“He dust another student?” Knute asked.
“Nope. Brody got wasted.”
“What do you mean?” Terry said, truly surprised, which was a rare thing. “Francovic?” Terry asked.
“No.”
“Who?”
“Some raw motherfucker, his jits was all rough, but he got it done.”
“What happened?” Knute asked.
“They beefed. Brody got in his face, took him down, and had him in a rear naked choke, but the guy busted a few of Brody’s fingers, got out of it, and punched his ticket. Knee strikes to the head.”
“He knocked fucking Len Brody out?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Who is this guy, Randy Couture?”
“A guy who came in asking around about some shit, and it just developed,” Kenny said.
“Cop?” Terry said, concerned, but keeping it out of his voice.
“No. Those bastards can’t wait to flash their badges around. This guy came back two times and didn’t do that. Afterward, I heard he was a private investigator asking about Santos.”
“What’d you do about it?” Terry asked. He didn’t bother hiding the concern anymore.
“Stayed out of his way.” Kenny said. “Heard he went in and talked to Francovic for a while. Then I heard he left. I’d already powdered out of there, took Brody to the doctor. Figured whatever was up, that was the best bet.”
“Yeah,” Terry said, and then he thought about it for a long moment. When he finally spoke again he said, “So what you gotta do now is, you gotta go ask Francovic who he is.”
“Yeah?”
“Fucking-A right. Just go in there wide-eyed, all ‘Hey, Mr. Francovic’ or ‘Hey, Master Francovic’-whatever the hell you call him-who was that bad, bad man who hurt Len Brody?”
“Okay,” Kenny said, not feeling too sure about it.
“Do it. Don’t make a special trip. Your next workout,” Terry said.
“All right,” Kenny said.
“Then bring back the name.” Terry tore a chili dog in half with his jaws and spoke through the meat and bread. “Tell your brothers.”
Kenny just nodded.
TWENTY-FIVE
A dead end was what Behr had. Two dead ends and a headache, more accurately, he thought, as he sat in his car on Pennsylvania outside the red brick building that housed the Star. And worse than all that was the ruined situation with Susan on his hands. He knew he should’ve called her, or e-mailed her, or texted her many times over the past days. He’d wanted to, but he didn’t know what to say, and all he seemed to be able to do was witness his own glacial drift toward silence. He hoped to change that now, although the dark clouds that hung low in the sky masking the summer sun echoed his mood. Fishing through the packed cartons in Bigby’s and Schmidt’s rooms, a realization settled on him, grim and unassailable: he was on some kind of autopilot, executing what seemed like sound investigative moves on one case, but he wasn’t thinking straight on another, and it had gotten his face smashed and it could’ve been worse. Brody could’ve broken his arm or choked him out, or he could’ve been gang stomped. Or he could’ve shot someone in that gym and he would’ve been done-off the streets and serving time for it. He’d allowed Dannels’s suggestion to dovetail with his own loose theories, then added the desire for easy revenge, and let it steamroll his intellect toward a conclusion, rather than seeing it for what it was-conjecture. Jean Gannon’s words about staying pro echoed in his mind. He suddenly knew what she meant.
He checked his nose in the rearview mirror. It had sounded worse than it was. It hadn’t bled, and there was only some swelling across the bridge, discoloration, and darkening beneath his eyes. The subsequent breaks are never as bad as the first one, and since that day in freshman football, he’d experienced too many to remember.
He badly needed information and facts. The thing was, it was never easy to tell which piece of a case was most important. They were all time-consuming, necessary. And it wasn’t even the need to discover all of the pieces, but to assemble them into the proper picture that was the hard part. It took external pressure to get it started. Threat-pressure, ask-pressure, desire-pressure, all applied in the right ways at the right time, to those who had the answers, until something popped loose. In order to do it, he needed to get clear. And to do that, he needed to talk to Susan, because she was a big part of his clarity, or lack thereof. He’d seen enough movies, read enough books, and heard enough country songs to know he’d done everything about as wrong as he could with her when she’d given him the news that he’d already suspected. Things were broken between them now, and it had him feeling like he had a hacksaw blade wedged in the middle of his chest. Or it could have been Brody’s knuckles driving into his sternum during the body lock that caused that.
A knocking on his window brought him out of the reverie. Behr turned and looked into the black eyes and glowing cigarette tip of Neil Ratay, the crime reporter. Behr lowered the window. “Hey, Neil,” he said.
“Frank.”
“Been reading you,” Behr said.
“I thank ye,” Ratay said with a nod.
“What’re you leaving out?” Behr asked. It was a question that used to be pro forma when he was on the force and would run into a reporter at a bar. Ratay shot out a little laugh. He’d heard the question plenty in his day, too.
“All right,” Ratay said. He took a last drag and fired the butt across the hood of Behr’s car into traffic. “The abandoned house with the bodies. It wasn’t really a derelict. It was a pea shake.”
“Really?” Behr said, allowing himself to sound surprised. “How do you know?”
“Well, for one, it wasn’t stripped.” He didn’t have to explain to Behr that it didn’t take long for a truly abandoned house in certain parts of Indianapolis to be set upon like a carcass in the Sahara. Urban vultures descended, removing sinks, tubs, radiators, ductwork, appliances, molding, and wood flooring. They even tore out wiring and copper piping for sale or use elsewhere. “And they’ve found other evidence.”
“Gambling instruments?” Behr asked.
Ratay nodded.
“What’s it about?” Behr wondered. “Turf war?”
“I don’t know,” Ratay shrugged, leaving Behr sure that he did know more. “As always, we will see…”
“Guess we will,” Behr said. It must have been some bargain that Pomeroy had struck for the reporter to sit on what he knew. Behr could only guess at what future “get” he’d been offered. It was a hell of a chit for him to hold. Behr used to have a few like it a long, long time ago.
“So, here to pick up Miss Susan?” Ratay asked and looked at him in a way that made him wonder if the reporter knew the specifics of their situation or was just a reader of situations in general. Either way, Behr felt like he was on a slide under a microscope.
“Yeah,” Behr said.
“I’m headed in. Take ’er easy,” Ratay said.
“Any way I can,” Behr answered, and with a knock on the car’s roof Ratay moved toward the Star’s building with long, unhurried strides.
Twenty minutes later Susan exited the building. Her hair flashed in the evening sunlight, but it looked like she bore a weight across her shoulders. She turned left, walking away from where he was parked. He started up the car and rolled up beside her at a trolling pace.
“Take you for a Ritter’s?” he asked. She looked over and saw him and stopped.
“I’ll follow you,” she answered.
They sat down outside Ritter’s with their frozen custards as the twilight settled around them. The cars going by created a steady, soothing drone.
