Black Irish (11 page)

He hadn’t been lucky with Ryan. He’d been proficient. And he’d carved the number “1” into his forehead.

Most killers who leave tokens at crime scenes have committed to their craft
, Abbie thought.
There will be more toy monkeys
, she thought.
And more victims
.

A
BBIE DROVE DOWN
E
LM
S
TREET IN DOWNTOWN
B
UFFALO
. S
HE NEEDED TO
fill out the story of Gerald Decatur, know what shape of puzzle piece he really was, before she could fit him into the overall picture. From the file, she knew Decatur had no living relatives in Buffalo. Either the streets, a family history of diabetes (mentioned in his jacket, from his hospital intake at the downstate prison), or a job in another city had taken them away. That left her only one choice.

She had to go see Reverend Zebediah.

Ever since coming back to Buffalo, Abbie had known she was going to have to make this visit sooner or later, even before the Jimmy Ryan case. The Reverend was too deep a part of her history here; out of respect, Abbie needed to see him. But she was afraid that it would all go wrong and that her warm memory of the Reverend would be replaced by a picture of a broken, cynical man. Buffalo tended to grind you down. Abbie was running out of good memories of the city, and she wanted to keep the Reverend safe.

She’d first met him during her junior year in high school. He’d been the resident minister at the City Mission, the homeless shelter downtown where her mother had ended her days, addicted to heroin and abandoned by Abbie’s father, who had given his daughter her dark hair but didn’t even leave her his name. Abbie had met the
Reverend on one of her periodic quests to find her roots. He was the unofficial mayor of Buffalo’s poor and mostly black East Side, and was in and out of the City Mission on a weekly basis. If someone needed a job, the Reverend knew a construction project that was looking for some minority workers to make its federal quota. If you needed a place to stay, he had a crumbling four-story former hotel on Hertel Avenue that he’d refurbished, if you could call mopping the floors, putting in some beds, and horse-trading for sheets and towels a refurbishment. If you needed spiritual guidance, he had the perfect line of Scripture to show you the way. If you needed a lawyer, he knew several who worked cheap and wouldn’t take the D
A’S
first plea bargain to lighten their workload. His clientele was multiracial and usually desperate.

The Reverend didn’t drive around in a Cadillac, taking people’s contributions and living high. He drove an old Oldsmobile Cutlass, worked nights, selling beer in the stands at Memorial Auditorium during hockey games. At the Aud, he was Zeb the Beer Guy, and sold more cups of Molson ale than anyone else there, his bald head shining with sweat by the end of the first period. With that money, and contributions, he kept a good part of the East Side afloat.

Abbie had started volunteering on weekends, part of the Reverend’s free-floating mission. As a white girl, a
County
girl, working on the East Side, she was a curiosity. But people welcomed her in, and what she’d found there had astonished her. The County was a swamp of repressed emotions that erupted only during epic drinking binges. But in this part of town, single mothers had hugged Abbie when she went door to door on Thanksgiving with cans of cranberry sauce and yams, invited her to sit down and eat. Middle-aged homeless men in the bombed-out buildings on Delaware and Main had thanked her for the sandwiches prepared by the Reverend’s minions in the hotel’s basement. The men’s fingers were often warped by arthritis or cold, and their eyes rheumy with alcohol, but they were grateful. They wept silently and called her “daughter.” In the County, they talked of the East Side as if it was some kind of lawless wasteland, where family had broken down and people preyed on each other in
packs. But she’d found people who could name their fourth cousins and who knew who those cousins were dating, where they worked, what their babies’ names were.

On her after-school trips down the unfamiliar streets, she’d asked about her mother, over and over, never telling people she was Natasha Minton’s daughter, but casually mentioning the name and waiting for the responses she’d dreamt of for years: “Natasha? Sure, I knew her. Got family over on Delavan.” And then Abbie knocking on a strange door.…

It had never happened. Natasha Minton had died at thirty-eight, leaving her two-year-old daughter nothing but a hazy memory of a woman in a yellow dress, holding her hand as they walked down Main Street. At the time of her death, Natasha was a recent transplant from the Midwest, by all accounts a secretive and mistrustful woman who barely made a mark on Buffalo. There were times Abbie hated her for it—
Couldn’t you have talked to someone
, she cursed silently,
had a single conversation about your past? Left me one pathetic little trail to follow? And who comes to Buffalo from the Midwest anyway? How desperate to escape your past do you have to be to come
here?

