Bagmen (A Victor Carl Novel) Read Online Free

growled McDeiss, catching me midstagger and saving me from an embarrassing face-first dive. “Take it easy there, boy.”
    I looked behind me. “Damn crack in the asphalt.”
    “I understand,” he said, and I suspected he did.
    Detective McDeiss was a bear of a man, with catcher’s mitts for hands, a face like a boiled potato, and a taste for ugly in sport coats and hats. We had worked more than a few cases together, on opposite sides, and he had made it clear that he didn’t like me much and trusted me even less. But while we hadn’t become pals, I liked to think we had developed a mutual respect, though maybe it was only that he respected my utter shamelessness and I respected that he could pound the stuffing out of me if I ever pulled a big enough turkey out of my ass.
    “How was the bash?” said McDeiss.
    “You yanked me out before I had a chance to find out.”
    “I did you a favor. Stinking flock of vultures.”
    “I think I saw your chief there.”
    From where I stood now, I could see where the arc lights were aiming, at something covered with a bright-blue tarp, slumped against a brick wall. I turned away from the thing and toward the crowd, but it didn’t help with the smell. “How’d you find me anyway?”
    “Your phone.”
    “I didn’t get a call.”
    “I didn’t say I called. Just a few weeks ago you were scouring the courthouse for pity cases and now here you are, fresh from hobnobbing with the elite, wearing a full-blown monkey suit. Who did you kill to rise so quickly?”
    “Is that an official query from the Homicide Division?”
    “That tux a rental?”
    “Detective, please. I have standards.”
    “I know you do, and I know what they are. You go to the party right from your office?”
    “I went home first, but not from the office. I was at a meeting.”
    “When did it end?”
    “About five thirty.”
    “Where and with who?”
    “It was about a legal matter. That’s all I can say.”
    “And then you went home to change?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Anyone see you there?”
    “There hasn’t been much of a crowd in my apartment since I sent away the Chinese acrobats. Do I need an alibi, Detective? Do I need a lawyer?”
    “You tell me.”
    “I always advise my clients to say nothing without a lawyer.”
    “That’s because all your scum clients are guilty as sin.”
    “Let’s not let the truth get in the way of things.”
    We stared at each other in a game of blink to decide which of us was going to volunteer something of interest first. I actually didn’t know anything of interest, so I had the upper hand. As I stood there marinating in the stench, I wondered if the reek of death was going to sink into the fabric and ruin my tuxedo. Maybe that explained McDeiss’s horrid sport coats; garments that ugly are easy to toss.
    “We have a corpse without any ID,” said McDeiss, finally. “No license, no phone, no shoes.”
    “No shoes?”
    “No shoes.”
    “There’s nothing like a good pair of shoes.”
    “We need an identification.”
    “And you think I can help.”
    “We do.”
    “Why?”
    “That’s confidential for the moment.”
    “How bad is it?”
    “I’ve seen worse.”
    “Have I seen worse?”
    “No,” he said.
    “Oh.”
    “And if you have to throw up, make sure it goes in your pocket and not on my crime scene.”
    What is it about dead people? We can pass scores of live humans without a second thought, with nary even a first. Whole universes collide about us, each thick with history and insight and wondrous perversion, uncharted territories ripe for exploration, and we barely notice. We are surrounded by the living, and amidst the crowds we think about them as much as fish think about water. But then we come face-to-face with the dead, and our breath catches. Something in the dead stills our unending internal monologue. Something in the dead has its call on us all. Now, standing there as the tarp was about to be pulled away, I would have thought