Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  “Mr. Marshall.”

  The man behind the desk slipped his glasses from his narrow face and looked up at the young man peeping through a crack in the office door. He motioned with his hand. The younger man slipped through the opening like smoke sliding into the room.

  “Tell me you finally have something,” Marshall said.

  “Yes sir.”

  “And it took five days for you people to come up with someone we can send down to Tijuana to check on this bank thing?”

  The younger man swallowed hard and slid a manila folder onto the desk. “We needed people with valid passports and without criminal records, sir. Not many of our brothers qualify.” He shrugged. “The Mexicans are making it harder and harder to get into the country . . . you know with all the immigration and building a wall stuff going on. There’s a lot of hard feelings.”

  The man behind the desk made a waving motion with his fingers. Looked like he was flicking a fly. “So?”

  “So . . . our contact at the bank won’t come to us.”

  “And why is that?”

  “He says he doesn’t have the necessary paperwork to get back and forth across the border, but I think he’s holding out with the information until he gets the money in his hand.” The young man cleared his throat. “So . . . you said no phones, no internet, no nothing. That you wanted the information in person from whoever we sent to get it.”

  “No footprint whatsoever, electronic or otherwise. Not a goddamn thing!” He pounded his fist on the table.

  Startled, the kid kept talking. “So some of the Brotherhood who are staying in the Tecate safe house are bringing the bank guy up there. Our guys are gonna meet him there, hand over the money, and come right back here to report in person.”

  “Our guys who?”

  The young man reached out and opened the folder, removed the contents, and made two piles. Each with a color head shot paper clipped to the first page. He pointed to the big moon-faced guy on the right.

  “This one is Chub Greenway. From the northern Florida chapter. His brother—”

  The older man cut him off. “Randy Greenway.”

  “Yes sir. Killed up in Conway.”

  “What’s Chub’s real name?”

  “Chub. That’s what’s on his birth certificate. I understand he was an unusually large baby. Over twelve pounds, if my information is correct.”

  “A most prodigious issue,” Marshall mused.

  “Came from a family of truck farmers in Marrinna, Florida. Way the hell up in the corner of the state. Not quite Georgia, not quite Alabama, they like to say. Lost their farm to taxes. Got evicted. The father . . .” He squinted down at the file on the desk. “Ah, Ewell Greenway . . . he met the sheriff’s eviction crew in the driveway with a shotgun. Shots were exchanged, and the elder Greenway was pronounced dead at the scene.”

  “Losing a father and a brother to the race pigs. I’d say Chub is motivated.” He mused over the thought for a moment and then asked, “The other one?”

  The other man pointed at the pile of paperwork. “Lamar Pope,” he said. “His parents were some sort of Holy Roller missionaries. They lived a couple of miles south of the U.S. border. Lamar speaks fluent Spanish.”

  “And what prompted Lamar to join our Brotherhood?”

  “His parents got killed in a car accident down in Mexico. Only relative he had was an eighty-year-old aunt in Chicago, Illinois, so that’s where they sent him. He was eight years old at the time. Problem was, the old lady died a year or so later, and Lamar ended up in the foster care system. Couple of professional foster parents from Gary, Indiana, took him in. From what I understand, it wasn’t an altogether pleasant experience for Lamar.”

  “How so?”

  The younger man hesitated. “Well . . . you know, sir, Gary, Indiana isn’t exactly . . .” He cleared his throat.

  “It’s a cesspool of racial impurity,” the older man said.

  The kid nodded. “Also, several of the other foster kids claimed they’d suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of their foster parents. The welfare system investigated and agreed. Took all the kids away from them.”

  “And Lamar. Did he . . .”

  “We don’t know, sir. He was sixteen at the time. Supposedly a hustler-type con man who thought he could talk his way out of anything. So anyway . . . while the state was looking for another foster family he apparently walked away. Doesn’t show up on the radar again until four years later, when he was accused of beating a black man to death in Pineville, Arkansas.”

