Thirteen Million Dollar Pop

15

“John Lutz, please. Frank Behr calling,” he said into his cell phone. After a moment’s wait, a warm voice came on the line.

“Y’ello?”

“Mr. Lutz?”

“Call me John,” the man said.

“All right, John,” Behr gave him his way. Lutz was the president of Payroll Place, and at the moment, his client.

“We’re expecting to see you in about a half hour, aren’t we?” Lutz asked. Behr couldn’t tell if others were supposed to be in the meeting or if Lutz was just a “we” kind of guy.

“That’s what I’m calling about, sir,” Behr said. “I wanted to let you know I wasn’t going to be able to make it down today.”

“Oh,” Lutz said, disappointment creeping into his tone.

“I am working on your case. I’m hip-deep in background checks on your employees, as a matter of fact.”

“I see,” Lutz said, brightening to the information. “Anything good? You have any thoughts? Any ideas?”

“Still in the preliminary stages. I’m going to get back to you about setting up some employee interviews shortly.”

“Okay,” Lutz said, not sounding too sure.

“Now I’m gonna just pop into the courthouse here and get back to work on these checks. I’ll be in touch, so … Take care,” Behr said, hanging up.

He stepped inside, but not into a courthouse. Rather, he left the sunlight behind and entered the artificially lit concrete confines of the parking garage of the office building on Pierson Street.

The place had nearly become his crypt a few days back, but it was the start of a workday and now it was full of parked cars and slowly trolling ones looking for spaces. He walked down, deeper underground, past P2, to the P3 level where it had happened. He turned the corner and got a view of the row where the Suburban had been parked. There was no crime scene tape. No indication that anything had happened there-certainly not from a distance, anyway. The shot-up cars had been towed or otherwise moved. The light fixtures that the shooter had disabled had been repaired. The lights he had shot out had been replaced. The area was once again bathed in a symmetrical amber pattern. It was business as usual, as it would have been had he caught some of the lead. Only when Behr drew close did he see signs of the encounter: small pockmarks along the concrete wall where the shooter’s rounds had chipped away at the smooth uniformity.

Behr squeezed in between a Toyota RAV4 and a Chrysler Pacifica and went to the wall. He ran his hand along the pattern of shots. It felt rough, like chips from a chisel point. It felt like nothing. He looked down to where he had dropped and fired, then he crossed toward where he’d tried to acquire his target. Fifty or sixty feet across the lanes where cars traveled to the next set of parked vehicles. It took him a minute, but he found his own shot pattern. His were lower, what would be right around the shooter’s midsection if he’d had any hits. His grouping wasn’t that spread out, all things considered, especially compared to his counterpart’s. But Behr had only been firing on semi, while the other guy was spraying and praying on full auto.

After a moment Behr walked down to both ends of the garage and found doors opening onto stairwells. One smelled like urine, the other was relatively clean. Neither held shell casings or any other evidence of the shooter’s presence. As he left and made his way back toward the shooter’s route of escape, he considered whether there was a driver, or if the shooter drove himself, and whether he had left the car running, or the key in the ignition at the very least. Then Behr stopped and looked up. Placed at the ramp where the rows of parking jogged back to create another level was the black glass hemisphere of a security camera.

Behr went to the booth by the exit, where monthly parkers waved a magnetic card that caused a wooden arm to rise and let them out and where visitors had to stop and pay for their time. There was an attendant in the booth, a heavyset woman who appeared to be from India or Pakistan. Behr approached her.

“Hello,” he said.

“Lost ticket, pay maximum,” she responded. Her English was rough, the phrase rehearsed.

“I didn’t lose my ticket,” he said.

“Lose ticket?” she asked.

“No ticket,” he said, attempting to wave away the topic. “Do you know about the shooting?” He made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and mimed firing. It seemed to register and she began to nod. “Were you here? The night of the shooting?” he asked, speaking slowly but checking a pointless urge to raise his volume.

She processed for a moment, then shook her head. “Me, night, eight o’clock …” she said, and used a hand gesture to indicate her going away.

“Okay,” Behr said, remembering that he had had to pay in advance that night and had received an exit ticket to feed into the machine since the booth would be closed and the attendant off duty. “Security?” Behr asked, pointing to the ceiling. “Cameras,” he added. But she just shook her head. “Security? Guard?” he continued.

“Guard. Yes.” Now she was nodding. “P one, P one.”

Behr found the garage security office, an offshoot of the building’s main security center, through a battered metal door near the elevator bank. He knocked and entered a cramped space that was dominated by a desk, which was crowded with black and white monitors blinking views from one area of garage to the next.

“Help you with something?” Sitting behind the desk was a middle-aged square badge in a rent-a-cop uniform. His glasses sat loosely on his face, the arms bent wide from being removed too often.

“Yeah, it’s about that incident the other night,” Behr began. In his experience security guards were either buffs, who could be induced into enthusiastically sharing all their information, or scared bureaucrats, who wielded their scrap of power like a truncheon. He wasn’t sure which he had in front of him.

“What about it?” square badge asked.

“Were you on duty?”

“Go ask your buddies,” the guard said. “Buddies” implied the cops, and Behr smelled some resentment there.

“I’m not with the cops,” Behr bit out. Instead of this information opening the man up, it closed him down.

