Don't Forget You Love Me

by Rosemary Aubert

  He shook his hand, rustling the papers he held.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” I challenged him. “It was you who followed me in the valley and wrote that note… How dare you harass me? On what grounds can you…”

  Al Brownette smiled an unpleasant smile. “I don’t need grounds for anything having to do with the breaking of city ordinances, Portal. And I don’t need them for these, either.” He shoved the papers he was holding at my chest.

  Before I could even look at them, Brownette shook his fingers in my face.

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to prove,” he hissed. “I know you’ve talked to Mark Milktoast and Feeance. But you’re not going to get anything else. That dirty old geezer died of a heart attack. That’s all. Happens all the time.”

  He looked around the apartment again and made a sweeping gesture. “This is a nice place. If I was an old guy like you, I’d stay home more often. Stay out of shelters and other dumps, stay out of the valley altogether. There’s nothing down there you need to know about. Except maybe these…” He reached over and with a grin shuffled the pages still in my hand.

  Then he turned and pretty much marched out the door. As he went, I noticed that the holster of his gun was unsnapped. It was too bold a gesture, too egregious an offense to be a matter of carelessness. He was threatening me and he knew that I knew that that was the case.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I stumbled back into the apartment, sat down and started to read.

  I was shocked. There were all sorts of summonses here: notices of violations of city ordinances, overdue tax bills, even parking tickets. All of them purporting to have to do with acts against the law committed by people who lived in our village.

  Topping off the mess was a handful of “homeless” tickets.

  And there were also notifications of motions made by City Councilors to shut down the village on the grounds of its being unsanitary, unhealthy, environmentally dangerous and even racist!

  I simply could not understand what was going on here. Had Jeffrey been grossly negligent in some way? I would not allow myself to believe that, especially after our conversation and after seeing with my own eyes that the village was in fine shape. Something else had to be going on.

  I spent hours studying those papers, looking up laws on the internet, comparing facts and figures.

  The numbers were all wrong. The number of people who lived in our village was nowhere near as high as reported in the minutes of City Council. The description of the sanitation we’d provided our residents was fraudulent. We had always had the best plumbing, the best water system. I was not the son of a builder for nothing. Though my father had been a muratore, a brickiere, a bricklayer, he had had a profound understanding of how a building worked. And so did Jeffrey, and so did I. The reports I was reading were clearly false, clearly intended to make the village look like some sort of careless collection of filthy hovels.

  I came to the conclusion that these papers were one further step in a campaign to destroy my village. I decided I needed help fighting this harassment, and though I had every reason to expect no help at all any more from Matt West, I decided to visit him again, anyway.

  When I got to Headquarters and asked for Matt, I was astonished that he came down to greet me and personally escorted me upstairs to his office. He was back to being his old friendly self. “What can I do for you?” he asked, studying me as though I were a suspect. You look a little flushed today. Everything all right?”

  I was beginning to be so fed up with the police that I actually thought Matt was trying to trick me somehow. The old good cop, bad cop routine. Except I had nothing to give, no beans to spill.

  “Here, have a seat. And a coffee. Two milks, no sugar, right?”

  In the old days, Matt had always had a pot of coffee going in his office, unlike any other cop I’d known. He’d used it to make people understand that they could feel at home here, could talk to him and trust him. Now he had one of those coffee-makers with little individual containers of gourmet grinds. The coffee routine was getting on my nerves. I was moving past the point of trusting anybody.

  He put a warm cup in my hand and pushed a button, telling his secretary to keep everybody else out.

  “Okay,” he said, “what’s up?”

  “These,” I said, barely containing my anger which seemed to get worse in direct proportion to Matt’s apparent kindness. “I’ve been handed these by one of your boys.”

  It was an insulting thing to say. Matt was not the type of police officer to ever refer to his fellow professionals as “boys.”

  But he just nodded and reached out for the papers, which I’d stuffed into a briefcase I hadn’t used in years. I felt a moment’s shame when I realized how shabby it looked against Matt’s slick new desk.

  If he noticed, he didn’t say anything. He began to read the papers, and by the motion of his eyes, I could see that he was a fast reader and fast at what he comprehended, too.

  But when it came to going over the papers with me, he took his time.

  “Some of these tickets—a couple of the parking tickets and a couple of the homeless tickets—are legit. They can be disposed of.”

  “How?”

  He glanced up from the papers. “By paying them!”

  I relaxed and smiled. Parking tickets given to people visiting the valley and parking on the streets above were not that unusual. And Jeffrey knew about homeless tickets even though he’d only settled a few of them.

  But the other papers were a different matter. “These complaints from City Council look pretty frightening, I agree,” Matt said. “But I can tell you that they are not actionable—they’re just suggestions that various councilors have made. They can be legally ignored, though they certainly give you a good idea of who your enemies are!”

  “I don’t get it, Matt. Why should I have so many enemies in the city? Why are people so against my efforts just to help a few people out? City Council is always going on about helping the poor and about citizens taking personal responsibility for the fate of their fellow citizens….”

