The Velvet Badge by Bob Mantel

Author:Bob Mantel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jakey Press, New York
Published: 2022-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

THE CALL CAME INTO Homicide at 2:24 p.m. on the 11th, a week following Labor Day and less than 24 hours after the Yanks took four from Boston by a combined score of 42–9. This pulled them even in the standings (86-56).

Detective R. (for Rainer) Tagrowd, just back from a foul but leisurely air-conditioned lunch of chili and fries, answered the phone on the third ring and filled out the preliminary reports. It sounded bad. A hot and sticky case, like the weather that Tagrowd had been avoiding off and on all day. “Name?” Rainer asked the caller.

“Murph.”

“Full name.”

“Salvatore Murphy.” He was a deliveryman for “Baby’s Breath Cleaners” who had swung his truck out by this woman’s place, a private residence, for his weekly pickup.

“Of what?”

“Dirty laundry. We also dry clean, do a little tailoring.” The woman hadn’t seemed to be home, so Salvo used his key.

“Girlfriend of yours?” the detective kidded.

“Uh-uh, no. Writes for TV and travels a lot. I let myself in.” He’d gathered washcloths, towels and such from the ground floor, then went up the stairs where he’d found her butchered body.

“You there now?”

“Yes.”

“Stay put,” Rainer said. “And don’t touch anything.”

Rainer mumbled, then added “Fuck” after he’d hung up, not recognizing the address he’d written. Unless it was way the hell out where they’d been demolishing old-timey Brooklyn for god knew how long. He’d ask the new dispatcher; she knew those areas really well. And while he had her, he’d ask where the hell Miodrag Badaracz had gone to. Badaracz was his partner in crime, so to speak.

First things first, though.

Call Forensics. Get the shield, the piece, the car keys, notebook, mechanical pencil, and wintergreen Tic-Tacs from his side desk drawer. That just about covered it. Except for Detective Badaracz who, like all cops, seemed never to be around when you needed him.

“Golden Boy?” went his question, while the new girl covered her dispatcher’s mike.

“Rain, he was just here.”

“Hmm.”

“Got another stiff?”

“Another day/another downer.”

“Must be this heat.” More than likely. But Tagrowd didn’t much care, since they only smelled worse, and you got used to that.

His short search had an OK ending. He found Miodrag seated at their workstation, smoking WBOA (Without Benefit of Ashtray). The detective left lit butt ends standing on their filters, smoldering tips upwards, while they burned themselves out. This usually meant several-packs-worth of extinguished cigs littering his desk or anywhere else he wandered. Or else, random conflagrations slowly taking hold across the squad room. “Hey!”

Tagrowd had swept Miodrag’s cigarette forest into the trash and tossed the one he had going into his coffee. “The cleaning lady is beginning to complain.”

“Well, fuck her!”

“I’m sure you’ve tried.”

“Then, fuck you!”

“We don’t have time.” He spoke at a tough-cop clip that impressed Badaracz, the junior partner of this duo. Tagrowd threw him out of kilter with his wise-cracking pose, into silence, and into a half-empty pack of Camel Wide Filters. He sat on the passenger’s side of their unmarked car. A complex-faced fellow, wide in the hip and lower thighs, with tiny terra-cotta hands searching his pockets for additional smokes.

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