No Way Out (2010)

by Joel Goldman

  “Doesn’t seem right.”

  “You’re damned straight it isn’t right!” he said, catching himself, pulling back and shutting down, realizing I was pimping him.

  “What happened between you and Ricky Suarez?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How did Frank Crenshaw get his gun?”

  He stared past me if I weren’t there.

  “Who was giving the orders?”

  He turned his head and coughed, looking at the ceiling.

  “You left your house with Evan and Cara at eight-thirty in the morning, and you were busted four hours later. I don’t think that was enough time to kill them, bury them, and load your truck with stolen copper. You figured you’d do the job and go get them. Tell me where you left them. It may not be too late.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, turned his head away, not saying a word. I let the silence work on him, watched him start to squirm, realizing at last there was another possibility.

  “Look at you, Jimmy. You haven’t had it easy. Guy like you gets hit a lot growing up by an old man whose old man hit him a lot, I’d bet my last nickel that you’d do the same to your kids. That’s the way it works. We become the people we hate. And you’re full of hate and mad at everyone. I get that. But the people I talked to say you loved your kids; that you lived for them. That may be the one and only good thing about you. A man like that wouldn’t hurt his kids and wouldn’t just dump them while he pulls a job. No, a man like that would leave his kids with someone he trusted to take care of them. Who was it, Jimmy? Who did you give your kids to?”

  “Do I look that stupid?”

  “You tell me. A gun dealer named Eldon Fowler was robbed up at Lake Perry last month. The thieves were chasing him down a gravel road in the woods when he hit a deer. Fowler died of a heart attack, but that’s enough to make a case for felony murder since he died while a crime was in progress. The crime-scene investigators found paint on the trunk of a tree that came from a Dodge Ram. If Nick Staley, Frank Crenshaw, or you own a Dodge Ram, it won’t be hard to tie you to his death. Be better if you tell me now than if you make the prosecuting attorney put it together.”

  His eyes burned, full and wet, as he spat on the floor. “You go to hell.”

  Chapter Sixty-five

  Kate told me that it takes five compliments to compensate for one insult, a commonsense rate of exchange that resonated as fair. Healing is slow, uncertain, and hard.

  As I walked out of the jail, I wondered how many bad traits a lone good one could balance out, whether there was a cosmic calculator programmed with an algorithm to weigh and rank each of us, spitting out the results in this life or the next, if there was one. I wasn’t religious, didn’t belong to a church or a tribe, and didn’t pray or meditate, kneel or genuflect. Though I believed that there were all kinds of reckonings, that reaping and sowing were inevitable and necessary, I couldn’t do the math on Jimmy Martin, a man whose anger, hate, crimes, and fear threatened to consume his singular love of his children.

  That didn’t mean he hadn’t killed his kids. People twist love in a lot of different ways, sometimes making it an excuse for murder. But the time line made it more likely that he had entrusted Evan and Cara to someone else. And that didn’t mean they were still alive. Joy and I had done the same thing with our son, Kevin.

  Jimmy had admitted to stealing the copper, partnering with Frank Crenshaw to fence the goods, and staging an escape to protect him from an unknown but real threat. More important was his Nuremberg defense that he was just taking orders and that he didn’t know who was giving them, the latter claim believable but only to a point.

  No one would confuse Jimmy with being the sharpest tool in the toolbox. His life had been a series of fuckups. He was the kind of man who could be trusted with doing one thing at a time and not much else. Steal the copper. Whoever was giving the orders forgot to tell him to check his vehicle tag first, exactly the kind of thing that Jimmy would never think to do, blaming everyone but himself when that’s what got him caught.

  Three other things stood out from my interrogation. The first was his reaction to Nick Staley’s murder, the news giving him a kick in the head but not knocking him out, as if Staley’s death had been a matter of when and not if.

  The second was his pain, not because of the beating he’d taken but because of his kids. It was raw and real and, I realized, the source of his fear. Ever the good soldier, he knew how to take orders and bullets. But it was different with his kids. He knew they were in danger and that the only way he could help them was to keep his mouth shut.

  Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley had been killed to keep them quiet or because they had pissed off the wrong people. Had Jimmy not been arrested, he’d probably be dead by now as well. While it wasn’t impossible to kill someone in jail, it was complicated and messy, leaving whomever ordered the hit to trust the least trustworthy.

  The easiest way to control Jimmy while he was in jail was to give him a good reason not to cooperate. There was no better leverage than his kids. Whoever had Evan and Cara would need to prove to Jimmy that they were alive and well or he’d have no reason to cooperate. Yet he was afraid for his life, knowing that his death would eliminate any reason to keep Evan and Cara alive, making solitary confinement the safest place for him and for his kids.

  I ran through it again and again, each time coming to the same conclusion. Whoever had Evan and Cara wasn’t trying to kill Jimmy and, therefore, hadn’t killed Frank Crenshaw and Nick Staley. Someone else was collecting dead bodies, someone who had a stake in the theft ring. Which meant that Jimmy was into something else heavy enough that his kids’ lives hung in the balance.

