The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of an Old Dead Guy, Part 1 of 6

Mickey Malloy has fought spies, assassins, pirates, ghosts, monkeys, dewormer-addicted engineering students, stunt pilots, and more, but the Axis agents arrayed against him have only just begun to show their hand.

Now, Mick’s been dragged up to the Big Apple to investigate the untimely demise of an important Office asset, but he doesn’t know this Joe from Adam. To him, the stiff’s just another old dead guy.

Until Only Roaches Remain is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

The Case of an Old Dead Guy is the first part of the third Billy Club Bastard anthology, Until Only Roaches Remain. It takes place a few months after the conclusion of Crazy, Crazy, Crazy, All the Time and revisits characters and situations introduced there and in other Vigilance stories.

Content warnings: Mild swearing, alcohol use, drug use, tobacco use, death, gore.

THURSDAY MORNING, JANUARY 7, 1943
NEW YORKER HOTEL, ROOM 3327
MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

“What do you see, Malloy?” Regional Inspector Wailey Earp asked the surly detective looming behind him.

“An old dead guy,” Mickey Malloy grumbled. He practically filled the Manhattan hotel room they occupied. He towered over both Earp and the shriveled corpse tucked into the twin bed before them. “You bring me all the way up to Gotham to look at an old dead guy?”

“What else?” Earp prodded. He knew Malloy was a top-notch investigator, but he also knew the former private detective's proclivities. He had to allow Mick his few minutes of belly-aching to get the best work out of him.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mickey said, and began plodding around the scene, careful to avoid the waist-high stacks of meticulously piled pages. For a smaller man it would have been called pacing, but Mickey was as big and as even-tempered as a grizzly bear, so he plodded. His stomach rumbled. Bitter coffee and cheap bourbon battled deep within his gut. He muttered obscene comments regarding his thoughts on early mornings, air travel, and early morning air travel as he took in each detail around the corpse.

The man on the bed was skinny, far too skinny, and tall as a telephone pole. The wrinkled geezer had only been dead a few hours, but he looked like he'd been starved for years before that. He was gaunt as a skeleton, with yellowing hair, still perfectly combed, and cheekbones that stuck out further than his ears. Looked like he hadn't been the sun in months, hadn’t had solid food in even longer, and had never even seen a woman. His powder blue pyjamas were baggy around his withered frame, but were immaculately bright and clean and still had ironing creases on the trousers. The old dead guy must have been tired that night, because he'd missed a button on his shirt before he'd gone to bed. His sheets were barely rumpled.

The old dead guy had gone quietly.

A tap on the window distracted Malloy for a second. A dozen pigeons were perched expectantly outside the glass, peering through at a bowl of birdseed just inside. There was one especially insistent bird, pure white and pecking at the glass in a distractingly hypnotic rhythm. Mickey flipped his gorilla wrist to shoo the flying rats away. They took off, a flock of flea-bitten gray with a spot of white, disappearing into Manhattan's concrete forest. Mickey shook his head. The dirty things were probably this old dead guy's only friends.

“If he was chained up, I’da thought for sure he was a prisoner,” Mickey finally said, “But the door locks from the inside. He's a recluse, probably a kook by the look of these papers.”

“But I wouldn't pull you from your beat just for some loon, would I?” Earp asked. Malloy glared at him wearily.

“You knew I was between Legion cells, anyway,” Mick grumbled. This time last week he’d been waist-deep in a salt marsh slapping ‘cuffs on a gaggle of Silver Legionnaires with an Antebellum dress-up fetish. He stretched and cracked his neck. Earp always winced whenever he heard Mickey's old bones popping. The plane ride from Georgia had been a pain in Mickey's rear, especially when the seats seemed sized for bathing suit models.

The Regional Inspector was only a year or so younger than Mickey, but the two officials couldn't look more different. Earp was tall and lean and looked every bit the John Wayne cowboy that his famous great-uncle was, though without his relative's ridiculous mustache. Next to him, Mick was a veritable ogre.

