Signature Kill

by David Levien

  After he’d spent the bulk of forty-eight hours on the sit, less three thirty-minute breaks to say hello to Susan and Trevor, use the bathroom, and reload on sandwiches and water, Behr had to admit Jones wasn’t home. He’d also had ample opportunity to feel foolish about the case itself and did his best to push these thoughts from his head.

  At one point the woman went out, piloting a beat-to-shit Honda Odyssey from the cluttered one-car detached garage, apparently on a shopping trip with the kids. Behr considered making entry to the house but decided against it. He had nothing concrete to look for, and he didn’t feel like getting arrested or contending with the dog. The woman and kids returned an hour later with a bunch of bags from Target. Sometimes patience was the only thing that worked, and every time Behr lost his he pictured his son, and that kept him rooted to his spot.

  It was almost dark on the second day when he was rewarded. A matte black F350 rolled up, and getting out of the passenger seat was a tree trunk dressed in work pants, boots, and a Dickies jacket. Behr checked the mug shot he’d sat with for two days. It was Jonesy. And unfortunately Jonesy had not been sloughing off when it came to the gym time. He moved around the truck to the driver’s side with surprising dexterity and slapped five with the driver, who took off in a spray of loose gravel as Jonesy headed for his house. Behr watched him go in and waited five minutes. Cutting off a man before he’d seen his wife and kids, causing him to wonder if they were okay or had been hassled, didn’t seem like a good idea. The mangy dog followed him inside too, and that was a plus.

  After the requisite time had passed, Behr got out of his car, though he left his key in the ignition and the door leaning closed but not shut. He’d knocked on enough strange doors to know it was wise to be prepared for a hasty retreat. He also grabbed a can of pepper spray out of the glove box, not sure if he was thinking of the dog or Jonesy, then passed through the rusty gate and up the two steps to the house’s battered front door.

  “Yeah?” Jonesy said, the word loaded with distrust, when he opened the front door, leaving only a heavy screen door between them.

  Before Behr had a chance to answer, the common-law wife spoke from inside the house. “I already told him you don’ do nothing.”

  “He’s not a parole officer,” Jonesy said to his woman. “Who are you and what do you want?”

  Behr took in the man’s thick neck. A white-collar geek who made the bad choice of not paying a certain hooker in some hotsheets hotel room would soon be quaking in his loafers upon this man’s arrival.

  “I’m here about Kendra Gibbons,” Behr said, omitting an answer to the question of his name.

  “Goddamn slut!” the wife spoke from behind Jonesy.

  “Shut the fuck up,” the man said to her. “What about Kendra?”

  “I’d like to know what you know about her disappearance,” Behr said.

  “I don’t know a damn thing ’bout what happened to that slut,” Jonesy said. Behr had to admit that sympathy for a prostitute he’d never met was pretty pathetic, but he didn’t care much for the way Jonesy referred to Kendra Gibbons. He supposed it was either a testament to the mother, Kerry, whom he’d liked a great deal, or a sure sign he was going soft in his middle age.

  “It was a long time ago,” Jonesy continued. “Now get the fuck off my front door.” A sense of dismay settled on Behr. He was losing his appetite for dealing with pricks. He ought to have been immune to it by now. It was one of the only parts of being a cop he didn’t miss, but he still had plenty of opportunity for it as an investigator.

  “Did you see her the night she went missing?” Behr asked, trying to stay on point.

  Jonesy said nothing, but Behr clocked a shrewd spark in the man’s eyes that he couldn’t ignore, and beyond that he was surprised to see some actual, if well-hidden, concern.

  “Did she have a problem with anybody? A customer that you got involved with?”

  “If she had a problem with a customer and I got involved, there wouldn’t be no problem anymore,” Jonesy said, despite himself and his desire to blank Behr completely.

  “I can see that,” Behr said, trying to flatter the man’s ego. There was something here worth digging for, he believed. “So no customer messed with her that you know of? What about your other girls, any of them know anything?”

