That’s how Ricky is with Sebastian.
If I were keeping score, I would chalk one up for Ricky.
But then I see Sebastian lying in the suitcase again, and I realize that it’s more than just adorable.
Much more.
“Laurie, I need to ask you something.”
She’s asleep, so I’m touching her arm as I talk.
She wakes up, and I see it takes her a second or two to gather her bearings. She’s in bed, I’m coming to bed, and I’m waking her up. This is not exactly breaking new ground. “If it’s what I think you’re going to ask me, the answer is no. No chance. Not a prayer.”
“Is sex all you ever think about?” I ask. “What about love, and caring, and human connection, and friendship?”
“Those are things you’ve read about?”
“I saw them in a TV commercial; it might have been for a phone company. But this is really about something else. The night that Pete called us, and we went to Ricky’s house, you went inside by yourself.”
“Right.”
“Where was Pete?”
“He was downstairs, talking to the forensics people.”
“And where was Ricky?”
“At the neighbor’s house,” she says. “Remember, you went over there a few minutes later. What’s going on?”
“When you and Pete went to the neighbors, Pete was carrying a suitcase.”
“Right. That was Ricky’s.”
“Who packed it?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I guess Ricky did.” She thinks for a moment, remembering. “It must have been Ricky, or maybe Danny, because when Pete and I went up to his room to get his stuff, we were surprised that the suitcase was packed.”
She just answered the key question, but I press the issue. “So Pete hadn’t been involved in the packing, or told him to do it?”
“I wouldn’t think so, not based on Pete’s reaction.” Then, “So they were already leaving.”
“Right. When Ricky said his father told him they were ‘going to see’ his stepmother, I thought he meant that they would be seeing her at some point. Now I think he literally meant they were going to see her, probably that night.”
“But we don’t know where she is,” Laurie points out. “And if she was in contact with Danny, and they had arranged in any manner to see each other, then she’d have to know by now that something happened to him.”
I nod. “And it wouldn’t be hard to find out what happened. Yet as far as I know no one has heard from her, and Ricky’s sleeping down the hall in our house.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“That Juanita Diaz is somehow involved in this. I have no idea how, but I don’t buy that all of this, with Pete, and Juanita, and then the murder, wasn’t somehow connected. I don’t know which side she’s on, but I’d bet anything she’s a player.”
“You think Danny was killed to prevent him from going to see her?”
“I doubt it. I think he was killed to put Pete out of commission, and a secondary reason might have been that Danny had become a loose end that needed to be tied. But I also think it’s more likely that Danny was trying to get Ricky out of danger, rather than bringing him toward it.”
“So what’s the next step? Should we ask Ricky who packed the suitcase?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to. I’m going to see Pete tomorrow, and confirm that he didn’t tell Ricky to pack the bag; otherwise it had to be Danny. Then I’ll check on any progress finding Juanita; she might well be a key.”
“You could call Pete now. I don’t think he’s getting much sleep these days, and he wouldn’t mind your waking him anyway.”
“No, if there’s one thing that Sam has taught me, it’s that you can’t trust phones or email to be private. It can wait until the morning.”
She nods. “Okay. You coming to bed?”
“You starting with the sex thing again? What are you, insatiable?”
“You’re right,” she says. “I’m sorry; I’ve got to learn to control myself.”
“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself. Insatiability is a very underrated quality.”
“I hadn’t heard that,” she says.
“That’s why I’m here. To teach you and guide you.”
“I have no idea why his suitcase was packed,” Pete says. “I had forgotten that it was until you just reminded me.”
“Danny told Ricky that they were going to see his mother.”
“That night?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure.” I need to be careful not to conflate the two, and make incorrect assumptions. That can lead to a lot of wasted time and effort down the road. “I can’t fully make that connection yet.”
“But did Ricky pack the bag that night?”
“I don’t know that either; I don’t want to give the kid the third degree. And I certainly don’t want to remind him of that night. At some point we might have to bring in a therapist to ask him questions like that.”
“Good … be careful with him,” Pete says, starting to pace around the room. The house definitely has that “lived-in” look. Dishes are piling up in the sink, and mail is strewn around. I’ve been in Pete’s house many times, and he usually keeps the place pretty neat. I think the confinement is already starting to get to him.
Pete pours himself a cup of coffee, and asks, “So what else have you come up with?”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“So let me make sure I understand this. On their side, they’ve got a boatload of evidence that I committed a murder and sold drugs, and on our side you’ve got a hunch that an eight-year-old was already packed? That’s where we stand?”
“Pretty good, huh?”
“I may be starting to get worried,” he says.
“The state of New Jersey wants to put you away for the rest of your life, you’re stuck in the house wearing an ankle bracelet with a guard outside your door, your lawyer is getting nowhere, and you’re just starting to get worried? You should have hit full-fledged panic days ago.”
“Thanks.”
