The Art of Death (22 page)
Authors: Margarite St. John
Burn Pit
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Thursday was a normal June day in Fort Wayne. Scattered clouds, a light breeze, no rain, temperature in the seventies -- perfect for outdoor work. Though Archie Trubrook liked being outside as much as any working man, he grumbled at his son’s request to meet at the Appledorn farmstead before he started his shift as a welder at an equipment repair facility. “What’s this about?” he asked, but Dougie didn’t know for sure.
Archie did not offer to shake hands when he was introduced to Lieutenant David Powers and Walter Richardson. Though he kept his hands in his pockets, he nodded politely. “What’s up?” he asked.
“Your son,” Dave said, “told us you might know something about the ashes in the big tomb out back. Specifically, the ashes in that urn with no sign on it.”
“Dougie asked me about that. You mind if I take a look? It’s been a few years.”
Once in the mausoleum, Archie hunkered down to take a close look and ran his hand over the urn. “Yup. I remember. I did the welding on this thing in the new pole barn I’d just put up, then brought it out here.”
“You remember the year?”
“More than that. It was April 19, 2006.”
“How do you remember that?”
“It was Dougie here’s twenty-first birthday. Chester said it was an emergency, it couldn’t wait another minute. Which I knew was crazy, but he wasn’t a man you crossed in those days. I argued it couldn’t be that important, but Chester wouldn’t take no for an answer. Besides he offered a fifty-dollar tip as a bonus. Nothing went right, though. My torch wasn’t working the way it should. Then I had a flat tire getting out here to deliver the thing. Chester didn’t have cash so I had to wait while he went to the bank. He insisted I cement it into place. One thing led to another and I ended up being late to Dougie’s party. Over an hour late, if I remember right. My wife had cleared out the pole barn except for my welding station, which she hid behind canvas curtains she hung from the ceiling. She decorated the place up real nice to look like a Texas beer hall, installed temporary ceiling lights, laid out big tables of food -- you know, pulled pork, beans, that kind of stuff. She invited everybody in the county. She even hired a dance band. Let me tell you, she gave me holy hell when I finally showed up.” He laughed grimly. “She could a welded hard metal to an iron base with just her tongue that night.”
“Did you put the ashes in the urn or did Chester?” Dave asked.
“He did.”
“What did he tell you they were from?”
“A dog.”
“You ever see the dog before it died?”
“No.”
“Did he give you a name?”
“No.”
“Where had the dog been cremated?”
Archie looked puzzled. “No idea.”
Walter spoke up for the first time. “Did Chester have a burn pit? I understand most farmers do.”
“Probably. My son would know better than me. I don’t know this farm like he does.”
“Dougie?” Dave prompted.
Dougie nodded. “At the very back of the property. Hasn’t been used since I got here, so far as I know. Somebody must have cut down hollyhocks and thrown them on because all around the edges, a perfect circle of hollyhocks has grown up. Otherwise, not much grows on the burn pile itself.” Dougie tilted his head as he gazed at the back of the property. “You think that’s where the dog’s body was burned?”
“Take us back there.”
Dave and Walter were silent as they trudged to the back of the property but they were thinking the same thing. The last time anyone saw Dan Belden alive was April 18, 2006.
Too Cruel
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Steve Wright had no more laid out the blueprints on his makeshift table at the Appledorn farm than he received a call from Madeleine Harrod.
Now what?
he thought with irritation. If he charged like a lawyer by the hour, he’d make a fortune taking Madeleine’s calls. She was always just checking to see how things were going, considering changing this or that but never quite coming to a decision, wondering when she could expect to start using the barn again.
Sometimes she tried to entangle him in romantic reminiscences about how hot the sex was when they were first married, how for the first six months they hardly saw their friends, preferring bedtime sport to social life. Intertwined with those memories were many encouraging words about his skill as a developer, his business acumen, his amazing ability to make a wife feel safe and protected. In his present financial plight as a businessman who had been duped by men he trusted and who owed almost every penny he made to a creditor or investor, Steve required every ounce of character to resist his ex-wife’s blandishments.
But this call was different. She was hysterical. “He was shot in an alley, Steve. Can you believe that? Last night.”
“Who was shot in what alley?”
“Anthony!” she cried impatiently as if he weren’t paying attention. “Anthony was shot. Here in Indianapolis. Behind Babette’s art gallery. She sent him a text message asking him to go to the back door in the alley to pick up a package, supposedly a gift from me for his 53rd birthday. But she -- .”
“Who?”
