Millstone & Roche 2 - (The Case of Pure Blue Murder) - Chapter 3
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All Rights Reserved © 2021, Rick Haydn Horst Formerly known as Rick Heathen
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Thank you for delving into this work; I hope you enjoy it.
The Case of Pure Blue Murder: a Millstone & Roche Investigation, By Rick Haydn Horst
CHAPTER THREE
[Main Source]
Bare as You Dare Day had arrived, a Franklin Funday that took place the second Saturday of July every year, and it's exactly what it sounds like. The freedom of expression in Franklin was almost sacrosanct, and the city had a sizable number of nudists who went without clothing, weather permitting, of course. Bare as You Dare Day was to celebrate the beauty of the human body without shame, and for us to show solidarity to one of our often-maligned groups who just wanted to live their lives in peace like the rest of us.
All the other groups had their days of celebration as well, for example, May 22 was World Goth Day. The LGBTQ+ pride parade took place the third Saturday in June, International Fetish Day was the third Friday in January, and so on.
Bare as You Dare Day had events that took place in the adults-only Roman Park, the city's largest park at 150 acres. It had a brick serpentine wall surrounding most of it with two entrances made to resemble triumphal arches. It held the city's open-all-hours indoor public pool in a stunning neoclassical edifice of enormous proportions.
Tucker started the Bare as You Dare Day challenge the day of Winter's housewarming, the Hanging of the Chimney Hook, because he and I have one thing in common. In our youths, our prodigious endowments made us feel self-conscious by other people's reaction to it. Independent of one another, we had concluded we should hide it behind long shirttails. But Franklin was not the outside world; we would not have the problem with it there we had elsewhere. So, we had begun tucking our shirts, allowing ourselves the privilege that most every other man took for granted of not giving a fuck if anyone noticed, and that was a huge step for us. However, the Bare as You Dare Day challenge, as well-intended as it may have been, was too much too soon. Tucker came to me earlier in the week informing me that he reconsidered the whole thing. The idea of showing himself in such a public locale, surrounded by thousands of people carrying their cellphones with high-definition cameras and 4K video at the ready like a hounding horde of prospective paparazzi, scared the hell out of him. I commended him for his willingness to admit his limitations. For myself, as Max pointed out, I had a need to keep a low profile due to my witness protection, and Special Agent Thomas Sawyer would probably frown on that kind of exposure. Emiliano Vianello's recognition of my face not withstanding, if most people couldn't recognize my face, that wouldn't mean they couldn't recognize my peace pipe. Its size is particularly uncommon, and in my sexual need over the years, I have enjoyed the talents of a profusion of pole-smokers who would have intimate knowledge of my anatomy. Of course, that wouldn't mean we had to hide ourselves entirely, but just avoid well-lit locations where hundreds of photos at various angles by different people would make it harder to dismiss the images as anything more than photoshop. For as much as Max loved the idea of us joining the events at the park on Bare as You Dare Day, he said he couldn't enjoy them without me. I really hated to disappoint him like that.
When I awoke Saturday, the sunlight from the east side of the building had brightened the sky enough to give the room a pleasant morning glow. Our bodies and sheets had reached the coolness that came with a satisfying slumber, inviting us to remain there, allowing the day to slip away with little notice or concern.
As we tended to arise before dawn by the alarm, I allowed Max a few more minutes of repose as I indulged myself in the experience of a few rare domestic joys. He lay asleep facing me, his golden blonde hair in a handsome display of the manly morning tousle that I found so adorable. In his stillness and steady breath, my eyes lingered upon the lips that I had kissed so many times. In the daytime, those lips would speak to me words of love, compassion, and encouragement, and in the night, they had begun urging me never to stop with a whisper of my name.
Max had not known my previous name, and I wondered how long it would take before he grew curious enough to ask. He assured me that he would never make the mistake of calling me that anywhere but in our most secluded and pleasurable moments. It became our little secret, a name he would call me when he felt the most connected to me, and I longed to hear it. Knowing what it meant, the sound of my name lingering on those lips as they spoke that little four-letter name expressed all I needed to know about us.
