by Tim Greaton
“I killed five men,” she said.
“Only five?” my Grandma Clara said caustically.
The girl shrugged.
“Two were boys. But boys will become men—well, would have become men.” She winked at me.
I shuddered and found the thought of spending even one more second with the vile woman revolting.
“It’s time you left,” Grandma Clara said, “and I don’t intend that as a suggestion.”
Suddenly, I saw Nathaniel standing on the roof of the house to the right of mine. The golden-haired archangel looked menacing. Movement to my upper left revealed itself to be another archangel, alighting on a roof to my left.
Like a movie star, the evil woman waved up at both of them.
The elderly woman next door, upon whose roof Nathaniel stood, ducked into her house and peered out the window. I wished I had done the same when my Grandma Clara had suggested it.
The murderess grinned at me then backed down my stairs. As she sauntered toward the fountain, a third and fourth archangel settled onto roofs not far from my own. Something sinister was about to happen. What else could attract so many archangels? In confirmation of my thoughts, not one, not two, but three demons fell from the sky and landed heavily around the colorful woman. She made as though to strike out at one of them. It hissed and backed away. She did the same to a second, causing it to cower.
As hard as it was to believe, the demons were afraid of her.
“Kneel,” she commanded one of them. Astonishingly, the gnarled, black-skinned creature did as told.
“Thanks, everyone,” she said to the gawking inhabitants of Under-Heaven. She seemed to take particular pleasure in waving toward Grandma Clara, me, and then each of the four archangels in turn. “I have a bit more revenge to seek on a rapist, but maybe I can come back and visit.”
She winked at me then gestured for the two standing demons to take her arms. Suddenly, she was being born away, one demon holding each arm and the third cradling her legs. The frightening smile never left her lips.
Any fears I might have harbored about my Uncle Finneus dissipated that day. I now knew the difference between bad and Evil.
As a teenager, Clay imagined that one day he would be cutting record deals and singing in front of thousands of people. And like the majority of folks in Oklahoma, he’d grown up on country and western. Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. and George Jones had been his earliest idols, and for almost ten years Clay had practiced and perfected his singing voice. Unfortunately, his practiced voice was soprano, which didn’t fare well when applied to the gravelly standards of the country singers of the day. His cousin Nelda once described his voice as “cat with man on tail.” His friends had begged him to join the pop music trend more suited to his high range, but Clay wouldn’t hear of it. Country was country, and if he couldn’t sing country, what was the sense? Times had changed, and in an ironic twist of fate, it was usually the pop stations he found his radio tuned to as he crisscrossed the country in search of children and clues.
He was singing along with the John Lennon tune Imagine when he spotted the tire warehouse at the corner of Alscott and Beamer streets in Boston. The traffic was thick, but fortunately there was a large parking lot and the roads were dry. In keeping with most of the drivers in Boston, he swerved out of his lane and suicidally crossed three lanes of oncoming traffic. The Corvette soared easily into the large paved expanse, and the stunt earned him only two horn blasts from oncoming traffic and one middle finger from an elderly woman in a speeding, green Volkswagen Bug.
As he came to a stop, Clay let the Corvette’s V-8 purr downward before he shut it off. Two young men, probably just under twenty, sat on two of the many stacks of tires outside the large open bay doors. Though it was less than forty degrees out, they were dressed in only dark tee shirts and sooty blue jeans. A small, hand-rolled cigarette passed between them.
Clay got out of the car and pulled his beige, trench coat tight against the bitter, city wind. The two young men blithely ignored him as the small cigarette passed back and forth again. As Clay approached, the taller of the two held the cigarette out.
“Want a hit?”
Clay recognized the smell from his own younger days, but beer—not marijuana—had always been his drug of choice. He could have counted the number of times he’d actually smoked the stuff.
“No thanks. How do you know I’m not a cop?”
They looked at one another and chuckled.
The shorter one said, “We thought you were.”
“I’m looking for Wagner Largess. Is he around?”
Another glance passed between them. It would have been a great Hollywood comic routine if it hadn’t already been so overdone.
“We ain’t seen that sack in a couple of months,” the taller one said. “Poor fucker went off the deep end with blow. Boss fired him about the same time his bitch threw him out.”
“No,” the shorter one said, smacking his friend in the shoulder. “That bitch threw him out long before that.”
“Oh, so now you’re an expert on bitches.”
As they bantered back and forth, Clay wondered if they knew how ignorant they sounded. Since it wasn’t his job to enlighten them, he said, “So he doesn’t ever come around?”
“Nope,” the shorter one said. “He wouldn’t dare. Not after he clipped the boss for an advance then dissed everyone and left.”
“Boss inside?” Clay asked.
“Unfortunately,” the taller one said. That earned him a great burst of laughter from his friend. They high-fived each other.
Clay went inside.
There were three loading docks, each one large enough to fit a full-sized semi-tractor, complete with trailer. A wooden set of stairs brought Clay up onto the warehouse level. The building was old and dimly lit. He could see bright florescent lighting hanging along the furthest aisle to the left. Thinking it might have been an office, he walked that way, the soles of his cowboy boots echoing through the half-empty building. It appeared business wasn’t so great. Though floor-to-ceiling metal racks cradled thousands of tires, there was room for thousands more. Large swaths of the racks sat empty.
