The Silent Hour

19

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I never knew my mother, but I know plenty of her expressions. She died when I was three, hit by a drunk driver at noon on a Sunday. She’d just left church; he’d just left a tip for the waitress who delivered his fifth Bloody Mary. Ordinarily, we’d have all been in the car together, but my sister and I were sick, sharing some sort of virus, and my father stayed home to watch us. Mom decided to go by herself. Every now and then, generally when my mind’s immersed in something, I’ll have a sudden sense that I can remember her voice, that I can hear the way she spoke. Then my conscious brain shifts over to try to trap it and it’s gone. Just that quick. I’ll hear her cadence perfectly in some secret lobe of memory, try to focus on it, and scare it off. She’s in there somewhere, though. I know that she is.

While the voice eludes me, the expressions do not. My father recalled them often when I was growing up, and in a way that’s how she came to exist for me: Your mother always said . . .

One favorite phrase, evidently, was head-spinner. As in, How was your day? Well, it was a head-spinner. It was how she referred to those days when things came too fast, too unexpected, too complicated.

My day? One hell of a head-spinner.

We’d gone out that morning thinking that Mark Ruzity might be able to give us some insight into the Cantrells. Instead, he’d given us John Dunbar, which at the time had felt like a significant breakthrough. Felt even more like that when Dunbar poured himself a Scotch and settled in to explain how he’d gotten Joshua Cantrell killed. Then he’d delivered the capstone: Talk to Detective Graham; of course he already knows this.

A head-spinner.

Had we gained anything? As I sat on the roof watching the sun fade and streetlamps come on and waiting for Amy to arrive, I tried to determine that, and couldn’t. A hell of a lot of information had come our way, and that felt like progress. The realization that Graham already had the information, though . . . yeah, that pretty well killed the sense of progress.

A head-spinner. You bet your ass.

I’d dropped Ken at his hotel and left him on his own for the night. Inhospitable, maybe, but I felt a strong need to be away from him and Graham and Dunbar and anyone else who’d ever heard of the Cantrells. We’d meet again in the morning, and then we’d see where it stood. Graham was the one who could tell us that. He hadn’t answered when I called him, so I left a message informing him we’d made a major break and he needed to drive up the next morning to discuss it. Since then, he’d called five times and I hadn’t answered or called him back. He probably wanted to avoid the trip, and I wanted him to make it. The son of a bitch could explain his lies in person.

Couldn’t be mad at him for lying, though. That’s what Joe would tell me. I was a civilian, Graham was a cop. Why would he tell me everything he knew? When had I ever done that for a civilian? It was a game, all of it was, and Graham was playing one version with me while I played another with Harrison. I wondered who in the hell kept track of the big board, though.

It was full night when Amy finally arrived, and we sat together as the temperature dropped. No radio tonight, no baseball game. Just talk, lots of it, the two of us tossing questions but no answers.

“You know who I feel sorry for?” Amy said after one long lull. She was curled up tight in her chair, sleeves pulled down over her hands, clearly freezing but not willing to speak of going inside until I did.

“Lincoln Perry, for getting sucked into this nightmare?”

“No, you’re doing a good enough job of feeling sorry for Lincoln Perry tonight.”

“This is why I gave up being single. Support like that.”

“Stop. You know it’s true. I’ve never seen anyone get as melodramatic over anything as you do when you’ve been lied to.”

I smiled. “It’s my subtle way of ensuring you always tell me the truth.”

“Subtle, sure. Now, can I say who I feel sorry for? Alexandra. I mean, step back and think about it. This woman comes from a family that should have its own HBO series, she somehow emerges sane and motivated to help people, and when she tries to do that her husband turns against her, tries to betray her brother, and gets himself killed. All of this just to hurt her.”

“Her brother talked about her as if she’s alive,” I said. “If that’s true, how does he know it? And if that’s true, how much does she understand?”

