Disheveled City

By Gaylord Dold

One cold winter a woman is found dead on her kitchen floor. Unfortunately, detective Mitch Roberts had once had a brief affair with the woman and becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation.

Gaylord Dold is the author of fifteen works of fiction including the highly acclaimed private detective series featuring Mitch Roberts, a well as numerous contemporary crime thrillers. Many of his novels have been singled out for awards and praise by a number of critics and writer’s organizations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaylord Dold
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311021656

Gaylord Dold

Gaylord Dold is the author of fifteen works of fiction including the highly acclaimed private detective series featuring Mitch Roberts, a well as numerous contemporary crime thrillers. Many of his novels have been singled out for awards and praise by a number of critics and writer’s organizations. As one of the founders of Watermark Press, Dold edited and published a number of distinguished literary works, including the novel Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien, which was made into a movie starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. Dold lives on the prairie of southern Kansas.

Book preview

DISHEVELED

CITY

Gaylord Dold

Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

Fiction by Gaylord Dold

Crime Novels

The Nickel Jolt

Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon

The Swarming Stage

Storm 33 (Originally titled, The Last Man in Berlin)

Six White Horses

The Devil to Pay

Schedule Two

Bay of Sorrows

The Mitch Roberts Series

The Wichita Mysteries

Samedi’s Knapsack

The World Beat

Rude Boys

A Penny for the Old Guy

Disheveled City

Muscle and Blood

Bonepile

Cold Cash

Snake Eyes

Hot Summer, Cold Murder

Copyright © 1990 by Gaylord Dold

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

ISBN 0-8041-0489-1

eISBN: 978-1-938582-78-3

Smashwords Edition

Published by Premier Digital Publishing

www.PremierDigitalPublishing.com

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91934

For two days I was hibernating to heal myself, to grow strong for what had to be done. I was to become a hunter, a man grown meditatively efficient, religious, and whole and full of spinach. My meals were soup and crackers, and I spent the evening listening to the radio news describing me for every peanut sheriff this side of Conga Springs, Colorado. On Tuesday morning I shaved my beloved beard and found a complete outfit of Grandpa's old clothes–felt fishing hat, baggy woolen pants, and a red lumberman's shirt. I spent hours cleaning the shotgun and the automatic, taking them apart and studying the apparatus of death, making it my brother in the enterprise to come. When I walked away from the trailer, it was as a different man. . . .

When I think these days

to write of it

I want always to begin:

O Wichita! O cold

disheveled city

of my sleep!

—Michael Van Walleghen

The Wichita Poems

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Epilogue

About The Author

ONE

Winter was dark work . . . .

An iron-cold snow knifed the air to a shredded glass blizzard, a wind-and-snow blizzard that echoed wildly in the dark blue spruce and the barren confines of horizon and sky. The kitchen windows were amber-tinged by weak sunshine, and as I looked through the panes I could see the leaded interstices curved by hoarfrost, snowbanked by semicircular ice, as if the panes were each a porthole to the winter light.

The sun itself was a tiny glimmer of orange buried like a penny in a convolution of smoke, driven snow, and cloud. It seemed there was a child on the hillside, but he was only a small speck struggling in deep snow, the wind at him like a pack of dogs. He seemed as unreal as the colors, a pandemonium of gray cloud illumined by sun, their underbellies purple and mauve, reflecting sunshine against the crystalline purity of the snow and the windows a kaleidoscope of coral and tan. The dead woman on the kitchen floor seemed unnaturally white.

She was on her back, her legs parted only slightly, her arms primly at her sides: She was wearing a sleeveless pink blouse with a gray sweater wrapped loosely around her shoulders. A string of iridescent pearls around her neck caught the light and reflected palely against the white skin. Her black skirt had been hiked slightly by the fall.

Blood flecked the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator. There was a speckled slice of blood on the wall above her head, and the floor was a mess where the red had spread and clotted to gray and purple. The woman herself was nothing but a mangled mess of sinew and naked bone, her face convulsed by terrible blows which had reduced something probably beautiful to a dreadful gore. Her hands had been hacked away from her arms, then shattered with explosive force. There was a shawl of blond hair streaked with blood and bone. As I stood in the unbearable heat of the room, a chromium glow flooded the canary walls, dropping nacreous beads of sunshine on the tables and chairs. There seemed no air left in the room.

