Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

“From?”

  “Club in Emeryville. Place called the Zoom Room. Where the son was playing.”

  “But the son,” Stluka said, getting into it again, “he didn’t need a drive. He walked.” He looked back and forth, Murchison to Holmes. “It ain’t just me. That doesn’t make sense.”

  Holmes slapped his notepad against his leg. “Like I said, he’s down at the station.”

  Murchison checked the time. “Okay. Holmesy. I got Truax calling in for more bodies. Connect with him. Get somebody to help Hennessey out there with the neighbors. Not just the crowd. Door-to-door, I don’t care what time it is. Anybody has a story, get the particulars, then call me. Get a guy who’s done some major accident work—Crawford’s good, wake him up, blame me—have him check for rubber out on the street. Get a man over to the hospital, right outside the girl’s door. She doesn’t leave. Nobody in the room but hospital staff. I want first crack. We good?”

  Holmes put his notepad in his slicker pocket and headed out. Murchison watched him go, loping like a giant through the gate.

  “Talk about the high priest of half-assed.” Stluka picked up the dead man’s hat, checked inside. “Shoulda put a man with the girl down at the hospital first thing.”

  • • •

  The house felt less gloomy inside than out. It was cluttered, dust motes sailing in the lamplight, but somebody’d put out the effort to make a home. To the right of the entry sat a cramped dining room, with an old oak table and chairs. To the left was the living room. A lumpy sofa sat against the far wall. Above it, family photographs covered almost every inch of plaster. Murchison went close, checked the faces.

  “Anybody we know?” Stluka asked, meaning perps and players.

  Murchison shrugged. “Come look.”

  The pictures seemed to be of family and friends. Three generations from the look of things: a matriarch, then the victim and his siblings, and after that nephews and nieces and others further removed. Murchison assumed the son was there—should have asked Holmes for a description, he thought—then shortly found the photograph he’d been hoping for.

  Raymond Carlisle and a younger man stood side by side, each carrying a horn case. The victim was taller, a fact accentuated by his reedy build. He was darker, too, his skin a deep coffee color, with the spatters of dark freckling across each cheek Murchison had noticed outside, just as he noticed again the salt-and-pepper goatee, the deepset eyes. In life, they’d perfected the man’s intensity.

  In contrast, the son, if that was who this was, looked studious. He had short-napped hair, and it set off his angular features, which resembled the victim’s. His skin was lighter, a reddish cinnamon color, and he wore a pair of rimless spectacles. Behind the glasses, his eyes conveyed warmth, not heat. But there was wariness in them, too. This young man, early twenties from the look of him, was no hothouse flower. He had a strength about him, and his bearing suggested an easy grace tinged with formality.

  “Think I found the son,” Murchison told Stluka finally, easing aside so they both could look.

  Murchison took note of Stluka struggling with his disbelief. The word musician conjured a distinctly different image in this town, given names like Pimp-T Junior, A. K. Hype, Treacherous Bo. The Violence Suppression Task Force had recently pulled in two rappers from Baymont tied to a statewide bank robbery gang who had laid out their entire MO on a locally pressed CD. The mastermind producer of the local rap scene was himself a major player in the crack trade who was currently sitting in jail, awaiting trial for placing a bomb outside the south county courthouse, hoping to destroy evidence in a third-strike prosecution that would put him away for life. The FBI had just helped out in the arrest of a group of failed rappers who called themselves Pitch Black Night, tied not only to drugs but six murders in the area. The granddaddy of them all, though, was a rapper named Master DePaul. He was the man who kicked off the turf war between Baymont and Dumpers that reached its peak body count in 1994. The city’s reputation still hadn’t recovered. Given all that and more, the general feeling on the force remained: if you were local, Black, and musical, you merited a watchful eye.

  “Care to comment?” Murchison asked, standing back to take in the whole wall.

  Stluka gnawed his lower lip, thinking. “Squeaky type, looks like. The son I mean.”

  “Yeah, but I was thinking more generally. These look like working people, church people.”

  “Spare me, Murch. Pictures lie.” Stluka turned away, took in the rest of the room. “Every fuckwad in the world’s got a snapshot somewhere makes him look harmless. And that’ll be the one the family fawns off on the media when it’s crying time.”