  The third thing was Jimmy’s reaction when I told him about the Dodge Ram. He was cornered but didn’t know what to do except fight.

  The county jail was at Thirteenth and Cherry on the east side of downtown. Lucy and Kate had insisted on driving me, but I’d refused and had taken the bus. It was a small-scale declaration of independence, one I made to have time to think things through on my own and to remind myself that there was still such a thing as my own time, my own way, my own life.

  The week was piling up on me, and my body was vibrating like a tuning fork. It was late afternoon, the sun surrendering to grimy clouds that matched the fog creeping into my brain. The October air had quickened, turning cold, smelling of rain. I cinched up my jacket collar and began moving, wrestling with the possible permutations, hoping I couldn’t walk and shake at the same time.

  I started with Frank Crenshaw and Jimmy’s construction materials recycling operation. Crenshaw didn’t strike me as management. From his lazy eye to the failure of his business to the short-tempered murder of his wife, he wasn’t a guy who would know how to put together a stolen-goods ring to pay the bills.

  Nick Staley was a better choice. He knew the importance of diversifying, buying rental properties, and he was willing to rob Peter to pay Paul, diverting rental income to his grocery. Most of all, having been an Army sergeant, he was a man used to giving orders. Using Jimmy to steal construction materials and Crenshaw to fence them had to have been his idea. That’s what he brought to the table in return for his cut, that and his son, who had to know what was going on and was likely doing his bit for the cause.

  Like any plan that looked good on paper, it was undone by human foibles and overlooked details. With Jimmy, it was an expired tag. For Frank, it was the pressure of crossing a line he never imagined crossing and a wife who rejected his midlife career change.

  And for all of them, it was Frank’s gun that pulled loose the final fatal thread, unraveling Braylon Jennings’s investigation of Cesar Mendez. Brett Staley was Jennings’s confidential informant, making him the nexus between his father’s operation and Mendez. If Mendez found it necessary to have Frank Crenshaw killed to protect his gun trafficking, he’d likely have felt the same about Crenshaw’s partners, forcing Brett to act as his proxy.

  I liked that mosaic unt
il I tried to fit in the piece with Eberto Garza’s name on it. If Brett Staley had killed his father, why would he wait in the store all night only to kill Eberto? It made more sense that Brett hadn’t killed his father, that instead the killer was waiting for him to close the circle. Perhaps Mendez had sent Eberto to check on things at the grocery, and in the dark, the killer, exhausted and stressed from killing one man and waiting for another, had shot Eberto by mistake.

  It was a way to make the piece about Eberto Garza fit, but it felt like I was squaring a round edge. That was a lot of killing to hide the origin of a single gun. It was like shooting your dick off because you had an itch in your crotch.

  There was another problem. Jimmy had to have taken his orders from someone. If it was Nick, he had no reason to lie about it since Nick was dead. Conclusion: Nick was taking orders from someone higher up in the chain of command, and Jimmy didn’t know whom that was.

  Isolating Jimmy from that information was insurance against him giving it up, but that wouldn’t stop him from trying to figure it out. If Ricky Suarez frightened him enough to stage an escape, he must have suspected that Cesar Mendez was on top of the totem pole.

  I was migrating north and west, aiming for the Transit Plaza at Tenth & Main with no more of a plan than to take the Number 24 out Independence Avenue, get off, and keep walking until I found Cesar Mendez or he found me. As plans went, it was a lousy one, but it was the best I could do.

  I reached Main and turned north, passing a parking garage, feeling more than seeing someone behind me, his footsteps matching mine, keeping a distance I guessed at ten feet for half a block. I stopped at the traffic light at Twelfth and Main, not turning to see what he would do. There were three other people on my corner and more crossing toward me, plus traffic moving in all four directions, making a daylight attack unlikely.

  “I hear you’re looking for Cesar Mendez,” a voice said from behind me.

  I turned around. It was the hostage negotiator, Jeremiah Quinn.

  Chapter Sixty-six

  The thing that most struck me about Quinn when I met him at the Municipal Farm was his nonchalance, his water-off-a-duck’s-back reaction to a man holding a woman hostage, a homemade knife at her throat. I’d known guys like him on the bomb squad, guys who looked at a bundle of wires wrapped around a package of explosives and shrapnel the way the people who do the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink look at the Sunday edition, an interesting problem to be solved but not one they hadn’t seen before.

  They lived for the competition, the higher the stakes the better. And like a center fielder that drifts back, loping to the warning track, glove extended at the last second, making a snow-cone catch and bouncing off the wall with a smile before trotting to the dugout, they made it look easy.

  I wasn’t one of those guys. I sweated a case from start to finish, second-guessing, starting over, feeling a piece of me die if it went bad, thanking a god I wasn’t certain I believed in when it went right. In the years since I began shaking I sometimes wondered if going all in all the time hadn’t taken a toll on my brain, stressing a neural connection until it short-circuited. The doctors told me no, but what did they know? They couldn’t even come up with a better name for my movement disorder than “tics.”

