Home Free (7 page)

I approached the counter and the uniform
said, “Yep?” without looking up from the fax that was coming
in.

“I’d like to see Jimmy Chang please.”

“Name?”

“Alexis Jordan.”

The cop picked up the phone and said
something into it, then waved me towards a bench. A minute later,
Jimmy C came through the closed door over to where I was waiting.
He looked the same as he had in high school. Straight black hair
cut short and spiky, round wire frame glasses over almond-shaped
black eyes, medium build and a killer smile. He was wearing a suit,
so I assumed he was a detective. On television, the ones in suits
are always detectives. I stood up and we hugged.

“Alex, hey, long time. You look better than
I’d expected.”

“Hi, Jimmy C. Well, most of the rumors aren’t
true -- I’m not dying.”

“Jack Murphy?”

I stifled a scream. “Doing some work on the
house.”

“I assume you want to take a walk?”

I nodded and we went outside. The station is
about two blocks from a little, tree filled park in front of the
historic old courthouse. It’s cleverly named Courthouse Park, and
because of the intense shade, it was about ten degrees cooler than
the surrounding area. We headed towards the park.

“You know anything about the body shop job?”
The paper hadn’t mentioned any detectives by name but simply
attributed all information to “department personnel.” For all I
knew, Jimmy C wasn’t even on the case. On the other hand, how many
detectives could there be in a town with only two Starbucks?

“Yeah, Morrissey and I caught that one.”

I assumed Morrissey was his partner. The only
Morrissey I knew was Abigail Morrissey, who graduated a couple
years after Jimmy C and me and whose claim to fame was that she had
so many clothes she never wore any outfit to school more than once.
Maybe she had a brother?

“I was wondering why you guys like my brother
and Danny Salazar for that.”

“I figured. Well, the obvious thing is the
arson. Danny’s a fireman, and firemen and pyros are often
synonymous. It appears to have been a professional job, and Danny
has the know-how. Kevin has access to the accelerants.”

“But what would their motive be? I mean, just
because they can do it, doesn’t mean they would do it.”

“Look, I know you’re worried about your
brother, but you need to stay out of this. It’s a police
matter.”

“I know, and I’m not getting involved. I’ve
been gone a long time, you know. I’m totally out of the loop, and
I’m just trying to piece together some information so I understand
what’s going on. Please? I promise, I never heard any of this from
you.”

He looked to the sky, shading his eyes from
the sun with his hands and thought for a second. Then he
nodded.

“Okay. We’ll call it old time’s sake. You
know Junior Salazar is out, right?”

I nodded.

“He got out earlier this year, and he’s
running the gravel yard. Says he’s legit,” Jimmy C rolled his eyes
before continuing, “and wants to expand. Apparently, he was in
negotiations with Jenkins to buy the body shop. He wants the land
to enlarge his operation. Jenkins has been looking to retire, and
Junior offered him a decent price, not fantastic, but fair. What we
think is that Jenkins decided to up the ante and Junior didn’t like
it and decided to send him a message. Evidently, the watchman
interrupted the festivities and got himself shot.”

“There’s no way Danny or my brother shot that
watchman.”

Jimmy C nodded, agreeing. “Chambers - he was
ID’d this morning - was shot with a forty-five. Danny has a
thirty-eight and a hunting rifle, all nice and legal. We searched
Junior’s apartment and the gravel yard office, and we didn’t find a
weapon. Of course, being a convicted felon, any firearm Junior had
would be illegal. Your brother doesn’t have a gun registered to
him, and we found nothing when we searched his place. I agree Danny
doesn’t seem like a killer. But blood is thicker than water, as
they say, and if Junior needed someone, who else do you think he’d
turn to?”

“I don’t know why you aren’t looking at
Junior himself. He was the one who wanted the land and had the
motive. And let’s not forget, he’s killed before.”

“We are looking at Junior. I told you, I
think Junior was trying to send Jenkins a message. I just don’t
think he sent it personally. But what we have on Junior is a lot of
speculation. He doesn’t personally have the know-how to put
together the kind of explosion that was used at the body shop. It
was a fairly sophisticated job. And so far, his alibi checks out.
There wasn’t enough of Chambers left to determine time of death,
but he called his mother at a little after eight. We know the
building exploded at about eleven-thirty. So whoever it was showed
up between eight and eleven-thirty, and Junior was at the Clampers
dinner Saturday night. Several people saw him there.”

