by Rick Bennet
Chavez turns, eyes flaring. He squints.
Kellogg: Arcides, it’s me.
Passer also calls out.
Chavez relaxes. Walks over to them. He smiles. Shakes hands with the still seated Kellogg. Chavez bends down, looks across Kellogg to Passer, smiles and says hola! Passer smiles broadly. She and Kellogg both like Chavez. Respect him. He is a short, wiry man with a proud mane of black hair, brown skin, sharp European features. His eyes seem always sad, never afraid.
Kellogg: Arcides, can we talk?
Chavez speaks English fairly well. He likes it that Passer speaks Spanish and that Kellogg hired her and trusts her; that helps him trust Kellogg. He is aware of prejudice the way most people are of weather. He knows what it is, occasionally behaves differently as it changes, but doesn’t take it personally. As a boy, he had a gun in his hand, fighting the class war in El Salvador.
Chavez: You can take me home. I am in Arlington now.
He gets in the back seat. Passer drives. Kellogg turns in his seat as best he can, to look around at Chavez.
Kellogg: Hungry?
Chavez: No. I eat for free here.
Kellogg: Then I’ll get to it. Arcides, what can you tell me about the murder of Henry James?
Chavez: Nothing. What I read in the paper.
Kellogg: You were working with Henry on something?
Chavez looks at Kellogg but says nothing.
Kellogg: Arcides, let me explain. The boy has not been found. We’re looking for him. His grandmother said he might have gone to you.
Chavez, nodding: Now I understand, yes. One night, I told the boy that I had been a soldier and learned how to live with fear, and he asked if he could come to me if he was in trouble and I said of course. But it was nothing more than that. I had met with his father that night, at his house, and the son, he had been listening. He was in the den to get jelly beans from the jar Mr. James keeps on his desk there, and when we came in, he hid behind the couch. Mr. James later went to the bathroom. I heard a noise and found the boy. He was scared by what he heard us talk about. I said do not be scared. We had a talk. He was a good boy Passer, listening as she drives, asks: Arcides, did he know where you live?
Chavez: No, I do not think so. I had already moved to Arlington by then.
Kellogg: What were you and Henry talking about, that scared the boy?
Chavez: Kellogg, my friend, I trust you. But I have people to protect. And, even, you to protect. You are looking for the boy? I cannot help you.
Passer: He might have gone looking for you, Arcides.
Chavez: It hurts me, what happened. You know, Mr. James and I, we became very close. We thought the same way about things. I have come to understand in myself, and to see sometimes in others, what I call the dignity of patience. The pride that says no one can make me hate them. No matter what you do, I will not hate you. I will fight you, but I will not hate you. I will not hate you back. Mr. James, he understood this. He had this dignity. We talked about it. About the nature of hate. He was like my brother.
Chavez’s voice is pained, his eyes narrowed.
Chavez: I would do anything to help the boy. You must know this is true.
They drive on in silence and shortly come to Chavez’s apartment building, a red-brick three-story in a passable complex. Kellogg gives him a business card. Asks him to call if he thinks of anything.
Kellogg and Passer go back to the diner/office. Have more coffee. They are opposites in many obvious ways, but they share a night owl habit.
For a half hour, they don’t talk much, lost in their own thoughts.
Passer rubs her temples, sighs heavily. Says: I’m not happy.
Kellogg smiles and she does too. Kellogg: Let’s refocus.
Passer: Henry and Jessie James get killed by Richard Ells, who gets killed by Detective Mallory. There’s no doubt that Ells killed the Jameses, or that he did it alone, because of the videotape. Ells has no concrete links to LTC except for a single attendance at one of their meetings, where he signed in on the guest sheet and left a motel’s phone number.
Kellogg: LTC denies he had any involvement beyond that, and the media horde that went looking found nothing except LTC members irate over the media horde’s looking.
Passer: Jimmy Close hires us to conduct our own investigation. Most specifically, he’s worried about some videotape he expects Henry James to have but isn’t sure he has, or where he has it if he does. Whether this tape is good or bad for Jimmy Close we don’t know. But we do know that there might be some other videotapes in this town that are pretty dangerous, and therefore scary, to some pretty important people. And we know the boy wasn’t killed at the scene, and disappeared with four videotapes.
