Fail

by Rick Skwiot

  Gabriel raised a finger to his lips. “Nothing official yet on this. Very hush-hush.”

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “Let’s compare any prints to those on the laptop I gave The Gecko yesterday.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. You’ll find them in the case file.” Gabriel turned away and waved as he moved back to his sedan. “‘Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night,’” he quoted as he retreated. But night was still a long way off.

  - 7 -

  From the Arch garage, Gabriel drove north on I-70 and exited at Riverview Boulevard, where the highway turned, and continued north, moving eventually onto Lewis & Clark Boulevard at the city limits. Within another ten minutes he was pulling into the plowed parking lot of the St. Louis Veterans Home.

  “Merry Christmas!” This from a young woman, high school age, at the reception.

  Men were already moving toward the dining room. Some ably, some with canes or walkers, some in motorized wheelchairs. Some were not much older than himself. He joined them as they cajoled the slow movers down the hallway.

  Gabriel found his father sitting ramrod straight at a table by himself, coffee-skinned and bespectacled, his walker, yellow tennis balls on its feet, behind him. Despite the overheated room he wore a blue cardigan sweater over a white cotton turtleneck. Even at eighty-five, he still had the hard glint in his eye.

  “Keep your knife out,” he had told his son more than once. “Then no one will mess with you.” It worked for him. The other vets settled in at nearby tables allowing Sergeant Samuel Gabriel the dubious pleasure of his own company.

  “Hey, Dad! Merry Christmas.”

  The old man lifted his chin in mute reply. Gabriel sat.

  He brought his father up-to-date on Tim and his great-grandchildren as the meal was served: passable turkey and stuffing along with canned cranberry sauce, grayish green beans, and pecan pie. His father listened without comment and, when Gabriel had finished his report, changed the subject to football.

  “The Rams don’t look so good. They used to have some players. Marshall Faulk. Isaac Bruce. Now just ballerinas and fat boys. And they won’t let them play, won’t let them hit.”

  He had been delighted when the team moved from Los Angeles to St. Louis in 1995. He had been a Rams fan in the ’50s and ’60s when he spent time in California as he shuffled back and forth to Korea and Vietnam.

  “You got the book I sent?”

  “‘NFL’s Greatest Players.’ You would have made a tight end, son.”

  “I know.”

  “You had the hands and the height.”

  “They didn’t have football at Saint Louis U., remember? It was roundball that paid my way.”

  “Still.…”

  They stayed put as the others finished their dinners and moved off to the TV room and the card room. Soon Gabriel and his father were alone except for two women busing away the dishes. The old man told them to leave Gabriel’s pecan pie, which he hadn’t touched.

  His father had not changed much with age, at least physically. He’d put on a few pounds and lost what minimal hair he’d had. His face sagged yet remained largely unlined. Even though his legs were shot he maintained his broad chest and powerful arms, using hand weights that he kept under his bed. Even now Gabriel figured his father could still take him at arm wrestling.

  “Ollie Matson.”

  “Huh?”

  “Now there was a football player. Long before he played for the Cardinals and Rams, I saw him play at University of San Francisco when I was waiting to go to Korea. That was nineteen and fifty-one. They were undefeated but got no bowl game because Ollie was colored.”

  Gabriel tilted his head. “Lots of changes since then.”

  His father cast him a glance. “At first we had our own units. Then the Army disbanded the 24th Infantry Regiment, so we all fought and died together. Same in Vietnam.”

  This was one of the mental changes: Now he talked about the past and about the wars. He had refused to when Gabriel was growing up. He would be gone for months or a year at a time then show up unannounced and suddenly be part of the family again. No, not part of the family but a haunting presence in their home, moving about like a sleepwalker, as if in a trance. Quick to correct any misdeed or mistake and quick to anger, as if a caricature of a drill sergeant. Gabriel had avoided him as best he could. And always, when they saw him off at Union Station, the old man would kiss his wife and daughters goodbye then turn to his only son. “My eye is on you, boy,” he’d say. Then he’d shake his hand, lift his olive-drab duffle bag to his shoulder, and step aboard the train.

