Back on Murder (17 page)

Watching him sweat, a thought occurs to me. If he’s just made a buy, then he had no idea he was under surveillance, which means he hasn’t intentionally been avoiding the secret location where he’s stashed Hannah Mayhew. The odds that this kid has her locked up somewhere are thin to none. But maybe he knows something that can help. Cavallo peers inside the bag. “Wow, James. I guess you just re-upped, huh? You must have quite a little operation going.”

I lean over for a look. Inside, a one-pound brick of what I’m guessing is Mexican schwag. Not the finest herb, but given the quantity there’s going to be no trouble calling this possession with intent to distribute.

I lean over the hood to get him eye level. “Partner, you just stepped in it.”

“That’s not mine,” he says halfheartedly.

“So your fingerprints aren’t going to be all over it?” I point to the cameraman, who waves at Fontaine. “This gentleman here with the camera has been watching your every move. That means we’ve got every step of the process, from the time you picked up the bag and put it in your hatchback to right now.”

He drops his head and starts sniffling. When he lifts it, sure enough there are tears streaking his cheeks. “Aw, come on, man,” he says, begging with his eyes. “You gotta be kidding me. It’s just weed, that’s all it is. It’s like, what, a misdemeanor, right? You don’t gotta call out the swat team and everything on account of something like this.”

Cavallo dumps the brick onto the hood. “We’re talking about a pound here, James, not a gram. That’s possession with intent. You divide this up into ounces and hand it out to your little dealin’ friends, is that it?”

“Look at that brown brick weed,” I say, nudging the plastic-wrapped packages. “I wouldn’t make brownies out of that. It’s a shame to go down for such low-quality product.”

The insult dries his tears a little. He’s about to protest when one of the Sheriff ’s Department men takes his arm. “Come on, G-Unit. Let’s read you your rights.”

They Mirandize the kid, then put him in the back of a cruiser to sweat. Once he’s stowed away, we all gather for an impromptu powwow around the BMW’s hood, everybody looking to Cavallo for direction.

“This isn’t about building a case,” she says. “The clock is ticking, and if that boy knows anything we need to get it out of him fast. If that means he walks on the drug charge, are any of us going to lose sleep over that?”

Headshaking all around. If there are any qualms in the group, they go unexpressed. Cavallo notices the surveillance guy’s camera.

“That thing’s not on, is it?” she asks.

Everybody laughs.

“Okay, so let’s get him into an interview room and see what happens.”

As the team packs up, I wander over to the unit where Fontaine sits. He leans his shoulder against the rolled-down window, sipping air through an inch-wide gap in the glass.

“You all right back there?”

“It’s pretty hot.”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’ll only get worse.”

The Northwest interview room is surprisingly spacious and well appointed. The table has all four legs, the chairs match, and the stains on the floor look dry and non-toxic. There’s even cold air blowing from the registers overhead. Fontaine slumps forward, his head resting on the table. We observe from the room next door, where the video feed is channeled onto a monitor. Lieutenant Mosser sits just to the side, where she can study the image closely, while Villanueva stands in the back corner, arms folded, signaling his unwillingness to get in the way.

“He’s not sleeping, is he?” Wanda asks.

Cavallo leans closer. “Sounds like he’s crying.”

There’s an old saw about the interview room: Whoever sleeps while he’s waiting for the detectives is obviously guilty; only the innocent are plagued by fears. I don’t put much stock in that kind of thing. Leave people in a bare room for long enough and they’ll do all kinds of strange things.

“What do you think this kid can give us?” I ask.

Wanda studies me a moment. “That’s what you’re going to find out, Roland. You think you can handle that?”

“Never mind him,” Cavallo says, taking my arm. “Come on.”

When we pop open the interview room door, Fontaine gives us an apprehensive smile. Cavallo takes the seat across from him, and I sit on the corner, cheating my chair over a bit so that I’m technically on his side. He isn’t sure which one of us to face, so he splits the difference.

We begin with small talk, Cavallo asking about his nice car, what his parents do for a living, how he likes school and what he thinks about his classes. His recent suspension for drug possession is glossed over – only happy or neutral topics for now. Hannah Mayhew isn’t mentioned. His answers are tentative at first, but the more questions she pitches across the plate, the more he loosens up and enjoys hitting them. This isn’t so bad, he’s probably thinking. He might just get through this.