  “What ‘other girls,’ douche bag?” Jonesy said, a ridge of flesh on the top of his bald head puckering in anger. “What do you think I do? Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

  “A guy who keeps his girls safe—” Behr began.

  “Don’t try and stroke me,” Jonesy said, his voice flat. “Plenty of other motherfuckers better than you have tried that con. And it was a fail.”

  “Can you just tell me—”

  “Only thing I’ll tell you is what I already told you: get the fuck off my front door.” Jonesy bent his knees slightly and leaned to the right, and when he straightened back up he was holding an aluminum baseball bat.

  They stared at each other for a long moment before Behr spoke. He was thinking of Gene Sasso, his old training officer on the Indianapolis Police. There were few things about being a cop, and a man, that Gene didn’t know. He spouted long sets of rules pertaining to various situations on the street. He did so with such authority it was hard to tell whether they were written on tablets by the finger of God and handed down, or if he made them up himself. But for a moment like this he’d say: “When a fight’s inevitable, you can’t be too violent too soon.”

  “I’ll get off your front door when I’m good and fucking ready,” Behr said. His voice was flat now too. The dismay was gone. They were now having an entirely different conversation.

  “Oh shit,” the wife said from inside the house and Jonesy stepped forward, blasting the screen door open as he came.

  Behr had to jump back to let the screen door miss him, and he was off to the side when Jonesy reached the porch. The big man had stepped right past Behr and into the wrong spot. He had no chance of swinging the bat and connecting from this angle. Behr seized the moment before Jonesy turned and readjusted, grabbed him by the shoulder and collar of his canvas jacket, and drove him toward the steps, sweeping the man’s feet as he did so. Jonesy flew through the air and down the two stairs to ground level, where he landed face-first and hard, the air squeezing out of him in a grunt. Behr was right behind him, jamming a knee into his back.

  “You had to go and be an asshole,” Behr said.

  Jonesy squirmed a bit, but he had no real chance to move as Behr dropped all of his weight on the knee. That’s when things turned into a full-on reality show.

  The sound of crying children in the background was issuing from the house, so Behr hadn’t heard the screen door open and shut, or the footsteps, he just felt a mass of soft flesh hurtle into his back and knock him off Jonesy. It was the wife, and the two of them tumbled to the cold dirt of the yard in a heap. This was the concern that police and investigators had when walking into any domestic setting—families stuck together. Countless cops had been shot or stabbed by the very same abused wives and girlfriends they’d been called to protect once they began taking down the husband or boyfriend who had been doing the abusing. As Behr and the wife landed, the woman commenced hitting at him around the face with inconsequential openhanded blows. She began shouting incoherent epithets in a foreign tongue too. Behr swam out from under all that flesh and onto his back to face her, doing a hip escape and sweeping her over easily. He’d gained top position and was preparing to disengage from the woman and stand when he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Jonesy was up with his bat. He rotated into a backswing, raising the bat, and at the last moment, Behr rolled, bringing the wife around on top of him just as Jonesy took a vicious cut.

  The blow landed hard across the woman’s upper back, and she let out a moan and went limp. Behr scrambled out from under her, trying to create distance between himself and Jonesy, but Jonesy was less concerned with him than with leaning down and check
ing on his wife.

  “Honeyknees! You okay?” he asked.

  That’s when Behr heard a growl and realized the mangy dog had gotten out of the house when the wife opened the door. He turned just in time to see the feral-looking creature coming at him for a piece of the action. Behr swung his leg and connected with a hard, low kick to the dog’s jaw. He reached for the pepper spray in his back pocket, but there was no need. The dog was whimpering, and limped away across the lawn, dragging his head low. Behr turned quickly to see Jonesy standing up and raising the bat.

  “You motherfucker,” Jonesy said, coiling and flexing what appeared to be every muscle in his body. Behr rushed him before Jonesy could swing, leaving his feet and closing the distance with a lunging punch. It landed just below Jonesy’s ear, causing the big man to sag, but not go down. Behr dropped the pepper spray, grabbed the jacket collar again, and raised his leg for a stomp-sidekick to the back of Jonesy’s knee. This crumpled the man to the ground, and Behr followed up with a stomp to Jonesy’s floating rib. Behr rolled him over, yanking the felled man’s arm straight, and landed a final stomp to the inside of Jonesy’s shoulder as he ripped the bat free.

