I said, “No,” holding out the log to her. “If you’ll take a look at this, we’ll get out of your way.”
She sat, clinging to the edge of the sofa, her skirt sweeping the floor, looking as if she were waiting for me to drop a bomb on her. I handed her the log and flipped it to the page I had marked. I said, “Look at this entry and tell me where that camera is now.” And remembered to add, “Please.”
Thea blushed such a deep and furious red that I was afraid she was having a stroke. I repeated, “Where can I find this camera?”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she croaked. She leaned in close to me to keep Mike from hearing. “Am I going to get into trouble?”
“It depends, I suppose, on what you’ve done. You want to tell me about it?”
“We’re friends,” she said, meaning she and I. “I can trust you.”
“Of course you can.”
“He said it would be okay. He said because of the funeral and all that it would be easier this way, to just sign the equipment back in.” She looked up, unhappy to see Mike looking over her shoulder. “It is company property. I was afraid it would end up on the lost-and-damaged log if I didn’t take charge, and then there would be so many papers to get filled out and signed. I didn’t want to upset anyone. I never thought anyone would notice. I mean, it’s not like anyone ever reads my reports.”
“Where’s the camera, Thea?”
“In the equipment locker. He gave it to me and I put it away where it’s supposed to go.”
“Who is he?” Mike asked.
I chimed in, “Barry Ridgeway?” watching her face.
Thea was thinking hard as she shifted her gaze from me to Mike, and then off into a corner, where I suspect she hoped she could find an alternate scenario. Finally, she nodded, mute, as if any word she uttered would get her into trouble.
Mike was letting me do the talking. I asked, “How well do you know Barry?”
She broke out in strawberry-colored blotches. “We’ve been dating.”
“For how long?”
“Since Monday. I met him at Hector’s house last Sunday.”
I sat on the low table in front of her. “Until today, you never mentioned that you were at Hector’s on Sunday. Do you realize that you’re one of the last people to see him alive?”
“But Maggie.” She was suddenly exasperated. “You never talk to me at all. When would I tell you anything? What would I say? Here’s your overtime report, and by the way, I saw Hector for two minutes on Sunday?”
“Why were you at Hector’s?”
“Why am I ever anywhere? He needed some information, so I took it to him.”
“What information?”
“The weekly filming schedule.” Her flash of anger was quickly spent. “He said he needed the lineup so he could arrange time off from work to do the interviews.”
“Barry Ridgeway arrived while you were there,” I said. “Did he see the schedule?”
“I don’t know.” She dropped her chin to her chest and spoke to the floor. “He said he only had eyes for me. He walked me to the elevator. That’s when he asked me out.”
I felt sick. The shooting schedule included a contact number for every person listed. How easy it would have been for anyone with a copy of it to call Michelle or JoAnn. You call an old friend you haven’t seen for twenty years, and what’s the second thing you say after, “How have you been?”
Mike had wandered off toward the small kitchen. “Did Ridgeway go back inside?”
She nodded. “They were going out for dinner.”
I touched Thea’s soft shoulder. “I don’t have a number for Barry. How can I reach him?”
“I’ll give you his number.” She reached for a pencil off the desk and her Rolodex. “But he hasn’t answered all day. I don’t know where he is.”
There was more. There had to be. Just returning a camera wouldn’t be enough to make her hand shake so badly that she could hardly write. I said, “Where were you yesterday?”
She gulped, looking ridiculously bug-eyed when she glanced from me to Mike to the pencil in her hand. Mike, in the kitchen alcove, opened the dishwasher and looked inside.
“Someone answered the phone at my house yesterday,” I said. “Was it you, Thea?”
An embarrassed giggle: “I felt so stupid when I did that. It was an automatic thing. You know, the phone rings, you pick it up.”
“There’s nothing automatic, however, about breaking into someone’s house.”
“He said it would be all right.” She burst into sobs that made her body shake all over. “He said it was just to spare everyone’s feelings.”
