I find the unit I am looking for, number 1112, and press the buzzer next to the door. A peep hole is set into it, its fisheye lens bright until a shadow blots light from the opposite side. The blackness lingers for a moment, the shadow’s maker puzzled by what they see. Finally brightness fills the tiny glass portal once more and multiple locks click, the door swinging open. Chris Wheeler stands just within, a regulated surprise about her.
“Michael,” she says, pleased but puzzled.
“Hello, Chris.” I catch my mistake. “Christine.”
She smiles, shakes off my correction. “Chris is fine. Michael, what are you…”
“Doing here?” I finish for her.
She nods, and I tell her, offering my apology for how I treated her at the cemetery. Somewhere in the conversation that spins from this she invites me in, and offers me some coffee. I hold the warming cup in my hand and stand in her living room as she scuttles about tidying a minor mess in her kitchen. It is what my mother would do—would have
done—
had guests shown up unexpectedly. God forbid there be a dirty dish in the sink, or a glass not put away in the cupboard.
“You called my mother to find me?” Chris says with obvious approval. “Wanna come work for us?”
In our conversation to this point she has already told me of her position, as a news editor for a local network affiliate, working the evening shift which, for her, begins in barely an hour.
“It was no feat,” I explain. “She’s listed.”
Chris comes out of the kitchen. She gathers her brown hair in a pony tail, wraps a scrunchy around it, lets it fall against the back of her cream colored blouse. The look of harried professional is all about her, wash and wear, more concern about function than form. If there is a part to look for the job she does I cannot imagine that this is it, which impresses me. She is not about show.
“We have ‘investigative journalists’,” she says, mocking with air quotes, “who give up if Google doesn’t give them the answer they want.”
I chuckle lightly and wander to the balcony door. Through the glass, as expected, I can just catch sight of the downtown towers, slivers of them, in the narrow canyon between two closer buildings.
“Fifty dollar view,” she says.
“That cheap?”
“I wish.” She joins me at the sliding glass door, but looks at me. Not the view. “So you came to see me because of a hat.”
It sounds beyond odd, but she does not treat the genesis of my journey here as such. To her it seems more kismet than kooky.
“We made those between our junior and senior years,” she says, laughing to herself at the act. “Two wild high school girls with knitting needles.”
“Whatever keeps you off the streets,” I comment, sipping the last of my coffee. She takes the cup and carries it to the counter between kitchen and living room, standing there with her back to me for a moment. A too long moment.
“I put that hat on when I visit her,” Chris says. She turns back toward me, a darkness about her now. Born of something that isn’t grief, or sudden sadness. Something more persistent that lies low and smolders, but which has been fanned to life with my coming.
“What’s wrong?” I ask her. She hesitates in responding, just staring at me, working over some decision. I have seen this on the face of many a parishioner as they struggle with some admission. Some sin to confess. I doubt there is a transgression Chris is trying to wrest free from its silent place within, but there is something she is trying to say. Something held close. Something that troubles her.
Her gaze changes, the look of one suddenly unbound about her. She seems almost apologetic as she says what she does next. “How much do you know about Katie’s murder?”
I could have spun a thousand different turns of phrase that she might speak right then, and I would have never come close to what she has just asked. It is so unexpected that my only reply is a look of wonder. A head-cocked inability to process the question in any meaningful way. She senses her words’ effect on me and approaches, lending comfort through proximity.
“I’m sorry to ask, Michael, but…” She pauses, then turns away. She goes to a desk across the room, laptop open on it, the knit cap resting right there, atop a thin file folder, the edges of news clippings poking free. She takes the folder and returns to where I stand, opening it before me, a sudden intensity clear in her manner. Some drive that has, until now, been in check. “I saved these.”
I look at what she holds before me. They are news clippings. About Katie. About her murder. I have likely seen many before, in the days after that terrible time, but any print reporting, any formal news at all, exists only in a haze for me. Here, though, it is blasted at me in bold and black.
