The Silent Hour

security tapes buried in some evidence locker. But I’m giving you my word that Darius Neloms was nowhere near Bertoli’s death scene. A car belonging to him was. I did not find out who was driving the car. I tried, and I did not find out.”

His voice was terse and biting, and Joe raised his eyebrows and gave me a little smile. I was stepping into dangerous turf now, with even a suggestion that Mike might have missed something.

“That’s good enough for me,” I said, trying to soothe, thinking that while I was still going to need to verify, there was no reason to call him out on it now. “I just don’t know what the hell to do with this, Mike. If Ken was excited about a car, I think it had to be the one you told us about, but where that took him . . .”

“Like I told you back in the spring, Darius was connected to Sanabria.”

“Evidently Ken wasn’t sure the murder had anything to do with Sanabria.”

“Then I quite simply don’t know what to tell you, Lincoln.”

I rubbed my forehead and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to think of the right question—hell, of any question. What could Ken have seen in that car that neither Mike nor I could?

“You traced the plate, and it ran back to Neloms directly,” I said. “Right?”

“Right. Wait, no. It was registered to his shop, which doesn’t really make a damn bit of difference. Ultimately still his vehicle. He claimed no idea of who could have driven it, said the keys were inside the shop and maybe somebody took them, then told us the car must have been stolen.”

“But it had been returned.”

“Uh-huh. I checked out every employee—most of whom were family or friends of his, cousins or nephews or whatever—and didn’t get anything, but I don’t think whoever was behind the wheel really had much to do with Neloms.”

“You think they worked for Sananbria.”

“Right. They had a history together.”

All of this was recycled, the same damn conversation we’d had six months ago, and all of it pointed back to Sanabria, when Ken’s final words pointed in another direction entirely.

“Look, Lincoln, I don’t know what else to tell you . . .”

“It’s fine, Mike. Don’t worry about it. If I think of something else, I’ll call.”

I thanked him and hung up.

“Mike thinks one of Sanabria’s guys drove the car,” Joe said.

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence and thought.

“This is going to sound crazy,” I said, “but what if Bertoli drove himself there?”

He frowned. “His ghost got up off the pavement and drove it back? The car was gone after he died, right? That’s why Mike was looking at it as a suspect vehicle.”

“Right,” I said, “but he had to get there somehow, and whoever killed him would have known that. The guy had just gotten out of prison; it’s unlikely he had his own car. So maybe he borrowed one from this Neloms guy. He drove that car to meet somebody, he got killed, and then someone else—maybe the guy who killed him, maybe not—drove the car back. Having the car gone from the scene is one less thing for the cops to look at, which is what they’d want, and they couldn’t have known . . .”

My voice trailed off, and Joe said, “Keep going,” but I didn’t answer. The notion of Bertoli as the driver had tripped something in my brain, and I got up and went to the file cabinet and pulled out the sheaf of papers Ken had given me on the case. Copies of everything he’d had, or so he’d told me.

It took me a while, but I located the paperwork he’d brought into the office on the morning after our first encounter, the morning after my wild drunken dream about Parker Harrison watching me on the roof. Profiles of all the convicts who’d stayed at Whisper Ridge. I flipped through until I found Bertoli. Read the report once again, the details of his arrest for beating the truck stop manager and stealing his heroin. The police had arrested him within hours. Due to his car.

39

__________

Bertoli used a stolen plate, but it was his own vehicle, an Impala with a custom paint job and chrome rims featuring cutouts in the shape of diamonds.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, and then, without bothering to say a word to Joe’s questioning glance, I pounded the redial button on the phone and got Mike London back on the line. He sounded weary when he realized it was me.

“One last question,” I said. “The car you saw that night, it was an Olds Cutlass, not an Impala, right?”

“Right.”

“You said it had custom features on it, though”

“Yeah, all that shit like in a rap video.”

“This is a long shot, but do you remember the rims?”

“The rims?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, they were spinners. You know, the kind that rotate when the engine’s on?”

“Right. You remember whether there were diamond etchings in them? Cutouts in the shape of diamonds?”

Silence while he thought, then, “Yeah, maybe. Maybe there were. I’m not sure, but I think that sounds right.”

“All right, Mike. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

I hung up with him again, and then I stood and brought the Bertoli report over to Joe’s desk and dropped it down, waited while he read it.

“You’re thinking that he got his car worked on down there?”

“Yes.”

“Makes sense. Of course, we already know Sanabria’s guys and Neloms had an association.”

“Uh-huh, but read that arrest report again—who was in the vehicle with Bertoli the night he stole the heroin?”

“Unidentified juvenile.”

“Right. Name redacted from Ken’s report, because what Ken could access was public record, and the passenger was a minor. There’s an original police report with that kid’s name. I want it.”

“I’ll call.”

Unlike me, he wouldn’t use the speakerphone. I heard him say what he wanted and was sure he’d be told to wait for a call back. That’s what it would have taken had I called—and if I didn’t pick the right person to lean on for the favor, the wait might have extended into the next day. Instead, Joe was on hold for what seemed like all of thirty seconds. He murmured a soft thank-you into the phone, scribbled a name onto his notepad, and then hung up and held the pad a few inches from my face.

Alvin Neloms, black juvenile, sixteen years old.

“A son, probably,” I said. “Darius has a son.”

“Check on it.”

I went back to my computer and ran a database search on Alvin Neloms and pulled up a family history. His father was listed as unknown. His mother had kept her own name, it seemed. According to the family chart the database offered, Darius Neloms was the boy’s uncle, not his father. He was from East Cleveland, was now twenty-nine years old, and had been arrested just one time as an adult, for drug possession, charge dismissed. These were all things Ken could have found in a few minutes of research after he made the connection between the cars.

“You know anybody with East Cleveland PD?” I asked.

“Tony Mitchell did some task force stuff with them.”

“Ask about this kid, would you? I want to know more before we talk to him.”