I thought Ramon was going to turn surly at this challenge to his recollection, but he apparently thought better of it. “Yeah, I’m sure. It was spooky, I can tell you. I didn’t expect nothing like that. But I listened, and I didn’t hear nobody, so I went in anyway.”
“All the lights were on?” Scott persisted.
“Nah, just the one in the ho’s office. Oh, yeah, and a little one in the ceiling in the entryway.” He stirred. “Can I have a coffee?”
There was a vending machine close by. Scott got the coffee and handed it to him without comment.
“So then,” Ramon said, sitting back in the chair in a slouch, “I just looked around for some stuff to take. There wasn’t all that much,” he said disgustedly. “But the dumb bitch had left her bank card in her desk drawer, so I thought maybe I could get some cash.”
“So you went through the drawers,” Scott said. “What else?”
Ramon shrugged. “Junk, you know. There wasn’t anything else. I looked on the shelves and all that. Nada. The bitch had a lot of paintings, but what would I want with those?”
“They were worth a lot of money,” I said.
Ramon snorted. “Those things? Ha! Well, I could maybe get fifty dollars on the street, but who wants to carry them around for that?”
I closed my eyes at the thought of some poor artist’s life work disappearing onto “the street” for a pittance.
“So you were pretty mad at Ms. Ivanova, right?” Scott asked.
“Sure,” Ramon said. “I told you already. She fired my mom.” He narrowed his eyes. “But not mad enough to kill her.”
“Mad enough to trash the place?”
Ramon sat up straight. “No way. They said I trashed the place, they lied.”
“Well, you had a good reason, as you said. Maybe you just got rid of some things she might have needed, like her files or her records.” Scott’s tone was even and bland. Come on, it suggested. You can tell me.
Ramon shook his head vehemently. “I didn’t touch nothing. That file cabinet was open, and I mighta looked in there, but I didn’t have time to go throwing away no files. Where would I throw them? Besides, I wanted to get outta there. The place gave me the creeps.”
I glanced at Scott, to see if he had picked up what I had, but he was wearing a poker face. “So you pulled open the file drawer, and—”
“No, man, what is it with you and the files?” Ramon sounded annoyed. “The drawer was already open. I just looked in there, but all there was was papers and those computer things, you know.”
“Disks?” Scott prompted.
“Yeah, that’s the one. I didn’t want any of that shit, so I left it alone. I told you, I was careful not to touch stuff.”
“Except the Erté,” Scott said.
“The wha’?”
“The statue. The one that looked like an Egyptian,” I told him.
Ramon slapped his forehead. “Oh, yeah. I fucked up there.” His eyes shifted away. “I shouldn’t’ve touched it. But it was pretty. Not like that other one.”
“Why didn’t you just steal it?” Scott asked him.
He studied his fingernails with intense interest. “I thought I mighta heard something,” he muttered. “I just grabbed the bag and the flashlight and got outta there.”
Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite place it.
“What did you hear?”
“I don’t know, man. Maybe a noise. Maybe nothing.” Ramon was clearly chagrined at his lack of bravery. “But I didn’t have no gun, so I didn’t want to stick around in case there was somebody else there.”
“Maybe you saw something,” Scott prompted him.
“Nah, nothing.”
I had it.
“Well, then,” Scott began.
“Wait,” I told him. “What other one?”
They both looked at me with identical expressions of incomprehension.
I took a breath. “You said you touched the Erté because it was pretty. ‘Not like the other one,’ you said.”
“Yeah, so what?”
“Well, what other one? Was there another statue somewhere?”
“Yeah,” he said, as if I were simpleminded. “Right on the desk.”
“On the desk? Where was the Erté—the one you thought was pretty—then?”
He looked at Scott. “Does this matter?”
God, we’d only been there fifteen minutes, and already the male exclusionary rituals were starting up.
Scott looked at me. “It might be important,” I said to him. “I’ve seen pictures of the crime scene. I’ve been in that office recently. You know I’d notice all the artworks.”
He nodded. “Go on,” he said.
“Well, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t another sculpture there in either case.”
“Interesting,” he agreed. He turned to Ramon. “Tell her what she wants to know.”
“What was that? I forgot.”
“Where was the Erté?”
He thought. “It was on a shelf, I guess.”
“And what did this other statue look like?”
He grinned. “Like my Aunt Rosa,” he said.
23
“I’m afraid we haven’t had the pleasure,” I told Ramon.
Scott smiled.
“You talk funny, you know that, lady?” Ramon said.
“She means we don’t know what your Aunt Rosa looks like,” Scott explained.
Ramon sniggered. “Fat,” he said derisively. “Really fat.”
“So you’re saying there was a sculpture of a fat woman?” Scott asked.
“A naked fat woman,” Ramon clarified. “It was disgusting, man.”
Another obsessee, obviously. If Mark were here, they could have debated the finer points of flab distribution, but all I could think to say was, “You’ve seen your aunt naked?”
“Sure,” he said, unfazed. “Lots of times.”
“Oh.” I had to ask. “Well, try to describe the sculpture some more. How big was it?”
He held his hands about a foot apart.
“Go on,” I prompted him.
