Dick Tracy for Grownups

I love Dick Tracy comics. I step off the train in the seventies somewhere, but I love about 40 years worth of that freakshow comic strip.

So I ripped it off, kinda. I'd love to write a real DT project sometime. The ugly creeps and criminals, the beautiful decent citizens, the whole thing. 

A literal trigger warning here: this is gory and full of gangster violence, so heads up for sensitive readers.

Drake Richie

in

Two Hundred Dollar Suit

1.

    It was nearly three in the morning when we stormed the money counting room behind the front office at the Chicagoland Palace. We got a call that something big and red and awful was going on down there and instinctively, I knew we were near the last act of a day-long horror show. Sam drove while I put the call in for assistance. We beat the fastest of our backup there by more than ten minutes.

I caught up with the man of the hour myself after following the trail of blood drops and broken furniture through the club to a room behind the main cashier’s office. He hadn’t bothered to close any doors behind him so finding him was a cinch.

    Walking into the room filled my nostrils with the metallic smell of fresh blood. I stood in the doorway, using the heavy door frame to shield myself. The room wasn’t big, but it had a high plaster ceiling, maybe twelve feet or more. There was a spray of blood droplets that followed down the opposite wall. A heavy oak chair was splintered to kindling and lay partially blocking the entrance. Cash by the fistfuls was strewn over the carpet and the velvet sofa by the far wall.

    I leaned in for a better look around. A lamp lay near a desk, its lampshade plastered bright red with the old type-A, throwing a gory glow onto the proceedings. A man- a monster- stood over a body on the floor. I couldn’t see the vic’s face, but I had a clear view of the place he’d been keeping it up until a few minutes earlier. The killer turned to face me. I knew him. You don’t forget a mug that goddamned ugly.

He seemed not to recognize me. He stood swaying, unsteady on his feet. His eyes focused and unfocused again and again. What was he on?

    He charged me, I put a slug in the meaty part of his shoulder. He swung at me, I blocked and hit that same shoulder with my pistol butt. He connected with his next try, I shot at him again, this time just catching air. I needed answers more than I needed another notch on my gun, so I went Tarzan on him, hitting him in the face with my best Regency Gym Golden Gloves right jab. He didn’t seem to like it, so I gave him another. And another.

    Hammering at the bastard’s head was getting me nowhere. His skull was like a gorilla’s and it must have been six inches thick at the brow. I got inspired and started in on his neck and body and before long I was rewarded with a wet snapping sound from under his jacket: paydirt!

    That got him howling. He was shouting at me, mostly in Italian, but sometimes in English. One of the things he said was calling my mother a tramp. That one cost him the bridge of his nose, as I used the grip of my pistol as an etiquette refresher. 

 
    I brought cuffs around and hooked him up to the hot radiator in the money room. I figured we had about fifteen minutes before the cuffs got hot enough to burn the son of a bitch. I’d try to make it back before then. I stood up and looked him over. That busted honker wasn’t going to make him any uglier; his handsome looks were a middle finger sent directly from God Almighty to his mother at birth. His face was made up of rolls of skin and tissue that pulled at his jowls and hung into his eyes and made folds that obscured any emotion or intelligence the brute might have had buried inside him. He looked angry all the time and so he was.

    Beneath that Halloween mask of a puss he was dressed in a two hundred dollar suit. As a cop, I cleared about eighty a week. It rankled, so I slapped him one more time before the boss showed up.

    “Nutsack, you miserable prick”, I said, “This has been a hell of a night, even for you. What set you off? Tell me and maybe I don’t take you down to the Hudson and throw you and your radiator there into the drink.”

    His face, frozen in its deformity, told me nothing. Then he tried to smile, showing his bloodstained teeth and his purple tongue. He shook his head and licked at the flow of juice coming from his nostrils, his tongue easily rounding the tip of his nose like a dog.

    Just as I was about to kick his face again, Chief showed up with Sam in tow.

