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The Organ Grinder's Monkey

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

"Sick, sick, sick," said the man from Homicide as he knelt beside the institutional desk under which all that remained of Eliot Fingerhut lay bloody and still. Detective Sergeant Shelly Lowenkopf couldn't help but agree: the purpling gash in the center of the corpse's pale belly bulged with organs that threatened to slide through any minute and settle in a steaming pile at his feet. The man from Homicide sniffed excitedly; he seemed to enjoy the idea, chalking the dead man's outline on the worn green linoleum.

Click! The lab photographer, a wiry, bouncing man, snapped three shots of the corpse—long, medium, and close-up—from each of three angles, squatting beside the glistening guts as he waited for the batteries in his strobe to recharge. The proximity of the desk to the lime-green wall allowed only a close-up from the fourth direction, which seemed to trouble him, so he snapped a second time from the same perspective. Poof.

The horror beneath the desk relieved none of the tedium as the crime scene unit poked around—bagging specimens, jotting notes, scratching befouled surfaces. Shelly rubbed his eyes, shutting out the room lined with fat ledgers and skinny circulars and a smell of etherized air conditioning. He stood between two officers, neither of whom he had met before, both of whom seemed quite at home in the guts of a human being. The big man on his knees was round with a red nose, a fifty-year-old plainclothes cop named Yankelvich who enjoyed his work too much to provoke much confidence. The other, a gaunt lieutenant named Louis Marks, wore an oversize parka, a salt-and-pepper mustache, and a brisk, uncertain manner.

"You see, Sergeant, why I called for local assistance. A tidy little pile, isn't he? Left behind to dirty your doorstep."

Shelly could make out the blue-veined sausage of the intestines, the purple, sacklike gallbladder, and, further back, the lurking brown mass of liver. The wound resembled a gaping maw chewing uncooked food. "Yes, sir. Is there something in particular you want me to do?"

He was hoping to move away from the entrails, but the lieutenant gestured vaguely toward the corpse. "Why don't you just poke around awhile? See what your nose turns up."

Shelly's nose twitched uncomfortably at the idea. By an ill-timed kindness, Homer Greeley was not with him. Fifteen minutes before the end of their shift, Shelly had dropped his partner at the subway and headed back alone to punch them out, arriving at the precinct house a few minutes early. He had used the time to call his son and arrange dinner at their favorite seafood place. Then he ambled over to the precinct time clock and watched his shift expire. But before he could wriggle either card into the slot, the captain caught his eye and waved him into the glass-walled office, pointing to the desktop digital, where a pitiless "57" refused to tick off the hour. Without dropping the telephone cradled at his ear, Madagascar stuffed a scrap of paper into the detective's shirt pocket with the address and Marks's name and rank. "It's yours," was all he had grumbled, leaving unsaid his thoughts about the two unpunched time cards in Shelly's hand.

"Lemme in here," the latent-print expert complained, elbowing past Shelly to dust the dead man's belt buckle, his heels, and the crystal of his watch. He was a short, pudgy man in a beige suit and tie, who eyed the smoother surfaces as a butterfly collector might regard a sluggish family of monarchs. He wanted them all at once. When he had finished, and there was nothing more to be dusted, he moved on and was replaced by the criminalist, a woman wearing a clear plastic raincoat trimmed in blue over a knit dress and Reeboks. She scratched a sample of dried blood from the linoleum beside the thigh with an expression of such distaste that Shelly couldn't help wondering what had drawn her into her particular occupation. There were certainly jobs for chemists in pharmacies, he imagined, that didn't require daily confrontations with the evidence of violent mortality.

Some people liked this line of work, he reminded himself, as the criminalist was displaced in turn by the deputy coroner, a bald man perspiring in a black wool overcoat which he unbuttoned as he squatted beside the body. He snapped a few Polaroids, tested the room temperature, and, with indecent satisfaction, made a small incision just above the liver.

Shelly averted his eyes in a ridiculous gesture of privacy for the dead man. At the same time, he felt a compulsion to watch as the deputy coroner inserted a glass thermometer and circled the incision with a yellow marker, to identify to the medical examiner his postmortem knifework. He tested the fingers for rigor mortis, made a note on his pad, and began rummaging through the victim's pockets.

Shelly and Homer normally directed similar assistance on the local investigations they handled themselves. But Shelly rarely examined the blood and guts too closely. He had a trick of staring at a patch of skin and thinking of something else. He liked being in charge, of course, but didn't mind this assignment to a special-crimes unit, taking instructions from a superior. Cases like these brought attention that could translate into commendations or promotions, in which he had acquired renewed interest. It had been piqued by a recent question from Thom, who had asked Sunday night after a day at the zoo, "You're still a sergeant, aren't you, Dad?"

