The River Murders Read online

  Just as I got Edith to her feet and we turned toward the front, I noticed a woman in an expensive leather coat standing silently just inside the door. It took me a moment to realize it was the same woman I’d spoken to in Pennsylvania three weeks earlier. She just stared at us. That’s when my anger melted away. This woman was scared.

  As I held Edith by the arm, I felt her tense and knew that she had recognized her daughter even after two and a half decades. Edith took a tentative step forward. The few people in the diner didn’t even realize what was happening, but Alicia did. She wrapped my hand in hers and squeezed it.

  I watched in excited silence as Edith moved closer to her daughter. Suddenly Linda burst forward and hugged her mother. They both started to cry. So did Alicia. Damn it, so did I, but I was able to cover it well.

  They both plopped down in the booth closest to where they’d been standing, holding each other’s hands across the table.

  Then my phone rang and I saw it was my brother, Natty.

  I thought about ignoring the call. Now wasn’t the time and Natty wasn’t the person I wanted to talk to. I hate to confess it, but the scene made me really want to call my mom.

  But guilt got the better of me and I answered the phone, “Hey, what’s up?”

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I need your help. I need your private investigator skills.”

  My brother wasn’t much for compliments. I was skeptical and knew my brother could be a jackass. I always had to be on the lookout for pranks.

  I said, “What kind of case?”

  “A homicide. I’m not kidding, Mitchum, I need your help right now.”

  I looked up at Edith and her daughter, who were chatting like family should, and told Natty, “I’m on my way.”

  If there was one thing I knew about my brother, it was that he had a knack for making mistakes. And it seemed like this one was deadly.

  CHAPTER 2

  I DIDN’T GENERALLY look forward to seeing my brother at his place of business in Newburgh, about twenty-five minutes south of Marlboro. He worked out of a bar called the State of Mind Tavern that didn’t seem to ever close. It was a dingy, one-story building that spanned a full block, with the parking lot on one side and a busy, industrial street on the other.

  As I pulled my beat-up station wagon into the lot, I saw my brother standing by the back door talking to two other men. My brother is two years older than me and thin as a rail, mostly from a life of cigarettes, skipped meals, and little sleep. Despite resembling a sickly marathon runner, he’s surprisingly tough. My theory is it has something to do with being a minor-league dope dealer in a tough town like Newburgh.

  At the moment, though, he looked like he might be overmatched as he exchanged angry words with two guys. One was built like him and the other was a Hispanic guy who obviously spent way too much time in the gym; he had arms like legs.

  I walked up casually, not wanting to give away my intentions. But I knew it might annoy my brother that I didn’t look worried.

  The big man turned and saw me and waved me toward the back door of the bar, saying, “Move on. This has nothing to do with you.”

  I noticed my brother had a bloody lip and a red splotch across his left cheek. That pissed me off. Generally, I was the only one allowed to pound on my brother once in a while.

  I said, “Everything all right, Natty?”

  “Does it look like everything’s all right?”

  I admired my brother’s bravado in the face of adversity.

  I said, “You guys think you could step away from my brother for a minute? Maybe we can talk about the issue.” I was serious, even though I probably was coming across as a smart-ass.

  The smaller guy, wiry like my brother, who I’d already determined was in charge, said, “Ain’t nothing to discuss. Got nothing to do with you.”

  “Except, like I said, he’s my brother. Mom expects to see him in one piece.”

  The wiry guy looked over his shoulder and said, “Manny, deal with this.”

  Everyone talks about how big guys are scary, but if you’ve been in a couple of fights, you learned a few things about dealing with giant, angry people. I let this behemoth turn toward me and square off just so I could get an idea of his abilities. Usually, when you’re that big, you don’t bother to learn the subtleties of martial arts or boxing. This guy was no exception. He balled up both fists and took a wide stance in front of me. I could’ve played with him and made it look like I had real skills, but instead I used an old, simple trick. I lifted my left hand high in the air and watched his eyes follow it like a puppy watching a ball. Then I used my right leg like a punter and brought it up right between his legs. The big man crumpled onto the ground while he tried to suck in some air.

  The wiry guy spun away from my brother and started to reach under his shirt. My brother shoved him hard toward me, and I lifted my elbow to catch him square in the chin. When he stumbled back onto the ground, I stepped over and found the small, cheap .380 automatic pistol he was reaching for. I dropped the magazine and ejected the round in the chamber. Then I threw the thing down hard on the street and was shocked to see it skip along the asphalt and drop into a drain. It was like I had scored a goal in hockey. Without thinking about it, I reached up and my brother gave me a high five. Just like when we were kids.

  I helped the giant man with the sore crotch stand and then grabbed the wiry guy by the arm.

  “You guys need to be on your way. You can talk to Natty some other time.” Somehow, I knew the nice, rented Cadillac parked right next to us was theirs, and I opened the door and stuffed the big guy behind the wheel.

  After a minute, when they slowly pulled out of the parking lot, my brother said, “Thanks, little brother.”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “He’s the guy I think committed that homicide I called you about.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I WAITED UNTIL the two men had pulled away in the rented Cadillac, then turned to my brother and said, “Is that what you called me about?”

