I dipped a fry in ketchup, ate it, looked at her.
“I think you said something just now,” she said. “When you looked at me.”
“Something,” I said.
We sat for a bit. The other waitress was handling the few customers. New kid. Her name was Kristen. Not really a diner waitress name, so I figured she wouldn’t last.
“It’s my nephew,” said Betty. “He died last week.”
“How?”
Her eyes clicked toward mine, held for a microsecond, then fell away. “You probably heard about it. Over by the projects?”
Sure, I’d heard about it. Everyone around here had. The William Lloyd Garrison Community Housing Project was the official name, but I doubt anyone’s called it that since they broke ground back in the seventies. It was ‘the projects.’ Nine five-story drab brick buildings erected around a playground and common area that was probably a needle park before the first tenants moved in. Poor white, poor black, poor Latino, and poor melting pot all shoved into cheap apartments with flimsy doors, suck-ass security, sub-standard plumbing, and no hope at all. Over the years a few lucky souls managed to get the hell out, but you couldn’t call it a majority. Not even close. A lot of people grew old and died there. Of the nine buildings, only three are in moderately decent shape, and by that I mean they aren’t active crack houses or simply falling down. Two are condemned; one’s a burned-out shell.
But what Betty was talking about was the kid who got so high in one of the crack pads that he thought he could fly. Or something. Witnesses say he fell right out of the fifth-floor window on one of the buildings. Did a turn and a half on the way down and landed in the pile position. Which is a smartass way of saying he took a header onto the concrete. Smashed his head, snapped his spine and probably never knew what he hit.
“He was your nephew?” I asked.
She nodded. “Jimmy. James O’Neill. He was only nineteen.” Betty sniffed. “Jimmy was my little sister’s only kid. Sherrie doesn’t live here in the city; she’s out in the suburbs. Got a nice house with her second husband. She’s a teller at a Wells Fargo out there.”
“Uh huh.”
“Jimmy was a good kid until sophomore year. He went out drinking with some other kids—first time for him, I think— and they got really drunk. Sick drunk. One of the kids was a senior and had his parents’ car. They… well, there was an accident. The papers said that the car never even tried to brake when it went through the red light over on the main drag that goes through Japantown. Their car hit an SUV.” She sniffed and shook her head. “Oh, god, it was horrible. There was a woman in the other car bringing her daughter home from dance class. They were both killed. And the little girl was only nine.”
“Jesus. What about the kids Jimmy was with?”
“There were two others and they… well, the boy who was driving wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He went partway through the window. They said he died on impact. The other one was Jimmy’s best friend. He was on life support for seventeen months before the family had him disconnected.”
I nodded. That was on the news, too. Kid was a straight-A student.
“Jimmy was the only one who survived the crash,” said Betty. “And he was awake the whole time. He saw everything. Saw all that blood. Saw his friends… and the woman and her…”
I touched her wrist to let her know that she didn’t need to jam broken glass into her own skin by telling me the rest.
“What happened to Jimmy after that?”
“He was expelled and there were charges, but because he was the youngest and was in the backseat the judge went easy on him. The husband of the dead woman sued his family, though, and my sister had to cash in her 401k, all of their stocks, their savings, and sell their house to pay the legal bills. They bought this little one-bedroom place and Jimmy had to sleep on the couch because there was no room, you know?”
I sighed, getting the picture. Horror, followed by general guilt and survivor’s guilt. That’s a witches’ brew few adults could handle, let alone a kid.
“When did he start in on the drugs?” I asked.
She dug a tissue out of her uniform pocket and dabbed at her eyes. I have always found it interesting, and kind of sexy, that women will be careful of their eye makeup no matter how much their heart is breaking. “His folks tried to get him into other schools, but no one really wanted him. They tried homeschooling, but that was a mess. My sister and her husband had to work all the time to pay their bills, you know?”
“Sure.”
“Sherrie doesn’t know when Jimmy started using. Or, maybe she did because she told me later that money was always missing from her purse. And some stuff around the house.”
“Stuff a kid could pawn?” I suggested.
“Yes. But when Jimmy was arrested, the cops told Sherrie that he was a junkie.” She picked her shoulders up and dropped them as she sighed, long and heavy. “They couldn’t afford rehab or counseling. Not a good shrink, anyway. They made him go to N.A. meetings, but you know how that is. You have to want to work the program.”
“And Jimmy didn’t?”
“No,” she said, “I think by then he was already lost.”
I’ve heard a lot of sad shit in my life. More than most people. But sitting there with this woman, hearing the echoes of the deep grief in her voice, seeing the brave little smile she kept hoisting up so I didn’t have to see her pain… fuck, man. That was one of the saddest things I ever heard.
I leaned forward and took her hands. It was a liberty, a line that she hadn’t invited me to cross, but I trusted her to know that it wasn’t any kind of come on. She looked at my big, knuckly, scarred hands, and then she curled her fingers around mine and held on for dear life.
3
“So how do you think I can help,” I asked. “I don’t mean to be a prick, but I’ve heard this story a thousand times. Kid loses his hold on the world, bottoms out, and then decides leaving is better than staying.” There was a song lyric about life being bigger than the strength he had to get up off his knees. Something like that, but it wasn’t the time to quote a song to her, not even a country and western song.
