David Levien - Where the dead lay

He had a pair of jeans and his laptop in the car, so he’d changed and driven to a coffee place with wireless Internet, and parked outside. Using their signal he accessed a pay database reverse directory and ran the phone number marked by the “F” in Aurelio’s book. He got an address on West Elm Avenue and headed for it.

He came up on the building and pulled over. It was a low-slung two-story stucco job that looked like it had been built as a motor inn thirty or forty years back but had been converted over to apartments. Behr clocked the unit, 11-B, on the far corner of the second floor. The curtains were drawn and it had no lights on at the moment. He got a look at one of the doors on the ground floor in front of him and it caused him to lean over and root around in the glove box until he found his fish-eye. Then he got out of the car and trotted up the stairs.

Behr tapped at the door a few times, waited, and then gave it a good whack. There was no one home, or no answer anyway. He tried to peer between the curtains but couldn’t get much of a look. He glanced around, saw no activity about the building, and produced what he’d brought from his glove box: his fish-eye lens peephole viewer. He placed the conical piece of plastic over the peephole on the door and leaned close. The convex lens gave him a super-wide-angle view inside the apartment. The wide lens and the darkness combined to create a somewhat distorted picture, but it was clear enough for him to see that the place was vacant.

Behr heard a thin, raspy cough behind him. He palmed the fish-eye and turned to see a bony, aged black man standing there. The man sported a swollen and blackened eye with a broken blood vessel in it that had spilled red where it should have been white around the iris.

“Who you looking for, Officer?” the man asked. He was hunched over a bad leg and supported himself with a cane.

“Who are you?” Behr asked, flat and cop-ish.

“Ezra Blanchard,” the man said. “I’m the on-site building manager. The real manager works at an office.”

“Then you know who I’m looking for,” Behr said.

“Flavia’s gone,” Ezra said, a slight tremble in his voice. There’s my “F,” Behr thought. “Gone on to a nicer place,” Ezra continued, and coughed. Behr tried to read him, wondering if she’d passed away and the old man was being poetic. “… that she’d found with her cousin,” he finally added.

“When?”

“Not long ago.” The man gave it some thought. “Two weeks.”

“Mid-month?” Behr asked.

“She had some paid time left, but she was in a hurry to go.”

“You have an address?”

“She told me she’d send it to me, to forward on any mail and her security check. And she asked me not to give it out when I did.”

“I understand,” Behr said.

“But she never did send it. Guess she forgot. Or changed her mind,” the old man said. His posture stiffened up after he spoke.

“I see. What happened to you, buddy? You take a trip down these stairs or something?” Behr asked.

Ezra just stared at him. Behr felt his gaze find the bloody and blackened eye and willed himself to try and read the man’s good one. “Not exactly,” Ezra finally answered.

“Who was she worried about getting to her?” Behr asked. Sometimes a simple zigzag was all it took on a person not used to lying. Ezra just shrugged. “That’s fine, but the ‘I can’t tell you’ bit isn’t gonna work here,” Behr said firmly.

Ezra shuddered a bit. “If it’s police business, I can tell you… I can tell you she was trying to keep away from that dude she was seeing

… if I had my guess.”

Behr just stood there in the night for a moment. “Is that who did this to you, Ezra?” he asked. Ezra paused, then nodded.

“Now who would he be?” Behr asked.

“Never did get a name. He’d wait in the car for her to come down. Then he’d drive her off. He’d bring her back late sometimes, and go in with her. But he’d be gone before morning,” Ezra said.

“What kind of guy was this?” Behr asked.

“White dude. Young. Six feet, lean and lanky. Had some shaggy brown hair. He’d go stomping up and down the stairs no matter what time of night it was. When she wasn’t around, he’d bang on her door and yell all night. He was a real asshole, this dude.”

“And you saw him rough her up, or drag her around? You got in the middle of it?”

“No,” Ezra said.

“But you think she was trying to lose the guy?”

“Oh, she did. ’Cause I seen him show up here a few times looking for her since she gone. Last time he kept banging on the door for twenty minutes until I went and talked to him. I asked him to quiet down. Told him she moved. Told him I didn’t have a forwarding address and to leave. He said to get outta his face or I’d ‘end up down by the river listening to the trains whistle by.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s what this dude said: ‘Tell me where she is or you’ll end up floating downriver by the m-f’ing railroad tracks.’ But he said the whole m-f word. Man, he was drunk as hell. I kept on telling him I didn’t know, and then… Well, like I said, the dude was a real asshole.”

“Did you call the cops?” Behr wondered.

“Didn’t have to,” Ezra said, “they came on their own. Someone else must’ve called. The guy was long gone of course. And then this lieutenant showed up, real nice fella, and took my statement. Told me they’d try and track the boyfriend down, but if he showed up again I should stay inside.”

“A lieutenant, huh?” Behr asked. Ezra nodded.

“You ever see her with a guy by the name of Aurelio Santos?”

“What’s he look like?” Ezra asked.

“About five-ten. Solid. Curly black hair. Mid-thirties. Real friendly.”

“No, no…”

“If you’re on the Internet I could show you a picture,” Behr offered.

“I don’t do computer,” Ezra said.

Behr was about ready to write out his number for Ezra and walk away when he just asked one more time. Sometimes that worked, too. “Give me her address, Ezra.”

“You’re not a cop, are you,” he said.

“Not anymore,” Behr said. Ezra shrugged.

“It’s in my unit.” Ezra shuffled down to the other end of the apartments. Behr followed and waited at the door, glancing inside at the man’s meager furnishings. Ezra disappeared into a back room for a moment, then reappeared holding a few envelopes and a Post-it with an address on Schultz Park.

“If you’re going over there, maybe you could give her these?” Ezra extended a small packet of envelopes rubber-banded together. Behr reached for them, wondering whether he should be careful about opening and resealing them or just tear them apart for information, when Ezra took that off the table, pulling back the mail. “I should just have the mailman do it. Federal offense otherwise, right?”

“Sure, you do it that way,” Behr said, taking the Post-it with the new address. He’d seen the woman’s whole name. It was Flavia Inez.

Behr handed Ezra a business card. “Call me if that boyfriend shows up again.”

“Okay,” the old man said, but he sounded doubtful.

Hector Nogero was in the den behind locked doors stacking “peas” and spinner baskets and considering his suerte. The last three months had been brilliant. He was making so much money he’d brought his father up from Chamelecon. With an introduction by letter from his uncle, who was in prison for gang activity in Honduras, Hector had taken title to the house on Traub from a man for close to nothing. Foreclosure proceedings had begun on the property, which was why the man had sold cheap, but Hector had earned more than enough to pay off the note and back taxes before the marshals would return to seize the place in the coming weeks. Four or five “shakes” a day, with a house full of paying customers playing at least one number if not dozens, and his only expenses were a bouncer, a pretty “shake girl” to pull in players and conduct the drawings, and a cut for MS-13 for his permiso to operate. He was like the fucking loteria. Even now he had a living room full of them, chilling, drinking a coffee, a beer, watching a race or a few innings of beisbol, and handing over their whole paychecks hoping to win a three or four number combination that would pay a few thousand. Soon he’d buy the electronic ticket machines and video surveillance cameras. He had his son with him, too-Chaco had come on the plane with his father. Hector looked over at Chaco, playing on the floor with some of the peas, which were actually plastic balls. He’d heard they used to use dried peas with numbers written on them back in the old days, when the game was invented, and that’s why it was called “pea shake.” But now the world was plastic.