Butterfly Knife
By
Larry Matthews
A Dave Haggard thriller
Butterfly Knife © 2012 All rights reserved by Larry Matthews.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any informational storage retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
W & B Publishers
Post Office Box 193
Colfax, NC 27235
Book Cover designed by Dubya
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead or to actual events is purely coincidental.
Chapter One
It was the feet that kept him awake, not the urine. The stench from the feet was overpowering in the sourness that had fermented on the man. The guy was inches from Dave’s nose, just across a trough of sour clothes in the space between the mattresses. Dave Haggard turned over and faced the wall, but it didn’t help. The reek of urine came up from his own mattress and he wondered yet again why he thought this would be a good story.
Life On The Street, that’s what he wanted to call it. A week with homeless men would give him and his listeners a real understanding of the problem. Washington, D.C., the capital of the free world, the seat of power, the city of monuments and memorials, was also the place where half-insane homeless men begged for change in front of the F.B.I. building and outside Metro stations as over-educated professionals scrambled for a spot on subways so they could get to their jobs at law offices, lobbyists, Beltway Bandits, and other slurpers at the public trough. Shit! Dave Haggard, Ace Reporter, was about to gag on his own story, right here in the shelter. Why don’t they clean the damn mattresses? Who peed here? He imagined that the others were plotting to steal the few things he had brought with him. His shoe laces were tied to his wrists to prevent them from stealing his shoes.
The man next to him moaned and farted and his eyes opened in a wide stare as he sat up and gazed at Dave. “Are you the word?”
Dave stared back, wondering what the man was talking about. The fellow had not bathed in a very long time, nor had he changed his clothes. Rumor had it that the old guy had maggots crawling around on his skin. The guy was clearly out of his mind. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
The man leaned closer and looked into Dave’s face. “Are you the word?” He was wearing a dirty knit hat and his greasy hair was hanging to his shoulders. His rheumy eyes were red and sad. Something crusty was stuck in his beard. It was hard to tell if he had any teeth.
“No,” Dave said.
“Peppers. They call me Peppers. You can tell me your truth.” Peppers was about to say something else when a shouting scuffle broke out on the landing outside the door, which had been left open to allow light into the room where eight men were sleeping on the mattresses scattered on the floor of a former Catholic school classroom. Dave heard someone falling down the stairs, or so it seemed, and footsteps running away. Peppers cocked his head but didn’t turn around. Another man sat up, looking frightened. The others didn’t make a move.
Dave jumped up, careful to take his shoes with him. He walked out onto the landing and saw the priest at the bottom of the stairs, bleeding and trying to speak. Blood was coming from his mouth and he was gasping for air. He was making a moaning, animal-like noise and motioning for Dave to help him. Dave ran down the stairs, bent to the priest, then ran out the front door to find help. Two D.C. cops were driving by, halfway through their shift, hoping for a quiet night. They saw Dave run into the street and wave, pointing to the entrance to the shelter.
“What the hell!” said the driver, pulling to the curb and turning on the patrol car’s flashing lights. “What’s up?” he asked, thinking that Dave was just another out-of-his-mind drunken bum.
“A guy’s been stabbed in the shelter. The priest. He needs help. He might be dying.”
The two cops looked at each other. The senior officer, the one riding shotgun, shook his head, thinking of the paperwork that would be involved if a priest in a shelter was stabbed. His first thought, as he opened the car’s door, was that he might not get home until noon, eight hours from now.
The officers ran up the stairs, nearly falling on the ice that had built up during the night’s cold, and into the vestibule, where two homeless men pointed to the priest, now unconscious. Thirteen minutes later two D.C. Emergency Medical Service members were trying to get Father Phil to breathe again. Father Phil went to his heavenly reward before he arrived at George Washington University Hospital. He had been stabbed ten times; eight of the wounds were in his chest.
Cops filled the building, some in uniform, others in plain clothes. They sealed the exits and tried to herd the homeless men into manageable groups for questioning. It was clear that some of the evening’s guests had already gone, driven away by the threat of any contact with the police for any reason. One of the missing was Peppers, a shadowy man under the best of circumstances. He came to the shelter on only the coldest nights. He preferred living under the big bushes near federal buildings, finding a measure of privacy in the tunnel-like warrens between the branches and the stone of the government edifices. But others were gone as well.
By Dave’s estimate, about a third of the seventy-odd men in the shelter that night were crazy, another third were unlucky saps whose lives went south and stayed there, and the rest were a mix of criminals on the run, hobos, sociopaths and oddballs of various stripes. More than a few of the men had the shifty eyes of gamblers, swindlers and thieves. Looking around at those who remained to be questioned by the police, Dave saw that the crazy and the unlucky were over-represented, while the shifty had quietly moved on.
