by Chris Culver
Gabriel considered and then nodded, so I reached into my jacket and pulled out a stack of cards. I only had five or six left, and each of the ministers took at least one.
“Thank you, everyone, for talking to me,” I said, standing. “I’m going to see if Mr. Alexander is available.”
Before I could leave, Martin put his hand on my forearm, stopping me. He looked directly in my eyes. “Brian Alexander is as good of a man as I’ve ever met, and I’ve known a lot of good men. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Remember that before you judge him.”
I nodded. “I will.”
“I believe that,” said Martin, removing his hand from my arm. I nodded to him and then the rest of the table before walking toward the double swinging doors that led to the kitchen. As I passed through those doors, I heard water running and Brian singing, his voice so deep I could practically feel it rumble in my chest from across the kitchen. Two enormous pots of chili simmered on a commercial range on the right side of the room, while a stainless steel walk-in freezer dominated the left. Four stainless steel islands, like desks in a classroom, sat in the center of the floor.
“Brian,” I called out. “It’s Ash Rashid from IMPD.”
Brian turned around. He didn’t recognize me at first, but then a smile cracked his chapped lips and he threw me the towel he had on his shoulder.
“We’ve got aprons in the supply closet,” he said. “If you can give me a hand drying, I’d appreciate it.”
I considered telling him I hadn’t come to volunteer, but he had a pile of dirty dishes on the counter to his left, a pile of clean ones on the counter to his right, and little time before the lunch rush probably began. He could use some help, and I could use some goodwill. I removed my jacket, rolled up my sleeves, and got to work. Since I didn’t know where anything went, I dried things as well as I could and then stacked them in what seemed like logical piles on one of the center isles. Despite what seemed like a lot of work, the two of us washed everything in about fifteen minutes, after which Brian wiped his hands on his apron and turned to me.
“Most of the time when police officers come here, they want to arrest one of our guests. It’s good to see that’s not all you people do.”
“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” I said, leaning against the nearest island. It must have been bolted to the floor because it took my weight without budging. “I’m here to talk.”
Brian reached into the murky water of the right sink and pulled out the drain. When he removed his arm, water ran to his elbow. I threw him one of the towels I had been using.
“Much obliged,” he said, nodding. “And I assume you’re here to talk to me.”
“I am.”
Brian nodded and threw the towel into a dirty-clothes hamper near the sink. “How’s the drinking?”
I furrowed my brow. “Excuse me?”
“I’m a man of God, Mr. Rashid. You and I may not be of the same faith, but we are of the same flesh. I know its temptations, and I know Michelle was your AA sponsor.”
It took me a moment to respond. Brian didn’t know me, but he seemed to genuinely care. Martin was correct. This was a good man, and that changed how I needed to approach this. No tricks, no games, no threats. Just questions.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “I think you know why I’m here.”
“Do I?”
“Santino Ramirez,” I said. “You lied on the stand. So did your wife, Dante Washington, Michelle Washington, Valerie Perez, and Xavier Jackson. We haven’t been able to find Xavier to warn him of what’s going on, so if you could help us locate him, it’d be much appreciated.”
Brian smiled. “The X-man is one of our projects that turned out okay. After testifying, he moved to St. Louis to live with his sister and her family. Jasmine and I visited him a couple of years back. He took us to a Cardinals game.”
I wrote the information down.
“Ten years ago, you told me you witnessed Santino Ramirez shoot Angel Hererra in the dining room. Where were you really when he got shot?”
He didn’t hesitate. He simply flicked his eyes upward. “In my office with Dante and Xavier. Valerie and Michelle were with my wife in our conference room. We were preparing to deliver some meals to our less ambulatory guests. Back in those days, we didn’t have GPS on our phones, so we were going over maps. We wanted to make a game out of it, boys versus girls, to see who could deliver their meals first and get back to the Mission.”
“When you heard the shots, what’d you do?”
Brian gestured to the pile of dishes behind me. I nodded, and he grabbed a pair of dry, large cutting boards and lugged them to a cabinet beside the stove.
“Same thing I do every time I hear shots. I ducked.”
I smiled a little. “What’d you do after that?”
“When nobody shot back, I called the police. Uniformed officers came, swept the building, and then your partner showed up.”
I didn’t want to get hostile, but he had held back. I shook my head to let him know I didn’t plan to let him get away with that. “You’ve skipped a few steps. Did you talk to those uniformed officers?”
Brian smiled indulgently, patiently. “We’ve had a few shootings in the area, so I knew we’d have detectives come shortly. I didn’t want to have to repeat my story, so I cut out the middleman and told the officers I would only speak to the supervisory detective assigned to the case.”
“And that was Keith Holliday,” I said.
Brian nodded and then picked up a large sauté pan from the pile I had dried. He ran his hand across the interior and then grabbed a reasonably dry towel. “You missed the handle. You put a dish away like this, it’s going to attract ants.”
“I apologize,” I said. “Did you tell Keith this story about Santino Ramirez doing the shooting?”
“Wasn’t a story,” said Brian, glaring at me as he ran a cloth over the handle of the sauté pan. He held the pan toward me. “See that? That’s how you dry a pan.”
