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  DEAD BIRMINGHAM

  The Roland Longville Mystery Series #3

  Written by Timothy C. Phillips

  Kindle: 978-1-58124-088-7

  ePub: 978-1-58124-294-2

  ©2012 by Timothy C. Phillips

  Published 2012 by The Fiction Works

  http://www.fictionworks.com

  [email protected]

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission, except for brief quotations to books and critical reviews. This story is a work of fiction. Characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Book One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Book Two

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Sometimes we do things we shouldn’t. We can’t help it. We read someone else’s mail, we lust after our neighbor’s wife or husband, we pocket that money that was just left lying around; or maybe, if the shadow of anger overcomes us and the tender works of mercy fall away, we might even kill someone. It is a simple tragedy, and it occurs every single day, because we are, after all, just human. But even this most heinous of crimes is not always due to passion overcoming reason. No, some lose their lives at the hands of their fellow human beings not for greed or spite, but for arcane reasons. Even if we are the ones who set the whole thing in motion, we might not understand what is happening to us.

  As I said, we aren’t perfect, and it isn’t a perfect world. In fact, it’s a pretty dirty world. I get paid to wade through the muck; don’t ask me why. I have heard the cries of the widows. I have seen the killers sneer in court and go free to walk in the light of day. I have held the dying victims. And I have felt the knife of the hunted man.

  My name is Roland Longville. I’m a private detective.

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter 1

  One man stood alone in a room, cooking. In the pan was a thick, aromatic sauce, and he stirred it slowly, savoring the smell with an angelic expression of pleasure.

  Another man entered the room, without knocking. They could be brothers, each man a little over average height, thick with muscle, comfortable middles, green eyes, black hair. Their skin hailed from different climes, however. The first man was dusky olive, the other one pale.

  The man at the stove turned to the newcomer, steaming wooden spoon in hand, still coated with a patina of red tomato paste, bits of chopped vegetables clinging in the thick sauce. He looked the new man over. “Irish?”

  “Yeah. Italian?”

  “Yeah. The Irish are all right.”

  “I used to date an Italian girl.”

  The necessary words out of the way, both men nodded at each other. “You got the money?” the man who was cooking asked.

  “You bring the stuff?” the newcomer replied with a wry smile.

  “The stuff? Oh, I get it. You’re a funny guy, Irish.”

  There was no stuff. The men shared a laugh, like they were part of a comedy routine, doing a gag about crime. Funny stuff.

  The paler of the two shrugged. A habitual gesture, like he just didn’t really care. “Hey, that sauce smells great. What are you having with that?”

  “I thought maybe a Guinness and a baked potato.” They both smiled and looked at each other again. Another gag. Just two guys having fun, swapping stereotypical jokes.

  “Hey, I like you, Dago. You’re a funny guy, too.” He threw a bag down onto the counter. “You want to take a count?”

  The man he called Dago shrugged. “I better do that. No offense.” The man licked his spoon, picked up a towel and wiped his hands.

  His Irish brother shrugged again in response. No offense taken.

  “Did they say what it was they wanted?”

  “Sure. They need a man to go down south. Somebody lost something.”

  “What was lost?”

  “Something that belongs to our uncle.” The Irish eyes stopped smiling. No more gags. It was all serious business now.

  “Ah.” The man who was cooking reflected for a second. “But still, there’s a lot of green here. More than enough for a job like that.”

  “This time it’s a special job . . . there are certain special circumstances. Uncle wants whoever took his belongings taught a lesson.”

  The Italian man nodded slowly. “I understand. This is still quite a bit more than they’d need for that, even. I mean, the people that we usually use never see this kind of money.”

  “Say, you’re smart, too, for little Italy. See, this time Uncle wants to use someone outside of our neighborhood. He wants a specific guy. A guy you used once before. This amount is what this special guy charges up front. He gets the same amount after the job is done. That’s the old school way. They said to tell you that they want him again. They want ‘the foreigner.’ They said you would know who I meant.”

  The man who liked to cook nodded again, this time more slowly. He put the spoon down on the counter and shuddered. The Foreigner. “Yeah. I know who they mean.”

  Chapter 2

  It was a slow day. I leaned back in my chair and stared out my office window, watching a brilliant sun through a break in effervescent, fluffy clouds.

  The sound of someone entering my office caught my attention. I got to my feet and turned to face an elderly fellow who stood just inside the door. He was sweating, and obviously very tired. The old man examined me with a dubious look as he tottered toward me. It was a look I see often, because I am a big, brawny black man in my middle thirties with an ugly scar on one side of my face.

