Ch.315Case File #231 – Staten Island Murder Case (2)

“I’ll lead the way. Please follow me.”

Willem got into the car, and the angel took flight effortlessly. Following the flying angel with his heavy body, Willem headed toward the most un-New York part of New York.

New York had several islands, but Staten Island seemed to be treated as an appendage of New York City. While Manhattan had a metropolis built upon it, Staten Island’s attractions amounted to little more than farms.

The car led by the angel sped through New York City as if driving on an empty mountain road. It didn’t take long to reach their destination. Lawrence Carter’s house was quite magnificent.

“He must have admired those plantation owners from the South.” Willem clicked his tongue as he looked at the mansion overlooking a sprawling farm. From inside the mansion came the sounds of commotion.

Since the angel also seemed unaware of what was happening, they entered the mansion together. A sharp smell filled the air. Gunpowder. Followed by the metallic scent of blood.

Did someone fire a gun? Willem hoped the case wouldn’t end anticlimactically with suicide. And inside the mansion… angels were pinning down a man, while others surrounded a woman sitting on the stairs.

The smell of gunpowder permeated the air, but the blood scent came from the woman. Blood was flowing from her leg. It appeared a bullet had lodged in her thigh, but fortunately it had missed any major blood vessels, as the bleeding was minimal.

Then the man being restrained by the angels must be the shooter. Was he the culprit in the Lawrence Carter case? Things couldn’t be that simple. Willem approached the angel restraining the man.

This one didn’t seem to be a fallen angel, as he merely stared blankly at Willem. Only after the angel who had brought Willem explained that he was a civilian consultant did the angel offer Willem a brief salute.

The case had become complicated. The current situation probably wasn’t to his liking. Willem knelt on one knee in front of the man who was pinned to the floor, wheezing for breath.

“Loosen your hold a bit. I have questions. Even a madman’s ramblings can sometimes be helpful.”

The angel operated mechanically. He removed his knee from the man’s back, allowing him to sit up. The shooter, finally able to breathe properly, took a deep breath and pointed at the woman in front of Willem.

“She did it! She’s the one who did that to my brother! I was trying to punish her myself when the angels happened to discover me… Anyway, arrest her! Hurry! That woman, I tell you!”

Willem waved two fingers in front of the man’s eyes as if telling him to come to his senses. When the man began to focus on Willem, the old detective spoke.

“After telling who did it, now’s the time to explain how and why. Tips are welcome, but there’s a limit to solving cases with a madman’s ramblings.”

“If that woman did it, isn’t it obvious? That woman is a vampire! She put her mouth on my brother’s neck, sucked out all his blood, and then stabbed him with a knife to hide the bite marks! That’s why my brother…”

This was a method Willem had already considered. He stood up briefly and approached the woman with the gunshot wound in her thigh. She was young. Twenty-two at most, probably twenty or twenty-one.

Unless Lawrence Carter had formed a gang and ruled the neighborhood at the age of twelve, they must have been a couple with quite an age difference. Willem bowed his head to her.

“I’m sorry about your husband’s passing, but I need to verify that fellow’s claims. No matter how absurd the testimony, such rumors following a woman…”

Willem tried to persuade her, but she didn’t seem to need his persuasion. She opened her mouth wide in front of Willem to show him the inside.

A pointed, long tongue extended out, and very clearly, the distinctive long and sharp fangs of a vampire gleamed inside.

She started laughing. As if she found it very amusing, as if she’d forgotten the pain in her thigh, she began to laugh. She spoke to the man pinned to the floor. Her voice rang clear and sharp.

“Yes. Good. Say more! Say it all! Tell us why that so-called ‘Mrs. Carter’ or whoever did such a thing.”

There was more to the story. Willem had clearly heard the pinned man trying to say that his brother, Lawrence Carter, had done something. There was no need to wonder about what came after.

But Willem had one thing he needed to ask. He briefly glanced at the man before turning back to Mrs. Carter. Perhaps calling her Mrs. Carter was disrespectful.

“I’m not sure what to call you, but Mrs. Carter doesn’t seem appropriate. There is one suitable name, but… since it’s not certain, Miss Nameless. May I ask how old you are?”

She looked up at Willem. Her expression was somewhat confused, but it didn’t take long for her to understand the meaning behind Willem’s elaborate speech. She bit the inside of her mouth with her fangs.

