“The guy had a way with people,” I concluded. “Very charismatic, some kind of homeless person’s saint.”
Jacobi drummed his fingers. “You don’t know this saint’s name, do you, Boxer?”
“No.”
“And you have no clue as to who killed him or what the motive was?”
“Not a hint of a clue.”
“That’s it, then,” Jacobi said, slapping the desk. “It’s over. Finished. Unless someone walks in and confesses, you’re done wasting department time. Get me?”
“Yes, sir,” said Conklin.
“Boxer?”
“I hear you, Lieutenant.”
We cleared out of Jacobi’s office and punched out for the day. I said to Conklin, “You understood that, right?”
“What’s not to understand about ‘finished’?”
“Rich, Jacobi was clear as day. He told us to work Bagman Jesus on our own time. I’m going down to see Claire. You coming?”
Chapter 7
CLAIRE WAS WEARING a surgical gown with a butterfly pin at the neckline, apron stretched across her girth, flowered shower cap covering her hair. On the stainless autopsy table in front of her lay a naked Bagman Jesus, his terrible bashed- in features facing up at the lights.
A Y incision ran from clavicles to pubis and had been sewn up in baseball stitches with coarse white thread. He had bruises all over his body and overlapping lacerations and contusions.
Bagman Jesus had been worked over with a vengeance.
“I got back the X-rays,” Claire said. As she talked, I looked over at where they were pinned to the light box on the wall.
“Broken right hand, probably took a swing at his attacker or it was stomped on when he was down. He’s got a lot of fractures involving his facial bones, as well as multiple skull fractures. Broken ribs, of course, three of them.
“All this multiple blunt-force trauma might have killed him, but by the time someone took a bat to him, he was already dead.”