Suspect, p.3
Suspect, page 3
Our building has a brass nameplate on the front that’s been there for more than a century and says, ‘The Archer.’ The sign is not a slick marketing move—we’re on Archer Avenue. I guess a hundred years ago, buildings were given names because street addresses were just starting to be used. Anyway, it’s a big buff-brick three-flat, solid as a castle and constructed in a U, the projecting wings creating a nice landscaped courtyard out front. I trudge up to the third floor.
I guess when the Archer was first built, my place and Weirdo’s next door were a single apartment, probably crowded with one of the large families of European immigrants who were flooding Highland Isle. On my side now, there’s a galley kitchen with a minuscule living room and a small bedroom. The old bathroom was split in half, leaving me with the claw-foot tub, outfitted with a ring shower. When I was searching for rentals, I also looked at TWO’s apartment. It’s bigger, but not worth the extra three hundred bucks the Vojczek leasing agent was asking.
My little hand-me-down dog, Gomer III—Gomer the Turd, as a woman I was hanging out with called him—peps up and then sags at the sight of me. He is always hoping against hope that it will be Helen, Rik’s mom, Gomer’s original owner, coming through the door. When Pops moved to assisted living, I got the dog by default since Rik’s younger daughter is allergic. Out of mutual gratitude, I was offered first dibs on Pops’s furniture. Most of what him and Helen owned was too big for this place, but I did take a small table that seats four, wicker with a glass top, that doubles as my desk, and a nice blue tweed love seat that I’ve made a mess of by eating there as I watch TV.
Tonight I spread out the newspaper on the table even before I unwrap my dinner. I can honestly say I’ve never opened the Wall Street Journal in my life. The only news I really care about is sports, and I get that from Twitter and The Athletic. The reason I recognized what Weird was reading was because the paper was delivered every day to the reception area at Pops’s law firm.
Anyway, I turn the big pages one by one, looking for the story that was facing me as I sat there at Ruben’s, with a photo of the newest wreckage in Ukraine. On the side TWO was looking at, I don’t find much, just a bunch of four-inch articles, mostly about quarterly financial results of various corporations. For me, they could just as well be written in Etruscan, with terms like ‘fiscal first quarter net’ and ‘EBITDA,’ requiring me to fight the lifelong habit to just quit reading. But I force myself to continue until I finally hit pay dirt, or what might be pay dirt, a squib about Northern Direct, Highland Isle’s biggest employer.
When Amity Nieves beat the so-called Mayor for Life, Lorenzo DeLoria, twelve years ago, while he was under federal indictment, her number one campaign promise was serious redevelopment in Highland Isle. With the help of our US senator, she brought in a ton of federal money. The city center is nicer now, which has attracted a lot of obnoxious hipsters to my part of town. Amity’s other big project, a so-called Tech Park in the blighted, half-deserted neighborhood of Anglia right under the interstate, has had mixed results. In fact, it’s the main issue this year in Amity’s race against Steven DeLoria, Lorenzo’s son, who is kind of his dad with better tailoring and speech classes.
In some senses, the Tech Park worked out well. A few local companies moved in there, including an educational software developer and two ‘green’ manufacturers—one that makes a switch that strengthens your Internet signal, and another that produces veterinary pharmaceuticals. But about 70 percent of the space set aside for the first phase of the Tech Park was awarded to Northern Direct, a huge defense contractor, which builds guidance systems here for missiles and planes. It’s a scary-looking place, a one-story building with these radar dishes on top and no windows, surrounded by chain link and razor wire, and security guys who carry AK-47s.
Direct brought with it nearly a thousand jobs—and a shitstorm. The uber liberals, who hate the military to start with, joined forces with local civil rights organizations and sued to block the tax breaks Amity gave Direct, which are supposedly keeping the City from honoring all the promises it made to the displaced residents. That halted the second stage of development, which is a problem for local businesspeople, like Rik, who bought our office building, anticipating big demand. Now he can’t get the rents he expected, which is why we’re stuck in the dingiest space in the place.
