Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“No foolin’,” he said.

I nodded.

“Look, all I know is, this dude came in all the time and gave me an envelope with cash in it,” Webster said. “Then he’d hand me a piece of paper with the name of the donor. I don’t know if it’s someone who’s dead or alive. I just write it down in the logbook, because Windy, he likes to put it in this computer file he has.”

“Computer file?” I asked, my interest piqued. “You mean, like an Excel spreadsheet?”

“Yeah. Whenever I got cash, Windy wanted to know so he could put it in his laptop.”

“Why in the world would he want to log illegal campaign contributions in a spreadsheet?”

“Maybe he didn’t know they were illegal,” Denardo said.

Even though Windy had never been the quickest draw in the saloon, I’m not sure even he could have been that willfully ignorant. He had to know the money was dirty. Then again, perhaps he hoped that if he logged it in his Excel file-then reported it for all the world to see on those ELEC reports-it would have the effect of cleaning it. It would at least give him some plausible deniability if he was ever investigated. Okay, so maybe he wasn’t as dumb as I thought.

“Do you have a copy of the file?” I asked.

“Naw, I didn’t do any of the computer stuff. I just did pen and paper. When the Spanish dude gave me cash, I wrote him a receipt. Then he’d leave. That’s all I know.”

“Tell me about the Spanish dude,” I said.

“I don’t know. He’s not the boss or nothing. He’s just a … a runner or something.”

“He got a name?” I asked.

“We never got real friendly.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Oh, man, he’s like … I don’t really look at him, you know?” Webster said. “He’s a Spanish dude. Kind of a little dude like those Spanish guys are. Sometimes he’s got tools on his belt. I think he’s like a construction worker or something.”

“What kind of car does he drive?”

“I don’t know.” Webster pointed to the drawn shades. “I can’t see the street from here.”

“How often does he come in?”

“Pretty regular. Every couple of weeks. Sometimes more, sometimes less.”

“When was the last time he was here?” I asked.

Webster reached into his desk, pulled out an account book, and leafed to the last page in which there were entries.

“Last week,” he said. “On Tuesday. I remember it was around lunchtime.”

That narrowed it down at least a little. Though I suspected his definition of lunchtime was rather generous.

“How much did he give?”

“Ten grand.”

“Where does it come from?”

“I don’t know, I swear. Please.”

I concentrated on Denardo’s pudgy face, searching for any kind of twitch or eye shift that might suggest artifice. But all I saw was an earnest, bordering-on-desperate gaze in return.

“No clue who his boss is?”

Webster shook his head. “Look, man, I swear, I ain’t clownin’ you or nothing. If I knew, I’d tell you. I just don’t know. Windy, he did his own thing and I did my own thing, you know? It wasn’t like we told each other everything.”

“Okay,” I said, getting ready to leave. “I’m sure I’m going to have more questions. I’ll call you. What’s your cell number?”

He gave it to me and added, “We’re cool, right?”

“Well, that depends. You’re not going to give me a hard time again, are you?”

“No way, man,” he said. “Anything you need. No appointment necessary.”

* * *

As I wandered back out to Springfield Avenue, I knew I needed to find the mysterious Spanish dude, who was probably either Portuguese or Brazilian, given the names he toted on those little pieces of paper.

I got back in my car and sat there hoping maybe, somehow, the Spanish dude would just drive up and park in front of me, with his envelope stuffed full of cash, and tell me everything-who he worked for, what the money was about, why it resulted in Windy needing to be dead. I could have the story written by five o’clock.

But that wasn’t going to happen. He was never coming back. And the chances that someone on a bustling avenue might have rememebered one random Hispanic guy who pulled up on the street every couple of weeks and went into Windy Byers’s constituent services office? Slim.

If only there was a camera in the office. But I’d looked. No camera. I stared out at the street some more, watching the traffic scoot along, looking at the buildings, reading their signs, waiting for inspiration.

And then I saw what I needed. High atop the three-story brick building that housed African Flavah, there was Khalid’s bulletproof camera, safe inside its little cage, bolted into the concrete.

I hurried into the restaurant to find Khalid in his normal spot: behind the counter, standing at the grill underneath an institutional-sized oven hood, cooking twenty lunches simultaneously, the orders for which he somehow kept in his head. Frankly, Khalid’s occupation was my idea of eternal damnation. But Khalid once told me he could do it happily, ten hours a day, every day of the week-which is what he pretty much did. He opened at five every morning, when the airport porters and construction guys started drifting in, and kept the grill roaring until three in the afternoon, when the lunch crowd finally died down and he closed up shop.

“What’s going on, Cousin Carter?” he boomed as soon as he saw me out of the corner of his eye.

He called me “Cousin Carter” because his grandmother was half white-German, I think. He figured that one-eighth Caucasian blood must mean we’re related somehow.

Then again, if you go back far enough, aren’t we all?

“Cousin Khalid,” I returned. “How you been?”

“Blessed. I’ve been blessed.”

I watched as he displayed his virtuosity on the grill, mesmerized by his ability to juggle eggs, sausage, hamburger, potatoes, French toast, fish, grilled cheese, pancakes, and bacon.

“So, trust me when I tell you I have a good reason for asking,” I said. “But tell me about that security camera outside.”

“Uh-oh,” he announced to the other customers sitting at the counter, none of whom looked like me, “the white man is here playing PO-lice. We all in trouble now.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, playing along. “You’re part white.”

“Yeah, but only a small part. That means when the PO-lice come, they gonna leave one-eighth of me alone, but the other seven-eighths is gonna be gettin’ its ass kicked.”

His audience cracked up. In truth, the frequency of police misconduct was exaggerated in the hood. A lot of it was just people telling stories, misrepeating versions of rumors that they themselves had greatly embellished. But it did happen on the rare occasion, and it only took one legitimate incident to lend credibility to all the loose talk for years to come.

“So with that camera, you keep tapes or anything?” I asked.

“Sort of, hang on,” he said. He said a few things in Spanish to one of the guys taking orders, who immediately assumed Khalid’s post behind the grill.

“Come on,” Khalid said, walking through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY and into a small office. A newish computer sat on a cluttered table, and he parked himself in front of it.

“This is actually pretty cool,” he continued. “They got these companies that want to charge you a billion bucks a month for monitoring, and then a billion more to store your data. But I figured out how to do it on this computer for free. The stuff you can do with wireless now is incredible.”

How about that: Khalid, short-order chef and closeted computer nerd.

“How much does the outside camera see of the street?” I asked.