by Matthew Iden
Check-in was an antiquated process. Cash only and a sign-in book like you read about in an Edith Wharton novel. The manager was an elderly white woman wearing a paisley dress and her hair in a bun. She handed me an honest-to-god brass key and told me that the diner next door was the best in town and probably all I could get after seven o’clock.
“Any place to get a drink?” I asked, on a whim.
“There’s a family restaurant down the highway that serves beer, I think,” she said, uncertainly. “But this is a dry county so you won’t be able to get anything on Sundays.”
“Good to know if I want to paint the town,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go there later.”
“We don’t really countenance drinking at the Mosby,” she said, trying to sound firm.
“I’ll probably just use the room for sleeping,” I said, then smiled. “Though I do like to dance sometimes, when I’m alone.”
Her face took on a horrified expression. I grabbed my day bag and hurried up the steps before she could return my money and demand I leave.
Room 302 was musty, but fit my requirements of character with its twelve-foot ceilings, dusty chandelier, and ruby glass lamps. The room was hot. An old window AC unit rattled alarmingly for a minute after I switched it on, quieting down once the coolant hit the pipes. A good-sized TV sat in a corner. Surprisingly, it was connected to a cable box, so there were some concessions to the modern age. I turned the comforter down on the bed, kicked off my shoes, and called home.
Amanda answered after three rings. “Arlington Area Morgue. You plug ’em, we plant ’em.”
“You answer the phone that way all the time?” I asked.
“It’s a cell, Marty,” she said. “I can see it’s you when you call, remember?”
Right. “How’s Pierre?”
“He’s fine.”
“When you say it that way it means you’re giving him too many treats,” I said.
“He’s just so cute,” she said. “He looks at me this one way, I just have to give him a couple.”
“A couple what?” I asked, a warning note in my voice.
“Handfuls.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “Amanda, he’s playing you.”
“I know. But you’ll be back soon and can go back to starving him.”
I stretched and stifled a yawn. “About that. I may not be home as soon as I thought.”
“What’s up?”
I gave her the scoop. Amanda was smart and a good kid. I’d helped her out of tight spot the previous year. Or, should I say, she helped me. I’d just been handed some pretty shitty news about my health; she’d just discovered that her mother’s killer was back in DC and planning to stalk her. Since he was somebody I’d failed to put away when I’d had the chance, I’d agreed to help her—reluctant, initially, to get involved since I thought I had enough problems of my own—but it turned out to be the best thing I could’ve done for myself. Life didn’t end until your heart stopped beating, I learned, and acting any other way was a waste of time.
“You know, I don’t have a long career in law enforcement, like you do…” she said when I was done.
“Un-huh.”
“But even I can deduce the family doesn’t want you there. Why are you sticking around?”
That twist in the gut again. Not as strong. I could tell Amanda, but later. No reason to ruin the nice conversation we had going. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the perverted injustice of it. Guy goes to jail, does his time, comes back to his hometown to make a new beginning, and gets aced.”
“Maybe that new beginning is what got him killed,” Amanda said. “Maybe he had it coming.”
“You sound like a cop.”
“I run with the wrong crowd,” she said, and I could hear the grin in her voice. “What makes this guy so special? There must be dozens of crooks you arrested over the years that don’t get this kind of treatment.”
Twist. “He just kind of stood out, I guess. And what was I supposed to do, just fly past the billboard without at least calling?”
“Uh-huh.” She could tell something wasn’t quite square, but didn’t have the lingo—or respected me too much—to drill any deeper. “So, what will you do?”
“I’ll nose around, ask some questions. I don’t even know how J.D. died yet or the state of the investigation. I can make sure the local cops are doing their job,” I said. “The fact that Mary Beth is advertising on Route 29 leads me to believe that J.D.’s case hasn’t been handled to the family’s satisfaction. I can give the ladies some tips on their rights, where they can push, where they can’t.”
