A Visible Darkness Page 11

  From here he would have been able to see the windows of the back bedroom, but not the front, where Ms. Thompson might have discreetly let her man in.

  I sat down on an upended paint can and watched the back of the house, guessing at the difficulty a killer would have getting across the darkened lawn to the storage shed behind the carport. None. A trail of ants worked in a line across the breadth of the alley like a fishing line on the surface of nervous water.

  He could have sat back here for hours. But who might have seen him? Trash collectors? Kids on their bikes? Neighbors using the alley to park instead of circling for a street-side spot?

  I moved the can closer to the hedge and estimated the cover he would have had in the dark to work on the carport door. Behind me I picked up the sound of shoes scuffing to my left. They weren’t sneaking, just walking slow and sure, like athletes showing up for practice.

  The three young men I’d first mistaken for the neighborhood drug posse had gathered behind me. The one who seemed to be the leader was watching me with a curious head tilt. The other two had cut off any escape route to the north. My truck clogged the path to the south. Their hands were out of their pockets this time. One of them was wearing a thin black glove with the fingers cut off. It was impossible to tell with their baggy, calf-high shorts and long shirts whether they were carrying or not.

  They let me check them before the leader took a couple of steps closer and then squatted on his heels to bring his face down even to mine.

  “This part of the investigation, G?”

  He had put a derisive emphasis on the “in” syllable.

  “I’m not with the government,” I said, holding his eyes but watching for movement from the pair behind him. I could probably kick through him and scramble for the truck. But if they were armed, I wouldn’t make it.

  “This the second place you showin’ up after somebody did wrong in the off-limits,” the leader said. “Ms. Mary said you was helpin’.”

  It was a statement, and it is my practice not to answer statements that are phrased as questions. Some people think I’m a smart-ass when I do it.

  “I’m working with an attorney,” I answered. “A friend of the women who have recently died like Ms. Mary’s mother.”

  “Workin’ on what? Takin’ they money?”

  His eyes betrayed no anger in the accusation. They only drifted off my face to the direction of the Thompson house. He was three feet away. I could see the two gold caps on his back teeth when he spoke. His breath was odorless.

  “Some people don’t think those women died naturally,” I said. “Some people think they might have been murdered for their life insurance money.”

  “Family gets insurance,” he said, this time his voice held a sense of dismissal.

  “In these cases, some investors bought up the policies. But the longer the women lived, the less the policies were worth.”

  He kept his eyes on the house for several beats, assessing my words.

  “Ms. Thompson ain’t dead,” he finally said, finding the flaw in my explanation.

  “Some people think whoever’s doing the killing didn’t know she was being visited by Mr. Harris.”

  One of the two standing close behind now snickered, and the sound pulled at the corner of the leader’s mouth.

  “Hell,” he said. “Everybody know Mr. Harris be visitin’.”

  When the leader went quiet, the others followed. He shifted his feet and the movement made me flinch, but I covered by asking my own question.

  “What did you mean by ‘the off-limits?’ ”

  He assessed me again and decided to answer.

  “They’s parts of the neighborhood that business ain’t done,” he said. “People here know you don’t mess in the places where the old folks live. ’Specially the great-grands.”

  The two behind were nodding.

  “You wanna sell and smoke some shit, they’s a place for that. We don’t mess with that. They leave the off-limits alone.”

  I nodded my head. It was an odd truce, but admirable in some way. Again the silence had its time.

  “I think the man who’s killing the elderly women, including Ms. Mary’s mother, is somebody from the neighborhood.”

  He again gave me the head tilt.

  “I see,” he suddenly said, changing the mannerisms in his voice to a mocking, officious tone. “Once again it is the notorious black- on-black crime pattern.”

  I started to think I’d made a mistake in tactics, trying to turn him into a source.

  “Look, this guy knows the streets, the layout of the homes, the habits of the people,” I said, trying again. “You know how a stranger would stick out here. You’re the first ones who would see it. Maybe this guy is someone who moved in years ago, started to fit in.”

  The leader was staring again at the house, thinking.

  “Maybe it’s somebody that flashes money around. Acts like everybody’s friend so no one suspects,” I said.

  “He got his needs?” the leader said, catching me off guard. He saw that I didn’t understand.

  “You know, habits. Dope, women, gamblin’?”

  “Hundred-dollar bills,” I said, dropping the only signature I had.

  Now it was his turned to be confused.

  “If he’s got habits, he might be paying with hundred-dollar bills,” I said.

  The leader looked around at his boys. They shook their heads. He turned back to me.

  “You got a cell or somethin’?” he said.

  I gave him my cell number. He didn’t write it down but I got the impression he didn’t need to. He stood up and so did I. He was four inches shorter, but the difference didn’t seem to phase him like it did some men.

  “We’ll see, G,” he said and then turned and walked away, the others following. Their hands were all back in their pockets, and when they got to the end of the alley they turned left and headed west.

  I stayed in the neighborhood, driving, watching, grinding the possibilities. If anyone could get a tip on the hundreds, the local crew trying to keep their pledge to the off-limits zone might. Then again, they could be playing me. I cruised past a dusty playground. The concrete basketball court was empty and unlined, the iron rims bent like the tongues of tired dogs.

