack Conan and a blonde woman, he immediately recognized Catherine Boyce. More pieces of the jigsaw puzzle were falling into place, but he now realized the finished picture may have him somewhere in the frame.
It came back to him like a baseball bat slamming into his head, Conan not only knew he had slept with Catherine Boyce, but he had gone out his way to explain that both Boyce and he were just puppets. He knew there and then that he was being trussed up like a Thanksgiving Turkey, and he knew just exactly who might have answers to this whole thing. The street was deserted when he pulled up, and a light was on in the bedroom of the apartment. It seemed a little peculiar that not a single other window in the building showed any light, well at least there was little chance of him being observed entering her apartment. That cold feeling down his back came over him again, the moment he saw the front door ajar. In this city, no one left their doors unlocked, and especially an attractive single woman. The moment he crossed the threshold he felt it, death had its own way of making itself known. She lay in the exact same place and position, he had last seen her. But the big difference was that her once pretty face looked like someone had taken a chainsaw to it, and the eyes were open and staring at the ceiling with a glazed look of horror.
Time suddenly lost all relevance as he stood rooted to the spot staring at the dead girl; the horror of it all was almost too much to take in. A little over twelve hours ago this woman had been alive and speaking to him, and now she would be forever captured in his mind in this terrible state. Rigor mortice had lent the illusion that the once pretty woman was now just some terrible replica of a living being beneath the sheet, the once pristine white sheets were now a disturbing shade of claret. A part of him wanted to touch her to ensure that this was not all some kind of a stress-induced illusion, but either way led only to the same conclusion, that insanity beckoned from somewhere very close by. An overwhelming sadness washed over him and he wanted to hold her and tell her how sorry he was, sorry for what exactly he could not say. Sorry for the fact that her young life had been so suddenly and brutally snuffed out or sorry for that the fact that their brief dalliance may have been the catalyst for her brutal murder.
Costello remained rigid in that one spot until his muscles began to ache; it was as if he had been turned to stone. His mind had somehow managed to blur out his surroundings and he was no longer tormented by that awful sight before him, instead, his mind played visions of the events leading up to this. The logic part of his brain had taken over and begun to analyze the past forty-eight hours, this part of his brain knew that to make sense of all this might be his one chance to step back from the precipice of utter insanity. At some stage during his frantic analysis of the situation, Costello must have taken himself from the apartment, because his next moment of positional awareness found him sitting behind the steering wheel of his car. Removed now from that awful scene he might have been forgiven for believing it had all been a terrible nightmare, but that logical part of his brain was still continuing to tease out the threads of everything that had happened. A picture was beginning to form in his mind and it was the face of a man, the man who had instructed him to work on this case solo.
John Casey had made sure and certain that Costello was out on a limb on this one, and then he shows up with the assistant police commissioner and hands the Conan case to detectives from uptown. Take into consideration the fact the both Casey and Murray appear in the same photograph as the recently deceased Conan and the murdered Boyce, then the coincidences were just a little too convenient. Conan’s words echoed in his head again, the bit about the guys pulling the strings being very high up. Well in anyone’s book an assistant police commissioner was fairly high up there, even Casey was several rungs above either him or Conan. Another thing struck him, was Casey purposely lying when he told him Conan was out of town. Conan could not have gotten away with the number of unexplained absences without the co-operation of someone above him, the logic part of his brain now told him to follow Casey and he would lead him upwards.
patrickgmoloney 