Tear It Down

by Nick Petrie

  “More than once, but he doesn’t want anything to do with it. Like charity, you know? He’s proud. Wants to make his own way.”

  “How do you get hold of him when you want to rehearse?”

  Dupree laughed. “We don’t rehearse, son, we just play. The kid’s a natural. I don’t think anybody taught him, he just kinda hears it, like he pulls it out of the air, you know? Like he was born with Louis Armstrong’s ears. The first time we sat down was like we’d been playing together for years.”

  “But how do you reach him?”

  Dupree looked at Peter for a moment, then turned away. “Enough about that guitar-playing fool. I got work to do.”

  “His name is Eli,” said Peter. “You know he’s in trouble, right?”

  Dupree turned back quickly, very serious. “I talked to Wanda. I know he took your truck. But I’m not giving him to you, not for no repair job. Not even for Wanda Wyatt.”

  “That’s not what this is about,” said Peter. “Not the job, not the truck. Eli robbed that jewelry store at the mall. King Robbie wants him very badly. I’m trying to help before he winds up dead.”

  Dupree closed his eyes. The lines on his face deepened.

  Peter said, “I’m sure Wanda talked to you about me, too.”

  “She did.” Dupree opened his eyes again. At that moment he looked a thousand years old. “Why would you want to help young Eli Bell?”

  “Selfish reasons,” Peter said. “I get restless. I like to be useful. Plus he’s got my truck.”

  “That ain’t all. What else?”

  Peter smiled. He wouldn’t tell Dupree everything. But he’d tell him enough. “Eli’s a pain in the ass, but I like him. And I’ve heard him play, remember? I’d like to hear him play again. I don’t want that sound gone from this world.”

  Dupree looked out across the Dumpster at the wrecked house.

  “That 1932 National he was playing last night, that’s my guitar. He sure makes it sing, don’t he?” He shook his head. “I tried to give it to him, but the boy won’t take it. Says he’s got no safe place to keep it.” Dupree sighed. “I haul that guitar to every gig, just hoping he’ll show up.”

  Softly, Peter said, “How do you reach him?”

  Dupree looked back to Peter. “I text my granddaughter, Nadine.”

  “He can choose the place and time. I just want to talk.”

  “Nadine’s gonna need to meet you.”

  Peter smiled. He was pretty sure he’d already met Nadine. “Why don’t you invite her for lunch? I’ll pick up some sandwiches. We’ll sit on the porch and talk.”

  “Nadine might like that,” Dupree said. “Or maybe not. With Nadine, there’s no telling.”

  37

  When Peter had first met Lewis, he’d been driving an old sheriff’s department Yukon that had been retired and sold at auction. It had been badly damaged in Milwaukee, and Lewis had replaced it with another retired law enforcement SUV, but a newer model. This one had the same law enforcement performance package, with the big motor and the upgraded suspension and the heavy tubular front bumper. It didn’t look like anything special, just a basic SUV with a few dents and dings.

  You’d never know it was built to be a hunter-killer on the highway.

  From the driver’s seat, Peter called Detective Gantry.

  “Can you get me in to see the guy who used to own Wanda Wyatt’s house?”

  “Vinny Charles, who drove his car into a bridge abutment? Are you on that again?” Gantry still sounded like Vegas-era Elvis.

  “There was something weird about what you said, before. The guy was a drug mule, right? Who didn’t know what he was carrying, where it was in the car, or who he was carrying for.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But he knew the job he was doing. He’d done it before.”

  “He didn’t confess, if that’s what you’re asking. I went through his file. He told the investigating officers that a man he’d never met had asked if he wanted to drive the car from New Orleans to Chicago. The whole thing was done by text, including where to pick up the car and the keys. Cash payment in an envelope under the seat. That’s all he knew. Turns out, the car was stolen in Houston, the license plates came from the New Orleans airport, and the texts came from a burner phone. Zero contact and total deniability, which is how King moves his product. Plus your friend Vinny had no visible means of support. The taxes on that house? He paid them in cash. So my guess is yes, he’d done it before.”

