The Silent Hour lp-4

by Michael Koryta

  “Maybe we will, or maybe we’ll still be talking about it, pissed off and annoyed, ten years from now. That happens sometimes, Ken.”

  He shook his head. “Not this time. No, I’ve got a feeling about it.”

  My apartment was dark and empty when I came inside, and I felt a surge of disappointment that Amy wasn’t there. No surprise—we hadn’t made plans for the night, and she rarely came by unannounced—but some nights you can’t help wishing that someone were waiting for you, had a light on. Of course, the first time that happened I’d probably wince at the sight of the light in the window and think longingly of a quiet, empty, and dark home. What can I say? We private eyes are dualistic creatures. It’s one of our human traits.

  I wanted to call Amy but figured Graham should come first. Sitting on the couch, I unbuttoned my shirt, removed the wire, and checked the recorder to see if all looked right. It did, but I wouldn’t be sure until I hooked it up to the computer, ripped the audio file, and played it back. That would wait until morning. I found Graham’s number and called.

  “I’m about to get in bed with my wife, Linc. In other words, you best have something worthwhile to say.”

  I looked at the clock. “It’s not even nine, Graham.”

  “Said I was getting into bed with her. Didn’t say anything about sleeping.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yeah, ah. Now, what do you have?”

  I took him through it as accurately as I could, albeit with a touch of varnish on my description of Ken’s contributions. It wasn’t a heavy enough coat.

  “He told Harrison that Bertoli was a suspect?”

  “You wanted us to drop the name.”

  “Drop the name, not call him a suspect! You think that’s one and the same?”

  “The implication would’ve been there anyhow.”

  He grumbled at that but let it go. “So Salvatore’s name gave Harrison a little stir, did it?”

  “Felt that way.”

  “Interesting. What do you think of that bit he said to you at the door?”

  “That Alexandra asked him to stay because she was afraid? I’m not sure what to think of it.”

  “I’ll ask you this, then—suppose you a woman, and you afraid. A convicted murderer is who you turn to for help?”

  “Could be she trusted him.”

  “Uh-huh, even if I buy that, I still go back to the convicted murderer element. She wants a guy with those credentials around for help, then what do you think she was afraid of?”

  “Husband, maybe.”

  “Guy’s a scholar, Linc. Weighed maybe a hundred and forty pounds, spent his day stuck in a book.”

  “You’ve been around long enough to know that doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “No, but if she’s afraid of him, why not call her brother?”

  “So maybe it was the brother she was afraid of.”

  “That’s what I like about your mind, Linc. It works just like mine, only slower.”

  “That’s a big jump, man, suggesting Dominic would go after his own sister.”

  “Who said anything about going after her? We’ve got one person confirmed dead, Linc, and it ain’t Alexandra.”

  “You think she was afraid for her husband.”

  “Makes sense, since he turned up dead,” Graham said, but then rushed out, “Look, let’s don’t get too sidetracked with this. Only reason we’re even talking about it is because of what Harrison said, and I don’t know how high he’d score in truthfulness. What do you think?”

  “About Harrison?”

  “Yeah. You were the one sat there and talked with him tonight. Give me your instinct. You feel he’s being straight? That he doesn’t know a hell of a lot more about this than he’s saying?”

  I thought about it, remembering his words, his body language, his eyes.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t trust him.”

  “Exactly. Now, you expect to hear from him? Think he’ll take the bait?”

  “Here’s what I expect—if he takes it, he’ll do so knowing damn well that it’s bait. He’s smart, Graham. He’s awfully smart.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Graham said.

  I was—And that’s why, when I got to the office at eight thirty the next morning to discover Harrison had left a message three hours earlier, I didn’t view it as any sort of victory.

  He’d called at five twenty in the morning and prefaced the message with an apology for the early hour, explaining that he needed to be at work by six.

