Tin Men

by Mike Knowles

  Tony nodded. You ask most people if they know the names of their children and they’ll say something like, “Of course.” The nod meant Tony probably didn’t know.

  “What’s the oldest kid’s name?”

  “Tony.” The response was fast. Tony threw out the name like he was solving the puzzle on Wheel of Fortune. It was loud and fast to show Woody that he knew what he was talking about.

  “What’s Tony’s birthday?” Woody asked.

  Tony had no loud, fast answer, and there was no way to nod himself out of the question.

  “Second oldest, what’s his name?’

  “Her name is Lilly.”

  “When’s her birthday?”

  No answer again. Tony just gave his newspaper a blank stare.

  “When was the last time you played a gig in Toronto?”

  “Two months ago,” Tony said.

  “First song?”

  “‘Love Sick’ by Mura Masa. Awesome track.”

  “Last song?”

  “Fugees, ‘Fu-Gee-La.’ I do a remix with it that people never see coming.”

  Woody nodded. “Last question. Little Tony’s mother, where is she?”

  “Fuck, I don’t know. Last I heard, she took the kid to Toronto with her.”

  Woody stood up and put a hand on his chair. “Thanks for the sit-down, Tony, it was . . . informative. Now come outside with me and pop the trunk of that green Civic.”

  “You said you’d leave it alone if I talked to you.”

  “I lied,” Woody said, putting his other hand on the butt of the pistol.

  “Not my car,” Tony said.

  “Your lawyer can sort that out. Let’s go.”

  Tony said something in Vietnamese, and the kid who had been looking at the Civic bolted from his seat. He ran around several tables on his way to the door. From there he would have to run across the lot to the car. Woody took his hand off the Glock and picked up the chair he had been sitting on. The legs were flimsy, but the seat was heavy. The chair shattered the window behind Tony. Woody stepped through the hole he made and pulled the Glock. He met the kid halfway, the gun pointed at his face.

  The kid put his hands up, and Woody motioned with the gun for him to get on his knees. He cuffed the kid and walked him back inside using the empty window frame instead of the door. The other three kids had run away, but Tony was still in his chair.

  When Woody sat the kid down at Tony’s table, Tony spoke to him in rapid-fire Vietnamese. The kid’s head bent low, and Woody knew what message was being sent. The kid would be arrested, convicted, and deported, and he would shut up and like it. The diners seated in the restaurant were either looking for the cheque or pretending the loud one-sided conversation wasn’t happening.

  “Not my car,” Tony said. “You’ll never pin that on me.”

  “You told him to run for it.”

  “Did I? I had no idea you spoke Vietnamese.” Tony smiled. “Doesn’t even matter if you actually do. I’ll say I didn’t,” Tony nodded toward the kid, “and so will he.”

  “Don’t care,” Woody said. “Think of today as a sign of things to come. Things are going to change. We don’t like you and we’re going to start fucking with you every day until you find somewhere better to be.” Woody decided that bullshitting Tony would keep him ignorant about why he was really here. It would keep Bertha out of it, too, preserving whatever work Julie did. Tony was a gangster—small time, but still a gangster. And gangsters liked nothing better than to think everything was about them.

  “I knew you wouldn’t crack, Tony. You’re a pro. But, I knew one of the kids would give it away. I just had to keep you talking.”

  Tony looked pleased with himself. Woody had just given him one hell of an ego boost.

  “I’m going to ruin the kid’s life unless he gives me you. And if he doesn’t, I’ll find someone else. I’m going to find your kids too. Something tells me you don’t pay child support. I’m going to make sure your bank account pays for all the fun your dick has ever had—unless, of course, you get out of town.”

  Tony laughed in Woody’s face. “Good luck, pig,” he said.

  *

  Ramirez wasn’t happy when Woody called him. “You said you were just going to check things out. You said pay a visit. A visit!”

  “That was the plan.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Things escalated.”

  “Who did the escalating?”

  Woody glanced back at the shattered window. “Fifty-fifty.”

