The Silent Hour lp-4

by Michael Koryta

  As I watched his face, I felt tinged with sorrow. I was looking at an old cop who’d believed something very deeply and was now considering that it might have been wrong.

  “You talked with a cop from East Cleveland,” he said. “Someone who knows about Neloms.”

  “Yes,” Joe said.

  “Can you call him back?” Dunbar said. “Can you ask him a question?”

  “What am I supposed to ask?”

  “If he has any idea when Alvin made his move into the power structure. If he has any idea where the supply came from. A small fortune of drugs disappeared when DiPietro got whacked. They never turned up with the Italians again.”

  Joe took his cell phone out and called. He asked for Tony, waited for a few minutes, and then spoke again. He repeated Dunbar’s questions, listened as Dunbar and I sat with our eyes on the floor, silent. At length, Joe thanked Tony and hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and waited for a few seconds before speaking. He did not look at Dunbar when he did.

  “The way Tony remembers it, Alvin was a lot like what you say, a corner kid, until he was in his late teens. Then he got his hands on some product. Nobody knew where, or how, but all of a sudden he had product, and then three major players were dropped in a drive-by over on St. Clair, and from that point on Alvin, while still a boy, was also the man in East Cleveland. This beginning when he was still in his teens. He was, Tony says, an ambitious young man.”

  I looked at Dunbar. “DiPietro controlled the drugs you were talking about, right? They were in his possession?”

  “You know they were. I already told you that. We looked at every associate, looked at everyone who . . .” his voice faded, and then he said, “Alvin Neloms was a boy. A child.”

  “Tony also said Alvin and his uncle were tight,” Joe said quietly. “Alvin’s father is an unknown, disappeared when the mother got pregnant, and Darius looked after the family. Supported the family.”

  I nodded. “Supported them with a little help from the mob, is what Mike London thought. He said Darius was involved with stolen cars, changing their look and putting them back out on the street.”

  Dunbar shift ed, smoothed his pants with his palms, swallowed as if it were a challenge.

  “You never even considered the possibility, did you?” I said.

  He looked up. “Neloms? Well, I had no idea—”

  “Not Neloms. The possibility that it might have been anybody other than Sanabria, period.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Really?”

  His gaze focused again, went defiant. “Perry, that man would’ve killed anyone who collided with him. You don’t understand that about him. I do. He had killed before, and I’d had him for it, okay? I told you that story.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m just wondering which murder you were really chasing him for. The new one you thought he’d committed, or the one he’d already beaten you on.”

  He held my eyes for a little while and then looked away and ran a hand over his mouth. His hands were dry and white and the blue veins stood out. They matched the strips of stark color under his eyes.

  “So what we’re thinking,” Joe said, “is that Bertoli and Neloms were friends, probably from meeting at the uncle’s shop. Neloms is along when Bertoli beats up the guy at the truck stop, but he doesn’t go in, which means that as a kid he’s somehow already got people doing the bleeding for him. It also means he was already looking for his own supply at that point, his own drug nest egg. He wanted to run the show, not stand on the corner for somebody else.”

  “The guy Bertoli beat up didn’t have as much product as they thought,” I said. “They overestimated his role. Bertoli got busted, but Neloms walked because he was a juvenile.”

  Joe nodded. “Right. After this, DiPietro is killed, a small fortune of drugs disappears, and suddenly a teenage kid became a deadly force. It was a power play, but one from a player nobody respected or even knew of at the time. This is the scenario?”

  “That’s the scenario,” I said. “Ken Merriman got about ten percent of the way there. He got to the connection between the cars. I bet he didn’t get farther than that, but he tried to. He tried to, and he died.”

  “What would he have done?” Joe said. “Once he connected the cars, what do you think he would have done?”

  “Gone and asked about them,” I answered, feeling a sick sadness. “He wasn’t a street detective. He would have gone right down to that body shop and asked about the car, thinking that was the next step. He might have suspected Cash Neloms was involved by then, but I don’t think he had a real sense of how dangerous the guy was. He would have gone down there to ask some questions, and he wouldn’t have been very good at it. I saw him in action with interviews, and he was not very good at it.”

  “Suppose you’re right on Bertoli,” Dunbar said. “Suppose he was killed by Neloms. That doesn’t mean Cantrell was, too. The styles of crime are entirely different. One was killed on scene and the body left without any concern; the other one was buried in another state. Those are two different killings, maybe by two different people.”

  On the surface he was right, but I understood what he didn’t: how Joshua Cantrell’s body had been transported, and why. The killings hadn’t been different in style at all—both bodies were left where they’d fallen. Same style, same killer. Solve one and you’ve solved the other.

  Thinking about that brought a realization to me. To whoever had killed Cantrell, the disappearance of his body must have seemed extraordinary. For twelve years, while the rest of the world wondered what had happened to him, one person wondered about the fate of his corpse. Wondered, no doubt, quite intensely.

  “I want to talk to Darius,” I said. “Not his nephew, not yet. Hit him with the only solid thing we have—that report on Bertoli’s car—and see what he’ll say.”

