Tableau Read online

  Tableau

  An Ezra Beckitt Novel

  © Michael Kanuckel, 2020

  One

  He had decided to be a good boy for once and not smoke in his office.

  “No good deed goes unpunished,” Ezra Beckitt said, staring out his window at the rain. The skies above Hatis City had opened up about half an hour before, just as he was shrugging into his suit jacket and getting ready to head out to the smokers’ commons; a tiny courtyard with no shelter from the sunshine or the rain, the stifling heat of summer or the freezing blasts of winter wind. Not that it mattered; if the powers that be changed the law so that the only place someone could smoke was in the middle of the street during rush hour, the smokers (himself included, if he felt inclined to follow the rules) would go.

  Ezra leaned back and looked out at the city through the sheets of rain spatting against his office window. Across Jacob’s Court, where the historical remains of Linkloft, home of the ancient royal family of d’Haventh, glistened blackly beneath the stormy sky, the Makross Building stood out against the gloom and reached up to pierce the dark heavens. He hated that building, its black durasteel walls all blank save for one stripe of red light running up the southern side of the tower. He hated Makross, bloated vulture of a megacorporation that dictated so much of how people lived their lives now. He hated that he wanted a cigarette, and he hated that he had thought it a good idea to quit smoking in his office, and he hated that he was going to go out into that maelstrom and have one. Ezra Beckitt was in a terribly foul mood.

  It was the rain, mostly, that did it. Some association with a wild storm like this one, that he could never quite get a grip on; something that had to do with when he was a green rookie, Striding Dream Street with that fat old rogue Norm Wendt. Ezra stared out through the pouring rain and remembered standing in some alley, wet as a drowned rat, water in his eyes and dripping from the end of his nose. He remembered his gun, a standard issue .38 back in those days, it came with the uniform, was in his hand- and it was fired empty. He recalled Wendt barreling over the curb in their old cruiser, a snarling Crown Miranda, and nosing it into the mouth of the alleyway. Wendt swearing at him, calling him a numb Cullen. Taking the spent clip from Ezra’s sidearm and winging into a storm drain, telling him-

  “Break the machine, clean the machine,” Ezra muttered. He reached into his shirt pocket and fished out a Chesterfield, his eyes unfocused and faraway as he lit it. Promises forgotten. He remembered Wendt shoving the gun back into his hands, the fat man’s florid face quaking, two alarming patches of white just below his piggy eyes. Wendt said something else then, what was it? “You didn’t fire your weapon today,” Ezra said softly. “You didn’t fire your weapon, an ya didn’t see shit. That’s what he said.”

  But what was it all about?

  “Dammit, Ez,” a voice said from the door.

  Ezra whirled in his chair. He had his right hand on the grips of the .45 in his shoulder holster before he saw that it was just Jim and not some specter from his rainy daydreams. His old friend- his current boss. The threads of the green and blue Commissioner’s stripes on the shoulders of Jim’s coat were still so new they all but glowed in the dim stormlight. “Jesus the Carpenter, Jim,” Ezra said. “Sneaking up on a man my age. You trying to give me a coronary?”

  “Gotta keep you on your toes,” Jim said. “What if some intrepid reporter from the Harvest Home was to wander in here and find you cooping in your chair, looking like some old hunting dog beside his wood stove? Can’t have it. You’re the Champion of Arcadia, after all.”

  Ezra grimaced. “Cut that,” he said, waving a hand at his old friend in a warding away gesture and leaving rings of smoke in the air of his stale office. He wished he could open his window and let some fresh early summer air in, despite the rain. “I’ve heard enough of that garbage, Jim. I swear.”

  Jim popped his eyes wide, and hoisted his eyebrows. He looked like a simpleton of a child- a born Cullen if ever there was one. “But,” he said, wringing his big hands in front of his stomach. “But you’re the one what brought down Eat-the-dead Fred and made the streets safe so all the junkies and lace-cunnies don’t have to walk all afraid in the shadows!”

  Ezra shot smoke from his nostrils, frowning hard. “I’ve heard enough of that nonsense as well. If I could get away with it I’d hang that son of a bitch Kemp for coming up with that ridiculous name. Loveless is insane- giving him that glossy tabloid handle makes him sound like…like some sort of a comic book supervillain. It glamorizes the whole thing, Jim. What he did, what he is, is ugly. Loveless is a monster- and we worked with him.”

