Lovely, Dark, and Deep

by Frank Zafiro

  “The truth of what? The councilman killed himself. How does that have anything to do with me or my company?”

  “You’re one of the top three bidders for the new condo development down in the valley.”

  “So?”

  “Councilman Tate chaired the committee that makes recommendations on those bids.”

  “So?” he repeated.

  “I’m just curious what your relationship to the councilman was.”

  “Relationship?” He shook his head at me. “I hardly knew the man, outside of the few meetings we had at his offices about the bid process.”

  “Tell me about those meetings.”

  He fixed me with a steely gaze. “Mr. Kopriva, I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know what, if any, authority you have to ask these questions. So excuse me if I politely refuse and ask you to leave.”

  “What harm can there be in answering a few questions?” I asked, not moving from my seat.

  “There’s always harm in sharing information needlessly,” he said, his tone sharpening. “Now are you going to leave, or shall I call for security?”

  I doubted the building actually had security guards, but it was a moot point.

  Markham was not going to talk to me.

  22

  If Markham was cool and polite, Beurkens was his polar opposite.

  I caught him at a work site on the short side of the South Hill. His crew was refurbishing a hundred and fifty year old residence that bordered between a house and a mansion. I knew who he was immediately, not so much because he was the only one wearing a white construction helmet, but because of the force of his presence.

  “No!” He screamed at one of his workers who held a coil of wire. “You hook that up to those old switches and they’ll burst into fucking flame.”

  The employee cringed under the barrage. “So I should replace the switches, then?”

  “Jesus Mary Fuck!” Beurkens yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

  The employee stared at him, cringing some more. “But I thought you said – ”

  “Are we building a new house or restoring an old one?” Beurkens snapped.

  “Restoring an old—”

  “So leave the goddamn original switches and use the right goddamn wire,” Beurkens finished. “Get the right stuff from Dan’s truck. Now!”

  The employee slunk away.

  Beurkens shook his head after him. “Moron,” he muttered, then turned to see me standing a few feet away. He sized me up for a moment, then growled, “What the fuck do you want?”

  It went downhill from there.

  After Beurkens threw me off his worksite without even asking my name, I traveled crosstown to visit Memphis Rossiter.

  I could have saved myself the trip.

  Caroline Construction was in a much more modest office space than Markham and Son, but somehow it seemed richer to me. The furniture was nicer. There were more people working there, too.

  Anyone who says they don’t notice race or skin color is lying. It impacts everyone differently, but everyone notices. Especially living in the inland Pacific Northwest. Portland and Seattle might be melting pots, but east of the Cascades, the population is pretty largely white. As a result, people of color stand out here a little more than might somewhere else.

  Walking into Caroline Construction, I saw one or two white faces and that was about it. Everyone else was darker skinned.

  If someone had asked me before I walked in to that office if that would have had any effect on me whatsoever, my answer would have been an easy ‘no.’ I might have even taken offense at the idea. I had been a cop. I worked around people of all kinds. Some were on my side of the law, some on the other. Some of those people, on both sides, were black. What did I care?

  People are people everywhere, right?

  Well, yeah. I was right about that. People are people everywhere. Unfortunately, people everywhere tend to be hyper aware of skin color. Walking into Caroline Construction, I suddenly was. And so was everyone who looked at me.

  “Can I help you?” The receptionist asked.

  I asked for Memphis Rossiter.

  “And who may I say is inquiring?” Her voice had a slight sing-song quality to it.

  I told her my name.

  She relayed my request, then gestured silently to the waiting area. I took a seat.

  And sat.

  It was a full twenty or thirty minutes before Memphis Rossiter emerged from a nearby office and approached me. He wore a medium brown suit with a subtle weave of green stitching. The brown made his skin seem darker than it probably was. “Mr. Kopriva?” he asked, his voice professionally pleasant.

  I stood. “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on back,” he said. He turned around and headed back the way he’d come. I followed.

  Once we were in his office, he motioned to the chair in front of his desk. The office was not as opulent or as decorated as Markham’s but it had more dignity to it. Both men seemed to want the person entering the office to be impressed with the man who sat behind the desk. Markham’s décor tried to grab you by the lapel and force you to agree with the idea. Rossiter’s took a more subtle approach, as if turning up his hands and saying, “So, you can see how impressive I am, can you not?” I didn’t get a chance to see Beurkens actual office, but somehow I guessed it would be more like Markham’s, only even more direct, like a punch in the nose.

  I sat and so did Rossiter. His trimmed beard had wisps of gray in it. So did his sideburns. His glasses were frameless. His eyes took me in but reflected nothing.

  “You didn’t have an appointment,” he observed.

  “I did not.”

  “You’re a police officer?”

  I shook my head, but smiled slightly. It seemed to be impossible to shake that mantle, even more than a decade after I stopped carrying a badge.

  “What’s so amusing?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just get that all the time.”

