The Occupied Read online

  As he wheeled around to leave, Elijah dropped another reminder. “Gotta remember: you’re a new creature now, after your spiritual turnaround.”

  I shot back, “I’m not digging that word creature, you know.”

  Elijah laughed again, and as he waved good-bye, he pointed his index finger toward the Bible on my bed and said, “Don’t forget, sword of the Spirit.”

  The other visitor was Dick Valentine, the NYPD detective with a widow’s peak kind of receding hairline and the build of a retired linebacker. At the outset he explained that he had heard about the incident at the museum and wanted to check up on me. I pressed him on whether it was a professional visit or a personal one. He said it was both, and then pulled up a chair next to my hospital bed.

  I poked back a little. “Let’s see. First you are assigned to my Dunning Kamera case. Then you investigate my wife’s death. And now this visit. I guess that makes you an official stalker.”

  “Maybe just curious.”

  “A perverse kind of curiosity.”

  Valentine smiled. “So let’s get the official part over with. I know you already gave the patrol officer a report when you were admitted to the ER. I had only one question. Can you tell us anything else about the security guard you described, the one in the doorway of the gallery?”

  “I already gave his description to the police.”

  “The museum says there is no such security guard.”

  “Right. I heard that. But I know I saw him.”

  “Your statement was pretty vague about how, or even why, Hanz Delpha knifed you.”

  “Purposely vague.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Hey, I thought you only had one question.”

  “Yeah, but it has a lot of subparts to it. Why did you beat around the bush in describing the knifing?”

  “Trial lawyers like me would call it plausible deniability.”

  Valentine pressed in. “I never pegged you for a guy who liked to blow smoke.”

  “Let’s just say that I see things differently now. Anything beyond that, I’m going to have to enter the Forrest Gump plea.”

  Valentine looked lost, so I filled it in with my slow drawl à la Tom Hanks. “‘That’s all I have tuh say about thay-ut.’”

  He must have missed the humor, because with a deadpan expression he just rolled on. “So, that stuff about you seeing things differently now,” Valentine said, repeating me. “You wanna talk about it?”

  “I thought I just made my point with the clever Gump impersonation.”

  I could see the brawny detective was thinking hard about something. Eventually he said, “I heard some rumors about an incident that happened between you and Dunning Kamera in the holding cell. So I went down there and checked things out myself. The jailers showed me the room. Looked normal enough to me. Table in place. Two chairs, nothing weird. The guards told me that nothing happened.”

  I was still stuck on something the detective had just said. “Rumors?” I asked.

  “Your little sidebar with Judge Cavendish,” he said. “The court reporter took it all down. I read the transcript. That led me to conclude that something must have happened during that jail conference you had with your client right before the court appearance.”

  I waited.

  Valentine continued. “I’m sort of old school, Trevor. Maybe it’s the Catholic neighborhood I grew up in. Anyway, I’m open to some mysteries. The invisible kind, I mean.”

  “Really?”

  Valentine rolled his eyes. “I said ‘open.’ Not gullible.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “I was thinking,” he went on, “now that your license is suspended, and you can’t practice law, maybe you ought to consider working as a private investigator.”

  “Private eye? So, what is that, like the sacred burial grounds for disbarred attorneys?”

  “Not in your case.”

  “So, I’m different?”

  Valentine bobbed his head back and forth, not quick to jump in, until he said, “I think so.”

  “I’d like to hear why.”

  Instead of answering that, he said, “Every once in a while the department gets a crime that is sort of, you know, special. You could help us out. On a confidential consulting basis. I could toss some work your way.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I’m a nice guy.” He stood up and looked like he was ready to leave. “You have any questions for me?”

  “Actually I do,” I replied. “About the Kamera case. About what was written on Heather’s body. I think it was some kind of question.”

  “You want to know about that?”

  “I did, once upon a time. But I think I figured it out. Now I’m guessing the murderer wrote a two-word question: something like, ‘Dead already?’ Am I right?”

  Valentine looked stunned. “I thought Betty Verring never gave you the rest of those photos.”

  “She didn’t. I only had the ones without the writing, but there was enough for me to guess the assailant had written a question. Before I could pursue my discovery demand for the rest, I was off the case.”

  The detective had a crooked little smile on his face. “The writing on her body—we kept that part of the case close to the vest. Your version—close, but no cigar. The phrase was ‘Already dead?’ So, how’d you know about that question written on her body?”

  I wasn’t ready to describe what I had seen and heard in the art museum. “Let’s just say a little birdie told me.” After a moment’s reflection, I modified that. “Actually, let’s call it a really big, ugly birdie.”

  “That birdie of yours—anybody I know?”

  “I hope not, for your sake.”

  Valentine nodded as if he understood, but his eyes told me he didn’t. Before he walked out, I asked him again, “So, why do you think I’m different?”

  This time Valentine gave me the straight answer. “About that holding cell that Kamera and you were in. It looked normal enough. Cleaned up. Unremarkable. Except for one thing: the holes in the floor. Where someone, or something, had pulled the big metal bolts clear out of the cement.”

