"That's what he goes by, yeah. Comes from an old playground basketball nickname, everybody called him 'Cash Money' when he was a kid because he had a jump shot that just did not miss. In another neighborhood, another school, that kid plays college ball and goes to the league. No question. I've seen him play plenty. We had surveillance details on Cash for years, and even while waiting to bust his ass, I was impressed by his game. He played it like he loved it, you know— Then he'd go off and kill someone. It's sad, is what it is."
"What exactly is his story—" Joe said.
"Drugs and blood. He's top of the food chain out there now. Nobody moves a damn dime bag through East Cleveland that he doesn't know about."
"He's only been arrested one time— Charge dismissed—"
"The boy is good, got it— Runs a couple dozen gangbangers and pushers who take his falls for him and isn't a one of them says a word, because if they do, they just dug a grave that fits them nice and tight. Cash runs shit organized, runs it like the damn Mafia."
Joe cocked his head and looked at me. I didn't say anything, didn't respond.
"Unofficial body count credited to Cash Neloms—" Tony said. "Twenty. Maybe twenty-five."
My chest muscles suddenly felt cold and constricted.
"You ever heard of him actually having mob ties—" Joe said.
"Nope. It's all his show, Pritchard. His organization. And that shitty side of town drips with his blood."
"Supposing we wanted to talk to him—" Joe began.
"Talk to Cash— On what—"
"Cold case investigation. Twelve years old."
"Twelve years old— Twelve— Sweet mother, Pritchard, I'll tell you this one time and make it clear as I can—this ain't a man you talk to. Not a PI. I know you were police for a long time, but you're a civilian now, and that's a distinction that means something to Cash. Understand— You walk in that neighborhood asking questions about Cash Neloms, you better be wearing a damn vest and carrying with your finger on the trigger."
"I'm advised," Joe said. "Thanks, Tony."
He disconnected, blew out a breath, and said, "Where are we going, Lincoln— Where in the hell are we going—"
I didn't know. I stood in silence for a minute, trying to think, but there were too many pieces and too many ways they could fit, and I could not see the whole for the sum of its parts, couldn't even get close. Eventually I picked up the phone and held it in my hand, thinking of Quinn Graham. I didn't call, though. I hung up before the dial tone switched over to that rapid off-the-hook beep, and then I lifted the receiver again and called John Dunbar. I used the home number, and he answered.
"Hey," I said, "it's Lincoln Perry. You remember me—"
"You got something—" he said, and it was incredible how much anticipation was in his voice, how much hope.
"Yeah," I said, "I got a question. You have access to phone records from the Cantrell house in the last few months they were there—"
"I've got the actual records. I told you, I kept everything. There's nothing there. I've been over those—"
"Do me a favor," I said, "and go find them. Check and see if there was a call to a guy named Alvin Neloms. Or maybe it was to an auto body shop on the east side. Look for either."
He set the phone down and disappeared. It was maybe five minutes before he came back, and his voice was lower.
"There were three calls to a place called Classic Auto Body, on Eddy Road."
"Were they all during Bertoli's stay—" I said. "The last weeks anyone was in that house—"
"Yes."
"Hang around, Dunbar," I said. "I'm headed your way."
I disconnected then and turned to look at Joe.
"The problem with this job," I said, "is that the guesswork always comes before the facts. I'm pretty sure that system put Ken in his grave."
* * *
Chapter Forty
I had to give John Dunbar credit—he didn't balk at the idea. In fact, what I saw in his face when I laid it out for him wasn't denial but shame. He actually seemed to wince when I showed him the police report that mentioned Bertoli's car at the time of his arrest and explained its similarities to a different car that had been near the death scene.
"I knew what kind of car he had," he said. "Of course I knew that, and I knew that's what got him arrested, but I didn't consider that it would have any importance beyond that. I didn't consider it."
He bit off that repeated line, angry, self-reproachful—I didn't consider it. Joe hadn't said much at all, but he looked at me when Dunbar said that, gave a small nod, showing that he thought it was legitimate.
