Suspect, p.4
Suspect, page 4
“I’ll tell you right now, with Frito, I don’t see him lying. He’d think God would strike him dead. The other two? You know, when I came on, they were already the usual cop burnouts, turned into sad shits twenty years ago when they figured out the job wasn’t a television show. I worked a little with both of them. On the street, they’re okay. They’d have your back if something went down. But they’re not worth much anywhere else.” She drops her voice a couple octaves in imitation. “‘You write the report, okay?’” She shakes her head. “They hang together a whole lot.”
Twelve years on the street has made her a different person, so much more confident it’s hard to recognize her in a way. I’m glad for her, and wonder for a second what the badge would have done for me.
“Family guys?” I ask.
“Hardly. Fucked their way out of their marriages from what I hear. Both of them. Well, maybe Primo’s wife is still holding on. You know, they’re the kind of dudes, half the guys who come in here are that way—get drunk and hook up with whoever they can. They don’t even have to be that drunk. I know Cornish’s ex better than him, to tell you the truth.”
“She a cop, too?”
“No. I know her from church.”
“Church?” I keep myself from saying anything else. Tonya has definitely been through some changes.
“It feels good. The whole vibe, you know. Mass. The community. And I like the priest.”
“Hip young dude who’s cool with lesbians?”
“Hip old dude. But yeah, he couldn’t care less. God made me, too, you know.”
God on top of everything else. This is why, when I was younger, I promised myself that I would never become a so-called adult and end up just accepting things that deep down have never made sense to me.
“Could you see if she’d talk to me? Mrs. Cornish?”
“Paulette.” She doesn’t think long, before shaking her head. “I can’t get in the middle of this. I’m all for the Chief, but you know, I’ve got a long time left out there. I don’t want to be on anybody’s team. That shit, his faction and her faction, it’s bad for the department. And me.”
“Understand,” I say, “but I bet Paulette’s got no love lost with her ex, given the way he fucked around on her. I wouldn’t want her to make anything up. Maybe you could just ask her? Tell her I’m good people and won’t screw her over. Then just step out of the way.”
She hitches a shoulder, noncommittal. We sit there looking at each other. With every passing second, the past is beginning to take up a lot more space.
In the academy, after a while, I kind of gave in and hung out with Tonya on a few weekends. The cadets were housed in this dilapidated old dorm at the U. We each had roommates but mine drove home when classes ended on Fridays.
With sex, starting with my so-called boyfriends in junior high, I have never been very good at saying no to anyone who seems to genuinely want me. One Friday night we ended up in my room on the crummy mattress, the old bed frame sort of singing along with us as we rolled around. Cadets were supposed to bring their own sheets, but that was the kind of thing I never could remember, and I recall laying there with her on the blue-and-white-striped ticking after the first time. She was crying like she’d lost something. I was clearly a lot more experienced.
‘I just know what I’m doing,’ I said.
‘I’ll say,’ she answered. ‘And you enjoy it so much.’
‘I always do,’ I told her, and that is the truth. I can almost always cut loose, especially with someone like Tonya, who is basically kind.
Now, across the high-top, I ask Tonya, “You ever hear any of the three talk about Moritz Vojczek?”
“Sure. He’s like the yeti. Everybody talks about him. Dude goes from the job to gazillionaire? What do you think?”
“But these guys specifically? They have any tie to Vojczek you know of?”
“They could. Word is the Ritz employs a lot of ex-cops or guys looking for a side hustle after hours. I mean, Primo and Walter, Vojczek was their lieutenant when he was on the job. The Chief was reorganizing the Narcotics Bureau when I started. She got rid of Ritz somehow and split up Cornish and DeGrassi. Some strange shit going down supposedly. Money and drugs disappearing during busts. You know, my heart won’t break for a dealer. But still. Chief straightened that out.”
I nod several times, just to show I am seeing things her way.
“Either of them, Cornish or DeGrassi, have any, you know, kind of enemies on the force or guys who don’t like them?” I ask.