I turned from the cabinets and stood supporting myself with one hand against the stable door, my face half buried in the frilly curtain. I looked through the drapery to the cold flagstone porch arched by evergreens and saw two cops shuffling through the gloom with flashlights. My wool shirt was heavy with perspiration, and I felt the sweat begin to trickle down my collar. I heard water drip from the faucet, and in some faraway part of the house a grandfather clock tocked heavily, the seconds seeping away like heartbeats m a dying man. There was a smell in the air like iron and salt, a heavy infuriating odor that only increased my sense of panic and claustrophobia. I seemed unable to avert my eyes from the woman's cocoonlike skirt, the narrow net of blood which wound her, and the two severed hands.

Stark shuffled through a portal that separated the kitchen from the dark dining area. He was a narrowly built police lieutenant with a fine bead of cottony hair and flinty blue eyes. He had a surgical kit for a face: a straight nose angled over a sharply defined septum to thin lips, a narrow high forehead, and unruly eyebrows masking sunken sockets. The eyes peered from the deep caverns like small fires. He carried an expensive camel-hair topcoat on his left arm, and there was nothing inexpensive about his brown suit. He had an English briar in his mouth, but it wasn't lit. He was a veteran on the force and bad come through the ranks fast by arresting a drunk who turned out to be a city official. The case had been quickly dropped, and Stark had gone from motorcycles to brown suits overnight, kicked upstairs to the detective unit. It wasn't something to blame Stark for, and nobody held it against him. Indeed, it was considered good luck by his fellow officers. As far as I knew he was a decent cop. He had two little girls he took to the ballpark. I had seem him there in the summer, managing his daughters’ curiosity the way fathers do.

Stark stopped beside me and stood looking at the dead woman and the blood. The he glanced at me as though studying my face. You look sick, he said, his words clattering through the pipestem.

I've been better.

‘'There's coffee in a thermos,’’ Stark said, jerking a thumb into the darkness of the dining room. Some cop noise filtered through more distant rooms and mingled with the clock noise and dripping water sounds. A thermostat clicked, and more dry heat rushed into the room, a gasp from a metal fretway cut into the dining-room floor. I looked over Stark's shoulder into the next room and saw an oblong walnut table and crystal cabinets, one dark hutch standing ceiling-high, and portraits on flowered walls. Stark took his pipe out of his mouth and stared some more at the woman.

No thanks, I said.

Stark seemed surprised. What? he muttered.

The coffee. No thanks.

Suit yourself. Stark unfolded his camel coat’ over one of the kitchen chairs. He released the coat carefully to avoid the blood which was everywhere—blobs on the chairs and along the baseboards, spatters of it on the picture of Jesus on the kitchen wall, streaking the lambs and olive groves of Gethsemene. Light flooded the room behind us suddenly, and a red-faced fat man strode in. He had a rumpled hat in his hand, and his painted tie poked through a vest which didn't quite wrap around his ample belly.

‘'They're working the bedroom,’’ the fat man said. His name was Gross, a detective as plump and sweet as an outhouse in July. Gross had caught on during the war, when men were scarce, and now he was stuck in Homicide like a tick on a dog's ear. Gross took off his coat and stood puffing. "We'll print the bedrooms and let the photographer get to work. The stuff we found is piled on her bed.’’

Be careful, Stark said. I don't want any mistakes.

Gross nodded. ‘'There won't be any mistakes.’’ He paused and rubbed a hand across his face, which had become wet with sweat. She's a mess, ain't she? he asked nobody.

"Be sure you inventory everything, Stark said. Some of those clowns you brought can't write their own names.’’

For Christ's sake, Gross said. I'll take care of it.

I want complete photos.

Sure, muttered Gross. Gross looked at me then. This the guy? he asked.

