“The Body in Lake Montebello”
January 20, 1958, 7:34 a.m.
It was the kind of cold that seeped into your bones. Dixon stepped out of the warm interior of his black Hudson, onto the tarmac path circling Lake Montebello, the water reservoir in east Baltimore, pulling his black wool overcoat tight around him, pressing his hat down over what remained of his hair. The horizon, between breaks in the rowhomes around him, was pink, fading upward into pale blue, and a frigid wind pressed hard against his face. It was Thursday, much earlier than he would have liked. He’d left his pretty new wife, Anne, sleeping in bed after receiving the call.
The body had been pulled half out of the water by the patrolman, an Irishman a few years younger than Dixon. O’Neil, maybe. O’Malley? O’something. A woman wearing worn black shoes, hair a snarl of gray and brown curls, had found the body. She stood shivering by the side of the path that ringed the lake, eyes distant— as if she’d seen worse.
He’d arrived before the hearse and crime lab folks, who’d take photographs and, if they could find any, shoe tread impressions. He’d also arrived, thank God, before the reporters. Any second now the vultures would descend: photogs from both the Sun and the Daily would arrive before the body was hauled away.
By the path beside the lake, Dixon asked the woman a few questions, took notes. The time she found the body: 6:30. How the body looked when she first found it: she thought it was a log at first, resting at the edge of the lake, but something told her it wasn’t. She’d walked down to the water, noticed a leg sticking out, realized it was a body, found the patrolman, sleeping in his car on Hillen.
When he got down to the body, Dixon scanned the ground for footprints. The ground was frozen and wouldn’t hold footprints, and no one had dropped anything nearby. It would take a careless criminal to leave something meaningful behind, and judging by the way the body had been packaged this had not been the act of a careless criminal.
Dixon crouched to get a closer look at the body. Wrapped inside a brown blanket, tied tightly with rope, both inside and outside the blanket. He tried to undo the knots, then cut through the ropes with his pocket knife. Pealed aside layers of blanket and a plastic tarp to reveal the head. The top of a black suit, with narrow lapels, and a white shirt, silk tie pulled askew. It was the aspect of the face that surprised Dixon. It was a white man, or at least had been at one time, yet the face was deformed. The nose was no more than two nostrils, almost slits, and there were growths on the forehead. Not what Dixon had expected. Despite its unusual appearance, the face looked at peace, as if the man were simply resting, not dead and drowned. No signs of struggle. It looked perfectly preserved. Which somehow made it even more disturbing.
“What do you think?” he asked O’Something, hovering behind him.
“Beats the hell out of me,” O’Something answered. “That’s your job.”
Dixon nodded, figuring the chances of solving the crime had increased. This was not a man who could walk unremarked down the street.
He walked the crime scene, looking for clues because that was what he was supposed to do, not because he had any hope of finding anything.
He sat for awhile in the Hudson with the woman. He took her name and number and told her she was free to leave, but she stayed in the car a little longer, watching as the crime lab people arrived and took photographs.
As expected, before long the vultures descended and took their photographs, of the body, the lake, the rowhomes across the lake, taking up stances like soldiers, as if they were doing something important in the world. A reporter he was familiar with, an older man with white hair named Tompkins, approached the car, but when he recognized Dixon he backed away. Dixon had a reputation among reporters. He’d coldcocked one a few years earlier outside City Hall, breaking the guy’s nose.
He sat inside the Husdon watching as the body was placed on a stretcher, the attendants grabbing ropes that held the body in its blanket, and carried away. The sun was full up now, the sky a sodium blue that made Dixon think of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
He’d grown up thinking the world was going to blow itself up someday. If it weren’t for Anne, he would have wished it had.
The city morgue was in the basement of the precinct building on Wabash. There were two ways to get in, three if you counted the bulkhead doors through which bodies were carried. Dixon preferred the back way, through a squat black door so old it had an iron ring for a handle. The stairwell was narrow and dark, and it grew colder as he descended. In the summer that was a relief from unrelenting humidity, but in the winters it was a reminder of the frozen tundra they lived in for several months a year.
