City of the Sun

by David Levien

  That all changed with Jamie. The moment he was born she was filled with energy, a purpose, for which she had never known to even hope. When he was a baby and his crying filled their apartment, and later their first small house, she would get up to attend to him. There was no bitterness, no black exhaustion in her step as she walked to his crib. When he got older and could sleep through the night before popping up to play at six or so in the morning, Carol felt that she barely needed sleep anymore. And by the time Jamie reached school age, Carol was getting up before he was. She faced the morning like a drill instructor, with energy and gusto, with near aggression. She’d rouse Jamie, corral him into the bathroom for a face washing and teeth brushing, get him into appropriate clothes, hustle him down for breakfast and take his lunch order, then putting it together and snapping it into his lunchbox, before he had finished his orange juice. She walked him to school with a bounce in her step. Rain or shine, each day felt like a gift.

  But now … Now Carol suspected the truth — that the energy had really been all Jamie’s. His youth, the relentless brand of spirit unique to young boys, was what had given her her power. Because now that he was gone, she sat at the kitchen table unable to do anything but wrap her fingers around her mug of inky coffee. There was a sense of stagnancy to her life worse than any hangover she’d endured during her partying days. The mornings were a nettlesome chore just to get through these days, a wall she didn’t know if she’d be able to climb. Waiting for Paul to leave for work set her teeth on edge.

  Carol kicked herself for her irritation at Paul this morning. He was pottering around endlessly, looking for something. She knew, on a rational level, that she should have more patience. Paul had found a way to keep going to work, to keep selling policies so that they could continue paying for the house. For several months she believed that that was the most important thing, because if Jamie ever returned he would know where to find them. If it had been left to her, they’d be living on the streets behind a Dumpster due to her inactivity. But all that didn’t matter anymore, because he wasn’t ever coming back. And this morning her nerves were unraveling like badly done knitting.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” she asked, recognizing the overtired timbre to her voice.

  Paul stopped and looked at her in surprise that she’d spoken to him before he’d been to work and back and it was dark outside.

  “For those cereal-box toys. I had a dozen of them. I was saving them.” He stood there holding the latest toy — a small spinning top — in one hand, a bowl of sugared flakes in the other.

  “Oh, those. I threw them away when I was cleaning out the drawers the other day,” she said, and got the strangest impression that her husband was going to cry.

  “Why? Why’d you do that, goddamnit?” he said, as angry as she’d ever seen him. It made her remember: He’d been saving the prizes for their son. Their son, who was never going to return. She’d had something on her mind for several weeks, and now seemed like as good a time as any to mention it.

  “Paul?” she said. “Paul, forget about the tops and things.” He looked to her. “Paul, I want to talk. There’s something I want to do.” He was expectant but said nothing. “I want to buy … I want us to get a plot. To put up a headstone for Jamie. I want to have a funeral and a place we can go to mourn. To remember him.” Everything in her married life told her that her husband would nod and acquiesce to her wish, so she looked on in shock when he slammed the cereal bowl he was holding against the countertop. It exploded in a shower of ceramic and sugared cereal flakes.

  “No,” he said. “No. No. No. No.” Then his face came apart in tearless sobs.

  It was pounding rain outside and the gutters were overflowing as Behr banged coffee and scoured DMV databases. Reading the numbers and addresses — dry, desiccated information — was a reprieve from his recent computer use. The sound of the rain brought him back to where he’d grown up, outside Everett, where this wouldn’t even be considered a drizzle but more of a light mist. After he’d gotten a criminology degree on a football scholarship, he’d learned that the Indianapolis P.D. was hiring and that the city had only fifty days of rain per year, which was about two hundred less than he was used to. The odd thing now was that he missed the rain most of the time.

