THE DEAD SURVIVORS

BY KJ ERICKSON

For every Southern boy…there is the instant when it’s…not yet two

o’clock on that July afternoon…and it’s all in the balance.

--William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust

CHAPTER 1

At four o’clock on that December afternoon, the dim winter sun cast a shallow light across Joey Beck’s apartment.  Outside, the sound of heavy traffic was steady as the Friday rush hour began.  Joey glanced at his watch, then at the beckoning couch.  He had two hours before he was due to meet his dad for dinner.  Bone weary, he stretched out on the couch.

It was the darkness of the room and the silence from the streets that wakened Joey five hours later.  He sat upright as if shocked, his heart racing.  His hand groped in the dark for the stem on his watch.  The green light on the watch face flashed on.  It was after 9:00 p.m.  More than three hours after the time his father had said he’d call.

     Joey clicked on a lamp, stretching and shaking as he rose, using physical motion to assert conscious control over the netherworld of sleep.  What had he forgotten?  Was it Friday night?  Hadn’t they planned dinner for sometime after six?

     No message light flashed on the answering machine.  Joey punched the menu on the phone to check the call log.  Maybe his dad had called but hadn’t left a message.  Rapidly, he clicked through calls for December 6.  Only three calls all day—none from his dad.

     He dialed his dad’s apartment.  Four rings and the answering machine picked up.  Joey hesitated, then said, “Dad.  It’s Joey.  Am I missing something?  Thought we were having dinner tonight.  I’m at my apartment.  Call.”

     Now fully awake, Joey still felt shocky, like something was wrong.  For all his faults, Frank Beck didn’t change plans without letting you know.  Joey paced, wanting to take a shower, but not wanting to miss his dad’s call.  It struck him that he didn’t know who to call to check on his dad.  Six months ago he would have called his mother, and she could have told him with certainty what was going on.  Six months ago he could have called any one of a half dozen of Frank Beck’s friends, all of whom would likely know where Frank was and what he was doing.

     But a lot had changed in six months.  A wife of thirty-plus years, friends, an older son and daughter—all had gone on one-too-many roller coaster rides with Frank Beck.  Six months ago when the roller coaster went down—went down steep—they’d all opted off.  Everybody except Joey.

     Joey hesitated for a moment, then dialed his mother’s number.

     “Hi, Joey.”  Mona Beck had gotten caller ID after the separation.  She wanted to be sure that when she answered her phone, Frank Beck wouldn’t be on the other end of the line.  She’d told everybody she knew:  “You call and I don’t know the number or it comes up ‘private name,’ or ‘unidentified’—I don’t answer.”  What she didn’t admit to anybody but herself was that she wouldn’t answer Frank Beck’s calls because she didn’t trust herself not to see him again if he did call.

     “Mom—I know you don’t want to be involved in anything with Dad….”

     “That’s right, Joey.”  Her voice was hard, just on the edge of mean.

     “The thing is, Dad and I had plans for dinner tonight, and he didn’t call.  I worked a double shift starting at midnight last night and didn’t get home until almost four this afternoon.  I laid down, expecting to wake up when Dad called at six—we were going to decide when he called where to meet.  But I just woke up and he hasn’t called….”

     Her voice was tight, impatient.  “I told you, Joey.  Your father is no longer my problem.  If you don’t expect anything from him, he can’t let you down.”

     “Mom, you know he never says he’s going to do something with one of us and then just doesn’t show up.  He always calls.  That much you can count on…”

     The line was silent for moments.  She knew that Joey was right.  “You called his apartment?”

     “Of course.  I left a message…”  She didn’t ask if he’d called his dad’s cell phone, which meant she knew Frank Beck no longer had a cell phone.  Frank Beck had been the first person Joey knew to use a cell phone, and the cell phone was as much a part of Frank Beck as his right arm.  It was when Joey found out his dad hadn’t been able to pay his cell phone bills that he knew things were irrevocably bad.

     “And you tried the office?”  His mother’s voice was now a little worried around the edges.

     “The office?  He still has the office?”

     “I ran into Phyllis Quinn at Lund’s a couple weeks ago—maybe longer—”  She stopped.  He knew they were both thinking the same thing.  His mother couldn’t afford to grocery shop at Lund’s.  Old habits die hard, and she was feeling guilty.  “Anyway, Phyllis said she’d run into your dad coming out of the Dachota Building the day before.  She’d asked him if he still had the office there, and he told her that the leasing agent was letting him stay through the end of the year.  No phone.  Probably no electricity….”

     “Phyllis said there was no phone?”

     She was slow in answering.  “I checked.  I just wanted to know….”

     “Maybe that’s it, Mom.  Maybe he started working on something, forgot about the time, and not having a phone handy….”

     “Your guess is as good as mine, Joey.  Probably better.”

