The Best American Mystery Stories 2012 (59 page)

“Why'd you bring him here?” Frankie asked, his dark eyes glassy beads set in fat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Trying to save my life,” I said.

Frankie's expression made it clear that he no longer thought of me as a friend. “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” he said, but he stepped out of my way.

Vinnie Montesi sat on a brick wall just outside the entrance. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was frantically rummaging through his coat pockets.

“Lost my damn lighter again,” he said. “Did I have it at the Waffle House?”

I shook my head and handed him my Zippo. “You all right?”

He fired the tip of his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled toward the gray clouds that drifted from across the river. “I spent two eternities in these frigging places. Michael was in Baptist Memorial,” he said. “But they're all the same. They feel the same. Like hopelessness and loss and bad memories. When Mikey died, he held my hand. He was too weak to squeeze it or anything, but he held on as long as he could.”

“I didn't . . .”

He flicked his hand to tell me to shut up. Then when Frankie Gee and the other guy stomped toward us, ready to break the rest of my ribs, he flicked his hand again.

“Those kids up there. We gave them cancer, didn't we? The stuff we dumped at the park.”

“Not all of them,” I said.

“That's why God did it,” he said. “Right? That's why Mikey got leukemia. We dumped that crap and made a lot of people sick, so Mikey got cancer.”

“I'm not saying that.”

“Never mind that Paul Cardo's been running this scam since the seventies or that my Uncle Tony raked in his share of the profits. I took my cut for six years so God killed my kid.” He exhaled smoke at the sky. “But what are you going to do? He's God, right? The boss of bosses. You eat his crap and pretend you're thankful.”

“I didn't bring you here to hurt you,” I said, and wondered if my feeling sympathy for Vincent Montesi meant I'd gone crazy or the world had turned upside down.

“You know what I think? I don't think God waits until the afterlife to punish you. I think he does it right here.” He flicked his cigarette away. “Way I see it? Screw eternity. Right here, right now is hell.”

“Maybe not,” I said, seizing what might have been the only opportunity I had to keep myself out of that cold, dark river. “Maybe every day is purgatory,” I said, grabbing at the shadow of a rope. “Maybe it's your chance to put right what you did the day before.”

It was pretty lame, I guess. Something I might have heard on a late-night drunk or read on a men's room wall. But it was all I had, and I was betting my life on it.

“Yeah?” he said, frowning, wanting to believe it. “Your chance to do what? Some kind of penance?”

I knew he'd taken the bait. “Maybe.”

A smile flittered around his lips and then died. “So maybe you can set things right, get to heaven where you can see . . .” He let the thought fade and buried it alongside the smile. “Shutting down a business like that would cause problems. Paulie wouldn't be happy. I'd have to deal with it.” He closed his eyes, nodded to himself. “But you know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Three weeks,” he said. “That's what I need to make sure there's nothing that could cause me or Tony any trouble. Three weeks. Then you can call the feds, let them start getting that garbage out of there. That's the only deal I'm going to offer.”

The people in South Memphis had been poisoned for over thirty years, so I figured three weeks wouldn't matter that much one way or the other. If saving my life—and Demond and Bop-Bop and Don Ellis's, I told myself to feel a little better—meant that some of the guilty would go free? Well, they always do, don't they?

“All right,” I said.

He stood then, motioned for Frankie and the other guy to head to the parking garage. There was no question about it. I wasn't invited.

“You really believe that?” he asked. “That every day is one more chance to do penance, settle old debts?”

“I want to,” I said.

He turned away and left me alone. But that was okay. I knew what I'd just done and that people were going to die because of it, and alone seemed like the right place for me to be.

 

How would you want it to end? If it could turn out any way you wanted, what would be different? I wasted a lot of time asking myself those questions. In the end, this is what happened.

Paulie Cardo and his mistress were found dead in her condo. According to Nate Randolph, the girl had been shot twice in the chest and hadn't suffered. They kept Paul Cardo alive for a while. After a couple of beers, I can tell myself that I'm not responsible, but I know better. When you suggest the idea of penance to a violent man, there's no reason to expect that his version of penance would be anything but violent.

