Arnold's phone was found shortly after Jim drove away. It was grimy and cracked, discarded in the gutter, most likely in a weak attempt of hiding it.
For a moment, Harvey just examined it, holding it at arm's length like it was contagious. He jumped when it rang and it slipped from his hand, landing face down. When he picked it up, quick to answer, the screen was more cracked than before. Yikes. Good thing the man didn't need it any more, otherwise he'd be in for it.
The name on the screen was Sam, followed by a cheesy <3 symbol.
Harvey clicked accept.
"Arnie?" a woman's voice asked.
He took a deep breath. "This is Detective Harvey Bullock from the GCPD. I'm-"
"Oh, God. What's he done now?"
Huh?
Those words being the follow-up question to a detective answering the phone was definitely something to ask her about.
Though he'd taken a second to prepare for his first words, he did anything but avoid being blunt for the big reveal. Back when he first got the job he always approached it lightly, but he'd long stopped caring. Mean, but if he took the time to be gentle with every single case, it would all take twice as long.
"He's dead."
---
When Sam Mendez opened the door to her pristine little town house, her eyes were pinker than the colour itself, though her makeup appeared undamaged. She wore a white shirt and blue jeans, a fluffy pink cardigan pulled around her in a way she hoped would be comforting. Her blonde hair was pulled back tightly, and overall she looked perfect. Not in a sweet way, per se, but in an almost spooky way.
The inside of the house reflected Harvey's impression of her. The walls were too white, the rugs too clean, the vases too polished. They sat at a spotless table in the sitcom-like kitchen, Sam with a mug of milky coffee that she never once raised to her lips.
Just by sitting in the house with his creased clothes and untrimmed beard, the soles of his clumsy shoes caked in dry mud, Harvey felt like he was trashing the place. He glanced around as cautiously as he would if his eyes were shooting out clouds of dirt, wondering if the area was somehow home to clues.
His eyes landed on a large photo on the wall, bigger than any of the colourless paintings he saw on his way through the corridor. It was of two young people. One was Sam, and the other must have been what Arnold looked like when he still had a face. Sam wore an elaborate white dress and Arnold a black suit, both smiling wider than most were able to.
"You and him were married?" he asked. He already knew the answer, yet it seemed traditional to make comments like this.
"Last month," Sam whispered.
Her eyes became glazed with tears and her mouth trembled, and Harvey frowned somewhat sympathetically.
"Is there anything you can tell me about..." he began, but cut himself off. "Over the phone, you asked me what he'd done. You expected he was in some kinda trouble, probably not for the first time. Wanna elaborate on that?"
Sam shrugged. "Arnie's not a bad man," she insisted, perhaps a little too quickly. "He just... he's always in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gets in fights, gets involved with the wrong people."
"Wrong people?"
"He's... he sells drugs, alright? That's how we can keep affording this place."
Harvey nodded, thinking. "Do you know anyone who'd wanna hurt him?"
"Maybe."
"Maybe?"
"I mean, I don't know. I don't get involved with his... business. I just cook, and I clean, and I keep the place tidy. He's very particular about that. If he comes home and finds even one little smudge of dirt, he..."
Sam shook her head and didn't even attempt to finish her sentence. She shrank back into her cardigan, looking like she wished it would consume her entirely. She hadn't been keeping eye contact with the detective at the best of times, but now she couldn't even look in his general direction.
Harvey raised his eyebrows. "Did Arnold hurt you, Sam?"
She shook her head again, but it was far too aggressive.
"You know he can't hear us, right?" he pried.
Sam blinked. "I know, I know, I just..."
She didn't need to elaborate. Harvey continued asking questions for a few more minutes, but he already knew everything he needed to.
---
"I've talked to the vic's wife," was the first thing he said to his partner when he got to the precinct. "She told me he's a dealer. An abuser too, I gathered, but I couldn't get her to talk about it."
It was early afternoon by now and Jim was sitting at his desk with a file about Arnold's murder, complete with gruesome close-up photos of the body. He avoided looking at them the best he could, especially with the sandwich he was trying to eat, but it was one of those scenes that were virtually impossible to look away from.
The results of the awkward autopsy confirmed that the rodents were the only thing that killed Mendez, not unless he had a heart attack (likely) or died of blood loss (very likely) beforehand.
Jim furrowed his brow. "So, what? We've got a vigilante on our hands?"
"Might be," Harvey shrugged. "Could just be coincidence."
"Yeah, well, I don't wanna wait around for the next kill to find out," he muttered. "Did you ask her about the cause of death? Guerra's confirmed it was rats."
Harvey pulled a face. "Did I what?"
"Ask about-"
"Yeah, hi Sam, sorry to hear your husband's been brutally murdered," he said mockingly. "Just out of interest, has he offended the rat mafia recently?"
"He's an abuser, what else could he be capable of?" Jim laughed.
"Hey, it was only yesterday you told me to ease off with those kinds of jokes."
"Bullock, yours was about a child."
"The little rascal killed his parents, what's your excuse?"
Jim shook his head dismissively.
While Harvey took his own seat opposite Jim, the latter turned his chair around to eat the rest of his sandwich in peace. The textures melted to mush in his mouth and he ate slower, closing his eyes. Big mistake, as the remnants of the dead man's upper body seemed to made a permanent home on the backs of his eyelids.
He ended up having to spit his lunch back in its packet and throw it all away. Harvey chuckled at this, leaning back smugly in his seat like it was his own doing.
"Don't make me say it again," Jim sighed.
"Oh, go on."
"Ha ha-"
"Gordon!" somebody called.
Both detectives looked up at the sound of Officer Alvarez as he hurried up the stairs to reach them both.
"You're gonna wanna hear this," he said. He took a moment to breathe, the sounds shallow like he'd just ran a mile.
"Don't leave us hanging," Jim prompted.
Alvarez smiled, but it quickly dropped. "You know the murder this morning, the guy with the rats?"
"I recall it as one might a dream, yes," Harvey said sarcastically.
"More like a nightmare," his partner mumbled.
"Yeah, well, there's another body just like him," Alvarez said.
Jim nodded. "Nice."
"Only this time, we don't think the killer was interrupted."
"Great."
"Which means the guy's, like, completely just... gone."
"Lovely."
"And, well, it was called in from Oswald Cobblepot's club."
"It just gets better with every sentence, doesn't it?" Harvey asked rhetorically. He'd had to take over from Jim, who now genuinely looked like he was going to be sick.
It wasn't the fact that there was another body, nor was it the idea of it being more decomposed than Arnold's.
No, it was the fact that this had happened under the watch of Oswald Cobblepot. A few months back, Jim wouldn't have thought twice about it. In fact, he wouldn't even have known who the man was. But now, he suspected that Cobblepot most likely had something to do with the murders, if he wasn't the man himself.
From that day by the lake, that goddamn day, until now, Cobblepot had advanced up Gotham's bad-news ranking system at a terrifying rate. He had connections to so many crime bosses, so many death traps and suicide missions, that you had to wonder whether it was worth getting involved in the case any further beyond this point.
The gunshot from that day still rang in Jim's ears from time to time.
So did the regret that he hadn't actually killed him.