Done for a Dime (4 page)

“The Zoom Room.” Stluka grinned. “It’s still deception, Murch.”

“So’s just about everything else at that age. She’s our only shot at an eyewitness so far. I’m not going to bag that up and log it till I know it means something. Let the defense blow its own smoke.”

Stluka sighed. “Fair enough. For now.” He dropped the other ID in and set the purse back down beside the piano. “Join me for a stroll?”

He turned and headed down the hallway. Murchison followed, watching as Stluka checked in every opening he passed—linen closet, laundry hamper, bathroom shelves—sniffing at things like a disgruntled critic lost in the bowels of some minor museum. He lifted pictures, checking behind for wall safes. Kicked the baseboards, listening for hidey-holes.

They came to two bedrooms at the end of the hall, and Murchison supposed the son had been using the smaller one. There was one bed, a twin, covered with an old Hudson blanket. The desktop was neat. Stluka pulled open a desk drawer, peeked inside, then shut it again.

“Can we agree this room looks undisturbed?”

Murchison inspected the closet. The clothes hung straight, shirts stacked tidily on the shelf above, shoes lined up like little soldiers on the floor below. Not many. Not enough. Inside a plastic bag he found a turtleneck and denim overalls, hightops, and socks. All stuffed in together, like laundry, and small. A woman’s. The girl had changed here, but no sign of staying.

“He doesn’t live here. The son, I mean. His being here, it’s short-term. And the girlfriend.” Murchison set the bag back down, nodded toward the narrow bed. “She doesn’t sleep over.”

Stluka considered it. “Maybe she’s a Thoroughbred, sleeps standing up.” He pointed across the hall. “Or she spends the night with Daddy.”

“You think?”

“I try not to make up my mind about people till they’ve had a chance to disappoint me.”

The furniture in the larger bedroom across the hall was Sears-quality, decades old. No conspicuous sign of disturbance, just day-to-day carelessness. Worn slippers lay askew beneath the unmade bed. Drawers sat open, revealing nothing valuable or shameful, just old clothes, folded and clean. An old dusty TV sat atop the highboy.

Stluka opened the closet. “Here’s where the guy’s money went.” He fingered the sleeve to a silk suit jacket. “Snazz ’n’ pizzazz. Show Man.” He dropped the sleeve, turned around. “Whereas this.” He gestured toward the room. “Dressed with flash, lived in trash.”

It was something routinely said of junkies. “You think?”

“No, we’d have seen more signs by now. Expression just leapt to mind.” Stluka looked around again, shivered with disgust. “This guy got laid, he did it somewhere else. Unless he was paying for it.”

Murchison checked the closet after Stluka, noted he was right: the quality of the wardrobe outpaced everything else in the house by far. Not surprising, Murchison thought, remembering the clothes on the body and what Marcellyne Pathon had said. He was
big.
Somebody with the guts to call his band The Mighty Firefly had to have style—thus the nickname, one supposed. Strong.

“ARF,” Stluka said behind him.

Murchison turned, saw Stluka holding a prescription bottle, studying the label. “What the hell is ‘ARF’?”

Murchison took the bottle from him. “Acute Renal Failure.” He checked the other bottles on top of the bed stand. They were the usual garden-variety post-op brew: antibiotics, painkillers, some Halcion for sleep. They rested atop a checklist titled
“Nephrectomy: Expectations after Surgery. Convalescence
.
”

“Our victim only had one kidney.”

“I think that’s the least of his worries right about now.”

“Dates on these scrips, I’d say it came out about two months ago.”

“You going somewhere with this?”

“Holmes found a bottle in a bag beside the guy. He’s putting it away, with one kidney.”

“Unless his doctor killed him for being a crappy patient, why do I care?”

Murchison shrugged. “Thinking out loud.” He crouched down, opened the bed stand drawer. “Well, well, what have we here, Mr. Carlisle?” Among reading glasses and ear plugs and Kleenex packs sat a snub-nosed .38, black metal with a brown wood grip. Loose shells rattled around in the bottom of the drawer. Careless old fool, he thought. He lifted the weapon, showed it to Stluka, then put it to his nose, shook his head. “Thing hasn’t been fired in forever.”

“Ah, piss.” Stluka pulled back the bedcovers, checked beneath the pillows, found a Walkman but no second gun. “Bag the damn thing anyway. Give it to ballistics, let them confirm the obvious. Remind us what geniuses they are.”

