Where the dead lay

FIFTEEN

Sound track,” Kenny said, leaning up between the front seats and hitting the CD player. A low swaying beat kicked out of the speakers. Notorious B.I.G.’s voice filled the Durango.

“… Glocks and Tecs are expected when I wreck shit,”

“Respect is collected, so check it…,” Kenny rapped along, “I got technique dripping out my butt cheeks, Sleep on my stomach so I don’t fuck up my sheets-”

“Dude, I’ve seen Mom dealing with your sheets,” Charlie cut him off, turning the volume low. “Something’s dripping out on ’em.” Knute laughed in that silent way of his, while Peanut snorted out loud.

“Yeah, and don’t you got any new shit? From some motherfucker who ain’t dead?” Peanut asked. They’d followed his directions to Stringtown, past an endless stretch of by-the-hour screw motels, and parked in a little notch on Belmont where they could see the house on Traub Avenue.

“Biggie’s not dead,” Kenny said. All three heads in the car swiveled toward him.

“What you talkin’ about-,” Peanut said.

“He’s alive. He knew if he stayed in the game, he’d get killed eventually, so he stepped out,” Kenny told them.

“Stepped out?” Peanut asked.

“What the fuck?” Knute said.

“Look at the signs. He practically told everybody he was gonna do it. Albums: No Way Out. Even early on he realizes he’s fucked. Life After Death, he gets the idea. Ready to Die, he puts the plan in action. Then he’s “killed” in an L.A. parking garage. No one apprehended in the shooting. He’s “dead,” but does the music stop? Hell no-”

“Man, they got tracks and tracks laid down in the studio. They only release the best. Then, when they dead, it get valuable so they keep pumping it out. Anyone know that-”

“Oh, sure. But the style changes. It evolves,” Kenny said, sounding sure. “How do you explain that?”

Charlie just shook his head. “Don’t get him started. He can go on for hours.”

“He let his family mourn. He let P. Diddy mourn. Lil’ Kim. Where he at then?” Peanut asked.

“Probably Africa,” Kenny answered.

“Africa, shit!”

“He’d blend in. Live like a king. Think about it…,” Kenny said.

“Look,” Charlie said, pointing to the house. Several cars were now parked in front, and several others were arriving, trolling slowly down the street, searching for spots.

“Diddy probably visits him over there,” Kenny added.

“What about ’Pac? He alive too? His music keep coming out,” Peanut asked, seemingly unable to help himself.

“Nah. Music shows no growth. He’s really dead. Shot in Vegas for real-”

“Guys, shut it,” came Knute’s voice, low and gravelly, and shut it they did. They all watched as people exited their cars and entered the house. From the assortment of race, sex, and age, it looked like an AA meeting or a factory shift change. But it wasn’t.

“Lookit ’em all,” Charlie said.

“If the Latinos and negroids poured all this money back into their communities it would virtually stamp out poverty in the city,” Kenny said.

“Yo, dead that ‘negroid’ shit,” Peanut warned.

“You a social scientist now?” Knute asked.

“I read it in the paper when I was taking a dump,” Kenny laughed.

“I don’t like the approach,” Charlie said. “Too open. I don’t give a fuck about any neighbors,” he went on, referring to the few houses around the one in question. With their broken windows, dirt lawns, and wrecked paint, it was clear they were abandoned. “But it’s a dead-end street.”

Knute nodded. “Car could get boxed in by some late arrival.”

“Uh-uh,” Peanut said, “this was for looks. They’s a back alley. Cut across Belmont over there…”

Charlie glanced back at Peanut in the rearview with a look of near respect.

They reached the head of a shared back alley, pocked by tipped-over garbage cans and spilled refuse, which led to the back of the Traub Avenue house. There was a detached garage, but no cars visible on this side.

“Don’t front in,” Peanut advised, “back on down, then you be ready to leave quick.” Charlie jacked the Durango into reverse and backed quickly and smoothly toward the house. Through the windshield they could see Nixie doing the same with Peanut’s car. Reaching a place he liked, about ten yards from the back door, Charlie put the Durango in park. For a moment there was only silence in the car.

