Vengeance (14 page)

Chapter 15

I woke to the regret of not calling Natalie the night before. I hadn’t spoken to her for days. More importantly, I hadn’t given her a thought in all that time. The realization that I could live without her in my daily life should have been comforting, but it came with a wave of sadness. I guess I wanted to hang on. In a way, acknowledging she wasn’t the love of my life was a worse loss than the break-up had been.

I sat up and swung my legs over the front of the couch. The coffee table’s glass top was a grimy landscape where bits of sugary cereals, cookies, and even noodles were strewn and sometimes fossilized within dried spills. Despite an enormous glass ashtray, butts and roaches had been smothered and discarded in clusters across the table. The carpet beyond was littered with bottle caps and shards of chips. There was a black trash bag along the wall just outside of the kitchen. It was bottom-heavy, but its top slumped, its mouth agape.

The milieu was familiar, but one I thought I had graduated from. I wasn’t disgusted by the filth, exactly. But finding myself immersed in it again, involved with shady characters and relying on the benevolence of whatever brand of criminal Casey had become – that’s what made my insides turn.

I was also hungry and cold, which might have had something to do with my uneasy stomach. I got up to check the thermostat. The heat was set at fifty degrees. The bare window in the living room was cold to the touch and had a light fog on it. But the kitchen was even colder. Some of the cupboards were open, revealing bare shelves. A few dead cockroaches lay feet-to-heaven along the edge of the bottom cabinets. Probably dead from starvation.

I peeked in every cupboard, the drawers, and the unplugged fridge. All empty. Even if I had found any food, I wasn’t sure I could muster up an appetite in that place. I went back through the living room to the bathroom. I ran the sink faucet as I pissed. I was pleasantly surprised to find there was hot water. But there were no towels in the bathroom other than a frayed hand towel hanging like a pelt of some urban rodent from the towel bar next to the sink.

I poked my head into each of the two side-by-side bedrooms. The smaller one shared a wall with the bathroom and was completely empty. Its carpet even had remarkably less debris than the living room’s. The bigger bedroom had a futon mattress on the floor against the wall that was adjacent to the living room. This room looked lived in. A milk crate with a poorly cut piece of plywood on top served as a bedside table. It sported a few empty bottles. The floor was adorned with a few balled-up socks, a wadded t-shirt, and what I could guess was his and hers underwear. So it was someone’s fuck pad. Someone who left in fewer clothes than they arrived in – and possibly not aware of it. I thought of Gina, or someone like her. How much could you possibly be getting paid if this was the flop he took you to? Or was I looking at a rape scene? I cringed and decided not to play detective with that room.

I walked along the edge of the room and looked in the closet. But there weren’t any towels there, either. Like the other bedroom, there was a single window centered on the far wall. But this room was darker because it had curtains. But they weren’t curtains. I stepped closer to confirm, and yes, there were two towels hanging from the curtain rod. I pulled one down. It didn’t feel saturated with spills or bodily fluids. I passed on the smell test and decided it would be better than nothing.

As I stripped down and shivered, I wished I had showered in the motel. I stepped under the needling water before I could grow colder. There was no soap, so I just rinsed my hair and stood under the hot water to thaw out for a few minutes. The bathroom door was wide open and there was no shower curtain. But, despite the signs of human activity in the apartment, I wasn’t worried anyone would be walking in on me.

I dressed and decided to venture out for some breakfast. I stopped at the door and took stock of the number of screw holes up and down the two foot stretch between the handle and eye level. A dozen different slide locks and other devices had been installed and removed. Stray hardware leftovers dotted the wall, while the door itself didn’t even have corresponding holes for some of the missing latches. I guessed the door had been kicked in at some point, probably breaking it beyond repair. The splintered molding from about knee height down attested to that possibility. Maybe that’s what had happened to all the food – or the towels.

As I opened the door, I heard something drop to the ground on the other side. It was a piece of paper folded into a business card-sized rectangle. Inside was a key that belonged to a gold Buick parked behind the building, Casey’s note on the inside of the paper said. It also included the name of a restaurant on First Avenue and told me to head there and call him when I arrived.

I got my bearings while I waited for the defrost to clear the windshield because there was no ice scraper in the car. I hit a little traffic downtown but still made it to the diner in about ten minutes, which my stomach was ecstatic about.

There was a pay phone between the restroom doors. I called Casey and he said he’d be right over and to go ahead and order. I thought about calling Natalie, but she would be at work. The waitress brought out my biscuits and gravy in less time than it took me to decide against an omelet. I dug in before they got cold and took inventory of what I knew so far. It didn’t amount to much. Suspicions, backed up by a shoddy police report. A motorcycle that presumably had no damage, which strongly suggested there had been no accident at all. But I hadn’t been able to see the bike myself, so I was taking a stranger’s word for it. I wished I had had the presence of mind to ask Jeremiah specific questions, like if the front tire had been flat or if the rim had been bent. That could have pointed to the bike hitting a stopped truck square in the bumper, like George had suggested. But I was sure something like that couldn’t have gone unnoticed if Jeremiah’s buddy had driven off on the bike. And I bet Jeremiah would have tried to have charged my dad for the cost of the new wheel if that had been the case.

Casey pulled in not two minutes later. He ordered and I recounted the list to him.

“And the location of the bike on the night Aiden died can’t be explained,” I said. I was eating while talking, swallowing without chewing well. I didn’t feel any need for social etiquette around Casey, or the need to let my own food get cold while he waited for his eggs and pancakes.

“It’s not much to go on,” he said, emptying sugar packets into his coffee. The place was empty except for an old man having toast in a booth on the adjacent wall.

