The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  I told her to call me Charlie and said how sorry I was about her loss. And she thanked me for that, even though we both knew words were little comfort.

  There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so we sat in silence for a few minutes before Frances Cheatham forced a smile and said it looked like both of us needed a refill. While she was in the kitchen, I went to look out the front window. The last of the light was seeping from a January sky. When you say Memphis, people think blistering August heat, but there are days in January and February when the skies are mold gray, a slanting, almost-frozen drizzle falls from dawn to midnight, and a wind whips across the Mississippi that makes you wonder if you haven’t been transported unaware from Beale Street to Boston. I was still standing at the window, dreading going back out into that cold, when a tall, scrawny kid dressed in a parka, sock cap, and sneakers crossed the street and headed into the parking lot.

  “You see Terrell coming?” Frances Cheatham asked, handing me my coffee.

  Before I could answer, a black Tahoe fishtailed into the lot, nearly slammed a row of parked cars, and then skidded to a stop. Peering over my shoulder, Frances Cheatham said, “Good Lord, they almost run right over Terrell.”

  Outside, the SUV’s passenger door was slung open, and a man, fiftyish, white, not much bigger than an oak tree, got out. Terrell tried to run. Tried was the operative word. He didn’t even get started before the guy in the overcoat raised a sawed-off shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

  “Oh sweet Jesus!” Frances Cheatham screamed in my ear.

  I pulled my .45 from beneath my jacket and ran for the door. I’d just opened it when the shotgun roared again. I knew it was too late for Terrell Cheatham, but I ran anyway, taking the stairs two at a time and nearly slipping and falling halfway down. His grandmother ran behind me, calling on the name of the Lord with each step she took.

  Just as we reached the lot, the Tahoe screeched away. I caught a glimpse of the driver—white, older than the shooter, thick, curly gray hair and glasses—but then the Tahoe was gone, heading northeast toward the interstate. Cursing, I stuffed my .45 back into my holster without having fired a shot.

  Frances Cheatham hunkered beside her grandson, screaming his name again and again. Now that the shooting was over, a few faces had emerged from the apartments, staring at the scene, some of them whispering their prayers.

  “I’ve called an ambulance,” a pretty girl about Terrell’s age shouted.

  An ambulance wasn’t going to help. The first blast from the shotgun had caught him just below the kidneys; the second, fired point-blank, had taken off most of the back of his head.

  “A PlayStation 3,” Frances Cheatham said when I touched her shoulder. “That’s why he robbed that store. That’s all my baby wanted. And just look at what someone done gone and did.”

  Four days later, the homicide detective who’d caught Terrell Cheatham’s case finally got tired of dodging my calls and ducking down the back stairs and agreed to meet me for a late lunch. Ray Pardue was a stoop-shouldered man with thinning, sand-colored hair and a nervous grin that never quite made it to a full-blown smile. Now he pushed aside a platter of Neely’s barbecue spaghetti and gave me a pained expression.

  “I feel as bad as you do for the kid’s grandmother. But Jesus Christ, Raines, where have you been living the last ten years? Kids in South Memphis get murdered every day. The Chamber of Commerce don’t advertise it in their See the River City brochures, but we both know the way it is.”

  He was right, of course, but Terrell Cheatham’s murder was the only one I’d witnessed. “So you’ve got no leads.” I said.

  “You were a cop. You know how it goes. You’re a day into one case when two or three more fall in your lap, so what do you do?”

  “You focus on the easiest to solve.”

  “It’s not that one victim’s more important than another, but a bird in the hand . . .” He paused while the waitress set fresh beers on the table. “You take a gang-related murder like Cheatham’s. Eventually someone will get pinched and want to make a deal. Until then, I got two other homicides to worry about.”

