Storm Cell

by Brendan DuBois

  “Yeah.”

  “And who questioned you?”

  He pointed. “That guy. Detective Josephs.”

  “I see. And what did the two of you discuss?”

  “Our video system. He asked a whole bunch of questions about it, and Christ, I hate to tell you, I didn’t know a lot of the answers. So I drug out our operation manual.”

  “I see. And did you learn anything from that manual?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause, and then she cleared her throat. “Mr. Plummer, could you tell us what you learned from that manual?”

  His eyes widened. “Couldn’t believe it! Even if the three red lights were on at the store, stuff was still being recorded at Safeguard Security.”

  “Meaning that even if you thought nothing was being recorded, it was in fact being recorded at Safeguard Security in Tyler?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  She went back to her desk, picked up a DVD, returned to the witness, and after some testimony about putting the DVD into evidence, Mr. Plummer indicated that yes, the DVD was the same one he had taken from Safeguard Security and was a recording of the night in question. She said, “Your Honor, if I may, I’d like to show the jury the contents of this DVD.”

  “Objection,” Hollis said, voice dispirited.

  “Overruled, Mr. Spinelli. You may go ahead.”

  She walked with confidence over to the DVD player, slipped the disc in, and switched on the TV. In a few seconds the screen came to life, and there was a slight whisper from the spectators when the outside of the store came into view, with Sher Avenue in front of it. Square in the middle was the apartment building where Fletcher Moore had been shot.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, could I draw your attention to the date and time stamp at the bottom of the screen?”

  Some jurors leaned forward, and the assistant attorney general said, “It’s 10:30 at night. Please note the gentleman who is about to enter the screen from the right.”

  Even in the dim light, it was easy to see who was walking up the sidewalk.

  Fletcher Moore.

  Somebody started sobbing in the audience.

  The DVD kept playing. Fletcher went to the apartment door entrance, opened the door, and then went in, the door closing behind him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m now going to fast-forward the recording.”

  She did just that, and a few figures moved whip-quick in and out of the store. Then she slowed it down.

  “Again, note the time, and note the person walking in from the left.”

  I held my breath.

  Another male came by.

  Felix Tinios.

  Hollis sank lower in his seat. Felix didn’t move an inch.

  On the screen, Felix went to the apartment entrance, entered, and disappeared.

  The assistant attorney general waited, didn’t say a word.

  Second by second, minute by minute, the DVD recording of that night displayed itself. A customer came into the store. Another customer came into the store.

  Felix came out and briskly walked to the left, and then out of view. The assistant attorney general paused the DVD.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you may, do check the time stamp.”

  The jurors did, and so did the spectators, and so did I. It was 11:06, one minute after the phone call had come in about two shots being fired, and Felix had been in the apartment the entire time.

  She went back to her table, and almost as an afterthought, said, “Your witness,” to Hollis Spinelli.

  Hollis got up like he was just recovering from the flu and was having a problem standing on his own two feet. He moved up to the lectern, started shuffling his notes, and over the next hour did his best to confuse, trip up, or otherwise antagonize Mr. Plummer. How did he know for sure the recordings hadn’t been tampered with? Did he have any connection to the owner of the apartment building? Wasn’t it true that he had some legal troubles with the city of Porter? Wasn’t it possible that his testimony today would help him with further legal troubles with the city of Porter?

  The assistant attorney general started to get up, and the judge beat her to it. “Mr. Spinelli, I’ve given you a lot of leeway, and the giving stops now. Do you have anything more to ask of this witness that hasn’t already been covered?”

  “Ah, not at the moment, Your Honor.”

  The judge looked up at the clock. “Then it’s time to adjourn. We’ll see everybody back here at two P.M.”

  The usual and typical adjournment process went on, and in the bustle out of the courtroom, I tried to catch up with Paula Quinn, but she had moved out quickly from the third floor. I was hoping she was meeting a deadline, and not avoiding me.

