Floodgate

by Johnny Shaw

  “I’m not a cop anymore. Haven’t been for over a year,” Andy said. “You remember that, right?”

  Champ shushed him, her eyes glued to the screen. “Come and watch with me. I’ll cover your eyes if it gets too grown-up.”

  Andy moved to the couch, his eyes on the woman who had raised him. He never called her Mom. She was his Champ. It’s what everyone called her. As the story went, she’d knocked out middleweight contender Max “Bruiser” Buchholz in a bar fight back in ’44, and the name stuck.

  In her seventies, she still had a youthful exuberance in voice and action, but her mind betrayed her. Mostly her memory. Andy didn’t fully understand how it all worked. She could outline the genealogy of five generations of families in the fictional Salem but could lose the events of last month, last week, an hour ago.

  The slow decay of her memory chipped at the thing that made Champ distinctly Champ. She and Andy may not have been blood, but it had been the two of them against the world for his whole life. Now she fought a losing battle on her own. Andy couldn’t fathom her no longer in his life, fearing the day that she wouldn’t recognize him. When she would be there and not be there at the same time.

  “Worst decision you ever made,” Champ said during the first commercial break.

  “Which one?” Andy said.

  “Signing up with those thugs.”

  “You mean the Auction City Police Department?”

  “Most vicious gang in town,” she said. “I got the scars to prove it.”

  “Wish I could argue,” Andy said. “Seemed like the right thing. Should’ve listened.”

  “Quiet. Show’s back on.”

  The small room in the Michael R. Batty Senior Living Center consisted of a large living space, a bathroom, and a small kitchenette. About the size of a nice hotel room. It wasn’t the house they both knew, but it had small touches that echoed home. Lace doilies on the small table, a few pictures on the bookcase, the “ashtray” that Andy had made at day camp. It looked more like a glittery dog turd, but you could put out a cigarette on it.

  Andy wished she could have stayed at the old house, but not after her stroke and memory loss. He was glad that she had people looking after her. She retained a level of independence but acknowledged her limitations and allowed people to assist her. It wasn’t easy for Champ. She was a scrapper, a fighter her whole life. But like any good brawler, she knew when she was in the late rounds.

  “I’m going to take off,” Andy said. “You need anything?”

  “The body of a twenty-year-old and a functioning brain.”

  Andy laughed. “Your brain functions. The vertical hold just needs adjusting.”

  “You going to cut my red wire?”

  “Hand me my pliers,” Andy said.

  “You could get me one thing,” she said. “Real food. The meals here ain’t bad, but I want the good stuff. Grease, fat, salt, fried. Cured meat, cheese, and gravies.”

  “Gravies, plural? More than one gravy?”

  “I’ll two-fist it.”

  When Andy reached the first floor, the elevator doors opened to a woman who made him do a double take. Somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties, she still stunned. Red hair with a gray forelock. Mean but alluring eyes. She wore a red blazer over a white blouse, a red skirt, and red heels. The theme apparently being red. Most people would have looked like a real estate agent in that getup, but she wasn’t supervising open houses.

  Andy tried to be discreet as he tracked her curves. He failed at discretion. When he reached her face, Andy saw her smiling.

  “Are you going to get out of the elevator?” she asked. “Or is this the best ride you could find?”

  Andy snapped out of it, sure he was blushing. He mumbled incoherence as he passed. She smelled great, like flowers. Walking through the lobby, he turned in time to see the elevator doors close and the woman giving him a fingery wave. Like an idiot, he waved to the closed doors.

  Andy handed a check to the receptionist. “Is there any way you can deposit this on Monday?”

  The receptionist gave him a look and thumbed through a binder. “This month has already been paid.”

  He almost protested, knowing that she was mistaken. Considering his paltry bank account, Andy decided to accept a clerical error that was to his advantage. Lottery tickets sometimes came in strange shapes.

  “That’s right. Yeah. I forgot,” Andy rambled. “Yeah. I paid that bill. Got it confused with the slip fees for the catamaran.”