In a perfect world, Demond and Bop-Bop would have realized the error of their ways. But of course that didn't happen. Six weeks ago Bop-Bop was arrested for slitting Demond's throat in a South Memphis pool hall. Most likely it was over an argument about the profits from their thriving drug business, but in perverse moments I wonder if Bop-Bop didn't finally get tired of Demond's vocabulary lessons and decide to silence him forever.

Vinnie Montesi has put on a few pounds and looks healthier, but I'd given him a balm for his conscience, not the key to a change of life. If you buy smack or coke or rent a prostitute anywhere from Dyersburg to Biloxi, odds are you're still lining Vinnie's pockets. Don Ellis committed suicide when the papers broke the story about chemical dumping in South Memphis. Maybe he did it because of the guilt or because he wanted to save his sons and his ex-wife from Vinnie Montesi's brand of penance. Whatever the reason, I like to think that in the end, Don Ellis found his courage.

For the next two weeks, people who were connected to the industrial park or Mid-South Transport turned up in the unlikeliest of places—burning wrecks on the interstate, sandbars in the Mississippi, abandoned warehouses downtown. It was an actuary's nightmare. I'd sentenced those people to death when I accepted Vinnie Montesi's offer to give him three weeks to tie up loose ends. To help myself sleep at night, I pretended that what happened to them was justice.

Eventually the FBI and the EPA gave up their investigations. The mob members who seemed to be involved ended up just as dead as the potential witnesses who might have testified against them. The corporate bosses and hospital administrators and paid-for politicians who made all this possible were never named in an indictment. Any chance that the people who profited from the dumping could have been found went away when I cut my deal with Vinnie Montesi.

I'm just like everyone else. I find it hard to live with the cowardly, self-serving parts of myself. I told myself that
if only
I'd had Terrell Cheatham's dossier, things would have been different, that I would have taken it to the papers or turned it over to the EPA and more of the guilty would have been identified. But thinking about the folder only brought more questions. What had happened to it? How had Cardo known where to find Terrell Cheatham but been clueless about Demond and Bop-Bop? That's when I started thinking about what Frances Cheatham had said.

When I paid my third visit to her apartment, spring had finally come to Memphis. Dogwoods were blooming. The sun was bright gold, and the entire world, even the toxic wasteland part of it, was cloaked with green. But inside Frances Cheatham's apartment, the shades were drawn and everything seemed to be coated with a layer of gray.

“He was a good boy,” she said, tapping a photo album with her index finger. “Smart, too. I should have listened.”

“He showed you his file. His dossier,” I said.

“Just like he showed me the roses or the rainbows he drew in school when he was a little child.” She picked up a glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “He loved his granddaddy, that's why he wanted to stop it. But he brought it to me. He told me what it was, what them men had done. He wanted to take it to somebody at the paper. I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski instead. He was the white man who was head of security at the park. They were holding back on Marcus's pension.”

“His pension?”

“Nine hundred and thirteen dollars a month. He had that coming, Marcus did. He worked hard and it killed him. So when Terrell showed me all that, I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski, to tell him to give us the money my husband earned or we'd make it public. Terrell didn't want to. He kept saying it was wrong, that we had to do something, but I told him, ‘Son, the only person that ever does something for you is yourself.' He loved me, so he let me talk him down. But you know that, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“I told myself I was doing it for
him,
so he could have the money to go to college and get out of this neighborhood. But I was doing it for myself, too, because I was scared of ending up sleeping under an overpass and eating garbage. But I knew as soon as they sent him away and told him they'd call us that they meant to kill him. That's why I was so glad to see you. I figured he'd be safe in jail.”

There was no point in telling her that half the cons and a third of the jailers were bought and paid for by men like Montesi and Cardo. Instead I said that she'd done the best she could. It didn't matter anyway. Lewinski was one of the corpses who'd turned up in the river.

“I'm sorry,” I said, but the words just hung there.

