AHMM, June 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Each pair of eyes scanned every inch of this scrawny Anglo as my escorts led me into the first room on the right. I was grateful that the plan, such as it was, did not depend on blending.

  The room held six others about the same size, four draped on the assorted overstuffed furniture and two at the window to see what else might have followed this specimen into the neighborhood.

  The man in the lead rapped on a closed door across the room. Something was said from inside. He opened the door and stepped back. I took that as an invitation.

  I walked up to the table in the middle of a room. A quick scan told me that there were five others scattered around the room, any one of whom could take me apart like a chicken. There was also a feeble old man rocking in a chair in the corner. Center stage, seated behind the table, was the one who made my stomach clench. The black shaved skin of his head emphasized the two pits of burning coal that were looking deep into my soul. I promised myself that if I ever walked out of that room alive, I'd switch to real estate law.

  "So you've got a message for me, lawyer. What's the message?"

  His voice was low, heavily accented, and full of the confidence I wanted to exude. I gave it my best shot.

  "Not so much a message. It's an offer."

  A grin came across his face. “What you got to offer me?"

  I ignored the grin. “Nothing."

  He froze a bit, but the grin came back. “You playin’ with me, man?"

  "No. As a matter of fact, I'm not even talking to you. I'm talking to the man in charge."

  The old man in the corner stopped rocking. He slowly got out of the chair and walked over to the table. One motion of his head got Coal Eyes out of the chair, and the old man sat down.

  The white of his beard and scant hair stood out against the weathered ebony skin. He moved with more grace than his age would have indicated.

  "You're a clever young man."

  "And you're an operation that moves around fast. I figured it was unlikely that a man of your years would be along as just baggage. I mean that respectfully."

  He smiled. “I so take it. Now to business. What's this offer?"

  He was a man who inspired direct talk.

  "You have Keno Westoba's family. And you have him in your grip. You wanted control for two reasons. You wanted Keno to burn a building. That's done. The second reason is to prevent him from causing you problems with anything he might say to the police. A man died in the fire. If Keno were to tell what he knows, you could all be facing a murder charge. You therefore need insurance that he won't."

  I paused. He was listening with his eyes closed. He opened them, looked at me, and said without commitment, “Go on."

  "The insurance you were counting on expired. It no longer works. I can offer you new insurance."

  I doubted that the deliberate calm in his voice was still legitimate.

  "Expired, you say? What does ‘expired’ mean here?"

  "Keno is in the hands of the police. They have him out of harm's way and available as a witness. Keno is ready to tell them everything he knows—or not, depending on what I tell him when I see him."

  The old man raised his palms. “If, as you say, we are holding his family, I only say ‘if,’ what makes you think he will say something now that he wouldn't say yesterday?"

  "Today he's heard that all of his family is dead at your hands."

  Now I had his attention. The mask of coolness was gone. I was either cooking or cooked.

  "And where would he hear such a thing?"

  "I told him."

  I was playing a little loose with the truth on that one, but on average I was hewing to the line of honesty. I reinforced it.

  "Keno believes you've killed them all. I made him promise to say nothing to the police until I talked to you. I can see to it that he continues to say nothing. Permanently."

  "And at what price."

  "You bring every one of his family that you're holding to this room. We leave together. I take them to Keno and show him they're alive and free. He will promise to say nothing. One thing more. Keno will execute a sworn affidavit disclosing everything he knows about you and give it to me. It will be in a safe place with instructions to deliver it to the police if any accident occurs involving Keno, his family, or for that matter, me."

  I could sense the wheels were turning. There was one last play.

  "You're wondering how you can believe me. Is Keno really with the police? May I use your phone?"

  He nodded to the telephone in front of him.

  "I'm calling the district attorney's office. I'll put it on the speaker so you can listen."

  The receptionist at the district attorney's office answered. I asked to be connected to Deputy District Attorney William Coyne. When Mr. Coyne picked up, I said, as we had planned, “This is Michael Knight. Please contact Keno Westoba wherever he's being held. Please have him call this number and simply say one sentence and hang up. Please have him say, ‘I'm in protective custody and I'm waiting to hear from Mr. Knight.’”

  Two hundred years went by in the next ten minutes until the phone rang and sent both of our heart rates over two hundred. I let the old man answer it. He just listened and then slowly lowered the phone.

  The old man looked at the others and then back at me. I could read what was going through his mind.

  "If you're thinking of moving out and going underground somewhere else, I suggest you look out that window."

  He nodded to one of the men close to the window. The man looked out the window and said something rapid and tense to the old man in their language. I thanked God once again that Billy Coyne had come through with police cars in the street at both exits.

  I looked him straight in the eye.

  "The deal is on the table. If I walk out of here with all of Keno's family, I'll see to it that he says nothing. The police will not have him as a witness against any of you. I can get the police cars to go away."

  "And I should trust you because...?"

  "Because this time, the shoe's on the other foot. This time you have no other option. I'm offering you the only way out. Otherwise you all face the death penalty, and whatever cause you're working for goes down with you."

  The old man, to his credit, remained unflustered. He gave it a minute's thought, during which time I reviewed all the regrets of my life—the greatest being getting into this situation.