  Realizing he was overdoing it, Andy stopped talking. To avoid eye contact, he glanced at the sign-in sheet and the most recent name written in hard, slanted cursive. Kate Girard. The name meant nothing to him.

  A block toward the Hampshire Court subway stop, he spotted Benny Gianfranco’s Italian beef stand. Those salty, sweet sandwiches were Champ’s favorite. He bought her the Italian beef deluxe with a fried egg, extra peppers, and mustard. The grease made the bag see-through within fifteen seconds.

  “Going to run back up. Need to drop this off,” Andy said to the woman at the reception desk, who didn’t care. Not one bit.

  Andy didn’t knock. He walked in on Champ and the woman in red on the couch together, sitting close, knees touching. Champ held the woman’s hand with both of her own. Heads leaning in like teenagers telling secrets. They turned to Andy. For a brief moment, Champ looked completely lucid, a light in her eyes.

  “You have company,” Andy said. “I didn’t know. Um. Just came back to—” He held up the bag in his hand. A drop of grease landed on the carpet.

  Andy glanced at the television. It was turned off, which was unprecedented. Champ was missing Days.

  Neither Champ nor the woman offered an introduction. The woman crossed her long legs. Andy admired them, which he knew was the point.

  Champ looked back and forth between the two of them, confusion clouding her once-clear vision. She contemplated the two people who didn’t belong in the same room together.

  “Claudia and I are old friends,” the woman said.

  “And you know each other from?” Andy asked.

  “The past,” the woman said.

  “You okay, Champ?” Andy asked.

  She snapped out of her daze. “I’m fine. Leave me and Katie be. We have things to talk about.”

  Andy leaned toward the woman. “I know Champ’s friends. Why haven’t I ever met you?”

  “It’s been a long while,” the woman said. “How long has it been, Claudia?”

  “A long while,” Champ said.

  “That long?” Andy said. “Who are you?”

  “Andrea Salvatore Destra,” Champ snapped, “you are being a rude brat. My life is my life. You don’t get to know everything just because you want to know. Thanks for the sandwich.”

  Andy felt the blood rush to his face. When she said his full name, she meant business. He knew better than to argue. “It was nice meeting you. Kate, was it? Maybe we’ll bump into each other again.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s a small world.”

  As he left, Andy gave one last turn and met Kate Girard’s eyes. Damned if she didn’t wink.

  CHAPTER 2

  You don’t tell a kid that his hero is a heel. Or a widow that her husband was a philanderer. Some secrets should stay secret.

  —From a speech made by District Attorney Todhunter Holbart after the conspiracy case against leaders in the Furgele crime family was abruptly dropped. Speculation rose that it would implicate too many city leaders (1939).

  Andy sat on a bus stop bench with a good sight line to the front entrance of the senior living facility. It wasn’t the nicest place, chipped plaster and scattered graffiti. While not officially in the Ruins, it was Ruins adjacent. Andy wished he could afford more for Champ, but since his shitcanning, money had been tight.

  He never knew if he was stupid or diligent, but he couldn’t let even the smallest mystery go. He knew the people Champ knew. Their time together spanned his entire life, decad
es, but he had never met or heard mention of anyone named Kate Girard.

  Andy should have stayed. Pressed harder for answers. Found out who the hell she was. The way Champ dismissed him suggested that Andy was never meant to meet her. Which made him want to know even more. As ridiculous as it sounded to him, the idea kept floating past that Kate Girard was the right age to be his mother.

  He had never met his parents. Didn’t know their names. All Champ had ever told him was that they loved him, left Andy with her for his own good, and made her promise to keep their secret. After all this time, he would have thought that it would matter less. But with Champ’s declining mental health, there was only a small window before her hidden knowledge disappeared forever.

  Champ had never said a word about his mother. She had mentioned his father on two occasions, and all she had said was, “He was a criminal,” and “He was a good man.” Andy had analyzed every word and possible connotation in those two spare sentences, the contradiction and the past tense not lost on him.

