The Drifter (17 page)

H
e still had a few hours before meeting Dinah, and he was starving. So he stopped at Café Corazón, a little Mexican place in an old triangular building around the corner from the lumberyard. He ordered to go and sat outside under a picnic shelter to eat his burrito. It was a very good burrito. Top ten, for sure. Maybe top five.

Then he took out his phone and tried Aurelia Castellano, the missing Marine’s grandmother. Again he got the woman’s voicemail.

He was leaving his number when he was interrupted. “Hello? Hello?” A strong voice, but with the patina of years. “Are you still there?”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m here,” said Peter, strangely relieved. Part of him was afraid she’d vanished, too.

“Praise the Lord, I was afraid I’d lost you,” she said. Then, “Do you know anything about my grandson Felix?” Her voice was full of hope, absurdly. Her grandson had been missing for months.

“I’m sorry, ma’am, I don’t,” said Peter. “But I wonder if I could come talk to you?”

When she didn’t respond, Peter said, “I’m not a reporter or a
policeman. I’m a Marine, like your grandson. I think you met a friend of mine. James Johnson.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. He could hear the smile in her voice. People almost always smiled when they talked about Jimmy. “I met Mr. Johnson,” she said. “Just over a month ago. What a
nice
man. He was looking for my Felix. But I haven’t heard from him. Not for quite some time.”

Peter said, “Ma’am? When could I come see you?”

She was home, just cleaning up. He could come by right now if he wanted to.

—

She met him at the door of a 1920s bungalow on the North Side.

The paint was old but touched up, the yard was neat, and he could see a kid’s play structure in the back. The houses on either side of hers were bigger, but they were boarded up, with a blue tarp over one roof that would not last the next storm, let alone the winter. Four other houses on the block had yellow notices taped up to their front doors.

This had been a nice neighborhood once, he thought. Now it was being gutted by the recession. Families foreclosed on, bank-owned homes standing empty and rotting.

“You must be Mr. Ash,” she said, holding the door open, smiling as if a stranger asking about her vanished grandson was the best part of her day. Maybe it was.

Mrs. Aurelia Castellano looked to be in her late sixties, with steel in her hair. Her skin was the color of burnished bronze. She wore half-glasses, a man’s dress shirt untucked with the sleeves rolled up, and immaculate blue jeans. She looked like a high school principal on her day off.

Which made Peter wish he had showered somewhere other than a car wash. And shaved. And gotten a haircut.

“Won’t you come in?”

He stood at the open door. The smell of mothballs and air freshener wafted out. He felt the static rise and his chest grow tight just with the idea of entering the house. “Ah—ma’am—”

She measured him with her eyes.

“Is there something wrong with my house, Mr. Ash?”

Peter shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

“Then why are you out here in the cold? Come in, young man, come in.”

And she took him by the arm and led him inside.

“Perhaps in the sunroom,” she said, and sat him in a white wicker chair in a bright room with leaded-glass windows on three sides and a broad view of the street. “I put on a fresh pot of coffee,” she said. “You’ll have some.”

It was not a question. He nodded and sat, breathing deeply, while she brought him a cup of coffee and set out a plate of cookies. Then she perched herself on the edge of the couch, hands on her knees, leaning toward Peter. She took a deep breath, then let it out.

“Now, then,” she said. “Why are you here?”

“I hoped you would tell me a little bit about your grandson,” said Peter.

The bright smile faded into the distance. “Felix was a nice boy. Polite, never in trouble. And a hard worker.”

“He grew up with you?”

“Yes, he lived in this very house, from the age of four. Several of my grandchildren lived with me at one time or another. But Felix stayed the longest. He graduated high school, stayed away from
bad influences.” The smile turned sad. “My hopes were on him more than the others.”

“He went overseas?” Peter asked.

Mrs. Castellano nodded. “It was my own fault,” she said. “He was such a kind, quiet boy. I suggested he join the Navy or the Air Force. He was good with his hands, always fixing things around the house. I hoped he would learn a trade and get money for college.” She shook her head. “He was always a skinny boy. I didn’t ever imagine he would join the Marines and get sent to the fighting. Maybe he thought he was proving something. Four years they kept him. He was always quiet before. But he came home hardly talking at all. Like he had ghosts inside him.”

Peter knew what that felt like. He felt it still, with the static sparking up inside him, even in that quiet, sunny room in Milwaukee. He rolled his shoulders to ease the tension, but it didn’t help the tightness in his chest.