“Babette Fouré! God, aren’t you listening? She’s the art dealer who sells my paintings. She claims she didn’t send him a message at all, but the cops say she did. The message is on his cellphone. I haven’t seen it but I believe them. Cops don’t lie, do they? I didn’t find out until it was almost daylight when the cops stormed into Babette’s house. I was staying there because I was afraid to be alone at the hotel. Just between you and me, her house is way overdone to look French with about a hundred too many pictures on the wall salon-style. And she doesn’t have even one of my paintings on her walls. Too sad. Anyway, they quizzed us -- .”
“Who quizzed who?” Steve interjected, lost in the disjointed thoughts, the digressions, the lost pronouns, the torrent of words.
“The cops quizzed Babette and me like suspects, if you can imagine that. We didn’t even have time to change out of our night clothes or get a cup of coffee. As if we had anything to do with shooting the poor man, and then they made us go to the morgue to identify him. Oh, Steve, he looked so terrible, all the blood drained out of him, a hole in his throat. They tried to keep his eyes closed but one -- the green one -- wouldn’t stay shut. That eye made me burst into giggles. The detective looked at me like I was crazy, but I was just so startled.
“Now I don’t know what to do. His death has hit me finally. I’m shaking so hard I can barely hold this phone. I can’t drive home alone but I’ve got to leave here. Daddy can’t come get me and I don’t know who else to ask but you. Can you please, please, pretty please come get me?”
“Is your car there?”
“Oh, yes, not only mine but Anthony’s too. But I don’t want to go near his stupid Fiat, which is nothing but a symbol of a midlife crisis. So unoriginal! I expected better of him. Besides the police are checking it out right now, so I won’t get possession of it for awhile.”
“Why would you get possession of it at all? You weren’t married to him, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t married to Anthony,” she said a little sharply. “But he promised to leave everything to me. But that’s not the issue right now. I can’t think straight. In this condition, I’d be a menace on the road even in my own car.”
“Why don’t you stay in a hotel for a few days till you calm down? Or maybe one of your employees or that Babette you mentioned will let you stay over for awhile till you feel better.”
“Oh, Lefty, don’t go all sensible and reasonable on me. Not now. You know, I feel so bad for Anthony, but despite his intellect, none of this is the least surprising. He was the most feckless man I ever met.”
“What’s feck and what did he have less of?”
She laughed. “Oh, you stand-up comedian. Irresponsible. Incompetent. Do you know he could barely change a light bulb? He couldn’t even hang a picture or get a new television to work. He couldn’t golf or play tennis or figure out how to use a fishing rod. Smart and distinguished, a dry sense of humor, and besotted with me, but he wasn’t a real man.”
“Real men aren’t smart and distinguished or funny?”
“Oh, Lefty, you know what I mean. He was way too gullible. I mean, what did he think would happen if he walked down an alley at night to get a mysterious package through a back door?”
“What time of night? What alley?”
“Eight thirty. The alley behind Babette’s art gallery. Anthony was a friend of Babette’s.”
“At eight thirty it was still light, so why would he hesitate? And if he was a friend of the art gallery owner, I can’t imagine why he’d be concerned.”
She sighed dramatically. “Because it was such a strange thing for Babette to ask of him. So out of the ordinary. You’re too smart to fall for something like that. You know how to think like a man. I should never have let you go.”
“You didn’t.”
I’d have shoved you over a cliff if I were a different man. And the fact that I let you live doesn’t mean I need you to tell me I know how to think.
He looked over at the house. “I don’t know if Nettie’s here yet. You want Dougie or me to check on your dad?”
“No. Definitely not. He’s fine. Nettie was going to stay overnight, so if you don’t see her, she’s probably cleaning something in the house. Don’t bother her. I don’t want Daddy to hear about this except from me. So will you come get me?”
“Sorry, but I can’t do that today.”
Or any other day
.
“Make some other arrangement until you feel better. Take your time. The cops may not want you to leave right away anyway. Or have one of your employees drive you home and fly him back to Indy.”
“Lefty, you’re too cruel. I’ll never forgive you.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
Chador
Friday, June 21, 2013
Pedro “Gomba” Escobar was arrested Friday in Indianapolis. As soon as Dave Powers heard about the murder of Dr. Beltrami, he gave Detective Ken Robins a tip about Gomba. The man had little dark eyes and deep furrows in his forehead as if he had a perpetual headache. He was missing the little finger on his left hand. Gang tattoos covered his neck and arms. He drove a black Cadillac. He had a rap sheet a yard long.
