A Brilliant Death (14 page)

“That’s what I’ve been told. Whatever happened to him?”

“I don’t know, and I couldn’t care less. As far as I was concerned, they should have taken the guy out behind the courthouse and shot him—saved the taxpayers some money.” Captain Troy Mathews’s steely gray eyes turned to little slits and his jaw tensed, sending little ripples of vibrations back toward his ears. “Where did this come from? Why do you want to know about Chase Tornik?”

Although Travis should have been prepared for the question, he wasn’t, and it caused him to stammer. “Oh, uh, no reason, really.”

“No reason, huh? Out of the clear blue Ohio sky, and for no apparent reason, you stop by and ask the local Marine recruiter about a crooked cop who went to prison, what, fifteen years ago?” Travis just shrugged. He was afraid to tell the captain the real reason for fear it would get back to Big Frank. Fortunately, like most residents of Brilliant, Captain Mathews was no fan of Frank Baron. “I don’t know where Tornik went after he got out of prison. I know he got out quite a while ago; I remember seeing it in the paper. Regardless, he’s trouble and you ought to stay away from him.” He stood up with his trimmers and stretched his back. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what you want to talk to him about, but I’d advise you to be very careful. Sometimes, it’s best just to leave the past in the past.”

“Did you know your mother, Captain Mathews?” Travis asked. The captain swiped at beads of sweat on his upper lip but said nothing. “If it had been your mother, would you be able to keep it in the past?”

I walked up alongside Travis. Captain Mathews looked away and started cleaning the blades of his trimmers with his fingers. “A couple months after your mother died, Tornik asked me about your dad. You know, the usual stuff—what did he do for a living, where’d he work, what kind of a guy was he. If a wife dies under mysterious circumstances, checking out the husband is standard procedure. The husband is always a suspect. Tornik told me there was something hinky about your mother’s death, so he was trying to get some background on your dad. I told him what I knew about your dad, which wasn’t much. They checked out his alibi and could account for his whereabouts the day before the accident. As I recall, it all checked out—gas and food receipts and things of that nature—all the way to wherever he was going—Mississippi or Arkansas, somewhere down south, I think.”

“If he thought it was a murder, who did Tornik think killed her?”

Mathews shook his head. “He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. If someone tells you something like that and it leaks out, all of a sudden your ass is in a sling. I just told him if there was anything I could do to let me know. Seems to me that Tornik went down in smoke not long after that.”

Travis nodded, wiped his sweaty palm on his shorts and extended it to Captain Mathews. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

We had walked just a few steps up Labelle Street when Captain Mathews said, “Travis!” We stopped. “There is one thing I should tell you,” the Marine said, taking a few steps toward us. “I’m no fan of Chase Tornik, but I’ll tell you this, he was a hell of an investigator. A
hell
of an investigator. He had this uncanny sixth sense for knowing who had committed a crime and how it went down. He just knew. It was incredible to watch. He could survey a crime scene, talk to a couple of neighbors, and say, ‘Okay, here’s what happened,’ and he’d start ticking it off, step by step. And by the time we got done with the investigation, I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right ninety-nine percent of the time. Chase Tornik had his faults, and they proved to be significant. However, if he thought your mother’s death was a homicide, I’d bet my bottom dollar that there was something to it.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Travis got a job that summer working at the bakery across the street from his house. He gassed up the trucks each afternoon when they came back from their routes, then unloaded the stale loaves of bread and cupcakes that were returned. He was saving his money to buy a car, which he planned to use to drive as far from Brilliant, Ohio, and Big Frank Baron as possible, the day after he graduated high school. The recent focus of Project Amanda had been to track down Chase Tornik. Travis had no idea how to do this. Since those who had worked with Tornik spat out his name like a mouthful of soured milk, Travis reasoned that Tornik was living the life of a recluse, forever shamed by his deeds.

We sat in the back room of the Coffee Pot one late summer evening, Creedence Clearwater Revival playing on the jukebox, the rain falling in waves and flooding the gutters along Third Street. “I’ve got a plan for finding Tornik,” he said.

I said, “I’m all ears, so long as it doesn’t involve climbing into your attic or camping out at the cemetery.”

“It doesn’t. I’m going to take the money I’ve been saving for a car and hire a private investigator to track him down.”

“Really? Good plan. How much is that going to cost?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t want to spend the dough, but I figured a private investigator could find him quicker than the two of us.”

“How much money do you have?”

“I’ve saved about eighty bucks, so far.”

“I don’t know much about private investigators, Trav, but I’ll bet they charge a lot more than eighty bucks to track someone down. Why can’t we look for him?”

“Like how?”

“I don’t know. Did you try the phone book?”

He rolled his eyes. “The phone book? After what he went through, I doubt very much he’s going to be in the phone book.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone we talked to would rather cuddle up with a leper than Chase Tornik.”

“Lepers are still allowed to have a telephone.”

“He probably doesn’t even live around here. How could you possibly live in a town where you screwed up so bad that everyone hates you?”

I shrugged. “You never know.” I went to the pay phone on the back wall and retrieved the Steubenville Area phone book from the shelf below the coin return. And there he was, snug between Torak, R. L. and Toronado, Thuman H.

“Dammit. Why didn’t you suggest that to begin with?” he asked.

“I knew it would somehow be my fault.” I shoved the phone book across the table to him. “You’re the brains of the outfit. I assumed that would have been your first move.”

He was sitting on the porch steps of a duplex, extremely neat by the standards of the neighborhood, with aluminum siding, new windows, and a porch so recently built that it had yet to be painted. On one side of the duplex was an abandoned house with waist-high weeds and gutters sagging under their own weight, and on the other was a one-story brick ranch with the screen door hanging from one hinge and dirty, shirtless kids playing on a beaten patch of ground.

