by Helene Baron-Murdock
The operations briefing was scheduled for 8 AM in Conference Room Two adjacent to the squad bay. Donovan had been in the office since 5. Now he was seated at the long table watching Lieutenant Jackson tack the mug shots of the three suspects and the reconstructed sketch of O.R. Phineas onto the white board.
Rick Nelson was there too, staring into the steam of a hot cup of coffee. He had that new-baby-no-sleep look to his bleary eyes. In answering “How’s the baby” he’d offered “I think she’s a vampire. She only sleeps during the day and stays awake all night. I could be catching a few precious winks if the Loot hadn’t called me in.”
Mike Jackson looked away from what he was writing on the white board. “Boss said he wanted everyone front and center. He even had me call Bobbie back.”
Lanky Townsend stopped at the doorway about to step in. “What? Bobbie Delyn? That’s cruel and usual punishment. I thought she was still going through rehab.”
“Boss’s orders,” Mike said to the white board and drawing a line connecting what he had written to the picture of O. R. Phineas that Donovan had printed out from an array of available images online. The victim had not been camera shy.
Stubby Burdon found a place at the table and set a paper hot cup down next to his file folder. “You’ll never guess who I saw in the breakroom.”
Nelson and Townsend turned to him and said “Bobbie” in unison.
“Taking my name in vain, are you?” The older woman in the doorway glared at them with mock displeasure.
“Not me, Sarge,” Burdon held up his hands in protest, “Just surprised to see you back is all.”
Sergeant Roberta Delyn had that tough cop look that only a woman can have. She was all business. No tolerance for boy games and pranks. If you messed up, she was the one who read you the riot act. At five foot five her square shoulders balanced a not exceptionally pretty face due to the white scar that ran from beneath her left ear across her cheek to the tip of her chin. A boyish dyed blond bob tucked under a ballcap, she was dressed in her usual puffy green down vest over a checked man’s shirt, a pair of Levi’s, one leg of which was wrapped in a brace, and a three toed aluminum cane. She passed behind Donovan’s chair to get to the end of the long table and casually asked, “Why are you still here?”
Donovan and Bobbie didn’t exactly have a history. Not that kind of history anyway. She’d been in Violent Crimes longer than he had. She was the Loots right hand and sometime his left foot. “Sergeant Delyn, always a pleasure.” Donovan raised his coffee cup in salute.
Jackson faced the detectives from the white board, sleeves rolled up, folder in hand. “Ok, let’s get started. Captain Voss will be delayed so we’ll start without him. Let’s hear what forensics came up with. Pete?”
“I have a question.” Bobbie had raised her hand. “Why am I here?”
“Come on, Sarge, as I explained, it was not my call.”
“I’m on sick leave, for cry’s sake!”
“You could have said no.”
“Well,” she said glaring at the other detectives at the table, “don’t expect me to ride your asses in my usual capable and efficient manner. If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the cafeteria.” At that she pushed her chair back and lifted herself, obviously in pain, to stand, and slowly shuffled her way out of the conference room and in the direction of the elevators.
Jackson shook his head. “Pete? You were saying?”
“Uh, not much new from the lab except that some of the bits and pieces are testing positive with non-human traces. Blood from the clothing of the gals matches the deceased, but other than that nothing. Samples from under their nails show no indication that they used their hands to rip the vic apart.”
“Maybe they washed their hands after,” Burdon offered.
“Jackson shook his head. “I don’t think so, Eric. Their clothing was bloody but I’m guessing it was transient. They may have handled some of the body parts. And not one has a broken nail, chewed maybe, so I’m leaning toward the idea that maybe they were bystanders, witnesses, if you will, not actually physically participating in the rendering.” He addressed Townsend again. “What kind of non-human traces? Are we talking about foxes or big cats? Bear?”
“They ruled out most of the local critters. They’re thinking something more exotic. They’re still waiting for confirmation on the sample but something along the lines of,” Townsend checked his notes, “pan troglodytes.”
“What?”
“Chimpanzee.” Donovan offered.
“I know that!” Jackson retorted.
“Our closest animal relative.”
“Yours maybe.” Which drew guffaws around the table. “Ok, Pete, anything else?”
