Sunday, November 27, 2005

A Mini Mystery: The Final Clue

“Hannibal, thank God you’re here,” Isaac said the second I stepped into the gym director’s office.

Isaac Ingersoll stood six foot four and weighed a good 325 pounds. It was weird to see a guy that size terrified. But when I walked in some of the terror left Isaac’s eyes. He looked like a man who had just been taken off death row. Looking down at the corpse on the floor, I hoped Isaac was right.
“Fascinating,” Police Detective Orson Rissik said. He was detaining everybody while they waited for the coroner. “The other three suspects called their lawyers, but Ingersoll called you, and you’re the first to arrive.”

“Maybe he figures he’s the one in trouble, detective.” I understood Isaac’s thinking. He was the biggest man in the room, although all four suspects were bigger than me. Their size was the reason that The Predators was such a great semi-professional football team, despite their recent slump. But size was no advantage to the players found in the building where a man was beaten and then stabbed to death.

The guy lying on his belly was the smallest man in the room. His face was turned toward the door. His right hand still held a death grip on the edge of the desk. His left hand was thrust under the back cover of a book apparently snatched from a collection of novels on the desk. I didn’t see a knife, but the wound on his side had surrounded him with a pool of blood.

I had worked with Rissik before so I knew I could push things a bit. “So, four football players in the gym but not together, right? Then somebody notices a trail of blood leading from the locker room to this office, to the guy laying over there with his hand on the last page of Patricia Cornwell’s latest bestseller.”

“That’s the basics,” Rissik said. “Looks to me like the vic was reaching for the phone, but couldn’t quite make it, so he grabbed a book instead.”

I squatted down for a closer look. The victim’s blank, empty eyes stared back at me from within dark circles. Blood from his nose and lips showed that somebody had worked him over good, but even mangled as it was, I recognized that face.

“You know this is Manny Simpson, right?”

“The gambler?” Rissik asked. “Last I heard, that weasel was fixing college basketball games. Considering who we got here today, I’m thinking he’s moved on to semi-pro football.”

Hannibal stood to face the short lineup against the wall. “So, who DO we have here?”

Rissik pointed his way down the line while his suspects stood silent. “You know the white fellow, Ingersoll. He’s fullback for the Predators. This next joker is Georgie Sparks. He’s a guard. The next man is Nick Davis, the tight end. Number four, Dan Cooper, is a wide receiver.”

I smirked at Rissik. “I get the sports connection, but there must have been other people in the gym. Why are you only holding the football players?”

Rissik smirked back. “You think the book’s a coincidence?”

I shrugged, pulled out my pen and got down on my knees. I didn’t figure Simpson for a literary type, so it made sense that he grabbed the book to leave some kind of clue. The title told me right away why Rissik was so sure of himself.

“Patricia Cornwell’s latest best seller, Predator. Yeah, I guess him grabbing this one from the half dozen books on the desk is a pretty clear pointer.”

“Yeah,” Rissik said. “I figured I had a dead lock until I turned up not one but four players.”

I slid my pencil under Simpson’s hand and lifted it. I wanted a good look at the book’s last page. “For a crooked gambler, I hear Simpson was pretty smart. Maybe there’s more to his dying clue.”

Rissik crossed his arms and walked toward me. “You know, we usually solve this kind of thing just like Scarpetta in Cornwell’s books. Forensic evidence will surface.”

“Really? I kind of like to try to noodle out the clues and solve the puzzle myself.” I knew I was pushing Rissik’s buttons. As expected, he rose to the bait.

“Okay, Jones. You figure you see something I missed? You think you know who it was?”

In fact, I did think I knew who killed Simpson. To test my theory, I’d have to push my man to a confession.

I walked right up to my suspect and looked him in the eye. “I saw your last couple of games. Kind of disappointing.”

Nick Davis leaned forward, maintaining eye contact with me. “Nobody plays their best game every single week. But I give this team all I got.”

“That’s bull,” I told him. “That fumble that cost the game last week? Pretty sloppy. And what about those two passes you just couldn’t get hold of three weeks ago?”

“Ain’t no law against having a bad day now and again,” Davis said, backing off just a bit.

It was time for me to get loud. “No, but there is a law against throwing games for a gambling syndicate. What was your beef with Simpson? Didn’t he pay you enough for shaving points?”

Ingersoll and the other two players stepped away from Davis, glaring at him. Their stares seemed to rattle him a lot more than I could.

“It ain’t like that. I met Simpson today to call it quits. I just couldn’t keep on betraying the team. But he wouldn’t let go. Said he’d tell the guys what I done. I couldn’t let him do that.”

