The Valley of Junk
David and I got Walt’s station wagon and drove down Broad Street. We navigated around City Hall and stayed on course until we were well into South Philly. The morning was bright and sunny. I was happy to see the sunshine instead of the grey skies we’d had for days, but the glare through the driver’s side window was hard on my head. I hadn’t been hungover in a long time. I hadn’t dealt with an upset stomach for an even longer time. Since I was out of practice with both, I’d neglected to take any aspirin for my head or bicarb for my stomach.
I mentally debated over making a detour to stop at one of the pharmacies along our route, but I didn’t want to waste the time. I was finally on the job, and I didn’t want to alter my course for any reason. “I’ll feel better once I’m working.” I muttered around my unlit cigar.
“I didn’t catch that, Law.” David said to respond to my words. He thought I had spoken to him, but he hadn’t heard what I’d said.
I shook my head, then wished I hadn’t. A stab of pain behind my eyes reminded me that rapid motion was as hard on a hangover as bright lights. I winced from pain and quickly forced my face to smooth. The clenched muscles of my miserable expression were almost as bad for my head as rapid movement. “Nothing.” I said to explain my utterance to David. “I was talking to myself.”
“I do that all the time.” David admitted, like he was proud to have something in common with me. “I also carry a little paper pad to write things in. The pad helps me remember stuff.”
The notebook David mentioned sounded like a good idea. If I hadn’t been so out of practice as a detective, I might have had one. I dismissed the thought as hindsight and made a left onto Oregon Avenue to drive into the morning sun. I flipped my visor down to shade my eyes. David reached up to lower his visor and stopped when his hand felt something he hadn’t expected to find.
From above the visor, he took down the folder we’d gotten from Scofield the lawyer the day before. I’d stuck the papers up there for safekeeping the previous evening. David opened the file in his lap and ran his eyes over the typewritten pages.
“Look for the address of the vacant lot where they found Ted.” I suggested. “We’ll start there and work backwards.”
David put his index finger to the page and used it to find the information I wanted. “The lot is on Bigler Street, between 2nd and 3rd.” He announced.
“That’s funny.” I said. “We drove right by there last night on our way to look at the bridge.”
David shut the folder and shifted in his seat. He seemed uncomfortable after my mention of our time at the bridge. I wondered if he was upset over the advances he’d made toward me, or that I’d rejected those advances. I wondered how much he even remembered. David had been very drunk then.
Some men remember very little under the influence. My curse was that I always remembered everything. I shook my head at the flashes of memory which illustrated some of the dumber shit I’d done when I was drunk, then immediately regretted the head shake. “Fuck.” I muttered aloud. David didn’t ask me what I said that time.
I counted the blocks down until I found 3rd Street, then I made a right and parked at the edge of the road. There was no curb to park against. The street between the vacant lots wasn’t even paved. The city had oiled the dirt to keep the dust down. I got out of the car and looked to the south, toward Bigler Street and beyond. David slid out behind me and did the same. We could see quite far over the vacant lots.
“What is all that?” David asked and pointed his finger toward a massive earth-moving effort which was spread out before us.
I took the cigar out of my mouth and spat on the ground. I made a sweeping gesture with the gnawed end of it to take in the entirety of the construction which seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. “They’re cutting the approach to the new bridge.” I explained about the draglines, bulldozers, dump trucks, and other equipment which droned and clanked and belched black smoke into the air.
The sound of the heavy equipment reminded me of a tank charge I’d been a part of during The Great War. The plan had been for the clanking tanks and their roaring, unmuffled engines to lead the way across ‘no man’s land.’ The tanks were to flatten the tangles of barbed wire ahead of us infantry soldiers. I thought the plan reasonable enough, but it went wrong almost immediately. The tankers hadn’t counted on the accuracy of the Kraut light artillery. The Germans blew the tracks off many of the advancing tanks. A trackless tank is a sitting duck. A sitting duck is a dead duck.
