“Even the many that he beat, many become his friends after. And some of them here today…”
But some of them aren’t, Behr thought, as the words bore into his gut, and it’s not just because they don’t live nearby. He glanced toward the door, about six steps away. He hoped his taking French leave wouldn’t be too conspicuous. He made his move.
Luck was raining down on him. There was no cop posted on Aurelio’s house. Behr had parked around the corner and was approaching from the rear, in case anyone on the street happened to be watching. And now he had an open window. As he cut across the backyard he saw it right away. He could’ve beaten the locks- which were bargain basement Schlages he remembered from his last visit-but he wasn’t the type to look a gift horse in the mouth. He figured he had forty-five minutes before anyone would be back from the memorial, so there was no time to waste, and he had the blade on his Leatherman tool out by the time he reached the house. He slid it quickly behind the frame of the screen, which came out of its track with a pop. The other side went even easier, and he raised the window and slid through.
The inside of the house smelled delicious. He had entered in the kitchen, and he saw a large pot of meat and rice on the stove that he imagined Aurelio’s mother had cooked for the group. The aroma made him hungry, but he moved on into the living room. There were a few open suitcases on the floor, as well as two large half-packed duffel bags. A sheet, blanket, and pillow were on the couch, which was likely being used as a bed by one of the brothers. He saw that the wires of Aurelio’s stereo had been disconnected, and the components were ready to be boxed up, the same with a forty-two-inch flat-screen television. The cable box and remote rested on the coffee table bundled up in the power cord. Behr checked along the bookshelves for any photos or loose papers but didn’t find any. He feathered the pages of several likely hardback books, but found nothing stashed. He considered continuing on through the hundred-plus paperbacks but abandoned the idea as too time-consuming with too little expectation of reward. As he walked toward the bedroom he hoped he wasn’t mistakenly leaving a lead undisturbed.
The moment he entered, he saw that the bedroom was a problem. There were four large cardboard boxes, three of them already sealed with tape. Damn, Behr breathed and crossed to the closet. He pulled a string, lighting the bare bulb. All he saw were wire hangers and dust balls. The family had been thorough and quick with the packing. He opened the only box that wasn’t closed up and found it full of shoes-dressy ones, sneakers, flip-flops, and a pair of low rubber winter boots that Aurelio must’ve despised. Behr closed the flaps and scanned around the room. It was not heavily or particularly well furnished. Aurelio wasn’t the kind to care. Behr dropped to his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He found nothing there but a yoga mat and a massage stick for breaking up fibrous tissue.
Back on his feet, Behr went and took a cursory glance at the bathroom. He examined the toiletries in it. Some were women’s, and he tried to deduce whether they were the mother and the sister’s or if they could belong to the “new girl.” Some of the products were Brazilian, others American. But a Schick razor and Suave shampoo weren’t much of an indicator. He noted that there was a half-empty green box of Trojan Twists in the medicine cabinet.
Behr was feeling he’d used up all his good fortune on getting inside when he continued on through the last door in the house and discovered the guest room. It held two twin beds that had clearly been slept in and two carry-on size roller suitcases with luggage tags from Brazil. And tucked in the corner was a desk. Behr practically leaped at it. He started with the laptop that rested in the center. He supposed it could have belonged to one of the brothers or the sister, but for some reason, maybe because of its placement, it seemed like Aurelio’s. Behr tried to remember if there had been a computer in the office down at the school, and believed there hadn’t been. He pressed the power button and the machine turned on with a mechanical chime. After a moment it booted up, and to his dismay, Behr saw that both the keyboard and the desktop were in Portuguese. He tried to double-click on some documents, but a box came up asking for what Behr assumed was a password. He considered stealing the machine and taking it to his IT connection to unravel it. After a moment Behr abandoned the idea and turned the computer off.
There were two drawers on either side of the desk, and he found them full of various papers-paid bills, solicitations, an outline for a book on jiu-jitsu handwritten in English with crudely drawn diagrams of the moves. There were snapshots taken at the school and in Aurelio’s home country, menus from local restaurants. Then, in the second to last drawer Behr hit pay dirt when he found Aurelio’s checkbook.