His assumption about the office turned out to be right. The door opened into a brightly lit room with one desk off to the right side. A man, probably in his thirties, sat behind the second large, worn wooden desk that might once have been staffed by a secretary. Though the man didn’t wear a tie with his casual jacket, he seemed much too well-dressed for the surroundings.
Clay knocked but could tell from the man’s calm glance in his direction that he’d already known someone was there. His eyebrows rose in question but he remained silent.
“Clay Gromkis, I’m a private investigator.” Clay took a couple of steps into the office.
The man got to his feet, revealing a matching set of dark slacks to go with the high thread count jacket. Comfortable in his off-the-rack suit and trench coat, Clay reached across the desk to take the man’s impeccably groomed hand. His grip was firm and confident, but he didn’t try to impress Clay with a death grip.
“Harry Bennerman. I have the unfortunate pleasure of owning this place.” He shrugged.
Though his personal style was a little flashy, he seemed like a pretty squared away and friendly guy—at least that seemed to be how Harry wanted him to feel.
“This is about Wagner,” Harry Bennerman said. It wasn’t a question.
“Well, not exactly. I was hired to find his son.”
Harry shook his head.
“I heard about that. ‘Hope the boy’s alright.”
“Do you know anything about Wagner’s location right now?”
“No but I wish I did,” Harry said with a sympathetic nod. “He and I grew up together, only a few blocks from here, down on Temple. We were good friends in school. When I got a chance to take this place over, he was the first person I hired. For the first three years it was just me and him.”
“But you fired him
?”
“Have a seat,” Harry said, waving toward a couple of chrome-framed office chairs that were surprisingly not covered with tire soot. The room was equally as clean with cream-colored walls and an off-white linoleum floor. Harry had a basic wooden desk in one corner to the left and a few tall file cabinets against the right wall. The office was functional with no luxuries. Harry settled into his own rolling cloth seat behind the desk. Clay pulled up one of the vinyl chairs across the desk from him.
“I didn’t fire Wagner, Mr. Gromkis. Never could have. As I told you, we were friends right from the beginning. Without him, I never could have gotten this place off the ground. Hell, we even used to do some autobody work at night just to keep the doors open. Wagner never made me pay the overtime.”
“Your crew says he clipped you for a little money before he left.”
“Nah, nothing really, just a couple hundred bucks. He’s earned it a dozen times over. If he showed up today, I’d happily give him another couple hundred and his job back. No one knows these racks like Wagner.”
“So you have no idea where I might be able to find him?”
“Not a clue. We haven’t seen him around here in probably two months, maybe more.”
“If you were going to try and find him, where would you look first?” Clay asked.
“That’s an easy one,” Harry said. “I’d check with his wife. If Wagner ever had a weakness, it was that girl of his. They fought like hound and fox, but he never could get enough.”
“Mrs. Largess is the one that hired me to find her son Jesse. She has no idea where he is or I’m sure she would have told me.”
Harry nodded. “Then I’d try the old neighborhood. He might still have some connections down there.”
Clay nodded. His hand slipped into his jacket and he rubbed his thumb across his pewter key chain. Something about this conversation wasn’t adding up, but he hadn’t quite placed the oddity yet.
“Do you have any connections you could check on for me?” he asked Harry. “You are from the same neighborhood, right?”
“Sure,” Harry said. He pushed his chair back a foot. “I can make some calls, but to tell you the truth I don’t really know anyone down there anymore.” He leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner. “I kind of grew out of the street scene, if you know what I mean.”
Clay nodded and stood.
“Thank you, Mr. Bennerman, for all of your help.”
Clay continued to rub his key chain as Harry followed him back out to the loading docks. Just as he’d been ready to go down the stairs to leave, he spun and caught the briefest expression of relief on Harry’s face. The look instantly disappeared.
“How’s the tire business, these days?” Clay asked.
Harry paused as though weighing various responses.
“I hate to talk about it.”
“Oh, I don’t mean specifically,” Clay said, “just overall. Things pretty good?”
Harry smiled and gestured with his hands out, palms up.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gromkis, but that’s not the sort of information I like to make public. It’s a business thing. You understand? Of course we all know how tough the economy is, so no matter what I said it would either be complaining or bragging.”
“No problem at all,” Clay said. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I’m from Oklahoma and down there folks’ll tell you anything from their shoe size to who they’re dating behind their wife’s back. I know it’s a little different up here on the East Coast.”
“No problem at all, Mr. Gromkis,” Harry said. “I’ll call around the old neighborhood and see if anyone has heard from Wagner. I’ll let you know if I learn anything.”
Clay thanked him and left. He hadn’t provided Harry with a card or a phone number to reach him. It didn’t matter, though, because they both knew he never intended to call.
24
Secrets and Hunches
Uncle Finneus arrived back in my Under-Heaven in a most unusual way: he knocked at the front door. My grandmother Alice had been gone for several hours when I went to see which member of the dead wanted me this time. As I opened the door, my uncle’s bruised and bloodied body fell onto the entry floor.
