‘What’re you doing with that?’ Bobby asked.
‘I’ll return it when we’re done,’ I said.
He moved toward the door but Charles cut him off and pulled the pistol out of his waistband again. He loaded it with three more rounds.
‘What do you want?’ There was pleading in Bobby’s voice.
Charles made no pretense toward friendliness or kindness. ‘For you to cooperate and stop acting like an asshole.’
We went into Bobby’s bedroom. Bobby had surprisingly little in it – a few changes of clothes and toiletries. It looked and felt like a guest room.
‘How long have you been staying here?’ I asked.
‘I’m done talking,’ he said.
We moved to Terrence’s bedroom, the room of a kid who’d become an adult and never left home. There was a plain twin bed, a brown pressboard bookcase, a desk with a laptop computer on it, a dresser, a cabinet and a dartboard hanging on the closet door.
‘Don’t search in here,’ Terrence said.
‘Sorry, son,’ Charles said.
Terrence’s face flashed anger but Charles held the pistol and wore such a strangely innocent expression that you could believe that he would use it like a child who knew no better.
I searched the dresser, the cabinet, and the closet and found nothing that interested me. ‘See? No reason to worry,’ I said and went to the bookshelf. A line of paperback novels and a dictionary stood on the top shelf. On the next shelf were stacks of old magazines and a hand-carved wooden box, the kind they sell in Mexican tourist markets. I picked up the top magazine, an old copy of Details. Under it was a deeply creased magazine called Whiplash – with pictures of bondage and S&M on the cover.
‘This what you’re into?’ I asked Terrence and picked it up.
About a dozen odd-shaped pieces of paper fell from between the magazine pages and snowed to the floor. Terrence had clipped out favorite pictures. A woman wearing a mask over her head and studs through her nipples landed face up. So did a woman with feet and hands splayed spread eagle, chained to a dark wall, a cut below her lip. ‘What do you do? Arrange them like paper dolls?’
Terrence sighed. He moved to pick up the pictures. But Charles grabbed him.
I gathered the pictures myself, scooping them between the magazine pages, and saw that Terrence had altered some of them. He’d cut pictures of faces from other magazines or clipped them from family photographs and pasted them above the shoulders of the Whiplash shots. One of the faces was of a little Asian girl, no older than seven, which he’d affixed to the body of a skinny white woman with bleeding nipples. I stared at the next one for several seconds before I comprehended what I was looking at. He’d cut out a fat white woman who was being doubly penetrated and had pasted on a photograph of the face of Belinda at twenty-one or twenty-two years old. Belinda’s hair was shorter than when I’d first met her but her eyes were still young and hopeful. She had an open-mouthed smile as two men reamed the woman under her.
‘Jesus!’ I said.
Terrence said, ‘I told you not to look.’
‘Why did you do that?’ I asked.
Terrence looked mortified but said, ‘You can’t control what you desire.’
‘You can control what you do about it,’ I said.
‘Can you?’ he said.
‘I hope so.’
Charles mumbled, ‘You never did.’
I balled up the picture and stuffed it in my pocket. ‘This isn’t desire. I understand what need can do to a man,’ I said. ‘But I don’t understand how you could make a picture like that.’
Terrence’s eyes were wet with shame and anger. ‘Get out of my room,’ he said. ‘Please.’
‘I want to,’ I said. ‘I honestly do.’ I turned back to the shelf and thumbed through the rest of the magazines. There were two more copies of Whiplash. I didn’t shake them to see what would fall out. I opened the carved wooden box. Inside was a pair of surgical scissors, probably the ones he’d used to snip pictures from magazines, and three glassine baggies. ‘Heroin?’ I asked.
‘Please get out of my room,’ he said.
I closed the box and said to Charles, ‘Let’s go.’
We went downstairs to the front door. Bobby and Terrence looked humiliated, the way men do when you’ve exposed their essential nakedness. Charles looked as innocent and content as ever. I tried not to look like I regretted stripping Terrence and Bobby of the little that seemed to cover them.
