He saw the overturned kitchen table first, the scattered chairs, then the large stain of blood on the linoleum, a trail of drops leading away from it and into the living room.
He instantly felt a rush of fear. It was ice cold, a blast from within. He stiffened, as if against an actual wind, and it took all he had to finally make himself move again.
Stepping into the living room, he followed with his eyes the trail of dried drops to another large stain. This one, though, looked like a spatter. The coffee table had been overturned, the couch was on its side, and there was, in one of the walls, the kind of dent that could only be left by a person being slammed against it.
His first instinct—to flee—was difficult to resist. There was a chance, though, however slim, that Lebell might be somewhere else in the apartment. Maybe hurt, maybe worse. The only room Cal couldn’t see into was the bedroom. He hurried to its doorway, adrenaline rushing into his limbs. Opening the door, he found the complete opposite of what he was expecting.
This room was undisturbed, no sign of blood anywhere.
He lingered in that doorway for a moment, both confused and relieved. Eventually, though, he stepped back into the kitchen and noticed that the blood trail also led to the doorway. The lamp above the overturned table cast enough light for him to see down the narrow stairwell beyond. The trail continued there.
Again, he fought the instinct to flee; knew, though, that he had to think through it. He was, after all, standing in a crime scene. A genuine shock, his suddenly being in the middle of one. So this was what it was like. His fingerprints, he realized, were everywhere—on the doorknob downstairs, the railing, as well as the door to the apartment and the light switches—God knows where else. Too many places for him to run around and wipe them away. Certainly his boots had brought in trace elements from the garage—oil, fibers, bits of stone from the gravel driveway. Not to mention that he must have at some point stepped in the dried blood.
No, fleeing—with so many traces of himself here—was out of the question. Anyway, where would go? Back home? To do what? Wait? That was what he had come here to avoid. Besides, all this blood—all the signs of violence—meant that in some way or another that Lebell was in trouble.
Realizing that there was only one thing he could do—the right thing to do, the expected thing to do, what, certainly, a good boy would do—Cal removed Heather’s cell phone from the pocket of his peacoat and switched it on.
Once the phone had powered up and located a signal, he dialed 911.
Seven
From the back of a patrol car, Cal watched the cops.
The first to arrive, moments after he’d made the call, was an officer named Clarke. She was in her late twenties, attractive and fit, brown hair, oval face, sharp eyes that never wavered from Cal’s as he told her his story. It was her patrol car that he was in now, having been put there when the second cop to arrive, a sergeant named Spadaro, instructed her to do so. Spadaro had also instructed her to take Cal’s driver’s license and cell phone. In that backseat, stripped of his only piece of identification and with no way to open the doors or even lower the windows, he felt both trapped and shut off from the world.
Well, not the world, he didn’t care about the world—but Heather. What if she needed him? What if she tried to call while the phone was in the possession of the police? He remembered what she had said about not trusting them. He could barely think of anything else. Did either of these cops know Heather’s husband? Did both of them?
Of course, he hadn’t forgotten about Lebell, or all the indications of violence up in his apartment. From the backseat of the patrol car Cal watched as the two cops set up a perimeter with yellow tape, hoping to see something in what they did that would mean something, tell him anything. Did they already know that Lebell was dead, and would it show in how they moved? Cal saw nothing, and it wasn’t long after the perimeter was set that a third patrol car arrived. Through the closed window Cal overheard—from this third cop as he walked past Clarke’s patrol car—that a detective was on the way. This third cop gave further instructions, but he had already stepped out of Cal’s earshot.
Again, shut off from the world.
The three cops then studied the blood trail on the sidewalk, pointing down the street, away from the village, not toward it. It was in this direction that the trail went. Cal watched them discuss it. By now, drawn by the commotion and the flashing lights, the neighbors had begun to emerge from their homes. They gathered together, some on the sidewalk, some in the middle of the street. It was obvious by the way the three patrol cars were parked—not to mention the yellow tape strung across it, from one signpost to another—that the street was now closed.