  “No, something else.”

  “You aren’t gonna tell me?”

  “It’s nothing. Business dispute. No big deal.”

  “Who in the hell were they?”

  Natty was rubbing his face where the big man had slapped him. “One of ’em is Alton Beatty, my competition and the main suspect in the homicide I called you about.”

  “Who’s dead? I mean, aside from the usual homicide victims that pile up here in Newburgh.”

  The way Natty hesitated made me realize the case really did mean something to him. Maybe it’d mean something to me as well.

  Natty said, “Pete Stahl was shot and killed on Friday.”

  I cocked my head. “Petey Stahl from Highland Middle School?”

  “The same.”

  I felt my legs go a little weak and leaned on the hood of an old Dodge. “I haven’t talked to him in a few months, but seriously? I really like that guy. Even though he became a …”

  “Drug dealer?”

  “I’m sorry, Natty, I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Natty said, “I know.” Then he surprised me by putting his arm around my shoulder.

  Petey was a year older than my brother and three years ahead of me, but I remembered him as a decent football player and one of my brother’s few friends who didn’t pick on me too much. When I got out of the Navy, we would play basketball and complain about my brother.

  “Does Mom know?”

  “Yeah, she’s the one who suggested I call you. She and Pete’s mom talk all the time and his mom is heartbroken. Not just because he was killed, but because no one seems to care. The police aren’t even doing anything about it.”

  I thought about the boy I knew and the man who still seemed like a decent guy, no matter what he did for a living. Now he was dead.

  Natty said, “He was a good friend and a good business associate.”

  I shook my head and said, “You mean dope dealer? At least ca
ll it by its name. I understand what you do, but I don’t like it.”

  “Jeez, Mitchum, this isn’t the 1970s. No one calls it dope anymore. That’s insulting to our customers. We enhance recreational activities. Or, if you have to label us, you can say ‘drug dealer,’ but the word dope is offensive.”

  “So why is Alton Beatty a ‘competitor’ and Pete Stahl an ‘associate’?”

  “Because Alton is overly ambitious. That’s why I think he killed Pete. They both focus more on meth and some of the more synthetic stuff, and the rumor was they made a big score in the city about a month ago.”

  “What kind of score?”

  “Money and maybe something else. Sounded like some kind of recipe for a variation of meth. I know there’s some Canadian dudes who’re really interested in it and would pay big money to have it.”

  I was still wrapping my head around the fact that a kid I used to play football with was dead. This was tough to swallow and started me thinking about how it could’ve been Natty. I saw Pete’s mom every once in a while and knew I wouldn’t be able to face her if I didn’t get involved. More than that, I had to give her some closure.

  Natty said, “There’s one other thing I should tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You know how Pete was married?”

  “Yeah, but I never met her.”

  “She’s a beautiful girl named Katie. She wasn’t involved in his business and still doesn’t know exactly what he did for a living.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Natty said, “I think I’m in love with her.”

  CHAPTER 4

  THE FIRST THING I wanted to do was get a look at the scene of the murder. That also got me away from the bar where my brother did business. His life depressed me.

  I knew the streets of Newburgh pretty well because I’d lived in Marlboro most of my life. Newburgh is a bigger town that is visually interesting, with grand brick buildings and a downtown that could’ve been a background for movies about small-town America.

  Now the city has seen some rough times and the only neighborhoods that are livable, at least if you have kids, are in the suburbs. The three-story brownstones have blue tarps on the roofs and duct tape patching cracks in the windows.

  Route 9 or, as we call it in the city, South Robinson Avenue, weaves through a mixture of industrial, commercial, and residential areas that no longer give the impression of a prosperous city.

  Natty told me Pete had been shot Friday night in front of a well-known drug house on North Miller Street near Farrington Street. It was just a block east of Downing Park, which covered a little bit of the inner city in a blanket of green peppered with some baseball fields. I guess you could call it their version of Central Park.

  My ten-year-old station wagon, with its shocks that’d been worn out from carrying bundles of newspapers in the back all the time, sounded like an old diesel trawler as I puttered through the city. I parked more than a block away so I wouldn’t attract attention.

  Two boys, around six, with a small black dog stared at me as I stepped out of the car. I smiled and said, “Hey, boys.”

  As I stepped onto the sidewalk, their dog trotted over to me and started sniffing my leg. “He smells my dog on me.”

  “Where’s your dog?”

  I thought about Bart Simpson, my mutt, who preferred the heat of my house to the winter wind, and said, “My house.”

  “Why do you have a dog if you don’t bring him with you?”

  “That is a good point and I’ll remember it.”

  As I walked along the uneven sidewalk, I noticed several sets of eyes on me and reached in my pocket to feel the familiar weight of my commemorative Navy knife with a combat blade. Generally, I only use it to open boxes and cut the straps on bundles of papers, but I had used it to defend myself. I briefly thought about my Beretta back at the house, but I was never one of those guys who felt like he needed to carry a gun all the time. That’s how a place like this city got to be a place like this city.