  Dunbar said, “I’ve got photographs.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’ve got photographs of Bertoli, and of his car. I’ve got photographs of damn near everybody’s car, everybody that went near Sanabria.”

  “How soon can you come up with them?”

  He stood up and went into the bedroom. From where I sat I could see through the doorway, and as I watched he opened a closet door. It was a small closet—every space in his house was small—and the clothes that hung in it were pushed far to the side to make room for a clear plastic organizer with drawers. It was the sort a lot of people had in their closets, usually for sweaters and old jeans, things they rarely used or for which they’d run out of shelf space. Dunbar’s didn’t hold any clothing, though, not a single piece of it. The thing was filled with manila folders, and I could see that each drawer was labeled with a date range.

  He’d been retired for nearly fifteen years and had almost no closet space. I looked at that set of plastic drawers and I felt sad for him again.

  It didn’t take him long. First drawer he opened, first folder he removed. When he came back to the living room he had three photos in his hands; he passed one to Joe and two to me.

  “These would have been taken just a few months before Bertoli was arrested, a little before DiPietro was killed. You can see the diamonds carved in the rims. They’re tiny, but they’re there.”

  Yes, they were. A half-dozen small diamonds. The car was an Impala, probably midseventies model, painted a metallic black. Bertoli wasn’t visible in either of the photographs—the windows were up, and they almost matched the car’s paint, clearly an illegal level of tint. Window tint like that pissed off street cops because you couldn’t see what was happening in the interior as you approached. The entire car was basically a rolling request to be stopped and searched.

  “This is perfect,” I said. “Can we borrow these?”

  Dunbar nodded, but his eyes seemed faraway again.

  I stood up. “Thank you. For the pictures, and the insight.”

  “I’ve got some other things I’ll go through,” he said, not looking up. “I’l
l do some thinking. I’m not sure you’re right . . . but I’ll do some thinking.”

  41

  __________

  Darius Neloms’s shop, Classic Auto Body, was on Eddy Road, which was one of the few streets in the city that I would actively try to avoid while driving. It’s an asphalt strip of neglect and anger, a place where as a rookie I’d been called to the scene of a fight and arrived to find a fourteen-year-old boy bleeding to death on the sidewalk from a knife wound to the neck. I’m not one of those PIs who loves to carry a gun, and I usually don’t have one in my truck. Eddy Road, though, can make me regret that.

  Today I had a gun, and I had Joe in the passenger seat, casting a dour eye over the neighborhood.

  “It just gets worse, doesn’t it?” he said. “I haven’t been down here in a few years, but you can’t pick up the paper without seeing something about this neighborhood. It just gets worse, poorer and bloodier.”

  “And more hopeless,” I said, because that’s how East Cleveland seemed to me, a legacy of poverty and crime and corruption drowning the people who tried to make a life there.

  “Ah, shit, nothing’s hopeless,” Joe said. “Just ignored.”

  My mind wasn’t on East Cleveland, though. I was thinking of Ken Merriman, of that spot in Mill Stream Run where his body had been dumped, and wondering whether he’d made a drive down Eddy Road on his last day alive. Joe had his face turned away from me, looking out at the neighborhood, and when I glanced at him I had a vision of the bullet holes that hid under his shirt, and then one of the steel security bar that rested across Amy’s door.

  “Hey,” I said, and he turned back to me. “When we talk to Darius, I don’t want to give him any names, all right?”

  “You mean Cantrell and Bertoli?”

  “No, I mean Pritchard and Perry.”

  He frowned.

  “Like I said before, this is a scouting trip, okay? I want to ask the guy about Bertoli’s car, drop Cantrell’s name, see if we get any sort of response. Feel him out. Then I’ll call Graham. It’s still his case, you know.”

  His frown didn’t fade. “What’s that have to do with names?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Then why—”

  “Look, Graham got on my ass about this before, told me to stay out of his way. I don’t want to deal with that again.”

  He looked at me for a long time, then nodded his head at the traffic light ahead.

  “You’ve got a green.”

  It was closing in on six now, streetlights coming on, but Classic Auto Body was still open. It was an ugly, sprawling place of cinder block, with a stack of tires and a few stripped cars in the parking lot. From the outside it looked like a picture of poverty, but the garage doors were up and two gleaming cars were visible inside, one a new Cadillac and the other a pickup truck that had been painted gold and black and mounted on massive, oversized tires. Two young black men lounged on stools in the garage. A set of speakers stood behind them, playing rap music with a bass line I could feel in my chest.

  “Hey,” Joe said as we got out of the truck, his voice soft, and when I looked at him he nodded at the black-and-gold pickup truck inside. “Look at the wheels.”

  There were small diamonds cut out of the chrome rims.

  One of the men inside the garage, a thin guy with darker skin and a shaved head, had moved his hand to rest beneath his oversized jacket when we drove in. Now that he saw us, he took it away and exchanged a look with his partner, who got to his feet and stepped over to a closed door. He opened it and said a few words, then shut it and came out to meet us. The guy with the jacket never moved.

  “We closed,” the one on his feet said, stopping at the edge of the garage. He wore a close-fitting, sleeveless white shirt, ridges of muscle clear beneath it. The music was even louder now, the sound of a ratcheting shotgun incorporated into the beat.

