A Welcome Grave

by Michael Koryta

  “Then go to your physical therapy,” I said. He started to shake his head, but I held up my hand. “Joe, go to it. I said you getting healthy is the most important thing, and I meant that. But come on by the office when you’re done. Come on by, and give me a hand.”

  He hesitated before nodding. We left the kitchen and walked outside. I paused at the door to my truck, and he slowed down and looked back at me. I said, “Thank you,” just as he said, “I’m sorry,” and then we both just nodded at each other. I climbed in my truck and started the engine, then drove to the office, feeling better than I had in a long time.

  Good enough that I could almost forget about the question he’d left unanswered.

  I’d been in the office for fifteen minutes before Targent and Daly showed up. All I’d accomplished so far was to boot up the computer and crack the windows, let a little of the Indian summer day bleed into the room. I heard their steps on the stairs as I settled back into my chair behind the desk, and for a moment I thought it was Joe, deciding to pass on therapy after all and get an early start on this. Then someone knocked on the door, and I had a bad feeling I knew my visitors.

  I pulled the door open, and Targent greeted me with a cheerful smile.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Perry.”

  They came inside. Daly was carrying a black leather bag, and he walked past me and sat on one of the old stadium chairs that occupy the center of our office, relics from Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Targent came in, too, but he stayed on his feet.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Well, you drove off in such a hurry the other night I didn’t have a chance to wrap up our chat.”

  “I wrapped it up, Targent. And I’m busy. So this better be damn important, because if you’re just visiting, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  He nodded, looking at me with a curious expression. “Speaking of visiting—you been doing any in places where you’re not wanted?”

  “Nope.”

  “Because,” he gestured at his own face, pointing to his eye and then to his lip, “you’re a little banged up there.”

  “Uh-huh. That’s a souvenir from the guy you should be arresting.” I knew where we were headed, and it wasn’t going to be good. I should have reported the attack. I’d waited because I hadn’t talked to Karen yet, and my chances of getting an honest answer about any extortion attempts seemed better if I went alone. Now that was about to blow up in my face.

  “The guy I should be arresting?” Targent’s eyebrows arched.

  “I was interrogated about some things last night. Rather vigorously. The guy put a bag over my head and asked me what had happened with Jefferson’s son, in Indiana.”

  Targent turned and looked at Daly. Then he looked back to me, and when he did all that was left on his face was anger.

  “You were interrogated about Jefferson’s son.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, someone is in trouble,” he said. “Whoever failed to get this police report to me and point out that it has a direct impact on my murder investigation, they are in some kind of trouble. We must have an incompetent asshole in our midst. Because I’m quite sure you had a police report made, and yet that report never made its way to my desk.”

  I held his eyes while I shook my head.

  “You didn’t,” Targent said, and now that low voice had the full force of his rising fury behind it. “You were approached—no, attacked—by a man you had every reason to believe was involved in a homicide, and you didn’t feel it necessary to inform the police? Is that what I’m understanding?”

  “I wanted to talk to Karen.”

  “She’s running the homicide investigation?”

  “No.”

  “So you are?”

  “No.” I paused but spoke again before he could jump in. “The last time we talked, you were full of shit, Detective. You blocked me in the driveway and gave that entertaining speech about the movie plots and generally wasted my time. You think I was in a hurry to sit down with you again?”

  “I’d like to think you would be in a hurry to see this crime solved. Holding back information like this is not a help, Perry. It’s a crime. You were a cop, you know that.”

  “Look, Targent, if I’d come to you last night it wouldn’t have helped. The guy was gone, and what lead would my story have given you? Nothing. All he left me with was vague talk and a collection of bruises.”

  “You held back critical information in a homicide investigation—”

  “I’m giving it to you now. You think you would’ve broken this case if I’d called you at two in the morning? Come on. I’m giving it to you now, and that’s enough. We can spend the rest of the day arguing about it, but if you’re so interested in getting this case closed, like you say, you’ll be smart enough to realize that’s not going to help. If you’re more worried about winning some sort of macho pissing contest with me, then go ahead. We can waste as many hours as you like.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We won’t argue about that, but I’m not ready to leave yet, either. There’s a matter I think you’re going to want to discuss with us.”

  “You don’t have anything I want to discuss.”

  “No?” His eyes had changed, the anger replaced by the hard glint of a poker player sitting on a hand he was sure the others at the table weren’t anticipating.

  “No.”

  “Not even a Russian by the name of Thor?”

  I looked at him for a long time, trying to keep my face impassive and hoping nobody could hear the thudding increase in my heart rate.

  “You don’t know a Russian named Thor?” he said. “I’d try the last name, but there’s no chance I’d even get in the ballpark. Too many consonants. Or maybe it was vowels.”

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “So you do know the man?”

  “I didn’t say that. Just tell me why you’re asking about him. Tell me that or get the hell out of here.”

  Targent smiled, enjoying the tension he heard in my voice. “After Jefferson’s body turned up, we searched his vehicle and pulled some prints. There were several different sets there, but only one turned up a match on our computers. Two fingers of the right hand of a Russian mobster named Thor. A gentleman who’s been charged with four crimes and investigated in maybe thirty others and convicted of none. Word about this guy is that he’s a hitter. Serious protection for Dainius Belov, and I’m quite sure you know who he is.”

