The Pact: A Detective Locklear Mystery Page 5

  “Just what? We won’t tell him, we promise, don’t we, sarge?” Mendoza flashed her white smile at the nervous woman.

  “Some nights Luke arrives and he just wants to sit here, with her. He loves her so much. So I leave the swing door unlatched and go for my break. I always know when he’s been here. I can smell him. Like the sweet smell of the sea without the sea. And, you know, I swear on those nights there’s a smile on Sara’s face. I’ve listened to him sometimes from the doorway, talking to her. Sometimes he brushes her hair and she’s calmer. No one knows Luke like me and Sara do. He’s sweet, and gentle. I tell Pastor Shank about Mrs Wyss visiting and Abigail and Andrew, Esther on Sunday afternoons, but I never tell him about Luke. You promise you won’t tell?”

  “Why would Mr Shank not like to see Luke around?”

  “No one really likes to see Luke. He’s in trouble in the community ... but they’re wrong. He’s a good man. He has to do the things he does because the land is cursed. Nothing will grow there.”

  Locklear and Mendoza exchanged a quick glance at each other and returned their gaze to the unusual woman.

  “We promise,” Mendoza said.

  On the way out of the hospital Locklear knocked at Laura Miller’s air-conditioned room and opened the door without waiting for a reply.

  “Dr Miller, who pays for Sara Fehr’s care here?”

  Miller frowned but there was a faint smile to her lips, a slight thaw in her earlier frosty demeanour.

  “The government covers some of her care.”

  “Who pays the balance?”

  “That’s confidential.”

  “If it’s Samuel Shank, don’t answer,” he said with a smile.

  Miller said nothing so he closed the door quietly and made his way to the foyer where Mendoza was helping herself to free coffee.

  She handed him a cup and waited.

  “What did you think of Sara Fehr’s carer?” he asked.

  “Apart from the fact that she’s a little nuts, she’s vulnerable, she’s alone in the world and she’s in love with Luke Fehr?”

  Locklear laughed. Kowalski was right. Mendoza was sharp.

  “Mendoza, I want you to find out why Samuel Shank is paying thousands of dollars for the care of an ex-communicated girl whose family he doesn’t even like. Now let’s go see if Carter has broken his swinging arm lugging history books around the library.”

  Locklear had decided that the back booth of the large diner on North Liberty Street would become the lunch hangout-point for the team during what he felt would be a long, drawn-out investigation. That first time the three sat in the red leathered booth and Carter recounted what he’d found in the local Civil War records. Not one but two Fehr brothers, Joshua and Daniel, fought on the Union side. They returned from the Civil War changed from the children they were when they left their farm in 1861. Daniel, the younger of the two, aged just fourteen, was awarded a silver medal for his bravery on the battlefield. He did not fight, the record showed, but played the drum continuously while his comrades fell around him. Joshua, aged just sixteen, lost a foot through gunshot but returned home with Daniel to their father’s farm on the outskirts of Dayton in August 1866. The record showed that it took the boys nine weeks to get home after they were released from the prison where they were to be shot as traitors for fighting against the Confederates. Of note was the reference to their friendship along the road with a black Union solider named John Grant whom they helped hide on their farm for weeks until his capture by Confederate troops.

  “Sir,” Carter said, “the Fehrs wouldn’t want this getting out in the public domain. Shunned or not, it’s shameful for a Mennonite to fight – but to fight with the Union? This town has a long history of tolerance but it never went down well that they wouldn’t fight during the war. Hearing that local Mennonites not only fought but fought with the Northerners wouldn’t be appreciated.”

  “I think the Fehrs already know, Carter. That’s why they and the Wyss family were shunned. What happened to them when they got back?”

  Carter scanned his notes. “Joshua died from a wound infection almost three months after his return and Adam, who had remained on the farm, also died. Daniel survived and remained on the family farm until his death.”

  “What did Adam die of?”

  Carter shrugged.