The Reverend, she believed, had known about these whispered conversations. But he never asked about them, never spoke about her mother at all. She was sure he’d asked around, too, and his inquiries rippled far further than her own. If the Reverend didn’t know you, you weren’t worth knowing. But he’d never come to her pulling along a newly minted cousin, saying, “This is someone you have to meet.” He’d done everything but that.

Now she was back to ask about Gerald Decatur.

She pulled the Crown Vic up to the converted hotel on Hertel, parked in front, and climbed the cement stairs covered with chipped green paint. The door was locked. The Reverend was probably on one of his many errands in the neighborhood, but he was never gone for long. She sat on the stoop to wait.

A little black girl with braided hair flying behind her came riding
along on a bike, even though it was about two degrees above zero. She stopped to stare at Abbie.

“Hi there,” Abbie said.

“Hello,” the girl said in a somber voice.

“Do you happen to know when the Reverend will be back?”

The girl tilted her head. “You talk funny.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot. What about the Reverend?”

“He’s at the corner store gettin’ some milk, but the mister there wanted to talk to him ’bout some problem with the power company.”

“Ah. Did he buy you that bike?”

“Yup.”

They spoke for a few more moments, and Abbie learned that the girl’s name was Rashida Jackson and she was eight and smart as a thin whip. After Abbie had given her a card with her name on it—proof that she was a real live policewoman—Rashida bicycled off furiously to show it to her friends. Abbie watched her go, then turned to see the Reverend striding up the street, a plastic shopping bags in each hand. She rose.

His face, set hard as he approached, broke into a smile.

“Absalom Kearney, I’ll be damned.”

He swept in for a hug, smelling of Old Spice. He stood back to look at her up and down, shaking his head.

“Grew up fine. I knew it, I always said so.”

“You always said I’d be knock-kneed and looking for a boyfriend till I was forty.”

“You got a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

He unlocked the door and led her to the right to his office, which fronted his small and neat apartment. As she walked in, the smell of a fastidious bachelor—shoe polish, tobacco, and aftershave—brought her back twenty years.

“What about you, Reverend? No girlfriend, I see.”

“I’m married to the Lord’s work, you know that,” he said. His smile grew until his white teeth parted to allow a peal of explosive
laughter to fill the apartment. The Reverend looked good, Abbie decided. And she was relieved.

“Sit down, sit down.”

They sat and he slapped both hands against his muscular legs.

“It’s good to see you, Absalom.”

“It’s good to see you, too. I was afraid the city had worn you down.”

He shrugged. “God never gives a man burdens he can’t carry,” he said. “But you’ve probably learned that yourself.”

“I’m still learning it, I guess.”

He smiled but there was concern in his eyes, a fatherly worry.

“You still searching, Absalom?”

“I think I’ll always be searching, Reverend. For one thing or another.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m gainfully employed. I’m damned good at what I do. I’m kind to animals and small children. And I think you’re gonna have to settle for that, Reverend.”

He laughed. “No one can defeat a woman who is strong in faith, whatever faith that may be. Now, what did you come here to talk about?”

“Gerald Decatur.”

“Ah.”

He turned away sharply, as if she’d slapped him.

“We lost him.”

“I know. What can you tell me about him—towards the end, I mean.”

“They say he was back dealing drugs.” The ever-present “they,” meaning the cops, the
Buffalo News
, the justice system.

“You don’t buy it?”

The Reverend swung his muscled face back and forth slowly, his eyes never leaving her face.

“No, I don’t buy it. He hadn’t gone near the drug boys since he got out of prison. I’m telling you this from my heart. Six months before he was murdered, he was right here in this office and I had
him going out to Dow Chemical up off the highway, for a job. He got that job and he was excited about it. Had a little apartment over on Genesee and a young girl he was getting serious about.”

