Feelers (12 page)

The itchy officer was being called over to where the new arrivals were assembled. You could tell the detectives right away. One was thick and Hispanic, the other slouchy and probably with an Irish name. The officer pointed a commanding finger at me.

“Wait right there.” He ducked under the tape and trotted over to his superiors and the EMS people. A reporter was in the mix, a man named Dexter Lewis. I went to high school with him. He was always recognizable at a distance by his Panama hat as much as by his clubfoot. Dexter lurched around like Juan Valdez with one giant honking black hobnail platform shoe and one small
black ballerina slipper. He was teased and tormented relentlessly back then by the other kids. I was always nice enough to him, and when we ran into each other on the street these days we said hello and exchanged pleasantries. He worked for the local paper, the
Brooklyn Gazette
, and was often the first on a neighborhood crime scene.

I had told the itchy cop my name was Bob. It seemed essential to slink away. If Dexter looked my direction, though, he would recognize me, and when I had vanished, and the cops got upset, he might ID me.

Wasn’t it just hours ago I was worrying about grapes? Wasn’t I considering French cheeses and fancy crackers and blender drinks and shelf cleaning? And do not imagine that I had forgotten about the thong and high heels.

Slowly, like a ghost, I drifted back from all the light and hubbub, seeking the corner of the building and a clear shot at my Camaro on the avenue. It was maybe fifty feet to the corner, and I kept my eyes trained on the fuzz and Dexter. Gawkers straggled around me toward the crime scene. I continued to back slowly toward the corner, toward the avenue, away from the police tape. Now if the authorities and a certain reporter would only keep their attention away from me.

I was next to the building, my hand dragging along the bricks, feeling for the corner.

My fingers danced along the brick, touching the cracks, the mortar, anticipating the sharp edge that would be the corner. I dared not take my eyes from the police and the Panama hat.

At last
.

I spun around the building corner. Directly into Speedy, my foreman, knocking the tiny brown man to the ground.

“Speedy!” I knew it was him immediately by the little straw
cowboy hat he wore, the brim rolled tightly on the sides. I moved to the other side of him, away from the police, and helped him to stand.

Speedy scrambled to his feet, hat in hand, cursing in Spanish. “Morty, what the hell is wrong with you? Jesus Christ, you about ran me over.”

“Come on.” I grabbed him by the elbow and led him to the hulk of my rusty white Camaro at the hydrant.

He shook free of my grip.

“
Dios mio!
What the hell is going on? Where are we going?”

“Mary is dead, killed.” It was then that I could smell the sweet peachy Thunderbird on his thick black mustache. He was a little drunk, and he was always irascible when drunk. “We have to get out of here.”

“We? Why do I have to get out of here? I want to go look.”

I put my hands way down there on his shoulders, trying to remain calm, trying to be fatherly. “Speedy, have I ever lied to you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“I am telling you that it is very important that you get in the car, we move away from here and the police in particular, and that we have a little talk. The cops will not let you see anything anyway, and in fact, they might want to take you down to the station and ask you questions all night long.”

“Your car is better. Mine isn’t running too good. Questions? Me? The police?” This notion seemed to make him teeter slightly, as if he were losing his balance or about to pass out. I took the opportunity to open the passenger door and guide him into the seat. I trotted around the car, got in, and moved us away from the hydrant and the police.

“Morty, are we in trouble with the police?” Speedy chewed on
his mustache nervously. I could see he was wearing what he always wore: plaid shirt, jeans, work boots, and of course his little cowboy hat. He couldn’t have looked more like a migrant worker if he tried. In fact, I think he did try. It was his way of gaining the trust of the laborers. But you would think when off duty he would wear something else. A tracksuit, maybe, and loafers.

“Not yet.”

“Not
yet
? We will be? But I have not done anything?”

I checked my rearview mirror. There were a couple cars behind me, and so I made a turn into an alley to see if any followed me. One did, what looked like an SUV of some kind. The headlights were higher than a sedan.