    “Hey, hey hey!” Sam admonished. “No more o’that here!” With his eyes, the Chief indicated a pair of beat reporters new to the scene. One with a notebook, the other a little guy with a camera. The bookworm rang no bells, but the shutterbug I knew from our transvestite queer sweeps in the Lavender district. The famous Wee Gee, now working the mob stories. I shot Wee Gee a phony sneer and he countered by throwing a couple of shadow boxing punches in the air and chased them with a wide, friendly grin. Wee Gee was all right people.

    I pointed to a messy stiff in the corner of the room. His rarely-used brains were piled net to him, near a clothes iron. “Sam! Just finishin’ up here for you. This one is Bernardo Rizzuto-“

    “-Five Head”, Sam finished. He smiled and shook his head. He took out a little black book and made a show out of scratching something out on one of the pages.

    “…and that one over with the raisin face there is Nutsack. Carmine Innocenti,” I said.

    “The famous Nutsack,” the Chief said, “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time. I’m thinking you and I should talk. It just might save you from the chair.”

    Sam squatted down next to Innocenti and spoke softly to him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but it shook the Italian up! He started crying.

    “Don’t let them do that to them. I’ll cooperate. I’ll give up Two Eyes and Crinkle Cut and Fishmonger- I’ll tell you where they are, but please! Don’t let them take my-“

    Chief put his finger to his lips with his right hand while covering Innocenti’s torn mouth with his left.

“Shhhhhh!”

    Innocenti was so shocked that his face, his granite face, actually changed expression. His eyes were wide and they darted between Sam and the cops behind us near the door. He nodded slowly and closed his eyes. I think I heard him start to sob. We walked away from them.

    Sam took two smokes out of the pack in his trench coat and offered one to me. I didn’t smoke. I took it.

    Sam lit my cigarette and fixed me with a quizzical look, “What the hell happened here?”

    I drew in the fresh, clean smoke and let it creep out of my nostrils. “That asshole over there (I nodded to Nutsack) forced his way in the door here sometime around 3:30. That asshole there (I motioned toward the late Fivehead) was apparently screwing a showgirl named Floozie O’Toole. She was Nutsack’s special lady, from what I can gather. There might be more to it than that, but we’re only getting started here.”

    Sam’s eyes hadn’t left Fivehead’s body since we started talking. He didn’t look upset, or sad. He just looked tired. As we stood watching, Wee Gee moved Fivehead’s Stetson from the hat rack by the door, placing it on the floor next to the shovelful of slurry that once filled his enormous noggin.

Sam suddenly brightened. He said, “Looks like Floozie definitely had a type, huh?” He laughed hard, eventually turning it into a coughing fit.

    “She likes ‘em big and fucking ugly,” I said, sending him laughing again. I think Sam had probably been awake for thirty hours by this point.

    “Nutsack finds out his skinny little Miss has been running around on him with every ugly prick gangster in town and he suddenly goes purple. Figure about four yesterday afternoon he starts in hunting the fellas down. Interrupts happy hour at Frankie’s by shooting Frankie Stein in the eye in front of thirty eyewitnesses. He kills two more at the door on the way out.”

    Sam was writing all of this down. I continued.

    “Gets in his Olds and heads over to Clean Benny’s place to look for Two-Tooth. He’s not there. He kills Benny and his sons Denny and Lenny for no reason. Drives to Pimples McQueen’s, intent on killing Pimples, but he finds Two-Tooth there with Pimples’ handsome brother Dimples. Kills Two Tooth shoots Dimples once in the rib. While he’s on the floor, he gets him with a carving knife and whittles all the handsome off him. Takes the knife with him.”

    Sam was writing in his notebook again. “That’s eight. Nine if you could that mess on the floor there,” he says.