“Tell me about William Hambler,” I say. That was the rich, dead person that Pete had mentioned in his current case file.
“He’s dead.”
“How did he die?”
“Heart attack,” he says. “No evidence of foul play.”
“Yet as I recall, you’re in the foul play business.”
“I was.”
He says it as banter, but I can tell it hurts. Pete is many things, but at the top of the list is the fact that he’s a good, dedicated cop. The inescapable fact is that it has been stripped away from him in the worst way possible.
“And will be again,” I say, with more hope than conviction. “Why were you investigating William Hambler’s death?”
“Because his son Robbie believes he was murdered.”
“But the coroner said a heart attack was the cause of death?”
“Yes,” Pete says.
“Yet you believe Robbie could be right?”
“I do.”
“Why did Robbie come to you, if the guy lived in Englewood Cliffs?”
“Because Robbie is a friend; I’ve known him for twenty years. We were in the army together.”
Pete is too good a cop to believe something just because it was said by a friend, so it seems worth pursuing. But I haven’t yet gotten out of him any logical reason for his suspicion. “You think I should talk to Robbie?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Can’t hurt, although I doubt that it’s connected to this case. But you should make your own judgment. I have other information I can give you as well, and I’ll email it to you if that’s easier. But start with Robbie.”
“Time is at a premium, Pete, unless you want me to get a delay.”
He shakes his head. “No. No delays.”
“Then give me a reason why you believe Robbie when he says that his father was murdered, other than the fact that he’s your friend and you trust his judgment.”
/>
“Because it’s just possible his father may not have been the only one that was murdered.”
“These are the calls made from Diaz’s cell phone,” Sam says, showing me the list. “Here are the calls he received, and here are the calls he made and received from the landline in his house. He used the cell much more than the landline.”
“Do you have the names attached to the phones he communicated with?”
“Some of them; I’m working on it.”
I don’t know if what I’m looking at will be helpful or not, but it certainly will give us something to do. “This is great, Sam, thanks.”
“There’s one more thing I can give you, if you want it.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, you know there’s a GPS in every phone, right?”
I certainly do know that, and I say so. We used it on a past case to track down some people. “If we find any people on the list you give me that we want to locate, we might want to use that.”
“What about Diaz’s phone?” he asks.
“I would think the cops have it, but what good would it do us to know where it is now? Diaz isn’t around to use it.”
“The phone company keeps the records in their database,” he says. “I know it’s there for months, and my guess is it’s much longer than that.”
“Are you saying that you can tell me where Diaz’s phone was any time in the past couple of months?”
He nods. “I just have to find it. But if it’s in their computers, I’ll find it.”
“You get me that and I’ll double your pay.”
“You don’t pay me anything.”
“Then I’ll triple it. Seriously, Sam, if I can trace Diaz’s physical whereabouts in the weeks before his death, it could be very helpful.”
“I’m on it.”
Sam leaves, and I briefly ponder the implications of this. Nothing he gets me is admissible in court, because his hacking efforts are not legal. However, once I know what is there, I can subpoena the same records through proper channels, and then it becomes admissible.
However, this may or may not be true with the GPS records. The fact of the matter is that knowing that Diaz’s phone was somewhere is not proof that Diaz was there. Someone else could have had his phone; I have no way to demonstrate otherwise. It would be up to the judge to determine if the jury can hear the information, and it’s probably a coin flip one way or the other what the decision would be.
But whether or not it can be used in court, the investigative value could be great, and we will try to take every advantage of it. If Danny Diaz knew his killers, and I increasingly believe that he did, then this may lead us to them.
But for now, all I can do is focus on those who knew Danny Diaz. To that end, I head down to Arturo’s Body Shop on Market Street in Paterson. It’s where Danny worked, alongside the man Laurie has determined was his best friend, Louis Cimino.
I had called ahead, and Cimino seemed quite willing to talk to me. That was something of a surprise, since a close friend of the victim might generally be disinclined to help the person defending the accused killer. That didn’t mean Cimino was likely to try and help me, but talking was all I cared about at the moment.
Often it takes many probing questions to draw people out, and then there are those like Louis Cimino. I can’t finish a question before he grabs on to it and commences a soliloquy.
“Me and Danny, we were buddies, you know? I still look over at his station every day, and I can’t believe he’s not there. Like I think any second he’ll show up with a cup of coffee, like nothin’ happened.”
“In the weeks before he died, was he acting—”
Cimino nods vigorously as if he knows where I’m going, even though I could have finished the question with “acting in Romeo and Juliet in Shakespeare in the Park?”
“Weird, yeah,” he says. “Really weird. It wasn’t Danny at all; I told him he was like an alien. Juanita not being there, that was the problem. I wanted to tell him, ‘you’re better off, man,’ but he wouldn’t have listened.”
“Better off?”
