Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (18 page)

“I’m already in. There’s no going back for me. I’ve been in this for months, keeping my head down and my eyes open, biding my time until I can hit back where it hurts.”

“You can’t, Jeff. It’s not your job. You’ve got to leave this to the police.”

“
The police are who killed him
.”

“That’s not . . . You’re not looking at the whole picture. Nesbitt drew first. He fired first. Whatever the rumors are on the Internet, those cops didn’t assassinate him.”

“Yeah,” he says, “and those guys tonight didn’t come after you. It was just a fender bender, right? Wrong place at the wrong time. You don’t get it. You still have blinders on. It’s time to wake up and see what’s happening in this country. If tonight didn’t do the trick, what’s it gonna take?”

It’s so late it’s early. Despite my warning that I might be out well past midnight, Charlotte will be worried about me. I should have called. If I do it now, though, I risk waking her up if she’s managed to get to sleep. Look at me, finding more excuses not to pick up the phone.

I rise to my feet, tucking the file under my arm.

“Lemme see that picture again,” he says.

I hand it over and he studies the faces like he’s committing them to memory.

“There’s one thing more I can tell you about this woman. Hilda, you called her? I liked her. She reminded me a lot of my own mom. Maybe she felt the same. After Mr. Nesbitt got shot, she did call me. Just checking to see if I was all right. This was after the others caught up to me and burgled my place. She gave me the address of somewhere I could hole up. A safe house, she said. But to be honest with you, I didn’t know if I could trust her. And I already had
this
scoped out.” He sweeps his hand through the air, indicating the garage.

“Do you remember where this safe house was?”

He goes to the table where his books are stacked and hands me
The Foxhole Atheist
. “You were flipping through it just a minute a go. It’ll be somewhere in the readings for April.”

I skim the section until I find a handwritten note on the entry for April 14, a page with the heading
COMFORT IN LIES IS NO COMFORT AT ALL
. Down the inside margin, scrawled in blue ink, is the address of a Midtown apartment tower.

I start to tear out the page.

“Don’t,” he says. “Just take it with you. I have another copy, and it’s such a good book. You should read it.”

I slip the book into my jacket pocket, then give the garage a final once-over. There’s nothing more I can do at the moment.

“Hey,” he says, “I’m still in this.” Issuing a challenge.

“Give me your number.” I program him into my phone, then outline the various numbers he can use to get in touch with me. Although I realize it will do no good, I warn him to keep his nose clean anyway. “Wait until I get back in touch, Jeff. Can you at least do that?”

He answers with a noncommittal shrug.

As I leave, the dead bolts start turning behind me.

Interlude : 1986

I ran into Magnum on base
fairly regularly after our first conversation, but we always kept our distance. Sometimes I’d pretend like I didn’t see him. Other times he’d acknowledge me with a far-off nod. Though we never talked, over time we were coming to understand each other better. I was conscious of his presence even when he wasn’t there.

This was some kind of test, I decided. Magnum was keeping an eye on me to see what I was made of. After all, he had told me things he probably had no right to reveal. Had he divined something in me—some kind of trustworthiness or cunning—that suggested there was no danger in opening up?

“I’m a talent scout,” he’d said. And I was a willing recruit.

Whenever scuttlebutt on base touched on the doings of Magnum and his cabana boys, Sgt. Crewes reported everything in thrilling detail. He kept an ear to the ground, presumably on Shattuck’s orders, though he never said as much. According to the Spanish-speaking master sergeant, Magnum’s men were Uruguayans, or possibly Argentines. They were junior officers of similar rank to one another with the exception of César, who gave orders and never seemed to get his hands dirty. Unlike the others, César also had the run of the town. He’d been observed sampling the Leesville night life, such as it was, doling out hundred-dollar bills like he had an endless supply. The whole group had come direct from Ft. Benning, meaning they were School of the Americas alumni. Crewes had to explain to me what that meant.

Unfortunately the sergeant’s intel was low-grade product, spiked with implausible rumors.

“One of them’s missing,” he revealed one afternoon. “They’re keeping everything hushed up, but the word is, he took a nosedive out of a Huey.”

“One of the cabana boys? He fell out of a chopper?”

“More likely he was pushed,” the sergeant said, a gleam in his eye. “It’s all over base.”

By “all over base,” he meant the tight-knit circle of long-serving
NCO
s who were the only soldiers who mattered to Sgt. Crewes. I was incredulous.

