Shakedown jd-1

by Joel Goldman

  The wok-roasted shrimp and scallops were delicious. I did a better job of saying good night in the parking lot than I did at IHOP.

  “Don’t forget that your class on micro expressions starts Friday night. You have the potential to be a very good student,” Kate said, slipping out of my arms. “I’ve got to go home and finish preparing for a client presentation in the morning.”

  “This is Wednesday. What am I supposed to do until then?”

  “Get a dog,” she said.

  I knew where to find one. That is, if Marcellus Pearson’s dog hadn’t run away in the nearly forty-eight hours since her owner had been murdered. The last trace of sunlight was being chased out of the western sky when I headed back to Quindaro to look for Ruby. I hoped she was as good at surviving on the streets as she was at retrieving twenty-dollar bills.

  I doubted that any FBI agents would still be going doorto-door, but if they were, I’d explain that I was looking for the dog, not wanting to leave her on her own or at the mercy of animal control. It was a thin story but I practiced saying it with a straight face and a mild case of the shakes.

  Half a dozen young black men were clustered in the driveway of a house on the corner of Marcellus’s block, two of them playing basketball, battling for position beneath a hoop without a net, the others smoking and joking. The game of one-on-one stopped when I drove by and parked in front of Marcellus’s house.

  One of the players held the ball on his hip, staring at me as I got out of my car. He was wearing shorts and was stripped to the waist, his ripped torso and shaved head glistening beneath the streetlight at the edge of the driveway. Someone snatched a towel from the ground, trading it to him for the ball. The player wiped the sweat off his body and handed the towel to another member of the group without taking his eyes off me. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the one left by Marcellus’s death was no exception.

  We sized each other up from a distance, wordlessly agreeing that we were neither afraid nor impressed, content to stay out of the other’s business for now. If I came closer, he’d feel compelled to test me, something I didn’t need.

  I gave him a slight nod, letting him know that I got it, that I was on his turf and that he was graciously allowing me to be there. He shot the ball at the other player, hitting him in the gut, picking up their game again.

  The crime scene tape that had been stretched across the front porch of Marcellus’s house was gone, only a few remnants clinging to the corner posts, the inside and outside of the house wrapped in shadows. I wondered whether Marcellus had owned the house. If someone else owned it, they might wash the blood off the?oor and walls and rent it to someone who didn’t know or care what had gone down inside.

  If that didn’t happen, Quindaro would eventually claim it. Young kids would break in to see where the bodies had fallen. Drug dealers and gangbangers would turn it into a free-trade zone to be shared with rats. The weeds would grow tall, the roof would leak, the concrete would crack, and the foundation would sag. The city would place liens on it for unpaid taxes, fine the unknown and absent owner for code violations, and let the property deteriorate, telling whoever complained that the city didn’t have the money to fix it up or tear it down. The people who’d lived there had died in an instant. The house would take longer.

  I found the light switch in the front room. The warped hardwood?oor had purpled where blood had been left to soak into the planks. Except for the bodies that had been removed, it was otherwise just as I had seen it two nights ago.

  I walked through the house again, stopping in the kitchen, at the top of the stairs, and in the bedrooms, imagining Keyshon eating his breakfast, taking a bath, and sleeping as his mother checked on him one last time before she went to bed. The clothes still hung in the closet where I’d found him clutched in his mother’s arms, more dried blood the only testimony to what had happened in that small, dim space. His mother was dead. His father was dead. It was as if he’d never lived. There was no one to remember him.

  That’s why I was there. To make certain someone did.

  Chapter Twenty

  The dog wasn’t in the house or in the backyard. I stood beneath the tree where Ruby had found the money, the ground now hard and rutted, turning in a slow circumference to get a sense of who and what could have been seen that night. The houses on either side were dark.

  LaDonna Simpson, elderly and deaf, had probably gone to bed. Wayne Miller was still in jail, his girlfriend Tarla Hicks most likely out on the town. A light was on in the back of Latrell Kelly’s house, though I didn’t see anyone moving through the half-open drapes.

  Using the tree as twelve o’clock, Latrell’s house was at eleven o’clock. The figure I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, running away was headed on a bearing at one o’clock, a path that would have taken him between the two houses to the north of Latrell’s. The backyards of those houses weren’t fenced.

  I did a quick inventory. Neither Marcellus’s nor Wayne Miller’s backyards were enclosed. LaDonna Simpson’s and Latrell Kelly’s were. The man had run away from the scene and away from the fences, choosing the path of least resistance.

  I walked the route I assumed the man would have taken, rousing dogs that patrolled their patches of turf from behind chain link or at the end of sturdy ropes. Most of them were big and aggressive-Dobermans, rottweilers, or a mix. None of them were friendly. I thought back to Monday night, not recalling the sound of barking, realizing that the helicopter would have drowned out the dogs’ noise. Whoever had been running away had cut his escape quite close. If I hadn’t wandered into Marcellus’s backyard, the helicopter’s searchlight may have found him.

  I stopped on the sidewalk in front of Latrell’s house. The dogs had quieted, the low hum of late-season cicadas filling the void. A third of the moon hung in the sky, cool light on a cool night, the seasons shifting from summer to fall, an easy passage marked by hard dying.

