Silent City

by Alex Segura

  The beige notebook was definitely his father’s, and seemed like something close to a diary. Dated entries—none longer than a few lines or pages, went as far back as a decade. Pete skimmed over the book’s worn pages until his eyes fell on one date. September 19, 1996. Just a few days after the incident with Pete and Javier at the convenience store. Pete felt his shoulders sag, but he continued to read.

  9/19/96

  The boy continues to confuse me. I realize his mother’s gone, but I’ve provided for everything else, and he’s still proving to be a problem. This incident is the last straw. I have to watch everything he does. I make sure he goes into his class in the morning. I check with him during the day to make sure he’s still at school. I pick him up after class. Bring him with me to work. It’s an ordeal. He resents me for it. I can see it in his tone and how he acts. But someday he’ll understand, I hope. Maybe when he figures out what to do with himself. Not a cop, though. Something a little more dignified. But what kind of world will this be? Not sure. I see a lot of terrible things every day. I pray he won’t have to.

  I’ve lost touch with his friend—Javier. The kid had no family to speak of, so he was taken into state custody. The store owner, Alfredo Florin, was intent on pressing charges. Pete—when he decides he is talking to me—tells me there’s an uncle that might take him in. I should have. But that would never fly. Still, I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed that young man. I pray God will forgive me. It’s hard enough raising my own son. I hope he finds the right path.

  —PF

  Pete continued to stare at the page long after he’d finished reading it. He felt his eyes welling up. Not from sadness. No, from some pride he’d denied himself for too long. He carefully put the journal down on the table, next to the box for further reading.

  He sat on the couch and looked toward his window. Dawn was near. Bits of light would be creeping into the house soon. He had nowhere to be tomorrow. He had nothing to do. Reading his father’s written words—something unfamiliar yet comfortable—had left Pete with a strange, nostalgic feeling. What would his father think? He wasn’t sure yet.

  “There’s still time,” he said, under his breath, turning to the remaining papers on the couch. He’d finish these today. Now.

  Another report seemed fairly nondescript, aside from the name. Jose Contreras. Owner of Casa Pepe’s. It was dated about five years previous. Contreras was under investigation after a former employee complained about mistreatment at Casa Pepe’s, claiming Contreras favored certain employees, and was verbally and physically abusive towards others. The report was long, from what Pete could tell, at least in comparison to some of the others in the box. This one was written by a name Pete didn’t recognize—Bill Sheffield. He walked over to the tiny desk in his bedroom and rummaged for a notebook. He found one of his old reporter’s notepads and grabbed a pen before returning to the couch. He began jotting down quick notes. Chaz. Clevelander. Contreras—abusive to certain employees? He kept reading—according to the final update on the file, no charges had been filed as there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Contreras with a crime, but the ancillary text, summing up the employee’s complaints, made for interesting reading nonetheless.

  The disgruntled employee—also benefiting from the work release program Javier would eventually become a part of—claimed Contreras did little actual work, and instead spent most of his time meeting with out-of-town contacts in a back room of the restaurant. He mentioned seeing Contreras often leave with a new bag or suitcase, which led him to believe that an exchange of some kind was going on. Pete saw random notes scribbled on the photocopied police report. This handwriting he recognized—his father’s. But why was his father collecting police reports about other cases? Cases that weren’t even murders? Pete wasn’t sure, until he reached the last page of the Contreras report, where he saw the restaurant owner’s name circled, with a quick note written in the margin next to it. Pete felt his temperature drop, as if a cold breeze had made its way into his small, cramped apartment:

  Silent Death?