“Well…,” Charlie said.

“Hammah time,” Kenny said, drumming on the back of the seat. His was first, and then the other three doors opened. Kenny went to the back and popped open the rear hatch. He handed Knute an aluminum baseball bat, took a length of pipe filled with iron filings and capped on both ends for himself and a six-battery metal flashlight for Charlie. That was in addition to the. 40 Smith amp; Wesson Sigma Charlie usually had in his belt when they did this.

“You sure you don’t want in? We’ll find you something fun to use

…,” Charlie offered.

Kenny spun his length of pipe like a martial artist and struck a pose out of a chop-socky movie, topping it off with a “Waaahhh.”

“Just the cheese and thirty seconds to fly,” Peanut said. Charlie pulled out the money-ten crisp hundred-dollar bills.

“We’ll talk to you soon about the next one,” Charlie said. “And about that other thing…”

“A’ight,” Peanut said, without much enthusiasm. He took the money and hurried to his car. He got in the passenger seat.

“Go on, dog,” he told Nixie. He glanced out the back in time to see Charlie lock the running Durango with a second key. “Them Schlegels is sick, sick, sick.”

Behr drove as if he could beat the night. After dropping off Susan he hadn’t even gone home. The information she’d laid on him was resting heavy and cold in his gut, and he wasn’t going to be able to sit around on it. He knew the news was the kind that most people reacted to with much happiness. But he wasn’t most people. This was an awareness he dragged around with him every day. He’d had his child. He’d had his wife. He’d experienced the chest-swelling joy that they’d produced. But that had all died, literally and figuratively, and he had been forced to move on to a different kind of life. He knew you’ve got to be bullish, as the financial guys said, on the world to have a kid, and his days of unbridled optimism were long past. His time with Susan was also pretty close to done, of that he was fairly certain. They’d had a good run, but she was just a kid, and if he stared it down in an honest light, this is the way it had to end sometime.

He had a pair of jeans and his laptop in the car, so he’d changed and driven to a coffee place with wireless Internet, and parked outside. Using their signal he accessed a pay database reverse directory and ran the phone number marked by the “F” in Aurelio’s book. He got an address on West Elm Avenue and headed for it.

He came up on the building and pulled over. It was a low-slung two-story stucco job that looked like it had been built as a motor inn thirty or forty years back but had been converted over to apartments. Behr clocked the unit, 11-B, on the far corner of the second floor. The curtains were drawn and it had no lights on at the moment. He got a look at one of the doors on the ground floor in front of him and it caused him to lean over and root around in the glove box until he found his fish-eye. Then he got out of the car and trotted up the stairs.

Behr tapped at the door a few times, waited, and then gave it a good whack. There was no one home, or no answer anyway. He tried to peer between the curtains but couldn’t get much of a look. He glanced around, saw no activity about the building, and produced what he’d brought from his glove box: his fish-eye lens peephole viewer. He placed the conical piece of plastic over the peephole on the door and leaned close. The convex lens gave him a super-wide-angle view inside the apartment. The wide lens and the darkness combined to create a somewhat distorted picture, but it was clear enough for him to see that the place was vacant.

Behr heard a thin, raspy cough behind him. He palmed the fish-eye and turned to see a bony, aged black man standing there. The man sported a swollen and blackened eye with a broken blood vessel in it that had spilled red where it should have been white around the iris.

“Who you looking for, Officer?” the man asked. He was hunched over a bad leg and supported himself with a cane.

“Who are you?” Behr asked, flat and cop-ish.

“Ezra Blanchard,” the man said. “I’m the on-site building manager. The real manager works at an office.”

“Then you know who I’m looking for,” Behr said.

“Flavia’s gone,” Ezra said, a slight tremble in his voice. There’s my “F,” Behr thought. “Gone on to a nicer place,” Ezra continued, and coughed. Behr tried to read him, wondering if she’d passed away and the old man was being poetic. “… that she’d found with her cousin,” he finally added.

“When?”

“Not long ago.” The man gave it some thought. “Two weeks.”

“Mid-month?” Behr asked.