  “You said his record was clean.”

  “It is, sir. He was acquitted. In Arkansas, they expunge your record if you’re acquitted.”

  The little man sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his bony chest.

  “Good folks in Arkansas,” Marshall said.

  The younger man kept talking. “We figured they’d make a good pair. Lamar is about as good a talker as we’ve got, and Chub can sure as hell handle anything physical that comes up.”

  “How long till we’re fully operational?”

  “A few more days.”

  “Why the delay?”

  “We’re still working on their paperwork. Making sure it’s just right.”

  “It better be,” the man behind the desk muttered.

  “We’re working on it, sir.”

  With me, it always starts with a single innocent-sounding self-deception. This time I told myself I was going to walk up to Santa Cruz and simply peek around the corner. See what in hell was going on. Nothing more. And then go straight home. A red aid car screamed up Bacon in the wake of the squad car. And then another.

  Four minutes later I was standing behind the yellow cop tape, looking down into Santa Cruz Cove, doing the Lambada with all the other spaced-out gawkers milling around the top of the stairs. What can I say?

  I’d been there a couple of minutes, standing at the end of Santa Cruz, looking at the action from a completely different angle, when I was inundated by a sudden spasm of lucidity.

  First thing that backhanded me across the face was the question of how in hell the body got to the spot where I’d found it. From below, it had looked as if the condos up on the cliff hovered directly over the spot. From here, though, you could see how far the condos were set back from the edge. Hell, there was a pool and a patio between the closest condos and the edge of the cliff. No way had anybody thrown that body from one of the balconies. I don’t care how big and strong that mofo was, there was no way anybody could throw a body that far without a medieval catapult.

  I’d originally come up from below. Took everything I’d had to crimp and claw up that slope. No way was anybody carrying a body up from below either. I don’t care if it was just a little boy.

  Realistic alternatives refused to readily come to mind.

  I craned my neck over the guy in front of me. Half a dozen EMTs and firemen were forcing a gurney through the undergrowth on pure muscle power. I watched as they plucked the kid from the bushes, wrapped him up in an oversize body bag, belted him down, and started passing him back across the slope. The body looked so small. I turned away. Looked out over the Pacific, listening to the roar of the tide. Half a dozen crows bounced around the phone lines, cawing and flapping as if to announce that the end was near.

  A couple of beefy SDPD uniforms started pushing the crowd back. “Give ’em room,” an Asian officer shouted into the gathering night. The assembled multitude shuffled backward about an inch and a half.

  Couple minutes later, the first fireman came into view. A car-wreck rumble rose from the crowd as the men eased the body up the last of the stairs, popped the wheels of the gurney down, and rolled it over to the back of the aid car. Last cop up the stairs was carrying the picker. I silently cursed again.

  That’s when I noticed how one of the cops had parked his cruiser across the street pointing directly at the collection of gawkers at the top of the stairs. The blinking red light in the windshield suggested that
we were being recorded for posterity and that all of us might be expecting a visit from the SDPD if they didn’t come up with something better to go on.

  I gave myself a mental kick in the ass for being such a careless jerk and then checked the street. The police had barricaded the last block of Santa Cruz. I watched as they moved one of the cruisers so the aid car could get out. I wanted to get the hell out of there too but didn’t want to be the first one to leave. Overhead, the crows got louder. The aid car disappeared around the corner.

  I waited until the crowd began to thin and then walked off behind a couple of girls wearing wet suits and carrying boogie boards, hoping it would look to the camera as if we were together.

  “I wonder how many people fall off Sunset Cliffs every year,” I said to their backs. In unison they both looked over their shoulders and scowled at me. “As if,” the taller of the two said as they hurried off down the street.

  So much for subterfuge.

  “We’re lookin’ for row D, number 107,” Lamar said.