  I know this is your office number, though, so I assume it’s not a problem. I gave your offer some consideration, Lincoln, and I’ve decided to accept. I’ll put a new retainer check in the mail today. For one thousand dollars. If that’s not enough, let me know. The check will be made out to you. If you’d like to pay Ken Merriman the full sum, that’s your decision, but the only way I’ll approach this is with you as a go-between. I think that’s fair, seeing how you’re the one who brought him to me. It wouldn’t be right for you to be completely removed from this. I’m not comfortable with that.

  He paused there, and I could hear his breathing, fast and shallow, in direct contrast with his patient, careful manner of speaking.

  I imagine you might be speaking with Detective Graham at some point. Feel free to give him my regards.

  Another pause.

  All right, so, I’ll mail the check. Now, I don’t mean to tell you how to do your business, but I suppose since you’re working for me, it’s fine if I make a request. Leave Mark Ruzity alone. He shouldn’t be of interest to you, and he shouldn’t be bothered. I’d like you to keep your distance from Mark.

  That was the end of the message. I listened to it a few times before Ken showed up, and as soon as he sat down I played it again and watched his face darken as Harrison talked.

  “You get the sense he may know exactly what we’re doing?” he said when the message was done.

  “I suggested that to Graham last night.”

  “And?”

  “Graham doesn’t agree, or doesn’t care. I’m not sure which.”

  “What Harrison said about him . . . that felt like a message, didn’t it? Like he was telling us—”

  “That he knows we’re doing this at Graham’s direction? Yeah.”

  “You talk to Graham since this call?”

  “Tried and didn’t get him. Left a message.”

  “Harrison still seems quite taken with you, Lincoln. Supposedly he just hired me, right? But he did that through a call to you and a check made out to you. What do you think of that?”

  I shook my head. “No idea. Why’d he come to me in the first place? Why keep writing letters after it was clear I wouldn’t respond? Why show up at my office after months of being ignored?”

  “You don’t like it.”

  “Would you?”

  His grin slipped back into place. “Shit, he’s sending you checks. How bad can it be?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “So what now, we wait on Graham?”

  “Uh-huh, that’s the drill.”

  “That last bit of the message is pretty damn strange,” Ken said. “Telling us to stay away from Ruzity.”

  “I was waiting for you to comment on that.”

  “As far as I knew, the two of them had no relationship. They were with the Cantrells at different times, and I had no idea their paths would have crossed.”

  “Seems like they did.”

  “Yeah. With Harrison being our client and all, I suppose we have to respect his wishes and leave Ruzity alone.”

  “That would be the ethical decision, certainly. We are in his employ.”

  “So as long as you got that message, we’d be required to keep our distance from Ruzity.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Imagine what might have happened if you didn’t come into the office right away, though.”

  I nodded. “Why, there’s a chance we might have blundered our way to Mr. Ruzity, oblivious to the wish
es of our client. In fact, until that message came through, he wasn’t our client. He was still considering things.”

  “An excellent point.” He flicked his eyes to the phone, and a smile drifted across his face. “So, let me ask you, Lincoln: When did you play that message?”

  “It’s tough to recall, Ken. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But I can’t imagine it was before we looked Ruzity up.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I can’t imagine it was.”

  16

  __________

  Finding Mark Ruzity was like looking for a lost dog in a neighborhood overrun by strays—nobody wanted to help, and nobody understood why in the hell you’d want to find him in the first place.

  We started at the pawnshop on Storer Avenue where, according to Ken’s notes, Ruzity worked repairing guitars. The notes were more than a decade old, though, and the pawnshop was now a vacant building with boarded windows. From there we went to his house on Denison, found nobody home, and started knocking on doors to see if anyone could tell us where to find him. Most of the people on the street seemed to know who he was, but nobody wanted to direct us to him.

  “He’s one of those guys,” said a Puerto Rican woman who kept the chain on the door while she talked to us, “you just keep your distance from him, you know? He’s lived here as long as we have, never caused a problem, but he looks like he could, right? He don’t bother nobody, but I sure as shit wouldn’t bother him, either. I don’t think you should bother him.”