“What was?”
“I made a mistake,” she said. “When I signed in the camera, I took out the tape that was inside and shelved it with the other project tapes. I numbered it, logged it, put it away where it was supposed to go. But he told me that the tape showed Hector getting shot and the other guy killing himself and if it got out to ‘Hard Copy’ or something it would traumatize Hector’s kids and the other guy’s mother, so it would be a kindness to just let him have it back and he’d get it to his police friends.”
“Did you get the tape back?” I asked her.
“I couldn’t find it,” she said, still emotional. “You and Guido keep moving the tapes around.”
Mike was going through the kitchen trash.
I asked, “Do you know what happened at my house last night?”
She gave me a bug-eyed stare again.
“Someone set a fire,” I said.
“It wasn’t me, honest, Maggie. You know I wouldn’t hurt anyone. All I did was watch videotapes in fast-forward all day.”
I said, “Thea, did it occur to you that if there is a tape of Hector’s death then there had to be a third person in the room when the shootings happened?”
“I’m not stupid, Maggie.” Finally, a flash of defiance from her.
“Did Ridgeway make promises to you?”
“Go to hell!” She was steamed. “Do you think that just because some idiot buys me dinner and fucks me that I would lose my mind and go set a house on fire? Well, think again. He didn’t use me, Maggie. He loves me. People like you never believe people like me can have lovers. Well, for your information, my man doesn’t need naked pictures to get a hard-on for me.”
Mike, who had wandered back in, missed the inference. But I saw the quick appraisal Mike gave her, comparing her, I suspected, to his memory of Ridgeway’s other women. Maybe I read him wrong, because he said, “You could do a whole lot better for yourself than an old con like Barry Ridgeway. And con is exactly the right word for the guy. Do you know where he is?”
“He was here last night.” With pride she said, “I made us dinner and then we made love.”
I thought of JoAnn Chin, and what she said about Frady during her interview: “Every time we fucked, I secretly wished we’d get caught just so everyone would know …”
Mike asked, “What time did he leave?”
“Around midnight. Maybe later.”
He said, “Uh-huh,” in a way that was a challenge.
“Midnight,” she repeated, firmly this time.
Mike stood, walked across the small room in five long strides. Before he went through the hall door, he said, “Mind if I use the rest room?”
“Sorry.” New blotches rose up her neck. “The toilet doesn’t work. I’m waiting for the plumber.”
“On Sunday?” He sniffed the air again. “Let me take a look. You don’t want to pay Sunday rates.”
“No!” Thea screamed, following him, with me behind.
Mike went straight for the laundry hamper and spooled out sheets printed with Batman scenes in deep reds and blues. The print masked the dark stains, but not the smell. I caught it every time Mike moved the sheets—the distinctive rustiness of blood.
“I smelled it the minute I walked in,” Mike said, holding up a stiff brown patch.
“I’m on my period,” Thea offered.
Without acknowledging what she said, Mike opened the cupboard under the sink and pulled out a trash can full of bloody dressings. Setting the can back, he turned to her. “How bad was it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Show me the bedroom,” Mike said, but it wasn’t a request. He had already brushed past us and turned down the short hallway. We followed and found him stripping back the bedding to expose a brown-stained mattress. The source had vacated.
He asked Thea, “You want to tell me again what time he left?”
She clamped her lips tight and shook her head, bouncing her ponytail, looking ridiculously awkward.
“Don’t make it hard on yourself,” he said. “Ridgeway knows how this goes down. Trust me, when we bring him in, he’s going to dump everything he can on you to make us go easy on him. Better for you to get the first shots in.”
“I know I don’t have to say anything without a lawyer,” Thea said. “Don’t harass me.”
“Have it your way,” he said.
Thea was too scared to cry. She stood as if numb when Mike used the bedside phone to call for uniformed backup and to request a Scientific Investigation unit. There were no tears even when he snapped handcuffs off his belt and hooked her up.