  “More than that,” said Peter. “It sounds like he made a living at it. But with all that in mind, does he sound like the kind of guy who’d be driving ninety on the expressway, high as a kite, seeing visions of the devil with a death warrant?”

  “You don’t know what goes on with these guys,” said Gantry. “They don’t exactly operate using the rules of logic. Vinny was carrying a whole pharmacy in that car. Maybe he found the stash and took a taste, I don’t know. Maybe the stash was uncut and Vinny got more than he bargained for. What’s your point?”

  “I want to talk to him. I want to know what happened.”

  “Wait. You think this is about the house?” Gantry asked. “Not Ms. Wyatt?”

  “That place has the living shit beat out of it. If they wanted to kill her, there are a lot easier ways. Wanda didn’t even lock her door. Whoever it is, I think they want her out of there.”

  Gantry sighed. “I’ll have somebody dig up the name of Vinny’s PD. You’ll have to see if she can get you in.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours later, Peter had bought some clean clothes and a cheap, anonymous phone with some of Lewis’s cash. He’d sent a text to June with his new number and put Wanda’s hotel room on Lewis’s credit card.

  After a quick stop at Donald’s Donuts on Union Avenue, he was fighting the white static on the second floor of the Criminal Justice Center on Poplar Avenue.

  Breathe, he told himself as he carried the box of a dozen frosted with sprinkles through a glass entryway past a sign that read, JUSTICE FOR A NEW GENERATION, LAW OFFICE, SHELBY COUNTY PUBLIC DEFENDER.

  Martine Hopkins waved a hand at her guest chair and glanced at her watch. She was young, in a bright blue blouse, her jacket on a hanger on the back of the door. Discreet diamond studs in her ears, her hair in a short natural style that showed off her elegant neck.

  “Thanks for your time,” Peter said.

  “Thanks for the donuts,” she replied, “but you didn’t have to come down here for this.”

  The office was small but as organized as an overworked public defender could make it. Her desk held just a computer and a photo of a handsome black man with a puppy in his arms. Her Emory University School of Law diploma hung on the wall. Manila folders were stacked neatly on tall file cabinets along the wall, beside a potted plant that was somehow thriving in the fluorescent light.

  The plant was doing better than Peter. At least he wasn’t sweating yet.

  She said, “I understand that you don’t have any official status, correct?” Peter nodded. “So I can’t just walk you into a state prison without prior authorization. The Department of Correction has an application process that requires identification, fingerprints, and a background check. It takes thirty days, sometimes longer.”

  “I don’t have thirty days.” Eli Bell had taken Peter’s wallet, so he didn’t have ID, either. “Do you remember the case?”

  “It would be hard to forget Mr. Charles,” she said. “He’s lucky he didn’t die in that accident. As it is, he’ll never walk again.” She leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. “Detective Gantry told me what’s happened to the woman who bought Mr. Charles’s house. I’m truly sorry for her troubles, but what exactly are you hoping to learn from my client?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Peter. “Gantry said that your client drove off the
road and into a bridge abutment. But he also said your client had a somewhat different version of the story?”

  “Mr. Charles had an entirely different version.” She glanced at her watch again, then at the computer, then back at Peter. Her eyes were deep brown, very large, and very serious. “Do you believe Mr. Charles is responsible for what’s happened to your friend?”

  “No. The police don’t think so, either. But something about it keeps banging around in my head. I thought if I could talk to him, I might figure out what that is.”

  “The police didn’t follow up on his statement,” she said. “They found the drugs in his car and heard his crazy story and that was that. They couldn’t imagine that he might be a victim, too.”

  “What kind of guy was he? Somebody you’d have coffee with?”