With a sudden deep breath, his eyes opened, and there's nothing quite like the feeling of seeing the man you love smile at you the moment he awakens--another domestic joy denied by the morning alarm. He said nothing, pulled me to him, and we rolled until he had me beneath him where he wanted me. He moved my hardening appendage up my body between us where I would be most comfortable. I almost spoke, but he silenced me with a kiss and placed his finger to my lips with a slight shake of his head. I smiled, withheld my "good morning," and played his little quiet game.
Our exhaustion the previous evening prevented us from anything more than removing our clothes and climbing into bed, so I knew what he wanted. Neither of us liked too many hours passing without my cock in his mouth at least once, and while we couldn't always make that happen, he would take a slurp of me as often as possible.
As his hands massaged the shaft, he engulfed the head with his mouth, making love to my schlong. That morning, it was all about the cock, the fact that I was attached to it was a bonus. He bobbed his head on my knob, slid his lips over the shaft, and his talented tongue, where most of the magic happened, cast its spell over me, and within minutes, I was feeding my muscular man his favorite protein shake. Afterward, he hovered over me, kissed me, and we greeted one another with a "good morning."
My first cousin once removed, Albert Sawyer, who lived across the hall had a date the previous evening, so he had company that morning, and as it was Saturday, Tucker would spend a leisurely breakfast with Wade, so Max and I ate alone. By nine o'clock, we were cleaning up discussing the Vianello situation.
"I've given it some thought," I said, "I think Vianello must know everything. I look different enough to fool most people, but he recognized me without having met me. The significance of him even bothering to approach me says something, but I'm not sure what, and that worries me."
"He seemed friendly," said Max. "He asked us to call him Emil. Would someone act so cordial if they meant any harm?"
"That's hard to say; I'm sure it's happened before. You know, Thomas Sawyer told me they sent me to Franklin because it was someplace the mafia wouldn't go. I guess that's out the window."
"Nicolo Vianello is a New York mob boss with a gay brother who lives in Franklin," said Max. "That's why he's here."
"You don't just think that Emil's here for his son Bravo?"
"Oh, come now, have you no gaydar at all? I think both Emil and his son are gay.
"I don't think I have gaydar," I said.
"Well, maybe, that will develop over time. So, you've not changed your mind about meeting Emil tonight at the Belcaro."
I shook my head. "I need answers for my own peace of mind."
"Oh, good. If we can't bare as we dare today with the masses, perhaps, we can tonight with a smaller crowd."
Tucker left that morning to take possession of his new Jeep about the time the department called Detective Edgerton to a crime scene, who called us at 10:30 about the case of blue murder, inviting us to consult.
The village of Gothwick stood in an area that the previous inhabitants of Franklin had allowed to dilapidate, drawing more of the unsavory elements of society. From what we heard; one would have avoided walking down the street in the middle of the night anywhere there. However, an ongoing reclamation and revitalization effort had turned what was once a dangerous and seedy area into a place that someone would feel proud to call home. When we arrived, we had reached the vehicle barrier on the outer edge of the village, so we walked to our destination. We noted the parking structure we utilized even had gothic flair with its pointed archways and black metallic railings.
Gothwick had pedestrianized, and paved with cobblestone, the main portion of the village. They had already lain the stones for the main thoroughfare of Walpole Avenue and all its side streets for several blocks in every direction. People strode about their business dressed in various modes of goth and gothic attire before public buildings whose Victorian Era facades looked right out of a Dickens or Stoker novel. No detail was overlooked, even every window in sight utilized the period-appropriate, smaller panes of glazing, but sandwiched between two larger panes of plate security glass, providing the Victorian aesthetic with a level of precaution that would still satisfy an insurance company. One thing struck me about it all, though, rather than using various treatments to provide the buildings with an aged appearance, everything looked relatively new, as it would have 150 years earlier. I guessed they wanted it to age naturally over time.
From the map on Max's phone, we found Gothwick Cemetery, a few blocks off Walpole Avenue located between a housing area and the 80 percent finished, gothic cathedral inspired by Notre Dame in Paris. Since people were leaving the area, the Catholic Church couldn't afford to complete or maintain it, so they abandoned it in the early 1990s. The property was sold to the city during that area's most derelict era.
