7.
-
“Okay, thanks.” I hung up the phone, threw the notepad back onto the desk, and put my head down on the wood surface next to it. Trying to track down any level of activity regarding the Mello or Hale names around the old apartment or in general was turning out to be almost impossible. Checks from a third party paid the rent on Hale’s apartment for years from a bank that didn’t exist anymore, and after that it’d been wire transfers, and no one was going to be sharing private banking information with me without something like a court warrant or whatever. The various owners of the building, at least the ones that were alive still, had no clue what I was talking about when I finally got in touch with them, or who Kirby Hale was.
Rob had been silent for a few days, so I walked over to the fridge while on my phone. “Yeah?” he muttered after a few rings, sounding distracted.
“Any luck on your end?” I found a frozen Weight Watchers meal, a leftover from an old girlfriend, and proceeded to try and rip it open to put in the microwave with one hand while holding the phone.
“Not really, though I’m actually heading out of here for a work thing soon that might help. You see the email I sent you?”
“You send me email?”
“Yeah I've sent you a bunch, Helen gave it to me,” I heard faintly, like he’d put the phone down and was yelling at it from a few feet away. “I’m giving a talk at a museum in Ohio about comic books for some librarians, and they might have a few things there about Hale or Mello or whoever, I think. Look,” the voice got normal again, the phone picked up, “I’m out the door for a few days, but check it out. Gotta go!”
The microwave beeped as he hung up, and I stared at the kitchen counter for a second. I’d put the turn-up remnants of the frozen meal down next to the pile of mail I’d taken from Hale’s apartment, forgotten after the whole realization of Hale being Caramello. I scattered the pile on the counter, the bills and junk that I’d discarded and ignored, staring at the names and addresses.
The NOT AT THIS ADDRESS sticker was barely sticking out, the obnoxious orange of the label the Post Office used the only thing that made it stand out amongst the pale white of envelopes and ugly beige of my countertop.
I pulled the envelope out of the pile, the rest of the mail scattering onto the counter and down to the floor as I walked back to my desk, grabbing at my pocket knife and slitting the envelope open to pull the letter out, stiff with age and something else, moisture. The envelope, I realized, was hard and crinkly. It’d been caught in the rain before being brought inside, and a part of my brain started to think to when the last time it rained long enough for mail to get trapped outside and soaked.
It was from an alarm company, reminding whoever lived at the previous address that the payment for a system installed in an apartment listed below had been disconnected due to a lack of payment. The date was a few weeks ago, right when I remembered the big rainstorm had hit us.
The address was in the middle of nowhere in the Bronx, past the furthest the subway even went. I’d been there once or twice, enough to know where it was, not enough to have any kind of connections or idea of what to expect.
Still, t was something, and at this point I needed something to happen. The deadline was starting to approach and I was feeling a little bad that I’d spent two days doing nothing but hoping someone smarter than me would call with a clue or a tip, while I read all the comics that Rob had left for me at my place and ate pizza while avoiding Ramnee’s phone calls.
I reached for my phone, swiping for Kalli’s number as I was out the door, down the stairs, the front door slamming closed behind me. “Hey, you need to meet me in the Bronx.”
“Uh huh, sure.” I could hear paper shuffling in the background. “Look, you and I both know that this comic thing is dying out. The kid sent me that email, and while it might pan out with something, Caramello’s going back to being another thing just left to...wait, why exactly are you asking me to come to the Bronx?” She was excited now and the shuffling of paper had stopped, whatever she was doing put down as I was out the building door and on the street, grabbing a free paper, looking for a bus stop. “What do you have?”
I smiled.
8.
-
By the time I got to the apartment it was dark already. I’m sure stopping to get something to eat and then answer text messages from an on-and-off girlfriend really didn’t help, but Kalli had told me she was running behind coming to meet me there anyway, so I figured I could afford to dilly-dally around.
It was a piece of paper we were after, it’s not like it could up and run away, I told myself.
At the front of the building, a shithole of a place that didn’t even have the odd comforting familiarity of young teenagers hanging out around the stairs or the lobby, I stood around for a bit, checking my phone to see if anything came in from Kalli.
“Hey, man!” I heard a voice yell, a ways away from me, and I turned towards it.