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“Ellen, is this really going to do any good?” Scott interrupted. “We don’t even know that there’s any significance attached to this statue anyway. And how can he possibly identify it? He isn’t trained in art.”
“I’ll show you,” I said, digging into the bag for the objects I hadn’t been forced to leave behind. I extracted a piece of paper and a thick marker, its tip too soft and blunt for possible use as a weapon. It would have to do in default of the presumably dangerous pencils and pens that Scott had advised me to leave in the car. “I can do this,” I said to Scott. “You do cross-examination; I do this. It’s my specialty.”
“Okay,” he said somewhat skeptically, “but our time here is almost up.”
“I’m hurrying,” I told him. “What color?” I asked Ramon.
“Brown.” He smiled. “That’s like Aunt Rosa, too.”
“Metal?”
He nodded.
I wrote “prob. bronze” across the top of the page. “Now, how was she standing? Arms up? Arms down?” I didn’t want to demonstrate various positions in a room next to armed guards, prisoners, and their families, but if I had to, I would.
Ramon lifted an imaginary cigarette. He wasn’t allowed to smoke in the visitors’ room. “Smoking,” he said, “like this. But lying down. Man, that was one fat ass, I can tell you.”
I sketched a reclining figure holding a cigarette and held it up. “Like this?”
“Longer hair,” he said, “and she was lying on something, like a rolled-up blanket or something.”
“You remember a lot about it,” Scott told him.
He shrugged. “I noticed, ’cause of Aunt Rosa.” He looked at his feet, the way he did every time he admitted to a decent impulse. “Also ’cause I like to draw things sometimes.”
“You have a good eye,” I told him. “Will
they let you have artist’s materials in here?”
He tried to look nonchalant. “Dunno.”
“I’ll find out,” I told him. “If it’s permitted, I’ll send you some.”
“Nah. We have to buy everything from these catalogues.” He looked at me.
“Then I’ll send you some money for them,” I told him.
“Hope I won’t be in here that long, lady.”
“Let’s get back to the sketch,” Scott said.
We worked on it for a couple more minutes until we had a facsimile Ramon was happy with. It was hard going, but at least the choices were a bit narrower than, say, the possibilities a police sketch-artist had to work from.
“Here’s what I’d like to do,” I said. “I’ll try to find some pictures of artworks that might resemble what we’ve sketched here. I’ll send them to you, and if anything looks like what you saw that night, I’d like you to let me know right away.”
“Okay,” he said.
There was nothing left to say. Scott looked at his watch, caught my eye, and stood up. “We should be going,” he said.
Ramon looked from side to side with a hint of panic. His hand rested briefly on the back of his chair. His eyes glistened. “I swear on the grave of my abuelita that I didn’t kill that lady,” he said in a hushed voice. All his bravado was drained away, and he looked as if he needed the back of the chair for support. “I never even saw her. I never saw nobody.” Then he turned and walked across the big room, where they waited to lead him away.
At least one of his grandmothers was still alive; I had met her myself. But it was a minor quibble.
I believed him anyway.
“Calm down,” Scott said to me, as we exited the Level-5 lobby and waited for the bus. “You’re hyperventilating.”
I was, though whether it was from excitement or the desire to breathe Free Air again, I couldn’t be sure. I looked around; even the desiccated brown foothills had taken on a more attractive hue.
“You’re jumping to conclusions,” he added.
“I haven’t even said anything,” I protested.
He smiled. “You don’t have to.”
“Are we talking nonverbal clues here?”
He laughed.
“Okay,” I said, “then tell me this: How did you know Ramon was lying about the police planting evidence on him?”
“I didn’t, but it seemed likely, so I decided to bluff.”
“You mean you didn’t watch his eyelids flutter or anything like that?”
He looked at me, amused. “I see you’ve been doing your research again,” he said.
“Mystery novels, I told you.”
“Well, there are studies that indicate that when somebody is feeling distress—maybe because he’s lying—the inner portion of the eyebrow lifts frequently. It’s not a movement you can generally control, so it’s often a dependable indicator. But I wasn’t watching Ray’s eyebrows. He didn’t even believe his own story. He shifted all over the seat and couldn’t come up with anything like a reasonable explanation. It’s a good thing he didn’t take the stand.”
“What difference did it make? He got convicted anyway.”
“Very true,” he said, “but if he’d made a liar out of himself on the stand, you probably wouldn’t be on this quest.”
“Maybe not,” I admitted.
“Still, I’m not so sure we helped him this morning.”
“How can you say that? We found out he didn’t touch the files, and about the statue.”
“Let’s set those aside for a minute. What we found out for sure is that Ray did break into Ivanova Associates and that he was mightily pissed off at Natasha because of the way she treated his mother. Which you failed to mention, I might add.”
“I forgot,” I said.
“A convincing argument,” he said dryly. “In all events, we now have a powerful motive for murder, and it looks a lot like premeditation.”
“So do you think Ramon really killed her? Even after what we heard today?”
“What I think doesn’t count. What matters is how the judicial system, which has already tidily disposed of Ray Garcia—after due process, I must point out—will react to our discoveries. It takes rather compelling evidence to get anyone to reconsider a done deal, unless 60 Minutes decides to do a story. And sometimes not even then.”
