He gestured the kind of nose ring he meant, and Maria needed no translation.
She said, “Sí, un anillo así. Una plaza de toros.”
“You know the guy,” Noah said.
“Yeah,” Izzy said. “I know the guy.”
All three of them were quiet for a few minutes after that. Izzy knitted his brow, puzzling it out. All Deacon had told him was that Cynthia was seeing someone else so he backed off. He hadn’t exactly lied, because Izzy never asked if he’d ever kissed her, or if he’d spent the night with her in an abandoned house on East Cesar Chavez. Still, it was hinky.
“For what it’s worth,” Noah said, breaking the silence, “Maria says she liked Cynthia a lot. She was a quiet girl but very polite. She didn’t understand Spanish well but they got along. She says it broke her heart to find her that way, and she’s praying for her.”
“If only that helped,” Izzy groused. Noah gave him a look. “Tell her thank you for me. Please.”
Noah and Maria spoke a little longer, her taking his hand and smiling sorrowfully. She then shook Izzy’s and saw them through the front door to the porch.
Noah said, “What now?”
“I want to look inside that house,” Izzy said, nodding his head at the derelict structure next door. “Then I’ll get you back to Sandy. I’ve got someone else to talk to, but I won’t need a translator.”
His jaw twitched, and he started for the frowzy yard.
Nineteen
The front door was locked, but the door in back was not. A screen door lay on the weeds, which worked slowly but surely at overtaking it. Izzy pushed the back door open, releasing a stale, sweaty aroma from within. Noah slapped at his arms and legs, waging a fruitless war against the mosquitos inhabiting the overgrowth. He and Izzy traded glances, and then Izzy went inside.
Noah hesitated, but started in after him. But Izzy reappeared in the doorway, startling him. He held his keys out.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “There are some paper grocery bags in my trunk from Whole Foods. Grab two or three of those for me, will you?”
“Uh,” Noah said, accepting the keys. “Okay.”
“And some gloves from the first aid kit, too. There should be some white ones in there.”
Inside, Izzy advanced to the middle of the backmost room, behind the kitchen. The house appeared to have the same setup at Maria’s piñata store, but there were no piñatas here. Only dust, dirt, mud, spiderwebs, a filthy sleeping bag, some well-read issues of Hustler, a banged up metal filing cabinet, a stool missing a leg on its side, spent cigarette butts, and a collection of five empty beer bottles arranged in a semi-circle. The light was bad and the smell was getting to him, but Izzy went over to the bottles where he crouched to get a better look. Presently Noah appeared at the back door, the bags folded up in one hand.
“Got ‘em,” he said.
“Good,” Izzy said. “Bring them here.”
Noah handed him the bags and withdrew the gloves from his pocket, which he also gave Izzy.
“So,” Noah said. “You said you’re a nurse?”
“Studying to be a forensic nurse,” Izzy said, pulling the gloves on, one at a time.
He picked up one of the bottles and looked it over. Natural Light, a little yellow scum in the bottom. With his free hand he snapped one of the bags open and set the bottle inside. He repeated this with the other four.
“Paper is breathable,” he explained. “Keeps any biological material dry and where it needs to be much better than plastic, which can screw up your evidence.”
“Aha,” Noah said. “And what evidence are you looking for, exactly?”
“A longshot,” Izzy said. He left the bag with the bottles where it was, and opening another deposited a dozen or so butts inside. They all had liggett stamped on the filters.
Noah said, “I guess they speed up this part on the TV shows.”
“I’m going to check out the rest of the rooms.”
Crossing his arms, Noah remained where he was.
The kitchen still had plates and glasses in the cupboard and cutlery in a drawer, but all of it was neatly put away and caked with dust and cobwebs. They hadn’t been used in a while. In the first of the front rooms, corresponding to Maria’s colorful cashier area, he found another sleeping bag, this one rolled up with twine. Beside it lay a pack of Liggett cigarettes, probably empty. On the wall above this was graffiti, all rushed and amateur. Broken glass was scattered on the bare wood floor from where the window panes had been knocked out.