"I knew it was Alvin Neloms who was in the car with Bertoli the night he was arrested," Dunbar said. "Of course I checked that out, of course I knew it, of course I did the same work you just did. Back then he was nothing more than a kid on the corner, someone who watched for police and maybe did a little muling. He was sixteen."
"He's not anymore," Joe said. "According to what we've been told, he's as close to a drug kingpin as the east side has. It's gang country out there; you do well to last six months. Neloms being around this many years later, that tells you something."
Dunbar's eyes flicked side to side but held distance, as if he were watching a film.
"DiPietro was providing some of the east side supply," he said, speaking slowly. "That was the point, see, that's when he and Sanabria had their first falling-out. Sanabria didn't trust drugs, and he certainly didn't trust blacks. His father was of that old school, racist, and I'm sure that stuck with Dominic. He did not want to be involved with the drug trade on the east side. We knew that, knew it from wiretaps and informants and a hell of a lot of work. We knew that Dominic was furious with DiPietro."
He paused and took a breath and then said, "Dominic killed DiPietro," but his voice had gone soft and he wouldn't take his eyes off the police report that detailed Bertoli's car.
As I watched his face, I felt tinged with sorrow. I was looking at an old cop who'd believed something very deeply and was now considering that it might have been wrong.
"You talked with a cop from East Cleveland," he said. "Someone who knows about Neloms."
"Yes," Joe said.
"Can you call him back—" Dunbar said. "Can you ask him a question—"
"What am I supposed to ask—"
"If he has any idea when Alvin made his move into the power structure. If he has any idea where the supply came from. A small fortune of drugs disappeared when DiPietro got whacked. They never turned up with the Italians again."
Joe took his cell phone out and called. He asked for Tony, waited for a few minutes, and then spoke again. He repeated Dunbar's questions, listened as Dunbar and I sat with our eyes on the floor, silent. At length, Joe thanked Tony and hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and waited for a few seconds before speaking. He did not look at Dunbar when he did.
"The way Tony remembers it, Alvin was a lot like what you say, a corner kid, until he was in his late teens. Then he got his hands on some product. Nobody knew where, or how, but all of a sudden he had product, and then three major players were dropped in a drive-by over on St. Clair, and from that point on Alvin, while still a boy, was also the man in East Cleveland. This beginning when he was still in his teens. He was, Tony says, an ambitious young man."
I looked at Dunbar. "DiPietro controlled the drugs you were talking about, right— They were in his possession—"
"You know they were. I already told you that. We looked at every associate, looked at everyone who…" his voice faded, and then he said, "Alvin Neloms was a boy. A child."
"Tony also said Alvin and his uncle were tight," Joe said quietly. "Alvin's father is an unknown, disappeared when the mother got pregnant, and Darius looked after the family. Supported the family."
I nodded. "Supported them with a little help from the mob, is what Mike London thought. He said Darius was involved with stolen cars, changing their look and putting them back out on the street."
Dunbar
shifted, smoothed his pants with his palms, swallowed as if it were a challenge.
"You never even considered the possibility, did you—" I said.
He looked up. "Neloms— Well, I had no idea—"
"Not Neloms. The possibility that it might have been anybody other than Sanabria, period."
"Of course I did."
"Really—"
His gaze focused again, went defiant. "Perry, that man would've killed anyone who collided with him. You don't understand that about him. I do. He had killed before, and I'd had him for it, okay— I told you that story."
"I know," I said. "I'm just wondering which murder you were really chasing him for. The new one you thought he'd committed, or the one he'd already beaten you on."
He held my eyes for a little while and then looked away and ran a hand over his mouth. His hands were dry and white and the blue veins stood out. They matched the strips of stark color under his eyes.
