9. Everett
CHAPTER 9
EVERETT
L eon, it turned out, wanted to meet at Decadence. The building used to be the railroad station, back when the town had been a manufacturing hub, but after the factories shut down in the seventies the station was eventually abandoned. Only industrial trains ever came through here now; they just didn’t bother stopping anymore. The place was rezoned commercial—Dad had considered moving the family business here back when I was little, but the rent had been too high. It had gone through a lot of iterations before settling on a club, which I’d never been to before this.
Actually, I’d never been to any club before. I’d always wanted to go, but there was never anyone to go with me, and it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to do alone. What if I broke some sort of club etiquette by cutting in line, or I pissed off a bouncer, or worse , I pissed off some guy who thought I was hitting on his girlfriend, which would be ridiculous since I was gay but whatever, and then he tried to fight me and I had to defend myself, and then the bouncer got involved, only he kicked me out because he thought I was the one who’d started it? What if I ended up getting arrested and went to jail for the night?
In fact, that might be a good way to talk to some cops, but the ones who worked at the jail probably didn’t know anything about this particular case, and?—
“Earth to Everett.”
I started and turned to blink at him. He’d already parked the car, turned the engine off, and had the driver’s side door open while I was sitting here with my seat belt still on. “Hey. Sorry.”
“What were you thinking about?”
Ha. I knew better than to answer that question directly. My family never bothered to ask anymore, they were so tired of my tangents. “You don’t want to know.” Kyle frowned, but I unbuckled my seat belt and got out before he could say something that was nice but would just end up frustrating him. “So, Leon said he’d be at a table in the back. Have you ever been in here before? Do you know where the back is?”
Kyle got out of the car too. “At the back of the building, I assume.”
“What if it’s not so clear where the back is once we’re in there?” I asked as we headed for the entrance. “What if it’s, like, a circle on the inside? Or a dodecahedron?”
Kyle made a noise that sounded like he was muffling a laugh. “That’s possible, but there’ll still be a back. We can ask if we need to, but really, it’s not that big a place.”
A familiar rumble began to reverberate through the air, then the ground. I stopped out of habit and turned in the direction of the incoming train, watching as the light on the front of it went from a faint dot to a blazing brightness that almost matched the intensity of the horn blast I knew was coming in five…four…
“Dude.” I nudged Kyle, then indicated putting my fingers in my ears. “You’re going to want to do that.”
A bit bemusedly, he did, then jumped as the train’s horn went off, a continuous blast that lasted all the way through the first two dozen cars before petering off. The train kept going, though, and I found myself counting as each new car went by. It was a short train, luckily, but Kyle stood with me and waited for the last one to disappear before he said, “Well. I guess if we get lost in there, we should just head in the direction of the train blast. That’ll be the back of the building.”
“Good call.”
I was a little disappointed to find that there wasn’t a bouncer waiting at the door to undo a velvet rope and let us in. There also wasn’t a line of people out the door, and once we got inside the music, surprisingly, was the mellowest rock ‘n roll instead of the mind-melting techno I’d expected.
Wow. Movies had a lot of lies to answer for.
“It’s just a bar!”
“A little bigger than a regular bar,” Kyle said, already scanning the room for Leon. “Did he tell you anything else we can use to identify him? What he’s wearing?”
“Um.” Shit, there totally was a description to go with this guy, but I didn’t remember it. Good thing I wasn’t trying to make it as a detective. “He did say…something, but…let’s just go look,” I said, and led the way through the rather thin crowd of patrons toward the back wall—which was disappointingly flat, I’d kind of been hoping for a circle at this point, or at least a pentagon—and started searching for someone who was as squirrely as Leon had sounded over the phone.
That ended up being a good way to identify him. Most of the patrons were leaning back in the armchairs and couches, which, oh my God, had to be a nightmare to clean. I bet Kyle was dying a little on the inside. They were relaxed and drinking and laughing with their friends, but one man was sitting in front of a low table, manspreading to keep the couch he was on to himself and tapping his fingers against the drink in his hands but not bothering to drink it.
