Authors: Dave White
“About twenty minutes. Depending on traffic on Eighteen.” Tracy stood, eyes closed. It seemed she was either making a decision or trying to build up some courage.
I waited, putting my hands in my pockets. My Glock rested in the shoulder holster pressing against my arm. After this afternoon’s visit, I wasn’t going anywhere unarmed.
“We can be a few minutes late,” she said after a deep breath. “Can we go up? Do you have a key?”
“I know the landlord.”
We walked onto the wooden porch, and I rang James’s doorbell. He answered. I told him what we wanted.
James said, “The cops told me not to let anyone up there.”
“We have to feed the cat.”
“There’s no cat. The police said—”
I pulled sixty bucks of the two hundred I’d taken from the stack of five thousand. Gave it to James. It was real easy to throw around.
“You’re not going to let the cat starve, are you?”
He unlocked the door and let us in. We had to duck under crime-scene tape.
Climbing the stairs, I got the same smell of lemon as the last time I was there, just a bit stronger. Tracy pushed the door open.
“I’m going to check the kitchen. I want to make sure he was eating right.” The words were laced with sarcasm, and I had the feeling she really wanted to look for bottles.
I was confident she wouldn’t find any.
I decided to make a sweep of the apartment. I started with the bathroom, which was crowded, small, claustrophobic. The color, a deep brown, made the walls seem closer than they actually were. There was a sink, a toilet against one wall, with about three feet between the end of the fixtures and the wall. The opposite wall held a radiator and a tall closet. A walk-in shower took up the wall opposite the door. I pushed the door closed and relieved myself.
Next, I washed my hands and checked the medicine cabinet. Nothing unusual: two bottles of Sudafed, a bottle of Advil, toothpaste, nail clipper, shaving cream, and a razor. Crouching, I checked behind the toilet and the sink. Nothing but floor tiles. I pulled open the shower and found a leaky faucet and a wet floor. Soap and shampoo rested on a shelf. Finally, I turned and opened the closet. What I saw made me catch my breath, though I wasn’t sure why.
The bottom shelf of the closet had a stack of bath towels. The shelf above it was filled with packages of lithium batteries, fifteen, twenty, maybe more. Very odd to be stored in a bathroom closet. On the shelf above that were about twenty bottles of Sudafed. Something started tickling the back of my brain, something from my days on the police force. Something I knew, something that if I wasn’t out of practice would have registered with me immediately.
I closed the closet door and found Tracy waiting in the living room.
“Did you go through all the cabinets?” I asked. “Yeah.”
“Did you see anything unusual?”
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing unusual?”
Tracy paused, as if thinking about it.
“He has a lot of matches. But I think that’s to start the oven.”
“Show me.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked, leading me into the kitchen.
“I’m not sure.” It wasn’t clear, but unless Gerry collected the items—which would be odd—something wasn’t right.
I checked the oven in the kitchen and saw it was autostart. No matches needed. Tracy, meanwhile, found a closet under the sink. It was filled with red-and-blue boxes of matches, the wooden kind with the sulfur tip. Next to it were two boxes of coffee filters. My brain was cramping. I was missing something, some connection. Sudafed, sulfur matches, and lithium batteries.
“What’s wrong?” Tracy asked. “Why does he have all these matches?”
I took a deep breath. Slowly it started to come together in my brain. I just had to talk it through.
“When I was on the police force, I was a narcotics cop. We used to go to workshops, where they’d teach us different ways to make different drugs. That way when we went to take someone down, a dealer, someone trying to make shit out of their bathtub, we knew what to look for.”
“What does that have to do with matches?”
“Sulfur, pseudoephedrine, and lithium. Each ingredient is tracked by the DEA, you can’t buy it in large portions. You do that, the DEA will be at your door in no time. But you can find sulfur in matches, lithium in batteries, and pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in Sudafed. I found Sudafed and a ton of batteries in the bathroom closet. Plenty of matches here.”
Tracy took a step back, covered her mouth. “These are the ingredients of crystal meth.”
Tracy’s face turned pale. She pushed past me and slammed the door to the bathroom. I could hear her crying, even as I tried not to listen. Deciding to give her privacy, I took the stairs out to the street. The air was cool and the faint breeze had picked up into a stiff wind. Heavy clouds hung overhead.
***
The clouds had opened and rain poured, my windshield wipers fighting to keep up. Traffic on Route 18 had slowed to a crawl, and we hit all the lights red. Ahead of
us, a trailer truck kicked up puddles of water, which splattered over the windshield. The storm had hit quickly, soaking the asphalt and shocking the rush-hour drivers.
Except for the rain tapping on the roof, the ride so far was silent, Tracy looking out the passenger window, me squinting to watch for brake lights. My Honda Prelude didn’t handle too well in the rain, and I didn’t want to push it. Questions about Gerry were just starting to come to the forefront of my mind, but I had to push them aside in order to focus on the road. It was slick and the first time I stepped on the brakes, I felt them lock and I had to struggle to control the car.
“Do you mind if I put on the radio?” Tracy asked.
“Go for it,” I said, swinging into the left lane. Passing the trailer would make it easier to see, I hoped.
Tracy spun the dial on the radio and came across a hip-hop tune. She whispered the lyrics to herself as she turned back toward the passenger window.
I passed the trailer, pulled back into the right lane, and said, “You okay?”
“Are you sure about what you saw in there?”
I nodded. “We found meth labs all the time on the force.”
“You know, when I was a kid, Gerry was the guy who gave me the drug talk. Not my dad, not my mom, but Uncle Gerry.”
“What did he tell you?”
