David Levien: Where the dead lay

Behr bristled, but nodded. “Aurelio Santos.”

“Like the name on the sign.”

“Yeah. It’s his place.” Behr heard the defeat in his own voice. He’d seen enough of them to know that this was one cold crime scene. It looked icy. How many dozens of prints and partials would be all over the place thanks to the student traffic? And no witnesses either. A grim, hopeless feeling looked for a place to grab hold in his belly at the waste of it, at the empty hull that was now all that remained of a man.

Then anger settled on Behr, hot and familiar. He felt his breath come in short stabs, a bellows of fury working deep within him. He tried to control it, to not be a “belly breather,” the way Aurelio had taught him when an opponent had knee-on-chest and was going for full mount and every cubic centimeter of oxygen left in the lungs meant the difference between light and blackness. His jaw set and he knew in that instant that whatever the police did or did not do, no matter how much or how little they threw at the case, no matter how quickly they might try to clear it, that he would invest the minutes, the hours, the days, the months it would take to hunt down the scum, the animals, the maggot-motherfuckers who had done this.

A random killing? Behr tried it out in his head. Not the norm for Indianapolis. There’d been too many murders in the city lately, but they all had a crime-on-crime connection and Aurelio was the furthest thing from a criminal. It wasn’t right. He felt it again: Someone had wanted something.

Behr’s eye fell on the office in the far corner of the main room. Information. It wasn’t a mere idea but an imperative that pulsed deep in his cortex, like a reptile’s desire for food. He figured Aurelio’s Rolodex would be on the desk, and his best hope of a lead would be found inside. But it would be only a matter of moments before the officers threw him out, regardless of whether he’d once been on the job, and went ahead and locked down the crime scene. Like the cop saying went: When you’re in you’re a guest, when you’re out you’re a pest.

Taking a chance, Behr started for the office, going wide around the body and blood trail, staying on the edge of the mat. His movement seemed to stir the others into action. As he passed the high shelves holding tall, elaborate trophies from Aurelio’s wins in the Mundial and Abu Dhabi and Tokyo, the EMTs started closing their unused medical kits, and the cops looked to each other.

“Ho, buddy. Where you headed?” asked the dark-haired officer, Dominic. Behr felt them starting after him.

“You guys are gonna need to notify next of kin, I’m gonna get the number,” Behr tossed back over his shoulder.

He reached the office, nudged the door open with a toe, and in the half-light saw an address book with a worn cloth cover on the corner of the desk. Leaving the lights off, Behr dropped his gym bag on top of the book, covering it. Then he took a paper clip off of a file cabinet and used it to gently click on the light switch without disturbing any possible prints.

“He’s from Brazil. Unmarried. No family in state. Are Homicide Branch and Crime Scene on the way? No one’s touched anything, right? You guys seem like you know the dance steps. Goddamn, he was a great guy…” Behr used the patter to distract while his eyes darted around the office looking for something he could use before they clocked his bag on the desk. The cops filled the doorway.

“Look at that, huh?” Behr said of a calendar sponsored by a Brazilian beer called Brahma featuring beautiful copper-skinned girls in dental floss bikinis playing volleyball on Ipanema beach. The young cops glanced at it for a long moment and then Behr saw a sheet of notepaper tacked to the wall over the phone. It was covered with scrawled Portuguese first names and digits with the +55 prefix needed to call Brazil. Aurelio was from a large, close-knit family, and the list was his frequently dialed numbers back home.

“There you go,” Behr said, stepping back, letting the officers move in. “If there isn’t a family member on that list I’d be real surprised, and there’ll at least be a close friend.”

“Thanks,” Regan said. Dominic just grunted. Then the pair raised their notebooks and started copying down the names and numbers. Their backs to him, Behr took the opportunity to pick up his bag, and the address book under it, which he made disappear into the waistband of his sweatpants, pulling his shirt down over it. It didn’t appear that the office had been disturbed by whoever had killed Aurelio, and the worn fabric of the book cover wouldn’t hold a print very well. The risk had already been taken anyway. There was no going back now.

Behr stepped into the main room again. The blond cop, Regan, followed him out, on point now.

“Okay, Behr, Frank,” he said, writing.

“B-e-h-r,” Behr spelled it for him.

“Phone numbers, home, office, cell.”

Behr supplied them, and his address.

“We train four days a week here, for an hour, hour and a half. Then the other instructors, some private students start to arrive. There’s a morning blue-belt class at eight most weekdays,” Behr went on. He began to feel his emotions beating at the door of his cold recitation of facts. He didn’t know how long the barrier would hold.

“Blue belt, what level’s that?”

“Fairly beginner, but guys who know their way around.”

“What belt are you?”

“We weren’t doing it that way.”

“So, no wife,” Regan shrugged. “He got an ex-wife?”

“No. Had a girlfriend but they broke up maybe ten months ago. No one steady since then.”

“Uh-huh. I’ll need that name.”

“If I can think of it. Maria something.”

“This guy have any beefs?”

“None that I know of. Everybody loved him.”

“Teachers he’d fired? Pissed-off student? Creditor?”

“I’m telling you, everybody loved the guy.”

“Someone didn’t fucking love him. Or had a strange way of showing it,” the dark-haired cop, Dominic, said as he joined them.

“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” Behr bored holes in him with his eyes. The one EMT who remained, writing notes on a clipboard, froze.

“Oh,” Dominic turned. “What’re you, gonna cry now?”

“Be a professional, asshole,” Behr said.

“You be one.” They stood nose to nose, or thereabouts, since Behr had a good couple of inches on him. The truth was, the guy didn’t mean anything by it, and Behr knew it. It was just the way cops talked to each other to get through their shift. That didn’t make Behr let off any, though.

“Look, you’ve been helpful, but you’re gonna need to fall back for us,” Regan said. “Watch commander’s coming to set.”

Behr broke off with Dominic, nodded, and took one last look at the scene, drinking it in with his eyes. Aurelio wore a green satiny warm-up suit that could’ve just as easily been his outfit from the night before as it was for that morning. He was wearing Puma track shoes, which he wouldn’t have stepped onto the mat with ordinarily, but under the circumstances that didn’t seem to mean much. The body still appeared supple. Rigidity hadn’t yet set in. The blood was wet. He couldn’t have been dead for very long. Behr was turning away when something struck him as wrong. He turned back and tried not to be blinded by the obvious, and then he saw just below where the wound started, Aurelio’s neck.

“You didn’t remove anything from him, did you?” Behr wondered. The EMT looked up at him.

“Yeah, a mole from his left butt cheek-,” Dominic started in.

“Like what?” Regan said, his voice sounding tired.

“You gonna give us a lesson-,” Dominic tried again.

“Jewelry,” Behr said. The EMT shook his head.