The color had gone out of Earp's crew-cut hair, but it had skipped the sickly gray that Mickey's had become and had alloyed right into a regal silver. Earp's sharp pinstriped charcoal suit and hip-holstered chrome .45 clashed with Mick's rumpled, mis-sized brown suit and black coat, as well as the beat-up .38 the concealed beneath.

They were both veterans, but Earp had made it through the Great War and Hoover's war on crime without a scar on him. Mickey looked like a science project. More fists, boots, barbed wire, straight razors, broken bottles, and cigar cherries had made their mark on his mug that he cared to remember, and the way he was working at it he was sure to etch a few more lines in his mug before he took the big sleep.

Mickey smirked, deepening the blade-hewn patterns in his face. He was a monster compared to the pretty boy Earp, but aside from looks they made a dinger of a team. Mick fished for a cigarette in his pocket while he considered the deceased wacko's identity.

“No smoking in the crime scene, Malloy,” Earp chided. He knew Malloy's vices all too well. He'd even asked Mick for a nip out of his flask then never handed it back. Underhanded, but understandable.

“Well somebody has been,” Mick said. He didn't have much of a sense of smell left, but he could still recognize ash on a carpet. “The stiff, maybe?”

“He wouldn't touch a cigarette,” said Earp.

“Then we see if any of the responders lit up in here.”

“Keaton,” Earp said. George Keaton, Earp's plain-faced right hand, had been listening from the door and whipped out his notepad to track down the doctors and cops who'd come through the room, as well as the hotel staff who'd been around the body. He was good at what he did, and he'd have an answer for Mickey in minutes.

Mick squatted to examine one of the towers of paper that had been stacked around the room. Both his knees popped with the effort, convincing him that near the floor was a good place to set for a while. He wasn't in a rush to hear them pop again when he stood back up.

“What's this gobbledegook?” Mickey asked. The meticulous hand-written notes looked as good as Greek to him, with everything from English to Latin to Cyrillic to shapes and numbers and probably goddamn hieroglyphics.

“Couldn't tell you, Mick,” replied Earp. “Could be anything from philosophy to astrophysics, written in at least eight languages, if not in code on top of all that. Got to wait 'til a crew from Cataloging gets here. And Zoo Base wants to take a look.”

Mick lifted the top sheet off the closest stack.

“I can't make heads or tails of this malarkey,” Mickey grumbled. His flask had been filched, his smokes were off-limits, and he couldn't understand more than two letters in a row of whatever he was looking at. He was about as effective at deciphering these notes as he would be at planning a wedding. “Ten hours or ten years, I don't have anything on this.”

Earp sighed and took the page out of Mickey’s hands. He examined it for a moment, flipping it to try to see if it made sense from any other angle. Unsatisfied, he set it back down on the the stack it had come from. He massaged his forehead and checked his gold pocket watch. The catalogers flying in from Scotland could not get there soon enough. The few research men Earp did have on hand didn't seem to be making much progress either.

“Might as well have been written in invisible ink,” he said. “This is the kind of stuff that geniuses can't get their heads around.”

“No one ever accused me of being a genius,” Mick said. “But the ADA crew and the Oak Ridge gang are certainly not shy about the ‘G’ word.”

“The vic was one of the Office's earliest Chief Research Associates, and a close colleague of some of the First Eleven,” Earp explained.

“Never seen this guy in my life,” Mick muttered. He was fairly certain he hadn’t, despite his First Eleven pedigree. “What did him in?”

“Doctors figured heart attack,” Earp said.

“You don't think so?” Mickey asked. He could tell by his boss' tone that there was more here than he was letting on.

“This guy should've gone on to be a hundred, the way he took care of himself.” Earp was standing at the foot of the bed, looking down on the peaceful old man.

“Almost looks it,” Mickey mused.

“Didn't touch booze, smokes, women, anything. Measured every bite he took by volume. Dressed and shaved obsessively. Took care of injured pigeons. He would outlive all of us.”

“A hundred years of sobriety, celibacy, and vermin?” Mick said. “Maybe he just realized what he was in for and keeled over.”