  Chub pointed off to the right. “D row,” he rumbled. The guy’s hand was the size of a fucking waffle iron. Lamar, who was a little over six feet two himself and considered by most to be a damn tough hombre, felt pretty sure he’d never seen a human being quite as large as Chub Greenway. They’d only met an hour ago. When Lamar had gotten off his plane from Tucson, Chub had been standing by the terminal door blotting out the sun.

  They’d exchanged a series of mumbles and manly nods and started off through the terminal, following the signs to the long-term parking lot in search of their ride. Chub was half a dozen steps ahead of Lamar when he suddenly skidded to a halt on the asphalt. The big duffel bag dropped from his hand. Lamar stopped walking and tried to peer around Chub, which was a lot like trying to see around Arizona.

  “What the fuck is this?” Chub demanded.

  Lamar stepped around his companion. D 107 was indeed painted on the pavement. He pulled a set of keys from his pants pocket.

  “That’s not a car,” Chub said.

  The noncar was yellow and white.

  “I believe it’s called a Smart car,” Lamar said.

  “Who the fuck rented this piece of shit?”

  “They bought it,” Lamar said.

  Chub’s barn door forehead wrinkled. “What the fuck for?”

  “Supply told me they bought it in case . . . they figured, you know, we might have to ditch it down there, and they didn’t want some rental company looking for the car. They said if we needed to ditch the car all we had to do was leave it at the curb with the keys in it. The beaners would be all over it like white on rice, and that way there wouldn’t be nobody lookin’ for it neither.”

  “I ain’t gonna fit in there.” Chub Greenway turned in Lamar’s direction. His furled fists hung from the ends of his arms like cannonballs.

  “Hey, man . . . ,” Lamar said. “I didn’t have nothing to do with this. I’m just doin’ like I was told.” He walked over to the front bumper of the little car.

  “You wanna drive?” he asked his humongous companion.

  Chub snatched the keys from Lamar’s fingers, unlocked the door, and jerked the driver’s seat back as far as it would go. He made a rude noise with his lips and then slammed the door. “It’s a fucking clown car,” he growled.

  “It’s only about sixty miles to Tecate,” Lamar said.

  By the time Lamar got their duffel bags tamped in behind the seats, Chub had folded himself nearly double into the passenger seat. With his eyes squeezed shut, he appeared to be praying for salvation. “Open the fucking sunroof,” he growled as Lamar got into the driver’s seat.

  Lamar reached up and began to twist the handle. The plastic panel slid back. And then stopped. Lamar stretched up a bit in the seat. A part of Chub’s jacket was caught in the mechanism.

  “Stuck,” Lamar said to nobody in particular.

  Not for long. Chub reached up, grabbed the edge of the sunroof, and with a muffled grunt, ripped it the rest of the way open. Mechanism notwithstanding.

  Lamar watched in silence as he folded his arms back against his sides, wiggled his ass deeper into the seat, then stuck his head out the sunroof.

  “Let’s get the fuck outta here,” Chub said.

  Lamar stifled a grin. “Less than sixty miles,” he said again. “And what the hell, man . . . it never rains in California.”

  Took ’em three days to get around to me. By Sunday I was beginning to think that the cops might have missed the discrepancy with the picker. But no such luck. Gabe and I were working our way through a bale of cilantro-garlic naan and some lamb dish from the Indian joint around the corner when somebody began to knock on the security door.

  Gabe wandered over to the front window and peeked out through the vertical blinds. I watched a smile settle in.

  “You want the good news or the bad news?” Gabe asked, letting the slat slide back within the others.

  “Good.”

  “One of ’em’s a cute little dish.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “They’re both sure as hell cops.” Gabe waved a diffident hand. “You know that heady mix of institutional arrogance and primal fear they emit.”

  I couldn’t help but return the smile.

  “Should I let ’em in?” Gabe asked.

  “No,” I said quickly. I jerked a thumb toward the back side of the apartment. “Let’s not give ’em anything we don’t have to.”

