A Manhattan Mortal in The Bay of All Saints

The third body was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Not that the first two didn’t get some attention, turning up as they did about a week apart on the steps of an old Catholic church in a part of town overrun by tourist traffic. The killer practically had to stand in line like some out-of-towner in order to dump the stiffs. The first one had been stabbed so many times that by the time it was stretched out on the church stairs, it had already bled out. This saved the padres a tough clean-up job and a tougher public relations problem. They weren’t so lucky with the second cadaver. It showed up a week later with most of the back of the head surgically removed by gunshots and planted face down for the maximum dramatic effect on passersby. Both these murders were gruesome enough, but at least within the realm of possible violence in any major urban center. The third one was another story entirely. It showed up ten days after number two, on the same church steps with his hands in his front pockets. This doesn’t sound too bad, except that his arms were tied to his ankles behind his back. He’d also had his eyes gouged out and they were found in his hands, in the pockets. The feeling was that he’d been strangled, but it was hard to say because his throat had been cut as well. A dollop of dog shit had been stuffed in his mouth for good measure. Sometimes the small touches make all the difference. The three cadavers had something else in common besides their final resting place. All of them had whip marks covering their backs. This type of urban littering generally puts a crimp in the local tourist trade. By the time the third body appeared, the area merchants, already somewhat antsy in light of their thinning tourist clientele, started making their displeasure known at the highest levels. This led to a spate of superficial activity that consisted of a loud press conference by the police commissioner and a flurry of articles detailing police progress on the case. This was followed by an increasing lack of interest as the murders receded from the present to the preterit to the past perfect tense. A couple of weeks went by and no new bodies appeared, so the general public went back to focusing on this month’s rent and groceries. The victims had never appeared on anybody’s society page and were considered working class, if they had been working at all. They were also black, at least by New York standards, even though their skin colors ranged all the way from Halle Berry to Don Cheadle. Of course, the hometown press described them more accurately, calling only the first victim a black man, while the other two were referred to as mulattos. That’s the kind of distinction people make in the city of Salvador, state of Bahia, in Brazil.