  “Well, find out, Carter and find out about this black soldier Grant. I want to know what happened to him. This is important. I can feel it. I want to know everything there is to know about that family. Tomorrow we’ll start on Samuel Shank and I want to interview Andrew’s employer and see where the boy lived. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Sir?” Carter said meekly.

  “What?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

  “So?”

  “It’s family day. My wife and my son, we go to church and then to visit my father. I already missed time with them today.”

  “OK, Carter. Mendoza?”

  Mendoza shook her head. Her son was waiting for her and Sunday would be the only day she’d see him while the investigation was live.

  Locklear ran his hand through his black mane. “OK, well, I guess it’s just me till Monday.”

  Chapter 6

  Locklear was happy to eat alone in the motel’s diner on Saturday evening and spent the rest of the evening in his room where he went over the case until the early hours of Sunday morning. When he eventually slept, he imagined Luke Fehr falling down a dark hole on the land. Locklear saw himself at the bottom, arms outstretched, trying to break the young man’s fall. The whole time Luke was falling Locklear could see the face of Samuel Shank laughing as he pulled a sheet over Andrew Fehr’s dead body. When he woke he tried to work out what the dream meant but gave up over a cold coffee in his room. He felt agitated. Something was troubling his mind but he did not know what. He phoned the hospital where Dr Bosch’s understudy assured him that Andrew was still alive. Twice he lifted the phone to check on Sara Fehr but put it down again, unsure what to say if anyone answered. Sara Fehr had been in the same sorry state for seven years and the only change anyone could expect to hear was that she had died.

  He decided to go to Dayton station and go over the facts once again. He didn’t really need to see the investigation laid out before him on Carter’s tidy noticeboard. It was all in his mind, albeit less tidily than in Carter’s arrangement. In neat rows, Carter had the names of the five Fehr children with Andrew at the centre. A red arrow, in what he assumed was Mendoza’s scrawl, linked Samuel Shank to Sara Fehr, denoting the exorbitant fees he was paying for Sara Fehr with a question mark. Why? The addresses of each of the Fehr children were written in blue beneath their names – Abigail with the Wysses, Esther with the Pletts, Sara in Dayton’s Kindred Hospital and Luke of no fixed abode. Locklear wondered where exactly Luke’s no fixed abode was. The man did not look homeless to him. He was cleanly dressed and did not have the look of a man sleeping outdoors. Besides, there was a house on the farm which he could live in. It was another question he needed to ask: why and when the house and farm were abandoned.

  It was Andrew Fehr’s address that caught his eye: Nick Lombardi’s Car Yard, Harrisonburg. It couldn’t be. Locklear walked swiftly down to the reception desk where a female cop was on duty. He barked an order for her to type the business name into the internet. He hated computers, didn’t know how to use them, and with only a few short years to retirement, he had no intention of becoming familiar with them. A huge photo of Nick Lombardi shot up onto the screen, an online advert of him standing in front of a huge car yard, smiling.

  “Do you know who he is?” he asked the cop.

  She looked at the screen. “Yes, we got word from Harlem that he was setting up here. We’ve been keeping an eye on him. He’s clean. Business is legit.”

  Locklear looked at the face of Nick Lombardi. It was more than thirty years since he saw that face. Lombardi looked older. He was smaller and thinner and his hair was slightly greying but he
still had that smug look plastered all over his face. The son of a small-time hoodlum who worked as a mechanic as a cover for his stolen-car business, Lombardi was born into a life of crime. He married Rosa Nardoni, a local beauty whose own family had no association with crime, and took the innocent girl down with him. Word was she was pregnant so a quick Catholic marriage was arranged and the seventeen-year-old couple found themselves living in the back room of his parents’ house with a young son and no money. It wasn’t long before Lombardi found a way of making money. Three times Locklear tried to send him down for running narcotics in New York and three times he walked free with the help of expensive, Mafia-funded lawyers. It was no consolation that Lombardi’s son, who ran the business at grass-roots level, started to taste the merchandise and ended up hooked on heroin. Lombardi paid for his son to enter every posh rehab clinic there was but each time he got out he was back on the streets, scoring a fix – a life ruined like hundreds or thousands of unfortunate Lombardi victims. The saying “if you live by the sword” came to mind but it was his son, who people in the know said wasn’t the brightest light in the harbour, whose future was sacrificed on his father’s sword. Locklear wondered what became of the boy. Lombardi was a dangerous, ruthless man. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that he got Andrew mixed up in something that resulted in the young man’s hanging.

