The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. Sorry—I had to run you. You know you got your license plate all taped up, right?”

  “Shit,” said Elias, forcing his face into a stupid smile.

  “Why you got it like that?”

  “It’s my partner’s idea of a joke.”

  “He got you.”

  “He sure did.”

  Trammell was sitting on the couch in his living room. His television was on with the volume muted. The screen showed a strong man competition. Huge men were straining as they ran around carrying anvils. Trammell hadn’t slept all night.

  His phone rang for the fourth time that morning—this time it was Trammell’s mother. She called every morning at seven to make sure he was awake.

  “Rise and shine, baby,” she said when he answered.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “You up?”

  “Of course.” One of the men on the television screen dropped an anvil and looked like he was going to cry.

  “What time you going to work?” his mother asked.

  “I’m off today.”

  “They still got you on the swing?”

  “Yep.”

  “Better than that night shift, though.”

  “I said I’m off today, though, Mom.”

  “But you’re still up this early?” she asked, sounding incredulous.

  Trammell closed his eyes and saw the dead woman in the shower. He saw her hands, her eyes, her hair.

  “It’s your aunty Qianna’s birthday today,” said his mother.

  In his mind he saw the woman’s car pulling into the driveway. He had called out Elias’s name. Where was Elias when he called for him? If Elias had just been there they could have left through the back door.

  “You gonna call her?” said his mother.

  “Of course, Ma.”

  “We doing a dinner for her at over at Sandy’s.”

  The woman had been out of the car almost as soon as she had parked. Trammell had committed to staying by the door when he saw her walking. For all he knew she could’ve had a gun.

  “I wish you could be down here for it,” said his mother.

  “Me, too, Mom,” said Trammell.

  He hadn’t wanted to hurt the lady. He hadn’t had a plan at all. He had figured they were going to just talk to her, but by the time she was unlocking the door, Trammell had simply freaked out. His main fear had been that the woman would see his face. He wanted to grab her and then get the hell out, but she started fighting. It all happened so fast. The feeling had been similar to dropping a dish, or getting in a car accident. The events felt drawn in by some kind of force.

  “You heard me?” his mom asked.

  “What?”

  “I wish you could be at this party.”

  “I said, yeah,” said Trammell.

  “We thought about doing a surprise party. Can you imagine your aunt?”

  “No.”

  “In the flowers,” said his mother.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I’m talking to Dale,” she said. Dale was his mother’s husband.

  Trammell looked at the television. One of the muscle men was spitting water at the ground and thumping his chest. Trammell closed his eyes and saw the dead woman’s face. He saw Elias’s ugly face.

  “Is your partner still driving you crazy?” asked his mom.

  “He’s all right,” said Trammell.

  “So, what are you going to do on your day off?”

  “Just go to the gym,” he said.

  His head hurt. He remembered putting the pillow over the woman’s face. The memory seemed detached, like he had watched someone else do it. He did it to help her. He remembered putting the gun to her neck.

  “You still dating that Shirley?”

  “Nope. Not really,” he said. He knew he sounded flat.

  “She was nice, though.”

  “Mom.”

  “You could’ve brought her down to Qi-Qi’s party.”

  A memory of his aunt Qianna catching him and his cousin masturbating passed through his mind; her face had shown confusion and then sympathy.

  “Just saying,” said his mother.

  “Tell her happy birthday for me.”

  “You said you’d call her.”

  McLaren Park was a perfect place for this kind of madness. It would be empty. It would be secluded. It was a regular place to dump bodies.

  University Street dead-ended near Mansell. There was a steep, woody hill with houses to the east and the park with its trees and bushes to the west. It was a residential area, but there wasn’t much foot traffic. It would do fine until dark. He could come back later with Trammell and deal with her properly, but right now, at this moment, the only thing Elias needed to do was separate himself from the body.

  He parked the car at the end of the block. He went to the back and opened up the door. The body was still covered with the blanket.

  A memory of camping played in his mind. His father used to take him to Yosemite in the summers. They would fish.