“Yeah, she was fooling around, almost from the time they got married. He never had no idea, and I wasn’t gonna tell him. He’d have punched me out.”
“Who was she fooling around with?”
He shrugs. “No one special; one-night deals, you know? But she didn’t really want to be married, and she didn’t want no kid. Never did; she shouldn’t have gotten married in the first place. And I guess she finally couldn’t take it no more. She told Danny she couldn’t breathe. What kind of bullshit is that? Can’t breathe? You open your mouth and you breathe. Give me a break.”
“So her leaving made him act weird?”
“At first. He kept talking about wanting her back, hoping she’d come back. But then one day, maybe two weeks before he died, not another word out of him. I mean nothing; he just went cold, you know? Like he was scared of something. Missed two days of work; Danny never missed work.”
“And you don’t know why?” I asked.
“Nah, he wouldn’t talk about it. And then all of a sudden he was dead, you know? Used to work right over there, and now he’s dead. I still can’t believe it.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“I don’t know, but if I find out, that guy is gonna be in deep shit. I just want five minutes in a room with him.”
I decide to ask the question straight out, in order to determine if I might want to call him as a witness. “You think it was Pete Stanton, the cop they arrested?”
Cimino shakes his head. “No chance. That cop was good to them, and Danny used to tell me how much he loved the kid. You don’t love a kid like that, and then kill his father.”
“I’m getting some internal pressure about Diaz’s son,” Richard Wallace says.
“What kind of pressure?” I ask. The next time Wallace calls me with good news will be the first.
“There are those who don’t think he should be living with you.”
I had worried about this possibility. Sometimes I think that my worrying about something means it will automatically come true. Maybe I should worry about winning the lottery.
“Why the hell not?” I ask, pretending I don’t know.
“Because he was in the house when his father was killed. There is a possibility that he will be a witness at trial. We generally don’t like to put up our prosecution witnesses at the defense attorney’s house.”
“Makes sense. Let’s take the kid and dump him into the system. Better yet, let’s put him in solitary confinement.”
“Come on, Andy.”
“No, Richard, this is bullshit. We are not talking about trial tactics here, we’re talking about a little boy who lost his parents. He likes it at our house; he likes Laurie, and Tara, and he doesn’t even think I’m an asshole. He’s gotten comfortable, and he’s not leaving. This I will take to the Supreme Court.”
Wallace is quiet for a few moments. I know I haven’t intimidated him, and I also know that he has no desire to take Ricky out of our house. Finally, he says, “So give me something.”
“Give you something? Like what?”
“We might want to talk to him … if so a trained therapist will do it. You’d get a transcript of the conversation.”
“Fair enough.” That can’t be what he meant by my giving him something.
“So give me your word that if, while he is at your house, he says anything relevant about the case, you will turn it over to me.”
“You think we’re spending the time grilling him?”
“No. But kids say things. Can I report back that I have your word?”
“You can. And just to show good faith, I’ll tell you something that he already said. Just came out with it; he wasn’t answering a question.”
“What is it?”
“He said that his father told him they were going to see his stepmother.” I have no problem telling Richard this. It in no way helps him, and I wa
s going to call him about finding Juanita Diaz anyway.
“What does that have to do with his murder?” Richard asks.
“Probably nothing, but I’m not sure about that. Which reminds me, how is the search going for Juanita Diaz?”
“I’ll have to check; it’s a police matter. But I haven’t heard anything about any progress.”
“Maybe some of the internal pressure should be directed toward finding his stepmother, rather than making him homeless.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, do we have a deal?”
“We do. Will that make this problem go away?”
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ve been around long enough that I know how to exert some internal pressure myself.”
Richard gets off the phone, leaving me to reflect on a very good deal for our side. I’m happy to share anything that Ricky says, unless of course he says something damaging to Pete. It’s pretty hard to imagine myself turning that kind of information over, but I don’t feel bad about it, since Richard knows that as well as I do.
Integrity, especially mine, has its limits.
I walk into the kitchen, where Ricky is sitting on the floor in the corner. He’s got a pencil in his hand, and there’s a large book on his lap. Tara and Sebastian are on the floor with him, each with their head resting on one of his knees.
He looks comfortable, and happy, and he’s not leaving until he has someplace better to go.
“Can you help me?” he asks.
“Sure. What do you need? Another dog?”
He laughs. “Noooo. I’m doing a crossword puzzle book. Edna gave it to me.”
“That’s a shocker,” I say.
“Sit down next to Tara,” he says, indicating an open space on the floor.
“Down there? You’ll need a crane to get me back up.”
I have never been comfortable sitting on the floor. It’s hard, and there’s no back, and no place to hang your legs. Floors are actually the reason they invented chairs. Yet some people seem quite fine doing it.
But I crouch down and assume the very uncomfortable position. “So what’s the problem?” I ask, noticing that he is eagerly writing something in the book.
Hounded Page 8
