Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  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 hadn’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 front 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.

  “What I’m saying,” she said in case I hadn’t understood, “is that it would probably be best if you didn’t come down here anymore.”

  Then she slammed the door. In the parking lot, a little boy, ten or eleven, maybe, stepped from between two cars. He was small, delicate looking, with huge brown eyes that seemed to swallow his face, but he already had the walk, the aggressively slumped shoulders, the sneer of a gang kid. Ten years from now, he’d have the jailhouse banter, the dead eyes, and the rap sheet to go with them—if he lived that long.

  “You Raines, right? They some people want to see you.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said.

  “I’m telling you,” he said. “You pass that school up the block? See the courts in the back? Bop-Bop and Demond ballin’ up there.”

  “Thanks for the message,” I said, opening my car door.

  “So you going?”

  “Depends on what they want.”

  “Man, they don’t tell me what they want. They just say go get that white guy, tell him we got something to talk about.” He kicked at the pavement with the toe of a scuffed sneaker. “So?”

  “You want a ride?”

  He took an instinctive step backward and his large eyes got larger. “I don’t get in cars with strangers.”

  “You tell me who you think had Terrell killed,” Demond Jones said.

  He was a rangy kid with a bushy Afro, a slow smile, and a shark’s eyes. He sprawled on the icy metal bleachers near a fenced-in basketball court, his long legs stretched out in front of him, a Kool dangling from the corner of his mouth and a 32-ounce can of Icehouse beer resting by his side. One row up, Bop-Bop Drake perched over his friend’s shoulder like an overgrown parrot.

  I wasn’t sure what I thought about any of what they had said. I looked away, watched the four-on-four game on the court. Most of the players were good, but one was spectacular, quick and surefooted with a smooth jump shot and a crossover dribble that could blow out a defender’s ankle. I recognized him from sports reports on the local news. A sophomore in high school, he was being recruited by half the major universities in America and destined to be an NBA star, but none of the kids gathered around the courts were paying him any attention. Down here
Demond and Bop-Bop were the stars, the heroes that all these thirteen- and fourteen-year-old kids wanted to be. It made sense. None of those kids had the talent of Kyrie Taylor, but they all knew they could learn to deal drugs or use a gun.

  “You’re telling me you guys firebombed that truck for political reasons.” I finally said.

  “We ain’t saying we did anything illegal at all,” Bop-Bop said. “I’m telling you that Terrell threw that Molotov because he was drunk and angry that they was killing us.”

  “Genocide is the word Bop-Bop’s trying to think of,” Demond said. “That’s what Terrell kept saying when he was drunk. They’re committing genocide, just like in Rwanda, but nobody knows it. T-Bone was smart. Educated, you know?”

  “He was in your gang.”

  “What gang?” Bop-Bop asked. “There ain’t no gangs around here.”

  “Terrell wasn’t in nothing. He just came to us because he knew I’d listen to what he had to say.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Was there money involved?”

  He gave me a slow grin. “You act like ’cause I do a little business I don’t care about nothing else. Making money is the American way, ain’t it?”

  “He told you what was going on at the industrial park? Enlighten me.”

  “I’m not clear on the particulars but I know something ain’t right around here.”

  “He said they were dumping?”

  “Chemicals and all kinds of shit like that. Illegal stuff from all over. T-Bone said it’s why his granddad died of bone cancer.” For the first time, Demond’s eyes softened and I remembered that he wasn’t just a gangbanger or a monster but also a nineteen-year-old kid. “He said it was the reason my baby sister got leukemia.”

  “There’s all kind of people sick down here. The apartments where I stay? I know at least six families got kids with cancer. You just go down to the Med, you’ll see,” Bop-Bop said.

  “T-Bone had all kinds of numbers and things he’d gathered,” Demond said.