The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  “And slick,” Hoskins adds. “For a big guy, he sure gets in and out of places unnoticed, without leaving a trail.”

  “Any photos of the Roy sons?” I ask.

  “No,” Ryan says. “But the two boys were in custodial care while Evangeline Roy was in jail and rehab. I’ve asked for photos of them from CPS.”

  Hoskins is studying the photo. “You got any family in East Texas, Detective?” He points to the woman. “I can see some resemblance. The keen gaze, the intelligent face.”

  “Very funny,” I tell Hoskins, grabbing for the photo. “Good work, Ryan. Let me know when you get photos of the kids. Also, check on biker-gang affiliation with the Roy family. Where there’s meth being produced in Texas, there’re bikers around to distribute it. We’ve got to start working on the cheese problem at the high school, like now. So all this,” I say, indicating the file, “needs to be done in the dead zone. Okay?”

  Everyone nods in agreement.

  “Okay,” Craddock says. He slaps his hands to his knees, stands, and begins sauntering back to his desk. “I’m ready for lunch now, y’all,” he says, rubbing his sizable belly. “First Mac and now cheese. All this talk of food is making me damn hungry.”

  Before I break away to my own desk, I pull Hoskins aside and say, teasingly, “Thanks, Bob, for coming to my aid back there in the break room. I had no idea you had such tender feelings for me.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t get all weepy on me,” he says, walking off while fanning the air aggressively with his arms, like he’s chasing away mosquitoes. “Last thing we need is a sexual-harassment suit, sucking up resources and wasting valuable man-hours, because a male police officer’s intent was misunderstood…”

  He keeps talking all the way down the hall, then he takes a hard left and disappears into the men’s room.

  19

  I sit in an unmarked car parked just across from the main entrance of St. Borromeo High—one of the largest, most expensive private institutions in the state—during afternoon carpool, waiting for Ryan to be enrolled into the senior honors program. The school will let him sit in on a few classes every day so that he can blend in by walking the halls and acting like every other student: trying to get laid, harassing the weak, submitting to the strong, and, hopefully, scoring some cheese. The dealers will not be showing up in the schoolyard, so Ryan will have to get himself invited to a few parties.

  The archdiocese has been aware of the drug problem for some time but had hoped that ramping up the religious instruction and sponsoring more Just Say No programs after school would do the trick. Now, two of their brightest students and champion wrestlers are going in the ground.

  The students are dressed in their regimented uniforms but will most certainly be stripping down to their Ralph Lauren polos and pastel shorts once they get home. For twelve years I went to a Catholic school in Brooklyn that had its share of rich kids, so I recognize the look of aggressive entitlement from the boys and the hostile, raking glances from the girls. The same confidently self-aware girls I’d seen in Dallas upscale malls who wore painted masks of disdain and disappointment. Females who never for a moment doubted that some camera, somewhere, was capturing their every studied move.

  In high school my nickname had been Thelma, partly because I resembled the tall, flame-haired Geena Davis in the movie Thelma and Louise, but also because there had been the titillating sophomoric buzz that the two heroines in the movie had the hots for each other, which explained why they were always running away from their men. The fact that they had had the shit beaten out of them, had been intimidated and raped by their men, was evidently not enough of a reason to run screaming for the hills. Or, in Thelma and Louise’s case, the canyons.

  In my classmates’ minds, the nickname was all the more appropriate because of my intense and obvious crush on my gorgeous history teacher, Talis Apreya, the name itself like a lover’s whisper. She had made the fatal mistake of simply being kind to me, sensing that behind my obnoxious posturing was a self-conscious, insecure young woman struggling to find a tolerable place inside the bleak walls of adolescence. She was terminated within her first year of teaching.

  Rousing myself from daydreaming, I take my phone out of my pocket to call Seth. I get no answer. Ryan’s perfect for this job, but his undercover field experience is limited and his conversation is confined to sports and updates on his fiancée, a young woman he met while they were on a mission trip to Guatemala and the only girl he has ever kissed.