“Junior is a Clamper?” The Clampers were a
sort of fraternal organization whose uniform consisted of garish
red shirts under black vests, and whose mission consisted of
drinking copious quantities of cheap domestic beer. Fifty year olds
were the youngsters of the group.

“Hunh-uh, the old man is. Anyway, the dinner
is a charity thing, you know. Open to anyone with twenty-five bucks
and a complete disregard for his or her liver.”

I thought about all this as we cut through
the park near a hot dog vendor. It smelled delicious. I motioned
Jimmy C to stop and fished some money out of my pocketbook. I
bought us a couple of dogs and sodas. I smeared mine with mustard
and relish. Jimmy ate his plain. It was a little before noon, so
the park wasn’t yet filled with hungry attorneys and clerks and
court reporters from the nearby court buildings, and we walked
without passing anyone else.

“If Danny and Kevin set up the explosion, why
would they hang around, waiting for it to go off and then waiting
some more for your boys to show up? That’s idiotic.” I licked
relish off my hand and sipped my Dr. Pepper.

“People have done stupider things. Last year
Mo and Mark Thompson poured about twenty gallons of gasoline on the
7-Eleven on Childs Avenue because they ran out of nacho sauce. The
fire department pulled up and found Mo standing there with an empty
gas can. Mark had gone back inside for gummy bears.”

“The Thompsons still eat paste and find
booger jokes hilarious. I don’t see Danny and Kevin quite the same
way.”

Jimmy C shrugged. “Maybe the explosion went
off before it was supposed to. It wasn’t on a timer, it was a
mechanical fuse. It could have malfunctioned, surprising them by
going off early. The county fire department is a block away, so
they probably didn’t have time to get away.”

I thought about my brother’s Harley, and I
had no doubt they’d have had plenty of time, if they’d been guilty
and trying to escape.

“Wait a minute,” I said, as a new thought
filtered through my brain. “What about Jenkins? What does he say?
Kevin told me Danny said Jenkins was the one who called him to go
out to the shop Saturday night.”

Jimmy C nodded. “That’s what Danny told us,
also. Unfortunately, we still haven’t been able to locate Jenkins.
Which is not a good sign. He’s divorced, lives alone. But no one
has seen him. And we haven’t found his car.”

Well, crap. I didn’t know what else to ask.
Finally, I said, “Did that Chambers guy have any enemies? Maybe
somebody just didn’t like him.”

“I’m pretty sure everybody just didn’t like
him. Hell, he sold drugs to kids. But that doesn’t change the fact
that we have a whole passel of evidence here.”

“A whole passel, hunh? Well, shit-howdy,
Jimmy C, that
is
convincing.”

Jimmy C grinned and looked at his watch. I
took the hint and thanked him, and he disappeared up the stairs
into the courthouse. I walked back to the police station parking
lot, finishing my hotdog, feeling as frustrated as I had when I
arrived. I didn’t think Junior’s alibi sounded that convincing. The
Clampers dinners were crowded, alcohol-soaked affairs. Junior could
have been there and left and returned later, and no one would have
been the wiser. I smushed the hotdog wrapper into the ashtray and
started the car.

When I pulled back into my driveway, Jack’s
truck was gone. I ambled up to the door and screamed when I almost
stepped on a dead mouse. It was hot enough to melt gummy bears
accidentally left in the car, so I guess it would be more accurate
to say I almost stepped on a dead, cooked mouse.

I considered leaving the mouse on Debbie’s
porch, since her stupid cat had killed it. But that would
necessitate carrying the gruesome thing even farther, so instead I
went in the kitchen and got a Tupperware bowl and lid, donned a
pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and tied a bandana around my nose
and mouth. Call me crazy, but I knew for a fact that rodents carry
the plague. I was a little iffy about Ebola, but better safe than
sorry. I went to the porch and scooped the little body into the
bowl, using the lid as a shovel. Then I sealed the lid and, holding
the bowl as far away from my body as my arms would allow, carried
it to the trashcan. I dropped the plastic coffin in the can, peeled
the gloves off and threw them inside, then untied the bandana and
threw it away too. I went inside and scrubbed my arms and hands,
then left a message for Debbie to call when she returned from
work.

