Inherit the Dead

in most towns in America, except that out here the luxury-car dealerships seemed to outnumber the convenience stores. But he’d miscalculated—traffic was nearly at a standstill. Directly ahead of him was a minivan with teenagers hanging out the windows, yelling at a fancier car full of equally drunk youngsters in the next lane. The cop in him knew that before the day was out somebody was going to get hurt. Perry reminded himself, with difficulty, that hewas no longer on the force, and that drunk, spoiled, rich kids were no longer his problem.
    His ex-wife used to accuse him of never letting his guard down, of always looking at the world with cynical cop’s eyes. He would answer, stupidly but accurately, that the world had a way of living down to a cynical cop’s expectations of it. On vacation Noreen would beg him to turn off his suspicion of everyone they passed for a week or at least a day, and Perry tried. Unfortunately, the hard truth was that in those days he trusted nobody but his family—and, since the divorce, nobody.
    Now those cop’s eyes were active again, counting off the landmarks according to their role in his working life as a PI since leaving the force: here the staid golf club where he had teased out the key clue in the Thursby investigation; there the lively garden shop where the serial killer Derace McDonald, under another name, had lived his fugitive existence. That one, he reminded himself with a shudder, had begun as a missing-persons case, too. So many of them did: it was as though America had become a vast network of lonely unhappy people so desperately seeking escape into their pasts that they were willing to spend good money to get there.
    As far as Perry was concerned, it was a missing-persons case that had got him booted from the police force—although that wasn’t the way People of the State of New York v. Bayer was filed. If you looked it up, Bayer had nothing to do with any missing person. It was a simple drug-possession bust, and Perry was involved because whenever his lieutenant was down on him, he wound up loaned to Narcotics, with explicit if unspoken instructions that he be assigned to forced-entry cases, preferably no later than second through the door.
    And his lieutenant had been down on him a lot.
    The case was in all the papers. Theo Bayer was a political firebrand and the pastor of one of the biggest churches in Harlem. Everybodyrunning for office in Manhattan made the pilgrimage to his town house on 145th Street, until the day the Narcotics boys broke down the basement door and found enough money and drugs to put him away for twenty years. Perry wouldn’t have given the case two thoughts had he not gone to dinner at the home of his uncle Jackie, by then retired from the force, who had trained the man who captained the 30th Precinct. Uncle Jackie told him that his protégé found the whole drug bust very strange. There was no narcotics activity to speak of around 145th Street, and he had never heard of a dealer of such prominence keeping a stash in his house. The drugs didn’t make any sense.
    Perry had been in on the bust. He assured Jackie that everything was clean and aboveboard. But he wondered. Sure, Bayer was already in plea negotiations. Sure, the brass had assured the press that one of the biggest dealers in Harlem had gone down. Still. Two of the Narcotics detectives on the scene, including the one whose informants had fingered the pastor, were men Perry had long suspected of being on the take. They made a nice side income by arresting dealers and stealing part of the stash. Not too much—always within a counting error, usually less than a tenth. So if the experts said the street value of the haul was a quarter of a million, they might bleed off ten or fifteen thousand—nothing that would ever be missed. Perry had gone to his uncle with the tale, and Jackie had laughed and told him boys will be boys. Not that he approved, the former Captain Christo hastily added. But it’s a little bit like the way the factories recycle their pollution to make electricity.
    Said Uncle Jackie.
    But Perry couldn’t leave the case alone. He’d been in plenty of drug dens, and the preacher’s well-kept town house had none of the telltale signs: no reinforced interior doors, no hollowed-out mattresses, no sweet sickly smell from the drains. When a public man went down, his fans always denied his guilt, but this time thebeseeching had the ring of truth. Bayer didn’t live