  There was a piano in the room, piled high with sheet music. Stluka drifted toward it as Murchison pulled back the curtain at the window. Unless this Lazarenko girl had been waiting, she most likely went to look only once she heard shots. Like Marcellyne Pathon. And saw nothing. The glass was filthy. Given the clouds, the rain, the sparse streetlights on the block, it would have been dark in the yard, nothing but an amber porch light strewn with cobwebs.

  “Well now, looky here,” Stluka said behind him.

  He was standing beside the piano, holding a purse in one hand, an ID in the other. Shaking the purse, he caught sight of something inside. “Get that.”

  Murchison glanced in, spotted the wallet, took it out.

  “There a driver’s license inside?”

  Murchison checked. “Yeah.” He read the name. “This doesn’t match what Holmes told us outside.”

  “Nadya Lazarenko.” Stluka showed Murchison the loose ID he’d found first. “She’s all of nineteen.”

  Murchison checked the other ID. “This one says she’s Stephanie Waugh, twenty-one.”

  “Ta-da.”

  Murchison checked the photos. The faces were similar, not identical. Probably a friend’s license. He dropped the wallet back into the purse. “She’d need phony ID to get into a club where her boyfriend’s playing.”

  “The Zoom Room.” Stluka grinned. “It’s still deception, Murch.”

  “So’s just about everything else at that age. She’s our only shot at an eyewitness so far. I’m not going to bag that up and log it till I know it means something. Let the defense blow its own smoke.”

  Stluka sighed. “Fair enough. For now.” He dropped the other ID in and set the purse back down beside the piano. “Join me for a stroll?”

  He turned and headed down the hallway. Murchison followed, watching as Stluka checked in every opening he passed—linen closet, laundry hamper, bathroom shelves—sniffing at things like a disgruntled critic lost in the bowels of some minor museum. He lifted pictures, checking behind for wall safes. Kicked the baseboards, listening for hidey-holes.

  They came to two bedrooms at the end of the hall, and Murchison supposed the son had been using the smaller one. There was one bed, a twin, covered with an old Hudson blanket. The desktop was neat. Stluka pulled open a desk drawer, peeked inside, then shut it again.

  “Can we agree this room looks undisturbed?”

  Murchison inspected the closet. The clothes hung straight, shirts stacked tidily on the shelf above, shoes lined up like little soldiers on the floor below. Not many. Not enough. Inside a plastic bag he found a turtleneck and denim overalls, hightops, and socks. All stuffed in together, like laundry, and small. A woman’s. The girl had changed here, but no sign of staying.

  “He doesn’t live here. The son, I mean. His being here, it’s short-term. And the girlfriend.” Murchison set the bag back down, nodded toward the narrow bed. “She doesn’t sleep over.”

  Stluka considered it. “Maybe she’s a Thoroughbred, sleeps standing up.” He pointed across the hall. “Or she spends the night with Daddy.”

  “You think?”

  “I try not to make up my mind about people till they’ve had a chance to disappoint me.”

  The furniture in the larger bedroom across the hall was Sears-quality, decades old. No conspicuous sign of disturbance
, just day-to-day carelessness. Worn slippers lay askew beneath the unmade bed. Drawers sat open, revealing nothing valuable or shameful, just old clothes, folded and clean. An old dusty TV sat atop the highboy.

  Stluka opened the closet. “Here’s where the guy’s money went.” He fingered the sleeve to a silk suit jacket. “Snazz ’n’ pizzazz. Show Man.” He dropped the sleeve, turned around. “Whereas this.” He gestured toward the room. “Dressed with flash, lived in trash.”

  It was something routinely said of junkies. “You think?”

  “No, we’d have seen more signs by now. Expression just leapt to mind.” Stluka looked around again, shivered with disgust. “This guy got laid, he did it somewhere else. Unless he was paying for it.”

  Murchison checked the closet after Stluka, noted he was right: the quality of the wardrobe outpaced everything else in the house by far. Not surprising, Murchison thought, remembering the clothes on the body and what Marcellyne Pathon had said. He was big. Somebody with the guts to call his band The Mighty Firefly had to have style—thus the nickname, one supposed. Strong.

  “ARF,” Stluka said behind him.

