Done for a Dime

by David Corbett

  Toby fumbled with his keys for what seemed an eternity, and as soon as he got the door open she fled past him, hurtling through the living room, then slamming the bathroom door.

  “Still think it was a good idea to bring her back here?” Murchison eased past him in the doorway. “Where did your father keep his mail and financial records?”

  Toby went to the china cabinet in the dining room, opened one of the lower panels, and withdrew the shoe box full of receipts and bill stubs, the checkbook. Placing them on the tabletop, he said, “My father was extremely private about all this. I won’t be able to make any better sense of it than you will. So if you’ll excuse me.”

  He left Murchison at the dining room table and ventured back toward the bathroom. He leaned toward the door, listened, caught the sound of Nadya gasping in and out, the sound strung together with whimpers. He pictured her on her knees, the cold tile, the bile on her lips. He lacked the heart to make her face him like that, so he drew away, went to his father’s room.

  It felt like a violation, being there. Raiding a tomb. He sat down on the unmade bed and stared at the open closet, the array of suits and sport jackets, lime-green polyester to worsted Italian wool. Weary, he put his hand out to brace himself on the mattress, and as he did, his hand brushed something hard beneath the pillow. He recoiled on impulse, even as his mind recognized what it was: his father’s portable CD player and headphones. Toby removed the unit from beneath the pillow and out of curiosity popped open the play port, to see what the last thing was his father had listened to.

  It was a disc by the baritone saxophonist Hamiet Bluiett and his sextet: Old Warrior, Young Warrior. Toby had given it to his father as a Christmas present; he’d meant it as an homage. His father, unwrapping it Christmas morning, sniffed the scent of free jazz and listened to no more than the first three tracks before turning it off. “Music to get lost by,” he’d said, then gone off to make tea. The crack had sparked one more round of insults between them. And now here it is, Toby thought, the thing he listened to at night before drifting off. Cherished in secret.

  He removed the small, shiny disc, holding it in his hand like a mirror as the bathroom door opened. Looking up, he saw Nadya appear in the doorway. She’d washed her face, gargled; he could smell the soap and mouthwash. He gestured for her to sit beside him.

  “You okay?”

  She buried her hands in the sleeves of the sweater. “Better. Some. What’s that?”

  “Present I gave Pops.” He turned the disc this way and that in his hand. “Reminded me of something.”

  “Tell me.”

  He shrugged, but she placed her hand on his shoulder. “Please. I’d like to hear it.”

  Toby puffed his cheeks and thought about where to start. “I was nine. Pops took me to see Illinois Jacquet’s big band. We went backstage before the first set. Pops knew Rudy Rutherford, he played clarinet and baritone in the band, and they did a little howdy-doo, you know, two old guns cracking wise. Then Pops asked if he could introduce me to Illinois.”

  He chuckled, remembering.

  “It was like meeting the pope in a bar. He was sitting in this tall, wobbly wood chair, a barber’s bib around his neck, while his manager fussed at his hair, straightening it with a heating iron. So damn proud of that wavy gray hair. Rudy introduced Pops and me, and Illinois played the gracious big shot. Asked me how I liked ‘playing the bone.’”

  Toby looked down at the CD player, reinserted the disc.

  “The band, they did a lot of old stuff. ‘White Heat,’ ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy.’ You’d have thought nobody could blow the dust off those tunes, but they did. I watched Pops as he listened—eyes almost glassy at times. Real quiet afterward.” He glanced up, to be sure Nadya followed. “That was the first time I think I actually understood my father. The dream always just outside his reach. All it takes is one signature tune. Illinois had it with ‘Flying Home.’ Lee Morgan had ‘The Sidewinder,’ Ahmad Jamal, ‘Poinciana.’ One tune, so people have something to hang your name on.

  “Pops almost had it with ‘Moanin’,’ or so he always said. He’d packed off for New York, and somehow hooked up with Mingus, who took him under his wing.” Toby chuckled. “The Angry Man of Jazz, he got called. Mingus had this reputation—he was a junkyard dog when his temper blew. Small wonder my old man admired him. But he could be gentle, too, and generous, even to guys like Pops, who was raw and young, but fearless. With Mingus on his side, Pops thought this was it. His shot. Mingus showed him lead sheets for ‘Moanin’,’ and a few other tunes that got laid down in the Blues and Roots sessions. Pops said he memorized what he saw then holed himself up in a Harlem cellar for weeks practicing. But come time to cut the wax, the record label wanted a name, so they went with Pepper Adams.”

