by Ryan Sayles
“Anything else just let me know.”
Hank Madison’s words float up into my mind and bring with them that horrible Gyro taste. “There is one more thing, Carla.”
“Yes?”
“When you were incarcerated, do you remember a guard by the name of Clarence Petticoat?”
She hums a monotonous, scratchy note while she thinks. I can imagine her eyes squinting, one hand running through her hair. Finally she says, “Yes, I think so.”
“Do you remember anything about him in particular?”
“Just that he was one of the guards who was accused of fiddling with the inmates. He disappeared in that big house cleaning I told you about.”
“Did Mickey ever talk about him?”
“No. Why? Is he involved in this?”
“His wife was the rape victim.”
“Petticoat’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“What a sleaze. I couldn’t believe the girls in prison would touch him, let alone that a woman would actually marry him. Did he have money? The girls in the prison who would talk about him weren’t worth the STDs, I can tell you that.”
“I bet not. Thanks, Carla.” I start to say goodbye and I can hear trepidation in her voice. She’s not done with the conversation but she doesn’t want to continue it, either. She needs to hear one thing.
I say plainly, “Carla, I don’t think Mickey raped anybody.”
A sigh of relief as wide as the Pacific. Then, gushing, “I told you, Mr. Buckner. Mickey might have been a burglar but he was a decent man. He was lovable and caring. Anyone who knew him doesn’t remember him for the crimes.”
“I believe you.”
Borne on hope now: “Do you know where he is?” The question is a fragile thing that floats gently between us. My answer sets fire to its wings. Goodbye, hope.
“I don’t think he’s alive, Carla.”
“I see.” Quiet. Very quiet now.
I don’t know what else to say. Whenever I’d do a death notification to a family it was awkward. People I don’t know, telling them something that wrecks their lives, then, well, just nothing. Some people went quiet and sat there motionless. Others went apeshit and flailed about, destroying things. I’ve seen fathers go back to sipping beer and channel surfing. I’ve seen mothers start cleaning and offer to make me a snack. One woman played a game of solitaire on her computer; another played piano for twenty minutes and then broke down into sobs and fell right off the bench. One guy dropped to the ground and started doing push-ups.
Telling someone that a person they love is eighty-sixed is an odd thing. Carla Gabler knew it somewhere in her heart. She might have convinced herself of it because that was the only reason she’d accept for him not waiting for her. I think she cries, but keeps it to herself. I stay on the line for a while but only because I can’t bring myself to say well, this has been fun but I need to take a shit and hang up.
So this is how we stay.
Eventually, she says, “Thank you.”
“Not a problem,” I say. “Listen, I have to go but I’m going to find Joann and ask her about anything Mickey might have said prior to his disappearance.”
“She’s a bitch, Mr. Buckner,” Carla says. Cuts right in. “That woman was born thinking she was better than her family and now that her frog husband has money, she lets everyone know it.”
“Okay. Will she be receptive?”
“No. If you walk in there and say Mickey is accused of murder she’ll think he did it.”
“Any suggestions then?”
“Yes. Avoid her.”
“Anything else?”
“Tell her...tell her you suspect he was murdered like you told me—” Tears now. Tears when she says that cold word. “—she might fill you in on what she knows, but you have to make it sound good. Like Mickey wasn’t going to do anything bad. Okay?”
“Okay.”
We say our goodbyes and hang up. Mickey might have been a decent man, but the people he associated with after getting released from prison are not.
I think it cost Mickey Cantu his life.
24
0800 hours
The sister wasn’t hard to find.
Joann Cantu-Pierre. She’s in the book. Address at a high-end townhome complex on the northern rim of the city. The address comes back to a Jean-Luc Basile Pierre, a high-end accountant. Sounds about right.