I found a post-it stuck to my computer screen
that read, “Dinner seven o’clock”. I crumpled it up and threw it
across the room, missing the trashcan by a good three feet. I
checked my cell to see if I’d missed any phone calls while I had it
muted for my meeting with Jimmy C.

The first message was from my mother.
Something about how, under the circumstances, we should pull
together and have a family dinner tonight. The second was from
Kevin. Something about how, under the circumstances, he would
sooner pull out his fingernails with pliers than have a family
dinner tonight.

The third was from Pauline. “The first number
is a land line, and there were no calls to it at all Saturday
night. The second number is a cell phone. There was one call, at
ten fifty-four, originating from a pay phone at a liquor store on
Martin Luther King near the movie theater. I’ll be by after work.
We need to have a talk about Danny Salazar.”

Damn. Anyone could have called from the pay
phone. It could have been Jenkins, but it could have been just
about anyone else, too. And I’d venture a guess that Danny had
never spoken to Jenkins before and could not identify him by voice,
but had simply taken the man at his word. Jimmy C had to have known
about the phone call when I’d talked to him earlier. He wasn’t
telling me everything, obviously.

On the plus side, Danny wasn’t getting a lot
of calls from women.

I called my mother and told her I had plans
for dinner, which went over like a lead balloon, but I didn’t care.
I couldn’t fathom spending the evening listening to Brian’s
campaign platform, unless maybe I was bound and sedated. Besides, I
had a date with a man who had a big... truck.

I flipped the computer screen on and went
back online. I love the interwebs. I went to Google again, and then
sat there. I had this incredible search engine at my disposal, and
I had no idea what I was supposed to search for. I stared out the
window. A gray Ford Escort was parked at the curb in front of the
topless man’s house, and I wondered if it was a laundry service,
here to return all his shirts. Hopefully, they wouldn’t take away
all his pants. Other than that, the street was empty. After a few
minutes, a woman walking a scruffy, disreputable-looking mutt
appeared in my line of sight and then disappeared again at the
other edge of the window.

Dammit, Alex, think.

For the hell of it, I typed in Michael
Salazar, Jr. I got a few hits for a Michael Salazar, Jr., M.D. who
had written an article on penile dysfunction. I clicked on one of
the headings and a medical article appeared, complete with some
rather disturbing photographs. I guess photography isn’t always the
glamorous job of taking pictures of beautiful models. I clicked
back to get back to Google and did a search for the Minter
newspaper.

The Sun-Herald’s home page was laid out with
current news headlines, weather and sports scores over the bulk of
the screen, with the left column reserved for other links. There
was a search option, so I typed in Michael Salazar, Jr. again and
hit
go
.

The headline for an article from sixteen
years earlier popped up on screen, along with the notice that if I
wanted to read the article, I had to subscribe to the online
newspaper. I filled out the subscription page and dug my credit
card out of my wallet so I could enter the payment information. I
submitted the page and waited for the electronic response. Two
minutes later, I was looking at the article.

The facts were far less sinister than what I
had remembered. Basically, Junior had been drinking, a month before
his eighteenth birthday, at a dive bar that had a reputation for
violence, and had gotten into a drunken brawl with a much older guy
over a somewhat older girl. Somehow, a gun appeared, and the man
got dead. It was certainly bad, but it seemed to me more the result
of alcohol and a genetically bad temper than pure, unadulterated
evil. Would the Junior who killed a man in a drunken rage kill a
man in cold blood and set his own brother up to take the blame? It
seemed far-fetched, but people had done a lot worse, I
supposed.

There were no more articles on Junior
Salazar, and I couldn’t think of anything else to search, so I
returned to the Garden Tour poster. It took awhile, but eventually
I came up with a design that was not only more appropriate than my
earlier attempt, but actually pretty darn good. Lettering wound
around tree trunks like ivy, inviting one and all to the annual
event. It beat the heck out of cemeteries, so I emailed it off and
shut down the computer. I went to the kitchen to make a pitcher of
iced tea and a plate of cheese and crackers. As usual, I was
starving, and Pauline was due any minute.