Dead Birmingham (2 page)

I had made the rounds of certain contacts immediately after the old man had departed. I realized that to track down the kids who'd stolen the box from Malvagio's Antiques, I would need to talk to people who were out on the streets a lot, fringe types. I'd started with the dope peddlers. I just figured that a bunch of dropout kids would sit around when they weren't stealing, sucking on a bong and giggling at whatever was on cable. The place that kids like that would most likely be found was in the seedy North Side, where the sellers of weed and other such amusements plied their trade, so I headed there.

I didn't especially like that part of town, but I knew it well enough because I'd been a cop there. At dusk, the avenues crawled with the down-on-their-luck disenfranchised. Stealthy shadows crept from hiding and started their sordid rounds, police sirens started up, and it all went on until dawn's return. People streamed in from Birmingham and parts beyond to get a little something that they couldn't get at home. Some went home happy, some to jail, some to the morgue. Just another night on the North Side.

On Fifth Avenue North, a man had been shot to death the night before, and his chalk outline was still there on the cement, accusing in the early dawn. Some passerby gave it an awed look and stepped religiously around it. Others, more hardened, did not even glance down as they smeared the outline with their feet. People died. Big deal.

The hard red sun slid down, down, slanting red light into the faces of the people who rose late and lurked later. These were the night people, those who only moved when the daylight failed.
 

The city was cut in half by a raised railroad trestle. The avenues to the north of that line became more lawless as they progressed. Women, and men too, sold their flesh, calling to passersby like the sirens to Odysseus. Street corner businessmen were everywhere; half had what you needed, the other half waited to take it from you.

I headed toward a certain snaky corner of a certain North Side Boulevard well known for a run-down hotel where women were made available to those with no cash flow problems. There, a certain slim, handsome, light-skinned black man sucked a toothpick and leaned against a wall of the Pitt hotel, a former north side land mark turned flop and whorehouse, now known by the likely nickname, “The Pit.”
 

The man appeared casual, but his eyes were constantly scanning, first this way, then that. Lyle “The Style” Carpenter, as he was known; had hard eyes that belied his boyish good looks. He turned his gaze on me just long enough to size me up. Then the eyes returned to their scanning.

“What you need, Longville?”

“Oh, nothing much, Lyle. Just looking for a gang of kids.”

“Well, just hang around, that's mostly what shows up around here. I'm sure a carload will be along in a few minutes.”

“That's funny, Lyle, but I'm looking for a certain group, not just any group. But I'm sure you knew that.”

“What's in it for me?” Carpenter said, the closest thing to a mantra he possessed.

“There's a reward out for one of them,” I lied. “A girl. You know the kind of cases I get . . . wandering daughters. I'll cut you in if you help me find the little crew she runs with. Her parents want me to find her pretty bad.”

Carpenter turned the hard eyes back to me and grinned. He relaxed, just an iota.
 

“Man, what you trying to pull? You expect me to believe that shit? Come on. Why don't you tell me what you really after.”

I grinned back and let a laugh slip out. “That's right, Lyle. I forget just how sharp you can be. My bad.” We stood for a second, neither speaking. Lyle scanned the street and I leaned against the wall beside him.
 

Finally, Lyle sighed, “Alright, Longville, you're bad for my business. You still look like a cop. But I guess you know that. Since it's the only way I'm going to get rid of you, I'll ask. What do you want them for, these kids?”

“Alright, I'll shoot straight with you. One of the kids is set to inherit some money. A lot of it. Kid's a drop-out from some big college. If I find her and bring her home, I get a cut.”

Lyle the Style was nodding now. “Okay, I see it. Rich kid, huh. Wants to get out and get into a little trouble. Now the parents are worried and want her back home.”

“You got it, Lyle. And, of course, they are willing to pay for their loved one's return.”

“I gotcha. So, you looking for a big cut?”

“Any cut of big money is a big cut for me, Style.” I shifted to the man's street name to remind him they were, after all, old friends . . . of a sort. “Reward, inheritance, either way, you help me, I'll slide you a piece of my piece.”

The Style's nod became more vigorous. “So, tell me about this case of yours. These a bunch of white kids?”

 

Chapter 3

 

I drove away from the North Side shaking my head. Lyle the Style Carpenter had sent me on to the other hustlers, pimps, and pushers, and we both pretended not to know that a web of cell phone users all across north Birmingham was spreading the story like summer wildfire, long before I arrived to tell it all over again, promising pieces of a non-existent fortune to people who would only tell me what I needed to know. They wouldn't tell me because they were good people, or concerned about someone's safety, but because there was a sum money possibly coming their way if they could provide me with what I was looking for.

I'm not a liar by temperament, or by habit, but in the parts of town where people lived or died by their wits from day to day, a human-interest story just never seemed to wash very well. People had a no-nonsense, what's-in-it-for-me mindset, just like Lyle the Style, and they assumed their own motivations were generic to everyone else they came into contact with.
 

Lyle Carpenter would never believe that I was doing something just for the good of it, so I had concocted the rich kid, big reward scenario. It had enough human darkness from all angles that Lyle, and all the subsequent denizens of the North Side, easily accepted it as truth.

The real truth was, of course, that I had already gotten money from the case; Malvagio's advance felt heavy in my pocket. I hadn't made any headway yet, and this was a case for a beginner, on its face. I had really counted on the all-seeing eyes of the North Side vice empire turning up something. I had asked a lot of people a lot of questions, and come up with nothing.

Were they lying? Holding out on me to check and see if my story was true? I didn't think so. The sad fact was, most likely, none of them knew anything. This was genuinely puzzling to me, since that was the stratum of society that the dispossessed always found themselves moving through. The bungled, the lost, the victims of the Big Mistakes we sometimes make in life.
 