Classical music played in the examination room, so Dixon knew Manuel was at work. Chopin, a piano sonata. Dixon was no classical music aficionado, but Manuel had predictable tastes. Chopin and Bizet, Beethoven and Debussy. The coroner would listen to sonatas when starting an examination, opera while writing up his reports or doing busy work.
Manuel was already working on the body when Dixon walked in, greeted by the nostril-clearing scent of formaldehyde. The body was laid out on a table. Manuel had snipped the rest of the ropes around the blanket, opened it and the tarp underneath, like a florist opening a bundle of flowers. The man inside, fully dressed, looked remarkably unaffected by death. The black suit was too big for him, as if he’d bought it on sale or had once been a much larger man. His hands were big and white and looked like workman’s hands, while the rest of him was small.
Manuel nodded at the detective.
“Doesn’t look dead, does he?” Dixon said.
“Oh, he’s dead all right. Don’t let him fool you.”
Manuel unknotted the tie, sliding it out from the collar, folding it, placing it on a table to the side. The music gave each of his gestures an air of civility. After unbuttoning the white shirt, exposing a bird-like chest, Manuel tilted the big head upward to show Dixon marks on the neck.
“Ligature. Probably choked to death. Definitely a homicide.”
“You think?”
“I do, yes.”
Sarcasm was lost on Manuel, or else he was a zen master of it.
As Dixon sat on the stool watching Manuel work, the two men settled into a comfortable quiet. The music ran on, phrases repeating in slightly different ways until they’d completely changed.
The body on the table revealed itself a little at a time, a narrow torso, dark nipples, a surprisingly slim body, a modest penis curled on its side like an anemone nestled inside dark hair. The feet, small and pale, reminded Dixon of a dancer’s.
“Could you tell if he was bigger once? Did he lose a lot of weight?”
“Not likely. There’s no excess skin. I’d say he’s always been about this size.”
“There’s some skin under his fingernails,” Manuel said a while later, showing Dixon the man’s hands, one of the fingernails blackened. “There was some struggle, but not very vigorous struggle.”
“It doesn’t look like he had much fight in him.”
“Small guys will surprise you sometimes.”
The doc opened the body and started rooting through the organs, pushing viscera here and there. The smell of an opened body seeped into all corners of the room, a smell so rank it almost crawled on hands and feet. Manuel was so absorbed in his work he acted like Dixon wasn’t there, so Dixon told him to call when the autopsy was finished, walked back out into the cold.
Inside the precinct building, he took the narrow, coffin-shaped elevator up, accompanied by some little rat in need of a haircut who slipped in just before the doors shut and couldn’t stop shaking. He was probably going to rat on someone so he could get enough scratch to buy a bottle, so he could survive a little longer before winding up shot or stabbed in some back alley, or frozen to death if the drink caught up to him before revenge could. He was a foot shorter than Dixon, his skin sallow. He reeked of sweat and piss and wore a flat cap pressed down over his hair. He kept scratching a gash on his neck, and Dixon thought of the marks on the dead man’s neck. A ligature. If he’d been strangled, why didn’t his face show any sign of struggle?
When they got off the elevator on the third floor, the rat went right while Dixon went left toward the bullpen, the dumping ground for all the unwanted refuse in the other precinct offices, an open room in a corner of the third floor, filled haphazardly with desks and filing cabinets. Old coatracks and random pieces of furniture lay around. Homicide took pride in not caring about their surroundings, pretending they were too busy to care. Mostly they were.
Dixon could look out the window and see the backs of City Hall and the Courthouse, buildings that had pretensions to classical virtues. Columns and faces carved into the lintels. There were three other detectives in the bullpen at this time of the morning, presumably working cases. Henderson was sitting with his feet up on his desk shoving a sandwich wrapped in wax paper into his mouth. Tollis was talking, low and excited, into the phone. To his bookie, Dixon assumed. Then there was old Brandt, who sat his fat ass in the corner of the room every day and stared out the window awaiting retirement, dreaming of whatever sexual proclivities thrilled him and the white beaches of Florida. Dixon hoped he never got to that point. Take him into some dark alley and shoot him first.