Like many cemeteries throughout the world, a wall enclosed this one, but through the gate we could see many mature trees and several thousand above-ground vaults visible in a pre-parceled, well-maintained space that could easily hold over a million internments on its 120 acres. It seemed clear that the planners of the cemetery intended it as a long-term plan for Franklin County, which could take a couple of hundred years to fill.
We found the entrance to the cemetery at the cut-off corner of the property. It sat within sight of the unfinished cathedral, providing a gothic-ruin like quality to the atmosphere. One of a couple of uniformed officers greeted us at the gate barring entry to the crime scene. He told us we would find the mausoleum where the path before us named Eternity met the junction for the paths of Chaos and Harmony.
I held Max's hand and we strolled the pebbled pathway with the tread of our feet, the occasional bird, and the light breeze rustling the leaves of trees as the only sounds. Having reached that point more than three football fields lengths into the cemetery, there stood the largest and most prominent mausoleum located in the center of an over-sized, raised platform of octagonal shape. The structure, made of some gray stone and 30 feet tall and 40 feet in diameter, appeared to me like the fully rounded apse of a cathedral built with a series of buttresses and all the necessary trappings of Gothic architecture.
However, as attractive as we found the mausoleum, it couldn't hold our attention. Similar in positions to the numbers on a clock face, seven elongated stone vaults surrounded the building on the octagonal platform's flat sides about 30 feet from the building. We stood on the three steps that led to the top, where the eighth one at 6 o'clock should have been. Upon the first vault to our right, near the mature Dragon's Blood Tree, sat a larger-than-life, white granite statue of an attractive naked man crouching down, and on his back, he displayed an enormous, elegantly crafted set of bronze bat wings. Max and I studied the eye-catching piece for a moment. By the statue's appearance, I sensed the being had just landed, and having flown a great distance, he paused to catch his breath, the chiseled features of his face expressed his fatigue, and his eyes stared intently at the door of the mausoleum before him.
"Beautiful, isn't he?" said a somber feminine voice. The intrusion into the silence startled both Max and me; we spun toward the sound. "He's the first of our seven fallen watchers," it said. "I suppose we'll have to install the second one now." The woman stood in the shadows near the door and seemed reluctant to step into the light to show herself fully.
"Who are you?" I asked as we approached the shadowy form.
"I'm Twila Korbel, but you might hear the others call me Ms. Renfield."
She opened the door and entered the mausoleum, so we did likewise. The interior showed that it had no windows, but enough light emanated from the fixtures in the dome-like ceiling and walls to see well once Twila closed the door behind us, shutting out the sunshine. It lasted only a moment, but I got a better look at Twila. At about 35 years old, she had straight, tawny hair, a beautiful face, pale skin, and light-colored eyes. Her tan pants and cream-colored button-up told me that she wasn't goth. In the center of the room lay a stone staircase built into the sides of a wide circular shaft that spiraled downward.
"Don't you want to know who we are?" asked Max, his voice echoing off the stone surrounding us.
"I know who you are," she said in a smooth, breathy voice. "You're the private dicks looking for Officer Sawyer." Twila gripped the wrought iron handrail as she descended, and we followed.
"Detective Edgerton isn't here?" I asked.
"He left about 15 minutes ago; he said that someone found a body in a motel on the other side of the city."
"Another body?" asked Max.
"When it rains, it pours, eh, fellas?"
The voice was Albert Sawyer's, my first cousin once removed, and came from 350 feet below us. When we reached the bottom of the staircase, Albert stood there looking official in his usual leather police uniform, but we had foregone our usual hug as the magnificent room had us distracted.
During our years living in the City of Franklin, Max and I had come across many unusual places and complicated circumstances. It took time to learn the full story behind where we were, but I'll try to condense it. Throughout the 20th century, Gothwick was known by the name Franklin Heights, a middle-class neighborhood with a lot of nuclear families, away from the more coveted neighborhoods like those that became Estonia and Queensbury located on "the other side of the bay" as the locals called it. Franklin Heights held the families of businessmen and the people who kept Franklin functioning as a city.