  “Doesn’t look that way,” I said.

  “Is, though.”

  “That’s all right. Don’t need any work done. Came to see Darius.”

  He reached up and scratched above his eyebrow, head tilted, studying me. “Darius a busy man.”

  “I’m sure of it. That’s why we don’t intend to keep him long. Got a picture to show him, a question to ask, then go on our way.”

  His eyes flicked over to Joe, whose look and demeanor said cop about as subtly as a billboard would.

  “I’ll give him the picture for you.”

  Joe shook his head. “We will. Thanks, though.”

  “Man, Darius ain’t available.”

  “You work with him?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you know how to get in touch with him. Give the man a call.”

  While Joe talked, I found myself staring at the man on the stool, that hand resting near his waist. He wasn’t looking back at me. He was looking at Joe.

  “He ain’t gonna answer,” the guy in the sleeveless shirt said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He busy.”

  “How about we call him just the same,” Joe said.

  “No,” I said, and they both looked at me with surprise. I shook my head. “If he’s not around, he’s not around. We’ll come back.”

  He nodded. “You do that, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turned and walked to the truck. I had the door open and was sitting behind the wheel before Joe even moved. He walked over slowly, got inside, and swung the door shut without a word. The guy from the stool got to his feet and came over to stand with the other man at the edge of the garage. They watched as I drove out of the lot.

  “Maybe I misread the situation,” Joe said after we were a few blocks away, “but I kind of assumed Darius was inside that office. You know, where the kid poked his head in before he came out to run us off.”

  “Could be.”

  “Uh-huh. You want to tell me what we’re doing driving away, then?”

  “I’m thinking we should pass this off to Graham,” I said. “His case, his decisions to make. You saw those diamonds on the rims down here, that’s enough, right? Between that and the phone calls, we’ve got enough. It’s time to pass it to him now.”

  “That’s a pretty different stance from the one you had this afternoon.”

  “Had a few hours to think about it.”

  “You’ve done some thinking,” he said, “but it’s not hours of it that are catching up with you now. It’s months.”

  We didn’t say much on the way back to the office. When we got there all he said was “Let me know if Alexandra calls” before he got into his own car and drove away.

  I went home, too, called Amy and said I’d come over and I had some news, and then took a shower. Before I got into the water I stood at the sink and stared into the mirror for a long time, waiting for the man looking back to tell me what he wanted to do. What he needed to do. Then the steam spread across the glass and he was gone, no answers left behind.

  I did not call Quinn Graham, as I had told Joe I would. I did not call anyone. That night I updated Amy, took her from my conversation with Alexandra Cantrell to my decision at the garage.

  “You’re really going to back off, pass it to Graham?” she said. “Then why were you there to begin with? Why spend two weeks watching for Alexandra?”

  “Just to see if he was right. I had to know. That’s all. Now I do.”

  “If who was right? Ken?”

  I nodded.

  “You said you were angry with him at first,” she said. “Hurt and betrayed, because he lied to you.”

  “Sure. You think that’s abnormal?”

  “No. But you don’t seem angry now.”

  “I understand why he did it now.”

  She nodded. “That makes it easier, doesn’t it.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know you’ve been lying to me?”

  “What?”

  “For three days you’ve been lying to me. Said you’d given up on the surveillanc
e, stopped going out there—and, unlike you with Ken, I don’t understand why.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think of it as lying, even though it was. I just knew that you and Joe thought I should quit—”

  “You told us you already had. Back in the summer, it was you who said you were done. Emphatically. Neither of us told you to give up your job, Lincoln, but you did, and then you went back to it in secret. Lying about it. I don’t understand.”

  I didn’t know how to make her understand. I couldn’t explain to her that she was one of the reasons I’d had to quit, that Ken’s murder had been one that hit too close to home. It could be her next time. Or Joe. My decision at the garage today had been made the moment the guy on the stool had reached under his jacket with his eyes on Joe. I understood some things in that moment, understood just how damn close we were to the one thing I could never allow to happen again. I would not bring those I loved into harm’s way again. I couldn’t.

  So if I understood that, then why couldn’t I stop altogether? Why had I ever gone back to that damned house in the woods with my camera and my binoculars?

  I didn’t have an answer for that one. It chilled me, but I didn’t. I’d ended up back out there, that was all. The absence of resolution, of truth, had tormented me for too many months. In the end, it won. I was weaker than I’d thought.

  “Let me ask you one more thing, and this time, if you care about me at all, tell me the truth,” Amy said. She was speaking very carefully, slowly, as if she needed me to feel the weight of the words. “If you don’t tell me the truth, we’re done, Lincoln. We will have to be done. Because I can’t live with you otherwise.”

  “Ask the question,” I said.

  “Are you really going to pass this off to Graham, or are you telling one thing to me and Joe and planning another?”

  I looked away.

  She said, “Lincoln.”

  “I’ve got something left to do,” I said. “That’s the truth. It’s something I’m going to do alone. Then I will give this to Graham and, yes, step away. I promise you, that is the truth. I’ve got one thing left to do.”