  “Legit, my ass,” he said to the cop who had lost interest in his search and had begun filing records at the back of the room.

  Locklear left the station and drove back to Harrisonburg where he pulled up across the street from Lombardi’s garage, which was located in the less salubrious part of town. It was exactly the type of place Lombardi would choose – among the vulnerable and destitute – easy victims to do his dirty work. As he walked across the street he saw the unshirted Lombardi, smoking a cigar and resting his bare arms on the white faux picket fence that ran around the front of the car yard.

  “I was wondering when you’d get to me. Heard you was here,” he grinned. “Long time no see, my friend.”

  “I’m not your friend, Lombardi,” Locklear spat. “What are you doing in this town?”

  Lombardi threw the half-smoked cigar on the pavement and let it smoulder. He straightened and walked to the opening in the fence. He pointed to the rows of expensive pickups.

  “Don’t you remember how I loved cars? They remind me of my old man.”

  “I mean – this town? Why here?”

  The smile slowly faded from Lombardi’s face. “To get away from it all,” he replied.

  Locklear noticed how faint his nemesis’s voice suddenly had become.

  “You want to come in? I’ve got a good bottle of Jameson. Your favourite, if I remember.”

  Locklear moved past Lombardi and took a closer look at the lot.

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Ah, a reformed man!”

  Locklear swung around. “Are you reformed, Nick? What are you really doing here?”

  A swing door opened. Rosa Lombardi hobbled out of her back door carrying two empty wine bottles and placed them in a garbage bin in the lot. Locklear was shocked by the former beauty’s appearance. She was painfully thin and her long black hair was now cut short and bobbed around her yellowed face in small waves. Her upper abdomen was swollen and she walked with the awkward gait of a woman in physical pain.

  Locklear turned to look at Lombardi.

  “Rosa’s sick,” Lombardi said.

  “I’m sorry,” Locklear replied and he meant it. Rosa was as much a victim of Lombardi as the people he sold drugs to. He had poisoned her life in much the same way.

  “Your son?”

  “My son died – a long time ago. In a back alley in Manhattan with a needle in his arm. Coroner said he was about three days under a cardboard box before anyone noticed. Rosa’s never been the same. She started drinking. We never had no more kids. He was everything to her ... and to me.”

  Locklear did not answer. He knew he should say he was sorry – but he couldn’t.

  “Anyway, Rosa couldn’t take that life no more so we split. Couple years we moved around but we drove through here one day and this yard was for sale so we bought it. Been here about sixteen years.”

  “I want to see where Andrew Fehr slept.”

  Lombardi escorted Locklear into the garage showroom and down a small, windowless corridor. A narrow metal staircase at the end of the corridor led up to a second level and housed the small apartment Lombardi provided for Andrew in exchange for a cut in his wages. It struck Locklear how most of the Fehr children lived at the back of somewhere: Esther at the back of the Pletts, Sara at the back of the hospital and Andrew at the back of a car yard which was probably a cover-up business for criminal activity. It was as though the world had no purpose for the motherless children so had stuffed them into the back rooms of other people’s lives.

  There was only one window in the small room which faced out onto the lot. The room held everything the boy owned and it wasn’t much. A single bed was shoved up against a windowless wall to make room for a two-cupboard unit at its foot. On the unit sat a two-ringed camping cooker, a kettle and one mug. Beside the bed was a small wooden locker on which stood three books on geology. Books again. Odd. And geology? Locklear lifted one and wondered why a boy like Andrew would be interested in the subject. A small fridge hummed beside the cupboard. There was no table in the room and a single chair parked against the far wall looked lost, as though it knew it should have a partner. An airless, bulbless bathroom to the right was only lighted by a skylight that did not appear to open.