  It was the same sentiment Harrison had expressed. For a guy who hadn’t taken a fall in fifteen years, Ruzity had one hell of a rep.

  Ken finally had the inspiration that got us to him.

  “He’s a musician, right? Is there anyplace in this neighborhood where a musician would want to go?”

  We found one: a used instrument store ten blocks from his house. They knew him, all right.

  “Dude can shred a guitar,” the kid behind the counter informed us from behind his protective layer of piercings. “I mean just melt the amp, really. But he won’t play with anybody else now. Only solo. Calls himself El Caballo Loco.”

  He paused, waiting for a reaction, and then said, “It means the crazy horse. Badass, right?”

  Badass, we agreed. Now where can we find him?

  “He’s a stone carver, man. Works with a guy named Ben down on Forty-eighth. Does all sorts of cool shit. You should see some of the gravestones.”

  “Gravestones?”

  “Yeah, awesome, right? Like I said, he’s pretty badass.”

  He didn’t have an address for the carving shop, but he gave us a close enough description. Ken and I didn’t speak until we were back in my truck.

  “So he carves the gravestones,” Ken said, “and Harrison keeps them clean? That’s the idea? A pair of murderers making a living in the cemetery business?”

  “Steady work,” I said. “They’re never going to run out of clients. Hell, they’ve helped produce some.”

  The carving shop—Strawn Stoneworks—occupied the bottom floor of a three-story brick building near the old stockyard district. Nobody answered our knock, but there were lights on in the back, and the door was unlocked. We went in.

  The front of the room was scattered with samples of carvings laid out on old wooden tables—a fireplace mantel, a small gargoyle, and a handful of headstones. There was a narrow corridor separating this room from the next, and at the opposite end fluorescent lights glowed and a steady tapping sound could be heard. Metal on stone.

  I led the way down the hall, and we came out in a workshop that smelled of sweat and dust. There were pieces of stone on the floor and on heavy-duty steel shelves, and tools littered the rest of the space—grinders and hammers and racks of chisels, an air compressor with hoses draped around it. A man was working with his back to us, chipping away at a piece of marble with a hammer and chisel. I was just opening my mouth to speak when he turned and said, “The hell you think you’re doing?”

  He was of average height, wiry in a hard way, with gray hair and a goatee. He wore an earring, and there were thin lines of sweat snaking down his forehead.

  “Hey, sorry, there wasn’t anybody out front,” I said.

  “Strawn left for a while. Said he was getting lunch, but he’s probably buying comic books. That’s what he does at lunch.” He wiped sweat away with the back of his hand. “Anyhow, he’s the owner; he’s the one you talk to. Not me. And nobody comes back into the workshop.”

  “We’re not looking for Strawn,” I said. “We’re looking for Mark Ruzity.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Are you—” I began, but then he cut me off.

  “Maybe I wasn’t clear. Nobody comes into the workshop.” He cocked his head and stared us down, first me, then Ken. “Lot of tools back here. People wander in, they could get hurt.”

  It didn’t feel like a public safety announcement.

  “Mark,” I said, “wouldn’t it be easier to answer five minutes of questions?”

  “Would be easiest to throw your asses out. Nobody—”

  “Comes into the workshop. We get it. But if you throw us out now, we’ll just have to go back to your place on Denison and wait around. What’s the point?”

  His eyes flickered and went dark when I said that. Didn’t like it that we knew where he lived.

  “Okay,” he said. “I can tell you what I’ve told every other cop: I’m clean. Haven’t killed anyone in a while. If you’re asking about something that went down in the neighborhood, you’re asking the wrong man. I’m not involved, and I don’t drop dimes.”

  “It’s not about the neighborhood,” Ken said. “It’s about Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell.”

