The Silent Hour

by Michael Koryta

  For a while, bits of the conversation with Ken Merriman played through my head, the most frequent recurrence being the moment he'd confessed it was Dominic Sanabria who'd called him. He'd thrown that out casually enough. It was your buddy Sanabria. Too casually— Was it something to wonder about, or just alcohol adding a dose of paranoia to my brain— I meant to ponder that one, but then the wind blew harder and the clouds moved quicker, and eventually the water glass slid from my hand and I was asleep.

  I dreamed that I woke. Sounds crazy, maybe, but it happens to me now and then, always when I fall asleep somewhere other than my bed, and often when the mind is encouraged toward odd behavior by alcohol or fatigue. This time I dreamed that when I came out of sleep I was facing the trapdoor that led to the stairs, still in the lounge chair. A figure stood beside the trapdoor, and my dream-mind registered that with surprise but not alarm. I didn't move from the chair, didn't speak, just watched the figure standing there in the dark, and eventually my vision adjusted and I saw that it was Parker Harrison.

  He looked at me for a long time, and I knew that I should rise, say something, order him out of my home, but instead I watched silently. The longer I looked at him the more my surprise edged toward fear, a steady crawl, and I held my breath when he reached into the shadowed folds of his clothing with his right hand. The clouds blew past the moon and a shaft of white light fell onto him, and I saw that though his face was normal the flesh on his arm was gone, only thin bones protruding from his sleeve. When his hand came free again, it, too, was nothing but bones, a skeleton hand, and there was a silver coin between his fingers.

  He looked across the roof at me, and then he flicked his thumb and spun the coin skyward. The moonlight gave it a bright, hard glint. He caught the coin and flipped it again, and again, and it seemed dangerous now, each flash as wicked as the edge of a sharp blade. My fear built with each toss and burst into pure terror when he caught the coin with an abrupt and theatrical slap of his hand, snatching it out of the air and folding it into his palm and hiding it from the light. When he clasped his hand shut, the bones shattered into a cloud of white powder that turned black as it drifted down to his feet. The coin landed on the roof and spun as the black dust settled around it, and suddenly I was awake and upright, my hands tight on the arms of the chair.

  I held that position for a few seconds while the wind fanned over the roof. It was much colder now than when I'd fallen asleep, and below me the avenue was silent. I swung my feet off the chair and stood up, forgetting about the glass resting against my side. It rolled off me and fell away from the chair and shattered on the stone, and I nearly jumped off the roof at the sound.

  The sparkle of the broken glass near my feet made me think of the coin from my dream, and like a child who can't trust that the dream world was a false one I turned and looked back at the trapdoor as if expecting to see Harrison there. The door was nothing but a dark square in the surface of the roof, and it was also behind me and not in front of me as it had been in the dream. I took a deep breath and walked toward the door, stepping over the broken glass. That could be dealt with in the morning. Down on the avenue a car finally passed by, rap music thumping out of its speakers, and I was grateful for the noise. I walked to the trapdoor and climbed carefully down the steps and then folded them back into the roof, the door snapping closed with a bang. It was dark inside the building, and my head pounded with a pressurized ache, as if someone had pumped it full of air, searching for leaks in the skull.

  "No more bourbon," I said aloud. "No more bourbon."

  I groped along the wall for the light switch, flicked it up, and flooded the hallway and stairs with light. Halfway to the apartment door, I paused and turned back, squinting against the brightness, and looked down the steps at the front door. Closed, and with the dead bolt turned. Of course it was. Of course.

  I went into the apartment and drank another glass of water, this time with a few ibuprofen tablets, and then went into the bedroom and slept. There were no dreams.

  Morning found me at the office with an extralarge cup of coffee and a continued headache, researching Ken Merriman. I spent most of an hour at it, and while everything he'd told me the previous night checked out—he was from Pittsburgh, had worked as a PI for fourteen years, was divorced, and had a fourteen-year-old daughter—there were a few details he'd chosen to omit. Namely, the unpleasant press he'd received from the Cantrell case.