“Let’s try to stay focused, if you don’t mind. You were upstairs when somebody shot Angel Hererra, but you testified that you were in the kitchen with a clear view.”
Brian nodded and hung the pan by its handle on a rack above the stove. How ants would reach that, I didn’t know.
“I did, and to the detriment of my soul, I convinced the others as well. Your partner understood.”
I blinked, sure that I had misheard him. “You told Keith the truth?”
“Yes, I did,” he said, taking a clean spoon from a drawer beside the sink and walking to one of his vats of chili. He tasted it and leaned back. “This is going to be just right in a few hours.”
“Let’s go back to my partner. What exactly did you tell him?”
“The same thing I’m telling you right now.”
My mouth almost fell open. “And how did he react?”
“Little less surprised than you are. He simply asked me one question: why?”
I waited for him to continue. He didn’t. “Okay. Help me understand like you helped Keith. Why’d you lie on the stand?”
Brian stopped walking a few feet from me. “Somebody had to.” Before I could say anything, he held up a hand, interrupting me. “Let me tell you a story about a runaway I met a couple of years back. He never told me how old he was but couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Kids on the street called him Noodles because he liked spaghetti so much,” said Brian, smiling to himself and leaning against the stainless steel island beside mine. “He’d tell stories like you wouldn’t believe. You’d hear him, and you’d laugh so much your belly would ache. You want to know what Santino Ramirez did to him?”
I shifted and looked down to my feet. “Killed him?”
“Nah,” said Brian, pausing until I looked him in the eye. “He gave him a gun. Noodles was lost when I met him, but he was a good kid. Now, when I see him, I look in his eyes and I see night without measure. No stars, no moon, no dawn, just cold black. I don’t scare easi
ly, but he scares me.”
I knew the look, and it scared me, too, although probably for different reasons. In my case, I feared one day I’d find it staring back at me from the mirror.
“The world would be better off without Santino Ramirez, but that didn’t give you the right to lie about what you saw, nor did it give you the right to convince others to lie, either.”
“I know, and that is something I will have to atone for at the end of my days. Santino Ramirez murdered Angel Hererra. Everybody knew it, but nobody stepped forward. His own wife told me it was going to happen two days before it did. I called the police, but they said they couldn’t post someone here indefinitely.”
I furrowed my brow. “Carla Ramirez told you her husband planned to shoot Angel?”
“Yeah. She was one of our regular volunteers. Twice a week, rain or shine, she’d come on her lunch break and serve our less fortunate men and women. When she had time, she even stuck around after the lunch rush to help me with the dishes. She was a nice woman who didn’t deserve her husband.”
During our investigation ten years ago, I saw photos taken from the emergency room documenting some of the beatings he gave her. Murderer or not, he deserved whatever he got in prison.
“So you lied because Carla asked you to?”
“No, Detective Rashid,” said Brian, shaking his head. “I lied because I found out Santino Ramirez wasn’t alone that day.”
I cocked my head at him. “Who was with him?”
“His son, Jacob. Kid was about eight years old. Carla told me he spent winters with his mom in Dayton, but summers in Indy with his dad. I had already seen Santino Ramirez ruin one life, so I drew a line in the sand and said no more. I told a lie and convinced others to do the same. If that damns me to Hell, that damns me to Hell. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“No,” I said, softly. “But it might tell me who murdered Michelle.”
Chapter 24
Carla hadn’t expected the early morning phone call from Kristen Tanaka’s office, but she agreed to stand beside her on the morning show without hesitation. Even though the reporter had no idea what Carla did for a living, she’d owe her a favor and in Carla’s business, favors made the world go round. Before the show had begun, Tanaka showed her the picture of Tino crossing the border into the United States on the day he supposedly shot Angel Hererra. She didn’t know where Tanaka had gotten the picture or why she chose to produce it now, but Carla doubted it had anything to do with justice. The rich and powerful played by slightly different rules than the common folk, but they played the same game she did. Tanaka expected to get something out of that picture
No matter what happened because of that picture, it didn’t matter. Even if the state of Indiana dropped the murder charges against Tino, she had enough information about her husband squirreled away to send him to prison for ten lifetimes. Over the years, he had killed almost a dozen people and buried them on a quarter-mile stretch of Sugar Creek, just north of Turkey Run State Park. Having canoed that same creek, Carla knew that campers oftentimes pitched their tents and drank themselves silly there, having no idea that two entire families decomposed just six feet beneath them. One of those families belonged to the imprisoned leader of an African-American street gang. Had his gang enjoyed ties to a national organization, Tino would have left them alone; since they didn’t, their territory had become an acquisition target, one they refused to give up freely. The second family belonged to a man and woman who had organized neighborhood watch groups in an area Tino intended to annex. They, too, refused to give up freely, and they, too, died for their misjudgment.
If the police exhumed the bodies, they’d find bullet fragments they could tie to the very same gun she had used to murder Angel Hererra, only this time, Tino wouldn’t weasel out of the charges. This time, he had no alibi. This time, he’d rot for good. She’d make sure of that.