  Gabe lobbed the last of the naan onto a paper plate, picked it up, and headed for the back of the apartment. I wiped my lips with a paper towel and pushed myself to my feet. I started for the door but had a second thought. I walked back to the table, put Gabe’s glass and silverware in the dishwasher, and quickly wiped off the table.

  The apartment had a burglar bar security door that we kept double locked at all times, so I wasn’t worried about one of them sticking a foot in the doorjamb as I pulled open the interior door.

  One of each. And Gabe was right too. She was fortysomething, about five foot six or so, in a brown two-piece suit that looked like it was fresh from the cleaners. Mona Lisa face and big blue eyes. She had her hair pulled back hard enough to lift her eyebrows. Seemed to be in firm possession of all the requisite woman equipment too.

  Her partner was about the same height, short brown hair, wearing one of those super skinny suits that clutched at his body like a sausage casing. His legs looked like pipe cleaners. One more tassel and his shoes would have been considered fringed. I was betting he regularly had himself waxed all over. Smooth as a billiard ball, I was guessing. Mr. Metrosexual.

  “Mr. Marks?” she asked immediately.

  “Who wants to know?”

  It was a dumb question. I mean the woman was wearing her badge around her neck.

  “I’m Sergeant Carolyn Saunders of the San Diego PD.” She threw a hand in her partner’s direction. “This is my associate, Detective Reynolds. We were wondering if we might ask you a few questions.”

  “Fire away,” I said through the grates and bars.

  “Perhaps we could come inside,” she said.

  “What can I help you with?” I asked.

  They exchanged a glance. I was guessing I wasn’t the first person to keep them out on the sidewalk. This was a real iconoclastic part of town. Lots of old hippies, free thinkers, and folks who weren’t exactly big fans of the system.

  Saunders took the lead. “Are you a member of the Thursday night beach cleanup crew?”

  “Sure am.”

  “Did you sign out for picker number seventeen on Thursday night?”

  “I signed out for a picker.” I shrugged. “The number I couldn’t tell you.”

  Mr. Metrosexual reached over to the side of the building and came back with an orange picker. It had a yellow evidence tag hanging from the handle.

  “Is this the picker, Mr. Marks?” he wanted to know.

  “Looks like it,” I allowed.

  “So this is the picke
r you were using on Thursday night,” she said quickly.

  “That’s not what I said. I said it looks like the one I used. They all look alike to me,” I said with a grin. Apparently humor is, as rumored, highly subjective.

  Cops are professional contradiction collectors, so the secret to dealing with them isn’t what you tell them. It’s what you don’t. Don’t being the key concept here. “I don’t know” is rather hard to dispute.

  “Is this about the body they found down there?” I asked.

  Another baleful glance was exchanged. You could hear boulders rolling in caves.

  “What do you know about that, Mr. Marks?” she asked.

  “Just that it happened.”

  “What was that, Mr. Marks?” her partner asked.

  “They found a kid’s body down there.”

  “How do you know it was a kid?” she asked.

  “The body bag was only half-full,” I said.

  “So you were present when they brought it up?”

  They already knew the answer to that one, so I confirmed it for them. Told them how I’d done my cleanup, walked back down to Niagara, dumped my junk, signed out, then realized I’d left my picker back at the cove and had gone back to fetch it, only to find the street full of cops and firemen, so naturally, like any curious primate, I’d walked up to the end of Santa Cruz to see what in hell was going on. I showed the ceiling my palms. “That’s it. End o’ story.”

  I’d just pissed all over their follow-up questions, so it took her a few seconds to regroup and decide what to ask me next.

  “Were you the last one on the beach, Mr. Marks?” she asked me.

  “I believe I was. They find out who the kid was?” I asked, before she could dredge up another query.

  “It’s an ongoing investigation,” Marvin Metrosexual sneered.

  “Well, if there’s anything else I can do, be sure to let me know.”

  I started to swing the inside door closed. She stepped right up to the security door. “And when you left . . . you had no idea the body was there?”