A quick glance told him the stubs went back almost a year and a half. He started the long process of thumbing through them, from most distant to most recent. The checks painted a picture of the mundane. It was Aurelio’s personal checking account, so there was nothing having to do with the academy, but there was a rent check each month on the house, same with the cable, and gas and electric. Aurelio had two credit cards on which he paid between two and six hundred dollars a month total. His car insurance was paid quarterly. The balance on the account hovered around six thousand in the beginning, but over the following year or so it had grown up to a high of sixteen thousand. Then two months back there was a check for four thousand made out to cash.
Red flag, Behr thought. And three and a half weeks later, another was written for seventy-five hundred dollars, again to cash. Flashing red light. Erratic banking often meant erratic behavior. But Aurelio was solid. He’d seemed solid anyhow. Drug use would often be the first thought, but surely Behr, even with his limited social skills, would have noticed the physical changes that drugs on that scale would have wrought. Gambling was his next thought. Gambling wouldn’t have left any physical traces. Behr had never heard him mention online poker. And as far as Behr knew, Aurelio never cared about American football or basketball. He was a soccer fan, and Behr supposed he could’ve gotten in deep over that even though local bookies weren’t that exotic and might not have taken big action on those games. There was also the possibility he was betting on MMA fights. Aurelio was no degenerate cowering over losses, Behr realized, someone showing up to strong-arm Aurelio into paying would’ve found himself in a rapidly deteriorating situation. It could’ve gone to guns…
Behr tossed the remaining drawer for the bank statements that would contain the canceled checks with endorsements that might fill in the picture, but he couldn’t find them. He looked all over the room, coming up empty, before he wrote down Aurelio’s account number and the numbers of the two big checks. He glanced at his watch and chewed the inside of his mouth. It’d be pretty handy to find those canceled checks, but he didn’t know where else to look and time was getting tight. He got up to go, made one last cursory sweep, and let himself out the back door. He paused to replace the screen before hustling low across the lawn toward his car.
“Tommy? Frank Behr,” he said into his cell phone as he made a short crosstown drive.
“Hey, Frank-o,” came back to him. Tommy Connaughton was the I. T connect he’d thought of earlier. Connaughton’s day job was as a computer repair and data recovery specialist, but that’s not how Behr had met him, or how he made the bulk of his money.
Some years back, just after Behr had gotten off the force and went private, he’d received a call from a student at Butler. It seemed the young man was having problems with the Taus, the football fraternity. He’d had the temerity to show up at their party and talk to the wrong girl or some such bullshit. The kid said he was from up Carmel, and his parents had money, and he was interested in hiring a bodyguard temporarily. Behr figured this was what happened when your name started with a “B” and someone went yellow page hunting, but he’d had precious little work back then-even less than he currently had-so he’d gone and met with the kid, though he had no real intention of taking the bodyguard gig. Behr was sitting across from the pale, skinny Tommy Connaughton in the student union, talking over coffee when the kid went stiff. Behr glanced over and saw half a dozen strong-looking athletes enter. They ranged from stout and solid to tall and lanky, as the positions they played dictated, and one, a thick-necked lineman, stood out.
“That’s Molk. He plays nose tackle and he’s like the lead prick,” Connaughton said. The nose tackle had longish greasy yellow hair in the Bob Golic mold and looked over at Connaughton with malice. It was probably only Behr’s presence that kept him from approaching.
“I tell you what,” Behr said to Connaughton, “I’m gonna help you. I’m not gonna bodyguard you, I’m just gonna make this go away.” They agreed on a five-hundred-dollar price.
Behr walked over to the athletes and rested his fists on the table, leaning down over the now-silent ballplayers. They may have been carrying a lot of gym-made meat on their frames, but he was pure gristle.
“You see Tom Connaughton over there?” Behr said. “You give him a twenty-five-foot buffer zone from now on. You don’t say anything to him. You don’t say anything about him. You sure as hell don’t touch him. Otherwise you’re dealing with me. Got it?” The ballplayers all just nodded. Behr looked into Molk’s eyes and saw fear there. He also saw a distinct lack of intelligence, and that was to become a lesson for Behr. Behr left with Connaughton, who promised him a check.