Malvagio's little group of educated, hipster twenty-somethings should have stood out like a big fat bug in an ice cream parlor. But they were unknown to the drug culture; rang no bells with the up-all night homeless who stood outside the porno shops and liquor stores begging for the guilty dollar of the shameful; and had never been seen by the street walkers on the North Side, who notice every little detail and turn it over and over in their long hours of talk, talk, talk, that come between fixes and back alley dates. So, it seemed, maybe these kids were not going to be quite so easy to find, after all.

Out on the ironically named expressway, the traffic was backed up as far as I could see. I could see the landing lights of planes coming into Birmingham International Airport; and the headlights of cars flooding into the city from the opposite direction after a long work day, on their way to catch a movie, grab a meal, or see an opera or a play.

So many lights. But no real light for many of us.

I had spent years as a police officer and several years more as a private detective. I had heard and seen a million hard things, things that a younger, more idealistic version of me might have been a little more cocky about. “I can handle it,” I might have said, and that younger me would have been right, for a while. But the truth is that every ugly thing you see, every battered wife or dead kid, leaves a scar on your soul, and when you get to be a certain age, those sad images come back to haunt you in those wee hours when you lie awake and ponder what your life has meant.

You are thirty-six years old. How long can you keep this up, when man's every inhumanity to man makes you see ghosts?

Ghosts. Stuff of the past. I had grown up in the projects, a poor black kid whose mom had been a college dropout. She didn't let that happen to me. She made sure that I developed a love of reading, of learning. She wanted me to stay in academics, and earn a PhD. But I'd taken my English degree and joined the army. And after my tour was up, I'd gone to the police academy.
 

I smiled and shook my head. No good wallowing in regret. A man has to live in the here and now.

Everything considered, though, this case didn't sound too bad. Just locate a bunch of up-to-no-good kids, in a greater metropolitan area of around a million, and take some priceless object back from them. Piece of Cake. Yeah, Piece of Devil's Food cake, maybe. So maybe the kids hadn't attracted as much attention around town as I had assumed they would. But someone would have noticed them. Someone always does.
 

I smiled suddenly, thinking about some of the strange cases that I had shared with my old partner, Lester Broom, when I was still on the Birmingham Police Force. I wondered what Les was up to, at that very moment.

 

Chapter 4

 

On the north end of Birmingham, it had begun to rain. Water slid down the dusty windows of the North Precinct in gray slow motion, and put a layer of white noise between the sounds of the city and the hum of the office where Detective Lieutenant Lester Broom took a momentary pause from his grim work to watch the rain, and to brood.

This was rough stuff, broom decided. Everybody dies; it's never easy. When your maiden aunt called to tell you that your grandfather went peacefully in his sleep, it was bullshit. He probably went hacking and coughing, with painful gasps, confused looks, and bad smells. But at least he had been old.

Lester Broom worked homicide. He was a big man, even as big men go, closer to seven feet than six. He was massive, and as strong as he looked. He had been on the Birmingham Police force for twenty years, the Homicide Squad for fifteen of that. He had seen some hard things, but what he was looking at now still made him queasy, although no one, save himself, would ever know it.
 

“You with us, Detective?” Arthur Walker, the Medical Examiner was asking.

Art was a tall, spare black man with a nimbus of gray hair around his head, and steel gray glasses balanced on his nose. He gave off a serene, kindly air. He looked more like a history teacher than an M.E.

Broom's attention snapped back to the present. He stood in the basement morgue of the North Precinct, where The M.E. was conducting a post-mortem examination. “Yeah, yeah, I'm listening. Just lost myself there for a second. Get on with it, Art.”

Art nodded serenely, pressed a red button on the side of his pocket recorder, and continued: “Subject is a white male, approximately 20 to 25 years of age. Several lacerations and ante mortem perforations around the abdominal thoracic areas; some trauma to the head. Both hands have been separated from the body and are currently missing, separated above the radialis by a sharp instrument. All wounds seem to be ante mortem.”

Broom heard the door slide open behind him. He turned to see McMahon walk through the doorway. McMahon was a thickly muscled man in his early thirties, nattily attired in a light blue suit and a burgundy tie adorned with silver “Erin Go Bragh” pin. Detective McMahon was Broom's latest partner. He'd had other partners, including Roland Longville.
 

McMahon, or “Mack,” as he preferred to be called, was a good cop on the job, methodical and unshakable. He grunted a greeting and handed Broom a folder. “The dead kid's name is Mueller. George Harmon Mueller the third, no less. Father's some kind of real estate magnate. He's been listed as missing since August of last year.”

“The parents know he's dead?”

“Not yet.”

 
“Want me to call them?”

“No, Mack, I'll do it.”

 
“Any priors?”
 

“A bunch. Take a look.”

Broom frowned and opened the folder. He let out a low whistle.

“Shoplifting. Shoplifting. Shoplifting . . . hmm. Attempting to sell stolen merchandise. Three counts. Jeez. If he's from money, why's he pilfering?”

McMahon nodded at the corpse on the table. “Looks like the kid was a professional shoplifter, what they call a “booster.” Lots of kids are into it now, especially among these neo-hippie types. They're got their own subculture, nowadays. Steal whatever you can get your hands on, and then go “return” it for cash. Lots of them do the deal where you find a receipt, go jack the merchandise to go along with it, and then return it for cash. Beats panhandling. Maybe he's got a drug habit. That's what has pulled a lot of kids like him into this sort of racket. Maybe he fell in with the wrong crowd, or started doing it just for fun.”