“She had some paid time left, but she was in a hurry to go.”

“You have an address?”

“She told me she’d send it to me, to forward on any mail and her security check. And she asked me not to give it out when I did.”

“I understand,” Behr said.

“But she never did send it. Guess she forgot. Or changed her mind,” the old man said. His posture stiffened up after he spoke.

“I see. What happened to you, buddy? You take a trip down these stairs or something?” Behr asked.

Ezra just stared at him. Behr felt his gaze find the bloody and blackened eye and willed himself to try and read the man’s good one. “Not exactly,” Ezra finally answered.

“Who was she worried about getting to her?” Behr asked. Sometimes a simple zigzag was all it took on a person not used to lying. Ezra just shrugged. “That’s fine, but the ‘I can’t tell you’ bit isn’t gonna work here,” Behr said firmly.

Ezra shuddered a bit. “If it’s police business, I can tell you… I can tell you she was trying to keep away from that dude she was seeing

… if I had my guess.”

Behr just stood there in the night for a moment. “Is that who did this to you, Ezra?” he asked. Ezra paused, then nodded.

“Now who would he be?” Behr asked.

“Never did get a name. He’d wait in the car for her to come down. Then he’d drive her off. He’d bring her back late sometimes, and go in with her. But he’d be gone before morning,” Ezra said.

“What kind of guy was this?” Behr asked.

“White dude. Young. Six feet, lean and lanky. Had some shaggy brown hair. He’d go stomping up and down the stairs no matter what time of night it was. When she wasn’t around, he’d bang on her door and yell all night. He was a real asshole, this dude.”

“And you saw him rough her up, or drag her around? You got in the middle of it?”

“No,” Ezra said.

“But you think she was trying to lose the guy?”

“Oh, she did. ’Cause I seen him show up here a few times looking for her since she gone. Last time he kept banging on the door for twenty minutes until I went and talked to him. I asked him to quiet down. Told him she moved. Told him I didn’t have a forwarding address and to leave. He said to get outta his face or I’d ‘end up down by the river listening to the trains whistle by.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s what this dude said: ‘Tell me where she is or you’ll end up floating downriver by the m-f’ing railroad tracks.’ But he said the whole m-f word. Man, he was drunk as hell. I kept on telling him I didn’t know, and then… Well, like I said, the dude was a real asshole.”

“Did you call the cops?” Behr wondered.

“Didn’t have to,” Ezra said, “they came on their own. Someone else must’ve called. The guy was long gone of course. And then this lieutenant showed up, real nice fella, and took my statement. Told me they’d try and track the boyfriend down, but if he showed up again I should stay inside.”

“A lieutenant, huh?” Behr asked. Ezra nodded.

“You ever see her with a guy by the name of Aurelio Santos?”

“What’s he look like?” Ezra asked.

“About five-ten. Solid. Curly black hair. Mid-thirties. Real friendly.”

“No, no…”

“If you’re on the Internet I could show you a picture,” Behr offered.

“I don’t do computer,” Ezra said.

Behr was about ready to write out his number for Ezra and walk away when he just asked one more time. Sometimes that worked, too. “Give me her address, Ezra.”

“You’re not a cop, are you,” he said.

“Not anymore,” Behr said. Ezra shrugged.

“It’s in my unit.” Ezra shuffled down to the other end of the apartments. Behr followed and waited at the door, glancing inside at the man’s meager furnishings. Ezra disappeared into a back room for a moment, then reappeared holding a few envelopes and a Post-it with an address on Schultz Park.

“If you’re going over there, maybe you could give her these?” Ezra extended a small packet of envelopes rubber-banded together. Behr reached for them, wondering whether he should be careful about opening and resealing them or just tear them apart for information, when Ezra took that off the table, pulling back the mail. “I should just have the mailman do it. Federal offense otherwise, right?”

“Sure, you do it that way,” Behr said, taking the Post-it with the new address. He’d seen the woman’s whole name. It was Flavia Inez.

Behr handed Ezra a business card. “Call me if that boyfriend shows up again.”

“Okay,” the old man said, but he sounded doubtful.