by Matthew Iden
“Hey,” a voice said. I looked up. Chick was looking at me, eyebrows raised. “You all there?”
“Yeah.”
He raised his notebook. “All done. Want to vamoose?”
We were quiet as we walked back to his Camaro. I got in, still thinking. Something about the burn site was bothering me.
“Looked like you struck a chord with Shane,” Chick said, interrupting my thoughts as he backed the car up and pulled onto the road. He reached into a pocket, took out his tin of mints, and popped one in his mouth as he drove. The mint clacked against his teeth. “You long-lost brothers or something?”
I shook my head. Whatever was bothering me floated away. “Was it the screaming in my face or the fact he almost took a swing that gave it away?”
“Actually it was the fact he even talked to you,” Chick said. “All I ever get from Shane is a dirty look and a ‘Talk to Palmer, Reyes.’ Then again, I can’t get in his face like you did, either. I guess that’s how you get people to open up. I mean, it worked at Jackie’s, right?”
“You have to try. You never know what happens when you push people, make them uncomfortable.”
“Sometimes you get your dick shot off.”
“That’s true. Good thing I haven’t needed mine in a while.”
“Mother of God, don’t tell me that,” he said, making a face. He rubbed the fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. “You might be bad luck. It’s hard enough to get laid in this town without you killing my chances.”
“The Latin lover thing isn’t doing the trick for you?”
“You’ve been to Jackie’s,” he said, glancing over. “What do you think?”
I thought of the all-white, nearly all-male clientele at the roadside bar. “I guess you swarthy types aren’t considered the marrying kind around here.”
“Not really, fucker.”
“Try shaving the Pancho Villa mustache off. You might get somewhere.”
“Like I’m going to take advice from an old man who doesn’t even use his junk,” Chick said, but he straightened as he checked himself in the mirror, running a hand over his mustache. “Why don’t you just donate it to science?”
I’ve already made my contribution, I wanted to say. But I said, “It was just a thought.”
He grumbled for a half minute, then, “Seriously, did Warren give you anything?”
“No. They’re not even sure she was there,” I said, wanting to believe it.
“But she hasn’t called? I mean, your house goes up in flames, you’re going to show up or call the cops or something.”
“Yeah,” I said, shifting in my seat. “In any case, kind of puts the Browers in a new light.”
“You think they did this?” he asked, jerking a thumb behind us.
“Well, yeah. Unless she really pissed somebody off at work. It’s pretty obvious, don’t you think?”
He shrugged. “Seems outside of their comfort zone. Punch a nosy ex-cop’s lights out in a bar? Sure. First degree murder? I can’t see it.”
I thought of Will Brower’s stony look as he’d slapped the cue stick in his palm and had no trouble seeing him tossing a Molotov cocktail on a mobile home. But, to be agreeable, I just said, “Either way, Warren will know more when the fire marshal’s report comes out.”
He made a face. “In three weeks? How does that help me now?”
“You’ll think of something, Chick,” I said. “There’s a lot of news to cover in the world.”
“That’s a nice thought. Not sure how it helps me pay my bills, though.”
We pulled into Jackie’s gravel lot. The bar was like an old hooker, looking even more forlorn and weathered in the daylight than it had last night. My car was the only one in the lot. Seeing as how I’d essentially left it in the hands of the Browers five minutes after pissing them all off, I half expected it to look a lot like Ginny Decker’s trailer, but it appeared to be untouched. Miracles do happen.
“Here you go, Singer,” Chick said, putting the Camaro in PARK. “Keep your nose clean.”
“How am I going to do that? I thought you wanted to get a story out of this.”
“I do. But I need something longer than an obituary,” he said, then pulled away.
v.
Stan is sweating. His b.o. and the smell of stale coffee are stifling in the car and I crack the window to pull in some fresh air. What comes in, though, isn’t much better and I put the window back up.
