Where the dead lay

TWENTY-EIGHT

"HOMELESS ASSAULTED IN SQUAT HOUSE,” announced the Star’s headline. The piece was written by Neil Ratay and told of an attack by several unidentified males on a house in the Meadows, near where the Mozel Sanders projects used to be, where a group of “the homeless” had assembled and were “thought to be residing.” Two of them needed to be taken to the hospital with blunt trauma injuries. The rest had scattered. No deaths. The victims were unidentified at “police request due to ongoing investigation.” Details were thin. There was no electricity in the house, and a few battery-powered lamps had been upset at the start of the violence, so the victims couldn’t even pinpoint the race of their attackers or how many had been involved. Behr read it and reread it and couldn’t decide if it even smacked of another pea-shake hit, with the reporting tamped down and manipulated by the police. He was tempted to reach out to Ratay and ask for the real deal, but he was concerned his questions would only serve to place a bigger story about the missing Caro detectives than the one he was confirming, so he didn’t. He figured he’d just check it out on his own.

There was no reason not to; things had gone quiet the past four days, and August had arrived, crawling slowly in on a trail of thick heat. Behr’s anger boiled, low and bilious, at the base of his throat. Frustration clutched at him. He was feeling abandoned by his sources, unoriginal in his thinking, without skill or drive. He had no live angles to work and had resorted to pursuing background on both his cases in a futile attempt to stay busy. His experience told him that if he kept at it he would discover a mistake or a connection that would lead him to answers. No one could commit ongoing crimes without leaving some residue. So he ran interviews, by phone, e-mail, and in person, with Aurelio’s students. He’d been out to Eli Lilly to see some executives and a guy from one of the warehouses, all who trained at the academy. He’d been to a fitness club where some other students worked as personal trainers. He’d been to a car dealership, a supermarket, and a bank. People from all walks of life trained jiu-jitsu now. Nothing of particular interest turned up. He had even gone and sat outside Ben Davis High School, where he waited for summer football practice to end, to talk to Max Sanchez and Juan Aybar, two juniors he knew vaguely from around the studio, kids who cleaned the mats and did errands for Aurelio in exchange for taking classes there.

He saw Sanchez first, looking bigger and stronger than when last he’d seen him, and called out, “Hey, Max.” Sanchez stopped putting his key into the door of an old Volkswagen Passat and turned.

“You doing summer school, man?” Sanchez asked.

“Yeah, exactly, studying up,” Behr said. “Wanted to talk to you and Juan about what went down. Didn’t see you at the memorial.”

“We had two-a-days. Coach said we could miss for family only. He’s a hard-ass mother-”

“They all are,” Behr said.

“I’m grabbing Aybes at the side door. We just lifted. Come on,” Sanchez said, and got in the car. Behr crammed himself into the passenger seat and they drove around to where a few ballplayers straggled out of the weight room. Juan was sitting outside, his back against the building, drinking a Gatorade. He got up and came toward the car carrying both of their gym bags as Behr unfolded himself from his seat.

“Hey, Behr,” Aybar said. He looked like he’d grown four inches in the past month, but his weight hadn’t kept pace.

“Hey,” Behr said, “wanted to know if you guys had seen or heard anything that might have a connection with what happened.” Both kids shrugged and shook their heads.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Besides class and cleaning up?” Max asked. Behr nodded.

“Nothing really. Picked up a bunch of cases of water with him at Wal-Mart,” Aybar said. “Oh, and the NAGA tournament.”

“In Chicago. We rode up there with him, a few weeks back,” Max added.

“How’d you do?” Behr wondered.

“Submitted my first guy, then got triangled,” Sanchez said, and Behr looked to Aybar.

“I submitted my first guy, then lost on points,” he said. “But that judge was totally tripping. He missed, like, two of my takedowns and a reversal. I totally had that shit.”

“Was anyone there from Francovic’s school?” Behr asked, though he felt it was pointless.

“Nah, don’t think so,” Sanchez said, “not in the under eighteens. Maybe some adults were there, I didn’t see ’em.”

“Was Francovic there? Did Aurelio talk to him?” Behr asked. Both kids shook their heads.