When she turned to me, I asked her, “How far will you go for this man who loves you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Will you go to prison for him?”
With an air of martyred pride, she said, “Depends.”
CHAPTER
24
“You need a little extra money, you give me a call.” Sal Ypolito wiped barbecue sauce off his chin. “We could use you on Saturday nights when the place really cooks.”
He was talking to Mike, not me, offering him a part-time security job.
The Hot-Cha Club’s sparse Sunday afternoon crowd seemed bored. So did the dancers. More interest was being given to the Rams game playing on the TV behind the bar than to the naked behinds up on the stage.
Mike seemed transfixed by a set of bounceless, augmented breasts swinging ever closer, like a pendulum, over his head. His answer to Sal’s offer was slow in coming.
“I don’t do part-time work anymore, Sal. Save the offer for one of the young guys with a mortgage and a couple of kids. I’m too old to work more than one job.”
I said, “What’s this too-old shit?”
He winked at me. “I need to save my strength for my domestic duties.”
“See that you do,” I said, and squeezed the top of his thigh under the table, felt the extent of the effect the dancer was having on the boy. I turned back to Sal.
“You’ve had some time to think about Mike’s question. You come up with an answer?”
“Yeah, sure. Why not? It’s not like I did nothin’ myself. I think sometimes, maybe if I say somethin’ about what happened that other time, maybe things coulda’ been different. So, what the hell, huh? You say nothin’s gonna come back on me.”
“So?” I said.
“So.” He shrugged. “I seen them in here last week. I didn’t recognize either one of them right off. Then they started talking to me and I knew it was Melendez and Ridgeway. Ordered Coke, the both of them. Jeesh, times have changed. Coke, can you believe that? Next it will be Ovaltine.
“Like I said, Ridgeway used to work security for me. He was a good bouncer, but he was also a lush, so I never knew if he was starting a fight or breaking one up. Then he had this deal going with Michelle, talkin’ about opening their own club. I never could figure that, I mean she musta’ had some hold on him because he was a smart guy and she was a bimbo.” Sal looked at me. “Sorry. Don’t speak ill of the dead—but it’s the truth.”
I said, “She wasn’t a businesswoman?”
“You could say that. Never got the big picture, you know? After a while, I couldn’t trust her—always stealin’ piddly little shit like napkins and glasses, like that was how she was going to stock her bar. Costs thousands to stock a good place and she’s nickel-and-diming my paper supplies. Don’t make me repeat myself.”
He leaned into Mike. “Every time Ridgeway came in, she’d dance raunchy for him like there was no one else in the place. I was going to let her go, ‘cuz I didn’t want to get shut down. I mean, there are limits to what the girls can do up there. But then he gets sent to prison and she settles back down.” Sal took another mouthful of chicken and talked around it. “She stayed on with me as long as she kept her figure. Never opened no club.”
“The night Frady died,” I said, “did Ridgeway come into the bar?”
Sal nodded, chewing fast. “Ridgeway came in late, real drunk. I told Michelle to go take him home. I didn’t want no fights.”
“He called you last night,” Mike said. In his shirt pocket he had the list of three calls made from my car after it was stolen. “You talked for two minutes.”
“Last night?” Sal thought about it. “I never talked to him. What time?”
“Three-forty-two.”
Sal’s eyebrows went up. “That was him? Some guy gets my machine last night after closing, starts screamin’, ‘Sal, Sal, pick up!’ Never gave no name. I didn’t know it was him. What did he think, I sleep here?”
“He wasn’t thinking. He was hurt.”
“What happened to him?”
I said, “I shot him.”
Sal backed up and gave me a horrified mug. “I knew better than to mess with you. But …”
“Call me if you hear from Ridgeway, Sal.” Mike dropped some bills on the bar as he started to rise.
Sal wadded up the money and stuffed it back into Mike’s pocket. “On the house, Officer. Just like the old days. Drop by for lunch anytime. I serve a nice buffet.”