“Dispatch got a call from a fisherman downstream from Sharon’s Crossing. Seems like we might have found the victim’s hands. Deputy’s on the way. We should know within the hour.”
“Alright, might as well have the coroner’s guys head that way, too. If they’re his hands we can get a positive id. His prints are in the system.” He turned address the white board. “Now our terrible trio here, dumb, dumber, and dumbest.” He tapped each of their photos with his pen. “Melanie, Dora, and Laurel are not being very forthcoming about what they saw and how they were involved.”
Burdon who’d been on the interrogation team volunteered, “Here’s what we’re dealing with. The Captain is sitting in. Out of nowhere, he says “Will you admit that you tore the limbs off this man because you were high on mushrooms and you floated his head down the river on a raft made of sticks.’ This is when we were grilling dumber, there in the middle. I had no idea where the heck that came from. So Dora, dumb Dora, it fits, goes ‘I dunno about the first part, I was pretty high, but yeah, his head, it seemed like the right thing to do.’ And I about. . . .”
“Uh, good, good, looks like Captain Voss is on his way,” Jackson held up his hand glancing toward the doorway. Conference Room Two became very quiet as Voss stepped in.
The Chief of Detectives nodded at his lieutenant and briefly glanced at the others at the table. “Continue Jackson, you can fill me in on what has already transpired. How is the questioning of the women going?”
“Ah, yes sir, we were just getting to that.”
Donovan knew the Loot well enough to know that when he put on that poker face, he was seething inside. He should have seen it coming when Jackson broke a little smile.
“But first Detective Donovan was going to brief us on the narrative he has developed of our victim’s movements before his murder.”
Donovan blinked, ok, Mike, you owe me one, and gathered the folders with his notes in front of him. “Yesterday, approximately 1700 hours we receive a call from the proprietor of Sharon’s Corner, Dane Carson, who said he could identify the composite broadcast on the local evening news. Earlier, approximately 1300 hours, a facial recognition search I had initiated came up with a possible id of the victim. The names matched, and in the process of questioning Mr. Carson, I learned that the victim had presented a poetry reading at his establishment, less than a week ago, last Sunday. There were approximately twenty people in attendance that evening. I interviewed one of them so far, the organizer of the event, Faye Angeli, and plan to interview the others on the list of attendees. I learned or confirmed that the victim, O.R. Phineas, was a kind of literary celebrity, a poet. Mr. Phineas was last seen driving away from Sharon’s Corner in a silver BMW convertible accompanied it would seem by our first suspect, Melanie, who had come to the reading with May Naddy, as had the other two of our charming trio. That would indicate that she has prior knowledge of the poet perhaps leading up to the time of his death.”
At Jackon’s nod he continued. “In my interview with Ms. Angeli, who is a real estate agent, she admitted to at one time being a part of the following of radical women around May Naddy known as The Bear Cult, but had left the group after what she termed an ‘unnerving incident.’ She wouldn’t say further what she meant by that but I’d guess that she witnessed something that still leaves her shaking. It’s her contention that May Naddy is a witch, evil, at least.”
Donovan pulled a print out of a photo from the folder and slide it across the table to the Loot. “Tack that one up next to the author’s photo of Phineas.” It was a picture of May Naddy from her last major film, Mistress of the Beasts. She wasn’t wearing a lot of clothes in that one either.
“Is this your idea of a joke, Detective, a pinup on the murder board?”
“The relevance of May Naddy in all of this is in the fact that she is well acquainted with Phineas. I did a little digging on the internet and you’d be surprised with what you can come up with. Before she moved her animal rescue operation to Weston County, May Naddy had a similar enterprise on an island off the coast of Croatia. She was also a patron the performance artist, Yuri Dicey.”
“I don’t see how any of this is relevant to our investigation, Detective.” Voss wasn’t the patient sort.
“Yuri Dicey was married to Oscar Reynaldo Phineas. She was killed when one of her stunts went wrong. He was suspected at first but was eventually cleared. But if you read the comments on stories about Dicey’s death, there are people who believe that Phineas in fact had something to do with his wife’s death.”
“That’s gossip, you’ve been wasting your time reading tabloids instead of doing police work!”
