The Silent Hour

41

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Darius Neloms’s shop, Classic Auto Body, was on Eddy Road, which was one of the few streets in the city that I would actively try to avoid while driving. It’s an asphalt strip of neglect and anger, a place where as a rookie I’d been called to the scene of a fight and arrived to find a fourteen-year-old boy bleeding to death on the sidewalk from a knife wound to the neck. I’m not one of those PIs who loves to carry a gun, and I usually don’t have one in my truck. Eddy Road, though, can make me regret that.

Today I had a gun, and I had Joe in the passenger seat, casting a dour eye over the neighborhood.

“It just gets worse, doesn’t it?” he said. “I haven’t been down here in a few years, but you can’t pick up the paper without seeing something about this neighborhood. It just gets worse, poorer and bloodier.”

“And more hopeless,” I said, because that’s how East Cleveland seemed to me, a legacy of poverty and crime and corruption drowning the people who tried to make a life there.

“Ah, shit, nothing’s hopeless,” Joe said. “Just ignored.”

My mind wasn’t on East Cleveland, though. I was thinking of Ken Merriman, of that spot in Mill Stream Run where his body had been dumped, and wondering whether he’d made a drive down Eddy Road on his last day alive. Joe had his face turned away from me, looking out at the neighborhood, and when I glanced at him I had a vision of the bullet holes that hid under his shirt, and then one of the steel security bar that rested across Amy’s door.

“Hey,” I said, and he turned back to me. “When we talk to Darius, I don’t want to give him any names, all right?”

“You mean Cantrell and Bertoli?”

“No, I mean Pritchard and Perry.”

He frowned.

“Like I said before, this is a scouting trip, okay? I want to ask the guy about Bertoli’s car, drop Cantrell’s name, see if we get any sort of response. Feel him out. Then I’ll call Graham. It’s still his case, you know.”

His frown didn’t fade. “What’s that have to do with names?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why—”

“Look, Graham got on my ass about this before, told me to stay out of his way. I don’t want to deal with that again.”

He looked at me for a long time, then nodded his head at the traffic light ahead.

“You’ve got a green.”

It was closing in on six now, streetlights coming on, but Classic Auto Body was still open. It was an ugly, sprawling place of cinder block, with a stack of tires and a few stripped cars in the parking lot. From the outside it looked like a picture of poverty, but the garage doors were up and two gleaming cars were visible inside, one a new Cadillac and the other a pickup truck that had been painted gold and black and mounted on massive, oversized tires. Two young black men lounged on stools in the garage. A set of speakers stood behind them, playing rap music with a bass line I could feel in my chest.

“Hey,” Joe said as we got out of the truck, his voice soft, and when I looked at him he nodded at the black-and-gold pickup truck inside. “Look at the wheels.”

There were small diamonds cut out of the chrome rims.

One of the men inside the garage, a thin guy with darker skin and a shaved head, had moved his hand to rest beneath his oversized jacket when we drove in. Now that he saw us, he took it away and exchanged a look with his partner, who got to his feet and stepped over to a closed door. He opened it and said a few words, then shut it and came out to meet us. The guy with the jacket never moved.

“We closed,” the one on his feet said, stopping at the edge of the garage. He wore a close-fitting, sleeveless white shirt, ridges of muscle clear beneath it. The music was even louder now, the sound of a ratcheting shotgun incorporated into the beat.

“Doesn’t look that way,” I said.

“Is, though.”

“That’s all right. Don’t need any work done. Came to see Darius.”

He reached up and scratched above his eyebrow, head tilted, studying me. “Darius a busy man.”

“I’m sure of it. That’s why we don’t intend to keep him long. Got a picture to show him, a question to ask, then go on our way.”

His eyes flicked over to Joe, whose look and demeanor said cop about as subtly as a billboard would.

“I’ll give him the picture for you.”

Joe shook his head. “We will. Thanks, though.”

“Man, Darius ain’t available.”

“You work with him?”

“That’s right.”

“Then you know how to get in touch with him. Give the man a call.”

While Joe talked, I found myself staring at the man on the stool, that hand resting near his waist. He wasn’t looking back at me. He was looking at Joe.

“He ain’t gonna answer,” the guy in the sleeveless shirt said.

“How do you know that?”

“He busy.”

“How about we call him just the same,” Joe said.

“No,” I said, and they both looked at me with surprise. I shook my head. “If he’s not around, he’s not around. We’ll come back.”

He nodded. “You do that, man.”

“Thanks.”

I turned and walked to the truck. I had the door open and was sitting behind the wheel before Joe even moved. He walked over slowly, got inside, and swung the door shut without a word. The guy from the stool got to his feet and came over to stand with the other man at the edge of the garage. They watched as I drove out of the lot.

“Maybe I misread the situation,” Joe said after we were a few blocks away, “but I kind of assumed Darius was inside that office. You know, where the kid poked his head in before he came out to run us off.”

“Could be.”

“Uh-huh. You want to tell me what we’re doing driving away, then?”

“I’m thinking we should pass this off to Graham,” I said. “His case, his decisions to make. You saw those diamonds on the rims down here, that’s enough, right? Between that and the phone calls, we’ve got enough. It’s time to pass it to him now.”

“That’s a pretty different stance from the one you had this afternoon.”

“Had a few hours to think about it.”

