Stone Rain

18

I SWUNG TRIXIE’S CAR into Bayside Park ten minutes later than I’d promised to get there. The heavily treed park was on a high parcel of land overlooking our Great Lake, and when I pulled up alongside a nondescript silver Buick, the view beyond my windshield was blue-gray to the horizon line. There was a light wind, and some chop on the water, and a freighter was moving slowly from west to east, heading back up the seaway.

I didn’t see Lawrence, or his car-neither the Jag nor the old clunker he used for surveillance-anyplace. He’d promised to be here, keeping a watch on things, in case anything unexpected happened.

Where the hell was he?

I glanced over at the Buick, and Brian Sandler got out and opened the passenger door of my GF300. I hastily grabbed my overnight bag and wrestled it over the center console and into the back seat.

“You’re late,” Sandler said, clearly agitated. “I thought you’d decided not to come, that something had happened.”

“Sorry,” I said. “The police dropped by.”

“Jesus!” Sandler said. “You didn’t talk to the police about this, did you? I didn’t tell you to go and call them.”

“Calm down,” I said. “It had nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, okay,” Sandler said. It was enough to know it wasn’t about him, and I was just as pleased not to have to explain it to him. “I don’t know about getting the police involved. I figure, if it comes out in the press, all at once like, then maybe I’ll be safe. There’ll be no point in them going after me then.”

“Mr. Sandler, what are you talking about?”

“You weren’t followed or anything, were you?”

“For Christ’s sake, no! You wanted a meeting. I’m here. And I’ve got a lot of other places to be today. What do you want to tell me?”

He sat still in the plush leather seat, pulling himself together, staring out at the lake but not really seeing it.

“The city health department,” he said. “It’s all…it’s all fucked up.”

“Tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Payoffs, threats, deals being made to look the other way. You got no idea.” He took a breath. “I want to state, for the record, here and now, that I have never taken a bribe. Not one penny. Nothing. No free tickets to baseball or hockey games, no free dinners, nothing. But I’m not going to let my family get hurt. No job is worth that. I don’t care if they put me in jail. I’m not going to let something happen to my family. I got two kids, Mr. Walker. My daughter is five, and my son is thirteen. I’m not going to let anyone hurt them, but I can’t go on like this, either.”

“Okay, just calm down. Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Are you taping this? Is there a tape recorder in this car?” He looked around the interior. “Fuck, reporters at the Metropolitan must do okay. What’s a car like this cost? These are even more than Beemers, aren’t they?”

“It’s not my car,” I said. “And no, you’re not being taped. But if you’re about to tell me something important, I’d like to take some notes. Is that okay with you?”

“Yeah, sure, take some notes. That’s okay.”

I reached into the back for the overnight bag. I’d tossed a reporter’s notebook in the top before leaving. I grabbed it, folded back the cover, and pulled a fine-point from my jacket pocket.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Not all, but there’s a bunch of businesses in the city, restaurants, a lot of these people that run them, they’re pretty well connected. Some of them, they’ve moved here in recent years from Europe, the old Soviet Union and other places, they don’t leave all their old ways behind. They don’t have a lot of time for rules and regulations, they don’t much like inspectors coming in, telling them what to do, insisting they spend money on proper equipment, pest extermination, stuff like that. Their way of dealing with this is, you give somebody some money, they go away.”

“So that’s what they’re doing? Buying people off?”

“Some. It’s cheaper to put a couple hundred bucks into somebody’s pocket than spend a thousand upgrading your kitchen. Or get him a hooker for the night. Or put a case of liquor in his trunk.”

“And what about those who won’t take a payoff?”

“They say things to you like ‘We know where you live. We know where your wife shops for groceries. We know the route your kids walk to go to school. Fuck with us,’ they say, ‘and we’ll fuck with you.’”

“What about Mrs. Gorkin?” I asked.

“That woman,” he said, “she scares the shit out of me. Her and those two girls of hers. They’re like robots or something. They’re not what you’d call very feminine, you know? About as sexy as cement trucks. She sends them out to do something and they do it, no questions asked.”

“Did she threaten you?”

“First time I go into her place, I tell her I see mouse droppings, she’s going to have to do something about that, the bathroom’s a mess, the grill isn’t properly cleaned. I find at least a dozen health violations. I could probably have shut the place down. I’m wondering, why didn’t my boss do something about this place? He used to have the same territory as me, then he gets made a supervisor, I inherit the territory.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Frank. Frank Ellinger.”

“Okay.” I was scribbling madly.

“So I’ve got a list for Mrs. Gorkin. Tell her she’s got to do these things. She’s ‘No, we no do dat.’ I say, ‘What?’ She says, talk to my boss, he’ll explain things to me. But first, she says, her girls will explain it to me first. And the two of them grab hold of me. This is, like, midafternoon, there are no customers. Mrs. Gorkin goes and closes the door, puts up a Closed sign, comes back, and the one of her girls, Ludmilla or Gavrilla-who knows, you can’t tell them apart-she’s got her hand around my mouth, holding one hand behind my back, and her sister, she holds my hand over the deep fryer.”