  Chapter Seventeen

  Pete awoke to a familiar sound—this time in stereo. His cat and his new roommate were crying at Pete’s feet, each louder than the last. Pete let out a groan as he realized where he was. On the couch. In the clothes he’d worn for most of the day yesterday. He looked at his watch. It was close to noon. He’d slept away the morning. He bolted up and wandered to the kitchen, the two cats not far behind. He felt slow and ragged—fallout from the night’s drinking. But his wheels were turning. Before he’d passed out on his couch in the minutes before dawn, the pieces had seemed to fit together. He kicked himself for not writing his conclusions down. His father thought Jose Contreras, the owner of Casa Pepe’s, might be the Silent Death. Detective Pedro Fernandez had also thought Chaz Bentley of interest enough to pull an old police report involving Chaz’s drunk and disorderly conduct for reference. Pete opened a few cans of food for the cats and set them on the floor, barely paying attention as the two tiny animals gorged themselves. His mind was elsewhere. For whatever reason, Chaz wanted Pete to look for Kathy—not the police. Chaz also got extremely agitated when Pete mentioned going to Casa Pepe’s and interacting with Contreras. Why hadn’t Chaz reported Kathy missing? What was it about Contreras that scared Chaz? And why did his father think Chaz was someone worth checking out in relation to the Silent Death? Pete had none of those answers. But he did have questions—some that even the good cops, like Carlos Broche, might not have considered yet. All this bounced around Pete’s head as he tossed his shirt and then the rest of his clothes into the growing pile of laundry in his bedroom and headed for the shower. He had to talk to Broche again, even if the idea of interacting with the person that had dressed him down so severely less than a day ago seemed like anathema. But first, he was going to confront Chaz Bentley. Pete felt the hot water slap his face and body as he stepped into the shower, the bathroom slowly filling with steam. He felt awake. He had something to do.

  • • •

  The drive to Chaz’s house had been smooth sailing until Pete reached the “city” of North Lauderdale—a tiny municipality in western Broward that was closer to a town. He hadn’t bothered to check for directions online before he left his apartment, instead foolishly relying on his own memory—he had worked around the area as a reporting intern during college—to guide him to Chaz’s apartment. Now he was lost. He called Chaz for the third time. No answer. Was he asleep? Not there? Pete turned down the volume of his car stereo, which was now on the second play-through of Neko Case’s “Blacklisted” album. He needed to concentrate. He turned into a strip mall—featuring a 7-Eleven, a Payless shoe store, and a small laundromat—and parked. He looked at the crumpled business card he’d had in his pocket. “Charles Bentley—Columnist.” On the back, in Chaz’s drunken scrawl from a few nights before, was his address and cell phone. Pete noticed another car entering the strip mall through his rearview. It was a black Nissan Sentra. It drove past where Pete was parked and out the other exit. Odd, Pete thought. The exit led to a complex of apartments, nothing more. Maybe it was a shortcut? Pete shrugged and stared at the card for another second before he heard his phone ring. He pulled it out of his pocket, expecting it to be Chaz. Instead, it was the last person he really wanted to talk to.

  “Hello?”

  “Pete, it’s Carlos.”

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in North Lauderdale. Trying to find Chaz’s apartment,” Pete said, turning the business card over in his hand.

  “What?”

  “I was going to tell him I’m done looking for Kathy,” Pete said, defensively. “Like we talked about.” The last thing Pete wanted was another verbal lashing from Broche. He was still recovering from the first.

  “I need you to get over here,” Broche said, his voice low and rushed. “Right now.”

  “Shit, what the hell is going on?” Pete said, annoyed at the idea of havin
g to drive back to downtown Miami with his task undone. “I am literally right by his place, so it’s going to take me a while to get back to Miami, I just need to find…”

  “I’m at Chaz’s,” Broche said, choosing his words carefully. “You need to get here. Now.

  • • •

  The scene at Chaz’s apartment building was subdued—at least compared to the crime scenes Pete had seen on television and the few he remembered as a kid, peering out from the back of his father’s car as his dad went to work. Pete could easily tell which apartment was Chaz’s by the bright yellow tape cordoning off the entrance and adjacent areas. He got out of his car quickly, having parked in the empty lot across the street, and walked over briskly. He saw Broche heading toward him and they met a few feet from the tape. Pete didn’t expect any good news.

  “That was fast,” Broche said, his hands in his pocket. Gone was the cheerful uncle that embraced him when he came into the police station. This was a seasoned homicide detective looking at—worst-case scenario—a possible suspect, at best a nuisance. “Thanks for coming.”

  “What the hell is happening?” Pete said, short of breath for some reason.

  “I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Broche said. “Because, to be frank, this looks strange.”

  “What is going on?”

  “Where were you last night?”

  Pete was taken aback. He paused for a second.

