Snooker Caldwell reached up with a grimy nail and thumped a small speck of fly shit off the window. It didn’t help much. He still couldn’t see through the residue of cigarette smoke that had settled onto the glass over the years he’d had this office.
“Oh, well, nothing I wanna’ see out there anyway,” he thought to himself.
He leaned his forehead against the glass and wondered if he could kill himself by jumping from a second floor window.
“Probably just break my God-damn legs. I’ll have to die like every other ‘has-been’ P.I….cancer and cirrhosis.”
He stuck a fresh butt in his mouth and lit it with the last embers of the one clutched in his yellow stained fingers, then turned to drag the last of the bourbon out of the bottom drawer of his battered desk.
“Oh, shit…,” The words jumped out of Snooker's mouth before he could swallow them back. He looked from the woman sitting in front of his desk to the closed door of his office and back again as if he were watching a tennis match. “I mean.” He stumbled over his words. “I mean, I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in. You kind’a startled me.”
Wanting to get a better look at her, he fanned the blue air that hovered like some permanent cloud around his head.
She smiled up at him from where she sat but didn’t speak.
He suddenly felt self-conscious about his appearance and his hands shook slightly as he tucked the corner of his wrinkled white shirt back into his pants. Tightening his crumpled, knit tie, Snooker mustered as much dignity as he could, pulled the chair from behind his desk and sat down.
“You’ll have to excuse the way I look, Miss. Being a P.I. can be a demanding business and I was working an all-night surveillance. Slept in my car part’a the night.” Realizing how that might sound to a potential new client, he brushed the comment aside with a nervous bark. “Ha…not to say that I was sleeping on the job. Not at all.” He was rambling and had to get a grip on himself. He sighed deeply and waved a hand. “Just the hazards of the profession.” He was hoping she wouldn’t notice how late it was in the afternoon and realize he’d obviously worn these crumpled clothes for a couple of days.
He decided to close his mouth for a moment and stall until he could gather his scattered wits. He opened a file drawer full of empty hanging files. Nothing in them but dust and… “Hello…” he thought as his hand touched the bottle of bourbon in the bottom of the drawer. His pride got the better of his habit and he left it where it was, pulling instead a frayed-edge legal pad from the drawer. He had to tear off six pages before he got to one that didn’t have a coffee cup ring soaked through.
Flipping the yellow pad onto the desktop, he pulled a Bic pen from the center drawer. Snooker leaned back in his chair, brushing away cigarette ashes that had fallen on his shirt.
“Well, young lady, unless you took a wrong turn in the hallway, you must be in the market for a private investigator. How can I help you? It couldn’t possibly be a cheating husband.” He laughed self-consciously, thinking he sounded like Woody Allen portraying the inept lover in ‘Play It Again, Sam’.
Her beautiful face clouded slightly and she uncrossed her legs causing Snooker to head off down a mental sidetrack he had no business being on. The woman in front of him was a vision of beauty. His professional analytical skills cranked stiffly into gear as he looked at her. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. Red hair…more of a ripe strawberry blond than an ‘I-love-Lucy’ red. Her eyes were a gorgeous ‘just-let-me-take-a-swim-in-those-pools-of-emerald’ green. His eyes drifted over her scarlet lips and he could feel his face turn red as his mind shifted to thoughts of Angelina Jolie and chrome bumper hitches. She wore a dress almost the same color as those wonderful eyes. It came to below her crossed knees and had an old-fashioned look he remembered from 30 years ago. Somewhere in the deep recesses of his preoccupied mind he heard a familiar name.
“Mr. Caldwell?”
He blinked, snapping back from a place in his distant youth where she and his imagination were walking hand in hand. “Yes, I’m sorry…uh…Miss?” he said realizing he hadn’t gotten her name yet.
“Please call me Melody.”
‘Of course,’ he thought. ‘What else.’