“It’s nothing at all! It’s circumstantial fodder for rumors. There isn’t a real piece of evidence in the whole mess.”

I dropped my fork on the plate. My appetite had shriveled. The waitress delivered Casey’s food and he made a production of spreading the butter and pouring the syrup. He cut into the stack of pancakes and stuffed his mouth before talking.

“You’re not in a court of law. You don’t have the same burden of proof on the streets,” he said.

“The only person I’m trying to convince is myself,” I said. “And my reasonable doubt is running pretty strong.”

“You must have some conviction in you to take on Rook two nights in a row!” He forked his mouth full of scrambled eggs once he had finished talking. “How’s your head and hand, anyway?”

“Better. Hand hurts when I wash it,” I said. “And the only reason I tried to deal with Rook was to see whether there was something to be learned – if there was any truth to this conspiracy stuff. I can’t say I think he’s being open, but that doesn’t necessarily prove he’s hiding anything.”

He nodded fervently as if to let me know he agreed and had something to add. He might also have been working all that food down his esophagus. When he finally swallowed, he chased a drink of water with a sip of coffee.

“Look,” he said, still clearing his airway. “I didn’t know how serious you were. Or if you had it in you. But now I know.”

He paused and I thought for a second he expected me to thank him for the compliment.

“I might have a lead for you,” he said. “But this can’t come back to me. Understand? You need to find out from Paige who Aiden’s dealer was. Get that, and I’ll tell you what to do next.”

“What good’s that gonna do?”

“Trust me,” he said. Something about someone telling me to trust them always made me want to lean in the other direction. But at that moment, I was more focused on how little I wanted to have to talk to Paige after our encounter in the motel.

“Can’t you find out?” I asked.

“Of course. I could make a call and tell you in two minutes. But someone is going to remember that I asked about it. And I need to keep my nose out of this. You? No one will think it’s odd you’re asking.”

I was beginning to wonder if I had underestimated how shrewd Casey had become.

“Fine,” I said. It was not fine. “You think Paige knows who the dealer is?”

“She was Aiden’s woman. She’ll know something.”

“So she tells me a name. Then what?”

“You feed it to me.”

“I thought you couldn’t help me.”

“As long as I have deniable culpability, it’s fine. I can’t feed you the dealer, but once I know who it is, I can tell you what there is to know about him.”

It seemed like a runaround. I understood Casey was protecting himself. But I had already been chasing shadows for days with nothing to show for it.

“I’m surprised you’re not worried about being seen at breakfast with me,” I said. As soon as it came out, I realized my exhaustion and hunger had teamed up with the grief and frustration.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Casey said as politely as possible in that context. “Breakfast is breakfast. You’re the brother of an old friend who just died. I’d be a shit not to have breakfast with you. But if I ask about Aiden’s dealer then you show up to ask the dealer about Aiden, it’ll come back to me fast and hard. There’s a certain code in my line of work. Respect that.”

“But if Paige tells me about the dealer…”

“No one gives a shit. Paige can tell you anything she wants. And if any of this ever comes back to my door, I can say Paige told you, and that will be the verifiable truth.”

I fished the paper with her number out of my pocket. Casey nodded to the pay phone as if urging me to call her. As I walked to the phone I thought once more how stupid it was to dial her number, ask her for a name, and tell that name to Casey, all so he could say he didn’t tell it to me himself. But I called her all the same. As the phone rang, I realized it was mid-morning on a weekday and relaxed at the thought that she was probably a work. Naturally, that’s when she picked up.

“You got my note,” she said after I told her who it was.

“Yeah. I thought you’d be at work, though. Listen, I need to find out who Aiden’s dealer was.”

I didn’t see any reason to beat around the bush. Especially if the bush belonged to my dead brother’s ex-lover.

“I work swing shift today,” she said flatly. “And I don’t know his name.”

I shrugged and shook my head at Casey. He was sitting sideways in the booth, his feet sticking out the end. He replied with a hand rolling hand signal as if to suggest I keep digging for information.

“He must have said something,” I said.

“He called the guy D-Bag,” she said.

“That’s all I needed to know,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

I hung up with no intention of calling her later.

“Guy’s name is D-Bag,” I said as I reached the booth.

“D-Bag?” Casey said. “Which one?”

“Which one?” I repeated. His question had snuffed my victorious glow.

“There’s at least three guys in town go by D-Bag. One deals in exotic porn and sex paraphernalia. Douche-Bag. So it’s not him. The other two are both drug dealers. There’s Dime-Bag and… you know, I was going to say the other is Dirt-Bag, but I think they both go by Dime-Bag.”

“The fucking nicknames around here!” I said. “What now?”

“I need to know which one to point you toward.”

“Seriously?”

“Just call her back. She’ll know what part of town he’s in.”

I got her back on the line.

“It’s later already, huh?” she said, with all the warmth I should have expected.

“I didn’t mean to cut you off before. I’m juggling a lot.”

She hummed a dubious “Mm-hmmmm” that conveyed she would entertain more dialogue.

“Did Aiden ever say where this guy did business?”

“I don’t have his address,” she said. I was about to signal to Casey it was a dead-end. Maybe he would throw me a bone. He could give me all of the D-Bags’ addresses and with any luck I’d find the right one before I stumbled into some S&M dungeon basement.

But then she added, “I can take you there.”

“I just need to know what part of town he’s on,” I said.

“Can’t think of it off the top of my head,” she said. “But if we get in the car and head the right way, I can find it. Aiden had me drive him there a few times.”

Casey was approaching me, reading his pager. His eyes met mine and he signaled he had somewhere to be.

“Hang on,” I told Paige. I covered the mouthpiece and said, “She can take me to the place.”