Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

So far, despite a few anomalies like the God-botherer’s pistol, it was pretty much the kind of thing that Wingate had expected. It was only when he looked through the contents of the suitcase that it started to get weird. He thought these would be as predictable as Vernon Kemp’s background, but he was wrong. Underneath the upper layer of pamphlets and a Bible lay a box of ammunition, a Sony camcorder, a roll of duct tape and five sets of handcuffs.

This made it look more like a dirt-on-dirt hit, what cops called a twofer: two dead assholes for the price of one. Whatever these guys had been aiming to do with that stuff, they were not only ofay but very definitely not OK. And sure as hell not jamming for Jehovah, either.

Lamont’s beeper went again, a drive-by at Central and Glenn, by the interstate exit. He told them he’d get over there ASAP and headed off to get a few statements to pad out the file. This being Pittsburgh, he didn’t expect a whole lot of cooperation, and he wasn’t disappointed. The only thing all the witnesses agreed on was that no Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to their door that evening. Apart from that, the stories varied wildly. Some people even denied hearing shots, although the burner that punched that crater in the white guy’s chest must have been a pound at the very least, and there was no way you weren’t going to hear anything that size going off right outside the house. Others admitted hearing shots-estimates varied from one to a dozen-but with a single exception no one had seen anything except Oprah .

The exception was Donna Grifton, an elderly woman living alone at 322 Carson. It was she who had called 911 in the first place.

“I heard some kind of noise in the street,” she told Lamont. “Like a car door slamming, something like that. I’d been expecting my niece to come and visit, thought maybe it was her. I was on my way over to see when I heard this other sound, real loud. I knew that weren’t no car door. I heard guns before, and this was a gun all right.”

Lamont nodded.

“And what did you see?”

“Hardly nothing. Time I got across to the windowlight, it was over. The gun went off again, and then I heered some kind of hollering. Only thing I see’d was the three of them laying there up the street. That’s when I called.”

Back at the scene, the garrulous drunk was still trying to tell his story to the beleaguered patrolman. Lamont Wingate felt the senseless shame he always did when a person of color started acting up. He knew this was dumb, a kind of Uncle Tom reflex, but he went over anyway and told the bum to quit acting the fool or he’d “bust him under statute triple four seven one A.” There was no such statute, but Lamont had never known the threat of invoking it to fail. It was that “A” that got to them, he reckoned.

But this particular citizen seemed unimpressed.

“I ain’t acting no fool,” he protested civilly. “I’m just trying to explain to this here police what happened here tonight.”

“The hell he was!” the patrolman retorted. “What the sorry son of a bitch’s been trying to do is tell me his entire life history since he got up this morning.”

“That is an arrant untruth,” the drunk replied in a hurt tone. “I may have been a mite circumstantial, but you got to understand I got liquor goggles on. Yet I see life not darkly, through a glass, but whole and entire. Everything is connected, so where to begin?”

He turned to Lamont Wingate.

“You law?” he said.

Lamont nodded.

“I saw the whole thing,” the drunk said with an air of bravado.

“Name?” said Lamont, getting out his notebook.

“Ulysses Grant.”

“Right! And I’m Robert E. Lee.”

The drunk produced a laminated card from his pocket and handed it to Lamont. It was a library pass made out in the name of Ulysses Grant. Lamont inspected it briefly, then handed it back.

“Where do you live, Mr. Grant?”

“Everywhere! In each creature and plant, and every human being that draws breath, as we all do, Mr. Lee. But I stay in that house right there.”

He made a gesture taking in half the street. Lamont sighed.

“OK, what did you see? No, let me rephrase that. What do you have to tell me about what happened tonight? That might be of interest to a body who don’t presently have the benefit of them goggles you mentioned, that is.”

Ulysses Grant frowned at him.

“Let me try and draw my mind up to these Lilliputian proportions. Damn, but it’s difficult! Makes me feel all dizzy-headed. OK. Whitey one enters left, seen from my box up there on the rise. Moons along the street like he’s subject to pull a car clout, something. Enter whitey two, stage right. Spies number one and comes over like he’s seen a ghost, which I have on many occasions experienced myself, the spirits of the dead rising sometimes as thick as steam from a street grate, and not surprising when the soil beneath our feet is stained its fine rich tint with the blood of our ancestors, Mr. Lee.”

Lamont Wingate tapped his notebook with the tip of his pen.

“I was on a cruise schedule, Mr. Grant, I could stand here and listen to you all night. As it is, you don’t cut to the chase, I’ll have to carry you downtown, hand you over to someone with the leisure to do your fine rhetoric the justice it surely deserves.”

Ulysses Grant gave a glare which mingled apprehension and defiance.

“Downtown? I ain’t been there in forty years. I don’t need anything they got to offer, ’sides which I hear it’s all been gussied up since these Yankee companies moved down here ’cos life is cheap. The War between the States might have broken the chains of slavery, Mr. Lee, but it replaced them with the chains of wage slavery, which are a hell of a sight harder to …”

He broke off, catching the look in Lamont Wingate’s eyes.