“You’ve done some thinking,” he said, “but it’s not hours of it that are catching up with you now. It’s months.”

We didn’t say much on the way back to the office. When we got there all he said was “Let me know if Alexandra calls” before he got into his own car and drove away.

I went home, too, called Amy and said I’d come over and I had some news, and then took a shower. Before I got into the water I stood at the sink and stared into the mirror for a long time, waiting for the man looking back to tell me what he wanted to do. What he needed to do. Then the steam spread across the glass and he was gone, no answers left behind.

I did not call Quinn Graham, as I had told Joe I would. I did not call anyone. That night I updated Amy, took her from my conversation with Alexandra Cantrell to my decision at the garage.

“You’re really going to back off, pass it to Graham?” she said. “Then why were you there to begin with? Why spend two weeks watching for Alexandra?”

“Just to see if he was right. I had to know. That’s all. Now I do.”

“If who was right? Ken?”

I nodded.

“You said you were angry with him at first,” she said. “Hurt and betrayed, because he lied to you.”

“Sure. You think that’s abnormal?”

“No. But you don’t seem angry now.”

“I understand why he did it now.”

She nodded. “That makes it easier, doesn’t it.”

“Of course.”

“You know you’ve been lying to me?”

“What?”

“For three days you’ve been lying to me. Said you’d given up on the surveillance, stopped going out there—and, unlike you with Ken, I don’t understand why.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think of it as lying, even though it was. I just knew that you and Joe thought I should quit—”

“You told us you already had. Back in the summer, it was you who said you were done. Emphatically. Neither of us told you to give up your job, Lincoln, but you did, and then you went back to it in secret. Lying about it. I don’t understand.”

I didn’t know how to make her understand. I couldn’t explain to her that she was one of the reasons I’d had to quit, that Ken’s murder had been one that hit too close to home. It could be her next time. Or Joe. My decision at the garage today had been made the moment the guy on the stool had reached under his jacket with his eyes on Joe. I understood some things in that moment, understood just how damn close we were to the one thing I could never allow to happen again. I would not bring those I loved into harm’s way again. I couldn’t.

So if I understood that, then why couldn’t I stop altogether? Why had I ever gone back to that damned house in the woods with my camera and my binoculars?

I didn’t have an answer for that one. It chilled me, but I didn’t. I’d ended up back out there, that was all. The absence of resolution, of truth, had tormented me for too many months. In the end, it won. I was weaker than I’d thought.

“Let me ask you one more thing, and this time, if you care about me at all, tell me the truth,” Amy said. She was speaking very carefully, slowly, as if she needed me to feel the weight of the words. “If you don’t tell me the truth, we’re done, Lincoln. We will have to be done. Because I can’t live with you otherwise.”

“Ask the question,” I said.

“Are you really going to pass this off to Graham, or are you telling one thing to me and Joe and planning another?”

I looked away.

She said, “Lincoln.”

“I’ve got something left to do,” I said. “That’s the truth. It’s something I’m going to do alone. Then I will give this to Graham and, yes, step away. I promise you, that is the truth. I’ve got one thing left to do.”

“What is it?”

“I’m going to get Graham the tape he wanted me to get from Harrison, only this time I’ll get it from the right source. I’m going to get him evidence, Amy, get him a case he can prosecute, a case that will end the right way. I don’t want to pass this off to him until I know it’s ready for that. I can’t stand to let it fall apart the way it did with Dunbar and Mike London and Graham and everyone else. Do you understand that? I can’t let it fall apart again.”

She fell asleep around midnight. I sat beside her in the dark, looking at a pale shaft of light across the carpet that I liked to imagine was the moon but was really from a parking lot light pole. She had not pressed me for more details of what I had planned, and I hadn’t offered them. It had been a quiet night. We didn’t make love or even talk when we turned out the lights and got into bed, but she fell asleep with her hand wrapped tight around my arm.

After twenty minutes, when her breathing had slowed to the rhythm of true and deep sleep, I got to my feet and found my car keys. She was on her side, face turned into the pillow, and before I left I leaned down and kissed the back of her head, smelled her hair. Then I walked through the dark apartment and opened the door and stepped out into the night. There was no way I could fasten the steel security bar behind me. I regretted that.

I stopped at a convenience store on Rocky River and bought a large black coffee, then drove home, went upstairs, and found the wire I’d used in the early stages with Parker Harrison. I’d never taken it back to the office. We’d had no use for it anymore.

I tested it and then put it on, clipping the microphone lower, near the fourth button instead of the first, remembering the way Harrison had torn at my shirt, how completely exposed it had been then. Once the wire was in place, I got my gun case out of the closet and removed the stainless steel Beretta 9 mm. It had been a while since I’d handled that gun, but I had a shoulder holster for it, and I put that on now and slipped the Beretta inside. I put a jacket on over that, leaving it unzipped, and then I put the Glock into its holster, this one secured on my spine. The East Cleveland Ensemble.

With that preparation complete, I turned off the lights and left the apartment and went to the office. I fired up the computer and then took my PI license out of my wallet and went to the scanner, made a copy of the image and loaded it onto the computer, and made a few changes before printing out a copy. A little trimming work with scissors, a quick pass through the card laminator I’d purchased years ago for just this sort of thing, and then I was done. I tucked the new ID into my wallet in place of the old one, left the office, and drove back to Eddy Road.