by Cam Larson
Daniel frowned as we both took our plates and sat down. "He was from the Drug Enforcement Agency? How do you know that?"
"I saw him when I went over to talk to Chief Hayes at the precinct house. He was taking a meeting with the chief while I was waiting my turn."
"DEA? Here? What for?"
I shrugged. "I don't know. You'd have to ask the chief."
Daniel paused. "I hate to say it, Laila, but we did just have a man found dead on the street from an overdose – or, at the very least a suspected overdose," he finished, blocking my objection before I could say anything.
I took a bite of the hot chicken chow mein. "I really had no idea West River had people living on the street – at least, other than John."
"They stay invisible for the most part," said Daniel. "At least, they do up in this end of town. Now – it's clear that you suspect Calvin Carpenter might have had something to do with John being dead. What's your evidence?"
I sighed. "I don’t have any tangible evidence. It would be a pretty big risk for him to actually murder someone – not when his campaign and re-election mean everything to him. But I can't forget him saying that he wanted all the homeless to ‘just disappear.’"
"I don't think he'd have much to gain by murdering someone, either. He talks a lot about his feelings about the homeless, but maybe it's just a cause to campaign on and if it wasn't that, it would be something else. So: What about Ronald Larch?"
"Oh, he's Carpenter's campaign manager, so he of course he says whatever Carpenter says. After John was found, I heard Larch say that it was just as well to be rid of one more homeless bum. Something like that.
"But then – somebody – yeah, it was Walt, Walter Schubert – said he thought Larch had known John personally."
"What did Larch say to that?"
I thought for a minute. "Nothing. He said nothing. And now that I think about it, I haven't seen Larch in Roasted Love for the past couple of days."
Daniel nodded. "Interesting. If Larch hadn't known John personally, why not just say so?"
"Good question," I said, turning back to my food. "Good question."
When we finished our meal, we took Thor out for a walk. Stars twinkled in the clear night sky and the air was warm with a slight breeze.
"So, you've got Calvin Carpenter and Ronald Larch on your list of possible suspects," said Daniel. "Anybody else?"
"No. I don't think so. Of course – I guess the drug dealers down in the rough part of town have to be considered. Even though, no, I still don't think John was an addict."
The truth was that I did have a few others in mind that I hadn’t looked into yet, but it wasn’t time for Daniel to know about that.
"I will say, though, that Councilman Calvin Carpenter still nags at me. He and Ronald Larch seem like the most likely suspects. They could have teamed up to have John murdered and hired someone to kill him. It's not that hard to do."
"I wouldn't know," he said giving me a funny look. "Just remember – the drug world is not the world you know. Speculating is fine, but I don't want you to do anything more than that. Just leave the investigation to the cops."
He gave me a kiss as he left to go home. But, I knew I couldn’t just drop what I had started in John’s case. My next plan was to scout out the councilman’s headquarters after closing.
# # #
The next night, I waited until nine o’clock and headed to the building that housed Carpenter's campaign headquarters. I arrived just as the last light was going off – I could see that it came from his office – so I circled around again to avoid him when he came out.
I gave him time to get in his car and leave, and then I drove back to the side door. I parked in a shadowed area between the streetlights and got out the bent bobby pin I'd prepared earlier.
I wasn’t sure how easy the side door lock would be to pick, but I'd noticed, when I left Carpenter's office after my visit there, that the side door only had an ordinary lock. There was no deadbolt on it.
I had no luck with the hairpin, so I tried the old credit card trick. Within a few moments I was rewarded with the door opening quite easily for me. I walked inside and shut the door behind me.
Adrenalin surged through me. I'd made it! I had no idea what to look for, but I felt sure that if "it" was there I would know it.
I headed for Carpenter’s office. The door opened right up. His desktop was stacked with various folders and I shuffled through them, but nothing there concerned homeless people.
Next was his desk drawer, which I rifled through. The first thing I noticed was the dark golden liquid in a small half-filled liquor bottle. There were a few family photos and a Twix bar among scattered pens and miscellaneous keys. Wrappers that had once held dark chocolate were wadded up and stuffed in the back of the deep drawer.
I sifted through a few scribbled notes. They seemed to be just reminders of significant dates coming up, all of which dealt with Carpenter's campaign.
On the credenza behind his desk I found more folders. I picked one up and saw that it was financial accounting for possible future plans to run for the Senate. He was ambitious, if nothing else.
Just as I was ready to close the folder, a few receipts fell onto my lap. The tabs revealed that they came from a night club in New York City. One was dated the same day John had died and was signed by Carpenter. It sure provided an alibi for the councilman and I decided I was ready to give up on Carpenter as a suspect. My findings were too thin to hold any water.
Then I froze. From the corner of my eye I saw a shadowed figure in the darkened hallway outside the councilman’s office.
I had no weapon with me or anything for defense, unless I counted the heavy paperweight on Carpenter’s desk.
"What are you doing here?" The voice was loud and demanding, but the face in the shadow was even more frightening – it was that of Councilman Calvin Carpenter.
