Back on Murder (43 page)

He responds to my jibe with a tug of the wrist, drawing the handcuffs securing him to the interview table taut.

“At least loosen them a little bit,” he sighs.

“Sorry about that, but last time we met, you got pretty rowdy. It’s for your own good. I don’t want all those deputies outside to have to come in here. They didn’t look too fond of you, to be honest. Here I was thinking you were a trusty, some kind of model prisoner.”

“You the one who put me back in here,” he says. “Don’t expect a man to make your life easier when all you do is make his harder.”

“I’m not asking you to make my life easier. I just want you to make it harder for Frank Rios. Remember him?”

Coleman’s brow lowers and his cheeks puff up. He remembers.

“Looked to me like you knew him pretty good,” I say. “Where’s he stay, huh?”

He smiles at the question, shakes his head. “Hey, send that other cop back in here, man. At least she’s pretty to look at.”

“I would, but she’s sensitive. I don’t think she appreciated what you said.”

“It was a compliment, man.” He gives a one-handed shrug, jiggling the handcuff again. “You can’t lock a man up like this and expect him not to say nothing when a piece of
that
walks through the door.”

“Oh, I’m sure she was flattered.”

It’s been five minutes since Cavallo walked out, either feigning offense or really feeling it. Either way, we’d been getting nowhere and he was using her presence as an excuse. Things needed a little shaking up.

“The way it’s supposed to work,” he says, “is I have something you want, so you give me something I want in return. Like a trade, man. Why I gotta explain all this?”

“I thought I had something you want. Revenge. You told Rios he’d be dead, so as long as he’s out there enjoying life, he’s making a fool of you. Now, if I knew where he stays, then he’d be in here, too, and maybe the two of you could work out your issues.”

“Our issues? You mean, like therapy?”

“Something like that.”

“So let me get this straight. The trade you’re offering is, I tell you where to find him, and you’ll send him to jail so I can shank him? They gettin’ all this on tape, man?” He laughs at his joke. “Here’s what I don’t get, though. When they made it a crime to snitch out your homeboys? You ain’t gonna send a man to jail for that. So what he done, man? You at least gotta tell me that.”

“You want to know what he did?”

“Man, how many times I gotta say it? Yeah, I wanna know.”

“You want me to tell you?”

He throws up his free hand, slumping back in his chair. “Mr. March, you didn’t used to be this slow. What happened, you have a stroke or something? Can’t you understand plain English no more?”

“Murder,” I say.

He sits forward, eyes narrowing. “Who he killed?”

“Nobody you know.”

“That boy Octavio? I heard about that.”

“No, not him.”

“Who then?”

“A girl, Coleman. He killed a teenage girl.”

His eyebrows raise. “He killed her? You talking literal or metaphorical? ’Cause I don’t think literally he killed nobody. It’s Little Evey you talking about, right? The one always followin’ him around.” He shakes his head. “I mean, what he done, it’s bad, but it ain’t the same as killin’.”

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I want to pounce on him, dragging out everything he knows, reaching down his throat with my fist if I have to, but the worst thing I can do is let on that I’m excited, or even interested.

“So you’re sticking up for him now, Coleman?”

“I ain’t stickin’ up for nobody, but if you was in the same kind of bind, you might see it different. You say he didn’t kill Octavio, but if anybody had a reason, it’s him. Man, he loved that girl for real. Drove all the way to New Orleans to get her back, that’s how much. Somebody take your woman like that, like she just another installment on the payment plan, what you gonna do then? Yeah, he killed him.”

“He didn’t,” I say.

Now he looks confused. “He told me he was gonna. I talked to him right after he left Octavio. He said he gave over the money – not all he owed, but a nice chunk he got from moving some product – and Octavio, he goes, ‘That’s a pretty little thing. She can stay here and work some debt off, too.’ And I go, ‘What you gonna do?’ I thought maybe he was wanting me to back his play, only that’s not my thing, right? But he’s all like, ‘I got it handled already. I got it taken care of.’ ”

“You thought he meant he was going to kill Octavio?”

