Authors: Dave White
“It’s time to own up.”
She spoke too quickly, not thinking about protecting her identity. “She told me the pictures were put away.”
“If,” I said slowly, “Anne is your mother, that makes Gerry Figuroa your father. Your husband was a hit man for drug dealers.”
“My husband is dead!”
“I know. And that’s not what you wanted, is it? I mean, why hire me to follow him after he killed your dad, unless you wanted me to find him?”
“Shut up.”
“You asked your husband to kill Gerry. You wanted it to look like an accident. But almost immediately the police didn’t buy it. So you were screwed.”
She buried her face in her hands.
“I’ve figured most of it out, Jen. But you have to help me fill in the holes. What happened when you heard it wasn’t being looked at as an accident? That was in the papers, wasn’t it? Or did Pablo tell you?”
“I don’t have to tell you. You’ll put me in jail.”
This was the tough part, the reason I didn’t come here directly after seeing Anne Backes. If I called the police on this, then Burgess’s trial would be skewed. My testimony wouldn’t be worth anything and there’d be a chance I’d go to jail. And a drug dealer might go free. I wasn’t willing to let that happen. As much as it burned
me, as much as she was responsible for the death of my friend, she was the lesser of two evils.
I sat back on the couch. “You’re not going to jail. I just want to know the truth.”
She looked me in the eyes.
“You have my word. I have nothing to gain by putting you in jail, Jen. I just want to know. And I’m sure it’s driving you nuts, keeping it bottled up.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“What happened? You asked Pablo to kill Gerry. Your own father. Why?”
“He wasn’t my father!” She took a deep breath. “My mother and I were the only family I had. He destroyed my mother, made her crazy. She left my brother with him because she couldn’t think straight. He had her so hopped up on drugs, she didn’t think to take Steven. She only took me when she realized she hit rock-bottom. She went to clean up and she only took me. She started to use the excuse that he had to learn to be a father on his own. Tough love bullshit. He ruined our family, and he couldn’t even clean up for it.”
I nodded. There wasn’t a flow to my questions, I just asked them when they came to mind. “Did you know you married a hit man?”
Jen Hanover shook her head. “At one point, when I was seventeen, a friend went into a tailspin. She slipped up and got back on heroin. She must have gone through Burgess. She met Pablo. She introduced him to me as Rex. I fell in love with Rex. She cleaned up not long after. He helped her. She always seemed scared of Rex. I never knew why, until . . . until . . .”
“When did you find out?”
“When Steven died, I called Gerry. I wanted to talk to him. He told me he was cleaning up. Stopped drinking. Stopped smoking. All that. I was so angry. Why did he have to wait until one of us died to clean up? I was so mad. Rex thought it would pass. That I would get over it. But I didn’t. Finally, a few months ago, he said—” She gagged. Caught her breath. “He said he would kill Gerry if I wanted. And I was so mad. I said yes. That’s when Rex told me everything.”
The room was still and quiet. The enormity of her words hung in the air as she took deep breaths. There were more questions to ask, but sometimes it was better
to let people talk. Once she got her breathing back to normal, I was confident she would continue. Jen needed to talk; the words were spilling out of her now.
“I told Rex to make it look like an accident, but he drove off. There were too many witnesses. And the more I thought about it, the more I started to hate him as well. Now that I knew his business, he let me hear everything. I knew when people were going to die. I knew about that woman at Drew.”
I nodded. “So you decided to hire me. To find him, to stop the killings?”
“No. I wanted you to catch him for killing Gerry. When I had talked to Gerry, he was mad that I didn’t come to Steve’s funeral, wanted to know where I was. That even his private investigator friend showed up. I remembered that and looked you up.”
Rubbing my chin, I asked, “But what if he was captured. Wouldn’t he implicate you?”
“Maybe I didn’t think things through. I trusted he loved me, would do anything for me. But by then, I didn’t love him. I hated him.
Part of me didn’t even care if he did turn me in. Gerry would still be dead.”
I thought about the first time I saw Najera, when he hung me out the window. “Did he know what you were doing?”
She shrugged. “I never told him. Never even saw him. Never got to say good-bye.”
“I think he did.”
“Why?”
I told her about him acting like Burgess had hired me. Pablo Najera put me on Michael Burgess’s tail to keep me away from his wife’s. Burgess acted surprised when I told him who hired me, but Najera knew all along.
“How far did you go to make sure Gerry’s death wasn’t your fault?”
“What do you mean?”
“The police found the ingredients of crystal meth all over his apartment, like he was making it to sell. Did you plant it there? Make it look like he was back in the drug business?”
She thought about it for a moment. “No,” she said. “I had nothing to do with that.”
I wanted her to say yes. Gerry was supposed to be the lovable old guy in the bar, the guy who’d tell jokes and you could laugh with. He wasn’t supposed to be making drugs to survive. But Jen had no reason to lie now. She was telling the truth. Gerry was selling again.
Jen gagged some more.
I stood to go. “One last thing. Did your cousin Tracy know you were Gerry’s daughter?”
“No. When we became friends, in college, Tracy was already too deep into drugs, she was a mess.”
“You met up with her in college?”
“I knew about her long before that. I wanted to know my family, even though my mother didn’t. I found out where she went to college and I applied. When I got in, I looked her up and we became friends.”
I nodded and moved to the door.
“You’re really going to let me be?”
I was afraid that not pinning Gerry’s death on Burgess would give the defense a cause to question the entire case.
“A major drug dealer is going to go to prison because of all of this,” I said. “You’re small-time compared to that.”
“So I’m going to be innocent.” It was a statement, not a question.
Staring at her, I said, ‘You’re the one who has to live with setting up the death of your father and being involved in the death of your husband.”