“You seem like a smart guy,” Cavallo says, getting him to nod along in agreement. “You’ve got a lot going for you. It’s a shame to see you in a situation like this, James. We’d rather be going after the real baddies, you know. Not giving guys like you a hard time.”

“That’s all right,” he says, perversely apologetic. “You gotta do your job. I understand.”

“Maybe you could help us, James. And maybe we could then help you. Are you nervous, James?”

He nods.

“I’d be worried, too, if I was in your shoes. Buying bricks like that, you know what it tells me? You’ve got more money than sense. And you know something, Texas is not exactly lenient when it comes to drug sentencing.”

Fontaine mumbles something.

“What was that?”

“I’m a minor.”

“In the eyes of the Penal Code, you’re an adult.”

“Welcome to Texas,” I say.

Cavallo smiles. “Problem is, if you’re slinging that stuff at Klein, you’re probably looking at a penalty enhancement, too, for distributing near a school.”

“To actual minors,” I add.

“Exactly. This is bad news, James. For one thing, say goodbye to that nice Beemer of yours.”

I nod in agreement. “That’ll be seized for sure.”

“You can do that?” he asks.

“Sure we can. Or . . .”

“Or what?”

“Or we can work together on something,” she says. “Like I told you, if you help us, maybe we can help you, too. How does that sound?”

His eyes widen. “Help you with what?”

Cavallo leans forward, ready to make her pitch. “The thing is, James, we’re willing to deal, but first we need to know if you have anything worthwhile. If there are any open cases you can help us with.”

And just like that, he rolls over. I wish I could credit our interrogation skills, but James Fontaine would have cracked for anyone.

“You want the names?” he asks. “ ’Cause I can give you some names. The dude I bought it off of, my connection, I can give you him. And the ones at school that actually do the dealin’? I can give you those, too. Me, I’m more like what you’d call a middleman, you know? The real bad guys, like what you want, I can give you some of those.”

Cavallo takes everything down, the various names and nicknames, the way he breaks the brick down, who it goes to, the number he calls when he wants some more. He knows other dealers, too, and where they get their supply. By the time he’s done, he’s leaning over the table helping with the spelling of names, saying who to underline and who to cross out. He’s almost exhilarated, working with the cops, thinking his problems are about to go away.

I can’t help feeling sorry for the kid.

“All of this, James,” Cavallo says, tearing the page off her notepad. “It’s worthless. It’s nothing.” She balls the page up and tosses it over her shoulder.

Fontaine’s jaw drops in shock. He glances to me for help as if to say, Look what she just did. I shrug. You asked for it, son.

“There’s something else I want you to help us with,” she continues, ignoring his devastated look. “You know that girl who disappeared, the one from your school?”

His right eyelid starts to flutter. Cavallo and I exchange a look. This kind of nervous tick is what we’re after. Now that we’ve chatted awhile, getting a baseline feel for how Fontaine behaves normally, the signs of stress that erupt under questioning will serve us as guides.

“What’s that girl’s name?” I ask, as if I can’t quite think of it.

Fontaine blinks harder, then wipes his hand over his face.

“Come on, James,” Cavallo says. “You know her, don’t you?”

“You mean Hannah?”

“That’s right. Tell me about Hannah.”

He shrugs. “Tell you what?”

“For one thing, how do you know her?”

“From school.”

“Are you two friends?”

“No, we ain’t friends.” He expels a puff of air. “Not hardly, not no more.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“On account of what she done to my car, her and that other girl.”

Not the answer I was expecting. “And what was that?” I ask.

“Busted the windows out,” he says, swinging an imaginary bat through the air. “Keyed up the side.”

“When did this happen?”

He hears the skepticism in my voice and rolls his eyes. “You the police, man. Look it up.”

Cavallo jumps in. “You reported it?”

“Of course we reported it,” he snaps. “You gotta report it for the insurance. And we told them who done it, too, but that didn’t matter obviously. They didn’t do nothing about it, did they?”