Earp chuckled, but didn't say anything. Mickey wished Earp hadn't 'borrowed' his flask. That line would've been a perfect one to punctuate with a swig.

The room was obsessively ordered, even filled with endless stacks of papers. Each inscribed tower was evenly-spaced and of exactly equal height, about two feet tall. The seed in the bowl next to the window was perfectly level. The old dead guy's slippers were perpendicular to the bed like he kept a protractor in his nightstand. Six sets of identical, powder blue, pressed pyjamas hung in the closet, each three inches apart. The old dead guy's hair was combed tight, parallel, and perfect, even before bed. Then Mickey saw it. The missed button. This old dead guy would never miss that button.

“What did they do to the body?” Mickey blurted.

“The doctors?” Earp asked.

“Did they try to resuscitate him?”

“He was cold when they got here. Just took a pulse off his neck and pronounced him.”

“And no one else touched him?”

“What do you see?”

“That button,” Mickey answered, extending a sausage finger out to the little ivory disk. Earp saw it, too.

“Keaton!” he shouted. Keaton appeared back in the doorway in seconds, ready for orders. “Lock this place down. No one in, clear all the civilians, tag 'em, and get them gone. The whole hotel.”

Keaton nodded and evaporated again, this time to interview, log, and evict a nine-hundred-room Manhattan hotel of all staff, guests, police, and the murder of carrion-starved crime reporters out front. All in a day's work for him. Keaton was as comfortable kicking down a spy master's door as he was taking witness reports.

Mickey took a pencil out of his breast pocket and leaned over the old dead guy, carefully working it under the next button to pop the pyjama shirt open. Two more buttons and the man's skeletal chest was exposed, hairless and bluing under incandescent light. Mickey slipped his minuscule reading glasses out of his coat and perched them on the tip of his twisted nose. It only took him a moment to spot the injection site, a tiny puncture carefully concealed in a dark mole over the man's heart.

“There it is, chief,” he said, and stood back up so Earp could get a good look. As the Regional Inspector bent over the old dead guy, Mickey brushed past, picking his flask back from Earp's jacket pocket. He unscrewed the cap and took a warm swig. Still as cheap as he remembered it. He could almost taste the rust on the bath tub that the swill had been brewed in.

“I can’t read a lick of this mess,” Mick declared as he wiped his lips on the back of his sleeve, “But I can read murderers.”

His arthritis-wracked hands automatically formed claws, perfectly shaped to hold the grip of his absent piano leg club. He tried to free his knobby sausage fingers from their pained petrification but was only rewarded with a chorus of popping knuckles. On second thought, he might be getting too old for murderers, too.

“What's the motive here?” he asked.

“You'd never know what this asset could be working on, but from his past inventions it'd either have to be theft or total asset denial. The krauts have a lot to gain by eliminating this man,” Earp answered. He looked around the room for answers, but the endless stacks of meticulous equations and blueprints was beyond him. “I couldn't tell you if anything is missing, though.”

“That's the cataloging team's job,” said Mick. “They read, we work.”

Earp sat quietly for a moment. The door and windows were sound. No marks from a struggle evident on the body. Nothing but the errant flakes of cigarette ash on the carpet and the single missed button could've given him away. Mickey analyzed the facts out loud.

“We got a pro here, a button man who can get in and out of a busy hotel with no trouble. A guy who stops a heart with barely a mark and without the target even knowing.”

“So how does someone that good leave ash on the carpet of a man who has never touched a cigarette?” Earp asked.

“He didn't know his target. Probably just a had a picture and an address, didn't know he didn't smoke. A hitter for hire.” Probably a local, too, Mickey figured.

“If this guy's no spy, how'd he get his hands on something that'd instantly stop a heart?”

“It ain't that hard to tweak an octogenarian's ticker,” Mick said. He had an idea about that. “Look at this.”

The nightstand next to bed was immaculate, but not quite enough for the old dead guy's standards. The glass of water was a quarter-inch off square, and the lamp was twisted a few degrees from parallel.