“Where did Felix live, after he came home?”

“He came home to his nana.” She patted her palm on the couch cushion beside her. “I was not going to have him spending his back pay on a place of his own, not until he got a good job.” She pierced him with a glance. “Veterans Day is on Monday. We’re supposed to honor our veterans. You’d think a decorated veteran could get a job. But there were no jobs to be had. He did enroll in college, I made sure of that.”

Peter nodded. He wouldn’t have been able to resist her, either.

She shook her head. “But Felix didn’t fit there, either. He was a war veteran sitting in a classroom with children just out of high school. They had no idea of what he’d been through. And the school had no idea what to do with him.”

Peter had heard this story before, too. “Then he disappeared?”

“Months later,” she said. “He started going to a veterans’ group.
I thought he might be getting better. But I arrived home one day and he was gone. He left a note.”

Mrs. Castellano reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a piece of lined notepaper, softened from handling. The creases where it had been folded were worn. After another few months they would wear through the paper entirely. Peter imagined her carrying it with her every day, and setting it on a table beside her bed before she went to sleep.

She unfolded the note with exquisite care.

“‘Dear Nana,’” she read. “‘I have something important to do. Please don’t try to find me. If you hear anything about me, please know that I love my country, I will always love you, and I always have done what I thought was right. With love, your Felix.’”

She turned to look at Peter, eyes bright with tears. “What can he be doing?” she asked. “What can he possibly be doing?”

Peter didn’t have an answer for her.

But he was afraid it involved a large sum of money and some plastic explosive. And a disturbed young man who was good with his hands.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I wish I knew. I really do.” He wasn’t sure how to say the next thing, so he just said it. “Do you remember my asking you about another man who came to talk to you? My friend James Johnson?”

She wiped her eyes with a white handkerchief. “Yes,” she said. “He said a Marine never leaves another Marine behind. He wanted to help find my Felix.”

Then she seemed to catch herself, and stared fiercely at Peter. It was like the light of the sun focused down through a magnifying glass, but in a good way. Peter felt what it must have been like to be under this woman’s care.

“Your friend,” she said. “We spoke several times. He said he
would tell me what he found. But I didn’t hear from him again. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Something happened to him.”

“Ma’am?” said Peter. “Where did you suggest Jimmy start looking for your grandson?”

—

Mrs. Castellano gave Peter a short list of Felix’s friends and their phone numbers. She’d given Jimmy the same list.

Felix didn’t go to taverns, she said. He belonged to the YMCA on Forty-sixth Street, he took care of himself. She had convinced the staff to post fliers and review their records. Felix hadn’t been to the Y since before he left her home.

Peter felt the static rise higher even before he asked his next question. The pricking of sweat on the back of his neck. He knew it would be bad.

“May I see his room?”

The stairwell was steep and narrow and tucked tightly under the eaves, and Peter had to hunch over and turn sideways to get up the stairs as the static crackled behind his ears and the steel band tightened around his chest. The bedroom wasn’t much bigger than the stairwell. Peter kept breathing, in and out, in and out. He was sweating freely now. He would last only so long. He’d better make the best of it.

The narrow bed was neatly made, waiting for Felix to come home. But the closet and a leaning particleboard dresser were nearly empty. The bulletin board over the dresser was bare. Pinholes and uneven fading showed where papers had been tacked up.

“He took all his medals with him,” she said. There was no space for two in the bedroom, so she stood in the doorway, looking in. “His discharge papers. His dress uniform. What would he need his dress uniform for?”

Peter felt it in his stomach. Something bad.

He thought of Jimmy’s little apartment, the rent three months in advance, the fridge cleaned out for a long absence.

“Ma’am, I’d like to search the room. Is that all right? I’ll put everything back the way I found it.”

Mrs. Castellano nodded.

There wasn’t much there. He would work fast.

He shoved the narrow bed away from the wall, pulled off the cheap linens, lifted the mattress from the box spring, then the box spring from the floor. Nothing.

He took the drawers from the dresser. A few torn T-shirts and worn-out socks, some old car magazines. He flipped through the magazines and saw only cars. Nothing taped on the undersides of the drawers.

He went through the closet, item by item. It didn’t take long. Two faded dress shirts, a plastic belt with a broken buckle. A thrift-shop suit with tickets to the North Division High School prom in the breast pocket and a dried boutonniere on the lapel. The flower, once a white rose, had thinned to pale parchment as fine as ash.