Dixon’s desk was in the far right hand corner of the bullpen, a desk he’d been given when he first started in the department and kept, even though he could have swapped it. He liked it; it was out of the way. He could disappear into the background. He wasn’t grubbing to move up the ladder, like most men his age, was perfectly content where he was.
He sat at his desk, shuffling papers, waiting for the call from Manuel. Figured Anne would be awake by now. Pictured her wearing black pants, the ones that ended just below the knee, fashionable pants that somehow both hid and accentuated her sexuality, pants that were probably too young for her. A lot of things Anne did were too young for her. She kept up. In her early thirties but still a schoolgirl. There were lost years in her past, years he had no idea what she’d been doing. She didn’t talk about her past, and he didn’t press.
He figured he could go down to Fells and talk to regulars and bartenders at the seedy bars, see if they’d ever seen the freak down there. They’d remember him. But Dixon didn’t get the feeling the freak would go in for bars. He wasn’t sure why. Just a feeling.
The harsh jangle of the phone caught Dixon’s attention. On the phone, Manuel explained what he’d found. Asphyxiation. There was no water in the freak’s lungs. He hadn’t drowned but, as expected, had been choked to death before being tied up and dumped in Lake Montebello. He couldn’t determine how long the body had been in the lake, precisely, but he’d been dead about a week. There were no other injuries aside from the one on his neck. 5’ 4”, 110 pounds. That sounded so small Dixon pictured a miniature man moving through a miniature world.
“One other thing,” Manuel said, reluctant to share whatever he was going to share next.
“What’s that?”
“There are some, er, abnormalities in the body.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning… He’s not exactly human.”
At first Dixon thought Manuel was joking, but that wasn’t Manuel’s way.
“Yeah? What is he then?”
“I have no idea. It’s like someone came up with a pretty good approximation of a human.”
“Okay.”
“But couldn’t quite pull it off. It’s tricky, the human body.”
“Okay.”
After thanking Manuel, Dixon put down the phone and looked out the window. The buildings looked fake in the stark light, like a series of geometrical patterns. He didn’t know what the hell Manuel was on about, or what it meant for the case, but he experienced a sudden feeling of dread.
He went home to Anne and they made love like the newlyweds they were, rattling the bedframe, embarrassing the neighbors. It made Dixon feel alive, but afterward Anne went to the library to do some studying and he was alone again. He put a record on the record player, Miles Davis, The Birth of the Cool. The body was not quite human. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
The next morning he picked up the papers and was surprised to see no news about the body found in Lake Montebello. He sat at his desk, wondering how to start an investigation into a deformed man no one had ever seen who was presumably not even human. Maybe he could start with the circus, though they hadn’t been in town for months.
He got a call around ten o’clock, an unknown voice asking him to meet at a bar in Fells, and when he got there he saw Tompkins, the photog he’d seen the day before at Lake Montebello, sitting at a table with a whiskey neat. Dixon ordered the same.
“Dixon,” Tomkins said. “So, what did you find out about the body in the lake?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’ve got some information that might be of interest to you.”
“The body had been choked.”
“That’s all?”
Dixon shrugged, looked around, infected by the other man’s paranoia. He didn’t like it, at all. Tompkins nodded and smiled. He looked like he was about two steps from either a vacation or an asylum.
“I know where he came from.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. You care to take a look?”
“I guess a good detective follows every lead.”
“Pick me up outside the Sun. Sundown is 5:22. Pick me up at 4:30 so we can get out there before then.”
Dixon nodded, feeling a little woozy from the day drinking.
He decided to surprise Anne at the library. He saw her through the window, wearing a cashmere sweater and black pants, her hair half in her face. She looked like a movie star. He still couldn’t believe his luck. Something horrible must have happened to her in the past for her to be happy with him. When she looked up from her book and saw him outside her face lit up.
“Hey, doll,” he said, when she came out and wrapped herself around him.
“Hey.”
They went to a bar near campus and ordered some simple lunch and a few drinks. She told him about what she was studying. The kwakiutl potlatch. In a potlatch the tribe gave gifts to the chief, then burned all those gifts. Some renunciation of worldly goods thing.
They parted ways with a sloppy kiss, and he told her he’d be home late, had to stake out an apartment for an investigation. An innocent lie.