“So you roughed him up in the locker room,” I said.

Rissik whipped out a pair of cuffs and slapped them on Davis. “Then, when he wouldn’t cut you loose you stabbed him. Well, I don’t think anybody will actually miss Simpson, but from the look of your teammates’ faces, you’ll be safer in custody.”

While Rissik read Davis his rights, Isaac jumped at me. I gritted my teeth against the slap on the back I knew was coming, and managed to not fall over when it landed.

“Thanks for coming down, Hannibal,” Isaac said. “I just know that would be me in the cuffs right now if not for you.”
Rissik shoved Davis into a chair, and I could see curiosity fighting grudging admiration on his face.
“Okay, spill it, Jones. What did you see on that page that tipped you that Davis was the killer?”

“You should have seen it yourself, Orson,” I said. “It was pretty clear that Simpson knew he was going to bleed out quick, so he snatched the book off the desk that he knew would implicate one of the players, and just had time to open it to the page he knew had words that would identify his killer.”

“You saying Simpson had read this novel?”

“No, Orson. I’m saying that Simpson knew the last page would tell us which player killed him. You know the words I mean now?”

Rissik cursed under his breath. “Of course. The two words that are on the last page of every book.

The End.”



Hannibal met and worked with Orson Rissik in
Blood and Bone.
Hannibal met Isaac Ingersoll and learned about The Predators in
Collateral Damage.

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Driving the District with Rey Santiago

My name is Reymundo Fernando Santiago, but you can call me Ray. I been driving a cab in this town for a lot of years and now, since I brought my baby girl here from Cuba. Thanks to some help from Hannibal I own my own cab company now. Hannibal is my friend, and he’s dating my only daughter, Cintia, so we’re pretty close. He asked me to help some new folks moving up here by telling them what they need to know about driving around here. Well nobody knows driving here better than me, so I said sure. And it sure ain’t nothing like back home in Cuba.

First off, you got to learn to call it by its right name. It is D.C. or "the District." Only tourists call it Washington. How do you tell the tourists? If you see somebody with their turn signal on, they are a tourist.

Maps are good to have, but if your road map of Montgomery County is more than a few weeks old, throw it out and buy a new one. It's obsolete. If you’re in Loudoun or Fairfax County and your map is one day old, it's already obsolete.

Now, there’s no such thing as a dangerous high-speed chase in D.C. It's just another chase, usually on the BW Parkway. That’s the Baltimore Washington Parkway, but you’ll never hear anybody say all that.

All directions around here start with The Beltway, which has no beginning and no end, just one continuous loop that locals believe is somehow clarified by an inner and outer loop designation. I know, that makes no sense to anybody outside the Beltway.

The morning rush hour is from 5 to 11 AM. The evening rush hour is from 1 to 8 PM. Friday's rush hour starts Thursday morning, especially during the summer on Route 50 eastbound.

Let’s see, what else. Well, if the Redskins are playing a home game, there’s no point in driving anywhere near PG County. Oh, never say PG County to anybody from Mitchellville, Upper Marlboro or Fort Washington. They'll blow a blood vessel.

Driving in The District proper, if you stop at a yellow light, you’ll get rear-ended. Or shot at. Now if you RUN a red light, be sure to smile for the hundred dollar picture you’ll get, courtesy of the DMV. On the other hand, if you don't hit the gas as soon as the light turns green, you’ll get cursed out about two hundred different languages, and none of them is English.

And you got to be ready for the construction. Construction on I-270 is a way of life. It’s funny – they call it an interstate, but it only runs from Bethesda to Frederick, so it ain’t, unless you consider Montgomery County another state, which I guess some people do. I-270 opened in the sixties, and it’s been torn up and under reconstruction ever since. And then it’s got a "Spur," whatever the hell that is.

What else. All unexplained sights are explained by this phrase: "Oh, we're in Takoma Park."

Car horns are really road rage indicators. Pay attention to the warning.

Unwritten law: Old ladies in Buicks have the right of way in the area of Leisure World.

A lot of roads around here just change their names when you cross an intersection. Don't ask why. Nobody knows.

If you need to ask directions in Arlington you got to know Spanish. Or in Langley Park for that matter. Or Wheaton, or Adams Morgan. In PG County, Eubonics will be your best bet. In Annandale, a Cambodian or Vietnamese dialect will come in handy. If you’re on DuPont Circle, Capital Hill or U Street, you just better be African American. And if you stop to ask directions in Hannibal’s neighborhood, in Southeast... well, don't.

