“You don’t like it.”
“Would you?”
His grin slipped back into place. “Shit, he’s sending you checks. How bad can it be?”
“Yeah, right.”
“So what now, we wait on Graham?”
“Uh-huh, that’s the drill.”
“That last bit of the message is pretty damn strange,” Ken said. “Telling us to stay away from Ruzity.”
“I was waiting for you to comment on that.”
“As far as I knew, the two of them had no relationship. They were with the Cantrells at different times, and I had no idea their paths would have crossed.”
“Seems like they did.”
“Yeah. With Harrison being our client and all, I suppose we have to respect his wishes and leave Ruzity alone.”
“That would be the ethical decision, certainly. We are in his employ.”
“So as long as you got that message, we’d be required to keep our distance from Ruzity.”
“Exactly.”
“Imagine what might have happened if you didn’t come into the office right away, though.”
I nodded. “Why, there’s a chance we might have blundered our way to Mr. Ruzity, oblivious to the wishes of our client. In fact, until that message came through, he
“An excellent point.” He flicked his eyes to the phone, and a smile drifted across his face. “So, let me ask you, Lincoln: When did you play that message?”
“It’s tough to recall, Ken. My memory isn’t what it used to be. But I can’t imagine it was
“Oh, no,” he said. “I can’t imagine it was.”
16
__________
Finding Mark Ruzity was like looking for a lost dog in a neighborhood overrun by strays—nobody wanted to help, and nobody understood why in the hell you’d want to find him in the first place.
We started at the pawnshop on Storer Avenue where, according to Ken’s notes, Ruzity worked repairing guitars. The notes were more than a decade old, though, and the pawnshop was now a vacant building with boarded windows. From there we went to his house on Denison, found nobody home, and started knocking on doors to see if anyone could tell us where to find him. Most of the people on the street seemed to know who he was, but nobody wanted to direct us to him.
“He’s one of those guys,” said a Puerto Rican woman who kept the chain on the door while she talked to us, “you just keep your distance from him, you know? He’s lived here as long as we have, never caused a problem, but he looks like he
It was the same sentiment Harrison had expressed. For a guy who hadn’t taken a fall in fifteen years, Ruzity had one hell of a rep.
Ken finally had the inspiration that got us to him.
“He’s a musician, right? Is there anyplace in this neighborhood where a musician would want to go?”
We found one: a used instrument store ten blocks from his house. They knew him, all right.
“Dude can shred a guitar,” the kid behind the counter informed us from behind his protective layer of piercings. “I mean just melt the amp, really. But he won’t play with anybody else now. Only solo. Calls himself El Caballo Loco.”
He paused, waiting for a reaction, and then said, “It means the crazy horse. Badass, right?”
Badass, we agreed. Now where can we find him?
“He’s a stone carver, man. Works with a guy named Ben down on Forty-eighth. Does all sorts of cool shit. You should see some of the gravestones.”
“Gravestones?”
“Yeah, awesome, right? Like I said, he’s pretty badass.”
He didn’t have an address for the carving shop, but he gave us a close enough description. Ken and I didn’t speak until we were back in my truck.
“So he carves the gravestones,” Ken said, “and Harrison keeps them clean? That’s the idea? A pair of murderers making a living in the cemetery business?”
“Steady work,” I said. “They’re never going to run out of clients. Hell, they’ve helped produce some.”
The carving shop—Strawn Stoneworks—occupied the bottom floor of a three-story brick building near the old stockyard district. Nobody answered our knock, but there were lights on in the back, and the door was unlocked. We went in.
The front of the room was scattered with samples of carvings laid out on old wooden tables—a fireplace mantel, a small gargoyle, and a handful of headstones. There was a narrow corridor separating this room from the next, and at the opposite end fluorescent lights glowed and a steady tapping sound could be heard. Metal on stone.
I led the way down the hall, and we came out in a workshop that smelled of sweat and dust. There were pieces of stone on the floor and on heavy-duty steel shelves, and tools littered the rest of the space—grinders and hammers and racks of chisels, an air compressor with hoses draped around it. A man was working with his back to us, chipping away at a piece of marble with a hammer and chisel. I was just opening my mouth to speak when he turned and said, “The hell you think you’re doing?”
He was of average height, wiry in a hard way, with gray hair and a goatee. He wore an earring, and there were thin lines of sweat snaking down his forehead.
“Hey, sorry, there wasn’t anybody out front,” I said.
“Strawn left for a while. Said he was getting lunch, but he’s probably buying comic books. That’s what he does at lunch.” He wiped sweat away with the back of his hand. “Anyhow, he’s the owner; he’s the one you talk to. Not me. And nobody comes back into the workshop.”
“We’re not looking for Strawn,” I said. “We’re looking for Mark Ruzity.”
He didn’t answer.
“Are you—” I began, but then he cut me off.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear. Nobody comes into the workshop.” He cocked his head and stared us down, first me, then Ken. “Lot of tools back here. People wander in, they could get hurt.”
It didn’t feel like a public safety announcement.
“Mark,” I said, “wouldn’t it be easier to answer five minutes of questions?”
“Would be
“Comes into the workshop. We get it. But if you throw us out now, we’ll just have to go back to your place on Denison and wait around. What’s the point?”
His eyes flickered and went dark when I said that. Didn’t like it that we knew where he lived.
“Okay,” he said. “I can tell you what I’ve told every other cop: I’m clean. Haven’t killed anyone in a while. If you’re asking about something that went down in the neighborhood, you’re asking the wrong man. I’m not involved, and I don’t drop dimes.”
“It’s not about the neighborhood,” Ken said. “It’s about Alexandra and Joshua Cantrell.”
Ruzity seemed to draw in air without taking a breath. Just absorbed it, sucked it right out of the dust-filled room until the walls felt tight around us. He didn’t speak, but he looked at Ken in a way that made me wish I were wearing a gun. There were pneumatic hammers on a table beside him, but he was using hand tools, a hammer in his right and a carbide chisel in his left. He turned the chisel in his fingers now. It looked natural in his hand. Familiar.