He was a lanky white dude with tattoos all over his skinny arms, not to mention his face and neck and even between some of his bleach blond cornrows. He carried himself with the kind of swagger that said he envisioned himself on the cover of a rap album.
A rap album in the ninety-nine-cent bin at Walmart, maybe.
And even from a distance, it was clear he was wearing Air Force 1s. The black kind. “Ooh look, Black Air Force energy,” I murmured as I pointed him out to Kyle. “That’s probably him.”
Kyle actually laughed. “I never thought I’d hear that meme used in person.”
“It doesn’t even really fit,” I said. Leon didn’t come off as aggressive, despite his larger-than-average size. On the contrary, apart from the shoes, he was sort of schlubby even in a branded basketball jersey, like even if he owned a nice suit it would probably be made of polyester and any tie he owned would inevitably be brown. Not that there was anything wrong with a brown tie every now and then, but?—
“Let’s see what he has to say.” Kyle walked over with all the forthrightness of a man who made a habit of not being intimidated by weird situations. He stopped in front of the table. “Hey. Are you Leon?”
“Yeah.” He looked Kyle up and down. “You Everett Mulligan?”
“No, that’s me.” It took everything I had not to raise my hand like a dweeb. “Dude, can I just say, your shoes are awesome?”
“My…” Leon glanced down at his feet and something like a smug expression came over his face. “Limited edition,” he bragged, some of the tension going out of his shoulders. All of a sudden he went from schlubbly to full of chutzpah, and wow, how many Yiddish words did I know? Schlub, chutzpah, putz?—
Focus, Everett.
“Do you mind if I get a picture of them?” I asked. “My brother is going to be so jealous I actually saw some in the wild.”
Leon shrugged, drained his beer bottle, and set it down on the table as he hoisted his feet up onto it. “Knock yourself out.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” I said as I snapped pictures from several different angles. I even had the beer bottle to measure against now— sweet .
“Sit.” Leon pointed at the couch across from him. We sat. “So you’re Everett. And you?”
“Kyle.”
“Kyle what?” Leon asked. “I like to know the full names of people I talk to.”
I could tell that Kyle wanted to turn the question around—he got this little twist in the side of his mouth when he felt put upon—but he finally said, “Kyle Bowman.”
Leon’s brow dropped and his hands clenched into fists. “I thought you looked familiar,” he snarled. “Another fucking Bowman, after I specifically said ‘no cops.’ You look a lot like your old man.”
“Well, that’s as far as the similarities go,” Kyle snapped right back. “I’m nothing like the rest of my family. I run a crime scene cleaning business, for shit’s sake—that’s how I learned about Rick’s death, and that’s why I think there’s more to it. I know better than most people how quick cops are to brush off anything that doesn’t look right when the victim is a drug user, but we” —he gestured at me—“believe Rick deserves justice. We don’t think he killed himself.”
“Ricky is not a user,” Leon snapped.
Kyle peered at him. “But at his house, they found needles and?—”
“Not his.” Leon shook his head. “He don’t let no one use at his place or even bring their stuff over. Not since his baby was born.”
“Okay,” Kyle said. “So that stuff wasn’t his, then.”
“No.” Leon relaxed slightly—just a little bit, but it was enough to make me think he wasn’t about to smash the bottle on the edge of the table and try to cut us. Or something. Did people actually do that with bottles? It seemed like the odds of it shattering in your hand and causing you as much damage as the person you wanted to hurt was too high to make it an ideal weapon.
“Why don’t you think he killed himself?” Leon asked, drawing my attention back where it needed to be.
“The angle of the gun was wrong for Rick to have managed setting it off himself,” I said, which—I didn’t know that for sure, but it didn’t really matter what I said at this point. All I needed was to say something that seemed credible to this guy. “At least not without some serious luck. There was also some blood in the hallway that the cops didn’t seem to care to explain.”
“Or even document,” Kyle muttered.
“Exactly.” I knew better than to mention the shoe print, but I could still use the contusion angle. “And Ricky had some bruises that no one seemed to care about, but it seemed like he’d been in a fight recently.”
Leon peered at me for a moment. “You work for the morgue or something? How do you know all this?”