"So what we're thinking," Joe said, "is that Bertoli and Neloms were friends, probably from meeting at the uncle's shop. Neloms is along when
Bertoli beats up the guy at the truck stop, but he doesn't go in, which means that as a kid he's somehow already got people doing the bleeding for him. It also means he was already looking for his own supply at that point, his own drug nest egg. He wanted to run the show, not stand on the corner for somebody else."
"The guy Bertoli beat up didn't have as much product as they thought," I said. "They overestimated his role. Bertoli got busted, but Neloms walked because he was a juvenile."
Joe nodded. "Right. After this, DiPietro is killed, a small fortune of drugs disappears, and suddenly a teenage kid became a deadly force. It was a power play, but one from a player nobody respected or even knew of at the time. This is the scenario—"
"That's the scenario," I said. "Ken Merriman got about ten percent of the way there. He got to the connection between the cars. I bet he didn't get farther than that, but he tried to. He tried to, and he died."
"What would he have done—" Joe said. "Once he connected the cars, what do you think he would have done—"
"Gone and asked about them," I answered, feeling a sick sadness. "He wasn't a street detective. He would have gone right down to that body shop and asked about the car, thinking that was the next step. He might have suspected Cash Neloms was involved by then, but I don't think he had a real sense of how dangerous the guy was. He would have gone down there to ask some questions, and he wouldn't have been very good at it. I saw him in action with interviews, and he was not very good at it."
"Suppose you're right on Bertoli," Dunbar said. "Suppose he was killed by Neloms. That doesn't mean Cantrell was, too. The styles of crime are entirely different. One was killed on scene and the body left without any concern; the other one was buried in another state. Those are two different killings, maybe by two different people."
On the surface he was right, but I understood what he didn't: how Joshua Cantrell's body had been transported, and why. The killings hadn't been different in style at all—both bodies were left where they'd fallen. Same style, same killer. Solve one and you've solved the other.
Thinking about that brought a realization to me. To whoever had killed
Cantrell, the disappearance of his body must have seemed extraordinary. For twelve years, while the rest of the world wondered what had happened to him, one person wondered about the fate of his corpse. Wondered, no doubt, quite intensely.
"I want to talk to Darius," I said. "Not his nephew, not yet. Hit him with the only solid thing we have—that report on Bertoli's car—and see what he'll say."
Dunbar said, "I've got photographs."
"Pardon—"
"I've got photographs of Bertoli, and of his car. I've got photographs of damn near everybody's car, everybody that went near Sanabria."
"How soon can you come up with them—"
He stood up and went into the bedroom. From where I sat I could see through the doorway, and as I watched he opened a closet door. It was a small closet—every space in his house was small—and the clothes that hung in it were pushed far to the side to make room for a clear plastic organizer with drawers. It was the sort a lot of people had in their closets, usually for sweaters and old jeans, things they rarely used or for which they'd run out of shelf space. Dunbar's didn't hold any clothing, though, not a single piece of it. The thing was filled with manila folders, and I could see that each drawer was labeled with a date range.
He'd been retired for nearly fifteen years and had almost no closet space. I looked at that set of plastic drawers and I felt sad for him again.
It didn't take him long. First drawer he opened, first folder he removed. When he came back to the living room he had three photos in his hands; he passed one to Joe and two to me.
"These would have been taken just a few months before Bertoli was arrested, a little before DiPietro was killed. You can see the diamonds carved in the rims. They're tiny, but they're there."
Yes, they were. A half-dozen small diamonds. The car was an Impala, probably midseventies model, painted a metallic black. Bertoli wasn't visible in either of the photographs—the windows were up, and they almost matched the car's paint, clearly an illegal level of tint. Window tint like that pissed off street cops because you couldn't see what was happening in the interior as you approached. The entire car was basically a rolling request to be stopped and searched.
"This is perfect," I said. "Can we borrow these—" Dunbar nodded, but his eyes seemed faraway again. I stood up. "Thank you. For the pictures, and the insight." "I've got some other things I'll go through," he said, not looking up. "I'll do some thinking. I'm not sure you're right… but I'll do some thinking."
