by Tim Tharp
“I don’t remember nothing.”
“Or it could’ve been a boyfriend. Miss Ockle said she thought it was her boyfriend.”
Beto smiled. “Oh, them ladies is crazy. I never saw no boyfriend.”
“We don’t mess around with no blond girls,” Oscar added.
“Besides, we don’t live here. This is our grandmother’s place. We just come by to check on her. She takes care of everybody’s kids. You never seen anyone like my abuelita. She’s a saint.”
“A saint,” Oscar confirmed.
“Well,” I said. “I was just wondering about Ashton, that’s all.”
“Whatchoo care about some rich girl, anyway?” he asked.
“I don’t know. She seems like a good person. It’s weird a girl like that would just disappear into thin air.”
“That is weird,” Beto agreed. “But not as weird as what happened to Hector, and it don’t seem like anyone’s interested in finding out about that too much. I went down to the police station myself and talked to this fool detective who had so much gel in his hair he looked like he mopped up an oil leak with it, and he started acting like I had something to do with selling them drugs to Hector. They don’t care what really happened to him.”
I could definitely sympathize with him about that. “I wish I could’ve done more about Hector,” I said. “But I told that same stupid detective everything I know, which isn’t anything, really.”
“Cops,” Oscar said, practically spitting the word. “They don’t care about nobody around here.”
“That’s okay, Dylan,” Beto told me. “You did your best.”
I wanted to ask him how he knew about the North Side Monarchs, but I didn’t know how to bring it up without breaking my promise to Nash to keep mum on the Gangland deal. Besides, I was ready to get out of there before I said something that might spark another punch in the head from Oscar.
“Yeah, I did my best,” I agreed, feeling a twinge of guilt. “Well, I guess I’d better take off. I have more food to deliver.”
“Good to see you, man.” Beto shook my hand again, but I couldn’t walk away without at least some hope of getting more info from him later.
“Um, you know what?” I said, standing at a safe distance from Oscar. “Why don’t I give you my phone number just in case you happen to see any rich blond girls hanging around the neighborhood?”
He grinned. “Sure, that’s a good idea. Just tell it to me. I’ll remember it.”
I rattled off the number, and he nodded. “See you later, amigo.”
Back in the car, I told Audrey and Trix what’d happened.
From where they were parked, they couldn’t see how I almost got massacred.
“Wow,” Trix said. “What are you, like a bizarre trouble magnet or something? You’re always running into dead guys or missing girls’ running shoes or dead guys’ cousins.”
“It is an odd coincidence,” Audrey added.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s not such a coincidence.”
“What do you mean?” Audrey asked.
I looked out the window at the run-down houses as we drove past. “I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure Ashton and Hector are tied together. I’m thinking he might’ve even been the mysterious boyfriend.”
“And someone didn’t like it,” Trix added, a gleam in her eye.
“Oh God,” Audrey said. “Now he has you playing Andromeda Man too.”
CHAPTER 24
I felt creepy calling Linda at FOKC to tell her we had to quit, but what could I do? We couldn’t keep delivering meals three times a week just so they wouldn’t suspect we were investigating the Ashton Browning deal. Linda sounded bummed but guaranteed we could always come back if we could find the time. That’d be great, I told her, but I doubted it would happen. Here I was—a big fat quitter all over again.
For my next newspaper article, I wrote about Ashton’s FOKC connection and what the clientele had to say about her. So, yes, I’ll admit it was a bit of a love letter again. How could it not be? The more I learned about her, the greater she sounded. Smart, funny, independent, socially conscious. The perfect match for an investigative reporter.
However, the part about Beto and Oscar didn’t end up in the article. For one thing, admitting I got punched in the back of the head wasn’t likely to charge up my mojo level, but more than that, I didn’t want to go into the Hector Maldonado connection until I knew if there really was one.
I had a couple of theories. First, if Hector actually was Ashton Browning’s boyfriend, that would fit with what the Ockles said. Plus, Hector was a pretty good-looking guy, and rich girls have been known to fool around with poor bad boys for the thrill of it. If her dad found out, it’d probably be just like Trix suggested—he wouldn’t like it one bit. Or maybe Rowan Adams was the one who didn’t like it. That angle felt better. As certain as I’d once been that Mr. Browning was guilty, I now preferred seeing Rowan go down. Besides, he was the godfather of the North Side Monarchs, and undoubtedly there was some connection there.
One problem with that theory—Hector wasn’t really poor and he definitely wasn’t a bad boy. So in my second theory, I imagined Ashton falling for Beto. Sure, he was friendly to me, but he had a dangerous air about him. Definite bad-boy material. Was he the type to get violent with the girls? I didn’t want to think so, but if he was, then maybe he went too far one night, and she ended up dead. How Hector and the Monarchs figured into that scenario, I didn’t know, but I decided digging into Hector’s life a little deeper might bring some answers.
I turned in my article to Ms. Jansen and sent a copy to Nash like I promised. Then, during lunch, I looked up Diron Moore, one of Hector’s small circle of buddies. Diron was a lot like Hector actually—a quiet guy who sat in the back of class and turned in his homework on time. His clothes always looked brand new.