  The old fellow had to be pushing eighty, I figured. He wore a nice cobalt gray suit, tasteful but simple, and a mist of sweat covered his forehead from taking three flights of stairs on a hot summer day. His hair was a gray that had once been black, a fact attested to by a peppering of still dark hairs around his temples. His appearance was one of understated wealth, quiet sophistication. His suit was of a thin, comfortable material, accompanied by a pale, tea-colored tie. I thought that he must be a wealthy, but modest man, and one with a good tailor. He also looked a little afraid.

  He walked cautiously up to the desk, as if expecting me to pounce on him.

  “You Longville?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Why in hell you gotta put your office on the third floor?”

  I gave him a wry smile. My office was the only one still open for business in the Brooks Building, a five-story brownstone relic in the similarly vacant Brooks Plaza. The plaza had once housed Birmingham’s financial district, before the fifties, when the center of the city had moved further south. My office was in the only suite still fit for occupancy, and it was on the third floor. People frequently complained about the climb, as th
ere was no functioning elevator. However, the rent is so low that I don’t like to think about moving. Besides, I like it here. Sally’s Diner, my favorite eatery, is right across the street.

  Once, I’d had a secretary, but she met someone and fell in love. She got married about two years before, and I haven’t gotten around to looking for a replacement. Her desk, chair, and filing cabinet remained in the outer office; I don’t have the heart to remove them. And besides, it gives the suggestion, at least, that I’m not in the building alone. Sometimes. Just a little.

  The old man introduced himself as Mr. Malvagio, and began telling me his problem. “An item was stolen from me. It’s very old, and very valuable. Some kids took it; they did it for kicks, but they don’t know what they’ve got. The value of such things is not common knowledge.”

  He was a little old Italian fellow, picturesque, friendly looking. He told me that he’d been running his little antique shop on the lower Southside for twenty years, and that he’d never been ripped off before. I didn’t doubt him.

  “I just want my belongings back,” Malvagio said. “The police, they aren’t being helpful. They don’t think this matter is important. So I come to you, who I hear about on the television. You get the stuff back for me, I’ll pay you handsomely. I get the items back, nobody has to get in trouble, you see.”

  “So what makes this item so valuable?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you know about history, but this particular box was a jewel case, though now empty. The box bears the family crest of the Medici. They were a powerful family of the Middle Ages. ”

  “No kidding, the Medici? Whatever’s inside something like that must be worth a fortune.”

  “Dio. There’s nothing in the box, I tell you. But it is good you know about the Medici. The box, it is empty, but this is no normal box, you see. It was commissioned centuries ago by the great Lorenzo Medici to hold the Medici jewels, although they are now long lost. But the box itself is still priceless. This antiquity was my retirement. I am old, getting on in the world. Next year I take the thing to Italy to sell, and I come home rich, you see? I can at last retire. These kids who stole the box, they can’t sell such an item. To whom would they sell it? To some other two-bit thief? You see? I shudder to think some young idiot gives this to his girlfriend to keep her diary in, because he cannot fence it. You see?”

  “I see. So how did they manage to steal such a valuable antique from you?”

  “There were six of them, these kids, they came into my shop together. The shop is small, kinda cluttered, you see? They acted friendly, but I suspected that they were up to something, you know? I tried to watch them. Then, one of these girls, she acted like she’d gotten hurt, said she slipped and fell down. I went to see what was the matter, and they all ran out, in different directions. I’m old, I could not chase them all. They knew this, the little bastards. I came back, the girl was gone. They’re all gone, of course, and they took something. But the other things they took are of no matter, you see? Only the jewel case is truly valuable—no, no . . . irreplaceable.”

  “How long ago did this take place?”

  “Two days. I gotta get it back, you see.”

  “Well, can you describe them to me? These kids? Since they run in a pack, they might be easy to find.”

  * * *

  Easy to find. I laughed silently at my earlier presumption. When do you get old enough to stop having moments of self-assured stupidity, I wondered? Probably never, I decided. Now, I was almost sure that I had caught a twinkle of amusement in old Malvagio’s eye, when I had offered him my confident assurances that the case would be a simple one. Fat chance, he’d probably thought.

  I had made the rounds of certain contacts immediately after the old man had departed. I realized that to track down the kids who’d stolen the box from Malvagio’s Antiques, I would need to talk to people who were out on the streets a lot, fringe types. I’d started with the dope peddlers. I just figured that a bunch of dropout kids would sit around when they weren’t stealing, sucking on a bong and giggling at whatever was on cable. The place that kids like that would most likely be found was in the seedy North Side, where the sellers of weed and other such amusements plied their trade, so I headed there.