“The cops and the news people all said that he killed himself,” said Betty.
“But—?”
She chewed her lip for a moment and then nodded as if she had come to a decision. Then she dug her cell phone out of her pocket. An Apple model that has been out of style so long I’d be surprised if they were still updating the operating system. Small, with a tiny screen. But she brought up her messages, scrolled through, sighed again, then turned the phone around and slid it across to me. I bent to read the screen display, and then used my forefinger to scroll up a bit so I could see more of the conversation. It was a short series of texts between Jimmy and his aunt. Jimmy had written to ask her for some cash and she was pretty blunt in her response.
BETTY: U know I won’t give U $ for that.
JIMMY: Not 4 that.
BETTY: ??
JIMMY: Need 2 get out.
All weird here now.
BETTY: What do U mean?
BETTY: What’s wrong?
The time code said that it was over ten minutes before Jimmy answered that post.
JIMMY: The stuff’s all wrong.
BETTY: What stuff.
JIMMY: U know. Grit.
I glanced at Betty. Grit was one of the street names for crack cocaine. There were a lot of cute names for it. Cloud, gravel, nuggets, piece, raw, 24-7, bad-rock, scrabble, sleet. Like that. Maybe it makes it taste better. Who the fuck knows and, more to the point, who the fuck cares?
BETTY: What do U mean ‘wrong’?
JIMMY: He knows I know it’s bad. But he’s selling it anyway.
Says there’s no more til this is gone.
JIMMY: A girl I knew got sick. They took her away. Other kids, too.
JIMMY: Couple of kids in the
JIMMY: My friend Rix ran right into traffic. He was all wrong. I’m scared.
BETTY: U need help.
JIMMY: He’s crazy. He knows it’s bad. He doesn’t care.
There was no more.
I looked up at Betty and there were fresh tears in her bright eyes.
“He wrote that to me at 5:21 that afternoon,” she said. “The police report says he went out of the window at 5:30.”
I sat back. “Who is ‘he’? Who’s the cat Jimmy was talking about? You know his name? Know anything about him?”
Her eyes darkened. “Jimmy talked about him a lot, but all he ever told me was his nickname. His street name, I guess. Dill.”
“Ah,” I said.
She frowned. “You know him?”
“Of him. Marcus Dillman,” I corrected. “I work for bail bondsmen and we always hear shit. What do you know about him?”
“I know he’s a dealer.”
“Yeah, he is. What else?”
“Not much, but I believe that Jimmy was telling me the truth,” she said, and when I didn’t comment, she added, “He never lies to me. To his folks, sure. To everyone else. Never to me.”
“Okay,” I said. “What else do you have other than Jimmy’s word?”
“Nothing,” said Betty. “I tried asking around, but nobody wants to talk about anything. They’re afraid to. Somebody’s always listening, you know?”
“Sure. There’s no percentage in diming the bad guys when they live there and the cops don’t.”
She nodded. “I was there this morning, but when I pulled up to the building where Jimmy was staying—squatting, I guess, though he called it crashing—there were two guys leaning against the wall. Like they were watching for me to come back because as soon as I parked they pushed off the wall and started walking right toward my car.”
“What’d you do?”
“What could I do? I left and I’m afraid to go back.”
“Smart. Don’t go back. Don’t even think about it.”
“But the cops aren’t even looking into it. They marked Jimmy as a suicide and because of his record they don’t even care that he died.”
I nodded. “They don’t care. They don’t have a reason to care and they don’t have the time or manpower to care. That’s how it is, especially in this part of town. Nobody much cares.”
“I care,” she said fiercely. She balled her fists and pounded the table. Not loud enough for anyone else to hear, but loud enough for me to see the fire inside her. “If no one else will help then I will go back. Jimmy knew something and he wanted out. He was scared of this guy, Dill, and he knew something, and that got him killed.”
“Killed? You’re saying he didn’t fall out of the window?”
“Jimmy didn’t commit suicide, if that’s what you’re asking,” she snapped.
“It’s what I’m asking.”
“Well… he didn’t.”
“Maybe he got stoned and didn’t know what he was doing. Or maybe Dill was selling some bad junk and Jimmy took a bad high,” I said, then before she could say anything I said, “No.”
The timing was all wrong for that. He wouldn’t have been firing up a crack pipe while he was texting his aunt for runaway money. I couldn’t sell that to myself anymore than Betty could.
How had Jimmy put it? My friend Rix ran right into traffic. He was all wrong. I’m scared.
Jesus.
I took a small bite of the burger, chewed it, didn’t taste it at all, put it down, looked across at her. “What do you want me to do?”