  “I imagine you do. So if you’re not with the police, who are you? And why are you here?”

  “I represent certain interests that prefer to remain confidential,” I said.

  “Interests?”

  “People who want to know more about the Looking Glass condo project.”

  Rossiter didn’t react, other than to press his lips together slightly. “That project is still in the bidding phase.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you talking to me?”

  “You’re a bidder.”

  “So are other companies.”

  “I’ve talked to them.”

  “Really?” He smiled slightly. “How did that go?”

  I considered, then shrugged. “There were varying degrees of cooperation.”

  Rossiter’s smile broadened. “That’s a choice way to put it. Varying degrees.” He chuckled. “Asking a businessman about business, you might as well be asking Coca-Cola about their recipe.”

  “I’m just looking to understand…”

  “Maybe if I knew who you represented, I’d be more willing to talk about this subject,” Rossiter interrupted.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I can’t share that.”

  “Then I guess our conversation is at an end.”

  “Sir –”

  He raised his hand to cut me off. “Mr. Kopriva, please. Don’t mistake my politeness for weakness. I grew up in East Central. I know other ways to ask you to leave, and ways to make it happen if you don’t feel like honoring my request. I’m just being a gentleman about it.”

  I got the hint, and left.

  23

  “So it was a total waste of time?” Clell asked me.

  We sat at the small corner diner, washing down dinner with a couple of beers.

  I shrugged at his question. “Nothing’s ever a total waste. But it wasn’t very productive.”

  “What’d you learn?”

  “Markham’s arrogant old money. Beurkens is a blue collar prick. And Rossiter
is cool new money.”

  “That’s the key,” Clell said, nodding his head with certainty. “Everything comes down to love or money. And I don’t see a whole lot of love going on in this situation, so it must be money.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “But nobody wants to talk.”

  “Nobody,” I agreed. I took a swallow of beer. “I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I waltz in with no credentials and start asking them about their business. Why would they talk?”

  Clell didn’t answer. He looked down into his beer, chewing on his lip.

  “I don’t know who I’m fooling,” I said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to figure out this mess. Not for Monique, and not for Rolo.” I let out a small snort. “Who will probably beat the shit out of me again for my trouble.”

  Clell didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, I feel like I’m just floating around, not accomplishing anything. I’m like a piece of wreckage from a ship that the ocean is tossing around.” I shook my head. “The broken wreckage has no impact at all on the ocean. In fact, the ocean probably isn’t even aware that it’s there.”

  Clell took a sip of his beer, then glanced up at me. “You drunk?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “Done with the pity party, then?”

  I sighed. Leave it to Clell to be direct. But goddamn if he wasn’t usually dead on with his observations.

  “I’m just saying I feel a little lost on this one,” I told him. “I don’t know how to proceed.”

  “You used to be a detective. How would you have done it back then?”

  I shook my head. “That was over a decade ago. Besides, I was never a detective.”

  Clell seemed surprised. “I thought you were.”

  “No. I was a patrol officer. I wore a uniform and shagged calls.”

  “But…” Clell paused. Then he said, “I thought you worked with Detective Browning. The one you said has the Tate case?” He looked me directly in the face. “When you worked on the case with the little girl, I mean.”

  “Amy Dugger,” I said quietly. “Her name was Amy Dugger.”

  “I know her name,” Clell answered.

  I didn’t answer him right away. I’d more or less dealt with the whole Amy Dugger baggage over the past ten, eleven years. Maybe I had come to terms with my own mistake in that case, even if it did cause the death of that beautiful six-year-old girl. I wasn’t wracked by guilt every moment of the day anymore. Or lost in a haze of booze and prescription drugs. Or thinking of eating my gun.

  But that didn’t mean that I was over it. It still hurt. Not a dull ache, either. A sharp, ripping tear.

  "I got shot. While I was recovering, they put me on light duty in the investigative division. I did paperwork and made phone calls to help out the detectives.”

  “So you didn’t work cases?”

  “No. But when Amy Dugger was kidnapped, it was all hands on deck. That’s how I ended up going to her grandmother’s house. It was to follow up a lead. At the time, everyone thought it was a weak lead, just a loose end that needed to be sewn up so that the case file was squared away.”

  “But it ended up not being such a weak lead, if I remember right.”

  I gritted my teeth together. “No. It ended up being the end of my career.” I stopped for a moment, feeling the bile roil in my stomach. Like I said, it still hurt.

  I glanced over at Clell, my expression hard. Finally, I said, “So I wasn’t a detective. I was just a patrol cop.”

  Clell let it go.“So you never investigated anything on patrol?”

  “No, I did. All the time, in fact. But on patrol, it’s usually happening right now. It’s an emergency. It’s raw. You follow a blood trail that’s still fresh. Not like this.”

  “Not like this how?” Clell pressed a little.

  “This…it’s more like detective work. Slow and methodical. Run down every lead. Except I’ve got none of the tools, no authority and no experience.”

