The Silent Hour lp-4

by Michael Koryta

  “Yeah, he has. Tell you something else that stood out to me from those articles—Bertoli’s death was ruled an accident. We already knew that, but reading it again made me think about how firm Dunbar was on the idea that the guy was murdered. He was white on rice with that, you know? Which makes me wonder—if there was an FBI agent involved who knew all the background, and believed Bertoli was murdered, then why rule it an accident and close the door to an investigation? Why weren’t the cops out looking for the Cantrells years ago as witnesses for the Bertoli case? Joshua Cantrell’s parents told me that the police brushed off the idea of a crime. How could they do that, if what Dunbar told us is true?”

  “All good questions,” I said. “Bertoli died in Cleveland, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Warehouse district, down by the river.”

  “So it was Cleveland police jurisdiction. Who had the case?”

  “His name is in there.”

  I found the article and read through it, and nodded as soon as I got to the lead investigator’s name—Mike London. I knew he’d take my call.

  “How about we get you some answers to those questions while we wait on Graham’s arrival, Kenny boy?”

  “Sounds good, Linc. Sounds good.”

  Mike London always reminded me of a circus bear—enormous and threatening, but a crowd-pleaser at heart. He was one of the better-known wise-asses in a department full of them, but he was a good detective, too. Didn’t have the sort of mind that Joe or some of the others had, that gift for problem solving, but he compensated with a good eye for detail and a dogged work ethic. Give Mike thirty leads at the start of the day, and he wasn’t going home until he’d tried all of them, and a few others generated along the way. That effort was what kept him in favor with the brass despite his sense of humor, which superiors never found quite as hilarious as the rest of the department did.

  He was out on the east side when I called, interviewing witnesses to a drive-by shooting that had missed the intended target and wounded a sixteen-year-old kid on Euclid Avenue the previous week, and said he’d give us some time provided I bought him lunch. Mike’s appetite had been the stuff of department lore for years, so that was no small concession.

  “Bertoli,” he said when I agreed. “That’s an old one, Lincoln. Old and cold.”

  “I know it. Just want to see what you remember about it.”

  “What I remember is that I did a bunch of interviews out Murray Hill way, because that’s where his family was. Say, you know what Murray Hill makes me think of?”

  “Food?”

  “Hell, boy, you always were a good detective. Now, you want to ask me some questions, you can feed me out there at Murray Hill. That little Italian place.”

  “Murray Hill’s nothing but little Italian places, Mike.”

  “The one with all the red, white, and green,” he said. Real help narrowing it down. When I finally determined he meant Mama Santa’s, we agreed to meet at noon.

  Ken and I left early, largely by virtue of having nothing else to do. There’d been no more word from Graham, so I assumed he was still planning to show up that afternoon. If he came by while we were with London, he could wait. I wasn’t feeling particularly gracious toward Quinn Graham.

  We got to Murray Hill around eleven thirty, which meant we were in for a long wait, because London was never early and rarely on time.

  “Here we are,” I said as we drove up Mayfield Road and passed by Holy Rosary’s brick facade and stained glass windows, the building more than a hundred years old now but still looking solid and clean. “Cleveland’s fierce Little Italy. Do you want to go to an art gallery first or a bakery?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it, not a threatening place anymore—but remember, we’re here to talk about a murder. Speaking of murder—”

  “I love that segue.”

  “Thought you would. I forgot to tell you, I checked my office voice mail last night. There was a message from an attorney representing Cantrell’s parents.”

  “Did somebody call them to ask about what you’re doing up here?”

  “Nope. Wanted to inform me that I may be called for a deposition. They’re trying to claim the property.”

  “That house?”

  He nodded. “You’ve been out there, you know how much it must be worth. The thing’s held free and clear in Alexandra and Joshua’s names, but they’re gone. So his parents want a piece of the estate.”

  “I don’t see how they could get it if there’s no proof that Alexandra is dead. The taxes are paid and current, there’s no mortgage, no excuse to take it away from her.”