  When he stood up, I knew what a defendant feels like on trial for his life, when the judge says to the foreman of the jury, “Please read the verdict."

  I was still in the dark when the old man shouted an order in dialect to one of the men and sat down in silence. He never looked at me for the next five minutes.

  An eternity later, the same man came back through the door with a woman about Keno's age and two small children.

  The old man still never looked at me. I threw him one last bone.

  "When these people and I get into the police car downstairs, we'll leave. You'll be free to move the whole operation wherever you want. I'll go directly to Keno and keep my part of the bargain."

  He nodded, and the men drew back from the doorway. I took the woman and each of us carried a child. We moved slowly through the hall and down the stairs and into the waiting police car. The woman was in tears, clutching the children, and I exhaled for the first time since I entered that building.

  * * * *

  We drove directly to where Keno was being held in protective custody. I had the pleasure of bringing his wife and children to him. I thought he'd burst an eardrum with the scream he let out when he saw them. There were tears enough to flood the Charles River, and I don't think a tank could pry apart the embrace that glued the four of them together.

  Deal or not, I had little trust in the Haitian mobsters. I wanted Keno and his family out of there. I used the reunion time to contact Daddy. I knew he had contacts in the jazz world all over the country. True enough, he made a phone call to a contact in Kansas City, a neat little jazz
town far from Boston and Philadelphia. With his recommendation of Keno's talent, he was able to set up a steady gig in a jazz club with a musician who took Daddy's word as gospel.

  * * * *

  There was just one promise left unfulfilled—this one to Billy Coyne. I made the trip back to Philadelphia to pay a call on Sosa Agipa in the lock-up where he was being held. At Mr. Coyne's request, the Philadelphia police were holding him for extradition to stand trial in Boston.

  Considering how we last parted company, there were no hugs and kisses when we met. He fell into a sullen silence, which let me do the talking.

  "You may think you had a bad day yesterday, Sosa. I guarantee you, today's worse. I just paid a visit to the big shot. You're very much on his mind. He and the boys are about to be picked up for the murder of Hector Makela. Keno won't testify against him. That leaves just you between him and the death penalty. How far do you suppose he trusts you at this moment, especially since he remembers that you were the one who led me to him?"

  His muscles looked tense, but the only outward reaction was a sneer. He was probably thinking of the small army of Haitian muscle that blocked the path to the boss.

  "You didn't see no one. You're a lying..."

  The rest is better not set in print. I kept my cool.

  "It's your life, Sosa. You can end it any way you want. Just one thought. You're being indicted for being an accessory to the murder of Makela. Any way you look at it, you're going to be spending a lot of time in the prison population. There are a number of Haitians mixed in there. You could even draw one as a cellmate. I guess maybe you're familiar with what they do to comrades they think might rat them out."

  He turned to stone.

  "I'm offering you full security in the witness protection program. In other words, I'm offering you your life in exchange for your testimony."

  His silence told me he still had his doubts about any of this—particularly my meeting with his boss. I got up and headed for the door. I gave him one last shot before leaving.

  "It's your call, Sosa. I'm just the messenger. By the way, your big secret boss? I'm surprised that he's a little guy, must be in his seventies, white thinning hair, white beard over black skin, has a gash about here on his chin. Tough cookie though. Adieu, Sosa."

  I left him with the look of creeping panic I was hoping to instill. I heard later that when they took him back, as he approached the door of his cell, he looked in at a Haitian inmate sitting on his bunk. That could have been an arranged coincidence. The inmate said one word to him in the Haitian dialect, and it sent Sosa into the arms of the guard and from there, directly into the witness protection program.

  As planned, when Billy had the police cars pull away from the house in Roxbury as I had promised after I took Keno's family out, he had a couple of undercover officers follow the old man and his band of merry men as they moved headquarters to another part of the city. They were sitting ducks for arrest as soon as Sosa began supplying testimony.

  * * * *

  I was in Daddy's on a Monday night about a month later. He took me into his office. He had that grin when he played me a tape he had just received from an address in Kansas City. It was a jazz trio that was really cooking. I could pick out the familiar riffs and phrases of the saxophone in the midst of his improvisation. I thought it was neat that our man, Keno, was keeping alive the spirit of Hector Makela.

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  Copyright © 2005 by John F. Dobbyn.

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  The Body in the Spring by Kevin Prufer

  The child had rolled with the waves all night, her hair spread around her like sea grass or a reflection of clouds. Her hands slept at her sides, and as the waves lifted her body, her back seemed to arch just slightly, her head tilted back into a heavenward gaze. She did not blink. Neither was she beautiful, though parts of her had that moonlit quality one might find in a page from an old storybook, something romantic, something cast against the slowly brightening cliffs of Dover. But this wasn't Dover, and the men around her, tugging her gently to shore with hooked sticks, weren't lovers. A woman took a picture with a flash, and off by the boats, the man who'd found her cradled his head in one hand and seemed to sleep.

