DISCLAIMER: I own nothing of it.
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INSOMNIMANIA
00001
TREMENDUM
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"BARGAIN-BASEMENT TRACHEOTOMY," Deput Coroner Frank Devereaux remarked, shining a penlight into the gaping throat wound and studying it through lowered bifocals. "Windpipe's sawed halfway through. Carotid arteries're severed. Sternomastoid muscles, too."
"Meaning?" Lieutenant Dean Winchester asked.
"Meaning I don't think he's gonna make it."
Dean chuckled grimly. No, this one definitely wasn't going to make it. Even from about five feet away, Dean could see that the wound - only an hour or so old - was showing sign of decay. The dead man's smell was nasty, too - the stench of raw, freshly cut meat and the mixed stink of feces and urine made the plush and well-lit hotel corridor smell incongruously like an outhouse.
Frank shined the penlight into the victim's eyes, and Dean could see that they had already flattened slightly - their fluid apparently had begun to drain. Dean made a note . . .
"2:25 A.M The stiff is wilting a little."
Dean always wrote down absolutely everything that entered his head while on the job, no matter how seemingly trivial, redundant, or absurd. Even though the local Hollywood detectives had surely taken notes, he would need his counted on for crucial details. Besides, notetaking was one of the few really natural things to do at a homicide scene. It kept one's hands busy.
"So how're you calling this one, Frank?" asked Dean partner, Sergeant Victor Hendrickson, who was gingerly stalking the area with a tape measure.
the gray-haired, pudgy deputy coroner sat back on his haunches.
"Reckon it'd be natural causes," Frank said. "It's got all the earmarks of a massive coronary or stroke. Or maybe just plain old age."
"Could he've choked on a chicken bone?" Victor asked. The black detective finished his measuring and turned to study the bloodstrain on the wall.
"Possibly, just possibly," Frank said. "He might have stuck his finger in a wall socket, too."
"What about suicide?" Dean asked.
"Get serious, Dean," Frank said, padding puppy dog - like around the body on his hands and knees. "Why would a guy that rich off himself?"
"Hell, we're talking about one of America's champion cutthroat buccaneers, here," Dean said. "Think of the guilt he must have been toting around. Here's what happened. About one-thirty-five this morning, Dick Roman's coporate sins caught up with him. He couldn't live with himself for one more minute. So he took a big butcher knife out of his suitcase, walked down the hotel hallway to the elevator, rode it two floors down, stepped out into the corridor here, and sliced himself open."
"Possible," Frank mused. "But what happened to the knife?"
"That is a problem," Dean grumbled.
Victor considered a moment and said, "That's obvious. Dick Roman handed it to some passerby during his dying moments. He said, 'Keep this. It'll be worth a lot of money one of these days.' "
Frank smiled, "Pretty compelling argument, guys. Still, there ought to be a suicide note."
"Looks to me like he was trying to write one on the wall over here," Victor said.
Dean went over and stared at the bloody blotch on the ornate white wall. It looked like paint slung from a moving brush.
"Read it to me," Frank requested.
"Looks pretty basic," Dean said. "But I've never gotten the hang of the language."
Victor glanced at him, but said nothing.
Dean flipped back to his previous notebook page and checked over his rough sketch and his jotted descriptions of the space: the two pairs of elevators facing jotted descriptions of the corridors; the mirrored wall at the corridor's end; the white, raised sun design between each of the elevators; the slashing bloodstain that lay across one of the suns. . .
Dean now drew a hasty little sketch of the blotch, indicating the large slash of red across the sun, smaller splatters on the rays, and a few isolated droplets extending across the raised leafy designs.
Pseudostylishness and gore. Not your typical homicide scene.
At about one-forty-five, the body of Dick Roman, CEO of Chicago-based Apex Airlines, had been discovered by a waiter delivering a very early breakfast. Immediately after phoning the police, the waiter had dutifully taken it upon himself to call the L. A. Times, several alternative news papers, and a fair assortment and detectives arrived in time to find the body engulfed by a piranhalike flashbulbs and videocams. The cops had finally gotten the crowd of gawkers and reporters out of the way and directed down the nearby stairwells to other elevators. When it had become clear that the case was going to be a major media event, Dean and Victor were called in from Homicide Special Section.
They had fought their way through a crowd to get to the area the uniformed cops had roped off. By that time, the likelihood of the crime team finding anything useful had diminished to near zero. A half-hearted attempt had been made to look for fingerprints. The fingerprint powder now clung to a brass plate encasing a pair of elevator buttons and would probably remain there for a long time. That part had been a joke, of course, revealing only an indecipherable jumble. The same was true of the door leading to the escape stairs. Too many people routinely passed through a place like that for fibers or fingerprints to mean very much.
The uniforms were now standing at the edge of the scene, dutifully and conspicuously keeping their hand in their pockets in accord with Dean's ritual demand that they not touch anything.