“You know, the usual stuff you tell a kid. The stuff that goes through your head the first time you smoke a joint in college. You’ll get hooked, no one in their right mind does the stuff. It’ll kill you. Your future will be screwed. The scary shit.”
“Why did Gerry give you the talk?”
“My parents were always working. My mom was a teacher, my dad was in business. After school was over, when my mom was still working remedial or driving home, Gerry was still around before he went to act. Steve came home from first grade and was talking about some kid who said his dad smoked different kinds of cigarettes.”
Steve was Gerry’s son. He died of cancer a few years ago.
Tracy continued, “Gerry took the opportunity, jumped right into the conversation. Must have watched a public-service announcement just before he picked us up. He sounded like a commercial.”
“I’m pretty sure your uncle did smoke pot at times.”
Tracy laughed. “I’m sure he did, too, but he never let us know about it. He wanted Steve and me to be like brother and sister, not cousins, and he wanted a Norman Rockwell childhood for us.”
“Did you get it?”
“Not a chance.”
Most of East Brunswick was strip malls and traffic lights, and I seemed to hit every red light. In fact, I think everyone did. It gave motorists more time to decide whether or not to stop at the Borders, Dick’s Sporting Goods, or Kohl’s that lined the highway. The rain hadn’t let up, but traffic was lighter as I crossed the last traffic light. I pressed the accelerator.
“I was thinking,” she said.
“What about?”
“The landlord said the cops had been up to the apartment.”
I knew what was coming. It had been bothering me as well. “Yeah. He did say that.”
“If you know what ingredients go into crystal meth, wouldn’t the police know as well?”
Martin sure as hell would. He went to the same workshops I did. “Yeah, they should.”
“Why didn’t the cops take all those ingredients in as evidence?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I put on my right blinker and took the next exit for Milltown Road. “Best I can figure is it’s circumstantial. There was no proof that Gerry was actually making crystal meth.”
“But you seem sure of yourself.”
“I’m not. But Gerry never seemed like the guy who would collect batteries, matches, and Sudafed. He was never that sick.”
“I don’t think my uncle was like that, though.”
I didn’t think he was either, but something inside me, that old cop instinct, was screaming at me to look at the evidence. I had no tangible proof, but all the evidence was there. Making crystal meth was a big deal; it wasn’t easy; and it could blow up on you at any moment. But someone confident, someone who knew what they were doing, could make a fortune selling the stuff.
Just a year ago Gerry was struggling to pay his rent. He even hired me to help him out. I tracked down a woman who owned a theater he used to work in. She was trying to force him out of house and home to drum up business. She figured if she could say this old actor was homeless or worse, she would drum up support for modern actors to keep them from finding the same fate. After clearing the case, I hadn’t heard any complaints about money from him, and I saw him at the bar nearly every night. I couldn’t prove anything, but I knew something bad was going on, and what we had found in the apartment seemed to support that idea.
I pulled into the funeral home parking lot, the rain still pounding down. I wondered if Gerry had enough money to pay for his own funeral. We exited the car and headed inside.
Brushing the rain off my shoulders and running my hand through my soaked hair, I followed Tracy into Rinaldi’s Funeral Home. The lobby was carpeted in red, and the wallpaper was mute beige. A few thick easy chairs, also dark, more a maroon, contrasted with the carpet. Perfect for a wake. A bronze coffee table sat across from the chairs, a few magazines resting on it. The lobby was clean and smelled antiseptic, a cross between lime and bleach, a scent I hadn’t experienced in a while.
A short heavy man in a black double-breasted suit stepped out of a room I assumed was his office. To his right was a larger room where they held the actual wakes. The man’s face was pale, except for deep red cheeks. He had dark hair slicked back. His clothes were neatly pressed, and his loafers reflected the artificial light from above. He smiled at Tracy.
“Ms. Boland, I assume?” He reached his hand out in her direction, taking hers and pumping it twice. He looked at me. “And you are?”
Tracy introduced me.
He took my hand loosely and shook it. “Mr. Donne. I am John Fleming, the funeral director.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Ah,” he said, looking at his watch. “I wish it was under better circumstances. You are about ten minutes late, Ms. Boland. I was beginning to worry.” He tugged at his lapels, then brushed a piece of lint off his shoulder. “If you’d like to get started, we can go to my office.”
Fleming turned on his heels and stepped through his office door. Tracy turned my way.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to handle this on my own.”
Tracy disappeared into Fleming’s office, the door swinging shut behind her. I took a few steps around the lobby and peeked into the funeral room. There wasn’t a
body or even a casket inside, but the room was set up with flowers and about ten rows of seats.
I walked around, the antiseptic smell growing stronger. The room’s colors were the same as the lobby, same carpet, same walls. The chairs were maroon as well, though they were more like folding chairs than easy chairs. I stepped up to the small lift where the body would be kept, trying not to picture Gerry’s body in a morgue; instead, trying to picture him lying at rest in a coffin tomorrow.
I never understood wakes, which were apparently for the living. Why keep a corpse, open casket, made up to look like some cheap plastic imitation of your loved one, lying at rest for four hours?
People came in and out, offered fake condolences for a while and said prayers, then left, hitting the local bar. It didn’t do anything for me.
The antiseptic smell was unique to funeral homes, and it brought back the memory of Jeanne’s wake. When Jeanne died, just two weeks after I had gotten out of rehab and six months before we were to be married, I wanted nothing to do with a wake. She had been cut down by a drunk driver as she drove herself home from a get-together with work friends. The driver had crossed the double yellow lines and smashed into her front fender, forcing her car off the road. By the time the fire department used the Jaws of Life, she was long dead. Her parents insisted I show at the wake and funeral, saying it would do me good to see her, to know how much her friends and relatives cared about her. I agreed.