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CRANKYBLANCA
CHAPTER THREE: Cybermorgue
RBB [voiceover]: I kept at Jason Cranky until he was tired of answering questions, and then a bit longer. When you have a client, you trust him ... but only up to a point. Often he'll think that something doesn't matter, and he won't mention it till you browbeat him to within an inch of his life. Just before he takes a swing at you, he'll blurt something, and you'll slump back in your chair and hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing the "Hallelujah Chorus" in your skull, as the missing piece tumbles onto the desk in front of you.
It didn't happen this time, but I wasn't expecting it to, so I had lost nothing by it except maybe irritating Jason Cranky. And that didn't matter. The Big Purple One needed my help, and he had already put himself in my hands. He couldn't fire me, not now. He needed me too much to fire me. His beloved Crankyland, which I got the feeling was the only thing he truly loved, was on the line, and if I was the key to preserving it, then he'd just have to sit there and take whatever I had to dish out. Not that I was planning to abuse the privilege.
Cranky had another minion bring a phone over, and I dialed up the medical examiner's office. Doc Rochelle answered on the first ring.
ROCHELLE: Richard! It has been too long.
RBB: Howdy, Doc. How are the girls?
ROCHELLE: Growing like crazy, and brilliant and wonderful as ever.
RBB: I expect no less.
ROCHELLE: Did I tell you that the oldest has discovered the word "fuck"? She told us to turn off that fucking boring movie! We grilled her about where she learned the word, and of course it's from her father.
RBB: Of course. Well, keep E-Mailing me photos, OK? They remind me that there's still good and beauty in the world. I hate to change the subject, but ...
ROCHELLE: Don't tell me -- let me guess... You're investigating the Jason Cranky case.
RBB: Is that what you're calling it?
ROCHELLE: Look, Richard, all the bodies end up in Cranky's office; what the hell should we call the case -- the Strom Thurmond case?
RBB: Has a nice ring to it.
ROCHELLE: Forget about it, Richard; that old buzzard will outlive Mount Rushmore.
RBB: And his head is just as dense.
ROCHELLE: What do you want to know?
RBB: Can I come down there? I have to ask some questions and see some stiffs.
ROCHELLE: I thought you *hated* to see stiffs.
RBB: A job's a job, Doc.
RBB [voiceover]: She said to come on down, and I took my leave of Jason Cranky. He looked a bit less tense, but I still didn't like his spherical head's shade of purple.
I walked out of the cafe and headed towards the city center. The morgue abuts One Police Plaza. Outside, it's a bland brick building with nothing special about it. Inside, it's as cold as Newt Gingrich's heart and twice as empty as his head. High ceilings with banks of fluorescent lights towered over me as I walked down the lonely hallway towards Doc Rochelle's lab. I heard the radio going, and I knew that Doc Rochelle was listening to her favorite disk jockey while she worked.
She welcomed me in, and I had an unpleasant surprise. There were Lieutenant JunkYardDog and Lieutenant zeppo. I had no idea that zeppo had transferred from L.A. to New York City; he didn't look any more welcoming or friendly here than he did on the Left Coast. And Lieutenant JunkYardDog's face, always a difficult job to look at on any kind of stomach, was creased into a hostile grimace that made me wish I was anywhere else but there.
JYD: Bernstein, why do you always try to horn in on stuff that isn't your business?
RBB: Jason Cranky hired me to make it my business. He doesn't like that corpses keep turning up in his favorite office chair.
zeppo: I don't care what he likes. You're going to make our lives difficult.
RBB: Look, pal, have I ever left a case unsolved?
JYD: No.
RBB: And have I ever stolen credit from you guys? Or hogged credit?
zeppo: No, but I still don't like it.
RBB: You don't *have* to like it, Lieutenant.
ROCHELLE: Enough of this garbage. Let's pull out our four guests. You're lucky it's a dull week here; otherwise there'd be corpses stacked like cordwood, and I wouldn't have time to watch you bozos argue with each other.
RBB [voiceover]: She went to the cold safe and pulled open four drawers in a row waist-high, from left to right. The bloated whale-like carcass of Simon the Great shone evilly in the washed-out fluorescent light. His puffy face looked even worse in person than in the crime-scene photo. I pretended to study with care the deep, precise incision that cut across his neck.