  Jonesy rolled and writhed, spittle flecking his mouth. Behr straightened, grabbing a breath of air, and tried to decide if he’d wandered into a rerun of Dog the Bounty Hunter.

  “Now it’s time to talk, motherfucker,” Behr said, leaning down and jamming the business end of the baseball bat into Jonesy’s sternum. “Send your woman inside and tell her to bring the dog with her.”

  “Honeyknees …” Jonesy said, still curled up in a ball. The common-law wife had risen to her knees and was pawing at her back.

  “She’ll be fine,” Behr said.

  “Go on in,” Jonesy told her. “Take Banzai with you.”

  The woman hobbled over, gathered the dispirited dog by the collar, and went toward the house, pausing only to ask: “Should I call the police?”

  “Shut up, and get inside,” Jonesy told her. He tried to sit, but Behr kept him pinned with the bat in his chest.

  “Please don’t violate me,” the downed man pleaded.

  “I’m not here to violate you,” Behr said. “Now what’s the story with Kendra?”

  “Kendra was my good girl, man,” Jonesy said.

  “What, were you with her?” Behr asked.

  “I’m with all my girls, man, that’s how it works,” Jonesy said, and Behr understood why it was a problem for him to discuss it in front of the common-law wife. “She was a sweet thing. Lots of fucking fun. Called her my little rabbit. She gave it her all. Man, she had a great ten years ahead of her.”

  Ten years as a prostitute, Behr thought, that was the loss the man was lamenting.

  “And what happened when she went missing?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “Nothing? Did a client rough her up? Did she O.D. and you had to get rid of her body?” Behr pressed the bat along with the inquiry. “Or was it you?” He thought of the hundred grand at the end of it. He thought of an answer for Kerry Gibbons.

  “None of that. No. Okay, here’s all I know: A girl—someone else’s girl—this janky-ass bitch thinks she saw Kendra get into a car up on East Tenth Street. She don’t remember if that was the last time she saw Kendra or not, but she thinks it was.”

  “What kind of car?” Behr asked.

  “She don’t know. A blue one.”

  “Two-door? Four? Foreign or American made?”

  “She don’t know.”

  “What about the driver?”

  “White.”

  “White? That’s it? Male or female?”

  “A dude.”

  “A white dude,” Behr said. “How old? Tall or short? Bearded or clean-shaven? Bald?”

  “A white dude. She thinks. That’s it. Believe me, I looked into this thing. I spent a month searching for Kendra. I opened whup-ass on every bitch on the walk and every broke-ass pimp that ran ’em, trying to get some info. I looked for this blue-car-white-dude every night, man. Figured I’d find the cocksucker and get my girl back. Or find out where she went if she left, or whatever happened to her. Police didn’t do a damn thing. I dogged this bitch through and through and through, because that’s how much it mattered to me. But I came up dry.”

  “If she had run off and you’d found her, what would you have done?” Behr asked. He was more curious than anything on this point.

  “I’da gone and dragged her ass back. No girl of mine has the right to leave ’less I tell her to go,” Jonesy said, as if it were obvious.

  Behr appraised the man on the ground. He was no humanitarian, but he seemed genuine in recounting his efforts to find Kendra, and more so about the warped kernel of feeling he clearly had for her.

  “Who’s the girl—the janky-ass one? Is she Samantha Williams?”

  “Her name’s Shantae. Shantae Williams.”

  If she’d given the police her real name, Samantha, but lived as Shantae for a long time, that would explain why Behr hadn’t been able to locate her.

  “You seen her lately?” Behr demanded.

  “No.”

  “You think you can find her again?”

  “Think so,” Jonesy said.

  “Good.” Behr flung the bat across the yard, where it landed with a clunk in a pile of refuse. He put a knee on Jonesy’s belly and dropped a business card down on him.