“So, you got a tip fingering J.D. for all the shootings,” I say. “And that he held on to the gun.”
“Yeah.”
I take shallow breaths. “Any trouble getting the warrant?”
“Nope. Signed, sealed, and delivered,” Stan says, patting a breast pocket. The action seems to remind him of something and he reaches in for his tube of lip balm.
“Got any doubts?”
“Nope. We tear his place apart, find the gun, then put this piece of shit away.”
I open my mouth to say something, but drop it. If Stan’s made up his mind, nothing I say is going to change it. We wait in silence for the MPDC badges that’ll be our backup on the warrant. There’s not much to see in Southeast that I haven’t seen a thousand times before. People, mostly black, going about their business. Trying to make ends meet in a hurry. Quick word to a neighbor or a scowl for a car running a red light as they try to cross the street. There’s a special on chicken thighs at the Safeway. Three guys sit on a low wall on the street side of the store, elbows touching knees, passing a bag back and forth.
“My grandson,” Stan says out of nowhere, “will be starting second grade this year.”
“That’s great,” I say out of habit. When family comes up, responses are limited and automatic.
“He’s four months older than the little girl this punk shot over in Fort Dupont.”
“Where’s he go to school?”
“Not around here,” Stan says. “If my daughter tried to raise her kids in DC, I’d put them all in a truck and drive them to Iowa. This place is a fucking hole.”
“It’s got its perks.”
“Like what? Getting shot in your living room?”
“Museums, galleries, theaters. Birthplace of a nation. The world’s capital.”
He makes a noise. “DC is a fucking hole and you know it, Marty. MPDC is just here to kill the rats and take out the garbage. And that’s what we’re going to do with J.D. Hope.”
A cruiser comes down the street and we drop our dead-end conversation to get out and meet the two cops. Introductions all around, then we cross the street to bang on the ground-floor apartment door of a sagging redbrick townhouse. Peripherally, I see the winos in front of Safeway get to their feet, casual, and ease down the street away from us.
In a minute, the door opens and J.D. Hope stands there in boxers and a tank top and widening eyes. Stan explains what we’re doing there, flashes the warrant. Over J.D.’s protests, we muscle our way into his apartment. It smells of corn dogs and chili. A cardboard case of Bud Light, open and spilling beers, sits on a kitchen counter. One of the beat cops moves J.D. off to the living room and watches him while the three of us each take a room. Stan heads back to the bedroom. I snap on a pair of plastic gloves and start sifting through the coins and receipts and envelopes stuffed into plastic cups or lying on side tables, the debris of a listless life. J.D.’s time in DC has been short and unproductive. I’m done in five minutes and head back to the bedroom.
“You need a hand?” I ask as I walk into the room. “There’s nothing out there.”
Stan is approaching the far side of a rumpled double bed. He looks startled, like he just fell from the sky. “Sure. Take the closet?”
I open the flimsy doors and start going through the handful of t-shirts and jeans hanging there. Most of the clothes have been worn and are on the floor. I’m glad for the gloves as I gingerly pick up the clothes, search them, and drop them in a pile by the door.
After a minute, Stan says, “You want to give me a h
and?” He points to the headboard of the bed.
As we move it, I hear the muffled thud of something hitting the floor. I kneel and reach into the gap we’ve created between the wall and the bed. Something heavy wrapped in a towel. I grab it and pull my hand out. I unwind the towel carefully, exposing a handgun, a chunky 9 mm.
“Well, lookee that,” Stan says. He holds his hand out and I give it to him carefully. “Looks like a Hi-Point. Cheap little sucker, but good enough for the job, I suppose.”
“Not much of a magazine,” I say, thinking of the spread of bullet holes peppering our first scene.
Stan gives me a look. “Ever hear of reloading, Marty?”
We walk out to the living room, Stan holding the gun in both hands like an offering. J.D. looks at us, a carefully fabricated expression of boredom on his face replaced in a flash by one of disbelief when he sees the gun.
