Last Bender, Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE

            “TIMOTHY Philip STRUNGil,” I said.

            “Right,” he barked back across the three-foot stack of folders and binders, each marked with a bible’s worth of Post-its, skin blanched by the overhead lights. The man was solid, concentrated, with a strong neck and large head, hair squared-off like a hedge. He had a thick, handle bar mustache and a mean mouth. His eyes were round and dark, bright and penetrating, but not without heart. They were not the dots you see poked into the foreheads of cons, or grunts who did their time in the wars.

            “Jack Bartell.”

            “I know, sir.”

            “Can the ‘sir.'”

            “O.K.,” he said, clipping off the sir, letting it hang there like the but that follows I love you.

            “Run it down,” I said.

            “O.K. Saturday, five p.m. All personnel assigned to Lab Seven are signed in, excluding the Director, Dr. Bromion St. Claude, and the Associate Director, Dr. Padraic Stanislau. It’s not as bad as it looks; they were finishing up a big project–”

            “Rat poison,” I cut in.

            “As a matter of fact su-, no. I have yet to ascertain the exact nature of their work but again, the dirt is it’s some kind of a drug; the low dirt that is. Anyway, at six you got a shift change with the guards. At eight, one of the guards, Bernie Tatlin, passes by, everything is cool. At twelve, he finds the blood slick and puts out the call.”

            “Maybe you got it at twelve. Mine came at three.”

            “Whatever. Code Red emergency procedures go into immediate effect. Samples are taken, high level meetings occur and a specially trained clean up crew arrives.”

            “Have you read the papers?”

            “Yeah. Slaughterhouse Five.”

            “Sound like our guys?”

            “Hard to say,” he said, letting down a bit.

            “Yeah. I got a friend on the job. She told me some things. Same M.O. I wanna talk to all the guards on duty that night. Especially that whatsisname, Tatler.”

            “You mean Tatlin? You can’t,” he said.

            “Why?”

            “Cause he’s dead. They all are. Dead or missing.”

            I felt this stabbing pain in my ear. “How come no one told me that?”

            “I’m telling you now.”

            “I hate when I don’t know what’s going on. It’s hard enough trying not to piss on your shoes without this Laraby shit going on all the time. Did Tatlin call in the accident? Was he alone?”

            “For some reason Tatlin was upstairs on twelve when it happened. Otherwise, he’d be missing too. Like the other two on duty. Everyone interviewed him that night. Lawyers, pathologists, Internal Security. The transcript’s in there,” he said, indicating one of the millions of folders on the desk, “but I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s listed in the index on page–”

            “What, there’s an index? Who had time–”

            “You can beat an index outta anyone,” he said through his teeth. Then he looked at me and smiled.

            “Well I’m glad you’re letting down a bit.”

            “I feel that I can relax, Jack.”

            “Don’t relax.”

            “It’s a figure of speech. It doesn’t mean a thing.”   He paused. “So, like I was saying, they depose Tatlin and send him home. Today he’s one of the no-shows. I called his family. I guess he took some sleeping pills and went for a swim, cause they found him last night, around one a.m., snagged up on some roots. Coroner says he drowned. I sent for that report too.”

            “Oh, never mind that. He was Cyclops.”

            Stronghole seemed all right. When a person puts you at your ease it’s a little disconcerting. It was time to let Stronghole off the leash to see what would happen.

            “Look, I’m gonna run uptown to talk to St. Claude’s wife. You make your way through as much of this shit as you can stand. Check on St. Claude’s financials. See what he owns and what he owes. You get any ideas, follow ’em. I guess we got to work some stoolies to find out who had their snouts in his pocket. You know anyone like that?”

            He looked noncommittal. “Maybe,”   he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”   He grabbed a stack of papers and supported them with his chin and waddled towards his own cubicle.

            “Later,” I said, but he was already gone. Then I called Linda and asked her to meet me in the afternoon for lunch.

            I looked at all the stuff that was left. It was still more than what I’d see in an average year on the job. Work records and personal files. Places of residence, spouses, parents, lovers, children. Known associates, after-hours haunts, hobbies. Piles and piles of hastily jotted information shuffled in with formal, typewritten reports.

            Then there were the while you were out slips. Two from Lieutenant Detective Bunuel of the Special Investigations Unit, and three from a guy named Johnny Braque. I was supposed to call Kelly Kelly at Channel 21  NNNews. Human Resources wanted to set up meetings with department heads to brief them on the unfolding (I would have said  unrolling) situation. There was a clip file of all the articles that had appeared so far about the Pechardine, with the usual crap about uncontrolled investigations.  

            The work was growing exponentially. I felt helpless, standing before this maw into which numbers and letters and facts would be hurled only to emerge, doubled in bulk, out the other end.

            The papers wouldn’t stop staring at me. I felt like they were trying to rip me off. I wanted a cigarette to calm down. I searched the drawer for something to suck. There was just this one piece of hard licorice. It was like gnawing on a root.