Gridiron - Philip Kerr

There was a bar on San Pedro Street Grabel went to, just a few blocks east of the Gridiron, an area of cheap hotels and Skid Row mission houses. He sat at the bar and put some money on the counter, so as the bartender would know he could pay, and ordered a drink. His hands were shaking. Had he screwed Richardson and his new building, or was he still planning to do it? He downed the drink, felt better and ordered another. He tried to remember the events of the previous evening and then thought again. Even the worst things looked better after a couple of drinks.

-###-

When the police had removed the body and the SID was finished in the computer room, Bob Beech surveyed Yojo's empty desk with sadness.

'Poor old Hideki,' he said.

'Yeah,' said Kenny. 'Strangled. Who'd want to strangle him?'

'The cop only said it was a possibility,' Mitch reminded them.

'Did you see Hideki's face?' said Kenny. 'You don't get a face like that singing in a church choir. Something happened to him. Something bad. You can bet on that.'

'Who would want to murder Hideki?' said Mitch.

Ken shrugged and shook his head.

'They took his chair away,' said Beech. 'Why did they do that?'

'Why do you think?' said Mitch. 'He must have crapped himself or something. Can't you smell it?'

'Not with these sinuses.'

'It's kind of high,' said Kenny. 'Abraham? Would you please change the air in here.'

'As you wish, sir.'

'Shit. Will you look at that?' Kenny pointed at Yojo's desk lamp. The transformer housing had melted, and although it was now cool it had the appearance of hot tar. 'Careless bastards. Some dumb cop must have folded it back while it was switched on.'

'My ex-girlfriend caught her hair on one of those halogen light bulbs and set it on fire,' said Beech.

'Jesus. Was she all right?'

'She was fine. I never did like her hair long.'

Kenny tried the light switch and found that the lamp was still working.

'Kind of surreal looking, don't you think? Like a Salvador Dali.'

Beech sat down heavily in his own chair, placed his elbows on the desk and sighed.

'I knew Hideki for almost ten years. There wasn't anything he didn't know about computers. The little Japanese bastard. Jesus, he was only thirty-seven. I can't believe he's dead. I mean, he seemed perfectly normal when I left last night. And, you know, since he started going to that chiropractor of your's, Aid, he'd stopped having his headaches.'

Beech shook his head. 'This is really going to hurt the Corp in America. Jardine Yu isn't going to believe it. Hideki was key to all our plans for the next five years.'

'We'll all miss him,' insisted Kenny.

Mitch waited for a moment and then said, 'That glitch on the real-time images program. D'you think he fixed it?'

Bob Beech pressed his palm on to the desk screen in front of him.

'We'll soon find out,' he said.

'What exactly was the problem?' said Mitch.

'Believe it or not,' Beech said, 'Abraham was just too fast for the RTI software. To trick the eye into believing that a holographic image is actually moving you need a minimum of sixty updates a second. That requires a data rate of around 12 trillion bits per second. Previous RTIs didn't give much more than a second or two's worth of interactive moving image, and even then it was kind of jerky looking. But by using LEMON, Yu Corp's new data compression program, and parallel processing, we worked out how to simulate terahertz-chip performance and make the RTI look lifelike. Our only problem was that the custommade software couldn't keep up. Hideki was trying to find some sort of equilibrium to achieve a smoother image.'

'You're going to run the program now, Bob?' said Kenny. He sounded surprised. 'Do you think that's a good idea?'

'Best way I know of checking it through.'

'I guess you're right. But I'd better check the atrium in case anyone's hanging around there.'

'Hey, you're right,' laughed Beech. 'RTI's liable to give someone the fright of their life when it comes on line. We've had enough shocks for one day.'

-###-

The Queen of Angels Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on

North Vermont Avenue was just north of the Hollywood Freeway. Only a short ride west from New Parker Center it was where the downtown Homicide Bureau's autopsies were carried out when the city's murder rate was even higher than usual and there was no more room for bodies at the County General Hospital.

Curtis and Coleman had already made the trip on four occasions that week and to save time they were attending two autopsies: one the shooting of a young black gangster and the other the death of Hideki Yojo.

The shooting was straightforward enough. Roo Evans, twenty years old and tattooed with a Playboy bunny that identified the gang which he belonged to, had been involved in a car chase with a rival gang up the Harbor Freeway. When they finally caught up with him, close to the LA Convention Center, they fired eleven rounds of 9 millimetre into his chest.