  Toby glanced up again, offered a wan smile, then winked.

  “At least, that’s the way Pops always told it. God only knows what the truth is. Could be Mingus was just blowing smoke. Young dude fresh off the bus, why crush his pride? Maybe Pops just decided the tune was his after hearing it so many times when he tagged along with the band. That would’ve been like him. I’ve never looked into it too hard, afraid the whole thing’s a lie. But the moral’s true, even if the story isn’t. That’s how close you can come. And still be nowhere near.”

  Nadya reached for his hand and gripped it hard. “You’re not like that. You’ll never be like that.”

  “We’re all like that.” He lifted her hand to his lips, kissed her fingers, then got up and headed to his room. “Just some more than others.”

  He gathered a change of clothes together. Nadya, following him in, sat on the bed, watching. Once he had his things packed, he pointed to her sweater and baggy jeans. “You want, I can leave you alone while you change out of those.”

  “I’d prefer you stayed, actually.”

  They traded places, Toby on the bed now, watching as she kicked off the paper slippers, untied the rope cincture at her waist, let the baggy jeans fall, then pulled the sweater over her head. She stood there naked a second, frail and small. The overalls and turtleneck she’d worn yesterday, before changing into her dancing outfit, lay in the closet, stuffed inside a plastic bag, along with her socks and high-tops. She didn’t put them on. Instead, she turned to face him.

  “When you’re with me like this, here, please don’t think I’m awful, saying this, I feel this overwhelming need to—I want you so badly. It sounds sick, weird, I can’t help it. I feel so ashamed. I’ve heard of things like this, how death does this, like instinct kicks in, but I always thought it was stupid and—”

  “I feel the same way,” he said, unable to get up from the bed, unable to look away from her. “I mean, wanting. I’ve felt it, too. Don’t think I’d be able, though.”

  “No.” She didn’t move. “Would you like to have a baby?”

  “Nadya—”

  “Someday?”

  He got up, took her in his arms, feeling the wiry smallness of her, rocking. “It’s cold. Get dressed.”

  She put on her turtleneck and overalls. They hung wrinkled on her. “I look like a bag lady,” she said, pulling on her socks. Once she’d knotted her hightop shoelaces, Toby reached out for her hand. “Let’s get steppin’.” One of his father’s phrases. They walked back to where Murchison sat poring through canceled checks in the dusty prismed glow of the dining room chandelier.

  “I want to bring my father’s horn with me,” Toby told him, setting down his bag. “I don’t want to find out somehow it turned up missing.”

  He didn’t wait for a response but marched back to the practice room. He spotted it in the far corner, the wood shell case propped open, about the size of a child’s coffin. The big brass Selmer horn with its lacquer finish lay inside, bedded in dark red velvet.

  Murchison returned to the Victorian where he reconnected with the officer-in-charge, a corporal named Coover—African American, short and moonfaced but hard in the body. Nose tackle material. He closed his e
yes every time he laughed, and he laughed often.

  Coover pointed vaguely toward the street. “Anything new?”

  “Tell you in a minute. What about in here?”

  Coover nodded at the door to the cellar. “Just what we found down there, the funky, nasty, smelly soup cans and such. Jesus. Nobody knows the rubble I’ve seen.” He laughed, softer than usual, but even so his whole torso shook and the eyes narrowed to slits. He pointed to the ceiling. “And his little crow’s nest up top. No weapon. No stash. This floor, second floor look clear. What’s naked to the eye, any rate.” He ran his fingertips along a window ledge, rubbed the gritty dust away. “Messed up, but clear.”

  “Anything to suggest the guy had a cell phone, a recharger, batteries, anything?”

  “No such luck, and that’d be luck, Murch, admit it.”

  “Evidence tech on the way?”

  “Yeah, and the stuff in plain view we got bagged.”

  Murchison liked working with Coover. He did things. “Okay.” He took a pair of gloves out of his pocket, slipped them on. “Let’s get busy on outside plain view.”

