The Silent Hour

40

__________

I had to give John Dunbar credit—he didn’t balk at the idea. In fact, what I saw in his face when I laid it out for him wasn’t denial but shame. He actually seemed to wince when I showed him the police report that mentioned Bertoli’s car at the time of his arrest and explained its similarities to a different car that had been near the death scene.

“I knew what kind of car he had,” he said. “Of course I knew that, and I knew that’s what got him arrested, but I didn’t consider that it would have any importance beyond that. I didn’t consider it.”

He bit off that repeated line, angry, self-reproachful—I didn’t consider it. Joe hadn’t said much at all, but he looked at me when Dunbar said that, gave a small nod, showing that he thought it was legitimate.

“I knew it was Alvin Neloms who was in the car with Bertoli the night he was arrested,” Dunbar said. “Of course I checked that out, of course I knew it, of course I did the same work you just did. Back then he was nothing more than a kid on the corner, someone who watched for police and maybe did a little muling. He was sixteen.”

“He’s not anymore,” Joe said. “According to what we’ve been told, he’s as close to a drug kingpin as the east side has. It’s gang country out there; you do well to last six months. Neloms being around this many years later, that tells you something.”

Dunbar’s eyes flicked side to side but held distance, as if he were watching a film.

“DiPietro was providing some of the east side supply,” he said, speaking slowly. “That was the point, see, that’s when he and Sanabria had their first falling-out. Sanabria didn’t trust drugs, and he certainly didn’t trust blacks. His father was of that old school, racist, and I’m sure that stuck with Dominic. He did not want to be involved with the drug trade on the east side. We knew that, knew it from wiretaps and informants and a hell of a lot of work. We knew that Dominic was furious with DiPietro.”

He paused and took a breath and then said, “Dominic killed DiPietro,” but his voice had gone soft and he wouldn’t take his eyes off the police report that detailed Bertoli’s car.

As I watched his face, I felt tinged with sorrow. I was looking at an old cop who’d believed something very deeply and was now considering that it might have been wrong.

“You talked with a cop from East Cleveland,” he said. “Someone who knows about Neloms.”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Can you call him back?” Dunbar said. “Can you ask him a question?”

“What am I supposed to ask?”

“If he has any idea when Alvin made his move into the power structure. If he has any idea where the supply came from. A small fortune of drugs disappeared when DiPietro got whacked. They never turned up with the Italians again.”

Joe took his cell phone out and called. He asked for Tony, waited for a few minutes, and then spoke again. He repeated Dunbar’s questions, listened as Dunbar and I sat with our eyes on the floor, silent. At length, Joe thanked Tony and hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and waited for a few seconds before speaking. He did not look at Dunbar when he did.

“The way Tony remembers it, Alvin was a lot like what you say, a corner kid, until he was in his late teens. Then he got his hands on some product. Nobody knew where, or how, but all of a sudden he had product, and then three major players were dropped in a drive-by over on St. Clair, and from that point on Alvin, while still a boy, was also the man in East Cleveland. This beginning when he was still in his teens. He was, Tony says, an ambitious young man.”

I looked at Dunbar. “DiPietro controlled the drugs you were talking about, right? They were in his possession?”

“You know they were. I already told you that. We looked at every associate, looked at everyone who . . .” his voice faded, and then he said, “Alvin Neloms was a boy. A child.”

“Tony also said Alvin and his uncle were tight,” Joe said quietly. “Alvin’s father is an unknown, disappeared when the mother got pregnant, and Darius looked after the family. Supported the family.”

I nodded. “Supported them with a little help from the mob, is what Mike London thought. He said Darius was involved with stolen cars, changing their look and putting them back out on the street.”

Dunbar shift ed, smoothed his pants with his palms, swallowed as if it were a challenge.

“You never even considered the possibility, did you?” I said.

He looked up. “Neloms? Well, I had no idea—”

“Not Neloms. The possibility that it might have been anybody other than Sanabria, period.”

“Of course I did.”

“Really?”

His gaze focused again, went defiant. “Perry, that man would’ve killed anyone who collided with him. You don’t understand that about him. I do. He had killed before, and I’d had him for it, okay? I told you that story.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m just wondering which murder you were really chasing him for. The new one you thought he’d committed, or the one he’d already beaten you on.”

