He jabbed the elevator button with his finger, and hopped on when the door skittered open. The lights were on on the fifth floor, so he felt sure that Harry was still there. He had never known Harry to leave the lights on when he was finished with a job. One thing you could say about Harry – he was dependable. Up until now, at least.
'Harry!' Abe called, but there was no answer. ' Harry! Where the hell are you!'
It took him three minutes to find Harry Ruhl, and he smelled him before he saw him. The odor, sharp and sweet and salty all at once, was coming from behind the closed door of one of the operating theatres. Abe thought he recognized the smell, but when he recalled where he had first come across it, he dismissed it as impossible. The Venetian Theatre was no battlefield.
He changed his mind when he opened the door. Harry Ruhl was lying on the operating table, his abdomen split open, his intestines seemingly floating in a pool of blood that had overflowed its boundaries and lay puddled on the tile floor. In one of the puddles lay his genitals. Where they had once been was now nothing but a deep gash, apparently slashed there by the pocketknife that remained in the wound. On what was left of the skin of Harry's chest were words drawn in blood, 'IM A PUSSY BOY.'
Abe Kipp did not scream, or faint, or vomit. Instead, he started to cry. He cried for a long time, and finally, when he was done, he went downstairs to find someone who could help.
Dan Munro was eating dinner when he got the call from the station, but he immediately put on his coat and told Patty not to wait up for him. He had had a gut feeling that the Werton guy's death had been more than just an accident, and now this new death added a gallon of gasoline to that fire. His deputy hadn't known exactly what the trouble was, just that someone from the theatre had called and said somebody had been killed and that the police should come right away.
Munro arrived at the same time as the ambulance, and went with the medics to the fifth floor. Three men who he recognized as Sid Harper, John Steinberg, and Curtis Wynn were standing in the hall. He nodded to them and went through the large door where he saw Bill, his white-faced subordinate, taking photographs of the body.
'Hey, Dan,' he said softly, and shook his head. 'I've never seen anything like this before.'
Neither had Munro. He felt bile rising in his throat, and looked away from the corpse long enough to force it back down.
'Don't feel bad,' Bill said. 'I threw up once already, and I'm afraid I'm working on my second shot.'
'Jesus,' said Munro, 'I know this kid. Harry Ruhl – played football for Kirkland, didn't he?' Bill nodded. 'What the hell happened to him?'
'I'm not sure. The guy who found him seems to know something about it, but I couldn't get much out of him. He kept crying.'
'Where is he?'
'Down on the second floor in the offices.'
Munro steeled himself and examined the body, wincing as he had to step around the pool of blood on the floor and the pitiful chunks of flesh in it.
'You think we oughta be able to pick them up,' Bill said. 'Goddam awful.”
“Not till the M.E. comes,' Munro answered.
'I know.'
Munro forced himself to look at the mutilated stomach and groin, noticing the angle in which the knife was placed. 'It's like he…” His words trailed off.
'Yeah,' Bill said. 'Like he carved himself a… ' Munro could almost hear the cruder word on Bill's lips, but the policeman pulled it back. '… a vagina.'
'Is this supposed to be `pussy boy?’' Munro wondered aloud. The row of bloody letters began at the corpse's left clavicle and went downward along his rib cage, finishing just above the gaping abdominal wound. Munro noticed that the Y of 'BOY' trailed down the side. When he examined the fingers of the right hand, he saw that the index and middle fingers were coated with blood.
'I called the state police,' Bill said. Munro would have expected that, and suspected that Bill had said it more for conversation than to convey information.
On his way to the offices, Munro passed the Medical Examiner and two state police investigators. The M.E. shook his head and muttered, 'Lifestyles of the dead and famous,' as he passed Munro. Munro didn't smile. He wondered how funny the M.E. would be when he saw what was waiting for him. Probably wouldn't affect him at all. Most of those guys had cast iron stomachs. Hell, they'd have to, wouldn't they, face to face with messy, violent death day after day? Munro was thankful this kind of thing didn't happen very often in his town. But Christ, this damn theatre -two ugly deaths in nearly as many months. Show people.
In the waiting area of the offices, Munro was amazed to find Abe Kipp crying. Kipp was one of the biggest hardasses in town, and had been, Munro had heard, a real hellion when he was younger, picking fights in bars, mostly with guys smaller than he was, and the years apparently had not mellowed him. Yet here he sat, blubbering like a baby, flanked by Donna Franklin on one side and Hamilton's wife on the other. The young man Munro had seen entering the theatre a few days before Thanksgiving was seated in the corner.
'Mr. Kipp, I'm Chief Munro.'
Kipp nodded. 'I know… I know you.'
'You found the body?'
'I did, yeah, I did… my fault, oh shit, all my fault.'
'Your fault?'
'He wouldn'ta done it… not without my teasin' him. I teased him, but it was just jokin', you know? Just a little joke, he was always so scared of everything -'
'Now wait,' Munro said sharply. 'You mean you think he did this to himself?'
'What, you…” Kipp's eyes widened. 'You think… I done it?' The surprise was so openly honest that Munro was instantly certain of the man's innocence, at least as far as wielding the knife went. 'I… I just teased him, y'see? Teased him about bein' a.. .” The words seemed to lock in Kipp's throat. “… a pussy boy, that's what I called him. But I didn't do that, oh hell, how could I have done that?'
'I don't know, Mr. Kipp. But you might just as well ask how could anyone have done that to himself.'
When the medical examiner was finished, he told Munro that death probably occurred between four-thirty and five-fifteen. 'Good thing I got called so fast,' he said. 'The fresher they are the easier it is to nail down the time.' At least, Munro thought, he wasn't smiling any more. 'The state boys tell me the prints of the victim are the only ones on the knife.'
'You saying it was suicide?'
The M.E. cocked his head. 'I know what you're thinking, Munro. Could he have cut himself open, buried the knife in his groin, and then misspelled words in his own blood? The answer, remarkably enough, is yes. He'd be bleeding like a river, but he would have time to do all those things. If he were so compelled. What would compel a man to do such things is beyond my comprehension. That's your job.'
'But it's possible.'
'Yes, it's possible. Look at the Samurai in Japan – they'd slice themselves open with two cuts, one across and one down. Now they generally had a friend to help finish them off by lopping off their heads, but it wasn't necessary. For all I know, they might have written haiku while bleeding to death, let alone the sad little epitaph our friend there composed.'
The interviews with the residents of the theatre were inconclusive. Alibis were abundant, since everyone was with someone else who could account for them. Even Abe Kipp had been seen at frequent enough intervals near the end of the day so that Munro knew he would not have had the time or opportunity to go to the fifth floor, perform that act of butchery, cleanse himself of the blood that must have resulted, and return backstage.
When Munro interviewed Dennis Hamilton, he found him red-eyed and unresponsive. There was no hostility, however, in the perfunctory way Hamilton answered Munro's questions, and Munro could not help but wonder if the man were on drugs, as he had heard so many people in show business were.
But maybe, Munro thought, it was something else. Maybe it was numbness, like psychological novocaine, a protective mask of some sort to guard him from the pain of having another person – maybe just an employee, maybe a friend – die under mysterious circumstances. Still, Munro couldn't get the idea out of his head that