“You’re saying one of them was thrown out of the copter—for what? To demonstrate how it’s done? Let me guess. Nobody actually saw this, but they heard it from someone who did. The Huey pilot will never turn up, and neither will the crew, but that doesn’t stop the word from getting around.”

“What’s your problem?”

I stiffened.

“Let me rephrase that,” he said. “What’s your problem,
sir
?”

“My problem is, you’re supposed to be a sergeant, but you gossip like an old woman.”

The words were out before I could stop them. I paused and swallowed hard, bracing myself from the reaction.

Crewes cocked his head like a pointer catching the scent of the fox.

“Oh,” he said to the air over our heads. “I think I know what the problem is now. Somebody has a crush.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s all those secret meetings,” he said, still talking to the ceiling. “Only the major already laid down the law on that point.”

He knew.

Crewes looked me in the eye and grinned. “I’m just saying, you’d better watch yourself, Lieutenant. Things aren’t always what they seem. And neither are people.”

———

The next time I spotted Magnum on base, he was coming out of the
PX
. I made a beeline for him, still shaken by the sergeant’s warning. Our paths would have crossed in the parking lot, but at the final moment I veered away, spooked. A few steps behind Magnum came a warrant officer assigned to our company, one of our criminal investigators. He looked preoccupied and nondescript, the way you would if you were tailing somebody.

Maybe he had just been doing some shopping. But I doubted it. I bent down between two cars to tighten my bootlaces, letting both of them pass. Then I headed off in the opposite direction, sweat blooming on my brow.

That night, dressed in jeans and a pullover, I made a round of the Leesville clubs. Since I’d grown up in Houston, there wasn’t much Sleezville’s bars and nightclubs and strip joints could do to shock me. Besides, I was moderate in my vices and preferred to indulge them outside the public eye. In the hot, intermingling crowd, the thumping music, the alluring shadows, I became too self-conscious ever to lose myself. I was an observer, an all-seeing eye. Sometimes that was all the escape I needed.

I passed the night in a series of dank settings, matte-black walls and jury-rigged stage lights, local bands offering a semblance of live music, half the crowd probably underage. Although I recognized a few faces, I spoke to no one and no one spoke to me. I thought about the girl I’d met in Alexandria and taken to the movies. I thought about the girl in the blue gown at the ball in Austin, too, her strange and lofty world so different from mine. Mostly I thought about Magnum and the way he’d led me on and groomed me. And the fact that, whatever he was up to, it was enough to infuriate an officer like Shattuck.

Past midnight I decided to call it quits. Out in the parking lot I recognized the Buick. Glancing around and seeing no one, I decided to walk over. Through the tinted glass I couldn’t tell whether anyone was inside the car. As I approached, the passenger door flung open. I took this as an invitation and went for it.

I had plenty I wanted to say to Magnum. The words lined up behind my teeth like paratroopers ready for the big jump. As I ducked down, a girl’s bare leg touched the ground. She rolled a little and propelled herself from the passenger seat, running smack into me. She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but she almost knocked me over. All I got was a glimpse of streaked mascara, the smell of alcohol on her breath, and a fleeting sob. She was past me then, stumbling and confused, turning backward to see what she’d struck. In the streetlight her face glowed amber. Her hair was chopped in a bob and there was a stud in her nostril—a strange sight in those days. Then she was gone.

I watched her, then leaned through the open passenger door. As I did, the driver got out. We faced each other across the roof of the Buick. He lit one of his thin cigars.

“You,” he said, exhaling smoke. “The policeman. From the base.”

He spoke in a low vibrating purr, the kind of voice he might use with a woman. He rested his elbows on the car and gazed up at the night sky.

“What an evening!”

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.

“This place,” he said, waving the cigar. “It’s not like my home.”

As he sighed, I felt an anger boiling inside me. Despite his aristocratic airs, César looked like he could take care of himself. But I reckoned he was ten, fifteen years older than me, and all those cigars couldn’t have helped his conditioning. I started thinking of what I’d like to do to him, realizing this was what it felt like to snap.

“Why did that girl take off like that? What were you doing to her?”

I didn’t wait to hear the answer. I was already making my move, rounding the back of the Buick so I wouldn’t have the open door between us. He watched, but that was all.

“Are you upset about that
puta
?” he asked, calm as ice. “It was not me doing anything to her, quite the other way around. Anyway, that was not the reason for the trouble. There was a disagreement over the price.”

