Broken Places

by Tracy Clark

  A couple of kids strolled into the store after school, but they only came out with bags of chips and cans of pop. Maisie would be hard-pressed to turn a profit on that. The kids eyed my car as they passed it, giving me and it a wide berth. Yep, word had gotten around, all right. The police cruiser crept by about every half hour, each pass pounding another nail into Maisie’s coffin.

  By five o’clock it looked like a McDonald’s had blown up in the back seat, but there I sat, watching Maisie stand guard over her empty store. No one came by to bust out my windows. Maybe I’d overestimated her access to muscle? If Pop were here, he’d tell me to let this whole thing go, but I just couldn’t. My getting the Bible back felt like I was doing something constructive, even if it came too late for it to matter overmuch.

  When Maisie closed up for the night, I drove away, but then had a paranoid thought that maybe she was waiting until I pulled off to open the store again, and so I doubled back around 2 AM just to check, but the store and her apartment were both dark.

  * * *

  Ella Fitzgerald blasted out of my radio midway through the next day. “Cow Cow Boogie” was in full swing when Maisie marched out of the store with Pop’s Bible. I rolled down my passenger window and waited. When she got close, she tossed the book onto the seat. “I was at the casino in Hammond!” she yelled.

  “Your son?”

  She glowered at me, biting back rage. “Renauld’s been inside for three months! Check, if you don’t believe me. Now get the hell away from my place!” She turned on her heels and stomped back into the store.

  I picked up the Bible, confirmed it was the one I wanted, and then drove away as I’d promised I would. I felt satisfied that I’d accomplished at least a little something for Pop. Now I could move on to finding who killed him.

  * * *

  Pop’s Bible lay in my lap, my fingers tracing gently over his golden initials. I supposed it was mine now, at least I thought he’d want me to have it. Maisie had stolen it just for spite, teasing him with it over the phone with her prank calls. When she saw that it wasn’t working, did she follow up face-to-face and somehow it went horribly wrong?

  Maisie was mean, but she wasn’t physically imposing; Pop was old, but he wasn’t by any means feeble. He could have easily defended himself against Maisie Ross without hurting her, and she wouldn’t have been able to carry, drag, or coax him into the confessional and force him to put a gun to his own head. And, again, I kept stubbing my toe on the same rock. None of it, the break-in, the confessional, the Bible—explained the dead kid on the altar steps.

  I looked around my living room at the lamps and tables and throw pillows and such. Bay windows overlooked trees just beginning to bloom for spring, double pocket doors of solid wood separated the large room from a dining room I rarely used. It’s where I kept my grandmother’s dining room table, a dark, polished monster of a thing that felt and looked like it weighed a ton, made back when things were expected to last long enough to be handed down to somebody. I used it now as a catchall space for spare bike gear, backup running shoes, unread mail, and magazines I’d never have time to get to.

  Just inside the front door, a warmly lit long corridor ran east and west. In the front hall sat a narrow table with an old artisan bowl on top. It’s where I dumped my keys. The hardwood floor was covered by a paisley runner—swirls of deep burgundy, black, gold, and red. My bedroom, a guest room, and a full bath were to the west; to the east were an underutilized kitchen and a neat storage alcove where my bike lived. The apartment was way too big for just me, but it suited me fine. I felt close to my grandparents here.

  I was stalling, of course. I didn’t need to take inventory. I’d lived here more than half my life. I could walk the entire building blindfolded. I opened the Bible, the paper-thin pages crinkling when I turned them. I started with the Old Testament and made my way forward, checking for special notations Pop might have made. It was likely a long shot, but what else did I have? I fingered my way through, losing track of time, getting caught in the words. When it became hard to see them, I looked up to figure out why. The sun was setting, and the room had gone dim. I turned on a lamp, and went back to it. If I hadn’t, I might have missed the yellow sticky note.

