Where the dead lay fb-2

by David Levien

  “Those guys said the reeds past where it gets marshy, right?” Tino asked.

  “They said the marsh. Where it’s reedy.” Pete sounded sure. The fact was, the tall grass they were slogging through stretched for a few hundred yards, and then there was some even taller grass ahead. Tino let the bags drop, straightened, and pulled up for a blow.

  Pete heard the wheezing and also stopped for a breather, looking back.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Tino asked. Pete shrugged, looked around, and started for some thick growth in the shadow of the berm under the train tracks.

  “Over here,” Pete said.

  “I goddamn love working with you, Petey,” Tino said and hoisted his load for the last time.

  • • •

  If we leave about now, we’ll be on I-70 over to 65 north and back in Chicago by the morning rush, Brodax thought. But at least we’ll be back, and rid of the car by noon. He flicked away a second cigarette when he saw them coming. Sweating like barnyard hogs, the two of them. Especially Tino. Their shoes, and their pants up to their calves, were smeared in red-yellow clay like they’d waded through sick baby shit.

  “Done, Bob B.!” Tino wheezed, climbing up onto the road surface, pushing a hand down on Pete’s shoulder to get a leg over the guardrail. Pete’s lips pressing together in effort was his only protest. They reached the car. Brodax looked to Pete, who slapped his hands together like he was dusting off crumbs.

  “Good,” Brodax said. He pulled a garbage-can liner out of his pocket, snapped it open, and in went their muddy shoes.

  THREE

  Ooh-ah, ooh-ah,” the little blonde moaned as Kenny Schlegel rode her. The “ooh” was the down stroke, which she was enjoying plenty, the “ah” caused by the impact of his new necklace banging into her chin on each thrust. He wasn’t so much nailing her as trying to bounce that thing off her face like it was some kind of carnival game. Kenny would’ve won the smaller prizes and traded all the way up to the jumbo for how good he was getting at it. It had him totally distracted from how tight the little blonde’s body was, and that had made him last at least thirty or forty minutes now.

  “Ooh-ah, ooh-ah, ooh-oh.” Though they were just taps, the repetition of it was going to leave a bruise on her face, he realized with satisfaction. But she wasn’t complaining none, the dirty little thing. What was she gonna say anyhow? Little sophomore bitch. Nice of her to wait around all night for him, too. She was pretty cranked up from the day before, so what else did she have to do? Her breath smelled like beer, and her pits reeked a little from the zoot. But in a good way. He put his face into one and took a deep sniff.

  “Oh yeah, Kelly, you ready for some skeet?” He looked to her eyes, which opened and flashed because he knew her name was Kathy. That’s why he’d called her Kelly. But she didn’t hit him as he’d hoped. She just upped the tempo. Maybe it was for the best, considering the big-ass bruise he had spreading all over his own cheek. He took another deep whiff, then reared back, ripped off the jimmy hat, and gave her an eight-roper across the belly. She moaned and groaned like some porn she must have seen, and as it subsided, all he could think about was last night, and breakfast.

  FOUR

  Aurelio Santos keys his way into his studio in the predawn gloom. He wears a warm-up suit and track shoes. He’s thinking about riding his motorcycle along Copacabana beach and how glad he is that the Indiana winter is over, when they come at him. Three masked assailants appear from around the building and do a push-in. The first one shoves him from behind, but Aurelio quickly recovers his balance, gets hold of the shover’s arm, and shoulder-throws him into the wall, caving in a chunk of it. Aurelio squares, swings, and lands a punch to the jaw of the second attacker, who goes down to the floor, toppling table and chair on his way. Aurelio moves to foot-stomp his face, when the third man racks a shotgun. Merda! Aurelio freezes, then raises his hands. He slowly backs across the mat…

  Is that what you did, Aurelio? Behr wondered. Is that the way it went down? Behr drove around, barely paying attention to where, or to the zoing and boing of morning radio playing low in the car. After a half hour or so the streets began filling up with the morning rush around him. There wasn’t much of it. Three cars in a row seemed like traffic in Indianapolis most of the time. But it was enough to slow him down and piss him off.