    “I’m not done,” I said, “He goes home to his apartment on Grant. He showers, changes clothes, eats a steak, and sets out again, refreshed and ready. Remember, he’s still looking for Pimples and this one over here. He looks for Pimples for hours. We figure he might have gone to talk to Big Feet Murphy at some point because that poor bastard’s car was found in the sulfur marsh on by the smelting plant out past Gracie around nine last night. No body inside, but he could be in the marsh somewhere, dead.”

Sam pointed to me with the eraser of his pencil. “I’ll put him down as a possible dead guy then,” he said.

    There was a four-hour gap in Nutsack’s known whereabouts between ten-thirty and two-thirty. Judging from the wrinkles in his linen suit and cotton shirt, I’m willing to bet he was asleep in his car somewhere. Probably exhausted himself. I shared this theory with Sam, but he didn’t write it down or anything. We’d know soon enough.

    Chief had Pat bring Floozie to the scene. She was being held at the station for her own protection since early last evening. She was dressed in a short satin dress and an oversized ermine coat. She’d been crying and her mascara was streaked down her face. From the neck down, she was a work of art. Smooth ivory skin, firm beautiful breasts, and long, shapely legs. From her pearl necklace up she was all hag though, which I find is typical for the molls in this town. I had to focus my attention either on her bosom or on some fixed point in the distance just past her head just to get through questioning her. She looked like she did all of her gold-digging using her face for a shovel.

    “Miss O’Toole, I’m sorry you’re having such a rough night, but I’ve got some questions for you that just won’t wait until morning,” I said.

    She looked up at me. I was relieved when I didn’t turn to stone.

    She turned her gaze to the floor as she spoke. She said, “You’re Drake Richie? They all talk about you. They really hate you, you know.”

    “That’s why they pay me the medium bucks,” I answered. Pat let out a single bark of laughter.

    I continued, “From what all of this looks like, it seems your boyfriend Mr. Innocenti over there was trying to get you all for himself by taking out the competition. Can you supply us with a list of the men in your life that Innocenti may have targeted? Anyone he might see as a rival for your affections?” I was getting used to her face a little now.

    This must have been news to Floozie. She was afraid that Nutsack was coming after her to kill her, not to make her his own. She turned and looked at Nutsack, who managed a look that was equal parts guilt and longing. I wish I hadn’t seen that look on his face.

    Floozie turned again to me. She said, “Carmine is jealous of everyone that so much as talks to me, but yeah, I can give you some names. Only the guys I actually “dated” regular, right? Do you have a pen and paper?”

    I gave her a notepad and my new Arrow fountain pen. She sat in a chair facing the door and bent over a telephone stand to write.

    “I’m gonna need more paper than this,” she said.

2.

    While the wrecking crew came to cart Five Head to his final dissecting place, Sam, Pat, and I sat in the bar at the Palace, comparing notes. Pat had just come from an unrelated crime scene, a simple murder-suicide that would have been only a suicide until the landlord showed up, demanding the next month’s rent from the ghost-to-be. If he’d stopped to pet the dog on the way up the stairs he could have been having the steak and eggs and Shandy’s tomorrow morning, but instead, he walked in on a self-razoring and wound up going along for the ride. You hear all kinds of stories in this job. Cops talk.

    As Pat talked, I passed my hand along the cool marble bar. On the backlit shelves above us, gilded cherubs presented crystal decanters of the worst rotgut and piss water in the city. An elephant ivory cigarette box on the bar held a selection of the same Luckys kids boost from the drugstore. Under the hand-tooled zebra skin stool I sat on at the bar was a wad of pink bubble gum the size of a tangerine. It seemed Chicagoland Palace was equal parts Palace and Chicagoland.

    Pat let a little detail slip he’d overheard at the Dimples murder scene. A porter in the hotel there said that a big, shit-ugly brute had come in looking for Pimples, but that he looked like he was under a “spell” of some kind.

    Sam popped an ice cube into his mouth. “Hippotized?”