One of them was a thin, fit man whose head was covered with a black knit hat. He had used burnt cork to hide his face from glare and notice as he moved down an alley near Connecticut Avenue and into an area that accommodated a small loading dock for one of the buildings that fronted the avenue. A dumpster was set against the wall of the dock and the man used it as a ledge to gain access to an open window. Within seconds, he was inside and the window was shut. Thirty minutes later he walked out onto Connecticut Avenue, just another well-suited businessman getting an early start to his day.
At the same moment, Dave Haggard was answering questions from D.C. Police Captain Daniel O’Neil, a tall, pot-bellied, red haired Irishman who cultivated reporters all over the city if he thought they might one day be useful to him or the department. O’Neil was heading Homicide at the moment and angling for promotion to Inspector. O’Neil worked reporters he thought might be useful and so Dave had been invited for coffee on several occasions in the past. A half-dozen other street reporters in the city had also been subjected to O’Neil’s charm and bullshit.
“So, you really are a bum,” O’Neil said, laughing at his little joke.
“You guys have been calling us reporters bums for years,” Dave replied, looking tired.
“You’ve been bums for years. Cheer up. You gave your statement to my guys, right?”
“Yeah, I gave it to a couple of guys. Do I need to go downtown?”
“Nah, we’re good. I want you to take a ride with me. I got something you might like for your story, whatever you’re working on.” O’Neil motioned to the door. “Nobody’s gettin’ any sleep here anyway. Hell, it’s almost time to throw you bums out for the day.”
O’Neil drove a standard-issue police sedan, a black four-door, rear-wheel drive behemoth with black wheels. The car might as well have had a neon sign blinking “COP”. He liked it that way. He was the kind of cop who liked people to know he was around and he cultivated a get-out-of-my-w
ay attitude that he found helpful in street investigations. That he coached his son’s Little League team and was an usher at his church in southern Maryland was not widely known to the people he routinely intimidated.
“So, what the hell are you doing sleeping in a place like that?” O’Neil asked.
“I’m researching a story about homelessness in Washington. I have a couple of stations interested in a series of reports about it.” Dave worked for a company called Now News, which sold Washington-based stories to radio and television stations across the country. There were dozens of such operations in Washington, most of them one-man or one-woman offices. Now News was staffed by fifty people, most of them young and available cheap. Some were part time and a few were stringers who worked for peanuts. Dave was Now News’s ace investigative reporter, mostly aiming at official misdeeds, but occasionally going after gritty street stuff.
“Who gives a shit about street bums?”
“Well, as it turns out, people in Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle think it’s a good story. Here we are in our Nation’s Capital, handing out quarters to beggars within sight of the Capitol and the White House. Maybe it makes people in Chicago feel better to know that misfortune isn’t theirs alone.” Dave was trying to be wry and failing at it.
“We got another misfortune for you to look at. Father Phil ain’t the only one who got wacked tonight.” O’Neil liked to use words like “wacked”. He thought it gave him a tough guy image. He drove into an alley off Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle where the lights of police cars were making crazy images on the walls of the adjoining office buildings. He pulled up behind a dumpster and motioned for Dave to get out. “We got another priest meeting his maker.”
The alley was slick with ice that had formed after the sun went down and the melted snow refroze. It was hard to walk in spots and Dave braced himself against a wall, nearly tripping on a dead rat that lay squashed on the concrete. A man’s body was covered by a black plastic tarp but his hands were visible and his body was propped against a building as if he were taking a nap sitting down. Several officers milled around, rubbing their hands together. A police photographer was leaving.
O’Neil talked to a detective who had been smoking in a small alcove, both men motioning to the body and drawing diagrams in the air. Dave wished he had a heavier coat. He also wished he hadn’t given up smoking. O’Neil walked over to Dave and shook his head. “Same thing as the other one. Multiple stab wounds. Somebody really wanted this guy to suffer and die. What do you think? Some kind of Catholic thing?”
Dave was surprised that O’Neil would ask him about the crimes. “I’m not a detective. I don’t know how you guys solve these things.”
O’Neil laughed. “Shit, neither do I, that’s why I’m askin’ you. Hell, let’s get warm. I’ll drive you downtown and we can talk there. You want to take a look before we go?”
“What’s to look at?”
“See for yourself.”
Dave walked over to the body and looked at it. He felt a strange sense of not caring that the man had been alive when the sun went down but would be on a slab when the sun came up. He looked up and took in the details of the alley, grabbing his notebook to jot down the layout of the buildings. A man was standing on P Street, at the end of the alley, looking in. It took Dave a minute to recognize Peppers, who was rubbing his hands together and nodding his head. Dave began walking toward Peppers but the man screamed “Are you the word?” and ran away.