My mind filled my consciousness with nightmarish images of horrified tank crews who abandoned their disabled tanks to flee for their lives. Most of them were cut down by fire from small caliber machine guns. I remembered their surprised expressions as they were killed by bullets which moments before, they’d been immune to. I rubbed my face to clear the unpleasant memory and stuffed the cigar back into my mouth. “Come on.” I said to David as I chewed the tobacco into my cheek. “Let’s go see what we can see.”
The property where Ted’s body was discovered wasn’t just a lot, it was an entire block. All four sides of the block were shielded from view by great, grassed-over mounds of dirt. The tallest of these was more than twenty feet high. I didn’t understand where the mounds had come from until I glanced to the south again. The work on the bridge approach had generated similar piles of unneeded dirt. The only difference between the mounds of spoil to the south and those on the ownerless block, was the mounds on the block were grassed over while those to the south were built from fresh, brown earth.
I assumed the grass covered mounds were from when the city had cut the streets around where we walked. They’d used the block as a place to stockpile the spoil rather than haul it away. The piles created a valley in the center of the block. Because the valley was out of sight, the property attracted illegal activity. From what Scofield had said, those activities included dumping and at least one murder.
David and I walked around the perimeter of the block to find the entrance. We went south on 3rd Street to Bigler and turned to the east, towards the morning sun. Without the car visor to protect my eyes from the glare, I was forced to squint into the painful brightness. I wished I had a hat to pull down over my eyes, but I didn’t. I raised my hand to shield my face but had to drop it when my aching shoulder protested with a sharp stab of pain. Left without options, I tried to hurry to find the entrance to the shaded valley between the piles.
David and I found the gap in the dirt piles midway along the side of the block which faced Bigler. We walked through. The ends of the opposite spoil piles fell one behind the other like a piece of wire wrapped around a post. We had to walk between them at an angle to the street. The obtuse angle of the entrance meant the interior of the block was completely shielded from the view of the street.
The ground of the pass-through area was rutted from vehicle tires and muddy from the recent rain. Many different patterns of tire tracks told me the property saw frequent use. David and I walked in the tire tracks to keep our shoes out of the soft mud as we passed into the interior of the lot. The valley inside was larger than I expected it to be. The block was one of the largest in the area because it was really two blocks combined.
The way South Philly was laid out, the rowhomes faced numbered streets which were the main thoroughfares for travel. The backs of the houses were accessed through a named alley which bisected the streets. The ownerless block hadn’t been split by an alley, seemingly because the people who excavated the streets wanted to maximize the block’s use as a place to stockpile spoil.
Inside the valley, the spoil piles formed a background for litter and trash. The dumped refuse was heaped unevenly against the winter-brown grass of the dirt mounds, like scummy foam on an ocean wave. At the bottom of a shaded alcove created by a rain-carved channel in the mound to my right, was a wooden icebox with its front smashed in. I remembered the icebox from the photo of Ted’s corpse. I pointed the area out to David and led the way toward it through the weeds. We picked our way among the scattered cans and broken glass which littered the ground.
I stood over the icebox and imagined Ted’s body from the photo I’d seen. The weathered wood of the box bore a dark stain which looked like blood. All the other traces of the murder had been washed away by the rain. Nearby was the upturned kitchen table that lent its leg to Ted’s murderer. I kicked around in the weeds and even managed to find the handle-less carpet beater which had been used to sodomize Ted after he was dead. My insides heaved and lurched over the melancholy of the scene.
“Poor bastard.” I muttered around my cigar. I took the saturated tobacco from my mouth and spat on the ground. I tore the mangled end from the cigar and threw it away. It landed on a spot of brown dirt with a wet splat. I pushed the fresh end into my mouth and chewed it into my cheek.