The first rule of people trying to get your attention in New York City, especially in places that are dumps, is never respond. Especially if the person is relatively close to you and uses “man,” “buddy,” or “bro.” All they want is to get close enough to you to try to strongarm you. From further away though? Totally fine.
At least, that’s what I thought as I turned to the voice, my instincts somehow overriding common sense. The hit came from behind me, not in front of me, the second guy’s voice just a “hfff” of exhertion from punching me in the back of the head and then shoulder-checking me to make sure I stay down on the ground. His shadow made the space over me darker, blocking out the ambient nighttime light of streetlights, windows, and I heard the first voice, again from further away.
“Watch him,” it hollered, and I tried to look up, seeing someone, young, white, in snappy “business casual” trying desperately to stuff a rag into a can of gasoline, standing under one of the windows of the front of the big old building. The DUM DUM of pressure on the can was somewhat humorous, watching this guy try to get the can over his head without the soaked rag brushing against his head. Whoever Tweedledee and Tweedledum were, I’m assuming they were going for some kind of Molotov cocktail-effect on the first floor. Of course, I thought, it’d help if they lit the rag up first before throwing the non-breakable metal can into the window of the first floor apartment.
The barred window, I realized.
The guy standing over me nudged me with a knee. “Hey, eyes down asshole. Hurry up!” he yelled.
“Relax!” the other guy said, realizing his mistake. So much for that much luck in my favor. He held the can aloft with one hand, the other poking around his pants pocket for a lighter or something. Briefly, I realized that if they did manage to set the first floor of this apartment building on fire, two things could happen.
One possible outcome involved the entire building going up in flames. But, as I thought about it, on all fours on the sidewalk, the likelyhood of that happening was nil.
Why the hell would anyone want to set this old dump on fire? If the outside denizens of the street and stoop had been chased off, it’d explain where everyone was, though again, this brought me back to why the hell anyone wanted to burn this building down. Unless of course…
No. No goddamn way. No way in hell that this had anything to do with that stupid comic. I shook my head there on the sidewalk. “No fucking way,” I muttered as the guy over me kicked me in the side, though the force wasn’t really that much.
“What the fuck is going on?” I heard a familiar voice yell suddenly from down the block. The tap-tap-tap of sensible business bootlike shoes, Kalli Kiliaris’s footwear walking and then running at us. “Ben?”
“Back up, lady,” I heard the one with the gas can say as he struggled, “Just back off, nobody gets hurt.”
Oh Jesus.
“You stupid piece of shit!” she said, swinging one arm suddenly. The asp snapped hard on his one arm, buckling it. Ten inches of metal and plast
ic hurt like hell, I remember her jokingly using it around the office when I worked for her.
I never even saw her take her hand out of her pocket.
“Holy shit!” he yelled, the gas can tumbling out of his grip, dripping and banging against his head, the smell of fuel everywhere. The thin metal container and rag smashed on the sidewalk as he turned to try to run after his friend, the arm Kalli smashed with the 10-inch collapsible baton dangling at his side. “Wait the fuck up!”
“Goddamn idiots,” she muttered. “Sorry, I drove up, finding parking was hell. What the hell was that?”
“No clue.”
My phone buzzed as we stood there, and I read the text from Wagner, scrolling through it a few times and rolling it over in my brain. Huh.
“Never mind, maybe I do.”
9.
-
The cops took their sweet time picking up Mr. I-Don’t-Know and Mr. Where’s-My-Lawyer while we sat there, Kalli doing most of the talking while I hung back and texted with Wagner furiously, trying to look like someone with a real job that a cop wouldn’t want to actually deal with.
“Come on,” Kalli said, waving me down the block, “they’re not going to let us in tonight, so let’s get something to eat and come back later. A car’s gonna sit on the spot here in case someone tries something.”
I didn’t feel good leaving the apartment, even for another few hours, so I called Helen Ramnee as we strolled, let her know that there was definitely a lead or two going on that would lead us to, if not the comic, then at least some juicy details for her to put in the book. It seemed to help her un-frazzle, which made me feel a little bit productive as we strolled up to a no-name diner a few blocks away. “I saw this place as I parked,” Kalli said noncommittally, walking in and, like every other place in New York, started talking Greek to the old man at the counter. A big fat grin split his face as he responded, and I rolled my eyes.