“One of those people is May Naddy. She has been quoted as saying she believes Phineas killed Yuri Dicey because he was jealous. I’ll just throw this out, Naddy and Dicey were rumored to be lovers.”
“And I’d throw that in the trash where it belongs. I don’t know where your reputation comes from, Donovan, but this certainly isn’t police work!”
“Hey, look at that!” Townsend held up his smart phone. “They found the hands and printed them! He’s our guy. O. R. Phineas, poet.”
Donovan sat opposite Bobbie Delyn at the table in the cafeteria with a paper cup of steaming caffeinated brown water and watched her chew the end of her pencil.
“What’s a four letter word for ‘martinet’?”
“Asshole.”
“Too many letters.”
“Voss.”
“That fits, and completes the cross word ‘retired police officer,’ ‘excop’.” Bobbie gave what passed for a smile that creased her white scar like an odd punctuation. “The investigation not going well?”
“Our new chief of detectives is intent on charging the three, I wouldn’t say undeserving but nonetheless not culpable, with murder. Unfortunately other than the bloody clothing nothing indicates that they were directly responsible for the victim dismemberment. Personally, and I’m not alone with this, I think it is physically impossible for them to do it.”
“Because they’re women.”
“Of course not. Even a very strong man would be incapable of ripping a torso to shreds like that, even with tools. This guy was practically confetti.”
“Ugh, now there’s a pretty picture.” Bobbie scribbled on the edge of the newspaper thoughtfully. “Some kind of animal, then?”
“Pan Troglodytes.”
“Chimp. I know that one from doing the crosswords. But a chimp in R.K. Turis State Park? Who would. . . ?”
“Let me finish that thought for you. May Naddy and her anxious animal ark. I got Woody Ames, the animal behavior vet out of bed early this morning.”
“The County Dog Catcher as he so often calls himself. Bet he was happy.”
“Because she operates a wild animal sanctuary one of the stipulations for the permit was that Animal Control had to regularly inspect conditions on the ranch, make sure they weren’t being mistreated and such.”
“Yeah, I think I heard Woody complaining about that.”
“There’ve been problems before. One of her cheetahs escaped and went after the neighboring ranch’s sheep. Fortunately, the cheetah was defanged. It just gummed a lamb. Unfortunately the lamp died of a heart attack.
“Gummed a lamb. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase that from my memory.”
“So Woody has an inventory of what kind of animals she has out there. They’re mostly arthritic big cats who have seen better days, all defanged, or blind. A black bear that is so fat it can’t walk, it can only roll, a couple of dogs pretending to be wolves, llamas who’ve lost their spit, a giraffe that can’t stand, horses one step from the glue factory. . .the usual assortment of misfit four legged, feral cats, stray dogs, and two legged runaways engaged in some kind of throwback evolution. . . .”
“His words, I’ll assume.”
“And a crazed chimpanzee. Said when he did the inspection, the chimp was kept in some kind of cage away from everyone, including the other animals. And believe it or not, went apeshit whenever anyone came near her. May Naddy was the only one who could calm the chimp down. Female I think he said. Probably the most dangerous animal out there. His opinion.”
“If I were to draw a conclusion from what you’ve told me, May Naddy’s chimp is the perp.”
“May is linked to Phineas through Yuri Dicey who was both their lover.”
“Sounds like someone was working all the angles hoping to get to the point.”
“Naddy blamed the poet for Yuri’s death. Either she had Faye Angeli lure Phineas to Weston County or it was by coincidence. Either way, May sees her chance at revenge.”
“And uses the chimp as her hitman? From what I’ve heard they’re strong enough. But why involve the three runaways?”
“They were bait. From what I’ve read about O.R. Phineas, he was a lady’s man, left a trail of broken hearts and promises from coast to coast. The silver BMW he was last seen driving was reported missing by some gal up in Eureka. . . .”
“Surprise!”
“And who didn’t want to press charges because she was certain O.R. had just borrowed it but changed her tune to stolen when we told her we’d found it torched in a turnout off a dirt road down here. I think May used these three kids to lure him to her place. Maybe even tortured him. The lab is putting together a composite of the body parts that might show indications of torture.”
“Adding insult to injury. But wouldn’t she worry that the three women would talk if they were involved in any of it.”