  Matt shrugged. “Whoever your enemy is, the person is clearly capable of getting a large and varied number of city officials on his or her side.”

  “How did Al Brownette find me?” I asked, impatient to get some inkling about what Matt was really saying here. “How did he know where I live?”

  He looked at me as if I’d asked a stupid question, which I had.

  “And what’s with Ted Downs? I saw him at a banquet not long ago. He was hobnobbing with developers. What’s his interest in my affairs?”

  “Ellis, you’re too keyed-up about all this. You’re putting two and two together and coming up with ten. If I were you, I’d just pay the damn tickets and relax.” He shuffled all the papers together and handed them to me. “And I’d lay off Ted Downs. He’s a good man who’s had a run of bad luck and who’s trying to pick up the pieces.”

  He gave me a look that said that I, better than anybody, should understand how that played out.

  “What do you mean, Matt? What sort of bad luck?”

  I didn’t expect him to get personal, but he did. “There’s nothing illegal about a police officer being a real estate investor. What Downs is doing is trying to rebuild his life after the suicide of his son.”

  The thought of such a thing hit me hard, considering how close Jeffrey and I had become in the past few years. “What happened?”

  Matt was silent for a moment. Then he went on in a voice that was pretty soft for the tough guy that I knew him to be. “It was one of those cases that you just can’t understand. Everything was fine for Ted. He had a nice wife and a teenage son. Apparently the kid was real smart, a geek type. But I guess the kid was bullied by somebody. Anyway, he committed suicide. It happened really fast. Shortly after it occurred, Mrs. Downs took off, blaming her husband for her son’s death….”

  “Bullied? You mean at school or on the internet?”

 
; Matt shrugged again. “Who knows?” He gestured toward his tidy desk. “Look, Ellis, I got a lot of work to do here. I hope you’re clear on those papers. Just pay the tickets and put the other things aside. If somebody’s against you for some reason, you’ll find out who and what soon enough. You can always call 911 if you find yourself in danger….”

  On the way home, I stopped to see Jeffrey. I told myself I needed to show him the tickets and ask his opinion on the other matters. But I really just wanted to make sure he was okay.

  “Dad, I’m not surprised. I’ve often helped people in the village with things like this. I’m sure you realize that assisting people the way we do makes us suspicious in some people’s eyes. It’s a sad fact—and a strange one. But I’ve gotten used to it. And as for the visit from the cop, that’s not unusual either.”

  “No? Just how long have the police have been frequenting the village?”

  Jeffrey laughed. “From day one.” He hesitated and I hoped it wasn’t because he was afraid to reveal something that we’d failed to discuss in our recent fraught conversation. “To tell the truth, Dad, I think that lately the police have been down here far more often than in the past--on an almost daily basis. They claim that the neighbors on the rim of the valley have security issues, and I’m sure that’s true. There have been so many buildings put up in the past year—expensive condos that well-heeled people are buying and moving into. I’m sure people like that would want to think that the police are keeping an eye on anything that’s happening down here.” He gestured upward, but I didn’t need to look at all those new glass giants to know what he was talking about.

  “And,” he went on, “I always have to face the fact that we’re not housing angels down here. Sooner or later somebody is going to piss off the cops in some way. Again, it’s just something I’ve learned to deal with.”

  “Who comes?”

  “What?”

  “The cops. Who comes? Is it guys on the beat or special squad teams or what?”

  Jeffrey thought for a minute. “Usually it’s random people—I mean different officers, though I suppose they’re mostly from the local station house. Once in a while, it’ll be somebody from downtown on a court matter. And a couple times lately it’s been that older man and younger man I told you about. They almost act like father and son, but I get the feeling they’re not as nice to other people as they seem to be to each other.”

  “But you say you didn’t get their names. Did they speak to each other, where they called Ted and Al?”

  “I didn’t hear, Dad. I’m sorry. All I can say is that they’ve been down here more than once and the last time, they sort of threw their weight around for a while and then left. You know, warning people in a general way to keep their noses clean.”

  “If you see them again, Son, you let me know. Right away. Phone me on my cell if you have to.”

  Jeffrey laughed. “Dad,” he said, “by the time you find your phone, they’ll be long gone.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Once again I had the feeling that I had gotten nowhere and would get nowhere with this “investigation”. None of the pieces fit together in any way I could understand. A man had been killed by four police officers. That had to have been what Queenie thought, or else why would she have sent me on this wild goose chase?

  Of the four, two appeared to be completely harmless as far as committing murder went. Feeance Blake struck me as an unfriendly person, but she also seemed straight-arrow, as if she had no axe to grind and no interest in anything but doing her job as an officer of the law. Mark Hopequist, on the other hand, didn’t strike me as having much of a police career ahead of him. He just wasn’t cut out for the job. Soft. Sentimental. Maybe kids liked him. Criminals would too.

