Corpses Say the Darndest Things: A Nod Blake Mystery Page 11

  “Don't be modest. Below and beside the message, aren't those your hand and shoe prints dancing all around like you were playing Grauman's Chinese Theater? Who'd you think you were, Frank Sinatra?”

  I brought the glass up and gave the photo another look. The fat bastard was right again; near the cryptic message (scratched with a proud flare in the mud) were a jumbled collection of hand and shoe prints that, if checked, would certainly be found to have been made by me. But how could he have known that?

  “Why were you there, Blake? At the scene of a double homicide? One murder here at home ain't good enough for ya'?”

  “Shoe prints? And an unreadable message? This is your evidence I was there? It's laughable.”

  “Then go ahead and laugh. And, no, future convict, this isn't my evidence. This is just a taste to see how big a lie you're going to tell. You're shaking your head No, Blake. Why are you shaking your head No? You were there. Stephenson County's got a village of excitable Russkies made the trip all the way to America just to put the finger on you. Their lab gurus played mud pies and moulage all morning and, as we speak, they are checking their results against your detective's license. Eh, we'll collect your shoes later.” He smiled like the Cheshire hog. “Yeah, I'm betting this week's pay check they're yours.”

  “Wake up, Wenders, you're dreaming.”

  “I'm dreamin'? How `bout I turn it into a wet dream? Wait till ya' hear the best part. That crappy Jag you drive? Yeah, it was there too. Ya' know how we know? You hit a tree, remember?”

  He was waiting for my reaction. I could feel it. But I couldn't really see it because my eyes had spun round in my skull and were staring at my brain, wanting to see for themselves what the hell it was going to do next. I hadn't hit a tree at Lost Lake; had not. I'd almost hit a tree, when the blue and gold things, the ghosts, the vision of the Nikitin brothers appeared from out of nowhere in front of my car. But I stopped in time. I hadn't hit a tree. What was Wenders talking about? And, now, why was the big ape laughing?

  “Get this,” he said with a roar. “You knocked off your front license plate. Swear to God. They got your license plate, Blake. Can you imagine anyone being so damned stupid?” He laughed till he was empty, which you might imagine took a while, then turned on me with deadly serious, iced-eyes. “Now, I am asking you officially, for the record, are you denying being at Lost Lake in Stephenson County last night?”

  Rule number one of being a detective: when you're caught in a trap, don't wriggle. I had not hit a tree at Lost Lake. Be that as it may, there was a good chance Wenders wasn't lying for once and, in that event, they had my license plate, and prints (again), and I really was caught. “No,” I said. “I don't deny it. I was there.”

  “Get your coat.”

  “Hold on. I don't need my coat.”

  “I warned you. You're sticking your nose in every murder in Illinois and I'm going to find out why.”

  “My nose was already in it. It's the same murder case you brought to me five days ago.”

  He stopped to think. That took a minute. “The Delp thing?”

  “Yeah, the Delp murder. There's nothing I can tell you at the station I can't tell you here. In fact, I can tell you more here.” Though I dreaded it as much as I had ever dreaded anything, I took a deep breath as I went to my desk and pulled out the envelope of photos I'd taken the night of the first murder; the pictures of Katherine Delp and Nick Nikitin at play. After all, with Nikitin a victim and not a suspect they could no longer send me to jail so he might just as well know they existed. “Mrs. Delp never knew I was there; outside of her house that night,” I told Wenders. “If she had, she probably wouldn't have had a visitor.”

  “What visitor?”

  “You can ask that with all the evidence collected by your lab boys. The sperm donor.”

  “So Delp had sex with his wife before he left, so what?”

  “You took his word for that?”

  “He can't be the murderer, he was out of town. I ain't asking Chicago's most famous minister to jerk off in a cup, when he can't be the perp.”

  He had a point. Right on top of his head. I stretched the pictures in Wenders' direction. “Here,” I told him. “Pull your hat down tight or don't blame me if your skull explodes.”

  He snatched the envelope and tore into it like Master Henry Jekyll opening his first chemistry set at Christmas. He swore when he saw the first picture. “If this is one of their church services,” he said, “I'm joinin'. If it ain't, Blake, you're going to jail.”