Driving south out of DC on I-395 is the scariest thing you will ever do. At some points you’ll be in seven lanes of traffic cruising along at 85 miles an hour, bumper to bumper. The minimum acceptable speed on the Beltway is 85. Hannibal described it just right. He says the Beltway is kind of like a daily version of a NASCAR reality show. Strap in and collect points as you go.

The open lane for passing on all Maryland interstates is the far right lane because no self-respecting Marylander would ever be caught driving in the slow lane. Unofficially, both shoulders are fair game too. The far left lanes on all Maryland interstates are the official chat lanes, filled by drivers who want to talk on their cell phones. And mini-vans can use the far left at whatever speed the driver feels most comfortable at while she’s doing two or three other things.

You need to check the weather before driving here too. For instance, rain makes these people stupid. For real. It rains, it’s an instant fifty point drop in IQ in DC drivers. Snow? A hundred point drop in IQ, and a rush to the Safeway for toilet paper and milk. If it's 10 degrees out, it's got to be Orioles opening day. If it's 110 degrees, it's the Skins opening day.
One thing about DC does remind me of back home in Cuba. If the humidity and the temperature are both above 90, then it's May, June, July, August and sometimes September. And maybe, if you're really lucky, October.

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Checking in with an old colleague: Detective Lucas Stonecoat


Back in my Secret Service Days I met a detective named Lucas Stonecoat on a trip through Texas. Even though Lucas is Native American we seemed to have a lot in common. We don’t talk a lot, but we sometimes talk about things that matter.

Lucas’ biographer, Robert W. Walker www.robertwwalker.com published a series of mysteries about Lucas called The Edge series, but he’s writing historical fiction now, like his new book, City for Ransom.


Out of nowhere Walker wrote to me the other day to let me know what’s going on with my friend Lucas. Cindy tells me it’s common for people to have “guest writers” on their web logs, so I decided to share Lucas’ story, just the way it was sent to me, just the way I stuck it in my journal.

Shy One Pearl
An original Lucas Stonecoat story from the Edge Series by Robert W. Walker
Quarrelsome was the single word most people leveled at Detective Lucas Stonecoat, a full-blood Texas Cherokee Indian cop in Houston, and a man who proved that a Native American Indian could buck and kick the stereotype, get off the reservation, and make a living as a policeman in the white world, and still keep his identity. There was much to admire about the man besides his Jimmy Smits good looks, his 6’4 lean frame, and his mesmerizing eyes. Still, he was surly and contentious ever since Pearl Sanchez had disappeared.

He kicked out at his desk, the sound sending a shot through the old police station slated for demolition.

“You gonna bring the house down before the wrecking ball?” asked Dr. Meredyth Sanger, police shrink, to whom Lucas always went for profiling help. He’d asked her for any insights she might have about the kind of man who could abduct a fourteen-year-old girl and then send little bloody pieces of her home to the family, making it clear he was chopping Pearl up little by little.

Lucas had gone over everything ten, eleven, twelve times. Everyone who worked for the father, everyone the mother had ever known, completely turning their private lives inside out in search of anyone anywhere at any time that either of the two might have crossed. Whoever was behind this crime seemed to take great, abiding joy in the suffering of Pearl’s parents, Pearl being their only daughter. It stood to reason it’d be a disgruntled employee, after All Sanchez ran a business both high-powered and involving hundreds of employees. Countless employees had come and gone, many of them upset with Sanchez. None of these panned out. But each had to be checked. Meanwhile the clock ticked on for Pearl.

He’d turned then in earnest to the mother, and he found things in her past she pleaded he keep just between them, things that even Sanchez didn’t know. Again none of the leads here panned out. He went back to Sanchez, tossing out the idea it was work-related, digging into his background. Could it be someone he’d crossed as a child, as a teen, as a young man in college? Nothing.
So much time wasted and nothing. The strike force had no better luck. The clock ticked on. Time was not on Pearl’s side.

They finally had to cede to the notion the maniac who had Pearl was a total psycho with an agenda he alone could possibly understand. A mad agenda that had no connection to the real world. This meant no real world sensible means of looking for a motive, and without a motive—if he had simply stalked her and lifted her off the street for no reason other than to chop her up and send her piece by piece home….how could they possibly catch the fiend?
He’d remained faceless all this time.

He left no clue, as corporeal as fog, a phantom within the fog, a fog that had kept Lucas in the dark all this time. Too long…another digit arrived in a tidy box.

The parents recognized the knuckle and nail.

Who knew if the crazed fiend might simply next take her leg, an arm, her head, or Pearl’s spleen, her heart, her stomach?

In the middle of it all, Lucas’s Chief, Aaron Phillips, recently having taken over the stationhouse that’d soon be leveled, got in Lucas’s face and ordered him in no uncertain terms to see a shrink other than his chum, Meredyth.

