'DEAD OF THE DAY'
Chapter 1
For a dead guy, Warren Black had a lot to say. I held the phone away
from my ear a little bit; he was shouting about how we got it wrong.
No shit.
"Mr. Black," I managed to say when he took a breath, "hold
on a sec, okay?"
We don't have a "hold" button on our phones, so I cradled the receiver
in my lap. "Marty?" I called across the aisle to the city editor. "I've
got a guy on the phone who says he's Warren Black."
Marty Thompson peered over the top of his
glasses. "But he was our
dead of the day."
"Well, he says he's still alive."
Marty rustled some papers around on his desk,
finally pulling a press release out from underneath the chaos. His
mouth sagged open, then shut again quickly. "You'd better transfer him to me," he
said, his voice so quiet I almost didn't hear him.
Not wanting to deal with Mr. Black's wrath
any further, I quickly pushed the transfer button and then Marty's
extension before hanging up my phone. This was the second time in a
month that our "dead of the day" as we
called them had not actually been dead.
Here at the New Haven Herald, we like to
memorialize our neighbors who have passed on to life eternal with a
little eulogy of our own. Family members and friends usually give us
the stories of their lives so we can write up a quick 10 inches. These
aren't necessarily the pillars of our community - some are grandmothers,
some are Elks, and one even turned out to be a child molester, but
of course we didn't know that at the time it was written. His fan club,
and I say that facetiously, notified us with a barrage of letters to
the editor and about a hundred phone calls the next day.
I really wasn't sure what had happened with Warren Black, but it was
likely that we'd put the wrong picture with the obituary. That's what
happened the last time. If there were photos of two different people
with the same name in the system, and the reporter writing up the story
didn't know one from the other, we had a 50-50 shot it would be right.
Too bad we were on the wrong end of those odds today.
But I didn't have time to ruminate about the New Haven Herald fuckups.
I was trying to pull together my notes to write a feature about the city's
new police chief. Tony Rodriguez had been on the job for two weeks now,
and he was full of idealistic plans to reduce crime that couldn't possibly
ever work, or at least would be stymied by the city's powers-that-be
for political reasons. But he didn't seem to know that yet.
My assignment was to spit out everything he'd told me so the city could
make up its own mind about him. It was not my favorite part of the job.
I glanced at the clock. I figured I had about two hours to get this
thing done and sent over to the Sunday editor.
If I managed to pull this off, it would be happy hour, but I wasn't
sure I had too much to be happy about on another Friday night alone.
It was my own damn fault. A few months ago, I was embarking on a relationship
with someone who turned me on and challenged me all at the same time.
We had three weeks together after Thanksgiving, three weeks during which
I lost about 10 pounds because of amazing sex and three weeks during
which I actually felt myself softening around the edges. But that was
probably from the sex, too.
Vinny DeLucia and I went to high school together, but he was a geek
and I wasn't interested back then. Now he was a hotshot private detective
with his own shingle and doing occasional work for my mother's law firm.
Our paths crossed several months ago while I was working on a story about
a dead Yalie, and our relationship progressed from there. It seemed like
things were going to work out with me and Vinny. Until Christmas.
Vinny didn't think we should spend Christmas together, at least not
with his family, which was the only option since my mother's Jewish and
my dad is in Vegas.
Vinny had just broken up with his longtime
fiancée - for me,
I might add. But his family wasn't too keen on that idea, and Rosie had
been invited to spend the holidays with them, out of some sort of solidarity.
I told Vinny he should boycott on principle, but he said he couldn't.
It blew up bigger than a goddamn balloon, and there I was, telling him
he was a fucking coward and walking out.
It was April now, and I hadn't seen Vinny since. Not that I hadn't
tried. He lives around the corner from me on Wooster Square, and I'd
come incredibly close to being a stalker at times, but I still hadn't
spotted him. It was almost as if he'd moved, but the Ford Explorer was
there on occasion, parked in front of his building.
Yeah, I was being an idiot. All I had to do was call him, but I'd been
too angry at first and then it just became a habit. With all the time
that had passed, it would be embarrassing to call him now.
My notes swirled together in front of my eyes, out of focus enough
so I wondered if I was going to need to get those drug store glasses
soon. Right, that would make me attractive to a man. I'd put those specs
on and he'd know right away that the goods were getting a little old.
And I wasn't even 40 yet.
The scanner started to squawk behind me, and I leaned over and turned
it up, causing Renee Chittenden, the social services reporter who sat
two desks away, to frown at me. I shrugged. It was my fucking job.
A body had been found at Long Wharf. That wasn't too far away. I pushed
my notes aside and grabbed my bag and jean jacket, making my way to Marty's
desk.
"A body," I said, ready to leave.
"What about the profile?"