Gomba -- which was Spanish for glue and prison slang for heroin -- was the drug courier who claimed Dr. Anthony Beltrami had been a regular client up until a month or so before he was arrested in Fort Wayne and owed him a whole lot of money. After Gomba made bail, he followed the doctor to the State’s capital with the intention of collecting what was owed to him. Dave Powers didn’t know that Gomba had left Fort Wayne but his suspicions turned out to be accurate.
Gomba’s image had been caught on Babette Fouré’s security camera. The film was frustrating to Robins. It caught the victim as he took a shot to the back of the neck. A few seconds later it caught Gomba, carrying a gun, stealthily emerging from the shadow of a dumpster. He leaned over the stricken man and grabbed the wrist adorned with the Rolex that Madeleine Harrod claimed to be a gift from her. Gomba swore that he was only checking the man’s pulse. If the
guey
was still alive, he’d have called the authorities. But the Rolex was just too hard to resist. In fact, Gomba was wearing it a few hours later when he was stopped for a traffic violation in his Cadillac. He was also carrying a 3.4” black Walther in his jacket pocket, the gun noticed on the security film.
Gomba swore he wasn’t the shooter. He wasn’t there to harm the
guey
-- which he explained with a smirk meant castrated bull. A gun powder test suggested he wasn’t lying, and the casing recovered at the scene was a .38, not a .22.
Unfortunately, the security camera did not catch the shooter, who was apparently just out of range.
But Gomba saw the shooter, he said. His description was so fanciful, however, that Robins would have dismissed it as nonsense but for certain items his technicians found in another dumpster at the far end of the alley after Gomba’s arrest.
“Tell me again,” Robins said. “What did the shooter look like?”
“It was a person dressed sort of like a priest -- you know, Santería or
Día de Muertos.”
On his computer screen, Robins showed Gomba an array of pictures of Catholic liturgical garments and Day of the Dead costumes. “See anything here?”
“No. Maybe it was more like something from one of those countries where women dress in tents, just their eyes showing. You know, yards of stuff.”
Robins clicked on a picture of a chador. “Was the person dressed in something like this?”
“Yeah. What is that?”
Robins explained that it was the cloak Muslim women wore as part of the Islamic dress code know as hijab. “But you say you saw the person’s eyes. What color were they?”
“No idea. I wasn’t thinking about the color. The light wasn’t good.”
“How about shoes?”
“Didn’t look.”
“You see the person’s hands?”
“No.”
“How tall?”
Gomba looked off into space. “Maybe a little taller than me.”
“Everybody’s taller than you. I’ve seen bigger doorstops.”
Unexpectedly, Gomba smiled, flashing a gold tooth. “That’s why I didn’t make the bowling team.”
Robins despised attempts at humor. “If you didn’t see the person’s eyes, hands, or shoes, then you don’t have any idea whether it was a woman or man under all that stuff.”
The furrows in Gomba’s forehead deepened. “If it wasn’t a priest, then it had to be a woman. No man would wear that cape.”
“Did you see the gun?”
“No. I didn’t really take a long look at the walking tent until I heard the shot.”
“Why not?”
“A clown, I thought, maybe some kind of
lunático
. Looked harmless enough.”
“You can’t even be sure that the woman -- or man -- in the chador did the shooting then, can you?”
Gomba shrugged. “I got ears. Besides, nobody else was nearby.”
“You sure you didn’t do the shooting?”
“I’m sure.”
“What did the figure in the chador do after the shot?”
“Turned around and walked away.”
“Why didn’t you try to catch the person, call the cops, yell for help?”
Gomba sputtered his lips. “Not my fight. Anyway, what’s a
chota
gonna do? Huh?”
Robins was offended but didn’t show it.
Chota
was prison slang for a crooked cop. “Not all cops are crooked.”
“Man, you don’t know nothing.”
“Why did you take the doctor’s watch?”
Gomba rolled his beady little eyes. “Because I could.”
“Then why not take his wallet too?”
“Didn’t have time. Some people on the street stopped to look down the alley.”
“Too bad for you. You missed an expensive diamond ring in his pocket.”
“No shit!”
“The good news is you won’t need a watch or a diamond ring where you’re going. And we’ll be checking your fingerprints on the gun we found in a dumpster, just in case you and not the stranger in the chador fired it.”
“Good luck.”
“And we’ll be test-firing your little .22 caliber pistol just for fun.”
“You don’t look like a man ever had fun.”
Robins ignored that. “A .22 is not a gun I’d expect you to carry.”
“Why?”
“Hard to kill a man with that. Have to aim perfectly or get real lucky.”
“Yeah. But you can make a man sweat, not knowing how many bullets you got left.”