  He quickly rifled the rest of the stack, giving himself an eyeful, a headache and, for all I knew, wood. I filled him in as he neared the last photograph. “Delp's old lady was being porked by an ex-church member, Nicholas Nikitin.”

  “That's one of the –”

  “Victims from the cabin fire last night,” I said, finishing it for him. “Yes. It will be when they finish with the autopsies.” I pointed back to the pictures in Wenders' fat hands. “Back to the night of the first murder. Nikitin showed up there, at the Delp mansion, around 1 am –”

  “The night of Katherine Delp's murder?”

  Quick as frozen mercury. “Right,” I said. “They bumped uglies and he left around 2:30.”

  My warning that Wenders control his temper had been entirely wasted. He turned red as a beet and it looked as if his head had no choice but to explode. “I don't believe this.”

  “What's not to believe?”

  “You, Blake! Who do you think you are withholding evidence?”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “What the hell do you think? Murder.”

  “Don't get your hopes up, Frank. He didn't do it; the guy was innocent.”

  “How do you know he was innocent? You hearing voices?”

  I let that one go without comment. Not that Wenders noticed. He was at full roar. “You didn't know he was innocent when you took these!”

  “No one was dead when I took those. All they are is evidence the reverend's wife was cheating on him. So unless Homicide has gone into investigating adultery, give your pump a rest.”

  “How do you know this guy wasn't the killer?”

  “His murder last night should suggest an answer if nothing else does. He's the second victim.”

  “Second victim?”

  “Or third, depends how you're counting.” He stared. I sighed. “I'll come round again, Frank, hold on this time. He's one of the two bodies in that cabin.”

  “I got that. I already said that! But just 'cause he's dead now don't mean he didn't kill her then?”

  “It's certainly suggestive, don't you think?” Still the dull stare like a dinosaur taxing his pea-sized brain. “Look, Wenders, when he saw the paper and read about Katherine Delp's murder, Nikitin got scared and took off. His brothers got him out of town; hid him in their cabin at the Russian lake. I traced them there but I was too late. The killer found them first.” I paused to edit the actual events in my mind before letting them reach my big mouth. Wenders could only handle so much truth from me. Any mention of the other things I'd seen at Lost Lake wouldn't do anybody any good. I only half believed it myself and understood it not one bit. There wasn't one chance in hell he was going to get it. Wenders wanted to stick me in jail something fierce, but he would have settled for locking me away in a nut house any day of the week. I wouldn't hand him the chance. “The cabin was totally engulfed when I got there. The doors were rigged outside so no one could get out and there were two bodies inside. Nick Nikitin and, I assumed, one of his brothers; one shot and both burned up.”

  “How do you know one was shot?” Oops. Stepped on my joint there. “How the hell do you know one of them was shot?”

  “It's a guess,” I said, trying to make lemonade. “The window was shot out. Nick's brothers were, are, physical freaks of nature. You'd have to shoot them just to slow them down. How else could the murderer have kept them inside?” Wenders wasn't lapping it up. Instead he was staring a hole through me. “It's a guess.
But I'll bet money I'm right.”

  He ignored the chance at my personal wealth. “What else do you know that I don't?”

  I snorted. “The list is endless.” Then I quietly breathed a sigh of relief. The big lug's complaint was not that I knew something I shouldn't. He was annoyed that he'd learned it from a mug like me instead of being told by one of the good guys. “As far as this case goes,” I told him, “I don't know anything else. That's what's so frustrating. I'm just like you, I'm not getting anywhere.”

  “Just like me,” he sneered. “I've about had it with you.”

  “God, you sound like my ex-wife.”

  “I'm not kidding, Blake. You're interfering with a homicide investigation, withholdin' evidence, lyin' to the police. It's called Obstruction of Justice, in case your memory is as bad as your attitude. For the love of Mike, we've got enough evidence to hold you for this… for these murders.”