  So that left Ted and his buddy Al. I had to admit that they were practically a cliché. I could have written a TV police drama about them—the old cop, hardened by years on the street and getting on as he always had by appearing to be congenial then coming down hard and heavy. And Al, the tough little puppy-dog doing all he could to learn how to bite—and when and how hard.

  None of these had the one thing you needed to kill somebody. They had no motive.

  Which brought me yet again to thoughts of the victim. It seemed like everybody except my Queenie had a motive to get him out of the way. He was obnoxious, argumentative, inflammable… But those negative personality traits were annoyances. They weren’t motives for homicide. They weren’t motives for anything except the profound desire to get away from the bastard.

  I went to the window of my apartment, as I had lately begun to do often, and looked out over the valley. Directly beneath me, the trees, now stripped and awaiting winter, stood in their profusion as if guarding the river. It was still flowing, and depending on the severity of the winter, might not freeze up at all. But if it did turn very cold very suddenly, parts of the river would solidify in days, if not hours. There had been a time when the river never froze because it had been so polluted, but things were different now. Most people respected the Don and refrained from using it as a garbage dump, though, as I said, I did sometimes see shopping carts down there as if it were some kind of challenge for a prankster to figure out how to steal one, run it to the river and heave it in.

  Of course I had total contempt for such people.

  But I had more important things to think about. What were Al and Ted doing down there? I was sure it was them that Jeffrey had described.

  I couldn’t think of anything that connected them to Jeffrey or to the village.

  But after a few moments’ thought, I realized there was one thing.

  Me.

  As I stood there, I remembered a day on which the river, or at least the part of it near the now skeletal long-term facility on its banks, had frozen solid. I recalled how on that day, I’d rescued a woman who had escaped from the facility. Not just any woman but a woman I had once loved and who had never returned my love—not even for an instant.

  And I thought of my first wife, the cool blond beauty who had betrayed me.

  And I thought of Queenie, my one true wife, the woman who had won my heart by her courage and her wry humor and her earthy beauty and—above all—by her kindness and her unending concern for other people.

  She had been kinder to me than anyone had ever been. The last thing she would have thought of was any sort of payback.

  But I owed her. And I would pay her back. At least in this one way: I would keep at it. I would find out who killed the Juicer and why. If it took me the rest of my life.

  So I decided to give it one more shot. And that led me to a place I didn’t really want to go: back to the domain of the infamous Johnny Dirt.

  To tell the truth, when I got there I was impressed. Apparently it was clinic day at the downtown shelter that he ran. I had to come to the conclusion that Johnny was yet another of the many people that Queenie had set on the path of success. When I had known Johnny before, he had been nothing but a dirty, irritating street bum. But now, one could almost say that he had become Queenie’s successor in the shelter business. Not only did he now seem remarkably organized personally, he was actually managing to run a place that—at least on this day—seemed a particularly smooth operation.

  What appeared to be a professional nurse was set up in the tiny room that served as Johnny’s office, and she was seeing patients who were lined up out the door of the office and into the larger adjacent room that each day served as an activity room, a dining room and, when the furniture had been shoved against the walls and the mats laid down, a dormitory for those who couldn’t stand sleeping outside in the increasing cold.

  I had to wait to see Johnny because he was so busy, but he seemed glad to see me, which was another remarkable thing. He had always given me reason to think he hated me in the past.

  “Look, man, I already told you. Queenie put up with people that nobody else would, and to her, the Juicer was a big kid who just needed somebody to look after him.”
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  “What about you, yourself, Johnny. What did you think? What was the Juicer’s problem, anyway?”

  “He was a gigantic all-round pain in the ass. But his worse problem was his big mouth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was a yapper. Wouldn’t shut up once he got started. And he thought he was smart enough to run the government. ‘If I was the mayor, I would—blah, blah, blah.’ To hear him tell it, he should run the whole damn city, if not the world.”

  I had to smile at the energy with which Johnny delivered this piece of information, but there was no smiling at what he said next.

  “There was one thing I don’t think Queenie ever really saw. The Bruiser—I mean the Juicer--was a bully when she wasn’t around. On any day, he would start with the help.”

  “The help?”

  “Yeah, the people who worked at the shelter. Not the just volunteers but the hired workers, too. He would tease them. It was funny at first. But it got mean real quick. He’d ask them where they came from—they were mostly immigrants—then he would make fun of their countries. Like he had a name—a bad name—for every group of people. Sometimes he went at it so hard and long that one of the women would start crying. They never complained, though. Because they were afraid for their jobs.”

  “You mean Queenie would fire them?” I asked with surprise.

  Johnny laughed. “Not hardly. They were just paranoid because of being immigrants.” He shook his head.

  “So the Juicer really went at them?”

  “Yeah, but not just them. He liked to spout people’s personal business in front of other people. Because he was always in some kind of trouble, he would run into people in jail and in the mental lockups. One of his favorite tricks was to claim that he saw somebody’s friend or relative in some lock-up, then haunt the person with the fact that his brother or whatever was a criminal or worse—a loony.”