On my way out the door, I stopped and looked back at her. She was tracing the photo album with the tip of her finger, cocooned in the guilt that would follow her to her grave. Then I thought about Vinnie Montesi drinking chocolate milk and staring at a syrup-covered waffle to hold on to the memory of his son and Demond Jones telling me that his little sister had begged him to make the pain go away. I thought about Don Ellis looking at his face in the mirror, wondering what had happened to the life he'd once known.

I closed the door behind me. Then I closed my eyes. For a moment I was back there in that hospital, smelling antiseptic and pine trees, listening to my wife weep and staring at the blue, lifeless lump that should have been my little girl.

A few blocks away, the cleanup at the industrial park was just beginning, but I knew it didn't matter. In the end, we don't dump the worst of our toxic waste in abandoned warehouses or slow-moving rivers. We carry it around in our memories until it's safely buried six feet underground.

FROM
The Outlaw Album

 

M
Y BROTHER LEFT
no footprints as he fled. There'd been three nights of freeze, and the mud had stiffened until the sloped field lay as hard as any slant road. Morning light met rime on the furrows and laid a shine between rows of cornstalks cut to winter spikes, and my brother, Harky, a mutinous man with a fog patch of gray hair drifting to the small of his back and black-booted feet, crushed the faded stalks aside as he came to them, and only these broken spikes marked his passing. His strides were long but curiosity curled his path, spun it about in small pondering circles as he glanced behind, followed by abrupt, total shifts in forward direction. The mud was unblemished but for the debris of cornstalks, and some of the pale dried shucks were spotted by kerosene drippings. Harky still carried the fuming torch he'd made of a baseball bat and a wadded sheet, the torch he'd used to set the neighbor's house afire, to make amends, to show his love, and flammable droplets fell beside him partway across the field.

Our father chased my brother. He chased him down the road from the burning house, into the field, wearing a white bathrobe and loose slippers. With each step he fell farther behind as his old sick feet skittered over uneven furrows and tripped. The nosepiece from his oxygen tube was yet pinched to his face, and a length of tube waved about while the robe flapped open. He fell repeatedly and stalks stabbed his skin broken at the ankles and hips. He stood up from the field six times, or only five, then again tripped over a furrow, collapsed to the frost, and lay there, face to the mud, withered fingers clenching at stalks, robe flung wide.

Smoke and shouts drifted from the neighbor's house.

Father's breathing could be heard beyond the fence line, up the road, the hoarse snatching after breath, rattling inhalations. He was raw beneath the robe, his skin ashen and his blood thinned by medications. The broken spots on his ankles and hips quickly turned blue and leaky. He held on to the oxygen tube with one hand, holding it still and inhaling, as if there might be a trapped bubble of pure oxygen his lungs could burst and pull through in shreds. Fogged eyeglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and his glum white private hair and forlorn flopping parts were open to the cold. He lay there weak as a babe, but a babe who'd already snuck a drink this morning, scotch, and chased it with a forbidden cigarette.

Across the mud and downslope he spotted Harky and his fog of hair scuttling from the field at the far end, plunging over the wire fence and into the thicket. Six-foot-two of man, with a jostling cloud riding his back and a blackened baseball bat in one hand.

Father rose to his knees, gasping, then stood and wobbled his way back to the road, legs too limber for firm strides, blood from his broken spots making lazy trails down his skin. Our father, the joking drunk who was so bitter when sober, shuffled past the edge of the fallow field, toward the big hunkered old house of glowering white that had been the home of our mother's family for three generations before recent inheritance delivered it down to us Dewlins. Mother waited near the door, pacing between the four-sided pillars on the veranda where she'd played jacks as a girl, hopscotch, her eyes glistening and rounded with anger. Her hair was a carefully selected chestnut hue, girlishly long and casually brushed, and she wore a winter coat belted over her bedclothes. She watched our father limp to the house and did not reach out to help him until he climbed the steps. They both paused on the veranda and looked across the road, toward the flames dancing on the shiny new log cottage of the only close neighbor, a man named Gordon Mather Adams, a retired schoolteacher of some sort, a man I'd never spoken to, busy beside his eastern wall with a yellow garden hose and a panicked air, the excess water running from the flames down the slope of winter grass toward the river behind his house.