Cavallo scribbles a note, then tears the sheet off her notepad, walking it out the door. While she’s gone, I give Fontaine a stern but paternal look.

“Hannah seems like a nice girl,” I say. “Why would she do something like that to your ride?”

The question makes him thoughtful. Sometimes a pause is strategic, buying time to invent an answer, but the way he starts rubbing his neck and studying the suspended ceiling tiles, I’m guessing he’s never stopped to wonder about this.

“She is a nice girl,” he admits with a nod. “In her own way. I liked her at first. I mean, she’s pretty fine looking, right? And underneath all that Jesus talk, she could be pretty cool sometimes.”

“You liked her.”

He shrugs. “She was all right. But all that religion and stuff – it’s fine for some people, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judgin’ or nothing – but it gets old, you know what I mean? Feeling like you the pet project, always needin’ to be dragged into church. And then she got all, like, clingy, you know?”

Cavallo reenters, pausing on the threshold. She has a new stack of papers in her hand. When she sits, she starts shuffling through them. “James, I have a question about your phone. The one we found you with, that’s with Cingular, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But you have another phone, don’t you?”

“I got my home phone.”

“Another mobile phone, I mean. What’s the number to that?”

He glances at me, confused. “What she talking about?”

“Your other phone,” I say.

“You already got my phone. I don’t got another one.”

Cavallo shakes her head. “You don’t conduct business on that phone, do you? The one your parents pay the bill for?”

“I’m seventeen,” he says. “I don’t conduct no business.”

She reaches down to the floor and starts unfolding the pile of notes he gave her a few minutes ago. “This looks like a business to me. What were you doing last Thursday?”

“I don’t remember. Why?”

She sits back. “You’re not being very cooperative, James.”

“What you want me to say? I don’t remember what I was doing. Probably nothing, since they suspended me from school.”

“Let’s talk about the car,” I say, breaking up the rhythm. “You never did tell me why she’d do something like that.”

He turns his chair so he’s facing me, ignoring Cavallo across the table. “Prob’ly ’cause of the weed they found in her locker.”

“So that was yours?”

“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”

Cavallo taps her pen on the table. “Why’d she think you did?”

He turns toward her. “Like I said, she was interfering with my game. I was, like, ‘you need to back off,’ and she was all uppity about it, you know, so we ended up having some words. That’s it, just words. And she was all crying and everything, and saying how she cared about me.” When he says
cared
, his shoulders tighten. “She was living some kind of fantasy in her head, I guess, thinking there was something more between us than there was.”

“Did you ever go out on a date?”

He laughs. “Man, she wears one of them rings – what’s it called? A promise ring?” He shakes his head. “Shawty’s saving herself, you know? Why would I take a girl like that out? Nothing in it for me.”

“You’re a class act,” Cavallo says.

He smiles her way. I liked him better when he was crying.

“So you told her to back off,” I say, “and suddenly some dope turns up in her locker. She assumes you put it there to get her in trouble, so she trashes your car?”

“Her and that other one. The Katrina girl.”

“Katrina who?” Cavallo asks, making a note.

He scrunches his face up in contempt. “No, not Katrina who. That New Orleans girl that was Hannah’s friend.” He edges toward me, man to man. “Talk about messed up. It’s that girl you need to be talking to, if you wanna know what happened. She was the instigator.”

Cavallo’s pen is still poised. “This girl have a name?”

He shrugs. “She got one. Don’t mean I remember it.”

“Evey?” I ask.

His eyes light up. “That’s the one. Talk to her. She’s one of those people seems normal, then all the sudden they just freak out on you. I told Hannah she needed to get clear of that one, but the girl don’t listen to me.”

Cavallo stands. “Let’s take a break.”

When it came to ratting out his friends, Fontaine seemed only too helpful, but on the subject of Hannah Mayhew, his answers strike me as evasive and confused. Not that I think he strangled her and buried her in his backyard, or has her locked up in his bedroom closet. Now more than ever, I’m convinced she ended up in that West Bellfort house, bleeding out on the dirty bed. Only I don’t know how she got there. If Fontaine had picked up his brick from some Crips, we’d have a direct link, but he went to the wrong neighborhood, Latin King territory if it was anyone’s at all.