  Clell raised his eyebrows. “No experience?”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Only a little. Two cases don’t make you a detective. Besides, both of those were different.”

  “How?”

  “They just were. Lower profile, for one.”

  Clell smiled just a little. “That pro hockey player wasn’t so low profile.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “My point is, maybe this is just the same as the other two. It’s just different, is all.”

  “Now you sound like Yogi Berra.”

  He squinted. “What’s this got to do with picnic baskets?”

  “Never mind,” I said. I was starting to remember those few years on the job more vividly.

  Clell shrugged. “Okay. Tell me this then. How’d you work on those cases you investigated in patrol?”

  “I used to bullshit them,” I said. “I tricked them. I lied.”

  Clell grunted his disapproval. “I don’t think cops should lie.”

  “I don’t mean in court or in a report,” I said. “I mean on the streets.”

  “A lie is a lie.”

  I shook my head. “It’s called proper trickery, and it’s allowed.”

  Clell frowned.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s not like you can just outright lie. But you can deceive a criminal as long as it isn’t something that would shock the conscience of a jury or compel an innocent person to admit to something they didn’t do.”

  Clell shook his head.

  “So you did this? You lied?”

  “I used proper trickery at times, yeah.”

  “Like?”

  “Like one time, I called a woman looking for her son, who had a stack of warrants. Some guy answered. I figured it was him, but used a ruse to get him to admit it and not be spooked. I didn’t want him to bail before I could get to the house and arrest him.”

  “What was the ruse?”

  “I pretended I was from the post office, chasing lost mail and forwarding addresses.”

  “Did it work?”

  I nodded. “If I remember right.”

  I remembered right. I remembered that I’d been with Katie on that call, like so many others. That was before we’d gotten together. Before I screwed that up, too.

  Memory Lane sucked. There were too many bombed out and boarded up houses along that street.

  “All right,” Clell said. “So you want to start lying to people in this case?”

  I let the answer hang in the air, not answering for a little while. Clell waited patiently. Finally I shook my head. “No. I don’t see it working. I’ve already shown my cards to too many people. I don’t see how a ruse would work at this point.”

  “Good,” Clell said. “Because no matter what you call it, lying is wrong.”

  He was probably right. But so far, telling the truth hasn’t yielded me much, either. Monique and Lara helped me based on hearing the truth, but everyone else has either shut me down or I’ve had to lie to get what I needed. I thought of the most recent instance – the nurses at the hospital.

  “If they won’t talk to me when I tell the truth and I can’t or won’t lie, what does that leave? How do I get anywhere on this case?”

  “What did you do back when you were a police officer?”

  “Called for back up,” I joked.

  Clell smiled. “Okay. What would someone like Detective Browning do?”

  “Work harder,” I said, half exasperated. “Keep digging.”

  Clell raised his beer. “Now that’s an answer I like.”

  24

  I had coffee with Adam the next morning. When he walked in and ordered, Ani the barista refused his money. She pointed over to me. Adam frowned and let out a sigh.

  “What’s this going to cost me?” he asked when he sat down with his cup.

  “What, a guy can’t buy a cup of java for a friend once in a while?”

  “Can it, Stef. What’s the deal?”

  I told him everything. The thing abou
t Adam that I liked was that he listened. He listened better than just about anyone I’d ever known, with the possible exception of Clell. He didn’t interrupt and I could almost see the gears turning behind his eyes as I spoke.

  When I’d finished, he continued to stare at me. “And?” he asked.

  “And,” I said, “I was hoping you could work up some kind of dossier on these three contractors for me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, as long as that’s it.” He sat back and said nothing. This time, I caught the sarcasm in his tone.

  “What?”

  “Do you know how much work that is? Hours. For each one.”

  “I could probably pay—”

  “Plus, it’s illegal.”

  I stopped. I’d asked Adam to do things that skirted the lines of legality before, but nothing that was outright illegal. “I’m not saying that you should hack into their bank accounts. I’m just asking for public information and…information that you might have access to that I don’t.”

  “Which is illegal.”

  “It’s more of a policy violation, isn’t it?”

  “No. Having this conversation is a policy violation. Giving you information like that is illegal.”

  “Well, then,” I said. “I guess you shouldn’t do it.”

  Adam paused. He leaned back in his chair. He took a sip of his coffee. He stared out the window.

  I waited.

  Finally, he turned back to me. “The thing is, I don’t have to do this for you. I’ve already done it.”

  “Why?”

  “For Detective Browning. He asked for a work up on all three contractors. I worked on it all day yesterday.”

  “Is Browning thinking that Tate was murdered?”

  Adam shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

  “So maybe he’s just being thorough.”

  “Probably.”

  “But you don’t want me stepping on his investigation.”

  “Right.”

  “I won’t.”

  Adam snorted. “How do you know that?”

  “Because anything I come across that has value, I'll give to him.”

  Adam eyed me suspiciously. “You’ll do that?”