“For kicking a desk?”

“Just do it before this case overwhelms you!”

“See a shrink when the case is ongoing!” Lucas demanded.

“That’s an order! No excuses!”

“But time’s of the essence, Chief! We need to keep on the case, else Pearl—”

“Case’ll be waiting, Lucas. This one’s going nowhere.”

“Nowhere?”

“Nowhere.”

It was too true. In every sense of the word, the Pearl Sanchez case was going nowhere.

As soon as Chief Phillips turned his back, Lucas felt an attack coming on, one of his blackouts from a lingering condition from years past that only Meredyth Sanger knew of. He’d learned to trust her for this reason, but now she’s handing me off to some shrink I don’t even know? And what gives with Chief Phillips, stopping me from doing my job in the middle of my investigation? That just isn’t done!

Then the blackout was over as quickly as it threatened to drop him to his knees, and he saw it…saw it clearly. Something had changed in Pearl’s life. Her routine disrupted. The new piano teacher. How many times had he seen it in the paperwork. How many times had he ignored it?

Pearl was locked away in her piano teacher’s basement or attic or crawl space. Little Pearl’d been taking lessons for three years, and she played at the school pageant, a regular prodigy. The pictures depicted a beautiful young Hispanic girl. But her piano teacher had died in a car accident, and she’d begun to go to a new piano teacher. It was a detail no one, including Lucas, had paid any attention to.

Lucas raced from the old stationhouse in Mid-town Houston. He drove across the city with his strobe light flashing, horn blaring. He called for backup as he did so. The last package sent to her parents had held Pearl’s bloody left ear. The maniac could tire of the ‘game’ at any time.
“Anatomy is destiny,” Sigmund Freud had said. This was a twisted truism here. At what point would the piano teacher-turned-killer decide to take a piece of Pearl that would be fatal?

He found the address that’d been in their files all along, the same address he’d subconsciously memorized. The piano teacher had been pleasant and had answered all the questions previous detectives working under Lucas had asked of her. Her alibi established, she’d claimed not to have seen Pearl for a week, not since her last session at the keys. Another dead end, so he’d thought.

So everyone had thought.

Now he stood pounding on the door. He had no warrant, so he must talk his way in, sift about the place, make small talk, find reason to open the door to the basement, try to get a rise out of the bitch.

He calmly did it all, and Mrs. Louise Bohnheim came at him with a knife as soon as he went for the door. As soon as she attacked, Lucas put her down with a right hook and tore the door open. He took the rickety stairwell two and three steps at a time, and sure enough here was Pearl, her eyes wide, her mouth moving below the gag, her bare body shivering and covered with small cuts where the mad woman had been at play.

Lucas tore away her bonds and gag, and he lifted her into his arms, and she said thank you repeatedly in a mantra of gratitude, and he told her to save her energy, and that he’d get her to a hospital, and that she’d soon be in the arms of mother and father. Safe.


“Is that the way you remember it, Detective Stonecoat?” asked Dr. Kari Martin, the police shrink he didn’t trust, despite kind things Meredyth had said about Martin.

“You can be sure she’s the best, Lucas. I would only find the best for you. I love you, remember?”

“Remember?” he looked up to see not Meredyth but Dr. Martin instead. “Hold on. Whataya mean, how I remember it. That’s how it was, just like I told you.”

“You spoke to Pearl when you found her?”

“Yes.”

“And she spoke back?”

“Yes.”

“Thanked you repeatedly, you say?”

“Repeatedly.”

“And when you got her to the hospital, she…her eyes were open and she was conscious?”

“Yes! How many g’damn times I gotta say it?”

“Until you get it right.”

“Right?”

“Meredyth said to keep at you until you get straight with this Pearl Sanchez business, detective.”

“Get straight?”

“Detective, the coroner has time of death for Pearl Sanchez at twenty-four hours before you reached her.”

He shook his head firmly….then more firmly. “That’s not how it happened.”

“No…not in your head, obviously.”

Lucas swallowed hard and stared at his griddle-sized hands; they seemed far away, as if his arms were turned to rubber and stretching away from him. Martin finally broke the silence. “Detective, how long since the Sanchez case was closed?”

“Active yesterday, closed today.”

“Try six months ago, Lucas.”

“Six months?” Lucas looked around the office and past the office to the green walls of the institution. “Six months?”

“That’s how long you’ve been with us here.”

Doctor and cop stared across at one another in a silence of infinite depth.

“You saying, I was committed?”

“Yes.”

“And Pearl Sanchez is dead?”