She continued and Snooker rushed to catch up. “I need you to help bring a killer to justice.”
“Oh, my God! A killer,” he said so suddenly his words sounded more like the exclamation of a surprised teenager than a professional investigator. “I mean, how could someone like you be mixed up in a killing?”
‘I’m not involved, really…not in the sense you might think. The victim was someone close to me, Mr. Caldwell.”
“I guess the police never got anywhere or you wouldn’t be here.”
“The police gave up after only a few months. There wasn’t much evidence and they never even got close to a suspect.” A look passed across her face like the shadow of a cloud on a sunny day.
Snooker flicked his bic, preparing to write and asked, “Who was the victim?”
The woman’s eyes went out of focus as if she were wandering through a mental place of her own and distantly said, “Her name was “Maggie…Margaret. Margaret Soames.” Snooker searched his mental index cards and couldn’t recall hearing about that one. On the other hand, his business had always been in the area of cheating wives and philandering husbands. Not many people ever asked him to solve a murder.
He meticulously jotted the name down on his pad and asked, “When did this happen?”
“It happened six years ago.” He wrote the number ‘6’ on his pad followed by ‘y/a’. Snooker looked up and shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why are you here now, after all this time?”
“Because he’s going to do it again.”
Snooker blinked, his lips parted in surprise. “You mean, you know who the killer is? How do you know? How do you know he’s going to do it again? Have you been to the police?”
“You have to help me, Mr. Caldwell. I just won’t be able rest until he is stopped.
#
Snooker paced the floor after his new client left. He was thrilled to have a new case to work. Truth be told, he was thrilled to have any case to work. He was on the verge of bankruptcy, sucking fumes from his last bottle of bourbon and smoking his cigarettes till they burned his lips.
He looked over at his desk at the necklace lying on the cheap cardboard blotter. She hadn’t had the money for a retainer and insisted that he take the exquisite piece in exchange for his services. Even in the dismal lighting of his office there was a flickering fire coming from the multiple strands of large, round-cut stones. Snooker didn’t know shit about diamonds or jewelry but he could tell he was going to owe her change when this was over.
Snooker kicked off his shoes, sighed in relief and wrinkled his nose at the musty odor rising from his feet. He leaned back in his chair with his fingers laced behind his head and propped his feet up on the corner of his desk. It was his favorite position for contemplation and he fixed his gaze on the ragged nail sticking out through a small hole it had chewed in the end of his sock.
He went over details the beautiful woman had given him…details that worked and ones that didn’t. He wasn’t sure whether he was up to the challenge of ‘solving the case’ but he wasn’t in a position to be humble regarding his abilities. He’d at least give it his best. Besides, the worst that could happen would be that the police might take a renewed interest in the case. And, at the thought of the police, Snooker realized where he would need to start. He reached for the phone.
#
“Snooker Caldwell? I heard you died.” ‘Colt’ Robbins had been on the job for as long as Snooker had known him which was twenty five, maybe thirty, years. He’d been in homicide for the last fifteen and had that look that cops get when they’ve been working the streets too long.
“You’ll go before I do, you big lush.” Snooker replied, hoping Colt wouldn’t remember the two hundred bucks Snooker had borrowed from him three months ago.
“Yeah, we’ll see. By the way, where’s the two hundred bucks you owe me?”
Fuck, Snooker thought.
“I got’cher two hundred, right here.” Snooker said, grabbing his crotch as if ‘Colt’ could see. Then, he laughed. “Seriously, I do have it and I’ll give it to you along with a steak dinner, if you’ll do me a favor.”
“Dinner include scotch?”
“Whatever you want, buddy.” Snooker replied, trying not to sound artificially congenial.
“What’cha need?”
Snooker told him.
#
“J.W. Gold on the rocks”, Colt shouted to the bartender as he made his way toward Snooker.
“Jesus Christ, Colt. When did you start drinking expensive scotch?” Snooker said, already seeing the evening tab ratcheting up.