Anyway, the WSJ article says that Northern Direct just won a $92,646,787 cost-plus fixed-fee contract from the Defense Department for a cybersecurity component that will protect air guidance systems from hacking. The paper says other details about the agreement are limited due to national security concerns, including where the equipment will be assembled.
It’s possible TWO was reading about Direct simply because it’s a company with a large local presence. Or because he seems to be a war guy who figures to be fascinated by weapons systems. Assuming the new security component will be built here, TWO, for all I know about him, may even see a job opportunity for himself. There are a lot of innocent explanations. But there are some sinister ones, too, that rush to mind as soon as you say ‘national security.’ Maybe TWO’s a peacenik intent on sabotaging Direct. Or a patent thief who wants to steal this new technology and sell it to someone else. I could probably conjure a dozen bad possibilities.
But this is my first solid clue. I point a finger at the wall we share and murmur, “Dude, I got my eye on you.”
4. Tonya
Rik has had an office in Highland Isle for more than twenty years. He’s very loyal to the place and is kind of Mr. Google, sharing little factoids whether or not I’ve asked. I now know that the population of HI has grown since the last census and is about 120,000 and that the city is an actual island in the River Kindle, which I, trapped on Planet Pinky, had never noticed. To the west, a skinny little tributary, not much more than a ditch beneath the roads, separates Highland Isle from the fancy West Bank suburbs where I grew up in eternal misery. To the east, across about a thousand yards of water, lies Kindle County and the North End of Kewahnee. Since the time of the first settlers, a busy port has operated over there, with freighters lined up carrying prime Midwestern cargo like iron ore and coal and wheat to the rest of the country.
In the 1880s, the poorest of the port workers, mostly Italian and Irish immigrants, became the first residents of HI. In the old-timey brown photos from the period, the island is just an unpromising pile of sand and shale in the middle of the water. The men would row to work in dinghies, except in the winter, when the Kindle iced over and they’d walk, meaning that in the dark some poor bastard was always stepping through a soft spot and drowning. From the start, Highland Isle was grim and tough—and full of crime.
By the 1920s, the mob had taken over, ensuring that the only crimes happening were the ones they were in charge of, especially bootlegging, with crates of illegal liquor boated around the Tri-Cities at night. They also controlled the city government, which was why Highland Isle never got absorbed into Kindle County.
In the 1960s, the white people headed for the nearby suburbs, and Latinos—mostly Puerto Ricans and Mexicans—moved into the blocks of solid brick tenements that are mixed in with rows of small bungalows that always remind me of fat toads. The mob still managed to run the city until a dozen years ago, when Mayor Lorenzo was nailed by the Feds for passing out city contracts to his sons and his brother-in-law and several cousins. Sixteen DeLorias in all got all-expenses-paid vacations in various federal correctional institutions. Steven, this year’s mayoral candidate, was the only close relative of Lorenzo’s who didn’t get indicted, and that was just because he was too young.
From my place in Highland Isle, it’s about a ten-minute drive to Mike’s, Kindle County’s busiest cop bar, which is situated on the edge of the bungalow belt across the river in Kewahnee at the foot of a highway cloverleaf. Mike’s is definitely no-frills. The bar occupies a freestanding storefront that could easily be mistaken for somebody’s garage, a flat-roofed one-story building with shingle siding around the door and a black window. Inside, it’s knotty pine with neon beer signs, including the one I’ve always loved, featuring a twinkling waterfall. Civilians come in here, too, but they are generally ignored.
Mike’s is the place players tend to head after the Monday and Thursday night Fraternal Order of Police Softball League games, now that things are kind of back to normal after COVID. (Since cops always want to appear fearless and don’t care much for rules applied to them, masks were always a rare sight in here.) League rules require each team to have two women on the field at all times, and I was all-conference in high school for three years, so after I flunked out at the academy, my teammates at the Shakespeare Street station found some discretionary fund that continues to pay my FOP dues. On the roster, I’m listed as ‘Regular Female,’ which I don’t hear many other places.