  “Damn it, Frank…”

  “And, big shot, there are rumors stirring through City Hall that are very un-good as far as you're concerned. Apparently, you don't even have a client anymore. You were fired, the way we hear it. So your snooping is now unauthorized and you're rubbin' Conrad Delp's rhubarb the wrong way. He's bitchin' to the people that make the rules.”

  “So I'm pissing someone off, that isn't a headline. As for authorization, I have a detective's license and I'm an American citizen. I don't need Delp's permission, or yours for that matter, to look into criminal cases in the public record.”

  “Don't you go anywhere,” Wenders snapped. “I'm going to let Stephenson County know I've talked to you and have my eye on ya'. But I want you here when I come to spring the trap.” He turned like a trick elephant in a circus ring and headed out with my photos clutched in his grubby hands. He turned back at the door. “In the meantime, you outta give serious thought to whoever it is tryin' to drop you in it. They want you drowned and you're doin' everything you can to help `em. If you got any brains, you'll get out of this case, and stay out, or you're going to wind up suckin' your thumb on death row.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I'd like to tell you that sanity took over; that I did the prudent thing, took Wenders warning, and got out from under this abortion of a case. I'd like to tell you that but can't because I did the opposite. On my way out, to once again stick my nose where it wasn't wanted, I took the time to examine the Jag and found the front license plate was indeed missing. It had been ripped off the bumper, no doubt by the arsonist himself. Meaning the murderer was still there, at the Nikitin cabin, when I arrived last night. He'd gone to the trouble to vandalize my car (and apparently an innocent tree) to shove me – personally – deeper into the mess. I intended to keep that in mind.

  Fresh out of clues and short on suspects to harass, I returned to the Nikitin place on Racine. Yeah, I know, two of them had just been horribly killed, so recently they didn't even know officially which two of the three were gone and which one was still up-right. It would be heartless and inappropriate to barge in on the survivor's grief. More, it would be crazy. Who did I think I was? Well, that was the point. I was the guy in it up to my neck and someone was doing their best to shove me further in, to bury me under these murders. Leaving that message, whatever it was, in the mud and my license plate beside a dented tree were sloppy attempts to involve me. Someone did it all the same and Wenders was going to use the situation to boil me in oil if he got the chance. As I had no ideas, I thought maybe the surviving Nikitin could point me in the right direction. I couldn't wait to find out.

  Then again, I had to wait, at least a few minutes, because the cops (a cruiser and an unmarked unit) were there when I went past.

  I found a drug store a block away and used their parking lot thinking that, if Wenders changed his mind and set the dogs on me, they wouldn't start by looking for needles in haystacks. You hide a tree in a forest; you hide a car in a parking lot. Besides, as bad as my dented brain was working, I'd gotten the brilliant idea to use the trip to – again – get rid of Willie's rattletrap of a car. I left it in the lot in its own cloud of gray smoke and put my gumshoes to work hoofing it back to the Nikitin house. I kept to the shadows as best I could, found my way back to my newest favorite alley (behind Nikitin's place), and reached the fence I'd already climbed earlier in this ridiculous adventure. I scaled it, again, and came down in the darkness of Nikitin's back yard.

  I waited in the shadows between the back and side of the house, beaming with pride at how smart I was. I sneaked peeks through several windows and got a gander at the red-eyed Mike Nikitin talking with the boys in blue. That made it all but official, the bodies in the cabin belonged to Nick and John. I saw the detectives, the bovine Wenders himself and his sidekick little runny-nosed Mason, and the two patrol officers, neither of whom I knew, and I marked time until they got their fill and left. Once they did, I waited a while longer just to make sure that when I made my presence known Mike would be good and alone. Yeah, I was real smart.

  I was still waiting, in the bushes, doing some late evening daydreaming about a certain too-good looking church secretary, when I was grabbed from behind, spun around, and smacked. Thankfully, the spin and the wind-up gave me a second to react. I juked my head enough that, though I didn't avoid the fist altogether, I managed to take it as a glancing blow to my tender nose and not as the full-on schnoz buster it was meant to be. That gave me the chance to see, by the houselight spill, that my attacker was Mike Nikitin. The big guy had somehow crept up behind me and, sisters and brothers, he looked goddamned mad.