“Speedy, remember all those tight ones?”

I saw the white of his eyes expand. “Yes, of course.”

“You have any idea how much money was there?”

“I try not to think of it. It is not mine.”

“Well, it was a shitload, and I think there are people who want it.” I checked my mirror again as the alley came to an end and I made a left at the cemetery. The SUV had drifted back, but I saw its headlights swing slowly into line behind me. “You got some of it, and if people want it back, they will take mine and yours.”

“Who are these people that want to take our money, Morty?”

“Let’s just say the person who stole it, and someone who probably wants to steal it from him.”

“
Dios mio
. So what do we do?”

“The first thing we have to do is shake the Balkan Boys.”

“Balkan Boys?” He seemed alarmed. As he should have.

“Pete the Prick is trying to steal the tight ones from me and has the Balkan Boys shadowing me. They are following us now—don’t turn around!”

Of course he did turn around, briefly.

“We need to go someplace for the night where they can’t get us, where maybe we can sneak out the back after a while. Know any place?”

“
Dios mio
. The Balkan Boys are after us. And the police. Are there others? It sounded like there were others, the ones who own the money.”

“Speedy, we own the money. Nobody else. A long time ago, it was legitimately owned by someone else, then it was stolen. Think, Speedy, where can we go?” I glanced at the headlights in the rearview. “We cannot go to my place, or yours . . . a barrio bar or something? After-hours place?”

Speedy sank his face into his hands, as if weeping, but I know this was the posture of thought for my friend. He seemed to need the darkness of his hands for the process of contemplation to be successful. It did not take long before he raised his face and showed me his big white teeth. It was a smile, of course, but a particular wolfish kind of smile men recognize.

“Chica bar!”

AS SPEEDY AND I DROVE
to the chica bar, the police examined the scene of the crime at Upscale Realty.

So did Dexter. As a star reporter, he was well connected and sort of had special privileges other reporters sometimes did not. That is to say, he had influence with local politicians and elected offcials, which I guess are the same thing if you think about it. Anyway, the cops trusted him not to use information and circumstances against them and had always championed their causes in his editorials. He did this almost purely out of a desire for the kind of access he was enjoying at Upscale Realty. He was allowed to put on the plastic shoe covers and roam the crime scene while the forensics people put things in Baggies and took photographs.

There was a lot to look at because the place was a mess, and the forensics people were rolling their eyes and shaking their heads at the task before them. It was like looking for a pin in a pile of grass clippings.

Dexter prided himself on being highly observant of things that were out of the ordinary, that were out of place. He stood in front of the desk where Mary had been killed. Her body had
been photographed and removed, but there was blood on the desk and much clutter. Dexter’s eyes came to rest on the flyer on Mary’s desk, the one of Danny that Charlie had dropped off.

How had this flyer come to be here among her house listings, lien searches, and applications? The paper it was copied onto was still very white, unlike copy paper that has been exposed to light for a few weeks, and it was near the top of the pile of blood-spattered papers on her desk. So he knew it was recent.

Dexter did not want to draw attention to the flyer. If the police found it and thought that this was important evidence, well . . . they were the experts, not him. At the same time, he felt it was important, so he leaned down for a quick look at what little of the flyer he could see. Yes, it was a mug shot. It did not look like there was a name on the flyer.

So how would a real estate broker come to possess this flyer? Unlikely she made it herself unless she moonlighted as a private detective. More likely that someone would have given it to her. Would someone have just given it to her, just given it to a single real estate broker? It was clear to Dexter that whoever made this flyer was looking for this person and had given it to Mary as part of the search. This person would be canvassing the neighborhood, and thus there were probably other people out there with this same poster. So even as Dexter could not touch anything at the crime scene, much less take this flyer, he determined to ask around to see if anybody else had found it.

Dexter glanced down again at the flyer. Perhaps this was nothing. Then again, perhaps this was the face of the killer staring right back at all these police. Would they think to notice it? A picture of the killer was not the sort of thing they usually expected to find at a crime scene, so Dexter figured it might take them a while.

