Murder Miscalculated (13 page)

I was too far away to hear what was said, but it wasn’t necessary to hear the words to know what was happening. The policewoman put handcuffs on the boy and helped him to his feet. His nose was bleeding. My sympathies were with the boy, I have to admit. That would have been me not too many years ago, with my hands in cuffs and blood on my face.

I sensed someone walking near me and heard the tapping of a cane on the pavement. I didn’t have to look to see who it was.

“Maybe we should try another time,” Max said, considerately.

I nodded. He was right. Everyone would be on their guard for a while.

Max’s cell phone rang. He answered it, spoke briefly and then put it away.

“That was Miss April,” he said. “She and Candy are swinging by to pick me up. It seems I’ve got another appearance to make.”

We walked over to the Market Street side of the plaza, and only a minute later April’s car pulled over. Candy was in the passenger seat.

Max clapped me on the shoulder. “Another day, eh, partner?” He opened the rear door and climbed in. The door shut with a thud. Candy waved to me as they pulled out into traffic.

Only after they disappeared from view did I realize that Max never did buy me that lunch.

The next morning I took a break from boosting wallets. I had promised Donnie I’d try to help Joey. Donnie’s idea was that I’d use my supposed pull with the FBI to keep Joey out of jail. My idea was that Joey might know where that damned data card was. Lynn’s idea was that she would go along. I knew better than to argue.

We headed out in her little Geo Metro to visit Joey’s sister. Candy had sent word the evening before that Esther might know where he was hiding. We puttered through the late rush hour traffic downtown and down Prospect Avenue to the outer districts.

The neighborhood of Butchertown got its name back at the turn of the previous century when the nascent city’s meat packing businesses were congregated over the hill from the rest of the population, where a strong bay breeze kept the smell of the slaughterhouses from spreading inland.

A hundred years later the meat packinghouses and their smells were gone, but remaining were blocks of small craftsman houses and cottages. The neighborhood has yet to fall prey to gentrification, so these remnants look much as they did in decades past with paint peeling, roofs in need of repair and front yards growing more weeds than grass.

We drove along potholed streets until we found the address we wanted. Lynn parked across the street, and we got out and studied the house where Joey’s sister lived. It was much like its neighbors, narrow and long, and it extended most of the way to the back of its lot. Inside, I imagined it was a typical shotgun layout with the livingroom in the front, then a hallway down the side of the house all the way back to the kitchen with occasional doors opening on bedrooms and one bathroom.

We went across the street and up the old concrete walkway to the front door. I knocked on the screen, rattling it as best I could, as there was no doorbell visible. There was no response. I knocked again, louder. This time a voice came from somewhere within the house, telling us to wait a minute.

The minute passed, and its passing brought the sound of someone walking toward the door. A few seconds later a figure appeared behind the screen.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” a woman’s voice demanded.

“Esther?” I asked.

“Who wants to know?”

I gave my name and told her I was looking for Joey.

“Joey ain’t here. Now go away.” She turned and walked away.

“Let me try,” Lynn said.

She rattled the door again. “Joey,” she called. “It’s Lynn. Lynn Vargas. You remember me from The Pink Poodle? I was one of the dancers. I’m here with The Kid. We need to talk.”

There was another long silence, and then we saw the woman’s figure shuffling toward us again. She unhooked the screen door and opened it. She looked at us with suspicion and then cast an eye up and down the street. Appearing satisfied, she motioned us inside and latched the door behind us. We followed her down a long, dimly lit hallway with walls covered in wallpaper that probably was original to the house. She stopped in front of a closed door and rapped with her knuckles.

“Joey, they’re here. They look okay.” We heard the sound of a key turning in a lock, and then the door opened. We slipped inside, and the door shut behind us. I heard the lock click again. Lynn and I turned and faced Joey.

He was the same and yet different. The Joey I knew from The Pink Poodle days provided muscle for Donnie. Big and beefy, he had a confidence in his size and menace that flowed from him like the cheap cologne he wore.