    Pat went on, “the kid said it looked like the guy was hopped up or something. He just kept saying, “Pimples! Pimples!” They told him he wasn’t there and the guy turned into a total asshole lunatic. Killed them that was in the room and two strangers at the door.”

    “Nutsack”, I said, “Right?”

    Pat nodded his head and said, “Yeah. Figures, anyhow.’

    Sam said, “Remember the list?”

    I didn’t know what was going on with the “spell” that Pat was talking about. I’ve heard of people getting a bloodlust on and getting this dead-eyed look about them and just killing, killing, killing like the way sharks do. Killing, killing…

    My wrist radio cracked and popped. Someone was trying to get hold of me. These radios have rotten reception, but the city paid almost ten thousand dollars to outfit all of the detectives and officers with them, so we’re pressed into using them whenever we can.

    “Ladies, I have to take this outside to get a signal. I’ll be back in a few minutes. Get us set up with another round. Tell the bartender to put some medicine in them this time.”

    My hand pushed on the heavy brass handle of the club’s revolving North door. I could see a brick red handprint on the other side of the glass. Innocenti must have pushed when he should have pulled trying to get into the building.

    Outside a couple of dozen cops and a dozen cop cars directed traffic and managed the press. I could see Chief talking to Wayland Morrow from The Globe. Another guy stood near them, swinging his arms around and raising his voice. If I didn’t already know who he was, the long, smooth legs sticking out of the car door behind him would have clued me. This had to be Floozie’s mouthpiece and he was giving Chief an earful about his client, who as far as I knew wasn’t being charged with anything in all of this anyway. I watched them with one eye while fixing my earpiece to my radio.

    I got my radio working. It was Captain Henry. I had thought it might be Chief, but when I saw him on the curb I knew if had to be Henry. So few people have authority to radio officers in the field.

Henry shouted into his handset, “Drake? Where the hell are you?” He was overcompensating for the poor reception. I put my finger on the speaker to muffle his voice. These radios had no volume control.

“The Palace. I’m comparing notes with Pat and Sam,” I said.

    “Jesus Christ is everyone down there? Good Christ, man. Get things squared away and get your asses back to the station house,” he said, “We have another nut job on the loose and we need to get a collar on him before someone gets killed that don’t deserve it.”

    He hung up before giving me anything more. I wound up by saying, “On my way!” to a dead signal. I slid the antennae closed on my radio and stood on for a minute, taking it all in. Floozie knew more than she was letting on. She was the catalyst in all of this. She was the reason for the bloodbath last night. Six of the dead men with ties to Floozie. It was more than bad luck or one crazy nut. As far as I knew Floozie was nobody’s first choice. To think that Innocenti lost his marbles over her after all this time spent sharing her with the mob community didn’t seem to add up to me. Sam and Pat walked out of the club to join me.

    “What happened? Did they finally 86 you two drunks?” I said.

    “Closin’ time,” Sam answered. He jerked a thumb toward the sign just as the lights were turned off.

    “Wanna continue at Mannheim’s? It’s still open for the night owl crowd,” Pat said.

    Night owls? It was quarter after five. I shook my head and turned up my collar. “Believe it or not, that was Captain Henry on the ‘watch. We’ve got another one of these type of things going on if I understood him right. We have to hustle back to the station to get brought up to speed. We should high tail it over now.”

    Sam was still carrying his highball glass when he left the club. He downed the last of his scotch and shattered the glass onto the pavement. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

    “Let’s go!” he said.

    We all crowded into Sam’s car, but since Sam was already feeling the effects of three scotches in less than an hour, I drove. Pat and Sam pulled at a flask that Sam had tucked in the glove box with his drop gun. In less than five minutes we were at the station. There is precious little traffic at this hour of the morning. As Sam and Pat took their time getting out of Sam’s bus, I used my penknife to cut the twine on a bundle of the morning’s Herald-Couriers tossed off at the newsy on the corner and I helped myself to a fresh one. There on the front page:

MOB WIPEOUT! CARMINE “GUILTY” INNOCENTI COPS TO DAY-LONG KILLING SPREE

    I scanned the paper for any tidbits that the Herald might have paid money for, but there wasn’t anything here that we didn’t already know. A series of photographs showed Dimples and Two Tooth lying side by side, Dimples’ toupee slightly askew. He would have been mortified.