  Perversely, I’m torn between wanting to mother and protect Ryan and wanting to take him to a truck drivers’ strip club in Little Korea, get him piss-drunk, and pair him with a cross-dresser I know stage-named Sally Balzzac.

  A small group of protesters from a nearby Baptist church have gathered a block from the school property and are marching with homemade picket signs reading IDOLS ARE NOT PLEASING TO THE LORD and DO YOU TRUST YOUR KIDS TO THEIR PRIESTS?

  I wonder if it’s just a coincidence that these good Protestants have singled out this school, as Saint Charles Borromeo, nephew to a Medici pope, made it his life’s work to rid the world of the godless reformers of the sixteenth century by tying them to stakes and burning them alive.

  I begin to dial Jackie’s number but am startled by a twenty-something woman sticking her head through the open passenger-side window.

  “Hi,” she says, pronouncing it “hah.” She looks painfully hopeful and purpose-driven and is wearing braces on already perfect teeth. “I don’t mean to intrude, but are you one of the parents at this school?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m just waiting on a friend—”

  “Did you know there are pedophiles teaching there? We’re a group of concerned parents trying to protect innocent children.”

  Certainly by children, she can’t be referring to the venal little tech junkies I’ve just watched swarming out of the halls of St. Borromeo. “Ah, I can’t really talk right now,” I say, holding up my phone. “I’m kind of in the middle of something. But I get it.” I give her a thumbs-up. “Just say nope to the pope.”

  Her disappointed gaze falls on my Saint Michael’s medal. “Oh, you’re Catholic.”

  “Only when it comes to burning Protestants,” I say. I give her a fixed stare until she backs away from the car and rejoins her group on the other side of the street.

  I reach Jackie on the phone and she tells me that her mother is happy for us to stay at her house until we can move back into our apartment. But I can tell that happy is probably not the emotion that Anne is feeling right now.

  “Baby, this might be an opportunity for Mom to get to know you better,” she says, her voice sounding plaintive.

  When I walked Jackie to her car that morning, she looked younger than her thirty-five years, and vulnerable.

  “I don’t know, Jackie,” I say. “Seth’s invited me to stay at his house. Maybe it would be less of a hassle for you to spend a few days alone with your mom.”

  There is a pause, a subtle intake of air.

  “Come stay at the house, Betty, please,” she begs.

  Jackie’s a respected doctor, but she’s no different than the rest of us, reduced to a quivering, insecure puddle when faced with disapproval from Mom or Dad.

  “Why don’t I come for dinner and see how it goes,” I say.

  “Great, thanks, babe,” she says, exhaling, obviously relieved.

  “Can I bring anything?” I offer, trying to lighten the mood. “Beer? Wine? Valium?”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. She laughs, but it’s a dry, strained laugh. “I got the sedatives covered. One each for us, and two for Mom. I’m going to put them in her afternoon gingersnaps. Oh, and just so you know, I’m getting a gun.”

  “Okay,” I say after a few seconds. “If it makes you feel safer.” She got her license within six months of moving to Dallas but had never before felt the need to buy a pistol. She always said that one armed and dangerous person in the house was enough. That she wants a gun no
w tells me how much she has been shaken by the intruder. “We can go buy one over the weekend,” I assure her.

  “That’s all right. I’ll just take one of Mom’s. You know she still has Dad’s arsenal in her closet. I think she may even have his assault rifle. Typical Texan.”

  “Right,” I say. “Typical Texan.”

  “I love you, Betty.”

  She hangs up before I can respond, and I try calling Seth again. I need to talk to my partner to stop the hamster wheel in my mind, which keeps returning to the question of how someone gained access to my apartment. Craddock interviewed Jimmy again only a few hours ago, asking him if he had had any repairmen or deliverymen at the complex who could have taken a quick photo of the master keys. Jimmy swore up and down that the keys were never out of his sight, that all the maintenance crew and service individuals were known to him.

  Seth finally answers and I tell him about the Roy family and the possible gang affiliation due to the meth connection. He tells me he’ll do some checking on his own.