“If they’ll talk to you again.”
“I think I can work on the daughter. She’s not as much of a bit—I mean, she seemed more willing to talk. Plus, I have unflappable charm. And virtue is on my side. I think.”
She laughed. “You worried about what you’ll find out?”
“If the cops are sandbagging this, then I can try and set it right. If they’re not and just stuck, maybe I can help out.”
“Marty Singer, Knight of the Round Table,” Amanda said, not unkindly.
“Yeah, yeah. J.D. probably turned out to be a total slimeball that got exactly what was coming to him.”
“What if that’s the case?”
“Then I tell Mary Beth and her mother that they’re on their own and I come home with a clear conscience.”
“But fewer friends in Cain’s Crossing, Virginia,” she said.
“There’s that,” I admitted. “Good thing I don’t plan on coming back.”
We chatted some more about the money she wasn’t making as a recent graduate from George Washington University, the work she was doing at a local shelter, and just how dumb even philanthropic bureaucracies could be. The local news in town was as sordid as ever. The DC city council was in a vote-buying scandal, all the sports teams were on record-setting losing streaks, and people were running from air-conditioned homes to air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices to escape the heat and humidity that was DC in late summer.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m good,” I said, truthfully. I knew better than to lie. “I mean, you saw me when I got out of the hospital. I had trouble making it from the bedroom to the bathroom. But I feel almost normal now. Nothing like last year. I can eat solid food and it actually stays in my stomach!”
“But you’re not going to overdo it on this little…what would you call it?”
“Inquiry?”
“You’re not going to overdo this inquiry, right?” she said. “A couple questions here, a few phone calls there, and then you’re coming home?”
I smiled. “Yes, mom. Shouldn’t take me but a day or two or three and then I’ll be heading north to add to the traffic on the Beltway.”
We said our goodbyes and hung up. I rolled off the bed and stretched, groaning as vertebrae that had been scrunched together popped, then went into the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face and took my shirt off.
Life had taken its toll. I’d had time to recover from everything that had been thrown at me, but my ribs still stuck out—I’d lost thirty pounds the previous year that I hadn’t found yet—and a wicked, web-shaped scar decorated my shoulder from where I’d taken a slug not long ago. A network of other permanent scratches and gouges and burns traced over my chest and back. My face was thinner than I pictured it and there was gray in hair that had always been black. I wouldn’t win any Over Fifty beauty contests, but I caught myself smiling like a butcher’s dog anyway.
I was alive.
It was a simple, straightforward fact and one I’d taken for granted for fifty-three years, right up until my diagnosis of colorectal cancer almost a year ago. After a quick retirement, life looked like it was on an inevitable downward spiral. No family, no career, and a disease that had taken over any future I might have. But helping Amanda had given me something back. I don’t know what you call it. A spark, a wake-up call, a reason to live. And I’d used that
to fight back, figuratively and literally. Even when chemo hadn’t really done the trick, I’d taken a deep breath and plowed ahead. If getting shot hadn’t done me in, I was damned if my own body was.
Chemo had been a dominant force for months until my oncologist had decided it was time to give the knockout blow and go for surgery. I’d undergone what my hospital bill called a partial colectomy two months ago. They’d taken almost a foot of my lower intestine in an effort to stop the disease in its tracks and, to the delight of both my oncologist and myself, it seemed to have worked. Thirty years of being a cop and a year of dealing with cancer had made me leery of believing anything one hundred percent, but after a short hospital stay and some convalescing at home with Amanda clucking over me like a mother hen, I’d been up, about, and cancer-free in just a few weeks. This trip south to see some friends had been the first real test.
I ran a hand over my lower stomach. Two small scars, each an inch long and on opposite sides of my stomach, marked where the surgeon had gone in, eliminated all the bad parts, and sewn me back up. I had trouble believing it. And part of me wanted to ask, Why didn’t we just do this from the start? Couldn’t we have just skipped the nausea and weight loss, the anxiety and insomnia? But it hadn’t been that easy and I knew it. I’d told myself once before that cancer wasn’t a bump in the road, it was the road, and life was what you made of it as you moved along.
