by Andy Straka
“I understand you folks were ask—” He stopped in midstride when he recognized Toronto and me. “Hey, fellas. What’re you guys doing here?”
“Waiting for you, counselor,” I said.
“Oh, really? Well, er … I’m supposed to be meeting somebody else.”
“Yeah, we know,” Toronto said. “He ain’t coming.”
Warnock looked as though he already needed a second drink. He acted like he didn’t know whether to stay or run.
I pushed a free stool from an adjacent table toward him. “Why don’t you sit down and join us, Tony?”
He looked at his drink for a moment.
“Go ahead. We don’t bite. Pull up a chair.”
He dragged the stool over to our table, plunked his weight down on it with a loud crackle of scratching leather, and looked at us warily.
“Guess you must be wondering how we knew you’d be here.”
“What?” He was busy staring at Toronto, who was grinning crazily. Warnock’s face registered a trace of cold fear for a moment, like he was seeing his own death.
“I said you must be wondering how we knew you’d be here.”
“Sure. Yeah.”
I fished in my pocket for a small notepad I kept there, pulled it out and flipped it open to an empty page. Then I uncapped the felt-tipped pen I kept attached to the binding and handed it to Warnock. “I’d like you to please write down the names of all of the Stonewall Rangers with whom you’ve had contact, as well as whoever else you might be funneling money from or to,” I said.
“What?” He seemed to snap back to reality. “Are you crazy? I can’t do that.”
“Oh, I think you can,” Toronto said. His voice carried a casual undertone of malice, but the words had their intended impact.
“Look, Pavlicek, you people have no idea what you’re messing with here.”
“Really?” I said. “Why don’t you tell us then?”
He searched my eyes. “This is bullshit,” he said. “Complete and utter bullshit.”
I said nothing.
“You can’t touch me.”
“Oh, no?”
“We all have civil rights. Not just some of us.”
I didn’t need to look at Toronto to sense that his jaw was clenching and the little vein on the side of his neck was throbbing.
“What was that guy doing in Chester’s woods?” 1 asked. “The one who socked me with the shotgun?”
Warnock snickered. “You really want to know who killed Chester, huh? Well, how do you know it wasn’t someone from your own government? You think the FBI and the ATF and all those faceless bureaucrats and phonies in Congress are immune to corruption?”
I smiled. “We’re not here to argue politics with you, pardn’r.”
Another snicker. He pursed his lips and shook his head. Then he took another sip of his Scotch.
“Well,” I said, “do you know who killed Chester or not?”
He lowered his voice and looked around. “No, goddamn it. Why do you think Higgins sent the kid back up there in the first place? And I don’t want my name dragged into any of this, do you hear?”
Chalk one up for hunches paying off.
“Of course not, Tony,” I said. “You’re a fine upstanding member of the bar. You happen to know this kid’s name and where I can find him so I can thank him for the bruise on my face?”
“Y’all are going to get me killed too,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“You could end up that way anyway,” Toronto said. He had whisked out a very serious looking stiletto and was now cleaning his thumbnail with it. His eyes never left either of us.
Warnock took one look at the nail cleaner and swallowed hard. He glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the room to make sure no one was watching us too closely. Then he flexed his jaw and stuck out his chin. “All right.” He picked up the pen and wrote down the name.
I read it and showed it to Toronto.
“Is this guy another Higgins lieutenant or just a lackey?” I asked.
“I don’t know what he is.”
I tore the piece of paper from the notepad and glanced at the name once more, committing it to memory. “Jake, you got a match?”
Toronto produced a book of matches from one of his pockets. I ripped one from the cardboard, struck it, and touched the flame to the piece of paper with the name on it.
Warnock looked at me with wonder. “What are you doing? Are you mentally disturbed?”
“You might say that. What else do you know. Tony? You’re good with money, aren’t you? Who are you moving money from and who are you moving it to?”
“Just accounts. I only know account numbers. I swear.”
The paper was completely engulfed in flames now. 1 transferred it to the ashtray on the table so it could finish burning out. One thing was for certain: we now had the attention of almost everyone else in the bar.
“Hope you didn’t have any further plans for the evening, Tony. You looked like you planned to spend a long time here drinking when you came in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The guy whose name is on this paper,” I said. “He in the bar right now?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Good.” I pushed my chair back from the table. “Then you’re going to get up from this table and go out that door with us and help us find him.”
“What? You guys are too much. Look, you’re being paid, Pavlicek, and I gave you the name, didn’t I?”
“Oh, I’m being paid now, am I?” I looked across at Toronto. “Did you know that, Jake? Did you know I was being paid?”
Toronto shrugged.
I fished out my wallet and took out Warnock’s nice legal check. I stuffed it into the ashtray, where it caught the last few sparks from the ashes of the other piece of paper and made its own new flame.
“Hey!” Roswell Parker yelled out from across the room. “What’re you fellas doing over there? Fixin’ to burn the place down?”