“Want to tell us about this?” Stan asks.
And the protests begin.
Chapter Eighteen
After Chick drove off, I got in my car and thought about my next move.
Maybe Chick was right and the Browers were just a bunch of big troublemaking goofballs and nothing more. Maybe Shane Warren and the Cain’s Crossing PD had everything under control, despite my feelings to the contrary. Maybe Ginny had been wrong and J.D. hadn’t been involved in anything criminal. Maybe he’d been killed by a lunatic passing through town. Maybe he’d tripped backwards and crushed his own skull on the plywood end table by the bed. Maybe Ginny Decker’s trailer had spontaneously combusted while she’d gone on vacation.
I kicked the floor of the car in frustration. Maybes didn’t get me anywhere. I’d learned as a cop that there was rarely any “maybe” about homicide. The question was, how did I make the maybes go away?
I didn’t have any solid sources of information. No snitches, no leads. The cops were a dead end. Chick seemed as clueless as I was. A frontal assault like my stunt at Jackie’s had produced less information than it had headaches and potential jail time.
Speaking of headaches, maybe I could beat someone up for information. The spinster managing the Mosby might know something. Or, hey, maybe there was another bar in town that I could go to and learn something interesting this time before I got thrown through a window? Throw a punch, dump a beer on someone, smash a bottle over somebody’s head—
A bottle?
I put the car in gear and headed for town.
. . .
Over the course of the next seven hours, I experienced more of Cain’s Crossing than I’d ever wanted to know.
I cruised every back street and alley, every fast-food joint and gas station, every driveway and auto repair shop and parking lot looking for a red pickup truck in need of some cosmetic work. I learned that the lights on Maple were timed their entire length while the ones on Walnut were not. Intrepid detecting informed me that there were five salons in town but only one gym, leading me to believe one gender valued its appearance more than the other, which wasn’t really news. I noticed that drivers in Cain’s Crossing drove at approximately half the speed that DC drivers did, causing me to white-knuckle the steering wheel. I saw mothers with strollers, old-timers with walkers, young studs in hot rods. I even saw a Cain’s Crossing PD cruiser with what looked like Shane Warren’s profile behind the wheel. I pulled a quick right turn and got out of his line of sight.
I was coming up empty and was about to cash it all in when I talked myself into doing one last run along Market Street. It was a main thoroughfare that would eventually lead back to my hotel anyway, so it didn’t really cost me anything to try.
And there it was. A beat-up old truck next to five or six other cars in a grocery store parking lot. A huge red-and-white sign over the entrance spelled out Dollar-Sav. I whipped into an empty space and headed inside.
It was small as modern grocers go, hardly big enough to fit an airplane. The produce section was as wide as my two outspread arms and from the entrance, I could see down almost every aisle. A teenage girl with frizzy hair and too much aqua-blue eye shadow leaned against the only open register. Her head was bent, examining bright orange nails, while she talked to the bagger, a nerdy-looking teen with greasy black hair, wearing a maroon apron. He gave a start as I walked in, as if he weren’t supposed to be talking on the job. Or maybe the cashier was the high school football captain’s girlfriend.
The one aisle that I couldn’t see was marked Beer and Spirits on the end. I had a pretty good idea where my target was. I worked my way over to the beer aisle and found my man squatting, one hand on the shelf above him for support, while he compared prices on the cases of cheap beer stacked on the floor. He looked up as I walked towards him, did the classic double take, and slowly got to his feet. His stance was casual, confident. No fear. I wondered if he was packing.
“Hey there, Jay-bone,” I said. “Remember me?”
He took his aviators off and hung them from his shirt collar. Lines in his face and blue smudges under the eyes aged him ten years.
“How you doin’, chief,” he said, cracking a smile. “You interested in shit beer, too, or you still mad about the scene out at Jackie’s? Looking to get even?”