  And then they had her, pulled her against the tall grass along the shore. The woman with the camera took another picture, and they lifted her, wrapped her carefully in a white cloth, and carried her past the yellow crime-scene tape to the back of a truck, where they spread her on a pallet.

  Later, they'd say that she'd seemed to have aged in the drive from Pertle Springs to the coroner's office in Kansas City. Unwrapping her, Detective Armand would gasp, because this wasn't a girl at all, but a grown woman of perhaps twenty-five or thirty. And how had he missed the wedding ring? Of course, she was small—that accounted for his misperception—and the moonlight, because the full moon had been out early that morning, had softened her features. In the harsh light of the coroner's office, she was no longer beautiful at all but, like any early death, both horrible and vaguely touching. She had a cut on her lip, but it had healed. And when the coroner snipped away her flowered blouse and traced over her belly with a cotton swab, he noticed that jagged smile of a caesarian section. Otherwise, nothing. No wound, no purse, nothing to give her name or history away.

  They hadn't been looking for her. They'd been looking for a ten-year-old girl who'd vanished with a redhaired man from the woods behind the Community Center, not a grown woman who'd slipped, perhaps, from a boat or the pier and had been dragged under. This wasn't his victim, was probably no victim at all. She was nobody's victim.

  But that night she returned to him. He lay in bed alone and recalled her face: gape-mouthed, the way the moonlight shone off her teeth. He recalled her feet, how they bobbed on the water, one foot unshod. Where had the other black pump gone? He imagined it rocking gently on the bottom of the lake, sifting into the sediment, half buried, now buried completely.

  He remembered the man who'd found her, how he'd touched Armand's shoulder and looked into his eyes. “I don't know her,” he'd said. “I was out for a walk and out of the corner of my eye—"

  He fixed himself a drink—bourbon, neat—and sat in front of the television. Too many nights alone, he thought, too many nights without Marcia. Twelve, no thirteen, weeks. Thirteen weeks.

  * * * *

  "Wrong stiff,” Franklin said. “All the way to Warrensburg for the wrong stiff?” He laughed. “No shit?"

  "It's true,” Armand said. They'd spent the morning knocking on doors, quizzing unfamiliar people in strange living rooms. Two children had seen the redhaired man take the girl by the hand and lead her through the woods, a shortcut to the parking lot. They'd thought he was her father. One of the camp counselors leaned against the door frame and cried. She'd been in charge.

  "Wrong fucking stiff,” Franklin said again. “Lighten up! The girl might be alive yet.” They were in the Plymouth, an unmarked police-issue. It smelled of Lysol and aftershave.

  "Sure, sure.” He sipped his coffee.

  "Cheer up, friend. You gotta get back in the world.” Franklin nudged him gently, turned the radio up. Some rap tune.

  "I didn't sleep, that's all. Who's next?"

  And so they drove on and on, into the night, from house to house. He called the coroner twice, but no one had turned in a lead on the drowned woman. There was no reason to suspect foul play; she'd slipped, most likely. Hit her head on the edge of the pier—no one had found a stray boat anywhere—and was pulled under. Could happen to anyone, especially after a couple drinks and a rain to make the wood slick.

  And no leads on the redhaired man or the girl, his fourth victim, nothing. Franklin said, “I'm gonna clock out for the night, Armand. You want to stop by for dinner?"

  "I'm good."

  "You need company, my man. I'll call Shavonne. She'll put an extra plate down. Have dinner with us. It's not healthy, sitting around your house all evening watching Cops. You gotta
get back among the living."

  * * * *

  Marcia, his wife, drove off one evening and never came back. Someone had found the car smashed against a utility pole on North 350 near the airport. Smashed and flipped over so glass scattered like sharp little ice shavings on the snowy road. In the police photograph—he insisted on seeing the photograph, though Franklin urged him not to, urged him to let others handle it—the scene was half veiled in snow squall. The flash had caught the taillight and glared. The Civic, he thought, looked like an insect turned and helpless on its back. That night, he'd fought with Marcia, and now he wished she'd just kept driving. It would be so much easier if she'd just kept driving, driving, driving out of Kansas City to Iowa, to Minnesota, north and north and away. He closed his eyes.

  About that time, the girls began to vanish. First a little blond child, seven years old, from River Market. And then another, and another. A girl vanished every month now in Kansas City—and a uniform tending the parking meters said he saw the latest disappear around the corner with a man in an army jacket, a man with red hair. Every month, and Franklin and Armand had driven up and down the streets, knocked on doors.

  "I need to think about a career change,” Franklin said.

  Silence.

  "Redheaded cracker. Only time a black man isn't public enemy number one in this town. I'd say it was a relief—"

  Armand grinned at that.

  "Gotcha,” Franklin said. “You cracked a smile."

  Later, he called the coroner again, who seemed irritated now. “No,” he said, “no news. Nobody's come forward. No one's claimed the body. Why do you care?” Armand shrugged, put the cell phone away.

  He and Franklin drove and drove through the streets of Kansas City.

  An old woman in a housedress said she'd seen the redheaded man in line at the Piggly Wiggly, said he bought a turkey baster and a set of Ginsu knives. “You know what he's doing with those girls?” she asked. “Isn't it obvious?"