  The house next door to his would have blocked Latrell’s view to the north, making it impossible for him to have seen the?eeing man. Though he had told Ammara Iverson that he was asleep at the time the murders were committed, he would have been awakened by the sirens, as was everyone else in the neighborhood. Someone should have seen the man. I hoped that the follow-up canvassing had produced a witness that made him real.

  My hope triggered another memory, one of omission, the kind that made me instinctively distrust every eyewitness I’d ever interrogated. I was looking for evidence of someone who may have committed the murders or been a witness to them; someone who might have seen Oleta Phillips standing beneath the tree, her hands bunched around bundles of twenty-dollar bills; someone who may have killed her for what she’d seen, not for the money she held. There was possibly no one more important to the investigation of these crimes and yet I hadn’t breathed a word of his possible existence to my squad.

  I knew all the excuses and explanations. People get so excited or traumatized by a crime that they often forget details, not knowing what they know until they have time for re?ection or until a skilled interrogator walks them through the moment frame by frame. Even then, such recovered memories are often tainted by time, bias, or the witnesses’ own suggestibility.

  I was one of those people the night of the murders, not only a witness to the mysterious?eeing man but a participant in my own sideline drama of shakes, shudders, and convulsions. My memory could be real or it could be pure confabulation. It meant nothing by itself, though it could lead to everything.

  Not all leads are created equal. They are appraised based on the credibility of the source. At the moment, I had less credibility than a politician swearing he did not have sex with that woman. The surest way to make certain my lead about the?eeing man was ignored was to tell my squad what I thought I might have seen.

  I started to walk back to my car when I heard a muf?ed, high-pitched bark, more like a burst of rapid-fire yaps. The front door to Latrell’s house was open, a splash of light marking Ruby’s swift?ight down the fron
t steps to where I stood. She planted her front paws on my leg, her tail wagging fast enough to fall off, her joy at seeing me expressed in the puddle she deposited at my feet.

  I scratched behind her ears and hoisted her to eye level. She rewarded me with a lick on my cheek and a playful swipe at my nose. I put her down and she immediately rolled on her back, legs spread so I could rub her belly.

  “She act like she’s your dog.”

  I’d been so preoccupied with the dog and Latrell had been so quiet in his approach that I didn’t realize he was there until he spoke. He was a half a head shorter than me, round-shouldered, and soft, just as he’d appeared on TV.

  Despite his innocuous looks and the clean pass Ammara had given him, I knew better than to dismiss him as a suspect. Most murder victims know their killer. Neighbors always qualify. He lived close enough to Marcellus to have shot everyone and gone home before Ammara rang his doorbell. If anything, his easy innocence should give me pause. I’d learned that lesson with Kevin’s killer.

  “We met the other night. I found her hiding under Marcellus Pearson’s bed.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Jack Davis. FBI.”

  “Lemme see some ID.”

  “I’m not here on official business.”

  “You’re standing out here in front of my house tellin’ me you’re FBI. Show me some ID.”

  He was asking, polite, not demanding, more curious than defensive. I showed him my driver’s license.

  He handed it back to me. “That’s not an FBI ID.”

  “I’m taking some time off.”

  “They take your ID when you go on vacation?”

  Same tone. Just trying to understand. No offense intended or taken. I started to shake, so I bent down to pet the dog, hoping to break the rhythm or distract Latrell’s attention. Neither worked.

  “Why you shaking?”

  I stood, letting the spasm pass, taking a breath. “I don’t know.”

  “That why you don’t have your FBI ID anymore?”

  I tried half a smile. “Yeah. Hard to catch the bad guys when I shake.”

  “But you say you were here the other night?”

  I wasn’t certain how I’d lost control of the situation, letting him question me, but I didn’t mind. He’d already been interviewed, maybe more than once. He’d want to ask his

  own questions before he’d consider answering any of mine.

  “I was.”

  “Hey, were you the guy in the backyard?”

  I nodded.

  “At first, I thought you musta been the one that did it, the way the cops surrounded you. Then I saw how one of them helped you and the rest of them just stood there. Didn’t look like they was arresting you or nothing.”

  “You saw all that?”

  “Watched from my kitchen, out the back window. One of them walked you out like there was something wrong with you. All them dead bodies make you start shaking?”

  I shook my head and smiled again. “Nope. But that’s when the people I work with caught me shaking.”

  Latrell laughed. “I guess that’s how come you on vacation and don’t have any FBI ID.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “So what you doing outside my house?”

  “I was looking for this dog, for Ruby. I got worried that she didn’t have anyone to take care of her. Looks like I was wrong.”

  “Couldn’t leave her on the street. Them Dobermans and rottweilers eat her for breakfast if they get half a chance.”

  “Well, you did the right thing, taking her in.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute, looking at me, then at the dog.

  “You want her?”

  I did. Not only because Kate had told me to get a dog, at least until Friday, and not because I was living alone in a house too big and empty for one person. I pictured Keyshon playing with the dog. Then I imagined Kevin playing with a dog we never had. Ruby linked those images, softened them for me. Still, I couldn’t take the dog from Latrell.