  “Is Chaz in there? Is he dead?”

  Pete’s genuine surprise seemed to soften Broche’s features slightly. His mind was more at ease. But he pressed on.

  “Where were you last night?”

  Pete stuck his hands in his pocket and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. He tossed it at Broche. The older detective grabbed it before it hit the ground. He unfolded the receipt and scanned the time stamp.

  “Zeke’s at 3 A.M.?” Broche said, his eyebrows raised slightly. “Still drunk?”

  Pete didn’t respond. He kept his hands in his pockets.

  Broche slipped the receipt in his pocket.

  “Chaz is dead,” Broche said. “At some point last night someone came into his apartment and shot him.”

  Pete’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t process the information fast enough. He had just been on his way to talk to Chaz and now he was dead. Just a few days prior, he’d sat with him at the Abbey having the conversation that started all of this. His job, memories of his father, and now someone was dead. Pete swallowed.

  “How did he die?”

  “I told you,” Broche said. “He was shot.”

  “Two in the head?”

  Broche’s eyes met Pete’s, confusion in them.

  “How the hell did you know that?”

  “It’s the Silent Death, isn’t it?”

  Broche coughed and grabbed Pete by the elbow, walking with him away from the crime scene and further out of earshot.

  “Shut the fuck up about that,” Broche said, his voice low. “You have no idea who’s listening here.”

  Pete lowered his voice.

  “Well, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Broche said. “It has all the earmarks. Two shots to the head. No witnesses talking about gunshot noises, which points to a silencer being used. Our medical guys seem to think it happened in the evening, considering the scene, which is his M.O.” Broche looked around, toward the yellow tape before continuing. “Look, we can’t talk about this for long. But I wanted to call you—to warn you. If this is who it looks like, then you’re in trouble, too. Whatever you’ve been sniffing around is not good. You need to step back. Take a vacation. Go away for a while. And definitely, definitely quit this shit. I can’t think of a better reason to back off than this.”

  “This isn’t about finding this girl anymore,” Broche said, his words quick. He was pacing around Pete. He was nervous. “This is about staying alive. Whoever found Chaz knows what you’ve been doing, too.”

  “Do you think it’s Contreras?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve read the reports,” Pete said, no longer worried about upsetting Broche. He wanted to hear what the detective thought. He needed more insight than he could provide himself. “I know my dad thought Contreras was the guy. I think he might have been right.”

  “Why’s that?” Broche said. “I’m not even going to ask how you got to those.”

  “Chaz was arrested a few years ago for harassing someone at a bar on South Beach,” Pete said, surprised at his facility with the information he’d read the night before. “The Clevelander’s a nice joint. Fancy. For people with money to burn. And from what I’ve read, he’s got some stuff going on outside of just running Casa Pepe’s. Maybe the kind of stuff that puts schlubs like Chaz Bentley in his debt.”

  Broche cleared his throat and pursed his lips. He was thinking.

  “Ok, hotshot, fair enough,” he said, turning to the crime scene but still talking to Pete. “So why kill Chaz Bentley now?”

  “Because he fucked up,” Pete said. “He shared too much information with some has-been newspaper editor, who has nothing better to do than sniff around Contreras’ operation.”

  Broche turned around, concern in his eyes.

  “You reminded me of your father for a second,” Broche said. He cleared his throat. “Sure, you may know what the score is, but whoever did this,” he said, waving his arm toward the crime scene, “can do a lot worse to you.”

  Pete nodded.

  Broche grabbed his arm. “No one is going to help you with this,” Broche said. “No one is on the other side of this guy except me, and I can’t do much. If you expect the Miami PD to do anything, you’ve already lost. This city doesn’t speak his name.”

  “I know,” Pete said, shaking off Broche’s grip. “I’ve heard all the stories. We don’t even know this is him, though.”

  “You just put the pieces together yourself,” Broche said. “Now you’re having doubts?”

  “I guess once the rush of figuring it out faded away, I realized I could be dead any minute now.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Pete pushed the security chime at the Miami Times employee entrance after realizing that his security pass had ceased to work, as Vance had said over the phone when he was suspending him. He waved and put on a smile as he saw Gustavo, the Times’ elderly security guard, make his way to the door. He didn’t wave back.