I rubbed my face with my palms, careful not to disturb my cigar, and swore my disgust at the whole situation. “Fucking cops really half-assed this one.” I said more to myself than to David. Had the detectives or the medical examiners done their jobs, the carpet beater would have been checked for fingerprints and would be in the evidence lockup. Instead, it had been left to rot like it was nothing more than another piece of meaningless refuse.
David wanted to know what I meant about my muttered words. “What are you talking about?” He asked. “Who’s a bastard? What was half-assed?”
“No one is a bastard.” I said. “That’s just an expression I use. I was talking about Ted. This is where they found him.”
“How do you know?” David asked.
“Scobie showed me some crime scene photos. He didn’t want you to see them because they’re hard to look at.”
David was indignant that Scofield had kept something from him. He protested with more volume than my aching head could take. “I told the both of you that I wanted to know everything!”
I covered my ears until David stopped shouting. “Please,” I begged, “my head is throbbing.”
David quieted, but he was still angry. He demanded to know why ‘you two,’ meaning me and Scofield, had ‘hidden’ the photos from him.
David’s accusation pissed me off. My temper flared. I shouted in spite of the pain it caused me. “HE LOOKED LIKE HE’D BEEN SHOVED THROUGH A MEAT GRINDER!” I bellowed and instantly regretted the volume I’d used.
I held my throbbing head between my hands and shut my eyes while I tried to explain. “Once you see something, you can never unsee it. Your last memory of Ted is probably one of an energetic youth, a friend to your son, a mechanic you respected. You should keep that memory. You shouldn’t ruin it by looking at what was left of him after he was dead. He was beaten to an unrecognizable mess. Most of the beating was done after he was dead. He didn’t suffer much, but the pictures were ugly. There was no reason to let you see that.”
David didn’t say anything. I kept my eyes closed and wished I could feel better. From behind my closed eyelids, I heard the sounds a man makes when he searches his pockets for something. Keys tinkled and change jingled. Small humming noises preceded a grunt of triumph when the looked-for object was found and produced. The object made several hollow metallic sounds as it was turned over in the hand that held it. “Do you want some aspirin?” David asked. “For your head?”
I opened my eyes to see a white tin of ‘Grizzly Aspirin, when you have a bear of a headache, reach for Grizzly!’ I gratefully accepted the tin and shook too many of the small white tablets into my hand. I took my cigar from my mouth and swallowed the pills dry. I gave the tin back to David with a heartfelt ‘thanks.’ I started to put the cigar back in my mouth, then decided I’d had enough of it. I tossed it away and dusted my hands off.
“Do you always carry aspirin?” I asked.
David shook his head to indicate he didn’t. “I bought it in the hotel lobby. I guess I drank too much at the bar last night because I didn’t feel well this morning. What about you? I didn’t think you had more than one beer.”
David’s talk of my pain caused my stomach to lurch. I had to clamp my teeth together to keep it from trying to climb out of my mouth. I didn’t know if my insides reacted from the mention of alcohol or the reference to the unpleasant reason for my drunkenness and subsequent hangover. I swallowed my stomach back to where it belonged and answered David with as little detail as possible. “I had a fight with Walt last night. To get over it, I drank a bottle of gin and slept on the sofa.”
David asked a question which proved he was more perceptive than I gave him credit for. “Was it about me?”
The fight had been obliquely about David, but I didn’t think he needed to know that. I told a partial lie so David wouldn’t feel bad. “No. There were other reasons.”
I could tell by the pinched and worried expression on his face, David didn’t believe me. He seemed ready to press the matter, but I had other things I wanted to focus on. “Let’s not go into that now. We need to deal with the crime.”
I turned to face away from the icebox and looked toward the gap between the dirt piles which led to the street. We stood on the blocked side of the sharp angle of the entrance. Nothing of the street was visible from the site of the murder. I monologued my thoughts on what may have happened on the night Ted was killed.