  The light changed, people sliding past us, scattered wind whipping raindrops splattering at our feet. I flashed on images of Quinn talking to Kate in the ambulance, handing her a card, and of Kate walking out of Simon’s office saying she had to make a call and staying in the car when we got to Roni Chase’s house to make another.

  “Kate Scranton called you,” I said.

  “She’s persistent.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That you’re proud, stubborn, and resistant to reason.”

  “That’s it?”

  “And she said you need a minder.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her I don’t babysit.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I help people make peace or make war.”

  “I thought you were a hostage negotiator,” I said.

  “That’s the peace part. Not every conflict can be resolved. People need help with the fight too.”

  “How do you do that?”

  He shrugged. “Make sure they know what they’re fighting for and why and that they understand what they have to do to win. If they can’t do it or aren’t willing to do it, then it’s time to make peace.”

  “And if they are willing to do it?”

  “I show them how.”

  “Ever do it for them?”

  “If they can’t and if they pay me enough.”

  “What if they can’t pay you?”

  “Maybe. If I care enough about who wins.”

  “Is Kate paying you?”

  “We’ll see.”

  He was shorter than me and younger by at least ten years. He also carried less weight, but more of it was wiry muscle. His leather jacket hung loose, a slight bulge on his right hip I took for a holstered gun. He was willing, that much was for certain, and he was for hire, my gut telling me it didn’t matter for which side as long as the money made it into his account. Not my type.

  “I’ll pass,” I said, turning my back and stepping off the curb.

  “I found Mendez. He wants to talk to you.”

  The light turned red again. I came back to the sidewalk. “Why would he talk to you, and why does he want to talk to me?”

  Quinn smiled. “Two questions, same answer. He realized it’s in his best interests.”

  I didn’t like Quinn, and I liked it less that Kate had gone behind my back telling him enough to get Mendez’s attention, information that could give Mendez more of an edge than he already had.

  “How do I know you didn’t tell Mendez too much and that we aren’t walking into a trap?”

  “This isn’t my first dance. Besides, I’m guessing you were about to go hunting him. What were you going to do? Set a trap and use yourself as bait?”

  The really annoying thing about guys like Quinn was that they were too often right and they knew it.

  “How’d you find Mendez?”

  “I’ve done some work with gang task forces. I knew who to ask and where to look.”

  “What did you do? Invite him to meet you at Starbucks so you could buy him a latte?”

  He shook his head, letting out a long breath. “Kate was right. She said you’d make this difficult, so I’m going to make it easy. I’ve been following you since you left the jail. You’re shaking and wobbling, just like Kate told me you would. She said that you wouldn’t listen, that you’d turn me down, and that when you did I should tell you that the moon is pink, whatever the hell that means.”

  I chuckled. “She said that?”

  “She did. And she said to tell you that if you try to do this on your own and get yourself killed, Joy will never forgive you, and she won’t either.”

  “And how are you going to keep me from getting killed?”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an orange. “With this.”

  “A piece of fruit?”

  He opened his coat, showing me the butt of his gun. “In case the orange doesn’t do the trick.”

  Chapter Sixty-seven

  Quinn drove a stripped-down black SUV wrapped in dark tinted windows, stick shift and rubber mats, no sound system for talk radio, top forty, or hard rock, the cup holders stuffed with gum wrappers, loose change, and wadded scraps of scribbled paper. There was a canvas bag on the front passenger seat that smelled like old sweat but rattled like it was packed with steel when I moved it to the back.

  “More oranges?” I asked him.

  “Odds and ends,” he said, settling behind the wheel and tossing me the orange. “Whose orange is that?”

  “Yours, I guess.”

  “Don’t guess.”

  “Okay. It’s yours.”

  “Based on what?”

  “You gave it to me.”r />
  “Whose name is on it?”

  I rotated the orange, finding the familiar stamp. “Sunkist.”

  “My name Sunkist?”

  He was making a point that began to dawn on me. “No, and neither is mine.”

  “Exactly. So you’ve got the orange. That gives you a possessor’s rights. Maybe that’s enough for you to keep it, maybe not. But I want the orange. I tell you it’s mine, that I bought and paid for it and I want it back. Naturally you say bullshit because you’ve got the orange and I don’t have a receipt for it and my name isn’t Sunkist. Now make peace.”

  I laughed. “When my kids were little, I’d tell them to work it out or I’d take the orange and neither one of them would get it. They’d both be mad at me, and I’d end up with an orange I didn’t want.”

  “And,” Quinn said, “if you were Solomon, you’d tell them to cut it in half.”

  “But you wouldn’t.”

  “Nope. They’d still be mad. The real is question is, why do you want the orange?”

  I shrugged. “I’m hungry. I want to eat it.”

  “And I want to use the peel to bake a cake.”

  “You don’t look the type.”

  “I’m not. I prefer moon pies. But if I was, we can both get what we want. You can have the fruit, and I can have the peel. We can make peace because knowing why we want what we want lets us expand the pie and meet both of our needs.”

  “That’s swell, Dr. Feel Good, but suppose I don’t give a shit about you or your cake and I want the whole thing because I don’t share well with others.”

  He smiled. “That’s when we find out how hungry you are and how badly I want to bake that pie.”