  Murchison turned, saw Stluka holding a prescription bottle, studying the label. “What the hell is ‘ARF’?”

  Murchison took the bottle from him. “Acute Renal Failure.” He checked the other bottles on top of the bed stand. They were the usual garden-variety post-op brew: antibiotics, painkillers, some Halcion for sleep. They rested atop a checklist titled “Nephrectomy: Expectations after Surgery. Convalescence.”

  “Our victim only had one kidney.”

  “I think that’s the least of his worries right about now.”

  “Dates on these scrips, I’d say it came out about two months ago.”

  “You going somewhere with this?”

  “Holmes found a bottle in a bag beside the guy. He’s putting it away, with one kidney.”

  “Unless his doctor killed him for being a crappy patient, why do I care?”

  Murchison shrugged. “Thinking out loud.” He crouched down, opened the bed stand drawer. “Well, well, what have we here, Mr. Carlisle?” Among reading glasses and ear plugs and Kleenex packs sat a snub-nosed .38, black metal with a brown wood grip. Loose shells rattled around in the bottom of the drawer. Careless old fool, he thought. He lifted the weapon, showed it to Stluka, then put it to his nose, shook his head. “Thing hasn’t been fired in forever.”

  “Ah, piss.” Stluka pulled back the bedcovers, checked beneath the pillows, found a Walkman but no second gun. “Bag the damn thing anyway. Give it to ballistics, let them confirm the obvious. Remind us what geniuses they are.”

  Murchison pulled an evidence bag from his pocket, shook it open, dropped the gun inside and then the cartridges. “Victim felt a need to keep a gun by his bed.”

  “In this neighborhood, come on. Wouldn’t you?”

  Checking the drawer again, Murchison found a photograph inside. An old one. He took it out. The face didn’t register with the others he’d seen in the living room. A woman, in her mid-twenties or so. She had long hair drawn back with combs, setting off her eyes and smile. On the back he found an inscription: Dear Raymond—With the warmest of hearts—Felicia. The script, it was perfectly feminine. You could almost smell her perfume.

  “Think we found the secret sweetheart.”

  Stluka took the picture from him, checked it front and back. “This thing’s twenty years old, minimum.”

  Just then, the heater came on, erupting from the cellar with a sound like thunder. Warm air that stank of mildew began pouring through the wall vents.

  Stluka shrank away from it. “I am really beginning to hate this case.”

  Murchison took the picture back, studied it one more time, then slipped it into his pocket. “Ideas?”

  Stluka cracked his knuckles. “Maybe it’s me, but I sense friction between the father and son.”

  “Style, you mean?”

  “Everything in Its Proper Place versus I Do What I Want—Try and Stop Me.”

  “The vic looks like a character,” Murchison agreed. “Headstrong. Daddy likes his drama. Son seems the dutiful type. And the girl?”

  “I’m not sold on her being uninvolved. Not yet.”

  “Interesting.” Murchison granted Stluka his instincts, which as a cop were often solid. His faults as a human being, those you had to deal with as they came. “And it’s not just that the son’s a neat freak, or that he’s only here short-term. It’s strange. He’s made an effort to clear a space for himself, but there’s no real stake in it.”

  “I’m here. Don’t push it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I’m still hung up on this thing about him walking. There’s a piece missing. He didn’t walk thirty miles home.”

  Murchison headed for the door, glancing around one last time. “Check out the rest of the house?”

  In the kitchen, a coffee mug lay in the sink, two cold tea bags shriveled inside it.

  “Smell that?”

  Stluka was already square with the next doorway. “I smell a lot of things. Pick one.”

  Murchison lifted the cup, sniffed, made sure. “Brandy, I think. Alcohol for sure.”

  Stluka closed his eyes, palms pressing his temples. “Murch, I got it. Okay? The guy was a lush.”

  “Bear with me.” Murchison opened cabinets, peered in. He found the brandy bottle. The cap was sticky but loose, like it had just been reopened after sitting awhile. “The father had a bad enough drinking problem it cost him a kidney. The son’s here to play caretaker. How long? Depends on how good a patient the old man is. Eight weeks of convalescence, he’s already at it again.”

  “You think they fought about it.”