* * *
Chapter Forty-one
Darius Neloms's shop, Classic Auto Body, was on Eddy Road, which was one of the few streets in the city that I would actively try to avoid while driving. It's an asphalt strip of neglect and anger, a place where as a rookie I'd been called to the scene of a fight and arrived to find a fourteen-year-old boy bleeding to death on the sidewalk from a knife wound to the neck. I'm not one of those PIs who loves to carry a gun, and I usually don't have one in my truck. Eddy Road, though, can make me regret that.
Today I had a gun, and I had Joe in the passenger seat, casting a dour eye over the neighborhood.
"It just gets worse, doesn't it—" he said. "I haven't been down here in a few years, but you can't pick up the paper without seeing something about this neighborhood. It just gets worse, poorer and bloodier."
"And more hopeless," I said, because that's how East Cleveland seemed to me, a legacy of poverty and crime and corruption drowning the people who tried to make a life there.
"Ah, shit, nothing's hopeless," Joe said. "Just ignored."
My mind wasn't on East Cleveland, though. I was thinking of Ken Merriman, of that spot in Mill Stream Run where his body had been dumped, and wondering whether he'd made a drive down Eddy Road on his last day alive. Joe had his face turned away from me, looking out at the neighborhood, and when I glanced at him I had a vision of the bullet holes that hid under his shirt, and then one of the steel security bar that rested across Amy's door.
"Hey," I said, and he turned back to me. "When we talk to Darius, I don't want to give him any names, all right—"
"You mean Cantrell and Bertoli—"
"No, I mean Pritchard and Perry."
He frowned.
"Like I said before, this is a scouting trip, okay— I want to ask the guy about Bertoli's car, drop Cantrell's name, see if we get any sort of response. Feel him out. Then I'll call Graham. It's still his case, you know."
His frown didn't fade. "What's that have to do with names—"
"Nothing."
"Then why—"
"Look, Graham got on my ass about this before, told me to stay out of his way. I don't want to deal with that again."
He looked at me for a long time, then nodded his head at the traffic light ahe
ad.
"You've got a green."
It was closing in on six now, streetlights coming on, but Classic Auto Body was still open. It was an ugly, sprawling place of cinder block, with a stack of tires and a few stripped cars in the parking lot. From the outside it looked like a picture of poverty, but the garage doors were up and two gleaming cars were visible inside, one a new Cadillac and the other a pickup truck that had been painted gold and black and mounted on massive, oversized tires. Two young black men lounged on stools in the garage. A set of speakers stood behind them, playing rap music with a bass line I could feel in my chest.
"Hey," Joe said as we got out of the truck, his voice soft, and when I looked at him he nodded at the black-and-gold pickup truck inside. "Look at the wheels."
There were small diamonds cut out of the chrome rims.
One of the men inside the garage, a thin guy with darker skin and a shaved head, had moved his hand to rest beneath his oversized jacket when we drove in. Now that he saw us, he took it away and exchanged a look with his partner, who got to his feet and stepped over to a closed door. He opened it and said a few words, then shut it and came out to meet us. The guy with the jacket never moved.
"We closed," the one on his feet said, stopping at the edge of the garage. He wore a close-fitting, sleeveless white shirt, ridges of muscle clear beneath it. The music was even louder now, the sound of a ratcheting shotgun incorporated into the beat.
"Doesn't look that way," I said.
"Is, though."
"That's all right. Don't need any work done. Came to see Darius."
He reached up and scratched above his eyebrow, head tilted, studying me. "Darius a busy man."
"I'm sure of it. That's why we don't intend to keep him long. Got a picture to show him, a question to ask, then go on our way."
His eyes flicked over to Joe, whose look and demeanor said cop about as subtly as a billboard would.
"I'll give him the picture for you."
Joe shook his head. "We will. Thanks, though."
The Silent Hour Page 26