  I thought of the street games I’d found soon after I’d moved out of South Philly to the town house up near Jefferson Hospital. Down Tenth Street was a one-court park that held a competitive game on the weekend. I’d been playing there for a month, getting into more and more games when the regulars figured out I was willing and able to play defense and could pull a rough rebound as well as anyone on the court. I was often the only white guy there and they started calling me Bobby Jones after the 76ers defensive star.

  One Saturday a group of challengers rolled in swaggering. One called game before he was even past the fence and everyone started posturing and trash talking and making their side bets.

  When it came time to pick up, the local guy who had next let me sit until his final choice and then made his play: “We take the old white guy make it easy on your ass an’ you buck up the bet another Jackson.” The new man looked at me, snorted and peeled off another twenty-dollar bill.

  I had learned over the years that as the minority on the ball courts the best tactic was to stay obscure, keep your mouth shut, and do the quiet things that win games and keep you playing. The real players are not dumb. They like to win. They’ll pick you to play for their own purposes, regardless of color.

  We won by six and I had only one basket but more assists and rebounds than anyone else on the court. After the game the local guy winked at me but never said a word. He collected his cash and I assume split it with his boys later. I picked up my ball and went home to get ready for a night shift.

  I’d lost my bearings on my trip to the past and looked up at the street sign to realize I was driving east. It was late afternoon, the temperature had crawled up near eighty and I decided to stop in at Kim’s. Maybe I
was hoping to run into McCane, find an excuse. But the bar was nearly empty. The same young bartender had an old Don Henley tune turned up on the jukebox and I sat in McCane’s seat. She brought me an ale.

  “Good memory,” I said, putting cash on the bar.

  “You and the good ’ol boy from Moultrie,” she said. “Where is your buddy, anyway? He don’t usually miss the TNT movie. Likes all those old ones, you know, like High Plains Drifter and Catch-22 and stuff.”

  I noticed the sound on the corner television was muted. Henley was singing about all the things he thought he’d figured out that he’d have to learn again. She had the air conditioning turned up high and the lights already low.

  “Did you say Moultrie?” I asked. “I thought he was from Charleston?”

  “Might have been. But he sure knows about the state pen near Moultrie,” she said, working the glassware under the bar even though there wasn’t a soul drinking but me.

  “Said he was a bull there and I should know. My daddy did some time there when I was a kid.”

  I wondered why McCane had skipped this part of his résumé, not that we were on reminiscing terms.

  “Must have been before I met him,” I said.

  She poured another beer from the tap and took my empty. I watched the lights playing in the bar’s back mirrors through my second and left her a five-dollar tip on the way out the door. When I got to the truck I called Billy.

  “Did you ever do a full dossier on McCane?” I asked, and it must have been in my voice. Billy was usually steps ahead of me and I had a feeling it got to his pride when he wasn’t.

  “No. I just verified that he works for the insurance company. Why? You find out he belongs to the Klan or something?”

  Billy is not usually a vindictive person.

  “We need to track his work background,” I said. “He told me he had been a cop in Charleston and Savannah, but we need to find out if he ever had any connection with the state pen near Moultrie.”

  Billy was quiet on the other end, spinning the information in his head, frustrated by the lack of logic.

  “You want to connect the dots on this one for me?” he finally said.

  “It might be nothing,” I said. “But let’s check.”

  Old cop thinking. Someone lies to you, there’s a reason, even if it’s a lie by omission. Maybe McCane just didn’t include it because being a prison guard isn’t exactly a revered position in law enforcement. Maybe there was more. Maybe I was paranoid. I drove north up the oceanside highway, watching the surf work at the Florida sand. Maybe I was back in the game.

  20

  When I got to Billy’s apartment, he was still in his back office, working the computers. I opened a beer and watched over his shoulder while he ran his fingers over the keyboard, popping up government websites and directories. He’d run McCane’s dossier and there were some major gaps in it, and that often meant that the person you were trying to track had either spent time in the system, or was in law enforcement, or had somehow had his history expunged. Billy had then called a prosecutor friend in Atlanta who lowered his voice when Billy asked him if Frank McCane’s name and the prison at Moultrie rang any bells. He asked Billy not to use him as a source, but told him the story.

  “McCane was a d-dayshift guard at the prison and had b-been there for several years. After a change in the governor’s seat, there was a c-crackdown on the Department of Correction’s internal system, which had been rife with abuse,” Billy said. “McCane had b-been the unofficial head of a shakedown club among the guards.”

  “So he was indicted?”

  “Not exactly.” Billy said. “When they backed him into a corner with proof, he made a d-deal with the governors office, t-turned over information on the warden and gave up his job. The only s-stipulation was lifelong p-probation. He could no longer w-work for the state, and if he was ever arrested on the outside, they’d re-file the whole l-load of charges from the p-prison on him.”

  “So he moved out of the state, gave up public police work and went with the insurance job,” I said, putting the obvious into the air. “Your friend give any details on what McCane specialized in during this stellar career?