  “Did he do it? Did he kill Julie?”

  “We didn’t get around to that.”

  “Fucking great! So you blew my case and you have got nothing to show for it. I let you in on Nguyen because I was told you were a professional. This is not how a professional works.”

  Woody got up from the table. “This is how a murder case works, Ramirez. I ask questions and get answers. Then, I ask more. The only thing Nguyen knows is that the cops are after him. He knew that already. I picked up Tony and one of his people because that was what he would have expected would happen. I played the asshole, so that he would see me that way.”

  Ramirez’s anger had dulled to petulance. “You think you’re not an asshole?”

  “Sure I am, but I’m an asshole who solves murders.” Woody looked at the kid with his hands cuffed behind his back. It was clear that Tony had told him to keep his mouth shut and he was getting a head start. “Tony and the kid were pretty interested in keeping me away from a car in the lot. If you want the collars and the car, it’ll cost you.”

  “Cost me what?”

  “I want the girlfriend’s address.”

  “You want me to turn over my informant after what you pulled?”

  “It’s not like I can hurt your case by talking to her, Ramirez. She already switched teams. Now you can tell me where I can find her, or I can find out on my own. Do you really want me talking to Tony again?”

  Ramirez showed up in the lot twenty minutes later with two patrol cars and another unmarked. Ramirez could barely look at Woody when he settled the bill.

  Woody didn’t care about Ramirez; he was too busy keying the address into his phone. When he had the directions, he left the scene to the GANG unit and the unis to clean up.

  The address Ramirez provided belonged to a high-rise apartment building. The high rise was one of five erected inside a wide square block. The buildings were all similar in size and wear—well past their prime. Woody rounded the block and drove into the rear parking lot that serviced the complex.

  Both sets of entry doors leading into the building were broken, and they opened without a key. Woody walked inside and passed a group of kids conspicuously doing nothing. One kid, in a sideways hat, had a Sharpie in his fist. Woody glanced to the left of the group and saw an almost finished message.

  “If you’re trying to say she’s a whore, you might want to consider putting a ‘w’ in there. The way you’re doing it makes Melissa look more a gardening tool than a girl with a habit of dating losers.”

  “Uh, okay,” the kid said. “How do you spell fuck off?”

  “C-O-P,” Woody said, showing the butt of his gun.

  All four kids turned and booked it out the broken doors.

  On the sixteenth floor, Woody knocked on the door of apartment 1620. The door was answered twenty seconds later by a hugely pregnant Vietnamese woman. Woody took one long look at her and said, “Sorry, I got the wrong apartment.”

  Bertha nodded and closed the door without saying anything, and Woody got back on the elevator.

  Outside the building, Woody saw the kid in the sideways hat had learned to spell whore correctly. He wrote it perfectly on the unmarked car’s side mirror. Now the warning read, “Whores in mirror may be closer than they appear.” Arrows pointed at the word so that he wou
ldn’t have been able to miss the graffiti. Clever kid, Woody thought.

  Woody was about to get into the car when Ramirez’s car pulled in behind him.

  “I’m going up with you,” Ramirez said as he got out of the car.

  Woody sat sideways in the car so that his feet could rest on the curb. “Too late.”

  “What? You already talked to her?”

  “Looked. I looked at her.”

  Ramirez shook his head. “What does that mean?”

  “She had nothing to do with it. Neither did Tony.”

  “Just like that?”

  Woody shrugged.

  “A couple of minutes ago, you said you hadn’t got around to asking Tony about the murder. Now, you say he didn’t do it. What changed?”

  “I saw his girl.”

  Ramirez threw his hands up in disbelief. “A conversation with Tony, a look at his girl, and you have it all figured out. I gotta tell you, you’re wasting your time as a homicide cop. You should be a judge. We’d never have a backlog again. You could just look at everybody and sentence them.”

  “You think she did it?” Woody asked.

  “Maybe not her, but she could have tipped Tony off.”

  “That how you see it playing out?”