The boy wouldn't say what had prompted his query, but Shelly suspected it might have been something said by Ruth, the boy's mother, grumbling as usual over the dinner table. She had expressed all their ambitions as a couple, then as a family. When Shelly had received his medal at the mayor's office and his promotion a few weeks later, Ruth had positively glowed with pride, her marital choice publicly justified. The fading of his accomplishment, and the long, anxious nights of routine police work, had diminished her enthusiasm for the prospects of their life together.

When he pulled up in Pelham to drop off his son, Thom had struggled to undo the locked car door. His father leaned over, pressing against it as he raised the lever, and the Volkswagen door opened with a sudden jerk. The boy sighed, confirmed in his mother's judgment, and Shelly felt a vague impulse to demonstrate progress, if only to silence his ex-wife's criticism before his son. He had to admit, as he watched the boy trudge up the long driveway to the tree-lined house, that his career might seem less than dazzling from a third-story corniced window.

He had an opportunity now to score some points, since Thom had talked about a mountain bike one of his friends had acquired. Overpriced, no doubt, but Ruth and Clem would certainly buy it for him, once they learned its importance. He had to move quickly before the coveted gift was bestowed without him. He hoped it wasn't too expensive, since his resources were limited: his salary, like his waistband, seemed to fit more snugly with each passing year. The special assignment presented a chance to make some gains there, if he could win the lieutenant's professional esteem.

Shelly asked if the phone had been dusted, then used it to call Thom, who expressed no disappointment at the broken dinner date—they would catch a couple of lobsters on the Island over the weekend. But the conversation soured Shelly slowly, and his open-ended instructions from the lieutenant failed to distract him. He would have liked to interview the chief of services and her nine-year-old son, who had discovered the body, but he decided to wait for his partner. Otherwise, Homer would have questions he hadn't thought to ask, and they'd have to repeat the whole encounter. He tried to figure how long it would take Homer on the train to reach his place on Bank Street and ride back again to the East Bronx, then walk three blocks from the elevated station under the tracks, along three empty lots, and then across the hospital grounds. Forty-five minutes? An hour?

"Hey," said the deputy coroner, "the poor bastard lost his stomach."

Shelly glanced quickly at the linoleum, to make sure he wasn't standing in its contents. But the deputy coroner was speaking literally, unable to locate the corpse's missing organ.

The lieutenant was apparently not at all surprised, swishing his mustache like a whisk broom before explaining that Mr. Fingerhut's stomach was not the first absent organ. Each of the last two corpses had also lacked an internal part—the first a liver, and the second a heart. But the liver had been found on the premises, and so had the heart. Therein lay the interest, the lieutenant said softly. The odd irregularities in the pattern intrigued him, the quirks of the mind responsible. "Why carry off the stomach? Of all things?"

The deputy coroner raised the blood-spattered undershirt, which had crept down over the top of the wound. "It ought to be here somewhere."

Marks pursed his lips, nodding at Yankelvich, who lumbered out of the room.

Shelly tried to concentrate on the dead man's clothing: oak-brown suit pants and cedar shoes, chocolate tie over a cream shirt, which had been unbuttoned to reveal a sleeveless undershirt, rolled between the armpits, and a hairless chest. He tried not to notice the purple gash creeping up between the ribs. The face was averted, but he saw the bald spot and enough of a cheek to guess the dead man's age at fifty-five, his weight at 190 pounds, and his height at five-foot-nine.

Lieutenant Marks hunkered down and searched the intestines like a fortune-teller hunting for omens. "Hullo," he said, "what's this?" He pulled at a thin flap, extracting something from between two bloody tubes, which he dropped on the desktop in a little red pool. He studied it a moment with his hands behind his back before wondering aloud, "What do you make of it?"

The deputy coroner was going through Fingerhut's wallet, and Shelly realized the question was meant for him. He turned slowly to the desk, dreading what he might find there. With some relief he saw a bloodied sheet of paper uncrumpling slowly, revealing a sports-car ad under the headline "The Spirit of '76!" A scarlet stain was spreading beneath it on the blotter, but no one seemed to mind. The man on the floor wouldn't be needing the desk any longer, and if he didn't care, why should anyone else?

Yet in the back of his mind, Shelly cared. The deepening stain disturbed him, and the blood at the edge of the page. It took all of his training to resist an impulse to wring out the page and toss it in the trash. Instead, as the lieutenant from Homicide watched, Shelly examined the advertisement. It showed a blonde behind the wheel of a red convertible, hair flying back in the wind. It had been glossy, torn from a magazine, crushed into a ball, and stuffed in a hole in the dead man where his stomach should have been. Now it bled on the desk blotter, uncurling minutely as he watched.

Shelly hadn't the slightest idea what it might mean. But he made no comment, nodding his head significantly. "Mmm."

