Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  If not for Charlotte, I would remain blissfully ignorant of these developments. While I quietly labor away on the Thomson case, hoping the lack of closure will be taken by my colleagues as a sign that I’m overly thorough or perhaps a bit rusty, she spends each night in front of the television, switching from the local broadcasts over to cable, then back to the local stations when they wrap up for the evening. On the rare occasions I’m home, nothing I do can wean her off the remote control.

  “There’s hardly anything about it,” she says, meaning the anniversary. “It’s like they’ve all forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”

  “It’s Hannah Mayhew’s fault.”

  She frowns. “Don’t blame her.”

  We sit together in silence, bathed in the screen’s flickering blue light, not speaking of the anniversary’s private significance because we almost never do. Not that we’ve forgotten. Our omission signals many things, but not that.

  On the day itself, we will keep our annual vigil, returning together to the graveside, leaving behind fresh flowers and tears and knee prints in the soft grass. Our grief will feel especially acute because it will be ours alone, unobserved by a world whose attention will be rightly fixed on commemorating the day’s larger tragedy. The Pearl Harbor of our generation will swallow up all the rest, including the random passing of a ten-year-old Houston girl, killed instantly when a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car.

  “Dying that day,” Charlotte once said, when the event was still fresh enough to talk about, “it’s like being born on Christmas, isn’t it?”

  Meaning people have bigger things on their minds. There’s only so much room in the ledger, and some entries require it all, leaving no space for smaller tragedies, even as footnotes.

  Tonight something has changed, though. As Charlotte flips through the channels, instead of Hannah, everyone’s talking about the latest hurricane brewing out in the Gulf, picking up speed as it approaches. Since Katrina, every swirl of clouds on the Doppler screen merits reverent attention, and the weathercasters speak almost hopefully about the potential for a Category 5 landfall, putting the New Orleans debacle to shame.

  “It’ll fizzle out like all the others,” Charlotte says.

  “Maybe.”

  Deep down, I find myself rooting for the storm, or at least for the breathing space it will afford people like Wanda Mosser and Theresa Cavallo. Fewer press conferences would mean more time for investigation, not that I hold out hope that any amount of extra effort will produce Hannah Mayhew, safe and sound or otherwise.

  To my surprise, Cavallo’s pledge to devote her free time to spadework on Salazar pays quick dividends. He rents a thirty-foot slip at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, housing an old but well-maintained cabin cruiser, a more substantial and significantly pricier boat than I’d imagined. A call to the marina confirms the whole place is monitored by video cameras. After explaining who I am to the head of security, who has his hands full preparing for the impending hurricane, I get an open-ended invitation to review the footage.

  “You have Labor Day weekend on tape?”

  “I’ll spool it up for you,” he says. “But do me a favor and leave it till next week, huh? We’ve got our hands full at the moment.”

  “I wish I could oblige, but . . . How about tonight?”

  He pauses long enough for me to consider the various ways he could make my life difficult, like demanding a warrant or hitting the delete key to save himself the inconvenience. But some people will bend over backward to cooperate with the police, and he happens to be one of them. We agree on a time and I drive down to Kemah full of hope, imagining a video image of Keller and Salazar hoisting a shrouded corpse aboard the boat.

  The fantasy is dashed the moment the security chief, a gray-haired man in white shorts and a potbellied polo shirt, cues up the appropriate footage. Like the surveillance tape from the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, like Joe Thomson’s cell-phone snap, the image is grainy and indistinct.

  “Is there a particular slip you’re interested in?” he asks, stroking his chin.

  “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  He’s disappointed, but in spite of the man’s willingness to help, I don’t want to single out Salazar’s boat. There’s always the chance they know each other, and the last thing I want to do is put my suspect any more on guard than he already is.

  We buzz through the footage, which is displayed in split screens on a computer monitor, starting midday on Thursday even though the shooting off West Bellfort didn’t go down until later. Approaching ten, the chief pauses.

  “The marina lights go off at ten,” he says, and sure enough the screens go black.

  After that, the only usable footage is of the well-lit parking lot. We fast-forward through a whole lot of nothing, and then he stops just after three in the morning, running the tape back a bit.

  “Look at that.”

  A black extended-cab pickup rolls into the parking lot, the truck bed enclosed by an aftermarket hardtop, turning into an empty space. Two figures get out, moving around to the tailgate. They’re too far from the camera to identify, but I’m certain the truck is Salazar’s, and there’s nothing about the figures to suggest they aren’t Keller and Salazar.

  “What’re they doing?” he asks.

  I lean closer to the screen. They reach into the bed, sliding out a long white form. I don’t say anything to the security chief, but it looks like a body bag to me. Between them, the two men heft the bag, carrying it off-screen in the direction of the marina. They return hours later, just before daybreak, and drive away, no sign of the body bag they’d been carrying before.

  After burning the relevant footage onto a DVD, he hands it over wide-eyed, under no illusions about what he’s just witnessed.

  “If you talk about this,” I tell him, “you’ll be jeopardizing an ongoing investigation.”

  He promises not to, punctuating the words with a dazzled gulp.

