Someone knew something about the murder. Everyone knew so someone had to know – a man found dead in his home, a break in at the basement egress window. A man in a mask an a uniform, working the basement. Don’t bother with the cops – it was an inside job. Crimes and acts of corruption. Thefts, extortion, narcotics trafficking, personal drug use, murder. The details painstakingly researched. Clear-eyed and narrow. Someone had to know, and we were there to find out.
What if a bad guy shows up while we’re looking? Tune him up? Work him over? We’re not that kind of investigators. What if a good guy shows up? Another cop… (a good guy with a gun?) an uncorrupted cop? Seems to be a rarity these days Forget about it, what are you going to say? It could have been you. It could have been me. This is for real. Bleeding, bally cops.
“Childhood memories are like that,” G. said to me as we investigated the house looking for evidence, for clues. “Connected. Interconnected. One to the next. Every vacation. Every trip. And here we are for another murder.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember those trips. I used to just stare out the back window of the family station wagon, looking at the reflection of the lights in the glass. I thought of them as my quiet friends. They were always there with me. And even if they never said anything, I knew their words.”
“Look at what he wrote here in this notebook: ‘he has all the names of history, the changing time and seasons, this man of sin with seven ugly heads, a brutish, brutalist beast with a heartbeat of concrete…’ What does any of that mean? It’s nothing but coincidence, circumstance, hearsay!” G. said, huffing as he shoved a handful of spiral bound notebooks back onto the unlevel bookshelf. “That’s all we’ve got here. That’s all we’re going to find. Where’s the evidence? Where’s the eyewitness?”
“Calm.” I said. “Quiet yourself.”
Not the brightest, closest, largest, easiest, but it there. Somewhere. Hidden, maybe, but there. Waiting for us to find it. It’s there where they left it. No follow up. No return. But there for us to find. And we would find it if we looked. If we looked in the right place. Eventually, one day, the mystery would open. In the front end they sell the equipment. Legal. Clean. In the back and in the basement they sell the drugs and the drugs. That’s the way they do it. That’s the way they make their money. American money. Millions of dollars. You’ve heard this story before, every loaded anecdote of the American dream. Who is this beast that owns the cops? Should we check for outstanding warrants? It wouldn’t matter any way.
“We believe in the future, yes?” I asked him.
“But…”
“But nothing. We believe in the future, yes?”
“Yes,” G. said. “I suppose we do.”
“Then there is nothing more to say.” And we return to our investigation.
No comments:
Post a Comment