“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, hating the hollow empty sound of the words as I spoke them.
He waved away my condolences. “My uncle likes you,” he said. “The way he ran things . . . well, they aren’t exactly my way but that don’t mean I don’t appreciate him. Out of respect for him, I’ll listen, but I’m not making promises.”
When I finished telling him what I knew and what I suspected, he nodded to himself. Then he spent a couple of minutes staring at a point on the ceiling.
“I’ve heard what you got to say.”
“And?”
“Paul Cardo’s a businessman, so am I. The way we do things is, he deals with his problems and I deal with mine.”
“You’re saying you don’t know what goes on at West Parrish Industrial Park?”
“Don’t know and don’t care.”
“As long as you get your cut.”
His tongue darted over his upper lip. “I have a piece of advice for you, Charlie, and I’m giving it because of your friendship with my uncle. This thing you told me today? You don’t want to be telling it to anyone else, especially not anyone connected to the federal government. A thing like that . . .” He shrugged and gave me a rattlesnake’s grin. “Well, my affection for my uncle only goes so far.”
I took a deep breath, glanced at the untouched waffle and the half-empty glass of chocolate milk. “What did your son die of? It was cancer, right?”
“Leukemia,” he said, his voice as cold as wind blowing over an iceberg. “Don’t push me, Raines.”
“I was in the Med the other day,” I said. “The emergency room . . .”
“I heard about that, too.”
“When they finished with the X-rays and the bandages, I had a little extra time, so I visited a few people, most of them from South Memphis.”
“We’re done here,” he said.
I shook my head. “Take a ride with me.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Take a ride with me.”
He grimaced. “To the Med?”
“One hour. That’s all I’m asking. Then I go away and keep my mouth shut. You don’t have to worry about offending your Uncle Tony. . . .”
“I’m not that worried.”
“Then it’ll save you the trouble of having me killed.”
My heart hammered and a little voice in the back of my head shouted that the only thing I was going to accomplish here was to get myself murdered, but I held my gaze as steady as I could. Then he caught me off guard.
“Tony says you lost a child.”
Even though all that was over twenty years ago, I felt as if he’d sucker- punched me in the center of my chest. “A daughter. Stillborn,” I said. “It’s not the same.”
He nodded more to himself than me. “You ride with us and I’ll give you an hour.” Then he grabbed my wrist and leaned across the booth so that a passerby might have thought he was about to kiss me. “And if you ever try to use my son’s memory to jerk me around again, I won’t bother having someone kill you. I swear to God, I’ll do it myself.”
It didn’t take an hour. After twenty minutes on the pediatrics wing of the Regional Medical Center, he grabbed my arm and stared at me with the wild, trapped eyes of a rabbit caught in a snare.
“I got to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t breathe. I just can’t get any air.”
Frankie Gee and another, younger soldier who’d come up with us turned to me as Vinnie bolted past them, his head down, his hand clamped over his mouth. When I tried to follow him to the elevator, Frankie blocked my path.
“Why’d you bring him here?” Frankie asked, his dark eyes glassy beads set in fat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
“Trying to save my life,” I said.
Frankie’s expression made it clear that he no longer thought of me as a friend. “Yeah, well good luck with that,” he said, but he stepped out of my way.
Vinnie Montesi sat on a brick wall just outside the entrance. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was frantically rummaging through his coat pockets.
“Lost my damn lighter again,” he said. “Did I have it at the Waffle House?”
I shook my head and handed him my Zippo. “You all right?”
He fired the tip of his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled towards the gray clouds that drifted from across the river. “I spent two eternities in these frigging places. Michael was in Baptist Memorial,” he said. “But they’re all the same. They feel the same. Like hopelessness and loss and bad memories. When Mikey died, he held my hand. He was too weak to squeeze it or anything but he held on as long as he could.”
“I didn’t . . .”
He flicked his hand to tell me to shut up. Then when Frankie Gee and the other guy stomped towards us, ready to break the rest of my ribs, he flicked his hand again.
“Those kids up there. We gave them cancer, didn’t we? The stuff we dumped at the Park.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“That’s why God did it,” he said. “Right? That’s why Mikey got leukemia. We dumped that crap and made a lot of people sick, so Mikey got cancer.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“Never mind that Paul Cardo’s been running this scam since the seventies or that my Uncle Tony raked in his share of the profits. I took my cut for six years so God killed my kid.” He exhaled smoke at the sky. “But what are you going to do? He’s God, right? The boss of bosses. You eat his crap and pretend you’re thankful.”
“I didn’t bring you here to hurt you,” I said and wondered if my feeling sympathy for Vincent Montesi meant I’d gone crazy or the world had turned upside down.
“You know what I think? I don’t think God waits until the afterlife to punish you. I think he does it right here.” He flicked his cigarette away. “Way I see it? Screw eternity. Right here, right now is hell.”