  “In Korea we had men, men who’d fought in World War II. In Vietnam it was different. Young fools right out of college or high school. You had to kick their butts to keep them alive.”

  A philosophy that Samuel Gabriel had also applied to his own son: hard love, with only the hard part apparent to a child. It had always been a shock to young Carlo when his father appeared and took charge after being feted and pampered for months by his mom, who, like most Mexican mothers, treated her son like Christ Almighty. It was why—in addition to Gabriel’s skin color, which was a notch closer to his mom’s light bronze than his dad’s brown—that as a boy he identified more with her and clung to her.

  But for all his parents’ seeming differences, they displayed only affection for one another with nary a caustic word between them, at least not in front of the children. They had met at the Fairmount Park racetrack across the river from St. Louis, where her father trained horses, when Samuel Gabriel was stationed in nearby Granite City. Love at first sight that never wavered.

  “You did a good job of that, Dad, with your men.” And maybe even with his son.

  “You have to fight the good fight to make your way. Be smart. Give it all you got. You making your way now, son? Or are they still messing with you?”

  “Doing okay. Hoping to be back downtown soon.”

  His father snorted. “You did right. You were taking care of your people. Civilians don’t understand.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Your men are your family. You’re responsible. You take care of your people. That’s why they call it service. Nothing wrong in serving. You don’t forget that, Carlo.”

  His father, nonetheless, seemed to forget that Carlo was almost fifty-five and not fifteen.

  “Yes, sir. I won’t.”

  - 8 -

  One good thing about being detached from headquarters was that he didn’t have to set an alarm. No morning meeting, no bureaucratic B.S., no adult supervision. Another gray day coaxed him to sleep till nine. When he finally got to the office, Gabriel stopped by The Gecko’s cubicle, where he found him navigating a laptop.

  “Stone’s?”

  “Just got going on it. I sent you the list of officers on duty at the mayor’s party. Guest list too.”

  Gabriel went to his office and perused the guest list on his laptop. The usual suspects: the Board of Aldermen, of course; the chief, fire chief, and acting school-board president; corporate bosses (both for-profit and nonprofit), Democratic Party bosses, the archbishop, and the Reverend Norris Pritchard, who ran a string of downtown homeless shelters; developers, bankers, news media shakers. He shrugged mentally, moved on to the duty roster for the event, and said aloud, “Aha!”

  He found Bosco again at the front desk.

  “Officer Boscovic!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Can you account for your whereabouts last Friday, December 20, between the hours of eight p.m. and midnight?”

  “Yes, I can, lieutenant. I was standing around bored shitless sober in the Mayfair Hotel ballroom watching the mayor and his cronies get plastered.”

  Gabriel lifted his laptop onto Bosco’s desk. “Remember seeing this bloke?”

  Bosco studied Stone’s photo and nodded. “Yeah, he was there.”

  “Notice anything about his activities or demeanor?”

  Bosco was th
inking, his thick lips parted, his tongue pushing outward the side of his chiseled face. He made a great witness in court: cocksure, unshakeable, and always with telling details that others missed and lent credibility—urban warfare apparently made one particularly observant. All delivered with a Slavic accent that made him sound like a philosophy professor. Bosco raised a finger to his eye.

  “He is a sly one, always seeing. Moving around the room.” Now his finger described a circle. “Listening, not much talking. Always one eye on the mayor’s woman.”

  “Mrs. Cira?”

  “The other.”

  “You mean his press secretary, Ellen Cantrell?”

  Bosco fixed Gabriel with a heavy-lidded gaze. “I mean Ellen Cantrell, the mayor’s woman.” He made an obscene gesture with his fist.

  Gabriel blinked. “Really?”

  Boscovic raised an eyebrow and tilted his head to the side as if to say, “Doubt me at your own risk.”

  “Interesting. Thanks.”