He flipped on the fluorescent office lights. In the sudden harsh glare, his face appeared grotesque from the rage that twisted it. "This is breaking and entering. I can bring charges against you right this minute! What are you doing here?" he repeated.
If I thought I'd seen anger on the day I'd visited him, it was nothing compared to the fury he displayed at this moment.
I stood up and faced him. I had to put on a brave face and bluff my way through this. There was no other option for me.
Before I had a chance to find an impossibly plausible answer, Carpenter snarled at me again. "If you're trying to find evidence of my stance on the homeless, and on drug dealers, there's nothing here that I haven't said publicly."
When I remained silent, his angry eyes narrowed even further. "Who are you working for? What are you trying to do? Ruin me?"
"No. I have no intentions of ruining you," I said at last. "Everyone has a right to their opinions. It’s just that the homeless are people, too – people who have had a run of bad luck."
"Your take on the homeless does not explain why you are rifling through my office!"
"I’m looking into the murder of John, the homeless man," I said. There was no other answer that came to mind.
Carpenter sighed heavily. "The police reported that he died of a heroin overdose, either accidental or as suicide." He glared at me with cold, cold anger. "So, you think I killed him? That it was murder?"
Again, I froze. I'd never seen anyone so furiously angry – especially not anyone so angry at me. It occurred to me that maybe he had killed John and that if he'd killed once, he could kill again.
The paperweight was too far away for me to grab it easily. He remained standing in the doorway with his hands on the door frame, trapping me inside his office.
We stared each other down for a few moments. Finally, his face relaxed slightly even though his eyes still blazed. His facial color began to look a little less red and a little more normal.
I found that I still had some courage left. "I don’t know who caused his death," I said, "but John did not use drugs. I'm sure o
f it. He may have died from an overdose of heroin, but he didn't do it to himself."
Carpenter moved further into the room and sat down in the visitor's chair on the other side of the desk. I wanted to head for the door, but that was impossible without passing him on the way. I sat down again in his desk chair.
"Now, let’s discuss this reasonably," said Carpenter, apparently deciding to use another angle. "It's true that I'm against the homeless littering the streets of West River. It's true that I want to get rid of them. But I do not want to do it by killing them off one by one. If nothing else, do you know what that would do to my chances of advancing to any higher political office?"
I nodded, just like a schoolgirl sent to the principal's office. I began to realize just how much trouble I was in, breaking into a locked office building at night. I'd been too focused on my goal of finding out what really happened to Homeless John to think clearly.
My only hope now was to talk calmly and logically and offer some kind of rational explanation. "Councilman, I want to explain some things that you may not be aware of. It has to do with the people who have nowhere to go and end up on the streets. I’ll use John as an example."
He gave me a small wave of his hand, so I went on. "John was intelligent. He'd attended two years of college. He spoke coherently on all kinds of subjects. And – did you know he had a family?"
"I did not know anything about him personally," said Carpenter.
"But I did. He had a brother. A brother who did fall into drug use. John spent a lot of time trying to help him. He told me he saw the poison of drugs on the streets, especially in our downtown area. He focused on his brother because they'd had a rough time when they were kids and John felt responsible for Steven. I saw John as a person who simply fell on hard times and had nowhere to go."
Carpenter relaxed a little more, and looked at me as if we'd just met for the first time. "I never thought of them as leading normal lives at one time. This may determine a different avenue in taking care of the problem."
"Seriously? There are families – like the woman with the two children – who are at high risk on the streets. These people need help, not another person trying to get rid of them. It's not always their fault." I was actually impressed with the way he listened to my thoughts about the issue.
"You have some good points, Laila. I’ll take them into consideration, but no promises this late in the game."
He was a politician, after all. I decided he felt it was too late to change course. But maybe I would still get a chance to convince him that there was another side to the homeless issue. I still had three weeks to change his mind.
"As for pressing charges against you – just promise that if you want to know anything else about me, you'll come in during office hours."
A wave of relief came over me and I thanked him as I walked past him and down the hall.
Carpenter laughed. "These office hours will soon be all-nighters anyway, in which case, you won’t have to break in after dark the next time."
Chapter Eleven
After the adrenalin rush of my escapade at Councilman Carpenter’s headquarters, I was left feeling pretty drained. It was close to midnight when I finally walked into my living room. After Thor’s enthusiastic welcome, I let him out to have a short run.
While the dog was outside, I thought more about Homeless John. I had to admit that Daniel was right when he told me I really knew nothing about the man. I'd liked him because he seemed so normal when he came into Roasted Love for his coffee, even when I knew he'd been sleeping next to a sidewalk all night.
But it was true that our conversations only skimmed the surface of who he really was. He told plenty of stories that had entertained me, but still hadn't revealed much about his actual life on the streets.
Where did he go during the day when the cops forced him to leave the Piazza? Had he lied when he'd told me he didn't do drugs?
I wanted answers, not more questions – but questions were all I had.
When I finally got to sleep that night, my dreams turned out to be what I can only call a "weird hodgepodge." Not only did Daniel show up in them, but Councilman Calvin Carpenter was there. I saw him curled up on the ground outside Roasted Love just like John had done when he was still alive.
