Dead on Arrival

17

The bar was called Mr Days. Flat-screen television sets marched across the walls of the place, one hanging every five feet, and showing on all those screens was nothing but sporting events. The sound on the sets had been muted, and captions ran across the bottom of the pictures so one could read the all-too-familiar cliches of the broadcasters. Everything that could be said about sports had already been said a thousand times over, but apparently something had to be said about these events.

DeMarco was waiting for a man named Barry King who worked for the DEA. He wanted to talk to King about Donny Cray. DeMarco felt somewhat guilty about not having followed up on Cray earlier; he probably would have had he not been so anxious to escape D.C. and bask in the sun. But, he rationalized, he really didn’t have any reason to investigate Cray more thoroughly until Cray died. Until then, the FBI’s explanation that Cray had most likely sold Reza the gun had sounded plausible; now, the coincidence of his dying before the Bureau could confirm the sale was disturbing.

As he waited for King, DeMarco thought about the marvelous time he’d had in Key West with Ellie Myers. He genuinely liked the woman in every way, and had she lived nearby, it was possible the relationship might have developed into something more than five days of sex and pina coladas. But she lived in Iowa, for Christ’s sake, a thousand miles away.

DeMarco had promised, as they kissed goodbye at the airport, that if he ever went to Iowa — God only knows why anyone ever went to Iowa — he would call her. She in turn had promised that if she ever came to D.C., she would do the same. But they both knew that the wonderful week they’d spent together was almost certainly the last they’d see of each other.

DeMarco was convinced that in some prior life he had done something horrible to women. There had to be some cosmic explanation for his terrible luck with the opposite sex. He married a woman who had cheated on him with his own cousin. A few months ago he met an FBI agent — a pretty lady from his old neighborhood back in New York named Diane Carlucci — and right after he’d fallen in love with her the Bureau reassigned her to Los Angeles, which was even farther from Washington than Iowa. And now he meets a cute schoolteacher with a sense of humor, has a wonderful vacation fling just like he’d always wanted, only to find out he wanted more. God was either testing him or toying with him, one or the other.

Fortunately, before DeMarco could get more depressed, King strolled into the bar. He was a lanky, fidgety guy, one of those people blessed with a me tabolism that allowed him to eat like a hog and never gain weight. He and DeMarco played on a softball team composed of men over forty who made up for their lack of youth and skill by being absurdly competitive in games that didn’t matter.

King had agreed to pull the DEA’s file on Donny Cray, not because DeMarco worked for Congress but because he and King were friends. He knew they were friends because King had once called DeMarco to help him move a sofa into his house, and once DeMarco had called King when he had to get a new washing machine down into his basement. That, DeMarco figured, was a good definition of a friend: someone you called when you had something you couldn’t lift on your own.

After DeMarco had told King about Cray’s death and his connection to Reza Zarif, King said, ‘According to our records, Cray was just a nasty cracker who spent half his life in jail. He’d been caught for using dope, selling dope, making dope, and transporting dope. He was also into guns. He’d modify ’em — you know, turn rifles into machine guns, that sorta thing — then sell ’em. But if you want to know more about the gun stuff, you’ll have to talk to somebody at ATF.’

This was typical: To find out about one small-time criminal, DeMarco would have to talk to the DEA, the ATF, the FBI, and God knows how many state and city cop shops.

‘The funny thing about Cray was …’

At that moment, on the television directly above their heads, one welterweight African American boxer began to pummel the shit out of a Puerto Rican boxer, both men looking as if they weighed maybe eighty pounds. The poundee had been pinned into a corner, his head snapping back with every punch, and just when it looked like the ref was about to stop the fight — which would have really pissed off all the rich white guys who’d paid to see it — the bell rang. DeMarco and King watched as the Puerto Rican’s cut man slit the puffy bag of blood beneath the boxer’s left eye, so that in the next round he’d be able to see the fist that would turn his brain to mush.

‘Oh, yuck,’ King said, as blood squirted from the boxer’s face.

‘You were saying about Cray,’ DeMarco said.

‘Oh, yeah. The funny thing is that in the last two years this guy wasn’t arrested once. He’d been working for a guy named Jubal Pugh.’

‘Jubal?’

‘Yeah. Southerners, go figure. Anyway, Pugh, from what I’ve heard, is one of the biggest meth distributors in Virginia.’

‘From what you’ve heard?’

‘Yeah. He’s not in the area I cover.’

Great, more bureaucratic divisions.

‘This guy Pugh is supposed to be careful, and apparently Cray had been doing exactly what Pugh told him to do, which explains why he hadn’t been nabbed for anything lately. But it makes me wonder what he was doing selling a gun to Zarif.’