  Feeling tired and achy, I went back home. Lunch was tomato soup, a stale chunk of bread, and a piece of cheddar cheese that I had to scrape some mold off before consuming. The trial had gotten me down, and this meager meal had lowered me further. Right now, all I wanted was a long nap. The disastrous defense of Felix Tinios would have to go on without me.

  So I went upstairs and collapsed on my new bed.

  A ringing phone woke me up.

  I stayed in bed.

  Stared at the new ceiling.

  Saw the faint marks up there where it had been installed.

  And remembered.

  The first week of the New Year, Felix was over at my house, helping with a variety of chores. The inside of the house was cold. It was poorly insulated to begin with, and the small oil furnace in the crawlspace marking my basement had decided to go on a break. Not to Florida, of course, but its heating abilities had taken a vacation. Felix and I were in my upstairs bedroom, fairly bare except for a bed frame and mattress on the floor.

  A contractor was supposed to come by and finish the walls and ceiling, but he hadn’t shown up. The only person working was a glum older woman from my oil delivery company, in the basement, banging around things and sometimes cursing in a florid way that made my ears burn.

  Felix and I both had on jeans, workboots, and sweatshirts. The room was cold. I had a glum thought of huddling underneath every blanket I owned later tonight when the sun set.

  He had his hands on his hips and said, “What was the contractor supposed to do today?”

  “Sand down the seams where the new sheetrock has been installed,” I said. “I have a painter coming tomorrow, if this work gets done and we get heat. If not, then I have to reschedule, and that’ll be the second time I’ve rescheduled. I don’t want to do that again. It was hard enough to get a painter who agreed to struggle down my driveway with all his gear.”

  Felix pointed to a pile of equipment, buckets, and a ladder in the corner of the empty bedroom. “That his stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s get it done.” He went over to my mattress and said, “C’mon, we’re burning daylight.”

  We both moved the mattress and the box spring across the hall, into my empty office, and we got to work. We put on dust masks and clear goggles and, with pads of sandpaper, worked from one end of the room to the next, sanding down the seams. Felix beat me on using the ladder and did the ones up top. It took the good part of the afternoon, and at some point, Felix stripped off his sweatshirt, revealing an old Boston Bruins T-shirt and a side holster for a small pistol, which later I learned was a particular SIG Sauer.

  By the time we had vacuumed the floor, ceiling, and walls and put everything back—including the bedding—it was starting to get dark. I switched on a floor lamp and retrieved two Sam Adams beers from the kitchen below, and we sat up against the wall, in the dim pool of light.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’ve said that too many times already,” Felix replied. “Knock it off.”

  I took a swallow, and the beer was cold and delicious and did a fine job of cutting through the dust in my mouth. “Where did you pick up such skills?”

  “Worked one summer for an uncle of mine, general contractor on the North
Shore. My mom was trying to convince me to go on the road of goodness.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “Never found the on-ramp, much to my mom’s dismay.”

  We sat there in silence for a while, just hearing the waves, and then there was a quick bang! and the gurgle-gurgle of water flowing into the wall-based radiators, and then the hum of the furnace.

  A strong woman’s voice bellowed up from downstairs. “Mr. Cole, you got your heat back!”

  “Thanks!” I yelled. “Can we help you bring your gear back to your truck?”

  She laughed and said something extraordinarily foul that even made Felix wince, and I heard some clomping up and down my basement stairs, then the slam of the front door.

  “She scares me,” Felix said.

  “Me too.”

  So a few more minutes passed, and I said, “Look, what you and Diane and your union friends did here, in getting my house rebuilt before the storm came, I—”

  “Forget it.”

  “I can’t, and I won’t.”

  He gently clinked the neck of his bottle to mine. “Then stop talking about it, friend. It’s . . . not necessary.”

