Venus de Milo

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I should start from the beginning, before it all spiraled out of control. Would you believe me if I told you all started with a thought? A simple correlation between a coin and a boat and like dominoes every piece cascaded into the next. Sometimes I wonder if he knew it'd start this way. Him. I don't even have a name, but he knows mine. He had picked the cast and wrote the play after all.

All along we thought we were living our life's play, not knowing about the looming masked figure lurking above us, masterfully pulling on the marionette doll strings.  

Our show started on that dark Thursday night. I thought it felt fitting: the weather had showed the decency to look upsetting. Dark clouds poured rain, hanging overhead, their colors heavy, impossibly large and yet somehow drown out: swallowed up by great pillars of concrete, windows, metal, letters and lights. Buildings shot upward, stabbing at the ominous sky above, stoic and unmoving in the falling rain or howling wind. A perfect setting for our tragic play.

Tomlins, clad in a heavy rain coat, cover peeled over his hat, stood guard in front of the scene.

He lifted the police line for me, "Detective. They're waiting for you inside."

The house was completely blocked off, and not just by police tape. A dozen or so police vehicles, ranging in size and intent, acted as a perimeter to the location. The response felt massive, too large for something this delicate.

It had been cream colored, the house. Or at least would be, come daylight, but now it was alternating tones of flashing red and blue, with a bit of muted, tired yellow in between. It was dead inside, the windows dark and vacant. A dichotomy of death against the life that buzzed outside it. Almost haunted, in a way. I know it's ridiculous, but some adolescent part of me couldn't shake the feeling of something spectral watching me.

"I was wondering when you'd show, Cooper."

"Sgt. Baker." I said, adjusting my wet rain coat. "I was out on the town, if you can believe it."

A smile spread across Baker's face. "A date with the Mrs.?

"Something like that."

"Well?"

"Ahh..." I said removing my wet cap now that I was below the awning. I scratched my head, a clear tell of nervousness, one I've never been able to shake. "I wouldn't know where to begin."

"Trouble in paradise?"

"Something like that," I said again, thinking of the way Ginny had looked at me when I left. My wedding ring itched on my finger. "I'll be honest, I was pretty happy the call came in to break it up."

"I'm sure the victim's family will be glad to hear that."

"Yeah, yeah..." I said. "Where is it at?"

"Just through the family room, and past the kitchen." Baker opened the door. "Just follow your nose. Hey, Gio, where's Reyes?"

I shrugged and stepped through the threshold of the doorway, calling back to Baker: "Mentioned something about your mother's house."

What life existed outside the house stopped at the doorway. The entry held a sullen stillness that sent a shiver up my spine. A lingering cold bit through my clothes and hit me at the bone. The lights were dead, only lamps setup by the PD shined here and those threw long, reaching tendril-like shadows against the wall, turning the room into something you might see in a haunted house. The fluorescent, pallid glow somehow made the room feel sickly and sterile at the same time. I could see the dust motes hanging in the air, along with the smell of something wet.

Tiny numbered tipi tents were scattered on the floor, marking a knocked over coat rack, a tipped over vase, a handful of coins scattered on the ground... I squinted hard at a few, had no idea where they were from but they certainly weren't American. Or any currency I had ever seen. "Smith" was carved into one. "Archer" into another.

In the next room was more of the same. Someone had stopped dropping tipi's next to coins all together, because they were everywhere. They gleamed with the light of the lamps. On the floor, on the coffee table and end table. On top of a TV. I had to weave a path through the room, making my way toward the kitchen. A drape had been hung in front of the doorway, I pushed it aside.

That's when the smell hit me. Wet and rank with rot, the hum of bluebottle flies compounded the scene and my mind did the rest of the work: rotting flesh. The stench was so volatile it was like a thick mist, hard to see through. An encapsulating buzzing static assaulted my senses as flies whirled around all corners of the room. I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket.