  20

  Two weeks after my discharge from the hospital, I was sitting in my condo, staring at the grainy remains of the espresso at the bottom of my cup and pondering my future. I decided to pursue Detective Valentine’s suggestion about a new career, so I called him on his direct number. When he picked up, I didn’t dive into the private investigator idea at first. Instead I asked him something even more personal. I wanted to know if he had ever found any evidence linking Bradley Yelsin to the cocaine that had taken Courtney’s life.

  But Valentine closed the door on that. “Sorry, nothing yet. We questioned him. He gave us permission to search his place, but it turned up zero. We’re still looking.”

  I didn’t want to let it go. “You sure? Bradley would have needed a Hazmat team to clean up all the drugs he kept at his place.”

  “For what it’s worth, I was surprised too. But there is some good news about that guy.”

  I was in the mood to hear something positive.

  Valentine said, “Yelsin was persuaded not to push for criminal battery charges against you. You know, for the punch in the nose you gave him.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I suggested to him that I could continue the investigation into his drug use. Or maybe not. His choice. And I strongly hinted at his making the right choice. As long as he was willing to forget about your knockout punch.”

  Another favor from Detective Valentine. “Thanks,” I said. “And while I have you on the line, I’m interested in your idea. About being a private investigator.”

  “Okay. But if you don’t mind, let’s hold off on your getting licensed by the state of New York as a PI. That is probably not necessary for what we would have you doing.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Using your talents, whatever they are, to help us.”

  I groaned. “You
mean, like the psychics? The crackpots who live in basement apartments with too many cats and tell you where the bodies are buried?”

  “Not exactly. You’d just screen some suspects for us. Bad people. And then tell us exactly how bad they are, and in what way.”

  “Oh. You mean, like a human Geiger counter?”

  “There you go. I like that,” he said.

  I told him I was willing, but wondered if I could make a living doing that. And then there was also the public relations problem. “My being on the payroll, wouldn’t that raise some eyebrows?”

  “The NYPD accountants have a way of cutting checks to you without the public knowing we’ve hired a demon chaser.”

  “Is that what I am?”

  “You tell me.”

  In truth, I couldn’t. I had no idea what I was at that point.

  Detective Valentine ended with a big flourish. “Oh. And some breaking news about Dunning Kamera. Just heard it on my private line. Not even on the police scanners yet.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Not sure if you knew, but yesterday in court, Kamera’s new attorney was able to get him released on bail. Judge Cavendish had recused herself. Supposedly because of something that was said during your last repartee with her in court. Anyway, a new judge came on the case and reversed Cavendish’s order and put Kamera back on the street.”

  “That’s terrible news.”

  “I’m not done. An hour ago your former client, after getting released from jail, threw himself in front of the subway train at the South Ferry stop. Not exactly a clean way to go.”

  While I was weighing that news, Valentine added, “I don’t know what would have taken Kamera to that station. It wasn’t even close to where he lived. The South Ferry stop is the end of the line. Literally.”

  The rest of my day, while tending to the necessities of my life, like checking on the balance of my retirement account and figuring out how I was going to make it financially, my mind kept drifting back to Dunning Kamera’s death.

  I had heard once about the suicide phenomenon that attracts people to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. How, according to some psychologists, the dreamers and drifters migrate to California thinking that they could discover the good life. When they didn’t find it, and having come to the end of land and having run out of dreams, they would hike onto the bridge and jump off.

  I had a different theory about Dunning Kamera. He may have traveled down to the South Ferry stop with the thought that once he was on the water, he would be safe. Then he realized that there was no escape. Because what he was trying to escape from seemed inescapable, because it had already inhabited him. And that’s why he jumped.

  The thoughts in my head were growing increasingly morbid.

  Then, out of the blue, I received a text from Jersey Dan Hoover. Dan’s message was about our Manitou teenage music crew that used to hang out together. A nice change.

  Hey Trevor. I’ve felt nostalgic lately, and finally looked up your contact info. How are ya? Been way too long. Am down at Muscle Shoals, AL right now. Doing a jazz/rock/blues festival. I connected with Bobby too. Just a quick text. He’s some kind of environmental scientist now. What a gas! I’m still trying to link with Augie. Man, that guy’s vanished. Do you know where he is? Are you still playing the blues harp? See ya. Dan

  Dan. Bobby. Augie. For some reason I had also been thinking a lot about those guys recently.

  But I had to laugh at Dan’s text, because I never would have pegged him, with his skyrocketing music career, to have been such an impresario of high school memories. Go figure.

  I should have realized it was more than coincidence that we both started thinking back to our old hometown.

  Later that day I forced myself to finally go through Courtney’s personal things. It was a task that I had deliberately put off, knowing that it would place me deeply inside the vacuum that had been left by her. Never mind that we had perfected the art of mutually assured destruction, with eventual infidelity by her and emotional abandonment by me way before that. None of that lessened the pain, just redirected it, like a nerve injury that sends the shock to the head rather than to the heart.