He looks at me like I’m wearing a dunce cap. “What else you think he meant? Like I said, you’d do the same thing.”

“Where’s he stay, Coleman?”

“Listen,” he says. “Since I been in here, I been thinking. So what if he’s snitching to the police, huh? He’s all right. What I said, that was words spoken in anger, without due consideration. I don’t wish nobody no ill. There ain’t no hate in me at all, not no more. It’s wrong to be a snitch, and it’s for sure wrong to leave that girl behind instead of throwin’ down right there, but what’s he gonna do? Answer me that. He said there’s, like, four or five of ’em, and they got guns.”

“Coleman, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen good. I’m not talking about Octavio Morales, and I’m not talking about Little Evey, either. The girl he killed was somebody else, a friend of hers. He shot her. He shot her three times with a .22. Right here” – I mark the spot on my own body with a fingertip – “and right here. And then he put the barrel against her temple and put the last one right here. In cold blood, Coleman. Now, are you going to sit here and try to defend that, or are you going to tell me where he stays?”

But he’s not ready to roll over yet. “Why he done it?”

“Does it matter why?”

He clamps a hand over his mouth, looking down at the table through slitted eyelids. I sit there and let him stew. Whatever I can say, I’ve said it already. The rest is up to him. If Cavallo were back at the table, she could try to work on his sympathies. She could whip out that cross of hers and tell him if he wants to get right with Jesus, it’s time to talk. But all I can do is level with him man to man and hope it’s enough. Part of me wishes she would walk back in so the burden wouldn’t rest on me alone. But she’s not going to sit here and be spoken to like that any more than I could sit through Hannah Mayhew’s funeral, thinking of my own girl in the casket the whole time.

“Listen,” he says, then lets out that sweet long sigh every interrogator will tell you is music to the ears, the sound that means he’s about to give it all up. “The thing is, there ain’t no one place he stays. But I know a couple you can check. He’s got this cousin named Tito – ”

“We know about that. He isn’t there.”

“All right. Did that cousin tell you he’s gotta van? Frank borrows it sometimes, and when they was looking for him that’s what he’d do, just pull over somewhere and sleep in the van.”

“We’ve got the van,” I say.”

He nods. “Before he start paying him again. That’s why he went, to get clear of the man. He was like, ‘I’ll pay you, but you gotta leave me be.’ Only that ain’t how it worked out, I guess.”

“Besides the van, where would he stay?”

“There’s some motels he’d go when he had money. And a couple of people he might stay with sometimes – including me, before this happened.” He jerks the cuffs again. “Give me that notepad and I’ll write some things down.”

I slide the legal pad across to him along with a pen. He hunches over and starts writing. I should feel relief, even optimism, but the longer it takes the less likely it is that Rios will be holed up at any of the locations. I was hoping he’d have a fixed abode, some kind of hideout known only to him and Coleman where we were sure to find him.

He hands the pad back.

“Now, Mr. March, on account of all this cooperation here, you gotta do something for me, right?”

I stand and head for the door. “I can put in a good word – ”

He laughs. “Whatever. That ain’t what I mean. Listen here. My grandma, every Saturday morning she walks over to Emancipation Park and sits on a bench there. She reads her psalm and she prays, probably for me. She can’t come up here, and me . . . well, I don’t like to call from here, neither. But you could tell her a message for me.”

“What message?”

“That everything’s all right,” he says. “Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I go to church every Sunday and sing in the choir.”

“Do you?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes. “You can tell her that, man. I helped you out.”

“Fine,” I say, tapping the edge of the pad against the table. “I’ll tell her.”

Cavallo waits outside, arms crossed, still steaming from Coleman’s earlier baiting. She asks what I got out of him and I tell her. When she hears I’m supposed to assure the grandmother that he’s a choirboy, she snorts in derision.

“There must be a different definition inside.”