Mrs. Castellano stood in the doorway, watching him make a mess of her grandson’s room. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll put it all back now.”

“No, no,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I should have done this myself when he left. But I just couldn’t.”

Peter remade the bed, put the clothes on their hangers, and picked up the drawers and went to return them to the dresser. On the floor in the open bottom of the dresser, maybe where it had fallen from the bulletin board, lay a business card.

A cream-colored card. With green lettering.

The Riverside Veterans’ Center.

Peter picked up the card and turned it over. On the back was
the same spidery black handwriting and the same phone number as the card that Jimmy had hidden in his money belt.

Peter took out his own wallet. Not much in there.

He removed the cream-colored card with the green lettering that Lipsky had given him.

The same card.

He turned it over.

The same phone number.

—

Standing outside on her stoop, Peter thanked Mrs. Castellano very much for her time. He told her that he would call her to let her know what he found out. He reminded her of the number for his cell phone.

“I’m so glad you called now,” she said. “I’ll have a new number this time next week. You never would have found me.” She pulled out a pen and wrote it down for him.

Peter looked at her.

She smiled brightly. “I’m moving into my sister’s house,” she said. “I worked at a bank for forty years, but when the FDIC took them over, my pension lost most of its value. My retirement savings dropped with the market. I haven’t been able to find a new job. I refinanced my house five years ago when my sister needed surgery, and now the bank is calling in the note.” She shrugged gracefully. “They’re taking the house.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She waved a hand. “Oh, it’s been a year coming,” she said. “I’ve come to terms with it. Although it certainly made Felix quite furious when he came home. That horrible bank putting his nana out of her house.”

“Is there something else you can do?”

“No.” She put her hand on his arm. “At least I have a place to go,” she said. “And I can get Social Security. Think of all those people without jobs, without savings, without any place to call home.” She shook her head. “My husband would roll over in his grave with all these bank bailouts, these executives getting their bonuses, while hardworking people lose their homes and children go hungry.”

“Do you need help moving?” Peter asked.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I have family for that.” Her grip was fierce. “You just find my Felix.”

L
ewis’s tan Yukon with its tubular steel bumper was parked up the street from Dinah’s place, with a clear view of the house. The Yukon was shut off, and the windows were cracked open a half-inch. Someone sitting in a car was easy to miss, but tailpipe exhaust or fogged windows would get noticed by anyone watching Dinah’s house for more than a few minutes. This wasn’t Lewis’s first rodeo.

Peter stopped, leaned across the seat, and rolled down his passenger window. “Anything?” he said.

Lewis wore a thick down coat and a black watch cap. “Nothing.” His breath steamed in the cold. “No dude with scars, no black SUV. I’m starting to think you made this motherfucker up.”

“He didn’t get past you, did he?”

Lewis gave him a look.

Peter grinned. “What about the alley?”

“Nino’s there now. We trade off.”

“Does Dinah know you’re here?”

Lewis shook his head. It didn’t seem to make him happy.

“I’m picking her up now,” said Peter. “You can go home, get warm. Come back in the morning. I’ll be parked out here all night.”

“You owe me, motherfucker.”

“Hey,” said Peter. “I just stepped into this. It’s not my fault you got pulled in.”

“Uh-huh,” said Lewis. “I know what you doing. But that ain’t what I mean. Nino all banged up, and Ray out with a ruptured fucking testicle, thanks to you. And I got something going in four days. So if Ray not good to go by then, you gonna get drafted.”

“We’ll see,” said Peter. “And thanks for this.”

“Don’t thank me yet, motherfucker.”

—

When Peter pulled up, Dinah came down the steps of the new front porch. She wore her good wool coat with a yellow scarf. He hadn’t really talked to her in a day and a half, and a lot had happened since then.

He got out to open the door for her. She stopped him on the curb.

“What happened to you?” She leaned in to examine the bruise on his face and touched it with cool, professional fingertips. Her breath was warm on his skin. It smelled like peppermint.

“A misunderstanding,” said Peter.

She gave him a look, still leaning in close. “How does the other guy look?”

“Two of them, actually,” said Peter, suppressing a smile. “We have a lot to talk about. But I have something to show you first. Should we go?”