Passer stops. Hesitates. Then goes on: It’s funny how it just hits me sometimes, out of the blue, that there’s this child out there somewhere, dead, or kidnapped, or just lost and wandering, in shock.
Kellogg: How can he be lost? How can he be wandering around? It’s been three days. His picture’s been on television and in the papers. The police did massive grid searching. Passer, get it out of your head that the boy’s alive. He can’t be. Even if no one outside the house, working with Ells, or Ells himself, killed the boy, then the boy, in some godawful shock, died on his own.
Passer: Then where’s his body?
Kellogg: Rock Creek Park’s a big place.
Passer: Not that big.
Kellogg: The Potomac River is. And maybe Ells killed the boy, took his body somewhere, came back to the James house for some reason, got himself killed. Maybe Ells didn’t kill the boy. Just kidnapped him. The boy’s dead now anyway, probably, if Ells stashed him somewhere secret, without food or water.
Passer: You can go three days without food. If he’s got water, he’s all right.
Kellogg: No. Not in the shock he must have been in. Passer shakes her head.
Kellogg: Shape up, Pass. Quit hoping. If he is alive and gets found, then fine, we’ll be all that much happier for the miracle. But he’s not alive. Because no one who might have taken him, no one working with Ells, or Ells himself, would have any reason to keep him alive, and they’d have plenty of reason to kill him. Understand?
Passer nods.
Kellogg, compassionately: I’m sorry.
Passer nods again. She knows he is.
Kellogg: Maybe Ells did lock him up somewhere.
Passer: Locked him up and came back? Mallory shot him just a block away.
Kellogg: Criminals, especially mentally fucked ones, do come back to the crime scene sometimes. They get a thrill out of it. Especially someone like Ells. I mean, he taped the murders. That tells you something.
Passer: He had blood on his clothes. He wouldn’t change first? Time of death was just after ten at night. Crime scene gets discovered at six the next morning. Ells gets shot about seven.
Kellogg: He didn’t have that much blood on his clothes. And you’re attributing logical behavior to a psycho.
Passer: Notice how we switch roles all the time? It’s like we just naturally contradict each other.
Kellogg: I’m just thinking things through. The boy leaves, just after Ells. Ells grabs him. Takes him somewhere.
Passer: He isn’t going to drive through the city, a white man with a screaming black child. He’s going to put the boy in the trunk.
Kellogg: That was my original thought.
Passer: So if Ells didn’t kill the boy, he locked him up, and the fact that no one’s found him means the boy is still locked up, and if the shock didn’t kill him, time has.
Kellogg, in a rare act, takes Passer’s hand.
Kellogg: There’s something about this case touching you real deep.
Passer: That boy, he could be my brother. Mixed-race child. You know?
Kellogg nods. Then, realizing where he’d put it, takes his hand away.
Passer: So he’s almost certainly dead, and if he’s not, he’s hungry and terrified and in shock.
Kellogg: Passer,
he has to be dead. If Chavez or Mrs. James didn’t get him, then that only leaves the bad guys. And I trust my instincts that Chavez and Mrs. James told us the truth.
She nods. Accepts.
Passer: So what are we investigating? The police have nothing to go on, and no reason not to accept Ells as a sole actor, and aren’t pushing any possible LTC connection. You’re pretty sure they don’t have the tape Close is worried about. So we don’t really have an excuse to be involved in this. We should be getting started on investigating Joan Price. That was the other thing Jimmy Close wanted from us.
Kellogg: We’ll be doing that soon. There’s going to be an LTC fund-raiser in Rockville tomorrow. But we can justify looking for the boy because there’s a good chance he’s got the videotape of Henry James and Jimmy Close’s meeting. Which brings us to the Big Fact. There’s one in every case.
Passer: And the Big Fact here is?
Kellogg: The erasures on the Ells tape. Why would someone not want the world to know that the boy took videotapes with him?