Murchison pulled an evidence bag from his pocket, shook it open, dropped the gun inside and then the cartridges. “Victim felt a need to keep a gun by his bed.”

“In this neighborhood, come on. Wouldn’t you?”

Checking the drawer again, Murchison found a photograph inside. An old one. He took it out. The face didn’t register with the others he’d seen in the living room. A woman, in her mid-twenties or so. She had long hair drawn back with combs, setting off her eyes and smile. On the back he found an inscription:
Dear Raymond—With the warmest of hearts—Felicia.
The script, it was perfectly feminine. You could almost smell her perfume.

“Think we found the secret sweetheart.”

Stluka took the picture from him, checked it front and back. “This thing’s twenty years old, minimum.”

Just then, the heater came on, erupting from the cellar with a sound like thunder. Warm air that stank of mildew began pouring through the wall vents.

Stluka shrank away from it. “I am really beginning to hate this case.”

Murchison took the picture back, studied it one more time, then slipped it into his pocket. “Ideas?”

Stluka cracked his knuckles. “Maybe it’s me, but I sense friction between the father and son.”

“Style, you mean?”

“Everything in Its Proper Place versus I Do What I Want—Try and Stop Me.”

“The vic looks like a character,” Murchison agreed. “Headstrong. Daddy likes his drama. Son seems the dutiful type. And the girl?”

“I’m not sold on her being uninvolved. Not yet.”

“Interesting.” Murchison granted Stluka his instincts, which as a cop were often solid. His faults as a human being, those you had to deal with as they came. “And it’s not just that the son’s a neat freak, or that he’s only here short-term. It’s strange. He’s made an effort to clear a space for himself, but there’s no real stake in it.”

“I’m here. Don’t push it.”

“Yeah.”

“And I’m still hung up on this thing about him walking. There’s a piece missing. He didn’t walk thirty miles home.”

Murchison headed for the door, glancing around one last time. “Check out the rest of the house?”

In the kitchen, a coffee mug lay in the sink, two cold tea bags shriveled inside it.

“Smell that?”

Stluka was already square with the next doorway. “I smell a lot of things. Pick one.”

Murchison lifted the cup, sniffed, made sure. “Brandy, I think. Alcohol for sure.”

Stluka closed his eyes, palms pressing his temples. “Murch, I got it. Okay? The guy was a lush.”

“Bear with me.” Murchison opened cabinets, peered in. He found the brandy bottle. The cap was sticky but loose, like it had just been reopened after sitting awhile. “The father had a bad enough drinking problem it cost him a kidney. The son’s here to play caretaker. How long? Depends on how good a patient the old man is. Eight weeks of convalescence, he’s already at it again.”

“You think they fought about it.”

“From the picture we saw, the son’s no loser. He looks smart. And he’s got himself a girlfriend, his own career. But he hauls himself up here anyway, to live in this dreary old hole.” He nodded toward the cup in the sink. “Now this. Old man’s mixing it in his tea, which is either some kind of homebrew cocktail or he was trying to hide it. And that means, yeah, maybe they fought about it.”

Stluka stared back from the doorway, giving it thought. He blinked like a cat.

“You’re the one brought up friction,” Murchison said.

Stluka waved his hands in mock surrender. “I confess.”

“I mean, given the neighborhood, the way he died, I wouldn’t say this was a family deal. But in here—”

“Tells a different story, yes it does.” Stluka tapped his hands against the door frame. “Wrap this up?”

The next doorway opened onto the addition. Mismatched chairs and music stands rested in haphazard clusters. Bookshelves, crammed with sheet music, lined one wall. The other three were covered with egg crate foam. The craftsmanship was shoddy—below, the rug buckled and curled at the edges, never tacked down; above, the ceiling lacked several acoustic tiles.

Stluka clasped his hands atop his head. “This guy had a real knack for unfinished business.”

At the back of the room, a gold banner with black lettering hung from the ceiling, draped wall to wall:

S
TRONG
C
ARLISLE
& T
HE
M
IGHTY
F
IREFLY
MF R&B

It dawned on Murchison, finally, what the curious name was code for: Mother Fucker. He felt the spirit of the dead man in that house a little more profoundly. Strong, they called him. Big, Marcellyne Pathon said. Cagey and sloppy and stylish and wild. With an ambivalent son and a twenty-year soft spot for a sweet-faced woman whose picture he hid away.