  What he’d learned from Figgis, the jogger, had increased his dread about the mission he was on, and Behr buried himself in the minutiae of the task in order to avoid it. A lone degenerate out to grab a kid would be bad enough. But the presence of two men, if that’s what they’d been there for, hinted at a more dark-hued thing: organization. Most likely the car that his jogger had mentioned was stolen, and Behr hoped to stumble across a report of a matching model on a motor-vehicle theft list. His hopes remained at low ebb as he covered the databases for Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and western Ohio. No old Lincolns and only one Pontiac — an ‘84 Sunfire outside of Chicago — were reported stolen in the days leading up to the event. The Sunfire was a small, two-door model, Behr knew. There were dozens of reports of stolen license plates during the same time period. This led him to believe it much more likely that the car had been purchased, not stolen, and then had stolen plates put on it. Even if a witness like Figgis had written down the plate number, it would lead nowhere. In the name of thoroughness Behr checked all the title transfers closely preceding October 24. It was a banner sales week for large used sedans. And the pink slips registered at the DMVs were only a fraction of the cars that had changed hands for cash, he knew.

  As far as the two men went — men without description — he realized he’d never figure out the way the car had come into their possession. The car data began to run together until his eyeballs spun like slot-machine wheels. The exercise was a bust. Behr leaned back and let the data wash together on the computer screen and join with the rain on the window. While it had given him a brief jolt of momentum, practically speaking, the car was a dead end.

  With all the advances in car theft, Behr considered, I’d probably have a better time finding the kid’s bike. …

  “The bike,” he said aloud. It gave him pause. Why not try to find the goddamn bike? Behr reached for his car keys.

  THIRTEEN

  BEHR FELT LIKE A FOOLISH FUCK as he drove out on 65 toward the Southern County Municipal Landfill in the dwindling rain. Long odds had never been his style, and here he was hoping for a lottery-style payout. Still, he drove on, and ahead in the distance loomed the chain-link gate of Southern. Thirty-four acres licensed by the county for the disposal of solid waste, the place was Terry Cottrell’s fiefdom. Cottrell had been a thief and a fence when Behr met him a dozen years back on a stolen merch case. Behr had arrested him, and on the way to the station he’d fallen under the man’s rap. Many criminals he’d busted had lobbied him in the squad car, looking for special treatment on that last ride to the lockup, but Behr had never had such an objective, almost philosophical conversation with one as he’d had with Cottrell.

  Cottrell was a gangly, skinny kid back then. He seemed concerned by his fate, but unwilling, as if bound by an unspoken but tangible code of honor, to question, complain, or speculate about what would become of him. Instead he talked police business with Behr, recent cases that had been in the headlines, and seemed to have a deep knowledge of the life of a cop.

  Then, during the trial, on the day he was supposed to testify, Behr found himself at the lunch recess in a diner sitting down the counter from Cottrell and his mother. It was never pleasant facing the family of a guy he was trying to put away. There were usually evil stares, hard words, and often threats. But it was not so in this case. Cot-trell’s mother, Lana, was an attractive middle-aged lady.

  “Good day, sir,” she said politely. “No need to feel funny, us all having lunch. We wouldn’t be here if not for him.”

  Behr nodded.

  “Mama—” Cottrell began, only to be silenced by her look.

  Cottrell had a hell of a lawyer and got a two-year suspended sentence, although Behr h
ad nailed him cold in a storage locker full of high-end audiovisual gear. Behr was a younger cop back then, not yet jaded to the ways of the system, and he felt slapped by the light sentence. After watching Cot-trell walk out of the courtroom wearing a fat smile, he couldn’t let it go. A few days later he showed up at Cottrell’s house to threaten him to not fuck around in the neighborhood at any point in the near future. But Cottrell was out and he ended up sitting with Lana. She was stricken over her son’s legal problems and feared that since he’d gotten off, he’d go further down the path of crime. She also talked about how he loved to read and showed Behr the boy’s room, which was neatly kept and packed to overflowing with books. Behr was moved enough to give the matter thought and eventually he figured out how to secure the steady, quiet county job at the landfill for the kid.

  He and Cottrell had slowly become a kind of friends, and if Cottrell had been fencing or involved in crime these last many years, he kept it small-time enough that it stayed off Behr’s radar.

