Where the Dead Lay

by David Levien

  “Flavia’s gone,” Ezra said, a slight tremble in his voice. There’s my “F,” Behr thought. “Gone on to a nicer place,” Ezra continued, and coughed. Behr tried to read him, wondering if she’d passed away and the old man was being poetic. “… that she’d found with her cousin,” he finally added.

  “When?”

  “Not long ago.” The man gave it some thought. “Two weeks.”

  “Mid-month?” Behr asked.

  “She had some paid time left, but she was in a hurry to go.”

  “You have an address?”

  “She told me she’d send it to me, to forward on any mail and her security check. And she asked me not to give it out when I did.”

  “I understand,” Behr said.

  “But she never did send it. Guess she forgot. Or changed her mind,” the old man said. His posture stiffened up after he spoke.

  “I see. What happened to you, buddy? You take a trip down these stairs or something?” Behr asked.

  Ezra just stared at him. Behr felt his gaze find the bloody and blackened eye and willed himself to try and read the man’s good one. “Not exactly,” Ezra finally answered.

  “Who was she worried about getting to her?” Behr asked. Sometimes a simple zigzag was all it took on a person not used to lying. Ezra just shrugged. “That’s fine, but the ‘I can’t tell you’ bit isn’t gonna work here,” Behr said firmly.

  Ezra shuddered a bit. “If it’s police business, I can tell you … I can tell you she was trying to keep away from that dude she was seeing … if I had my guess.”

  Behr just stood there in the night for a moment. “Is that who did this to you, Ezra?” he asked. Ezra paused, then nodded.

  “Now who would he be?” Behr asked.

  “Never did get a name. He’d wait in the car for her to come down. Then he’d drive her off. He’d bring her back late sometimes, and go in with her. But he’d be gone before morning,” Ezra said.

  “What kind of guy was this?” Behr asked.

  “White dude. Young. Six feet, lean and lanky. Had some shaggy brown hair. He’d go stomping up and down the stairs no matter what time of night it was. When she wasn’t around, he’d bang on her door and yell all night. He was a real asshole, this dude.”

  “And you saw him rough her up, or drag her around? You got in the middle of it?”

  “No,” Ezra said.

  “But you think she was trying to lose the guy?”

  “Oh, she did. ’Cause I seen him show up here a few times looking for her since she gone. Last time he kept banging on the door for twenty minutes until I went and talked to him. I asked him to quiet down. Told him she moved. Told him I didn’t have a forwarding address and to leave. He said to get outta his face or I’d ‘end up down by the river listening to the trains whistle by.’”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s what this dude said: ‘Tell me where she is or you’ll end up floating downriver by the m-f’ing railroad tracks.’ But he said the whole m-f word. Man, he was drunk as hell. I kept on telling him I didn’t know, and then … Well, like I said, the dude was a real asshole.”

  “Did you call the cops?” Behr wondered.

  “Didn’t have to,” Ezra said, “they came on their own. Someone else must’ve called. The guy was long gone of course. And then this lieutenant showed up, real nice fella, and took my statement. Told me they’d try and track the boyfriend down, but if he showed up again I should stay inside.”

  “A lieutenant, huh?” Behr asked. Ezra nodded.

  “You ever see her with a guy by the name of Aurelio Santos?”

  “What’s he look like?” Ezra asked.

  “About five-ten. Solid. Curly black hair. Mid-thirties. Real friendly.”

  “No, no …”

  “If you’re on the Internet I could show you a picture,” Behr offered.

  “I don’t do computer,” Ezra said.

  Behr was about ready to write out his number for Ezra and walk away when he just asked one more time. Sometimes that worked, too. “Give me her address, Ezra.”

  “You’re not a cop, are you,” he said.

  “Not anymore,” Behr said. Ezra shrugged.

  “It’s in my unit.” Ezra shuffled down to the other end of the apartments. Behr followed and waited at the door, glancing inside at the man’s meager furnishings. Ezra disappeared into a back room for a moment, then reappeared holding a few envelopes and a Post-it with an address on Schultz Park.

