by David Levien
After a while Behr noticed cars showing up and a stream of people, some of them students and instructors he recognized, heading into the academy. It was time.
Behr entered to find the place four times as crowded as he’d ever seen it. Besides the regular members of the school, many others were arriving. Aurelio was something of a legend in mixed martial arts, and lots of trainers, aficionados, and fighters, past and present, were entering, some even famous. Behr could only wonder at the attendance had the memorial been held in Las Vegas or Los Angeles. Things were more cramped than they would have been, because the mat where Aurelio had been found was taped off, and the proceedings were held in the waiting and warm-up area.
Snuffling, coughing, and wiping of tears had already begun even though people were only milling about and speaking informally. A framed and prominently displayed thirty-inch photo of Aurelio in his prime, smiling, his hands raised in victory as he straddled the cage wall after a fight, was enough to break them all down. A ring of votive candles burned around the photo, and soulful Brazilian guitar music played softly out of a boom box. Behr walked past the massive and impressive display of Aurelio’s trophies, belts, and awards. He felt awkward, attired as he was in blazer and tie. Most of the others, especially the Brazilians, were dressed much more casually. He greeted several instructors and a few of the students he knew.
He also noted the IMPD detective on the case, there clocking those in attendance, based on the old saw that the killer often can’t stop himself from going to the funeral, Behr supposed. He didn’t know the guy, who was trying to blend in by the coffee machine, but it was clear enough who he was—after all, he was wearing a blazer and tie just like Behr. Behr gave him a nod across the room. Nothing came back.
Despite today’s turnout, the school was still small, Behr realized, perhaps three more years from really starting to grow and needing a larger space. Aurelio had left Brazil a decade ago, but he had first gone to New York, where he had trained out of a cousin’s gym. After he had finished the main body of his career as a fighter, he had decided to find a new city in which to establish his own training center and had moved to Indianapolis. This was the way Brazilian jiu-jitsu spread—families and friends built their schools in loose association with more established ones. They used their reputations to make inroads into new markets. Eventually, as the original students, the ones who hung in, started to earn their brown and black belts, took on some of the teaching duties, and began competing and winning in local and regional matches, a school really sunk its roots and grew. Aurelio’s was just on the cusp of that kind of success. Now there was a real question as to whether or not the place would survive without him.
As he moved through the crowd, Behr lightly grabbed elbows of the locals and doled out business cards, asking people to e-mail him so he could be in touch. Those who knew him, and what he did for a living, asked him if he’d heard anything. This was a bad sign. A lot of the time people didn’t know how much they actually knew, and he believed there must be something out there, but he already felt like a jackal scavenging for scraps of information during a time of mourning. He couldn’t take it much further at the moment. The other bad sign was that the police had turned the location back over to the family after only a few days. After their initial processing of the crime scene, they must not have felt there was any more hope of physical evidence.
Behr steeled himself and moved through a maze of folding chairs and a din of English, broken English, and Portuguese, toward the family in its place of honor.
“Mr. and Mrs. Santos? Frank Behr. I was a student. My condolences.” He wasn’t sure if they spoke English, and after they nodded their thanks, he still wasn’t. He moved past them to two men in their late twenties or early thirties. Curly haired, heavy featured, and fit, they were clearly Aurelio’s brothers. They flanked a dark-haired, grief-stricken young woman with red-rimmed eyes whom Behr pegged as a sister.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Behr said to them, shaking their hands between both of his.
“You train with my brother?” the older one asked. “I’m Alberto.”
“Yeah, Frank Behr. I was taking private—”
“Oh, sure, ’Elio told us about you. He say you will be a pain in the ass to submit one day soon. He say you forget you only training.”
“I’m stupid like that,” Behr said. He glanced over at the other brother, who seemed to be listening.
“Rory don’t speak English,” Alberto said. Then Alberto spoke Portuguese and Behr heard his name. Then Rory said a few words including “detetive.”
Alberto turned to him. “You are a detective?”
Behr nodded.
“The police say there is nothing so far. You can maybe find something about what happened?” he asked. The desperation Behr saw in such a strong man’s eyes made it all the more unbearable.
“I’ll try. I am trying,” Behr said.
Rory, who’d been following the exchange in silence, stood up. He crossed to a table where perhaps a dozen Brazilian flags were folded. Rory took one and handed it to Behr and then spoke in Portuguese.
“These are the flags he wear into the ring,” Alberto translated. Behr knew that Aurelio’s practice was to drape one around his shoulders when entering, and he waved them and held them aloft to the crowd after a win. “We want to give them to the special students. To remember.”
Behr felt the green flag, smooth and shiny under his fingers, and stood there for a moment unable to speak. He finally nodded his thanks and scratched out an “Obrigado … obrigado.” He looked up and saw that Alberto’s eyes were moist, but he wore a smile so close to Aurelio’s they might have shared the one.