Her expression suggested she was overcome with emotion, but Willem slowly clicked his tongue and shook his head. He took her hand.

“Humans can gnaw like that with their blunt teeth, but vampires have excessively long fangs, and gnawing like that will leave bruises on your lower jaw. You’ve lived a life unbecoming of a vampire. It’s alright. The truth seems to be emerging, so please punch a hole in the departure ticket for the train leaving the tunnel.”

She decided to trust this man with his scholarly and verbose speech. She spoke, trying to suppress her anger. Her fangs were covered in her own blood.

“Twenty, twenty-one. That’s…”

Willem raised one finger and wiggled it from side to side. It was time for the detective to step in. Willem was not a great detective. Sometimes he failed to catch the culprit. The reasons varied.

He approached the angel who had brought him. After clearing his throat twice with his fist in front of his mouth, he began to speak. His gestures were quite showy and theatrical.

“I know who the culprit is. But before I reveal the culprit, I’d like to ask one thing. The law must be fair. In the land of free people, the law must be equal for all, and that’s why the judges in this land look through past precedents when making judgments. Am I correct?”

The angel nodded. The past holds back the present. Memories of the past can drag a person down to something less than human, but they can also become the most competent attorney in a petition for restoration of human rights.

Willem approached the woman sitting on the stairs without even glancing at the accuser with the gun. Calling her Mrs. Carter was truly the worst possible way to address her.

“I’ll be brief. The culprit is Mrs. Carter. No, the culprit is Miss Gemini Phillips lying here. Gemini Phillips, who was exactly eight years old when Lawrence Carter set fire to her home to seize the Phillips farm, and who is now twenty-one years old, thirteen years later. I’ll say it a third time. There is no such person as Mrs. Carter here. Only Gemini Phillips.”

Repeating the culprit’s name three times was usually meant to induce shame, but not this time. Willem had decided to restore her. To her original life.

Willem spoke as if possessed by the Holy Spirit. All the information was there. He had simply failed to discover one tiny connection. He addressed the angel inspector.

“What did you tell me about whether a vampire could drain all the blood from an adult male? Please repeat it here.”

The angel was overwhelmed by his demeanor. This aging, pot-bellied detective was now speaking like a fierce wave capable of breaking the keel of an ironclad ship.

“It’s possible, but not easy, as I said. Drinking blood with such high iron content all at once could cause iron poisoning…”

“Enough! So a vampire determined to avenge her family after thirteen years could do it. Isn’t that right? Someone who has resolved to abandon all names like vampire species or vampire human and live as a blood-sucking ghost or monster could do it. Am I wrong?”

“Since it’s not physically impossible, with that kind of motivation… I think it would be possible.”

He had figured out how. Now it was time to reveal why. He continued speaking as he walked toward the accuser. Truth comes first. Mourning follows.

“So we’ve figured out how the blood disappeared. Mr. Lawrence Carter had multiple knife wounds. He was hacked randomly with a sharp hunting knife. It’s difficult to do such a thing out of ordinary hatred. Because the moment you stab someone, you realize that this person is made of flesh like me and bleeds when stabbed. But this time, that’s what happened.”

Willem knelt again in front of the accuser. Last time, his gaze was that of a detective, but this time, it was the expression of a father looking at the tragedy of a child young enough to be his daughter.

“Perhaps if someone disrupted the happy life of a family with money and violence, and ultimately burned the will to resist, one could harbor such hatred? What was your brother going to say next? Wasn’t that exactly what Lawrence Carter did? You weren’t planning to report it, but in your stupidity and dullness, you were about to blurt it out!”

Willem thundered. He could shout at someone who had abandoned principles yet acted as if they were an apostle of justice trying to take revenge. The accuser nodded, gasping as if about to faint.

“Y-yes, that’s right. That…”

Willem rose from him and turned to look at Mrs. Carter… no, Gemini Phillips again. In this case, Willem didn’t even need to use his deductive powers. Everything was too natural.

The police had all the information and were simply waiting for someone to come with a needle and thread it all together. It wasn’t a moment that required a brilliant detective, just a detective.

Someone wanted recognition. She probably didn’t even hope for commemoration or mourning, but a person whose life has been torn apart by desire should be mourned, even as a dead flower.

“I’ll conclude. Mr. Lawrence Carter has been incinerated. The flames started thirteen years ago and quietly followed him. Miss Gemini Phillips, who survived the fire for whatever reason, was raised in secret, which is why she has no knowledge or records. She became Mrs. Carter because he desired her, having grown up to be beautiful and charming in a vampire-like way.”