I walked to the front door. “Wait,” she said.
I turned back.
Her eyes were nearly black, her face flushed. She looked so small in the easy chair she sat in, so alone. Which, I suppose, is what she wanted to be.
“When I married him, Rex promised he’d never hurt me.”
“I think he tried his best to keep that promise,” I said.
***
At six in the evening the Olde Towne Tavern was quiet for a Saturday. A month ago, Gerry would have been sitting at his usual stool in the corner, sipping his coffee,
telling some college kid a war story. Or an acting story. Any kind of story. But now the corner seat was empty.
The college kids who’d usually eat up those kind of stories were playing darts. I sat at the bar drinking Amstel, watching Artie wipe the bar down.
“How was the test?” he asked. I shrugged. “Pointless.”
“Gotta do what you gotta do.” He smiled. “It’s over now? That Burgess guy killed Gerry because he was selling some drugs to make rent?”
I thought about telling him everything. But it was time to let the case die. Time to leave Gerry’s memory alone. “Yeah. That’s what happened.”
“Fucking old man. He could have come to any of us for help, for money. He was our friend.”
I finished my beer. The college kids finished playing darts and moved on to the pool table. As they racked them up, I wondered how close they were to each other, what kind of friends they were, how far they’d go for each other. Or if they were only drinking buddies hanging out because they were all free tonight.
Artie got me another. “I never got to say thank you, Jackson. And sorry.”
“For what?”
“For thinking you weren’t doing your job. For getting you involved in this. You didn’t want to, from the start. But I forced you into it. And you lost your license. And found out a bunch of shit we both probably didn’t want to know. I’m sorry for being such an asshole.”
I took a long drink from the new bottle of Amstel and thought about how far Pablo Najera went for his wife. Thought about how far Anne Backes went to try and get Gerry to clean up. How far she went to make her family whole. I thought about all the promises people made every day, and how far they went to keep them.
Then I thought about how hard I tried to keep away from mine. “Jackson?” Artie said. He reached out his hand and shook mine. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I promised.”
There are so many people I need to thank. To Allan Guthrie and Jason Pinter for taking this book and making it so much better than it was.
Jason also gets thanks—so much thanks—for creating Polis and saving this book and Jackson Donne from oblivion.
To Erin and Ben, whom I love more than anything.
My family and friends for always believing, sometimes more than I did.
Kevin Burton Smith, Victoria Esposito-Shea, and Gerald So over at the
Thrilling Detective
website for accepting my first Donne stories, and helping to grow the character.
The faculty, staff and administration in the Clifton Public Schools system for their constant support.
Ray Banks, Laura Lippman, Duane Swierczynski, Pat Lambe, Charlie Stella, Russel McLean, Jay Stringer, Charlie Stella, Bryon Quertermous, John Rickards, Sarah Weinman, Ed Champion, and the rest of the authors who’ve always been there: you’re the best.
Thanks, everybody.
Dave White is a Derringer Award-winning mystery author and educator. White, an eighth grade teacher for the Clifton, NJ Public School district, attended Rutgers University and received his MAT from Montclair State University. His 2002 short story, “Closure,” won the Derringer Award for Best Short Mystery Story the following year.
Publishers Weekly
gave the first two novels in his Jackson Donne series,
When One Man Dies
and
The Evil That Men Do
, starred reviews, calling
When One Man Dies
an “engrossing, evocative debut novel” and writing that his second novel “fulfills the promise of his debut.” He received praise from crime fiction luminaries such as bestselling, Edgar Award-winning Laura Lippman and the legendary James Crumley.
Both
When One Man Dies
and
The Evil That Men Do
were nominated for the prestigious Shamus Award, and
When One Man Dies
was nominated for the Strand Critics Award for “Best First Novel”. His standalone thriller,
Witness To Death
, was an ebook bestseller upon release and named one of the Best Books of the Year by the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
.
The third book in his acclaimed Jackson Donne series,
Not Even Past
, will be published in February 2014 by Polis Books.
Follow Dave White on Twitter at
@dave_white
.
Read on for an excerpt from
The Evil That Men Do
, the acclaimed second novel in Dave White’s Jackson Donne series:
PART ONE
JOE TENANT
1938
Joe Tenant tied the barge to the dock. The water licked its sides, and the boat swayed back and forth. The chill of the morning air made him shiver, and he wished for the sun to rise a little faster. He pulled the knot tight, made sure it was secure, and stepped onto the wooden planks
.
A few men sorted through their lunch boxes, looking for a quick breakfast before starting the day shift. Tenant always thought that odd, because, as long as he’d worked the night shift, the morning had always signaled dinner to him. Working nights was difficult, adjusting to the schedule, keeping a wife happy, but Tenant enjoyed the silence
.
“Hey, Tugboat, how’s the water today?” one of the daymen asked. “They ‘re transferring me to nights next week, so I want to enjoy it while I can.”
Tenant smiled at his nickname. He hadn’t liked it at first, thought the men were mocking him, but he’d soon learned that everybody had a nickname on the water
.
“How are you, Sops? Water’s kind of rocky, might be a storm later in the day.”
“Fantastic,” Sops said
.
Tenant wished them a good day and headed toward the parking lot. The warehouses that surrounded the lot expelled smoke and steam, doing their best to spur the economy. The air smelled like fish and soot, and Tenant would be happy just to get home
.
He reached his car and was reminded how lucky he was. In these days, it was good fate to have a car when hardly anyone did. Meanwhile those guys down in Clifton were trying to build that dog park, and doing whatever the hell else FDR wanted them to do. And all that shit out in Europe, he was living a blessed life
.