“Just as soon as you said you were buying”. Colt flopped his bulk down into the red leather booth and, out of habit, shifted his shoulder rig around within reach.
Now that he had a few bucks to spare, Snooker wanted to order a steak the size of a Cadillac Seville but he didn’t want to rush Colt through the required pleasantries. They exchanged the usual ‘what’s up/complain about the job/are you getting any’ bullshit that two old friends will share. Their stomachs finally rumbled the alarm for food and they ordered.
#
They had both polished off matching 18 oz. T-bone steaks and at least a pound of French fries each. “Fuck salad,” Colt had said. “I wanna hear my arteries clogging up.” Colt leaned back, pushing against the table, causing leather seat to groan. His face wrinkled slightly and turned pink until he finally let out a belch that knocked over the salt-shaker and caused two women at the bar to look around at them in disgust.
“Sorry, ladies…needed to make room for dessert,” then, he turned to Snooker and laughed softly. “So, let’s talk, Snooker. What’s got you interested in such an old case?”
Snooker raised one shoulder and tilted his head. He wanted to show Colt less interest in the case than he really felt. “Awe, it’s no big deal, Colt. I ran across some information…you know how us P.I’s are…always diggin’ around where we got no business. Just kind of peaked my interest in this one.” Trying to move it along, he said, “Is the case still active? What did you find?”
“Depends on what you call ‘active’. The case doesn’t get closed until it’s cleared. But, this one’s in the ‘cold case’ files. Nothing’s happened for years and, even though it’s pulling down the unit’s clearance rate, no one’s actually working it.”
“Did you bring me something to look at?” Snooker knew he had brought the file with him because he saw Colt slide it under his leg when he sat down.
“Yeah, well. Officially, it’s an ongoing case and we aren’t supposed to share this kind of shit with ‘outsiders’ but what the fuck. It can’t hurt at this stage.” He reached under his thigh, extracting a now-wrinkled manila envelope. Opening the metal tabs, he extracted a one inch stack of white papers. Colt spread the pile out on the table in front of them like an oversized stack of playing cards. “Here, read this first,” Colt said pulling the investigative narrative from the middle of the stack.
Snooker took the report and fanned the pages with his thumb. There were twenty-two typewritten pages. He was surprised at how quickly his investigative reflexes returned to him as he turned the pages and assimilated the background on the case.
Ten years ago, the neighborhood where Margaret Soames had lived was made up of nothing but crack houses, drug whores and abandoned ‘shooting galleries.” Eventually, the place became the gang-banger equivalent of a Viet Nam where everyone was either a suspect of something or a victim of everything. The city fathers, in their limitless wisdom, decided it was time to ‘clean up Dodge City.’ Within two years, the gangsters were gone, or, if they’d made enough money selling drugs, bought up places and had become landlords. The buildings had been refurbished into executive flats and artist lofts. Artist’s loft…that’s what they called one-room shitholes where the rent runs twenty-five hundred bucks a month. She was one of the first of the upper-crust, young professionals to move into the new ‘hood.
Snooker read on through the papers, making notes on his mental pad…
Lived alone.
Security building, no doorman.
No relatives…parents died in plane crash years earlier.
Worked most nights and week-ends as semi-successful lounge singer.
No financial problems, money from parent’s estate.
Not close to anyone in the building.
Discovered by building super looking for gas leak.
Jewelry still in a rosewood chest on dresser.
“So, it doesn’t look like you have shit here, Colt.”
“Well, if you mean old fashioned clues, yeah, we ain’t got shit. No boyfriend in two or three years so love wasn’t the motive which pretty much ruled out jealousy, too. She was only modestly successful as a club singer so there wasn’t an issue of professional competition either. Her jewelry was still on her dresser as was her purse with cash in it, so robbery is out. The place hadn’t been broken into either so we figure she let the perp into her place. Forensics found the usual trace evidence but nothing with the killer’s name on it unfortunately.