  First thing Behr had done after he had exited the academy was to go around the back of the building to look for anything with meaning. The rear door was closed and locked, which, as it was a fire door, it did automatically. There were old cigarette butts and a few broken bottles among the weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, but the pieces looked too small to hold prints, and besides, they seemed like they’d been there for a long time. The windows were undisturbed and there was no way to get on the roof short of bringing your own ladder. Just like inside the academy: he had a big pile of nothing.

  The sun was already climbing, a thick heat spreading itself over the city, as Behr went back around front and wrote out a note: “All Classes Canceled.” Once the cops were done, they’d lock the door, affix a crime-scene sticker, and leave, and people who hadn’t come that morning, or hadn’t heard the news, might keep showing up. Behr stuck the note to the front window and got out of there. He’d wanted to miss the morning students and assistant instructors. He’d talk to them all soon enough-when he interviewed them-but he wasn’t in the mood for hand-holding and hugs at the moment. Then, since he couldn’t canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, as the cops would be doing that and wouldn’t appreciate him stepping on their toes, he had started driving.

  Behr pulled up in front of Aurelio’s house. It was a one-story brick bungalow with a Toyota parked in front. He needed to get in there and take a long look, but now wasn’t the time for that. Police would arrive within minutes, Behr anticipated. He weighed the risk for a split second before hurrying to get a pair of latex gloves out of the kit in his trunk. He tried Aurelio’s car, which was locked. So was the house, both the front and back doors. Behr peered in through the windows but couldn’t see much past the horizontal blinds. What he did see looked undisturbed. Behr stripped off his gloves and hurried back to his car. When the detectives went knocking on doors he didn’t need any neighbors ID’ing him.

  Aurelio’s place was a mile and a half from the jiu-jitsu school, and it wasn’t unusual for him to jog that distance to get warmed up before training. That might have been the case today, which would explain why the car was still at home. Or he might have been taken against his will, Behr considered, getting back in his own car and turning over the engine. He was making the left back onto Baker as the first detective’s unmarked unit rolled toward Aurelio’s house…

  Cruising around envisioning how the thing could’ve gone was a pointless exercise, but Behr couldn’t help himself. At least for those moments, in his mind, Aurelio was still alive. And when he was done, because he’d run out of things to do for the present, the finality of it was able to surge up into his chest. It was the old vault door asking to be opened, to be filled, to be slammed shut again. All the shit he’d seen on the street as a cop, and then as a private investigator afterward, needed some place to go. So he’d learned pretty quickly to make a spot for it. An empty box inside him where he could throw the pain, and drop the lid on it before it became intolerable. The tendency was to stop thinking of the victims as human beings altogether. Instead, they became a set of facts, an equation to solve, a clue, a piece of meat to be handled. This gave the investigator objectivity. It gave him the ability to reason. It made him powerful and knowing so he was ready in the moment when he had to interdict a perpetrator. Problem was, before long, the ability to discern was lost and a lot of other things ended up getting thrown in the vault as well. Good things, like wives and kids and friends. Just about everything really, and if you weren’t careful, or even if you were, you could end up zombied out, going through the motions in your life and the work, praying that mere competence would get you by.r />
  The evolved cop, the one who distinguished himself, the one who made it all the way, managed to push the pain down someplace but not cut it off completely. He carried it and retained his connection to it, and what it meant. The victims remained human beings to the good cop, and despite the pain-or because of it- that became the cop’s salvation. Behr wasn’t sure in which group he’d spent most of his time on the job. He had his suspicions, especially at the end. But on this one, he swore, he would do it right. So he let the pain come. He let it come.

  A loud, angry honk sounded behind him. Behr looked up and saw he was sitting at a green light. He glanced into his rearview mirror at the pickup truck behind him and raised a hand. “I’m going. I’m going,” he said and turned for home.