My postgame stops here are pretty much what passes for my social life during the season, which extends from the current mittens weather in April to late October. This is a no-judgment place. Guys get wasted and tell all kinds of lies, strange stories from the street that they heard years ago and repeat as something that happened to them last night. Over time, I have heard three different cops claim to have found an intact human kidney in a Ziploc bag. This is about as comfortable as I will ever be in a crowd. No one seems to look long at my nail or my haircut (although now and then somebody tuning me will whisper, ‘UC, right?’ as they’re handing me a beer, thinking I work undercover and that my ink is something that will wash off in the shower).
It’s 7 p.m., between the after-work crowd and the folks who drift in for a nightcap. We had beautiful weather for our first game last week, but tonight, leaving aside the smokers, it’s too cold to sit out in the so-called beer garden, which is nothing more than a yard with picnic benches and views of the empty lot next door, full of busted concrete from some construction project, and the rushing highway overhead. It’s an indoors night, with the jukebox gunning heavy metal, and the yeasty smell of spilled beer heavy in the air.
I figured this would be neutral turf for a meetup with me and Tonya Eo. No one she cares about will see us, since most HI cops never visit, inasmuch as the Kindle County officers always treat the HI police like they are six-year-olds with plastic stars. I climb up on a wooden stool next to a high-top and wait. I figure it’s fifty-fifty Tonya will show. I messaged her on Facebook that I wanted to talk offline about police business, and she answered ‘ok,’ but ours wasn’t a good breakup, and if it were me, I’d probably decide against being zombied. Aside from a couple innocuous comments about posts, Tonya—‘Toy’ I sometimes called her—and me haven’t had a real conversation in a dozen years.
But about ten minutes later, here she is, in civvies with a belted trench coat, which she quickly throws over a stool. I haven’t spent much time on her feed, and I’m glad for her sake about how good she looks.
“Girl,” I say, “you’re all glo’d up.”
She gives me an itsy-bitsy smile in spite of herself.
“Said bye to a few LBs,” she answers.
She is wearing makeup, which she never used to, and a short blunt cut with a part to one side. In her black fashion jeans, she has a waist now. She’s definitely gone femme.
“Still Lite?” I ask. She likes that I remember, and I signal Dutch, the bartender, for the beer. “How’s the fam?”
“Same same. Dad’s got some stuff with his kidneys.”
“You ever come out to them?”
She rears back a tad and shoots me a tentative look. I can tell she’s not sure she wants to get personal, but she finally answers.
“Couple years back,” she says.
“And?”
“And just screaming and yelling and crying, and then finally they decided, you know, ‘You’re gonna change your mind.’ That’s where they are, waiting for me to change my mind. Like I’m gonna drive up in a minivan full of kids with my husband any day now.”
“That’s tough.”
“You know, it makes me feel better that I did it, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. My mother’s brother in Manila? He’s in fashion, and a sweetheart. I love him to pieces, I swear, but the guy is so gay, and nobody in the family can see it. ‘Uncle Eo? He’s just different.’ He’s sixty and my mom refers to him as a bachelor, like he’ll be next on the TV show.”
I laugh. She’s funny. She’s always been funny. She didn’t usually say much, but that sense of humor was always kind of lying in wait.
“What’s up with you?” she asks. “Still hate your mom?”
“Forever,” I say. “Dad’s still a washout, but it looks better on him now that he’s old enough to be retired. You remember my grandfather?” Sitting here, I recall taking her over once to meet Sandy and Helen. “I’d been living in his house, helping out, but he’s in assisted living now. So I’ve got my own place. It’s in HI, actually.”
I know she also lives in town, because the cops have residency requirements, and the way she perks up when I say that makes me instantly afraid that I’ve sent the wrong signal, as I so often do. I take a sharp left and head for the safety of business.
“I work as an investigator for Rik Dudek. Do you know who that is?” I ask.
“He’s represented the bad guy on a couple of my cases. Not the usual slimebag.”