“Don’t try stealing the beer and we won’t have a problem.”
He snorted. “I ain’t Dwayne. I pay for what I drink.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “Actually, I just thought I’d ask you a couple questions, see if you’re more, ah, forthcoming without the Three Stooges hanging around.”
“Yeah? About what?”
“I’m curious. I heard you and J.D. had your differences when he first came back home, but were able to patch things up since you both ended up working for the Browers. But what, exactly, is so worth doing that you’re willing to play nice with a guy who hit you with a beer bottle?”
He rubbed the side of his neck, maybe in subconscious memory. “Jobs are tough to come by in Cain’s Crossing, chief. You take work when you can get it.”
“Things tough enough to take it away from someone else?”
He laughed, a short bark. “You think I wasted J.D.? Because of a bar fight? Over some work? Sorry, chief. I got better things to do.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It makes a kind of sense, if you ask me. Payback for getting smacked, plus narrowing down the competition.”
He shook his head. “Try again.”
“All right. Maybe the Browers didn’t like something about J.D. You’re their go-to guy. You’d put J.D. in the ground if Will Brower told you, wouldn’t you?”
“Bud, I know this is going to sound like it’s straight out of a movie, but you don’t know what you’re fucking with,” he said. “Don’t get caught up in something you can’t get out of.”
“See, you told me there’s something to look out for,” I said. “Now I’m curious.”
He shook his head, as if he were more sad than anything. “There’s nothing to look into. And why would you want to? What’s it to you?”
“Let’s just say I have a habit of wanting to do the right thing. Finding out who killed J.D. is one of those things. And if the Browers get a bloody nose in the process, that’s okay with me. And they’re not the only ones. Maybe you’re the one who’s caught.”
Jay slipped his aviators back on again, transforming himself into someone cooler and more dangerous. “You’re not a cop, right? I mean we got that out of the way when Deputy Dog cuffed you and put you in the back of the squad car. So I’m pretty sure I don’t have to stand here and shoot the breeze with you all day while you try to pin J.D.’s murder on me. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
He grabbed two boxes of Milwaukee’s Best and headed down the aisle, brushing past me on the way.
“Jay?” I called. He turned. “You hear what happened to Ginny Decker this morning?”
He waited, motionless.
“Someone burnt her trailer to the ground. Nothing’s more than ankle-high by now. You willing to take the fall for that, too, when the cop
s finger the Browers for it? You willing to go to jail for something you didn’t do?”
He stared at me for a second, then shook his head, and kept walking.
Chapter Nineteen
I hadn’t learned anything from Jay-bone, although hopefully I’d given him some food for thought. It wasn’t much, but maybe I could drive a wedge between him and the Browers that could be exploited later.
There’d better be something. Until something blossomed on that front, I had nothing to go on. All I could do was go back over J.D.’s paperwork and hope for a break. Mary Beth and I had read through it once already, of course, but finding J.D.’s prescription and the surprise behind it had put a different spin on things. Maybe there was another nugget of information if I dove in again. First time through, eyes glazed over, numbers crowded together, information was lost. A fresh going-over always had the chance of turning something up.
I headed back to my hotel room and began laying out all the paperwork from the super pile, deconstructing it into their smaller groups across my bed. Jotting down dates, amounts, and locations, I started with the receipts and any bills I could find, then moved to the miscellaneous lists and one-off pieces of paper. Small piles became larger ones as I cataloged each scrap, pouring myself into the mundane details of the paper trail. The world outside faded away. The sun set, throwing cherry-red slabs of light through the windows that I only noticed when I raised my head to give my eyes a break. The sound of traffic swelled and relaxed as regular folks quit work, went to dinner, and abandoned the street. Occasionally, a random honk or shout would reach me over the rattling of the air conditioner, but soon the sounds stopped altogether. It wasn’t until I found myself holding a piece of paper two inches from my nose that I realized I’d worked well into the night.