My fist was half cocked. He looked at it, amused.

“You understand what I am saying?” he asked. “She was just a whore.”

What was I doing here? What right did I have—? I paused, then lowered my hand. The moment was gone.

“Come,” he said. “I have heard all about you. A drink, yes?”

He closed the car door and gestured toward the club. Only after he’d stepped past me and turned did I realize he was inviting me inside.

“What do you take me for?” I said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“For a drink, yes? There are plenty of them to go around in there. You don’t get angry over just one.”

“What?”

“The whore,” he said, smiling. “I will show you. Come on.”

It was all an act, I realized. The crossed signals, the failure to communicate. For all his smiling bonhomie, he couldn’t get the reptilian calculation out of his eyes. He would put a knife in me first chance. All he was doing was trying to decide where to slide it in.

“Come,” he said.

I left without turning my back on him, then spent the night dreaming of that mole on his face and the glacier underneath his smile.

The next morning,
with the sun blazing through the half-open blinds and the clock on my nightstand reading a quarter past ten, I roll over to find Charlotte long gone, the sheets cool, the damp of her morning shower all but dissipated. It’s a strange feeling, sleeping in. Nowhere to be, no one expecting me. I’ve slept on my right side, intermittently aware of the numbness in my left leg. Now, as I test my foot on the wood floor, a dull ache radiates through my thigh and into my lower back. I swallow more pills and go downstairs.

As I brew coffee, I notice the back door ajar. In a rush, Charlotte must have neglected to pull it closed. The problem with an old Victorian house is that no matter how much of the woodwork is restored and replaced, fluctuations in temperature cause what remains to expand and contract. In the summer heat, none of our doors seem to fit their frames anymore. I shove the door closed, then use the keypad on the wall to arm the security system.

For years we did without one, not wanting to tamper too much with the aesthetic, but when the sanctity of our home was violated last year and my wife was attacked by a maniac named David Bayard in our bedroom, we decided there were things more important than the historical character of an old house. If it hadn’t been for Carter, she might have been killed. I was hours away, pursuing a lead in New Orleans, while he was upstairs over the garage. Now that the Robbs have moved out, I’m grateful Charlotte spends her days away from home.

We’re on the grid, in Jeff’s terms. Easy to find. If the men from last night want to catch up with me, it won’t be too hard.

With a mug in one hand, I settle down in front of the computer, sifting through search results until I’ve located the video from Nesbitt’s shooting that’s all over the Internet. The resolution on most of the copies is pretty poor, but after a string of misses I find one that’s not too bad, complete with subtitles to help with the grainy audio, probably added by a helpful news desk. I download the video and copy it onto a
USB
drive, which I take into the living room and plug into the flat screen. It takes some trial and error, but within a couple of minutes I’m reclining on the couch, watching Nesbitt’s death clip again and again.

I wouldn’t be doing this if Englewood hadn’t mentioned Reg Keller’s name. Wilcox’s assurance that the shooting was justified is enough for me. Even without it, I have never questioned what really happened. Nesbitt drew and fired. Case closed. Corrupt cops exist, but they typically fall into two categories: cops on the pad and cops exceeding their authority. Sometimes the lines blur. A guy taking kickbacks will compensate by going extra hard on crime, busting heads to balance his own sense of guilt. There aren’t many cops, I reckon, who would cold-bloodedly execute a man on orders. Not in front of a dashboard camera.

To my eyes, everything looks right. The subtitles tag the dialogue with the names of each uniform. The rookie is Farouk, his training officer Silvestri. I’ve never met either one. In the opening frames, a vintage Mercedes 450SL, signature ride of the ’80s oil boom in Houston, is pulled over on the curb, lit by the patrol car’s powerful spotlight. The back of a man’s head is visible through the rear window. Farouk advances on the driver’s side, his torso stiff and upright, hand resting on the butt of his pistol. On the passenger side, Silvestri carries himself more relaxed, scanning the car with an offhand flashlight.

“What’s going on here? What is this?”

Nesbitt’s already edgy. Farouk glances toward Silvestri, just a microscopic turn, probably looking for reassurance. Then he launches into his patter, his voice even and reassuring. He requests identification, and Nesbitt responds by demanding to know why he’s been pulled over. When Farouk asks again, Nesbitt snaps at him.

“Who put you up to this? You think I don’t see what’s going on here?”