Toronto smiled in her direction and held up his hand. “Got it under control,” he said. We watched it burn for a couple of moments until the flames died down.
I clapped Warnock on the shoulder and shook his hand so that everyone in the bar could see us. “Time we took a walk outside, don’t you think?”
Meanwhile Toronto placed a hand on Warnock’s other arm. To anyone across the room, it would’ve looked like a friendly gesture. To Warnock, who was feeling Toronto’s grip, it was obviously something else. “Yeah, Tony. Mr. Pavlicek here and I would be delighted to have your further company.”
Warnock’s eyes darted back and forth between Toronto and me. “What time is it right now?” he asked.
I checked my watch. “A couple minutes past nine.”
“I can tell you exactly where you can find him,” he said.
I examined his eyes for any signs of deception. “All right,” I said to Jake. “Let him go.”
Toronto released his grip. Warnock was hunched over, wincing and rubbing his elbow.
“Tony, now don’t do anything crazy on us. We might be back to talk to you some more later,” I said.
He looked out at us again with fear-filled eyes. But this time I don’t believe it was Toronto or anyone else he was afraid of. He seemed to be staring beyond us into the darkest abyss of his own clouded soul.
20
There was no crowd at the Burger King in South Charleston. Dinner hour had long since come and gone, and the only patrons at present were an elderly couple lingering over their burgers and milk shakes and two little children, one in diapers and the other a wild man of a toddler who seemed to be fascinated with making the swinging trap doors on all the garbage bins rock back and forth while his young mother, barely out of her adolescent years herself, kept her nose buried in what must have been a fairly current issue of Seventeen magazine.
I asked for the manager. The order taker behind the counter, a fiftyish woman with leathery skin and hair dyed
brunette, took one look at Toronto’s motorcycle jacket and the almost fiendish gleam in his eyes and retreated to the back as if she were about to become the victim of a stickup. A half minute later, she was back with the person in charge, a short, owlish man whose bushy mustache and eyebrows made him look like a fast-food Albert Einstein. The name badge attached to the pocket of his shirt said he was the assistant manager.
He too cast a wary eye toward Toronto’s olive complexion and muscle-bound physique. “May I help you gentlemen?”
“Yes, sir. My name is Frank Pavlicek and this is my associate Jake Toronto.” He shook my hand and I showed him my PI registration and gave him one of my cards. “I’m looking for one of your employees. Caleb Connors? I was told he’d be working here tonight.”
He twisted my card between his fingers, reading. “Private investigators.” He snickered, looking around the wall at the customers seated in the restaurant and lowering his voice. “Figures. What kind of trouble have they gotten into now?”
“They?”
“Yeah. They’re brothers. Matt and Caleb. They both work here.”
“I don’t know if they’ve gotten into any trouble, sir. We were just hoping to have a few words with Caleb.”
“About what? Something to do with the restaurant?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing to do with his work here.”
“That right? Well, maybe I can help you find him then. And maybe you can help me. I’ve just been on the phone. They’re my weekend closers, but neither of ‘em showed up for their shift tonight. Leaves me real short-handed with the cleanup and everything, you know?”
“Sure. You have home addresses for them?”
“Yeah, yeah, in the files in back. They were both still living at home with their mother, but they moved into a place of their own not too long back. Rented a house over on Chandler Road. I can get you the number.”
“I would really appreciate that. Is it like the two of them to miss work?”
He shrugged. “It’s happened once or twice before, but they’ve both been with me here steady for a couple of years now and Christ, you know how hard it is to find kids who’ll stick around through the training and then show up for work even halfway regular these days?”
“Either of the Connorses work anywhere else?”
“Not that I know of. I try to make sure they each get thirty or forty hours a week here. They’re usually pretty good workers. Which is why I’m so screwed without them tonight. Hey, you find ‘em, you tell ‘em Mr. Quinones is not happy.”
I nodded my sympathy, wondering what the two brothers—both in their twenties—could’ve earned at jobs like this and if they might’ve been in the market for some kind of income supplementation, maybe the off-the-books kind. “We’ll be sure and do that,” I said.
The assistant manager disappeared in back, leaving us to stand uncomfortably with the woman for a few moments. There was another younger woman in back working the grill. She was flipping burgers and not looking too happy about it.
Quinones came back with the address written on a blank time card. “Hey, you know, I hope these kids aren’t in some kind of real trouble or something, ‘cause I’d hate to see that happen. Some of these kids, I try to give ‘em a break and everything, you know? These two, from what I know, they don’t got much of a family backing ‘em up or anything.” He handed me the card and I took it and shoved it into my coat pocket.
“You mentioned the mother,” I said.
He turned his back to his other employees and lowered his voice again—the woman at the counter, while she was pretending to wipe down some counters, had obviously been eavesdropping.
“She’s a drinker,” he whispered. “Been in and out of work. In and out of rehab a few times too now, I guess. Last I heard, she was even turning a few tricks now and then on the street.”