  His words slid in and out of my brain. I couldn’t focus on anything other than a Russian with the palest blue eyes I’d ever seen, eyes that belonged to some ancient glacier. Did I know Thor? Targent had asked. Proof of that acquaintance was standing in front of him. Thor had saved my life once. Saved it while taking the lives of a few other men, sure, but when you’re the one who comes out alive you tend not to worry about the other side of the equation so much.

  “We were pretty intrigued by this guy, right from the start,” Targent was saying. I blinked hard and stared at him, struggling to pay attention, to look calm, and not like I’d just been kicked in the stomach.

  “Yeah?”

  “A guy with that sort of reputation, you kidding me? Looked like a good fit. Problem was motive, Perry. All we had connecting Jefferson to this guy were those two fingerprints in the car. Nothing else. Not a phone record, not a mutual acquaintance, nothing. Then we learned something very interesting about you.”

  He motioned at Daly, who reached into his bag and pulled out a sheaf of papers. Targent took them and shuffled them for a minute, then spoke again.

  “We’re acquainted with a homicide detective named Swanders. That one familiar to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Right. Turns out you two were working the same case about a year ago. Guy named Wayne Weston got whacked. Trail ran back to the Russian mob, Belov’s crew. You played a pretty heavy role in the way everything shook out on that one. Dangerous stuff, is how they wrote it up in the papers
. The interesting thing about the newspaper articles was that they were filled with loose ends. I hate unanswered questions, you know? So I threw a few of those questions at Swanders. The way he remembers it, right around the same time this Weston case was going on, the Russians had a bit of an internal shake-up.”

  I sat down on the chair behind my desk, leaned back, and gave him indifferent, as bored an expression as I could muster. It wasn’t much.

  “We asked around about this shake-up. There are a couple guys with the department and a few more with the FBI who keep a tight watch on the Russians. They remember the situation. Seems about three of the Russians who were affiliated with Belov just disappeared.” He snapped his fingers. “Poof. One day they were here, wreaking havoc on the city, and the next, they were gone. Then there’s you, a guy who by all accounts should have been viewed as a major pain in the ass by these Russians, and yet . . . you’re still here. Some of the cops who work on these guys? They find that pretty damn incredible.”

  “If you’ve got prints from this Thor, and he’s got such a history, seems like you should be talking to him, not me.”

  “We’ve talked to him,” Targent said. “Tried to, at least. He lawyered up right away. I’m wondering if maybe we asked the wrong questions.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. None of your questions seem particularly bright to me.”

  “You’ve got the motive. Thor didn’t, not that we can see, but you do. And when we prove you’re connected to him, Perry? Shit’s gonna turn pretty damn interesting, I’d say.”

  I leaned back and smiled at him. “Targent?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Get the hell out of my office. Immediately. You’ve been crowding the line with me, and today you jumped over it with both feet. I’m done tolerating your stupidity.”

  I stood up and went to the door, opened it, and stood there looking at him expectantly.

  “You don’t think we’ll be able to connect you to him?” Targent said.

  “You’re done. Leave.”

  “I’m guessing we can make that connection,” he said, starting for the door. “I’m guessing you and this guy have some serious history.”

  They brushed past me and went outside, and I slammed the door behind them. When I heard their car start up in the parking lot, I looked at the clock, wondering when Joe would be done with therapy, hoping he’d have some advice about how to handle a ghost with a Russian accent and translucent blue eyes.

  14

  Joe’s natural expression falls somewhere between grim and gloomy. To see him look troubled, then, is to see the kind of look that belongs only on the face of a man in a foxhole who is running out of ammunition and has an entire enemy battalion headed his way. It doesn’t bolster your confidence, is what I’m saying.

  “Thor,” he said, hunched forward at his desk, flexing a thin metal ruler in his hands as if he were testing its strength, expecting to need it as a weapon at any moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You didn’t pay him to kill Jefferson, did you?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Shit,” he said again, and he pushed the ends of the ruler closer together, straining the metal’s flexibility, and stared at me with that look of impending doom.

  “I think we’ve agreed on that point,” I said.

  He dropped the ruler on the desk. “This development is more than a little disturbing, LP. This isn’t a small town. The odds of Thor being brought in as a total coincidence are not good.”

  “Could it be a bluff?”

  “You mean Targent is looking for ways to make you sweat and decided to push that button?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Hell of a good guess on the right button, then. If he looks hard enough, he might find that his theoretical connection between you and Thor is a very real one. And that’s going to raise some problems.”

  “If it’s not a bluff, then what the hell was Thor doing in Jefferson’s car?”

  That question made Joe’s frown deepen, and he reached for the ruler again, went back to bending it. “Any chance the guy who grabbed you off Chatfield the other night was Russian?”

  I shook my head. “His speech was pure Midwest.”

  “Maybe it’s simple. Jefferson defended Thor in court, something like that.”