This is the guy. Stark put his pipe back in his mouth. Now beat it.

I turned to the kitchen window. The stable doors led onto a small stoop, and then flagstones wormed in two directions between evergreen bushes. On my left the flagstones rose two steps to a brick patio with three or four lawn chairs and some end tables hunkered in snow and a brick barbecue surrounded by rose trellis and some scrawny shrubs. The other flagstone path led ten yards to a detached garage. There were ragged starlings on the garage roof, their black feathers ruffled by the wind. Two cops stood in the driveway stomping their big boots and talking. White smoke escaped their mouths as the sun disappeared behind a line of spruce and pine, leaving the horizon a thin purple line. The air was like gray stone and the clouds like bruises.

Maybe I'll take the coffee, I said.

Stark walked into the dining room and came back with a paper cup full of steaming coffee. I sipped the coffee and watched twilight descend the cold spaces. While I sipped, night came the way it does in winter, swiftly as death itself, leaving only a vague cloudbank in the west and the grim sound of invisible wind.

Then a young man with wispy blond hair walked past Stark into the kitchen. He wore a white smock above green institutional trousers and carried a big metal box with two handles. He knelt and opened the box with a professional twist of his wrist and examined a gleaming series of petri dishes, metal spoons, syringes, tweezers, and wooden depressors. He pulled on rubber gloves and without a word went to work on the dead woman, scraping at some blood under her right shoulder. The scraping revealed a gray crust beneath which was bright red. I watched as he dropped the sample into a petri dish, labeled the dish, and deposited it in his metal box. With minute care he worked at the head and torso, the severed hands, the small drops on the cupboards, walls, and baseboards, gathering samples of hair and fingernail and fluid. He wrapped the severed fingers in wax paper and labeled each. When I couldn't watch anymore, I spun toward the window and placed my feverish face on the cold glass.

I heard the young man stand and strip off his gloves. When I turned, he was wiping some sweat from his face with a towel, standing quietly with his hands on his hips looking at the woman. He glanced at me, his friendly face utterly devoid of any emotion. ‘'Who would do that?'’ he said quietly.

Then he closed his metal box, picked it up, and walked quickly away through the portal and the dining room. Stark walked into the kitchen smoking his pipe as a photographer followed behind him toting a big police flash camera. The photographer walked around the room snapping pictures, exploding the scene with sudden flashes of incredible brilliance and lucidity, shooting high and low.

He finished and stood next to Stark. I got about forty before the lab guy took his samples. I just took another fifteen. I think we got the ‘before’ and ‘after’ covered pretty good.

Yeah, grumbled Stark. How about the other rooms?

Everything catalogued like procedure says.

How about the garage?

Those guys say there isn't anything out there.

Shoot the garage, said Stark.

Give me a break, the photographer moaned.

I don't want some asshole lawyer to get you on the stand and make you admit you forgot the garage.

An asshole lawyer couldn't do shit to me.

‘'And your mother didn't raise any living kids. Get the hell going." The photographer thought it over. He took his camera and went away through the dining room. I stood beside Stark as ambulance men carne through the stable doors and bundled the dead woman onto a stretcher and wrapped her in a dark blanket. She had stiffened, and there was no more blood. While the ambulance boys worked on the body, Gross poked his head through the portal. ‘'Checking the basement,’’ he growled.

‘'Be thorough,’’ said Stark. Gross snorted and walked away. I heard him tramp down stairs and then I heard some cops laugh and six booted feet stamping in a ricocheted echo. The ambulance boys laid a yellow tarp over the dark blanket on the stretcher and folded the metal legs on the stretcher, working away oblivious to the mangled body which had been so terribly disfigured. One dark fellow with hairy arms wrapped leather straps around the yellow tarp and hooked them together beneath the stretcher. Then they walked her to the stable door and were gone down the icy flagstones. Snow sifted into the kitchen, little steely points driven by wind. I stood in the cool, clearing my head as Stark pushed the door closed.

Let's sit down, he said.