  Gustavo pushed the intercom button, his eyes squinting at Pete.

  “Your pass not working?”

  “Guess not,” Pete said, waving it in front of the two-way glass for some reason. “Probably been in my car too long.”

  Gustavo nodded in disagreement, his movements slow and deliberate. “No,” he said in his accented English. “Your pass was deactivated. I saw you last week. Worked fine.”

  Shit. He’d hoped for a few things to fall into place when—on his way home from the crime scene surrounding Chaz’s apartment—he’d decided to go back to the Times building. One was that his access card still worked. Another, in lieu of a working card, was that he’d be able to charm Gustavo, into letting him in. His plan was falling apart.

  “It’s weird,” Pete said, talking louder than usual because of the glass between them. “I guess it just stopped working. Can you let me in?”

  Gustavo nodded “No” again, pulling out a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket. Inside the notebook was a folded piece of paper with printed text on it. Gustavo slowly unfolded it and turned it so Pete could see the text. It was a list of names, mostly people from his department. He figured the numbers were identification codes of some kind. His name was highlighted.

  “You’re not here anymore,” Gustavo said. “Bosses say your pass not working. No pass, no entry.”

  Pete started to turn back, but stopped himself. He approached the glass window, hands up.

  “Look, Gustavo,” Pete said, making a point of using the guard’s name, hoping the sense of familiarity would help his cause, “I just need to get a few thing
s from my desk. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. I just have a few pictures of my ex in there and…I know this sounds terrible, but it’d mean a lot to me to get them back.”

  Gustavo kept his eyes locked on Pete. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, before turning the door handle and opening the security entrance. Pete walked through and half-bowed, sheepishly.

  “You hurry up,” Gustavo said. Pete felt a pang of guilt for playing to the wizened security guard’s kindness. “I get in major trouble if bosses know I did this.”

  “I know,” Pete said, pushing the elevator button that would send him upstairs. “Thank you.”

  Gustavo returned to his post and Pete waited impatiently for the elevator, the beeping sound that signaled each floor the only noise in the poorly lit entrance.

  • • •

  The third floor was empty and dark when Pete got off the elevator. He’d chosen the floor—which housed mostly ad sales representatives and the business people who worked standard 9-to-5 schedules—because the last thing he needed was to run into a coworker, much less one who’d wonder why he was snooping around the Times. He made an immediate left and tried the first set of offices—Online Ad Sales. Locked. He walked down the hall and tried the next door—Classified Ads. The door creaked open. Pete looked around quickly, noticed no one, and slipped into the office.

  The room was relatively small, with a few cubicles stationed in the middle of the room and two locked offices on the west side. Pete decided against turning on the main light and slid into the nearest terminal. He scanned the computer—which was archaic and probably slow, much like his old work computer—and cautiously booted it up. While he waited for the machine to wheeze into existence, he pulled out a tiny black book from his front pocket. Kathy’s address book. He flipped to the back of the book and folded it slightly to keep it from closing on itself. He waited for the usual login screen to appear on the computer monitor, prompting him to sign into the Miami Times internal editing server and employee network. But instead of using his own username and password, which, he guessed, had been deactivated along with his security pass. He carefully typed in the login and password from Kathy’s book, hoping that he’d guessed correctly what the two words were. The slightly loud whirr coming from the old computer confirmed that Pete was right, and the login screen went blank and morphed into something else. The screen was still monochromatic, which reminded Pete of his computer classes in middle school. the Times’ usenet, or SCI as the tech support guys called it, was basically just a glorified file-sharing network, where a reporter or editor had his own private “basket” of files, either stories in progress, notes or miscellaneous text, and a number of public baskets. Depending on where a story was in the editing process, it could be in one of any number of baskets, from “Slot,” meaning it was in the hands of the duty editor to “1A,” meaning it was edited and ready to be placed on the front page. But Pete was very familiar with SCI and knew that the most interesting stories were the ones tucked away, either in reporters’ private files or in the kind of baskets no one really bothered with, like “Enterprise,” which was just a fancy way of saying it was a story you, as a reporter, had decided to research or begin working on without much editorial guidance. It was there that Pete started.