Cal did see something in the behavior of these cops that was telling. Once the third cop had arrived, all communications, which had up to that point been via radios, switched suddenly to cell phones. Telling, maybe, but of what Cal didn’t know.
Ten minutes passed before another vehicle, an unmarked sedan, arrived. Cal recognized its driver the moment he got out as the detective who had been assigned to Aaron’s disappearance—and then murder—four years before. His name was Messing, and he was, from what Cal remembered, a decent enough guy, polite, straightforward; he had seemed genuinely sorry for Cal’s loss, for this young man left now to fend for himself.
Messing talked to the three cops for a few moments, then stepped aside with the third one and talked to him privately. Finally, Messing headed inside Lebell’s apartment, waving for Spadaro to join him, leaving Clarke and the third cop to remain outside.
As Cal waited he began to sweat under his peacoat. It took fifteen minutes for Messing and Spadaro to exit the building. As they spoke to Clarke and the third cop, the four of them standing on the narrow sidewalk, Messing looked toward Clarke’s patrol car. Clarke was talking now, giving Messing her report, and he nodded as he listened, looking away from her patrol car—the solitary figure in its backseat, actually—only long enough to quick-check his watch, which he did several times.
Cal was feeling restless now. Just as Clarke finished giving Messing her report, the detective’s cell phone rang. Cal could barely hear it through the glass. Messing answered, stepping away, talked as much as he listened, then ended the call and immediately gave orders to Clarke and Spadaro. The two cops began to clear the street of the neighbors, and Messing stepped aside again to speak privately to the third cop.
It seemed clear to Cal that they were now preparing for the arrival of another vehicle, and sure enough, not long after Clarke and Spadaro had gotten everyone back on the sidewalk, another unmarked sedan turned onto Meeting House Lane and came to a stop behind Messing’s.
Its bright headlights filled the inside of Clarke’s patrol car, then finally went out. A man emerged, dressed in a suit and an overcoat and shining black shoes. By the way Messing reacted to his arrival—he broke away from the third cop midsentence and walked quickly to meet this man—Cal knew that this was the person for whom Messing had been waiting, and that this person was someone important.
This man and Messing talked for a moment, alone, the two of them standing close together, as if in a two-man huddle. Now the man in the overcoat was looking toward Clarke’s patrol car. He never once, though, unlike Messing, took his eyes off the kid in the backseat.
Messing did most of the talking—bringing the man up to speed, no doubt—and when Messing was done, the man in the overcoat said a few words. The detective handed him something, and then something else, but Cal couldn’t see what.
Then the man in the overcoat nodded once, and he and Messing stepped off the sidewalk and headed toward Clarke’s patrol car.
They crossed the narrow street with determined strides.
As Messing opened the driver’s door, a gust of cold air came rushing into the interior, which had gradually grown chill in the half hour Cal had been waiting and watching. First flipping a switch on the door’s console that unlocked the back door, Messing then climbed in behind the wheel. Th
e man in the overcoat opened the back door and slid in beside Cal.
Someone’s cologne quickly erased almost all trace of Cal’s scent. The man beside him adjusted his overcoat and got comfortable, didn’t look, though, at Cal. It was his cologne, Cal determined, that came in with all that cold air. Up front, Messing watched Cal via the rearview mirror mounted on the windshield.
“How are you tonight, Cal?” Messing said.
He was in his fifties—an older man, a larger and better-dressed man, certainly, but Cal, the scrawny kid in jeans and a thermal shirt and old peacoat, wasn’t intimidated. Shy around cops his whole life, he nonetheless knew their ways, had learned all he needed to know about them from his father. Having done nothing wrong, he was determined not to let either of these men make him feel as though he had, which, his father used to say, was a favorite trick of theirs.