  “Speaking of,” Jim said. “Have you become acquainted with the new sawbones?”

  “Haven’t had the pleasure as of yet,” Ezra said. “Vidscreen messenger suffices for death certifications when you’re dealing with straight homicides.”

  “Well, I’d like for you to take the long, arduous trip downstairs and introduce yourself,” Jim said. “Doctor Leonard is the new man’s name, and he’s greener than beer on Saint Patrick’s Day. We got him right out of Wuster Medical University, where he graduated- early- with High Honors.”

  Ezra shrugged. “Bully for Doctor Leonard,” he said. “What’s that to me?”

  Jim’s face got serious. “I’d like ya to go down and talk with him, Ez,” he said.

  Eyes flashing, Ezra put both boots down on the floor and sat up straight. “What’s the deal, Jim? Whaddya got?”

  “A dead man,” Jim said. “What else? But this particular dead man- no one can figure out why he’s dead, exactly. Bronson was on this case, and he basically intimidated our good Doctor Leonard into a determination of ‘death by misadventure.’ The case is closed. But it’s fishy, Ez. Something’s real wonky with this one.”

  “So you’re reopening,” Ezra said. “And you want me to take a look.”

  “Absolutely not,” Jim said. He held up one blunt finger, and held Ezra with his eyes as well. “This case has been closed, thanks to the hard work and keen eye of High Guard First Class Mitchell Bronson- and our learned Chief Medical Examiner. There is nothing to reopen, rehash, or reexamine. Ya get?”

  Ezra butted his Chesterfield out in the ashtray he wasn’t supposed to have on his desk and got to his feet. “I getcha, Jim. Loud and clear. Now if you don’t mind, I suppose it’s high time I went and introduced myself to our new Chief o’ Corpses, yeah?”

  Two

  Going to the morgue gave Ezra the creeps now. It wasn’t the dead bodies: he was a Guard, and he’d seen dead bodies of every size, shape, and stage of dismemberment or decomposition. No, it was the idea that he had spent so much time down there working in close proximity to a monster that did it. Riding alone in the elevator as it descended from the offices and bullpen of the High Guards to the bowels of the Justice Building, Ezra leaned back against the paneled wall and stared up at the emergency hatch in the ceiling. He thought about Loveless: his smile full of jostling teeth; his wideset, muddy eyes; his off-kilter laugh, like a recording of a donkey braying played back at slow speed. Mostly he thought about how Loveless had insisted that he couldn’t be guilty of homicide because the things he’d tortured, killed, and partially devoured weren’t human; that was what stuck with Ezra the most about the man the press had dubbed “Eat-the-dead Fred.” Even now, as the Prosecutor of Law was preparing the state’s case against the man and the man himself sat in a private suite of rooms down in Renfield’s, doped to the gills, Guards were still turning up bodies associated with the case.

  The elevator slowed and came to a gentle stop. Ezra stepped out into Purgatory. Old Shepherd, polished shoes up on his desk and his nose buried in the paper, nodded to him but had nothing to say. He shoved through the stainless steel doors at the end of the short hal
l and had a look around. Everything was the same: same rows of metal lockers; same tables with drains underneath them and shallow troughs along the sides; same smells of disinfectant and chemicals; same unforgiving florescent lights and frigid air. He looked at the desk where Loveless used to sit, the throne for his kingdom of the dead, and blinked. Some kid sat there in a spotless white lab coat, wild curls of reddish brown hair tumbling over his forehead and framing a face smooth and unblemished as a baby’s backside. The kid was listening to something on a glowing blue earjuke, bopping his head right along, eyes closed behind a pair of rimless silver specs. A framed diploma from Wuster MU hung on the wall above the kid’s head; the ink on the rich vellum paper still looked wet.

  This can’t be him, Ezra thought. Jim said he was young, but c’mon. The kid reminded him of a TV show that was big when he was a boy. He couldn’t remember the name of it now, but it was about some genius teenager who went to college when he was fourteen or thereabouts and then became a doctor.

  “Hey, kid,” Ezra said. “Go grab your boss for me, yeah?”