  As Gabriel walked back past The Gecko’s cubicle, he heard, “Hey, Carlo! Question.…”

  He stopped.

  “The backgrounder you sent me said Stone was working on his dissertation.”

  “It’s not there?”

  “Is this it: ‘The Masks of Mark Twain: Misidentification, Subterfuge and Disappearance as a River to Truth’?”

  “Yep, whatever that means.”

  “Funny.”

  “Funny what?”

  “The file hasn’t been touched since September second. Doesn’t seem like he was all that interested in finishing it.”

  After basketball and a steam, Gabriel left his car on the YMCA lot and walked down the alley to Olive Street. Still no sunshine. Dirty snow in the gutters. It had been a week at least and snow was still banked up in the street.

  He waited for the light to change at 14th Street and sensed the warm gas wafting up from the storm sewer—unmistakably St. Louis. It smelled of the river and the limestone caves that undermined the city.

  He moved on to the Central Library—a monumental white-stone building with arched entrances—and trudged up its front steps. Wasn’t it just yesterday that his father showed him how to use the microfiche reader, the card catalog with its long wooden drawers, and the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature? Now the dreaded nexus of research tedium was all computerized. He pulled open the heavy door and thought about all the date nights he’d spent studying with Janet. Deep history, now shunted into his personal archives.

  He found Dadisi sitting at a low table in the children’s library, a thick paperback opened in his lap. His two daughters turned the pages of an oversized book picturing mountain ranges, forests, and lakes. When he saw Gabriel, he closed his book and rose with effort from the child-sized chair.

  “The knees. That’s what goes first.”

  “Don’t I know,” said Gabriel, knocking on the wooden doorjamb as they passed into the Great Hall with its arched windows, ornate ceiling and chandeliers.

  Dadisi looked up. “I love this place, man. Carnegie gave the money for it, you know. Used to have glass floors back in the stacks to let light through. My wife worked here before moving to the university library.”

  They stopped and Gabriel turned to him. “Can I ask a personal question?”

  “Okay.” Dadisi cocked his head.

  “You’re doing well. Why stay in East St. Louis?”

  “Ah, a personal question—from a cop’s point of view. Yeah, it’s depressing and dangerous, but it’s home. I grew up there. Those are my people. Most everyone and everything have abandoned it, but I haven’t given up on it yet. I’m involved. Mayor’s advisory group, board of a charter school, this and that. People are counting on me to do the right thing.”

  Gabriel studied him. “Me too, brother. You helped by directing me to Stone’s student evaluations. Now I’m counting on you to help me some more.”

  “Still no sign of him?”

  “We found his car at the Arch with the keys in it.”

  Dadisi shook his head. “I don’t like that.”

  “Maybe it’s not what it looks like. If I could get a clearer picture of his state of mind it might help me find him and put everyone’s cares to rest. That’s why I called.”

  “His state of mind? How good could it have been? He’d just been canned.”

  “Depends on how and why. Lots of people lose their jobs. Very few go postal or leap into the Mississippi.”

  Dadisi pulled out a chair at a wooden table in the bright-lit room. Gabriel sat across from him. The teacher brought his hands together at his lips as if in prayer. He stayed that way a moment, quiet, reading glasses hanging from his fingertips. Then he looked up. “Still confidential?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’ve got a full-time gig, but it’s not tenure-track. So I didn’t tell you anything, okay?”

  “Got it.”

  “I don’t know all the details and some of what I know is second- or third-hand, but it’s not that complicated. Stone had a junior-college transfer in his grammar class, DuWayne Hawkins. Starting forward on the basketball team, who needed to pass the course to move on to freshman comp and remain eligible. But that was somewhat in doubt. Apparently someone leaned on Betancourt to make sure Hawkins got through, and he leaned on Stone. But Stone dug in his heels.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He came back to our office after meeting with Betancourt. I’d never seen him so angry. Seething, near tears. He said DuWayne was a second-rate player on a second-rate team and never going pro. He wasn’t going to give him a second-rate education as well. He’d been passed along his whole life by people abdicating their responsibility. ‘It stops here, with me,’ he said. I believed him. Stone may be naïve and idealistic, but he’s a man of his word. And his heart’s in the right place.”