Amy tried to nod but lost it in midshiver as the wind picked up. I got to my feet, pulled her up and toward me, and wrapped my arms around her and rubbed her back. She was shaking against me.

“You look like you’re ready to go in,” I said.

“Only if you are.”

I laughed. “Okay, that’s support.”

I turned, ready to move for the stairs, but she stopped me.

“Imagine what that would feel like,” she said, her voice muffled against my chest.

“Imagine what?”

“If she is alive, and she does understand. If she knows that her brother killed her husband, and if she knows why it happened.”

I didn’t answer, just took her hand and guided her toward the steps. The wind was blowing harder now, and I was feeling the cold, too.

Graham rose to the bait. When I finally played his messages the next morning, he cursed me for not returning his calls, then said he’d be up, though not until afternoon. He sounded curious, and I was glad. We didn’t have a damn thing that was new to him, but if he wanted to jerk me around, I was happy to return the favor.

Ken came into the office ten minutes after I did, with a cup of coffee in each hand and a stack of papers held between his chin and his chest. He swung the door shut with his foot, set one cup down in front of me, and then lifted his chin, spilling the papers across my desk.

“Thanks.”

“No problem.”

I took a drink of the coffee and waved at the papers he’d dumped on the desk. “So what’s all this?”

“When do you think that first bust with Dunbar and Sanabria went down?” he said. “The one that got screwed up by the informant and the motel room?”

“A while ago. He was talking about using a pager.”

“Try twenty years.”

“Twenty?”

“I was surprised, too. Dunbar talked about it like it had been a few years, right? Not twenty of them.”

“I don’t suppose it changes anything,” I said, gathering the pages into a stack and pulling them toward me. “How’d you find that out?”

“Library. They’ve got good newspaper archives.”

“You went last night?” Now I felt guilty about blowing him off, spending the night with Amy while he was working.

“What else am I going to do? Can only watch so much ESPN.”

He’d apparently printed out every article mentioning Sanabria or Dunbar or Bertoli, and it amounted to quite a collection. I flipped through them, skimming most, reading a few completely. Dunbar’s account seemed accurate enough.

“Dunbar’s been around for a long time,” I said, looking at the dates on the articles that referenced him. They started in the late seventies.

“Yeah, he has. Tell you something else that stood out to me from those articles—Bertoli’s death was ruled an accident. We already knew that, but reading it again made me think about how firm Dunbar was on the idea that the guy was murdered. He was white on rice with that, you know? Which makes me wonder—if there was an FBI agent involved who knew all the background, and believed Bertoli was murdered, then why rule it an accident and close the door to an investigation? Why weren’t the cops out looking for the Cantrells years ago as witnesses for the Bertoli case? Joshua Cantrell’s parents told me that the police brushed off the idea of a crime. How could they do that, if what Dunbar told us is true?”

“All good questions,” I said. “Bertoli died in Cleveland, didn’t he?”

“Yes. Warehouse district, down by the river.”

“So it was Cleveland police jurisdiction. Who had the case?”

“His name is in there.”

I found the article and read through it, and nodded as soon as I got to the lead investigator’s name—Mike London. I knew he’d take my call.

“How about we get you some answers to those questions while we wait on Graham’s arrival, Kenny boy?”

“Sounds good, Linc. Sounds good.”

Mike London always reminded me of a circus bear—enormous and threatening, but a crowd-pleaser at heart. He was one of the better-known wise-asses in a department full of them, but he was a good detective, too. Didn’t have the sort of mind that Joe or some of the others had, that gift for problem solving, but he compensated with a good eye for detail and a dogged work ethic. Give Mike thirty leads at the start of the day, and he wasn’t going home until he’d tried all of them, and a few others generated along the way. That effort was what kept him in favor with the brass despite his sense of humor, which superiors never found quite as hilarious as the rest of the department did.