  Kate Girard was probably nobody of interest. A high school friend, someone Champ used to play mahjong with, a former coworker from the wartime artillery factory days. But he couldn’t resist the possibility or the puzzle. Her appearance was just the kind of question that kept Andy up at night. Until he replaced the question mark with a period, he couldn’t let it go. Andy didn’t have hobbies—no ships in a bottle or crochet for him. He had fixations. He had obsessions. He connected things.

  Twenty minutes later Kate Girard exited the building. She stood on the curb and lit a cigarette. Andy leaned inside the bus shelter, out of view.

  A late-seventies, faux-wood-paneled Chrysler station wagon pulled to the curb. It didn’t really fit her veneer. He had expected town car, not Town & Country. Andy wrote down the license plate number on the back of a receipt for some AA batteries.

  Kate Girard took one last inhale, flicked her smoke in a high arc, and got in the car. As it drove away, Andy walked into the open to catch a look at the driver. A man in a brimmed hat was all he made out. The car took a right at the first intersection and was gone.

  With a pair of tweezers, Andy picked up the still-smoldering cigarette. Bright-red lipstick encircled the filter. He knocked off the burning cherry with his fingernail and put the cigarette in a small evidence bag. Besides tweezers and evidence bags, Andy carried a number of other essentials: roll of nickels, lock pick set, small magnifying glass, mini–tape recorder, Swiss Army knife, penlight, and a bag of salted almonds. Andy liked to be ready for anything.

  The subway would have been quicker, but Andy chose to walk. It cleared his head. At the same time, he could disseminate more propaganda, stapling handbills to telephone poles and boarded-up windows. He had papered most of the city with the posters. Big letters with the heading: WANTED: BAD COP. A picture of Aloysius Gray, the deputy commissioner of the Auction City Police Department. The text below accused the department of numerous crimes committed on Gray’s orders: testilying in court, bullying witnesses, graft, brutality, extortion, and even murder.

  He had enough evidence to be sure himself, but not enough to do anything but anger the police. Since he’d started his crusade against police corruption, everyone saw him as a wingnut. It wasn’t that people didn’t believe him. It was that they knew that nothing could be done about it. It was difficult to gather hard evidence against the organization that collected the evidence.

  He passed Cleo’s Liquors and the tough guys loitering at the side of the building. A rotating cast of hardened, tired men. The cops constantly rousted them. The price of looking the part, even if no law had been broken. At the moment, a patrol car sat parked in the store lot around the corner. Two patrolmen had four of the toughs against the wall, emptying their pockets and throwing the contents on the ground. Loose bills, wallets, combs, pocket knives, gum. One of the men received a kidney punch for no apparent reason. Andy recognized the older of the two cops, Patrick Thornton.

  There were at least a dozen Thorntons working in the Auction City Police Department. A savage cop family that went back generations. Goons with badges. Gray’s key strong-arm men. Dangerous, cruel, and stupid. Patrick was no exception.

  Andy strolled past, paying the matinee no mind. He turned the corner, walked to the back of the police car, and picked the trunk lock. Tucked under the spare tire, he found a paper sack with a few hundred dollars in mostly fives and tens, the day’s protection money. He pocketed the dough and put the empty sack back where he’d found it.

  By the time he came out of Cleo’s with a box of merchandise, the patrol car was gone. Off to harass some other members of the taxpaying public. He wished he could’ve been there when the Thornton found the empty sack. He wondered if he would accuse his partner of stealing his stolen money.

  Around the corner, the men shoved their belongings back in their pockets, cursing under their breath. One man chased a loose dollar bill caught in the wind. Andy set the box down. Inside, a case of beer, various Roscoe Peppercorn pepperoni snack products, two bags of Taterville potato chips, a half-dozen doughnuts, and copies of Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler.

  “Courtesy of the ACPD,” Andy said. He walked away feeling like a sidewalk saint.

  Andy reached the fourth-floor landing of his apartment building. It wasn’t the climb that left him out of breath. The excitement of a new—if dubious—case got his heart racing. His investigation of Gray and the police had stalled, idling until new evidence surfaced. Kate Girard was a welcome distraction.

  Taking a breather outside his front door, he heard Mrs. Hammond’s lock click. When he turned, he caught her peeking from behind the chain.

