Where the dead lay

THIRTY-SEVEN

Behr sat outside a Circle K store, lacing up a pair of dry shoes he had in the trunk, downing a quart bottle of Gatorade, and feeling handled when his phone rang. He’d heard old detectives, lifers, espouse a theory that there were no coincidences. That everything on a case was connected and that there wasn’t such thing as separate cases in the first place, that everything, all the cases an investigator looked at his whole career long were interrelated in one long indecipherable chain that could only be understood at the very end. Behr didn’t go in much for the mystical bullshit, but it was easy enough to see what they meant at the moment. Aurelio had been killed, and he’d walked into it, and Dominic had seen him there, and his name had rung a bell so he’d reported it to Pomeroy who’d seen his opportunity. Maybe Pomeroy had smelled the connection and had gone outside of the department because he suspected what Behr had now learned about Bustamante-he had a dirty cop tipping and steering and otherwise protecting the Schlegels from the inside. Maybe Pomeroy hadn’t had the Schlegels or even Bustamante at all. There was still a lot that wasn’t clear to him, especially whether or not he was willing to stick, or whether he should drop it and walk away and live his life, whatever that amounted to at the moment.

Behr reached slowly for his still-ringing phone. “Yeah?” he said quietly, without even bothering to check the caller ID.

“Sorry it took so long, Frank,” a voice said.

“Tommy?” It was Tommy Connaughton. “You got something?” Behr asked.

“I finally got into that Santos account.”

“Okay.”

“But the checks weren’t presented at a bank. They were cashed at Check Express, a Western Union-type place.”

“Shit.”

“So I hacked them, no charge,” Connaughton said, a smile of pride in his voice.

“Good man. And?”

“Flavia Inez. Or Inez Flavia. I don’t know which-it was recorded differently on each transaction. Someone there is worse with the Spanish than me.”

“She’s the girlfriend,” Behr said, certain of what he’d suspected at first but had too quickly moved off.

“What?”

“Nothing, go on.”

“Anyway, those two checks-one for four thousand, the other for seventy-five hundred-she cashed ’em.”

“Thanks, Tommy, send me a bill,” Behr said, hanging up and swinging his feet inside the car. He turned the ignition and started to drive.

It was quarter to eight by the time Behr reached Dannels’s house. It wasn’t his final destination, but he needed another piece and hoped he wasn’t too late. He jumped out of his car, in time to see Dannels backing a well-kept Bravada out of the driveway, and ran around to the driver’s window.

“Oi, mate, you look like an all-night trucker,” Dannels said, his hair still wet from a shower, a conservative striped tie knotted around his thick neck.

“Hey, man, I know you’re on your way to work, but did Aurelio come into any money recently?” It was a question Behr should’ve asked the first time if he’d been thinking straight, but he hadn’t been.

Dannels’s eyes lit. “He hadn’t come into any. He’d won some.”

“Won it how, fighting?” Behr asked, knowing the answer.

“Nah, he dumped his fight purses into the school. That was his business. This was his fun. He loved the gambling. Lotto and pea shake,” Dannels said. “Must be a cultural thing. I ran the probabilities for him many times, the odds of winning long term at lottery-style betting-it’s piss poor. But he kept spending thirty, forty, fifty bucks a day on that crap. Then he hit a couple of shakes a few months back, five or ten thousand, I don’t remember how much. He was so fucking happy, mate. Acting quite vindicated about his gambling prowess with me.” Dannels smiled despite himself. It was what Behr knew, that the wins jibed with the deposits in the checkbook. And there was something beyond that, too. He knew that Aurelio hadn’t met Flavia Inez by accident.