“The chase,” he said hurriedly. “Whitey two blows up at whitey one. Then the brothers arrive.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“Recognize any of them?”

Ulysses Grant smiled vastly.

“Them niggers all look the same to me,” he said.

Lamont Wingate nodded.

“Go on.”

“They go to clean out the white guys. Number one breaks bad, bucks Vernon there. Someone else takes the guy down, then the other. Exeunt right.”

“I believe the correct word is ‘exit,’” Lamont observed with a malicious gleam.

“Then your belief is misplaced, Mr. Lee, account of there was two of them. You exit. Y’all exeunt.”

Utterly defeated, Lamont Wingate packed up his notebook, returned to the patrol car and called in to find out why the guys from the morgue hadn’t showed up yet. The dispatcher told him that one of the other detectives had gone to look into the drive-by, so Lamont went back to his car and drove off, munching on one of the light bread sandwiches his wife had packed and mentally composing his prelim on the Pittsburgh shooting.

On the face of it, it sounded like a no-brainer. Vernon Kemp and a couple of dudes he was down with see these two suits and go to hit on them. Kemp’d likely been aching to get a body for some time, keep any of the Jams from trashing his rep, prove he had the juice. That side of it he could see. The problem was the other guys. If the drunk was to be credited, they’d fired first, two on three, and staring down the barrel of some major ordnance. That didn’t make no sense. And what the hell were they doing there in the first place, with a suitcase full of restraint equipment and a video camera, passing themselves off as a direct-sales team for the big kahuna?

“A pistol each, handcuffs, roll of tape, video camera,” he said out loud for the benefit of his father, who had died of a stroke two years earlier.

He hung a loose right on Georgia and drifted down to Capitol, past the construction site for the Olympic stadium. To the left, the IBM tower dominated the night sky, its latticework spire illuminated from inside like a Halloween pumpkin. Lamont thought about what the old drunk had said about the northerners moving in. What broke the South wasn’t the war, it was air-conditioning. Before that came along, the Yankees couldn’t take the climate. Lamont smiled and shook his head, recalling one guy he heard of, moved down here from New England, who kept his AC going full blast in the winter so he could have a log fire. Go figure!

“Maybe a burglary?” his father whispered unexpectedly. “Make like they’re peddling religion to get the door open, then pull out the hardware and clean the place out.”

“What’s to clean?” demanded Lamont. “That area, even the cockroaches are on food stamps.”

He went north on Hill, past demolished lots lined with parked cars during the day and under the expressway opposite the grim Stalinist bulk of Grady Memorial Hospital. That’s where they’d have taken the white survivor. He stood a better chance at Grady than most anywhere else in the country. They saw so many gunshot wounds the army sent their surgeons there to gain field experience. Lamont hoped the guy would pull through, or at least hang in long enough to talk.

“A sex crime, maybe?” his father suggested tentatively. Even when he was alive, he’d never cared to discuss this subject. “Like those perverts you read about in the paper. He threatens them with the gun, handcuffs and gags them, then videotapes the whole thing to watch later at home.”

“There were two of them, Pop. Sex offenders work alone, except it’s gang rape or whatever, and then they don’t bother with cuffs, all that shit.”

Rebuffed, his father fell silent. Lamont cruised on up to North Avenue, then swung right under a railroad bridge and into a humpbacked concrete side street ending at the tracks. Looking at the Homicide Task Force headquarters, you would never have guessed that Atlanta had one of the highest murder rates in the country. A small one-story brick block with a mean row of teensy windows, it might have been the workshop for the office stamp outlet next door.

Lamont went inside and called Grady. It took some time for them to track the guy down, since neither Lamont nor the hospital had a name for him. Presently tagged as “Patient #4663981: Identity Unknown,” the individual was said to be recovering from emergency surgery. His condition was described as stable but critical.

“So you didn’t find any ID on him?” Lamont asked the voice on the phone, the fourth he’d been put through to. “Driver’s license, credit cards, nothing?”

“If we did, it’d be on the chit.”

This was getting weirder and weirder. It sounded like these guys had deliberately stripped their pockets before going out, just like a couple of professionals. Except no professional would go up against a trio of armed muggers with a twenty-two.

Lamont popped one of the little breath-freshening mints which were his only vice. He was up to two packs a day, maybe it was time to slow down. He pulled out the phone book. Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared under Business Listings. There were about twenty numbers in all. Lamont called Central Congregation, the downtown branch. He got a recorded voice which explained that the office was closed right now and invited him to leave a message or dial another number if he wished to speak to a counselor.

“This is Detective Wingate, Atlanta Police,” he recited after the tone. “Couple of individuals have been sighted in Carson Street, off McDaniel, claiming to represent your church. Could you let me know if you have anyone out working the houses in that part of town? We suspect they may be impostors.”

He left a number and asked them to call him back. This was just to cover his butt. He knew damn well the guys weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses. What he didn’t know, what he couldn’t even begin to guess, was what in hell’s name they were. The only person who knew for sure was “stable but critical,” which was the way doctors covered their butts. His father had been stable but critical for almost two weeks before he died. Another few days, they would have had to remortgage the house.