  Behr rolled through the gates and caught the acrid smell of the dump. Buried under large berms were millions of cubic yards of waste. In addition to the cars and household appliances quietly rusting into oblivion, there were industrial castoffs like coal tar, iron oxide, and paint, barreled and sunk. Supervising the spreading of earth over the refuse, and generally maintaining the facility, probably wasn’t the healthiest job in the world, Behr considered, but it had a hell of a lot more upside than Cottrell’s former occupation. Behr pulled up not far from the double-wide that was Cottrell’s headquarters.

  “Oh, shit, Big Sleep’s in the house,” Cottrell called as Behr lumbered out of his car.

  “What’s cracking, Terry?” Behr asked, shaking his hand.

  “ ‘S’up, Philly?” Cottrell asked back, leaning into a chest bump with Behr. He called Behr “Philly,” as in Philip Marlowe, half in jest, half out of respect.

  “Damn.” Cottrell seemed to appraise Behr’s bulk for a moment after the chest bump before going back to what he had been doing, which was feeding popcorn to a flock of crows. The big, ugly birds, disturbed at the hiatus, began cawing at him loudly. Their calls knifed through the air. Cottrell drew a few large handfuls of popcorn from a tin at his feet and threw it in the direction of the birds.

  “Most sensible people can’t stand these damn things,” Behr said, massaging his ears against the ringing squawks, “and here you are feeding ‘em.”

  Cottrell shrugged and flung another handful.

  “That’s why they’ve got these things called scarecrows, you know, to keep ‘em away,” Behr said, shaking his head.

  “Can I tell you, my man? I always liked these birds. ‘Cause they black and they loud. Just like me. …” Then Cottrell treated Behr to his signature explosive laugh. “Hah, heh-heh, heh-heh-heh.”

  Behr smiled and then paused, wanting, for a moment, to hold off what he knew was coming next. Cottrell picked up the tin and flung the remaining corn at the crows. Behr sighed and went ahead. “If I was looking to buy or sell a stolen bicycle, who’d be the main fence in this area?”

  Cottrell was genuinely surprised for a second at the question and then he went with it, spreading a thick layer of additional trumped-up mystification over his features.

  “Oh, I get it, I get it. Now I done seen it all. Motherfucking Trouble’s Your Business. Philly’s working the big cases now. Hah, heh-heh, heh-heh-heh.”

  Behr just shook his head and waited for the cackling to subside. It did eventually.

  “Well, well, let’s see,” Cottrell said, wiping his eyes. “C’mon back to my bat cave.”

  Behr followed him to the double-wide.

  Once inside, Cottrell splashed enough Old Grandad to cover the bottom of his coffee cup and filled it the rest of the way with Pepsi. He knew enough not to offer any to Behr as it would be refused. They used to drink together some days, but that was a long time back when they were nearly a dozen years younger and twenty pounds lighter and when Behr was still on the force before his kid had died.

  He watched Behr fall back into an old La-Z-Boy and check out the trailer. The walls, as in his room at his mother’s house, were lined with bookshelves. The shelves were filled with crime novels and literature. He could’ve opened a secondhand specialty bookshop if the books weren’t so worn from use and if he weren’t interested in keeping them. He’d been a full-on crime-writing buff when he was younger. He’d believed, hoped at least, that a thorough knowledge of how the great fictional gumshoes broke their cases, and the way the famous criminals slipped up, would ensure his success as a fence. In any case he moved on to literature after he found out he was mistaken.

  “So, man, what you want?”

  “I told you.”

  “F’real?”

  “For real.”

  Terry Cottrell looked across his trailer at someone who had done plenty for him and never expected much in return. He’d known Behr as a cop who had worked on violent crimes, important cases, and he didn’t know why the hell he was looking into stolen bikes now. The expression on the big man’s grill assured him there was a goddamn good reason, though.

  “Man, you know how much I hate shouting names,” he said. There’d only been a few occasions when Behr had asked him to, and no problems had come home to roost based on information he’d given Behr. But still.

  “And you know how much I hate asking, Terry,” Behr said, immobile, his arms resting on the chair’s arms. He seemed strong enough to tear them clean off at will.