“You got the coroner’s report?”
“Yep, including the tox screen. No drugs in her system; not even liquor, caffeine or nicotine.”
“Jesus. No sex. No booze. No liquor, coffee or cigs. She wasn’t much better off alive than she is now. So, what was the conclusion?”
“She was hit from behind but the report says it would have likely only dazed her. Her hands and feet were tied.”
Snooker looked at the crime photos. A slender woman whose skin was so white he doubted it had ever seen the light of day. No swimsuit tan lines. She was naked and looked so fragile. A plastic bag was over her head and secured with what looked like a cord or rope.
“I just don’t understand this, Colt. It wasn’t rape. It wasn’t robbery or jealousy. This doesn’t look like anger. What the hell was this about?”
“It was for fun, Snook. He did it for the fun of it.”
Snooker couldn’t even imagine any truth in what he was hearing. He squinted his eyes as if he were in pain, which he may have been somewhere in his soul.
Colt continued. “She suffocated after he put the bag over her head. But, the coroner found marks, like fingerprints, around her mouth and the outer edges of her nostrils were bruised. He had apparently played with her…cutting off her air, over and over again until he finally got bored and put the bag over her head. She tried so hard to get air she had parts of the plastic bag up in her sinuses. She died hard, Snooker.”
“What…and the cops just gave up. Somebody ought’a be busting his ass on this one, even after all this time.” Snooker said angrily. Before Colt could reply defensively, Snooker remembered what his client had told him about the killer. “Did you check out the neighbors? All of them?”
“Of course. We aren’t amateurs, ya’ know. We wanted to get this guy as much as any perp we ever went after. There was just nothing there. Nothing to follow.”
“What about the guy in the loft upstairs? What do you know about him?”
“What guy? The loft above hers was empty for a couple of weeks before she was killed. It had been occupied by a writer who moved to Phoenix. We did talk to him just to touch bases but he’d only seen her a couple of times in the hall while he lived there…no more than anyone else in the building that still lived there. Hell, I’d’a been more suspicious of him if he’d moved out right after she was killed rather than two weeks before.”
“I used to be a pretty good detective, Colt …you know, P.I., I mean. Not now, I’m just old and tired. But, I have a feeling about this. Have there been any cases since that followed the same pattern?”
“No, nothing in the local area. There were a couple of similar cases from a few years before but they were on the east coast. Long time back…killers like this don’t wait that long to hit again.”
“How many years before the Soames killing was the one on the one you got back east?”
“Seven years or so, far as I remember. But, there were a couple of them. Not enough to link them to Soames.”
Snooker looked at the crime scene photos again and ground his teeth together. His stomach was feeling too small for the dinner he’d put in it. He was beginning to think he wasn’t up to the task he’d been set to by the client.
Behind the tinkle of ice in the last of his bourbon, he mumbled to himself, “Shit.”
“What?” Colt asked.
“Just…nothing.” Snooker said setting his empty tumbler down too hard on the table. His glass caught the edge of the manila envelope, spilling the last of the ice across the top. He grabbed the envelope to keep in from getting too wet and felt something inside. Snooker opened the envelope and slid one remaining 8x10 photograph from inside. It was a professional portrait done in black and white with only the lips and hair colorized. The short hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his balls snuggled up close away from the cold feeling that swept up his body from beneath the table.
The woman in the picture was beautiful and her red hair flowed down over alabaster shoulders. Her eyes looked away at some distant peace and a slight smile pulled at her full, red lips. The same diamond necklace that Snooker had seen on his desk was draped around her neck. Snooker heard her voice say to him again, “I just won’t be able rest until he is stopped.”
“Who’s this?” Snooker asked barely recognizing his own voice…already knowing the answer to his question.
Colt replied from far away. “That’s the vic, Snooker. Margaret Soames. Her friends called her Melody.”