  “Very little,” Billy said. “He’s a state p-prosecutor. It’s a political year in Georgia. N-No one’s going to b-be in the mood to hang their butt out.”

  I drained the beer and went for another. Billy declined to join me and I changed my own mind on my way to the refrigerator. The Moultrie prison was stuck in my head from a Philadelphia case, and I was trying to dig it out of its place in the past. I started a pot of coffee.

  “Can you find a Philadelphia Inquirer archive on the box?” I called back to him while the coffee was brewing.

  “Sure. What are we looking for?”

  “Name of an inmate. A guy we tried to help out after we broke a car theft ring. The bust went bad and a port officer got killed. This guy was a locksmith at the time and he ended up on the rotten end of a murder charge.”

  “They would have done a news story at the time?”

  “I hope so.”

  While Billy clicked at the computers, I sat at the kitchen counter telling him the story, unraveling a day at a Delaware River port warehouse in a time before I was a completely disillusioned police detective.

  A handful of us had been assigned to an auto theft task force that was working with Customs on the theft and importation of cars and trucks from the northeast to Haiti and the Caribbean.

  The feds had been working the scam up and down the coast. The theft ring was the typical game. At the low end, they hired car thieves to do the heists. The boosters were given special lists of makes and models, actual orders to fill. Most of the cars were high- end SUVs, especially Toyota 4Runners. At the time, the loose pack of military thugs running Haiti had a liking for the all-terrain vehicles. The Toyota emblem on the front of the hood looked distinctly like a bull with horns, and to them the bull image carried an aura of masculine power. The SUVs brought top dollar.

  The car thieves were told the less damage the more they would get paid, and they’d boost the cars and park them in a commuter lot at Philly International Airport to be sure they didn’t have anti-theft locators. If the cops traced the electronic beacon, all they’d get was the car abandoned at the airport.

  Once the cars cooled, the shippers would then move them inside a warehouse at the port where a guy could cut a key. When they were ready, a tractor-trailer would back up to the warehouse loading dock and the cars would be driven inside. The crew would then pack the rest of the trailer, floor to ceiling, with household goods, boxes of clothes, bags of rice. If an inspector decided to pop the back door, all he could see in the first ten feet were legitimate goods for shipping.

  “What do you think? Five years ago?” Billy said from the other room, still clicking.

  “No, more like seven.”

  Most of the task force work had been with informants, kids picked up on auto theft charges who were looking to deal information for a break. We’d put surveillance on a warehouse and it was primed. I was one of four detectives, a U.S. Customs agent and a handful of port police used to cut off any escape routes. We were in position. It was hot and dusty as we leaned into a corrugated wall around the corner.

  “Summertime,” I said to Billy.

  “I think I’ve got it,” he said.

  We waited in the heat until the tractor-trailer was loaded and started to pull away on its route to the holding area, where the container would be loaded onto an outbound freighter to Haiti. When the trailer cleared the doors we jumped, guns drawn.

  “U.S. Customs, hands in the air!” the agent yelled as three of us came through the front and two more took down a door to the back.

  The element of surprise. Four men were eating lunch around a wire-spool table, another was in the glass-walled office, sleeping with his feet on the desktop. One was busy near the back of the warehouse, his head down and a pair of safety glasses on his face while he work
ed over a machine. He was my guy—the key man.

  It would have gone down like clockwork but for the idiot in the john. The last one to see us had to be the cowboy.

  Everyone in the warehouse had already let the air out of their lungs when the asshole came sprinting out of the cheap wooden door of the bathroom and started firing a second-rate .38, thinking he might get to the loading dock door. He made it twenty feet before he took four rounds and dropped. But one of his random shots also hit a port policeman.

  “Harlan P. Moticker,” Billy said from his room. “The locksmith.”

  “That’s him,” I said, walking into the study.

  Harlan was the outsider in the group, hired to cut the keys for the stolen vehicles so they could go abroad in no-fuss driving condition. He was a southern boy down on his luck, trying to make a go of it up north and making extra cash on the wrong side.

  All seven men were arrested and when the port cop died of his wound, the ante got raised. Because a person had died during the commission of a felony, they were all charged with murder.

  “Can you check the Department of Corrections in Georgia to see if he’s still in?”

  Billy had already pushed his chair to the other screen.

  Harlan P. was the only one of the group who wasn’t connected to the offshore ring. As a result, he was the only one who had nothing to deal. He had no useful information for Customs, so no matter how much he wanted to cooperate he still ate the whole twenty-five to life. He’d been paid two hundred dollars for the job.

  “Harlan P. Moticker, prisoner ID #3568649. The Haverford State Correctional Facility in Moultrie,” Billy read.

  I suppose I’d felt for the guy. When we were writing up the case the older guys in the squad kept forwarding the calls from his young wife to me. He pleaded guilty to avoid a trial and when his attorney asked to have him swapped to a Georgia prison near his family for a Philadelphia mob flunky who wanted to come home, I was the one who gave the department’s blessing. Nobody else cared.