Willem trembled. He couldn’t understand how broken a person would have to be to raise the only surviving eight-year-old child from a family he had killed and then take her as his wife.

“She resolved to take revenge. But she was a person with no records, even presumed dead, while her opponent was a wealthy man on Staten Island, so she couldn’t take revenge immediately. She waited for the right time. It was a marriage to someone she hated, but she gained a life. A fake name and fake identity, but a life nonetheless. The time for revenge had come.”

Willem was a person who could be honest with his emotions. After killing a child kidnapper with the seventh bullet, he had proudly defended himself, and now he was expressing his opinion again.

But in his eyes, he saw someone who couldn’t do the same. Someone who had to pretend to smile brightly when all that remained was hatred. He tried not to pity her.

“She intended to be caught from the beginning. She thought the police would have records. It wasn’t just about killing him; she deliberately aroused suspicion so that during questioning, she could talk about her past. She wanted to tell how her family died and how they were forgotten. This was her only outlet. How…”

Willem swallowed his emotional words. In this play written by Gemini Phillips, she played the role of the culprit, and Willem played the detective. He shouldn’t act as the audience.

“Fortunately for her, the gamble succeeded. The police knew what crimes Lawrence Carter had committed in the past, and they could even detect that she was acting. She wouldn’t have feared prison, and lack of freedom wouldn’t have been a punishment. The word ‘freedom’ hadn’t been listed in the dictionary of her life since the edition from thirteen years ago.”

But things wouldn’t go exactly as she had planned. Willem decided to improvise. The play now becomes an impromptu performance. It departs from New York’s colors.

He wasn’t a New Yorker. He was a European with a desperate longing for happy endings and colorful fantasies of the Belle Époque that hadn’t completely faded. So, like European detectives, he led the play.

“I’ll cite a precedent. The fire thirteen years ago that Lawrence Carter committed, that everyone knew Lawrence Carter committed, that evidence showed Lawrence Carter committed, yet for which no one was punished. This is an inappropriate citation. Say that I, still Willem rather than William, don’t understand the American legal system. Let me ask, Inspector. Who is the culprit in this case?”

Willem knew what precedents were and how they were used, but he boldly cited the precedent inappropriately. The angel inspector looked somewhat confused after hearing Willem’s passionate speech and denunciation.

And the next moment… Willem could be certain that the angel’s fall was not a fall. The angel inspector finally decided. One more unsolved case in this city wouldn’t change anything.

“Lawrence Carter was not indicted. The reason was that it’s possible for a fire to break out in a house by chance and kill an entire family. I probably won’t file a report either. It’s… possible for Lawrence Carter, knowing his responsibility for what happened thirteen years ago, to hack himself to death with his own knife. I apologize about the blood. The scene was covered in blood, but…”

Angels were, as he said, clumsy in their work and prone to minor mistakes. The fallen angel inspector knew this fact very well. That face, sculpted by the hand of the God-President, smiled a little. He lied.

“I seem to have forgotten to record that fact, making it look like an absurd unsolved case, consultant. Officer Suriel, arrest that bastard. Aggravated assault. We might find more if we dig deeper.”

Willem approached Miss Gemini Phillips. The emergency treatment for her thigh was complete, and vampires recover quickly after consuming a large amount of blood. She had recovered enough to almost walk.

The detective she had so desperately wanted extended his hand to her. She took Willem’s hand. Willem helped her walk outside the mansion, despite her limping.

Willem twirled his magnificent beard with his finger and spread his arms. In the distance, Manhattan’s bustling streets could be seen.

“How does freedom feel?”

She decided to be honest, at least with Willem. She poured out her feelings about the immense emptiness she felt now that the goal of revenge, which had occupied her entire life, was gone.

“I don’t know. I’ve never learned how to live… and I don’t know what I can do now…”

“I happen to be looking for a secretary… It takes a lot of time to trim this magnificent beard, you see. I need someone to answer the phone and organize work while I’m trimming my beard. It’s a simple job, but would you… like to try? A very methodical person would be excellent.”

The seventh was always unlucky. The number 231 was the sum of 7 added thirty-three times. Why did it seem lucky this time? Willem pondered briefly.

Perhaps the number 3 was a lucky number. 7 is one, and 3 is two. So 3 won. He decided to leave it at that.