“She’s got some kind of psychic grip on them. The experience was probably so horrific they’re suffering from amnesiac shock. If we let them stew a bit longer, one of them might loosen their hold on whatever false scenario they’re clinging to.”
Bobbie penciled in an answer with a grunt of satisfaction. “Might be a little complicated for the new guy.”
“He as much said I should be writing for TV cops shows. It was the most farfetched narrative he’s ever heard.”
“He won’t last long.”
“You don’t think so? I’ll be long gone, but you guys are going to have to put up with him.”
“He doesn’t fit. Who’s ever heard of a Derrick Voss. Helen Reddie over in HR told me that they had a much better candidate, guy by the name of Hendrix. He would have been a perfect fit, she said.”
Donovan took a sip of his coffee which had gone from scald to just hot. “You’re not thinking of jumping ship soon are you?”
“Me? No way. I’ve got half a dozen years before I’m eligible.” Bobbie pointed to her knee. “Unless I go out on a medical.” Then she frowned. “Wait! How old do you think I am?”
“Hey, Sarge. No offense, you just look mature for your age.”
“Geez, like I haven’t heard that one before.” She sighed and tapped the pencil eraser on the table. “So how are you going to deal with Voss the boss?”
“Mike’s getting a search warrant for the Bear Ranch. We’ll see if we can make a match with the chimp. If so, then it goes in that direction and Voss will have to follow it.”
“He was hoping for something cut and dried, this sounds sloppy and wet. So what’s the motive besides sheer cruelty and mayhem? Revenge for the girlfriend’s death?”
Donovan shrugged. “That’s one of them.” He retrieved a slim volume from his folder and passed to Bobbie.
“What’s this? Poetry? When Sunny Get Glue by O.R. Phoneas, er Phineas?”
“Yeah, Fay Angeli had an extra copy.”
“So your saying he was killed because of his poetry?” Bobbie leafed through the pages, lingered on some passages, winced, looked disgusted, sighed, and then passed the book back. “With something like that, anyone could claim justifiable homicide.”
Neither of the two bartenders treading the boards pouring drinks and ringing up the sales on the big brass cash register was the tree trunk that had served me the first time when I’d stepped in to avoid a tail. I tried to wedge myself between a couple of muscle heads who weren’t interested in letting me squeeze through until they laid eyes on Rebecca. Then they became gentlemen whose mouths had dropped open and whose eyes popped out of their sockets accompanied by an ahooga horn.
I nudged her with my elbow. “imtay otay ogay.”
A herd of elephants might have been quieter climbing up the two flights to my office. Alice must have forgotten to lock the door and I walked right in. The bruiser had an iron grip on my shoulder. “Don’t try any funny business,” Sid warned. I flicked on the light and saw what Alice and Rebecca had seen earlier that day. Messes don’t have a tendency to right themselves no matter how long they’re left alone.
I could see Dempsey pause at the top of the stoop, look around to see if he could spot me. Out of breath, he lifted his cop cap and scratched his head realizing he’d lost me. He slapped the billy in the palm of his hand a couple of times and then strode off to the call box at the other end of the block.
The old man’s children, four boys and three girls, stood at graveside, their heads bowed. Paulita, the youngest of the girls, held the three-year old boy on one hip. Apollinara stared solemnly, stoically at the long plain coffin holding her husband’s body. In her black-gloved hand, she clutched the telegram of condolence from the President, Theodore Roosevelt. At her side, a grim Governor Kerry stared intently at the red muck that encased his new boots. The old man’s brothers, long estranged, had made the trip from Louisiana, tall and gangly like their departed sibling. A young reporter from the El Paso Herald stood off to one side, unobtrusively, jotting in a narrow notebook.
“Oh, he’s always said plenty. You see, the killing of Colonel Jennings was thought to be a feather in their cap by some, including themselves. Leland was just a boy himself when the murders were committed, and he was cocky, boastful and impulsive as most boys are. And not too bright.
The old man took another swig. The answer to that question led to the unraveling of the entire unfortunate adventure. They had not surprised O’Lee and Leland under the blankets. Instead they had rousted the Madisons, a family O’Lee had hired as caretakers. Old lady Madison had sat up stiff as a plank and started screaming when she woke to see a pistol barrel stuck in her face, and that in turn had awakened her husband and the two children. There had been another adult sleeping in the room too, but he was no one they could identify. He had ordered them to light a candle, and after a quick search of the single room and the sleeping loft where the children had been, he had found no one else.