The Reverend rubbed his knuckles in his other hand, massaging them as if he were wringing out a cloth.

“It perturbs me. After he died, I called out to Dow and spoke to his supervisor. Gerald hadn’t missed a single day in weeks. The man had nothing but good things to say about him. He even asked me if I had another like him.”

Abbie frowned.

“That was a callous thing to say, considering.”

“I agree with you on that. Like I was sending them damn mules or something.”

“What’s the girlfriend’s name?”

“Monica. Monica Merriweather. Funny name. She’s gone south now, like everybody else. Couldn’t even go back to his apartment to clean out his things. I had to do that for her. I packed up what she wanted and sent it down to her in Texas, UPS. Got the address if you want it.”

She shook her head. “Reverend, how can you be sure he wasn’t back to dealing? Maybe he wanted to buy this Monica a nice birthday gift. Maybe he wanted to put a down payment on a car.”

“Because I know everyone he would have called to get the stuff, Absalom. And I asked them, believe me. They were as surprised as anyone else.
Somebody
would have known. And there wasn’t a whisper.”

She nodded. “Anything else I should know about him?”

“Nothing. He’s forgotten already. Nobody gives a damn …”

He looked at her, his wide-set brown eyes considering.

“I care,” she said, and meant it.

“I’m going to choose to believe you. But you working for the police …”

He looked down at the scuffed hardwood floor, a patch of light glimmering on his bald pate, and shook his head slowly.

His eyes came back to hers. “It gives me pause, Absalom.”

“For them or for me?”

“For you, child. But I’m happy to see you. You know what I mean. It’s good to see you like this.”

He spread his hands out toward her, as if she were some kind of homecoming queen or the favorite candidate for mayor.

Abbie suddenly felt close to tears. She nodded and looked down quickly, pretending to study her notes. So many of the Reverend’s “projects” came back to him pregnant, addicted, or homeless. She guessed she qualified as a success story, and that’s what the Reverend lived for: the rare girl or boy who returned employed and bright-eyed. She couldn’t let him down.

I wish I could tell you how lost I feel
, she thought.
I wish I could tell you I found my place in the world, but I can’t
.

“It’s good to see you again, Reverend.” They stood up and he gave her a hug that was fiercer than she anticipated.

“I’m proud of you, Absalom.”

Leaving, Abbie turned so that he wouldn’t see her face.

When she got home, her father was in his room with his door closed. She did a load of whites in the washer and dryer in the basement laundry room, and tried to read a novel that the owner at the Talking Leaves bookstore down the street had recommended highly. But her mind kept drifting and, after she’d added the fabric softener, she put the book down and sat Indian-style on top of the dryer and let herself concentrate on the two thoughts that kept edging into her brain.

Gerald Decatur was not back into dealing drugs.

And: The Reverend was worried about her working for the Buffalo PD.

Two thoughts that troubled her equally.

W
HEN THE PHONE RANG THE NEXT MORNING DURING BREAKFAST, SHE
snapped it up.

“It’s Mills. Niagara Falls PD. You called?”

“I did. Can I tell you that your partner is an unprofessional asshole?”

“You could but I’d have to tell you that I already knew that. What’d he do?”

“Refused to put me in touch with you. Called me a Buffalo bitch, actually.”

Mills sighed on the other end of the line.

“I’ll call him on it but don’t expect an apology.”

“What I expect is basic professional competence.”

“Yeah, okay. What were you calling about?”

“I found something at the motel.”

“Yeah? What?”

“A plastic toy, a monkey. The same kind as one that was hung around my doorknob two days ago. And, between you and me, the same as was found in our Jimmy Ryan murder.”

She heard what sounded like the feet of a chair hit a hardwood floor.

“Say that again?”

“After I started investigating the Jimmy Ryan case, someone came by my apartment, tried the doorknob, then left a calling card. A brown plastic monkey. The same as was found forcibly inserted into Ryan’s mouth. I found a near-identical one at the Lucky Clover.”

“
Where
at the Lucky Clover?”