So Weeps the Willow - 30. Salix Babylonica 8 - The Warrens

Salix Babylonica 8 - The Warrens

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

Frank Herbert

Rush opened the door to their house and could smell the heady scents of cumin, peppers, beef and toasting corn. It was taco night at the Romer and Miller residence. These aromas made him smile. He was home.

“What’s going on?” he called out as he took off his light coat and hung it on the hook in the hall. There were sounds of a television comedy in the living room and Clay’s high-pitched laughter. Rush also heard someone else, the undertone of a laugh more punctuated and lower. It was a sound he wasn’t familiar with.

“Come to the kitchen!” Ben’s familiar tenor voice called out. “I’m finishing up dinner and we were waiting on you.”

Rush felt his tension from the interview with Wylie’s roommate slide off. He was home in time for dinner, and for the past few months, that was something so new.

“Rush, dude, you cannot believe this,” he heard Clay yell from the next room. He diverted in that direction.

Rush smiled at Clay’s excitement over… whatever. But that wasn’t what capture his attention. Beside him was a small teen who looked at least three years younger.

“Yes?” Rush asked, and he then deliberately turned to the diminutive companion of Clay’s. “And you are?”

The kid grinned and blushed.

Clay snorted and said, “That’s my friend Carl.”

Rush nodded and the boy reached out, an open palm. Was this kid offering to shake hands?

“Nice to meet you,” Carl said, his eyes nervously flitting from his friend to Rush and back again.

“Great meeting you too,” Rush said, taking the teen’s hand and pumping it enthusiastically. This was the first person Clay had brought home for them to meet. Up until now, Clay’s social life had been entirely theoretical. Odd, when he suddenly realized this fact.

“Watch this,” Clay demanded and pointed to their modestly-sized flat screen TV. It was the news, and at first Rush was confused, thinking it was a riot. Then it dawned on him what he was seeing.

There was a bizarre assemblage of people collected around a kind of square. Some reporters were poised and holding out microphones and the cameras were shaking wildly. Behind some lined-up people was a sign announcing an event.

A voice introduced the scene. “Tickets for the next epic Eric Crenshaw show are about to go on sale. These tickets are golden, rare and hard to come by, so if you want to make it into the hottest teen group show on the planet, you need to get down here with your credit card. Eric Crenshaw’s hit, “Wanna Love Me Like I Love You,” has been scorching the charts.

“Rush, I really wanna go to this,” Clay begged. He turned and his eyes were moist. His friend looked just as expectedly. “Can we get tickets for it? Please?”

There was a definite whine in his foster child’s request. Rush decided to ignore that sound and not tease him about it.

“Early birthday present?” he said finally, cutting the tension.

Clay looked like he was about to scream, but instead jumped up and grabbed the smaller boy and started dancing around the living room.

“I’ve got tacos ready to eat.”

Rush turned to see Ben standing in the doorway. It was striking.

The light from the kitchen had a halo effect around the man. Beams of bright yellow light radiated and the detective felt a bit awed. He also felt like he was home, and the image was burned brightly in his brain.

“We’re ready to eat,” Rush said.

“Yeah!” Clay shouted and bounced, his friend -- boyfriend? Carl followed in turn. Rush simply walked behind them to the kitchen where the scents of chili flavored sauce and rich golden corn beckoned.

They all loved taco night.

***

“Steve Wylie had another apartment?” Ben asked, then he speared the last of his lettuce.

“Not another residence,” Rush corrected. “This was the artist space you read about in a report or something. It’s a bigger space than we thought, big enough that he sometimes slept there according to the roommate.”

“Oh,” Ben answered.

“I think it sounds cool,” Clay said, reaching for another taco shell. It was his fifth.

“I told Hammond about it, and he sent some cops to look at the space again.”

“Let’s see if our Crenshaw ticket request was accepted,” Clay said, nodding at his friend. Carl beamed and jumped up from the table. Clay had refused to come to the table until the tickets had been ordered.

“What the hell?” Rush asked as the two stampeded past them.

“Teens,” Ben said waving his hand dismissively. “When did you find out more about Wylie’s artist space?”

Rush recapped about the deceased man’s roommate and her description of the events before his death.

“Goddamn,” Ben said. “That’s kind of spooky. Living with a person who didn’t care if you were around or not.” He paused, then asked, “Why would he need his own place to work?”

Rush considered the question. “I’m not sure. It’s not really a specially defined thing. She said it was a place for people like musicians or painters or something to work on their stuff.”