    Sam and Pat were already across the street and on their way into the building. Sam had complained of a bursting bladder on the drive over so he was in an obvious hurry to get to the Gents'. Pat was holding him up. I hope Sam had it in him to stand and piss by himself.

    The bright lights at the front desk were a reminder to me of how long it had been since I’d been awake. This was one of the longest shifts I’d ever put in and it wasn’t done yet.

    “Henry?” I asked the desk sergeant.

    “Uhhhh…he’s in squad room 3. He told me to send you up there as soon as you got in,” he said, “Just you.”

    Well, when Pat and Sam get out of the head, stall them or something,” I said. I rubbed at my eyes headed up the stairs.

    Squad room 3 wasn’t really a squad room. It was too small for that use, so we took it off the rotation. It became the closed-door meeting room we’d use whenever someone wanted to bring up something outside of our normal police line of inquiry. Last time I used it was when I found out Sergeant Tommy Lemon was stealing heroin from the evidence locker and replacing it with confectioner’s sugar. The ants in the basement were the co-leads on that investigation.

    I walked up the hallway in complete silence. I had gum soles on my shoes and I was as quiet as a cat. When I got to the door, I heard Henry and DA Strictman inside. My nose being what it is, I leaned in and listened for a minute.

    “Four in a month and a half isn’t exactly a crime wave in this town!” I heard Strictman say.

    “Four incidents, but ten dead last night, six three weeks ago, seven before that, and now three so far this morning,” Captain Henry said, “I think the matter bears looking into, don’t you?”

    “We are looking into it! It’s not like we’re not going to hang the bastards responsible! No one’s getting a free pass, Charles!” said Strictman. I decided to show myself and I knocked at the door and let myself in.

    “Drake. We have a second killer moving through the city tonight. These deaths aren’t connected to the Innocenti arrest, these are new murders,” he said, “All mobbed up like the ones last night.”

    The room was dark, save for a hanging light over the heavy, dark desk that had been dragged to the center of the room. We were surrounded by boxes of evidence of early cases, stacked to the ceiling. It was good to see this room finally getting some use. I turned on the overhead lights and was surprised to see more than half of them come to life. With the brightness came the awareness of the layers of dust that covered everything. Even the black iron bars on the window looked a pale gray.

    “Let me see those,” I said. I motioned for the folder of photographs the Captain had been gently mangling in his hands.

    “Not these, Drake. These are unrelated to this case,“ he said and he hurried to return them to his briefcase.

    “That’s not what I heard a second before I opened that door,” I said. I held eye contact with Henry until he gave up the pictures. Strictman stood with his arms gently folded, as if he had just been waiting for me to ask for them.

    I opened the file and spread its contents out over the dusty, wooden surface between us. There were pictures of ten victims unrelated to any active investigation I was a part of. Boxcars O’Brien was here, half chiseled out of a crate of concrete. So was Big Dick Storm, turned half inside out by an expertly handled bread knife.

    There was Trashy Pete, whose death scene photograph did not immediately suggest which end was up and which was down. We put that one in the middle of the table between us.

    After taking a few minutes to absorb what I was looking at, I asked Captain Henry what this was all about. Strictman answered instead.

    “Richie, your Captain here thinks all of these UN-related murders are connected somehow,” Strictman said, “We have all of the killers in custody save this man-at-large today and Pee Wee Miller, who was killed by one of our K9s at the scene of this murder here.” He pointed to Julius “Juicy Fruit” Ketcham.

