Back on Murder rm-1

by J. Mark Bertrand

  “Lorenz caught that one, I heard.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I was working it, too, then they pulled me off.”

  He smiles. “And you want to show him up, is that it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He drums his fingers on the desk in thought. “I do owe you,” he concedes. “The fact is, I haven’t heard anything, and now that I’m on this detail, I haven’t really kept up with my network, apart from the odd informant like that guy the other day. Obviously, I haven’t even kept up with him. But if you want, I guess I could make a couple of calls and see what comes up.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “All right then.” He smacks his hands together, rubbing the palms, then hops off the desk. “Anything drops, I’ll let you know.”

  He’s anxious for me to go, and since I can’t think of any excuse that would stall him awhile longer, I oblige. The moment I’m out the door, though, the office next to his opens. Thinking it might be Thomson’s, I pause. Salazar puts a hand on my back, urging me along, but I slip his grasp, pretending something’s just occurred to me.

  “What?” he says under his breath.

  I smack my forehead, buying a few seconds.

  From the open door, Reg Keller emerges. He takes one step outside, then freezes, drawing in breath like he’s just stepped on something. His flame-blue glare zeroes in on my shoes, as if he somehow recognizes them as mine, then slowly works its way upward, taking me in inch by inch.

  “Sorry, boss,” Salazar says.

  Keller makes no reply. He’s an inch or so taller than me, menacingly fit, with a shaved head and a tight row of clenched teeth. He wears his stiff navy suit like a uniform, shirt crisp with starch, tie knotted just so, knife-edge creases everywhere you look. As much as I hate the man, there was a time I admired him, and coming face-to-face like this it’s hard to keep myself from reflexively cowering. In a dream, now would be the time to throw my punch, but in the flesh I find there’s more flight in me than fight.

  He plants his hands on his hips, leaning forward aggressively, a vein going rigid in his neck. “You want to tell me what he’s doing here?”

  Salazar sputters, hands spread.

  “Instead of just standing there, maybe you should do something about it.”

  With surprising power, Salazar takes me by the elbow, pulling me back. I dig in at first, but he shoulders me along.

  “Come on, man,” he whispers.

  The secretary stands, one hand to her chest, shrugging emphatically in Keller’s direction, her chin ducked as though worried he might be able to hit her from across the room.

  As Salazar bunches me through the door, I glance back at Keller, who still hasn’t budged an inch. His cheeks flush with outrage, nostrils flaring, and at that moment it wouldn’t surprise me if he charged. A note of protest sounds at the back of my mind. What have I ever done to him? What’s he got to complain about? He should be the one they’re afraid of. They should pack him out the door.

  Then I’m in the hallway and the door swings shut. The last thing I see is the apologetic wince on Salazar’s lips.

  The whole exercise was pointless. If Thomson was there, I didn’t see him and he didn’t see me. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. All the old feelings come rushing back, the vengeful drives I surrendered back when it seemed there was no hope of ever fulfilling them. My leg rears back of its own accord, and it’s all I can do to keep from kicking the shut door.

  But I don’t. That would only make a bad situation worse. And besides, the visit isn’t a total loss. They’re going to be talking about it for a while in there. Maybe Thomson, if he wasn’t already lurking behind a closed door, will hear about the incident, and realize it’s time to get in touch.

  Sergeant Nixon settles behind the wheel of his cruiser, giving me a sideways glance. “Don’t get the wrong idea, Detective. It’s not a taxi service I’m running here. But you used to be one of my boys, so that entitles you to some special treatment.”

  “Thanks, Nix,” I say. “I appreciate this.”

  The last time I saw him was at the Morales scene, when he sent me on the wild goose chase across the street, interviewing the hot Latina who’d witnessed nothing much. Before that, we’ve bumped into each other a few times, him always making a point of addressing me by my rank, the way a proud father would. I started out under Nix, driving one of his patrol cars, and while we hadn’t formed anything like a special bond, I have a few fond memories of his sarcastic lectures and crass practical jokes.

