“The Cape Dripped Red” Part IV

Originally published February 2, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1159

I knew better than to roll over the corpse of the Big Boss—or, should I say, what was left of the corpse of the Big Boss. The last thing I needed was to have my fingerprints all over the epidermis of the recently deceased.

But even without getting close, I noticed something straight off.

Someone had sliced him up. The cape was intact, but the sleeves of his suit and portions of his face were cut up. I’d seen people cut up by knives before, but usually the incisions were much wider, skin torn by the strength it took to drive the knife through. But these gashes were incredibly thin—yet some of them were pretty deep.

Looked like it was done with a razor blade.

I trotted into the building as fast as I could, pushing through the throng of people who were heading in the opposite direction. I grabbed an elevator and, moments later, was back on the 20^th floor.

I froze in place. I couldn’t believe it.

The place looked like a war zone.

The heavy-duty glass door that had effectively kept me out earlier was shattered. There were rings of carbon on the walls indicating some sort of small arms fire. There was a small fire burning on the carpet which I stomped out.

The receptionist was slumped forward over her desk, a startled expression on her face. I didn’t have to get close to see that there was nothing I could do. I moved quickly through the corridors, past other offices, stepping over bodies. What in the hëll had just happened? Only minutes ago this had been a thriving, busy office. There had been people working as hard as they could, doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. And now—

Nothing.

I had my gun out. I would have been an idiot not to. It was possible that whoever had done this could jump out from behind a corner and try to put a hole as big as the national debt through my gut.

Double-gripping my weapon, I made my way to he office of the Big Boss. Far below me, I heard police sirens. They’d made pretty good time. Then I remembered: I’d passed Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away. There were probably about a hundred cops in the immediate vicinity.

His secretary, Irene, was pitched back in her chair, staring up at the ceiling. I barely afforded her a glance; I’d seen plenty of stiffs in my time. And I’d seen them left in far worse condition than this.

Every so often I’d still wake up screaming when I’d dream of those corpses I literally stumbled over during my investigation into devil-worshipping civil suits (which I wrote up in a case study called The Satanic Versus.)

Several of the giant cutouts of the company’s heroes which I’d seen mounted on the walls had been shattered. The villain, swathed in green and purple, was intact, but he was covered with blood. Definitely something symbolic in that.

I sidled into the office of the Big Boss, being careful not to touch anything. A stiff breeze was blowing through the window that had been shattered by the Big Boss being tossed through it like a sack of bricks.

There were definite signs of a struggle. The Big Boss hadn’t gone down—way down—without a fight. His huge desk had been reduced to so much scrap. The carpet had been torn, shredded, and burned in some places. There were papers all over the place, and I noticed one that was partly crumbled on the floor. It read “Distributors” and it was a list of names and addresses. I remembered how the Big Boss had said the distributors were responsible for all the fun being sucked out of comics. I folded the paper carefully and tucked it into my pocket.

And that’s when I noticed the message on the wall.

It wasn’t writ in burning letters of flame, but it was pretty definitive, nevertheless. It was scrawled in what appeared to be blood, in letters about a foot or so high. And the word was “PURGE.”

I stepped closer when I noticed that it didn’t seem to be coagulating the way blood normally does. And the color seemed a little bit off. I still didn’t want to touch anything but I noticed some of it had flaked off onto the floor. No harm in inspecting it. After all, I was supposed to be a detective; sooner or later I’d have to get around to detecting.

I holstered my gun, pulled rubber gloves out of my pocket, and picked up a few of the red flakes. I rubbed them between my fingers. Definitely not blood.

“Get away from there!”

I didn’t bother to turn at first, recognizing the gruff, Bronx-accented voice. “How you doing, Shenk?” I asked.

“That you, Cosmic? I’m not going to tell you again. Back away from the blood.”

I stepped back and turned. Lieutenant Shenk was standing there, wearing the trench coat that he’d been sporting, rain or shine, for the last couple of decades. Shenk had been stuck as a detective lieutenant for years, ever since he wound up getting blamed for that whole gang-shooting incident on the West Side.

“What blood?” I asked, eyes wide in innocence.