Victim Killed In Robbery… Robbery Goes Wrong… Market Heist Fatality…
There are more. But I look away, to Chris, wondering clear on my face as to why she would show these to me. Why she would dredge the past in this way.
“When she was killed,” Chris begins to explain, “I had no way to grieve. We’d drifted apart by then, and I would just grab on to anything I could about her. I missed her.”
I nod. Thinking I understand.
I do not.
“But something was wrong with this,” Chris continues, gesturing to the news clippings. She seems to struggle for a moment with how to proceed, finally getting her mental footing. She fixes on me, the darkness that had welled up about her these past few minutes edging beyond itself. It is another look I have seen, in my own reflection, as I am about to deliver grave news to one unprepared for such. “I was new at the station, but you hear things. Reporters hear things. They know things that police know. Stuff that isn’t supposed to be made public because it will help them identify a criminal later.”
“Okay,” I say. It is easy to keep up, but impossible to anticipate where she is going with this. Or how it might bear on what happened to Katie.
She glances down at the clippings again. “Michael, all of these say she was killed during a robbery, but there was no money taken.”
Did it for the money…
Eric’s words echo in my mind with a flourish.
“The register was full of cash,” Chris tells me. “Katie had a fifty dollar bill in her hand. No one took anything.”
I stare at Chris and try to process what she has told me, its meaning going to a place even she cannot see. A place beyond mere discrepancy between what was reported, and what was. A place where a dying man spoke to a motive that, now, begs its own explanation.
Eric said it.
Did it for the money…
And so there is a question where there was none, and a soft retreat from my decision to move on. To not let my life be dictated by what I never should have known.
For the money…
I ask myself now, in light of the deeper truth Chris has shown me, and told me.
What
was done for
what
money?
Chapter Eleven
Roads
There is the concept of being faced with two paths, which to me has always seemed simplistic in its herald of choice. Were there but a road this way, and a road that, all about our existence would be simplified to the point where meaning, and truth, were to be found by little more than a shift in direction.
Or avoidance altogether. Choosing neither road.
I am where those roads meet, or diverge, depending on one’s direction of travel. It could be said I reached this point when Eric uttered his confession as the life slipped swiftly from him. Or it could be when Chris Wheeler showed me her clippings and expressed her puzzlement at the circumstances of Katie’s death. What is certain is that, lacking
some
circumstance or stimuli, I would not be where I am now, parked outside a north side barber shop called Clip Joint.
Still, I might have avoided this trip, I do admit. I could have pressed Chris as to anything further she had stumbled upon. But I chose not to. Making abrupt and clumsy excuses I left her condo, hardly a goodbye trailing in my wake.
I felt it there. That pull. That want of more knowing. Gravity from a realm within my own being, drawing me toward one road where each step would lead me away from my calling, my vows. Wise words from Father Taylor and a brief sojourn to the house on Arrow Lake had settled the matter for me, I had thought. I had believed.
Until Chris.
I had no plan to come here. And, even being here, I am uncertain as to what I hope to gain. What I might leave with. Some added certainty that any gnashing through old what’s and how’s would be pointless. I stare at the barber pole, which has spun ribbons of red and white for longer than I have been on this earth, and pray, actually pray, that this can be the end of this misguided errand upon which I have sent myself.
I step from my car and walk to the storefront, wide windows filling the space beyond with light that brightens and wanes as scabs of dark gray race across the afternoon sky. Inside I see four chairs, their swiveling bases bolted to the aged linoleum floor, just one occupied by an older gentleman. A single barber works long scissors leisurely, clipping strands. Thick hands oddly deft.
I enter and Dave Benz looks up from his task, fixing a look that is half glad, half worried. “Mike…”
“How are you, Dave?” I ask, still struggling with the familiarity. Had we engaged much past the time of my youth I imagine it would not seem the least bit out of sorts, but we have not. And this past week there have been no child-like pleasantries or playfulness. Just the grating intrusion of real life.
“Good, Mike,” he says, clipping as he talks. “Everything okay?”