Before he knew it it was 4:00 and he driving to the Sun building, sitting outside in his Hudson, letting the engine run so he could get some modicum of warmth through the vents.
He drove where Tompkins directed him: out of the city, through the countryside, down a dirt road that ended at an abandoned asylum. While he drove they were mostly quiet. He noticed Tompkins’s hand. At first he didn’t know why the hand, with fingers splayed across his thigh, seemed odd, but then he realized there was an extra finger on it. It wasn’t the pinky or the pointer, could have been either an extra ring or middle finger, though “middle” finger would be inaccurate on him.
They drove out past the asylum, down more dirt roads. Dixon knew no one was to be trusted, but he wasn’t worried about Tompkins. He could handle Tompkins and his six fingers.
“Been following the story long?”
“About a year now. And it’s gotten to me.”
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“It gets weirder the longer I’m on it. It starts with a few sightings, then there are all these bodies showing up.”
“More than one?”
“This isn’t the first.”
Dixon nodded, parked, followed Tompkins into the woods. He wore a fedora and a loose gray suit, which, along with the white hair, made him easy to follow. Almost immediately he lost sight of Tompkins on the trail. He was much faster than a man his age should have been, though he didn’t seem to exert himself. Dixon, meanwhile, huffed and puffed. The woods got darker fast, but when they emerged, after climbing uphill about a half hour, they were on the spine of what seemed like a small mountain range, though it was probably just a good-sized hill. Below, Dixon could see the Patapsco River and the railroad tracks. It was a pretty sight. Tompkins settled down on the dirt, making himself comfortable, folding his legs Indian-style.
“Might take a while,” Tompkins said, pulling a flask from his pocket, displaying it and smiling. Dixon, still looped from his day drinks, smiled back and accepted the flask when it was handed to him. They set to waiting.
The next thing Dixon knew he was coming to on the rocks on top of that hill, his body sweat-soaked, in the dark. Drunker than he’d ever felt in his life. The sky made a whooshing sound above him, but all he saw were stars. Tompkins nowhere to be seen. Dixon staggered up, veering toward the edge of the rock, almost toppling over before getting his legs underneath him.
The images passing through his mind could not be called memories. They were disjointed, vivid yet somehow unclear. Tompkins laughing, something in the sky, a flash of silver, something smooth and round, something else sharp and jutting. He remembered smells, but they were not smells he’d ever smelled before. Not only unfamiliar but unimaginable. Leaning against a tree trying to get his bearings, he realized his gun was gone. The whooshing was coming not from the sky but from inside his skull.
The trail was steep, areas of scree hard to negotiate in the moonlight. He kept having to scramble. He tried to remember the story Tompkins had been telling before he lost consciousness, about little men infiltrating the human race, how they were trying to take over. He thought of Tompkins’s six fingers and his supernormal speed on the trails. The body he’d seen pulled out of Lake Montebello. If not for the body, he would have thought it was all the hackneyed dream of a fevered mind preoccupied with popular culture. There were all kinds of movies about flying saucers, and he’d heard reports. People were dumb enough to believe anything. He wouldn’t have believed it if Manuel hadn’t told him that the body wasn’t human. If there hadn’t been a coverup by the newspapermen. He wondered if they were safe, any of them. Before this he’d thought the city was going to pot, but now he wondered if it weren’t bigger than that.
He was halfway down the trail when the whooshing in his head separated and came from the sky again. He looked up. Saw a flash. Something swift and stealthy, a shadow more than anything, but a shadow with cognizance, a shadow very clearly pursuing him. He tried to run, his feet uncertain on the scree, ankles wobbling. He kept to the shadows of trees, but that made it impossible to see anything. Whatever the shadow was, it was onto him, getting closer, the sound moving through the air and getting into his head.
Hours later, he slid into bed. He felt his body shaking, then taking in the warmth of the blanket, the warmth of Anne’s body, slowly calming.
When she turned to smile at him, he saw too many teeth in her mouth. She was like a shark with rows and rows of teeth.
Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His stories have been published in many journals online and in print, including Punk Noir Magazine, Poverty House, Bull Fiction, and LIT Magazine. His collection, American Animism, will be published in 2025.
REVOLUTION JOHN. 