The smell was worse here. Like a combination of cheap candle wax and bad chicken left out in the hot sun, Izzy thought. His gorge rose in his throat as his heart picked up its rhythm. He knew that odor more intimately than he liked. Pinching the collar of his shirt to tug up over his face in lieu of Vick’s, he dropped the remaining paper bags beside the rolled sleeping bag and walked cautiously to the next, final room of the house.
There he stopped so abruptly he almost fell forward onto his face. His breath hitched in his lungs. From behind, Noah came stamping in.
“Is this going to take much long—oh my Christ.”
Izzy looked at him, then back down at the body in the corner opposite the front window. The dead man was slumped over, his legs spread out straight before him, his arms limp and palms up. Flies buzzed around his face, did curlicue flight patterns overtop the corpse’s stubbly, shaved head. The flesh of his face and jowls seemed to hang off the skull, distended and yellowish. In the center of it all gleamed a thick silver ring suspended from the dead man’s septum.
“You’d better let Sandy know you’ll be late,” Izzy said. “You’re a witness now, my friend.”
Noah sucked down a second bottle of water after the detective brought it to him. He’d been sweating and shaking since before the homicide unit arrived, and he’d told everyone present at least twice each that he’d only come along to help translate for a friend of a friend.
Izzy felt terrible for him. More than that, he was more confused than ever and itching to talk to Forbes. What he got was the Medical Examiner, Marty Dalecki.
“You’re Forbes’ kid, right?”
The ME for the county had more than a passing resemblance to a mad scientist from Central Casting, his gray hair as wild as ever and clothes rumpled and wrinkled. He half-smiled out of the side of his mouth like he was trying it out for the first time.
Izzy said, “Bishop, yeah.”
“I remember you from the morgue the other day. You found a body in there?”
He nodded and checked to see if Forbes had responded to his text yet. She hadn’t.
“I talked to Corporal Parks over there,” he told Dalecki, indicating a thick-necked, ruddy-cheeked homicide detective in a brown suit with a brown mustache in need of a trim. “My statement or whatever. Didn’t touch the body, but I did take some shots on my phone.”
“The hell were you doing in there, kid?” Dalecki asked, scratching his head. He squinted in the sun and wrinkled his nose. “Forbes not bringing you enough corpses to study on?”
“I’ve been following up on Cynthia Ramos on my own time. I didn’t think it was an OD when we all examined her, and I really don’t think so now.”
“Watch that hotdoggin’, Bishop,” the ME warned him. “Maybe that impresses Forbes, but most folks are put off with that sort of shit. I know you want in on all this glamor and glitz—just rein it in a little, okay?”
With that, Dalecki affected a smug grin and wandered off to meet Parks.
“Where you been hiding, Jimmy?” Daleki boomed, throwing his arm around the detective. Together they went into the house.
Izzy rolled his eyes. Noah looked over at him and mouthed, Thanks.
A couple of patrolmen leaned on the hood of a cruiser in front of the house, looking bored in their Ray-Bans. One of them raised his head, watching the piñata store, and Izzy followed the line of sight to see the other detective exiting. Maria stood on the porch, hugging herself and looking ext
remely worried. Izzy wanted to find a large, lonely rock and climb underneath it.
“Isaiah Bishop?” the detective said. Izzy stood. “César Esperanza.”
Esperanza said neither detective nor homicide to identify himself. Somehow it put Izzy at ease.
“You want some water?” Esperanza asked. “Hot day.”
“I’m all right, thanks.”
“Looks like you came down with Mr. Flaherty there to speak with Missus Gomez next door today?”
“We did,” Izzy said. “I’ve told all this to Corporal Parks.”
“I know, but tell it to me now.”
Izzy told him. Esperanza did not record him or take any notes. He just stood there with his hands behind his back and listened, occasionally nodding. When he finished, the detective smiled.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now I understand you had a little trouble with a break in recently, like a home invasion thing?”