  The spot where Pete died was on the steps of a three-story brick brownstone that looked abandoned. The vacant lot next to it had been used as a dumping ground for God knew how long. Plastic bags were stuck on the sagging chain-link fence and piles of trash blew all over the lot. An old pickup truck rusted near the back fence.

  A line of young men on the porch of the house next door watched me. Despite the cold, a couple of them sat on a sagging couch wearing nothing but wifebeater undershirts. They were showing off how tough they were.

  I had to shake my head and mutter, “Idiots.”

  There was still evidence of the crime scene right on the steps leading up to the front door of the house. I saw pieces of police tape, and the dark stain on two of the steps had to be blood. No one bothered to clean places like this very thoroughly after a murder. It was the same everywhere. Only this was a place where someone I knew had died.

  I crouched down to examine the stain and looked up to see if I could figure out what had happened. The little I had learned on the internet about the shooting said that Pete was unarmed and stumbled onto the stairs with two gunshot wounds to his abdomen. At the time, people had been renting the house, but they had all fled the night of the shooting. It had been nothing but a drug house for the past decade, and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it. The whole situation made me ashamed of my brother and how he made a living.

  As I crouched there, drawing the attention of the neighbors, a dark-blue Ford Crown Victoria pulled to the curb directly in front of the house. All it needed was lights on the top to advertise it was a police car. I stood slowly and turned as the car door opened.

  A big man, an inch taller than me with more meat on his shoulders, emerged from the car, looked at me, and said, “Hey, dropout, what do you think you’re doing in the big city?”

  CHAPTER 5

  I STARED AT the Newburgh detective, who wore a heavy coat over a cheap shirt and tie, and remembered his name was Mike Tharpe. Last time I’d seen him, a few months ago, he’d also thought it was funny to call me “dropout.” I guess it was true, I had dropped out of Navy SEAL training during my final week. But it wasn’t exactly a decision on my part. Either way, I accepted my past. Now I needed some questions answered and I didn’t need to antagonize a cop, especially if he was trying to jostle me.

  As the detective stepped toward me, one of the men on the porch made a pretty good pig grunt. It carried across the open space. The men on the porch all started to laugh.

  Tharpe looked up at the man who had made the noise and said, “You must’ve heard that last night from your mom when I was visiting. Sometimes she likes to make a sound like an elephant, too, ya know?” That sent an uncomfortable silence through the group. The man who had made the sound was clearly furious. It made no impact on the veteran Newburgh detective.

  Tharpe looked at me and said, “If you’re looking for your brother, he usually hangs out at a bar on South Robinson Street.”

  “You mean the State of Mind Tavern? I know. I talked to him a little while ago.”

  “What brings you here? I mean to this neighborhood.”

  “My brother said a friend of ours was killed here.”

  “You knew Peter Stahl?”

  “He grew up in Marlboro.” For some reason I didn’t want this guy to know how much Pete meant to me. It was like he hadn’t earned the right to know my pain. I said, “My brother told me what happened and I was curious about his murder.”

  “Murder! He died of natural causes.”

  I stared at the detective and said, “I read that he was shot to death.”

  “That is natural causes for a dope dealer.”

  “Drug dealer.”

  “What?”

  “No one calls it dope anymore. They call themselves drug dealers.” I usually didn’t split hairs but did when it annoyed someone in a position of authority.

  CHAPTER 6

  THARPE SIGHED, THEN took a few minutes to explain wh
at had happened. He led me toward the house, pointing through the open door into the hallway.

  “Near as I can figure, one of the local dopers”—he paused and looked at me—“sorry, drug dealers, thought Stahl was moving in on his territory and made a business decision.”

  We climbed the five stone steps to the landing in front of the door. The men from next door were acting like we didn’t exist, which was fine with me.

  Once we were in the hallway, Tharpe looked at me and said, “Did you know Stahl well?”

  I calculated my answer carefully. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “My brother says you guys aren’t doing everything you could to solve the shooting.”

  Tharpe stiffened at that. “If I did everything I could on every shooting in this screwed-up town, I wouldn’t have time to sleep.” His face turned a little red. “Peter Stahl sold dope and got shot. It’s the natural order of things. Happens all the time. That’s what we call the ‘price of doing business.’”

  We stood in the door and looked out onto the street. Tharpe explained to me how Pete had stumbled out of the vacant lot next door before he fell onto the steps. He said, “Stahl had been shot twice at close range. No one heard the shots and only a couple of locals acknowledged the body. By the time the crime scene was secured and police arrived, the only evidence was a body on the steps and a pistol that was found in the lot. It’s being examined, but there’s no telling what they’ll find, or when. Our backlog would blow your mind. One of our narcotics guys thinks it might have been Stahl’s own gun.” He looked out over the neighborhood. “I don’t know why we try so hard. There were no casings recovered, no witness who claimed to have seen anything or heard the shots, and all we got was an anonymous call to 911.”

  I thought about the facts: gunshot death of a known drug dealer. No witnesses. There wasn’t much I could do. The police had declared the death a homicide and the listed potential motive as drug-related activity. That was about as much work as the Newburgh police intended to put into the case. I knew I had to at least do something. I wasn’t sure I could face Pete’s mom or sisters otherwise. They needed to know that someone had looked at the case.