  “That’s what I thought, but their attorney intends to file suit to have her declared dead. They’re going to subpoena her attorney to see if he’s had any contact with her in the last seven years. Apparently that’s some sort of legal standard. They’re sure nobody else has been in touch with her for that long.”

  It sounded crazy, seeking a courtroom ruling over whether or not a life still existed, but I supposed it was reasonable for them to try. Just the night before, Amy and I had wondered if Alexandra was still alive.

  “Supposing Child says he hasn’t heard from her in the last seven years, then . . .”

  “They’ll have to publish a notice of her presumed death. Run that for sixty days or something, I’m not sure of the specifics. If she doesn’t respond in that time frame, and nobody else comes forward with proof of life, they can get a judge to rule that she’s legally deceased. Once that’s done, they can put a claim on the property.”

  I sat with my car keys in my hand and thought about the house, that arched doorway into the earth, the quiet that surrounded it. “They’re going to sell it, aren’t they?”

  “I’m sure that’s the idea. They aren’t well-off.”

  It was tough to imagine anyone moving into the place. I tried to picture it—a moving truck parked outside under the trees, a family inside sorting through boxes, kids running around the grounds, ready to transform the empty home into someplace full of life. It didn’t seem right.

  “That’s interesting,” I said finally, when I realized Ken was still looking at me and I hadn’t said anything for a long time. “I’ll be curious to see what happens.”

  “She’ll come back to it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I think Alexandra will come back to it if she’s still alive.”

  “I don’t know why she would.”

  “Because the place is a grave to her, Lincoln. It’s a memorial. You have to see that. She left a home that’s worth millions sitting empty and alone for twelve years. She had a damn epitaph carved beside the door. That place means something to her. So let me tell you—if she’s alive, I bet she’ll come back to see it again.”

  20

  __________

  There are plenty of good restaurants on Murray Hill, but Mama Santa’s pizzeria is one of the oldest and best known. Ken and I were ahead of the lunch crowd and got a table in the back of the dark, wood-paneled dining room.

  “I hope Mike sits next to you,” I said as we took our seats.

  “He’s that big?”

  “Three hundred at least.”

  “That’s not tiny.”

  “I knew a guy who worked a surveillance with him once, said Mike brought this feed bag of beef jerky along, like five pounds of the stuff. Went through that in the first hour, then spent the rest of the night bitching about how hungry he was. Guy said the longer the surveillance went on, the less he liked the way Mike looked at him, started to feel like he was out with the Donner Party.”

  Ken smiled as he leaned back from the table, stretched out his long legs, and crossed his feet at the ankles. “What’s your best surveillance story? Or worst experience, rather. Those usually make the best stories.”

  “That’s easy. I was in an unmarked car by myself not long after I switched to narcotics and started working with Joe. This is early on, and Joe was something of a legend, so I’m trying to impress, right? W
ell, it’s February, bad snowstorm had just blown through, left it cold as a bastard, and my lovely and charming fiancée—yes, I was engaged, and no, it didn’t stick—she’s feeling bad for me and decides to give me a present. One of these heated pads for the car seat, you plug it into the cigarette lighter. I was embarrassed by the damn thing since it didn’t exactly feed the tough-guy image I was trying to cultivate. I threw it in the car, though, because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

  “So, the night of this surveillance, we sit on the guy’s house for hours, and nothing happens. Started in late afternoon, and now it’s two in the morning and our guy hasn’t moved, which means neither have we. It’s getting colder and colder, just crawling into my bones, you know, and I figure, hell, might as well use her gift for a little while, just long enough to warm up. I plugged it in for maybe twenty minutes. Half hour at best.”

  Ken’s smile widened as he saw where I was headed.

  “Thing warms me up, and now I understand why—it must have been burning watts like a set of stadium lights. I unplug it about an hour before our guy moves. He comes out of the house and gets into his car, and I think, finally, and turn the key.”

  “Click,” Ken said, and laughed.

