by David Levien
The night air had been chill next to the river, and his boots and pants quickly became soaked up to the knees, yet he’d warmed as he alternately walked the tracks and the bank. He was aware of how easily he could miss what he was looking for. He could walk right by it. He could be looking in all the wrong places. His instincts and his source could be wrong altogether. Still, he carried on until he’d felt satisfied that the first spot held nothing. He hiked back to his car and drove on to the next location, a place where the tracks ran next to Waterway. He covered both sides of the river and found nothing but loose refuse, a cache of beer and soda bottles, and rusted car parts. Next he parked on South West Street between Raymond and Morris, where he slid down a steep gravel and dirt pitch next to a railroad bridge that crossed over the water.
The mud along the bank sucked at his hopes as it did his feet, but he kept on. He kept on although all he found was an array of trash and detritus similar to that littering the other spots. Then, when he was nearly through with the area, he stumbled across the carcass of a large dead dog. The hindquarters of the animal lay in the water, a weak current lapping against it until the dark fur had grown matted and wet. The dog’s one visible eye had gone green and opaque in death and was turning gelatinous. Behr looked it over, checking for tracks that would indicate from which direction it had come. He couldn’t spot any sign, but finding the body buoyed him to continue.
He decided, though it seemed a bit unlikely due to its proximity to the city, to move on and try a spot in the shadows of the White River Parkway Drive, near the Chevy plant, continuing on his south-to-north route. When he parked he saw that despite being only several minutes’ drive from downtown, there was a certain abandoned quality to the area, perhaps due to the hour, which made a dump possible. He had gone over a quarter mile from the tracks and had neared a sloppy, marshy area along the bank when he stopped. He saw the cluster of dark green plastic contractor bags in the distance ahead of him. He wouldn’t have thought much of it except for the way they were all stacked together. They couldn’t have landed that way if they’d been thrown from a passing train. The location represented a lot of effort for some illegal dumping. The bags were all neatly cinched with large plastic twist ties. Behr walked slowly across the expanse toward the bags, dread rising within him. The water here was dank and fetid. He became acutely aware of the slurping sound the mud made under his feet.
He circled to the far side of the pile, carefully avoiding some footprints in the soft, wet ground, then paused and looked around. He peeled a blade free from his Leatherman tool, reached for the nearest bag, and sliced into the top. A thick wave of black flies rose up into his face as the bag gaped open and the smell hit him. He waved away the insects and saw the white of sawed-off bone, encased by pale, deteriorating flesh. The bag contained a pair of lower legs, the feet still shod in dress socks and black wingtips. He was pretty sure he’d found Bigby and Schmidt.
“Get Pomeroy on the line,” Behr said. He leaned against the quarter panel of his car talking to Karl Potempa at the Caro Group on his cell phone. He’d dialed as soon as his hands had stopped trembling.
“Who would that be?” Potempa intoned in his smooth voice, for which Behr wasn’t in the mood.
“Don’t fuck with me, get Captain Pomeroy.”
There was a brief hold during which Behr watched the sickly slate green of the White River burble by.
“Yeah?” Pomeroy’s voice came on, trying to hide his concern under a mask of irritation.
“We’re all on,” Potempa said, “and the line is secure.”
“Off West Washington and White River, on the southwest bank of the river.”
“That spit of land below Chevy?” Potempa asked. Behr could hear a pen scratching against paper.
“That’s right. Where it gets marshy. Against the hill below the track bed, that’s where you’ll find your A team. There are four trash bags—”
“Oh crap—,” Potempa croaked, his voice gone rough.
“Jesus Christ—,” Pomeroy added.
“Yeah, all of it.”
“What’s their … condition?” Potempa wondered, grasping for control.
“Their condition is all damn done. Chopped up and bagged. Feet, hands, heads. I didn’t dig around much, I didn’t want to disturb the scene, but it looks like they were bled and quartered somewhere else. Thanks for this, by the way,” Behr said.
“Have you developed any information on whom—,” Pomeroy started in.
“Whoa,” Behr said. “You asked me to find ’em. They’re found. An ex-Treasury and a fifteen-year Philly PD, like they just ran into Bill the Butcher. You wanna know ‘who,’ that’s a different deal and I pass.”
There was a long beat of silence, then an audible sigh. “All right. West Wash and White River.”
“Yeah,” Behr said, “bring your galoshes,” and he hung up on them.
Behr retired to a vantage point near the Chevy plant grounds where the tracks split and he was able to park and watch the personnel arrive, sirens wailing in the distance. Uniforms and plainclothes, Violent Crime, Crime Scene, and Coroner, they all descended on the site. Pomeroy, other brass, and some blue suits that must’ve been Caro boys arrived, too. They all executed their tasks with the diligence and instinct of worker ants.
Then a navy blue Cadillac STS rolled up and Potempa picked his way across the mud over to the hub of the activity, where he shook hands with Pomeroy before taking a look. When he caught a glimpse inside the bags he sagged back, and Pomeroy caught him by the elbow to keep him upright.