Chapter Five
The Cain’s Crossing Police Department was a tidy, two-story brick-and-tan building with sharp corners, no-nonsense lettering, and thigh-high, anti-car pillars spaced every five feet. I walked through two sets of bulletproof glass doors, between the metal detectors, and straight to the front desk, where I asked for the lead investigator in John Delaney Hope’s murder. I gave my name and was told to wait by the pretty lady behind the glass. I wandered over to the sets of Just Say No and Citizen’s Watch posters gummed to the wall with layers of Scotch tape. I entertained myself by wondering if the posters were cheaper or more expensive than paint, since they might as well be invisible for all the attention anybody paid them. A couple cops went in and out, tossing a wave to the duty officer, flicking their eyes over me as they passed through the door.
After fifteen minutes, I heard a door open. “Mr. Singer?”
I turned. A heavyset, forty-something cop with black hair cropped close enough to see the scalp was holding a glass door open, looking my way with eyebrows raised. I nodded and he waved me through, gesturing with a manila folder in his hand, then led us into a side room that turned out to be a conference room. Not a good sign. If he wasn’t willing to take me back to his desk, then he didn’t plan to give me any details or spend much time on me.
“Have a seat,” he said, tossing the folder onto the table. He was stuffed into a maroon shirt a size too small that made the skin of his neck spill over the collar, threatening to cover a skinny black tie that was aggressively out of fashion. A giant belly swelled underneath both like a platform. I watched as he moved around it like it was a separate entity before dropping into a conference room chair with a grunt.
I stuck out my hand. “Marty Singer.”
He looked at my hand, shook reluctantly. “Detective Shane Warren.”
“Nice to meet you, Detective.”
“Yeah,” Warren said, waving me to a seat. “What’s the problem, Mr. Singer?”
“I’m looking into J.D. Hope’s murder,” I said.
“Yeah, Stacey out front told me,” he said. “But ‘looking’ covers a lot of ground. What are you looking for?”
“I’m trying to clear up a few things about the killing,” I said, choosing my words. “Get some facts straight.”
“And what makes you qualified to do the looking?”
“Thirty years in the MPDC,” I said, not trying to brag. It was true and he’d asked, so how else do you say it? “Homicide.”
“This something official? We didn’t get anything over the wire.”
“No. I’m retired. This is purely on my own time.”
His face settled, flattened, as if a thin layer of super glue had been applied. He raised a hand, palm up. Care to explain?
I leaned back in my chair. “It’s complicated. I was Hope’s arresting officer in the swoop that put him away. Later on, he got religion and promised to turn himself around.”
“And, now that he got himself killed, you’re here to set things right?” Warren asked. His tone of voice let me know what he thought of that.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m not even sure what I’m doing. I was literally driving by your town when I saw this billboard—”
Warren slapped the top of the table, hard. “That goddamned billboard. Makes the whole town look like a bunch of yahoos. Like we didn’t know there’d been a murder in town.”
I paused for a second, giving him a chance to simmer down. “I got the sense from their taking out advertising about the case that the family feels your department hasn’t shown, ah, due diligence,” I said. “That perhaps J.D. wasn’t very high on your list when it came to victims of crime.”
“John Delaney Hope was a shitbird,” Warren said. “That’s as plain as I can put it. He was a waste of space from the day he was born. Sixteen priors when he left Cain’s Crossing and that’s before he moved to DC and he got in trouble with you folks. So, no. J.D. Hope’s murder was not, and is not, a high priority for this department.”
“I understand where you’re coming from, but we both know that the easiest way to get the family off your back is to give them something. Shitbird or not, Hope’s murder has to have caused some kind of stir down here. Feed the family a couple of tidbits and they’ll probably drop it.”
