Authors: Michael Koryta
I
disconnected then and turned to look at Joe.
"The
problem with this job," I said, "is that the guesswork always comes
before the facts. I'm pretty sure that system put Ken in his grave."
I had
to give John Dunbar credit—he didn't balk at the idea. In fact, what I saw in
his face when I laid it out for him wasn't denial but shame. He actually seemed
to wince when I showed him the police report that mentioned Bertoli's car at
the time of his arrest and explained its similarities to a different car that
had been near the death scene.
"I
knew what kind of car he had," he said. "Of course I knew that, and I
knew that's what got him arrested, but I didn't consider that it would have any
importance beyond that. I didn't consider it."
He
bit off that repeated line, angry, self-reproachful—
I didn't
consider
it.
Joe hadn't said much at all, but he looked at me when Dunbar said that,
gave a small nod, showing that he thought it was legitimate.
"I
knew it was Alvin Neloms who was in the car with Bertoli the night he was
arrested," Dunbar said. "Of course I checked that out, of course I
knew it,
of course
I did the same work you just did. Back then he was
nothing more than a kid on the corner, someone who watched for police and maybe
did a little muling. He was sixteen."
"He's
not anymore," Joe said. "According to what we've been told, he's as
close to a drug kingpin as the east side has. It's gang country out there; you
do well to last six months. Neloms being around this many years later, that
tells you something."
Dunbar's
eyes flicked side to side but held distance, as if he were watching a film.
"DiPietro
was providing some of the east side supply," he said, speaking slowly.
"That was the point, see, that's when he and Sanabria had their first
falling-out. Sanabria didn't trust drugs, and he certainly didn't trust blacks.
His father was of that old school, racist, and I'm sure that stuck with
Dominic. He did not want to be involved with the drug trade on the east side.
We knew that, knew it from wiretaps and informants and a hell of a lot of work.
We knew that Dominic was furious with DiPietro."
He
paused and took a breath and then said, "Dominic killed DiPietro,"
but his voice had gone soft and he wouldn't take his eyes off the police report
that detailed Bertoli's car.
As I
watched his face, I felt tinged with sorrow. I was looking at an old cop who'd
believed something very deeply and was now considering that it might have been
wrong.
"You
talked with a cop from East Cleveland," he said. "Someone who knows
about Neloms."
"Yes,"
Joe said.
"Can
you call him back—" Dunbar said. "Can you ask him a question—"
"What
am I supposed to ask—"
"If
he has any idea when Alvin made his move into the power structure. If he has
any idea where the supply came from. A small fortune of drugs disappeared when
DiPietro got whacked. They never turned up with the Italians again."
Joe
took his cell phone out and called. He asked for Tony, waited for a few
minutes, and then spoke again. He repeated Dunbar's questions, listened as
Dunbar and I sat with our eyes on the floor, silent. At length, Joe thanked
Tony and hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and waited for a few
seconds before speaking. He did not look at Dunbar when he did.
"The
way Tony remembers it, Alvin was a lot like what you say, a corner kid, until
he was in his late teens. Then he got his hands on some product. Nobody knew
where, or how, but all of a sudden he had product, and then three major players
were dropped in a drive-by over on St. Clair, and from that point on Alvin,
while still a boy, was also the
man
in East Cleveland. This beginning
when he was still in his teens. He was, Tony says, an ambitious young
man."
I
looked at Dunbar. "DiPietro controlled the drugs you were talking about,
right— They were in his possession—"
"You
know they were. I already told you that. We looked at every associate, looked
at everyone who…" his voice faded, and then he said, "Alvin Neloms
was a boy. A child."
"Tony
also said Alvin and his uncle were tight," Joe said quietly. "Alvin's
father is an unknown, disappeared when the mother got pregnant, and Darius
looked after the family. Supported the family."
I
nodded. "Supported them with a little help from the mob, is what Mike
London thought. He said Darius was involved with stolen cars, changing their
look and putting them back out on the street."
Dunbar
shifted, smoothed his pants with his palms, swallowed as if it were a
challenge.
"You
never even considered the possibility, did you—" I said.
He
looked up. "Neloms— Well, I had no idea—"
"Not
Neloms. The possibility that it might have been anybody other than Sanabria,
period."
"Of
course I did."
"Really—"
His
gaze focused again, went defiant. "Perry, that man would've killed anyone
who collided with him. You don't understand that about him. I do. He had killed
before, and I'd
had
him for it, okay— I told you that story."
"I
know," I said. "I'm just wondering which murder you were really
chasing him for. The new one you thought he'd committed, or the one he'd
already beaten you on."
He
held my eyes for a little while and then looked away and ran a hand over his
mouth. His hands were dry and white and the blue veins stood out. They matched
the strips of stark color under his eyes.
"So
what we're thinking," Joe said, "is that Bertoli and Neloms were
friends, probably from meeting at the uncle's shop. Neloms is along when
Bertoli
beats up the guy at the truck stop, but he doesn't go in, which means that as a
kid he's somehow already got people doing the bleeding for him. It also means
he was already looking for his own supply at that point, his own drug nest egg.
He wanted to run the show, not stand on the corner for somebody else."
"The
guy Bertoli beat up didn't have as much product as they thought," I said.