  Seeing him in the car pool, already feeling a bit nostalgic after my run-in with Keller, I decided to hitch a ride. Northwest was far out of his way, but he told me to hop in regardless.

  “You remember Reg Keller?” I ask.

  He snorts. “He always thought he was something, didn’t he?”

  “Still does.”

  “I take it you two haven’t made peace yet? That’s what I figured. I wish you could have brought him down, Detective. He was ripe for it back then, but I’m afraid you done missed your chance.”

  I’m tempted to contradict him, but I don’t.

  Nix is one of the few people who knows the story about my beef with Keller. When Big Reg showed up in Central, he was already larger than life, with a ready-made entourage of corner-cutting patrol officers fawning on his every utterance. I was one of them, or at least I wanted to be. For the longest time, Keller shut me out, treating me like the unimaginative, by-the-book stuffed shirt I was afraid I really was. I’d see the guys he took under his wing, strutting around like they were God’s gift to law enforcement, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of them.

  Noticing this, Nix took me aside for a heart-to-heart, telling me I was lucky Keller hadn’t taken a shine to me. The guys he groomed had one thing in common: a moral flaw. The way Nix put it, they’d rather have the gun than the badge.

  “You warned me about him,” I say. “All those years ago.”

  “Did I?” He rubs his mustache, a little pleased with himself. “Did it do any good?”

  “Not really.”

  Everybody knew Keller was moving up the chain, sloughing off the uniform to get a shiny new detective’s shield. Rumors circulated, as they always do. He’d be taking some cronies along with him. This was the time to get yourself on Big Reg’s radar screen. So one night as we’re tooling up for patrol, I go up and tell him he can ride shotgun with me, assuming he wants to. I can’t remember the exact words, but it came out like a challenge and that kind of bravado appealed to Big Reg. Before I knew it, we were on the street. I finally had my chance to prove myself.

  Nix must be remembering, too, because he sighs against the driver’s side window. We’re taking I-10 through the middle of town, hooking up to the Loop and then heading up the Northwest Freeway.

  “I should have listened,” I say.

  He just grunts.

  Near the end of the shift, desperate to impress, I floored it over to a convenience store robbery in progress called in by an employee hidden in the back room. As we rolled up, Keller press-checked his grandfathered Government Model in the passenger seat, confirming the round in the chamber. I popped the thumb break on my sig Sauer, leaving it holstered for the moment.

  Two men burst through the glass doors. The one up front saw us and stopped short, but the second one ducked around him, breaking off to the right. Keller went after him, shouting. The first guy, meanwhile, leveled his pistol right at me.

  The distance was about thirty feet, but I recognized his weapon. I’d worked all through school at my uncle’s gun shop off of Richmond, selling handguns and hustling on the indoor range, priding myself on the knowledge thus acquired. He was pointing a nickel-plated Browning bda at me, or possibly a Beretta Model 84 — essentially the same thing, though they tended to be blued. The fact I had time to register this is a testament to how everything slows down under stress. I noticed the gun, then a split-second later noticed the plume of fire coming from the muzzle.
r />   I didn’t take evasive action. I didn’t move for cover. I just stood there flatfooted and let the bullets whiz by. When he ran, I was still standing there, my hand on my holstered side arm.

  It was the first time anyone had ever shot at me. I couldn’t quite believe it.

  Keller’s kid had bolted, but I could still hear him shouting around the side of the building. I started off after mine.

  He skimmed his way along a chain-link fence, then ducked down a driveway running parallel to a self-storage unit whose bright lights made him impossible to miss. I had my gun out now, but without closing the distance there wasn’t much hope of actually hitting him. So I poured on some speed. By the time he reached the end of the road, where the light suddenly dropped off, he was winded and staggering. I brought my pistol up and started yelling for him to freeze.

  Instead, he turned on me.

  I thought I saw the gun barrel shining through the shadows. I put two rounds into him, my gun bucking in my hands.

  He stood on tiptoes a moment, then sank to one knee. By the time I reached him, he was facedown on the cracked concrete, breathing hard, moaning.