  Gang-related. Terrell Cheatham’s murder hadn’t rated a lot of coverage. The local news stations were too busy covering the latest scandal in the mayor’s office and the groundbreaking for the Michael Montesi North Memphis Children’s Health and Recreational Center, a multimillion-dollar complex that was being built by Vincent “Little Vinnie” Montesi, head of the Italian mob in southwest Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, in honor of his son. The news anchor talked a lot about the tragedy of nine-year-old Michael Montesi’s death from leukemia and about the generosity of his grief-stricken father. They failed to mention all the kids who’d died from the drugs Montesi and his crew brought into the city, or the ones he’d orphaned during his reign at the head of the Montesi family. When you donate a few million dollars to a local charity, people tend to overlook the things you’ve done to make that money. The death of yet another black kid in a Memphis project didn’t have the same appeal to the public imagination, but during the terse, thirty-second spot that the murder had been given, the news anchor had used the same phrase. Gang-related. Unless South Memphis street gangs had started recruiting late-middle-aged white men, someone was making a serious mistake.

  “The shooter and the driver were white,” I said. “I told that to the on-scene detective.”

  “She noted it in her report, but we got a half-dozen other witnesses who say the perps were young black men, late teens or early twenties.” He stifled a belch with the back of his hand. “Acid reflux,” he said. “I chew Tums by the dozens, take this prescription medicine that costs a fortune, sleep with my bed propped up on bricks so that I got a crick in my neck all the time. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”

  “I saw them. They were white.”

  “And other people say they were young black men. What do you want me to tell you?” He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “That should cover the tip.”

  “A kid whose only criminal record comes from stealing a couple of video games gets his face blown off and y’all decide it’s gang-related, put it in a file, and forget it?”

  He took a deep breath. “Look, Raines, I shouldn’t be telling you this, because it’s information that you got no right to have, but Terrell Cheatham was running with gang kids, two in particular. Demond Jones and Bop-Bop Drake. Drug dealers, pimps, suspects in a half-dozen robberies and a couple of murders. The way I figure it, either Cheatham got targeted by a rival gang or he had a falling-out with his good pals Bop-Bop and Demond.”

  “Your other witnesses tell you that?”

  “Surveillance tape, witnesses, informants.” He stood up, took his coat from the back of the chair. “And a guy who matched Cheatham’s description is a suspect in an attempted murder.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “A forty-six-year-old truck driver for a company called Mid-South Transport. He was making a delivery in the neighborhood and had engine trouble. The guy was sitting behind the wheel, trying to get the ignition to fire, when three black kids, we’re figuring Cheatham, Jones, and Drake, threw a Molotov cocktail at his truck.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and his eyes were hard and angry. “I guess they figured blowing up a white guy was a fun way to spend a Friday night. Maybe you ought to drive down to Southaven, take a good look at the burn scars, and then ask Don Ellis what priority he thinks this Cheatham kid’s murder ought to get.”

  “Don Ellis? From Southaven?” I said. “I think I know him.”

  “Well, you won’t recognize him if you do.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but it didn’t matter. Pardue had already turned on his heel and was headed for the door.

  Don Ellis’s house was a small, two-bedroom ranch in a neighborhood that had probably been nice ten years ago. I sat on a beer-stained sofa in his living room, asking myself why in the hell I was here. No one had hired me; I h
adn’t been a cop in over ten years, and Terrell Cheatham’s life and death were none of my business anyway. But for two days I’d been worrying it like a bad tooth. I couldn’t get Frances Cheatham’s raw, wounded voice out of my head, couldn’t stop hearing her say, “A PlayStation 3, that’s all my baby wanted,” and couldn’t get a handle on Terrell Cheatham himself. Who was he? An honor student, a hard worker, and a loving grandson or a gangbanger who’d tried to burn an innocent man alive? Finally I’d given in, looked up Don Ellis’s address and number, made a call. Now I was waiting for him to identify Terrell Cheatham as one of his attackers so I could call the kid’s murder karma or justice and get back to the serious business of repossessing cars.

  But it didn’t look as if it was going to be that easy. Don Ellis studied the photograph for a second, laid it back on the coffee table, and shook his head.

