Magic City Blues, page 13
“I’d prefer it if she weren’t,” I said.
“Me too,” she said. “Everything about this is awful. I can’t imagine going to bed with Ralph. Ick.”
“Yeah, but the alternative is even worse to consider.”
“I know, I know.”
Everything I thought I knew about Abby felt slick and slippery, like water through my fingers. I didn’t want to think that she would lie to me, but I couldn’t discount the idea, either. It seemed like she was lying to everyone else.
“Hey,” D’Agostino said, “are you in a hurry to see Doyle?”
“No, why?”
“I want to go by and look at Carraway.”
“Fine by me,” I said, and then whispered, “if you don’t kill us first.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Asshole, my driving is not that bad.” She paused to swerve around a series of traffic cones, turning right onto Carraway Boulevard. The car rocked toward the driver’s side so that we were nearly on two wheels. When the weight of the big Charger settled, the car was very quiet. “I mean, I haven’t killed anyone.”
“Yet,” I said, and she took one hand off the wheel to punch me in the shoulder playfully, or as playful as D’Agostino got.
Carraway Hospital—officially named Carraway Methodist Medical Center—had been a fixture in Birmingham’s Black community since it opened in 1908. Since its closing, the ownership—and the city—had let it slip into ruin, and the shadow of the 10-story building and the surrounding property loomed over the Norwood neighborhood like a giant who has already died but not yet fallen down.
D’Agostino slowed as we approached the property. She drove around, taking a quick turn into the street that ran between the parking deck and the hospital proper. Broken glass from the hospital’s doors and windows littered the ground and weeds grew everywhere. Graffiti was thick as kudzu on the lower levels of the buildings, and the place seemed to reek of despair and desolation. While much of the city was making a comeback, the neighborhoods in north Birmingham hadn’t seen the same kind of recovery.
“It’s not a bad thing, you know,” D’Agostino said.
“What?”
“Making this place into something new, something usable.”
I didn’t disagree with her on that point. The area was too historically valuable to the city to continue to go to waste. What I disagreed with was that gentrification was the way to go. Property values would rise and the poor black people who lived in the neighborhood would soon flee increased property taxes or rental fees. The place would become increasingly white and homogenized. The neighborhood—and Birmingham at large—would lose a little more of what made it a unique metropolitan, urban center. The poor would get pushed around again, and nobody would complain much. Or if they did, it wouldn’t matter.
In other words, business as usual in the Magic City.
There were already parts of the gentrification process that had pushed into the area, like the TopGolf complex that stood out in gaudy juxtaposition to the poorer neighborhoods surrounding it. White kids from the suburbs came through with the late-model luxury cars, hoisting oversized golf bags into the facility and playing at some weird golf-like game that didn’t require anyone to walk around a course or tip a caddy at the end of the round.
I had always viewed golf suspiciously. In the homes where I grew up, sports ran to baseball and football—sometimes basketball if a kid had a little bit of a vertical leap and a good eye—and golf was something reserved for the rich folks in town. But the place in north Birmingham was a sign of things to come, and I wondered if Becks Towson understood that. He was getting old, somewhere near seventy, maybe older. He’d gone through the Civil Rights wars when he was just a kid, and as a teenager he’d seen opportunity in neighborhoods like Norwood, East Lake, Crestwood, Avondale, Ensley, and Midfield.
Becks must have wondered what the hell was going on when the bearded white hipsters with their black, plastic-framed glasses and tallboy cans of PBR started to infiltrate his part of the city like advance scouts in a mostly bloodless war. Now Avondale and Crestwood were a couple of the most-sought neighborhoods in Birmingham, with breweries and bars, Zagat-rated restaurants, and mostly crime-free streets. Weed was in plentiful supply, but if you wanted to buy a baggie of coke or skag, East Lake or Glen Iris would be a better bet.
And even there, time seemed short for guys like Becks. In some ways, when he was gone, a part of Birmingham’s past would go with him. He had been around a long time, and despite the BPD’s best efforts, no one had taken him down yet. I kind of liked him, just for the pure ballsy guts of the old man, even though I knew that he was a stone killer who would just as soon pull a trigger as look at you.
“What are you thinking?” Laura asked, and I told her.
“Sentimental,” she said. “I wouldn’t have thought it of a tough guy like you.”
I laughed and recited a line I’d heard somewhere—maybe on TV, maybe in a book—“Tough, but oh so gentle.”
Laura took my hand in hers and dared a look in my direction.
“I’m familiar,” she said, and flashed me her even white teeth.
We circled the dilapidated old hospital a couple of times, then looped around the property in ever-widening circles. The Norwood neighborhood was predominantly Black, like most of the city proper, and most of the houses were crowded close together, their clapboard siding fraying and deteriorating over time. There were few garages. Some of the larger homes—these made of brick—had carports. Narrow, rutted, and nearly forgotten alleys wriggled like diseased worms behind many streets. We drove down them, not seeing much. Occasionally there were dogs that moved in packs, canines that had filtered down through the litters of so many years that they no longer appeared to be of any specific breed and were merely the apotheosis of Dog. They rummaged through trash and refuse that lined the gutters of the back alleys, and they raised their muzzles at us as we passed, their teeth bared in a silent warning snarl. But they didn’t bark.