  She gave Peter a sharp look. “I’m a defender. He was my client.” Then her face softened. “He was a nice man. He didn’t deserve what happened to him. Regardless, nobody else was looking out for him. Just me.”

  Peter found himself liking Public Defender Martine Hopkins. “Was he high during the accident? Anything in his system?”

  “The blood test showed only marijuana,” she said. “He admitted to being a habitual user. But so is half the city. And for a habitual user, smoking marijuana wouldn’t account for his behavior, or what he says he saw.”

  “Would it be possible for me to see a copy of his statement?”

  She pulled in a breath, then let it out. “I can do better than that,” she said. “The detectives who interviewed him in the hospital made a video recording. It was part of his trial, so now it’s in the public record. Would you like to see it?”

  38

  Martine Hopkins brought up a video window on her computer.

  The screen showed a soft brown face half-covered in white bandages. One arm was in a bent fiberglass cast up to the shoulder, and both legs were in casts that disappeared under his gown. Steel rods extended from the casts to points on a metal immobilization cage, the modern version of traction.

  His free wrist was cuffed to the bed rail.

  “This is Vinson Charles, two days after the accident,” she said. “He’s on pain medication, but the doctor said he wouldn’t be cognitively impaired, and he wanted to talk to the police quite badly. He was worried about the medical bills. I think he just wanted it to be over.”

  She ran the cursor over the time bar at the bottom of the window.

  “This early part won’t interest you,” she said. “They read him his rights, they asked about the drugs in the car. He didn’t know there were any drugs. He never met the guy who hired him, didn’t have any information to trade. They had him on a Class B felony, possession with intent to distribute. Eight to thirty years, and up to a hundred thousand dollars in fines. I suggested he plead guilty and hope for a light sentence based on his injuries. He’ll be an expensive inmate, which helps.”

  “You were there?”

  “I was his defender, of course I was there.” She kept scrolling forward until the figure on the screen lurched in the bed. She stopped the video and backed it up just a bit. “Here we go.”

  A soft drawling voice said, “Do you have anything else to add, Mr. Charles?”

  “I do,” said Vinny Charles in a wet rasp. “Y’all keep calling this an accident. I’m telling you, it wasn’t no accident. It was the Devil himself run me off that road.”

  “How do you know it was the Devil?” The drawling voice didn’t laugh, but Peter could hear the amusement in it.

  “I saw him.” Vinny Charles tried to lift himself up in his bed, the casts rising, the immobilization cage flexing. “He drove a shiny red pickup truck, and he came up behind me like he was flying. He sat on my tail and I tried to outrun him, but I couldn’t. Can’t nobody outrun they sins. He pulled up beside me and I saw him, clear as day. A grinning blue skull with pointed teeth.”

  “Was it some kind of mask?”

  It was the same question Peter had asked himself about what he’d seen in the station wagon at Wanda’s house. That blue shadow across a pale face. With pointed teeth.

  “Y’all must not go to church,” said Vinny. “I may have lost my way, but I know the Devil when I see him. When he pointed to the road ahead, I looked and saw the bridge coming up. When I looked back, the Devil laughed and turned the wheel of his big red truck and pushed me off the highway. I was going way too fast to stop.”

  “I see,” said the voice offscreen. “The Devil made you do it.”

  Vinny eased himself back down, his face a grimace of pain. “I’m laying here in this bed, all broken up and bound for prison, but I know what I saw. The Devil driving his road to hell. Only the Lord God knows why, but He saw fit to spare my life. From now on, I will be His servant on the righteous path.”

  Martine Hopkins paused the video and looked at Peter. She saw something in his face. “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He nodded at the screen, Vinny Charles and his injuries frozen in time. “Do you believe him?”

  She sighed. “I believe he saw something,” she said. “But I don’t need to believe in some blue-faced devil to know there’s evil in the world. I see it in my work every week.”

  “Has Vinny Charles followed a righteous path in prison?”