“Lackland Ask is the name. ‘Lack’ to my friends, ‘Don’t’ to those who think they’re funny. You might have seen my portrait on the cover of Black Mask, the crime fiction magazine. This is my story. It starts with a blonde. This kind of story always starts with a blonde.” Thus begins the seemingly non-stop, endless narrative of Better Than Dead in which women are not the only trouble although most of it, told with the wit and street savvy of Runyon and Parker.
In late February of 1908, a one-time drover, buffalo hunter, saloon owner, hog farmer, peach grower, horse rancher, US Customs inspector, private investigator, county sheriff, and Deputy US Marshal set out from his adobe home on the mesa above Organ, New Mexico accompanied by a young man in a black buggy on the journey to Las Cruces. He would never arrive. This is the story of that journey, a novel account of the last day in the life of a legendary lawman.
Greek myth is rife with murder, mutilation, cannibalism, mayhem, and the ever popular incest. Weston County Sheriff’s Detective Jim Donovan of the Violent Crimes Unit wouldn’t know a Greek myth from a Greek salad, but if he did he would find some troubling similarities to the cases he’s investigating. Revisited as crime fiction are the strange death of Hippolytus, the agonizing death of Heracles, the slaughter of Penelope’s suitors, the Fall of Icarus, the sparagamos of Orpheus, and the cursed lineage of Pelops. Helene Baron-Murdock’s Hard Boiled Myth taps into the rich vein of classical literature to frame these ancient tales in a modern context.
“Sure, Lack.” She’d started another cigarette and let the smoke drift from between her lips. “But if you kids need a place to hang out for a while, that’s alright with me.”
“We ran into that creep Curtis when we were leaving.” Alice was digging through the drawers of her dresser under the portrait of Ted. “I told him that we had a bag for you but you weren’t in your apartment, which, by the way, is a picture perfect disaster zone.” I noticed Becky wrinkling her nosy at the unpleasantness of the experience. “He didn’t say anything about the rent. Probably because he was too busy ogling your ‘sister’.” Alice indicated a beaming Becky with a nod of her head. “From Wyoming.”
I pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go have a drink and think this over.”
The facts of the investigation had been straightforward. A posse had been assembled soon after the postman had alerted the family to what Jennings had told him. By then, the Colonel had been overdue, long enough to cause concern.
The posse had then followed the horsemen’s trail east toward Wildy Well where they knew that there was a line shack used by O’Lee’s drovers. Dog Canyon, O’Lee’s ranch house, lay just beyond. At one point, the tracks of three riders had diverged, one going southeast in the direction of Wildy Well, and the other two towards Dog Canyon. The posse had split up also. Two men had gone after the lone rider, five followed after the two headed northeast. The remaining searchers had returned to Mesilla with the wagon.
Outrage had swept through the Rio Grande valley. A two thousand-dollar reward and full immunity from prosecution had been offered to any of the accomplices who would come forward to give evidence against the principals.
“What with the Governor’s offer and the potential of collecting the reward, I was sorely tempted. I know that there was talk of how I rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. But the people who hired me knew that I would get the job done no matter who my enemies were.
“By the time I was finally appointed Sheriff, I had enough evidence against O’Lee, and his accomplices, Gil Leland and Jim Mcann, that I felt I could secure an indictment from the grand jury. I was not going to be bullied by any Texans and I made no secret my intentions. I had the authority to arrest and bring them to trial. My case was ready to be made.
The old man shook his head. “That game was played to a draw. But it wasn’t because of George Kerry’s lack of trying to precipitate a fracas. At first, they were all worried that I would start some kind of gunplay though of course they tried not to show it. I was heeled, I had my .44 Colt, and I could see by the plow handle stuck in his belt that O’Lee was as well. I calmly called for a fresh deck and had Tiptoe deal me in. The first hand I drew was a three, jack, and an ace showing, with a deuce in my hand. I drew the other jack on my last card. O’Lee, Kerry, Falk folded with Tobey paying to get a look at it. The pair of tens showing was all that he had.