  “If you’re going over there, maybe you could give her these?” Ezra extended a small packet of envelopes rubber-banded together. Behr reached for them, wondering whether he should be careful about opening and resealing them or just tear them apart for information, when Ezra took that off the table, pulling back the mail. “I should just have the mailman do it. Federal offense otherwise, right?”

  “Sure, you do it that way,” Behr said, taking the Post-it with the new address. He’d seen the woman’s whole name. It was Flavia Inez.

  Behr handed Ezra a business card. “Call me if that boyfriend shows up again.”

  “Okay,” the old man said, but he sounded doubtful.

  SIXTEEN

  Hector Nogero was in the den behind locked doors stacking “peas” and spinner baskets and considering his suerte. The last three months had been brilliant. He was making so much money he’d brought his father up from Chamelecón. With an introduction by letter from his uncle, who was in prison for gang activity in Honduras, Hector had taken title to the house on Traub from a man for close to nothing. Foreclosure proceedings had begun on the property, which was why the man had sold cheap, but Hector had earned more than enough to pay off the note and back taxes before the marshals would return to seize the place in the coming weeks. Four or five “shakes” a day, with a house full of paying customers playing at least one number if not dozens, and his only expenses were a bouncer, a pretty “shake girl” to pull in players and conduct the drawings, and a cut for MS-13 for his permiso to operate. He was like the fucking lotería. Even now he had a living room full of them, chilling, drinking a coffee, a beer, watching a race or a few innings of béisbol, and handing over their whole paychecks hoping to win a three or four number combination that would pay a few thousand. Soon he’d buy the electronic ticket machines and video surveillance cameras. He had his son with him, too—Chaco had come on the plane with his father. Hector looked over at Chaco, playing on the floor with some of the peas, which were actually plastic balls. He’d heard they used to use dried peas with numbers written on them back in the old days, when the game was invented, and that’s why it was called “pea shake.” But now the world was plastic.

  When the summer ended he would send Chaco to American preschool. By the time he was four, he’d speak perfect English.

  “¿Estás bien?” Hector asked Chaco as he unlocked the door and exited the den. Chaco nodded several times. “¿Estás cansado?” Hector asked. This time Chaco shook his head, and Hector pulled the door shut behind him. On his way to the front parlor, where the sounds of many voices told him he had a full house of customers, he glanced down the hall toward the back door. His father was headed in that direction.

  “¿Qué haces, viejo?” Hector called out. Then he heard a tapping at the back door.

  “¿Quién es?” his father said, reaching for the doorknob.

  “¡No, papa!” Hector called as his father swung the door open and he saw the three men. His father tried to push the door closed, but it blasted open and the first man stepped in. He brought down a black cylinder on top of his father’s head with a crack. The old man crumpled to the ground.

  “Austin!” Hector yelled. His bouncer appeared in the living room doorway. He was big, filling the frame, but the man who had dropped his father was almost as big, and harder. The two men behind him—one young and wild looking, the other older and bad—were no joke either. They were all inside now. The first one advanced, his face speckled with the blood of Hector’s fa
ther; he could now see that the black cylinder was a metal flashlight, raised to strike. In his last glance back, Hector saw Austin, the fucking maricón American bouncer everyone told him he needed to hire to make a smooth transition into the neighborhood, run back for the living room. And out the door after that, Hector realized with a sinking feeling. Hector turned and lunged at the man who had hit his father, punching him in the jaw. The man’s head turned briefly to the side then back forward, his eyes filled with rage. Hector was only a meter sixty-two, his weight under seventy kilos; how much damage could he have hoped for?