When it was finally close to done, when the body parts had been packed up and Potempa had been seen back to his car by a uniform and had driven away, Pomeroy broke off from the rest and made his way along the tracks toward where Behr waited. The captain scrambled up the loose gravel lining the railway bed and was breathing quickly by the time he made it to Behr. Behr could see by his shoes that Pomeroy hadn’t realized he was serious about the galoshes.
“There was a castable footprint down there. I’m assuming your crew saw it.”
Pomeroy breathed and nodded. “Listen,” he started, breathed again, swallowed, and then continued, “you can’t be done with this.”
What he’d found had Behr thinking it was time for him to leave it alone. “You or the Caro boys should do it yourselves.”
“Just tell me what you have.”
Behr broke it all down for him, winding his way through what had previously seemed random. When Behr got to the part about the Schlegels and the connection to Lieutenant Bustamante he expected disgust, or at least surprise from Pomeroy. Instead, all he got was a dull nod. “So you might want to have IAD grab a look at him.”
“They already are,” Pomeroy said.
“You knew?”
Pomeroy didn’t speak to the question, but instead asked one. “You have a next move?”
“This isn’t just local shit. Pros from Detroit or Chicago or Cleveland or somewhere are likely involved. There’ll be nothing. No way to find ’em. And if I did, what the hell would I do then? You want me to build a case or try and take ’em down? Either way, it’s not what I do,” Behr said. He shut his mouth, a little embarrassed at how easy it had all come out.
“It may be pros. May be. If it is, you’re right. You won’t find ’em. But they didn’t come down here on their own, and you know it. I want who hired them.”
Behr didn’t move. “I think we know—”
“The linkage. Get me the local linkage,” Pomeroy demanded.
“You want the linkage,” Behr repeated. He was close enough to Pomeroy to see small patches of rosacea on his cheeks below the man’s unwavering eyes.
“Get me the linkage.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Behr sat outside a Circle K store, lacing up a pair of dry shoes he had in the trunk, downing a quart bottle of Gatorade, and feeling handled when his phone rang. He’d heard old detectives, lifers, espouse a theory that there were no coincidences. That ev
erything on a case was connected and that there wasn’t such thing as separate cases in the first place, that everything, all the cases an investigator looked at his whole career long were interrelated in one long indecipherable chain that could only be understood at the very end. Behr didn’t go in much for the mystical bullshit, but it was easy enough to see what they meant at the moment. Aurelio had been killed, and he’d walked into it, and Dominic had seen him there, and his name had rung a bell so he’d reported it to Pomeroy who’d seen his opportunity. Maybe Pomeroy had smelled the connection and had gone outside of the department because he suspected what Behr had now learned about Bustamante—he had a dirty cop tipping and steering and otherwise protecting the Schlegels from the inside. Maybe Pomeroy hadn’t had the Schlegels or even Bustamante at all. There was still a lot that wasn’t clear to him, especially whether or not he was willing to stick, or whether he should drop it and walk away and live his life, whatever that amounted to at the moment.
Behr reached slowly for his still-ringing phone. “Yeah?” he said quietly, without even bothering to check the caller ID.
“Sorry it took so long, Frank,” a voice said.
“Tommy?” It was Tommy Connaughton. “You got something?” Behr asked.
“I finally got into that Santos account.”
“Okay.”
“But the checks weren’t presented at a bank. They were cashed at Check Express, a Western Union-type place.”
“Shit.”
“So I hacked them, no charge,” Connaughton said, a smile of pride in his voice.
“Good man. And?”
“Flavia Inez. Or Inez Flavia. I don’t know which—it was recorded differently on each transaction. Someone there is worse with the Spanish than me.”
“She’s the girlfriend,” Behr said, certain of what he’d suspected at first but had too quickly moved off.
“What?”
“Nothing, go on.”
“Anyway, those two checks—one for four thousand, the other for seventy-five hundred—she cashed ’em.”
“Thanks, Tommy, send me a bill,” Behr said, hanging up and swinging his feet inside the car. He turned the ignition and started to drive.
It was quarter to eight by the time Behr reached Dannels’s house. It wasn’t his final destination, but he needed another piece and hoped he wasn’t too late. He jumped out of his car, in time to see Dannels backing a well-kept Bravada out of the driveway, and ran around to the driver’s window.
“Oi, mate, you look like an all-night trucker,” Dannels said, his hair still wet from a shower, a conservative striped tie knotted around his thick neck.
“Hey, man, I know you’re on your way to work, but did Aurelio come into any money recently?” It was a question Behr should’ve asked the first time if he’d been thinking straight, but he hadn’t been.
Dannels’s eyes lit. “He hadn’t come into any. He’d won some.”
“Won it how, fighting?” Behr asked, knowing the answer.