“Other than that, just the usual picking up boxes, moving around furniture, and shit,” Sanchez shrugged.

“The whole thing really sucks,” Aybar said. Behr nodded his agreement. Then Aybar continued, “We got nowhere to roll now.”

“We can do it in the wrestling room here, but we got to find another teacher,” Sanchez added. Behr looked at them, young and strong, so full of life and maybe because of that so unattached to it. Any sadness they might have felt competed with the inconvenience of not having an instructor in a way that was so completely genuine and without malice he almost laughed.

“Yeah,” Behr said. “Maybe the academy will open back up.”

So four days had passed, and while he searched for an angle to pursue, Behr went to the tire. It was a training technique he used from time to time. He had a large tractor tire stashed down at the track of the nearby middle school that was closed for the summer. He’d go down there and rope it to an old weight belt he strapped around his waist. Then he’d run, the heavy black rubber circle bouncing and dragging behind him, as he went around the track and up and down the hill next to it. When his lungs and legs gave out, he’d unbuckle the belt and go after the tire with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer. He’d slam the thing, controlling the rebound of the heavy hammer, until his core and his extremities were quaking and his mind was blank, even mercifully so of Susan. The idea was to continue on, session after session, until the tire had worn away to nothing, then get a new tire and do it all again. Then Behr would drag his hammer home, enveloped in a sense of hollowness. He was hitting it hard, literally and figuratively, but there was no longer a sense of purpose to it for him. While he had previously trained to support his efforts in jiu-jitsu, so that the physical fitness component wouldn’t hinder his progress, that was gone. His motivation had been replaced by a grim but increasingly vague sense of payback.

Then there was the Caro list. Behr ground it out nightly, driving by every last damn one of those miserable properties in his rapidly-becoming-a-piece-of-shit car. He glanced at the passenger seat, which while it wasn’t new, was still in pristine condition. Testament to how few people rode in it, and for how little time, compared to the leatherette under his ass and behind his head, which was cracking and peeling-disintegrating really-under his weight and sweat and the fact that he practically lived in the car at times. But the answers were out there, somewhere, in a morass of meaningless information and blank faces and seemingly disconnected facts. It was just a question of him finding them, so he went.

And as for the properties themselves, paint was nearly nonexistent on the houses, as were intact windows. Rotten siding was the rule. Foundations and eaves sagged. His expeditions stretched into the nights, when he would cross paths with the SLED team- the Street Level Enforcement Detail-an aggressive roving tactical unit that was supposed to turn the tide, or at least survive, the high crime areas-and they would eyeball him, silently urging him to get on his way.

As he visited the addresses on the list, he was able to enter them all. The abandoned houses were easy targets, with broken windows and rotted jambs and sashes and weak locks-when the locks and knobs and even doors weren’t missing altogether. None of it was going to keep him out. But once he was inside, there was very little to inform him. Save for feral cats, used crack vials, spent malt liquor cans, and even human feces, the dwellings were all empty in a way that seemed a reflection of his own being at the moment. The gleaming commercial and municipal structures of downtown, like the one that housed Caro, and the immaculate parks and public spaces that surrounded them, filled with lunchers, strollers, and joggers, were a world away and seemed built to mock him and the neighborhoods he was exploring.

Among the worst of them was the house from Ratay’s latest story. Behr made his way past some fallen crime scene tape and through a loose piece of plywood into the darkened cavern of the busted-out dwelling. As he made his way through a living room he shined his Mini Maglite and stepped around empty bottles of Alize and Martel in his path. He was headed toward the bedrooms when he froze and killed the light. He heard noises, a voice, and recognized that he wasn’t alone in the house. He moved silently in the direction of the sound. Stepping into the doorway, Behr raised his light with his left hand and pressed his right against his gun’s handle, ready to draw it if necessary. Jacked-up eyes, glowing red in the flashlight beam, peered back at him. There were three of them, two men and a woman, all African American. They looked old and weathered at first glance, but upon closer inspection Behr saw none of them was close to thirty yet.

“Oh shit, you police?” one of the men said. “We won’t run.”

“I’m not,” Behr said. “Don’t run anyway.”

One of the men nodded and finished what he was doing, which was handing a glass pipe to the woman.

