Garvey pulled a particularly thick file from the stack on his desk and flipped through it. After scanning a few pages he identified the case as an ancient one, not even his, an heirloom from a previous detective. He set it to the side, knowing that it had to die eventually, and then he pushed deeper into the stack of remaining papers.
Garvey was never entirely sure how much work he had left at any given moment. He’d often meant to arrange his paperwork according to some structure, but before he could begin he needed to clear out what was still left to do. After several months of delays he now saw little chance of that. Usually his desk resembled a battlefield, or even an architectural miracle; stacks of files slouched up against one another, propped up by cups or boxes or envelopes or even silverware, with corners or edges bent up to form little flags or markers whose meanings he soon forgot. Sometimes he thought his desk was sentient, lurking in the back of the Homicide office and soaking up the perfume of burned coffee and stale cigarette smoke that pervaded the upper floors of the Department. Every other day he’d prune it back, removing one of the more outrageous towers of paper and shuffling it off to elsewhere, but then the next day the growth of papers would have almost magically regenerated until it threatened to spill over the edges.
The mess of paperwork had only one consistent feature: a photograph that always peeked over a stack of old reports in the corner. The visible part of the photograph showed two little girls, each somberly staring at him over the reports as though hiding. Somewhere in the bottom of the photograph, concealed by the paperwork, was Garvey’s ex-wife, seated before the girls and smiling. Some days Garvey felt the urge to lift the paperwork away and to show her as well. On others he felt like piling more on and covering up the photograph entirely so they could not see what he had to deal with each day. But mostly he did nothing, and so his two little girls remained there, yellowing and watchful, and somehow reproachful as he did his day’s work.
That day had dragged on after the morning at the canal, a slow slog of repetitious conversations with starved men and women with sunken eyes. Now at the end he documented it all, scrawling down the essentials, ensuring that they became an immortal part of the Evesden Police Department’s filing system.
He took out a small pad and read what he had written there to remind himself. Then he looked up and scanned the wealth of misery at his fingertips and selected the appropriate report and opened it.
This one a trembling mother who had stabbed her daughter’s lover. The boy had clutched a balcony railing, a pair of knitting shears buried at the base of his neck. Mouth gaping like a fish, blood raining down on the street. Dozens of witnesses had seen her standing at the balcony door, howling obscenities at this terrified, dying thing, but few had stayed, and those who had did not wish to testify. Instead Garvey had spoken to her after. She had listened to him as he told her he understood perfectly, son of a bitch had it coming, why, I got two little girls of my own and if I’d been in your shoes…
At the end of the day she had been led to her cell, confident in his sympathy, assured that the world would turn out all right. He filled out her paperwork and set her judgment in motion. Fed her into the waiting doom that he created.
Garvey wrote it all down. All down.
His hand passed over another report. He remembered it from last May. A woman trampled in a stable, having been led there by a paranoid lover. The man had frightened the horses and then locked the door and leaned against it, trapping her inside. Garvey remembered the musty stink of manure and the scent of animal anxiety that had still sung in the air. He remembered her ribs broken and leaking, viscera pooling from her neck and hip. A jawbone so bloodless it was like old wood. Her killer had been found sobbing in an alley not more than a block away, urine snailing down both trouser legs. When Garvey had gotten ahold of him the trembling man could do no more than mewl “yes” or “no,” but it was all Garvey needed, or at least all that was required by the city of Evesden.
That had been an easy one. Fallen and filed in minutes, hours. Garvey wrote it down, wrote it all down, and as he added on to the report he went over the names in his head. The bronzed list on the Pit wall. Names of the dead, hanging tags and labels for things long since departed. It seemed there were so many these days.
He pulled open a drawer, fingers dancing along the edges of the tomes. He dug up an old report for a fellow detective. He had found a man with the corpse of a little girl in his arms, rocking gently back and forth in the blackened corner of a burned-down building, murmuring, “I just wanted something beautiful. I just wanted something beautiful.”