  The temptation to board Salazar’s boat is strong, but for that I really will need a warrant, otherwise anything I find will be inadmissible. Still, I gaze out over the marina awhile, the bobbing boats illuminated by strong stadium lights, thinking about how easily I could slip through for a little preview, just to make sure the search warrant is worth the effort. The only thing stopping me is my conscience. That and the thought of the security cameras overhead.

  “Seven years,” the captain says, shaking his head at the muted television on the credenza, where a platform of politicians take turns reading memorial speeches before a gathered crowd and the ubiquitous media. The ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen recaps a National Weather Service warning that Galveston, just south of us, is where the hurricane will make landfall, whipping up a catastrophic storm surge.

  He turns his chair to face me, momentarily uncertain why I’m here. Then he remembers.

  “About Thomson’s body,” he says. “You haven’t released it yet.”

  “No.”

  “Any particular reason? The man’s wife wants to bury him. It’s hard enough on everyone, a brother officer going out like that. No need to prolong the suffering, March.”

  “Maybe there is,” I say.

  I take a deep breath, then lay it all out. I start with Chad Macneil, who disappeared, presumably with Keller’s money, and then Mitch Geiger’s rumor about the string of drug heists, perhaps an attempt to make up the loss. He listens impassively with an occasional lizard-like blink of the eyes. When I mention Thomson’s offer and how I took it to Wilcox for help, he raises an eyebrow, nothing more.

  The ballistics business, Castro’s theory about the tactics at the Morales scene and later the switched barrels, gets no reaction, but at least he doesn’t interrupt. I explain the photo on Thomson’s phone and end with the footage of Keller and Salazar – I make the identification sound a little more solid than it is – carrying a body bag out to the boat.

  “So they dumped this woman’s body out in the Gulf ?” he a
sks. “And then they shot Thomson to keep him from rolling over?”

  “I think so. Yes.”

  “And you’re just bringing this to me now?”

  I answer with an apologetic shrug.

  “You wouldn’t have said a thing if I hadn’t asked about releasing the body.”

  “I wanted to be sure first,” I say.

  “Because you were afraid I’d take you off the case?” I nod.

  “Well,” he says, leaning forward, “you were right. That’s exactly what I’m going to do – ”

  “But, sir.”

  He consults the calendar on his desk blotter. “As of . . . let’s say next Thursday, the eighteenth. On that date you will conclude your investigation, release the body, and move on. Unless of course something more concrete develops, in which case . . .” His voice trails off and he turns back to the television, dismissing me by unmuting the volume just as a stern-faced woman in red says why we must never, will never, forget, to a ripple of sober applause.

  I stumble outside his office with another week on the clock, though it is much more than that, I start to realize. Hedges knows, he knows and approves, willing to give me enough time to develop something solid, assuming I work quickly. There’s an understanding between us now, a faint flicker of the dimly remembered bond. Something akin to trust.

  There’s no time to consider the ramifications, though, because Charlotte is waiting.

  I clock out early and head home, pausing at the curb with the engine running until she comes out, unsteady on her heels, fixing an earring in place. She wears a black linen skirt and a black cardigan, her hair pulled back in an elegant chignon, as if it’s a dinner date we’re headed to and not a graveside.

  Stopping on the steps, she remembers suddenly, ducking inside again and reappearing with the plastic-wrapped flowers. I go around to the passenger door, opening it for her, snapping it shut once she’s safely inside. Circling back, I get behind the wheel. Next to me, the flowers on the floor mat rising up between her knees, my wife covers her face in her hands and sobs.

  “It’s all right,” I say, flattening a hand on her back, feeling the gaps between the vertebrae.

  She motions for me to drive.

  So I drive.

  At the headstone of our daughter, kneeling down with our hands clasped, we unwrap the flowers and lay them down, and then we water them with tears. On this day seven years ago, something was taken from us all. What we lost, in the overall scheme, may pale in comparison. But to Charlotte and me, it was everything. She was everything. And on the days, the infrequent days, when my heart clings to a belief in the afterlife, she is the reason, the fragile thought that the small, cold hand I let go of once will be warm once more, warm and with the power not only to be clung to but to cling. What faith I have, and it isn’t much, resides in the grip of that tiny hand.

  CHAPTER 22

  After Hurricane Rita, the sequel to Katrina, left the neighborhood without power and thus without air-conditioning, I stopped talking about getting a generator and actually bought one, storing it in the garage along with some sticky, dust-covered jerry cans of gasoline and gallons of drinking water. Now, instructions in hand, I try to work out how to operate the thing. Never much good with engines or anything mechanical, the challenge soon stumps me, but not enough to summon Tommy down to assist. His repertoire of life skills, augmented by the time he spent in Africa, no doubt includes the function of generators. But I’d better wait at least until Charlotte is gone.

  Along with Ann, she plans to weather the storm in style at a Dallas hotel, returning once everything’s back to normal. Her overnight bag is packed, waiting by the front door for her sister’s arrival. She finds me in the garage, frowning at the inscrutable little machine.

  “I feel like I’m abandoning you,” she says.