  I watch Ryan walk out of the front entrance of the school and across the lawn toward the car, carrying a jacket and tie that he’d bought at the school’s uniform shop. He gets into the car grim-faced. A few hours at St. Borromeo and he’s already hooked up with a junior named ShaeLynn who invited him to a party next Tuesday night that will be, in her words, “a kick-ass fiesta, for real.”

  The party is in one of the high-rises near the arts district downtown. A building, no doubt, with killer views of the Bank of America Tower, with its acid-green neon outlines, or the Crescent, which looks like a child’s glass stacking cubes. And it would be in an apartment where the parents were gone, the concierge turning a blind eye to the wealthy tenants’ inebriated offspring.

  “That’s good news, right, Ryan?” I ask.

  “Man, these girls. She grabbed my ass in the hallway. What if I have to kiss her?”

  “Or, worse, you may have to go down on her.”

  “What am I going to tell my fiancée?” he asks, throwing the jacket into the backseat. “I thought only Vice cops got into these types of situations.”

  “You’ve got me at a disadvantage there, Detective Ryan. What do male cops usually tell their wives and fiancées? Hey, you know who’d know a hell of a lot more than I do?”

  I look at him, and after a few beats, we both say at the same time, “Hoskins.”

  On our way back to headquarters Jackie texts me, asking if I can go by the apartment to pick up a few more items of clothing.

  Dropping Ryan off at the station, I tell him I have an errand to run but will be back before six. It’s four thirty and the rush-hour traffic southbound on Interstate 75 has already begun. The sun is low and blinding through the passenger-side window and, as usual, Dallasites have begun their assault-with-a-deadly-vehicle exodus, ignoring proper lane-changing techniques.

  “Just put on your goddamned blinkers once in a while,” I yell at a Dodge Ram, a V-8-powered Death Star of a truck with a Confederate flag sticker on its rear bumper, which muscles itself into my lane without signaling.

  At a traffic light a few blocks from the apartment, I pull out my cell phone and hit auto-dial for Jackie’s great-uncle James Earle. Not so long ago, I would have been calling Benny to get some experienced perspective. Drug-dealer retaliations usually stick to a script, a bloody but predictable series of shootings, maimings, and beheadings. Two in the back of the head—Los Zetas. Two in the front of the head, one in the groin—Aryan Brotherhood. The beheading of El Gitano might have been Mexican cartel, but there were no bullet holes in his skull, and the whole hair thing felt off-script and unpredictable. James had been an MP, not regular police but a cop nonetheless, and he had had his share of unraveling the kinks of a killer’s mind.

  James picks up on the fifth ring. “All okay?” he asks, his voice rumbling like a squeezebox at a Polish dance.

  “Hey, James. It’s Betty.”

  “I know it’s you. That’s why I picked up.”

  “Can you talk for a minute?”

  “Wait, first let me take my truffle butter off the stovetop before it burns. Of course I can talk to you.”

  He coughs raggedly a few times, and then I tell him about the home invasion, Lana’s missing hair being left on the bed, and Jimmy’s insistence that no keys were taken or copied.

  He asks almost immediately, “Was the hair left on your side of the bed or Jackie’s?”

  “My side,” I say.

  “Then the message was meant for you. To get your attention.”

  There was the familiar sensation in the pit of my stomach of a settling truth. But I ask, “How do you know that for certain?”

  “Because a killer takes a body souvenir for only two reasons. To remind him of the kill, or to send a message.”

  I hear the crackling sound of a cigarette being lit, followed by a deep, satisfied inhalation. Then he says, “In ’seventy-one I was with the Eighth MP Brigade in Long Binh. We had half a dozen girls working out of the local massage parlors who’d turned up strangled, their middle fingers sheared off. Whoever was killing the girls left the fingers outside the stockade. Little pointing fingers in the dirt. Turns out it was an active-duty soldier. He was pissed at his CO for putting him in the brig for roughing up a Viet prossie. The guy wanted to get his CO’s attention. It did the trick. Does the killer have your attention now?”