Charles said, ‘Let’s check the garage.’
I’d seen enough. ‘I’m done.’
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I might want to trade that piece-of-junk Dodge you gave me for one of their cars.’ He walked back through the house, into the kitchen, through a large laundry room and into a three-car garage. A brown Nissan SUV and a burgundy Mercedes convertible were parked in two of the spots, both looking like they’d come straight from the carwash.
‘Could anyone mistake the Nissan for green?’ I asked.
‘Doubt it,’ Charles said.
A clean workbench with a tall tool chest and a set of shelves stood in the third parking spot. I went to the chest and opened the drawers. It held tools, though they looked unused.
Charles went to the shelves. They held vases and flowerpots, garden shears, a couple of pairs of garden gloves and a spool of clear plastic lawn bags. Charles peeled one of the large bags off the spool.
Bobby said, ‘We hire Mexicans for that.’
‘Shut up, Bobby,’ I said.
Charles climbed into the passenger seat of the Nissan and checked the glove compartment, then got out and looked in the back. He did the same with the Mercedes.
‘All right?’ I asked.
‘Good enough. Let’s go.’
We went back through the house and out on to the front porch.
Heavy thunderheads had rolled in silently while we were inside. The green of the lawn and trees had deepened in the gloom. The air was still and humid.
‘When’s Belinda’s funeral?’ I asked Bobby.
He shook his head. ‘Police won’t release her body. They say it could be weeks.’
‘How about a memorial service?’
‘Sorry. You’re not invited.’
Terrence glanced at his uncle, then me. ‘Tomorrow at four. Palm Valley Baptist Church.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Bobby asked Charles, ‘What are you going to do with Jerry’s gun?’
‘I was planning to add it to my collection,’ Charles said. ‘What do you think I should do with it?’
‘I think you should give it back.’
Charles pulled it from his belt. ‘Yeah? It won’t do you any good. You’ve got to be able to shoot it.’
‘It’s not yours,’ Bobby said.
‘Fine.’ Charles handed the gun to Bobby, butt first, setting it roughly into Bobby’s bandaged fingers. He dug the box of shells out of his pocket and gave it to him too. ‘There’re still three rounds in the magazine. Don’t forget to unload it.’
Bobby struggled to point the gun at him. ‘Give me the other things.’
Charles considered the leatherette portfolio that I’d taken from the file cabinet and said, ‘Ah, go to hell.’ He turned and walked toward his car.
Bobby fumbled with the pistol, pointed it at the lowering clouds and managed to pull the trigger. The shot cracked through the air. Charles stopped and cocked his head to the side as though he couldn’t believe what he’d heard and was deciding what to do about it. He came back and got close to Bobby, who pointed the pistol at him, looking shocked at his own nerve.
‘You stupid sonofabitch,’ Charles said. He swung the portfolio at Bobby and knocked the pistol out of his hands. It landed softly on the lawn. A sudden cool wind gusted through the branches in the side yard and crossed the grass. Bobby turned from the gun and looked at the sky as if the storm might strike us down. The first cold, fat raindrops splashed on the neatly raked gravel of the front walk.
FO
URTEEN
Charles and I pulled out of the driveway, the portfolio at my feet. Thunder rumbled high in the clouds, and then a shard of lightning tore from the sky and exploded in the air above us. I asked, ‘Could it be Terrence?’
‘No.’
‘The lawn bags?’
‘You can buy them at any Home Depot,’ Charles said.
‘Then why’d you take one?’
‘To watch his reaction.’
‘Which was?’
‘He had none.’ A half block away the street disappeared in a haze where rain was falling hard. Charles flipped the wipers to high and a few moments later the shower pelted the metal roof and washed over the windshield. ‘On the other hand,’ Charles said, ‘if he’s the kind of psychopath who could kill four women, he might not react.’