It was our third trip to the south Steubenville neighborhood in search of Tornik. The first night he wasn’t home, so we parked down the street and waited for him. One of the little brats from the brick ranch pedaled his bicycle up to the driver’s-side door and asked, “What are you doin’?”

“None of your business,” I said.

“Got any money?”

“Yeah, I’ve got money, but you’re not getting any of it.”

The little turd called me an ass wipe and spit on my windshield as he pedaled off.

We waited an hour, but Tornik never showed up.

We returned two days later. Again he wasn’t home, and again we staked out the house. The same kid came pedaling straight at my car. “You spit on my car again and I swear I’ll beat the livin’ . . .”

Again, he hawked on the windshield and yelled “bite me, ass wipe,” while he pedaled away. Travis laughed. As we waited, a black kid no older than ten started chucking rocks through the windows of the abandoned two-story house on the other side of Tornik’s. This lasted until mamma came out of a house across the street, picked up a two-by-four from the yard, and started after him. He easily outran her, but the last thing I heard her say was, “Thas awright, you have to sleep sometime.”

Again, Tornik didn’t show.

He was on the porch when we drove past on this Saturday shortly before noon. The neighborhood was full of the sound of kids yelling and crying, but if this bothered Chase Tornik you couldn’t tell. He sat on the top step of his porch sipping an amber liquid from a clear glass tumbler. The morning paper lay neatly folded beside him, and his knees served as rests for a pair of sinewy forearms. A cigarette burned between the cupped fingers of his left hand, and he held the tumbler in his right. They both looked natural in his hands, as though years of constant use had made them permanent appendages. He was neatly attired in a white, short-sleeved dress shirt, pressed slacks, and polished black dress shoes. Not a hair was out of place on a coif that was slicked down and a mix of dirty blond and gray. His face was scrubbed white and pockmarked across his cheeks and neck, his nose crimson and rocky, a monument to the fluid in the tumbler. We parked just down the street and walked back. He must have thought we were either Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons hoping to save his soul because when we neared his porch he said, “Boys, if you’re trying to keep me from spending eternity in hell, I’m afraid that train’s already left the station.”

Travis frowned at me. He didn’t get it. “We’re not out saving souls today,” I said.

“Are you Chase Tornik?” Travis asked.

The man lifted the hand that held his cigarette and shielded his eyes from the morning sun, squinting first into the youthful face of Travis Baron, then at me. One eye squinted in the glare. “I might be. Who wants to know?”

“I do.”

The man dropped his hand and took a short hit from his cigarette. “That seems somewhat obvious. How about him?” He nodded at me. “Does he want to know, too?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then just who might you be?”

Travis swallowed. “This is my friend, Mitchell Malone. My name is Travis Baron.”

Slowly, the man nodded his head, the slightest of smiles pursing his lips. “Travis Baron, is it?” He had a rattling voice—dry and rough—that came from deep in his chest and sounded as if every syllable was uttered with great effort. He took a last hit from the cigarette and flicked the burning nub past my ear and into the street. “Yeah, I’m Tornik.”

“Do you know who I am?” Travis asked.

Tornik’s nod was nearly imperceptible. “I’ve got a pretty good idea.” He pulled a hard pack of Winstons from his breast pocket and used his lips to cull another smoke from the herd, never taking his eyes off Travis. He worked his jaw and, I thought, was searching for a name that hadn’t crossed his mind in years. In a tone almost as imperceptible as the nod, he said, “Amanda Baron?” Travis nodded. Tornik lit the cigarette, and a plume of blue smoke escaped from his mouth and curled around his face. “You’re Amanda Baron’s son?”

“I’m surprised that you remembered,” Travis replied.

“Remembering a name is no great feat. What can I do for you?”

“I want to talk to you about my mother.”

Tornik nodded for Travis to sit next to him on the top step. I stood by the bottom step, leaning against the handrail. “I don’t know that I can be much help. It’s been a long time. How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen!” Tornik repeated. “Christ Almighty.” He sipped his drink. “It’s been that long, huh? Hard to believe. So, what is it that you want to know about her?”

Tornik had a calm demeanor and no edge to his tone. I got the impression that he didn’t rile very easily, and I imagined that surviving seven years in prison as a former cop would make other problems seem somewhat insignificant. “I’d like to know anything that you can tell me about her, anything that you can remember.”

“You sure I’m the right person to do that? Is your dad still alive?”

“Yeah, but it’s not one of his favorite subjects. In fact, he won’t talk about it at all. He’s old-style Italian with a nasty temper, and his wife got killed while cheating on him, so it doesn’t sit very well.”

“I suspect not,” Tornik said.

“Mostly, I want to know why you thought she was murdered. I saw an article in the
Herald-Star
that said you were investigating her death as a homicide.”

Again, he sipped his whiskey. “That was a long, long time ago, son. I don’t remember the article. But, yeah, I was looking into her death as a possible homicide. I recall that much . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at Travis and slowly shook his head. “I guess, now that I think about it, I don’t really remember too much about the case.”

He was lying, I thought. He was debating why he should tell her son what he knew. I could sense that he was uncomfortable with the situation. “You remembered her name without any trouble,” I said.

Tornik nodded. “Yeah, but I just don’t remember much else. I don’t think I can be much help to you boys.” He picked up his newspaper and started to stand.

“I can refresh your memory, if you like,” Travis said, standing up from the porch. I knew Travis, and I knew that tone. The conversation was about to take an ugly turn. “You were doing an investigation into my mom’s death when you got sent to prison for being a crooked cop. Does that jog your memory at all?”