“No father?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard much of anything about. The older one, Caleb, I remember him saying something once about how his old man had been in the army, but that’s the only time either of them ever mentioned him.”
I tapped the card in my pocket. “This address you’re sending us to, how’s the neighborhood?”
He made a show of looking Toronto and me up and down again. “This time of night? You two fellas look like you can handle yourselves, but I wouldn’t be going over there by myself, if you know what I mean. That’s one thing about those Connors boys—they always seem to stick together.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Quinones. You’ve been a great help.”
“Don’t mention it. Listen, you find those two, you tell ‘em I said to get straight on back to work here and keep their noses clean. I really need them.”
I shook his hand and thanked him again—he even shook Toronto’s hand this time after a slight hesitation. We left there with me wondering if this little man in his empty fast-food place on a Saturday night could even begin to hold back all the forces arrayed against him.
Charleston’s west end is a residential district of steep hills and small houses running down to and beyond the main drag, which is Washington Street. Along Washington are several commercial establishments, everything from a Laundromat to biker bars, redneck bars, and just about everything in between. There are also a couple of projects; not as bad as Roseberry Circle, but the clash of cultures in the west end, mixed with greed, crack, crystal meth, and booze, makes for a potent mix.
Toronto told me all this as we drove down there to look for Caleb Connors. He said the cops referred to the area as the Wild West.
“Sounds just like your kind of place, Jake.”
We found the house, a dark blue bungalow with a sagging porch on Chandler Road, just as Quinones had described. There was nobody home, but a sallow-eyed next-door neighbor shoveling a pile of sawdust beneath a floodlight beside his garage told us he thought the Connors boys had gone out for the evening, probably to one of the bars down on Washington.
“Usually do,” he said. “About the only time I get any real peace and quiet around here.”
We spent the next hour hitting bars up and down Washington Street, coming up empty. All we left with was a better description of the brothers and the car they drove, a bright orange classic GTO.
“I feel like we need a gear change,” I said as we climbed back into my pickup for the tenth or twelfth time.
“Yeah? How’s that?”
“We can waste all night trying to chase down these two French fries. We might be better off hitting them bright and early tomorrow when they’re sleeping it off back there at that little shack of theirs.”
“Maybe we should go back, find Warnock, and lean on him some more.”
“Or we could go see if we can follow up with that vet, Dr. Winston.”
“The place won’t be open though.”
“Right. But it looked to me like Winston owns an entire property with a house out back where he lives. Must make for a short commute to the office.”
“Ties up a loose end, either way.”
“You said you didn’t get to see him earlier like I did, but you met him once before with Chester. You think he’ll remember you too if we show up at the house?”
Toronto smiled but said nothing.
“All right, I know … people have a way of remembering you,” I said.
The parking lot at the veterinary clinic in Dunbar was empty and the office building dark. Away from the traffic off the road to one side stood a row of exercise runs surrounded by chain-link fence. The vet probably boarded pets overnight or kept some for observation when needed after surgery. Lights blazed from the house out back, and there was a fairly new Range Rover parked in the driveway.
As we climbed out of the truck, the echo of barking from inside the animal hospital hit our ears, mixed with the faint sounds of traffic in the background. There were several dogs and they sounded agitated. Lucky thing for the vet, his neighbors on either side and in back were all commercial establishments—an outdoor tree nu
rsery, a small office building, and an auto body shop—all of which appeared to close up at night so there was no one around to complain about the racket.
The house was built of wood but had a brick foundation and a set of brick stairs leading up to a small open front porch with wrought-iron railings and twin lantern porch lights glowing brightly on either side. I followed Toronto over the short walk and up the stairs and waited as he pushed the lighted button to ring the bell. The cold air smelted faintly of an odd mixture of auto exhaust, earth, and animal waste.
Several seconds passed, but there was no answer. Toronto tried the bell again.
Still no answer.
There was a heavy black door knocker that matched the railings so Toronto grabbed it and knocked three or four times.
Nothing, not even a hint of activity or movement from inside.
“Maybe he’s gone out,” Toronto offered. “Young guy. Saturday night. Probably decided to leave some lights on for security.”
“But the Range Rover’s still in the driveway.”
“Maybe he’s got a second car.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Instinctively perhaps, Toronto had already begun to scan the security on the front door, gently attempting to turn the knob just in case. It was locked tight, with a mortise lock and decent cylinder dead bolt, not to mention an alarm system, judging from the sensor foil taped just inside the window frame; none of which would have been insurmountable obstacles for my companion had we not been standing in a brightly lit area with our backs to a distant line of moving cars.
“Why don’t we take a look out back?” I suggested.
We looped around the sparse foundation planting to check out the rear of the house, which was also well illuminated by a couple of floodlights attached to the top corners of the house just below the roofline. There was a wooden table and chairs alongside a gas grill, both draped in vinyl weather coverings for the winter. A set of sliding glass doors led into what looked like a neatly furnished and undisturbed family room. The doors were also locked, and apparently armed by the alarm. Otherwise, we found no sign of anything out of order.