No One Rides For Free - Larry Beinhart (9 page)

"Look, I'm sorry. It was a stab in the dark. A
couple of years back I ran into a case, a guy was killed the same
way, pretty much, by some Colombians over a coke deal, and they tried
to make it look like a mugging and stole the guy's car."

"Is that true? Is that really why you asked?"

"Really why I asked? Because I have nothing to
go on and that might have been an idea, and until I find something
else I'm taking wild shots."

My business was done. There was no excuse to stay.
There was an illusion weaving thick through the air that we had other
things to say and do. Sea-green eyes, an emotional vibrato in her
throat, long flanks so live they glowed, dark hair livened with
sunstreaks and a great ass, I told myself, were shallow things. Not
with a structure so solid, so real and so fine as Glenda and Wayne
made of my life. It was a foolish time to be foolish. As it always
is.
 

9
LIGHTNIN'-STRUCK
TREE

THE 0NLY TRACE
of Edgar
Wood in the Virginia farmhouse was his crystal brandy snifter and the
bottle of VSOP with one good shot left. I sat in what had been his
chair, swirled his brandy in his glass.

"Tell me, ghost, what was your secret? Was it
worth killing for'? In your estimation was it worth dying for? Did
you tell it to Mel Brodsky? Or were you saving it for last, your ace
in the hole? Tell me, Mr. Wood, did you know how beautiful your
daughter is? Looking back on it all, if you had to choose between
another ten or twenty or something years and eight million dollars,
which would it be?"

I sipped at his brandy, giving him plenty of time to
answer. But he was, as I had suspected, as silent as the grave.

"
I gotta talk to a bunch of people about you,
Edgar. I like talking to your daughter best, but I gotta talk to the
police, I gotta talk to Brodsky, and I'm not sure where I'll find the
leverage for that; and Charles Goreman, even more leverage. And the
Colombians. To tell you the truth, I feel real shy about that. Maybe
'cause I don't so much want to talk as to hurt them, or maybe I'm
scared of them . . . see, there is a point where you and I, we
coincide. Fear and vengeance, that's a swell meeting of the minds.

"So long, Edgar," I said, finishing his
brandy, "our first and last meeting of the minds. I gotta go to
work now."

I wanted to retrieve my microphone and recording rig,
expensive little toys that they are. Everything was intact, the
waterproof box had done a hell of a job though the batteries were
shot. I was also intensely curious to know if someone else had left
something similar about the premises.

I looked in the phones, inside the air conditioner,
under the radiator cover, behind the pictures on the wall—not one
of which was worth looking at unless you like English
hunty-doggy-horsy--and through the largest collection of Readers
Digest condensed books I had ever seen. I looked through anything
that had an underside, an inside or a backside, including all 112
dusty panels of dropped ceiling.

I looked until there was nothing to look at but the
walls. I rapped, and the bruising on my knuckles convinced me they
were real plaster and solid. The molding was some sort of hard wood
under the paint. I could tell because someone had lifted it and I
could see where the paint was chipped .... Oh!

A minute or two of gentle prying and there she was. A
very nice job too, the transformer clipped directly into an A.C. line
and no battery to wear out.

I took mine. I left theirs in place. Then I went to
meet Captain Robert E. L. Deltchev at Culpeper County Police
Headquarters.

I had visualized the place as a southern courthouse
and county jail, reeking of dark cruel secrets, petty power politics,
injustices racial and otherwise, lit in 1940s Warner Brothers
Neo-Realism. But the station was merely overused, overcrowded, 1950s
strictly brick and functional. An Anywhere USA cop house.

The cop at the glassed-in front desk looked to be
forty-five minutes past mandatory retirement. The cable-aud-jack
phone system he was plugged into was twenty years past it. He had a
wad in his cheek that he chomped with bovine regularity. Between
chaws he told me, "Captain ain't heyah."

"When will he be in?" I asked.

"Don't rightly know," the cop said, then
started answering the phone and plugging the lines into the right, or
wrong, extensions. That went on for some time and he ignored me
without any apparent effort.

"I have an appointment," I said. He nodded
and blew a bubble. That disappointed me; I had really hoped for
tobacco.

"Maybe you could call him. I bet he has a police
car, and I bet it has a radio. And remind him that he has an
appointment."

"Don't rightly think so," he said and went
back to the switchboard as lights and bells went off.

I waited. Several other people came and went, cops
and civilians. The oddest group was led by a very large man in
uniform with pockmarked slabs for a face who blew in like a destroyer
on patrol. An intense-looking woman dressed as a New Jersey housewife
and what had to be a plainclothes cop bobbed along in his wake. Ten
minutes later, they came charging back out.

After they left I asked the cop at the desk once
again, "When and where am I going to find Deltchev?"

"Why didn't you speak to him while he was here?"
he answered, then started on a new piece of gum.

"When was he here?"

"He just left."

"Either I've seen this movie before or I read
the book," I mumbled.

"What books that?”

"Is Deltchev coming back?" I growled.

"Mostly he does," he said, working up to a
new bubble.

"I'm going out to get some coffee; can I get you
some more gum?" I said.

"
That's right nice. That really is. I like that
double-bubble grape flavor," he replied and even offered me a
nickel. I took it.

It was authentic southern coffee, which resembles
real coffee only in that they both start with water and are normally
served warm. If a New York coffee shop palmed off the stuff on an
N.Y.P.D. cop, they would be promptly and rudely busted for fraud. And
although there were cows in Virginia--from what I had seen of
Culpeper, probably right in town--the white stuff they gave me to put
in the warm, tan liquid was a powder built in Ohio. 'They did not
have Danish. They had sweet rolls. I don't really know what wheat
gluten is, but I think that's what the rolls were made of. And sugar.