Donovan drove out to Sharon’s Crossing, the sun sparking at the horizon and glancing amber rays off the rolling pasture land and encroaching suburban sprawl before the Santa Lena Hwy headed further west and entered the deep shadows of dark green coniferous stands crowding the roadway fringed by barbed skylines and winding parallel to the Acre River.
Voss was pointing to the photos of numbered placards each designating a body part strewn across the forest floor. “They found the head” he said referencing another slide, “floating down the Acre River near Sharon’s Crossing on some kind of rude raft made of branches.” He paused to give Donovan a nod and then said, “Glad you could make it, Detective.”
The sheriff winced like his gout was acting up. “May Naddy?”
“I’ve got a facial recognition match in progress, thought you might want to take a look at the sketch that’s going out to the field.”
“Rudolph.”
“The same. In fact, that’s where I first met the Colonel. Even then, he had a reputation that made Bonney look like a pipsqueak by comparison. Al Jennings was a hardheaded, no-holds-barred politician. There’s a story about him that while he as a member of the Texas legislature he fought a pistol duel with a political rival. He got the worst of it and was wounded in the shoulder but he managed to get to his horse and ride off.
There was a special hatred for Mexicans among Texans, and O’Lee as well as the two other men implicated in Jennings’ murder, Jim Mcann and Gil Leland, were prime examples. 
Curly O’Lee was a Texas range rat, a mongrel breed all his own. Cocky, brass, and ruthless, he’d had the ambition to be a cattle baron, and the determination to attempt it. He was built close to the ground and he walked with the unsteady gait of a man used to letting his horse do it for him. Wiry, with long gangling arms stretched, no doubt, from a lifetime of roping cows, he looked like a saddle bum down from the line shack after six months. A pale moon face topped the slightly stooped shoulders. The crooked toothy smile and pale blue eyes masked a sadistic killer. His big sandy moustache seemed to float under a red puff of nose. He had what the natives called a “Yankee face”. Red, white and blue. Whenever without the big white Stetson on his head, he combed the thinning wisps of hair from one temple to the other to cover the obviously barren terrain. This was the picture of O’Lee he remembered.
“Now you’d think that a man who was implicated in the disappearance and murder of a prominent citizen and his son would not be your likely candidate for a seat in the Santa Fe Legislature, would you? 
“Obviously you ain’t the only one. He is made out to be a respected businessman now, but he murdered Jennings and his son. That fact will never change for me. True, the jury acquitted him, Leland, and Macann, but the jury was intimidated by the ruffians and Texas cowboys O’Lee imported up to Hillsboro and billeted in the only hotel in town. Hell, the jury had to sleep in the hayloft at the livery! It was a jamboree up there. People came from all over the Southwest, pitched their tents, and lined up every day hoping to get in to see the trial. The jury got wind of what some of the tougher O’Lee guns were planning if they even considered finding their boss guilty. But he didn’t need them. His lawyer, Abe Falk, destroyed the prosecution’s case. The attorney for the Territory was a political hack from Santa Fe who could have cared less who O’Lee had killed. He had been sent to make sure that Falk, the Democrat, did not win. Everyone knew that. What had been a clear-cut case of kidnap, murder, and conspiracy was made hostage to political maneuvering. What I had believed to be right and the law suddenly shifted in the political wind like it was no more than the smoke off this cigar!”
Ash had admonished him against politics more than once. He had had his ambition to sit in Santa Fe, but Ash had told him, “You’re too upright a fellow to be mingling with those old foxes. 
Santa Fe was being pressured from both Washing-ton and the local citizenry to resolve the case and bring the criminals to justice. The Sheriff of Dona Ana County at the time was doing nothing because of his fear of O’Lee and the fact that they were both Democrats. Everyone knew or said they knew who the guilty parties were. O’Lee’s confederates tried to blame it on disgruntled Mexicans. That was highly unlikely as Jennings received much of his support from that segment of the population. The most widely accepted version was that O’Lee had done the deed or had hired someone to do it.
Ash had the habit of adding flourishes to the facts. He, on the other hand, felt confident only to tell the facts the way he had experienced them. 
Dime Pulp 