“Maybe not,” I said, seizing what might have been the only opportunity I had to keep myself out of that cold, dark river. “Maybe every day is purgatory,” I said, grabbing at the shadow of a rope. “Maybe it’s your chance to put right what you did the day before.”
It was pretty lame, I guess. Something I might have heard on a late-night drunk or read on a men’s room wall. But it was all I had, and I was betting my life on it.
“Yeah?” he said, frowning, wanting to believe it. “Your chance to do what? Some kind of penance?”
I knew he’d taken the bait. “Maybe.”
A smile flittered around his lips and then died. “So maybe you can set things right, get to heaven where you can see . . .” He let the thought fade and buried it alongside the smile. “Shutting down a business like that would cause problems. Paulie wouldn’t be happy. I’d have to deal with it.” He closed his eyes, nodded to himself. “But you know that, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Three weeks,” he said. “That’s what I need to make sure there’s nothing that could cause me or Tony any trouble. Three weeks. Then you can call the Feds, let them start getting that garbage out of there. That’s the only deal I’m going to offer.”
The people in South Memphis had been poisoned for over thirty years so I figured three weeks wouldn’t matter that much one way or the other. If saving my life—and Demond and Bop-Bop and Don Ellis’s, I told myself to feel a little better—meant that some of the guilty would go free? Well, they always do, don’t they?
“All right,” I said.
He stood then, motioned for Frankie and the other guy to head to the parking garage. There was no question about it. I wasn’t invited.
“You really believe that?” he asked. “That every day is one more chance to do penance, settle old debts?”
“I want to,” I said.
He turned away and left me alone. But that was okay. I knew what I’d just done and that people were going to die because of it, and alone seemed like the right place for me to be.
How would you want it to end? If it could turn out any
way you wanted, what would be different? I wasted a lot of time asking myself those questions. In the end, this is what happened.
Paulie Cardo and his mistress were found dead in her condo. According to Nate Randolph, the girl had been shot twice in the chest and hadn’t suffered. They kept Paul Cardo alive for a while. After a couple of beers, I can tell myself that I’m not responsible, but I know better. When you suggest the idea of penance to a violent man, there’s no reason to expect that his version of penance would be anything but violent.
In a perfect world, Demond and Bop-Bop would have realized the error of their ways. But of course, that didn’t happen. Six weeks ago, Bop-Bop was arrested for slitting Demond’s throat in a South Memphis pool hall. Most likely it was over an argument about the profits from their thriving drug business, but in perverse moments I wonder if Bop-Bop didn’t finally get tired of Demond’s vocabulary lessons and decide to silence him forever.
Vinnie Montesi has put on a few pounds and looks healthier, but I’d given him a balm for his conscience, not the key to a change of life. If you buy smack or coke or rent a prostitute anywhere from Dyersburg to Biloxi, odds are you’re still lining Vinnie’s pockets. Don Ellis committed suicide when the papers broke the story about chemical dumping in South Memphis. Maybe he did it because of the guilt or because he wanted to save his sons and his ex-wife from Vinnie Montesi’s brand of penance. Whatever the reason, I like to think that in the end, Don Ellis found his courage.
For the next two weeks, people who were connected to the industrial park or Mid-South Transport turned up in the unlikeliest of places—burning wrecks on the interstate, sandbars in the Mississippi, abandoned warehouses downtown. It was an actuary’s nightmare. I’d sentenced those people to death when I accepted Vinnie Montesi’s offer to give him three weeks to tie up loose ends. To help myself sleep at night, I pretended that what happened to them was justice.
Eventually, the FBI and the EPA gave up their investigations. The mob members who seemed to be involved ended up just as dead as the potential witnesses who might have testified against them. The corporate bosses and hospital administrators and paid-for politicians who made all this possible were never named in an indictment. Any chance that the people who profited from the dumping could have been found went away when I cut my deal with Vinnie Montesi.
I’m just like everyone else. I find it hard to live with the cowardly, self-serving parts of myself. I told myself that if only I’d had Terrell Cheatham’s dossier things would have been different, that I would have taken it to the papers or turned it over to the EPA and more of the guilty would have been identified. But thinking about the folder only brought more questions. What had happened to it? How had Cardo known where to find Terrell Cheatham but been clueless about Demond and Bop-Bop? That’s when I started thinking about what Frances Cheatham had said.
When I paid my third visit to her apartment, spring had finally come to Memphis. Dogwoods were blooming. The sun was bright gold, and the entire world, even the toxic wasteland part of it, was cloaked with green. But inside Frances Cheatham’s apartment, the shades were drawn and everything seemed to be coated with a layer of gray.
“He was a good boy,” she said, tapping a photo album with her index finger. “Smart too. I should have listened.”
“He showed you his file. His dossier,” I said.
“Just like he showed me the roses or the rainbows he drew in school when he was a little child.” She picked up a glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “He loved his granddaddy, that’s why he wanted to stop it. But he brought it to me. He told me what it was, what them men had done. He wanted to take it to somebody at the paper. I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski instead. He was the white man who was head of security at the Park. They were holding back on Marcus’s pension.”
