“Did she say who was looking for her?”
Gloria shook her head. “I figure she owe some dealer. Around midnight, one o’clock, somewhere around there, she went out on the street to make some money, to buy her some more crystal. I went out with her. She walk up one side of Wilmington, I walk up the other, you know, going in opposite directions, but close enough so we could holler back and forth. I got me a date first and drove away with him.
“I was gone fifteen, twenty minutes when my date left me off again. I saw Hanna was talkin’ to some dude in a blue car. Then she started to run away. She come down here by the school, lookin’ for a way to get through the fence into the school yard. The blue car followed her. I see the dude get out of the car. I hear him lettin’ two off, I see the flames shoot outta the end of his gun. Hanna don’t say nothin’, she just fall right down. This man, he revved up some and then he was gone. Then I see Hanna get up and start runnin’ again. Come here across the street. That’s all I saw.”
I was close enough to Gloria Griffin to smell something like ether on her breath, the sharp doctor’s-office smell of the cocaine freebaser. I asked, “Did you see the driver of the car?”
“Not close,” she said, gazing across the street where the shooting had occurred before she turned her attention back to me. “When Hanna start runnin’, I don’t want to get too close. I’m thinkin’ maybe this guy she owe money to has come collectin’. Somethin’ like that.”
The detective gave me the evil eye that meant she was in charge. She resumed the interview. “What did you do when you realized Hanna Rhodes had been shot?”
“Girlfriend was scared. I run back to the house on Hickory Street. I had me some money then, so I got me some rock and smoked it.”
“How do you feel right now?” I asked her.
“Mellow,” she said, smiling. I hoped that it wasn’t so dark that the tape wouldn’t pick up the unfocused look she gave me. “I feel okay.”
The detective asked, “Can you describe the car? Make? Model? Age?”
“That’s the one.” Gloria turned and pointed to Mike’s blue Blazer.
I knew where Mike was at the time of the shooting, snoring beside my ear. Still, I felt very uneasy about Gloria pointing out his car. I felt very uneasy about anything that tended to tie Mike to this mess of a situation. Gloria was bombed, kept snapping her head up to hang in with us. The Blazer was the only civilian car within her range of vision: how easy to tag it when she didn’t have another answer. I said, “Late model, American-made, four-wheel-drive car.”
“Whatever you say,” she said. “It was that one.”
As Guido turned the camera toward Mike’s car, I put up my hand and stopped him. He gave me a funny look, but he turned back around.
“Thank you, Miss Griffin,” the detective said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but we need you to identify the body.”
The officers who had brought Gloria walked her up on the porch and had her look at Hanna’s face. I stayed back because I didn’t want to see it. Guido went right in with Gloria, his lens following her point of view, then pulling back to catch her reaction. I was still worried about the lighting. Guido and his techno friends at UCLA could do some computer enhancement, but low light punched up electronically always came out looking artificial. Flat.
Hanna must not have looked like a party under that sheet, because Gloria Griffin was nearly overcome when she took her look. With her hand over her mouth, she fled the porch. The roots of an old sycamore tree pushing up through the sidewalk tripped her, made her fall against the trunk of the tree. I heard her swear, and I saw her take something from the pocket of her shorts and put it into her mouth. Could have been anything, but it seemed to make her feel better.
Hector Melendez had seen her take it, too. When I sort of ambled in her direction, Hector Melendez sort of ambled along with me.
Gloria’s hand shook too much for her to connect the match in her hand with the cigarette she put between her lips. I took the matchbook from her and lit the cigarette.
“Pretty bad?” I asked.
“Shit,” she exhaled, leaning against the tree for support. “How well did you know Hanna?”
“I know her my whole damn life. We grow up in the same neighborhood.”
I caught Guido’s eye and motioned for him to come over. When he was ready with his camera, I said, “You grew up with Hanna Rhodes?”
Gloria nodded. “Know her my whole life. She was my play sister. Our kids is friends, too.”
“Tell me about her children.”
“She have just one little girl. Yoandra. She’s about ten now. Live with her grandmother.”
“How old was Hanna?”
“Twenty-five, about. Same as me. We used to go to that school over across the street. But they never used to lock the gate all the way, you know. They let us go in and play. Guess Hanna didn’t know they was locking things up these days so she couldn’t get through.”
“What a shame,” I said. Hector’s touch was warm through my sleeve. “I was wondering, Gloria,” I said. “This date you had, he must have seen the shooting.”
“He didn’t see nothin’,” she said, adamant. She lit a new cigarette from the glowing stub between her fingers.
“I’d still like to talk to him. Men notice cars better than we do.”
She took a long drag. “I don’t know nothin’ about him. He just a date, you know?”
“A regular date?” Hector asked. “You’re very pretty, Miss Griffin. You must have regulars.”
She smiled in spite of herself, flipped her hair up off her neck, flirting with him. “Maybe I do.”
“Was he a regular?” I asked. “Do you know where I might find him?”
“Maybe.” She gave the three of us a keen appraisal. Then she looked down, dropped her cigarette, and stubbed it out with her toe. She took so long doing this, I thought she had forgotten about us. Finally, she said, “What I know will cost you two dead presidents.”