My former boss and big-shot PI company owner still couldn’t help showing off that she used to be a Greek girl from Queens working in a diner through high school, hoping one day to, at the very least, not end up with four ungrateful kids and a church schedule to rival March Madness. Every diner in New York, she’d tell me periodically, was either owned or run by Greeks, and it almost always worked out for her. A few bucks off the tab, an extra slice of pie, something like that.
Of course, it also still helped her cultivate one of the best information networks in New York City, because who knows more than a nosy diner cook who overhears every cop and late-night weirdo at the counter talking about work?
“So what makes you think that it’s in there?” she asked as we sat down, the same slighty-dingy plastic drinking glasses of water and ice in front of us that you find in every diner in New York, a smiling older man bringing us coffee cups. Kalli and him exchanged some words in Greek before she looked back at me, putting the now-collapsed asp and her cell phone on the table by the sugar and salt-n-pepper shakers.
I rubbed the back of my head. Those kids might have been punks, but the one had definitely thought far too long and hard about punching someone in the back of the head, because I was still a little dizzy. “Who knows. At this point, it’s the only lead I’ve got, and honestly I feel a little bad that it’s taken so long to get anything besides a faint tie-in to some weird old organized crime urban legend.”
The coffee was awful, even with the four spoonfuls of sugar I poured into it, but the harsh dark burn of it helped ease the throbbing in my head and steady my breathing as my side recovered a bit. “I mean Jesus Christ, I was looking for a piece of paper, I got all this cash from these people and I got almost nothing out of it. They’ll get even less if I don’t find something.”
She didn’t say anything, checking her phone as I talked. “What was that text you got before?”
“Hmm? Oh that, the guy I’m working with, said he found some weird clue or whatever. He says it’s tied into the whole mob thing, so I guess we’ll see whatever it is when he gets back tomorrow.” I scrolled through my phone. “Something about the ‘Hawkblade’ fan club and fan prizes with clues? He’s a terrible texter, I can’t really tell. It can wait.” I pushed away from the booth. “Whatever, I think I just want to go home at this point, the apartment can wait.”
Kalli shook her head. “Fuck no, Ben. Are you kidding me, after getting me to come all the way down here and then probably break that stupid wannabe-gangster’s arm?” She stood up too, tossing a few dollar bills down on the table.
“Let’s go see what’s inside.”
10.
-
"Found it."
"Wait, what?"
The cops were gone, clearly having decided after a while that it wasn't worth it to maintain a presence after after all. We'd circled the block a few times in her car to make sure no cop car actually had been left behind in some misplaced sense of duty, Kalli and I got into the lobby of the building, a dingy old apartment building that still had enough decrepit pre-war decor going on to almost seem like a forgotten era-sorta place, the kind of building you'd think would be part of a mysterious cult or some kind of haunting.
It wasn't thought, it was just another old building forgotten by time and by just about everyone except the tenants, who probably paid next to nothing for rent, holding out generation to generation until the last of them died off or moved away, letting this get turned into some kind of three-thousand-a-month condominium with a doorman. It didn't feel that far off in the lobby, but for a moment, it still hadn't happened.
I'd dug the piece of mail I'd managed to keep in my pocket this whole time out, looking for the apartment number. Dutifully trudging up to the door, the corner apartment door yielded to the mechanical skeleton key Kalli fished out of her coat pocket, what looked like an electric toothbrush had sex with a power drill and sounded almost as loud. The apartment was, unlike the other one, the complete opposite, with simple neat furniture, a few books, a TV, an unused kitchenette, and a bedroom with a closet full of moldy old clothes. There was a layer of dust on almost everything, and the power was clearly out. Unlike the mess in the Hale apartment, this felt almost minimalist, less a home than a hotel room. I'd swiped the flashlight on my phone awake, while Kalli clicked a small light from her pocket on. In the dark, we looked through cabinets, mostly-empty bookshelves, and under pillows, and wherever we could. At one point, I opened the closed curtains, the ambient outside light of the night came through to help a little, though, I admitted to myself, we were still rooting through a strange dark apartment that had been closed up for years in the middle of the night.
We'd been in there for just a short while, maybe twenty minutes before Kalli came across the strip. After all this, I wasn't even the one who found it, hidden in a book on baseball under the TV, in a clear plastic envelope between two pieces of tracing paper.