“Were any of you here the other night when that thing went down?” Behr asked.

They all shook their heads no. “We come after the police are done, nobody’s around for a few days,” the woman said, “and we have us a place.”

“I get it. Was this a pea-shake house? You know anything about it?”

“Nope,” the woman said. They all shrugged and shook their heads again, and then just sat there looking as fearful as newborn rodents. Behr stared at them for a moment. Then he clicked off his light and left the way he’d come.

Upon his return home he ran property searches on the addresses that told a story of foreclosures, city seizures, building department condemnations, and cases of flat-out abandonment. A few of the houses changed hands via sale, but the owners’ names meant nothing to him and didn’t form any discernible pattern that he could see. Pilgren, Craig, to Stavros, Mr. A. Had it been a dream home purchase? In that neighborhood it seemed unlikely. Or was it a bad play before the real estate bubble burst. Rodriguez, Raul, to Bustamante, Victoria. It could have been a Latin-to-Latin transfer, or Latin to Italian. Her name was on a few transactions. She must have been a low-level speculator. Same with Snopes, C, to Kale, Maurice. Mr. Kale owned five properties but had lost three to foreclosure within the past eighteen months. He made a note to run a p-check on those names.

And then, finally, there was nothing else to do. Originally Behr had gone into police work and then investigation in order to wrestle with the not knowing. He had imagined himself uniquely built to explore the dank, murky corners of crime, where lacking the coordinates of hard information, the ordinary person might become lost and panic. But that had been near twenty years ago, and lately the state of things had gone beyond the intriguing, past the irritating, and was approaching the maddening. The thought of another twenty years of it stretching out ahead of him was daunting. Especially when he considered he might be at the height of his powers, or worse, that the high water mark was already behind him. He had the sensation he was up to his shoulders in cold, wet mud, and he was sinking. What good was what he was doing anyway? Regardless of what he found out, Aurelio was going to stay dead, and this crew wasn’t his problem in the first place. Was he going to feel satisfied if he found something out? What did that mean anyway?

It made him want to give it up, and not just these matters, but maybe the profession as a whole. He didn’t know how to do anything else though, and shining his flashlight on the doors of a Costco in a night watchman’s uniform didn’t seem like much of an alternative.

His mind was chewing itself into a pulp, and perhaps that was why he found himself, in the fading light, driving through the gates of South County Municipal Landfill. He was desperate, and this latest hit on a house was in the ’hood, and no one he knew knew the ’hood as well as his friend Terry Cottrell.

Behr parked and got out of his car to see Cottrell standing on a dirt mound pumping an air pistol, which he then raised and fired. Satisfied with his shot, he turned and saw Behr.

“Huh-heh, Large,” Cottrell said.

“Big-game hunting?” Behr said.

“Rats around here qualify,” Terry said, and spat some steel pellets, the extra ammo stored in his cheek, onto the ground. They shook hands and chest bumped. It was a silly action, and not something Behr engaged in with anyone else. They began walking through the low stink. The refuse was well spread out at South County, but the heat intensified the odor into a potent cloud of fecund rot that surrounded them. Behr wondered if getting Cottrell the job overseeing the facility years ago, which had moved the man off the streets and out of a life of larceny, was going to hurt him worse in the long run due to the exposure to carcinogens.

“Let’s get inside,” Cottrell said, seeming to read his mind, “I got the AC kicking.” Behr followed him to a doublewide.

It was air-conditioned cold and dark in the trailer, the only light coming from a too-big flat-screen television freeze-framed on a black-and-white image of a man in a trench coat lighting a cigarette.

“What you been up to?” Behr asked. He cast his eyes about as they adjusted to the low light and saw that several stacks of books had been moved from their shelves to accommodate a large DVD collection.

“Been watching,” Cottrell said. “I’m on a New Wave and noir kick: 400 Blows, Rififi, Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, ca va?” Cottrell blazed a Newport in the disaffected way Behr had seen in the few French films he’d caught with girls back in college. “You know Elevator to the Gallows?” Cottrell asked.

“That what this is?” Behr asked of muted, soulful trumpet music that was playing in the trailer.