  It was stuck to the page next to Romans 12:17. There wasn’t much written on it, but what was there was in Pop’s handwriting: 430/HWY, 150-DB. I sat bolt upright. What was it? Someone’s initials? An abbreviation? Four hundred and thirty. What was that? Was HWY short for highway? There was nothing written on the back, but Pop had underlined the Bible passage: “Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.... ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

  Sure sounded like Pop, but why underline it? Whose vengeance? Whose evil? I clawed my hands through my hair in frustration. Pop often wrote little notes to himself, sticking them everywhere as reminders to do something or go somewhere, but something about this note, here in the Bible, felt purposeful. And I wasn’t getting it. I closed the cover and lay the book down next to me on the couch. I was too tired to think anymore. I lay down just for a moment to rest my eyes and promptly fell asleep.

  I was startled awake at six A.M. by someone ringing my bell. Ben’s voice boomed over the intercom, and I quickly buzzed him up. Maybe he had something new to report. I waited anxiously at the door for him as he climbed the three flights, using the time to smooth down a major case of pillow head.

  “What have you got?” I asked as soon as he stepped inside the apartment.

  Ben stared at me intently.

  His full attention had me taking a step backward. I folded my arms protectively across my chest. “Stop looking at me like I’m about to jump off a ledge, or something.” My eyes skittered away nervously. “I’m fine.”

  He kept staring. “You were getting fine, but now you’re not, which is why I’m here.” He lifted a white deli bag stained with grease. “Bagels. Still warm. And it looks like you could use one.”

  “Do you have a lead? Information? Anything?”

  Ben shook his head. “Not yet.”

  I knew it was too soon, but I deflated nonetheless. Knowing how things worked, how slow they could move, didn’t keep me from being disappointed by the lack of progress. Pop’s killer was out there, and it was making me antsy. Why were we wasting time with bagels? “I’m not hungry, but thanks.”

  “You don’t have to be hungry to eat a frigging bagel. You just open your mouth and pop the damn thing in. It’s like gulping air or scarfing down cotton candy.” He snapped his fingers. “Like nothing.”

  My eyes narrowed, suspicious now. “This is not about the bagels, is it?”

  He shrugged. “If you want to get some things off your chest while you’re eating it, I won’t stop you.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He smiled. “You do. You just don’t know it.”

  I led him back to the kitchen. “I’ll make coffee.” I didn’t drink it, but I kept it around for those of my friends who couldn’t seem to meet the day without it.

  “Nuh-uh, I’ll handle it. You tea snobs don’t know shit about coffee beans.”

  “Did you come over here just to insult me?”

  “Not just,” he said, giving me a playful shove. “So, you want onion or sesame seed?”

  Ben tossed the bag of bagels on the counter and padded over to the coffeemaker. I grabbed orange juice and a bag of ground coffee out of the fridge and tossed the bag to him.

  “Bring me up to speed,” I said. “There has to be something.”

  Ben went to work on his coffee—filters, water, it was a process. “No burglar tools on the kid—no picklocks, no screwdriver—and no keys on Father Ray. The door to the basement was jimmied, so you’d think that’s how the kid got in, but it’s sooty and dirty as hell down there. That old church still uses coal, if you can believe it. But there was no soot or coal dust on either of them. You saw that for yourself.”

  I pulled a juice glass
from the cabinet, thought it through. “There were no sooty footprints anywhere near that altar. I’d have noticed.” An image of the bloodied bodies flashed in my head, along with the horror and panic I’d felt. “At least I think I would have. And Pop would have had his keys. He’d have known the church was locked. He saw me check it.”

  “But it was open when you got there,” Ben said. “So where’d his keys go?”

  “Someone took them or tossed them. Maybe they figured the jimmied door would be enough for the police to jump to the same conclusion Farraday did—a simple break-in gone bad. Taking the keys was a mistake.”

  He scooped coffee into the filter. “There could have been two kids. The other one jimmies the door, crawls through the soot, opens the door from the inside for the one we found dead, and that’s what Father Ray walks in on. First guy shakes him down, takes the keys and whatever else is in his pockets. Dead guy goes for something else, a candlestick, a chalice, there’s a struggle, the gun goes off. The guy in the soot books it, leaving the scene like you found it.”