  FIVE

  Susan Durant was in the bathroom peeing on the little plastic tab when she heard a car pull up and Frank’s heavy step sounded on the stairs. It was only supposed to take a minute for the results, but she didn’t have time. Besides, she had her suspicions about the answer and didn’t know how to handle her reaction. She finished up, flushed the toilet, dumped the contents of the small trash can, which contained the box and directions, into the CVS bag, and dropped the plastic tab in on top of it. She was in the living room smoothing her skirt over her hips when he entered. She turned from the mirror and smiled as the door closed behind him.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  “Is this skirt riding up? I put on three pounds the past month. You’re gonna have me fat and happy, Behr,” she said, hoping she sounded breezy.

  He didn’t respond, and instead entered the kitchen. She heard his hand clattering among glass bottles as he fished around the makeshift bar on the counter. She reached the doorway in time to see him find a small bottle covered by a white paper wrapper. He emptied brown liquid into a glass, tried to add club soda from a bottle that was empty, then splashed tonic in the glass and drank. Susan stepped farther into the kitchen, still holding the plastic bag.

  “You’re drinking, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  Behr grimaced, finished, held up the bottle for her to see. Angostura. “Just bitters.” He launched the bottle into the sink, where it broke.

  “Why are you back so early?”

  “Aurelio’s dead,” he said. She absorbed the news, a dozen questions raised and checked in her mind.

  “How?” she finally asked.

  “Murdered. Shot. At the school,” Behr said, watching her try to understand. Then he looked at her more closely. “What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No?”

  “No. God, Frank, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry. How could this happen?”

  Behr shook his head.

  “Are you okay?”

  He just stared at her. She went to him, put her arms around him. He didn’t return the gesture. He was a log. She stepped back and looked at him. His face was taut, heavy dark brows knit. His black eyes were distant, but focused, as if fixed on something departing far away on the horizon. He wasn’t even there in the kitchen with her, not really. She hadn’t seen him like this since the beginning between them, when he’d been fifty feet deep on a case.

  “Was it a robbery?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Was it a random thing? Could it have been an accident?”

  Behr shook his head again.

  “I mean… could he have been… what was he into?” she wondered aloud.

  Behr stopped shaking his head and looked at her. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just that if it’s not a fluke thing, then-”

  “Then what? He was into some shit and had it coming?”

  “Frank, no, that’s not what I… Not how it was supposed to sound-”

  “Just lay off the theories then, all right? They’re not gonna help here.”

  She looked at him. The tension was immediate, thick, and unfamiliar between them. They’d been getting along well this past year and change. Too well, maybe, like a couple of frigging songbirds. But now, with all the thorny Scotch, German, Irish, mid-western, and Pacific Northwestern blood in the room, an apology was a long way off. She stepped back. “I’m here for you if you want, but it’s pretty clear you don’t,” she finally said. “I’m going to work.”

  “Fine,” he said, and nothing more.

  After another moment she picked up her purse, kept the plastic CVS bag she was carrying, and headed for the door.

  “See you,” she said.

  “Yeah-” he answered, as the closing door clipped off the word.

  SIX

  Vicky Schlegel put a plate of egg whites and whole grain toast down on the kitchen table and turned back to a pan sizzling on the stove behind her. The Smiley Morning Show played on the countertop radio. Outside, the dogs, smelling the food, were stirring in their run.

  “Hold on, I’ve got your bacon about ready, hon.” She drew on her cigarette and appraised her youngest boy Kenny’s shirtless back as he salted his eggs. He was getting big from all the lifting, just like his brothers. He was already bigger than his father, Terry, but not bigger than Terry had been at that age. They’d met when he was a few years older, but she’d seen pictures.

  “You know I can’t eat that fatty shit, Ma.”

  “I know, I know. It’s turkey bacon,” Vicky said, shoveling the strips out of the pan with a spatula and moving away from the stove.

  “Awesome.”

  “You asked me once, that’s all it takes, dear,” she said and put the strips on his plate. He looked up and she saw the bruise purpling on his cheek.

  “Kenny-bear, what happened to your face?”

  “Training, Ma,” he shrugged. “It’s nothing. Gimme some character, right?”