  “If Shantae sees this guy and this car again, I want her to call you and then I want you to call me,” Behr told him.

  Jonesy nodded slowly.

  “And if I ever have occasion to come talk to you again and you welcome me with a baseball bat, I will break every fucking limb off your body.”

  Jonesy just lay there frozen as Behr stood and, to prove his point, went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and ripped it backward off its hinges. Then he picked up his pepper spray and walked away.

  12

  It is afternoon, after the school buses have left the streets, in the pale before winter’s early dark, when he finally sees her again. Cinnamon. He is sitting at a traffic light, and the door to a package store swings open and she emerges carrying a small sack. Time goes liquid. The light changes. She starts walking south, toward Lowell Avenue. He watches her go until he becomes aware of a horn honking from what seems a far-off distance. He takes his foot off the brake and makes a right turn. He isn’t anxious. In fact, he is totally relaxed. He knew this moment would come. He creates a box, making the next right, and the next, turning the corner back onto Lowell. He doesn’t see her, not at first. He wonders if she’s gone into another store. Then a couple of pedestrians clear as they enter a fried-chicken stand and she becomes visible, walking away from him at her own smooth pace. Her head bounces slightly as she walks, and he perceives she is listening to music through small in-ear headphones, though he can’t see them. He remains where he is, allowing her to walk away from him. He will stay where he is until she’s almost drawn out of sight or she turns. He is good at this.

  After a few long moments she does turn: a left, onto Hawthorne. It is only then that he puts the car back into gear and drives slowly after her. He reaches Hawthorne as she nears midblock, and she is in his sight when she turns onto Marquette. He repeats the move of reaching the new street after she’s had a chance to go about halfway down it. He noses the car around the corner in time to see her walk up three stairs and into a small brick house. She doesn’t use a key—the door must be unlocked. She didn’t knock, though. Her manner is proprietary. She is home.

  He puts the car in park and watches and waits. He considers making entry. Going right in. The idea is always there. There is plenty of pressure for it inside of him. But not so much that not going in is out of the question. He is able to wait, so he does. No one else comes or goes as he sits and watches, but that is no guarantee she lives alone. Besides, his kit isn’t in the car. It is of no matter. He knows where to find her now. There will come a time when he can’t wait any longer, and when it does, h
e will be ready. Until then, his mind races off through the dark places and he waits. After three hours he has grown hungry, but not for food. He puts the car in gear once more and drives away from her house—one he will be back at again soon.

  13

  Beating up pimps didn’t come cheap, and Behr waited for any one of the countless potential injuries that went along with that kind of activity to announce itself. At his age even winning a fight could result in a blown shoulder, a torn calf, a dislocated wrist or ankle, at best. But this time there seemed to be none. He’d come through his tussle with Jonesy clean. Of course he had tweaked his neck when the woman tackled him, and his foot was sore—bruised but not broken—due to his kick, because fighting a pimp’s wife and dog didn’t come cheap either.

  Behr had gone on and spent the rest of the day trying to find a known address for Shantae Williams. Now that he had her street name along with her real one, Behr had thought he’d be able to find her quickly. He’d thought wrong. Live long enough on cash with no credit cards, no mortgage, someone else on the rent and utility bills, don’t register to vote, and move after a last arrest, and a person can disappear in plain sight. Behr figured he’d find her eventually, but for now he was dead tired, and headed for Susan’s place.

  “There he is, the Chairman of the Board!” rang out in greeting when Behr walked into her living room.

  Chad Quell, Susan’s coworker and friend, was sitting there with Trevor near his feet. Chad was wearing socks, a pair of trendy pointy-toed lace-up shoes sitting nearby. Susan was in the kitchen making a salad. Behr and Chad hadn’t gotten off to a great start and hadn’t been particularly fond of each other for a while. But after Behr had prevented Chad from getting a life-altering beating, things turned around pretty quickly. The young man used to be flippant at best, but now whenever he saw Behr, instead of Frank, it was “Francis Albert” or “Chairman of the Board,” as in Sinatra, as a sign of respect.