by John McMahon
I took a shower and threw on some dark jeans. A black tee and a midnight-blue hoodie.
When I came out, the game was in the sixth inning, and the two dogs were both asleep on the couch, a foot or so between them. A good first day.
Marvin stretched his left leg out, the heel of his sock up on the edge of the coffee table. He pointed his toes toward the TV and then brought them back again, working the muscles in his calf.
“You robbin’ a bank or something?” he asked, staring at my clothes.
I shrugged. “Porsches don’t come easy.”
I grabbed my keys and drove to the address that Remy had texted me.
24
I sat at the counter at Scala’s, a full mug of Pabst Blue Ribbon in front of me.
The place was a neighborhood bar, and in not such a good neighborhood. The numbered streets, 20th and Pike to be exact.
I’d been to this bar for a cop’s retirement party. But it was years ago, and my policy back then was one beer and home to the wife.
The owner of Scala’s had been a boxer, and he’d decorated the walls with images of famous boxing moments—some from movies and others from the yellowing extracts of sports sections. All of them were housed in black frames that plastered every wall.
I sat at a counter facing the street, my view a handful of empty storefronts along 21st Street. A shuttered hardware place. An abandoned liquor store. A barber shop that was still in business, but closed now, at ten p.m.
The bar smelled like stale beer and pretzels. When I heard the chime on the door, I glanced to my right.
At work, Remy Morgan dresses up. So other than at a stakeout like the other night, it’s all professional-looking skirts or pantsuits. Nice jackets. But now she had on gray leggings and a black T-shirt that read Extra in black letters.
A waitress came by as Remy climbed onto the stool next to me. “What’ll you have, hon?”
“Ginger ale,” she said, looking from my beer to me.
After the woman left, I pushed it farther away. “A prop,” I said. “If I wanted to start drinking again, it wouldn’t be PBR.”
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Was following up on a lead.”
“Everything all right?”
Remy nodded.
Tomorrow I was expected back at work, per a text I’d gotten from Chief Senza. So I’d be back on the case Remy was working late on. With four dead bodies and counting, I’d have to be ready to go whole hog.
“The short guy,” she said. “I went back over the area outside of Tandy’s in the daylight on Saturday. Specifically the route that Shorty took out the bathroom window.”
“You find something?”
“In the weeds outside the window,” Remy said. “A motel key card.”
“What motel?”
“The Garden Palms,” Remy said. “Although the card was generic, so it took us a day to figure that out.”
“I know that place,” I said. It was a crap bucket down the road from Tandy’s. A one-story motel. The kind of joint that put stickers on the front door reminding guests not to enter with guns.
“And?” I asked.
“Me and Abe spent Sunday there. Short guy’s name is Thiago Carilla.”
“You find a weapon in his place?” I asked. “He didn’t have a gun in the forest, or he would’ve shot back at the old guy.”
Which meant his weapon might’ve been left in his hotel room.
“Abe said the same thing,” my partner said. “But no. No weapon. We found six spools of Ace bandages. Vaseline. Two boxes of gauze.” Remy did an imitation of Abe. “‘Rem—it looks like a damn Eckerd’s exploded in here.’”
I grinned at this. “And you told him, ‘Eckerd’s stopped exploding ten years ago. Those are all called Rite Aid now.’”
“Pretty much,” she said. “But judging by the amount of blood loss this guy was dealing with, we’re thinking Carilla’s hand injury might’ve been a bullet wound, P.T. A graze.”
“Well.” I shrugged. “The M.E.’s got the body. What does Sarah say?”
“Inconclusive,” she said. “She did note a divot at the proximal end of the wound.”
“A divot?” I repeated. “Did it have a parallel mark next to it, right before the abrasion?”
“Exactly,” Remy said.
The M.E. before Sarah had once explained to me about the odd relationship between the yaw of a bullet as it caromed off human skin. Pressure waves were generated, and the skin buckled. It’s sort of like a plane’s nose, touching the ground and then bouncing off it. There’s a notch in the skin where the bullet first connects, then two parallel marks and a shallow abrasion that follows.
I sat back, thinking about how this might change our theory of the crime.
The two dead men in the car were killed execution style, and the truth was that we were still guessing as to how the short guy and the old guy were connected.
Remy’s drink came, and behind us the music changed to “Light My Fire” by the Doors. Ten minutes later, the sound of shuffleboard stopped, and so did the music.
“We’re closing up, hon,” the waitress said.
I dropped some cash onto the counter and pulled on my hoodie. The night air was brisk, and Remy and I left, walking out onto Pike.
As I headed out, I glanced back to confirm that the beer on the counter was still full. Not a touch gone.
We headed into the alley beside the bar, and I lit a Marlboro Red.
Remy confirmed that we were here to check out the liquor store across the way, but were waiting for the street to clear. The bar was the last place open on the street every night, which was why Remy asked to meet there.
“We also found a throwaway cell phone in the short guy’s hotel room,” Remy said.
“Anything good on it?”