  James and Maria Cantrell had given an interview after their son disappeared, imploring the public to help in their quest. As a part of that interview, they let loose on Ken, claiming he'd taken thousands from them and done nothing on the case. James even suggested they would consider a lawsuit against Ken but couldn't afford the legal fees. The reporter had contacted Ken only to be given a "no comment" response. It wasn't necessarily a fair attack—every PI in the business knows the headaches that come from clients who believe they're paying for a specific result, not for work that may produce no result or one contrary to the client's wishes—but it was the sort of publicity that could damage a career, too. I was impressed that Ken had survived it, and I understood a little better why he seemed to be stuck with insurance and infidelity work now. Still, the Sanabria call lingered with me, and that odd personal revelation toward the end of the night. Had it been too much— A melodramatic sales technique—

  I knew a PI in the Pittsburgh area through a group called NALI, the National Association of Legal Investigators, a generally high quality group of PIs. His name was Casey Hopper, and he was about Joe's age; he'd been around the business a long time and knew who was worth a shit and who wasn't. I decided it might be worth a call to see if he'd ever heard of Ken.

  "Good guy," Casey said as soon as I mentioned the name. "I've worked with him several times."

  "You trust him—"

  "Much as I trust anyone I don't know particularly well, sure. He's always seemed genuine enough to me, but, you know, there've been some stories about him. Well, one story really."

  He then proceeded to relate the Cantrell case to me, and I let him run with it. His take seemed to jibe with every other account—and that included Ken's.

  "You thinking about giving him some work—" Casey asked.

  "The other way around. He's wanting to partner up on something. I'm not sure about it."

  "Well, I can tell you this: He's one hell of a surveillance expert. Good as anybody I've worked with, in that regard. Damn near invisible, and the most patient son of a bitch I've ever seen." He paused, then added, "You know I was a sniper in Vietnam, too."

  "Yeah."

  "So when I say somebody is patient…"

  "Yeah."

  "Thing with Ken, though, is that's really all the work he gets. He has a steady client base on the surveillance side, insurance and divorce work, shit like that, but as far as a field investigation goes, I don't know that he has much experience at all. I gave him an interview job once when I was out of town, subbed it out to him, and he screwed that up pretty royally. Just didn't know how to take a statement that would be worth a shit in court. So I've avoided giving him anything like that again, and that seems to be the general consensus about him around here. Give him any extra surveillance work you've got; otherwise, find somebody else. He wasn't a cop, wasn't mentored by a good PI, doesn't really have any background on a full-scale investigation, but the son of a bitch can hide in your rearview mirror."

  That wasn't exactly encouraging, since the case he wanted a piece of now was going to require the polar opposite of his skill set.

  "The Cantrell thing is what he's interested in coming back to," I said. "I bumped into it inadvertently up here, and he looked me up and asked me to help."

  "He's back at that— Who the hell is paying him—"

  "Nobody. He claims he wants to finish now what he couldn't then. You buy it—"

  Casey was quiet for a moment. "Yeah, I probably do. It did some real damage to his career basically because he didn't have any other experience
to claim as proof that he knew what he was doing. Ordinary people might forget the story, but law firms and agencies who sub out work, the sort of people you need to rely on for quality business, they don't."

  I thanked him for the insight and hung up. Then I went back to search for more information and found little else. Beyond that story, there was nothing that stood out, and certainly no indicators that Ken had been telling me anything but the truth. His loyalty to the family seemed odd, considering the charges they'd levied at him, but perhaps his real motivation was in proving them wrong all these years later.

  It was ten thirty by the time Ken showed up, and he looked rough. Same clothes as he'd had on the previous day, only now his face had a darker shading of beard and the whites of his eyes wore pink cobwebs. He closed the door behind him with infinite care, as if a loud slam might shatter something in his brain, then looked over at me with a pained smile.