I latched onto him in the west hall and told him I’d been doing a lot of thinking and decided I wanted to know more about Hector so I could get over picturing him as the guy I found in the Dumpster. Diron looked a little suspicious, and I couldn’t blame him—I had let quite a bit of time go by between then and now. Once he started talking, though, he poured out some pretty solid info.
Apparently, if you really got to know Hector, he wasn’t the shy kid you might have expected. He was funny, smart, and interested in all sorts of things. That sounded like a pretty good match for Ashton. Also, he had his sights set on going to college somewhere East Coastwards, then wanted to come back here and get into politics, do something good for the Hispanic community. He had a lot of family all over the city, some who had lived here a long time, some who arrived more recently—Diron didn’t say, but I took that to mean some of them might be illegals.
That was all interesting, but what I really wanted to know was whether Hector had had a rich blond girlfriend. Or if his cousin Beto did. Diron didn’t know about that, though. It seemed Hector hadn’t hung out with his friends so much after school hours this fall. Yes, he did have a girlfriend over the summer, but she was black-haired—Mexican American—and went to a different South Side school. They broke up, though, and afterward Hector kept making excuses not to hang around with his old crew at our school.
“I just figured he was taking the breakup bad,” Diron said. “He would’ve got over that, though—if he ever got the chance.”
“I’m sure he would’ve,” I told Diron, but I was actually thinking maybe Hector was over it. Because maybe he’d already moved on—to Ashton Browning.
I was definitely on to something, but Audrey didn’t back me up. She said I didn’t have one single fact that tied Ashton and Hector together. Just because I happened to run across Hector’s Hispanic cousin in a Hispanic neighborhood didn’t mean anything. No, her money was all on Rowan Adams.
“It has to be the ex-boyfriend,” she said.
“Hey, it still could be. Maybe Rowan hired this Beto guy to put out a hit on Hector, and then they had to get rid of Ashton because
she knew about it.”
“A hit? Are you serious? You really do need to lay off the TV shows.”
Okay, that was deflating, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my theory. I just had to do some more research. I didn’t really know where to start, though. It wasn’t like I could walk up to Beto Hernandez and ask him about it. Especially if Oscar Tattoo Head was anywhere around.
But someone else could ask him about it—a cop. As much as I hated the idea of dealing with the police, I decided they needed to know about the Ashton-Hector connection. Of course, no way was I about to go back to Detectives Hair Gel and Forehead, but I figured the police at the main headquarters might be different from the ones at the outpost on my side of town. After all, wasn’t I the one who found Ashton’s running shoe for them? They were on the news almost every day asking for tips concerning the case; surely they’d listen to one from me.
So I went down to their huge palatial headquarters thinking I’d march right in and talk to the captain in all his starched-white-shirt splendor. Didn’t happen.
I waited and waited. Cops came and went. A guy with blood on his sweatshirt and his front teeth knocked out wobbled in and had to wait in a chair next to me.
“I hate my father-in-law,” he sputtered without looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
We waited some more. Then he got called in to talk to somebody before I did. About ten minutes later, a lady cop told me to follow her. She left me in an office with no decorations, not even a family picture or Don’t Do Drugs poster. It was like going to the doctor’s office—you sit around in the waiting area, and then you go to the examination room and sit around some more.
When the door finally opened, I was disappointed. Instead of the captain, a uniformed officer walked in, the same uniformed officer who tried to take credit for finding Ashton’s shoe on the search party.
“I recognize you,” he said, sitting behind the desk. “You were at the nature park when we did our sweep—the kid who watches Andromeda Man, right?”
I’m like, “Uh, yeah.”
“That’s a ridiculous show.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me like he was expecting the punch line to a joke. “So you have a tip about the Ashton Browning case, huh?”
I started into how I’d been writing investigative reports about her, trying to establish some credibility, but he wasn’t interested in that. All he wanted to hear about was my tip. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to name any suspects—that was their job to figure out—so I just explained my theory about how Ashton and Hector might be connected while he jotted notes down on a pad.
When I was done, he set his pen down. “So let me get this straight—you think one of the richest girls in the city was romantically involved with this Hector Almarado, a Mexican drug addict.”
“It’s Maldonado. And he wasn’t Mexican—he was American—and he wasn’t a drug addict. That’s just the point. Someone must have poisoned him with some kind of drug. He didn’t take it himself.”
“I see. And can anybody confirm that Mr. Almarado and Ms. Browning were connected?”
“You mean like an eyewitness? Not exactly, but it just makes sense.”
“And why does it make sense?”
“Because I saw Hector’s cousin at a house down on the South Side right next to where the Ockle ladies live, and they were on Ashton’s FOKC route.”
“Her what route?”
“F-O-K-C. Feed Oklahoma City. It’s this charity thing she volunteered for.”
I explained how Ashton wasn’t always alone when she delivered meals to the Ockles and that there was a good chance the extra someone was Hector. But the more I described the Ockles, the more his interest faded. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into so much detail about how fond Mrs. Ockle was of Ashton’s sandwiches.
He nodded. “Yes, that makes sense all right,” he said condescendingly. “A couple of old ladies saw someone they couldn’t actually identify, but you’re certain it was your deceased buddy Hector. Well, we’ll certainly take that into consideration.”