The pudgy forensics doctor huffed and groaned a little as he brushed his hands off on his trouser legs and rose to his feet.
"Well, gentlemen," Frank said, "I sure hate to go out on a limb with some crazy-assed hypothesis, but my guess is it was murder. 'Course, that's good news for you guys. When folks stop doing each other in, you'll be looking for work."
"I could do with a change," Dean said. "I've been following the want ads for months."
"Yeah, and I'll bet there's a lotta work out there for an over-the-hill jerk who's done nothing his whole adult life 'cept go poking around other people's business."
"Hey, I'm not looking for a job for you, Franky."
"Very funny. You're too fast for me, Dean."
"Doesn't take a Ferrari."
"You could never go civilian. You love this stuff. Who could help but love it?"
"OK, let's call it murder for a moment, just to be goofy," Dean said. "Who was the prep?"
"Hey, you're the homicide expert," Frank said. "Don't ask me to do your job for you. I can tell you on one thing though. The motive wasn't robbery."
Frank stooped over and raised up the victim's left hand. He carefully removed a ring with a substantial diamond. Then he took a glittering gold Rolex from the wrist.
"Hell, those watches cost more than ten grand," Victor observed, as Frank took the items off the corpse, dropped them into a plastic bag, and handed them to Dean.
"That kind of cash'd sure help with Sammy's college tuition."
"Stop begging," Frank scolded.
"Let's have a look at his wallet."
"Just make sure you turn it in the way you found it."
Frank slid the wallet across the floor. Dean stopped to pick it up. He opened it, and a batch of glittering, multi-colored, metallic-embossed credit cards tumbled out, accordion-fashion. Dean thumbed through the wallet. It hardly contained anything except credit cards - just enough cash to give the hotel staff rudimentary tips.
"No pictures of his wife and kids?"
"And no portraits of Mother Teresa or Albert Schweitzer or the Dalai Lama, either," Victor added, looking over Dean's shoulder. "Plastic can sure take up a lot of room in your life."
Part of Frank's team was now unfolding the black body bag. The doctor hovered over them, admonishing them fussily about every move, treating the corpse like an artistic treasure. Dean was reminded of the career-loving gravedigger in Hamlet. Whenever, Dean worked a homicide scene with Frank, he more than half expected the man to whip out the extra skull for proud display. Frank never looked happier than when he was around a dead body.
As for himself, Dean could feel his own face frozen into a joyless expression. He didn't find his own wisecracks amusing, and he didn't really imagine anyone else did either.
So why do I do it?
The cliched explanation was that cops told jokes around murder scene to keep themselves sane. Dean sometimes suspected that that was a pretty flimsy rationlization.
Maybe we tell jokes around murder scene to hide the fact that we've already lost it.
Dean watched as Frank's team manipulated the body, folding its arms and generally preparing it for the bag. The corpse was remarkably pliable. It almost seemed to shift consciously and give here and there to assist the team. Corpses at this stage were really quite cooperative - like well-behaved pets.
A word crossed Dean's mind . . .
Tremendum.
That was a word Dean's father and one-time mentor, John Winchester had used. Dean wasn't sure whether it was an actual clinical term or just one of "Crazy" John's numerous coinages, but it had always struck him as a useful word. It described that uniquely self-conscious, uniquely human horror and awe and at the sight of a corpse - any corpse, even that of a total stranger. It was the ghastly mortal comprehension of the fact of death - and the awareness that death came to all.
Animals couldn't feel it.
Experienced cops couldn't either.
Dean certainly didn't feel any tremendum right at the moment. As far as he could tell, he didn't feel much of anything.
It was supposed to be that way, of course. You were supposed to get inured to it. Dean could remember a time when could still feel it, though - particularyly the first time. It was at the scene of a three-car accident on a New Year's Eve some fifteen years ago, back when Dean was still a rookie. Four dead teenagers were stretched on the pavement awaiting body bags. There had been another collision, fortunately minor, between two drivers who couldn't keep their eyes off the wreckage.
Dean had looked at those drivers and realized that they felt it, too. At that moment, he had understood how wrong-headed all those morbid jokes were about traffic bogging down at an accident. It wasn't grim smugness that slowed those cars. It was a kind of religious terror that seized even the most determined atheist. It was tremendum.
Frank's team delicately hoisted the body into the bag. Frank supervised. Dean thought about Hamlet again as he contemplated his own utter lack of terror and awe . . .
" . . . a beast, that wants discourse of reason, would have mourn'd longer."
Dean had been through a time of terrible mourning.
It wasn't very long ago.
But had he mourned enough?
Had he felt enough? Could a cop feel enough?
"At time like now," Frank mused elegiacally, "I'm reminded of the words of the poet: 'To die, to be really dead - that must be glorious!' "
"Nice," Dean said.
"Thank you," Frank replied.
"Who was the poet?" Victor asked.
"Dracula," Frank told him.
The body bag was closed with a noisy zip.
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TBC