  He laid her clothes out; her sweatpants were stained with specks of white paint. Was he losing his mind? His hand shook as he pulled the blanket off her. The worst was her dead face. I need a new life, he thought. I need a new job.

  Get her dressed. He looked up the block again and then started pulling the shirt over her head, but it didn’t work—it went over the head, but the arms didn’t fit into the arm holes. Her body had become stiff with rigor mortis. It was like a puzzle. Do it, he told himself, like a living person would, arms first. He pulled the shirt over her cold hand, trying not to breathe any smells, and then he got the other arm in and pulled the shirt up and over her head. The pants were no easier. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  Her back arched like a board as he lowered her legs out of the car. He put the blanket over her head and upper body and dragged her from the car to the wooded area. She was bundled up in the blankets and he bear-hugged her body close to his and her feet dragged in the middle of his steps. He took her to the steep side, away from the trail. The sun was shining and there were planes in the sky. He put the body down about a hundred feet away from the street and rearranged the blanket and sheet to cover her. The mafia robbed a bank, he thought, they robbed a bank, killed the manager, and dumped her body in the park.

  Elias went from the park to a corner store on San Bruno and Bacon, bought an eleven-dollar screw-topped bottle of Chardonnay and a thirty-two-ounce mango-flavored Gatorade, went outside, took a sip from the Gatorade, then bent down and dumped the rest in the gutter. He then poured the wine into the empty bottle. An old Chinese woman, collecting recycling out of a trash can on the corner, turned and walked away from him when he tried to give her the empty wine bottle. He went back into the store for oranges, but they didn’t have any. He had to settle for some kind of chocolate-cake thing for his breath.

  Trammell lived on Topeka Avenue; Elias figured he would just casually drop by. It was 7:10 a.m. Trammell should be up by now. He took his phone out to see if his partner had called. There was a voice mail message from his wife. He texted her while he drove: STILL WORKING.

  Elias parked across from Trammell’s house. The block was silent. The houses were drab. Trammell was one of the only cops who still lived in San Francisco. Elias drank wine from the Gatorade bottle and chewed the chocolate cake and stared at Trammell’s door wondering whether he should even tell him about moving the body. He didn’t want to scare him. He was sure Trammell would be in a bad mood. He’d have to treat him with kid gloves.

  He pressed the little white doorbell. A car drove by. He couldn’t hear whether the bell had sounded, so he leaned in a little and pressed it again. This time he heard a dull buzz. He could see into the kitchen, but that was all. He waited. He was so tired. He pressed the bell again, giving it the little one-two, one-two rhythm of a friendly call. Nothing. The house was silent. He took out his cell phone. It rang five times and then went to voice mail.

>   “Hey, Sam, what’s up, it’s Leo. Hey, I’m right outside, man. I just rang your doorbell—we gotta talk. Listen, why don’t you just call me when you’re up and we’ll meet up and talk about our work stuff, you know. Okay, cool. Thanks, partner.” The word partner came out sounding pinched, like Elias had run out of breath.

  He walked down the stairs and toward his car. When he was in the middle of the street he turned and saw the blinds on the living room window swinging.

  This thing was moving fast. No time for sleep. He had to catch them now. Had to find the money. Thanks, partner. He did the math in his head: the bank got robbed on Monday, today was Sunday—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, seven days. Find the girl, solve the case, get the money.

  The Hall of Justice was big and gray and deserted looking. Elias parked on Bryant Street instead of in the lot and, because he was trying to avoid his coworkers, went in the front door like a regular person, instead of the side, like a cop. He nodded to the young sheriff’s trainee who was manning the door, and even in this little gesture Elias felt inauthentic. He kept repeating the nod as he waited for the elevator.

  His cell phone buzzed. He looked at it; a text from his wife: LETTER FROM BANK. CALL ME.

  When he went into his office, one of his co-officers, Cal Toomey, exactly the type of person he was trying to avoid, looked at him and said, “Jesus, Leo, what the fuck happened to you?”