“It’s Cal, right?” Messing said. “You prefer to be called Cal.”
Nodding, Cal looked over at the man in the overcoat, could see now what it was Messing had handed to him before they had crossed the street.
Cal’s driver’s license and Heather’s cell phone, in hands that were easily twice the size of Cal’s.
The man in the overcoat was looking at the driver’s license, holding it with fingers that were long and thick.
“Rakowski, Adam C.,” the man read. “Cal, I take it, is your middle name.”
The less said, the better, so Cal didn’t answer. In his head now, suddenly, his father’s words, various warnings spoken over time so long ago.
“Cal is short for what? Caleb? Religious parents, maybe?” The man paused, then said, “I’m curious why you don’t go by your first name.”
Cal shrugged. “I just don’t.”
“Messing here says your father was something of a career lowlife, and that his name was Adam. Apparently you’ve never once had a run-in with the law yourself, not even a traffic violation. So I was wondering if maybe there was significance in you not going by the same name as your old man.”
He’d been Cal for as long as he could remember. His only real memories of his mother were of her saying his name. A voice in the darkness, as she tucked him in—good night, Cal, good night.
If there was any significance at all to his being called by his middle name instead of his first, it had never been shared with him.
“Actually,” Messing said, “Cal here seems to have his head on pretty straight. So far, anyway. Which is pretty impressive, considering that the Rakowski clan was known to be something of a wild bunch. The only reason I know him at all, in fact, is because both his father and his brother got themselves killed. Years apart, but the circumstances weren’t all that different. How long ago was it for your brother, Cal? Three years?”
“Four.”
“Sorry to hear that,” the man in the overcoat said. His voice, though, was flat, empty of feeling—empty even of the pretense of it. “How did he die?”
“He was shot,” Messing said. “During a drug deal gone bad. A shame, actually; it looked like he’d finally gotten his act together. He’d been in lots of trouble when he was younger, but then he seemed to turn himself around, became an A student, was even an all-state wrestler. After graduation he even found a steady job and managed to keep it, which is pretty good for anyone out here. Then, one day, boom, out of nowhere, back to his old ways and shot dead.”
Not exactly the whole story, Cal thought, but he didn’t bother to correct the detective, didn’t see the point in telling either of them that it wasn’t a drug deal gone bad, at least not in the sense Messing meant. Only Cal—and the girl Aaron had been determined to help—knew this. Only they had cared.
If you are going to use, I want you to use here, not behind my back, Aaron had told her one night. It hadn’t worked; she took off anyway, leaving not just Aaron but Cal, too. Several nights later, Aaron went out to buy her drug of choice, as a means, no doubt, of luring her back.
It was only then that Cal made the connection between what Aaron had done so long ago and what Ronnie Pamona had tried to do.
Two completely different things, he quickly told himself. Two completely different men.
The man in the overcoat, still reading the license, said, “There’s that old saying. ‘The apple eventually falls.’ Just how far from the tree it lands, that’s the question.”
Cal looked at the reflection of Messing’s eyes in the rearview mirror. His confusion—who the fuck is this guy—must have shown, because Messing promptly said, “Cal, this is Special Agent Tierno. He’s with the FBI.”
Tierno reached into his overcoat, removed his identification, flashed it for Cal, then returned it to the inside pocket. He did this, more or less, without taking his eyes off the license.
Was it really taking him this long to read the name and address? Was he taking note of every piece of information it contained? No eyewear restrictions, a motorcycle endorsement, the small icon of a heart to indicate that Cal was an organ donor. Maybe the man was looking to see if the license was a fake? Why would it be? Anyway, Messing knew who Cal was, and that he’d always been that.
The son of a thief who had been the son of a thief and so on.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” Tierno said. He handed Cal the license, then turned his attention to the cell phone, flipping it open. “This is your phone, correct?”
“No.”
Tierno seemed confused by Cal’s response—and perturbed. He glanced forward at Messing’s reflection. There was an element of hostility in the way he looked at the detective.