Joey moved a few feet in the dim light and sat on the edge of an unmade bed. I studied the room. This must have been Joey’s bedroom all through high school. There were posters of rock bands on the wall, a couple of small bookcases that mainly held wrestling trophies, and other odds and ends. Near the window, where the curtains were drawn tightly against the daylight, there was a small desk and chair, the kind called a student desk, made of cheap pressboard. I pulled the chair out and turned it to face the bed and offered it to Lynn. She sat while I leaned against the desk, being careful not to put too much weight on it.

Poor Joey. He looked miserable and seemed to have shrunk to only half his size. His hair, normally slicked back and combed, was a tousled mess, and his clothes were wrinkled and creased as though he’d slept in them, if he had slept at all. His face was puffy and unshaven.

“I’m in trouble, ain’t I, Kid?”

“I don’t know, Joey. What happened the other day? Why did you run?”

“He told me to.”

“He? Who told you to run, Joey?”

“Mr. Zager. When I leaned over him after he got shot. He told me, ‘Get out of here, Joey, or they’ll get you, too.’ So I did like he said. I got out of there.”

I marveled at the ability of some people to do blindly as they were told no matter what was going on. A dying man told him to leave, so he did. Simple.

“Did you see who shot Zager?”

“Just a guy in a suit. Oh, yeah, he had a ponytail.” Curiosity finally made an appearance in Joey’s mind. “What’s this all about, Kid?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Well, I’ll tell you another thing that’s strange.”

“Another thing?”

“Yeah. Mr. Zager was acting weird ever since I met him at the airport the night before. Usually he’s cracking jokes and stuff, asking me about how I’m doing, that kind of thing. This trip he wasn’t like that at all. Kept quiet all the way from the airport.”

“You didn’t stay with him at the hotel?”

“No. I always offered to, but he didn’t think it was necessary. I came home and then went back the next morning to pick him up. Nine o’clock sharp. Those were his orders, and I was there on time.” He shook his head. “I done this three, four times before. Never any trouble, and I never saw this coming. But maybe he did.”

“How so?”

Joey was wary. “I don’t know how much I ought to be telling you about this, Kid. I think I’m in enough trouble as it is.”

Lynn got up from the desk chair and sat on the bed next to Joey. “We don’t want you to get into trouble, Joey. It’s just that everyone is looking for something that was in Mr. Zager’s wallet, a data card. Do you know where it is?”

“You mean like they use in a computer or a camera?”

My hopes shot up and then dropped back down again.

Joey shook his head. “No, nothin’ like that. I did just what I was hired to do. I picked up Mr. Zager at the airport and dropped him off at his hotel, just like I was told to do. I came back in the morning, just like I was told to do. It was no different than the other times I picked him up and dropped him off,” Joey shrugged, “except for the part about him getting shot and all.”

I tried again. “What did you mean when you said that maybe Zager expected trouble?”

Joey thought for a second. “Well, it sounds funny, but Mister Zager seemed to know something was going to happen to him. He told me he had a,” Joey faltered as he searched for a word, “you know, one of those things where you know what’s going to happen?”

“A premonition?” prompted Lynn.

“Yeah, that’s it. He said he had a premonition,” Joey sounded the word out carefully, “that someone was going to try something. I think that’s why he was acting so strange, on account of that premonition.” Again he sounded the word out syllable by syllable.

He checked an alarm clock on the desk next to where I was perched. “I got to go soon. He wants to talk to me.”

“Who wants to talk with you, Joey?” asked Lynn.

“The guy who hired me,” Joey answered.

“Who is that?”

Joey lifted his big shoulders and dropped them. “I don’t know. I never met him. Hell, I never even talked to him. Mr. DeMarco told me when and where I was supposed to go.”

Getting information from Joey was like nailing jelly to a tree, not that I’ve ever tried that. “Did Mr. DeMarco tell you that the man who hired you wants to meet you?”

Joey frowned. “No, he didn’t.” He pointed to the desk. “The guy called my sister on the telephone, and she wrote down the message for me.”

There was scrap of lined paper on the desk. The writing on it was blocky and uneven. I picked it up and read it aloud.