After the first autopsy Curtis and Coleman sat drinking coffee in the Detectives' Room, waiting for the doctor to come and tell them when she was ready to section Hideki Yojo. It was another hot day and the smell was starting to turn Coleman's stomach.

'How does she do it?'

'Who?'

'Janet. Dr Bragg. Two in a row. I mean, Christ. She opened that kid's belly up like he was a goddamn trout.'

'It didn't need much help from her,' observed Curtis. 'Eleven rounds of 9 M. Those guys really made sure of it. A Glock. Just like you, Nat.'

'What am I, a suspect?'

'You always had a double-stack nine?'

'My momma done told me. I never was much of a shot, so I thought it was best I should have something to lay down lots of lead.'

The door opened and an attractive middle-aged black woman pushed her head into the room. 'We're about to start, gentlemen,' said Janet Bragg. She handed Curtis a small bottle of eucalyptus oil.

Curtis unscrewed the top and then dabbed some under each nostril. Nathan Coleman did the same and lit a defensive cigarette for good measure.

'Tell him what a smoker's lung looks like when it's on the slab, Janet,' said Curtis as they stepped into the corridor.

'It's a sight,' she admitted with considerable understatement. 'Odour's worse, though. Like concentrated ashtrays.'

Bragg was dressed for a shift in a hamburger factory: white overalls, gumboots, a plastic hair covering, goggles, an apron, heavy duty rubber gloves.

'You're looking good today, Janet,' said Coleman. 'Mmm. I like a woman who knows how to excite a man by the way she dresses.'

'Since you mention it,' said Bragg, 'there was semen on the inside of the cadaver's underpants.'

'Before he died, he came in his pants?' Nathan Coleman's surprise was mixed with revulsion.

'Well he didn't do it afterwards,' observed Curtis. 'That's for sure.'

'It's not uncommon in cases involving strangulation.'

'Is that what this is?' said Curtis. 'A strangulation?'

Bragg pushed open two flexible membrane doors that led into a large cold room.

'We'll soon see.'

Yojo's naked body lay on his refrigeration tray next to a stainless-steel autopsy table. Curtis had seen Bragg work often enough to know that she would require no assistance in shifting the body on to the table. Rollers beneath the perforated grid of the table allowed her to launch Yojo directly onto the table with one hand; and she performed this manoeuvre with the practised air of a stage magician removing a tablecloth from underneath a dinner service. Next she adjusted the height of the table and switched on an air-extraction facility that led into a below-slab ducting system. A biopsy sink was fitted at one end, with two lever-action mixer taps. She turned the taps on and also a spray washing handset with a flexible hose.

When she was ready Curtis turned on the Super-8 video camera that would record the whole autopsy. He checked the focus and then stood back to watch her work.

'Usual autopsy signs of asphyxia,' remarked Bragg, 'but there are no marks of any kind on the neck,' she observed, turning Yojo's head one way and then the other. 'Hard to see how he was strangled.'

'What about a plastic bag over the head?' suggested Curtis.

'Don't rush me, Frank,' she scolded and picked up her scalpel. Autopsy procedure had changed very little in the twenty years Frank Curtis had worked in homicide. Having examined the exterior of the body for any abnormality or trauma the main incisions remained the same. A Y-shaped incision, with each arm of the Y extending from the armpit beneath the breast to the botton of the sternum in the midline; and from this point of juncture to the lower abdomen and the genital area. Janet Bragg worked quickly, ligating the great vessels to the head, neck and arms and humming a little tune to herself as she prepared to remove the organs for later dissection.

The hum became the words of a song by Madonna.

'Holida-ay! It would be all right! Holida-ay!'

'I like a woman who's happy in her work,' said Curtis.

'You get used to anything.'

She collected the chest organs, placed them in a plastic bucket and repeated the procedure with the abdominal organs, for which there was a separate bucket. Groups of organs were always removed together so that any disturbances in their functional relationships might be determined. Then she picked up her electric saw and began to remove the vault of Hideki Yojo's skull.

Curtis looked around for Nathan Coleman and found him seated at a bench and looking through a microscope at a length of his own hair.

'Look, Nat, it's just like eating a boiled egg,' he remarked cruelly. 'Or are you one of these weirdos who insists on bashing the top in and peeling off the pieces of shell?'

Coleman tried to ignore the sound of the saw.

'I never eat eggs,' he said quietly. 'I can't stand the smell of them.'