  Coover shot him a wary look. “Sure that’s not a little gung-ho?”

  “We’ve got permission from the owners to search the premises. And the kid staying here had no expectation of privacy, he was an intruder. Add to that what I learned outside. The girl who was with the vic last night? She remembers a guy matches the visual on our slob in here getting into it with the old man at the club where the son was playing. Besides, the guy looks like a firebug, and we’ve had too may fires around town not to act on that. I’ll take the risk. Public safety. We’re looking for a weapon and any further evidence of arson.” And any safes, he thought, where Long Walk Mooney stashes his cash. He looked around the empty, filthy space. “Okay. You want, start down-stairs. Do the wall sockets, check for loose floorboards, ceiling panels, everything. You find anything, leave it where it is, holler. Let me make the judgment call before we actually bag it up. If it looks like I should have gone for the warrant—”

  “I can keep a secret,” Coover said.

  Murchison nodded, grateful and at the same time uneasy. “I appreciate that. I’m gonna take one last check upstairs.”

  On the second landing, a pull-down spring ladder led to the third floor. Murchison scurried up, entering an attic, half built out. Plywood sheets had been laid down for flooring, and where they hadn’t been, knob-and-tube wiring ran exposed along fiberglass insulation decades old. He lifted the nearest edge of the dense stuff, once pink, now gray, checking for a stash spot—a gun, shells, a cleaning kit, anything—then made a mental note to make sure they ripped up every square inch of it before they were through.

  The whole place smelled like an ashtray. Murchison, bowed at the waist to make the low clearance, headed for the window at the far wall.

  They’d taken away the cigarette butts and logged them into evidence, but the burn marks remained, rough black smudges on the knotholed wood, marring the window ledge, too. They’d also found and bagged up a half-dozen spray cans and hundreds of spent matches. The kid was making flamethrowers up here, entertaining himself with practice—but nobody’d seen that. In a high, curtainless window on a dark street. Sometimes it seemed a miracle they ever solved anything.

  Manny had come and gone through a basement door, a padlock protecting the place while he was away, a broom handle propped up against the door when he was inside. That would clear Stluka for any blame in not discovering he’d been getting in here. He slept and ate in the cellar, out of sight, but then, to pass the time, climbed up here.

  Looking out the window, Murchison could see the whole front yard of the Carlisle property, much of the back. The angle was wrong for peering in beyond the curtains, but Murchison harbored little doubt why Manny, whoever he was, had sat up here. Same reason he’d turned up at the club.

  He had a thing for the girl.

  How that played into the victim’s fight with Arlie Thigpen—or the fact that the victim’s sister and Arlie and Manny all had ties to Long Walk Mooney—he couldn’t say just yet. A cell phone and its record of calls would help, but Coover was right, that was a long shot. One thing remained obvious, though, from just the way they’d found this window. Manny obsessed. Murchison would bet anything the object of that obsession was Nadya Lazarenko.

  He cringed, remembering what she’d said—Why are you being so hostile? It echoed with the contempt he’d felt from her at the hospital, with the disdain he’d felt everywhere the past few hours. What have we done? … There is a sadness about you, Detective … a kind of desperation. Marcellyne Pathon had wanted him out of her house, though she’d been too Christian, or scared, to tell him so. And the way the nurse at the hospital had screamed at him and Stluka to get out, you’d have thought they’d been going after the Lazarenko girl with razor blades.

  Again, he felt puzzled by how much it bothered him. Only rookies expect gratitude; it was one of the first casualties of the job. And yet he wasn’t like Stluka, dividing the world into cops, fools, and assholes. But there were times he found himself driven by little more than habit and a shameless need not to look ridiculous. He didn’t have any ideals or convictions anymore. The job beat them out of you.

  Who are you doing this for?

  The problem, he knew, was him. Arlie and Toby, they’d been suspects; he had every right to go at them, even with the liberties he’d taken, the lies he’d told. Not everyone would back him up on that, but their resentment didn’t trouble him, at least not as much as the others. The others had sensed something he’d been unable to hide. You don’t see it in yourself? Unsettling, having his expression unpacked like that, the way he unpacked the faces of men he interrogated. And once he realized that the accusers who troubled him most were women, it came to him.