“An interesting text. ‘Need more scratch,’ it read. Sent to another throwaway cell phone.”
“More scratch as in he wanted more money?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Remy said. “Sent on Wednesday.”
This was two days before the short guy had been shot out in the forest behind the bar. I put out my cig, and we moved to my truck, our eyes on the employees inside the bar cleaning up.
“Hey,” I said to Remy. “You don’t have the final medical report on Dilmendes on your phone, do you? The guy in the passenger seat of the Caprice?”
“No,” she said. “Why?”
“That other bullet he took. Through his back.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “There were no other bullets, P.T. The headshot was his only injury. A through-and-through.”
I took this in. Then where the hell did the bloodstain on the back of the passenger seat come from?
“We’d been thinking that the short guy—”
“Carilla,” she interrupted.
“Carilla.” I used his name. “That he was our shooter, but there’s another possibility, Rem. The bullets in the gut of the college kid and Carilla were both .22 slugs, right?”
“Yup.”
“Well, we know the bullets in the two dead guys on the roadside were also from a .22. If the slugs match, that could mean it’s the same gun. Meaning the old man from the forest is our killer on the side of the road.”
Remy nodded. “So under that theory, the old man enters the back seat of the Caprice.”
“Driver’s side.” I pointed. “Back door.”
Remy nodded, agreeing. “Two guys that are soon to be dead are in the front.”
We each thought about this for a second, and I pictured it.
“I’ve been stuck on that blood,” I said. “The bloodstain on the back of the passenger seat.”
“‘Fixated’ is a better word.”
“I’ve been fixated,” I agreed. “But here’s my new theory. There’s three guys
in the car. Driver and his buddy in the front. And Carilla, also a buddy, in the back seat, passenger side.”
“Okay . . . ?”
“Old guy gets in. Pops Vinorama, the driver. Pops Dilmendes in the passenger seat. He turns to shoot Carilla, but by this time, the short guy has the door open and is on the run.”
“He grazes him in the left hand with a bullet,” Remy said.
“Exactly.” I nodded. “That’s why he had the gauze on his hand.”
“And all those medical supplies in his motel.”
“The shot nicks him,” I said. “And after that, the old guy’s searching for Carilla—because whatever he killed the other two men for, Carilla’s a witness to it.”
Remy’s eyebrows went up, and I could tell from the look that she liked the logic.
“If that’s the case, P.T., then the blood on the Ace bandage will match that blood on the back of the seat. Both would be Carilla’s blood. That’s easy to test.”
“And then,” I said, “maybe you won’t refer to me as fixated, but astute.”
Remy smiled, and we went silent for a moment, scanning the stores. The bartender and waitress from Scala’s were gone, and I turned to my partner.
“So . . . you said to meet you here.” I glanced around. “What’s the plan?”
“Well,” she said, “two days ago, I started researching that partnership you told me about.”
“Lauten Hartley’s partnership?” I asked, referring to the company that owned the liquor store. “FJF Investments?”
Remy nodded, and outside a single car passed us. A beat-up Hyundai Santa Fe.
“The Golden Oaks liquor store.” She pointed across the street. “If you believe the filings, the store was making good money. Lottery tickets and hard liquor mostly. And then it just shuttered. Out of nowhere. Right past Christmas two years ago.”
I stared over at the façade that once read Golden Oaks.
I still couldn’t explain why I’d told my wife that I was too busy to help with her battery problem at the roadside back in December of ’17. I’d been consumed with this robbery and asked Lena to call her father, Marvin.
Marvin arrived at the side of I-32. But as he spoke to his daughter at her window, a car struck Marvin’s vehicle into Lena’s. And down the hill my wife’s Jeep went. Into the Tullumy River, where Lena and Jonas would drown in minutes.
The empty space I stared at across the way had no sign on it. The windows that were once crowded with liquor bottles were blocked with bars. And behind them, someone had placed plywood with the words “out of business” spray-painted on the wood.
The words “Golden Oaks,” which used to sit on a horizontal sign above the front door, were gone, as were the words “Liquor,” “Fine Wine,” and an illustration of a yellow oak tree.
The only remnants, in fact, that it had been a package store at all were the vertical letters that spelled LIQUOR attached to a concrete spear that stuck up into the sky and was probably too expensive to remove.
“Are you okay?” Remy asked.
I’d felt a curious calm in the last day or so, not just because I’d taken time off, but because I get this sort of focus when I chase a lead. And no lead mattered more to me than this one.
“Yeah,” I said. “Are we breaking in?”
“I prefer to call it exploring,” Remy said.
25
We walked across 20th Street and passed the front of the Golden Oaks. Moved past the package store and turned down Pike to an alley behind the place.
A rolling gate stood between the worn asphalt of the alley and the back of the store property. It was my height roughly, but above the gate was a string of razor wire, formed into a series of loops.
I took off my hoodie and swung it atop the sharp wire, pulling the fabric down so it formed a barrier above the razor to grab on to.
Remy found a foothold and climbed over, disappearing out of sight.
