Milo and I walk inside. Two uniform cops are here. I introduce myself. They explain the situation. I tell them Milo and I will take it from here.
Music blares. People slurp beer. I look around. Plastic cups sit on beat-up dirty tables. The floor is filthy, the bar grimy. Dim blueand-red pseudo-nightclub lighting is intended to mask these things, but it doesn’t work. A prostrate body lies face-up in a corner. Two crime-scene techs and a pathologist crouch around it.
The dead man isn’t fat, but maybe two hundred and sixty pounds, well over six feet tall. He’s a baby-faced corpse, not much more than a kid, and appears as if he’s sleeping. Two bouncers and two rent-a-cops in police-style coveralls and boots stand around the massive corpse, hands in their pockets, shift their weight back and forth on their feet like they’re guilty of something.
I flash my police card. Milo pushes past the bouncers and rent-a-cops, bends down and talks to the pathologist.
A bouncer starts to shout in my ear, over the sound system. I yell, too, and cut him off. “Shut down the music. Turn up the houselights. Close the bar. Lock the door. Nobody leaves. The club is closed for the night.”
He tries to argue. The law doesn’t require that an establishment that serves alcohol be closed in the event of a death. His boss will be pissed off.
I shake my head. “We’re operating under my law. Do it now.”
Bouncer number one scurries off to follow instructions. Milo comes over. “Dead as a bag of hammers. Most likely because his hyoid bone is broken.”
The music dies and the house goes quiet, except for a lone sobbing. A heavyset young guy, another giant, sits on a barstool, holds his face in his hands and cries. I ask Milo to take photos and witness statements from customers while I question the bouncers and rent-a-cops. Milo uses the camera in his cell phone to snap pics of the corpse and the club. Apparently, he doesn’t mind deferring to me in matters that don’t require his overwhelming intellectual prowess.
Bouncer number two stands near me. He has big muscles encased in a layer of fat. He wears jeans and a tight black T-shirt.
I take out a notepad and pen. “What’s your name?” I ask.
“Timo Sipila.”
“Address, telephone and social security numbers.”
He gives them to me.
“What happened?”
“This guy and his brother,” he points at the boy giant in tears, “got into an argument. They started shoving each other. First we called Securitas-the rent-a-cops-then me and my partner, Joni Korjus, went over to calm them down.”
Korjus is also huge. I’m in a bar full of mastodons.
“The dead guy had an attitude, so we told him to leave,” Timo says. “He refused and started yelling at us to mind our own business. Securitas got here about the time we started to carry him out. They can back up my story.”
The rent-a-cops nod agreement.
I get to the meat of the issue. “Why is he dead?”
“I got him in a headlock, and Joni grabbed his legs. We carried him outside like that and then dropped him outside the front door. He wasn’t breathing anymore.”
“You held him suspended by the neck,” I say. “How long was he in that position?”
“Ninety seconds, two minutes tops.”
More than enough time to kill him. “You broke his hyoid and caused him to choke to death.”
The bouncer says nothing.
“Why so long, why was it necessary to remove him in that manner, and did his brother interfere?”
Timo ignores the first two parts of the question. “No, his brother just followed us and screamed for us to stop.”
Now I have a sense of the situation. Two brothers have a spat. Two bored bouncers overreact because they have nothing else to do. They have a bit of fun at the victim’s expense while they eject him. He dies.