I nod, unsurprised by his query. The few friends whom my mother and father held close—whom my mother
allowed
close, to be precise—expect little good news where she is concerned. A phone call from my father or an unexpected visit by me would rightly trigger worry. “Mom and pop are good,” I assure him. “How’s Luke?”
Dave gestures to the row of chairs facing the workspace and I take a seat. “Coming along good. He’ll be back out there in a few weeks.” He leans a bit forward and speaks to the man in the barber chair. “This is Gus Jerome’s kid, Mike.”
The man smiles and nods my way, saying nothing, yet I need no more to know that he is retired CPD. The likelihood of any Clip Joint patron or worker being anything other is remote. It is owned by a mix of those who’d worn the uniform, a hangout to keep idle hands at work, and idle minds engaged. There was hardly a chance that the receipts even made rent, but that wasn’t the point. If Dave Benz wasn’t giving trims it might be Dick Vessey or Lenny Hescher or Gordo Holt. Were my mother not afflicted as she was my father’s name might be included among those and the dozen others who’d banded together to give good talk and middling haircuts.
“What are you doing in the neighborhood,” Dave asks, finishing up and sweeping the sheet from his customer with a flourish, bits of gray hair cast about the floor.
“Had something I wanted to talk about,” I tell him. His brow bunches toward the center, a hard convergence of worry and wonder. Cops, I have learned, despise the unknown. What lies down a dark alley. Who’s waiting behind a closed door. Conversations requested out of the blue.
“Yeah, sure.” He takes a fiver from his customer and sees the man off, holding the door open for him. When he turns back to me the fold of skin above his nose has relaxed. But in his eyes there is a hollow apprehension, that branded stare common to his profession. One that marks an expectation of the worst. I remember that from my father, when his days were filled with chasing criminals and taping off horrific scenes where a jumper couldn’t be talked down. That admission that, as bad as the world was, it always found a way to take things down a notch. “Let me clean that mop you got up while we yack.”
I slip into the barber chair and he swings a sheet around me, clipping it together behind my collar.
“Neil, we need a sweep out here,” Dave shouts toward the back of the shop as he wipes his scissors down.
Neil Benz. My head turns just as he comes through the curtained doorway. The
other
son. Two years older than Luke and a million miles from his father’s expectations.
“Hey, Mike,” he says as he takes the broom from where it leans against the wall and begins short stroking the scattering of hair into a pile.
“Neil,” I say, still surprised by his presence. The last I’d heard, which has to be four years ago now from a casual mention by my father, he was just out of jail in Arizona. Check fraud this time, some scheme to cover gambling debts. He avoids my gaze as I appraise his presence, thin muscle under tanned skin. Somehow he’d avoided drugs as a vice, but hadn’t had the same luck with horses, or cards, or greyhounds. He and Katie played as kids on occasion, though not with any frequency. My mother had cast a wary eye on Neil Benz even then. It was no great display of prescience, just a general feeling shared by more than a few in the Jerome-Benz circle of acquaintances. Casual comments that ‘that boy is going to end up doing no good’. “You in town to stay?”
In the mirror ahead I catch a glimpse of Dave glancing harshly toward his eldest. Not the look of one hoping a response will avoid impropriety, but one curious as to the response.
“Trying to get something going,” he says, crouching with a small dustpan and pushing the hair into it. He pauses down there and looks up, his gaze split furtively between his father and me. “Wanna head back west when I can.”
Translation of word to meaning comes easily. He is hiding, from debt or debtor, hoping that any who might seek him will think twice realizing the proximity of he to his father.
Dave eases my head forward with a touch on the back and begins clipping at the nape of my neck. I can no longer glimpse him in the mirror, but by Neil’s haste I imagine a look from father to son has directed him to leave. He leans broom against wall and disappears into the back with the dustpan, door to the alley opening a second later.
“What is it you wanted to talk about?” Dave asks, direct but not abrupt. Were Neil not in proximity I suspect he would have chatted me up with small talk for a bit. Or tried to. If that had been the case I doubt I could have managed more than cursory pleasantries. There is purpose to my visit.