“I don’t know. DeGrassi, he’s kind of a clown really, lots of laughs. Cornish has some edges. I don’t think he gets along with some of the Black officers. He had a fight a couple years ago with a cop named Emmitt LaTreaux about something LaTreaux thought was racist.”
I write ‘LaTreaux’ on a napkin, then say, “I could use your help on a couple things.” I keep going before she can say no. “You Facebook friends with any of the three?”
“Blanco, yeah.”
“Could you friend the other two?”
“I guess.”
“I just want to see their feed. Photos. Profile. A screen grab here and there, if you could. Just print them out and mail it to me at the office in an envelope without a return address. No questions asked.”
Her lips rumple up. “I’ll think about it.”
“Great. Thanks. Thanks. It could really help the Chief.”
She looks at me across her beer. Her eyes, as I remembered, are so black. Dead stars.
“You happy?” she asks me. There’s a lot lingering in that question, but I decide to play it straight.
“‘Happy?’” I’m not really sure what that means. I’ve had a lot of thrills in my life, boarding especially, that moment where oh-fuck meets the will to live and you have a split second to keep control. Landing was always such an amazing rush, such a triumph, your body—your ability—triumphing over chaos and gravity. When I broke my back, and the doctors canceled jumping again, that was the hardest part—knowing that moment was gone for good. “I’m not sure ‘happy’ is ever gonna be a Pinky state of being,” I tell Tonya. “I figure I’m aiming more for ‘okay,’ Toy. Like I just want to be okay. And I pretty much am. I love this gig, being an investigator. I think all the time, Don’t fuck this up, the way you did the academy. That just laid waste to me for years.”
“You got fucked over on that,” she says. We’d had our bad breakup by the time I was dismissed, so she never heard the whole story. In the first couple months, quite a few recruits peeled off every week, mostly because they were failing the written tests, but in the last month, we all felt we were on a glide path. Around then, my jaw began to feel like it was breaking, and I ended up at an oral surgeon who said I had to get my wisdom teeth out. He gave me a letter for the lieutenant, saying I would need Vicodin for the pain afterwards, and the lieutenant said I could skip my drop that week—we peed in the bottle every Friday.
After the extractions, thinking I had a freebie, I got some X and also had a little smoke, mostly just because I could. Then the lieutenant told me that the commandant had overruled him and decided I should drop anyway. Like I say, cops are always suspicious. I had a history of juvenile adjustments for drugs. State law said they couldn’t keep me out of the academy for underage offenses, but the commandant had an eye on me all along and never liked my look. I was gone by Monday.
“Story of my life,” I say to Tonya. “But I always think, What if.”
She sort of seesaws her head.
“I don’t know, Pinky,” she says. “I realize you loved the thought of being a cop, but in reality, you might have decided it sucked. There are rules, double-dumbshit stuff you have to do. You would never have put up with that.”
“I’m a little different now.”
“You’re never gonna be that different. I bet as an investigator you just go off and do whatever the fuck you think will work, right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, that’s not being a cop. Not a good cop. I love most of it and accept what I don’t love. But I’m cut out for that. You know, my parents brought me up to think of obedience as a virtue.”
I know she means well by saying all of this. But hearing it casts me down into the dungeon of gloom where I end up now and then, remembering how often I fucked up, and the heavy price I seemed to pay almost every time. I wiped out on a 1080 I’d completed a dozen times in the half-pipe, destroying my back and my future, because I was obsessing on a nasty remark my mom had passed that morning. And now that I’m in this mood, the memory returns full force of how I screwed over Tonya, a nice person with a heart that had been pretty much unscarred until I stomped on it.
“Gotta bounce,” I say, standing abruptly. “Thanks for coming out. Think about that stuff, okay?”
I get out fast, feeling sick, not of Tonya, but myself.