“I’ve been talking to a number of people about Cynthia Ramos. Someone is apparently upset with me about it. Deacon was one of the people I talked to.”
“The decedent in the house?”
“Yes.”
Esperanza withdrew a slim notepad from the inside pocket of his suit jacket and peered at it.
“ID on him says Byron Lee Twillig. Deacon a nickname?”
“I don’t know. It’s how he introduced himself to me.”
“Where’d you meet him?”
Izzy paused, unsure of bringing more people into it.
“A squat house, maybe a couple miles from here. They call it the Lost Forty.”
“Lost…Forty,” Esperanza repeated, jotting it down. “You have an address for that?”
Izzy gave it to him, and he wrote that down, too.
“So you spoke to this Deacon about Miss Ramos.”
“I did.”
“And what did he tell you?”
“Not a lot. He was interested in her romantically but said she was seeing someone else. Maria—Missus Gomez—suggested otherwise.”
“Could be she was seeing both of them,” the detective said. “Were either Twillig or Ramos living at the squat?”
“He was there at the time I went and appeared to be living there. He was under the impression that Cynthia had left for a few days and might be back. He didn’t know she’d died until I told him.”
“Yet they stayed at this address on occasion, as well.”
“That seems to be the case. Her more often than him. She didn’t let a lot of people in and avoided the company of others when possible. It looks like she was closer to him than he let on to me.”
“Well,” Esperanza said, “you’re not a detective. It would be easier and less frightening to lie to you than someone who could get him in trouble.”
“He won’t be lying to any of us anymore,” Izzy said.
Detective Esperanza raised his eyebrows.
Their concentration and conversation was then interrupted by Dalecki’s loud voice, emanating from the front door where he and Parks were coming back out into the daylight.
“It’s a goddamned shooting gallery,” he said. “Sooner they tear it down, the better. Until then this probably won’t be the last dead junkie you call me to come look at in there. Chrissakes.”
Izzy said, “Shooting gallery?”
“It means a place where heroin addicts go—”
“I know what it means, detective, but why did he say that?”
“Twillig probably OD’ed in there, like the Ramos girl.”
Overhearing, Dalecki redirected himself at Izzy and Esperanza and said, “Punctures between the toes. Less visible that way, they can still play straight. Something else for you to study on, Nurse Bishop.”
He winked at Izzy and continued to the meat wagon parked behind the cruiser, Corporal Parks ambling beside him and lighting a cigarette. Izzy fumed, his face darkening.
“Fanfarrón Cojida,” Esperanza muttered.
Izzy said, “What was that?”
“Nothing. Listen, I’m going to give you my card so the next time you feel like asking some questions, you can give me a call first. I understand wanting to get to the bottom of things where a friend or loved one is concerned, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it seems like you’re getting involved with some pretty seedy characters and putting yourself at risk.”
The card, which identified him as Detective Sergeant, went into Izzy’s shirt pocket, and Esperanza patted him on the shoulder.
“Is there anything else you’d like to ask or say? You didn’t remove anything from the crime scene or anything like that?”
“No sir,” Izzy lied. “I just called you guys first thing.”
“All right,” Esperanza said, shaking his hand. “Call me if you feel the need.”
He went over to Noah after that, who sat on the curb with his head in his hands and the back of his shirt dark from sweat. Noah sat up and spoke with the detective, so Izzy walked back to his car, sat down behind the wheel, started the engine, and blasted the A/C. It was warm air, but it still felt good. He switched on the radio, found the oldies station, and listened to the second half of an Isley Brothers track while the paper bags in his trunk seemed to thump at him like the Telltale Heart.
When at last the phone vibrated in the console where he set it, he scooped it up, saw a text back from the FNDI, and immediately dialed her number.
When Alana Forbes answered, he said, “It’s Bishop. Got a minute?”
Twenty
“I could have sworn I told you to be careful,” Forbes said, looking down into the Mazda’s trunk. “And this is just crazy, Bishop. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking I have some questions that might be answered by what’s in those bags,” he said.