During the boom time in the early part of the 20th century, in Franklin's determination to "Keep Up with the Jones's" of other cities who people viewed as modern, the city started an effort to have its own subway system. The spending for it got out of control, and when the stock market crashed in 1929, that effort died as unceremoniously as the men who jumped to their death from the rooftops of downtown buildings. So, the lengthy tunnels sat un-railed and unused, languishing underground for decades. After the Second Red Scare of the 1950s, and when the fallout shelter craze began, someone got the bright idea to enlarge some areas of the tunnels and utilize them as the city's underground bunkers in the case of a nuclear attack. They located one of them at the subway station in Franklin Heights.
After many years, a group of seven Elder Goths, known as The Fallen Watchers, bought the land that contained the entrance to the subway, including the subway station turned nuclear bunker. They also purchased its neighboring park from the city when it went up for sale (a popular hangout for drug addicts in the past), and they bought several adjacent properties with dilapidating buildings and abandoned houses. They razed all the buildings and turned the whole 120 acres into an asset for the non-profit organization they formed called Gothwick Cemetery, licensed by both the state and local government. Their intention was to create a cemetery with a beauty on par with the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. They started selling grave plots and utilized the revenue to build the walled enclosure for the property, to build the mausoleum over the underground entrance, and to improve the underground space. Through the non-profit, they rented the underground bunker to themselves for a profit-making vampire goth nightclub called The Crypt. The high rent they paid to the non-profit was utilized to improve the cemetery, to assist with paying for elaborate above-ground vaults and statuary for those who couldn't afford it, and for the completed renovation we stared at just then in awe.
They restructured the entire underground interior, removing two suspended floors that had divided the height of the room by thirds. Seeing it as we saw it then, I couldn't imagine the space the elders had purchased from the city, but 12 years of hard work and vision had us enveloped by a voluminous room that once just held the platforms where one would catch the non-existent subway train (the recesses in the floor for those were filled in). They had lined the room in Corinthian columns about 80 feet tall. Their heights led the eye upward to the breathtaking fan vaulted ceiling that stretched the full length of the room, 100 yards long and 35 yards wide. If we hadn't a job to do and a body to see, I felt I could have stood there for hours, my attention lost to anything, but the delicate shadows cast by the intricate stones laid on the ceiling above us with spiderweb-like precision and artistry. The walls, where some designs might have had towering tracery windows, they had covered in blood red velvet draperies to help absorb the music they played during the night hours. In various strategic places stood spiring electric candelabras, and massive chandeliers hung from the ceiling. A series of carpets covered the floor in most areas and upon them they placed Victorian era lounges and other seating. And finally, upon that seating sat three women and three men, all wore robes or dressing gowns, and all were weeping.
"Who are they?" I asked.
Twila said, "They're Pascal and the five remaining Elder Goths of the nightclub's coven of vampires."
"Vampires...," said Max. "It's daytime. Shouldn't they be in their coffins?"
"They were," said Albert. "We woke them when we got here, and they were none too happy about it, but once they discovered why, they've been like that."
"They loved Barty very much," said Twila. "We all did."
"From left to right," said Albert, "that's the couple Genevieve Beausoleil and Pascal Cochet, Cyra and Yvonne Beausoleil are also a couple, and so are Wren and Fabrice Beausoleil. Beausoleil is their coven surname taken from the original elder's birth surname, Nathanael Beausoleil. He died three years ago from heart disease. The statue you couldn't have missed on the surface sits on his tomb and the artist made it in Nathanael's likeness. None of these people are biologically related. They all claim to have last seen the victim Bartholomew Beausoleil well before 4:00 a.m. when the club closed, and everyone went to their rooms. They all give one another an alibi."
One of the forensics team handed us a pair of nitrile gloves and shoe covers, and Albert led us to a room to the far right.