“Nah, he dumped his fight purses into the school. That was his business. This was his fun. He loved the gambling. Lotto and pea shake,” Dannels said. “Must be a cultural thing. I ran the probabilities for him many times, the odds of winning long term at lottery-style betting—it’s piss poor. But he kept spending thirty, forty, fifty bucks a day on that crap. Then he hit a couple of shakes a few months back, five or ten thousand, I don’t remember how much. He was so fucking happy, mate. Acting quite vindicated about his gambling prowess with me.” Dannels smiled despite himself. It was what Behr knew, that the wins jibed with the deposits in the checkbook. And there was something beyond that, too. He knew that Aurelio hadn’t met Flavia Inez by accident.
THIRTY-EIGHT
The living room smelled lightly of sandalwood incense. Behr had been sitting on the sofa for a long time. Perhaps three hours had gone by. He’d reviewed his notes a dozen times and had dozed. He had already searched the place top to bottom and sideways. He hadn’t found any financial records or journals, calendars, organizers, or diaries. Another thing he hadn’t found were any haircutting implements. Besides her personal brush, there wasn’t a single pair of scissors, a clipper, a comb or cape in the place. But he had discovered $3,800 in cash secreted in an empty jar of cold cream under the bathroom sink, and because of that he knew she’d be back. Eventually. When he had arrived a woman had been steering a baby in a stroller, with another slightly older child in tow, out of the building. The look of gratitude on her face as Behr held the door for her made it plain she wouldn’t be asking if he belonged as he entered. When he’d reached Flavia’s door, after knocking repeatedly and pressing an ear against the door, he’d made fast work of the old and basic Kwikset lock. She hadn’t bothered with the dead bolt. When he finished his search he had taken his seat. His phone buzzed once, and he checked it and saw the incoming call was from Susan. The phone buzzed again when her voice mail hit, but he didn’t listen to it. Instead, he gazed down at the coffee table, at the pile of cash there next to a scattered handful of Trojan Twists. His stomach ground on itself in hunger, and he considered whether he should help himself to some empanadas he’d found in the kitchen or do something ridiculous like order a pizza, when he heard keys jingling outside the door.
Susan Durant pulled over outside the Broad Ripple location of Women’s Choice Clinic and turned off the engine. She sat there staring straight ahead for a long moment, and Lynn, sitting in the passenger seat because someone had to be there to see her home after the procedure, did the same. She had been crying too much, feeling nauseous and headachy all day. She knew it was probably the hormones, but the realities of the situation weren’t helping any. In fact, the only times she’d felt halfway decent over the past few weeks was the moment she was drinking her morning cup of coffee—she’d read that one cup a day was okay—or eating pizza or pasta. Literally the moment she was eating it. While she was chewing the crispy crust or shoveling in the noodles and sauce she got a moment’s relief from the hollowed-out panicky feeling in her stomach. But the second she put down the fork and wiped her mouth, the queasy feeling would rush back over her and she’d long to be in her bed in a dark room. It seemed to be getting worse day by day. She’d even thrown up in her mouth at work the other day, for god’s sake, and not wanting anyone to know, had to swallow the vile stuff down.
“Suze?” Lynn said.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Lynn,” she said, not looking at her friend. “You know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I know.” Lynn nodded. “It never is. That’s what my parents said when I came out. Then I figured out it is what it is, and you’ve gotta deal with it.”
Susan nodded slowly and thought about Frank, off somewhere chasing down whoever killed his friend, and who knows what else. He was probably only across town, but he felt a world farther away than that.
“Well?” Lynn said, patient, her words a gentle prompt. Susan reached for the key in the ignition.
The yellow-and-white-striped tent was doing little to cut the sun’s glare, as pit bulls of all sizes, coat colors, and quality were busy being unloaded from trucks and cages. It was the end of the summer Bully B-B-Q. Terry Schlegel rubbed his face and drank his third Diet Pepsi of the morning and thought of the story on the cover of the newspaper. He’d been pushing hard, and he knew taking the little Latino out for spite might’ve been over the line, but as for some kid getting caught up in it, that wasn’t something he’d planned. A group of six or seven bull pups growled, barked, and yelped as they tumbled over one another playing grab-ass in some owner’s pen. Terry just wasn’t in the mood for this. The hangover was gripping him hard, and the pair of corn dogs he’d downed and the sodas weren’t helping. The splattering sounds that Dean had produced that morning played in his mind. It had woken him, and the noise of the spraying hose as Dean cleaned off the cement steps hadn’t allowed him to go back to sleep. The memory, and the smell of slow-cooking smoked pork rising from a large steel barrel barbecue pit, w
as enough to turn his stomach. Then he saw Charlie’s Durango pull up and glanced over to see him and Kenny pile out of the SUV. They circled around back and unloaded their pair of tiger stripe bullies. He felt a surge of pride at the sight of his boys, tall and strong, wrangling those beasts they pretended were dogs. He watched several passersby greet them. Black dudes, Latin guys, white girls. His boys were faces in this part of town, they had a name and were treated with respect, and it made Terry feel good. He kept watching, waiting for Deanie to join them.