Garvey remembered it. He had been there. The girl’s dusty skin had been the color of ripe melon, and both their cheeks stained with ashes, like survivors of an immolated world. They could not determine how she had died, since the fracture in her skull could have been accidental. There had been no witnesses, and the man had seemed mad since, so they could not say what had happened, not with certainty. Perhaps he was simply a crazed vagrant who’d stumbled across her where she lay. But a day ago Garvey had tracked down a street vendor who’d heard that the suspect had been awful riled up for young pussy, yessir. Awful riled up, but when wasn’t he? And could you blame him? Could you, really?
Write it down, write it all down, he said to himself. If you don’t write it and file it, then it didn’t happen. Write and keep writing.
Another handful of pages, another memory. He remembered a little black newsie no older than sixteen, shot four times next to a newspaper stand. Keeled over with one hand clutched around the leg of the stand as if trying to anchor himself to life. He had held a sheet of newspaper over his face, trying to prevent passersby from witnessing his death. Some curbside Julius Caesar who considered his fellow man too common to see his passing.
They had not found his killer. It went unfiled. Still he wrote.
Then when Garvey was done he sat looking at this new report. John Doe, found floating in a man-made river, washed away like the other refuse of this city. There were only three pages of it so far. Almost nothing.
He wondered how Hayes would look at it. He probably wouldn’t even bother. That was what made him good, plus the mad gift that ate his brain alive, thought Garvey. But it also made him weak. He would look for the flash and the glitter, things that intrigued and teased him. But without it there was no point to the chase. No fun.
This was not fun. Nor was it meant to be.
“Garvey?” said a voice.
He looked up and saw Collins sidling over, his hangdog face somehow even deeper and sadder in the light of the table lamps. “What are you doing here?” he said. “This isn’t your shift.”
“No, Lieutenant,” said Garvey. “I’m just waiting. I’ve got a body downstairs. Gibson’s going to start in on it in a second.”
Collins shook his head and leaned over Garvey’s shoulder to read his paperwork. His lieutenant was a big man, broad in the shoulders with a walrus mustache, but his droopy, pessimistic demeanor often made people forget his size. On the rare moments when he showed his anger he suddenly seemed to swell up and tower over people. Whether they were errant detectives or babbling suspects, it often had dramatic effects.
“Always gets to me,” he said. “How you look. Most cops, they’d do anything to get away.”
“I know,” said Garvey.
“You think this one’s got any promise?”
Garvey helplessly lifted his hands and dropped them. “It’s a piece of shit.”
“Hm. No one likes a floater, that’s for sure. What about your spook? The blondie, did you bring him in?”
“Yeah. He didn’t have anything. Makes sense. If our boy was McNaughton he was definitely lower-level. Insignificant, I suppose.”
“I hate that little shit. I don’t see why you run around with him.”
“He gets bodies filed.”
“I still don’t like him,” said Collins. “He stinks of that goddamn company he works for.”
Garvey hesitated, tongue between his lips. “Lieutenant?”
“Yeah?”
“Mind if I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“This prioritization thing. I heard that came in from Brightly. You know, over at-”
“I know who he is,” said Collins sharply.
“Well. Is it true, sir?”
Collins eyed him sourly, hunching up his shoulders until the muscles bunched around his neck. His gin-blossom cheeks deepened in tint until they were nearly purple. “You know what, I’m going to suggest you put your attention elsewhere,” he said. He reached out and touched the files on his desk with one thick finger. “Maybe on this, eh? Does that sound agreeable to you?”
Garvey nodded and stared into his desk. “Right,” he said. He glanced sideways and sighed as he watched Collins hulk back into his office.
“Detective?” said a voice.
He looked up. A scrawny boy in a white smock stood peeking into the Homicide office. “Yeah?” Garvey said.
“We’re about to begin,” said the boy.
“All right.”
Garvey stood and followed the boy across the rotunda and down the steps, then across the lower levels to the bleached tile stairs that wound down to where the dead slept and doctors did their best to make them speak.
The air grew cool down in the basement. The light was so lifeless here it was almost a different type of dark. Dusky jars of pink fluid lurked on shelves and blades winked from nearby rolling tables. The nauseating fragrance of formaldehyde and God knew what else floated in the room like a fog. And somewhere among it all was Gibson, overweight and darkly humorous, a cigarette dangling from his thick lips. No one had asked why he came seeking this job. It was the type of question you didn’t ask because you might get an answer.