I expected the body, but was greeted with something else. Not a body, but a series of them. Not human. Quartered pieces of what must have been a cow, or something close to bovine. One in the sink, another on the counter top. A third on the floor. They looked like had been taken straight out of the butcher's shop and left to decompose.

A meat cleaver was stuck in one of the husks of meat that had begun to turn green. Old juices oozed from under and dripped onto the floor. Flies crawled across the meat's surface, maggots writhed within. My nostrils burned, eyes watered. Something heavy rose up in my throat, the taste of bile on my tongue. I swallowed hard.

A series of flashes lit up the window in front of me. I took it as an open invitation and made my way outside. The air was mostly fresh, I could breathe out of my nostrils again, but there was still a tinge of the decay.

"Pretty foul, isn't it?" A voice I recognized called to me. It was deep, something that a gravel pit might produce.

"I was thinking more along the lines of fucking foul. But yeah," I paused. "Pretty foul."

Biggs had beaten me here. No surprise, the precinct was just a dozen blocks away. He was another detective at the PD. He called Reyes and I the dynamic duo or the lover's quarrel; often incorrect and horribly unoriginal—a phrase I would use to describe him. He had a decade of harassment write-ups that always ended with an inevitable slap on the wrist. Worst of all, he was bad at his job. But Dad wanted his son to play cop, so here we were.

"What took you so long?" Biggs asked, pulling up his collar against the beating rain.

"Hawthorne was backed up pretty bad."

Biggs nodded. "Where's that partner of yours?"

"I dialed her. She must be on her way."

In the back, our photographer was taking pictures of what looked like a broken window. Shattered pieces of glass flared to life with every photo. Possibly a forced entry point. I noted the window in my mind.

"Well, I suppose I'll show you around. You've seen the worst of it, if you can believe it. Take a couple more deep breaths, and we'll head upstairs."

He opened the door back up and led me inside and up a set of stairs parallel to the kitchen.

The stairway was straight and narrow. Like a stiletto through flesh, it stabbed upward into the heart of the house. Tight and claustrophobic, the type of thing a knight might scale before reaching the highest tower to face a monster. Lights here were out too, but with no space for a lamp or flashlight, the small stairway was left unlit. The only light was coming from beneath a door at the top, a slit of orange seeping out just enough for me to be able to see my breath.

The door opened into a small loft. A room no bigger than the kitchen or living room below, with more lamps setup here. But they were not part of the PD, their color the soft glow of incandesces. Four were placed in a square around what looked like an art piece in the center of the room. It looked like one of those old Greek statues, the bust with missing arms and vacant eyes.

"Fucking sick, isn't it?" Biggs said while lighting a cigarette.

I grabbed the cigarette out of his mouth and pinched it out. "How 'bout we do that outside." I looked back to the statue and a saw an odd softness in its features. Then it dawned on me what Biggs was talking about.

"It's a corpse." I said.

Biggs pulled out another cigarette and lit it, not bothering to exhale the smoke away from me. "Bingo."

"Have they photographed this room yet?"

Biggs nodded.

The arms had been severed but sutured, no sign of bone or flesh. Eyes glossed over with something to make it match the greyish hue of the cadaver's skin. Her head was tilted away from us, looking off in the distance, standing on her pedestal, she looked like a Greek god or beauty. It was familiar to me, but I couldn't put my finger on the name. I went through the motions, pulled out a pair of gloves and walked around the propped-up body. I touched her skin, felt the coolness of it give beneath my fingers. I couldn't tell where the stand was, or rather how she was standing up in such a perfect pose. Peeling off my right glove, I pulled out my notebook and noted the time, I ran my pencil back and forth across the page, glancing up at the woman every so often.

"I don't know why you do that." Biggs said.

"Do what?"

"Draw this shit." His hand gestured to the woman in the center of the room. "Didn't I say we got a photographer in here?"

