The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

Even the larger undertaking establishments, when business was good, often used one of the four black Suburbans Classic Livery had made available to the trade, as they similarly availed themselves of hearses, flower cars, and limousines from Classic Livery’s fleet when their own equipment was not sufficient to meet the demands of that particular day’s service to the deceased and bereaved.

Classic Livery, Inc., also owned the black Lincoln sedan parked among the rows of cars in the basement garage of Ketcham’s garden apartment, and the four men in it—who had been waiting for Ketcham for two hours before the shit-ass finally showed up—were longtime employees of Classic Livery.

Ketcham parked his Buick coupe in the place reserved for it, got out, reached in and took his briefcase from the rear seat, and walked toward the elevator.

As Ketcham did so, everyone in the Lincoln sedan except the driver got out, and the driver of the remains-transporting Suburban started his engine.

The three men from the Lincoln reached the door to the elevator at about the time Ketcham reached it. One of them, a well-dressed thirty-five-year-old of Sicilian ancestry, smiled at Ketcham and waved him into the open elevator door. When Ketcham had entered the elevator, the three men got into it with him.

The elevator door closed.

The driver of the black Suburban drove to the door of the elevator and backed up to it. The doors were opened from the inside.

The elevator door opened again not quite a full minute later. Ketcham, the upper part of his body now concealed in an overcoat, and staggering, as if he had been subjected to some sort of blow to the head, emerged from the elevator, supported by two of the three men who had entered the elevator with him.

Ketcham was assisted into the Suburban, and one of the three men from the Lincoln got in with him. Ketcham was dragged toward the front of the Suburban—all but the front seat, of course, had been removed, so there would be room for a cadaver—where he lay upon his stomach. The doors were closed.

The other two men walked unhurriedly back to the Lincoln and got in. When the black Suburban drove away from the elevator door toward the entrance of the garage, the Lincoln followed it.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Ketcham asked, his voice somewhat muffled by the overcoat over his head and shoulders.

The man who had opened the doors from the inside, and was now half sitting on a small ledge in the side of the Suburban, kicked him in the face.

“Shut your fucking face,” he said.

He then proceeded to wrap two-inch-wide white surgical—or perhaps “morticians and embalmers”—white gauze around Ketcham’s neck, in such a manner that the overcoat would not become dislodged.

Next, he used the tape to bind Ketcham’s wrists together, and then his ankles.

Approximately five minutes later, Ketcham, who sounded close to tears, said one word: “Please . . .”

This earned him two sharp kicks, one in the ear from the man in the front, and a second in the buttocks, delivered by the man who had smiled at him as he had entered the elevator and who had gotten into the Suburban with him.

Ketcham said nothing else during the rest of the journey, which took approximately forty minutes, and neither did either of the two men with him in the rear of the remains-transporting Suburban.

Ketcham tried to recognize, and make sense of, the sounds and noises he heard during the trip. From the frequent stops and starts, and the sounds of automobiles accelerating and shifting gears, Ketcham deduced they were in

traffic somewhere.

He searched his memory, very hard, in an attempt to guess who was doing this to him and why, but to no avail. The first thing that occurred to him, perhaps naturally, was that it had something to do with Mr. Amos J. Williams.

At first—Ketcham was understandably upset and not thinking too clearly, although the two lines of cocaine he had nasally ingested in the men’s room of the Blue Rock Tavern on his way home gave him a feeling of euphoria about all things, including a sense that his mind was really firing on all twelve cylinders—that seemed the most logical inference to draw.

Williams—and his thugs—had been arrested at the Howard Johnson motel on Roosevelt Boulevard, and I wasn’t. That damned well might have made him suspicious, maybe made him think I had set him up with the police. And his getting arrested had also caused him to lose the cocaine he had intended to sell me. Even if he had paid only half of what he was going to sell it to me for, that’s still ten thousand dollars, and he would be very unhappy about losing that much money.

And if he has decided—he’s not intelligent, obviously, so he’s liable to decide anything—that I had something to do with his arrest, then this may be my punishment for that.

Unlikely. The first thing he would do—intelligent or not, he has a certain criminal cunning—would be to recoup his losses. At least the ten thousand he had invested, and possibly the entire twenty I had agreed to pay him. Once he had done that, he might well kill me. But what would be the purpose?

If it’s money he wants, I’ll promise to get it for him. Under these circumstances, I will be certainly motivated to find it somewhere.

But wait a minute! If this, whatever this is, has something to do with Amos Williams & Company, he would have sent his man Baby Brownlee. The people who are doing this to me are white men!

Could this be a case of mistaken identity?

For that matter, could I be hallucinating? This does feel like a bad dream. Am I going to wake up in just a minute?

Or could I really be hallucinating? I did a couple of lines . . . what, forty minutes ago? Was it bad stuff?