It took her a moment to actually say it. If she really had known about how the tattoos worked and what it cost me to go as far as getting one inked onto my skin, then maybe she wouldn’t have asked. Jimmy was her nephew, sure, and clearly she loved the kid, but he was dead long before he went out that window. He probably died in that car crash, and maybe should have. I don’t know. I’m not a therapist and I’m not a saint. But I’ve seen people who have tried to live past their own expiration date, and I’ve seen the tortured ghosts they became, haunting their own lives. Sure, some of them can be saved, but coming back to life is a lot like working the Twelve Steps—you have to want to do the work. Some people don’t. Some people want to be dead and are simply taking the long way around. And some people—and my guess is that Jimmy was one of them—needed to do some penance. Being alive was exactly the same as being in hell for their sins, and they had just enough self-respect to not want to dodge that responsibility. It’s fucked up and it’s miles past sad, but there it is.
It took Betty a lot to ask. It took all of her love for her nephew; it took compassion for anyone else this Dill cocksucker might hurt; it took her personal courage and it took every atom of her battered pride.
“Can you find out who killed Jimmy?” she asked, her voice rough with emotion. “Can you find out why?”
The clock on the wall above the door was one of those big, industrial battery-operated clunkers that ticked very loudly. The jukebox was between songs and the Christmas noise from the street seemed muted. I listened to a lot of seconds being chopped off by the sharp blade of the ticking hand of that ugly clock.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll find out.”
4
Here’s the thing.
I wasn’t taking a case to do a full-blown investigation. Because I’m a skip tracer in this town it means I had to get a P.I. license, but Betty wasn’t hiring me to collect evidence and build a case that we could take to the local police. She was too much of a decent person to ask what she really wanted.
Not sure the word ‘revenge’ is the right word. And ‘justice’ is too corny.
Maybe the word is ‘payback’, but that’s pretty trite, too.
Whatever it was, she asked and I said yes.
It was getting late, and if this was a normal gig I’d wait for daylight and maybe even put on a sports coat and try to look normal.
Instead I left the diner and walked the five blocks to the projects. The holiday shoppers were thinning out because nice people don’t go out in the dark in this part of town. Not twice. Because the later it gets the more the neighborhood looks like what it is.
The streets were dry and we hadn’t had any rain in weeks. That was good, because I was able to find the spot outside of the building where Jimmy stuck the landing. In nicer neighborhoods someone—the cops or the building super—hoses down the pavement so there’s nothing horrible to see. This isn’t one of those neighborhoods, so the red splotch was still there. It didn’t look like anything. Just a mess. A central impact point and tendrils of blood spatter going out as far as the blacktop. He’d fallen five stories, so he’d had time to build up some speed.
There were people around, but no thugs leaning on the wall, so I knelt and used the blade of a Boy Scout knife to scrape some dried flakes of blood into a little glass vial. I keep a couple of those in my jacket pocket for this kind of thing. They look like crack vials. The next step would be to take the vial over to Patty Cake and have her mix it with ink. Sometimes she’d roll a blunt and we’d both get baked before she set to work. Sometimes it was Kentucky whiskey. Sometimes we did it just on nerves. A lot of it depended on what kind of vibe we were getting from just being on the fringes of a new case. Or, maybe the ghosts would be breathing cold air on the back of our necks and freaking us out. Even I don’t know which.
I straightened, listening to the creak and pop of my knees, looking around at the desolation of this place. It looked like a demilitarized zone but people lived there. Lights burned in a few of the windows of the other buildings and in one I saw the silhouette of a Christmas tree and as I stared at it the little twinkly lights came on. Nobody here had an extra dime, but there was someone who’d bought a tree and was willing to pay the bump in electricity bill to let it shine. That kind of optimism made me want to cry.
As I turned to go, I saw that there was someone standing by a burned-out shell of a stripped car. A skinny young man wearing a hoodie and stained jeans. Sneakers with graffiti on them, hands jammed into his pants pockets, shoulders hunched
against the cold. It wasn’t actually too bad out, but he didn’t have an ounce of meat on his bones.
I walked over and stopped in front of him. His face was almost invisible inside the shadows of his hood.
“Hey, Jimmy,” I said.
He said nothing. Just looked at me. One eye was all red, the other was blue. He wasn’t a good-looking kid, and maybe some of the guilt of what happened a few years ago was his, but not as much as I saw haunting his eyes.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Your Aunt Betty loves you,” I said. “You know that, right?”
Another nod. His face was covered with blood and bits of brain and bone. He looked fucking awful. I saw tears rolling through all that muck.
“Tell me something straight, kid,” I said. “Did you get wasted and walk out the window?”
He didn’t move.
“Or did Dill do something to you?”
A fresh set of tears rolled down.
“Why?” I asked. “Was it something you saw?”
He looked at me. I knew he wanted to talk, but he couldn’t. They can’t until I have their faces inked onto me, and after that they’re stuck with me. And me with them. This wasn’t about justice, and somehow Jimmy knew it the same way they all knew it. If I inked his face onto my flesh then, sure, I’d be able to know how he died. Know it for sure, but it meant that Jimmy would join the parade of other pale ghosts that were always with me. Nobody could see them but me, but they were always there. At night, when I tried to sleep, they stood around my bed. Some of them were silent, and maybe Jimmy would be one of those. Some were screamers. They screamed and screamed and screamed. They would scream until my heart finally stopped beating. And none of us—not them or me— knew if that would put an end to it. If I died, would they move on? Or would we all be in that purgatory together forever?
Dark Cities Page 16