  Keller drove up with the second kid in the back of the cruiser. He told me to holster my gun, then rolled my perp over to check on him. I’d have sworn both rounds hit center of mass, but in fact he’d only been hit once, the projectile ripping a superficial channel through the fleshy part of his side, then smashing into his bicep just above the elbow.

  “He’s gonna be fine,” Big Reg said. “But, son, we seem to have a problem.”

  Namely, there was a wounded perp on the ground, but no nickel-plated automatic. Stand-up guy that he was, Big Reg doubled back along the route we’d just run, searching the uncut grass along the chain-link fence for any sign of a discarded piece. He came back shaking his head, telling me not to worry, though, because he’d back my story. The guy had taken a couple of shots at me, there was no disputing that. Later, it turned out Keller didn’t have to back me: the video-surveillance cameras took care of that.

  Still, I was grateful.

  Six months later, once Big Reg had disappeared into the detective bureau, word trickled down that he’d had to gun down a dealer who came after him off duty. Feeling a bond after the way he’d helped me through my own shooting, I made a point of dropping in as a show of support. Talking to the other narcotics detectives, I learned something significant. The thug who’d stepped up to Keller was brandishing a nickel-plated Browning BDA.

  He hadn’t missed the discarded weapon. He’d pocketed it for use later on. Which meant his latest shooting was dirty.

  “You know,” I tell Nix as we emerge onto 290, “if you’d helped me out a little when Keller planted that piece, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “Right,” he says. “Because we wouldn’t be with the department anymore. I’m all in favor of settling scores, but not at the expense of the job.” He gives his badge a pat, reassuring himself it’s still in place.

  He’s probably right. I could’ve made trouble for Keller, but not enough for it to matter. People would have closed ranks, because that’s what you do when a brother officer is challenged. None of us knows when he’ll be forced into the same situation, making a mistake that needs covering.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “If you’re gonna slip a knife into somebody’s back — whether they deserve it or not — you gotta make sure you sneak up on them first. Get my drift?”

  Yeah, I do. And showing up in Keller’s office, putting myself front and center like that, it probably wasn’t the best move. Maybe Nix already heard the news and is letting me know. If he’s just spouting random advice, it’s pretty good advice.

  From now on, I’d better start listening.

  For the second time I show up at task force headquarters late, with no explanation, and for the second time Cavallo chooses not to call me on it. She eyes me silently as I approach, then slides a stack of interview forms across the table, picking up where we left off before. I recap my late-night visit to the Robbs’, giving her the various accounts of the vandalism incident.

  Yawning, she digs through her box of files, pulling a couple of sheets out. I skim them quickly. The thirteen-year-old youth group girls Gina Robb said were in her class gave statements to the police early on, including the accusation that Hannah had bashed up the car of an unnamed boyfriend of Evangeline Dyer.

  “How does stuff like this get missed?” I slap the pages down.

  She shrugs. “Information overload. Nobody knows it’s important at the time. And anyway, is it important? If it’s true Hannah keyed his car, then I guess that gives him some kind of motive — but I thought you’d already ruled Fontaine out.”

  “Maybe. But we should at least follow up on Evey Dyer, get her side of things. If she was such a good friend of Hannah’s, no matter how they left things, she might be able to tell us something useful.”

  “Anything’s worth a try.” She throws her hands up in frustration.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She brushes her hair back. “Everything.”

  I remember Bascombe’s words about the Morales case. A cool breeze blowing. The same thing’s happening here, and Cavallo’s not taking it well. The reason professionals don’t invest too much of themselves in a case like this is that it’s almost certain to end badly. But of course professionals do it all the time, because they’re human like anyone else. Cavallo lets out a sigh, then rubs her eyes until she can’t rub anymore. She starts back on the interview forms, making me wonder if she’s more human than most.