The perpetrator had left the door open, that's how Ms. Korbel found the body at 8 o'clock this morning when she arrived. I glanced about before we entered. The room, the size of a large hotel room, included a full bathroom. It had the same mottled tan and beige polished granite floor that the rest of the underground had. Along with the roomful of ostentatious, gilded, Louis the XVI furniture, a wardrobe, clothes drawers, end tables, an enormous bed, a table with chairs, comfortable seating, a desk, and a harpsichord--much of it with a Chinoiserie finish--it also included a wide, freestanding coffin made in a matching style. It sat on a rug in prominence before the wall-to-wall glass-fronted display cabinet that covered the space where one might have expected to see a bank of windows. Then, of course, there was the obvious naked body of a man on the floor with an ornate wooden stake through his heart, and a wooden mallet lying beside him. A man of short stature in white coveralls was standing over it, waiting with the look of impatience.
"This is forensic pathologist, Dr. Boram Gun," said Albert. "Dr. Gun, these are the consultants of whom I told you, Howard Millstone and Max Roche."
He shook our hands. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said. "Sorry for the rush, but I must do this and go. Detective Edgerton needs me at the other crime scene, and that means I now have two bodies to autopsy. This man either hit the back of his head--possibly on the floor--or someone struck him with a blunt object sometime the previous evening. It's hard to say what or if anything occurred from that. By the coloring and swelling, it might have occurred two hours prior to his death. Based on the body temperature, rigor, and lividity, he died around 6 o'clock this morning. It appears he was killed with a wooden stake about two centimeters in diameter through the heart, but I'll have to conduct the postmortem to know for sure."
"There's not much blood," said Max. "I would have expected more."
The doctor smiled a little. "Officer Sawyer said you were once a registered nurse. I thought the same thing. I will admit, though, this is a new one for me. So, without the autopsy, I'm just guessing here, but if it were done rapidly, maybe, the stake is sort of acting like a plug. I'll have to see. Have you any questions of me?"
"Not here," I said. "It would be good to have your lab results. Thank you for waiting, I apologize that it took so long to get here."
"No problem. It wasn't that long. The forensics team has finished fingerprinting and photographing, I'll have them take the body to the lab as I go, but a few will remain to bag and tag the remaining evidence once you've had a look. That's how Detective Edgerton prefers it." He picked up his forensics case and hurried away as the bagging of the body began.
"We're pretty sure that the stake and mallet came from this cabinet on the wall," said Albert.
Max and I gave it a look. The cabinet in question contained a well-lit display of a series of unusual items grouped together in sets with various sorts of cases. The one Albert pointed out contained an antique glass flask with a silver cap and matching crucifix attached to the side, a silver magnifying glass, a glass syringe, five antique crucifixes made of wood and silver, a rosary with beads made of bloodstone, an empty space for a wooden mallet, and four ornate wooden stakes with elaborate carved crosses. We also saw an empty slot for the matching stake that someone had hammered into the deceased.
"Are all these what I think they are?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Albert. "It seems Bartholomew Beausoleil had a fascination with vampire slaying kits. He'd collected quite a number of them."
"That was Nathanael's collection," said Ms. Korbel who stood outside the door, making way for the body as they removed it. "And those aren't real. He just bought those for display. Most of the pieces inside them are antique, but they were assembled sometime in the last 50 years into cases made to appear old. He always appreciated the wooden one that opens like an old medicine chest most. He had only one genuine kit, built by an 18th century Italian priest. He said that one's worth a lot of money. I don't know how much."
"Where is that one?" asked Max.
"A safety deposit box."
"Can you tell if anything in this room is missing?" I asked.
"I glanced around after I phoned about the body. It all looked the same, except the case on the table there. He would never have laid it on the table--it scratched the finish--and as you can see, someone cut the sealing straps. Barty would never have opened it. He bought it for Wren to open at his birthday party next week. It's probably the most valuable, portable thing in the room but they left it."
"What's it worth?" asked Max.
"I'm not sure," she said, "but Barty was known for extravagant gifts. He meant it as a surprise."--she turned her head for a second--"Excuse me, apparently `Ms. Renfield' is being summoned by Genevieve." She took a deep breath and departed.
I looked Albert in the face, and I could see his eagerness to tell us about it. "You know about this wine, don't you?"
Albert said, "It's an Italian wine called Caeruleum Occidentum, that's Latin for Blue Murder. It's what Detective Edgerton referred to when he called you. Each bottle is worth $15,000 and there's 12 bottles, so it's $180,000 worth of wine."