I stopped writing.

“The oil, I can feel the heat from it, and my hand’s still a good six inches away. And then she starts moving my hand closer. She gets hold of my index finger, wraps her hand-her hand’s the size of a fucking catcher’s mitt-around the rest of my fist.” He demonstrated, holding his right hand so only one finger protruded. “And she moves my finger toward the hot oil, like she’s going to dip it in.”

“God,” I said.

“And she’s saying, ‘In the oil, Ma?’ Like, she’s taking directions every step of the way. And Momma says, ‘Maybe just the tip.’ This bitch, she takes the very tip of my finger and touches it to the oil, and pulls away.” He paused. “My fucking finger sizzled.”

I wrote down “finger sizzled.”

“So then she pulls my finger away, but the two of them are still holding me, and Mrs. Gorkin, she comes around, stands in front me, must be a good foot shorter than I am, and she wags a finger in my face and says, ‘Next time, we put your whole arm in. Or we cut off your dick and drop it in and serve it to somebody as a hot dog.’ She says, ‘You understand?’ And all I can do is nod, her fucking daughter still has her hand over my mouth. And then she says, ‘After we cook your dick, we go find your wife, we cut off her tits, and we cook them too. And your kids, because some people, they like their meat extra tender.’”

He was shaking. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a tissue, and wiped his nose.

I finished writing and looked at him.

“Did you talk to your supervisor?” I said. “This Frank Ellinger guy?”

“Yeah,” Brian Sandler said, pulling himself together. “I told him I’d been to see the Gorkins. He says, ‘Hey, you can cut them some slack. They’re just trying to make a go of it here.’ If I looked after them, they’d look after me. I said to him, ‘They tried to fry my fucking finger.’ And you know what he says?”

“What?”

“He says be glad that’s all they fried. But the thing is, it’s not just the Gorkins. They’re connected with some other places, run by their Russian or whatever friends. They do all other kinds of shit on the side. Drugs, I’m pretty sure. It’s like a dropoff point or something. A shipment comes in, they leave it with the Gorkins, someone else comes to pick it up. They figure, they have this legit business, the burger joint, makes them look less suspicious, since people are coming in and out all the time anyway.”

“How many others in the department are being threatened or taking bribes?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone. But this other guy I work with, Harry? He’s been buying all this hot-shit electronic stuff the last few months. Gadgets. Going out, partying, new clothes. We don’t make that kind of money. He didn’t used to have it. Now he does.”

“What about the cops?”

Sandler craned his neck around, checking the parking lot for strange cars. “I’ve thought about it. But what if they start checking around, can’t prove anything? What’s going to happen to me then? The Gorkins figure out it was me, or Frank rats me out to them, what happens? But if there’s a story in the paper, if you guys can blow the lid off this all at once, the city, the mayor and council, they’ll have to take action. They’ll demand an investigation. It’ll all be out there, in the public. They won’t be able to do anything to me then, or to my family. Right? And then, the cops will have to protect me. Won’t they?”

“Probably,” I said.

“Can you do this story?”

“I think so.” I decided not to tell Sandler that I was not, technically, a reporter at the moment.

“What do you mean, you think so?”

“I mean, yes. This can be done. Why are you telling me all this? As opposed to some other reporter.”

“When you called, about your son, and the incident at Burger Crisp, I figured it was only a matter of time before the shit hit the fan. I want to get out in front of this. I don’t want to be dragged down by it. I’d rather be the guy who blew the whistle than get caught in this with everybody else.”

I asked him a few more questions. Names and dates, as many specific details as I could pull out of him. Plus where I could reach him.

“You gotta be really careful how you go about asking questions,” he said. “I don’t want anyone knowing where all this came from, not before the story hits the paper.”

“I understand.” I paused. “Does your wife know what’s happening?”

Sandler shook his head. “I’m too ashamed. Maybe, when it comes out, it’ll give me some of my pride back, and then I can tell her.” He looked at his watch. “I gotta go.”

“Listen,” I said, “I have a couple of other things I have to deal with first.” I was thinking of my trip to Canborough and beyond. “But in a day or so, I’ll start looking into this.”

Unburdened, he said thank you, asked me for an e-mail address, which he wrote down, then slipped out of my car and back into his Buick. The tires of his car crunched the gravel and he backed out, turned around, and drove out of Bayside Park.

I sat there, a plan taking shape in my mind, a plan that could get me, and Sarah, our rightful jobs back. If I had a story about rampant corruption in the health department, about restaurant owners offering bribes, making death threats, I’d-

The passenger door opened abruptly. Before I could even think, I’d shouted, “Jesus!”

Lawrence Jones settled in next to me. “You always that jumpy when a black man gets in your car?” He pulled the door shut, looked at what I was driving. “Wow. This makes my Jag look like a piece of shit.”