5. Another Strange Thing
Every few days, I clock another strange detail about my next-door neighbor. For example: All these brick tenements in the Tri-Cities metro area were constructed the same way a century ago. Instead of iron fire escapes, the buildings have flights of carpenter’s stairs, built along the unfaced bricks at the rear. On every floor, there is a good-sized landing outside the kitchen door of each apartment. Some of my neighbors even park lawn chairs out there to take the air on summer evenings. For reasons I have yet to understand, both the stairways and the porches throughout Kindle County and the nearby towns are always painted in this heavy gray enamel, the color of pigeons.
Since our apartments were carved from what was once one home, TWO and I share the rear porch. Not long after he moved in, I heard the boards out there squeaking around two a.m. and realized, even in my sleep, that there was a human weight behind the sound. I bolted up. Peering around my shade, I saw a man and was already heading for the biometric gun safe under my bed when I realized who it was. My cell service has recently gone completely to shit—it was never great to start—and my first thought was that he was awake to call someone in Asia and was outside looking for a signal. Then I saw the orange ember: He was sneaking a cigarette.
Our whole building is no-smoking, including the porches, where I suspect the goal is to keep people from barbecuing on the landings and maybe burning the whole place down. I was a smoker for years and still will bum a cigarette sometimes when I’m hammered.
Having been there, I knew that this had to be a bitch for TWO—waiting until the middle of the night to get his little fix, just to be sure Arturo, the janitor, doesn’t see him and the neighbors can’t tell where the smell is coming from. But as I wrote in my notes, ‘There are still rentals in Highland Isle with smoking wings or first-floor smoking lounges. Why move in here?’
I also realized eventually that it was strange I could see so little when he was out there. I checked the light fixture between our back doors that’s supposed to stay on all night in case of fire. The bulb had been loosened. I screwed it back in. But by the end of the week, the fixture seemed to have shorted out.
I’m frequently in my apartment during the day. Even before COVID, Rik was okay with me doing my written stuff—interview reports or document summaries—at home, where there are fewer distractions. Given a choice, I always prefer to be alone anyway.
That means I’m often around when TWO heads out with his gym bag. That gives me a couple hours to snoop. Several times I’ve gone to the back porch to try to sneak a peek through his kitchen window, but he seems to have installed a shade, which I slowly recognized is always drawn. Each week, I paw through his trash and recycling but learn nothing.
A few days after my drink with Tonya, while I’m at home in the late afternoon doing some Internet research about the three guys who are going to testify against the Chief, I hear El Weirdo moving around inside his place. This doesn’t happen much, and I freeze. Then his front door slams. I hustle to my own door and make out his footfalls as he heads downstairs. About ten minutes later, I hear him coming back up.
The following day it’s the same deal, and I creep out about thirty seconds behind him. I wonder if maybe he’s visiting another tenant, but as I peer down between the railings, I catch sight of him using his key to enter the first-floor door to the basement. I go down there myself sometimes to talk to Arturo, but I can hear the janitor working outside now, hauling the trash cans to the alley for garbage pickup tomorrow. Eventually, I realize TWO must be visiting the little storage coop which each tenant has.
The next afternoon, as soon as he has departed with his gym bag, I scurry down. TWO’s cage, like his apartment, is next to mine, and he’s secured it with a heavy-duty padlock. Inside the chain link, he’s stored only a single item, a kind of trunk that I think is called an ATA case, used by roadies to haul around expensive musical equipment like amps. It’s black vinyl with riveted aluminum on the seams, thick stainless-steel handles on two sides, and small casters that allow it to roll.
I open my own coop and step in to get a closer look. Even though the coop is padlocked, he’s applied another lock to secure the center latch on the case, meaning he’s taking a lot of precautions to protect what’s in there. Without a car, TWO had to ship the case here, but he’s removed any baggage or freight tags. I store my skis in my cage—I still go every winter with my dad for a day or two—and now I extend an aluminum pole between the openings in the chain link and prod TWO’s trunk. It won’t budge, meaning he’s got something pretty heavy stored inside.