I moved to the plastic case on the table and noted that whoever sat it there had indeed scratched the table's pristine finish with it. I opened the lid. "Being the wine connoisseur among us, Al, I'll take your word for it."
It was built like an oversized rolling suitcase. Each wine bottle slipped inside a hole built into the special foam interior and a foam insert slipped over the neck of the bottle to prevent any jostling.
"So, what makes it so valuable?" asked Max.
"The Italian vintner made it from a single grape vine found growing somewhere near Rome. As it grew, they propagated the vine by re-grafting it repeatedly to create a small vineyard of special vines that grow blue grapes. It's just caused by some natural genetic variation, a fluke really, and one might say, they're milking that vine for all its worth. The company started wine production in 2005, and they produce a couple of thousand cases of blue wine every year. It's a novelty wine, but it's good enough to draw a high demand."
I carefully removed a bottle from the case. The vintners used a standard size bottle made of opaque black satin glass, and they had dipped the entire top of the bottle in soft, light blue sealing wax with a round "C.O." emblem pressed into the very top. The paper label read "Caeruleum Occidentum" in an attractive font, and among all the necessary features indicative of Italian wines, it listed the vintage as 2009.
"Why do they call it Blue Murder?" asked Max.
"That's the other reason it has a high demand. A legend surrounding the vine has cropped up. It's hard to know if the name or the legend came first. Someone supposedly planted the original vine on the grave of a murdered Italian aristocrat named Count Francesco Cenci in the late 16th century, and that turned the grapes blue for his blue blood. He was a despicable person by all accounts. It was known that he abused his daughter Beatrice and raped her repeatedly. So, to rid themselves of him, his family bludgeoned him to death with a hammer. They were arrested, and despite the abuse, Pope Clement the 8th showed no mercy and had the daughter beheaded along with other adult members of her family. When having this wine at gatherings, it's become tradition to make the first toast to Beatrice Cenci due to the injustice."
"I can imagine a wealthy vampire goth finding that story appealing enough to make a purchase," said Max.
"So, we have a real case of Blue Murder," I said.
Albert nodded. "Yeah. We were told by the others that we will discover this room loaded with the DNA of hundreds of people. So, the chances of us catching the assailant that way will likely turn up a big goose egg. He was the only one of the elders to have no partner, and he was sexually prolific, apparently. The others here saw him with multiple people last night, and he disappeared into his room before the nightclub closed. They don't know if he invited anyone to spend the day with him in his coffin, and he sometimes did that. As you can see, someone made up the bed, but a damp towel lay on the rack in the bathroom, so he probably showered before intending to go to bed. The others say that no one ever locked interior doors here, so if anyone hid inside the club they could have entered while he showered, if they weren't already in the room."
"He comes out," I said, "catches the culprit messing with the wine case and scratching his furniture. They argue, he gets tripped up, he falls and hits his head on the granite floor...and then what? The assailant takes the time to kill him with the stake through the heart but then leaves the wine?" I thought about it for a moment and shook my head. "No, I don't like it; we're missing something."
"Maybe, they'll find something in the forensic evidence," said Max. "We probably should wait. But I have a question. How the hell did they get all these antiques down those stairs?"
"They didn't," said Albert. "They have a freight elevator to the surface in the back. It's also used as the entrance for anyone with mobility issues."
"Oh good," I said to Max. "Call me lazy if you want, but we're going out that way."
The baroque-style phone on the desk rang. Cell service couldn't reach that far underground, so everything was wired in. Albert picked up the old-fashioned handset and smiled at the oddity of a landline in our modern, wireless era. It was Detective Edgerton. Albert stood there listening with several vocal indications that he was continuing to listen. "Right," he said. "I'll send them over." He then replaced the handset onto the phone. "This just got more complicated. Detective Edgerton says he needs you at the Placid Motel on Bay Boulevard. The man whose body the maid found this morning is the same man who delivered this case of Blue Murder here yesterday afternoon."
Please send questions, comments, or complaints to RickHaydnHorst@gmail.com. I would enjoy reading what you have to say. I ask for patience, I'm writing this as I go, like I did the first novel, and it's going to take time. Keep checking back!