  “It’s me,” Andy said, forcing a smile.

  She stared at him for a moment, then screamed, “I see you, Crazy Andy,” and slammed the door. Andy might have been insulted, but she’d called him that since he’d moved in. Even when he’d been a cop. If she’d called him “Sane Andy,” he’d have worried.

  It took Andy a full minute to unlock the series of deadbolts and mortise locks that secured his apartment. He had installed an extra-heavy door at his own cost, not even bothering to inform the super. Andy didn’t consider himself paranoid. He preferred the word cautious.

  He scoonched past a row of filing cabinets that lined the entry and created a narrow passage leading to what would have been the living room. Although no real living happened there. It looked like a hostage negotiator’s temporary command post. More filing cabinets, stacked boxes, and the centerpiece—a hollow-core door on sawhorses with stacks of paper covering every inch.

  When Andy had gotten rid of his bed, he knew he was one step away from buying tinfoil in bulk. Even as he saw it happen, he couldn’t stop the momentum. He now slept in a sleeping bag underneath the makeshift desk. One small earthquake and they’d find him a week later when the smell of his flattened corpse alerted the neighbors.

  Photos, maps, notes, string, pins, matchbooks, coasters, and fingerprint sheets completely covered the walls. The hodgepodge of ephemera created the core of Andy’s investigation of the Auction City Police Department. Hundreds of officers marched lockstep to Deputy Commissioner Gray’s commands regardless of law or civil rights. A praetorian system that stood broken and ruthless.

  A map of the city covered one wall. Small pins and flags denoted locations cross-referenced in one of Andy’s notebooks. From the old money of Gallows Terrace to the poverty-stricken housing of the Ruins, from the twisting alleys of Little Nagasaki to the disturbingly peaceful Blackstreet Hollow, each neighborhood of Auction City represented a different class strata, a different atmosphere, and a different mystery. Separate but tied together by the money and corruption that ran the city.

  What had started as a probe of the police department had extended far beyond, encompassing seemingly random aspects of Auction City, all the way down to the trash collectors and the river barges. Something was happening below the surface of the city, but it was like buying a thousand jigsaw puzzles and e
mptying all of them onto the floor at the same time. Occasionally he could fit two pieces together, the obvious matches, corners and sides. The problem was that the rest of the puzzle was all sky.

  KATE GIRARD

  Assistant to the District Attorney 1958–1966

  Major cases include: The City Vs. Horace Cavanaugh

  (see file #60-DA), The City Vs. the Auction City Seven

  (see file #64-DA), The City Vs. Nat Turner Shabazz

  (see file Shabazz-1)

  That was all Andy had in his files on Kate Girard. He knew the Auction City Seven and Shabazz cases, but he hadn’t remembered her name.

  Kate Girard had been a lawyer who had left the DA’s office in 1966. After that, no mention of her. Nothing. Gone. She had probably left the city. He would hit public records in the morning.

  He dug through the scraps of paper in his pocket and found the receipt with the Chrysler’s license plate on it. Now it was a matter of finding his phone. With all the mess, the telephone ended up in strange places. He went to the wall, found the jack, and ran his hand along the cord until it reached telephone. In the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet marked “Crime Stats—By District.”

  He pulled a file from another filing cabinet and dialed. He dropped his voice an octave, slurred a little, hint of a brogue. “Hi, Frank. Yeah, Fergus Thornton. What? Christ.” He consulted the file. “Badge number 872, like you don’t know me. I need you to run a plate. Chrysler Town & Country, 1977 or 1978. Plate number is J4BX68.” Andy listened. “No. I’m on a stakeout. I’ll call you back.”

  An hour later, he learned that the car was registered to a John Dole, which might have been a real name but was more likely a bad joke. Either way, Dole had an address.

  CHAPTER 3

  As much a moral labyrinth as an American city. Irrecoverable, irretrievable, and irrevocable. A purgatory with no hope of heaven, only the promise of hell. They call the metropolis Auction City, but the bidding had closed years ago. Unfortunately, no one had informed the bright-eyed Twyla Tharn.