  Hector felt himself fly into the wall, and then he felt the pain behind his ear. Somehow he knew this must’ve been backward and that the flashlight hit was first, the throw second. Before Hector could fall to the ground, the man had him by the neck, had twisted his head sideways and encircled it with an arm. It wasn’t exactly a headlock, nor was it a chokehold. He’d have to call it a neck-break half applied. The top of his head was wedged into the man’s trunk, his spine arching. He stood up on his toes and tried desperately to keep his balance. He felt the man’s forearm crushing into his jaw. His rear teeth crumbled against one another as he was dragged into the front room.

  “Shake’s over, motherfuckers,” Kenny Schlegel screamed, dinging the person nearest him, a middle-aged black woman smoking a menthol, on her upper back with his length of pipe.

  “Oh, lord,” she said, going down; as it was a glancing blow, she then managed to scramble away on all fours.

  Knute followed Kenny into the room and used his aluminum bat to obliterate a flat-screen showing a harness race. Then he rang the bat off shins and elbows until a half-dozen would-be pea-shake players were hopping and squirming.

  “What the fuck?” said a skinny blonde, in a miniskirt and heavy makeup—the “shake hostess”—as she emerged from the kitchen, holding a cup of coffee.

  “Shut up, skank,” Charlie said, pointing to the wall where most of the patrons huddled. “Get over there with them.”

  “Why should I? Who the fuck are you?” she screeched. Kenny approached her, pointing the end of his pipe in her face.

  “Shut up and get over there before I kick you in the cunt,” he bellowed.

  “Fuck off, tough guy—,” she started. Kenny swung his rear leg forward in a vicious up-kick that caught her where her legs met under her brief miniskirt. “Oof,” she said, going down, rolling and writhing, coffee spilling all over her.

  “What the fuck did I tell you?” Kenny loomed over her.

  “Oahhh, oahhhh,” she went on and on, curled into a ball.

  Knute and Charlie exchanged a look, wondering if the kid, his blood up, was going to cave in her skull with the pipe.

  “Take … the … money,” Hector grunted, barely able to move his mouth. He held up a thick, dirty wad of bills from his pants pocket.

  “Shut up,” Charlie said, taking it, stuffing it in his own pocket, and racking him in the head with the flashlight. Then he turned to the assembled players, perhaps thirty people, frozen in front of him.

  “Who said you could pea shake here?” Charlie asked them. He punctuated his words with raps to the face and head of the smallish man he held. “Who said you could shake with this little dirt-bag spic?” Charlie strutted around feeling like a WWE wrestler, and he considered whether he should bash the man’s head into something, or if that was too flashy. “Well?” he asked. There was a bulky, tough-looking Latino with ink creeping up out of his shirt collar standing near the door who wasn’t cowering properly. Knute caught it at the same time.

  “Door,” Knute said.

  “Got it. What the fuck are you thinking, bro?” Charlie screamed, advancing toward the bulky Latino, whacking his captive again and lifting his shirt to reveal the butt of his pistol. “See that door, motherfucker? Use it. And none of you ever use it again once you’re gone. This place is not authorized. You fucking get it?”

  There was a moment’s pause as the gamblers wondered if their release was the truth or some horrible joke.

  Kenny flicked open a Zippo with a metallic clink and waved the flame at them. “It’s that or we lock it and burn this shit hole to the ground.”

  The bulky Latino acted first, hurtling out through the door and into the night. The rest followed, keeping wary eyes on their attackers but receiving boots in the asses and backs and shots across the shoulders all the same. Even the pea-shake girl, dragging herself along like a car-hit dog, made it out. Soon the room was empty and quiet save for the sound of engines starting and tires screeching.

  Charlie straightened Hector up by the head and spoke directly into his face. “I don’t want to fucking see you here again, comprende?” Instead of waiting for an answer, Charlie nodded to Kenny, who swung the pipe across Hector’s stomach like he was lashing a double into the gap. Charlie let the man collapse.

  Charlie, Kenny, and Knute sauntered down the hall the way they had come. They stepped over the body of the wiry old man, who hadn’t moved an inch. They went out to the car. Charlie hit the auto-lock button on his extra key and they got in.

  “Let’s go to the bar,” Charlie said.