  “You had lunch with him last Friday?”

  “Being it was his last day, I took him down the street to an Italian place.”

  “What was his mood?”

  “Pensive, as always. Seemed like a lot stirring around inside—understandably. But if Stone was devastated by getting the sack, he didn’t show it—though he never showed much. Word had gotten around that he wasn’t coming back. His cover was that he was taking time off to work on his dissertation. I told him, ‘You got a raw deal, man.’

  “He stared at me and said: ‘I’m not the victim here.’”

  “Who then?” Gabriel asked.

  “He meant DuWayne Hawkins.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “You read the sports page Sunday?”

  Gabriel shrugged.

  “DuWayne scored thirty points Saturday night in the Quincy Holiday Tournament.”

  Outside the library, Gabriel checked his cell phone and found a text message from Detective Rebecca Sellers. As he had anticipated, the only prints found in the black Jeep—two sets, one male, one female—matched those found on Jonathan Stone’s laptop.

  He dialed Laura Berkman and turned his back to the wind.

  “Laura baby, where are you?”

  “Board of Aldermen committee meeting,” she whispered.

  “Have you eaten? Meet me for late lunch?”

  “Is this a date?”

  “It’s on me. Enter it in your diary however you want.”

  “Give me a half hour.”

  She showed up forty-five minutes later at a dark steak house a block from City Hall. Gabriel, who sat sipping red wine from a tall goblet and reading a paperback, stood as she approached. They grasped hands and brushed cheeks. Berkman sat and reached across to lift Gabriel’s book from the white tablecloth.

  “‘English Grammar for Idiots’? Part of your reeducation, lieutenant?”

  He motioned for her to hand it back. “Spied it on the new-books shelf at the library. Relates to my top-secret assignment.”

  “That’s right: Literature and language, you said. Interesting reading?”

  “Depends upon you
r mood.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke, as in ‘subjunctive mood’?”

  “Perhaps, but it’s not imperative to laugh.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Spare me.”

  A waiter came and handed her a menu. “Pricey. I am going to guess that this is more business than pleasure.”

  “A little of both.”

  “When will I ever again get a full dose of the latter?”

  Gabriel reached for his wine and sniffed. “You probably can’t tell, what with the dim light and my dark complexion, that I’m blushing.”

  “Due to my sexual innuendo?”

  “Not that but my failure to call for an encore. You see, well… I’m not good at explaining myself. Just ask my ex.”

  “Try, just a little. I thought our one indiscreet night was pretty hot.”

  “As did I.”

  “Yet no reprise.”

  He sipped more wine to buy time while he found the words. “You’re a good gal, Laura, and I am one faithless cop. Again, ask my ex. Lovers I can find. Friends don’t come so easy. Wouldn’t want to jeopardize that with my noted fickleness and faithlessness.”

  She fondled her silver necklace as she considered his explanation. At last she said, “I guess that makes sense. You’re probably right—woman scorned and all that. But perhaps an occasional get together between friends who know the score might be okay.”

  The waiter brought her a glass of wine.

  “That might be more than okay,” Gabriel said with a smile. He tipped his glass to hers. “Cheers.”

  “Maybe we should get down to business. I take it this has to do with your top-secret assignment.”

  “It does. This is big for me, Laura. If I can handle it right I’ll be back where I belong.”

  “Never realized you were so ambitious.”

  He bit his lips, thinking.

  “Not sure I am. Despite my usual line of crap, it’s not about the money or the title or the perks. It’s about respect. My dad was—is—all spit-and-polish, ex-military. A man I both loved and feared—and still do. He drilled it into me to be a stand-up guy. And that was my rep until that shit hit the front page. Made me look like I was some kind of depraved thug. This would be vindication for me, Laura.”