  I nodded. “Click. Absolutely no juice, battery’s dead. So I have to get on the radio with Joe and say, uh, our boy’s in motion, but I can’t tail him until I get a jump.”

  “You tell him what killed the battery?”

  “Hell no. You kidding me? I spent the next three weeks bitching about the shitty unmarked cars they gave us. Joe still doesn’t know the truth about that one.”

  “Nice.”

  “All right, your turn,” I said.

  “You’ll like this—worst surveillance I ever went on was a fake surveillance.”

  “A fake surveillance?”

  “I have—had, rather—a brother-in-law who I simply could not stand. He was older than my wife, had the protective big brother thing going on, but he was also just a dick, you know? Owned a car lot, made piles of money, told bad jokes and laughed at them way too loud. Only his own jokes, though. Never cracked a smile at anything anybody else had to say, but when he’d make a joke he always cut up, roared at his own dazzling wit. When we first got married, my patience with him could last about an hour. That’s how long I could stand to be in the same room. That time frame diminished over the years.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “One Friday night my wife informs me that he’s coming by for dinner, and I thought, oh, shit, not on a weekend. Because on the weekends he liked to hit the bottle, and when he did that, he lingered longer and laughed louder. So I thought, just tell one little white lie and give yourself a night off. Tell them you have to work, a rush surveillance job came up, and then go sit in a bar and watch a basketball game.”

  “Good plan.”

  “That’s what I thought. When I came home that night, I planned to sell the story to my wife by picking up a tripod and acting real annoyed at this last-minute development. Well, the son of a bitch was already there. He’d shown up early. So he started asking a thousand questions about the surveillance, what it is that I do, all of that. I was edging for the door, he was following me with beer in hand, and just as I was about to escape, he turned to my wife and said, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t mind if I skipped dinner and tagged along with Ken, would you?’ ”

  I started to laugh.

  “Yeah,” Ken said, nodding. “Of course she agreed to it. So now instead of dealing with this asshole over dinner in my own home, with my wife to distract him, I’ve got him alone, and in my car.”

  “Without any surveillance to do.”

  “Exactly. So I thought, well, what the hell can you do at this point but play it out? I drove us to some apartment complex, just picked one at random, and gave him a story about what we were watching for. We sat there for five hours, him drinking and talking and pointing at every car that came and went—‘is that them, is that them?’ ”

  “That’s fantastic,” I said. “A cautionary tale.”

  We traded a few more war stories while we waited. Ken asked if I had a surveillance theme song, and I had to laugh.

  “A theme song? Are you kidding me? You play the Mission Impossible sound track when you’re working?”

  “Everybody should have a theme song,” he said, unbothered, “and, no, mine’s not the Mission Impossible sound track. Song’s called ‘Cold Trail Blues.’ By a guy named Peter Case. Ever heard it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Thing speaks to me,” he said with a faint grin. “Speaks about the Cantrells, too. All about some guy searching through the gloom, wondering if he’ll ever find what he’s looking for. Thinking it’s too late, and he’s too far behind.”

  “If that’s your theme song,” I said, “it’s no damn wonder that you haven’t found Alexandra yet. Encouraging shit.”

  His smile was hollow. “I’ll burn you a copy.”

  When Mike finally entered, it was twenty past twelve. He wedged in through the door, lumbered across the room, extended his hand, and set to work crushing my fingers. A Mike London handshake was both a greeting and a warning, I always thought.

  “How are you, Mike?”

  “Hungry. I am hungry, Lincoln, my boy.” He turned and cast an interrogator’s stare down at Ken. “You’re Pennsylvania?”

  “Ken Merriman.”

  “From Pennsylvania,” Mike said, as if that dismissed any need for Ken to have a name. A location would suffice. He dropped into the chair beside Ken and heaved his bulk up to the table’s edge. I saw Ken trying to slide closer to the wall to make room for him, and I had to hide a grin.