The house: a ridiculous edifice which screams my penis is so small not even a solid gold Lamborghini will make up for it. There must be eight thousand square inside the place with a lawn virtually too small to hold it. I think about parking on the street, but decide on the driveway. It could play host to a drive-in movie theater. My car isn’t swank enough to be on the property, so the aesthetic is ruined. The douche in me is satisfied.
I exhale long and go over my plan one more time as I wait for an answer to the doorbell.
A woman finally answers the door, plainly annoyed to have to do so at seven a.m. She is without make-up and should not be. Her lusterless blonde hair is very short and cut to be styled, which it is not at this hour and instead looks like a bedhead halo accentuated by electric shocks and two-day-old gel. Puffy eyes. Thin lips. Deep lines running from her nose down to her chin like Meg Ryan.
“Hello, ma’am,” I say, trying to sound soft. “My name is Richard Buckner. I apologize for knocking so early but I am looking for Joann Cantu, the sister of Mickey Cantu.”
“That’s me,” she grumbles at the mere mention of Mickey. I can see her winding up to tell me to fuck off.
“Ma’am, I was a former detective for the Saint Ansgar police and Mickey was working with me on a case. I—”
“You’ve seen Mickey?”
“No, ma’am. We were working together quite some time ago—”
“I was gonna say I haven’t seen that wretch since he got out of prison in 1992.”
“Like I said, he was helping us when he got out and I believe—”
Joann snarls, “I mean, seriously? Twenty years and no contact? Who does that?”
“Ma’am, I was saying—”
“An asshole, that’s who. Mickey was the type of guy to come over to your house and ask how much everything cost. Not because he was without couth, no. Because he was doing the math in his head on how much he could hawk your stuff for. You know he sold our dead mother’s diamond—”
“Joann, close it,” I say. She stares at me with indignation.
“Some jackoff comes on my doorstep and orders me to shut up? Just who the hell do—”
“Mickey was helping us and someone found out. Someone bad.” I stare right back at her. “And I think Mickey got hurt over it.”
“What do you mean hurt? Is he dead?”
“I believe so, ma’am.”
Inside.
Joann walks around numbly; as news of her estranged brother’s probable murder sinks in like a slow stain. Her coffee is so beyond café quality I’m actively thinking of ways to drag this out so I can drink more. I’ve even fought the urge to spike it with whiskey when she turns her back. And people have been known to place bets on when I drink straight coffee it’s such a rare occurrence.
Joann walks over to a box of tissues, draws one but doesn’t use it. She appears bizarrely confused about shedding a tear. Carla made it seem like Joann hates her brother, and now to find out on a random day at a random time from a random stranger that said brother has met his blip, it has plunged mixed emotions into her still sleep-heavy heart. I just drink more coffee. The president doesn’t drink joe this good.
“I’d like to see his body.”
“We don’t have it, ma’am. I have confirmation of his death by testimony only.”
“Who killed him?” she asks, her voice trembling like just the right nerve was pinched.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Do you think it’s a mistake?” She’s grappling with something here. Minutes before, she was calling him a wretch and gett
ing ready to throw me off her porch for mentioning his name. Now, at the news of his death and the finality of all of it, she is looking for ways to make this not so. One always feels better about despising family when there is still time to make amends.
“No.”
Finally Joann’s heart makes its decision and she sobs very hard. Just explodes into a deluge like a Midwestern spring storm. She braces herself on her counter and her knees look weak. Very weak. I peer at my watch. After about thirty seconds I take one more swig and stand up. Walk over to her, coffee mug in hand. Her knees buckle as I approach and I catch her with one arm; ease her to the immaculate tile floor. She slides her back against some cabinets and holds a tissue to her face. I get the box and offer it.
With a meager “thank you” she takes it, sets it down beside her like an old friend sharing a park bench. I refill my mug and stand near her, hoping she thinks I’m a kind and gentle soul. While she cries I look around her kitchen and see what a childless, married and excessive life looks like.
