Where the dead lay

FOUR

Aurelio Santos keys his way into his studio in the predawn gloom. He wears a warm-up suit and track shoes. He’s thinking about riding his motorcycle along Copacabana beach and how glad he is that the Indiana winter is over, when they come at him. Three masked assailants appear from around the building and do a push-in. The first one shoves him from behind, but Aurelio quickly recovers his balance, gets hold of the shover’s arm, and shoulder-throws him into the wall, caving in a chunk of it. Aurelio squares, swings, and lands a punch to the jaw of the second attacker, who goes down to the floor, toppling table and chair on his way. Aurelio moves to foot-stomp his face, when the third man racks a shotgun. Merda! Aurelio freezes, then raises his hands. He slowly backs across the mat…

Is that what you did, Aurelio? Behr wondered. Is that the way it went down? Behr drove around, barely paying attention to where, or to the zoing and boing of morning radio playing low in the car. After a half hour or so the streets began filling up with the morning rush around him. There wasn’t much of it. Three cars in a row seemed like traffic in Indianapolis most of the time. But it was enough to slow him down and piss him off.

First thing Behr had done after he had exited the academy was to go around the back of the building to look for anything with meaning. The rear door was closed and locked, which, as it was a fire door, it did automatically. There were old cigarette butts and a few broken bottles among the weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, but the pieces looked too small to hold prints, and besides, they seemed like they’d been there for a long time. The windows were undisturbed and there was no way to get on the roof short of bringing your own ladder. Just like inside the academy: he had a big pile of nothing.

The sun was already climbing, a thick heat spreading itself over the city, as Behr went back around front and wrote out a note: “All Classes Canceled.” Once the cops were done, they’d lock the door, affix a crime-scene sticker, and leave, and people who hadn’t come that morning, or hadn’t heard the news, might keep showing up. Behr stuck the note to the front window and got out of there. He’d wanted to miss the morning students and assistant instructors. He’d talk to them all soon enough-when he interviewed them-but he wasn’t in the mood for hand-holding and hugs at the moment. Then, since he couldn’t canvass the neighborhood for witnesses, as the cops would be doing that and wouldn’t appreciate him stepping on their toes, he had started driving.

Behr pulled up in front of Aurelio’s house. It was a one-story brick bungalow with a Toyota parked in front. He needed to get in there and take a long look, but now wasn’t the time for that. Police would arrive within minutes, Behr anticipated. He weighed the risk for a split second before hurrying to get a pair of latex gloves out of the kit in his trunk. He tried Aurelio’s car, which was locked. So was the house, both the front and back doors. Behr peered in through the windows but couldn’t see much past the horizontal blinds. What he did see looked undisturbed. Behr stripped off his gloves and hurried back to his car. When the detectives went knocking on doors he didn’t need any neighbors ID’ing him.

Aurelio’s place was a mile and a half from the jiu-jitsu school, and it wasn’t unusual for him to jog that distance to get warmed up before training. That might have been the case today, which would explain why the car was still at home. Or he might have been taken against his will, Behr considered, getting back in his own car and turning over the engine. He was making the left back onto Baker as the first detective’s unmarked unit rolled toward Aurelio’s house…

Cruising around envisioning how the thing could’ve gone was a pointless exercise, but Behr couldn’t help himself. At least for those moments, in his mind, Aurelio was still alive. And when he was done, because he’d run out of things to do for the present, the finality of it was able to surge up into his chest. It was the old vault door asking to be opened, to be filled, to be slammed shut again. All the shit he’d seen on the street as a cop, and then as a private investigator afterward, needed some place to go. So he’d learned pretty quickly to make a spot for it. An empty box inside him where he could throw the pain, and drop the lid on it before it became intolerable. The tendency was to stop thinking of the victims as human beings altogether. Instead, they became a set of facts, an equation to solve, a clue, a piece of meat to be handled. This gave the investigator objectivity. It gave him the ability to reason. It made him powerful and knowing so he was ready in the moment when he had to interdict a perpetrator. Problem was, before long, the ability to discern was lost and a lot of other things ended up getting thrown in the vault as well. Good things, like wives and kids and friends. Just about everything really, and if you weren’t careful, or even if you were, you could end up zombied out, going through the motions in your life and the work, praying that mere competence would get you by.

The evolved cop, the one who distinguished himself, the one who made it all the way, managed to push the pain down someplace but not cut it off completely. He carried it and retained his connection to it, and what it meant. The victims remained human beings to the good cop, and despite the pain-or because of it- that became the cop’s salvation. Behr wasn’t sure in which group he’d spent most of his time on the job. He had his suspicions, especially at the end. But on this one, he swore, he would do it right. So he let the pain come. He let it come.

A loud, angry honk sounded behind him. Behr looked up and saw he was sitting at a green light. He glanced into his rearview mirror at the pickup truck behind him and raised a hand. “I’m going. I’m going,” he said and turned for home.