  “He could have been one of them. But it was after midnight and the streetlights down there don’t ever seem to work.” He glanced at a picture of his ex-wife and his sons on the end table beside his wheelchair. “The truth is, the pain’s been so bad and I been so doped up that I’m kind of hazy about that whole night.”

  I smiled and said sure, I understood. It was a lie, of course. Understand? I couldn’t even imagine. The burns were less than six weeks old—he’d only been out of the hospital for three days—and his face resembled a rubber Halloween mask that someone had snagged from a bonfire. The skin was bubbled and shiny, bright pink in most places but splotched with patches of bleached-out white just below his cheeks. The damaged facial muscles made it seem as if his lips were twisted into a permanent sneer, and he spoke with the halting slur of a stroke victim. It didn’t take a psychic to see his future: long hospital stays, multiple skin grafts, lots of pain.

  “We should have kept in touch,” he said. “After we graduated, I mean. You get so busy you don’t realize you’re losing touch with all your friends.”

  I said that’s just the way it was, but we were never really friends, just classmates on friendly terms. I hadn’t thought of him in years.

  “So who is he?” Don finally asked.

  He looked away from me when he asked the question, and I had the feeling that he remembered a lot more about the night he had been attacked than he said. Call it intuition if you want. That sounds a lot nicer than cynicism or paranoia.

  “A twenty-year-old kid who had his head blown off by a shotgun a few days ago,” I said.

  “The same age as my oldest boy.” He picked up the photograph of his family from the table. “You got kids, Charlie?”

  “No. Just didn’t happen.”

  There was a lot more to it than that, but catching up on old times has its limits.

  “When you have kids, you want to give them everything.” He stared at the photograph and took a long breath that made him shudder. “What am I going to give them now? A truckload of debt? The thirty-three dollars I got left out of my SSI check?”

  “Mid-South Transport isn’t paying you? If you’re in a union . . .”

  “I’m not a truck driver. I’m a body man and painter, been doing it since the week I got out of school. The truck-driving thing was just on the side. After my divorce I had the free time, and with the boys starting college, I needed the extra money.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I try to send Cass a little something extra when I can. We had twenty-one and a half good years and you never know. People get back together the same as they split up, right?”

  “You worked nights. Local deliveries?”

  “The general area, yeah. Sal Junior, my boss at the shop, hooked me up with the gig. The pay was good and in cash and what was I doing anyway? Sitting around here by myself, drinking too much beer.”

  “Sal Junior.” I made a connection I didn’t want to make. “You work for the Arcados?”

  His flinch was all the answer I needed. Arcado Automotive was the largest independent body shop in Memphis. Everyone knew that if you wanted a first-class paint job or if you needed a totaled ’67 Mustang restored to cherry perfection, you went to Arcado Automotive. Everyone in law enforcement also knew that the garage had been a front for the Montesi crime family since JFK was in the White House. If Sal Junior was involved with Mid-South Transport, it meant something very profitable and most likely very illegal was going on.

  “What were you hauling for them, Don? Electronics? Television sets? Hijacked cigarettes?”

  “Nothing like that. Just garbage,” he said. “And it didn’t have nothing to do with my attack, anyway. I’d unloaded my truck at the industrial park. We were on our way out of the neighborhood when the engine broke down.”

  “I thought you were alone when it happened. You said we.”

  His eyes darted away from me. “The drugs,” he said. “They make me fuzzy.”

  “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything.”

  “Look, Charlie. I’m tired, okay? I think I need to lie down.”

  “Don . . .”

  “I’m going to lie down.”

  I got the message so I said sure, that was probably a good idea. Then he stopped me.

  “Those kids who did this?”

  “Yeah?”

  He shivered a little, remembering. “I tell you the truth, Charlie. I think they just wanted to watch me burn.”