I followed Stark to the walnut dining table and pulled back one of the carpet chairs. We sat quietly above the burnished surface of the table, our reflections at play in the waxy glare below a big bowl of fake fruit. There was a gold cross hung on the dining-room wall which caught the light from a chandelier. Stark poured me some more coffee, and I took a cigarette from my shirt pocket and looked at the cop. He nodded, and I lit the cigarette and blew smoke into the heater vent. The smoke curled and rose to the ceiling with the warm air.

It's too hot in here, I said. Can we turn this thing down?

I didn't want to touch the thermostat until the print boys give the house a going over. Stark took the pipe from his mouth and sat for a while fiddling with a loose end from one of his eyebrows. You know the dead woman? he asked suddenly in a piercing monotone.

‘'Are you being funny?'’ I puffed on the cigarette.

Stark replaced his pipe. Do you find this scene funny?

Nothing funny.

How long have you lived in Wichita?

Since the war. I tried to go to college, but I gave up and opened shop. You know that, Stark.

There's nothing too bad in your folder.

I hear you're a real human being too.

I'm the kind of guy, Stark drawled, who writes his mother and does the dishes.

I bit my lip. ‘'All right,’’ I said. ‘'When do we chalk our cues and play some real snooker. It's hot in here, and I've had a long day. Why don't you give me a break and tell me why you called and asked me to come down here. I've never been in this house in my life. The dead woman is hacked beyond recognition, so I couldn't identify her if I wanted to. What's on your mind, Stark?"

Just then two cold cops clopped into the dining room. They both had on their bulky gray uniform trousers with a yellow stripe down the side, green coats with fur collars, patrolman hats with earmuffs. They were red-faced from the cold and stood in the room like hairy oxen, stomping their hooves. One cop stepped forward and stripped off a heavy set of gloves. He stood in the harsh glare, panting and rubbing his hands and fingers. Clancy and me are done, he puffed.

Give it to me, said Stark.

‘'We been around the house. We checked the paths in front and back and under the evergreen hedges like you said. We checked the garage and made a loop around the yard. I even walked down the block myself and knocked on all the neighbors’ doors."

You get a merit badge, joked Stark.

We could use one. Anyway, there weren't any footprints on the patio, in the back of the house, or on the flagstones. There were footprints on the front walk, but they been pretty well filled in, and it looked like one set leading up and back to the front door. We checked the windows and the kitchen door and there's no sign of forced entry. There's some French windows in the lady's bedroom, but they ain't been forced. There's a Cadillac in the garage, but the motor was cold as piss and the doors were locked, not a sign of a footprint on the driveway so far as we could tell.’’ The cop grinned foolishly. I guess we could check the roof if you detectives think Santa done this, what with reindeer shitting like they do." The cop who must have been Clancy snickered nervously.

‘'Why don't you do that, asshole,’’ growled Stark.

Ah, come on, Captain Stark. Clancy wants to go home. He's been crying for an hour now. If it was me, I'd stay here all night, but Clancy, he's got a thing for that little wife of his.

What about the neighbors? asked Stark.

‘'There are only two other houses on this lane down to Douglas Street. This is the last house on a dead-end dirt road. The folks in both houses were pretty old and hadn't heard a thing. One of the folks had been away all afternoon. I don't think you'll get anything from the neighbors. Car tracks are a mess in this snow."

Make a report. Stark sucked his pipe as the two cops left the room. Some noise from Gross and his crew drifted from the basement, and behind me snow snarled against a curtained plate-glass window. The wind arched then like an ache in the world's ear. Stark loosened his tie and unbuttoned his white shirt at the collar. He clicked the pipe between his teeth and sat for a long time staring through the portal to the blood-drenched kitchen. Then I heard the front door open and watched as two men in plainclothes walked into the dining room carrying fingerprint trays. The men stood without speaking. Stark stared at his own reflection on the walnut table.

Start in the bedrooms, Stark ‘said languidly. "I want master sets if you can get them. Do all the surfaces you can think of, even bathrooms. When you're done there, I want you to do the kitchen. Do the knives and forks. Do the faucets. Maybe the killer washed his hands. Do the shaving