He held my eyes for a little while and then looked away and ran a hand over his mouth. His hands were dry and white and the blue veins stood out. They matched the strips of stark color under his eyes.

“So what we’re thinking,” Joe said, “is that Bertoli and Neloms were friends, probably from meeting at the uncle’s shop. Neloms is along when Bertoli beats up the guy at the truck stop, but he doesn’t go in, which means that as a kid he’s somehow already got people doing the bleeding for him. It also means he was already looking for his own supply at that point, his own drug nest egg. He wanted to run the show, not stand on the corner for somebody else.”

“The guy Bertoli beat up didn’t have as much product as they thought,” I said. “They overestimated his role. Bertoli got busted, but Neloms walked because he was a juvenile.”

Joe nodded. “Right. After this, DiPietro is killed, a small fortune of drugs disappears, and suddenly a teenage kid became a deadly force. It was a power play, but one from a player nobody respected or even knew of at the time. This is the scenario?”

“That’s the scenario,” I said. “Ken Merriman got about ten percent of the way there. He got to the connection between the cars. I bet he didn’t get farther than that, but he tried to. He tried to, and he died.”

“What would he have done?” Joe said. “Once he connected the cars, what do you think he would have done?”

“Gone and asked about them,” I answered, feeling a sick sadness. “He wasn’t a street detective. He would have gone right down to that body shop and asked about the car, thinking that was the next step. He might have suspected Cash Neloms was involved by then, but I don’t think he had a real sense of how dangerous the guy was. He would have gone down there to ask some questions, and he wouldn’t have been very good at it. I saw him in action with interviews, and he was not very good at it.”

“Suppose you’re right on Bertoli,” Dunbar said. “Suppose he was killed by Neloms. That doesn’t mean Cantrell was, too. The styles of crime are entirely different. One was killed on scene and the body left without any concern; the other one was buried in another state. Those are two different killings, maybe by two different people.”

On the surface he was right, but I understood what he didn’t: how Joshua Cantrell’s body had been transported, and why. The killings hadn’t been different in style at all—both bodies were left where they’d fallen. Same style, same killer. Solve one and you’ve solved the other.

Thinking about that brought a realization to me. To whoever had killed Cantrell, the disappearance of his body must have seemed extraordinary. For twelve years, while the rest of the world wondered what had happened to him, one person wondered about the fate of his corpse. Wondered, no doubt, quite intensely.

“I want to talk to Darius,” I said. “Not his nephew, not yet. Hit him with the only solid thing we have—that report on Bertoli’s car—and see what he’ll say.”

Dunbar said, “I’ve got photographs.”

“Pardon?”

“I’ve got photographs of Bertoli, and of his car. I’ve got photographs of damn near everybody’s car, everybody that went near Sanabria.”

“How soon can you come up with them?”

He stood up and went into the bedroom. From where I sat I could see through the doorway, and as I watched he opened a closet door. It was a small closet—every space in his house was small—and the clothes that hung in it were pushed far to the side to make room for a clear plastic organizer with drawers. It was the sort a lot of people had in their closets, usually for sweaters and old jeans, things they rarely used or for which they’d run out of shelf space. Dunbar’s didn’t hold any clothing, though, not a single piece of it. The thing was filled with manila folders, and I could see that each drawer was labeled with a date range.

He’d been retired for nearly fifteen years and had almost no closet space. I looked at that set of plastic drawers and I felt sad for him again.

It didn’t take him long. First drawer he opened, first folder he removed. When he came back to the living room he had three photos in his hands; he passed one to Joe and two to me.

“These would have been taken just a few months before Bertoli was arrested, a little before DiPietro was killed. You can see the diamonds carved in the rims. They’re tiny, but they’re there.”

Yes, they were. A half-dozen small diamonds. The car was an Impala, probably midseventies model, painted a metallic black. Bertoli wasn’t visible in either of the photographs—the windows were up, and they almost matched the car’s paint, clearly an illegal level of tint. Window tint like that pissed off street cops because you couldn’t see what was happening in the interior as you approached. The entire car was basically a rolling request to be stopped and searched.

“This is perfect,” I said. “Can we borrow these?”

Dunbar nodded, but his eyes seemed faraway again.

I stood up. “Thank you. For the pictures, and the insight.”

“I’ve got some other things I’ll go through,” he said, not looking up. “I’ll do some thinking. I’m not sure you’re right . . . but I’ll do some thinking.”