3

T
oby Marchand sat alone in one of the police station’s two cinder block interview rooms. He was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn onstage that night: gray serge suit, white Oxford shirt, Nino Mori necktie. He smelled of sweat, some of it rank from fear. His mouth tasted sour from vomit.

The memory came unbidden. Turning the corner, seeing too many people out and squad cars parked helter skelter in the street, strobe lights spinning. Feeling the bottom drop out of his stomach. Running up, pushing through the crowd—he got recognized, got ignored—reaching the gate, only to be hammerlocked by the cop standing there, told he couldn’t go in. Shortly after, told why.

The images froze in his mind. Then the next moment he half expected his father to storm through the interview room doorway: Howling abuse. Ready to raise hell. The delusion brought to mind amputees complaining of pain in phantom limbs.

He’d been in the practice room, straddling a wood chair, reaming his trombone slide with a cleaning rod coiled in cheesecloth. Five o’clock, already twilight. His father charged in barefoot. His trouser legs flapped against his calves, shirttails sailing behind as he strode forward. He carried a large mug in one hand. The other hand rose up from his side, and a long bony finger sliced the air.

“Hey, boy wonder—yeah, you—eyes front.”

Toby ignored him. Established habit.

“You gonna tell me what the fuck’s goin’ on? Or you want, I can guess. I’d love to guess.”

Toby puffed his cheeks and sighed. “May I infer from your bellowing that your health is sound?”

“I’ll bellow all I
goddamn
please. Got a fourteen-year-old white girl out there has the nerve to think she’s some kind of fucking nurse.”

From beyond the doorway leading back to the kitchen, a tiny female voice: “I’m sorry.”

“I want somebody’s face in my business, I’ll call my sister.”

Removing the cloth-wrapped rod from his slide, Toby inspected it for bits of flaking brass. The cheesecloth smelled of Slide-O-Mix.

“Not fourteen. Nineteen. Nadya is nineteen.”

“Like hell she is. That girl’s a virgin. I can hear the skinny-skin snapping like a snare head when she walks across the room.”

Toby glanced up, his eyes a warning. “I seriously doubt that.”

“You speaking from personal experience?”

Toby uttered a soft begrudging moan. “Unh-uh. You’ll have to try harder than that. Meanwhile, back to the point, she’s nineteen.”

“You better pray to God she is, junior.”

Toby opened the carrying case for his horn, placed the slide and the main assembly down into their velvet bed, and snapped the clasps shut. “Remind me, O ancient one—this the Jack Johnson speech, or the Chuck Berry speech?”

“Given I still say she’s fourteen, it’s the Chuck Berry speech. And good for you, child prodigy, to know there’s a goddamn difference.”

Toby rose from his chair. “Yes, well—”

“Jack Johnson went down because his woman was white. Not because she was young. Chuck Berry, that girl was young. And white. So yes, dear boy of mine, this is the Chuck Berry speech.”

“Marie is only six years old,” Toby sang quietly.

“Not that young.”

“Ta-da.”

“But white.”

Toby lifted the necktie from the back of his chair and slid it under his collar. Fastening his top shirt button, he glanced to the ceiling and intoned, “The color white. ‘The intensifying agent in things most appalling to mankind.’”

His father squinted. “Damn straight.” A finger softly tapped the side of his cup. “Who said that?”

“Melville,” Toby replied. “White guy.”

“You’re developing a serious case of snide, know that?”

As he passed his father, Toby caught the sharp sour taint coming from the old man’s tea. He stopped, leaned forward, sniffed. “Tell me that’s not what I think it is.”

His father tipped the cup away and nodded toward the door beyond which Nadya still lingered, out of sight. “Seems to me you got your own business to mind.”

“You are my business. I wouldn’t be here if you weren’t.”

A car horn sounded from the street. “Good God.” Toby checked his watch. “Nadya,” he called out. “Go out, please, tell Francis I’ll be there in five?”

The girl edged out from the shadow of the doorway. She was petite, finely boned, with jet-black hair, dressed in a turtleneck, overalls, hightop Keds. Fierce eyes dominated a bone-white face. Nadya Katarinya Lazarenko. Toby liked saying the name out loud, quietly to himself. Ukrainian, it conjured images of tormented exiles, seraphic ballerinas.

“Five minutes,” he said again, gentler this time.

She nodded, held out her hand, every finger extended—as though to respond, “Gotcha, five, over.” Toby half expected a cartoonish
fffuuttt
as she withdrew the hand, spun around, and fled. It was part of her charm, this comic, almost goofy eccentricity. A defense she’d concocted against her family.