  Ruzity seemed to draw in air without taking a breath. Just absorbed it, sucked it right out of the dust-filled room until the walls felt tight around us. He didn’t speak, but he looked at Ken in a way that made me wish I were wearing a gun. There were pneumatic hammers on a table beside him, but he was using hand tools, a hammer in his right and a carbide chisel in his left. He turned the chisel in his fingers now. It looked natural in his hand. Familiar.

  “I suspect the time has come,” he said, “for us to share some names. You already know mine. What are yours?”

  We told him. Names and occupation. He kept rotating the chisel. It had a flared point, ridged with small, sharp teeth. Sweat had slipped behind his glasses and found his eyes, and he blinked it away without dropping his stare.

  “Private investigators,” he said. “Then police didn’t send you. So who did? Dunbar?”

  I could feel Ken’s who’s Dunbar? question on the way, could also feel the price of it if he let it escape his lips, and rushed out my own response first. “What’s your problem with Dunbar?”

  Mark Ruzity switched his eyes to me. “My problem? The son of a bitch has spent twelve years harassing me and sending cops my way. You ask what my problem is?”

  I shrugged, and he narrowed his gaze. “Dunbar does his own hassling, though. FBI guys don’t hire anybody else to do it for them. So who the hell you working for?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Ken said, “maybe you could answer a question or two and then we will. You know, fair trade.”

  “Fair trade?” He took a step closer and drew himself up to his full height, and the muscles in his forearms stood out tight around the chisel and the hammer. Then he paused, as if something had interrupted his forthcoming words, and frowned at Ken.

  “Merriman,” he said. “That’s your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “You came around a long time ago,” he said. “Back at the start.”

  “You wouldn’t agree to see me,” Ken said.

  “No. And I won’t now. You were working for his parents.” His frown deepened. “What in the hell brings you back all these years later?”

  “The case remains unsolved, Mark.”

  “No shit. You been working it for the whole time?”

  “No. I’m back becaus
e they found his body. It . . . stimulated my interest.”

  Ruzity pulled his head back, stared down at Ken with his eyes thoughtful and his mouth open, as if Ken had just told him a riddle and Ruzity wanted to be damn sure he got the right answer.

  “His body,” Ruzity said at length, “doesn’t mean shit to me. Okay? Unless you want me to carve his headstone, it doesn’t mean shit to me. It shouldn’t to you, either.”

  “No? Like I said, the crime remains—”

  “Unsolved,” he said. “Yeah, I got it. Maybe it’s better that way, too.”

  “Think you can explain that remark?” I said, and he ignored me, still focused on Ken.

  “His parents hired you again when the body turned up? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “No. I’m not working for them anymore.”

  “Bullshit. Or, wait—give a shit. As in: I don’t. Who sent you here is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that you haul your asses out the door and go back to your clients and tell them to stay the hell away from Mark Ruzity.”

  “Odd response,” I said, “coming from someone the Cantrells helped. I’d think you would care about seeing Joshua’s death and his wife’s disappearance resolved.”

  His head swiveled to me, and I felt a cold tightness along my spine.

  “You think you know something about what the Cantrells did for me?” he said. “You think you know a damn thing about that? Let me tell you what they did—showed me that I’m the sort of man who needs his space. Why? To keep from losing a temper that I don’t have real good control over. I’ve controlled it for a while now. Some years, in fact. But it’s a daily chore, and it only works when I keep my space, and other people keep theirs.”

  He lifted the chisel, put the tip to my forehead, and then gave it a gentle tap with the hammer. The tiny teeth bit into my skin. Enough that I felt it, but not enough to draw blood. Ken shifted toward us, but Ruzity appeared unconcerned with him.

  “Right now?” he said. “You’re in my space, brother.”

  He’d lowered the hammer but was still holding the chisel against my forehead. Now he leaned close, so close that his goatee brushed my jaw, and spoke into my ear.

  “You want to know what Alexandra Cantrell did for me?” he said. “She taught me how to keep myself from putting that chisel through your brain.”