The sun had set, but the heat of the day lingered in the Stoneridge employee parking lot where they stood. Forbes, Izzy noted, never seemed to sweat. But she did look more than a little anxious at the moment.
“What have you got in there?”
“Some beer bottles in one, cigarette butts in another. I want you to pull some strings for me in the APD forensic science center if you can. Test for DNA, see if it matches this Deacon guy or gets any cold hits on CODIS.”
“Christ, Bishop,” she said.
“And before that, I want to examine Cynthia’s mouth more carefully. Apparently she was going at it with that guy muy apasionadamente. It’s a longshot from hell and it’ll probably only yield what we already know, but I’m desperate and I want to make sure.”
“Let me get this straight,” Forbes said, pushing the trunk closed as if there was a body inside she didn’t want to be seen around. “You want me to help you swab Ramos’s mouth for possible foreign DNA, then take that and all this crap you stole from a crime scene to the people you stole if from to see if they get any matches. Is that about right?”
“Not the same people. I took it from the detectives. Not the lab techs.”
“It’s all APD, Bishop. And even if I did get it in their cycle—which would be near impossible unless Marty Dalecki’s signature is on it—without a departmental say-so it’ll just get backlogged for God knows how long, anyway. You got a detective wants to speed that up for you?” Izzy pursed his mouth. “I didn’t think so.”
“Forbes, please. Back me up on this. No one else will.”
The streetlamps running the periphery of the lot hummed loudly and started flickering on. Forbes took a few steps, staring at the purple dusk sky.
“What did Marty make of the stiff?” she asked.
Izzy hesitated.
“Bishop…”
“Ruled it an OD. Tracks between the toes.”
She stomped a heel on the asphalt and spun around to face him.
“It’s a shooting gallery!” she said. “That doesn’t help your case, it blows it right out of the water.”
“I went over every single room in that place,” Izzy protested. “I didn’t see a single syringe, not one cooking spoon, no
thing that could be used for a tourniquet.”
“Did you search his pockets?”
“No, but one syringe wouldn’t make a shooting gallery. And there wasn’t one on or anywhere near Cynthia when she was found. No kit. For either of them.”
“That’s thin, Bishop,” she said, shaking her head. “Paper thin.”
“It’s reasonable doubt,” Izzy said, and he reopened the trunk. “Help me out.”
“Even if I could, what do you expect this to reveal? That these two specific people who died at this particular scene smoked some cigarettes, drank some beer, and made out? Where would that leave you?”
“Right where I am right now,” he said. “Except with that much ruled out and filed away.”
“He probably went there to wipe himself out on dope after what happened to the girl he liked. Did you think of that?”
“Or Deacon was telling the truth when he said there was someone else. Someone Cynthia was seeing who might tie this all together. The tattoos, the dope, the party, the helium. It’s worth a shot, Forbes.”
“No pun intended,” she said.
Izzy frowned.
Forbes sighed and put up her hands.
“I know some people at the Department of Public Safety,” she said. “DPS has its own crime lab, separate from APD. I can talk to them, put in a request, but I can’t promise it’ll get done in any hurry.”
“And the mouth swab?”
“Ramos is still in the drawer,” Forbes said, gesturing vaguely at the hospital behind them. “Talk to the tech, and do it right. Bring it to me at my office, and I’ll send it all off to DPS.”
“I want to kiss you,” Izzy said.
“If you try it, you’ll be in a drawer, too.”
“Thank you, Forbes. I mean it.”
“This is it, Bishop,” she said. “This is all I’m doing. I have a career and a reputation, you know. You’re a student, and not a very consistent one. If you end up a fool, that is going to be on you.”
Izzy said, “I understand.”
He retrieved the paper bags from the trunk, bunched them together, and gave them to her. She held them with some disdain written on her face, heaved another sigh, and without another word marched back to her Volkswagen a couple dozen spaces away. Izzy watched her climb in and drive off, hoping against hope that this wasn’t going to be the end of the line.
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 10