“I hate this,” D’Agostino said.
“What?”
She gestured around us with the hand that occasionally worked the steering wheel.
“All of this.”
A lot of the houses were one- and two-bedroom bungalows, small affairs that had probably been owned by Black people for generations. In many driveways, newer cars and SUVs were parked. At first glance, it looked incongruous.
“This is a working neighborhood,” I said. “These people go out to a job where they make ten bucks an hour, maybe a little more. The houses have probably been in their families for a couple generations, maybe longer. In some cases, it’s all they have. Whole families are crowded together in these little one-bedroom houses. I mean, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I know,” D’Agostino said. “I’m not judging, I swear. I just wish—I don’t know what I wish.”
“Life is hard here, babe,” I said.
“It’s hard everywhere.”
In truth, much of Birmingham had been in decline since before the Civil Rights era. The city, which was once considered the steel city of the Confederacy, lost a lot of its economic momentum when Sloss Furnace closed in 1971. It had taken more than forty years and the place was making a comeback. While iron ore, steel, and coke continued to play a part in the economics of Birmingham and the surrounding areas, there were new industries making headway. Software developers had discovered the South; media companies were taking advantage of cheap, well-trained labor; and Birmingham had changed from a place where people made things that were meant to last, to strengthen the industry and infrastructure of a vast nation. Now it was no longer a place for concrete creations. Now it was a place for creating ideas.
I looked at the neighborhood around us as the blasted-out hulk of Carraway Hospital receded in D’Agostino’s rear-view mirror. If Birmingham was indeed looking forward—as the city fathers always assured us that it was—then what would happen to these people who were being left behind?
“Are you ready to go talk with Doyle?”
I thought about it for a long minute, feeling the seconds tick by in my head.
“No,” I said finally.
“What?”
“We don’t know enough. We know what Abby says—what you cops would say she alleges—”
D’Agostino shot me an amused look, then turned her attention back to the road. Thank God.
“But I don’t think we have enough information. We don’t know what happened with Britt. Was he a target? Or just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
Laura drummed her fingers on the steering wheel.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “Doyle and Martin James put together the Carraway deal, right? So just spitballing here, there’s a lot of money involved in developing this project, yes?”
“Millions.”
“So if you’re dealing with a lot of money, putting together a deal like this, what would you do?”
“Me? I have no idea. I keep all of my money in my mattress.”
“Yeah,” D’Agostino said. “If you’re a regular person, like me, you put it in a bank somewhere, let it draw interest. If you’re really daring, maybe you get a money market account, some CDs, something.”
“I buried some in a jar in the yard once, when I was a kid.”
D’Agostino revved the engine on the Charger and sped past a school bus that was just pulling to a stop. My heart leapt in my chest, and I closed my eyes again. She continued to talk as if she hadn’t noticed the school bus or my myocardial infarction.
“If you’re rich, you don’t do that,” D’Agostino said. “You have people to manage your money. You have advisors, you know, people who tell you what to do with your money, where to move it around. You have accountants.”
I opened my eyes and looked at her steadily.
“Britt was a lawyer.”
D’Agostino started to grin.
“He was, wasn’t he?”
“Lawyers and accountants, they find out where the money is, and then they go there.”
Carlton Doyle and Martin James were doing a deal to buy and develop one of the largest pieces of private property in the city. Of course they’d have at least one lawyer on hand—maybe a team of them—looking at the deal. It made sense. And if Britt had been involved in that deal, then it meant that he was more than a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It meant that he was a target, too. Things were clicking into place, or at least that’s what it felt like at the time. Finally, some forward momentum.
Laura laughed, and she turned the car South, toward Britt’s place. The way she drove, it didn’t take long.
Twenty
“I don’t quite know what we’re looking for,” I said. We had let ourselves into Britt Parker’s home using Abby’s key. This time, since we didn’t have to worry about her, D’Agostino went through the place properly, making sure each room was clear as we went. When we reached the office on the top floor, we knew we were alone. D’Agostino had taken out her phone and shot photos of the office from every angle possible.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” Laura said. She picked up a long accordion-style box from the floor and started riffling through the folders it contained. “Lots of records here, going back, good God, fourteen years? I hate you a little bit for this, Kincaid.”
I looked around the office, trying to think of a place to start. There was a big calendar-at-a-glance blotter on the desk surface, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Client meetings, tennis matches. Britt looked like he lived the ordinary life of the young and upwardly mobile. The big cherry-wood desk was unlocked, so I started with the middle drawer. There wasn’t much there, just the normal detritus of any home office, including paper clips, extra staples, a roll of stamps, spare pens and worn-down nubs of Berol Black Beauty pencils. The drawer to the left held a couple of reams of white copy paper, a box of blank thank-you notes and envelopes, as well as various other envelopes ranging from business-sized to 11-by-14 manila-colored mailers. The top left-hand drawer held a lined yellow notepad, undated, with figures lined neatly along the left side of the page. There was no notation to indicate what the figures meant, so it was useless to us.