  Ramirez gave it a few seconds’ thought. “Look, I loved Julie. Loved her. But she could be a real hard-ass. She turned the screws on Bertha. Maybe Bertha decided to turn them herself.”

  “Using the man she was screwing as her screw,” Woody said.

  “This isn’t a joke.”

  Woody ignored Ramirez’s hurt feelings. “What’s the M.O. of the Yellow Circle attacks?”

  “Machetes,” Ramirez said.

  “Yep. Machetes and numbers are the way they operate. A bunch of kids with knives surround and hack at a victim right?”

  Ramirez nodded.

  “Didn’t happen to Julie. Someone cut her up, but it was done with purpose. I doubt from the cuts that a machete was used. And it wasn’t a swarm; there’s no way a group of kids would leave a crime scene that clean. There was no blood on the floor or the walls. I’ve seen messier slumber parties. I’m guessing one doer with a knife from the kitchen.”

  “Tony could have gone himself and done it, or sent one guy over.”

  “Alright, let’s go with that for a second. Tony goes after Julie. Why?”

  “He finds out his girl was ratting him out to her.”

  “So he kills a cop. No, scratch that. He butchers a cop.”

  Ramirez nodded.

  “How’d he find Julie’s apartment? She was on the girl, not him. Bertha never went to Julie’s place so how would he know where to go?”

  Ramirez said nothing.

  “Tony Nguyen seemed like the kind of guy with enough juice to have dirty cops on his payroll? I met him, and his personal security all looked like they were new to shaving. But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Tony has more clout than we know, and he found out about Julie and tracked her down. Do you think he would have just let Bertha slide?”

  “She was pregnant with his kid.”

  “You’re thinking like you and not like him, Ramirez. Tony has eight kids with several women already. He doesn’t know anything about any of his children or their mothers. My guess is he couldn’t give a shit about Bertha. There’s no way he’d let her walk without at least slapping her around. I just saw her, and she looks fine.”

  “She’s pregnant.”

  Woody sighed. “She’s ratting out her mob boyfriend. A man she’s already scared of. Do you think she’d have told him about it voluntarily? He’d have had to get it out of her. It would have been physical—it always is. And you can’t tell me he’d be mean enough to cut Julie up, but too nice to hit his girlfriend. You can’t have it both ways. He’s not my guy. He’s still yours, though.”

  “We won’t be able to hold him on anything,” Ramirez said.

  “I know. I wanted it that way. I made him feel like Scarface. Right now, Tony’s in a cell thinking about how he’s a badass gangster who’s going to outfox the cops. He has no idea what I wanted was about Bertha and neither does she.”

  “Great. Except Julie’s killer is still out there.”

  Woody nodded.

  “What are you going to do?” Ramirez asked.

  “I’m going to start looking for that cop.”

  Ramirez nodded. “If he’s out there.”

  “You and I think he is.”

  “Hey,” Ramirez said, “you okay? You look a little pale.”

  Woody leaned forward and looked at himself in the side mirror. He skin had lost most of its colour and some of his hair was damp against his forehead.

  “I’m fine.” Woody pulled his legs into the car. “Just a little tired. I gotta go, Ramirez.”

  “You need something, you let me know,” Ramirez said.

  Woody nodded and closed the door. When he was back on King Street he dry swallowed two of the pills Joanne had given him without even thinking about it.

  22

  Dennis poured two glasses of red wine and took a deep inhale over his glass as though he had a clue what he was doing.

  “Is that red wine?”

  “It’s a pinot,” Dennis said.

  “Oooh, Daddy, I love pinot,” Jennifer said.

