It was the first Tuesday of the month, so I was lunching at Sneaky Pete’s with Kowalski. We do this regularly, I to catch up on police business with the hope that it will make a human interest news story, he to catch up on his T-bone steak allotment with the hope that the waitress will smile at him. It’s usually good for both of us: Kowalski gets a meal at my newspaper’s expense; I get a good story for the paper.
“So what’s new in the precinct?” I asked. Lest you think my approach a little straightforward, Kowalski is not one of those cops you need to wheedle much to deliver up a story.
Kowalski paused to swallow a large lump of browned cow, then said, “We got the weirdo who did the Jingle Bells Murder.”
I liked the sound of that. “Give me the details,” I said.
“Well, about two weeks ago, we get a call from the super of one of those crappy walk-ups over east. They got a body. Me and Mick go over there and sure enough, they got a body, all right. In a small room, there’s the body of a girl, naked, tied hand and foot in intricate bondage-type roping, gag in her mouth, throat cut from ear to ear. Right?”
“I see,” I replied, mentally canceling any plans to aim this one at the kiddies’ pages.
“No prizes for guessing this girl is working as a hooker: in those buildings they all do. There’s no sign of a fight, and no major rope burns on her, so it looks like the bondage thing was all agreed to. Paid for, of course. Probably paid a lot.”
He paused, perhaps to give me ample room to marvel at the sheer breadth of perversities that can make up the sum total of human experience, but mostly to shovel in and swallow another mouthful of beef.
“Anyway, we’re looking at the body, and we notice that apart from blood from the wound, it’s completely clean. Now probably you don’t know these whores – I sure hope not – but cleanliness is not one of the traits for which they are noted.” he went on.
“Well, later when the body is at the morgue, the doc there confirms what we suspected: the girl has been washed all over, very carefully, with soap. Before having her throat cut, but after the bondage. Weird, huh? Some fruitcake pays for a whore, ties her up, gags her, soaps her body all over, then cuts her throat. Bizarre.”
“Indeed,” I said. “Some sort of semi-religious cleansing ritual, perhaps. What happened next?”
“Well, the forensic guys manage to get lumps of the soap out of the ropes tying her up … she was soaped after she was tied, see? They analyse the soap, compare it to a huge range of soaps to try and identify it. Come up with nothing. But they do say it doesn’t appear to be a commercial product at all. Not sure how they know that; something to do with not having certain things in it that all commercially-sold soaps are supposed to have. Anyway, that starts us thinking, and Mick mentions that there is a woman at that little hippie market on Saturdays at Eden Park who sells soap. Home-made soap.”
He paused again, this time clearly for effect. I nod encouragingly.
“So on Saturday we trot out to the Park. Sure enough, there’s this feral type selling soap. I’m thinking she can’t be selling much, ‘cos those hippies sure don’t seem to be using any. But when we check out some of her produce, it’s a hundred percent match to the soap on our hooker. And what’s more, this hippie chick is happy to tell us that she sold half a dozen bars of the stuff to a guy a week ago, who definitely didn’t look like her normal clientele. She normally sells to genteel city folk who somehow think the stuff is more natural, and worth paying huge prices for. But this guy she remembered, because he was dressed all in black and looked like he had come from a rock concert.”
“So we ask her would she recognize him if she saw him, and she says ‘definitely’. We ask her to come in and do an Identikit. Well, it turns out this girl is an artist, and instead, she just knocks out a drawing of the guy! And blow me down if it isn’t a guy I recognize. Greg Downs, a seedy-looking guy who we’ve hauled in for a bunch of creepy activities: following women around, peering in windows, that kind of thing. He has a couple of convictions, but never serious enough to do time.”
“Well, I don’t know where he lives, but I know a few people who do, and who don’t like him much, so we get an address pretty quickly. We show our evidence to the judge, he agrees we have enough for a search warrant, and we go to visit our friend Mr Downs.”
Another lump of beef disappears. Kowalski is in the final straight now.
“Downs puts on a brave face when we arrive, but he slumps like a man on the gallows when we show him the warrant. No wonder too: we find a digital camera … the nutjob took pictures of the whole thing. And also we found a few cakes of that hippie soap. Downs confesses to all and sundry down at the station, and the last I heard, he and his lawyer were working out some insanity defense based on his being denied breastfeeding as a child. From our point of view though, case solved.”
“Neat,” I replied. “Only one thing remains to explain: why was it called the Jingle Bells Murder?”
“Ah,” said Kowalski, his face breaking into a grin, “Modus operandi, you see: it was a one-whore soap-‘n’-slay”.
martinclear 