    "The little guy here had used a very big gun on Ketcham, but he used up all of his ammunition in a frenzy and didn’t have anything left to save himself when the dogs came."

    With several priors for everything from attempted rape to attempted kidnapping, I wasn't sorry to see that one go.

    Captain Henry spoke, “We’ve got another one of these chain-murders going on right now. We don’t know where he’s heading next but we do know his name: Paul Krabb, aka the Claw, aka Krabb Claw. Someone saw him earlier today at Fisherman’s Wharf. Said he looked glassy-eyed and that he didn’t seem to care at all that he was soaked in blood. I’m thinking he must be hopped up.”

    “Sure sounds like reefer or something. What’s this got to do with all of this other mess?” I said, waving my hand over the spread of death scenes.

    “Don’t know. Something. It’s got SOMEthing to do with this shit,” he said, “Damnedest thing if all of this was a coincidence, don’t you think?”

    Well, first things first. We had to stop the new killer. So far every victim in this string of killings was connected in some way to organized crime, but sooner or later someone was gonna get killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I shuffled the photos into a stack and rapped them once with my knuckles.

    “Let’s talk again once we haul this new SOB in for questioning,” I said.

    “Fair enough,” Strictman said. He obviously counted this as a victory. He shot me a glance. I looked at Captain Henry. He also shot me a glance. I had managed to make the both of them feel like they'd won the standoff. I turned and walked out into the hallway. As I reached the stairwell, my watch radio started to chirp. I hurried down the stairs, past Sam and Pat , and out the front door to answer it.

    “Hello?”

    “Drake, it’s Chief Bronson. Listen, we’re out on 226 Pine Valley West. What do you say you and the boys swing by and do some fucking police work for a change?”

    Sounded pissed.

    “226 Pine Valley West. Right,” I said,” See you in twenty minutes.”

    Sam and Pat followed me outside. Sam looked green, but I could tell he was rallying. He was eating a package of corn nuts from the vending machine. Pat carried two coffees.

    “Drake!” he said, holding one out to me. “Black, two sugars.”

    “Yuh!” I said, winking my thanks to him. I was starving too. No time to eat, we’d have to get something later in the day. It was nearly six now and the sun was waking things up pretty good. We walked over to Sam’s car but he just crawled into the back seat and stretched out. Pat got in the passenger’s seat and leaned heavily on the right door, settling in to nap on the way. I walked around to the driver’s door and climbed inside. Who knows when he got hold of them, but Pat produced a roll of Necco wafers. We split them between the two of us, dealing the sleeping Sam out of what would be the only meal any of us was going to eat for the next ten hours.

3.

    I took Pat’s coffee cup from his hand and threw it out the window. He snored heavily as if in protest. I drove the slow route out, planning on telling the Captain I’d gotten lost along the way. The boys needed time to sleep and I needed time to think.

    I let the stink of low tide stream in through the windows as I muscled the car down past the wharf. My headlights spooked and scattered the sailors, dockhands, and whores that lingered there.

    So, we had a series of horrific killings, all or most of them mobbed-up victims. One or two might have been wrong place/wrong timers, but most or all of the dead were most likely killers themselves. Killed by other mob contacts or cronies. I’d never heard of Nutsack having any problem with Pimples’ crowd. Ditto Boxcars, Chester, Tucci, or any of them. There was always something happening between the different gangs, but nothing like this since ‘29. No, something else was going on. Twice I wanted to wake Pat and talk it out, but I stayed dumb.

    I pulled up to the Pine Valley address just about the time when my headlights were starting to look a little redundant in the early sun of the morning. There were three black and whites and a couple of tanks from the coroner’s office on scene, as well as a half dozen other vehicles I took for press and other detectives. A truck from New York Power was parked square on the front lawn near the walk. I pulled over near the ditch on the west side of the road and got out. I left Laurel and Hardy in the car until I could get the temperature of the room. Rolling two drunk dicks out into a live crime scene wouldn’t wash with Chief. If he was in a good mood, it wouldn’t be a big deal., but not now.