"Well, that was...easy?" I ran my flashlight beam over it, black ink and, still visible, a few jots and dashes of pencil and white paint or corrective fluid on the paper, still mostly white after all these years. "Here," Kalli handed it to me, "I'm gonna have some of my guys come over here, you should take that." She put her flashlight away and fished a cellphone out instead, dialing.
"Why?" I didn't quite know how to hold the whole thing, which felt stupid to just have in my hands but wasn't rigid enough to put under my arm. Kalli ignored me, "Hey, it's me. Look, see if you can call Alphonso and maybe Rich...they just got back? Good, put Rich on. Hey," she turned away from me, talking. Alphonso and Rich, I vaguely remembered from when I worked there, were two of the older employees, an ex-cop and a former ambulance driver. She walked out the still-open door and stood in the hallway. "Look, you should probably go. Once Rich and Al are done here for me, the Feds are gonna swing by."
"The Feds? Like, you mean the FBI? Why?" I asked, starting down the stairs towards the lobby. While I'm sure my former boss had a decent reason, I definitely didn't want to be around to deal with law enforcement from the federal governmen
t. I could barely stomach being a private investigator.
My experience with FBI agents, limited as it was, just brought back weird sour memories of a time when I worked for Kalli and having to explain research methodology to some humorless fart my age but clearly already envisioning a trophy wife and blood pressure medication in a Florida condominium, bragging about having been an "agent" to get dates and drinks at local bars. He wanted to know how I'd managed to track down some name they'd been tracking for over two years, so obviously trying to explain my Google-fu was too much. It hadn't gone too well, I'd gotten a lecture over it somehow, and I ended up deciding the less I had to deal with federal bureaus of investigating how to flush the toilet, the better.
Kalli looked back down at her phone, texting, swiping, typing. "I might have called them once we discovered Hale was Caramello, so they're interested in what they can find."
"You 'might' have called them? Come on Kalli, really?"
"They might want the strip too, so you should get it to that Ramnee woman, out of the way. They might think it's evidence about the gold."
"Jesus, you're still on that?"
"Look, I know you don't think it's real, God fucking knows you talked about it enough to everyone who would listen when you still worked for me, but I think Caramello was a part of the gold heist, and that there's a clue as to what happened to it somewhere in his things. This apartment's the first real untouched clue in who knows how long, I gotta try it." She sighed. "Just get outta here, I'll call you tomorrow."
I walked slowly down the stairs, awkwardly holding the strip, until I got outside. In the colder air, I stood around, not knowing what to quite make of what Kalli had just said and done, and feeling, quite honestly, like this was all a little anti-climactic. I shouldn't have beens surprised honestly about Kalli wanting to get back on the whole gold thing, but it felt like just another insane level that had suddenly been added to this whole case, right at the end.
Something was bugging me as I walked off in the cool night, calling Ramnee and, after telling her the good news, listening to her rattle off instructions of where she could meet me in an hour to pick up the strip. Something that I couldn't shake off, that made me think about the other apartment, the one in the Hale name, with all that other art and all that other stuff, clearly the life that Caramello had been living by then.
Why was it hidden here?
11.
-
The knocking on the door was consistent, but muted, someone just rapping over and over and over and over.
I groaned, rolling off the couch, spilling the cat off me. I'd gotten in finally after meeting with Helen Ramnee at some restaurant at a godforsaken hour, handing off the strip art for her to slide it, reverently, into an art case
Kalli was standing there, with an envelope and a Starbucks tray with two cups in one hand, the other now again on her ever-present phone. She shoved the tray at me, "your payment's in the envelope, I'll call you later. Gotta go, bye!" and walked off, down the hallway to the elevator. I was barely awake as I took a step back into the apartment, a tad confused, and pushed the door closed with my shoulder.
I put the coffee cups down on the desk by the computer, picking one up. I put it to my lips, and nothing came out, only a heavy THUD rattling around in the cup.
Huh, weird. I popped the cap off the cup of coffee, and a cellphone was inside.
I opened up the envelope, sliding the contents out, a check for the Manta Books job...and a piece of notebook paper, stapled to a business card. The business card was from Kalli's office, with a phone number scrawled on the back of it. The notebook paper had five words written quickly in some sort of old black marker across it, underlined.
A