  Dennis had spent the rest of the day going over the statements the uniform cops had taken at the scene. Nothing had any real value. No one seemed to know Julie, and no one had heard anything the night of the murder. Julie’s neighbour to the left was out late at the gym, and the neighbour on the other side had the stereo turned up. Mrs. Chang’s statement contributed less than nothing and everything she had said matched what Lisa had told Dennis in her apartment. The statements were done well. Dennis thought the small blond cop he had put in charge had real potential. The only person who knew Julie at all, it seemed, was Lisa O’Brien, and now she was dead. There were a lot of pedestrian deaths in the city this year. It was getting to be an epidemic. Dennis circled her name in his notepad. He would talk to someone in traffic about what happened as soon as the case gave him a chance to come up for air. Losing someone so close to the vic was bad, but Dennis could console himself with the fact that he, and not some halfwit, had been the one to interview Lisa. He thought about the interview and felt he wouldn’t have done anything different if he had the chance—which he didn’t.

  Dennis entered all of his notes into the case file and hoped the system would flag one of the names mentioned or a detail of the murder. Every case went into the computer and the program cross-referenced the names, crimes, and details with every other file in the system. Nothing Dennis entered raised any alarms; there were no recently paroled knife-wielding maniacs living in Julie’s building. The other half of the day was spent avoiding Jerry. The tubby detective sergeant was by his desk every ten minutes for an update he could take upstairs. It was like he didn’t hear Dennis when he told him the case had about as much momentum as a turd on the sidewalk in January. Dennis managed to sneak out at seven when Jerry went upstairs for his last brief.

  Dennis stopped by Subway and ate a foot-long meatball sub. He washed it down with a Coke and had some of the freshly baked cookies for dessert. After his fourth cookie, he saw that it was almost nine. He got in the car and went looking for something sweet.

  Jennifer, the diamond in the rough from the night before, was in the same spot she had been in the other day. She was wearing a blue dress made of a clingy material that left almost nothing to the imagination. Well, almost nothing—Dennis still couldn’t see her package. He pulled up to the curb and yelled, “Benjamin,” out the window.

  Jennifer sauntered over. “It’s Jennifer, baby.”

  “The fuck it is. Meet me in the parking lot across the street.”

  “Sure, Daddy.”

  Denni
s waited for a break in traffic and then crossed four lanes to get into the parking lot. He pulled into a space in front of the 7/11 doors and waited for Jennifer to make her way across the street.

  When she got close, Dennis got out and said, “I’m going inside to get some gum. Wait in the car.”

  “Get me something to eat. I’m starving.”

  “What do you want?” Dennis asked.

  “Something hard.”

  Dennis blushed a little at the comment. He hadn’t done that in a long while. “Just get in the car.”

  Dennis got some gum and a popsicle and got back in the car. Jennifer greedily took the popsicle out of the plastic and began sucking it. Dennis watched for a minute, until the silence in the car became awkward.

  “I had a bad day,” Dennis said.

  “It was probably nothing compared to my day, Daddy. I ripped my dress on the way out and I had to put on this old thing ’cause it was the only clean thing I had. Then, I got to my corner and I find Angela standing there. Bitch doesn’t even look like a bitch. I said to her, ‘Mangela, you better get your fat ass off my corner.’ Bitch put up a fight until it was time to put up, then she just left.”

  Dennis shook his head. “Someone died.”

  Jennifer looked genuinely sad. “I’m sorry. Was it family?”

  Dennis shook his head.

  “A friend?”

  Dennis shook his head again.

  “I didn’t know her, but she knew me. Weird as that sounds, she knew me better than anyone. I can’t explain it, but it felt so good to have a person like that in my life—even if she wasn’t really in my life.”

  “I know how that is,” Jennifer said.

  Dennis looked away from the lot and into Jennifer’s eyes. He thought maybe she did know what he meant.

  “I know what people think of me, and that’s the me that I let them see. That isn’t even—” he turned over his palms and let them hover over his lap before moving them over Jennifer’s crossed legs, “this.” He let his hands fall. “She knew. She knew all of it and she didn’t judge me.” Dennis absentmindedly rubbed against the stubble on Jennifer’s thigh. “I never had that before. I don’t think I’ll ever have it again.” Jennifer put her hand over his and tried to ease it closer to her lap, but Dennis resisted and kept it where it was. “You ever been happy?”