“His pension?”
“Nine hundred and thirteen dollars a month. He had that coming, Marcus did. He worked hard and it killed him. So when Terrell showed me all that, I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski, to tell him to give us the money my husband earned or we’d make it public. Terrell didn’t want to. He kept saying it was wrong, that we had to do something, but I told him, ‘Son the only person that ever does something for you is yourself.’ He loved me, so he let me talk him down. But you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I told myself I was doing it for him, so he could have the money to go to college and get out of this neighborhood. But I was doing it for myself, too, because I was scared of ending up sleeping under an overpass and eating garbage. But I knew as soon as they sent him away and told him they’d call us that they meant to kill him. That’s why I was so glad to see you. I figured he’d be safe in jail.”
There was no point in telling her that half the cons and a third of the jailers were bought and paid for by men like Montesi and Cardo. Instead, I said that she’d done the best she could. It didn’t matter anyway. Lewinski was one of the corpses who’d turned up in the river.
“I’m sorry,” I said, but the words just hung there.
On my way out the door, I stopped and looked back at her. She was tracing the photo album with the tip of her finger, cocooned in the guilt that would follow her to her grave. Then I thought about Vinnie Montesi drinking chocolate milk and staring at a syrup-covered waffle to hold on to the memory of his son and Demond Jones telling me that his little sister had begged him to make the pain go away. I thought about Don Ellis looking at his face in the mirror, wondering what had happened to the life he’d once known.
I closed the door behind me. Then I closed my eyes. For a moment I was back there in that hospital, smelling antiseptic and pine trees, listening to my wife weep and staring at the blue, lifeless lump that should have been my little girl.
A few blocks away, the cleanup at the industrial park was just beginning, but I knew it didn’t matter. In the end, we don’t dump the worst of our toxic waste in abandoned warehouses or slow-moving rivers. We carry it around in our memories until it’s safely buried six feet underground.
Copyright © 2011 by Tim L. Williams. Black Mask Magazine title, logo and mask device copyright © 2011 by Keith Alan Deutsch. Licensed by written permission.
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
Shelf-Cocked
by Erika Jahneke
Erika Jahneke is an author and blogger whose subjects (for publications such as Smile, Hon) range from how the city of Baltimore is depicted in pop culture to women’s reproductive health. Her fiction...
Top of DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
Black Mask PASSPORT TO CRIME
DEPARTMENT OF FIRST STORIES
Shelf-Cocked
by Erika Jahneke
Erika Jahneke is an author and blogger whose subjects (for publications such as Smile, Hon) range from how the city of Baltimore is depicted in pop culture to women’s reproductive health. Her fiction has appeared in several e-zines, but this is her first paid print short story. The Phoenix resident says her writing almost makes up for the physical power she lost when she developed a brain injury at birth and became a life-long wheelchair user.
It was the most perfect copy of The Maltese Falcon any of the antiques-shop owners of down town Glendale had ever seen, and it was in my dad’s store. I missed not having to care about things like that, but the recession had brought such tough times to writers that nowadays I had to try to convince myself there were worse fates than feeling twelve years old every time someone’s old book was pronounced “shelf-cocked” and therefore too bent and damaged to sell. I had only worked there a short time, but I was feeling shelf-cocked myself.
I tried to feel lucky. The old man had thought of me, for once, rare books being a big part of his trade; just the fact that he’d pitched me the job at all could represent a real turning point from our past: criticism on his side, rebellion on mine. Although, in view of what eventually happened, I suppose I should say that my father ne
ither touched me inappropriately nor locked me in a closet for whole nights at a time. Does it count as inappropriate touching if you remember the one time he rubbed eucalyptus on your congested chest more clearly than when the space shuttle blew up? Because I still do, along with the little jingle that may have kept me from joining my friends in college in fierce denunciations of television commercials. I think it’s inappropriate that I can count the times he hugged me on one hand. I use all the fingers, but just barely. I suppose if he didn’t spend his days and nights pricing snuff boxes and thimbles it would be easier to think of him as the strong, silent type, but at least my mother’s post-divorce nickname for him, Claude Rains, made sense now. Once in a while, though, he had a sentimental craving to be on Mom’s good side, and she probably told him that my term-paper editing business had gotten slow and my articles weren’t selling like they used to. For too much of my life, he’d been invisible. While it was probably too late for him to save the day with soft words and circus tickets, I admit that I came into the job very determined to get something at last. The role of model employee was definitely out, as he and Lola spent most of every work day together, laughing at private jokes and poring over eBay on her pink laptop. I tried hard to impress for a few weeks, though, as the something I wanted started out recession-modest and as naked as a good girl’s need for gold stars. At least you have a job, I told myself. And I did get to take a book with me and read in the back sometimes, which was good—if I could edit out the way Lola treated me as if I left Pig-Pen stink-lines as I walked away.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 Page 29