Passer: It really could have been an accidental erasure. You’re the one always saying never underestimate the role of chance in the world, never conclude conspiracy when incompetence or stupidity explains things just as well.
Kellogg: Nah, not here. It’s too conspicuous. No, it all comes down to videotapes. Figure it this way: Henry James gets hold of some tapes. Part of some investigation. Major evidence. Keeps them at home instead of the office because he isn’t ready to make it official yet, or he doesn’t trust his office staff. He takes them home, hides them in boxes labeled as children’s movies. Henry is his son’s greatest hero, and the boy is fascinated with his work, completely loyal to him. The boy listens in on his father’s conversations, like the one with Chavez. Learns about the videotapes’ importance. Probably doesn’t know anything but learns that they’re important somehow. It all blows up in the boy’s mind that his father’s work is the most important work in the world and the tapes are the key.
The boy is sleeping. Gets woken by a noise. Goes downstairs. Finds his parents unbelievably butchered. In his mind, this is an attack on his father for what he stood for. And all that’s left of what his father stood for is the videotapes. I’m not saying the boy is thinking straight. Of course he isn’t thinking straight. He’s emotionally destroyed and clings to something, anything. To his father’s work. To the tapes. He grabs them. Runs out. Maybe Ells gets him. Takes the boy and the tapes somewhere, kills him, locks him away, with the tapes. Maybe Ells in fact comes back to the crime scene hoping it hasn’t been discovered and planning to go back in the house and get his own tape. Maybe, if Ells was working with people, those people got the boy and the tapes. Maybe it was the tapes they were after the whole time. The tapes, and the elimination of Henry James because he knew about the tapes. And then again, maybe the boy just runs and runs and collapses, or hides and collapses, and dies in some hidden place—some bridge underpass, some thicket in a patch of woods, some basement in an abandoned building.
Passer: Which brings us back to the Big Fact. The after-the-murder fact. The fact that someone with power or connections in the police department didn’t want the fact of the tapes to be public knowledge.
Kellogg: We’re saying tapes, plural, but it was probably just one tape that mattered to them.
Passer: So who has that kind of power with the police department?
Kellogg: New Africa, maybe. The FBI maybe. The Mayor, definitely. The police hierarchy itself. Passer: But LTC, definitely not. Kellogg: Definitely not. Passer: And Mallory?
Kellogg: I’m surprised I haven’t called him yet. Passer: Do it. Kellogg: Yessa, bozz.
Passer gets up, goes behind the diner counter, gets the coffeepot, pours Kellogg a refill but not herself, returns the pot, comes back.
Kellogg: By that I presume you’re going to sleep soon.
Passer nods.
Kellogg lights a cigarette. Inhales, exhales, inhales, exhales. Thinks. Says: Chavez.
Passer: He knows something.
Kellogg: Not about the boy but about Henry James’s investigations. They were working on something. Something—how did Chavez put it?—that we shouldn’t know about for our own protection.
Passer: Yeah.
Kellogg: Chavez is not the sort to talk much, even to people he trusts, assuming he trusts us. But we need to know what he knows.
Passer knocks on the table, points her finger at Kellogg. Says: Chavez is about family. He’s sensitive about loss of family. That’s our in.
Kellogg: How do we work it?
Passer: We get Mrs. James to personally ask him to help us.
Kellogg knocks on the table, too, in appreciation of the psychology Passer’s figuring. He smiles. Says: You’re right. That’s our in with him. That’s what he’ll go for. A mother who’s lost a son, asking him a favor.
Passer: And our interest?
Kellogg: Doing our job for Close, trying to track down the videotape he’s worried about.
14
MRS. JAMES CALLS CHAVEZ. He remembers her from the trial of the men who murdered his wife, and respects her as Henry’s mother, and sympathizes with her loss of family, and when she asks him to help Kellogg, he says of course he will. Thirty seconds after they hang up, his phone rings again. It’s Kellogg, asking if they can meet. Chavez says he isn’t working that day and that Kellogg can find him at a certain bar in Mount Pleasant, Washington’s Hispanic neighborhood.
