Hard Fall: A gripping, noir detective thriller (Thomas Blume series of Hard-Boiled Mysteries, Book 1) (4 page)

“I’ve got to.”

“You see the tragedy of all this, my friend, is that you don’t. Go home, find some help. There’s nothing for you in London anymore.”

I swallowed some water, washing down a bite of falafel. I looked Amir in the eyes. “I need to know who did this to them.”

“And all this excessive drinking? You think this will help your investigation?”

I grimaced. “I sleep better when I’m loaded,” I said. The dreams seem to go away. And when I’m awake, the memories don’t hurt as bad if I’m drinking.”

“So this isn’t a
purposeful
self-destruction? You’re medicating yourself?”

“You could say that.”

He looked to me with the unconditionally loyal eyes of a dear friend. Ever since I had saved his sister, Amir had treated me like family. He joked that we had become soul brothers because I had unintentionally followed him across the globe. “I didn’t know you were a doctor, Thomas,” he finally said.

I sighed. I knew he was right. I was never going to be able to solve Sarah and Tommy’s case if I kept drinking the days away. “I think I have been purposefully putting it off,” I muttered.

“What’s that?” Amir asked.

“I’ve just been going over these case files over and over again. I haven’t been making any forward progress. You’re right. If I want to get to the bottom of this I need to kick the drinking, shape myself up. Then I can start for real.”

Amir sighed, disappointed. “And then where will you be? Still obsessed with your past. Do you think Sarah would want to see you this way? No, she would want you to move on. Focus on your present; your future.”

Not that I had much future, I thought. At least not in London. Even if the cops didn’t deport me, I was going to run out of money soon. Eventually I was going to have to figure out how to get some cash flowing in. Still, the thought of letting Sarah and Tommy’s case go cold made me hate myself. “No,” I shook my head. “This is too important.”

“Why?” Amir demanded. “Why is it important to chase the killers of the dead? What do you hope to accomplish?”

“Justice.”

“You don’t want justice, you want revenge. And with revenge you will find only more pain and more guilt.”

“What would you have me do, huh?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “You seem incapable of helping yourself. Maybe you should try helping others.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean use the talents God gave you. You’re a brilliant detective, Thomas. My sister owes her life to you. That is a gift I will never forget. Use your skills to help the living. Become a proper investigator.”

I sneered. “I’m retired, Amir. Even if I wanted to do what you’re suggesting, I don’t have any authority. Especially not out here.”

“Fine,” Amir sank back in his seat, putting one long arm up on the back of the booth.

“You’re right about the drinking though,” I admitted. “I’ll get dry.”

“You mean that?”

“Yes, and because I’m spilling all of this crap to you, I leave
you
in charge of holding me accountable.”

“I look forward to it,” Amir said. “Now, go ahead and finish your beer. If I’m being held accountable, it will be the last one you have in quite some time.”

“Fair enough,” I said, grasping the glass and taking a huge gulp.

***

Of course, Amir couldn’t see me all of the time. Not when I’m sitting in my dank little apartment with my fridge full of beer and my nearly full bottle of whiskey. I also knew that he was the responsible type who left for home at a decent hour…so if I decided to head out to a bar, there was no way he’d know.

Cheating on that little commitment I had made to him heaped even more guilt on me, but that was okay. By then remorse and I had become close. I’m not sure how I could function without it.

I didn’t feel
too
bad about the thing with Amir, though. I
did
intend to find my family’s killers. It was just the drinking thing I had told a little white lie about.

I was acting out on that lie, knocking back my fifth beer of the night (which was probably my ninth or tenth of the day), when someone knocked on my door. It was after ten at night so having a visitor was strange. Hell, having a visitor at
any
time was strange. Curious, I stood up…a bit too quickly. I had forgotten about the couple of shots of whiskey I’d downed. It caught up to my legs, and I damn near fell down.

I steadied myself, waiting for the knock to come again. “One minute,” I hollered, totally surprised by how buzzed I was. I wasn’t quite drunk yet, but I was quickly tipping over to that side.

I gathered my momentum and headed through my office for the door. I estimated that about fifteen seconds had passed since the knock had come. I opened the door slowly, still uncertain who could be coming to visit at such an hour.

When I stepped out and looked over the rail to the street below, the light was bad, the shadows blanketing everything, and the weak light from the lamp at the end of the street doing nothing to help. Faintly, I caught a glimpse of a woman’s figure halfway down the street. She looked to be in a hurry. Seeing as how there was no one else on the street within the immediate vicinity, I assumed this was the woman that had knocked on my door.

I nearly called out to her, but my tongue was far too lazy from the booze. Instead, I watched her slink out of view, swallowed by the shadows. I made a
“huh”
sound as she got into a car on the curb. She didn’t even look back in my direction as she started the engine and drove off. I watched her headlights flick on, pointed further down the street. Then she turned the corner and was gone, leaving behind nothing but darkness and the patter of rain.