“Somebody cleared some space here,” Earp said.

“And I know what for.” Mickey peered down, finally spotting a single pin-point bead of sticky liquid that had been left on the wood grain surface. Mickey extended a gnarled finger and wiped the stuff up.

“Evidence!” Earp protested, but the candy-sweet substance was already on Mickey's tongue.

“Gear,” Mickey said, confirming what he had already guessed.

“Gear?”

“Hop, horse, junk, snow. Heroin. Good for a buzz, better for stopping hearts in their tracks. Our hitter prepped right here, then did the deed.”

“What does heroin tell us?” Earp asked.

“Well, the only jokers importing junk to the Big Apple are wops, they own the market,” Mick answered.

“Italians are behind this?”

“Not Benito's boys,” Mick said. “Some home-grown wise guys. Contractors. The krauts can hire them as easy as I could, long as the money's right.”

“Traitors,” Earp growled.

“Entrepreneurs.”

Earp stewed on that for a moment. The floors in the hotel were thin: they could hear a couple arguing against Keaton’s forced eviction in the room below.

“So when are you going to tell me who this old dead guy is?” Mickey asked after a moment.

“He was an inventor, and a patriot,” Earp said quietly. “His name was Nikola Tesla.”

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, JANUARY 18, 1942
SAINT ANDREW THE APOSTLE CONVALESCENCE HOME
QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

Quintin Castaño took a deep breath, squared his feet, bent his knees, held the basketball on his fingertips, took a breath and held it. He did not have his left arm to steady the ball or to keep his balance. He felt his central line shift and willed it back into place, unconsciously tightening his corded muscles here and there to compensate for the missing limb. He waited for a frozen instant before exploding upward, pushing up from below and sending it on a high arc from the three point line. He noticed the trio of old white men watching him as it swished through the hanging net.

“His kinesthetic control seems ideal,” the one he didn’t recognize whispered to Wailey Earp, the uptight G-man, from the edge of the court.

“My hearing’s pretty good, too,” Castaño called out. His voice carried in the empty gym, careening off folded bleachers and waxed wooden floor. The ball bounced loudly in the intruders’ sudden, embarrassed silence.

“Sergeant Castaño, a pleasure to see you again,” the most pompous of the three men said. Quint remembered him well: Halistone, the high-society adventurer. He’d come by two or three times before, hoping to rope Quint back into his dog-and-pony show, wriggling with his mustache and tapping with his pipe.

Castaño was not interested. Losing one arm was enough for him.

“You done made a long trip for little return, pal,” Castaño said. Earp scooped up the bouncing ball, taking it as an implied hostage to be released in exchange for a conversation. Castaño sighed and ambled over to the waiting men.

“I brought an old friend who wanted to meet you, that is all,” the Brit said after Castaño took up position about six feet away, his hand in his pocket. “This is Nikola Tesla. Nikola, this is Sergeant Castaño.”

“A pleasure to meet you, sir,” Tesla said. He was rail-thin and ancient, even compared to the Brit and the G-man. His accent was odd, some flavor of European, one Castaño couldn’t place. He clenched his jaw, knowing that Harry would’ve ID’d it within a couple syllables.

But Harry was dead. He’d gone the way of Castaño’s arm.

Tesla reached out into the icy, open space between them, his hand extended. Castaño snorted, then took it. Tesla was absolutely skeletal. It was like shaking hands with a fistful of dice. He was glad to let him go.

“So what’s the sales pitch this time?” Castaño asked Halistone. “Still want to fit me with a hook and throw me back on the front lines?”

“If you want to go, then yes,” Halistone replied.

“And why would I want to do that?” Castaño demanded.

“People need your help,” Earp said.

“Everybody needs help. What good am I to them?” Castaño snapped, pointing at the empty T-shirt shirt sleeve, dangling where his arm and shoulder had once been.

“I can make available to you a new manner of prosthesis,” Tesla offered. “One with increased utility.”

“To go fight,” Castaño said, his tone as dry as sand.

“You may use it as you see fit,” Tesla replied. “You have already fought, sergeant.”