The only dead presidents in my pocket were some George Washington. I looked up at Hector. “Two dead presidents, is that two hundred dollars?”
“That’s what I say,” she said. “Two of ‘em.”
Hector had glanced away, seemed to be smiling at something. Mike tells me a lot of war stories about things that go down on the job. I remembered one he had told me about Hector and dead presidents. I took hold of Hector’s sleeve and said, “Hey, Gloria, you ever play Monopoly?”
“Maybe I did,” she said, wary, as if she was afraid I was making fun of her.
“In Monopoly they have something called a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the game, the card’s worth two hundred dollars,” I said. Hector, on cue, took out one of his business cards with its big silver detective shield and his office phone number on it, and handed it to me. I passed it to Gloria. “Here’s your getout-of-jail-free card. Next time you get picked up on the street, you give this card to the officer, tell him to call Detective Melendez. It’s a whole lot better than dead presidents.”
She studied the card before she tucked it into the front of her halter top. Then she looked up and said, “His name’s Tiny and he hangs up at the Bayou Barbeque. I see him there all the time.”
“Thanks, Gloria,” I said. The androgynous officers were walking toward us. “Thank you very much. If we want to talk to you again, where can we reach you?”
She smiled, coming on to Hector again. “You know where my office is. Up on that corner. You want to talk to me, just call my pager number.”
She walked off to meet her escorts, swaying her narrow hips for Hector’s benefit.
When Guido took the camera off his shoulder, he was laughing. “You two should go on the road with that card routine.”
“It’s already been on the road,” I said. “Part of the Mike Flint repertoire, right Hector?”
“What other stories he tell you?” Hector asked. He was blushing furiously.
“Tons of them. When he told me about the get-out
-of-jail-free card stunt, he said, ‘Got us what we needed and no one laid a hand on the whore. That’s called good police work, my friend. Good police work.’ “
“That’s called bullshit,” Guido countered.
Hector laughed. “Same thing. With Flint, it’s an art form.”
Guido, who lives most of his professional life within the confines of university-directed tenets of political correctitude, visibly winced when I said “whore.” He was suddenly not very amused.
“Can we go home now?” Guido asked me. “I’ve got the crime scene, the victim, the cops, the witness.”
“Get the bystanders,” I said. “And the cars on the street.”
“Except the Blazer?” he said, sarcastic.
I reached into my pocket and switched off the tape recorder. “Everything except the Blazer. You have a problem with that?”
“No,” he said, jutting out his chin like a defiant kid. “I don’t have any problems. I’m having more fun than I’ve had since we camped out in the jungles of Salvador. At least here there aren’t any biting bugs and at the moment no one’s shooting at us. Just perfectly dandy. Doing this arty, interpretive shit is so much easier than working hard news: we don’t even have to pretend we’re looking for the facts as long as we get some hot footage. I always think patterns of light and shadow are more important than story content.”
I ignored the insult, put it down to an unguarded flash of jealousy. Best friends often feel pushed out when a lover comes on the scene, comes between them. I had been noticing ever since I moved down that Guido seemed to bristle every time Mike’s name came up. I walked away from him to give him space to cool off, but he followed.
“Hanna grew up in this general neighborhood,” I said, moving past the tantrum. He had stung me deeply, and he knew it. Why belabor the issue? “She went to that elementary school across the street, little girl with pigtails, maybe. I like the way this is all coming together. With some luck and persistence, we may be able to hook up with Hanna’s mother, or maybe the school administration, and find some old pictures of her. Little kid with gaps in her front teeth, cut to the body on the porch. That would be beautiful, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know if beautiful is the right word, but it would be powerful.” Guido, chagrined suddenly, dropped his gaze, did an unnecessary battery check. “Very powerful.”
“I love you, Guido,” I said.
“I know.” He looked at me through his long lashes. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
Gloria was driven away. She waved to us from the backseat of the patrol car as she went past. I knew she faced an all-nighter, what was left of the night, under questioning at Southeast Division. I hoped they would at least buy her breakfast when it was over because she looked as if she hadn’t eaten for a long time.
The forensics people would probably be around the crime scene most of the day with their tape measures, chalk, and little plastic bags. I overheard them discussing whether a gouge on a metal fence post was a bullet impact or some other sort of collision, maybe a hard encounter with a bicycle handlebar. None of it seemed essential to our needs. Once Hanna had been taken away in the coroner’s van, there was no reason for us to stay.
Guido, still chastened, walked me back to the Blazer, where Hector was waiting. I had the envelope Hector had given me tucked under my arm.
“Hector,” I said, “did you know Wyatt Johnson?”
He shook his head. “I think he worked out of Hollywood or maybe Hollenbeck. I don’t know what he was doing down here.”
“Maybe there’s something in his file.”
“Could be,” he said.
“What they’re saying Mike did,” I said, but Hector held up his hands, stopped me from saying anything more.
“Mike Flint’s the best,” he said. “Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.”
“Thanks for coming out,” I said. I offered him my hand, but he gave me a long hug.
“Look after Mike,” he said. “Because trouble is always looking out for him.”