A gust of wind buffeted the car and rain slapped the windows. Fronds on the street-side palms swung wildly.
‘How about the pictures?’ I asked.
‘Who can explain desire?’
‘Hmm.’
‘OK, the man has problems,’ Charles said. ‘But I’ve known people capable of doing what this killer has done and he doesn’t impress me that way. He’s not smart enough, not cold enough.’
‘Not enough like you?’ I said.
Charles smiled. ‘Or you for that matter. Even if he is your son.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t feel it. He’s a stranger to me.’
‘Were all strangers, sooner or later,’ he said.
I looked at him. ‘Even you and me?’
He kept his eyes on the road. ‘Especially you and me.’
‘Why did you burn Bobby’s hands?’ I asked.
‘Don’t ask questions unless you really want to know the answers,’ he said.
I considered what we’d walked into at Belinda’s house. The air-conditioned stillness of the rooms. The glimpses of the Fairline motor cruiser from the back windows as storm clouds approached over the water. The hot shade and the faint smell of gasoline in the garage.
I said, ‘If you drive a brown SUV at night someone might see it as green.’
‘More likely the other way around,’ Charles said. ‘At night you’d see green as brown.’
‘So it isn’t Terrence.’
‘I doubt it.’
The rain silenced as we crossed under a viaduct beneath the highway leading back to the city. Charles drove past the on-ramp. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘I want to see what’s in the leather case,’ he said.
We parked at an Applebee’s restaurant and ran through the rain. The neon apple at the top of the sign glowed in the downpour. The hostess, dressed in a red polo shirt with an Applebee’s button, brightened when we stepped inside. ‘Hi, Charlie,’ she said and gave him a hug.
Charlie. ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’ I said.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘This where you hang out?’
‘Beats Little Vegas.’
‘I don’t know.’
He reached for the portfolio. ‘Let’s see.’
We spread the papers on the table as rain smeared the windows. The letterheads were mostly from legal and governmental offices in Chicago, dating from four to five years back, though a few recent letters had come from local addresses. Four separate letters from the chambers of a judge named Glen Stanislaus in the U.S. District Court building on Dearborn in Chicago were paperclipped together. One referred to limits that the judge was placing on an interstate interdiction unit. Another, signed by a clerk, not the judge, discussed the statutes of limitations for federal offenses. Clipped together separately, two testimonials – from the congressman for Illinois’ seventh state congressional district and the city alderman for Chicago’s second ward – said that Stilman had a good character and had helped revitalize the city’s south and west sides. In another letter, a vice president at a Jacksonville company called Tri-Quon mentioned conversations with Stilman and said he hoped they would continue to talk in the future.
‘D’you have any idea what this is about?’ I asked.
Charles put down the Tri-Quon letter. ‘I think so. What’s in the envelope?’
I opened the manila envelope that had shared the file drawer with the portfolio. It contained receipts from a foreign bank named Grüd Fortem Čenen. Most of them showed monthly payouts of $3,000, a few considerably more.
‘Damned cute,’ Charles said.
‘What language is that?’
‘Grüd’s the name of a town in Ukraine. Also an anagram of drug. Fortem is Latin for strong and also the name of a town in Belgium. Čenen without the accent means dine in Spanish, as in, They cenen at Applebee’s.’
‘First,’ I said, ‘how do you know that? Second, what does it mean?’
‘I’ve seen it and names like it before, and it means there’s an overly clever asshole at the DEA. It’s a shell name. Tri-Quon’s a shell company. The DEA was paying off Jerry Stilman.’
‘The DEA? Why?’
A gust slapped rain against the window and the lights in the restaurant flickered. Charles squinted at the storm as if assessing it as an enemy. ‘My guess is he was informing on his old buddies. If he’d been clean and buying real estate for fourteen or fifteen years, the statute of limitations would’ve expired for drug crimes but let’s say someone died during the drug years and Stilman pulled the trigger. There’s no limit on murder charges. If the feds showed him that they had evidence that could put him away, he’d find it easy to talk, especially if he’d really gone clean. He’d also think moving here from Chicago would be a good idea. He’d be running away but he might make it look like retirement to his old drug buddies.’