Detective Ruez was suddenly standing next to him in front of the desk. He was a barrel-chested Hispanic man in his forties with a cleft chin and nervous but dull eyes.

“Notice the blood spatter?” Ruez pointed with his cleft chin. “She was sitting down. Which is why he got her in the eye, not the gut or chest.”

“Wow, I didn’t notice that.” Dexter adjusted his Panama hat and smiled admiringly at Ruez’s cunning detective work. Ruez was probably right. Of course, her body was next to the toppled chair, so Dexter did not consider this a novel observation.

The other detective, who had a very faint mustache, shambled up next to Dexter’s other flank. He was one of those adult males who would never quite shed his boyish looks, and though he wore a tie and jacket, he tended to squirm as if the clothes made him uncomfortable. His name was Pool, and he nodded his head thoughtfully. “Must have been someone she knew. Some of the neighbors we interviewed said she locked the doors after five but often worked late. So she must have let him in. No sign of forced entry.”

“
Him
?” Dexter asked naively.

Ruez and Pool shared a dull look and said in unison: “It’s always a he when it’s a she.”

“Yes, I have noticed that, too. You are right. Most likely a he.” Dexter was outwardly admiring their insights while inwardly wondering when they would see the mug shot for the blood spatter. You know, like the forest for the woods.

It was moments like these that made Dexter feel like a genius.

Wasn’t it Einstein who invented the atom bomb?

SPEEDY AND I DROVE TO
Queens, the clumsy Balkan Boys in tow, to a Latino area that I would not normally go to but was no doubt familiar to most of the day workers. That is because it is where most of them lived in shabby rental homes, six to a room, like in a bunk house on a ranch. Their lodgings were illegal, of course, and every once in a while the city cracked down on them as they do on many small crimes—mainly for show.

You may wonder what day laborers do when they are not crowding street corners in their steel-tipped work boots. They make very little money, and most of what profits they make are sent to their families in Mexico or Central or South America. Of course, they must eat, but most of that is rice and beans, almost exclusively. You could not spend a lot of money on rice and beans if you tried. So once you have the food and shelter part taken care of, what do you have left?

As they say, men do not live by rice and beans alone.

We drove into an area that was houses on one side and auto shops and wrecking yards on the other.

“Here.” Speedy pointed to a driveway with a chain across it.

“Here?” It looked like the entrance to a scrap yard of some kind, but then beyond the streetlamp glow I could make out a row of cars.

“Beep the horn. Just one small beep.”

I did so.

A dark man in a tight white T-shirt appeared from the lot ahead. He was a large man, the kind that flexes his muscles in front of mirrors, and he stepped over the chain and swaggered toward us.

“It’s me, Speedy.”

“Speedy who?”

“Come on, Pitu, you know me.”

The large man took a flashlight from his belt and shined it through Speedy’s window, blinding us.

The light went out, and by the time my eyes could see more than green blobs I saw the large man in the tight white T-shirt standing to one side of the drive holding the chain.

So I drove in and parked next to the other crappy cars. They were even more rusted than mine.

We climbed out.

“Speedy, what is this place?”

“Come on, Morty, I will show you.”

He started off to a far corner of the lot, where I could see Pitu’s white T-shirt. As we got closer, I could see he was standing next to a door leading into what looked like an abandoned manufacturing plant of some kind.

“I like to tip Pitu—give him ten bucks, Morty.”

I fished out a ten-spot and handed it to Pitu at the door. He took it without a smile or thank you and opened the door.

Bomba music and light lay beyond the door. I shielded my eyes and saw tables filled with little thick brown men like Speedy.
Except they had their hair carefully slicked back and wore equally slick, brightly colored shirts and tight white or black pants. They far outnumbered the thick little brown women scattered amongst them in frilly dresses. Some of these women sat in the men’s laps, some just sat next to them holding their hands, and some others sat with men playing cards.