  When I slowly entered her twenty-two-foot clothes closet, I could still detect the faint scent of her Clive Christian perfume. At first I toyed with selling all of her clothes on eBay, but decided instead to donate her fashion retinue to a worthy charity. So I started pawing my way through the racks of clothes and jotting it all down on a legal pad.

  Every so often I would reach down or bend the wrong way, and there was that shooting pain again at the site of the wound in my chest.

  More than once I would pull up my shirt and look at it again. As I studied the red, angry flesh and the sutured edges where I had been stabbed, there was the same thought. It had been plaguing me. The jagged cut on my torso was in the exact same location as the entry wound on Heather’s body. The difference, of course, was that she had been killed first and then her heart had been cut out through that opening in her flesh. I, on the other hand, was still alive. But we were both slashed at the same spot.

  All of that came from the objective side of my brain. But logic wasn’t enough. Yes, there were some similarities between Heather’s murder and my attack.

  But it also meant something else. If Elijah White was right, it meant that I was now the target of demonic forces from the underworld. While I tried to hunt them, they would be hunting me.

  So, that is where things stood. Well then, I thought, if that’s what life looks like, I might as well make a living at it. I left a voice mail on Valentine’s cell: “Let me know when we can start.”

  21

  During the months that followed, Detective Dick Valentine was true to his word. He brought me into the precinct once or twice a week to eyeball a variety of suspects and arrestees who did the lineup routine: front view, turn to the right and turn to the left, while victims behind one-way glass tried to identify the perpetrator. There were holdup men, muggers, kidnappers, and wife beaters. I watched interrogations of gang members who had inflicted violence for no other reason than it was part of their initiation, as well as a stream of pickpockets, arsonists, serial rapists, and drug dealers (a lot of those).

  But missing was the familiar stench reminiscent of the Manitou landfill fires—not a hint of it, despite the despicable things these suspects had done. I was beginning to wonder why I was being paid to traipse regularly into the cop shop at all, because I was adding nothing to the police effort.

  At the same time I was being exposed to a flotilla of human depravity that topped anything I had ever experienced before, at least not since my short career as a public defender, my first sixteen months fresh out of law school before the firm snatched me up.

  As a criminal defense lawyer I thought I had seen it all. But I hadn’t. The only lowlifes I represented in private practice were the ones who could pay me my quarter-of-a-million-dollar initial retainer fee. That fact alone cordoned me off from a whole criminal underbelly of humanity.

  During my stint as the NYPD’s “special consultant,” the title that was printed on my checks’ memo line, there was one perp named Jimmy Delacroix. His specialty was residential burglaries, which he would execute through the use of a chimpanzee that he had trained to scamper up to windows and then find which ones were not securely locked.

  Then there was Little Ted, a bearded dwarf with a photographic memory who stood in line at ATMs behind high rollers when they would dash out of their limos to get some cash; he memorized the passcodes as the victims typed them in, having a perfect line of sight for the keypad due to his short stature. Ted made his living selling the passcodes. Ted was hot for Little Betty, a nightclub entertainer who stood four feet tall in her high heels but who spurned his advances. When Betty disappeared, the police suspected foul play and fingered Ted, but their suspicions happily fizzled when Betty showed up very much alive after a trip to Vero Beach, Florida. You can’t make this kind o
f stuff up.

  At the same time, I felt like a freeloader in my work with Dick Valentine, given that I was feeding at the public trough while seemingly doing nothing productive for the privilege.

  One day Dick Valentine and I walked out to our vehicles together at the end of his shift and I put the question to him. “Why are you keeping me on? I haven’t given you once piece of information about these evildoers that you couldn’t have figured out yourself.”

  Valentine was customarily a plain-talking man, but not then. He said, “It only takes one. That’ll be worth it.”

  “One what?” I asked.

  “That’s what we’re waiting for. For you to show us the one.” Then he pointed an index finger up in the air.

  While he stood next to his Ford Taurus, I kept up the conversation with another question. “As a cop, do you believe in demons? I mean, the real ones?”

  While he fished his keys out of his pockets, he explained. “You remember Jeffrey Dahmer? Milwaukee serial killer?”

  “Of course. The trial was covered on TV, gavel to gavel.”

  “He was into human desecration,” Valentine continued, “body parts in the refrigerator. He emulsified the corpses in his own toxic vat. Cannibalism. I had a friend on the Milwaukee PD who sent me the police supplementals. One part of the report had portions of Dahmer’s confession, the things that didn’t get televised. Never made the papers. The way Dahmer explained it, there was this point in his life, before his rampage really started, when he knew he was at a crossroads. And he describes how he made this conscious choice to go to the dark side, and he says when he did, an irresistible evil force, a true demonic power, took over from that point on. After that, he said he felt helpless. This is not stuff I would ever say publicly, you understand. But there it is.”

  “Then you do believe?”