“Yeah, Miles Davis did the soundtrack. Brother laid it down live to picture. He had a flap of skin that came loose on his lip but kept playing. That’s what gives it that muted quality.”

“That’s fascinating, buddy,” Behr said. He would’ve been mocking Cottrell if it weren’t so interesting. He’d tried listening to jazz a few times, but it made him feel like he was eating dinner at an airport hotel, and today he just didn’t have the time. “I’m on something that has to do with pea shake and was wondering if you knew anything about that?”

Cottrell’s eyes narrowed for a moment, then relaxed and filled with mirth. “No, but I heard there’s some broad-ass shit being pulled over at the Flackville Bingo game-” Cottrell cut himself off with his own harsh staccato laugh: “Hah heh-heh-heh-heh-hey.”

“Come on, man,” Behr said.

“Okay. You don’t want to know about a major league skim, don’t matter to me…”

“Do I look like I’m playing?” Behr said.

“You never do.”

“So tell me what you know.”

“Folks in the community still like the numbers, that’s all I can tell you,” Cottrell said.

“When grandma has her dream you gotta put your dollar down on it.”

“Damn skippy, you Richard Pryor motherfucker…” Cottrell shook his head. “But there’s plenty out there playing pea shake too, I guess. Then there’s your folks, but they mostly play Cherry Master, don’t they.” Cottrell was referring to the legal video gambling machines that licensed, mostly white-run and patronized bars, were able to install. The inequity and potential racism of the system was an oft-debated topic in the paper and on the Web.

Behr saw a few days’ worth of the Star sitting on a side table. “You read about that shit over by the fairgrounds?”

“I mighta glimpsed it,” Cottrell said. “Angry Latinos.”

Behr shook his head.

“No?” Cottrell blew out smoke.

“Some kind of a move on a shake house,” Behr said. He looked at Cottrell, almost thirty now, still lean and wiry, pulling away from his youth out on the corner with grace. Despite his distance from that world, and working the straight job for the last several years, Cottrell still seemed to know most everything that went down in the projects and their surrounding strata.

“Someone’s running a Trafficante play, huh?” Cottrell said. Behr knew he was well read in crime, both fictional and true, and recognized the mobster’s name, but he didn’t get the reference. “Old Santo rounded up the bolita business down in Tampa-the Cuban and Sicilian part of town, Ybor City. Made himself rich off it.”

“Is that what’s going on here?”

“I don’t know what all’s going on here. I didn’t know shit about it until you just told me.” Cottrell stubbed out his cigarette in a half-full ashtray. “Just saying it’s a traditional way to build a power base, at least for La Cosa Nostra, ha-heh-heh-heh-heh-hey.”

“Glad you find it such an interesting social study. And so amusing,” Behr said. There was no Indianapolis Mafia as far as he knew, so it wasn’t much help. “Could you work it for me?” Behr asked.

“He-ll no!” Cottrell said. “I don’t do that.”

“Would you be so kind as to let me know if you hear anything about it then? I’m looking for a pair of missing investigators, they were working it for an outfit called Caro. Could be big for me if I can locate ’em.”

“Yep, I’ll go ’round the way asking a bunch of questions, and when the homies ask why, I’ll say some ex-cop I truck with wants to know. Cool?” Cottrell said, and Behr rode a fresh wave of his laughter out the door.

Behr crossed the lot to his car. As he got in he glanced back at Cottrell, framed in the doorway of the trailer, lighting a fresh cigarette, and could swear he saw his friend’s face pinched in concern, or maybe it was just thought, but he was too far away to be sure.

Night had come and Behr was near home and debating whether or not to get something to eat when his cell rang with a number he didn’t recognize.

“Is this Behr?” came a voice.

“Who’s this?” he asked back.

“Kid McMurphy. Pal’s-”

“Where you been?” Behr asked.

“That guy, you know, the one I told you about. He was away for a while, but he’s back,” McMurphy said.

“He ready to tell me something?”

“Well…,” McMurphy said, then seemed to drift off mid-conversation.

“Where is he? We’ll figure it out,” Behr said.

“Can you, like, do it without me? I’ll just tell you what he looks like and-”

“No. Where are you? I’ll pick you up,” Behr said, and stepped on the gas.