  "Maybe I should have told you this last night," he said, "but I'm not a whiskey drinker."

  "I like a good Scotch," I said, "but that swill wasn't it. It occurred to me sometime around three in the morning that what the Hideaway considers a well bourbon is probably closer to leaded gasoline."

  He groaned and fell onto one of the stadium seats.

  "Careful there," I said. "Those seats watched the Cleveland Browns beat the shit out of the Steelers many, many times."

  "I'm too hungover to even rise to that argument."

  "That bad, eh—"

  "Yeah. You bounced back well. Sleep it off peacefully—"

  I remembered the slap of Parker Harrison's skeleton hand, the way the bones had burst into powder, how it had looked like fine black dust by the time it settled around the spinning coin.

  "Peacefully," I echoed with a nod.

  "Wish I could say the same," he said and then held up the scuffed briefcase he'd carried in with him. "Last night you agreed to look this over with me. In fairness, though, I thought I should give you a sober chance to back out of it. You don't owe me anything, and you're certainly not obligated to waste your time on this."

  "I can give you a few hours."

  He put the briefcase on his lap and folded his arms over it. "Look, Lincoln, I might have gotten a bit more, uh, personal than I should have last night. I mean, shit, you don't even know me, and I was dumping some information on you that probably made the whole thing awkward for you. All of that crap about my wife's new husband—"

  "Don't worry about it, Ken."

  "No, it wasn't anything you needed to hear, and to be honest, it embarrassed the hell out of me once I got back to the hotel and realized everything I'd said. So, you know, if you could just chalk that up to the booze and forget about it…"

  "I just said not to worry about it. Okay— It's nothing, man."

  He nodded, and an awkward pause settled into the room for a few seconds before he broke it by slapping a hand on the briefcase.

  "Well, is this a good time, or you want me to come back in a bit, or—"

  "Now's good. Let's see what you've got."

  He set the case on the table beside him and opened it, and I raised my eyebrows when I saw all the papers that were inside, hundreds of pages.

  "I've got a lot here," he said.

  "No kidding."

  "I don't want to drown you with shit you're not interested in, so if you've got any idea on where to start…"

  "I'd be most interested in what you've got from the people who knew them best," I said. "Particularly the people who knew them best at the time they took off. Friends, co-workers, colleagues."

  "They didn't work."

  I lifted an eyebrow. "Neither of them—"

  "Nope. Lived off her money."

  "Well, how the hell did she get so much money—"

  "The late Christopher Sanabria."

  "Surely he wasn't worth that much."

  "Was worth a lot, and when he got clipped, the family discovered he'd left the whole pile to Alexandra. It was several million at the time, and she had to wait about eight years until she turned twenty-one and the trust kicked in. By then it was worth a hell of a lot more. Christopher was well invested, it seemed."

  "She got every dime—"

  "Of his financial holdings, yes. House and possessions split among the sons."

  "Nothing to the wife—"

  "Wife was dead. Suicide a year before Christopher was murdered. That was the reason Alexandra was sent away. He thought she needed a female influence."

  I shook my head. "How many sons did he have—"

  "Two. Dominic and Thomas. Thomas was shot and killed by a cop in Youngstown about five years after the father died. Drug bust, but just one cop went in. Odd, right— Said he was checking out a tip he didn't have much faith in. Rumors went around that it was a setup, that the cop was paid for the hit, but nothing ever came of the investigation."

  "Alexandra was away at her boarding school for this—"

  He nodded. "She left when she was twelve, came back to Ohio after getting out of college."

  "To work with the prison system."

  "Yes."

  I didn't say anything for a minute. I was remembering the way Dominic Sanabria had spoken of his sister. Every family has their darling. She is ours.

  "Do you know anything about the family relationship after she got back—" I asked. "Was there any bitterness over the money— The mob connections don't even apply to that—father dies and leaves a few million to one kid but not the other, it would start personal problems in most families."