As she hurried out of the television station, salt spread on the sidewalks to keep them from frosting overnight crunched under her heels. She had worn flats, a sensible choice considering she didn’t know how much time she would have on her feet that morning. Events had progressed quickly after invoking Santa Muerte and murdering Gail and Mark Pennington. Tino’s old crews didn’t suddenly accept her, but they had begun accepting Jacob, especially when Miguel stood near him. The crew boys had stopped fighting each other and focused on their common enemies, namely the police and the men and women who had put Tino in prison. They wouldn’t move without Jacob or Miguel’s say-so, but she could rally at least fifteen members of Tino’s old crews to their cause. Every day brought new recruits.
Chaos and infighting made things difficult, true, but they also made change possible. Like a forest fire, Tino’s execution would wipe the ground clean. She had another week, she guessed, to shape Barrio Sureño into the lean, strong organization it should have always been, and that meant she had little time to cull the chaff from the wheat, starting with some of her husband’s more questionable business enterprises.
When Miguel Navarra had come into her life, she and Tino controlled a small area and moved perhaps half a million dollars of various products a year. They did reasonably well for themselves, but that success made them vulnerable. They needed partners to expand their territory and to preserve what they had. Miguel provided everything they needed. In those first few weeks, Tino used to stay up at night telling her about the things Miguel had done, about the men and women he had killed, about the business he had secured. Her husband had an infatuation with the man, that much she saw immediately, and she couldn’t blame him. A former colonel in the Mexican Army, Miguel had a swagger about him that left women whispering to one another about his availability when he left the room.
He taught her husband how to better utilize his resources, how to instill loyalty in his recruits, how to develop the skills he had inherent in him. For a time, business went well and everyone profited. Then, Miguel began coming to Tino with other ideas. With their trucks and their connections at the border, Miguel and his business partners had an easy time bringing not just drugs but people across the border, and sometimes, Miguel needed help with those people in Indianapolis. Tino stepped in without hesitation, providing manpower where needed.
Each week, Miguel brought twenty to thirty people across the border, across the Great Plains, and into Indianapolis. Carla didn’t know how much he charged them, but Tino received two hundred dollars for every person he helped usher into their new life in the US. At first, Tino and his crews didn’t have to do much. They stopped the occasional fight, they babysat, and they contacted families to pick up their loved ones. It became a supplemental income, but a quite important supplemental income. Then, Miguel and his handlers became greedy. They realized that some of their smuggled clients could afford far more than whatever they charged in Mexico, so Tino set up a network of stash houses across the city in which they would put migrants after their long journey. Miguel or someone from his organization would then contact the client’s family and request more money, sometimes five or ten thousand dollars. Miguel never threatened anyone the first time he made contact, but most people understood the situation and paid.
Those who didn’t pay received a body part in the mail, usually a finger but occasionally a toe or an ear if it had an identifying mark. Everyone paid eventually, or their loved ones died. Carla hated the business. She didn’t mind killing people when needed, but this had far too much risk and not nearly enough reward. If one person—just one single person out of the hundreds they brought into the US each year—escaped and made his or her way to the police, the soldiers of Barrio Sureño would fill death row to capacity. No one should have to operate with that hanging over their heads, and now that she had her opportunity to rid herself of it, she would.
She headed southwest. Barrio Sureño rented and maintained a network of warehouses and homes for their illicit trade, but Miguel used one warehouse in particular to stash his more valuable assets, VIP immigrants among the
m. She drove until she left the city behind and entered an industrial area. Miguel counted a freight company amongst his neighbors, so Carla knew she had come to the right area when she came across a semi carrying a load of what looked like hundreds of wooden pallets on the back of a flatbed. Two more turns, and she saw Miguel’s warehouse, a red-brick, two-story building at the end of a rutted lane. She parked beside Miguel’s truck and watched as a young man emerged from the nearest door. He had a buzz cut and a sour expression on his face. Her husband would have known his name, where he came from, and the names of the women he had slept with most recently. Tino had a gift for that sort of thing. Carla remembered seeing him once or twice, but she didn’t know who he was affiliated with. She’d have to rectify that in the future.
She grabbed her iPad and stepped out of her car and nodded to him. “Excuse me. I’m looking for Miguel. Is he in?”
“You his old lady or something?” he asked, squinting at her and reaching into his jacket with his left hand.
“No,” she said, closing her car door and stepping forward. “My name is Carla Ramirez. Miguel and my husband are friends.”
He looked at her from her feet to her face, paying special attention to her chest. “You’re Tino’s bitch? I didn’t recognize you.”
“I’m Tino’s wife,” she said. “If you call me anything but Mrs. Ramirez, it will be the last thing you call anyone.”
He stood a little straighter and then looked around, as if for help. When he found himself alone, he looked back at Carla, but he looked as if he had shrunk two or three inches. “I didn’t mean offense. I’m just saying, you’re Tino’s girl, right?”
He waited, as if for her to say something, but she merely stared at him, unblinking.
“Seriously, I’m sorry, Mrs. Ramirez,” he said. “I’ll tell Miguel you’re here.” He started toward the door, but stopped before opening it. “And I’m sorry about Tino. He was a good dude. He was like my hero growing up.”