‘You don’t think he would have sold Zarif a gun?’ DeMarco said. ‘Why not? Because he was a Muslim?’

‘No, he wouldn’t have cared if Zarif was a Muslim. Donny would have sold a gun to a four-year-old if the four-year-old had the money. What I’m saying is, I’m surprised he was selling guns at the same time he was working for Pugh. Pugh’s into dope, not guns, and from what I’ve heard about Pugh, he wouldn’t like it if one of his guys was moonlighting.’

‘Huh,’ DeMarco said. ‘So that’s the whole story on Cray? Drugs and guns?’

‘No,’ King said, ‘drugs and guns are the only things he was convicted for. He’s probably got some kinda back story — been buggered by an uncle or starved by his foster parents — but whatever the reason, Donny was one mean son of a bitch. He pistol-whipped a neighbor practically to death because the guy told him to keep his dog chained up. He didn’t do time for that because the neighbor was afraid to testify. And he smacked a couple of his girlfriends around, bad enough to put one in the hospital for a week. Why in God’s name a woman would hook up with someone like him is a mystery to me. I also saw one note on his sheet that said he was suspected of killing another meth dealer when he worked for Pugh but, like I said, I don’t know anything about Pugh.’

‘Was Cray political at all?’ DeMarco said.

‘Political?’ King said.

‘You know, into radical causes, white-power stuff, anything like that?’

‘Not that I know of, but I think Pugh might be. I remember hearing something, but I can’t remember what.’

‘And to find out, I have to talk to somebody else over at the DEA,’ DeMarco said.

‘Yeah, Patsy Hall. She’s the expert on Pugh. She hates his guts.’

King said he’d get DeMarco in to see Hall if he wanted to talk to her, but it would have to be in a week or so because right now she was out of town.

DeMarco and King watched the rest of the fight, which the ref finally stopped when the Puerto Rican’s face resembled a plate of uncooked ground beef. As the cameras were showing a close-up of what used to be the Puerto Rican’s nose, DeMarco thought to himself that you’d have to hold a gun to his head to get him to climb into a ring with a professional boxer.

And then DeMarco was no longer seeing what was on the television screen. It was as if his brain had just changed lanes. You’d have to hold a gun to his head.

Goddammit. He wanted to be done with this thing with Reza Zarif, but now there was something else he needed to do. He was going to have to go to New York and talk to Youseff Khalid’s wife.

He told King it was time for him to leave because he had to go home and buy an airline ticket and pack for a trip, but King begged him to stay. King wasn’t yet ready to face his wife and three noisy kids. And it wasn’t hard to twist DeMarco’s arm. It wasn’t like he had that much to pack.

So he sat there with King and drank half a dozen more beers and tried to focus on three TV sets simultaneously, one showing another fight, one a hockey game in Toronto, and the third a golf tournament in San Diego. The shots of blue skies and palm trees in California reminded DeMarco of Key West, which in turn reminded him of Ellie.

The next morning DeMarco woke up late and with a terrible hangover. Beer always gave him one, so why did he drink it? The answer came from that great western philosopher John Wayne: Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

He caught a midafternoon shuttle up to New York and spent the night at his mother’s place in Queens. The following morning, as he’d consumed no beer and been fawned over and fed by his mom, he woke up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to conquer the world.

He took a cab to an apartment building in the Astoria section of Queens, where his knock was answered by an enormous scowling black woman in a bright orange and yellow caftan.

‘Are you Mrs Khalid?’ DeMarco asked.

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘Who are you? A reporter? Police?’

The woman’s English was heavily accented but understandable; what her native tongue was DeMarco had no idea.

‘No, ma’am,’ he said, and showed her his ID and explained that he worked for the U.S. Congress.

The woman glanced at his identification and looked back at DeMarco’s face. She had a truly impressive scowl. He bet she scared the hell out of small children.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

‘Just to speak to Mrs Khalid. I want … I need to ask her a few questions.’

‘About what?’

‘Is she here?’ DeMarco said. This woman may have had him outweighed and intimidated, but she was starting to annoy him.

The woman stood there for a moment longer, like the immovable object she was, and finally stepped back so DeMarco could enter the apartment. Sitting on a couch inside the small apartment was another black woman. This woman was wearing a scarf on her head and a drab gray-colored robe that reached her knees. Beneath the robe she had on jeans. Sitting near the woman were three children, two girls and one boy, ranging in age from maybe two to eight. All the children had enormous luminous dark eyes.