  "No sign of that, but I always wondered," Ken said. "By the time she was old enough to take the trust, Dominic was a pretty big deal in Youngstown, had a lot of other things on his mind, and a decent pile of his own cash. He's more than ten years older than her."

  I was quiet again, not entirely sold on the idea. Being jilted out of your family money in favor of another sibling was a difficult thing for a man to ignore, particularly a man like Dominic Sanabria. It wasn't easy to imagine the guy going after his own sister, though—that notion of honor among thieves applied more to family than anything else. I wasn't going to figure that out sitting at my desk, though, and I didn't want to have to leave my desk on this. Instead, I waved at Ken's briefcase.

  "Well, if their parolees are the only people who saw the Cantrells regularly, what do you have on them—"

  "Pretty detailed profiles. There were four of them who worked out there, and three are still alive."

  "You ever talk to them—"

  "Only two." His head was bowed while he rifled through the briefcase and pulled out a thick manila folder. "Had trouble tracking the other guy down, and then the budget ran out and I was off the case."

  He opened the folder and pulled out a stapled sheaf of papers. "The one I never got in touch with, and he was working with them right up until they took off, was a guy named Parker Harrison. So maybe you want to start with—"

  "No," I said. "Let's start with the first one, okay— Work forward."

  He didn't react other than to nod and slide the Harrison papers back into the folder.

  * * *

  Chapter Ten

  The four offenders who'd worked with the Cantrells at their strange home in the woods near Hinckley had all been sentenced for violent crimes. Three had been convicted of murder, another for armed robbery and assault.

  The couple's first hire was a Serb named Mark Ruzity, who'd grown up in the Slavic Village on Cleveland's east side. It was a damn hard neighborhood. At one time Ruzity had a bright future. A blues guitarist of some renown, he'd been featured in a few newspaper and magazine articles after landing gigs with national acts. Ken had copies of those stories, glimpses of what could have been. Ruzity's success had always been short-lived, though; his drug problems limited his career. He bottomed out in New Orleans while touring with a band called Three Sheiks to the Wind, attacking an audience member who sat in the front of the club and talked loudly during the performance. Ruzity's luck was poor—not only did
he break a good guitar on the gentleman's back, but it turned out his victim was an off-duty cop. That incident landed him in jail for six months, and when he got out he was broke and bandless.

  After returning to Cleveland, Ruzity got a job in construction and began playing again, mostly in local bars and for little money. For more than a year he held it together, until he met a leggy redhead named Valerie after a gig one night. She was beautiful, he was stoned, and by morning he was in love. There was just one problem: Valerie was a prostitute.

  He didn't remember paying her that night, though he apparently had, and when she informed him the relationship had been strictly professional, he viewed it not as a deal-breaker but as a challenge. The Montagues and the Capulets. After a day of brooding, with a few black beauties and some gin to clear his head, Ruzity determined there was only one way this mess could be sorted out: He murdered her pimp.

  The beautiful romantic vision came to a fast and painful end when Valerie herself turned him in. The bad news was that he'd just been caught for murder; the good news was that he'd murdered a pimp with a record. The sentencing judge went easy, and Ruzity spent fifteen years in prison, writing songs and studying the blues. He had no living family and no close friends, and the state's department of rehabilitation placed him in a job with Joshua and Alexandra Cantrell, who had some ideas about offender reentry that seemed worth a try.

  Ruzity lived and worked with them for six months before moving back into the city, where he made a living repairing instruments at a pawnshop and teaching guitar lessons.

  The second parolee who found his way to Whisper Ridge was Nimir Farah, who'd used a machete in an attempt to murder his own cousin over a suspected affair with Farah's girlfriend. Farah had immigrated to the United States only two years earlier, fleeing a desperate situation in his home country, Sudan. He'd come to Columbus to live with a cousin who'd arrived years earlier on a student visa and was the last living member of Farah's family, or at least the last he'd been able to keep track of as war and famine swept Sudan.