“Aren’t you going to write it down?”
“Sure, sure. I’ll write the whole thing up later.” He stared at me for a good thirty seconds. “Is that all?” he said finally.
“Are you going to do anything about what I told you?”
“Definitely. It’s all going into the file.” He picked up his pen and tapped it on the desktop.
“In the file, huh? Well, I hope someone reads that file because this is something that needs to be investigated.”
“I’m sure you do have your hopes up,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go spending that reward money yet if I were you.”
So that was it. He thought I was like the other hundred people who had probably sat in this office before me, making up stories just to get the reward.
“Look,” I said, “this info is legit.”
He gave me the silent stare again, still tapping the desktop with his pen, until finally he’s like, “Do you think you can find your way out?”
That was my cue to leave. “I’m just trying to help,” I told him.
“I appreciate that,” he said as I headed to the door. “In fact, I think this tip is so good I’ll probably turn it right over to the FBI—or the Andromeda Man.”
What a jerk. By the time I got home, I was more determined than ever to keep up my own investigation—forget the cops. But I didn’t have the slightest idea what my next move should be.
Then, after school the next day, as I was walking upstairs to my room, I got a phone call. I didn’t recognize the voice, but I did recognize this might just be the opportunity I’d been waiting for.
CHAPTER 25
The caller’s voice was muffled, probably intentionally disguised. It was a male voice, but it didn’t sound like a kid. Or maybe it was a kid trying to sound like an old guy. I couldn’t be sure—he’d blocked my caller ID. Whoever he was, he asked if I was the one doing research on the Ashton Browning case, and when I said yes, he told me we needed to talk.
“We are talking,” I said, but he’s like, “No. We need to talk face to face. I have something you need to see.”
I tried to find out more about who he was and what he had to show me, but he cut me short. If I wanted any more information, I’d have to meet him the next evening at seven o’clock. He’d even let me choose the place. That made the offer a little more tempting. I could pick a location where I wasn’t likely to have someone sneak up behind me and punch me in the back of the head—or worse. I chose Topper’s. If something bad ended up happening, at least I could have a good burger first.
“How’d you get this number, anyway?” I asked, but the line went dead.
This was very weird, I thought. It was probably the kind of thing that happened to New York Times reporters every day, and now it was happening to me.
Either that or someone was playing a practical joke on me. Immediately, I called Randy, but he swore up and down he didn’t have anything to do with it. In fact, he wanted to go along. I told him okay, but the truth was I started having second thoughts about the meeting.
I almost had a good excuse to blow it off too. Audrey couldn’t give me a ride to Topper’s the next evening. She was going to the movies with Trix.
“Can you believe it?” she gushed. “This is like the greatest thing ever.”
“Yeah, it’s great,” I said. “But could you put it off until another night? I think this could be a really important case breaker.”
And she’s like, “Are you kidding me? Going out with Trix is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life. I’m not postponing it.”
“But is it really a real date? I mean, did you ask her out on a date or did you just ask her to go to a movie?”
Her smile faded. “Just to go to a movie. But that doesn’t mean it can’t turn out to be like a real date.”
“Well, okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll skip the meeting, even though it could solve the whole cas
e.” But truthfully I wasn’t that disappointed. It was like this was a sign warning me I’d be better off not taking a chance. Unfortunately, Audrey had to go and come up with a solution—I could take my parents’ car.
Now this might seem simple, but you don’t know my parents. For one thing, they only have one car. Can you believe that? Whose parents only have one car? They say they want to cut down on their carbon footprint, and also they only need one car because they both basically work the same schedule, but I think it’s mainly because they’re cheap.
So I’m like, “Yeah, right. You know how my parents are about letting me drive their car. Half the time my mom’s on call at the hospital, and when she’s not, they’re like, ‘What if we need it while you’re out driving around all over the place? We’ll be stuck.’ Like they ever go anywhere.”
“So, tell them it’s important. Make something up. And take Randy with you so you won’t be alone. Everything will be all right.”
I wasn’t so sure about that.
All the way to dinnertime I rolled the idea over in my mind. Should I go or not? Finally, I decided I had to. I quit the grocery-sacking job, I quit FOKC, I even quit football in middle school. I couldn’t quit on this case.
I had to come up with a good story about why I needed my parents’ car, though. I mean, they weren’t about to go along with the idea that I needed a ride to go talk to some shadowy anonymous informant about Ashton Browning. So, after running through several options, I came up with a lie about needing the car for a movie date. Seeing as how I’d never had a date before, this was pretty far-fetched, but when I ran it by them, they didn’t call me a liar. No, it was worse than that. They were proud of me.
“That’s great,” Mom said, beaming like a headlight. She looked at Dad. “Did you hear that? He has a date.”
“Fantastic,” said Dad, grinning. You would’ve thought I’d just won a scholarship to Harvard.
Then they launched into grilling me about who the girl was. Not being too quick on my feet when dealing with a situation like this, the only girl I could think of was Trix Westwood. After all, no way would my parents be acquainted with anyone who even knew Trix or her dad.