  Terry swilled a sip of whiskey and mulled over the names he knew. “At thirty plus I’s getting old to clock the streets. Especially since I been retired for so long.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I’m retired like MJ was, I still got a few fall-away moves. Problem is, most fences I know deal in bigger items than bikes.” He knew Rally Cooper was the one to see if you were looking for a Mercedes. And Earl Powers for rods. Blood could even get you a .30-caliber machine gun. Cot-trell figured he could ask Behr why he needed to know and he would probably tell him. But his relationship with Big Philly was based on trust, he decided, and that shit was solid.

  Behr sat patiently and waited for Cottrell to work out his answer. The kid wasn’t born to talk, and Behr respected that about him. When he gave up a name or a piece of information, he was never rolling over, he was helping, and Behr appreciated the difference.

  Cottrell finished his thought with a tsk of his teeth and spoke. “Mickey Handley. Heard of him? Kid’s a wigger from over the other side.”

  “People still do that?”

  “Yeah, man. White kid from up north with a bad case of brother love. Listens to hip-hop, wears the big jeans, thinks he one of us.”

  Behr nodded. He knew the type. They tried to come off gangsta, though they usually just came off silly. “Where is he?”

  “He at Plainfield.”

  Behr raised his eyebrows.

  “Oh, yeah. White boy caught a F. He like me — a fast starter, and quick to get popped. He didn’t get himself no Allen Rossum though,” Cottrell said, naming the lawyer who’d gotten him off his charges way back.

  Behr nodded again. “I appreciate it, Terry,” he said, standing. Cottrell nodded. “Reading anything good?”

  “Fyodor. The Russians,” Cottrell answered. “Shit stands up to repeat. Don’t wait till the next big case to stop by.” His eyes flashed.

  “Sure. We should catch the Pacers.”

  “A’ight. But I can’t be sitting down at Conseco with 5–0.”

  “We’ll watch it on TV then.” The men shook and hugged and Behr turned to go, Cottrell watching him. Behr reached his car.

  “Yo, Big,” Cottrell called out. Behr looked back. “You know where Moses was when the lights went out?”

  Behr shook his head.

  “In the dark, same as you. Hah, heh-heh, heh-heh-heh.”

  Behr got in his car and left.

  FOURTEEN

  BEHR LOOPED BACK past the south edge of
the city and got on 40 west. He went past Six Points and drove into Plainfield. On the way he dialed Stan Brookings, an acquaintance from the force who was now a supervisor at the Plainfield adult facility. He asked for and got a hook at the juvenile “campus.”

  “Have lunch,” Brookings told him, “a visitor’s pass’ll be waiting for you by the time you’re done.”

  “You got a recommend?”

  “Try Gulliver’s, it’s nearby on North Carr.”

  Behr rolled into Gulliver’s and commandeered a booth. They sold antacids right next to the cash register, which was not a good sign, and whether or not the place had had a lunch rush, it was now after 3:00 and dead empty. He scanned the menu and considered his options. The idea of food wasn’t a welcome one as his appetite had been a relic since surfing the child-porn sites the other night. Usually he had a cast-iron stomach and could get by on the same fare as the average barnyard goat. Back during his days in uniform, his fellow officers used to joke about his ability to drink coffee at a motor vehicle accident scene or grab a bite of sandwich in the middle of a shoot investigation. But this case had turned his stomach and made his willingness to eat an even-up proposition at best.

  “You want something?” the waitress asked, her words in tune with the indecision on his face. She wore a tan uniform with “Darla” on her name tag.

  “I think I can do a bowl of chili,” he answered, “if it’s good.”

  “It is good,” Darla assured him, and he nodded that he’d take it.

  The longer it went, Behr thought, the worse the chances of finding ‘em. After about twelve hours, the odds went to shit. It’d been well over twelve months, and that gnawed at him like rats sharpening their teeth on plumbing pipes.

  Behr had grown up on a small farm in the Northwest, one where food was basic, if not scarce. The family killed their own chickens for supper back then, same with the seasonal hog. But the chickens had become his job once he’d reached the age of eight. How many hundreds of them had he put on the stump and finished, bringing down the hatchet, then putting all his weight on the twitching birds so they didn’t flap around the yard? By the time he had reached his teens, he’d merely taken them by the head and casually swung his wrist in a circle.