All original art. I get the feeling prints are as good as toilet paper here. The frames are more expensive than most prints. Small decorative touches like glass jars filled with garlic cloves and red pepper slices suspended in olive oil, a mason jar meticulously layered in baking ingredients that could be poured out, mixed and turned into brownies. Food as decoration.
But the real impressive sights are the kitchen gizmos. Joann, plopped on her ass and crying, all the things she didn’t say to Mickey or the things she did say and now can’t apologize for, they come rushing back and I’m looking at the one gallon food processor she has on the counter next to her automatic paper towel dispenser next to her electric tea kettle next to her hand soap warmer. And that’s not all. That’s the first countertop. She’s got miles of granite top counters in here. There is no island counter top. There’s an entire archipelago.
Her coffee maker isn’t just any coffee maker. It probably cost more than my car and it’s about the same size. I see a digital read out on the motherfucker and that just doesn’t look right. It has a steaming pipe for milk and a separate attachment for espressos. Then the water machine. Filtered, purified, reverse-osmosis or some shit. Her coffee bean grinder also has a setting and a digital read-out.
There are some muffins under a thick glass lid on a Lazy Susan within reach. I snag one. Cranberry citrus. I eat two before she is finished enough to speak English.
“You said he worked for you?” she asks, face buried in her hands.
“Yes.”
Tell her you suspect he was murdered. She might fill you in on what she knows, but you have to make it sound good. Like Mickey wasn’t going to do anything bad, Carla said.
“Prison set him straight,” I say. “He was going to help us catch some guys we’d been looking for. Guys we had tied to the rape of a woman who was unfortunate enough to come home during a burglary.”
Between sobs. “Now that you mention it, I remember him talking about helping you.”
What? “He did, huh?” I ask, tuning in much more carefully now.
“Yes. When he got out he said he was going to help a guy. I could have sworn he said CO but he must have been talking about you.”
“He said he was going to help a CO? With a burglary?”
“Yes. He said it was all planned out. I didn’t want to listen. I just...I just told him to leave.” Starts crying again.
I stand up as the dots start to connect. Well, I’ll be damned.
25
“Petticoat, I’m going to kill you,” I mumble low enough so Joann can’t hear it but I have to say out loud because some small part of me hopes he hears it wherever he is.
No wonder he was so off from the very beginning. Why his bullshit story was flimsy. Why he was so nervous just talking to me and why, even though he thought he was doing a good job being discrete, the rapist was still able to brazenly tail him to my office.
The plot: Petticoat knew Carla at Happenstance, gets transferred to the all-male prison for porking the women—they didn’t fire back then they just shuffled their people. Geographical cure. Petticoat knows about Mickey because of Carla so he strikes a deal with him: I’ll take my wife out to dinner and you burglarize my house for whatever end Petticoat was trying to reach. It pays both. Mickey gets all the scratch and Petticoat gets whatever it is he wanted. Insurance fraud, something. Maybe he just hated his TV and his wife wouldn’t let him buy a new one. But instead Petticoat comes home, gets attacked and his wife gets raped. Where is Mickey and how did the rapist get brought into the picture? The wife whacks herself and now Petticoat is left holding the bag for this whole stinking pile of shit. He gets rich in real estate, gets blackmailed by whoever actually raped his wife. He’s not sick and dying but he can’t squeal without the rapist revealing what he did all those years ago. The whole thing about Carla sleeping with Martins was bullshit. Petticoat was just trying to get me started on Mickey’s trail without letting me know about his involvement. Of course he wants me to kill the rapist. The assassin part. That keeps his hands clean, gets rid of the blackmail and shuts off whatever valve is ready to spill over and tell about how bad he fucked up back in the day. His own wife.
But why the Monday deadline?
Petticoat is still traveling to Three Mile High. The blackmail price just went up. He might have a deal up there that he won’t have the money for if he pays the rapist. Got to be it. This guy isn’t that complex. Clarence T. Petticoat is far from a mastermind. He’s little more than a used car salesman with a smidge of imagination.