  The kid in the lab coat didn’t respond. He started singing along under his breath with whatever he was listening to, the words indistinguishable from across the room. His long fingers, clever fingers but so soft-looking and white, snapped. The kid spun a circle in his swivel chair. Coming around for another turn he opened his eyes, saw Ezra, and almost knocked himself onto the floor jumping out of his chair while the Guard stared at him with his arms crossed, leaning on a file cabinet.

  “How long you been standing there watching me make an ass of myself?” the kid asked. He pulled the device from his ear and flipped it onto the Chief ME’s desk; that proprietary move should have been enough to convince Ezra, but he persisted in his disbelief.

  “Long enough,” Ezra said. “Listen, Gordon sent me down here to see the new Chief. Go and grab your boss for me, all right? C’mon, daylight’s wasting.”

  The kid in the lab coat turned slowly in his chair, looking up, down, and all around the cold, sterile room. “I am the boss, far as I know,” he said. “I mean, I’m still pretty new here. Is there like, a Super-Chief ME that I don’t know about? Otherwise, I’m your guy. Doctor Forest Leonard, at your service.” The kid stood up, right hand extending out as he came. Ezra took the offered hand; the kid’s grip was strong, despite the delicate look of his long fingers, and his hand was cool but not clammy- good, solid shake.

  “High Guard Ezra Beckitt,” Ezra said. “Sorry bout that. Jim said you were young, but even so…”

  “Yeah, I get it,” Doctor Leonard said. “And the answer to your question is yes, I am old enough to buy us a round at Wallace’s. Should you ever feel so inclined. I know we just met and all,” the young doctor said, staring directly into Ezra’s eyes with his bright green ones, “but it’s just like, I feel this real connection between us already.”

  Ezra stared at the kid for a second, then chuckled. “That’s good, kid,” he said. “Funny.”

  “I do know you, though,” Doctor Leonard said. He plopped back down in his chair, skinny arms crossed over the front of his lab coat. Now that they were facing each other, Ezra could see the name stitched on the breast pocket of the stupid thing. “Sure, everyone does. You’re the guy who brought down my predecessor.”

  “Lot of luck,” Ezra said. “And I had a lot of help.” That was a sore spot, though. High Guard Robin Drake was a sore spot, and he didn’t want to think about any of that. “Most of the time that’s all this job is- luck, resources, and staying on task.”

  Doctor Leonard cocked his head, looking at Ezra at a sharp angle. “Humble, too,” he said. “Sometimes the flowers arrange themselves, is that it?”

  Ezra could only shrug. On the inside, he liked this kid. He was young, but he seemed sharp- and anything a person could listen to that even allowed for head-bopping and finger-snapping couldn’t be all that bad.

  “So what brings you to my dungeon, High Guard Beckitt?” Doctor Leonard asked.

  “Not the atmosphere,” Ezra said. “You’re an improvement on the overall ambience of the room, kid, but I’ll tell ya- I haven’t been down here since the last time I looked at a body with the former Chief Loveless.”

  Doctor Leonard nodded, inviting the older man to go on with an expectant look.

  “Jim- that is, the Commissioner came to my office and said you might have something for me to take a look at. Not in exactly an official capacity, per se, but maybe just to get another set of eyes on the thing.”

  The young doctor mulled this over. “The thing,” he said, “being a case that has already been closed. Closed quietly and neatly by a High Guard who, no offense to you or your brothers, looks like the closest he’s ever come to understanding science was when a guy in a cardigan sweater told him about how lightning works on the vidscreen.”

  Ezra chuckled.

  “And now,” Doctor Leonard went on, “our boss is maybe getting a little nervous about the determination of ‘death by misadventure’ and is thinking something’s a little hinky- but he can’t reopen the case without shaking a big gold cage and ruffling a lot of feathers, so he’s pulled an ace from his sleeve, quietly.”

  Ezra shot the kid with a finger gun.

  Doctor Leonard looked at the Guard for a long moment, head cocked to the side again and the overhead lights turning his eyes into silver coins behind his spectacles. He slapped his knees and then rose from his seat, lab coat flapping around his skinny shanks. “Well by all means,” he said, bowing and gesturing Beckitt onward. “Enter my parlor, said the spider to the fly.”