  “Just working.”

  “You look like shit,” he said, then, his voice rising almost to a shout, “Fucking man in black here.” He turned his head and called out to someone in the back, “Hey Dickhead, come look at fucking Plastic Face, the man in black, working on a fucking Sunday.” He turned back to Elias. “You looking to make sergeant, or what? Fucking shithead.”

  “Shut up!” yelled Elias.

  He went to his desk and turned on his computer and leaned back in his chair, feeling as tired as he ever had. As the computer hummed to life, his hands went down to his pockets and he realized he didn’t have what he was looking for. It felt like a jolt. He wanted to scream. He didn’t have the phone numbers they’d gleaned from Rada Harkov’s phone. He didn’t have Sophia’s number. Trammell had the numbers. He wanted to bang his head on his keyboard. Nothing was working. Okay, think, think . . . Stanford, San Jose State, Blue Note . . . and it came to him like a song, 610, Joe Montana, 49’ers: 610-1649. He wrote it down on scratch paper and logged onto his person-locator program.

  The phone was a Sprint cellular phone registered to Sophia Kamenka. 2516 Fifteenth Avenue, San Francisco. Elias smiled for what felt like the first time in his life.

  “Sophia Ka . . . menko.” Cal Toomey was standing behind Elias’s shoulder, bent over and spying. Elias nearly screamed. “What the fuck? You stalking her?” said Toomey.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck me? You’re dressed in black stalking a Polack lady on your off day. I should fucking arrest you. Fuck me? Fuck you, you fucking sicko.”

  “Not the fucking day for this.”

  “All right, come on, hands up, up against the wall.” Toomey started to wrestle with Elias, grabbing at his wrists.

  “Fuck off!”

  “Jesus, Leo! What’s wrong with you?” said Toomey, looking like his feelings were hurt.

  “I’m busy,” said Elias. He was using his body to shield the monitor from Toomey, who decided the game was over. He walked away with his fat swaying walk, his chest puffed out like a pigeon.

  Elias took a pen and wrote the address onto a piece of paper. 15th Ave, 15th Ave, 15th Ave. He’d run her criminal history later. On his way out he could have sworn he heard Cal Toomey saying the words McLaren Park.

  Trammell still hadn’t slept. It was almost 10 a.m. He had started drinking screwdrivers after getting off the phone with his mom and he had continued drinking even as Elias had come to his door and left.

  Why the fuck did God put me with you? Trammell wondered. God could have partnered me with any other cop, but he chose you: crazy fucking Plastic Face. Fucking psycho. Probably punishing me for choosing to be a cop. Ugly motherfucker. Fuck you, God. Fuck you, Plastic Face.

  The ice in the screwdriver had melted into little almond-shaped spheres. Trammell looked over his living room. A thin coat of black dust covered the floor. His house was near both freeways, and dust from the tires of cars had invaded every surface.

  I should have never become a cop, thought Trammell. I’ll quit. I’ll put in my two weeks’ notice and quit. Move back to L.A. Work with my hands. Be a chef. God doesn’t like cops.

  Trammell had often daydreamed about becoming a chef. He imagined that cooking food brought a kind of professional contentedness that he could never find by being a cop. Food made people happy. He wanted to open a pizza place.

  Move back and open a pizza place. He imagined throwing the dough. Call it: Love Triangles. He saw the dough in the air, and then he saw the redheaded woman. He saw her hair thrashing around while he was trying to get a hold of her. He saw her laid out on the ground. He saw the shell of her body, a body that had been alive, and was now dead.

  He saw his aunt Qianna. He saw his mother. He saw Elias.

  He fell asleep and dreamed that he was in a museum in Chicago. He was playing basketball on the third floor. He was shooting three-pointers in a wide-open space. He was making the shots. A worker came and told him it cost thirty dollars to be in there. He told the worker that was robbery and then they argued about who was more poor.