“Heyo, Garv,” said Gibson. “Long time no see.”
“Not long enough.”
“You wound me, Garv,” he said. “You wound me. Who’s our lucky boy tonight?”
“No idea. That’s the problem.”
“I know. I was just making conversation.” He led Garvey to the little cabinets that hid the dead. Their shoes were loud on the tile floor, painfully so. The morgue was usually silent except for the hiss and chuckle of the pneumatic tubes in the walls as messages and packages shot in from somewhere out in the city. Other hospitals and labs, perhaps. Garvey had heard the contents were often gruesome. There was a story of a jar of fingers that had been misdirected up to Vice with the day’s mail, and Garvey wasn’t sure whether to believe it.
Gibson came to one cabinet door and offered Garvey a small jar of perfumed salve. “Here you go,” he said.
“I don’t need it.”
He chuckled. “You will.”
Garvey looked at it, then at the wall of small metal doors. “You got a ripe one?”
“Riper than a homegrown tomato,” Gibson said cheerfully.
“Then yeah. Yeah, I do.”
He laughed again and tossed it to him. “Smart boy.”
Garvey opened it and smeared a thumbful of the salve across his upper lip. Then he took a chair, put it next to the table, opened up the report, and began to write. Gibson and his attendant glanced at each other and Gibson smirked and shook his head. Then they opened the door, reached in, and pulled out the tray carrying the morning’s load.
His color and thickness had changed slightly, but that was all. His face had drained off some water and perhaps he had lost more of what little blood he had left. But overall it was the same. Garvey looked at his thin, intelligent face, his retreating hairline. Strong, worn hands, scarred lower arms. Genitals shrunken against the inside of his thigh. A man like any other, washed up on cement shores.
“Well,” Garvey said. “At least we know he wasn’t killed by denners.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Gibson.
“He’s still got a face, doesn’t he?”
Gibson chuckled and then began his inspection, chanting his litany of facts as he went along. Cause of death, estimation of age, summary description of wounds. The Latin terms for each body part formed some strange incantation in Garvey’s head. He and Gibson’s attendant wrote as fast as they could.
Garvey did this with nearly every homicide he caught. No other detective did, choosing instead to rely upon Gibson’s reports. Gibson was a fine doctor and did his job well, and Gibson knew that it wasn’t a sign of Garvey’s doubt that he was down here whenever he could be, watching their grim procedure. He knew it was something else.
Garvey did not know the word “vigil,” but he didn’t need to. This was a ritual for him, even though it had no name. It was a process of documentation, of marking the passage of the dead and the beginning of Garvey’s attempt to exact some sort of justice. And that was what their job was, at heart. They were men who noted deaths and attempted to change the world because of them. To put their killers to justice, perhaps, but what was that beyond a way of saying that this man mattered, that his life was important, and so his death should affect his killer’s life in turn?
And so he listened. And wrote.
He was considering the official phrasing of one of his sentences when he heard Gibson say, “Did you hear that, Detective?”
“Hear what?”
“Tattoo. On the inside of his bicep. It’s real faded. Hidden close to the armpit, probably so that you couldn’t see it.”
“What’s it of?” he asked, and stood.
“Looks like a bell and a hammer.”
“You mind?” Garvey asked, reaching for the corpse.
“I’m not married to him. Go on ahead.”
Garvey took the flesh of the man’s arm with his thumb and pushed it up. On the inside was a small black bell with a white hammer inside, acting as the clapper. It looked medieval. Some badge of brotherhood, almost.
“Ever seen it before?” asked Garvey.
“No,” said Gibson, frowning. “Well, I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“I haven’t. You?” Garvey asked the attendant.
The boy shook his head.
“Hm,” said Garvey. He looked at it a while, then picked up his file and sketched out the tattoo.
“Amateur stuff,” said Gibson. He flicked the dead man’s arm, the flesh as solid as rubber. “He didn’t know what he was doing at all. Probably just got some ink and a pin, maybe a razor, and went to it.”
“It’s the only identifying mark we have, though, right?”
“That’s true.”
Garvey sat back down, made sure to carefully notate the details of the tattoo, and then said, “Okay. Let’s continue on, then.”