“So, short of calling in Mike Wallace, what we have to do is find the real killer,” I said glumly. Both possibilities seemed equally remote.
“It’s not necessary to find the real killer,” he said “But we have to have something more than what we’ve got, to exculpate Ray. And I’m not sure that’s going to happen.”
I noticed that “real killer.” I turned to him. “You don’t believe it was Ray, then!” I was surprised to discover how important it was that he agree with me.
He looked sheepish, as if he’d been caught in something he’d rather not admit to. “Let’s just say I have my doubts.” He sighed. “For whatever good that does.” He was silent a moment. “Are you hungry?”
He must have heard my stomach growling. I winced. “I’m afraid so,” I said.
“Would you consider lunch? As long as it’s a working conference and not a date?” He grinned.
“What did you have in mind?” I asked him. The only place I had ever been to eat near Bakersfield was a Basque restaurant, where the waiter had talked Michael and me into ordering mutton. There are people who swear by it. I’d discovered I was not one of them.
“It’s a surprise,” he said, “if you’re up for one.”
“I like surprises,” I told him.
It was so hot by the time we got back to the car that we had to put the top up. It was either that or heat stroke, and I wanted to keep a clear head. “How far to the surprise?” I asked Scott.
“A ways,” he said. “Just keep on the highway till I tell you where to turn off.”
“Then let’s reconstruct what we found out,” I said. I felt both elated and relieved by my certainty, finally, that Ramon was innocent. I didn’t want to lose all the thoughts tumbling around in my head before I could put them in order. “You can challenge me on every point,” I offered generously.
He laughed. “I’m on your side, remember?”
“You can’t help yourself,” I told him. “Anyway, I mean it. Play Devil’s Advocate. It might be useful,” I admitted.
“How flattering,” he said. “Do you want to start?”
“Okay.” I wiped my hands on my pants to keep from getting the steering wheel sticky with sweat. “Let’s start with the time of the phone call reporting the ‘break-in.’ If we can believe Ramon—”
“Big ‘if,’” Scott commented.
“See?” I said. “I rest my case.”
“I’m being useful. You’ve already admitted it. Proceed.”
“If we can believe Ramon, he broke in about four in the morning. The call didn’t come in till after five. Unless you suppose he hung around the office for an hour looking at the artworks, why the delay? Doesn’t it suggest there’s something fishy about the phone call?”
Scott shook his head. “In the first place, we only have Ramon’s word about when he broke in, and even he is a little vague about the time. In the second, there’s no proof one way or the other as to how long he was there. They’d demolish you with that argument.” He looked at me. “I’m showing you how a judge would see it. It doesn’t mean you aren’t right.”
“Fair enough,” I told him. “Next is the matter of the files—”
“Inconclusive,” Scott said. “You don’t even know that the files disappeared on the night of the murder. You’re just guessing.”
“I’m assuming. Bear with me.”
“Okay.” He smiled.
“Well, assuming they did disappear on the night of the murder, and assuming again that Ramon didn’t take them or destroy them—”
Scott rolled his eyes.
“—Then their disappearance strongly suggests th
at someone else was there, doesn’t it? Maybe there was something in them that the real killer wanted to hide. Maybe the files were the reason for the murder in the first place.”
“And maybe somebody took them out the week before, and no one noticed until Natasha was killed,” he said reasonably. “You do realize that you can’t build any kind of a case on ‘maybes,’ don’t you?”
“I’m hoping that if there are enough ‘maybes,’ they’ll add up to a reasonable doubt,” I told him. “Just enough to get somebody interested enough to look again.”
“So far, the likely conclusion would be that you’re grasping at straws,” he said. “Proceed, however.”
“Thank you, Counselor. I haven’t even come to the best part yet—the statue.”
“The putative statue.”
“You sound like a lawyer,” I said.
“I am a lawyer.”
“Okay, the putative statue. Naked, too,” I said. “That statue interests me a lot.”
“Obviously,” Scott observed.
“Well, look, if it was there when Ramon broke in and not there when the police discovered Natasha’s body—and of course we’ll have to check on that, but I’m sure I would have remembered it if it had been in any of the crime-scene photos—then it must have disappeared between about four and five-thirty in the morning on that day. It’s got to be connected somehow. The real killer must have taken it.”
“Even if that were true, you’ve got a lot of problems. One, how are you going to identify it? Two, how could you track it down if you did? If the killer took it, he’s probably still hanging on to it, don’t you suppose?”
I bit my lip, thinking. “I don’t know. It might not be as hard to track it down as you think. I’ll work on it.” I paused. “There’s something else, too.”
“I knew there would be,” he said, with a smile.
“Well, what would an artwork like that be doing on her desk in the first place? I mean, if you’re running a very exclusive matchmaking service for extremely picky clientele, would you want a statue of an obese woman in a prominent place? The men all want to meet models, like Mira or Patrice. Even if the sculpture is a Henry Moore, doesn’t it send the wrong message?”
“Do you think all men are obsessed with women’s weight?” he asked in an interested tone.
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