“Your accent is good,” he said. “So tell me, I don’t see the new girl. You know her?”
“Girl …?” Behr began.
“The one he start with maybe six weeks ago,” Alberto said. “I don’t speak to him much in these days, he so busy. So busy with her. He don’t tell me her name, just that there is a new girl.”
Five hours a week alone with the guy, and he didn’t know something as basic as his new girlfriend. Behr marveled at his own anti-people skills, his ability to not connect. Before the conversation could continue, Aurelio’s father stood and cleared his throat.
“We talk again after, I translate for my father now,” Alberto said. Behr nodded and moved toward the door where there were still one or two empty seats.
Aurelio’s father began in halting, emotional Portuguese for a time and then allowed his son to speak his words to the room. “My son Aurelio love the jiu-jitsu. My father taught me. I teach Aurelio. And even though he don’t have a son, he love the people he teach. He do it from when he was five year old and it is his life …” The father spoke again for a few moments and Behr’s mind ran back over some of the many things Aurelio had taught him, and taught him the hard way—by using them on him. The guillotine, the reverse guillotine, front headlock choke, omaplata, gogoplata, knee bar, ankle lock, the Western, the stocks, kimura, jujigitame—arm bar—of all stripes, triangle choke, arm triangle, bolt cutter, a nasty one called the crucifix. The list went on and on. The variety and combination of the moves was an endless and fluid stream from Aurelio, but then it had stopped in the abrupt, graceless way that only death could bring.
Behr had a reason for choosing his seat near the door: as inappropriate as it was to walk out on a friend’s memorial, Behr knew it was his last best chance to get into Aurelio’s house. The family, if they were staying at his place, as he assumed they were, would all be at the school for the next little while. When the ceremony was over it was likely they would go back and begin packing his personal effects, and Behr would lose the chance for good. He only hoped the police wouldn’t still be sitting on the house, or that he’d have the good judgment not to go in anyway.
The father paused in his words and then Alberto took over once more. “My son have a special way with the people. He always compete with the most respect,” he said. �
�He never try to make someone feel small, he always try to lift up when he teach,” Behr raised his eyes and scanned the room. Several of the fighters were nodding. “Even the many that he beat, many become his friends after. And some of them here today …”
But some of them aren’t, Behr thought, as the words bore into his gut, and it’s not just because they don’t live nearby. He glanced toward the door, about six steps away. He hoped his taking French leave wouldn’t be too conspicuous. He made his move.
Luck was raining down on him. There was no cop posted on Aurelio’s house. Behr had parked around the corner and was approaching from the rear, in case anyone on the street happened to be watching. And now he had an open window. As he cut across the backyard he saw it right away. He could’ve beaten the locks— which were bargain basement Schlages he remembered from his last visit—but he wasn’t the type to look a gift horse in the mouth. He figured he had forty-five minutes before anyone would be back from the memorial, so there was no time to waste, and he had the blade on his Leatherman tool out by the time he reached the house. He slid it quickly behind the frame of the screen, which came out of its track with a pop. The other side went even easier, and he raised the window and slid through.
The inside of the house smelled delicious. He had entered in the kitchen, and he saw a large pot of meat and rice on the stove that he imagined Aurelio’s mother had cooked for the group. The aroma made him hungry, but he moved on into the living room. There were a few open suitcases on the floor, as well as two large half-packed duffel bags. A sheet, blanket, and pillow were on the couch, which was likely being used as a bed by one of the brothers. He saw that the wires of Aurelio’s stereo had been disconnected, and the components were ready to be boxed up, the same with a forty-two-inch flat-screen television. The cable box and remote rested on the coffee table bundled up in the power cord. Behr checked along the bookshelves for any photos or loose papers but didn’t find any. He feathered the pages of several likely hardback books, but found nothing stashed. He considered continuing on through the hundred-plus paperbacks but abandoned the idea as too time-consuming with too little expectation of reward. As he walked toward the bedroom he hoped he wasn’t mistakenly leaving a lead undisturbed.
The moment he entered, he saw that the bedroom was a problem. There were four large cardboard boxes, three of them already sealed with tape. Damn, Behr breathed and crossed to the closet. He pulled a string, lighting the bare bulb. All he saw were wire hangers and dust balls. The family had been thorough and quick with the packing. He opened the only box that wasn’t closed up and found it full of shoes—dressy ones, sneakers, flip-flops, and a pair of low rubber winter boots that Aurelio must’ve despised. Behr closed the flaps and scanned around the room. It was not heavily or particularly well furnished. Aurelio wasn’t the kind to care. Behr dropped to his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He found nothing there but a yoga mat and a massage stick for breaking up fibrous tissue.
Back on his feet, Behr went and took a cursory glance at the bathroom. He examined the toiletries in it. Some were women’s, and he tried to deduce whether they were the mother and the sister’s or if they could belong to the “new girl.” Some of the products were Brazilian, others American. But a Schick razor and Suave shampoo weren’t much of an indicator. He noted that there was a half-empty green box of Trojan Twists in the medicine cabinet.
