J Bertrand - Back on Murder

At the top, Charlotte stands, her legs bare, her body swathed in one of my white dress shirts, the collar turned. Her eyes sparkle in the candlelight.

“I thought you’d never get back,” she says. “What took so long?”

I slide my off-duty gun back in the holster, slump down on the bottom step, and bury my head in my hands. Behind me, I hear her weight on the steps, her bare feet padding down, and then her hand touches the back of my neck, cool and dry, her fingers sliding upward through my hair.

The sheets drag away from me, Charlotte rolling in her sleep, and I wake up, staring into the dark, feeling the fan’s cool breeze on my skin, listening to the blades revolve. A thought surfaces, a memory, a yellow string knotted around my imaginary finger, and I turn to the nightstand in dismay, where the clock reads a little past midnight. I was supposed to phone the Robbs. Is it too late to bother them?

My mobile, still in my pants pocket on the floor, displays a string of missed calls. At dinner I’d turned off the ringer and never switched it back. Gina Robb is listed, and so is Carter, calling from his cell. He left a message just a minute ago – it was the buzz of notification, not Charlotte’s movement, that must have wakened me – speaking in a breathy whisper, mentioning an apartment complex in Sharpstown and giving me a unit number, telling me to meet him there right away. I redial his number, but the call goes straight to voicemail.

“What are you doing?” Charlotte asks as I pull my clothes on.

“I’ve gotta go.”

She’s been married to a homicide detective long enough to accept sudden departures. She rolls back over, then grabs my pillow to shore her head up.

“Since you’re leaving,” she says.

Past midnight the landscape of Houston changes, which is another way of saying there’s a lot less traffic. I roll the window down, letting in a blast of humid air, my foot heavy on the accelerator, my heart tight in my chest. The blocks fly past and I’m racing down Interstate 10 until it melts into the Loop, the lighted glass and steel buildings along Post Oak and the towers hedging the Galleria all shimmering in the hazy night. I exit onto Highway 59, impatient in spite of the brisk driving, a sense building inside me that I’ve overstepped. That the error I planted by enlisting Carter Robb will reap a black harvest.

When I reach the address – a modest, drive-up affair with tiny fenced balconies on both levels, perhaps a dozen units in all – I find to my surprise a red logo-covered van from Cypress Community Church parked on the curb just a block away. The man knows nothing of subtlety, but then who would suspect a church van of containing a set of watching eyes?

The complex is not one of the access-controlled empires favored by the gangs, but just a brown, run-down and rusted rental property dating from the 1970s, the kind of place I would have driven past without notice if I hadn’t been looking for it. And if there wasn’t a church van out front. One thing I’m sure of: this address was not on our list.

The number Robb gave me is upstairs, so I ascend the metal steps, keeping my footfalls light, not knowing what to expect. A dusty, spider-webbed grill sits next to the door. The bulb in the fixture beside the entrance is burned out, but the peephole glows dimly, letting me know somebody’s home. I draw my pistol, tucking it down beside my hip, then give the door a light rap.

It opens slightly, straining against a security chain, and I get a glimpse of Carter Robb’s face, pale, damp with sweat, eyes bulging a bit, before the door slams shut. He releases the chain and throws it open wide. His skin has a noticeable pallor, as if he hasn’t eaten in a long time and might be feverish. He wears dark jeans and a black T-shirt that reads VIVA LA REFORMACION in red letters, with a posterized man dressed like he’s going to the Renaissance Festival taking the place of Che Guevara.

“You called,” I say, casting a wary glance over the apartment.

The living room is filled with matched furniture straight out of a thrift shop, upholstered in nubby, synthetic-looking blue tweed. A stack of magazines, mostly checkout counter fare, is centered on the coffee table with the TV remote on top. Posters tacked on the wall. In an armchair, a basket of laundry consisting of towels and socks and T-shirts and women’s underwear, still waiting to be folded. Plastic cups are discarded everywhere, some of them empty, others still with liquid stagnant inside.

Robb wobbles on his feet, taking a step back to steady himself. I reach out, then notice what’s hanging from his left hand.

“You want to give me that?”

He blinks, then glances down at the Ruger.22 caliber pistol, almost as if he didn’t realize it was there. With the barrel down he hands it over. I strip the magazine out, ejecting a round from the chamber, then tuck it into my waistband for safekeeping.

“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I better show you,” he says.

He points down the hallway, toward the bedroom presumably, and I see there’s blood on his hand, and more wetting his dark shirt. His knuckles have the bruised and scuffed look of a man who’s thrown some punches without knowing how. We walk toward the hallway, Robb pausing over the laundry basket. He lifts a wadded shirt, leaving a smear of blood on the fabric.

“This was Evey’s.” He turns it this way and that, then lets it drop. “I was just about to leave, like you said, and as soon as I turned the engine on, there he was. He knocked on a door – not the one from your list – and talked to some guy. They exchanged something. I think he sold the guy drugs, because he had a wad of cash in his pocket. I followed him, and this is where he went.”

He leads the way to the back bedroom, with me trailing a few feet behind, dreading what I’ll find on the other side of the door. I remember the saintly spasm of Octavio Morales’s death agony, the startled expression on Joe Thomson’s face in his final gasp. The security guard, Cropper, coiled up in a pool of blood, dead by my hand on the warehouse pavement. And Salazar, his body small and crumpled under the hospital sheets, that death also down to me.

And this one is, too. Even if Robb pulled the trigger, it’s my sin to carry, just as much as if I’d put the gun in his hand and told him to shoot. I’d deputized him, appointed him an instrument of vengeance, and probably destroyed the man in the process. I can tell by the way he’s moving, the jerking, twisting shuffle, the thousand-mile stare. He’s been gutted, his soul carved out, astonished to find himself capable of such bestiality.

I pause in the dark hallway, just outside the light spilling through the bedroom door, imagining Frank Rios as I last saw him, picturing him spread out on the bed like Morales, hands lifted stiffly heavenward, the blood cooling, settling in his extremities. But when I enter, it isn’t a beatific corpse waiting for me.

Rios sits on the edge of the bed, his wrists lashed together with an extension cord, its opposite end secured to the bedpost beneath him, between his legs, forcing him to hunch forward, to tilt his battered head up in order to see. He looks at me through one eye, the lid swollen, his face puffy and scratched, blood dripping from his mouth and nose. It takes a moment for him to recognize me, and then he tugs on the cord violently. He spits to clear his mouth.

“You gotta help me, man,” he whispers.

Robb goes to the mirrored closet, leaning back against the door, his knees buckling under him. As he slides down, he leaves a wet trail on the glass. I kneel beside him, pulling at the T-shirt. A seeping washrag is duct-taped to his side. Underneath, a tiny hole oozes blood.