  I shook my head, unconvinced. “He did not kill himself. You’re still operating like this was a burglary. It wasn’t.”

  “Then you explain the dead kid.”

  “I can’t. Not yet, but I will.” I told him about Cummings and Maisie and Pop’s Bible. I showed him the sticky note. “This is just a start. There’s bound to be more.”

  “Aww, this could be anything—a shopping list, a reminder to a dentist’s appointment.”

  “It feels important.”

  The coffeemaker began to burp and bubble, filling the kitchen with the aroma of brewed coffee. Ben stood there, his back to me, not saying what I knew he wanted to say. He wanted me to stand down, but not because of Farraday’s threat. He knew how important this was to me, how much it would cost.

  “I know what I’m doing,” I said, busying myself so I wouldn’t have to look at him and make a big thing out of it.

  “I know.” He tossed me the bag of coffee, and I put it back in the fridge.

  “Maisie Ross had good reason, at least in her mind, to want to hurt him,” I said. “You could check the casino’s surveillance cameras to verify her alibi. As for Cummings, he admitted arguing with Pop, but he seems to have gotten over it. Besides, wrangling over how best to tackle a problem hardly seems like a reason to kill. Maybe he was home that night and didn’t hear the sirens, but, if I believe his neighbor, and I have no reason not to, his wife wasn’t there with him. So why’d he include her?”

  “But if you’re right, somebody didn’t just kill him, did they? They made it look like he killed himself. That’s a lot of rage. A Bible, a shouting match over feeding the homeless, and a couple of initials on a sticky note don’t lead us anywhere we want to go, at least not yet.”

  I grabbed a bagel from the bag. Sesame seed. “Then I keep digging. I still have the janitor to talk to.”

  Ben pulled down a coffee mug from the shelf, his expression pensive. “You’re on a collision course with Farraday, you know that, right?”

  “I don’t care about Farraday.”

  He sighed, filled his cup. “What if I ask you, pretty please, to back off?”

  I pulled a face. “What grown man says pretty please?”

  “One who’s trying to keep his partner out of jail for interfering in a police investigation.”

  I slowly poured myself a glass of OJ. “I’d do anything for you, you know that.”

  Ben squinted, his gaze anticipatory. “Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming on?”

  I shrugged, smiled sweetly. “Well, if you sense it, I don’t have to say it.” I handed him the greasy bag. “Onion bagel?”

  * * *

  Nancy Akers, the school’s receptionist, was a big, startled-looking woman with auburn hair pulled back into a severe bun. Her green eyes were red from crying. She couldn’t believe Pop was dead. I knew, because she kept repeating “I can’t believe he’s dead.” When I told her why I’d come, she was finally able to pull herself together enough to summon Anton Bolek over the PA system. It was going to be a long day for the both of us.

  I’d seen Bolek before, but this would be our first time meeting formally. Pop never said too much about him, but Thea had come up with his name pretty quickly when I asked if Pop had had a problem with anyone close to home. Again, something else Pop didn’t feel it necessary to mention to me. I was beginning to see a pattern forming and didn’t like it much. I waited for Bolek in the rotunda, anxious to get it done, so that I could move on to the next thing. When the side door screeched open, I turned to watch him lumber in. As he drew closer, I wondered what he’d done to get on Pop’s bad side.

  He was portly, pockmarked, and dressed in a dark green janitor’s uniform. He was maybe in his early sixties, if I had to guess, and nearly bald, the top of his head freckled from the sun. Bolek walked deliberately, at half pace, as though he was counting every step. His work boots skimmed the carpet, barely clearing the nap, and he listed slightly to the right as he ambled forward, a massive key ring clipped to his belt, the keys jangling like wind chimes.

  He shot me a long, calculating look. “You’re the detective they called me for?” He emphasized the first word, which immediately got my hackles up. His small dark eyes, like inky dots, narrowed. “I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?” He nodded. “Sure, you were with Heaton. Detective, huh? Go figure.” His eyes darted around the circular room, landing on nothing in particular, until finally making their way back around to me. “What’s this about then?”