  “Fully,” I tell him.

  There is the pop and fizz of a carbonated-beverage can being opened. “Don’t worry,” he assures me. “It’s a Dr Pepper, not a Shiner Bock.” He takes a drink, belches quietly, and says, “You say that the door was locked, both locks, top and bottom, when you came back?”

  “I had to unlock both the knob and dead-bolt locks.”

  He has taken another deep drag of the cigarette, but he blows the smoke out abruptly, almost impatiently. “You’ve got to know that locks are more of a psychological barrier than a physical one. Any lock can be picked. I got pretty good at picking them myself. Yet one more skill I learned in the U.S. Army. Never knew when you’d have to sneak up and arrest some mean, drunken armed serviceman.”

  I pull up in front of my apartment, park a few yards from the breezeway gate. I cut the motor and watch familiar and unfamiliar tenants going in and out of the portal, most of them to walk their dogs. The complex is large enough so that not every guest or delivery person is going to be recognizable to every tenant.

  It’s late afternoon and Forensics would have packed it in long ago. Jimmy the super has locked up with the new ASSA pick-proof cylinders, although James Earle has reiterated what I already know: with enough time and skill and the right tools, any lock can be breached.

  “Here’s the thing that’s bothering me, though,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I check my watch, realizing I’ve spent too much time just sitting and shooting the breeze with James Earle. I need to get back to the station.

  “If the guy gained access to your apartment to leave Lana’s hair,” James says, “why did he bother locking the door again when he left? He could have just unbolted the door and walked out.”

  A prickling at the base of my neck and a surge of adrenaline brings back a memory of hiding in a basement closet with my brother, his face invisible to me but the sound of his voice reassuring. “He’ll never find us here,” my brother is whispering to me—“he” being our father. And my brother is right. The closet’s next to the spare refrigerator where the beer is kept, the location too obvious for the now raging man upstairs, turning over furniture, to bother checking.

  “You carry your service piece at all times, right?” James asks.

  “I will from now on,” I tell him.

  “Okay, then. Stay alert,” he warns, and after I assure him that I’ll be vigilant, I end the call.

  Putting the phone back in my pocket, I get out of the car and walk through the gate into the breezeway. I pull the new keys out of my pocket and stop in front of my apartment door. It’s w
ide open.

  There’s a blank hole in my mind where an immediate impulse to act should be, but then I jerk the SIG out of my holster and press myself against the wall, away from the gaping space between the door and the frame. I can feel the cold air of the AC vent in the apartment blowing past my cheek, and, irrationally, I think how high our electric bill is going to be this month.

  I do a quick look-see, eyes scanning between the gap, and call out, “Jackie?”

  There’s no answer, no noise coming from inside.

  Maybe the super or the Homicide unit decided to check on the apartment again. An alternative explanation is trying to break through the growing fear, but I push it away.

  “Hello,” I yell. “Jimmy?”

  I look up and down the breezeway, but there is no one in sight. A dizzying thought occurs to me: Maybe Jackie decided to come get her things herself and ran into trouble. I see nothing in the living room but furniture, some of the walls and cabinetry dark with smudges from Homicide’s fingerprinting dust. The door to the master bedroom is fully open and there is no movement there either.

  After checking the kitchen and main bedroom, calling out Jackie’s name several more times, I move cautiously into the office, gun-first. The door is open, the room empty. But in the closet ceiling there is a three-by-three open square of blackness that leads to a narrow crawl space where the AC repair work is done. The panel that’s usually there has been dislodged and moved into the crawl space. It was in place when I left earlier today.

  I grab a small tactical flashlight from one of the shelves and shine the beam up into the space, which has a head clearance of several feet, illuminating the wires and ductwork, blanketed with dust. Jackie and I have heard rats and mice sometimes scurrying through the area, and in the two years we’ve lived in the apartment, Jimmy has squeezed himself up there half a dozen times to lay traps and poison. There is no sound now coming from the crawlway.