"You do you, Biggs, and I'll do me." I said without looking up. "Is this her house?"

Biggs shrugged. "No, but maybe. The house is owned by"—he checked his own notebook—"Mr. Darren Garder. Him and his daughter live here."

"Where are they?"

"The neighbors said the two of them bought the place, then went on vacation a couple weeks back. Haven't been here long, just moved in back in October. Neighbors been house sitting since they left. We're trying to follow up on that."

"They're the ones that found the body?"

Biggs nodded. "Just before dinner, neighbor's daughter came over to water the plants and found the kitchen. Told dad and dad told the operator there had been a Jim Jones massacre in the neighbor's house. Daughter didn't look long enough to see it was just butchered meat."

"I bet that ruined her appetite."

He grimaced seriously, "Among other things."

"This daughter, she not the type to check the house every day?"

"That's part of the mystery," Biggs exhaled more smoke into the room. "They were here last night. Nothing. No corpse, no coins, no rotting meat."

"What about the broken window?"

"Broken window?"

I nodded and looked back at the scene. No coins here. Just add an informational plaque beneath the woman and some velvet rope and the room would have been right at home in a museum. The corpse stared off into nowhere.

"Any idea on the coins downstairs?" I found myself asking.

"Not from any country that I can remember." Biggs said. "Baker thinks it's Latin." He fished around his coat pocket and pulled out a small Ziploc bag and handed it to me. A coin was inside.

"This was the only one we found in this room." He said.

I eyed it through its plastic covering. Words ran across the perimeter of both sides of coin. On the back, there was a picture, clear as any painting I had seen. A small boat on a long and winding river. Huddled masses sat side by side on the ship's bow. At the stern of the ship was a cloaked figure, he held a long pole and seemed to be pushing the boat through the water.

"It's not Latin." I said.

"I'm sorry?"

"It's Greek."

"Since when do you read Greek?"

"Cooper Gianopulos seem like a French name to you?" I flipped over the coin once more. "Truth be told, I don't. But my grandmother couldn't write a lick of English, so my dad would have to translate her letters to us. Look on the back of the coin. You see the boat?"

"Clear as day."

"I'm assuming that's not Greek currency. I don't see any numbers on it."

"So then what the hell is the point of it?" Biggs asked.

"I don't know."

"Well," Biggs said, exhaling the last draw from his cigarette. "If you get any ideas, let me know. I'll be downstairs."

I watched him leave, and shut the door behind him. Looking back to the drawing, I wondered what it meant. Certainly this was left to send a message to whoever found it, especially the coin from this room. It had something to do with the coins downstairs, but this one didn't have anything carved in the back. It didn't explain the connection to the rot in the kitchen. I needed a wall to throw some ideas off of. I checked my phone, searching for a missed call from Sarah, but found none.

She was heading inland to see her aunt; did she miss the ferry?

That thought went through my mind, innocuous and irrelevant, but it acted as the first domino, falling into place. It started as a seed and blossomed into the nightshade that'd loom over for me for the entirety of the investigation.

The ferry. My mind almost audibly clicked as I looked to the back of the coin and saw at least one connection. I thought of the ferryman, the shepherd for lost souls.

"It's the god Charon." I said to the empty room, looking back to the woman.

I knew one last place to look, if the suspect knew his Greek mythology. I snapped on another pair of gloves and walked over to statued body. Stepping up on the pedestal the woman stood on I delicately opened her mouth. She had no teeth, but something was planted between her gums: a bag.

It was ziplock, like the one Biggs carried the coin in. Through the plastic I could see a coin, and what looked like paper. I peeled it open, fished out the coin and flipped it over in my hand and felt blood freeze in my veins.

"Reyes" was carved on one side. Something close to fear touched my senses. Reyes was a common enough name, right? Still I checked my phone again, and hoped she'd called.