  Felix seemed to be searching for the right words and phrases, and I didn’t want to interrupt him, so I didn’t. He said, “A lot of things have gone on between us, and among us. You may think that you’re in debt up to your proverbial eyeballs to me, and I would say you have it wrong. I owe you for . . . for making me think. For holding me back when I would have plowed forth. For a number of things. For that, we’re even. And will always be even. Capisce?”

  “Is that Italian?”

  “Yeah, that’s Italian.”

  “Because you say it so well.”

  The room started warming up. A very good feeling indeed. He finished off his beer and said, “Speaking of debts, where do you stand? Has your insurance company come through yet?”

  “Any week now,” I said. “Though it had better be a week real soon now, or I’m going to be visiting my local food bank and unemployment office.”

  “Shoreline magazine still a no-go?”

  “That’s right. Either I become editor and move to Boston, or nothing. No more work as a magazine columnist.”

  “But what about that retired admiral who hired you? What’s his name . . . Holbrook? I thought you liked working for him.”

  “I did, but he’s on leave from the magazine. I can’t get ahold of him, either via phone or e-mail. The Navy and Defense Department called him back to active duty, and now he’s supposedly serving a grateful nation, somewhere in Asia or the Mideast.”

  “Some debts never get paid, do they?”

  “Got that right,” I said.

  The phone stopped ringing. I moved around some on the bed.

  There were a variety of things I could do—from unboxing more books to rearranging some of the new furniture downstairs—but none of that was appealing.

  What now?

  The voice of Diane Woods came back to me, as well as my response.

  “What, they take your rough and tough away, Lewis?”

  “No.”

  “Then prove it.”

  I got out of bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As the afternoon session was probably being adjourned back at the county courthouse, I was back at Sher Avenue in Porter. I parked near the same place I had before, and wondered if the nosy neighbors from before would call my presence in to the police. We’d just have to see. The streets were narrow and crooked, and I’m sure if the utility poles and pavement were stripped away, the little neighborhood would look exactly the same as it had two hundred years ago.

  I got out of the Pilot and looked back at the convenience store, where the CCTVs had recorded the night’s events in January, and hadn’t just put another nail in Felix’s coffin, but had loaded it up in the hearse on the way to the burial ground.

  I walked across the street, went to the main entrance to the left. The door was open. Inside I could hear music coming from the second-floor apartment. I started at number one, knocked on the door, and waited. According to the black metal mailbox, it belonged to MONTELEONE.

  The door slowly moved open. A tired-looking short woman with black-rimmed glasses and pulled-back black hair looked up at me. She had on Air Force–issue fatigues and said, “Yes?”

  I checked out the chevrons on her arm. “Staff Sergeant, my name is Lewis Cole.” I displayed my letter from FBI Special Agent Krueger. “I’m on assignment from the Boston office of the FBI, looking into the homicide that took place here back in January.”

  There was a child crying in the rear, and I could see the general layout of this apartment was like the one on the top floor, except this living room was jammed with furniture, a television, toys, and a couch that held an older woman and a young girl, about three or four, who was sobbing. The older woman said, “Shhh,” and then the little girl saw me, gave up a shy smile, and buried her head into a welcoming shoulder.

  “Staff sergeant,” Monteleone said. “Nice eye. You serve?”

  “A long time ago, in a Defense Department far, far away,” I said. “You’re busy. I promise I won’t keep you.”

  “Hold on, let’s get a bit private.” She turned and said, “Just a sec, Ma, okay?” And before Ma could reply, she came out into the entryway and shut the door behind her.

  “FBI, eh? Why’s the FBI interested in that guy who got murdered? He a terrorist suspect or something?”

  “No, just a politician and a real estate guy from Tyler.”

  She folded her arms. “My ma and me, we already talked to the Porter cops. Twice. I was working the night the guy got shot, and my little girl, she was sick, and Ma had her at the Porter Hospital ER for half the night. That’s all. Didn’t hear or see anything before or after.”