The scowling woman who had opened the door said something in a foreign language that DeMarco couldn’t identify, and the children left the room without a murmur of protest. As the children were leaving, DeMarco looked for some sign that Mrs Khalid and her children had been recently abused. This was important, but he couldn’t see any marks or bruises or any other indicator that she or her kids had been hurt or restrained in any way. All he could see was that Mrs Khalid was scared to death.

‘The reason I’m here,’ DeMarco said, ‘is I’d like to know if you have any other explanation for why your husband did what he did. I mean, I know he lost his job and he was angry, but hijacking an airplane?’ Hell, he might as well spit it out. ‘Look, what I’m trying to say is: Did someone make Youseff hijack that plane?’

The big woman spoke. ‘Mrs Khalid doesn’t speak English,’ she said.

Oh, great.

‘Well, can you tell her what I said?’ DeMarco asked.

The big woman talked to Youseff’s wife for what seemed an unusually long time for a simple question, and Mrs Khalid’s response was equally long. As she spoke, DeMarco could hear the agony in her voice even if he couldn’t understand the words. Finally the big woman turned to DeMarco and said, ‘She doesn’t know.’

All that talk, and he gets a three-word response.

‘Then ask her if she or her children were used in any way to force her husband to hijack the plane.’ She should at least know that, DeMarco was thinking.

The woman looked at DeMarco for a moment as if he were crazy, then had another long conversation with Mrs Khalid. The women must have talked for at least three minutes, and by the time they were done Mrs Khalid was weeping.

‘She says no,’ the big woman said to DeMarco.

Jesus, this was hopeless. He had no idea what the two women were saying to each other — he didn’t even know what language they were speaking — and all he was getting was one-word answers. He told the big woman he didn’t have anything else to ask and rose to leave. As he was doing so, Mrs Khalid said something to him.

The big woman said to DeMarco, ‘She wants to know what will happen to her and her children. Will they be sent back to Africa?’

‘I’m sorry,’ DeMarco said, ‘but I have no idea.’ Then, because he knew his response had just added to the poor woman’s anguish, he added, ‘But I’m sure that if she wasn’t involved in any way with what her husband did she has nothing to fear.’

‘Bullshit,’ the big woman said. She pronounced the word perfectly.

After his short fruitless meeting with Mrs Khalid, DeMarco had five hours to kill before his flight back to D.C. so he decided to visit a man named Orin Blunt. Blunt was the air marshal who had shot Youseff Khalid in the head from a sitting position in the airplane.

The newspapers said there’d been no interaction between Blunt and Khalid before the shooting, but DeMarco still wanted to talk to him. He wanted to hear directly about the moments leading up to the hijacking and see if Blunt remembered anything Khalid had said that hadn’t been reported in the papers. The other thing was — and he didn’t know why — DeMarco just wanted to put his eyes on the guy.

About the only thing DeMarco knew about federal air marshals was what he’d seen on a television show, probably 60 Minutes. At one time the marshals had worked for the FAA in the Department of Transportation, but when the Department of Homeland Security was formed, the air marshals were placed under the Transportation Security Administration. The only other thing he knew was that to be a marshal one had to be able to shoot the eye out of a gnat with a handgun, such a qualification being reasonable if your job entailed shooting hijackers in crowded airplanes flying at thirty-five thousand feet.

Blunt worked out of an office at JFK Airport. DeMarco took a cab to the airport and located the air marshals’ office, where he found three men engaged in an intense discussion about the New York Giants. Two of the men were white, the third man black, and none of them was physically impressive. They were all of average height and weight, not muscular but not skinny or fat either. If you saw them seated in the coach section of an airplane dressed in rumpled suits, they’d look like tired salesmen on their way home.

DeMarco showed them his ID and told them he was a lawyer who worked for Congress. If the marshals were impressed, they disguised their awe quite well. He asked where he could find Blunt and was told that the man was on administrative leave. That made sense. DeMarco guessed that when a marshal shot somebody — though he couldn’t recall this ever happening before — the bosses would probably conduct some sort of review and take the guy off duty until the review was complete. But he didn’t bother to confirm this with the three guys in the bullpen; he could tell they’d be no help at all. When he asked where Blunt lived, they as much as told him to go shit in his hat. If he wanted that sort of information he’d have to talk to their supervisor, who was in D.C. and wouldn’t be back for two days.

So DeMarco thanked Blunt’s coworkers for all their help, called directory assistance, and got an address and a phone number for Blunt in the town of Commack on Long Island. He called the phone number; nobody answered. He caught another cab, took a long, expensive ride out to Blunt’s place, and discovered that Blunt wasn’t home.

There’s an old mountain man’s saying: Some days you eat the bear and some days the bear eats you. The bear, that day, had DeMarco for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.