HUIT.
THE POLICE SHOWED UP eventually, just one cop, a real donuteater.
Along with the trespasser and La Presidente it made for quite the trio of confused idiots standing around in the sun. Mitch trying to explain what he saw and not even trying to explain who he was, La Presidente constantly interrupting in a less and less intelligible way, and the patrol officer who had no capability or willingness to understand either of them.
He showed them the car, but by the time he got them over to the gate to show them the discarded cleaning supplies their attention span was shot.
The cop, at the lady’s constant pestering, told him to leave. Mitch insisted on him taking a report, to which the cop replied, “On what?”
Δ
He wasn’t even out of the gate before he smelt it.
Something stunk.
He’d smelt it outside and figured someone had stepped in dogshit or something but as he drove it nipped his nose again. The tang of shit and chode, that sharp mix that just pisses you off to smell.
The sponge lay on the passenger seat. He’d taken it with him. He knew it was important somehow. But why was it that when he looked at it, that’s when it smelt even worse?!
“Drown in fire,” he whispered to himself, shaking his head. Of the lines he’d picked out on his very cursory look through the letters, this one had stuck with him.
So much to be done.
The mountain was calling.
He got back on the 111 (windows down), blowing past the giant casinos stationed on either side of the highway, not giving the gaudy structures nor their augmented phantasms begging for his money even a moment’s notice.
It was that particular phrase, he thought, heading further north by the second. It worried him. Not only was it paradoxical and dangerous, what most people would consider “deranged” or “disturbing”, but it was an indication of a certain mental state, as much as it was a certain smell.
Eloquence meant something to the killer.
The language, it was stylized for a purpose.
He had the certain inkling that the killer saw his work as an “artistic achievement”. Crime was the killer’s “craft”, his passion. A religious vocation in which individual lives were expendable.
The medium? Murder.
The killer’d risk getting caught, he figured, in order to make a statement. He already had by posting the murderous letters on a private detective’s front door.
But who bore more risk in the end? For Mitch even one victim was infinitely too much. And there were already 3.
The letters had started a game, set the pieces on the chessboard. Hoping the killer would make a mistake, so that Mitch or the police could catch him, might imply that yet another victim would need to be sacrificed (and what if the killer got away? how many more would have to die before the good guys got it right?).
It was too dire a hope.
He wouldn’t have it.
And the killer would know that.
He went over the events at Hunter’s house again as he neared the exit for the Downtown Medical District, while ahead of him due north lay the savaged hectares of burnt wasteland where the body of Doctor Zemarkis had been found.
Our city turned into a graveyard.
Would that the bodies of the victims be as fertile as ash.
He had the disturbed feeling that he had been so close to something back at the house—the maid was the key...—but it had gotten away from him, the key moment had come and gone and slipped through his fingers before he could figure out what to do, and now it was over.
He might not ever come so close again...
Navigating the narrow streets he came to the hospital where the second victim in this triptych of crimes, Mrs Rita Kissinger, had been taken by the mysterious policeman the night she died.
Was it someone impersonating a cop? he wondered.
The idea of a self-propagating conspiracy gave him a jolt of excitement.
The feeling intensified as he entered the hospital.
In the heightened state of expectation he was in he took it to mean that something about the case, some clue, was coming to him, he could feel it in the air. He was sure he would encounter it any second now.
It made his hair stand on end, standing there in the lobby, to think the next break in the case could come from anywhere.
He realized soon enough what it was—— “It” was a girl, an acquaintance of his from a long time ago. She was sitting behind the counter at the General Information Desk.
Her name was Chloë Fiorina. She’d dated a friend of his in bygone days. He thought about passing by pretending not to notice but instead he walked up to her and said hello.
She was short and had a round face with large brown eyes and dark hair. Mitch had always thought she was pretty. He hadn’t known her all that well, but he remembered her as a nice girl, popular with friends and comfortable in social situations.
“Hi, Chloë.”
“Hey, I thought that was you.”
He was this close to asking how she’d been but thankfully he stopped himself. No small talk.
“I’m here about a patient that was brought here the night of April 1st. Her name was Rita Kissinger.”
That same nervous energy was in the room again, the feeling he felt was related to the case. Did she feel it, too? She seemed to, but how could she?
“I’m a private detective,” he added, when she said nothing.
“Oh yeah. I remember something like that,” she said, eyes glancing at him, glancing elsewhere.
Ephemera.
“And Kissinger. ‘Zat ring a bell?”
“Sounds familiar,” she said, without elaborating. She narrowed her eyes slightly, studying him.
“She had some injury. I don’t know the details. And the cop, the one who brought her in, he left without speaking to anyone at the hospital. Just straight dipped. Which... they tell me is irregular.”
Chloë’s look blossomed into a blatant snideness, a look so surprising he found it impossible to decipher.
“What do you want to know, exactly?”
It was a good question.
He looked up at the skylights carved into the angled ceiling.
On the other side of the french-style windowpanes a knotted profusion of puffy white cloud was blocking the sun.
Silver lining everywhere.
Inside the hospital it was cool and they were mostly alone in the large lobby besides the odd scrubbed staffer passing by, or the wheeled patient heading toward the sliding glass doors for freedom and a second chance at life.
Each time the doors opened, to let someone in, or parted so that one might go out, a hush of air would flow through the lobby that smelled like rain, and each time it did Mitch smelt the rain and a shrill of hiraeth would run through him, pin-pricking the opioid receptors all throughout his body.
Through the window he could see the clouds and smell the rain.
Euphoria.
Run away with me.
Let’s go to Lisboa right now.
We can smoke cigarettes and go to cafés, we can lay around in parks all day and do whatever we want.
“If I could go up and speak with the nurses,” was the version he finally said out loud however, “maybe they might know.”
“No,” said Chloë with an air of finality that was so convincing it seemed to answer his question in a cosmic sense. He didn’t even ask a followup.
“No,” he repeated, “Didn’t think so.”
He thought about saying he was with the DA’s Office but he stopped before any breath was put to the words.
A supplication to no one.
She looked at him, and the snideness in her countenance was replaced by an equally surprising emotion, a look of pure accusatory disappointment.
Is she reading my mind?
Because of the strange and marvelous atmosphere of the lobby, the sense of coincidence and happenstance and serendipity so thick in the air, he more than half expected Chloë to extend the conversation further, maybe even open up the opportunity for him to ask her out.
Possibility with all of its gorgeous vagueness was there like a glade of silvery blue in the tumultuous skies above.
Staring at him through the window.
“Well,” was all he could say however to that accusatory glance, “I’ll be leaving then.”
She smiled at him in return, the same smile she gave to anyone who approached her desk in need of general information. It made him feel terrible, like he’d let the image of the clouds through the skylights down, the smell of the rain, down.
Like he'd let her down.
The feeling that he had not lived up to the moment.
He arched his eyebrows in goodbye to the girl he sort of knew, smiled too, and left.
📬