  It had happened several months ago, in the dead of night. Joan thought he was asleep, lying on his side with his back to her. Sliding behind him, she loosened the drawstring of her pajamas, reached inside, and fingered herself to climax, trying to disguise her breathing so as not to wake him. He didn’t stir—it felt cowardly at the time, more so in retrospect—just listening. He wondered if she’d needed him near her, needed his scent, the warmth of his body, to feel aroused. If so, it seemed a dismal kind of flattery.

  Sex had seldom been easy between them. Catholicism? Too easy to blame. She never looked at him was one problem. On her back, or her on top, straddling him, she closed her eyes. Or, her preference, being taken from behind. Was it her or him? He knew what his face looked like; even back in his playing days, he’d hardly turned heads. He couldn’t find the words to tell her how it made him feel—again, that manly, cowardly inability to talk.

  Once she’d finished, she retied her pajamas and slid back to the far side of the bed. In time, her breathing settled and she drifted off. He remained awake, engulfed in a loneliness he supposed there was a word for.

  14

  Ferry returned to his lair in the office complex, plugged in his laptop, and logged on. He’d needed to get the lay of the land first before connecting with Marisela.

  He typed in her E-mail address, and like most Central Americans, she had a Mexican ISP. True to their routine, he wrote in English, the better for her to practice. He wrote simply, mentally translating his words first into his own rudimentary Spanish, then back again, knowing her shaky understanding of his language matched his own feeble grasp of hers. Six years, you’d think one or the other would have improved in the foreign language department, but given the nature of the attraction, talk had never been their first priority. Besides, they spent a lot of time apart anymore.

  Querida Marisela: My work is complete tonight. I drive to Baja tomorrow. Tell Ovidio that somebody, one of his friends or contacts, needs to meet me with a boat. Pick a place, Bajamar to El Rosario. Sorry I did not know sooner. Things just happened quick. I realize it’s a lot to ask, but I’ll pay. I miss you, and think of you every day.

  They’d met a few
years after the UN-brokered peace accord removed the odious Salvadoran military from any law enforcement role. An exchange program developed between a few American and Salvadoran police departments. Ferry—at that time Bill Malvasio, his given name—had ten years behind him with Chicago PD. He’d spent the last three working undercover with the Area Six tac team—mocking up tracks on his skin with mortician’s wax and mascara; waiting as robed women from Nigeria crapped out balloons filled with Karachi white; breaking down teary strung-out hookers in shooting galleries, manhandling their crotches searching for the little knotted Baggies. It was great fun. He and a few of his pals on the squad called themselves the Laugh Masters.

  He got teamed up with a squad of Salvadoran officers scheduled for antinarcotics work and befriended a few. They were tough types, a little of the old macho swagger, but generous guys, a trait he learned was typical. They invited him down for a visit, meet the families, see their own mean streets, such as they were, and get a feel for what they did shift to shift.

  He’d never seen such beaches—Costa del Sol, Playa El Tunco, Playa El Sunzal—all within a stone’s throw of tin hut villages and beggars. Fifty-year-old school buses painted Halloween colors carried campesinos through the dense wet heat from La Libertad into the interior for starvation-wage work, trailing flatbeds stacked with sugarcane. Women carrying baskets atop their heads made their way along roadside culverts where derelict cattle grazed. Despite so many wretched poor, the bratty rich, the grimy heat and the hard life, he told himself, I could live here. Strange, how idle dreams sometimes harden into necessities.

  He’d met Marisela in Santa Tecla. She was the sister-in-law, la cuñada, of one of the narcs he’d trained, Ovidio Morales, and she worked for her father’s lumber business. A true morena, she had the kind of deep dark eyes Ferry could get lost in. Her body was slightly plump—she bemoaned the poundage on her hips, patting it sometimes like a pair of holstered guns, calling it mis pistolas—but the soft skin, the high cheeks, the full lips, they did the trick. Not to the point he’d marry her, bestow the much-wanted green card, but they were amantes speciales. Amazing, the degree of heat a gringo lover could excite in that country, especially once prices shot sky-high when the dollar muscled the colón aside as the official currency.