  But that was his problem. Truth be told, there had been days when my mood was brighter. This case was going backwards at Mach 10 with its hair on fire. I'd had it with intimations that I was responsible for these killings. I'd had it with being pushed around. And I was sick and tired of getting hit in the head. Mike had the drop on me but, to my credit and his regret, this time I didn't drop easily. We proceeded to dance, to re-landscape his back yard, and to redecorate the patio. I'll skip the details as long as you keep in mind that a second sucker punch, by a second Nikitin brother, in one week inspired me and that I fought a lot better when I was conscious. In short order, I handed the last surviving Nikitin his ass on a plate and, at the same time, answered the age-old question, If a big Russian falls in his backyard when there's nobody there that gives a shit, does he make a noise? The answer was Yes, a grunt when he starts to topple, an escape of air on the way over, and a dull thud when his coconut whacks the stone deck.

  I opened the patio's sliding glass door, grabbed him by the back of his collar, and dragged his oversized butt through and into the kitchen. I paused at the sink to catch my breath, to tamp the blood from my nose and lips with a dishrag, and to enjoy a badly needed glass of water from the tap. I refilled the glass and threw it in Mike's face on the floor. He sputtered and ran his scales sounding like Chumley the Walrus as he returned to consciousness. Then, swear to God, he asked me if I thought I was Bruce Lee. When I finished shaking my head, I yanked him up-right, propped his dripping head against the cupboard, reminded him that he'd thrown the first punch, then started the talk I'd come for.

  I opened the meeting with a discussion of the cabin fire. That might seem cold but I had to erase his notion that I had something to do with it or his brothers' deaths; a notion I couldn't help but think Wenders had given him. It made no sense for me to kill the one witness I so desperately needed to talk with. As upset as he was, Mike was able to see that. He likewise got it when I explained Wenders' habit of putting me in the frame anytime it suited him. For a hunk of meat, I was delighted to discover Mike had a brain that worked. Finally, he agreed that the real killer, whoever it was, was apparently trying to set me up. Neither of us knew why. He wanted to know how his brothers got it and how I thought they went. I pleaded ignorance and made it stick by telling him nobody knew anything until the autopsy reports were finished. There are some things people are better off not knowing and, believe me, I had no interest in reliving it (and I
do mean reliving it) again. That covered the cabin.

  Next came the murder of the minister's wife. That would take longer. I convinced Mike that I needed to know all I could about Nick, his relationships with Katherine, the reverend, Reggie Riaz, Gina and the church. I needed Nick's side of the story, and plenty of it, if I was ever going to find any justice for his brothers (and if I was ever going to dig myself out of the hole I was in). I got him up off of the kitchen floor and onto the living room couch where we'd originally met, and I got him talking.

  “John had to get him away. Not just to hide him, though that was part, but to keep him from ruining his life; to shut him up. He kept saying he was guilty, he was guilty.”

  “Guilty?”

  “Not of murder, he did not kill the reverend's wife, Mr. Blake. He had nothing to do with it. But he said, if it had not been for him, Katherine would be alive.”

  “He didn't kill her?”

  “No. No, of course. But he kept saying it was his fault she was dead.”

  “But why? Why did Nick think her murder was his fault?”

  Mike shrugged. “He said he knew of what her husband was capable.”

  “He thought Reverend Delp murdered his wife?”

  “He could not prove anything, if that is what you are asking. I asked this question. He said he could not prove it. But, yes, he thought Delp murdered her.”

  I shook my head, which was a mistake, and had to pause to let the marbles stop rolling and my equilibrium return. Mike used the time-out to rub his swelling jaw. “You punch like Jack Palance.”

  “Jack Palance?”

  “He is Ukrainian. Volodymyr Jack Palahniuk. Professional boxer before he became actor.”

  Great. Not only was I the butt of Fates' running gag; now the jokes were coming with explanations. “Fascinating,” I told him. “Can we get back to business? Delp couldn't have killed her. He has an alibi. He was in Atlanta the night his wife died. Where was Nick?”

  Mike reared back as if the question burned but he recovered quickly and looked me in the eye again. “Is this another question to which you already know the answer?”