That afternoon, Passer, looking Latina, picks Kellogg up. They find the bar, park a block away, and walk up. The neighborhood, a commercial street surrounded by old but sometimes still attractive row houses and apartment buildings, bears scars from the riots but doesn’t reek of despair, certainly not of danger. The streets are lively on this pretty, warm day, mostly with immigrant Latinos, but also with Americans. Everyone hanging out on the street is Latino. The two beat police are black, and they are eyed carefully, angrily.
The bar is busy but not overly crowded. Latin jazz plays softly. Passer instinctively moves with it as she leads Kellogg down the narrow aisle to an empty back table. Almost all the bar’s patrons are men; almost all turn to look at her as she moves by them, her long legs in tight designer jeans balanced easily on black heels, her dark eyes in a heavily made up face sparkling out at them from under a brunette wig. Kellogg, too, is noticed, but for other reasons. He is the biggest man in the place. The whitest.
They sit. A waitress comes up and, curious as to whether Passer is Hispanic (enough Americans come in that she doesn’t jump to that conclusion just because someone is dark), asks her in Spanish what they would like. Passer, in northern-Mexico-accented Spanish, answers they would like beer.
When the waitress leaves, Passer asks Kellogg if Chavez might not come. Kellogg says he would bet that he’d be here shortly, because when they came in, a man at the bar eyed them and then went straight to the phone and called someone.
Their beers come, with burning-hot salsa and chips.
“Why are you doing the Latina bit?” Kellogg asks.
“Just for fun. I miss it.”
“Is that the main culture you grew up with?”
“Outside the house it was, when I was a teenager, because I was in a Mexican street gang. That’s just one kind of Hispanic-American culture, of course. Just one part of it. Which is true of all cultures. People talk about what’s a certain cultural characteristic, but really it’s bullshit. There’re so many ways to act like a ‘kind’ of person. But yeah, there are stereotypes, generalities, and I know how to use them. It’s mostly just dress and attitude and accent, more than skin color. Really, I don’t have to change my color at all if I don’t want to. I mean, there are black Latinos, white Latinos, brown ones. Light-skinned black people, dark-skinned whites.”
“You can do them all.”
“Sure. And the world reacts differently to me too, depending on how I’m posing. And not just the white world. I find that blacks are the most color conscious, Latino
s the least, whites somewhere in the middle. Latinos are the most class conscious, though, and blacks the least.”
Kellogg laughs. “You should have been a cop. You are the most observant person I know. You dissect people’s appearances and mannerisms and accents, see the patterns of what those things mean about who the person is. And what’s more, you can mimic them.”
“I could never be a cop.”
“Why?”
“I’m too afraid of violence.”
“Then go to college. Be a sociologist.”
“I thought about it. But I can’t fill out the admission forms. Right after name and address, they ask your race. Besides, I’m going to be a writer, remember?”
Chavez suddenly comes through the kitchen door and quickly sits with them. In his slight accent, he says, “You have Mrs. James call me for you. Very nice.”
Kellogg is glad Chavez has a little humor in his voice. He has some in his own when he answers that he thought it was fair to remind him why they’re on this investigation.
Chavez nods. “We will talk out back.”
*
In the alley behind the bar, Kellogg sits on a plastic milk crate, leaning back against the dirty white-brick wall Chavez sits on the black steel steps that lead to the heavy kitchen door, and Passer stands on the littered, puddled asphalt, hands in her pockets, looking for and seeing rats dodging about. Other restaurants’ rear entrances feed this alley, and occasionally a busboy or dishwasher steps out with garbage to throw away. Once, three Latino boys come speeding by on their bikes, excited about something.
“Mr. James, he was a good man,” Chavez says. “An honest man. And he helped me to live, to have reason to live, after the murder of my wife. I told him I needed to do something. So he asked me to do something for him. Something dangerous. He asked me because he knew I had to do something. I had to feel I was working to help things. I had dreams of taking my rifle against a gang and dying in battle. That gang, that crew, that killed my wife, that threatened the witnesses and scared them away from the truth, those men I could kill, those men could kill me, and I would not care. Mr. James, he gave me a chance to risk my life, to try, to do something dangerous, but to help.