I went next, landing on a fenced-off rectangle of blacktop behind the liquor store, an area that was empty, except for two angled white streaks denoting parking spaces. One of them still held the faded blue markings of a handicapped sign, painted onto the ground.
I stared at the rear of the store. In front of us was a steel door, and off to its right a window.
I tested the door, pulling on the latch, but quickly realized that it wasn’t going anywhere.
“Your plan . . .” I whispered to Remy.
“Sure.” She nodded. “You didn’t hear something inside?”
I blinked. Thinking I knew where she was going.
“I mean, anyone could be in there,” Remy said. “And we have a responsibility to investigate.”
I smiled at this, but also thought through the machinations of this deception. My partner was talking about us going through the place, and then reporting it. Saying we heard a noise. Then getting a patrol car down here, to document anything we found. This held more risk than usual, with Hartley’s position on the police board.
Remy walked back to the six-foot-tall fence. She grabbed my hoodie and wrapped it around her fist. Approached the window.
Without warning she punched at the glass.
I’d seen Remy hit plenty. Both out in the field and at her kickboxing gym.
The glass shattered fast, and she took a flashlight from her back pocket. Looked inside.
I wondered how much of this Remy had thought through before she met me at the bar. Her moves were something I’d do, and it usually wasn’t good to be working off the P. T. Marsh playbook.
Remy took her right boot off then and used the metal heel to clear the rest of the window, sending glass shards down into the store.
Knocking out the remaining glass with the toe, she shined her flashlight inside again, and we saw it was a small bathroom. Through the open door at the far side of the tiny room, we could make out the empty liquor store.
“Age before beauty,” my partner said, spreading the hoodie over the edge of the window.
I laid my right foot inside the hole, and then my left. Turned on my stomach and eased myself backward through the two-foot-square space.
I thudded to the ground, noticing a piece of glass had sliced at my right hand on the way in.
My blood was smeared onto some shards on the floor, and I carefully picked up the red glass and placed it in my back pocket.
I flicked on my own flashlight, raking the darkness with light. In the quiet, rats scurried, and Remy landed behind me.
We moved into a storeroom, standing in the middle of two aisles with empty wooden racks. From the different heights of the shelves, I could imagine which ones once stored six-packs and which ones were for “fine wine,” as the sign outside had originally advertised. More like Two-Buck Chuck.
But nothing lined the shelves now except an inch of dust.
When I first came to investigate the robbery in December 2017, I’d met a man named Christian Pelo. He was a new employee, a few days into the gig, when a man in a ski mask walked in and demanded everything in the register.
Pelo was in training, and his boss, a store manager named John Adrian, had just left for the bank. Adrian left Pelo shorthanded, with only thirty-three bucks in the till.
If you were a crook, it was the definition of shitty timing. Then again, I hadn’t arrested a lot of Rhodes scholars while working in burglary or homicide.
Pelo showed the thief the safe, which was empty, and he opened the register too. Full transparency to try to save his own life.
The robber cracked Pelo with his rifle, took the thirty-three dollars, and filled up a Cherry Coke. Fountain drink, not bottle. And that’s what got me fired up about finding the shitbrick back in 2017. The nerve to stop and fill his drink with ice. Then soda. Take his time leaving.
The event also reminded me how much the numbered streets had fa
llen into disrepair since I’d been on patrol. Part of me thought the blame for that fell on us, in MFPD, for choosing to ignore calls and not make obvious arrests. “Why arrest them?” I’d once heard a blue-suiter say. “Let the animals kill themselves.” It was exactly the wrong philosophy to come from any cop if our goal was to ever come together as a city.
Within a day, Christian Pelo was gone from the job at the Golden Oaks.
When I came by to get more information from John Adrian, the store manager, he never seemed to be able to tell me where Pelo lived.
“Do you have his employment paperwork?” I’d asked Adrian, trying to get a valid address for the short-term employee. “His I-9 form?”
At every turn, gathering information was like peeling cat hair off duct tape.
I got railroaded. Ignored.
But I’m a stubborn person. And proud of my record on cases back when I worked robbery full-time. So even though I was just covering for guys in that department, I stuck by the case. Came by again and again over the next week. A couple weeks after that, on December 21, the accident with Lena happened.
In the days that followed, I dropped the Golden Oaks robbery. I later learned that it was closed as unsolved. With only thirty-three dollars missing, no one seemed to care.
Remy and I fanned our flashlights across the place, and dust moved through the rays of light. We walked into the main area of the store and out toward those plywood boards that covered the windows facing 20th.
With Remy digging through details and not liking them, I felt recharged. I wasn’t some crazy guy who lived in the past with a talking dog and invented details to fit the case. I was Detective Marsh, from the old days. The guy with gut instinct. The guy you went to when the hair on your arms stood up.
But now that I was standing here, I wondered what the hell I was even looking for.
I stood by the door where I’d come in and talked to the manager.
“Tell me what you remember,” Remy said.
“Adrian was nervous,” I said.
“He was the guy who got robbed?”