“Yes.”

“I carried her to the hospital in my arms. Gave her to the ER people.”

“Dead, sir. You carried her in dead.”

“I did?”

“I’m sorry, but at least for you, this is a good day.”

“A good day?”

“A breakthrough. You’re aware of your surroundings.”

“Pearl didn’t make it?”

“You had a break down, Lucas.”

“But she talked to me.”

“Perhaps on some level she did; perhaps you soothed her spirit, Lucas, but her body was gone when you arrived ahhh…too late.”

“Too late. But for six months now, playing it over and over in my mind…”

“You saved Pearl. You weren’t too late.”

“I let her down in the real world.”

“It’s a burden to be sure, detective, but one that we’re here to help you accept.”

“Accept?”

“The only way to free you.”

“Free me from this place?”

“No…from…from this version of events…”

“Gotta accept the truth.”

“Then we can talk about your going out the door.”

Lucas heard faint music playing somewhere the other side of the door. He stood, pushed his chair away, and went toward the door. “I could’ve sworn I’d gotten there in time.”

“I’m sorry. Everyone is.”

“I never suspected the piano teacher.”

“No one did.”

“No one did in time.”

Quarrelsome was the single word most people used for Detective Lucas Stonecoat, surly and contentious ever since the Pearl Sanchez case. Before that he’d been a likeable fellow and he’d had a chance with Dr. Sanger. Not anymore. That Sanchez girl…what was her name? Pearl, a shy one, yeah….he’d gotten there shy maybe twenty, twenty-four hours…had failed to break it in time.
Now shy Pearl haunted him.

Now his badge weighed heavy.

Monday, November 07, 2005

The original Hannibal

This sheet of paper from my young friend Monte is in my journal because it’s dear to me. For the future, when my memory lapses, I should jot down the back-story.

One Saturday, while Monte was taking me to school with a little one-on-one on a nearby court, one of his classmates came by. Naturally, Monte introduced us. And as so often happens, I heard that hackneyed response.

“Hannibal? Eewww. You mean like that guy who eats people?”

Some days I explain who my parents named me after. I might mention that I was born before Thomas Harris wrote his novels featuring Hannibal Lector. Once in a while I talk about watching The A Team TV show with George Peppard playing a cigar smoking character who shared my first name. This time I just waved it off. Monte waited until his friend was gone before he said anything.

“Doesn’t that frost you? To know that everyone who meets you thinks of that creepy guy in a horror movie? Why would they give you such a weird name?”

I dribbled while I thought. “You know Monte, it just doesn’t matter what anybody thinks. I know who my folks were thinking of when they named me. Why’d they give me that name? You can figure that one out for yourself.”

Monte ran me around the court for another hour and I forgot all about that conversation. I thought he had too until about two weeks later when I walked into my office one afternoon and found this short essay on my desk.

Hannibal Barca

About 2,200 years ago, a General of Carthage named Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps with an army of elephants to fight the Romans. Carthage was in North Africa, near where Tunisia is today. It was an empire just like the Roman Empire. Both empires existed side by side for centuries. Then the Romans decided they didn’t want the trading competition and started the Punic Wars.

Hannibal fought the Second Punic War, after Carthage lost the first one. When the main general was assassinated, the troops elected Hannibal to lead them. He attacked Spain and crossed the Alps in 14 days to invade Italy, handing the Romans a series of defeats for 16 years. He kept his army in the field that whole time and they never mutinied against him or fought among themselves. That’s really cool because he had the first Army of diversity. It was made up of people from different countries-- Africans, Spaniards, Gauls, Carthaginians, Italians, and Greeks. They all had different customs and languages, but he got them all to recognize one authority.

He never lost a major battle in Italy but Rome invaded Carthage and he was called home to defend it. They beat him there, which ended the Second Punic War, but they didn’t catch him. Hannibal lived as a hunted man all over the Middle East but he never gave up. He hired out as a soldier against Rome's allies until they cornered him in Turkey. He was so unwilling to let the Romans catch him, he took poison.

Some might think we know more about the Roman leaders because they were European and the people of Carthage were Africans. I think it is just because Rome eventually destroyed Carthage and the winner of the war gets to write history. Hannibal was a military genius, very brave and a great leader. He never quit against a bigger army, and he got people of different cultures to work together. Anybody should be proud to be named after this man, and it’s a shame that his name is now attached to a fictional serial killer.


No, I’ll never tell Monte how touched I was that he cared enough to do the research and write this thing. But he probably noticed that I hung his essay to the front of my refrigerator for a couple of weeks and wrote the words “Nice Job” next to the big red “A” at the top of the page.