The desk chair was a small low-backed model on four ball casters. The desk itself was crowded but neatly organized, as if prepared by a careful mind for inspection. Two pens sat in a Styrofoam cup, next to which a pencil, eraser, and ruler had been placed. Lowenkopf noted the regularity of their arrangement, the ruler on the inside, adjacent to the cup, the pencil next to that in perfect parallel, the worn gray-and-gray eraser on the outside, shepherding the pencil. Fingerhut had been a neat desk manager. Except, he noticed, for a pen on the floor next to one leg, its cap off. He stooped and found the cap further under the desk, with a faint set of toothmarks in it.

"He might've been standing here. Writing."

"Maybe," the lieutenant said. "On what?"

There was no writing pad on the desk, or any scrap of inked paper. Shelly bent down, looking past the chewed cap, but saw none beneath the desk either. He knelt and opened the top left-hand drawer. In it was a cassette player engraved HAPI, sitting beside seven audio cassettes, each dated and labeled GOVCOM. The most recent, lying on top of the machine, had been recorded a few hours earlier in the day. In the bottom drawer was a thick computer printout, its blue pages still unseparated. These were covered with columns of numbers, in pencil. There was a file of similar printouts on top of the desk, anchored by a bronze pencil sharpener in the shape of a cannon. It was the only personal item on the desktop, the only one in the room except for Fingerhut's leather suitcase in the closet and a brown felt hat on a hook behind the door.

Shelly shook his head. "Nothing written in pen, is there? Not a blot of ink anywhere. And no sign of forced entry, I'll bet."

Marks craned his head toward the door, but it was hard to tell if he was scrutinizing the lock or just scratching his neck. "Why don't you look?"

Shelly knelt beside the entrance and opened the door. It was hollow, pickle-green aluminum, chipping at the hinges and knob. Below was a hole for a large skeleton key, protected by a metal plate—an institutional lock that could not be forced, though there'd be no shortage of keys. Fingerhut must also have doubted the privacy it afforded, because a second lock had been installed above it, a private security cylinder. Shelly turned to the window, where a mesh of steel fencing protected thick, dusty panes. No entry there, he guessed. There was no other means of access to the room. The heating shaft ended in a grid, bolted down and painted over in the same dull green that covered the ceiling and the walls and had dribbled long ago across the darker floor. Whoever had split the victim open had not crawled in unexpected, but had been admitted deliberately as a visitor.

"What about deliveries?"

"We're checking," Marks said. "The guardhouse sent nobody this way. But a psychiatric hospital is a busy place. Lots of people moving around, even at night. Dinner trays delivered, and medicines."

"From across the lawn?"

"Why not?"

Shelly rubbed a small circle in the window dust and peered through. Beneath the window was a driveway blocked by three cars, including his own Volkswagen squareback. To his right along the drive was a three-story bunker of rough-hewn stones which he knew contained administrative offices, the hierarchic cortex of the facility. Beyond it was a guardhouse and the narrow gate through which all vehicles passed, entering the grounds. His eyes scanned the landscape, tracing the route the slasher might have followed after mutilating Fingerhut. Near the gate, an empty patch of ground sprouted a few hardy dandelions. The weeds in the lee of the guardhouse were gnarled, in a pool of black; others, in the wind, were sparse balls of gray puff and bare green stalks. Uneven clumps of weed and grass cast jagged shadows in the fluorescent glare, providing a patchwork darkness through which a careful killer might have slipped. Was he still there now, hiding between the blades? For a moment the silent grasses wavered treacherously, every brick and stone concealing a terror.

There was a lot of ground to cover. To his left the lawn crowned in a low hill on which rested a modern structure of concrete and Plexiglas with a domed roof and tinted two-story windows. The whimsical roof extended a welcome that was denied by the glinting, impenetrable glass. This was the Rehabilitation Building, providing retraining and other services not limited to any individual ward. Behind that loomed the silhouettes of two stockier buildings, dark and regular in the early-March night. Both were oblong, but the farther one was a vertical shaft and the nearer one a horizontal block that looked as if it had fallen on its side, tipped perhaps by the aggregate weight of patients collecting at its eastern windows, straining toward the rolling landfill and the spiked iron fence and the highway.

At that moment, in a room on the fourteenth floor of the taller ward building, a skinny figure in green pajamas stood on a bed, his fingers, hooked in the window mesh, clenching and unclenching with excitement. His face seemed to shrivel as he squinted through the grime, though from the smoothness of the skin at the back of his neck he could not have been more than twenty. He leaned forward, chin and forehead resting against steel. His cheeks were flush from a halogen light flooding the entrance below, but now and then his eyes twinkled redly as a light flashed on a station wagon parked across the lawn in the hospital director's driveway.

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Excerpted from The Organ Grinder's Monkey by Richard Fliegel. Copyright © 1989 Richard Fliegel. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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