  “Targent said they’d been unable to find any connection between Thor and Jefferson until they found me. If it was something as obvious as Jefferson handling work for Belov’s crew, they would have turned that up right away.”

  Joe didn’t say anything. I sat with my feet up on the desk and stared out the window. Someone had parked beneath us and left the stereo running, rap music thumping loud enough to make our windowpane tremble slightly.

  “I suppose I could look Thor up.”

  Joe looked at me as if I were pushing on a pull door. “Brilliant, LP. The cops are looking to pin a murder on you based in part upon your association with that lunatic, an association that you denied, and now you think you should go look him up?”

  I shrugged. “He could answer some questions, maybe.”

  “Or slit your throat, maybe.”

  The last time I’d seen Thor, he’d stabbed a hunting knife into another man’s thigh. Perhaps Joe raised a valid point.

  “So we push on as if we didn’t even know this little detail?”

  Joe scowled. “I don’t like it, either, but I have to say that seems like the brightest option. You’ve got to remember that you’re a suspect, LP. That’s going to have to change some things about the way you operate.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, the rap music still booming beneath us, Joe still flexing that metal ruler.

  “If I found Thor, got just five minutes with him for some questions,” I began, but Joe cut me off with a groan.

  “There are other things we can do, too. We still haven’t checked out those phone calls.”

  “Joe, come on. With Thor involved, I think it’s gone beyond worrying about phone records.”

  “Why? An hour ago you insisted those calls were significant. Now, because Thor’s name is mentioned, you’re wild to grab a gun and go after him? Do some detective work. That’s how you get answers. Did you accomplish anything while I was gone other than getting your ass chewed by Targent?”

  “I was waiting for your great wisdom.”

  “Good, because I’m ready to parcel some of it out. First thought is that you need to stay away from the Russian angle. Far away from it. You start nosing around with those boys, and Targent will catch wind of it. Second thought is that those calls in the middle of the night mattered. Don’t give up on them just because Targent threw you a curve.”

  I nodded and retrieved the list of numbers. Seven total, from calls spaced over a five-year period. I gave the three most recent numbers to Joe, kept the three earlier numbers for myself. The seventh didn’t matter—I already knew it was Matt Jefferson’s cell phone.

  It took us less than twenty minutes to break all the numbers. Some were easy, using a basic reverse lookup, and two others—pay phones—required our more sophisticated search databases.

  “Both of the recent calls were made from pay phones,” Joe said. “Not surprising, if those were the calls that freaked Jefferson out, this guy stepping back into his life. What do you have?”

  “Two of the calls he received came from Fairview Park Hospital. They’re four years old, though, and my guy last night made some reference to five years ago. I’m more interested in a number Jefferson called.”

  I explained the sequence to Joe: At nearly two in the morning, Matt Jefferson had called his father, who then immediately made another call.

  “And you got a match on the number he called?”

  “Yeah. It returns to one Paul Brooks, of Geneva-on-the-Lake.”

  “Mr. Brooks would seem to be our best option, then. Nobody at the hospital is going to talk to us about a four-year-old phone call, and
the last time I interviewed a pay phone it didn’t go well.”

  “You really are dispensing wisdom today, aren’t you?”

  “Geneva-on-the-Lake is a long drive. Let’s hope the guy’s around. If not, we can wait on him.”

  “You want to drive out there? Don’t think we should call first?”

  He shook his head. “Harder to blow us off in person.”

  “True.”

  He got to his feet and picked up his car keys. They belonged to a new Ford Taurus. His old Taurus had suffered a little body damage back in the summer. A little body damage of the sort a car can suffer when an assault rifle is unloaded into it. True to form, Joe simply purchased a newer version of the exact same car, in the exact same color. Word from Ford was that the Taurus would soon be reaching the end of its line. I didn’t want to break that news to Joe, though. He’s a strong man, but news like that . . . no sure thing that he could handle it.

  “You driving?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Wouldn’t it make sense to let the guy with two good arms drive?”

  “Not when the guy is you. Besides, I need to put some miles on the car, break it in. Still haven’t hit a thousand.”

  “You’ve had the car for two months, Joe. How have you not hit a thousand miles?”

  “Haven’t had to go anywhere. It’s been two months since you got yourself into trouble.”

  “A new record,” I said, and then I followed him out the door.

  An hour later, Joe pulled onto 534 north as it became the lake road and led into the village of Geneva-on-the-Lake. In the summer, the place would have been buzzing, filled with families and tourists, but here in late October things were quiet. We drove through the village and onto a winding country road, glimpses of Lake Erie showing through the pines occasionally.

  “We should be coming up on it,” he said. “I hope the damn place has a mailbox with numbers. Drives me nuts when the mailboxes don’t have numbers.”

  Turned out he didn’t have to worry—the numbers were two feet high, painted on a huge wooden sign that proclaimed Paul Brooks’s residence as BROOKS’S NORTHSHORE WINERY. Joe turned the Taurus into the drive and pulled into a long parking lot filled with cars. Behind the parking lot was a large log building, and behind that was the lake, looking hard and gray.