He sounds crazy, frankly. Delusional. And the rookie takes this in stride, aware that people are strange and you can never predict how they’ll react. Silvestri crouches down a little for a better look into the car. I can’t see his face, but judging by his body language, he’s still not overly concerned. He’s a T.O. He’s seen it all before. It would take a lot to rattle a man like him.

“I will not submit to this. I’m under no obligation to cooperate.”

“Sir, if you operate a motor vehicle in the state of Texas . . .”

“Was I speeding? Do I have a brake light out?”

“Sir, if you can just cut me some slack here. License and registration?”

Something in Farouk’s manner seems to reassure Nesbitt. The only part of him visible to the cameras is the back of his head. He slumps a little and sighs loud enough for the microphone to pick it up.

“You need to understand something. I want you to listen carefully. You are interfering with a U.S. government operation. I’m working directly with the Central Intelligence Agency. You understand what I’m telling you, officer?”

Farouk sends another micro-glance toward Silvestri. When I was in uniform, there were some heady late-night traffic stops, but nothing like this. If a guy I’d pulled over started telling me he worked for the
CIA
, I’m not sure how I would’ve handled it. I probably would have laughed. To his credit, Farouk stays professional. Maybe he’s too nervous in front of his training officer to show what he’s really thinking.

“Sir, I’m going to need your license and registration to call this in.”

He doesn’t come out and say that he’s going to confirm Nesbitt’s story, but his words are carefully enough chosen to be interpreted that way. Despite his belligerence, Nesbitt’s hand appears in the window, extending his license toward Farouk. Then he reaches toward the glove compartment and returns with an insurance card. Farouk tells him to sit tight, then returns to the patrol car, disappearing from view.

My next step in this situation would probably have been to administer a Breathalyzer. Whether you smell alcohol or not, when a driver claims to be a secret agent, that’s probable cause in my book. Maybe Farouk signals something to Silvestri. The training officer takes a couple of steps toward the cruiser, then stops. He seems to nod, as if to say
message received
. Then he turns on his heel and approaches Nesbitt’s window.

I’ve watched the video countless times by now, but never on a large screen. The enlargement renders the details as boxy pixels, but even so, I notice something this time that I’ve never observed before.

As Silvestri makes his approach, Nesbitt’s head is clearly turned. Up to this point, only the back of the head was visible, but now I can see the darkened cavity of an eye and a mouth. He is watching the training officer as he advances.

And Silvestri does something I never noted before, too. Like Farouk, he rests his hand on the butt of his pistol. As he passes across the spotlight’s beam, his right hand is brightly illuminated. I can’t make out the individual digits, but the gesture is too familiar for me to miss. He pops the thumb break securing his gun into the holster, then flips it free. This is the sort of thing a cop might do if he’s expecting to have to draw.

I pause the video and go back to the computer, doing a search that cross-references the shooting and the term
thumb break
. Instead of the hundreds of results that came up earlier, this time there are only a few. The first one takes me to a blog post with screen captures from this moment in the video. Red lines overlay the image, illustrating the significance of the movement. The title of the post reads,
EXECUTIONER COP GETS READY FOR THE KILL
. So at least I’m not the only one to have noticed.

Back in front of the television, I advance the video a few frames at a time. Silvestri never lifts his side arm out of the holster. He also never removes his hand from the butt. There’s nothing to suggest he’s a would-be executioner. Then again, he’s clearly prepared to draw his weapon.

“You have no justification for doing that!”

The tone of Nesbitt’s voice sounds different to me. He’s not arguing about the traffic stop. He’s protesting that popped thumb break. I feel certain of that. It’s the perceived escalation of force that sets him off this time.

Silvestri’s reaction is a little surprising. On the big screen, it’s clear that as Nesbitt speaks, the training officer’s face turns. He looks away from the driver, back toward the patrol car. Back toward the camera. I pause the video and run it back. The resolution is poor, but I’m sure there is a change in the face, a momentary fullness signifying the backward glance. Why would he take his eyes off a belligerent driver at such a critical moment? To check on Farouk, perhaps? To make sure he’s ready to provide backup should it be necessary? That makes sense. I can even imagine myself in the same situation making a similar mistake. But watching again, what it really looks like is this: Silvestri’s about to make a move and he’s checking behind him to see if anybody’s looking.

It’s ridiculous, of course. He’s a training officer, brimming with experience. Even if the conspiracy theorists are right and he’s about to attempt an assassination, a glance over the shoulder isn’t enough. He would know the camera was filming everything he did.