“Tell Joey to go to the corner of 12th and Grant at eleven this morning. A car will pick him up.”

Joey reached for the message, and I handed it to him. He folded it carefully and put it in his pants pocket. “See, Kid. I got to do what he says. It’s the only way to show him I didn’t have anything to do with Mr. Zager getting shot.”

It was clear that Joey had made up his mind, and nothing we could say would change it.

“Can we give you a ride?” asked Lynn as we left the bedroom and walked down the dingy hallway toward the front door.

Joey thought about it. “I guess that wouldn’t hurt,” he admitted, “but you got to promise not to stick around or anything. I don’t want to get into any more trouble.”

We both promised, while avoiding looking at each other. I didn’t want to get Joey into trouble but was hoping there would be a way to place ourselves where we could watch without him or anyone else noticing.

I had to squeeze into the back seat of Lynn’s little Metro, sitting sidewise with my feet up on the seat next to me since Joey could barely fit into the front passenger seat even with it shoved all the way back. We rode that way to downtown with me, once again, feeling every pothole in the city.

My plans for spying on Joey were ruined when he displayed a little more cunning than I would have given him credit for.

“Pull over here,” he said before we were at his pickup place. Lynn swerved over to the curb. Joey got out, and I removed myself from the back. “I’ll walk from here. Thanks a lot for the ride.”

Joey walked quickly to the corner and turned right. I got back into the car.

“Come on,” I said to Lynn, “Let’s follow.”

She pointed to the one-way sign for the cross street. It pointed left. “No can do, Kid. By the time we go up another block and then work our way around to where he’s being met he’ll be gone.”

I argued that we had time, and she humored me by giving it a try, but she was right, as she usually is. A long black car pulled from the corner where Joey was supposed to be but wasn’t. It headed down a side street ahead of us, with no way for Lynn to make the turn in time to follow.

Stuck in traffic at the light, I watched the car as it drove away, wondering if Joey was inside and what was going to happen now.

The next morning I got an early start to my renewed life of crime. I stumbled into the shower, then dressed and went downstairs long before Lynn was ready to get up.

Junior was crunching dry cat food in his dish in the corner, and Cochran was sitting at the kitchen table. He was already dressed, with a cup of coffee in front of him. He looked like he was waiting for me.

He was.

I wondered if he had learned about our visit the day before to see Joey. Lynn and I had decided to keep that to ourselves, at least for the time being. It turned out he hadn’t, not that that made my conscience feel any better.

“Kid, you got a minute before you leave?” I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down. Sun streamed in through the back window curtains. Junior finished his breakfast and walked over to my chair. I moved my leg, and he hopped up into my lap and began washing himself.

“What’s up, Cochran?” I asked without preamble.

“I talked to Talbot a few minutes ago, and he told me something I think you should know.” Cochran lowered his voice. “The thing is, you can’t let on you know it. Talbot would have my hide if he found out.”

I put the coffee cup down. “What is it?”

“Dennis Metcalf, Wolfe’s lawyer and number two man, flew into town from the Caribbean last night.”

“Are you going to pick him up?”

“That’s what I asked Talbot. He said no, but he didn’t say why. My guess is he doesn’t want to alert Wolfe that we knew he was coming.”

“And expose the mole Talbot has inside Wolfe’s organization.”

Cochran nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “What does this have to do with me?”

“I’m worried, Kid. Metcalf is probably here to look into Zager’s death and,” Cochran paused and looked straight at me, “it’s possible he’s going to take a fresh look at you.”

“What can I do?”

“Just keep on as before, but keep your eyes and ears open. If I’m right, there’s going to be people asking about you the next couple of days.”

With that disquieting news on my mind, I took my leave of the store. It was still early enough that the streets and sidewalks were full of people hurrying to work, and it was garbage pickup day on our block, but I paid little attention to the people or the smell as I mulled over what Cochran had told me.

I took a bus to the corner of Jackson and Nineteenth, across from the county courthouse, and resumed my charade of working the street.