  “Don’t. I’ll be happier knowing you’re all right. Besides, if I don’t figure this thing out, it’ll be like an oven inside. You don’t want to go through that again.”

  She takes the instructions out of my grease-stained fingers and attempts for a few minutes to make sense of them. Just as she grasps the basic idea and starts explaining, Ann’s Toyota hums quietly up the driveway, a Prius hybrid just like the ones we pretended to be giving away in the cars-for-criminals scam.

  “Gotta go,” Charlotte says, pecking me on the lips.

  Since the grave visit, she’s been more relaxed. All the static building in her atmosphere suddenly discharged in a flow of quiet tears, and now it’s like the tension never existed. We haven’t had an argument in twenty-four hours. Last night, she stayed up with me instead of going to bed early. Even the sleeping pills have disappeared into the nightstand.

  “Be safe,” I call after her.

  “You, too.”

  The silence following her departure lasts a half minute before Tommy creaks down the side stairs, poking his head through the open garage door. Seeing the coast is clear, he bounds forward with a look of relief.

  “Hey, it’s supposed to make landfall sometime tonight,” he says. “Got any big plans?”

  “I’ve got to work.” The instructions hang limp in my hand. “You don’t happen to know how to run one of these things, do you?”

  He hunches over the generator, a gleam in his eye. “Not exactly. But, hey, we can figure it out, right?”

  “You figure it out. I’ll be out to check on you in a minute.”

  I leave him to it, going back inside to change. The house in Charlotte’s absence takes on a still, empty air, so I shower and dress quickly, wanting to get back to the case quickly. Hedges gave me a week, which isn’t much to begin with, but if the hurricane proves as disastrous as they’re saying on the news, with massive flooding and power outages, then my week could contract into a day. So I’d better make the most of it.

  Before heading downstairs, I glance inside Charlotte’s nightstand to see whether she’s taken the pills with her. The bottle rolls against the front of the drawer. I shut it, my idiot grin reflected back from the dresser mirror.

  When the phone rings, I answer without checking the caller ID, expecting Charlotte since the image of her in my mind shines so vividly. The voice is male, though, and after a second I recognize it. The youth pastor, Carter Robb, who I haven’t seen since my late-night visit to his apartment, when I commissioned him with the task of finding the Dyers.

  “I just thought I should touch base,” he says. “I managed to get a number from somebody at the church, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I do have that picture for you, though.”

  “Picture?”

  “Of Hannah and Evey Dyer.”

  I clear my throat before speaking. “Mr. Robb, I’ve been reassigned.

  I’m not working with the task force anymore.”

  “Oh.”

  “Have you tried calling Detective Cavallo?”

  He sighs. “I have, actually. Donna asked me to, trying to get an update. She feels like, with some of the things she said on the news, there might be some bad feelings. I’ve left Detective Cavallo a couple of messages, but I was hoping – ”

  “She’s got her hands full,” I say. “But I’m sure she’ll get back to you as soon as she can. And that’s nonsense about bad feelings. The lady’s daughter is missing. She can say whatever she wants.” I want to get rid of this guy, but I feel like I owe him more than a casual brush-off. “Look, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? I can make a couple of calls and let you know what I find out.”

  “That would be great,” he says, giving me his mobile number as well as the number of what he calls a community outreach center. “It’s one of the places the youth group did some volunteering. A friend of mine from seminary runs it, and with the storm coming he needs some help down there getting everything secure. I’m planning to spend the night.”

  “Where is this place?” I ask.

  He gives an address in Montrose, just a few blocks away from the Morgan St. Café. I ask if he’s ever been to the
café before, but he’s never even heard of it. It’s a small world, but not that small.

  “If I find out anything, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Even if you don’t,” he says. “I’d appreciate hearing something, even if it’s nothing.”

  When I return to the garage, the generator is already running while Tommy stares long and hard at the electrical box, trying to figure out exactly how to achieve a link-up. Maybe he’ll electrocute himself, I think, which would solve my tenant problem. Then again, he might burn the house down, which is more solution than I’m really looking for.

  “Everything all right?”

  “Leave it with me,” he says. “I’ll have it going in no time.”

  I study him a moment, trying to decide if what I’m seeing is confidence or foolhardiness.

  “Fine.” I throw my briefcase in the car and start the engine, rolling the window down to impart some final advice. “Tommy, don’t burn the house down.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “And don’t electrocute yourself, either.”

  Gene Fontenot answers my call in mid-apology, like he started even before pushing the talk button. “I been meaning to call you, man, really I have. It’s right here on my list of things to do.” He thumps his finger on what must be the list. “You gotta forgive me for not being quicker on this, but what can I say? We get a little busy around here. You know how it goes – ”

  “Gene,” I say, cutting him off. “It’s fine. I’ve been pretty busy myself. But have you managed to track down this Dyer woman and her daughter?”

  “About that . . .” He rustles some papers around. “Here we go. The answer to your question is yes and no. Yes, I found the lady. She got a place over in Kenner, out by the airport. That’s the good news. The bad news is, the daughter Evangeline, she don’t stay there no more. The mother says, once they moved back, the girl, she fell into her old ways. They had a lotta problems, and eventually the girl run away with some boy.”