Then he looked at me. “No firearms allowed on the premises.”
Outside again, when I reached for the car door, Mike gripped my arm. He had a deep furrow between his white brows. “No cop killed Frady.”
“Whatever you say,” I said. “But what about Hector? Did a cop kill him?”
“I don’t know.” When Mike drove out of the lot, he avoided looking at my side of the car.
Mike called in: the stakeout on Ridgeway’s apartment said there was no mail in his box, but the morning paper was still on his doorstep. The neighbors hadn’t seen him all day, and his car was gone. Mike had already asked for an APB on Thea’s missing VW bug. He added Ridgeway’s car to the list.
Three calls had been made from my car: to Thea, to Sal, and to Michelle’s sister Flora.
Freeway traffic was light all the way to Boyle Heights in East L.A., where Michelle Tarbett had lived. The surface streets were jammed with Sunday cruisers, the sidewalks full of family groups parading in their Sunday finery. All the little girls wore bright-colored ruffled dresses and shiny black shoes, and danced the way girls in ruffly dresses must, looking like so many flowers blowing along the sidewalks. Mike smiled as he watched them. When I touched his arm he said, “Little home wreckers.”
“They’re only babies,” I said.
“They’re home wreckers in training,” he said. “And ain’t they cute?”
They were cute. Much cuter than their young, worn-out-looking mothers.
From the street when we parked, we could see Michelle’s sister Flora inside her living room, sewing on a frothy white garment. When I knocked, she glanced up only long enough to see who I was, and then her head bent back to the clouds of lace spilling over her arms.
“May we come in and talk to you?” I asked.
“I don’t mind.” She bit off an end of thread the same way I had seen Michelle do it. “I got the flowers you sent. Real pretty ones. Looked nice at the services yesterday.”
“I’m sorry about Michelle,” Mike said, standing over Flora, watching her swift hands.
“Yeah.” Her chin rose a bare inch. “Me, too.”
“I know the police spoke with you, and you’re probably tired of all their questions. But I want to make sure we didn
’t miss anything. Do you feel up to some questions?”
“I don’t mind,” she said again. She glanced at me as she reached for her thread and rethreaded her needle. “You was talking to Michelle about that cop killing that they never caught the guy. I don’t want it like that for her, you know? It isn’t right for the bastard to get away with something like that.”
“I agree,” I said. I carried the chair from Michelle’s battered old desk and set it down next to Flora. “When I was here, Michelle received a number of calls. She wrote them all down in an appointment book. But when the police came to question you, you told them there was no book. What happened to it?”
“I know how she earned her money,” Flora said, almost scolding. “And I know what that book meant. It should have been buried right beside her. Put to rest. My sister is dead. I don’t want no police dragging her through the mud.”
“Where’s the book?” Mike asked.
“Yesterday before the funeral, I said the rosary for Michelle and threw that damn thing in the garbage. That’s where it belongs—in the garbage.”
“Where’s your garbage?” Mike asked.
“Out in back,” she said. “It’s still out there. But I ain’t going to touch it.”
“Mind if I look?” he asked, but he was out the back door before she had time to respond.
Flora shrugged. “What bit him?”
“He’s just the energetic type,” I said. I touched the lace edge of the garment and she opened it out for me, laid it across her lap so that I could see it, a very ornate baby dress of silk organza and re-embroidered lace with seed pearls, like a wedding dress.
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Is it for a christening?”
“No.” She made the sign of the cross. “For a funeral. The priest asked me yesterday, right after Michelle’s funeral, could I make something for a little baby Mr. Rojas found in the dumpster behind his market. I tell Father, I don’t mind. I have lots of leftover stuff around here, plenty to make a tiny baby a burial robe. I figure, if I couldn’t make the mother a dress for her wedding, at least I can do this for her baby. You know?”
77th Street Requiem Page 27