"I think a body supercedes the profile," I said, but when his mouth
set into a grim line, added, "I'll stay late and finish the profile." I
said it like it was putting me out, like I was willing to sacrifice my
life for my job. Marty knew I was full of shit.
He nodded. "Take a photographer with you."
Wesley Bell was just coming around the corner
of the photo lab. "Hey,
Wesley, body at Long Wharf," I said, not stopping, knowing he'd grab
his stuff and probably get there before I did. With his bow ties and
penny loafers, he didn't look like a typical photojournalist, but his
pictures were the best I'd ever seen. I wouldn't be surprised if Hagrid
the Giant showed up one day with an invitation to Hogwarts and told him
he was a goddamn wizard.
The road was blocked off, and I pulled into the Rusty Scupper restaurant
parking lot. It was filling up with happy hour traffic; I stuck my press
card on the dashboard and hoped they wouldn't tow me.
The masts of the Quinnipiack, the old schooner, rose high above the
pier that jutted out into the harbor perpendicular to the Visitors Information
Center. The tide was going out; there was a rank fishy smell hanging
in the air. The yellow crime scene tape was flapping in the breeze, and
I counted three police cars, their red lights flashing. I didn't count
the cops, didn't pay attention to any of them except the detective in
the tweed sport jacket, his blonde hair a little mussed, his blue eyes
taking in the scene.
"Hey, Tom," I said softly from behind him,
the tape between us.
He turned around and nodded. "Hi, Annie."
I missed his quick smile, the twinkle in his eye that used to be for
me. I wondered who got it now.
"Whatchagot?" I asked.
He took a deep breath. "Floater."
The fishy smell suddenly took on a whole
new meaning. "Any ID?" I
asked.
Tom shook his head. "He was naked. Hispanic."
He was telling me this only because he knew I'd find out eventually
and it wasn't compromising anything. And a Hispanic man in New Haven
wasn't exactly a rarity. Hell, I heard more Spanish around the New Haven
Herald than I did English at times.
"Cause of death?" I asked.
"Not sure yet."
So it wasn't a gunshot wound or a stabbing. Probably the guy just drowned.
Too bad. I wanted this to be bigger, so I would have a good excuse not
to finish that stupid profile.
I took in the scene at the end of the pier, where the forensics guys
were doing their thing. It was sort of like on TV, but the people weren't
as good looking. Except maybe Tom.
Tom and I broke up because of Vinny. He didn't know, or at least I
didn't think he knew, that Vinny and I were history. And I certainly
wasn't going to enlighten him.
"You okay?" Tom was asking, and when I looked
back at him, I could see genuine concern in his face.
I frowned. "Sure, I mean, why wouldn't I
be?"
"You don't look great."
I'd had a cold that had hung on for weeks,
and I'd finally shaken it. But I knew that wasn't what he saw. "I'm okay," I said gruffly. "Had
a cold."
He was a detective and he could see the lie.
But he played along. "Yeah,
something was going around."
I spotted Wesley Bell over near the body, his face hidden by the gigantic
lens, his camera recording everything.
"How did he get over there?" Tom muttered,
starting to walk toward him.
I didn't have the heart to tell him about Wesley's powers.
Not wanting to go back and abandoned by the
only person in any position to tell me anything, I lingered for a few
minutes, jotting down what I saw. It wasn't much. My eyes strayed across
the harbor to the huge freighter docked on the other side at the port.
I'd been curious about what went on over there for a while now; no
one covered the harbor anymore - not
for years - Marty said we didn't have enough reporters. But since 9/11
and reports about possible terrorists infiltrating the country's ports,
my interest had been piqued. New Haven's port was the busiest in the
state, with freighters bringing in fuel and scrap metal and some other
shit. There was a jet fuel pipeline that ran from the harbor to the airport
north of Hartford, which seemed like a pretty big deal to me but not
to anyone else at the Herald.
I'd heard through the grapevine that there was some problem with scrap
metal theft, but since I couldn't confirm it, Marty didn't want to know
about it.
On a whim, I'd driven over there once but couldn't get past the fences.
"Interesting," I heard behind me.
Wesley Bell was tucking his camera into his bag.
"What's interesting?" I asked.
He looked up from the bag at me. "The dead
guy. Wasn't in the water too long, from the looks of it."
Thank God. Wesley would have pictures of the body, none of them would
be in the paper, but we'd all stare at them, our grisly senses of humor
would spew forth and there would be a lot of floater jokes tonight.
"See anything else?" I asked.
Wesley nodded. "Yeah. And I only noticed it because of my cousin." He
paused. "He got stung last summer in the back yard. My wife put some
baking soda on it and the swelling went down, but he said it hurt like
a sonofabitch."
I frowned, trying to put two and two together.
Wesley was staring off at the floater on
the pier. "Bee stings," he
said. "On his stomach."
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