Behr was feeling he’d used up all his good fortune on getting inside when he continued on through the last door in the house and discovered the guest room. It held two twin beds that had clearly been slept in and two carry-on size roller suitcases with luggage tags from Brazil. And tucked in the corner was a desk. Behr practically leaped at it. He started with the laptop that rested in the center. He supposed it could have belonged to one of the brothers or the sister, but for some reason, maybe because of its placement, it seemed like Aurelio’s. Behr tried to remember if there had been a computer in the office down at the school, and believed there hadn’t been. He pressed the power button and the machine turned on with a mechanical chime. After a moment it booted up, and to his dismay, Behr saw that both the keyboard and the desktop were in Portuguese. He tried to double-click on some documents, but a box came up asking for what Behr assumed was a password. He considered stealing the machine and taking it to his IT connection to unravel it. After a moment Behr abandoned the idea and turned the computer off.
There were two drawers on either side of the desk, and he found them full of various papers—paid bills, solicitations, an outline for a book on jiu-jitsu handwritten in English with crudely drawn diagrams of the moves. There were snapshots taken at the school and in Aurelio’s home country, menus from local restaurants. Then, in the second to last drawer Behr hit pay dirt when he found Aurelio’s checkbook.
A quick glance told him the stubs went back almost a year and a half. He started the long process of thumbing through them, from most distant to most recent. The checks painted a picture of the mundane. It was Aurelio’s personal checking account, so there was nothing having to do with the academy, but there was a rent check each month on the house, same with the cable, and gas and electric. Aurelio had two credit cards on which he paid between two and six hundred dollars a month total. His car insurance was paid quarterly. The balance on the account hovered around six thousand in the beginning, but over the following year or so it had grown up to a high of sixteen thousand. Then two months back there was a check for four thousand made out to cash.
Red flag, Behr thought. And three and a half weeks later, another was written for seventy-five hundred dollars, again to cash. Flashing red light. Erratic banking often meant erratic behavior. But Aurelio was solid. He’d seemed solid anyhow. Drug use would often be the first thought, but surely Behr, even with his limited social skills, would have noticed the physical changes that drugs on that scale would have wrought. Gambling was his next thought. Gambling wouldn’t have left any physical traces. Behr had never heard him mention online poker. And as far as Behr knew, Aurelio never cared about American football or basketball. He was a soccer fan, and Behr supposed he could’ve gotten in deep over that even though local bookies weren’t that exotic and might not have taken big action on those games. There was also the possibility he was betting on MMA fights. Aurelio was no degenerate cowering over losses, Behr realized, someone showing up to strong-arm Aurelio into paying would’ve found himself in a rapidly deteriorating situation. It could’ve gone to guns…
Behr tossed the remaining drawer for the bank statements that would contain the canceled checks with endorsements that might fill in the picture, but he couldn’t find them. He looked all over the room, coming up empty, before he wrote down Aurelio’s account number and the numbers of the two big checks. He glanced at his watch and chewed the inside of his mouth. It’d be pretty handy to find those canceled checks, but he didn’t know where else to look and time was getting tight. He got up to go, made one last cursory sweep, and let himself out the back door. He paused to replace the screen before hustling low across the lawn toward his car.
“Tommy? Frank Behr,” he said into his cell phone as he made a short crosstown drive.
“Hey, Frank-o,” came back to him. Tommy Connaughton was the I.T connect he’d thought of earlier. Connaughton’s day job was as a computer repair and data recovery specialist, but that’s not how Behr had met him, or how he made the bulk of his money.
Some years back, just after Behr had gotten off the force and went private, he’d received a call from a student at Butler. It seemed the young man was having problems with the Taus, the football fraternity. He’d had the temerity to show up at their party and talk to the wrong girl or some such bullshit. The kid said he was from up Carmel, and his parents had money, and he was interested in hiring a bodyguard temporarily. Behr figured this was what happened when your name started with a “B” and someone went yellow page hunting, but he’d had precious little work back then—even less than he currently had—so he’d gone and
met with the kid, though he had no real intention of taking the bodyguard gig. Behr was sitting across from the pale, skinny Tommy Connaughton in the student union, talking over coffee when the kid went stiff. Behr glanced over and saw half a dozen strong-looking athletes enter. They ranged from stout and solid to tall and lanky, as the positions they played dictated, and one, a thick-necked lineman, stood out.
“That’s Molk. He plays nose tackle and he’s like the lead prick,” Connaughton said. The nose tackle had longish greasy yellow hair in the Bob Golic mold and looked over at Connaughton with malice. It was probably only Behr’s presence that kept him from approaching.
“I tell you what,” Behr said to Connaughton, “I’m gonna help you. I’m not gonna bodyguard you, I’m just gonna make this go away.” They agreed on a five-hundred-dollar price.