He was out on the east side when I called, interviewing witnesses to a drive-by shooting that had missed the intended target and wounded a sixteen-year-old kid on Euclid Avenue the previous week, and said he’d give us some time provided I bought him lunch. Mike’s appetite had been the stuff of department lore for years, so that was no small concession.

“Bertoli,” he said when I agreed. “That’s an old one, Lincoln. Old and cold.”

“I know it. Just want to see what you remember about it.”

“What I remember is that I did a bunch of interviews out Murray Hill way, because that’s where his family was. Say, you know what Murray Hill makes me think of?”

“Food?”

“Hell, boy, you always were a good detective. Now, you want to ask me some questions, you can feed me out there at Murray Hill. That little Italian place.”

“Murray Hill’s nothing but little Italian places, Mike.”

“The one with all the red, white, and green,” he said. Real help narrowing it down. When I finally determined he meant Mama Santa’s, we agreed to meet at noon.

Ken and I left early, largely by virtue of having nothing else to do. There’d been no more word from Graham, so I assumed he was still planning to show up that afternoon. If he came by while we were with London, he could wait. I wasn’t feeling particularly gracious toward Quinn Graham.

We got to Murray Hill around eleven thirty, which meant we were in for a long wait, because London was never early and rarely on time.

“Here we are,” I said as we drove up Mayfield Road and passed by Holy Rosary’s brick facade and stained glass windows, the building more than a hundred years old now but still looking solid and clean. “Cleveland’s fierce Little Italy. Do you want to go to an art gallery first or a bakery?”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, not a threatening place anymore—but remember, we’re here to talk about a murder. Speaking of murder—”

“I love that segue.”

“Thought you would. I forgot to tell you, I checked my office voice mail last night. There was a message from an attorney representing Cantrell’s parents.”

“Did somebody call them to ask about what you’re doing up here?”

“Nope. Wanted to inform me that I may be called for a deposition. They’re trying to claim the property.”

“That house?”

He nodded. “You’ve been out there, you know how much it must be worth. The thing’s held free and clear in Alexandra and Joshua’s names, but they’re gone. So his parents want a piece of the estate.”

“I don’t see how they could get it if there’s no proof that Alexandra is dead. The taxes are paid and current, there’s no mortgage, no excuse to take it away from her.”

“That’s what I thought, but their attorney intends to file suit to have her declared dead. They’re going to subpoena her attorney to see if he’s had any contact with her in the last seven years. Apparently that’s some sort of legal standard. They’re sure nobody else has been in touch with her for that long.”

It sounded crazy, seeking a courtroom ruling over whether or not a life still existed, but I supposed it was reasonable for them to try. Just the night before, Amy and I had wondered if Alexandra was still alive.

“Supposing Child says he hasn’t heard from her in the last seven years, then . . .”

“They’ll have to publish a notice of her presumed death. Run that for sixty days or something, I’m not sure of the specifics. If she doesn’t respond in that time frame, and nobody else comes forward with proof of life, they can get a judge to rule that she’s legally deceased. Once that’s done, they can put a claim on the property.”

I sat with my car keys in my hand and thought about the house, that arched doorway into the earth, the quiet that surrounded it. “They’re going to sell it, aren’t they?”

“I’m sure that’s the idea. They aren’t well-off.”

It was tough to imagine anyone moving into the place. I tried to picture it—a moving truck parked outside under the trees, a family inside sorting through boxes, kids running around the grounds, ready to transform the empty home into someplace full of life. It didn’t seem right.

“That’s interesting,” I said finally, when I realized Ken was still looking at me and I hadn’t said anything for a long time. “I’ll be curious to see what happens.”

“She’ll come back to it,” he said.

“What?”

“I think Alexandra will come back to it if she’s still alive.”

“I don’t know why she would.”

“Because the place is a grave to her, Lincoln. It’s a memorial. You have to see that. She left a home that’s worth millions sitting empty and alone for twelve years. She had a damn epitaph carved beside the door. That place means something to her. So let me tell you—if she’s alive, I bet she’ll come back to see it again.”