  Frances Cheatham looked as if she’d lost five pounds and added ten years since the day her grandson died. She sat in her shadowed living room, surrounded by flowers and condolence cards and her photo albums, sipping straight bourbon from a coffee cup.

  “I don’t see what my husband’s job has to do with Terrell.”

  “I’m not sure that it does,” I said.

  But that was only partly true. Nate Randolph, my old partner in the homicide division, had surprised me by not only returning my call but actually doing me a favor. A decade ago I’d ended up in a situation where I had a choice between destroying evidence that could have put the former head of the Montesi family, Fat Tony, in prison for twenty years or saving the life of a woman who was very close to me. The internal affairs investigation that followed my decision led me to resign from the Memphis P.D. Guilt by association ended Nate’s chance at making captain. Maybe his new wife had mellowed him.

  Two years retired, Nate still had a lot of friends. It had taken him less than twenty minutes to find out that although they hadn’t been arrested, Bop-Bop Drake and Demond Jones were considered the only suspects in Terrell Cheatham’s murder and that four of the five witnesses who claimed the perps were young black men were employed at the West Parrish Industrial Park, the Depression-era sprawl of abandoned brick warehouses, corrugated tin shacks, rusted-out water and gasoline storage tanks, and collapsing docks on the banks of the Mississippi River just a few blocks from Frances Cheatham’s apartment. The park had last operated at full capacity back during the Vietnam War but somehow seemed to employ everyone on the scene of the murder as well as Frances Cheatham’s late husband.

  “Terrell worked there, too, before he went to Tops,” I said.

  “It was temporary work, is all. About the time Marcus found out he had cancer, Terrell’s job played out. Things always happen at the worst time.” She glared at me from over the rim of her coffee cup. “At least, that’s the way it works around here.”

  “Your husband worked the night shift,” I said. “It’s odd, don’t you think? That the park would need twenty-four-hour security, I mean?”

  “We were thankful to have a steady paycheck.”

  “Did your husband or Terrell ever mention Mid-South Transport?”

  “Not that I remember,” she said, but her eyes darted away from me.

  “Mrs. Cheatham, you and I both know that Terrell was killed by two white men. Somehow five people claim the shooters were young and black. Four of the five work at the industrial park where your husband and grandson were employed. The fifth works for Mid-South Transport, a trucking company that makes regular deliveries to the park and one I’m fairly certain is a fr
ont for the Mafia. If your husband ever mentioned what goes on there . . .”

  “He never said and I never asked.” She met my eyes. “I’ve not hired you for anything, and you’re not a cop, so I don’t know what you think you can do.”

  It was a good question, and I didn’t really have an answer. Part of it was pride, maybe. I didn’t like being told that I hadn’t seen what I knew I had. But it was more than that. The pain I’d seen in Frances Cheatham’s face when she realized Terrell was dead and that impotent drowning feeling I’d had as I rushed into the parking lot a few minutes too late to do anything that mattered haunted my sleep. This was the only way I knew to put those memories to rest.

  “If someone has threatened you or if you’re . . .”

  “Ain’t no one done nothing,” she said, her voice quavering and angry. “But what does it matter anyway? Nothing you or me do is going to bring my grandson back, is it?”

  “No, ma’am,” I admitted.

  “Then what’s it matter?” She shook her head and reached for her coffee mug. “It doesn’t matter. Not now.” Her eyes flashed at me. “This was our home. We told ourselves if we raised him right, things could be different for him, that if you was fair to people they’d be fair to you, that if you did the right thing it would be right. We was stupid, and I’m just a fool. My husband was a good man and Terrell was, too. At least he was going to be.”

  She stared into her empty coffee mug as if she could will whiskey to appear. After a minute she pulled herself from the couch, wobbling a little as she waited for me to stand.

  “Sometimes you got to look after yourself. You can’t always be worrying about what ought to be. Sometimes you just got to take care of your own.”

  I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I agreed with her that sometimes you did. Then she reminded me that this was a dangerous neighborhood, especially for someone with my skin tone.