I awoke around five a.m. and turned over to try to finish my sleep. A short catnap helped clear out the weird dreams and when my alarm rang, it startled me fully awake. But thoughts of the bizarre dream still drifted across my mind before I rolled myself out of bed. Even on my days off from work, I tried to keep the same schedule for getting up in the morning. It was just easier that way.
Once I had two cups of delicious dark roasted coffee in me, I sat down at my computer screen, opened up Google and typed in Steven Collins Maxfield Correctional Facility. I was sure I remembered John telling me that that was where his brother was serving time.
There was no Steven Collins listed at that place. I wondered if maybe he'd been released, but I had no idea if two years was a normal sentence for a drug dealer or not.
When I did a general search on "Steven Collins" though, there were many, many hits. It was a common name, after all. At least three were listed in their eighties and nineties, and most of the others weren't within the right age range at all. If John's brother was no longer behind bars, he could be back out on the streets again and wouldn't show up on an Internet search
Finding him would be next to impossible.
No matter what, I would have to go back to the old downtown area. And I had to convince Chief Donald Hayes he had an unsolved murder case on his hands, not an accidental drug overdose.
I pushed Daniel from my mind because if I thought about him, I'd have to admit that I planned to break my promise to stay out of the world of drugs and dealers. But I just couldn't let this go.
When my cell rang, I hesitated, hoping for once that it wasn’t Daniel. It wasn't. Councilman Calvin Carpenter was on the line.
The night before, when he'd caught me in his office, I'd left my number with him. I didn't care whether he thought it was important to have. I just wanted to develop a working relationship with him, so that maybe in the future, he'd be a resource I could use to help solve the issues of drugs and the homeless. Both of those things were becoming more interesting to me all the time.
I may end up working on his campaign after all, I thought.
"Laila," Carpenter said. "I thought a lot about what you told me last night. It sure seems to me that the problems of homelessness and drug addiction are connected. Maybe using drugs is one way for them to survive on the streets."
My optimism grew as he talked. "Yes, Councilman. I think so, too. It's a survival strategy in the short term, even though it's terribly destructive in the long run."
"I’m calling you," he went on, "because if you still insist on the homeless man’s death being a murder case, I have a name you can contact. Do you want it?"
I grabbed a notepad on the counter near my coffeepot, and quickly bent down to retrieve the pen that landed on the floor. "I’m ready."
"His name is Ricky Thomas. He lives down in the rough part of the old downtown. But if you do decide to go talk to him, I strongly advise you not to go there alone."
Well, my only traveling partner for this would be Thor – but I felt sure he would be all I'd need. "What does this Ricky Thomas look like?" I asked.
"Scruffy looking. A lot of bushy facial hair. His hair is brown and it comes down to the middle of his shoulders in the back."
The man he described could be the one I'd talked with the day I drove down there. "How do you know him?" I asked.
"One of my campaigners told me I should go see the people I was ready to get rid of. A group of us went down there several weeks ago. This Ricky was walking up and down the street alone. I watched him pace within a half-block radius until finally somebody walked up to him. They obviously exchanged money for drugs. I was disgusted with the whole scene."
He paused for a few s
econds. I waited, and kept quiet. "I went up to him and introduced myself and told him I'm trying to rid downtown of drugs. He didn't take too kindly to it, but I tried to win him over with the same winning personality that got me elected, and he eventually told me his name and a bit of his story. Laila, I do want the downtown area revitalized. But that’s not going to happen as long as drug dealers reign down there."
"Wow, seems you got quite the gift. Yeah. I have to agree with that part. It would be good to have an up-and-coming downtown in West River," I said. I wondered just how, exactly, he would rid the area of druggies and their sources, but right now I was more interested in the man named Ricky.
"Okay. I promise that if – if I go down there – I'll be careful. Now, what does this guy Ricky Thomas look like?"
"Well, Ricky Thomas can’t be missed. His arms are heavily tattooed. I remember seeing a bulldog tattoo on his upper arm."
"A bulldog tattoo. Got it." I thought for a minute. "Before you hang up, I have a question for you, Councilman," I said. "Why did you suddenly decide to help me? I mean, what changed your mind?"
He paused. "You enlightened me last night. Your take on the issues convinced me to take a second look."
"That’s it?" I asked.
"Well, of course I want to get re-elected. That way, I can help the community in positive ways." He was a politician, all right. He was real slick at changing the subject. "Laila, have you told the police your suspicions about foul play regarding the homeless man’s death?"
I was not ready to get that friendly with the councilman. "Oh, I'm still thinking about that," I said lightly. He wasn't the only one who could evade a question. Then I thanked him for the information and we ended the call.
I had to think about my next moves very carefully. I thought about the bushy-haired man I talked to on the bad side of town – especially his anger when I'd mentioned the name "John."
I only knew John as a mild-mannered guy who had accepted coffee and Danish from me a few mornings a week. What could he have done to provoke such outrage in a low-life drug dealer on a crime-ridden street?