She got in the truck and they drove toward Jimmy’s apartment. Dinah rubbed her hands together. “I’m cold. Do you mind rolling your window up?”

“I can’t,” said Peter. He cranked up the heat. “The window’s broken.”

“I am so sorry.” She shook her head. “This neighborhood is just sad. I have got to get out of here. Did they steal anything?”

“That’s not it,” he said. “Somebody shot at me.”

“What?” Dinah was horrified. “Where? How?”

“It’s okay,” said Peter. “I’ve been shot at before.” He didn’t want to tell her he’d killed the man who’d shot at him. He didn’t want to tell her about his latest meeting with the scarred man, either. “But I think I got someone’s attention.”

“Was it the man with the scars who shot at you?”

Peter shook his head. “No. But that’s probably who sent the guy. I’m working on it.”

He turned at Jimmy’s block and found a parking spot. He pointed at the duplex house. “That’s where Jimmy was staying. The keys from his pocket fit the door to the upstairs apartment.”

Dinah watched the house through the glass. She didn’t speak.

Peter watched the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck. The pulse of the vein beneath her skin. “We could go in if you want,” he said. “I met his landlady. Jimmy told her he was going on a trip. He paid his rent three months in advance. He was looking for a Marine veteran who had gone missing.”

Dinah put her hand to her mouth and turned to Peter.

For a brief moment, it was the face of a child who had been told a terrible truth of the grown-up world. But Dinah was an adult. She knew what it meant.

Peter said it anyway. “It wasn’t suicide.”

He saw the muscles in her jaw clench and knot. She grabbed the edges of the seat with her fists and pressed her feet to the floor as if she were setting herself against the waters of a flood. She closed her eyes, turned inward, and took a deep, shuddering breath.

Then she turned and looked Peter hard in the face. “Tell me everything you know.”

He told her about meeting Miss Rosetta Phelps, about Mingus being Jimmy’s dog, about searching Jimmy’s apartment. He told her about the kid with the assault rifle and being grilled by Lipsky. He told her about going back to Lewis’s building, and the fight with Nino and Ray, and how Lewis had promised he would watch her house.

“I don’t believe it. Lewis said that?”

Peter nodded. “When you’re a guy like Lewis, all you have is your word. Your own sense of honor.”

“Lewis is a criminal,” she said. “A criminal and a killer.”

Jimmy was a killer. It was part of his job description. Peter was a killer, too, and now a criminal. He didn’t bring that up. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Lewis will keep his word.”

“Lewis will keep his word? You believe that?”

Peter nodded. “I do. In an uncertain world, honor is very important. Lewis knows that.”

She looked skeptical.

“Lewis lives by a code,” said Peter. “You remember how he wouldn’t let Nino and Ray take your money? That’s part of his code. He’s been parked on your street, watching for the man with the scars. Even though I basically twisted his arm to get him there. That’s part of his code, too.”

Dinah shook her head. She was having trouble with the thought that Lewis might not be entirely bad.

Peter said, “It’s an old idea, from a time before police and lawyers and contracts. When violence was an everyday occurrence. Living by your word was both a promise and a threat.” He shrugged. “It still works for a certain kind of honorable criminal. And for soldiers.” He gave her a small smile. “Marines, especially.”

“Like Jimmy,” she said, maybe beginning to understand. “Is that why he moved out?”

“I think so,” said Peter. “He needed to stand on his own. I think that’s why he started looking for this missing Marine, too.”

He told her about sorting through Jimmy’s things, about finding the same yellow flier on the wall that was tucked into Jimmy’s belt when he died, and about Felix Castellano and his grandmother.

“The Riverside Veterans’ Center,” she said. “How many of these cards do you have now?”

“Three,” he said. “One from Jimmy’s belt compartment. One from behind Felix’s dresser. One that Lipsky gave me. And they all had the same phone number on the back. The same handwriting.”

“And what does all this have to do with the man with the scars, and that money?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But I’ll find out.”

“Oh, hell, yes,” she said.

—

They climbed the steep, narrow steps to the apartment.

Peter stood just inside the door, the static jolting his brainstem, while Dinah prowled the room from corner to corner, trying to capture the last faint traces of her murdered husband.

She looked at the clean dishes neatly set out to dry, at the books arranged on their shelf, at the sagging chair where he had sat. She looked at the frayed rug and the cracked plaster walls and the narrow bed where he had slept. And the shell of anger and ferocity she had built slowly peeled away. What remained was utter sorrow.