'What a sensitive soul you are.'

'Holy shit,' breathed Bragg. What she saw when she removed the dome had left her feeling astonished for the first time in years.

'What is it?'

'I never did,' she said, grinning excitedly. 'I never did see such a thing.'

'Don't make us beg for it, Janet.'

'Wait just a moment.' She picked up a curved curette and worked it around the inside of Yojo's head before allowing the contents of his skull to fall into her hands.

'What have you got?'

Nathan Coleman stood up and joined Curtis at the side of the autopsy table.

'I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself.'

She laid an object about the size of a tennis ball on to a surgical plate and stood back, shaking her head. The thing was dark, brown and crispy looking, almost as if it had been dipped in hot fat.

'What the fuck is that?' breathed Curtis. 'Some kind of tumour?'

'That's no tumour. What you are looking at, gentlemen, is all that's left of this man's brain.'

'You're shitting me!'

'Take a look inside his skull, Frank. There's nothing else hiding in there.'

'Jesus, Janet,' exclaimed Coleman, 'that thing looks like a goddamned hamburger.'

'A little overdone for my taste,' said Curtis.

Bragg picked up the brain and placed it on the scales. It weighed less than five ounces.

'So what happened to it?' said Curtis.

'I've only ever read about this,' Bragg admitted, 'but I'd say it's more than likely he suffered a massive epileptic fit. There is an extremely rare condition known as status epilepticus. Most epileptic fits last a few minutes, but occasionally they're prolonged more than, say, thirty minutes, or several occur so rapidly that there is no recovery between successive attacks. The brain overworks itself to the extent that it fries itself in the skull.'

'An epileptic fit did this? But what about the ejaculate?'

'A strong electrical excitation of the brain will cause it to experience a quite bewildering series of sensations and emotions, Frank. Erection and orgasm could follow as a corollary of the hypothalamus and nearby septal areas of the brain becoming excited.' Bragg nodded. 'That's what must have happend. Only I never saw one myself, until now.'

Curtis took out his ballpoint pen and poked the cooked brain as if it had been a dead beatle.

' Status epilepticus,' he said thoughtfully. 'How about that? But what might have caused a fit on this sort of scale? Aren't you curious? You said yourself it's kind of unusual.'

She shrugged.

'It could have been anything. Intercranial tumour, neoplasm, abscess, thrombosis of the superficial veins. He was a computer worker, right?

Well, maybe it was brought on by staring at the monitor screen. That would have done it. Investigate his background. Could be he had some kind of medical condition that he kept quiet about. With the brain in the condition it's in now, I've done all I can. You might as well section shoe leather for all that piece of shit is going to tell us.'

-###-

'Natural causes,' said Mitch. 'They just heard from the coroner's office. An epileptic fit. A fairly massive one as it happened. Hideki had a predisposition to epilepsy. He was photosensitive and his seizure was triggered by his computer screen. It seems he actually knew that he should never have gone near a television monitor.' Mitch shrugged. 'But then, what else could you do if computers were your life?'

He had met Ray Richardson on the stairs at the office. Richardson was carrying a large briefcase and a laptop computer and was on his way to LAX. His Gulfstream was waiting to fly him to Tulane, where he was to present the directors of the local university's law school with his design for their new smart faculty building.

'I can understand that,' said Richardson. 'I guess if some doctor told me I should stay away from new buildings I'd ignore him too.'

Mitch nodded thoughtfully, uncertain if he would have thought quite the same way about it.

'Walk down to the car with me, will you, Mitch?'

'Sure.'

Mitch assumed that Richardson's troubled expression related to the tragedy of Yojo's death. But he was only partly correct.

'I want you to speak to our lawyers, Mitch. Tell them what happened to Yojo. You'd better call our insurers too. Just in case some sonofabitch on a contingency decides to try and make a case. Until that building is signed off it's our ass they'll come looking for, not the Yu Corporation.'

'Ray, it was natural causes. There's no way we could be held liable for that.'

'No harm in explaining all the circumstances to an attorney,"

Richardson insisted. 'Yojo was working late, wasn't he? Maybe someone will say that someone else should have stopped him. You see what I'm doing? I'm just trying to think like some fucking asshole of a lawyer here, Mitch. The kind of shit they might try and hit us with. The sort of argument that might make us liable. God, I really hate those bastards.'

'I wouldn't tell that to Tulane Law School,' Mitch advised him.