  “So you want me to follow up on the Dyer girl?” I ask.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  After an hour of hunting and pecking on the computer keyboard, I decide to take a shortcut around my technological limitations, placing a long distance call to Detective Eugene Fontenot, a New Orleans homicide detective who helped me out years ago on my most celebrated case, the Fauk stabbing, which was the basis for Brad Templeton’s book The Kingwood Killing. We had a good laugh about that, Gene and I, when he stayed at my place after Hurricane Katrina blew his house down. Like Evangeline Dyer’s mother, he’d toyed with the idea of a new life in Texas before nopd reeled him back.

  “Don’t you people have such a thing as databases out there in Texas?” he asks. “I’m lucky you didn’t talk me into staying.”

  “There’s nothing like the human touch, Gene. Besides, I heard you’d gotten fat and could use some exercise.”

  Over the line I hear him patting his belly. “My ex-wife been talkin’ again?”

  He asks about Charlotte, then gives me an update on his leisure time, which seems mainly to be taken up by fishing. Finally, I get his attention by explaining the link between the favor I’m asking for and the case that’s on every television screen.

  “This is connected to that girl?” he says, wonder in his voice.

  “The one you’d be locating is supposed to be her best friend.”

  Fontenot hums a tune, thinking things over. “For you, I wouldn’t lift a finger. You’ve never brought me anything but trouble. Still, I’ve got kids of my own, and if one of them went missing, I’d want anybody who could lift a finger to do it.”

  “That’s noble of you, Gene.”

  “I’m a noble sort of man.”

  “Not according to your ex-wife, you’re not.”

  He laughs with me a little, then at me, and then hangs up the phone. Cavallo, who’s been making an effort not to pay attention — or at least, not to seem to be — can’t help looking up with an inquisitive lift of the eyebrows.

  “Gene Fontenot,” I explain.

  “That name sounds familiar,” she says. Reaching under the table, she digs through her shoulder bag for a couple of seconds, then produces a dog-eared copy of The Kingwood Killing. “I’ve been reading up on you, March.”

  I snatch the book away, flipping absently through the pages. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
r />   “Not everybody around here has a book written about them.”

  “It’s not about me.” I hand it back to her. “Trust me, when you’re at your prime, the last thing you want is for someone to capture it like that. You’ll always be reminded of what you used to be.”

  She fingers the book contemplatively, then stashes it away. She has questions to ask, I can tell, but I’m not in the mood to answer them. With Evey Dyer taken care of for the moment, I still have Thomson to worry about. I excuse myself from the table and go in search of a telephone directory.

  I wait until the shift ends, then call from behind the wheel of my car. A woman’s voice answers.

  “Is Joe there?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Can I take a message?”

  “Is this his wife?”

  A pause. “Yes, it is.”

  So what Wilcox said is true. He really has put his marriage back together. The same woman who divorced him is now waiting at home by the phone. I can’t quite fathom how a life so shattered can be put back together like that, but remembering Charlotte’s words this morning, the idea gives me hope.

  “Do you know where I can reach him?” I ask.

  “Ah. . can I ask who’s calling?”

  “Just a friend.”

  She’s about to hang up, and for some reason I don’t want her to. I have this crazy notion all the sudden that she can tell me something.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I say.

  “Stephanie.”

  “Hi, Stephanie. Listen. I heard Joe’s taken up sculpting?”

  She clears her throat. “Yeah. .”

  I can tell from her tone that she’s a little perplexed by my call. Nix’s words about sneaking up come to mind. Time to end this.

  “Never mind,” I say. “I was just thinking. . Anyway, it’s great that you two are back together. It’s great about the. . art.”

  “Thanks.”

  After I hang up, a strange laugh echoes in the car. It’s me, only I can’t think what’s so funny all the sudden. Maybe it’s the desperation of my phone call, trying the guy at home instead of waiting for him to touch base. Now that I’ve put in an appearance at the office and chatted with his wife, Thomson’s bound to come out of the woodwork. When he does, I’ll tell him what Wilcox said. Putting the Morales case down is all well and good, but there are bigger fish to fry. If he wants the written assurances I collected from Internal Affairs, he’s got to give me nothing less than Reg Keller.