  Ezra followed the good doctor past the examination tables and on into the freezing cold room. Doctor Leonard stopped in front of a locker, pulled it open, and unzipped a heavy black bag to display a body in a white shroud. With a delicate touch, Leonard grabbed hold of the shroud and pulled it down to the body’s stomach; his motions were almost reverent. Aside from the faint bluish hue of the cold skin (and the ME’s stitchwork, of course), the body could have been a young man having a snooze; it was one of the cleanest corpses he’d ever encountered.

  “High Guard Ezra Beckitt,” Doctor Leonard said, “allow me the pleasure of introducing you to Mister Kevin Peters, formally of Apartment 3C, 384 East Laird Avenue, Hatis City, presently a temporary guest of the state of d’Haventh- and about to be shipped home to his grieving family in Barnhill.”

  Ezra walked around the body, frowning with concentration. There wasn’t a mark on it other than the lumpy black Y of stitches left over from Doctor Leonard’s examination. “Okay, I give,” he finally said. “This kid is, what, nineteen? Why is he dead?”

  Doctor Leonard shrugged expansively. “You’ve been in this business a long time, Beckitt,” he said. “You know what a determination of death my misadventure usually means.”

  “Sure,” Ezra said. “It means we don’t know but this guy’s sure dead. But really- what gives?”

  “Mister Peters was, as you so astutely surmised, all of nineteen years old,” Doctor Leonard said. “He was in excellent physical health. He played high school baseball, shortstop and sometimes relief pitcher, and was about to begin a college career doing the same. They tell me that scouts were already looking at him to turn pro. Fleet of foot, killer instincts, great arm. According to his family and friends, and from what I could tell through the wonders of science, young Kevin had no bad habits. No recreational drugs, no performance enhancing drugs, no alcohol, and no tobacco- his lungs were so clean I could have eaten my lunch from them.”

  Ezra shot the kid a look.

  Doctor Leonard cleared his throat. “Perhaps, under the circumstances and considering where we are and who my predecessor was, that jest was made in poor taste. Sorry. I get glib because it makes my work easier to deal with.”

  “Sure,” Ezra said. “No big deal. Now, what about the designer drugs? Stuff like Darchangel, it doesn’t show up during a regular toxscreen. Neither does murdok.”

  “The date rape drug St
reeters call brighteyes, due to the fact that it causes temporary blindness in the victim?” Doctor Leonard said. “No, regular tests miss that. I ran the full spectrum of tests, because I was coming up with nothing. No result. And Darchangel, as you may or may not know, vanishes from the bloodstream almost immediately but leaves a telltale calling card in the form of a blackening of the cornea in all but the most casual users. With Mister Peters there are no indications of drug abuse of any kind…unless the alley chemists have come up with something new in the two minutes since I graduated, that is.”

  Ezra nodded. The kid knew his stuff, okay. “Sometimes, kids who seem healthy and play sports just drop,” he said. “Blood clots. Heart attacks. Some freak embolism or something like that.”

  Leonard was shaking his head before Ezra even finished speaking. “The kid was tip-top.”

  Ezra raised his hands in the air and dropped them to his sides. “Okay, so what the hell killed him?” he said. “Did he have any augments? Sometimes they can go haywire.”

  “Nope. The boy was all natural, Grade A. Didn’t even have designer eyes.”

  “Well, he died of something,” Ezra said. “Here he lies.”

  “Here he lies,” Doctor Leonard agreed. “But not for much longer- the family will be here tomorrow morning to collect Kevin’s earthly remains and cart them back to Barnhill, where I’m sure the memorial service will be packed with everyone from his high school including the teachers and the principal- all of them with a story to tell about how bright, how kind, what a pillar of the youth community, such a promising future, and blah and bleh.”

  Ezra raised an eyebrow. “So cynical, for such a young man.”

  “Sorry,” Doctor Leonard said. “I’m sure he was a very nice young man. And what he was is nothing to me, anyway, nor what becomes of his earthly remains. My task is to determine why he’s no longer among the living, and in that task I am failing. Greatly. There’s always an answer, my old professor was wont to say. It’s always in the data and if you can’t find it, look again. But I’m coming up empty, High Guard Beckitt. The young man is just dead.”