The heater was out in Joey’s car, and he shivered all the way downtown.  Joey wished his dad’s office was anywhere other than in the downtown Minneapolis warehouse district.  On a Friday night, the district’s bars and restaurants would be full and parking would be at a premium.  Then Joey remembered.  His dad used to park in the alley behind the Dachota in a space that came with the lease.  If his dad’s car were in the space it would make sense to go to the trouble of parking and going up to the office.

     Joey hit First Avenue North just as traffic from a Target Center concert was getting out.  Joey’s car crawled, his anxiety building with each traffic light that changed before he made it through an intersection.  Couples ran across the street between the cars, women dressed for a night on the town.  The women clung to their boyfriends for warmth and to balance themselves on spike heels.  These were people his own age, but Joey felt no connection to their high spirits.  He resented that any problems they had were easy enough to be obliterated by the energy of a Friday night.

     Finally reaching Fifth Street North, Joey swung right, drove a half block, and pulled into the alley behind the Dachota.  Without streetlights, it was like driving down a hole.  But even in the dark, Joey could see the dim gleam of his dad’s silver Jaguar.  A wave of relief washed over him—but seconds later he realized the car behind the Dachota didn’t explain why his dad hadn’t called.  All the parked Jaguar meant was that the bankruptcy settlement hadn’t taken place yet.

     Joey pulled up behind the Jaguar.  If you parked here on a weekday during business hours, you’d get towed before your engine cooled.  But after ten on a Friday night, with First Avenue traffic backed up, Joey had all the time he needed to get up to his dad’s fifth-floor office and back to the car.

     Getting out of his car, Joey looked up toward the fifth floor.  The windows were dark.  Which meant one of two things:  that the heavy black blinds in the office were down or that the office lights were out.  Joey thought about what his mother had said about the electricity probably being off.  If that was the case, what would his father be doing in a dark office with no lights, no phone, no functioning computer?

     Walking toward the back door, Joey checked his key ring.  The office key—which he hadn’t used in months—was still there.  Turning the lock, Joey pushed open the heavy metal door.  Immediately he was hit with the particular smell of the Dachota’s back entrance:  unvarnished wood floors, indigenous dust, and uncirculated air that collected under the high ceilings.

     Frank Beck had been among the first businessmen in town to renovate office space in one of the handsome old buildings in the warehouse district.  He couldn’t afford Class A office space for his start-up wireless electronics business, but after he saw the Dachota, it didn’t matter.  In its first life, the Dachota had been a warehouse that supplied farm implements to the prairies west of the Twin Cities.  Beck had signed a lease minutes after opening the door to the vast, derelict fifth-floor space and within a month had gutted the Dachota’s top floor down to brick walls and exposed vent work.  He’d covered the high, broad windows with heavy black shades.  When the shades were up, there was a spectacular 360-degree view that took in the downtown skyline in one direction and the Mississippi River in the opposite direction.

     Within weeks of Beck Electronics moving into the Dachota, a half dozen other businesses had signed lease agreements and the warehouse office boom was under way.  Frank could have taken an option to buy the Dachota and two other warehouse buildings for less money than a single lease in the Dachota was going for by year end.  But as usual, his too-scarce capital was tied up in a venture that was long on concept and short on business plan.  So he’d passed on an opportunity that would have made a fortune even Frank Beck would have been hard-pressed to blow.

The back halls of the Dachota were badly lit, and the silence late on a Friday night did nothing to relieve Joey’s anxiety.  He wound his way through the labyrinth of hallways to the freight elevator, pushed the up button, and heard the immediate clank of the elevator’s lifts.  The slow grind of the elevator’s gears filled the empty corridor, ending with a double thunk as the elevator landed on the first floor.  The double steel doors slid back, and Joey stepped forward, pulled the metal gate to the side, and headed out.

     Two things were wrong when the elevator doors opened.  The first thing was the black lacquer door to Beck Electronics.  It was partially open, with no light coming from behind the door.  The second thing wrong was the cold air Joey could feel coming from behind the partially open door before he was off the elevator.

     The cold hit him with a physical force as he stepped into the office.  Without thinking, he pulled the door shut behind him, closing off the single ray of light in the space.  Into the darkness he called, “Dad?”

     His voice hung in the air for seconds before being sucked into the void.  With his right hand, he felt along the wall for the light switches.  He flicked all the switches, but no lights came on.  He turned to reopen the door to regain the shaft of light, but already the deep darkness had caused him to lose his bearings.  He reached again for the wall, finding only empty darkness.

     He forced himself to stand still to quell the dizziness.  Joey thought about the layout of the office.  It was open plan with four space dividers and a couple dozen workstations scattered across the polished hardwood floors.  The only thing he could think to do was to follow the river of cold air to what must have been an open window.  Once he got to the windows, he could raise the shades and let in some street light.  You wouldn’t be able to read by it, but at least you could see the basic outlines of what was in the office.

     Joey started a careful shuffle in the direction of the cold.  He had taken a half dozen steps when he struck something.  It moved away from him as he reached for it, then swung back at him.  He couldn’t think of anything in the office that hung from the ceiling.  Reaching out, he stabilized the object.