‘Why keep the bank records? Why take the payoffs at all? He could’ve just given the DEA what they asked for and been done with it. You saw the house. He didn’t need the money.’
Charles said, ‘If he didn’t go on the payroll he’d have less proof that he was working on the good side if the deal fell apart. Plus the guy was a businessman. He didn’t give anything away if he could sell it.’
I had the sense that Charles knew what he was talking about but I said, ‘These papers could’ve gotten Stilman and Belinda killed. Why wouldn’t they keep them in the safe?’
‘If local law or the feds came into the house, Stilman would want to be able to produce the papers fast. If any of his trafficking buddies suspected him, he’d be a dead man with or without the papers. Putting the papers in a locked drawer seems just about right.’
A waitress brought two hamburger plates. ‘Here you go, Charlie,’ she said and squeezed his shoulder. I knew there were women who liked scarred men though I never understood why.
I asked him, ‘Does the DEA have an office here?’
‘They work out of an office park on Woodcock Drive. I’ve got a friend there. But they spend most of their time at the port.’
‘Some day you’re going to tell me stories,’ I said.
‘I doubt it.’ He drank from his coffee. ‘So, I’ll ask the DEA if Stilman was still talking with them when he died. And if he’d really gotten away from the drugs. I’ll ask where the drugs came from. Through the Caribbean? Jamaica?’
‘Ask if Belinda was involved,’ I said.
‘Got it.’
‘And what do they know about Terrence?’
‘You really want to know about him?’
‘Ask them,’ I said.
We ate our burgers.
‘So Belinda dated Melchiori’s friend David Fowler in the mayor’s office,’ Charles said.
‘You know who he is?’
‘Never heard of him. But he seems like a man worth getting to know.’
The rain was still coming down hard when Charles dropped me off at home. The police car that had been parked outside during the night was still following Thomas or else the driver had figured out our game and gone back to the station to face Daniel. I felt the absence of Fela as I put the key in the door and I missed the gentle pressure I’d come
to expect as she’d leaned against my legs. Inside, the house was quiet. The dry, air-conditioned air chilled my damp skin. The three clay bowls that Thomas and I had made stood on the kitchen counter.
I got a Coors from the refrigerator, sat on a stool, took a long drink, and shuddered from the cold. I poured beer into one of the clay bowls and tasted it. It had the gritty bitterness of mud. What was I doing? I picked up the phone and dialed Thomas’s cell number. It rang four times and voicemail picked up. I imagined Thomas in handcuffs sitting in the backseat of a squad car. Or lying in a ditch in the falling rain, having lost control of a car he was just learning to drive. More likely, though, he had turned the radio volume high and had no idea that the trilling of the phone wasn’t part of the music. I left a message telling him to call.
I went to the French doors, opened them and watched the rain pock and froth the surface of the pool. In a rain like this, anything at all – a body, an old tire, a disease – could float inches below the surface and you’d never see it. When the wind gusted, the froth skimmed across the pool and a warm mist stung my face and arms.
I worried about Charles. In the years I’d known him he’d revealed that he knew the insides of the sheriff’s department, the ATF and now the DEA, and I guessed that he’d done contract work for the federal government outside of the country. But I’d never sensed that he’d done what he’d done because it was right. As far as I could tell he’d done it only because he was good at it, it paid him well and it gave him pleasure.
After he helped me during my troubles in college I hadn’t ridden with him again until a year before Thomas was born. Less than a mile from my house three brothers had been playing in their front yard when a sedan driven by a balding white man had slowed to the curb. The man had rolled down the passenger window and called to them. He had a sick bear, he said, and wondered if the boys could help. On the front seat next to him sat a large yellow teddy bear, the kind you can win as a grand prize at carnival games.
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