“The stipulation is that you can’t use it in public,” Earp quipped. “This thing ain’t ready to be known about yet.”

“This ‘thing?’ You figuring me for some kind of lab rat?”

“As yet, it is a unique creation, made exclusively for you,” Tesla answered. “One day, with more testing and feedback, it will be cleared for everyone’s use. For now, I would like to offer it to you.”

“No strings?” Castaño asked.

“It is already made. To enact further stipulations on its use now would be illogical. The time has already been spent. It would be a waste to prevent you from using it.”

Time was Tesla’s most precious resource. He wasn’t worried about money, it was time.

“How’d you already make it?”

“I made it based on your medical records.”

“You have my - !” Castaño started, then glared at the G-man and the aristocrat flanking Tesla. Of course they had his medical records.

“It’s here if you want to, you know, try it on,” Earp said. Castaño looked past him to see a long black box on the floor by the gym’s double doors. It looked like a damn trombone case.

“If you find it agreeable, it is yours,” Tesla told him. “Should you decide not to pursue a further career with the Office, it will take me a few days to remove its more combat-oriented capabilities, but I will return it to you.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Earp replied. “If you change your mind later and get tired of it, call me, it needs to come back to us.”

“To me,” Tesla specified. Halistone huffed, but caught himself. Tesla pretended not to hear him: “This prosthesis was made for you and for you alone. You have given so much to fight fascism. I can give you some of it back, and I would be honored to do so.”

Castaño didn’t have anything to say to that. A lot of folks promised a lot of things when he got back to the States, but most of it had been hollow words. All he’d ended up with was a narrow hospital bed every night and a candy bag of pills every morning.

“May I show you?” Tesla asked.

“Sure,” Castaño muttered. Earp took off at a trot and retrieved the case. They drifted over to the empty bleachers and sat. The case thumped onto the hardwood seating, heavier than it looked. Tesla flipped its clasps and opened the lid.

The arm laid within, gleaming bright as chrome. It looked like art, like a limb sawed off a Michelangelo sculpture and dipped in silver.

Tesla reached in and turned it over so Castaño could see inside the cup that would slip over his shoulder. It was filled with pressure switches and electrodes.

“Although your arm is gone, the systems that it was once connected to remain. These sensors can detect when those nerves and tendons would move your arm and will cause the prosthesis to respond in kind.”

“So I’d just act like I was moving my arm…”

“And the prosthesis would respond,” Tesla confirmed. “It may take some practice as your connections will have atrophied since the attack. Here, try it on. You will need to remove your shirt.”

Castaño froze. The only people who had seen him shirtless, seen his wounds, had been doctors.

“I will help you,” Tesla said, understanding. “Gentlemen, some privacy, please.”

Earp and Halistone turned around to watch the gym door.

Castaño took a deep breath then peeled his sweaty shirt off. The scars the shark had left him with ran from above where his ear had been down to his hip. His entire side looked like carne asada. The shark had bitten through his shoulder and taken part of his collarbone with it, notching out his frame. He couldn’t even wear suspenders anymore.

“If it is uncomfortable, I can make adjustments,” Tesla assured him. He handed Castaño a small jar filled with a thick blueish gel. “Spread a thin layer of this across your injury area. It will increase conductivity to the sensors.”

Castaño scooped a glop of it and spread it across the gnarled ruin that had once been his shoulder. It was cold and it raised goosebumps down his back.

“Perfect,” Tesla told him. The old man grunted as he lifted the arm out of the case. It was rigid. If it had articulation points, Castaño couldn’t see them. He slid the cupped shoulder onto Castaño’s wound. It settled perfectly over the carved-out flesh, fitting snug. Tesla pulled a set of leather straps out of the case. “Now we secure it…”

One padded strap went around Castaño’s back, over the other other side of his neck, and hooked in across his chest. another went around, under his arm, and across his ribs. The contraption was heavy, but lighter than a solid block of metal should have been.

“That should hold it long enough to test,” Tesla said. Castaño stood, letting the dead weight hang off of him.