“Oh, my god,” I said, rolling him face up to see how bad the injuries were. As I turned him over, a wide grin spread across his bloody lips.
“Gotcha!” he said jovially.
He got to his feet and shook like my Whiskey used to do when drying himself off. By the time he stopped, all the blood and bruises were gone, his hair was neatly combed back, and his mustache was curled at the ends. He was as dapper as ever.
I didn’t know whether to be mad or thankful he was all right.
“Not fair,” I said. “I was really worried.”
“You must admit it was a fine trick, young Nathaniel,” he said with a smile.
Not wasting any more words, I hugged him. Whether he was returning the same affection or just keeping up an act that would allow him to stay out of Hell for another extended stay was hard to say, but it was good to feel his arms around me.
“I really missed you, Uncle Finneus,” I told him sincerely. “I was scared something awful had happened.”
“What, something happen to Finneus T. Buckland?” He placed his top hat back upon his head. “Don’t be ridiculous, child. Now, I must admit there was a bit of unpleasantness, but nothing I couldn’t handle in my typical dazzling style. There were a few tight bits. You’ve a dark streak in your ancestry, you know, one that runs right from your grandfather on your mother’s side all the way back to the Slavic nations of the seventeen-nineties. If I ever see another Yugoslavian pike again, it’ll be too soon.”
“Someone tried to stab you with a pike?” I asked, shocked that he could have survived such an attack.
Uncle Finneus chortled.
“This is the underworld we’re talking about, young Nathaniel. Of course they tried to stab me with a pike, several dozen of them to be exact. But I made short work of that European rabble. For as long as their pea brains can hold a memory, the name of Finneus T. Buckland will bring tears to their eyes and send chills down their backbones!”
“But how could you beat dozens of them?” I asked, as much from curiosity as from admiration.
“Well, it helps if you know those fancy kar-aat-tay moves.” He puffed his chest out and did a kick that fell short of knee height. “But, of course, knowing a few tunnels that let you skip right under the bumbling fools’ noses doesn’t hurt either.”
I smiled at the joke, but somehow suspected my uncle hadn’t needed to do much sneaking. Previously, I had glimpsed a cobra-like strength reflected in his in his eyes. Though I doubted he’d be much for fighting fair, I imagined he could handle himself just fine in most any skirmish. I certainly pitied the first soul who had come at him with a pike.
I was ready to offer space on my couch until he could get himself settled again. But he stepped toward my blank kitchen wall, extended his hand and starting with the handle, a brand new door seemed to sprout from his palm, quickly spreading itself up and down the wall. He casually opened it, tipped his hat to me then went downstairs, closing the door quietly behind him.
As simple as that, my Under-Heaven had returned to normal.
Clay spent the rest of the day shopping. It wasn’t that he particularly needed anything, it was just that it gave him a chance to mingle with a few of the small shop owners in one of the Boston shopping districts. As he had suspected, each of the business owners he met was happy to answer his simple question: “How’s business?”
One clothing storeowner, a woman in her sixties best summed up what most of them had all been saying, “It’s not busy like it was a couple of years ago, but it’s been steady.” A shoe storeowner said, “It’s been the worst damn year since I opened. And I’ve had some rough years.” Even the fellow that ran the coffee shop commented, “You can’t win in this business, but it’s better than sweeping streets.” Besides the fact that the economy was
obviously tough, each of them had offered an instant response as though they had answered the question dozens if not hundreds of times. With Harry Bennerman, however, it had been as if he’d never been asked about his tire business before. Or maybe it was that he didn’t really know how the tire business was.
Clay felt that one of two things was true: either the man he had just met was not Harry Bennerman—and, judging from Laurel and Hardy’s comments before Clay walked inside, he was; or Harry Bennerman was not and never had been in the tire business. That’s not to say he didn’t sell an occasional tire or two, but Clay was willing to bet that was not where he made his money. The inner city offered all kinds of illegal ways to make money, but Clay’s bet was on drugs, possibly drugs that could be shipped inside the few tires that Harry did sell.
Though Clay knew he was stretching one thin theory on top of another, he wondered if Harry Bennerman might be some type of a drug kingpin. And if he were, what did that make Wagner Largess? Clay didn’t have any answers, but the questions were stacking up. And, one way or another, he would get his answers because there was a little boy out there depending on him.
And he intended to bring this one back alive.
In frustration, I splashed my hand into the fountain pool and ended the viewing. I’d only been watching Vicky for a few minutes, but as usual she had been with a boyfriend. The latest was tall with muscular arms bursting out of his tight-fitting shirt. His face was unshaven but had a cropped appearance that made me think he kept his whiskers that way, never letting them grow out too far but never shaving them off either. When Vicky slid into his metallic purple Jaguar convertible, I had seen enough. Though only two years had passed since her boyfriend Kevin had been shot and killed, my sister seemed to have forgotten completely about the danger that type of man had gotten her into. She seemed intent on self-destruction.
I trudged across the grass, across the cobblestone street and back into my house. It was late. I was as tired as I’d ever been. Recently, my life in Under-Heaven had begun to feel like a chore. Just getting out of bed some mornings took all the energy I could muster.