  That earned Peter a wry smile. “The prison medical system isn’t the best,” she said. “I’m told he’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Burn scars cover half his face. But he’s become a lay preacher. He assists the chaplain, ministers to the sick in the infirmary. Maybe seeing the Devil was good for him.”

  “Maybe so,” Peter said absently.

  Thinking that the only thing Vinny Charles and Wanda Wyatt had in common was the house they were living in.

  Peter thought again about what he thought he’d seen in the back of that old station wagon.

  What would a blue-faced devil want with that broken-down old house?

  * * *

  • • •

  Back in Lewis’s Yukon, Peter checked Wanda’s phone, which he’d put on mute during his meeting with the public defender.

  There was a text from Dupree, telling Peter that his granddaughter, Nadine, would come at noon, and she’d bring lunch for all of them. Peter liked her already.

  The caller ID also showed that a Garry from the Bedrosian Gallery in New York had called. Peter listened to the message.

  “Wanda, it’s Garry. We are running out of time. I understand that your life is in turmoil right now, and I’m sorry to have to say this, but if I don’t have the images ready for production in the next two days, I’ll be forced to cancel your show.”

  Peter made a face.

  He checked his new anonymous phone, which he’d left in the car, and saw a recent text from June. Layover in Denver. Will call when I get in.

  He pressed the call button. When June answered, she was chewing.

  “What’s up?”

  “Oh, not much,” he said. “How was your flight?”

  “Fine.” She was still chewing. “I left Seattle at seven a.m. I get to Memphis at two thirty. I’ll call you when I get to the hotel.”

  “I left a key at the desk,” he said. “Um, is everything okay?”

  “Oh, I’m fucking great.” Her voice rose. “I talked to Wanda this morning, and got an earful about some Memphis gangsters you pissed off. You took a gun off some guy named Mad Chester?”

  “Wanda might be exaggerating a little,” he said. “And I was going to call you about that. I’ve been busy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He heard her take another bite of whatever she was eating. It sounded crunchy.

  “June, I’m sorry. Things have gotten complicated.”

  More chewing, even louder now. “Uh-huh. It’s always fucking complicated with you.”

  “This one’s more complicated than
usual.” He put a smile in his voice. “On the upside, Lewis got here this morning.”

  “Oh, things always calm the fuck down when Lewis shows up.” Chomp, chomp, chomp.

  “So, I’m thinking maybe you’re angry?”

  “You,” she said, “are a fucking genius.” She swallowed, slurped something through a straw, then sighed. “I’ll call after I get in, okay? It’ll be better when I can kick your ass in person.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said. “Listen, while you’re all worked up? Wanda’s gallery guy left a voice mail. They’re going to cancel her show if she doesn’t get her shit together. She’s got two days. Any chance you could call them?”

  He heard a different sound on the other end of the line. Maybe a growl.

  “Those fuckers. Forward me that voice mail and any contact information you have.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, but she’d already cut the connection.

  He sent the voice mail and contacts as quickly as he could.

  He was eight years a Marine, boots on the ground in two ugly wars. Hand grenades for breakfast, mortar shells for lunch.

  Sometimes he was a little afraid of June Cassidy.

  39

  Coming down the block toward Wanda’s house, Peter saw that the lumber pile was half-gone, and the swing door on the Dumpster was open. He could hear the pop pop of a framer’s nailgun coming from inside.

  When he pulled the Yukon into the driveway, Lewis stepped out of the Dumpster, shotgun at his shoulder. He lowered it when he saw Peter.

  Lewis was shirtless and shining with sweat, stacked slabs of muscle on his torso, veins standing out on his arms and shoulders. His skin was smeared with red brick dust and the ancient black patina of centuries-old wood, but he was smiling broadly. Behind him, the container was filling with broken bricks and shattered lumber. A wheelbarrow stood waiting.

  “You’ve found your true calling,” said Peter. “Demolition man.”