     The first shape he recognized was a man’s hand.

CHAPTER 2

The message was on his desk when Mars Bahr walked into the squad room of the Minneapolis Police Department Homicide Division.

     Call Danny Borg.

     He looked at it for a moment before turning to see his partner, Nettie Frisch, come across the room from the direction of the employee lounge.  The message wasn’t in her handwriting, but he asked her anyway.

     “You know what Borg wants?”

     “Wasn’t here when he called.”  In front of her computer, Nettie immediately focused on the monitor.  She took a big gulp from a partially frozen bottle of Evian water and said, without looking at him, “He probably just wanted to hear your voice.”

     Mars sifted through the stuff on his desk that had come in while he’d been out.  Nothing urgent.  Things were slow.  Minnesota Nice was in ascendance; the city was in danger of losing its hard-earned sobriquet as Murderapolis.  He dropped papers back on the desk and glanced over at Nettie.  It struck him that something was wrong.  It took him a minute, then he said, “You’re wearing denim, Nettie.  What happened to the black-and-white only rule?”

     “Denim is consistent with the rule.  The reason I made the only-wear-black-and-white rule was to keep my life simple.  Denim doesn’t make my life complicated. Plaid would be complicated.  What I want to avoid is having too many options.”

     “There’s no such thing as too many options, Nettie.  Not in our business.”  Mars shifted his attention back to Borg’s message, the only thing on his desk with any promise of being interesting.  He stretched back in his chair and dialed the downtown command.

     Mars had worked with Borg on another case and had been impressed by Danny’s hustle.  Borg wasn’t the most sensitive guy around, but Mars had liked his commitment and energy.  Some cops, even good ones, went for the easy answers in an investigation.  Borg focused on hard questions.

     The duty officer in the downtown command said Borg was out on patrol, but offered to page him.  Mars hung up and looked at his watch, making a bet with himself that Borg would call back in less than five minutes.  Mars got up to walk back to the lounge for a Coke, but his phone rang before he’d made it out of the squad room.

     Danny’s voice was breathless.  “Special Detective Bahr?  I apologize for missing your call.”

     Mars shook his head.  One of Borg’s endearing characteristics was a deep capacity for reverence, which was fine except that Mars had become the object of Borg’s worship.  He’d told Borg to drop the title and call him Mars almost a year ago.  Borg’s response had been, “Yes, sir.  I’ll do that sir.”

     “Not a problem, Danny.  What’s on your mind.”

     Danny Borg’s voice lowered.  “Do you recall hearing about the guy who hung himself in his office last week?  There was a big article on the front page of the Metro/State section on Monday…”

     “I remember seeing the article.  Sounded like a slam-dunk suicide.  This the guy who’d gone bust, right?”

     “Yeah.  Frank Beck.  He’d lost his business, most of his family kind of backed off on him—and the ME’s office found out he had colon cancer when they did the autopsy.”

     “Yeah.  I definitely remember reading about it.  Homicide never got a referral—at least, it never came to me.  And it would definitely be my kinda case if someone thought it was a homicide.”

     Borg didn’t answer right away.  When he did, his voice had dropped another octave.  “No, there wasn’t any referral to homicide.  My sergeant’s decision. I was the investigating officer on the scene.  Got sent over when the nine-one-one call came in.”  Borg hesitated again.  “The thing is, sir, I did recommend a referral to homicide, but my sergeant said, ‘No way.’  And on the face of it, I can understand that.  It’s just that there were a couple of things I thought merited a second look.  But my sergeant is saying to leave things as they are.  He’s probably right….”

     “Tell me why you thought it should have been referred.”

     “There were two things.  A number written on the guy’s arm, and I couldn’t find anything that connected to those numbers.  No bank accounts, pin numbers, nothing.  That, and I couldn’t find where the guy got the fabric for the noose.  For that matter, I couldn’t find anyone who knew him who said Frank Beck knew how to tie a hangman’s knot.  What everybody said about him was that Beck wasn’t a detail guy.  He was a big idea man.  Was sloppy about doing anything that required a long attention span.  So I have to ask myself, how’d a guy like that tie a picture-perfect hangman’s knot?

     Mars didn’t say anything right away.  He bounced a pencil on his desk and thought about it.  His first reaction was that if Danny Borg had a gut feeling something wasn’t right on a death, that in itself was enough to bring homicide in.  And he agreed with Borg that questions about the number and the noose should be resolved.

     “Let’s do this.  Send me a copy of your report from the scene, the medical examiner’s report, and anything you took from the scene.  I’ll look it over.  If anything comes out of our review, we’ll open an investigation.  No promises, but I agree with you.  It sounds like we should know more than we do about the number and the noose….”

READ ALL OF

THE DEAD SURVIVORS

Coming in March 2002

St. Martin’s Minotaur

Copyright 2002 by KJ Erickson.  All Rights Reserved

ISBN 0-312-26699-5