    The house was typical of the homes in the woods up here. It was a big, three-story mansion back in the day, but with no money to keep it up, it had fallen almost into ruin. Layers of paint peeked through from years past and the shingles on the roof had begun to blow off, leaving a swollen patch in the wood where the tar beneath them had split apart. There were flowers in all of the window boxes and the grass had been cut only a day or so earlier.

    The scene was quiet chaos. Someone had cut the power lines going into the building, so no real investigation had been done of the scene until just before I showed up when the power company had finished repairing the line. Now, with floodlights in place and every light in the joint turned on, the whole spectacle was being taken in for the first time. One blue sat on the front steps with his head in his hands. One cop was walking out of sight, around the corner of the building. I could hear him crying.

I patted the shoulder of the guy on the steps as I walked past him. He didn’t seem to notice me. I stood on the straw doormat, allowing the morning breeze coming up from the bay to help me focus a little. I could tell from the feel of the scene that this was going to be a mess. Chief shouldered out through the crowd before I could step inside. He locked eyes with me in a way that told me to follow him and we both stepped down off the porch and walked to the street in silence. Stopping by a parked ambulance, Chief took his hat off, leaned over the curb and retched. Nothing but coffee. I got him the rest of my coffee from the car, which he used to rinse his mouth out, spitting onto the lawn of the neighbor’s house. After a few minutes, we settled across the street, leaning on a car there and at last he talked.

Chief glared at the front door as he spoke. “It’s a house full of death in there, Richie. Six so far, all of ‘em dead. Two women upstairs, dead. An older gal down in the kitchen, in a wheelchair- also deceased. Two old guys in the cellar- heads blowed off. A younger guy near the back door- the milkman, from the looks o' things. There is nothing in that house that isn’t covered in blood. They even killed the family dog. Little schnauzer all stamped on by the icebox. What kind of son of a bitch kills a schnauzer?”

    “Oof”, I said.

    Chief put his hat on his head, took it off, put it back on again. He said, “I ain’t never seen anything like it. There’s a coal cellar underneath with a load of fresh coal dumped inside. I have Demetrios and Gully down there digging through to make sure there’s nothing underneath the coal.”

    I looked the Chief up and down. He looked older than his fifty-seven years by at least a decade.

“I’ll take a look inside and I’ll come back out in a while and tell you what I saw”, I said. I walked around to the rear door stepped inside. I focused at first on the detectives on the scene. Jimmy Wong was there. Jimmy was a detective who had previously worked as an assistant to the coroner. This gave him some insights on crime scenes that the rest of us couldn't match. I was glad to see him.

    “Jimmy! What do you think we’ve got here?”

    He looked at me for a split second. Everything he said came in a throaty whisper.

    “Drake. Eight dead so far, five women, including an old lady in the kitchen”, Jimmy said,” All of them were stabbed, the women upstairs were stabbed and bludgeoned. See this?”

    He pushed a wooden ruler to the neck of one woman and opened a few of a series of identical stab wounds near the base of her throat.

    “I figure that wound is from a pen. A writing pen. I'm just getting to the others, but this makes me think it's possible all of this damage was done with objects the killer found in the home. The old lady in the kitchen is a whole 'nother story. The milkman, too.”

    I looked down at a basket of milk bottles carefully set by the back doorstep. PD photographers were shooting the milkman now. His white linen uniform was almost entirely soaked through bright red now.

I didn’t want to pester Jimmy by asking him who he thought might have done this. It was too fresh and too raw for those kinds of questions. Instead, I asked him to get a set of crime scene photos to me when they were ready and I pressed on for a private tour of the house.

    I passed through the tiny kitchen. It was too crowded to move in there, with men from the coroner's office, photographers, and a group of uniforms ready to be used as muscle. Blood and broken dishes were strewn everywhere.

©Tom Dougherty 2021.