Warren was about to answer when the door swung open without a knock and a trim, fiftyish cop came into the room. His uniform was in perfect order: the commendations just so, the pants without a hint of a wrinkle, the shoes shined to a mirror gloss. His face was clean-shaven and lean, but the skin had a doughy look, which laugh lines and creases didn’t help. His eyes caught mine, then switched to Warren.
“You got anything on that McCreary burning, Shane?” the man asked.
“Not yet, Chief,” Warren said, his voice guarded. “Patty’s been there since eight and hasn’t called in yet.”
“You’ll let me know when she does?” he asked, then turned to me without waiting for an answer. He did a once-over. “You don’t look like a felon.”
I put on my party smile and stuck out my hand. It wouldn’t hurt to get on the Cain’s Crossing chief of police’s good side. “Not yet, Chief. Marty Singer, formerly of DC Homicide.”
The chief pumped my arm up and down. “Lloyd Palmer. What brings you to our little ol’ burg, Marty?”
I explained in quick detail, trying to convey my mission without boring him. If his eyes glazed over and he left, I’d be stuck with the not-so-cooperative Detective Warren.
Once I’d finished, Palmer nodded, then gestured to Warren. “Well, you’re in good hands with Shane, here. I’m sure he’s told you that we’ve pretty much done everything we could, but we’re a small town with a small budget and…”
“…a small force with no time to dig into the murders of die-hard cons,” I finished for him. “I understand, Chief, and, believe me, I sympathize. But as I was telling the detective, here, the family would be happy with almost any news. You don’t have to bring them the killer’s head on a pole, they just want to know they’re being heard.”
I expected Palmer to grit his teeth or tell me to get the hell out of his town, but his face softened instead. He sighed. “Marty, believe me, if I could give Dorothea and Mary Beth some solace, I would. But when I say we’re a small department on a limited budget, that’s not just a line of bull. Off the record, our best leads on the case are that J.D. was killed by dealers or gangbangers from your neck of the woods. Not surprising, really, considering his history and the fact that, at the heart of it, J.D. was a real small fish swimming in a great big pond. It doesn’t take m
uch imagination to see him ticking off the wrong people and then thinking he could just scuttle back to his hometown to hide. Not to be melodramatic, but his past caught up with him.”
“You think he was offed by someone from DC?” I asked.
Palmer nodded. “A deal gone wrong, a grudge from when he was on the inside, who knows? Whatever it was, J.D. thought no one could track him to Cain’s Crossing. Now you see where the ‘limited budget’ thing comes in. I can’t afford to send Shane to DC just to work the leads on this. Best we can do is send a couple of emails, try to get some interdepartmental cooperation, but I think you know better than we do what kind of priority a request from some backwater Virginia town would get from DC Homicide.”
“I can guess,” I said.
“Exactly. So, in the meantime, what do we tell the family? That our theory is some faceless hit man killed their son and brother? That we’d be lucky to even get a name? Or do we let the process roll along and see if, by some miracle, somebody in DC helps us? So far, I’ve gone with the second option. Unfortunately, that means no news for the Hope family, because I’m not going give them something half-baked. Not to mention, I don’t need them road-tripping to DC and plastering your hometown with billboards and handbills. Lord knows they’ve embarrassed all of us enough already.”
“I understand. But you know, until recently, I was a respected member of that big-city police department you mentioned,” I said. “Well, respected is pushing it. But I still know people. I could make a couple of calls, see what I could find. Try to cut through the red tape for you.”
Warren studied the top of the table. Palmer grimaced and gave one of those cringing, single shrugs people do when they want to let you down easy. “I appreciate that, Marty. I really do. But I’d just as soon ask you to keep this to yourself. We’ve already got requests in to several departments. If you started calling in favors for us, it would seem like we were trying to cheat. To do an end run around the process. Can’t really afford that right now. But I thank you for the suggestion.”