ROCHELLE: Don't bother to pretend you know what you're doing with that corpse, Richard. I'll fill you in. The subject is about 5'10" and 220 pounds. A big, fat man. But the guy who killed him had no trouble doing it. There were no signs of struggle, no difficulties with the wound that caused the death. We know it wasn't self-inflicted; there are usually two or three hesitation cuts in the case of a suicide. This one was a smooth, clean cut with a very sharp blade, from left to right, suggesting that the killer was behind the victim and right-handed. Suggesting, also that the killer is at least 5'10" tall. Suggesting, finally, that the killer is proficient with a knife or a razor or a sword and has no squeamishness about him. There was a hell of a lot of blood at the time of the killing.
RBB: Which would confirm that this guy wasn't killed in Jason Cranky's office.
JYD: None of them was killed there. No sign of blood anywhere in the place.
zeppo: And Jason Cranky had no time to change the carpets or the furniture or the chair after any of the killings. His secretary, Veruca Salt, or his second-in-command, Hans, was there late each and every night, and checked the office before closing. It would have taken hours to pull up the carpet, to scrub down the desk and walls, to bring in a new chair. No -- nothing was disturbed, and no trace of blood. Therefore, they were killed elsewhere and brought to the office.
RBB: How?
JYD: If we knew that...
RBB [voiceover]: A thought tickled the back of my mind, and as I looked down at what was left of Simon the Great, I let the thought unfold like an origami bird. There was one way to get a corpse into a place of business at night. But I wasn't about to tip my hand just yet.
RBB: Let's see the next customer.
RBB [voiceover]: Doc Rochelle rolled each one out, and the story was the same every time. One clean, quick, deep slash, right across the throat from left to right, cut from behind by someone strong enough to make it a clean, quick, deep death cut and tall enough not to have to reach upward. No signs of struggle, nothing at all. Until we got to gnosticdogma....
RBB: What's that?
DOC ROCHELLE: What's what?
JYD: I don't see anything.
zeppo: Me neither.
RBB: What's that?
RBB [voiceover]: I was pointing to three cuts on the back of the corpse's right hand. One was vertical, the other two met at the bottom to form a V. I looked and looked, and then it hit me: "IV."
RBB: Doc, are there cuts like this on the other bodies?
ROCHELLE: Let me see. I don't know if I could have missed it, but then again I was looking mostly for the cause of death... I'll be damned. I did miss it.
JYD: Son of a bitch.
zeppo: Holy Mother of God.
RBB [voiceover]: There they were, in series. "I" on Simon, "II" on Discord, "III" on Darksider.
RBB: The fucking bastard is giving his kills numbers.... Do you have the bags with their last effects?
ROCHELLE: Right here.
RBB [voiceover]: We went through the bags, and suddenly I saw what I was looking for. In Simon's wallet, there was a postcard of Big Ben with a red check on the number "I." In Discord's bag, there was a book with a Big Ben postcard as a bookmark; the number "II" was circled in red. In Darksider's bag there was a paperback novel with Big Ben on the cover; the number "III" was x-ed out in red. And in gnosticdogma's bag, there was a BBC program guide with the number "IV" on Big Ben's face canceled with a red slash.
JYD: BBC?
RBB: BBC Radio uses the chimes of Big Ben as its trademark sound.
ROCHELLE: He's done this four times
RBB: He's one-third done.
JYD: What do you mean?
RBB: Four murders, and there are twelve Roman numerals on Big Ben's face.
At that moment, we heard the disk jockey begin his between-songs patter:
VINYLMAN: Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, cats and dogs. This is Vinylman, at WKRK, Radio Crankyland, spinning oldies and the latest, good stuff and bad, classic and romantic and jazz and pop and rock, you name it, I've got it. And now, a good old tune from when I was a young man with my heart filled with hope, a song that is loving and scary at the same time, Roberta Flack singing, "Killing Me Softly With His Song..."
RBB [voiceover]: As the music filled the room, we looked at one another, and I began to feel ill. We had a killer on the loose, with plans to commit twelve murders, and no clue as to who he was or how to stop him.
[end of chapter two ...]
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