  “How about a week before? Or a month?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That third-floor apartment. Was it always empty?”

  “Not when we moved in,” she said. “A nice older woman lived there. Brought us chocolate chip cookies when we moved in last fall. Last I heard, she was too old to live there by herself, went to live in some assisted living facility.”

  “So no one’s been up there since?”

  The slightest of pauses. “No one’s ever moved in.”

  I kept quiet, then asked, “So who’s been up there? And when?”

  Arms still folded, she said, “Look, the cops asked me if I could tell them anything about what happened to that guy who got shot. I honestly said no. We weren’t around that night.”

  “But somebody else has been up there.”

  Her eyes flashed at me. “Sorry, not going any further.”

  “Please,” I said. “I don’t want it to go any further, either. Let me know what you know, I promise, it’ll be between us. No report, no paperwork, nothing.”

  “How can I trust you?”

  “I recognized you as an Air Force staff sergeant. I hope that should count for something.”

  A slight smile, and I was unexpectedly envious of any male who ever saw that smile. “Look, it’s probably nothing, but that place on the third floor, it wasn’t always empty, you know? Not that I saw anybody, but I heard footsteps go up there, sometimes music, laughter, sometimes . . . well, you could tell whoever was up there was having some fun.”

  “Any particular time?”

  “Nope. Afternoon. Early morning. Weekend nights. It didn’t mean anything to me. I figured some guy was using it as a place to get laid without the missus knowing. But when the cops started asking around, well, I didn’t want to get into it. Really didn’t.”

  I could hear her little girl resume her crying. “You stationed over at McIntosh?”

  “Yeah,” she said, turning her head at the sound of her child. “Assigned to a maintenance squadron. In my spare time, I also work at a Midas dealership, and go to school. And help my mom raise my little girl.”

  “A handful.”

 
Again that smile. “You can say that again. Bruce, well, when he got killed, we get some money per month. Not enough. So I make do, and maybe I haven’t given the bank the right forwarding address so they can keep beating me up about my overdue loans. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t want to say too much to the cops. Why get on the bank’s radar? But I figure by the time I’m thirty, I should be on my two feet, living a regular life without all this goddamn juggling.”

  Her hand reached for the door. “You look like the kind of guy who when he got out of college, the time was you could get a job pretty quick and start your career. Right?”

  I could have debated the point, but I decided not to. “Pretty much.”

  “Thought so. Anything else?”

  I pointed up the stairwell. “Who’s up on the second floor?”

  A mirthless laugh. “Bunch of whiz kids. Good luck understanding a word they’re saying, or what the hell they’re doing.”

  At the second-floor landing, it took several hefty knocks on the door before it opened up, and the door only opened a few inches, held back by a chain. A thin young man with a stringy beard and bleary eyes looked out at me and said, “The fuck?”

  “A cheery good afternoon to you as well,” I said. “My name is Lewis Cole and I’m working for the—”

  The door slammed shut.

  I tried knocking again, to no avail. Then I resorted to my right foot and there were loud voices from within, and the door opened up again with the chain holding it in place, with the same young man as before. He started to run through some curses and I thrust my arm forward, grabbed his nose, gave it a firm twist, and shoved him back.

  He squealed and fell out of sight.

  With the door being secured by the chain, I reared back and went at the upper door with my shoulder. It blew open with a satisfying thump and I walked in, closed the door behind me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought I heard someone call for help and I guess I overreacted.”

  It took me a good handful of seconds to process what I was seeing. Earlier I’d thought the ground-floor apartment was a mess, but it was something from Better Homes and Gardens compared to what was here. There were five people to begin with—three young men, two young women—in jeans, sweatshirts, and T-shirts, and their exposed skin was tattooed, pierced, or not lately washed. Chinese food containers and pizza boxes were piled high, along with banks of what looked to be computer servers, external hard drives, and four huge monitors that looked fit for a cable news network.