  “Jesus!” Locklear said.

  “Hey, these Mennonites don’t want much – they like the simple life.”

  “Ex-Mennonite. His family were shunned.”

  “Him and me both!” Lombardi quipped.

  “Except you deserved it, Lombardi.”

  “Father Sheehan in Queens … if he’s still alive ... I made sure he won’t never forget me.”

  Locklear sat down on the neatly made bed. “Remind me how that went again?” He remembered well enough but wanted to keep Lombardi in confessional mode.

  Lombardi shrugged, lowered himself onto the single chair and began to talk.

  Rosa was pregnant with what would have been their second child. Like with her first pregnancy, his wife’s emotions fluctuated between bouts of uncontrolled rage and inconsolable weeping, and so he strayed from her and found comfort with other women in other bedrooms of other homes, leaving his wife and son alone, often for weeks on end. He always intended to come back. He thought she knew that but Rosa, after a particularly prolonged absence, terminated the pregnancy in a back-street clinic where no one would know her. He found her in New Jersey with relatives, a shell of the beautiful girl he knew, and took her back to New York where he tended to her day and night, trying to bring her back to the woman he had known her to be. Tortured by what she’d done, Rosa sought forgiveness in confession but was denied this from their priest, Father Sheehan, and so she took to her bed and spent her days under a cloud of drink-induced sleep. Lombardi did the only thing he knew how and went to the church, gun in hand. The only thing his plan achieved was a chalice full of lead. Sheehan called in the cops but eventually didn’t press charges. However, he did report to his boss, resulting in the ex-communication of both Lombardi and Rosa. That was thirty-five years ago and, as far as Lombardi knew, the Church no longer ostracised people. He didn’t care but Rosa did. Rosa still cared. Rosa cared, Rosa worried, Rosa fretted and got sick and everything that happened was a result of his, and not his wife’s actions.

  When Lombardi’s tale finally ground to a halt, Locklear stayed silent for a few beats and then asked, “What does Andrew Fehr do here?”

  “He cleans up, helps with repairs, drives the cars into the lot at night.”

  “Drives? I thought he was slow?”

  “Slow, my ass. I thought that myself when I hired him but, about two years ago, I had a break-in. I know what
you’re thinking. Who’d have the nerve to rob from me? People around here – they don’t know who I am but they do know I keep a loaded gun under my bed and I ain’t scared to use it.”

  “Thought you’d be shooting your mouth off about your Mafioso links?” Locklear said sarcastically.

  “Rosa, she prefers that people don’t know nothing and I gotta do what’s right by her. I gotta do what I can for her while there’s time.”

  Lombardi fell silent and Locklear waited.

  “Anyway, the cops come,” he went on. “They’re crawling all over my yard. First time in my life I got cops here for the right reasons. I’m spitting chips in the lot. Four cars missing and the till empty. Must have put two hundred bucks in the float that morning and it was a busy day – I had a sale on – sold around six second-hand cars and trucks ... mostly cash.”

  Locklear laughed. “Cash, huh?”

  “You can laugh. You got good reason but I’m legit, my friend. I’m a changed man. That’s why me and Rosa is here. We just want peace.”

  “What do the family say about your new-found life?” Locklear was referring to Lombardi’s three brothers who were all involved in a family business that you just don’t leave.

  Lombardi’s smile drifted away. “We don’t got no more contact with the family. We never even says where we was going. It broke my heart but it’s for Rosa.”

  Locklear almost believed him.

  “Anyways the cops come and they question me and they question the boy. They asks me how much dough was in the till. Course I don’t know. It’s broken – doesn’t add up right. A lot, is all I can say. Then they ask Andrew and he says straight out – $46,845.16c. Most was stuffed into a bag when the till wouldn’t shut no more but the jokers got it all. I went through the sales receipts later and he was only a couple of dollars out. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “You didn’t put it in a safe at night?”

  “I was still thinking I was in New York – thinking, like I said, who’s going to be crazy enough to fuck with me?”