  Her house was on a nice little hill in the Sunset District. Elias parked across the street, a few doors down, and watched.

  It didn’t look like a bank robber’s house. It had an orange, Spanish-looking roof, clean white walls, a big bay window with white-lacy blinds. The small yard was filled with well-tended plants. The window in the living room probably had a view of the ocean. There were no cars parked out front.

  He watched the house, feeling sleep, hunger, thirst, and the need to piss in equal measures. He didn’t have a plan—he would go to the door and see what he saw. If somebody was home and they challenged him, he would improvise, ask for Mr. so-and-so, something like that. He would wing it.

  He walked up the stairs to the front door. Everything had become more vivid: the orange of the stairs, the brightness of the blue sky. The doorbell sounded out in a series of low-toned gongs. He felt as though he were being watched. Nobody answered. He rang again. Butterflies grew in his stomach. A low-pitched sound reached his ears. He looked around and tried to read the meaning of things. A garden hose, rolled up with cobwebs on it, was sitting near his feet. Do bank robbers water their plants?

  He looked over his shoulder and then reached in through the metal gate to the mailbox and pulled out two pieces of mail. The envelopes were addressed to Sophia Kamenka.

  He went back to the car and watched. Nothing was happening, nothing was moving, nobody was coming or going. It was Sunday—where were they? His AM radio guys talked about sports. He liked the way they yelled about things: everything was black-and-white; everything was figured out.

  A sheriff’s deputy pulled out Billy Franco from his cell and brought him into an interview room. It was another long shot, but Elias had run out of ideas.

  The deputy opened the door to the tiny room and asked Elias if he wanted Franco in cuffs.

  “Nah, he’s all right,” said Elias.

  Franco was in an orange jailhouse uniform. He looked like he needed some sun. He was withdrawing from something; he looked unsteady, and had a raw sore on his temple. He appeared to have just woken up.

  Elias took a stick of Old Spice and set it on the table. After pornography, deodorant was the second most valuable legal commodity in the jail.

  “What the fuck y’all pulling me out for?” said Franco, taking the deodorant and tucking it into the front waistband of his pants.

  “It’s not y’all, it’s just me.”

  “I’m on the mainline, man—you understand? You can’t jus
t pull me out—y’all gonna get this motherfucker killed in here.”

  “Tell them it was your lawyer,” said Elias.

  “On a Sunday? Come on, now. So, what you want, Plastic Man?” said Franco, looking over his shoulder at the window on the door to make sure none of his fellow inmates were walking by. There was dandruff in Franco’s black hair.

  “There was a bank robbery in the Richmond.”

  “So what?”

  “So what do you know?”

  “I know it happened.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s it, man. I read it in the papers.”

  “You know any Russians?”

  “Are you kidding me?” He looked incredulous. Hostile.

  “Come on, Franco knows all, remember?” said Elias.

  “Not this one.”

  “Well, this is the one you want to know,” said Elias. “This is no joke.” He leaned across the table and whispered, “Find me something good and I’ll get you out of here.”

  “Good like what?”

  “Russians,” said Elias. “Find us some Russians. Russians doing anything. Ear to the street.”

  “Man, my ear works better when I’m on the street,” said Franco.

  “Give me something.”

  “What do I get for something?” asked Franco. He didn’t seem happy.

  “Consideration,” said Elias. “Serious and good consideration. And a call to your parole officer.” Elias watched for a reaction, didn’t see one, and continued: “Garcia’s my buddy. He’s my cousin’s husband.” The cousin’s husband stuff was a lie, but he had the right parole officer: Franco’s eyes squinted.

  A group of inmates dressed in orange walked by the interview room pushing food carts. Franco let them walk ten steps past and then he stood up, put his head out of the room, and yelled to the deputy, “Hey Caldwell, man, take me away from this punk motherfucker unless he’s ready to charge me with something.”

  He turned back to Elias and asked, “You at the same number?”

  “Sure am,” said Elias. “Call me collect.”

  “We’ll see,” said Franco.

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