  Inside, on the floor, Hector heard the car drive away. After a while he rolled over onto his back and felt around his ribs and organs. Nothing seemed broken. Eventually he got up on all fours, spat out blood and a gritty dust that was his molars, then made it to his feet. One advantage of being his size and growing up in the streets was that he’d gotten used to taking a lot of punishment over the years. He went down the hall and shook his head at the sight of his father lying there in a pool of blood. He couldn’t call 911. They’d all be arrested and deported if he did.

  “Vámonos, Chaco,” he called out, opening the door to the den. “¡Rapido!” Chaco emerged from a low cabinet along the floor where he’d been hiding. The boy’s eyes were huge, but he didn’t say a word, and he followed as Hector lifted his father and carried him out to the car.

  Mierda, Hector thought, now I have to get a gun.

  SEVENTEEN

  Dean Schlegel was in his room crying in the dark when he got their call. It was the vodka and Percocet he was using for his mouth that must’ve made him this way, because he couldn’t remember crying since he was a kid. Then again, things had gotten plenty fucked up over the last little while.

  “Yo, D., where you at? We’re down at the bar.” It was Kenny. He could hear the sounds of glasses and music and voices in the background.

  “I’m home, man,” Dean answered.

  “We’re down at the bar,” Kenny said again. “Me and Charlie, and Knute, and Dad, too. You gotta come out.” But Dean just didn’t feel up for the Tip-Over tonight.

  “I don’t know, Ken—”

  “Don’t be a puss, brah. Marcus is spinning down here and you know the hos flow where he go.”

  Lately, it seemed every time that Dean left the house, something happened that he either didn’t like right away or after some time had passed, he liked even less. He felt guilty for all of it, especially that old man he’d busted up. Still, locking himself away in a dark room wasn’t an option that was paying off.

  “Come on, meet some new, get that scurvy bitch off your mind—”

  “Don’t go there, dick,” Dean said.

  “All right. I’m just saying. Get your ass down here, drink your face off, you’ll feel better.” Kenny hung up. Dean sat there for a moment deciding, and then he reached for his pants.

  Behr arrived at Flavia Inez’s new address and saw that her old building manager had been right: she’d found a much nicer place. It was a ten-story brick job with casement windows and a new awning. She lived in 9-F, according to the Post-it. Behr went to the building’s outer door and saw the apartments were marked “F” and “R,” front and rear, only two per floor. It was a real way of life she’d found for herself compared to where she’d been. What Behr didn’t find, however, was her name on the list. Instead, the resident of 9-F was listed as “Blanca White.”

 
Bullshit, he thought. White White? He checked his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Too late for a proper, polite first interview. He hesitated for a moment before he pressed the buzzer. He waited but there was no answer. He tried again several more times. Then he took out his cell phone and dialed the number. Once again he got the pop song, but no voice on the outgoing message. At least it hadn’t been disconnected. “Hello, this is Frank Behr calling about Aurelio Santos again …” He left his numbers and asked her to call. He tried the lobby door, which was locked with a solid-looking brass Baldwin. It wasn’t going to happen, he realized, not tonight.

  • • •

  The Tip-Over Tap Room’s got one hell of an identity crisis, Marcus Daudre, better known as DJ M.D. or simply “the Doc,” thought to himself. It had the bones of a low-end outskirts Indy pub that should’ve been full of fifty-year-old rummies and blue-collar factory shit-kickers. But thanks to the Schlegel boys, the fact that Kenny loved hip-hop and every damn one of ’em loved fresh white females, they’d been hiring him to spin tunes. Now there were no rummies in sight, and the place was pulling more white shorties than Nicky Blaine’s. The little dance floor was currently filled with blondes in belly shirts who were freaking to his mash-up of T.I. and Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was chemical, M.D. figured, two parts black music, with a base of redneck, and the white folks just couldn’t help themselves. He wound it down and hit an extended mix playlist on his Mac and headed to the bar to take a break.