  She smiled, and then her eye fell on the nasty black tattoo on the left side of Kenny’s chest. “RTD,” in Gothic lettering. It was some rapper’s slogan-“Ready To Die.” The thought of it made her shudder. All three of her boys wore ink. It was the style now. Damn disgrace, she thought. “Spray paint on a Rembrandt,” was what she said when Kenny had come home with the lettering on his seventeenth birthday last year.

  “You think I could get some OJ, Mrs. Schlegel?” the little blonde asked. Vicky turned toward the girl-Karen, was it? — and picked up her cigarettes. Three handsome boys like hers, all with the ladies’ man gene courtesy of their father, and it was a constant stream of chippies in the house for Vicky to deal with. She should’ve held the line when Charlie, her oldest, started asking if it’d “be cool if his girlfriend crashed on Friday nights.” She should’ve told him it certainly was not cool. And she would’ve if she had foreseen that the Fridays would turn into weekend-long “hangs.” By the time her middle boy, Dean, started dating, they had “guests” on weeknights, too. Then, when Kenny made it to high school three years ago, it became a regular flow of horny little things parading through the house. She couldn’t keep the names straight and didn’t even try anymore.

  At one point a few years back Vicky had gone to her husband to put an end to it. “What should they do, go fuck in a car like the tar babies?” Terry had said. “Besides, you’re the one who says you’re too young to be a grandma.”

  “C’mon, Terry,” she pleaded.

  “Rubbers and a room, it’s the least we can do for ’em. Boys’ll be boys,” he said, and laughed. She had a suspicion he liked having the string of ripe little bouncies around. Now it seemed the house was perpetually running out of toilet paper and frozen pizzas, and the little wenches would’ve drummed her out of shampoo and makeup altogether if she didn’t put her foot down on that.

  Now Vicky turned to the latest skank du jour at her kitchen table and gave her standard reply: “Oh, honey, listen, I’ll serve my boys till I die, but not their little twists. It’s just a rule I have. So get it yourself.” Vicky jutted her thumb toward the refrigerator and lit her cigarette. A short snort of laughter was the only evidence that Kenny had
heard it.

  The blonde’s nose wrinkled in hurt. “Jeez. Kenny, can we just do the picture now?”

  “In a minute,” he said, taking a bite of his food. Then he piled the egg whites and turkey bacon on the whole grain toast.

  The girl made a huffing noise and crossed her arms. Mrs. Schlegel just leaned against the counter and drank her coffee.

  “All right,” Kenny said, folding the toast into a sandwich, “Let’s go, ya little hoodrat.”

  He got up and led her out of the kitchen. “C’mon, Kenny-bear,” she said and snapped the waistband of his boxer shorts as they went.

  “Get off,” he said, swatting at her, causing her to giggle.

  Vicky Schlegel reached for the coffeepot and seethed.

  SEVEN

  Aurelio Santos jogs up Cumberland and slows to walk the last block. He crosses the parking area and be-bops toward his studio, quietly singing “Chuva, Suor e Cerveja.” His keys click and rattle as he spins the key ring around his finger, ready to let himself in. When he reaches the door and inserts the key, the bolt doesn’t turn, it is already open. Estranho, he thinks, sure he’d locked it the night before. He walks inside and is hit across the back of his head, a solid blow. The pain comes in a hot rush that makes him see white. He tries to keep his balance, reaching for the chair, but falls through it, crashing into the table next to it and knocking it over as he hits the ground. Knees to armpits. In a rush of instinct, he rolls to his back and curls into a tight ball, finding the position that’s second nature to him. He spins on his back to face his attacker. In the dim morning light he makes out a few others coming from behind the first one. One holds a large black shotgun. That’s what I was hit with, Aurelio registers, and then launches out a low sideways kick that lands on his attacker’s patella. The man goes down. Aurelio seizes the opportunity to kip up to his feet. But the blow to the back of his head has done damage and he doesn’t land solidly. He totters to the side, getting hold of the second man, but not for a clean throw. Instead, he lurches forward, knocking the man into the wall, caving it in. Then more white flashes through his eyes, as he is gun-butted in the back of the head for a second time. He feels himself falling, falling through darkness…