"They overestimated his role. Bertoli got busted, but Neloms walked
because he was a juvenile."
Joe
nodded. "Right. After this, DiPietro is killed, a small fortune of drugs
disappears, and suddenly a teenage kid became a deadly force. It was a power
play, but one from a player nobody respected or even knew of at the time. This
is the scenario—"
"That's
the scenario," I said. "Ken Merriman got about ten percent of the way
there. He got to the connection between the cars. I bet he didn't get farther
than that, but he tried to. He tried to, and he died."
"What
would he have done—" Joe said. "Once he connected the cars, what do
you think he would have done—"
"Gone
and asked about them," I answered, feeling a sick sadness. "He wasn't
a street detective. He would have gone right down to that body shop and asked
about the car, thinking that was the next step. He might have suspected Cash
Neloms was involved by then, but I don't think he had a real sense of how
dangerous the guy was. He would have gone down there to ask some questions, and
he wouldn't have been very good at it. I saw him in action with interviews, and
he was not very good at it."
"Suppose
you're right on Bertoli," Dunbar said. "Suppose he was killed by
Neloms. That doesn't mean Cantrell was, too. The styles of crime are entirely
different. One was killed on scene and the body left without any concern; the
other one was buried in another state. Those are two different killings, maybe
by two different people."
On
the surface he was right, but I understood what he didn't: how Joshua
Cantrell's body had been transported, and why. The killings hadn't been
different in style at all—both bodies were left where they'd fallen. Same
style, same killer. Solve one and you've solved the other.
Thinking
about that brought a realization to me. To whoever had killed
Cantrell,
the disappearance of his body must have seemed extraordinary. For twelve years,
while the rest of the world wondered what had happened to him, one person
wondered about the fate of his corpse. Wondered, no doubt, quite intensely.
"I
want to talk to Darius," I said. "Not his nephew, not yet. Hit him
with the only solid thing we have—that report on Bertoli's car—and see what
he'll say."
Dunbar
said, "I've got photographs."
"Pardon—"
"I've
got photographs of Bertoli, and of his car. I've got photographs of damn near
everybody's car, everybody that went near Sanabria."
"How
soon can you come up with them—"
He
stood up and went into the bedroom. From where I sat I could see through the
doorway, and as I watched he opened a closet door. It was a small closet—every
space in his house was small—and the clothes that hung in it were pushed far to
the side to make room for a clear plastic organizer with drawers. It was the
sort a lot of people had in their closets, usually for sweaters and old jeans,
things they rarely used or for which they'd run out of shelf space. Dunbar's
didn't hold any clothing, though, not a single piece of it. The thing was
filled with manila folders, and I could see that each drawer was labeled with a
date range.
He'd
been retired for nearly fifteen years and had almost no closet space. I looked
at that set of plastic drawers and I felt sad for him again.
It
didn't take him long. First drawer he opened, first folder he removed. When he
came back to the living room he had three photos in his hands; he passed one to
Joe and two to me.
"These
would have been taken just a few months before Bertoli was arrested, a little
before DiPietro was killed. You can see the diamonds carved in the rims.
They're tiny, but they're there."
Yes,
they were. A half-dozen small diamonds. The car was an Impala, probably
midseventies model, painted a metallic black. Bertoli wasn't visible in either
of the photographs—the windows were up, and they almost matched the car's
paint, clearly an illegal level of tint. Window tint like that pissed off
street cops because you couldn't see what was happening in the interior as you
approached. The entire car was basically a rolling request to be stopped and
searched.
"This
is perfect," I said. "Can we borrow these—" Dunbar nodded, but
his eyes seemed faraway again. I stood up. "Thank you. For the pictures,
and the insight." "I've got some other things I'll go through,"
he said, not looking up. "I'll do some thinking. I'm not sure you're
right… but I'll do some thinking."
Darius
Neloms's shop, Classic Auto Body, was on Eddy Road, which was one of the few
streets in the city that I would actively try to avoid while driving. It's an
asphalt strip of neglect and anger, a place where as a rookie I'd been called
to the scene of a fight and arrived to find a fourteen-year-old boy bleeding to
death on the sidewalk from a knife wound to the neck. I'm not one of those PIs
who loves to carry a gun, and I usually don't have one in my truck. Eddy Road,
though, can make me regret that.
Today
I had a gun, and I had Joe in the passenger seat, casting a dour eye over the
neighborhood.
"It
just gets worse, doesn't it—" he said. "I haven't been down here in a
few years, but you can't pick up the paper without seeing something about this
neighborhood. It just gets worse, poorer and bloodier."
"And
more hopeless," I said, because that's how East Cleveland seemed to me, a
legacy of poverty and crime and corruption drowning the people who tried to
make a life there.
"Ah,
shit, nothing's hopeless," Joe said. "Just ignored."
My
mind wasn't on East Cleveland, though. I was thinking of Ken Merriman, of that
spot in Mill Stream Run where his body had been dumped, and wondering whether
he'd made a drive down Eddy Road on his last day alive. Joe had his face turned
away from me, looking out at the neighborhood, and when I glanced at him I had
a vision of the bullet holes that hid under his shirt, and then one of the
steel security bar that rested across Amy's door.