“Oh,” Ben said. “But, you think there may be something there that helps with the investigation?” The man paused and he continued excitedly. “Maybe that’s where he was kept after he died. They only found his remains, rather decomposed at that, and we know he was held someplace else. Could Wylie have been kept at this artist place?”

“I don’t know,” Rush answered, getting up to collect the dirty dishes. He started loading the dishwasher as Ben grabbed his laptop from the breakfast nook. “We know Wylie was kept someplace cool, or at least that’s what the experts say.”

Ben was focused on the screen and commented aloud, “This place is segmented into several spaces for artists including writers, sculptors, rock bands, and even performance artists. The walls are mostly sound-proofed and the entrance is kept secure and private.”

“The units are sound-proofed?” Rush asked, his brain now whirling.

“Yeah, and listen to this. There was an assault at the place a couple of years ago. No one witnessed the action because of the insulation of the space.” Ben looked over the screen. “Rush, this could be the murder scene.”

“Yeah,” Rush said, feeling his heart quickening. He finished loading the dishwasher as the jangle of the phone made Ben and him look up.

“I’ll get it,” Ben said quickly. He grabbed the cell. Rush sensed they were now proceeding quickly, and that meant the case was being resolved.

He started the dishwasher and leaning against it, waited patiently.

“It’s a Sgt. Blake,” Ben announced as he walked into the room handing Rush the phone. “Hammond wants you at this artist’s space. Apparently, this is a big deal.”

“Okay, while you’re getting ready—"

“They just want you.” Ben’s face was passive, but his eyes were angry.

Rush tenderly touched his partner as he left the house. Ben gave him a sad smile, and it made the detective a little pissed. Hammond was such a fucker.

***

As Rush entered The Warrens, he was surprised at how utilitarian it was. The brick walls were plain and hard, without graffiti or any embellishment. The floors were polished pebblestone, plain and without features. They passed several doors as they made their way to their destination. It seemed to take some time, and yet also the final door to Wylie’s room came up quite abruptly. A uniformed police officer was standing at the door and nodded as the private detective passed.

Rush walked into the place and his boss, or his contractor to be more accurate, was talking loudly on the phone.

“Maybe. We can’t be sure right now. I’m having them photograph everything and the medical forensic team is on its way. If the body was here at one time, or if the murder occurred here, we’ll know.”

Hammond turned after he ended the call and his brows arched as he recognized Romer. “Well, this is what we found.” He gestured around him, and there wasn’t much to see.

“This is the space Steve Wylie rented. We’ve confirmed that much with the management company, but I’m not sure what it means.”

Rush looked around as he listened to the Hennepin County detective speak. He was surprised at the sparseness of the contents. It was not promising.

To the right, there was a sleeping bag on the floor, crumpled into a ball, stuffed with clothing. A pillow was sitting next to it, covered in a faded blue pillowcase, and the old camping kit was gray with a red flannel lining. It looked a little sad and like it had been unused for some time. The earlier report had failed to note much of this.

The walls were bare. The workbench along the space near the door was empty, except for a couple of cobwebs. There was red dust on the surface and a little pile near the one end, but otherwise, the area was clear of debris or implements.

On the opposite side from the sleeping bag there were a couple of shelving units, galvanized steel and also empty. The metal was pitted and gray with some dust and plenty of additional webs. Obviously, this space was a spiders’ heaven, and yet no insect seemed to be present.

“Okay, it doesn’t look like much now, but the roommate insisted this was Wylie’s second home,” Rush said defensively.

“Steve Wylie’s artist space isn’t very impressive, is it?” Hammond asked, with a hint of superiority in his tone. Rush immediately felt embarrassed for the dead man.

“What did he do here?” Rush asked, thinking back to the first report by the police. “Didn’t they find lots of dust, and not much else?”

“I don’t know what he did here either, but it’s pretty cleared out,” Hammond answered. “Let’s go over here and talk. There’s a table and chairs in the hallway. Let’s hash this out.”

After they were seated, Hammond asked, “Why are we looking more closely at this?”

“His roommate said he spent a lot of time here,” Rush answered automatically. “Something happened here. There is a lot missing.”

“What do you mean?” Hammond asked sharply. “Nothing is here. It’s empty.”

“Why would a guy making twelve bucks an hour rent an apartment AND rent a place like this? He’s got no money to spare, so why lease this, unless he was doing something here. There’s nothing really to show what he did here.”

“Doing what?” Hammond asked skeptically. Rush knew that tone though. The detective was following his reasoning. There were important answers to these questions.