Connect Mickey to the rapist. This is all about him now.
I start to walk out the door when I remember Joann is still here, sobbing. I stop and stand there, looking at myself in the reflection of a glass cabinet. My eyes crawl off of my own ugly mug and onto Joann. Here is a woman I do not know. One man connects her to a woman with whom I have spoken. Carla says that her dead boyfriend’s sister is a bitch and an elitist who is ashamed of her roots. I can believe that. I don’t know her roots, how she was raised, her parents or anything else. I came here with that prejudice. I wouldn’t have seen Joann any other way.
Of course, I barely know Carla. What I do know is she is a felon, in love with the memory of a dead felon. I think I’ve seen a glimpse of her heart when she opened up about Mickey. She made no bones about who she was. One reason she hates Joann is because of how cruel she said Joann was towards her love. But maybe another is because both women come from the same place and Joann spent her life trying to get out of it while Carla never did. Roots.
I’m not ashamed of my roots, but they are shameful. There is a difference. No matter what Joann is outside of our little moment in time here—snobby, bitter, falsely affluent—what she is now is a broken woman. I can see the guilt on her face about how she treated Mickey. How she felt about him. There are secrets there, deep inside, that make her cry for more reasons than loss. Everyone has those. When you tell enough people their loved ones aren’t coming back, aren’t going to keep their promises, aren’t going to be around to continue their annoying habits like leaving the toilet seat up or drinking milk from the carton, all of a sudden the family want nothing more than to see the toilet seat left up one more time.
People want people around. They want their people around. And sudden acts of life and death prevent that. Here I am, most of the pieces of my puzzle fall into place, and I leave a woman on the floor to bear that weight by herself after I had the biggest hand in putting it on her.
If Joann Cantu-Pierre were a man, I’d continue to walk out the door. Since she is not I turn around and lift her to her feet. I am easily three times her size and I wrap my arms around her. Pull her in. Gently hold the back of her bedhead halo and rest my cheek against her ear. She cries again. She lets it out. Whatever deep secrets she has in there she has harbored against her brother, whatever thoughts she would be ashamed of admitting to, they come out with her sobs. I do the work of holding her upright so she may concentrate on
cleansing herself of the guilt.
We stay like this for as long as she needs.
26
After a time, Joann separates herself from me and leans on a barstool before she finally sits down.
“Thank you,” she says as she looks away. She takes her coffee mug and sips from it. “Cold.”
I grab the pot and offer it to her. She holds her mug out and I fill it up. I scratch my head and want a cigarette.
“Joann, did Mickey ever talk about anyone else?”
“At first I thought he was going to have Carla in on it, whatever it was you guys were going to do. But she was still in prison I guess.”
“Yes, she was.”
“No. He never said anything about—well, he used to steal things and sell them to some shop down town. But that’s a stretch, I guess. I never knew of him working with anybody except Carla. Why?”
“Just trying to put together a case. Do you remember the shop?”
“No.” She drinks her coffee and blows her nose. “Did he die recently? Why wait twenty-something years to investigate?”
“We didn’t know where Mickey was. You know. He just up and vanished. I got a break just the other day that made the case hot again.”
“Can you tell me more specifics?”
“Not at this time.” I need to leave now. I look at my watch and feign raising my eyebrows. “I apologize but I actually have to go. I have a few more places to get to this morning.”
“Damn you, Mickey,” she says, staring at her tiny fists. “Sometimes I wish we never...”
I stare, waiting. Whatever it is, I want to hear it. When she stops talking, she looks at me ashamed. Finally, I have to pry. “You wish you never what?”
She looks away. “Nothing.”
“It might help.”
“No it won’t.”
And that is it. Joann is too taxed form her sorrow to do or say much more. I thank her for the coffee, her time, the information; apologize for the terrible news, blah blah blah. She walks me to the door and limply apologizes for how bad she looks. I blow it off as a courtesy. She does look pretty bad though.