“Looks good,” Earp offered. His voice bounced around the empty gym.

“Press two fingers against the bicep,” Tesla said. Castaño did and found a small panel concealed in the gleaming surface. It hinged open to become a handle. “That is your starter cable. Pull it.”

Castaño hooked his fingers beneath and yanked the ripcord. A small engine rumbled to life within the arm’s shoulder. two vents snapped open, one expelling exhaust behind and the other sucking in fresh air to feed what must have been the smallest diesel engine in existence.

“¡Santa vaca!” Castaño yelped. His sudden motion brought the entire arm to life. What had looked a solid mirrored surface rippled, like a chilly bird puffing its feathers. Dozens of hatches stretched open across the arm and hand then snapped shut. He stumbled backward in shock, tripping over the first bleacher row. His eyes went even wider when he realized that he’d caught himself with his new arm.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. He pushed himself up. His brain was stuttering. He moved his arm, the arm that he’d spent months accepting was gone, and this silver thing hanging off of him moved. He wiggled his fingers, its fingers wiggled.

“Excellent responsiveness,” Tesla noted.

“It’s like… like a puppet,” Castaño stammered. He clenched and unclenched ‘his’ fist, rolled ‘his’ shoulder, extended ‘his’ elbow. “I’m moving it, but I don’t feel anything.”

“I am considering implementing tactile feedback for the next iteration,” Tesla mentioned. “Were you to use this prosthesis in combat, a sense of feeling in the arm might prove distracting.”

“What does…” Castaño said, examining the back of ‘his’ forearm. A hatch popped open and a shotgun barrel emerged. “Damn.”

“As I mentioned, this prosthesis was designed for defensive operation. It contains nearly thirty martial applications. If you are uninterested in further violence, I can remove them.”

“‘Uninterested in violence?”” Castaño snapped. “Who the hell is interested in violence?”

“An awkward phrasing, nothing more, sergeant,” Halistone assured him.

Castaño twisted the arm arm around, revealing hidden compartments packed with shells, cables, fluids, and blades.

“I don’t want to do this any more,” he whispered.

“Neither do I, pal,” Earp said.

“I have been fighting since I was a boy,” Halistone added.

“I create these things to help and to heal,” Tesla replied. “We all do what we must in the face of true horror.”

“It’s not fair,” Castaño said.

“Wasn’t ever supposed to be,” Earp said. “It takes folks like you and me, Colonel Halistone and Nik, to help tip the scale closer to it.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, we found where they make them,” Earp said. He squeezed the basketball like he thought he could pop it with his bare hands then thought better of it and gave it a couple experimental bounces. He let his statement rise up into the gym’s high rafters and dissipate.

“Make who?” Castaño asked once the air had grown too thin.

“The sharks,” Earp replied.

“There’s more than one?” Castaño asked.

“Many more. The Nazis have constructed a factory for them, to grow dozens at a time,” Halistone explained. “They wish to swarm them across Europe. What happened to you shall be replicated a thousandfold.”

“Well God damn,” Castaño sighed. “Laying it on a bit thick there, pal.”

“Yeah,” Earp agreed. “But Nazis are or they aren’t. You don’t half-ass with Nazis.”

“I agree. But why’s a chewed-up cripple worth this visit?” Castaño asked. He held up his shiny new arm. “Why am I worth this?”

“Because you understand who we are fighting, Sergeant Castaño,” Halistone replied. “And you understand sacrifice.”

“I didn’t sacrifice. I lost,” Castaño said.

“Only if it stops you,” Tesla said. “Fighting fascism takes many forms. Only as a soldier does it require violence. It is an injustice that we would ask any more violence of you.”

“You can take all the weapons out of this?” Castaño asked Tesla.

“I can, I would be happy to.”

Earp and Halistone exchanged a quick look.

“I’m going to ask you to do that,” Castaño replied, “The second I’m done setting this Nazi shit straight.”

Like what you read? Buy me a beer or @ me about it.

Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Bruce Connors.

The Case of an Old Dead Guy is complete.
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.