  I didn’t especially like that part of town, but I knew it well enough because I’d been a cop there. At dusk, the avenues crawled with the down-on-their-luck disenfranchised. Stealthy shadows crept from hiding and started their sordid rounds, police sirens started up, and it all went on until dawn’s return. People streamed in from Birmingham and parts beyond to get a little something that they couldn’t get at home. Some went home happy, some to jail, some to the morgue. Just another night on the North Side.

  On Fifth Avenue North, a man had been shot to death the night before, and his chalk outline was still there on the cement, accusing in the early dawn. Some passerby gave it an awed look and stepped religiously around it. Others, more hardened, did not even glance down as they smeared the outline with their feet. People died. Big deal.

  The hard red sun slid down, down, slanting red light into the faces of the people who rose late and lurked later. These were the night people, those who only moved when the daylight failed.

  The city was cut in half by a raised railroad trestle. The avenues to the north of that line became more lawless as they progressed. Women, and men too, sold their flesh, calling to passersby like the sirens to Odysseus. Street corner businessmen were everywhere; half had what you needed, the other half waited to take it from you.

  I headed toward a certain snaky corner of a certain North Side Boulevard well known for a run-down hotel where women were made available to those with no cash flow problems. There, a certain slim, handsome, light-skinned black man sucked a toothpick and leaned against a wall of the Pitt hotel, a former north side land mark turned flop and whorehouse, now known by the likely nickname, “The Pit.”

  The man appeared casual, but his eyes were constantly scanning, first this way, then that. Lyle “The Style” Carpenter, as he was known; had hard eyes that belied his boyish good looks. He turned his gaze on me just long enough to size me up. Then the eyes returned to their scanning.

  “What you need, Longville?”

  “Oh, nothing much, Lyle. Just looking for a gang of kids.”

  “Well, just hang around, that’s mostly what shows up around here. I’m sure a carload will be along in a few minutes.”

  “That’s funny, Lyle, but I’m looking for a certain group, not just any group. But I’m sure you knew that.”

  “What’s in it for me?” Carpenter said, the closest thing to a mantra he possessed.

  “There’s a reward out for one of them,” I lied. “A girl. You know the kind of cases I get . . . wandering daughters. I’ll cut you in if you help me find the little crew she runs with. Her parents want me to find her pretty bad.”

  Carpenter turned the hard eyes back to me and grinned. He relaxed, just an iota.

  “Man, what you trying to pull? You expect me to believe that shit? Come on. Why don’t you tell me what you really after.”

  I grinned back and let a laugh slip out. “That’s right, Lyle. I forget just how sharp you can be. My bad.” We stood for a second, neither speaking. Lyle scanned the street and I leaned against the wall beside him.

  Finally, Lyle sighed, “Alright, Longville, you’re bad for my business. You still look like a cop. But I guess you know that. Since it’s the only way I’m going to get rid of you, I’ll ask. What do you want them for, these kids?”

  “Alright, I’ll shoot straight with you. One of the kids is set to inherit some money. A lot of it. Kid’s a drop-out from some big college. If I find her and bring her home, I get a cut.”

  Lyle the Style was nodding now. “Okay, I see it. Rich kid, huh. Wants to get out and get into a little trouble. Now the parents are worried and want her back home.”

  “You got it, Lyle. And, of course, they are willing to pay for their loved one’s return.
”

  “I gotcha. So, you looking for a big cut?”

  “Any cut of big money is a big cut for me, Style.” I shifted to the man’s street name to remind him they were, after all, old friends . . . of a sort. “Reward, inheritance, either way, you help me, I’ll slide you a piece of my piece.”

  The Style’s nod became more vigorous. “So, tell me about this case of yours. These a bunch of white kids?”

  Chapter 3

  I drove away from the North Side shaking my head. Lyle the Style Carpenter had sent me on to the other hustlers, pimps, and pushers, and we both pretended not to know that a web of cell phone users all across north Birmingham was spreading the story like summer wildfire, long before I arrived to tell it all over again, promising pieces of a non-existent fortune to people who would only tell me what I needed to know. They wouldn’t tell me because they were good people, or concerned about someone’s safety, but because there was a sum money possibly coming their way if they could provide me with what I was looking for.

  I’m not a liar by temperament, or by habit, but in the parts of town where people lived or died by their wits from day to day, a human-interest story just never seemed to wash very well. People had a no-nonsense, what’s-in-it-for-me mindset, just like Lyle the Style, and they assumed their own motivations were generic to everyone else they came into contact with.

  Lyle Carpenter would never believe that I was doing something just for the good of it, so I had concocted the rich kid, big reward scenario. It had enough human darkness from all angles that Lyle, and all the subsequent denizens of the North Side, easily accepted it as truth.