***

As Rush drove home, he thought about the practice space, layered in red and gray dust, empty, without a purpose. Steve Wylie was a person whose life had been cut short, like Jake’s. They knew each other, at least tangentially. Both frequented a bar, Gallivant’s, and both had their young lives cut short.

Was it their lifestyles that subjected both men to early demise? What elements were common between the two? These were the basic, and frustrating questions, being bantered about by police, the press, and anyone else interested in the death of two young men, both in the prime of their lives.

It made him sick.

Rush stopped at a red light, only about ten blocks from home. Wylie had rented a space to do something, something artistic. Yet the space was abandoned and empty. Hammond was furious at the cops who looked at the space initially and failed to record the presence of Wylie’s sleeping bag and clothing. It made the department look foolish.

Rush took the facts as he knew them, and again thought about the victims.

Jake was a young man who had such promise in grad school, at least that’s what his professors said. Wylie was an artist who worked as a grease monkey to make ends meet. Yet the two men knew each other. They had common environs. But that seemed to be it.

What was the connection? The clothes on Wylie suggested he was gay. The things within his room also made that seem apparent, but nobody who knew him thought it was true. For Rush, the idea seemed preposterous. After someone is revealed as closeted, everyone is usually surprised, but then realizes the truth. But, with Wylie, the opposite seemed true. Nobody believed it, at least those who knew him.

Jake died in his bed from carbon monoxide poisoning. His ex was around, maybe visiting him, maybe reconnecting. Nobody knew. He was suffering from chemical dependency. His mother was a mess. His life was on the upswing, and then a messed-up heater killed him.

The police believed the cases were linked. The evidence suggested that was probably true.

It all seemed such a whirl of disconnections, but something tied it all together other than the bar. Something was missing that bound these two men’s deaths together, or else it was a coincidence.

Rush parked in front of their house. He stared into the inky blackness and nothing fit, and nothing made sense. His fingers tapped on the steering wheel. The detective felt his eyes blink and twitch. His brain was processing, and sensed something important was missing. Something vital.

Rush climbed out of the vehicle and his breath puffed white in the late March air. It dissipated as he surged forward to the house. A thought bounced from his memory. It pinged about and touched the ideas that had been stewing. The something he was missing, actually a couple of things, were there, stewing though slightly out of reach. It was pissing him off.

Rush unlocked the front door and banged it open. He marched inside, and then shut it loudly, the sound reverberating. It echoed about the hallway, but that didn’t concern him. Rush hurried through the kitchen into the back room where Ben was reading something in a file folder.

He flicked on the light at the desk and sprawled into his chair. While his computer loaded and warmed up, he started organizing things as he did in the past. While at the BCA, he considered the signature of a killer or a criminal. Criminals were used to doing things that had worked in the past. With these habitual patterns impregnated in their behaviors; the signatures became obvious and unique. In other words, humans liked to recreate that which worked.

Like the strokes of a pen, with a hesitant downslope or a courageous loop, these criminals made designs in their work. He wasn’t looking for the signature in the two cases, and that’s what was making this harder.

Humans are masters at deciphering forms. The scent of deer dung, a slipped hoof, the odor of a scared man, the flickering eyes of a liar, and the responses of a killer all contain evidence a tracker can follow. What were these patterns he was missing?

Rush opened the file with the words written by Jake Ogden. He started reading and some things were becoming clear, and it made him gasp.

From Jake’s blog, right before he was killed:

“At the end of our talk, we agreed to take it slow. We’d actually date and get closer again while being careful about the other’s space. Eddie seemed so happy, relieved, and content. I admit, I finally felt it was a good decision. I need to turn my back on this drunken debauchery that has gotten me nowhere. It’s not like my other option was going to commit, not to me. No, definitely not.

A little later there was this.

“And then there’s Eddie. We talked before work. He told me he’d call at ten o’clock and we could get together. He hadn’t called, so I called him. I don’t know what’s going on. This seems odd. This morning, things seemed to be coming together. I had Eddie back in my life.”

Rush leaned back, and he felt a warm arm on his back. He squawked and turned. It was Ben, intently reading from over his shoulder.

Rush saw his partner’s reaction from this hundredth review. Ben was thinking the same thing; his eyes were flashing with understanding. He was nodding. They both saw it in a new light.

“This is the evidence of the end.” Ben pointed at the script on the computer. “Eddie discovered Jake’s being with someone else. Could that someone be Steve?”

“And Eddie killed Jake and Steve. Yeah, I know what you’re seeing.”

The two men squeezed one another as the impact filled them with sadness.