  “The way we got to Bertoli,” I began, but Mike lifted a hand to silence me.

  “I need a menu and a waitress. Then you can tell me all that shit.”

  We got him a menu and a waitress, and once the food was ordered he drained his glass of water as if it were a shot and said, “All right, get to it.”

  “Ken was hired by the parents of Joshua Cantrell a while back,” I said. “Do you remember that story?”

  “Guy went missing with his wife and was found last winter.”

  “That’s him, yeah. We’re trying to figure out how he ended up dead and in Pennsylvania, and where the wife went.”

  “We? How’d you get involved?”

  It froze me for a moment, and even Ken gave me an odd look, because it shouldn’t have been that difficult a question to answer. Eventually I forced a grin and said, “Just doing what I do, Mike. Just doing what I do.”

  His eyebrows knit together, as if he thought it was a bullshit answer or at least a strange one, and then he said, “Whatever. None of my business. Let’s hear the questions.”

  “Seems the Cantrells were involved in an offender reentry program, had a bunch of parolees working out at their place, and Bertoli was one of them,” I said. It was a cursory version, certainly, but that’s all I wanted to give him right now. He didn’t need to know about Harrison or Graham or Dunbar. Not yet.

  “He was,” Mike said, nodding his enormous head. He’d grown a beard since I’d last seen him, which added even more size. “You probably know that their vanishing act was almost simultaneous with Bertoli getting whacked.”

  “You say getting whacked,” Ken said. “That’s the perspective we’ve heard from some others, too, but the cause of death was given as an accident.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, why wasn’t there an investigation, if the evidence pointed to homicide?”

  “There was an investigation, friend. I ran it. As for the death ruling, you got to look at physical evidence. That’s the key. And the physical evidence didn’t point to a homicide, necessarily. Guy took a fall off a warehouse, clipped his head on a Dumpster, then bounced off the pavement, and turned his face inside out. Nasty way to go, but the cause of death was the fall. That’s something I won’t dispute. Whether he took that fall willingly . . . I have strong feelings a
bout that, but my strong feelings weren’t going to get the cause of death changed. Fall killed him. What triggered the fall, we couldn’t say for sure. No physical evidence to suggest that anybody pitched him off the roof. Someone could have, and probably did, but we couldn’t prove that.”

  “There’s an FBI agent named John Dunbar,” I said, “who knew a hell of a lot about what was going on with Bertoli. Did he approach you?”

  Mike smiled. “Oh, you know Dunbar, eh?”

  “Uh-huh. You have some problems with him?”

  “Not exactly. He was cooperative as hell once Bertoli was dead, but more hindrance than help. He might not have realized it, but other people did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dunbar told you what, exactly? About Bertoli?”

  “That he was a potential witness against Dominic Sanabria, and Dunbar was working with Joshua Cantrell to get information out of him.”

  “He mention that he was retired at the time?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, Lincoln. Dunbar was retired from the Bureau when all this shit went down. Everything he told you about his plan with Bertoli and Cantrell is accurate, but it was also unofficial. The Feds had no idea what was going on, because he wasn’t working for them anymore. There was no law enforcement involvement, period. Dunbar’s idea was that he’d go to them when he had something to show. Didn’t pan out, did it?”

  My disbelief turned quickly to understanding. The previous day I’d had trouble believing that the FBI could have implemented such a ludicrous plan, placing Bertoli in the home of Sanabria’s sister and using Cantrell as an informant. Now I understood—the FBI hadn’t implemented the plan. It had been Dunbar and Cantrell, working alone.

  “That makes sense,” I said. “Hell, that’s the only way it makes sense. The whole idea was insane. If they never approved it, that means—”

  “He was running his own show with Cantrell,” Mike said. “Which tells you two things. One, the only official version is the one Dunbar provided, because everybody else who was involved is dead or missing, and, two, the man had a king-sized hard-on for Dominic Sanabria. I mean, he turned Sanabria into a retirement project? Pro bono prosecution? Crazy shit.”