“I do my best. We’ll have you and your wife to dinner as soon as we get settled in.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll take you both out.”
I kissed his cool cheek and pulled away. “Go home. Get some sleep.”
It was a good idea. Guido talked all the way back to the Valley, on and on about a new video disk recorder he was trying to get a grant to buy for his department. He must have memorized all of the support literature, because I heard so much arcane technical detail that, had I tended at all toward the suicidal, I would have done myself in long before we reached the downtown interchange. I knew he was taking the responsibility for filling dead air space, atoning for his earlier outburst. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Mike, it was that he wouldn’t have chosen Mike for me.
Guido declined my offer of breakfast when he dropped me off. It was still awfully early. I went into a quiet house, hoping for company. Someone was in the shower—I could hear the hot water pipes. There was fresh coffee in Mr. Espresso. But no one was walking around.
I put eggs on to boil, dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, poured some coffee, and sat down at the table to look through the folder Hector had slipped to me.
Just as my toast popped, Mike came in the back door wearing running shorts and shoes and dripping with sweat.
He rubbed his salty, unshaven chin across the back of my neck as he looked over my shoulder. “What do you have?”
“Hanna Rhodes’s rap sheet.”
“Good.” He pulled out the chair next to me. “I asked Hec to run it.”
“And you asked Hec to come to the scene to watch over me.”
“Didn’t have to ask. He’s my old partner. He takes care of me.” He kissed my shoulder. “And mine.”
If I hadn’t been so tired, I would have challenged that “mine” remark. I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, so I began reading to him from the rap sheet.
“Booked under five versions of her name: Rhodes, Hanna S.; Rhodes, Hanna Sue; Rhodes, Hannah; Rhodes, Sue; Farmer, Demetria. The charges begin with possession of a controlled substance, detained and released for lack of probable cause.
One year later, arrested for petty theft and trespass: occupying property without consent. Convicted, sentenced to jail, sentence suspended. Two months later, arrested for burglary. Convicted. With a prior, Hanna went to county jail for six months. Another theft charge, robbery this time. With priors, given a year in jail. Out on probation, arrested for disorderly conduct: prostitution, solicitation. Pled nolo contenders, convicted, sentence suspended. Again, picked up for prostitution, plea-bargained sentence to time served. Four more disorderly conduct/prostitution charges, all of them bumped or plea-bargained for a total of maybe six months time in the slam. Finally, felony theft with a prior, sent to state prison for eighteen months, got an early release and hit the streets again last Friday. End of record. What does it tell you?” I asked.
“She was a junkie. Hooking, stealing to buy shit. She has a juvenile record, too. But it’s sealed. So, this paragon of veracity—if you believe the D.A.—has ten misdemeanor convictions and one felony over a six-year period. She’s out of prison three days and she takes one through the chest. I’d say the miracle here is that she didn’t take one a long time ago.”
“How did you know she took one through the chest?”
“Talked to Hector.” He pulled my by-now cold toast out of the toaster, buttered a piece, and began to eat it. “What bothers me is the timing of the shooting. I always have to look real hard at coincidence.”
“If it wasn’t a coincidence, who shot her?” I put in more toast.
“Hell if I know.” Then, just when my coffee was finally cool enough to drink, he drank it.
I took the little revolver from my belt and laid it on the table between us. With my hand over the gun butt, I said, “Don’t touch my eggs.”
He put the revolver in his shorts waistband and
poured more coffee. “But I like your eggs. I even like the dark circles under your baby blues. I’m really happy to see all of you safely back in this kitchen.”
“Good,” I said. I crossed my arms on the table, rested my head on them, and fell asleep.
Chapter 10
The director of dance at Casey’s new school executed a magnificent leap, a gold-medal effort. But it was the prize-winning zucchini in the front of his flesh-colored tights that held the freshman dancers in thrall. Casey, sitting on the practice room floor with a dozen or so other new classmates, dropped her jaw and stared.
Because of Casey I have been around a lot of ballet, have seen a lot of stuffed tights. You get used to them, as you do tutus and other archaic accoutrements of dance. What gave me pause as the director went through his routine was Casey’s reaction to his malehood: over the summer she had evolved from indifferent to awed. The change made me worry.
I looked around the practice studio at the other parents lined up against the mirrored walls. The attentive masks that had carried us through the boring academic portion of the school’s orientation had dropped away as the demonstration by the director, his gifted young faculty, and the senior students began.
They performed for a tough, critical audience; every parent there had already invested a fortune in time, emotional support, and cash to prepare their young dancers for the privilege of attending this school. The sacrifices that had brought them this far had honed their expectations. I tried to pick out the mouthpieces, the vigilant parents who always kvetch when they are displeased. Every school, especially private schools, has nightmare parent police.
As the director tour jete’d toward us, Mike leaned in and muttered into my ear, “Are we expected to tuck money in his jock when he dances over here?”
“Good idea.” I passed him the first quarter’s tuition check. “Any tips are up to you.”
He glanced at the check and his eyes widened. As he refolded it he said, “You’re sure this is what you want for Casey?”
Bad Intent Page 8