“Don’t get smart with me, Cosmic. The blood on the wall.”

I held up my rubber-encased hands. “You mean the red ink?”

His eyes narrowed. “It’s red ink?”

“Yup.”

“Since you got all the answers, mind telling me what you’re doing here? Or should I just arrest you, bring you downtown, and beat it out of you?”

I forced a wide smile. Shenk had always envied me my freedom, as a private dìçk, to step around the rules when it suited me. I, on the other hand, had always envied him his ability to run roughshod over rules when it suited him.

“Investigating on behalf of a kid client who wanted to know who took the fun out of comics,” I said, shrugging. “I was here talking to the Big Boss.”

“You mean you were here when,” and he gestured, “this happened?”

“I got a funny feeling that, if I had been, I’d be about as lively as anybody else here. No, I left a few minutes ago. Then the Big Boss wound up as a sidewalk pizza, and I came back up here to check things out.”

“Did he say anything that made you think someone would do all this?”

“You mean something like, ‘Oh, and if you find everybody in the office mowed down, the butler did it’? No, I think I’d remember if he’d warned me about that.”

Shenk nodded slowly. “You get on your way, Cosmic. But don’t leave town. We’ll probably want to talk with you.”

“I’ll keep my dance card open so we can waltz.”

I headed for the door, as Shenk studied the wall and said to himself, “‘Purge.’ What’s that supposed to mean?”

I assumed he was talking to me rather than thinking out loud, since thinking wasn’t one of Shenk’s top 10 activities. “From what I understand,” I said, “the comic book industry was on a binge for a long time.

“Well—after a huge binge comes a purge. I’d say all you have to do is find a blood-covered, heavily armed bulimic, and you’ve got your murderer.”

Shenk grimaced at me, which was as close as he ever came to a smile. He had a plainclothes cop escort me out. There were cops everywhere, checking out all the stiffs. It was a sign of the police department’s respect for me that they didn’t consider me a suspect. Either that or they just held me in utter contempt and figured I didn’t have the guts to slaughter an office full of people.

I waiting until I was a few blocks away from the scene of the crime before I pulled the paper out from my pocket. The list of distributors was clearly some sort of list intended for internal use. Then again, I didn’t think they were going to have much use for it now, internally or otherwise. I skimmed the list and saw that one of the branch warehouses was situated downtown.

This case was rapidly spinning out of control. It had started as an innocent query from some kid, wanting to hire a detective to find out why his hobby wasn’t fun anymore. And he’d plunked his last couple of weeks’ allowance on the desk of Richard Kosmikian, a.k.a. Ðìçk Cosmic, the Cosmic Ðìçk, asking for some answers to be found.

And I, king sap of the western world, had played along because I had had nothing better to do with my time.

Since then, I’d found myself wading through an industry that was in upheaval, had had my head tap-danced on by a couple of goons, and had seen an entire company “purged.”

Whenever a case started to go haywire, it was important to keep focused on what was being investigated in the first place. I’d been going from one participant to the next in the industry—from retailer to speculator to publisher—and each of them had been quick to pin the blame on the industry’s current sorry state on somebody else. The Big Boss of the publishing company had been putting the blame on the distributors, so I figured I might as well see this through and check with a distributor. See if someone was willing to stand up and take credit and/or blame for the way things were.

The snow had started again, and this time it looked like a really nasty state of affairs. The sky was darkening, and the flakes were big and fat, pelting all around me.

I reached the address in the warehouse district, glanced at the paper once more to make sure I had the right place, and then slowed as I approached the front door.

There were two sets of footprints leading towards the door. One of them was square-toed and reminiscent of a shoe I’d had opportunity to inspect at close range. It belonged to one of the two gorillas who had taken it upon themselves to tap-dance on my cranium while warning me off the comic book case—a warning that I had not taken.

The snow was newly fallen and the tracks were newly imprinted. Nor was there any sign of the footprints heading back out, which meant that they were still in there.

Making a straightforward entrance under the circumstances seemed unwise. I made my way around the side of the building and found a loading bay door that was open a couple of feet. I wormed my way under and through, keeping my ears open and my mouth shut.