  “She’s yours. You’re taking care of her.”

  “Only ‘cause no one else would. I keep a neat house. That is not a neat dog. Wasn’t raised right. Not her fault. You take her.”

  He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, both looking like they’d just been pressed. I noticed his yard for the first time. Even in the dark, I could see that it was neatly mowed, the grass next to the sidewalk and steps cleanly edged. A row of close-cropped shrubs ran beneath the front windows, concrete?owerpots filled and blooming atop the stairs leading to his door.

  “You keep a nice-looking place. You own or rent?”

  Latrell stood a couple of inches taller. “It’s mine.”

  “Good for you. How long have you owned it?”

  “A while.”

  “You’re pretty young to have been able to buy a house.”

  “My momma left me some money.”

  I studied his empty face. If there were another story hidden beneath it, someone else would have to dig it up.

  “Any idea who owns Marcellus’s house?”

  He shook his head. “Not my business.”

  Ruby jumped up, bracing herself against my leg again.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to keep her?” I asked him.

  “I didn’t want nothing to happen to her, but I can’t have a dog messing up my house. You don’t take her, I got to do something with her.”

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  “Sure enough I’ll let you buy the dog food I got for her. Wait here.”

  He went inside, returning a moment later with a bag of Science Diet and a dish with separate bowls for food and water.

  “I don’t have a leash,” Latrell said, handing me the supplies.

  “Thanks. Will this cover it?” I handed him two twenties.

  He folded the bills between his fingers.

  “Close enough,” he said with a grin. “You saving me money. That dog eats, too,” he said, turning back toward his house.

  I called to him. “You know, I’m sure you’ve been over this with other agents, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about the other night.”

  He stopped, looking back at me. “How come? They took your ID. What you got to do with it now?”

  I shrugged. “Hard to stop being what I am.”

  He nodded, arms at his side, relaxed. “I got that. What you want to know?”

  “I’ll make it easy. Give me the short version. What you saw, what you heard.”

  “It’s like I told them other agents. I was asleep until I heard the sirens. Then I come downstairs into the kitchen, looked out my back window. Everything was over by then, I guess. All I seen was you and then the rest of them come get you. That’s all.”

  I rubbed my chin, thinking about what he said. This was how memories were shaped. The witness didn’t see or doesn’t remember. The cop prods the witness’s memory with a suggestion that blossoms into a fact. If the witness is a suspect, the memories can become a trap.

  “There may have been a couple of other people in the backyard or close by, maybe standing near that big tree where you saw me-a woman and a man. The man may have been running away just when I came out of Marcellus’s back door.”

  “I didn’t see anyone like that. I only saw you. And that was after.”

  “The man may have been the killer or he may have seen what happened. You sure you didn’t see anybody running away?”

  Latrell didn’t hesitate, shaking his head. “Didn’t see nobody running away. You ask the other people live around here?”

  If Latrell were the killer, he would have jumped on the?eeing man, letting us chase a ghost, unless he thought I was trying to catch him with a lie about a witness that didn’t exist. His unforced answer said he was either innocent or brilliant.

  “I’m sure the other agents did. Somebody always sees something. You know a woman named Oleta Phillips?”

  “I know who she is and I seen her around, but I don’
t know her to talk to her.”

  “You see her that night?”

  He shook his head again. “Like I told you, I didn’t see nobody besides you and the rest of the police and FBI. They already come talk to me. You can ask them.”

  “No need. That’s what they told me before I went on leave. It’s just that sometimes people remember things later on that they don’t remember the first time they are asked. The mind is funny like that. Happens to me, too. You think of anything else, you call the FBI. Ask for Ammara Iverson.”

  I handed him one of my business cards, jotting down Ammara’s name.

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “You take care of that dog.”

  “Don’t worry. Hey, you know, I saw you on television, on the news.”

  “Is that right?” Latrell asked, smiling.

  “Yeah. You said something that really hit home with me.”

  “I did?”

  “The reporter asked you for your reaction to the shootings and you said that’s what happens when no one takes care of a little boy.”

  He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “What’s that to you?”

  “It’s my whole life. I made that mistake with my son and I lost him.”

  He nodded, his face softening, his soft voice almost a whisper. “Then you know it’s true,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Latrell watched the FBI agent drive away, glad to be shed of the dog. He felt responsible for having orphaned the mutt and meant it when he told the agent that he wanted to protect the dog from the bigger, stronger predators in the neighborhood. The dog, smaller and weaker, wasn’t to blame for having been abandoned. Nonetheless, he didn’t like cleaning up after the dog, which had left her messes all over his house. If the agent hadn’t taken the dog, he would have gotten rid of her, one way or the other.

  He wasn’t certain what to make of the man who said he was FBI except he wasn’t working because he shook too much except there he was on Latrell’s street looking for that dog and oh, by the way, he says do you mind if I ask you some questions like did he see a woman out back of Marcellus’s house and did he know Oleta Phillips. Only reason Latrell believed he was FBI was because of seeing him come out of Marcellus’s back door that night and the way everyone treated him when he seized up.