“This is a lonely spot. At night, there would be no light at all. We’re pretty far in from the street. Ted wasn’t a big man, but as a mechanic, he would have been strong for his size. Even someone who was much bigger than him would have had trouble dragging him in here if he didn’t want to go. That gives us two possibilities. The first is Ted went willingly with his murderer. The second is he was unconscious or already dead. If I had to bet, I’d bet he went willingly.”
David didn’t see the situation in the same way I did. “Why would he come into a place like this?”
I recounted what I’d learned from Smug Stanley. “You remember what Larry said about how Ted like to service straight guys? I found out last night that Stan from Kellerman’s shop was regularly having sex with Ted. They would do it in Stan’s car. Stan would park between the vacant blocks somewhere around here. When they were finished, he’d kick Ted out of the car and make him walk home. We’re supposed to meet Stan later tonight. He’s going to take us to the races so we can try to piece together the night of the murder.”
David drew a logical conclusion from my words. “You think Ted came in here with someone to have…relations?”
“Yes.” I agreed. “I would think they, Ted and his killer, came in a car. The night was cold. I doubt they would have wanted to have sex outside. This would be a nice, private place to park. No one can see from the street. They could have left the dash lights on, a nice glow to fuck by. They might have even left the car idle to keep the heater running. With as high as the dirt piles are, and the fact that there’s no houses around, they could have been as loud as they wanted. Cries of passion or cries of pain wouldn’t have reached anyone.”
David wasn’t convinced. “But why kill Ted? If they came here to…to do that, why kill him?”
I lifted my shoulders to shrug. Both of them struck back with pain. I skipped the shrug and gave my answer without a physical motion to precede it. “Again, there’s two possibilities. Either the killer always planned to kill Ted and lured him here with the promise of sex, or it was an impulse. Kellerman said that Ted was arrogant. Maybe the killer couldn’t get it up and Ted made fun of him. The right kind of man might snap and beat Ted to death over the slight.”
David still wasn’t convinced. “But…but why the rest of it? You said they kept hitting him after he was dead. Why do that?”
I almost attempted another shrug, but I stopped myself just in time. “Rage.” I said. “The killer was consumed by it. When Ted died, the killer still had rage to spend, so he went right on beating Ted until he was exhausted. I’ve seen that kind of thing before.”
“You’ve seen people beaten to death before?” David asked incredulously.
I admitted I had. “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that I’ve seen things that would give you nightmares for the rest of your days. I was in The Great War. I saw a lot in the trenches. When I was on the police force and later when I was a private detective, I saw even more. I’ve seen terrible things. That’s why I know how stuff like this can happen.
“When I was a patrolman, I was the first man on the scene when a guy beat his wife to death. He took her to bed to stick it to her, and he couldn’t get it up. The wife had a sharp tongue. She made fun of his trouble. He got mad and knocked her against the bedpost. She hit her head and was killed instantly. Her death wasn’t enough for this guy because he was still angry. He dragged her onto the floor and beat her until she was just dead, raw meat. When he was done, he washed up and went out to find a cop to turn himself in. I was the cop he found. It never bothered him that he did it. All the way to the electric chair he never repented or apologized.”
“My God, Law!” David yelped. “That’s awful.”
“Yes, it was. It’s also how I know Larry didn’t do this. Ted would have had no reason to walk into this place with Larry. If Ted didn’t want to go willingly, I doubt Larry could have dragged him…not without Ted getting away. Having met your son, I can’t see him having the amount of darkness inside him to do a thing like I just described. Larry is physically capable of beating someone to death, but if he did, it would be a tragic accident. Whoever beat Ted to death is a soulless monster, just like that husband I told you about.
“Pisses me off because if the cops cared even a little about catching the real murderer, they never would have arrested Larry. We’ve only been here for a few minutes and it’s obvious Larry couldn’t have done this.”
“I’m happy to hear you say it,” David said, “but how can we prove it?”
“Somehow, we have to find the man who did it.” I replied. I had one more look around the valley of junk and decided there was no more we could learn from the place. “Come on.” I said to get David moving. “We’ve got work to do.”