  “Father Heaton’s dead,” I said, watching, sizing him up. “You worked with him. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Bolek’s eyes widened. “What kind of questions?”

  “Whether you noticed anything out of the ordinary, saw anyone hanging around, or could tell if Father Heaton seemed upset or distracted. General questions. How you two got along.”

  According to Thea, they didn’t. In fact, she painted Bolek as a very difficult man to get along with. Pop, I knew, would have made the effort, and would have kept on making it.

  Bolek glanced around. “We weren’t exactly drinking buddies. It’s a job. I come in, I do it, I go home. That sums it up.”

  “You’re here every day?”

  “I don’t do weekends. I’m in at six A.M. on the dot, and I’m out the minute that bell rings at three o’clock. They can’t pay me enough to stick around here after the sun goes down. Once it does, this neighborhood turns into a regular shooting gallery, what with the gangbangers and such, no offense.”

  “Good people live here, Mr. Bolek. Not everyone’s in a gang.”

  Bolek snorted. “Tell that to the police blotter. That’s what happens when you turn the zoo over to the animals. I knew this neighborhood back in the day when it was all Irish. They had nuns here then, real ones, not these others they got now.” He chuckled meanly. “You could say I knew it when.”

  Our eyes held for a time as I worked to tamp down a growing desire to take Anton Bolek’s ring of keys and shove them up a dark and narrow place. He knew I was black, right? I mean, I was standing not two feet from him. Who would not take offense? “Let’s get back to Father Heaton. When’s the last time you saw him?”

  Bolek blinked, thought for a moment, and then I could almost see the light bulb go off in his head. “Oh, hey, I get it. You guys need somebody to pin this whole thing on, and you’re going for the white guy in the basement, that it?”

  He started to sweat, damp circles forming under his armpits. I watched as he checked out the rotunda again, as though there might be a hidden camera somewhere. Cops learned to read body language. Bolek’s wasn’t hard to decipher. He was guilty about something. “Look, I was way in my own neighborhood when all this went down, and I got plenty of witnesses who can prove it.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  “A cop asking you about a killing? I know how that goes.”

  “I’m a private investigator, not a
cop. I’m looking for information, that’s all. Perhaps there was someone around paying close attention to Father Heaton’s comings and goings? Maybe you know someone else he had a beef with?”

  He appeared to settle down some, though his eyes stayed squirrely. “A private dick? That’s all? You had me worried there for a second, doll, not that I have anything to worry about, mind. It’s just I’m no fan of cops. I hate ’em, matter of fact.”

  I glared at him with hard eyes, not bothering to smile this time. “That so?”

  A slimy grin revealed double rows of nicotine-stained teeth. “Never met an honest one my whole life, and that’s a true fact.”

  Bolek’s picking away at my good graces was beginning to wear thin. First, the swipe at the neighborhood and the people in it, then the sexist labels, now the swipe at cops. Thea had pegged him right. Bolek was old school, his teeth cut on generations of prejudice, fear, and a warped sense of how things should go and what type of people they should go for. He was entitled to his narrow-mindedness. If the situation were not what it was now, I’d even call him on it, but Pop was dead. I needed Bolek’s cooperation, no matter how much it pained me to stand here and angle for it.

  “Then it’s a good thing I’m not one,” I said, forcing a weak smile. “So? Anything you noticed?”

  He crossed his short, chubby arms across his chest. “You don’t see much from the basement. I start these crap furnaces first thing, then walk the place all day tinkering with old pipes, then I hightail it out of here while it’s still light out. Same every day, come Hell or high water.” Bolek stared at me with a look of trollish cunning for a moment too long; he gave me the creeps. I wondered about the safety of the children he came in contact with every day, and wondered what I could do about it.

  “And you and Father Heaton?”

  “Didn’t like him, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I don’t like anybody who looks over my shoulder all day like I don’t know what I’m doing, even if he is a priest.”