“You were carrying it, were you not?” Tierno said to Cal.
“Yeah, but it isn’t mine. It belongs to a friend of mine. She let me borrow it.”
Tierno nodded, looked back at the phone. “Not a lot of usage, I’m told. Two incoming calls tonight, nothing at all before that. No outgoing calls, either.” He pressed buttons, scrolling through the various menus.
“Like I said, it’s not mine.”
Tierno closed the phone but held on to it. “Officer Clarke, is it?” His question was directed to the detective in the front seat.
Messing nodded. “Yes.”
Finally, Tierno directed his attention to Cal. He was in his forties, Cal guessed, with short dark hair and a square, clean-shaven face. He wore a near-permanent look of skepticism: thick black eyebrows furrowed above squinted eyes, mouth held tightly closed, an expression that somehow conveyed both neutrality and mistrust. From this Cal had concluded that the FBI agent had already decided to doubt everything Cal told him—or at least make Cal think that.
Cal, though, wouldn’t be so easily baited. His father’s words were like echoes now, faint but distinguishable, repeating again and again.
He hadn’t thought of his old man for a long time. Now, countless little memories Cal didn’t know he retained.
“Officer Clarke,” Tierno continued, “said that you arrived looking for your friend and that you found the door open. Is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“And you went inside because you saw the blood.”
Cal corrected that. “No. I went in, then saw the blood.”
“So you didn’t see the trail on the stairs.”
“The light was out.”
“You left it off?”
“No. It doesn’t work.”
Of course, Tierno had to know all this—getting facts wrong in this way was just another part of the game authorities liked to play.
“I don’t understand something,” Tierno said. “Did you have plans with your friend tonight?”
“No.”
“So you just happened to stop by?”
“I hadn’t heard from him all day. I came by to see if anything was wrong.”
“Is there any reason why something would be wrong?”
“Other than the fact that I hadn’t heard from him, no,” Cal said.
Tierno nodded, said nothing to that. Maybe he knew that was a lie, maybe he didn’t. I
t was possible that this silence was meant to unnerve Cal, compel him to fill it, elaborate, confess something, anything. Cal didn’t for even a moment think of taking this bait, either. He instead let the silence linger, leaving it for someone else to break.
“Your friend, his name is Lebell, right?” Tierno said finally.
“Yeah.”
“How do you two know each other?”
Cal hesitated. Both he and Lebell were off-the-books employees. More than that, they worked in a garage that wasn’t anywhere near up to code and would certainly, should the wrong people come to know about it, be shut down in a heartbeat. Good reasons, these, not to answer the question.
“You aren’t in any trouble,” Messing said. “We just need to know a few things so we can figure out exactly what happened here.”
“Is he dead?” Cal said.
Maybe the detective was aware of the similarity between this night and the night Cal had been told that Aaron was dead. It had been, in fact, Messing himself who broke the news to Cal.
“We’re hoping to find your friend alive,” Messing assured him. “We need your help if we’re going to do that.”
“Frankly,” Tierno said, “I am a little curious how you happened to become such good friends with a man like him.”
“What do you mean, ‘a man like him’?”
Tierno ignored the question. “I’m going to ask you again. How do you two know each other?
“We work together.”
“Where?”
“An auto shop.”
“You’re a mechanic?”
“Yeah.”
“What did your friend do there?”
“Body work. Part-time, when we need him.”
Tierno nodded, thought for a moment. There was something in the way he did that that told Cal this detail was somehow significant.
Up front, Messing said nothing, continued to watch Cal through the rearview mirror. Cal suddenly felt a flash of anger. He no longer cared who these men were, what badges they possessed and the powers that came with such things. He was tired, had had enough of their games, was about to ask what the hell was going on, was about to demand that they cut the shit, when Tierno finally spoke.
[2010] The Violet Hour Page 10