Was it really so common? A piece of me knew this was our Reyes, the one that told Biggs to go fuck himself when he whistled at her on her first day as detective. The one that strode into the room where rival mob members had painted the walls with each other's brains, confident, dutiful to her job, where others had left the room and the contents of their stomachs on the floor. The one who who'd smell butterscotch, just before an attack took hold.

But how many Reyes's were there in the city? It could have been any of them, I told myself.

Alongside the coin, was a small piece of paper:

Check the Dresser.

The first three drawers were just clothes, but in the fourth, behind a pair of pants, was small box. With the words: 

Open me

In typeface across the top.

Like a good little monkey, I did. Inside I found a cassette tape with my name written on it on it. Not Coop, or Gio, or detective, but its entirety. Middle name and all. Like a government document notifying me that I was late on my taxes. Beneath that, a detective's badge. I read the number and my heart sank. Wedged between a pair of socks was a cassette player. I slid the tape into place, clicking the little door then hitting play. Quiet static popped, then after a moment, I heard someone take a deep breath, then another.

Then he began, his voice that of an Opera singer:

Dear Detective Gianopulos,

Can I call you Cooper? I find your surname is terribly hard to spell. Would you believe me if I told you I have to look it up every time I want to type it? In fact "Gianopulos" has several different adaptations. Probably bastardized every time a donkey loving Pendos slipped ship and came to America. I can say that because my family is also Greek.

Whoops. I should not have said that. Consider it a "freebie." Is that the correct use of the phrase? I have never been good with slang.

I suppose I could just say "Gio" but from what I have come to understand that is a nickname reserved for only friendships. Although I think in another life we could have been, certainly now our paths dictate that we could never be friends with one another.

Especially after all I have done.

I have your detective. Yes, I do. I promise you I have her, you have no doubt found the badge by now. I am pleased you have found it, kind of a "gimme" really. I had to place this note somewhere a brain-dead police officer would not find it, but a detective might. Not many would check the mouth, certainly not that low-browed invalid Donald M. Biggs. But both you and Sarah Reyes have a keener eye for things. Which is why I have chosen you.

I believe we both have something of value. Your abilities and connections are something that I DESPERATELY need. You are a looking glass for the public, focusing their tawdry eye to something magnificent. The world we live in is ugly, no great art has graced this swirling ball of filth in decades. Art can be transcending, and though this gala is beneath us, I propose we elevate it, you and I.

Here is my proposition:

You give me what I want and I'll give you back Reyes.

And in return? I want that stage, Cooper. Although I am talented, every protagonist needs a supporting cast. Every artist; a canvas. But let us keep this as a duet for now, shall we? No need to bring in the rest of the force. Not yet. I think my work here is proof enough I should be taken seriously.

In the meantime, how about a gift?

Consider it an appetizer for what awaits you. A prologue, so to speak, to set the stage; an introduction to an art exhibition; or the delightful foreplay of removing a fingernail before clipping the finger off at the top knuckle. It is a way to identify this wonderful piece of art before you (since she seems to be missing all the important bits). Though it was the last of her worries by the time I was finished.

Act I begins now, the setting? 435 East Barrington Heights. If you hurry, you might not be too late.

Sincerely, your acquaintance,

I waited for the name, but the tape just continued with the soft static it had started with. I rewound the tape back to the beginning, listened to it again, and found I'd be gripping the edges of the cassette player hard.

A gift. He had said. A prologue.

In the box was a velvet cloth, draped over something.

A beneath it, the gift he spoke of. I felt my stomach turn.

A severed finger, effeminate and manicured. Something you'd find attached to a woman with class.

I thought of the last time I'd seriously worried for Sarah. A few years back she'd taken a hit from a druggie in a dark alley who thought he was seeing ghosts. I had asked her if she was OK and she fired back, "Go fuck yourself" before falling into a fit of laughter.

I grimaced at the delicate finger in the box and closed my eyes, feeling thankful.

It couldn't have belonged to Reyes.

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