She sat carefully on the bed, put her face in her hands, and cried.

Peter tried to make himself stand and watch. He had already cried for his dead friend. He knew how much it hurt. It still hurt.

Finally he couldn’t help himself. He sat on the bed beside her
and put his hand on her shoulder. She folded herself into him. He put his arms around her. She buried her face in his chest. Her shoulders heaved.

She cried for her dead husband, and for doubting him.

She cried because she had thrown him out, and because he had gone without a fight.

She cried because she had believed he’d killed himself, and because he hadn’t.

Her sobs were wrenching and violent, as if she could barely gather breath between them, as if something were dying, or being born.

—

After she was done, she wiped her eyes with a tissue taken from her shirtsleeve. She sighed and shook her head. “You got a lot more than you bargained for.”

Peter didn’t say anything. She tilted her head then and looked at him sideways. “Peter,” she said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but how long has it been since you’ve showered?”

Peter looked at his hands. “It’s been a few days,” he said. “I’ve been busy. That’s mostly the dog, by the way.” It was embarrassing to blame his own stink on Mingus.

“Why have you been sleeping in your truck?”

He didn’t want to explain it to her. “I’m not sleeping in my truck,” he said. “I’m sleeping in front of your house.”

Her face held an expression he couldn’t decipher. Her voice was gentle. “Why are you sleeping in front of my house?”

“To protect you,” he said. “Because Jimmy can’t.”

There was a moment when neither of them said anything. He filled the silence. “I was planning to get a hotel room today,” he said. “To shower. But I didn’t have time. I need to do laundry, too.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. She said, “If James were still alive, would you stay with him?”

No, he thought. Because I can’t stay inside for more than twenty minutes before starting to scream. And I’m nearing my limit.

“Sure,” he said.

“Well,” said Dinah, “this is his apartment. James wouldn’t mind. The rent is paid up, right? I think you should stay here. You can use his bathroom.”

“Okay.” Peter nodded again. “I will.”

“No,” Dinah said. “I mean right now. Really. Go take a shower.”

She stood up and took Jimmy’s bathrobe from the hook by the door, and held it out. It was far too big. Peter took it anyway.

—

The bathroom was cold, and it felt odd to take his clothes off. Like he was removing his second skin. His protection. He was naked and Dinah was in the next room, behind the thin veneer of a hollow-core door. It was disturbing and exhilarating at the same time.

But the water of the shower was delicious. It sluiced over his shoulders and down his back, as hot as it would go, relaxing the knotted muscles and driving the white static down to a hum. He felt his pores opening up, releasing the dirt and dried sweat and the smell of dog.

He rubbed the ancient dried-out bar of soap on his chest, down his legs and the crack of his ass. He wanted to be clean. The noise of the falling water was loud in the cheap fiberglass shower stall. It sounded just like the shower his father had installed in the basement when Peter was a kid. The memory eased the static.

He closed his eyes to wash his hair and stubbled beard with the cheap shampoo. He wanted to sit on the floor and wash his feet, between his toes. He wanted to lean back and fall asleep in there.

He couldn’t help wondering what Dinah was doing in the other room.

He wondered if she thought about him, too.

Peter was not proud of himself.

But that wasn’t the same as being able to stop himself.

He imagined her stepping into the bathroom and standing on the other side of the shower curtain. The water coming down, the steam rising.

He imagined her slipping out of her clothes. How she might part the shower curtain with her fingers and step inside. With him. Under the water.

He imagined how she would look, the sheen of her skin, the water beading up. The slope of her breasts, the gentle mound of her belly. The softness of hair, the slickness between her legs.

The taste of her lips.

He imagined how he would pick her up. He would lift her legs and raise her up and set her slickness down on him. Gently at first, up and down. Up and down, again and again, the strength of his arms made for this, for nothing else, not made for war or fighting in the street, no, not anything else but this, only this.

The heat in the water faded to cold. He opened his eyes. He must have nearly emptied the tank. The hot was gone.

He stepped out of the shower and toweled off, put on Jimmy’s enormous bathrobe. His clothes were missing from the floor.

When he opened the bathroom door, she was gone.

His jeans were neatly folded on the bed, with his keys, wallet, and new phone. The folded shirt lay beside them.

Atop the shirt was the picture he’d been carrying in his pocket.

The picture of Jimmy.