The succeeding day, it’s the same, he makes two trips down and up. ‘Best guess, he’s got something in that case that he’s using and then storing again. But what kind of shit can’t you keep in your own apartment?’ I decide I’ve got to get a look inside.
One piece of PIBOT know-how I’ve had in mind to learn is lock picking, and TWO’s storage cage presents a teachable moment. Believe it or not, there are several instructional videos on YouTube. The one I like best is from England and makes the whole operation look pretty simple. Two tiny tools are required. One is a little L-shaped piece of metal called a tension wrench that goes through the opening for the key and then relieves the pressure of the springs that normally fix the pins in place to keep the barrel from turning. The second thing you need is a pick, which functions more or less the way your key does, slowly lifting the pins to the heights that open the mechanism.
I order the tools online and take cell phone photos of TWO’s padlocks. Both are a brand called Superlock. I locate those online, too. Everything arrives in a day, and I practice that night until I can open each lock in less than thirty seconds.
By definition, what I’m going to do—picking my way into TWO’s cage and opening his trunk—is illegal, trespassing at best, probably breaking and entering, which is a felony. If someone—Arturo or another tenant or even, God forbid, TWO—sees me in there, I’ll say I saw the padlocks hanging open and curiosity got the best of me. Lame, but probably good enough not to get busted.
My plan requires occupying Arturo, who has an office of sorts in what is basically a closet in the basement. A heavyset guy with a bad leg he’s always dragging behind him, Arturo is probably the only thing about this building that is genuinely superior. He is one of those people who does his supposedly menial job like he’s handling the nuclear codes. The common areas gleam. I barely put the phone down after telling him something’s broken, when he’s at my door. The basement smells strongly of the disinfectant he uses to conduct his ongoing campaign against mold.
I find him in his office, just finishing lunch—I’m always touched by the tender way he unwraps the tortillas his wife packs. I tell him I’m on my way out but ask if he would mind checking my apartment, because I think I heard squirrels in the walls. This conversation, like most I have with Arturo, is conducted in my broken Spanish, but I blank on the word for squirrels and have to do a little pantomime to explain what I mean by “como una rata con cola peluda.” (Like a rat with a bushy tail.) Once he gets it, though, his heavy face with his thick black mustache assumes an indignant look. He gets right to it and heads up with his toolbox. With his bad leg, it will take him a bit longer to get upstairs, and then he’ll go around knocking on the walls while he listens. Overall, I should get at least ten minutes.
Once I’m alone, I have the heavy-duty padlock on TWO’s cage door open in less than thirty seconds, and I quietly move inside. I grab the trunk’s handle, hoping to nudge it a little so I can get to the other lock, which is up against the concrete wall. At that point, I recognize a mistake, which worries me immediately that I’ve made others. The reason the case wouldn’t move when I poked it was because the casters are locked. Once I turn the switches, the trunk slides around like it’s on ice.
I grab hold of the second padlock and fit the tension wrench inside easily, but I have to apply more force to the pick this time. The lock clicks open. But at the same instant, the pick breaks in my hand. It happens so quickly that it seems as if the tool was designed to snap. A jagged little piece of black metal protrudes from the key slot.
“Oh, fuck me,” I say under my breath. I can’t just leave it there, because TWO will know someone has been in here. Same problem if I steal the lock outright. And if I run back to my apartment for a pair of pliers, Arturo’s going to expect me to hang out while he finishes his inspection. Having no other choice, I get down on my knees and lift the padlock to my mouth.
We are now at a quintessential Pinky moment. I have done something really stupid, ignoring the possible consequences, and have been forced into a maneuver destined by some eternal law worse than Murphy’s to go completely to shit. I’ll cut my gum and bleed all over, or break a tooth. My worthless ass will get arrested, I’ll lose my PI license and my job, and to top it all, I’ll have to endure that old look on my mother’s face. But there is no retreating now. I catch the edge of what’s left of the pick between my front teeth and bite hard. To my amazement the piece slides out smoothly on the first try.