“Then why would I tell you anything about our system?” the man said with some edge, crossing his arms.

“Not asking you for state secrets,” Behr said, “just wondering if you were around.”

“Are you suggesting some failure on the part of building security or garage security in specific?” the man said, his voice thinning to an almost aggressive whine.

Great, Behr thought, shut down, self-important, and paranoid-the perfect subject. There was a time when Behr would’ve grabbed the geek by the neck and shaken him until the information fell out, but nowadays, as a Caro boy, Behr was doing things differently. He was trying to, anyway. So he spread his feet and settled, as if he had no plans to leave anytime soon.

“But for your information, no, I wasn’t on. I’m the day man. I punch out and another guy handles the afternoon and early evening. There used to be an overnight shift, but that got trimmed because of budget. So, you know, what does management expect if they don’t pay for coverage?”

Behr pictured the guard, had he been on duty, armed with a flashlight, rounding the corner into the firefight. That would’ve done a lot of good.

“So it was just the cameras, then. They get a pretty good look at the whole thing? What’s the storage length on the footage?” Behr asked as lightly as he could.

A cagey look came to the guard’s eyes. “Why’re you so interested?”

“I know the guy involved.”

“You work for him?”

Behr just shrugged.

“I was in charge of burning copies to a disk for the police,” the guard said. “You can ask them what was on the tape. As for storage, we used to run thirty days-probably would’ve had footage of guys casing the garage. But now it’s seventy-two hours, because they took a bunch of our hard drives for the lobby. Lobby guys get it all. New cappuccino makers, new chairs, extra hard drives …”

Behr cut a glance at the bank of monitors, wondering what he’d be able to pick up if he saw the footage from the shoot.

The guard leaned forward. “I think we’re done here,” he said.

Behr was headed back to his car when he saw a janitor, a Hispanic kid wearing earbuds and pushing a rolling garbage can.

“Hey, man,” Behr said loudly, tapping his own ear. The kid stopped and pulled out the left earbud, allowing the tinny sound of congas and trumpets to spill into the garage.

“Yo,” the janitor said.

“What happened here the other night?” Behr asked.

“That throw down? Some Bs flew.” The kid shifted his weight and a thick ring of keys clinked.

“You think it’s on the security tapes?” Behr asked.

“How much?” the kid responded.

“How much what?”

“How much you got?”

A hundred bucks. It was more than he could afford, but it was still the standard unit of measure for bribery in matters of any import on the street, and that’s what Behr paid him. The kid thought the security guard was a prick, and knew he was headed to lunch in an hour. He told Behr to go get a cup of coffee and meet him back at the security office in an hour and ten exactly, so that’s what Behr did.

When he returned, it was in time to see the kid leave the security office with a wastebasket, dump it into his rolling garbage can, and replace the basket in the office. When he exited, however, he left the door slightly ajar and rolled off into the recesses of the garage. Behr knew the area was probably on camera, but the kid’s actions would look like a mistake, some youthful, sloppy work. His entry, on the other hand, would not. Behr tipped his chin down and walked briskly inside.

He locked the door behind him. Not that it mattered. The cramped, hot space had no other way out. If square badge returned, Behr would be discovered. So he worked quickly, sitting down at the desk, and keyboarding in to the security archives. It took him a few minutes, but the log was fairly straightforward and clearly dated, and he soon found the time and angle he was looking for. Behr scrolled to 10:55 of the night in question. He estimated the shooting started within a few minutes of that time. The video ran, showing no movement, but at 10:57 it blinked forward to 12:31. This footage showed the police in the final stages of their investigation and cleanup.

Confused, Behr scrolled back, thinking he’d perhaps hit a key commanding the system to skip. But he hadn’t. Behr assumed a copy had been made for the police. That’s what square badge had said. In the days of videotape it would’ve been conceivable that they’d handed over the original, but now everything was digital. While a CD may have been burned and given to the police, after that, either accidentally or intentionally, the material had been deleted. Behr knew enough about computers to understand that unless an elaborate scrubbing process had been followed, the footage was actually in the hard drive somewhere, because delete usually meant a repurposing of the memory space. But it would take him hours and a call to his computer guy to figure out how to pull it up, and he didn’t have that kind of time. At the moment he didn’t have much of anything.

Behr drove out of the garage into daylight and a ringing cell phone. “Behr,” he said.

“Frank, Neil Ratay here.” The reporter’s voice came back to him through the phone.

“What’s up, Neil?”

“Not much. Listen, about that story, my editor doesn’t have any appetite for it.”

“I see,” Behr said. He needed to make a right onto Delaware to head back to the office, but he found himself turning left onto Capitol. “Did someone tell him not to, or is he just not hungry?”

“Don’t know,” Ratay said, “but with the state of the newspaper business, it means the same thing to me. Sorry I can’t help you.”

“Got it,” Behr said, “and thanks, Neil.” Behr hung up. He was on North Meridian now, the big dividing road that bisected the city. He passed stately homes behind wrought iron gates, including the ceremonial governor’s mansion. As he continued north and out of town, the city quickly released its grasp and gave way to thick trees that spread into a more open sky. He was headed toward Carmel, the well-to-do suburb that was Bernie Cool’s domain.