  “From the picture we saw, the son’s no loser. He looks smart. And he’s got himself a girlfriend, his own career. But he hauls himself up here anyway, to live in this dreary old hole.” He nodded toward the cup in the sink. “Now this. Old man’s mixing it in his tea, which is either some kind of homebrew cocktail or he was trying to hide it. And that means, yeah, maybe they fought about it.”

  Stluka stared back from the doorway, giving it thought. He blinked like a cat.

  “You’re the one brought up friction,” Murchison said.

  Stluka waved his hands in mock surrender. “I confess.”

  “I mean, given the neighborhood, the way he died, I wouldn’t say this was a family deal. But in here—”

  “Tells a different story, yes it does.” Stluka tapped his hands against the door frame. “Wrap this up?”

  The next doorway opened onto the addition. Mismatched chairs and music stands rested in haphazard clusters. Bookshelves, crammed with sheet music, lined one wall. The other three were covered with egg crate foam. The craftsmanship was shoddy—below, the rug buckled and curled at the edges, never tacked down; above, the ceiling lacked several acoustic tiles.

  Stluka clasped his hands atop his head. “This guy had a real knack for unfinished business.”

  At the back of the room, a gold banner with black lettering hung from the ceiling, draped wall to wall:

  STRONG CARLISLE & THE MIGHTY FIREFLY

  MF R&B

  It dawned on Murchison, finally, what the curious name was code for: Mother Fucker. He felt the spirit of the dead man in that house a little more profoundly. Strong, they called him. Big, Marcellyne Pathon said. Cagey and sloppy and stylish and wild. With an ambivalent son and a twenty-year soft spot for a sweet-faced woman whose picture he hid away.

  3

  Toby Marchand sat alone in one of the police station’s two cinder block interview rooms. He was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn onstage that night: gray serge suit, white Oxford shirt, Nino Mori necktie. He smelled of sweat, some of it rank from fear. His mouth tasted sour from vomit.

  The memory came unbidden. Turning the corner, seeing too many people out and squad cars parked helter skelter in the street, strobe lights spinning. Feeling the bottom drop out of his stoma
ch. Running up, pushing through the crowd—he got recognized, got ignored—reaching the gate, only to be hammerlocked by the cop standing there, told he couldn’t go in. Shortly after, told why.

  The images froze in his mind. Then the next moment he half expected his father to storm through the interview room doorway: Howling abuse. Ready to raise hell. The delusion brought to mind amputees complaining of pain in phantom limbs.

  He’d been in the practice room, straddling a wood chair, reaming his trombone slide with a cleaning rod coiled in cheesecloth. Five o’clock, already twilight. His father charged in barefoot. His trouser legs flapped against his calves, shirttails sailing behind as he strode forward. He carried a large mug in one hand. The other hand rose up from his side, and a long bony finger sliced the air.

  “Hey, boy wonder—yeah, you—eyes front.”

  Toby ignored him. Established habit.

  “You gonna tell me what the fuck’s goin’ on? Or you want, I can guess. I’d love to guess.”

  Toby puffed his cheeks and sighed. “May I infer from your bellowing that your health is sound?”

  “I’ll bellow all I goddamn please. Got a fourteen-year-old white girl out there has the nerve to think she’s some kind of fucking nurse.”

  From beyond the doorway leading back to the kitchen, a tiny female voice: “I’m sorry.”

  “I want somebody’s face in my business, I’ll call my sister.”

  Removing the cloth-wrapped rod from his slide, Toby inspected it for bits of flaking brass. The cheesecloth smelled of Slide-O-Mix.

  “Not fourteen. Nineteen. Nadya is nineteen.”

  “Like hell she is. That girl’s a virgin. I can hear the skinny-skin snapping like a snare head when she walks across the room.”

  Toby glanced up, his eyes a warning. “I seriously doubt that.”

  “You speaking from personal experience?”

  Toby uttered a soft begrudging moan. “Unh-uh. You’ll have to try harder than that. Meanwhile, back to the point, she’s nineteen.”

  “You better pray to God she is, junior.”

  Toby opened the carrying case for his horn, placed the slide and the main assembly down into their velvet bed, and snapped the clasps shut. “Remind me, O ancient one—this the Jack Johnson speech, or the Chuck Berry speech?”