Everywhere I looked, there were comic books: shelves and metal shelves, boxes upon boxes running up and down the aisles. They were thick with dust; it was hard to tell when the last time had been that anyone had cracked them open.

I heard a familiar sound of meaty fist slugging against bone and made my way in that direction, keeping to the shadows. I felt like Lamont Cranston. Or Alec Baldwin, except without the looks, the money, the career, or the wife. Otherwise we were in exactly the same situation in life.

I peered from around one of the sets of shelves and, sure enough, there they were. Dumb and dumber. Thug and thugee. They were working over some poor schmo who must have been the warehouse manager. They’d already blackened his left eye and seemed to be working on his right. I couldn’t make out what they were saying. They kept asking about something that the schmo obviously didn’t know the answer to.

They were dressed exactly the way I’d seen them before—might have been the only suits they owned. There didn’t seem to be any spots of blood on them, which would have connected them with the slaughter back at the comic book company. Which didn’t automatically excuse them from being tied into it, but just once, just once, it would be nice to get something gift-wrapped.

The bigger gorilla gave a fierce slap to the schmo. The punch flipped him like a poker chip, knocking him a good 10 feet away. The shorter gorilla was looking at something on the far wall, something that seemed to concern him—

Then he whirled, his gun in his hand, and I suddenly realized that what had absorbed his interest so thoroughly had been my shadow against the wall. I’d been spotted.

I dodged to the right behind the shelving, a bullet kicking a piece of metal just past my ear. I tried to pull my gun, but the shelving was so tight I couldn’t get my arm clear.

I suddenly realized the weapon I had at my disposal. I threw my full weight against the shelving. It rocked ever so slightly, and then another bullet blew through a box right in front of my face. That was enough to get the old adrenalin going, and I shoved all the harder. I felt the shelving start to give, kept the momentum going, and was rewarded with a roar of fright from one of the gorillas. I didn’t know which one it was, but I was happy in either case. From the corner of my eye I saw the schmo. When the gorilla has slugged him, he’d granted the schmo an unintentional favor by knocking him clear.

The boxes of comics slid off the shelves, falling everywhere, and then with a roar of steel the entire rack of shelving collapsed. It crashed to the ground, burying both gorillas beneath twisted metal and boxes and boxes of funny books. All those trees that had died for something as silly as comic books could take solace in the notion that they had passed on for an even higher cause: clobbering bad guys.

I moved quickly around the disarray to the schmo. He looked up at me with slightly blurry eyes. “Thanks,” he managed to get out between lips that were already puffing up.

“Sorry about your comic books.”

“S’alright,” he said. “First time they’ve seen any movement in years. All back issues. Number ones of issues that shipped late and we couldn’t unload. Comics from retailers who couldn’t pay their bills or went out of business.”

His nose was bleeding. I pulled out a handkerchief and he stuffed it up his nose, tilting his head back. “This is—this is some timing. They’re getting ready to shut this warehouse down. Shut ’em all down. The retailers blew it, they really blew it.”

“The retailers—?”

“It’s all their fault, man. They ordered without budgets or mishandled their inventory. They got greedy, man. Got greedy and sank it all.”

The circle of blame had gone all the way around, and I was left knowing no more than I had before, but with a trail of bodies behind me that could have been stacked yards high.

I nodded my head in the direction of the gorillas. “What did they want?”

“I—I don’t know. They just seemed—really mad. They kept saying something about getting even—about taking control and lateral movements and—”

“Well, let’s find out from the source, shall we?”

By this point I had my gun out and aimed unflinchingly at the center of the mess. “Come out, come out, boys. Sing a song of explanation, if you would be so kind.”

No response. I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was every possibility that they were old cold.

I was a better shot left-handed than right, so I switched the gun to my left, came forward cautiously, and started shoving boxes to the side. I was on full alert, every sense extended, waiting for some sort of movement—some sort of trick.

But there was no trick. There was no response. Because there were no bodies.

My disbelief grew with every passing moment. I kicked papers aside with greater and greater urgency as I ran out of places to look.

They had vanished. Vanished into thin air. The only marks on the floor were smears of blood.

No. Not blood.

Red ink.

To Be Concluded

Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., P.O. Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.