“I moved the body,” I told him. “That’s what I do. I mean, more than that too, all sorts of mortuary services, but I specialize in—” Kyle nudged me. “Ah. Sorry. I don’t work for the morgue, exactly, but I contract with them. And the people on the scene just didn’t seem to give a shit that things weren’t right.”
“Ah.”
A waitress arrived a second later, and Leon ordered another beer. I was tempted, since I wasn’t driving, but Kyle didn’t order anything for himself so I decided not to either.
“Well,” Leon said after the woman walked away, “I can explain the bruises, at least. Ever since Ricky and his baby mama went their separate ways, he’s been getting harassed and beat on by someone on the force at least once a week.” Leon smirked, but there was no pleasure there. “Usually after he had the audacity to call Rosie up and see how his kid’s doing. Two months ago, some cop beat him badly enough he had to go to the ER to get patched up—his eye was swollen as big as an orange. I had to drive him home that night.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said feelingly.
Leon shrugged. “Cops can get away with a lot. Ask your friend here how many times his daddy’s ever been given a speeding ticket.”
I turned to Kyle. He was staring down at his hands and digging his thumbnail into what I thought was an old scar. His glasses reflected the neon lights at the bar when he finally turned to me and said, “He’s not wrong. They give each other a lot of leeway. Families too. It wasn’t until I went into business for myself that I got my first ticket for a parking violation.” He looked down again. “Parking too close to an intersection, it said, but the intersection was twenty feet away.”
“ Dude .”
“I know.”
Leon accepted his new bottle from the waitress and hoisted it up in our direction. “Here’s to the boys in blue. Always there, just never when you need them. Anyway, if I were you, I’d look into the guys who’ve been fucking with Ricky for months now. Probably one of them finally decided he’d had enough of Ricky not getting the message and backing away from his kid.”
That was useful information, except… “Her father is the Chief of Police, and that guy is like twenty years overdue for retirement. He couldn’t have roughed up Rick himself, so who?—”
“He didn’t get to be chief without stacking a bunch of pigs in his pocket.” Leon took a long drink. “Look, man. Whoever fucked up Ricky—he’s probably got himself a badge. Why do you think it’s so easy to get the rest of ‘em to fall in line and cover things up? Blue covers blue. It’s always been that way.”
Kyle and I glanced at each other.
“Any idea which cop?” Kyle asked.
Leon shrugged and didn’t answer. It wasn’t a no, but it wasn’t anything useful, either. But what were we going to do? Interrogate the guy? As we’d pointed out, we weren’t cops. We couldn’t compel Leon to do anything for us or tell us anything, and I wouldn’t be comfortable with that anyway. I barely felt comfortable reminding my dad that he did have to pay me and give me vacation time and sick leave and all that stuff, because I wasn’t a teenager working “for the experience” any more.
“Thank you,” I said.
Leon looked at me for a moment, but when he spoke it was to Kyle. “Listen, you’re blood to the cops but not in the ‘family,’ so you know how bad this sort of thing can be.” He gestured at me. “You better leash your puppy, man. Otherwise he’s going to get hurt. You’re lucky I’m a nice guy, or this could have gone real bad.”
Um, no? Because I called Kyle and asked him to come with me; that was the definition of getting backup.
But Kyle nodded. Nodded! “I know. We’ll be more careful.” He got to his feet, nodded again, and turned to leave. I followed him, feeling kind of like a puppy that had just been spanked.
“That seemed unnecessarily cryptic,” I said once we were back outside.
“There was nothing cryptic about it,” Kyle replied. “Look, I believe that there are legitimate reasons to have a police force and that a lot—probably most—cops just want to do their jobs. They may get a few perks, may look the other way a time or two, but I do believe most of them are genuinely good people. That being said…” He scrubbed a hand through his hair, ruffling it into spikes. I wanted to pet it back down, but killed the impulse. “There are some people who abuse the system, but because they’re part of the tribe they don’t get called on it the way they should. I’ve met cops like that. I—shit.”
“What shit? Shit what?”
He stared up at the night sky for a second, clasped hands locked behind his neck. “I’m going to have to talk to my family.”