While detectives from my squad work Coleman’s list, trying to bring Frank Rios to heel, and Lieutenant Bascombe sweats Jiménez personally in Interview Room 1, I pay a visit to the crime lab garage, where the white panel van has been carefully gone over, every surface scrutinized, every fascia removed for testing. The technician walks me through the results. The dried specks we saw through the window are indeed blood, and Luminol tests show smears all over the interior, especially under the plywood.

“He scrubbed it out pretty good,” the tech says, “but when I shined the black light on it, the floor just lit up.”

Removing the plywood, he also recovered a single spent shell, a tiny, crimped .22 caliber casing. Rios knew to collect them, but missed one in the rush.

“When we unloaded the painting supplies, we also found rolls of plastic they use as drop cloths. We’re seeing if we can match the ragged edge up with the sheet her body was rolled in. Might not work, but it’s worth a try.”

I nod in agreement. “What about the gun?”

“No sign of it.”

Back upstairs, a group of spectators is camped out in the monitor room, watching Bascombe’s performance.

“How’s he doing?” I ask.

Ordway sits up front, paws folded over his belly. “He’s just staring at the poor man. It’s unbelievable. Tito talks and the lieutenant just stares him down, so Tito talks some more.”

“Anything good?”

“He’s admitted to keeping a Ruger .22 under the seat of the van.”

“It’s not there now.”

He nods. “He says it’s got to be Rios who took it.”

“Does he know where Rios is staying?”

“Naw, but he offered to go undercover and find him.”

“For real?”

“The man’s desperate at this point. He also says Rios might have hightailed it back to Old Mexico.”

“I doubt that. Remember, I spoke to him. The kid’s got no accent. If he wasn’t born here, he definitely grew up here. It’s not like he just crossed the border. I saw his driver’s license.”

“And illegals can’t get those.” Ordway smiles at my naiveté.

“Well, if he is south of the border, Mack, we’re sending you down to get him.”

“Be my guest. I’m overdue for a vacation.”

Back at my desk, I stare at the computer awhile, then find myself flipping through Joe Thomson’s sketchbook, tracing the lines of the now-familiar face with my fingertip. While I’m daydreaming, Aguilar taps me on the shoulder and says the captain wants to see me. I knock on the boss’s door and he summons me inside.

“March, we’ve had our differences. You haven’t always made things easy for yourself around here, not recently. But I’ve had a good feeling about you the past couple of weeks. Kicking you down to the task force was probably the best thing I ever did.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“I’ve talked to Bascombe about this, and we’re on the same page.”

I nod uncertainly.

“To make a long story short,” he says, “I’m putting you back on the board. Starting tomorrow, you’re on rotation like everybody else. No more special assignments. No more loaning you out. You’ve proven yourself.”

He reaches across the desk to shake my hand.

“No more suicide cop?” I ask.

He hesitates at first, then smiles. “Right. No more.”

The heavens haven’t exactly opened up and no choirs of angels sing, but the firm pressure of the captain’s handshake goes a long way. Light-headed, I turn toward the door.

“Sir,” I say, pausing on the threshold. “My cases aren’t down yet. We don’t have Keller. We don’t have Rios. The way Wilcox is handing out immunity, Salazar will walk.”

“It’s a matter of time, that’s all. Your work on this . . . everything before pales in comparison.” He glances around, retrieving his copy of
The Kingwood Killing
from the shelf behind him. “This pales in comparison. Really. Good work.”

“Thank you.”

The door closes behind me. The farther I get from it, the less his confidence reassures me. We know what happened and we can pretty much prove it, and by some standards that’s enough, even if no one spends a day behind bars. The detective work is the same, either way. But there are things you can live with and things you can’t.

If Rios left his girlfriend behind as part of a payment to Octavio Morales, and then he put three bullets into Hannah Mayhew for trying to help her friend, the idea of him walking away, growing old somewhere in Mexico or under another name here in the States, in this very city where a man can walk in plain sight for decades without being recognized for who he is, that concept is unacceptable. If the world works that way, I want no part of it.