Now that I knew what Deltchev looked like—a
pock-marked naval destroyer--I waited outside where I could wonder
where the scent of magnolia blossom had gone to. Three hours after I
arrived, and three more cups of warm tinted water, Deltchev steamed
in again. He was still with the same group, and I tailed along like
just another piece of jetsam caught in his wake.

When we all got trapped in a traffic jam trying to
enter the door of Deltchev's office, he became aware of my presence.

"Who are you?"

I introduced myself and reminded him of the
appointment that was now three hours late.

"I do not have the time to spare at this time,"
he announced.

"Look, Captain, I flew down from New York to
talk to you."

"I bet your arms are tired." The slabs of
his face crooked briefly into a smile so we would all know it was a
joke.

"
It's by water, by running water, " the
woman who looked like a New Jersey housewife said.

"Look, Captain," I said, "I have been
waiting here for three hours."

"She has to concentrate," the other guy,
the one in the polyester plainclothes cop suit, said.

"Don't bother me, son," Deltchev said.

"We're prepared to give you all the time you
need," the other guy said to Deltchev, "but not for these
interruptions."

"You hear that, you hear what the man said?"
Deltchev said to me, pointing a finger somewhat smaller than a
kielbasa at me. "Now desist these interruptions."

"Don't wave your finger in my face .... " I
snapped.

The man in plainclothes stepped between us and shoved
me. I didn't want to hit a cop in a police station. There are some
forms of stupidity that even I find excessive. But I did say, "If
you fucking touch me again, I'll break your fucking arm."

Unlike Deltchev, he was pretty close to my size and I
might have been able to do it.

At that point still another party entered the fray. A
slim, neatly dressed black man, who I also took to be a cop, stepped
between me and the pusher.

"What's the problem?" he said calmly.

"The fucking problem . . ." I started to
explain.

"Tillman," Deltchev bellowed, "you
take care of him. Dan, come with me. We have things to do," and
he swept into his office, the other two following in his wake,
Tillman staying with me.

"Detective Tillman," he said with the same
aplomb, "what can I do for you?"

"I came down from New York to see Captain
Deltchev; I had an appointment. I've been waiting three hours."

"Are you from the media?" he asked.

"Media?"

"I guess not," he said. "Who are you?"

I told him, I even gave him a card. I explained why I
was there.

"Too bad you're not from the media," he
said.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"Come on into my office, I'm the one who's
really handling the Wood thing now. I'm sorry," he said, as I
followed him, "you came at a bad time. We have some little girls
missing, three of them, and we found the body of a fourth. The
captain's a little preoccupied."

He gestured me to a seat while he opened a file
cabinet and took out the paperwork. I complimented him on what a good
report he had written up and what thorough police work
they
had done.

"Is there anything," I asked, "any
dangling thread, any detail that didn't fit, or maybe just a sense of
things that didn't find its way into that report?"

"Right now it looks a whole lot like the report
reads. I'll fill you in on a little background though. Lately, we've
been getting a big rise in auto theft. It seems like it's been moving
out from the city, all around, over in Maryland too. They like to
work shopping centers, particularly where there are restaurants. Not
McDonald's or Burger King, real restaurants. You figure a guy goes
into a restaurant, you got an hour or two before he's out. That's
time enough for the car to be good and gone and at the chop shop. It
seems like it's organized, because there's a pattern and because
they're picky about it, BMWs, Volvos, Mercedes, Saabs, the smaller
Caddies, Lincolns. The high-price spread. I'm figuring a lot of it
goes straight to parts. Do you have any idea what a replacement
engine for a BMW goes for?

"We had one victim, three months ago, was having
dinner with his wife. He says, 'Oh, honey, I left my wallet in the
car.' But what he really was doing was sneaking to the pay phone to
call his extracurricular lady friend. But from the pay phone he sees
these two perpetrators messing with his brand-new Seville. Being at
the phone anyway, he calls police emergency. By then, the perps have
already got his door open, which doesn't take but a couple of
seconds, so he goes tear-ass out of the restaurant screaming; they
jump away from his car and they tear-ass out in the car they came in.
Less than a minute later the patrol car comes into the lot, but
they're long gone, and the victim doesn't have a license number, or
even a description of the perp's auto."

"What about them, does he have a description of
them?"

"Young, big, black, and dat's all, folks."

"What about muggings or assaults?"

"We have about three, real similar. Two of them
hit on the head from behind. Now either we are talking about the same
people, or they all went to the same training program, or if it is
murder designed to look like car theft someone did their homework
real well."

The door burst open; another black cop, in uniform,
charged in, saying, "I gotta talk to you, Bill."

In his unflappable way, Tillman said, "What is
it, Jimmy Lee?"

The other cop looked at me, but Tillman said, "Go
on."

"You know Nora Anne Johnson, owns the grocery
place, up Davis Road?"

"Uh huh."

"That's a good woman, churchgoing, hardworking.
She's in my patrol area, or what oughta be my patrol area, except
that I'm down the other end of the county looking for a
lightnin'-split tree near runnin' water—yestiday it was standing
water--while she is being robbed. Now Nora Arme she works hard for
her nickels and dimes, she works hard. So she doesn 't want to just
plain give that money away, and they done shot her. They done shot
her. I have a pretty fair idea who done it to her, I do. But the
Captain, he got me looking for that lightnin'-split tree, so I can't
do my real job, which is looking after the peoples in my patrol area.
Now can you do something about that man!"