“He’s a good guy.”
“He’s a lawyer,” says Tonya.
“Well, he’s the Chief’s lawyer. What do you think of her?”
“I think she’s crushing it. She promoted me.” No smile. Very Tonya. Her main act is tough. Quiet. Blank faced. Straight ahead. When I was just getting to know her, years before, catching on to her deadpan was the first thing that made me realize there was more to her than met the eye. “I actually took the HI offer,” Tonya says, “when I graduated from the academy, instead of Kindle, because the Chief had just been appointed. I figured any department run by a woman was a better bet. Kindle County back then, a female cop was either a mother, a bitch or a whore—those were the only ways they’d see you.”
In the academy, most of the cadets stayed the hell away from me. I was an inked-up queerdo who, given my whole vibe, was destined for failure. Eventually word spread that I had once been sort-of/kind-of on my way to the Olympic trials, which bought me something, along with the fact that I kicked ass in physical training, stuff like our morning run, where I beat all the boys.
Still, I noticed when Tonya seemed to make a point of sitting down next to me during the middle of the day when we were doing academic classes, like criminal procedure. She kept to herself so much that she clearly wasn’t there for conversation, meaning I got a feeling pretty soon about what was up. I wasn’t completely sure, because her family had emigrated when she was a kid, and now and then there were cultural nuances that seemed to go past her, so I wasn’t positive she intended the messages she seemed to be sending. That’s me too, of course. Once in a while, some person who is getting to know me, say in a bar, will ask me in a super-nice way, ‘Did you grow up here?’
I did not necessarily find her attractive. She was pretty lumberjack, which is not my thing. She’s got kind of a squinched-up face, and her skin looked like it had been really bad when she was a teen, and she was thicker physically. Then again, she was interesting, secretly funny, and not quite like anybody else I’d met. All I knew about Filipinos was that some racist kid in high school once said they eat dogs, which I didn’t imagine was actually true. Her family was from one of the outer islands, and all the rest of them—her father, her mother, her two sisters—worked as caregivers for older people. I asked her once why so many Filipinos seemed to do that, at least around Kindle County, and she said, ‘We respect our elders.’
“She says you slay, by the way,” I tell her. “The Chief?”
“Oh yeah? How do you know that?” She’s suspicious, as I expected her to be.
“I mentioned your name, you know, when I met her. As someone I knew in her department.”
“Okay.”
“How you feel about the charges against her with P&F? You know the allegations, right?”
She smirks. “Of course.”
“And what do you think?”
She makes a face and says, “I think that’s what you get when you mess around with men.”
This may be meant as a kind of a put-down of me, but I won’t go there. Truth is she always had an edge about guys, like they’re all just waiting out there to rape or beat you. Me, I basically like men. The most reliable people in my life are male—my dad, Pops, Rik. I start out giving a guy the benefit of the doubt and let him show me that he’s a jerk, which, to be honest, a lot of them do. But Tonya’s attitude gives me a way to work her.
“Yeah,” I say, “but don’t you think it’s insane bullshit? You believe there’s a man in the world, let alone three of them, who is going to let a woman tell him what to do with his thing? I mean, guys, men, that piece of meat is who they are. They’d give her a smack, commanding officer or not. Don’t you think?”
“Definitely,” she answers. “No, you’re right,” she says. She sits back to take my measure. “We just spillin tea or what?”
“Rik—and the Chief—are counting on me to come up with stuff to shoot holes in the three HI cops’ stories, and so far I don’t have much ammunition. For obvious reasons, the Chief can’t ask around. I need background on these guys. Anything will help. It can all be on the DL. I won’t write anything down.”
“Background? Well, how about the foreground? Not throwin shade, but have you had a look at those dudes? Even Frito,” she says, meaning Blanco. “He’s younger and a good guy, but he could stand a full season in the gym. The other two, Cornish and DeGrassi? Old fucks, if you don’t mind.”
“There’s got to be mountains about these guys I’d like to know.”