What did she want with me?

I shrugged and then closed the door. Sure, an unexpected visitor at such an hour was strange, but it wasn’t enough of a mystery to keep me awake… or sober.

***

I stayed in the following day. I laid up in the apartment, staring blankly at what passed for daytime television on the scuzzy TV set I had found in the closet when I moved in.

I gave some thought to my late night visitor, trying to figure out who it might be. The only thing I could figure is that maybe Anthony’s wife had found out where I lived. Maybe she had come by to give me a piece of her mind and then chickened out when she heard someone stumbling towards the door.

The real question was why she had knocked on my door only to run away before I could answer.
Isn’t it obvious, you drunk?
I told myself.
She heard you stumbling around in here and she got scared.

The stream of ideas came and went, fading in and out during the day. It was what Sarah would have called a Wasted Day — one of those days when you do absolutely nothing. It’s a waste of time, a lurid sort of nothingness.

Somehow, night came. I sort of recalled eating lunch, and I know I had a dinner of god-awful mac and cheese. I had considered heading to the pub, but I hadn’t drunk anything all day, and I figured what the hell? Maybe I could give my promise to Amir the old college try after all.

I also know that I spent the wasted hours of that day thinking about Sarah and Tommy. I recalled the details of their case files. I had photocopies of the files in my closet (a gift that the Metropolitan Police Department didn’t know I had), and I knew I could go to them whenever I wanted. I also knew every line by heart, every gruesome heartbreaking detail. Every Photograph.

The Blackened room. Sarah’s ruined body sprawled on the sofa. Tommy, face down on the floor, left hand outstretched clutching his favorite orange toy gun.

There were no answers to be had there. If there
were,
then I was apparently not a good enough cop anymore to figure them out.

I decided to head to bed early. Maybe a restful night’s sleep would help to re-orient me. A good sleep, a huge breakfast…and then perhaps the next day I would do as I had told Amir. I’d start really working on the case, interviewing their old neighbors or Sarah’s former co-workers. Then, after some real, sober police work, I might find myself with some kind of lead.

As I was heading to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I caught a flicker of light outside of my grimy living room window. Someone had pulled to the side of the street to park and —

I froze for a moment in front of the window. It was the car from last night — the car the woman had gotten into after retreating from my door. I saw it just enough in the scant light from the lamppost. If she was trying to be sneaky, she was doing a piss-poor job. I stood there and watched her, waiting to see if she would get out. If she did, the interior light would kick on, and I might be able to get a good look at her face.

But she didn’t. In fact, I don’t think she even bothered to kill the engine. She apparently changed her mind about meeting me again. She pulled away from the curb less than thirty seconds after parking there. I watched her taillights fade away in a swirl of dazzling red that reflected from the drizzling rain.

I retired to bed as I had originally planned, but sleep was a long time coming. I kept seeing those red taillights and knew that something peculiar was going on.

Who was this mystery woman?

FIVE

Smoke and taillights.

The next day was better in a few ways. I went into the office with the files on my family and went over it all again. There was nothing new, of course. They had died from the fire at the house. Sarah had been hit over the head first. No signs of rape or much of a struggle. Cloth under Tommy’s fingernails where it is assumed he fought off an attacker. Even at the age of ten, my son had been willing to die to protect his mother.

And where had I been when they had been killed right in their very own home? I knew the answer. It was one that disgusted me and that I had been living with ever since. It was the sole reason for the guilt I carried — the reason that going through these files was like having someone suffocate me as I read.

I’d been on the other side of the Atlantic.

Sarah had once told me,
“If you can’t do the smart thing, do the right thing”.

What was the right thing to do here? Was I wasting my time by being halfway around the world to investigate her death?

I grabbed a lunch of Pita and Falafel at Amir’s restaurant, partly because it was close but mostly because it was free, then I stayed in the office for ten hours. I did some new research online, finding nothing. I made notes, cross-referenced things, and even tried creating a timeline of events on the day they had died.

Night came almost too quickly, and when I looked out to the streets and saw that it was dark already, an idea came to me. I shut my computer down, locked the office, and headed down through the closing restaurant. I noticed that Amir seemed in good spirits with his staff. He didn’t even look skeptical when he spoke to me. Not once did he ask about my drinking or how I had slept. I guess I was looking better than I had when I’d had lunch with him.

I did
feel
better. Especially now that I had a steady idea in my head. The notion had nothing to do with my family’s case, but I thought it might go a long way in getting my head clear and setting me back on a motivated path.

I headed out to my Toyota and drove around the block a few times scoping the scene. When I came back to my street, I parked at the end behind one of my neighbor’s cars and some large industrial bins. I sat there and ate some sandwiches I had picked up at a gas station, looking to the mostly empty streets around me.