The muzzle flash from Nesbitt’s pistol looks huge on screen, out of all proportion to the tiny size of his .32 caliber ammunition. The flash is caused by unburned power hitting the night air. Erupting in Silvestri’s face, it must have been blinding. He reacts like a blindman, stumbling backward, falling on his backside. Only after he’s on the ground does his gun clear the holster. I remember it differently, the training officer firing from the ground, but watching closely this doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s Farouk who flies into action, Farouk who’s already rushing forward, his bullets shattering the windows of Nesbitt’s Merc. As far as I can tell, the training officer never even fires. Nesbitt slumps forward, just the top of his head visible on camera. He’s dead, struck in the neck by one of Farouk’s .40 caliber rounds.

When the footage ends, I sit with the controller pressed against my cheek, contemplating a replay. I thought I knew what I was going to see. For the most part, I did. But that gesture of Silvestri’s, the backward glance, coupled with the release of his thumb break . . . I’m starting to have my doubts.

Nesbitt was clearly worked up. Based on the way things actually went down, there’s no question he was also in the wrong. If I’m right about him seeing Silvestri release the thumb break, though, it helps explain why he thought his only course of action was a preemptive strike. And that backward glance really bothers me. It looks like the unconscious action of a guilty man.

———

Troubled by my new doubts, I shower and shave. The water makes the scrapes and nicks on my hands and legs burn, scrapes and nicks I didn’t realize I even had.

“You’re getting too old for this,” I tell the reflection in the steamy mirror.

I towel myself dry and do some stretching exercises on the bedroom floor, trying to limber my leg for the day. Bending over, I can just touch the ground without bending my knees, but there’s a nasty pull all down my leg. It feels like a bamboo shoot has been jammed down through the muscles. All I have to do is push the stretch a little further and the pain grows intense. The way it travels along the sciatic line, I imagine digging my hand through the tissue, grabbing hold of the nerve, and yanking it out.

The stretch exacerbates the discomfort at first. After I walk it off, I can feel the leg relaxing into a prickly numbness, about as functional as it gets.

I’ve known cops who had to retire based on back injuries. There’s so much weight to carry, so many demands that even a plainclothes detective can’t keep up. In my mind, there’s always been something pathetic about such cases. I’ve always wondered if the guys whining about their bad backs weren’t goldbricking. Now I’m one of them.

And the stupidity of the fall still gets to me. A man urges me to be careful, and because he’s younger than me and I’m feeling conscious of my age, to defy his expectations I take a leap that ends up confirming both his assumption and my worst fear.

Given time, a man can adapt to just about any pain. I can live with this if I have to. That’s what I tell myself. I can live with it until the day that I can’t.

After I’m dressed, I head downstairs again. Part of me wants to call Wilcox back and get him to watch the video with me. Either he will tell me I’m crazy or he’ll see what I see. If it’s the latter, I reckon he will feel duty-bound to take a second look at the case. I’ll warn him about giving out Tom Englewood’s number, too.
That’s a good way to get people killed.

Not that I want to put ideas in Wilcox’s head.

Seeing him again stirred up some feelings. Maybe I’m yearning for the old days when we were still partners and the world seemed so uncomplicated.

The old days.

That was a phrase Jeff used last night. He had insisted that Nesbitt and I were acquainted, that we knew each other from “the old days,” whatever that means. Once the thought lodges in my head, I can’t get it out.

The only photos I remember seeing of Nesbitt were in the newspaper just after the shooting. They didn’t ring a bell at the time, but I wasn’t expecting them to. It’s always possible we knew each other by sight or that—considering his penchant for cloak-and-dagger—I knew him by a different name.

Back to the computer, back to the interminable search results. I click around until only images are displayed, then only the ones with decent resolution. There seem to have been two pictures of Andrew Nesbitt circulating at the time of his death. The more common one depicts a jowly, balding man of sixty with capped teeth and crow’s-feet. His button-down collar bulges at the sides, framing the knot of a regimental tie. I stare at the picture, but there’s nothing familiar.

In the second image, which appears only on a few sites and seems to have been produced in an effort to verify his intelligence claims, a younger Nesbitt stands in a receiving line, shaking hands with the first President Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence. The photo appears to date during Bush’s reelection campaign, so there’s no direct tie to the
CIA
. His face is leaner and more handsome, his hair thick and jet-black. He sports a full Tom Selleck mustache.