The right-hand drawer wasn’t really a drawer at all. It looked exactly like the left-hand side, but instead of a set of drawers, it was one large door that opened outward to reveal a safe that had been custom-fitted to the space. A recessed space in the door served as a handle, and I slipped my fingers into it, pulling gently.
Locked, of course.
“Shit.”
D’Agostino looked over, noting the presence of the safe, and continued walking her fingers through the folders in the accordioned case. She was methodical, not allowing my own discovery to derail her own work. I turned back to the safe. It was a combination lock, and instead of an old-fashioned mechanical combination that could potentially be manipulated by guys like me, it had a keypad and digital readout where a user could put in a passcode. Most people who owned a safe like this used a combination of numbers that was significant to them. For example, I always used the last four digits of my foster parents’ phone number from the year I graduated high school: nine-four-seven-six.
Maybe Britt had used something similar.
I texted Abby, asking her for Britt’s birth date. She sent me the information, and I entered it into the keypad. Nothing. Then I asked for hers. She sent a text back, and I entered the numbers. Again, the safe rejected the passcode.
“Try it backwards,” D’Agostino said, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. She had finished her box and set it aside on the floor. I’d been so concentrated on what I was doing that I had never heard her come up behind me.
“Are you trying to give me an early coronary?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Am I on your insurance policy yet?” One side of her mouth rose in her self-amused little smile, and she punched me gently in the arm. I bent back down to the safe and entered Britt’s D.O.B. again, this time backward. Nothing. I looked at D’Agostino, and she raised an eyebrow at me.
“Might as well try,” she said, and I bent back to it. This time I punched in Abby’s numbers—backwards, naturally—and the keypad beeped at me. From somewhere inside, there was a soft click. I let out a little cry of triumph and pulled the door open before the damned thing could change its mind.
Inside the safe were stacks of cash. Fifties clotted the upper shelf, each banded with a brown strap and signed with what appeared to be Britt’s initials in black Sharpie. I pulled the bundles out and counted them: twenty-five bundles, with one hundred bills each: a hundred and twenty-five grand, and that was just from the upper shelf.
The bottom shelf was piled high with neat rows of hundred-dollar bundles wrapped in gold bands and again apparently initialed by Britt Parker. I dug them out and counted. There were forty bundles of hundreds, for a cool four hundred thousand. D’Agostino’s eyes were very large as she squatted beside me to inspect the money.
“Oh. My. God,” D’Agostino said. I was glad she was able to say something, because all I could do was mentally stutter. I’d never seen that much cash before in my life. We looked at one another, neither of us sure what to do. I had visions of Aruba in my head, maybe a small boat to pilot from island to island down in the Caribbean while I worked on my tan. I pushed those thoughts away, but they came back.
Beside me, D’Agostino’s breath seemed to have caught in her throat. She reached down and picked one of the bundles up. She flicked through it, then tossed it down on the floor again. I watched her lick her lips, the pink tip of her tongue moving sensuously.
“This—” she cleared her throat, “—this is one of those times when I wish I was Elliot Ness.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Nobody knows about this money,” she said. “We could—oh wow—”
Laura’s voice trailed off as she wrestled with a temptation that I would never be familiar with. Had I been the only one there, the money would have already been stuffed into a trash bag and hauled down to my car to eventually be salted away somewhere. But Laura was better than me, and she made me want to be better.
Damn her.
She finally looked away from the big mound of cash, used her hands to push against her knees, and levered herself upright.
“Put it back,” she said. “You have to put it back.”
I was looking at the safe. Something didn’t seem right with it. I swept the upper shelf with my hand and then ran my hand along the underside. There was something there.
“Wait,” I said, and Laura turned back to me. I bent down to get a better look, and saw it: a manila envelope taped to the bottom of the shelf with duct tape. I used my Swiss Army knife to peel away the tape from the shelf and then handed the envelope to Laura. She got a fingernail under the little metal butterfly clasp and pulled the envelope open. She shook the envelope out onto the surface of Britt Parker’s big desk. Several sheets of folded white paper as well as some kind of grainy, black-and-white images fluttered onto the desk.
“Is that—” I hesitated.
“An ultrasound,” D’Agostino said, lifting them carefully by the edges so that she wouldn’t leave fingerprints on any potential evidence. “Five of them.”
She handed me one of the photos, and I held it the same way she had.
“I don’t understand what I’m looking at.,” I said.
“Look at the dates,” she said, and used the back of one knuckle to spread the flimsy photos out so that I could see. When I leaned over them and really looked, it dawned on me. Each grainy black-and-white photo showed a small blob that looked something like a kidney bean. It was hard to believe that the bean was anything that would eventually become a real human being, but I knew D’Agostino had to be right. Each of the photos bore Abby’s name, the name of the hospital, the gynecologist who had performed the procedure, and the date it was completed. From the date of the oldest one, Abby would have been about fourteen the first time she got pregnant.
