Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  “It was white. It had ladders on the side, I remember that.”

  “He’s a painter, apparently.”

  “Makes sense. It was that kind without windows, you know? Sliding door on the side. I can’t remember if there was a company name. I don’t think so.”

  “You didn’t write down the license number or anything?”

  He smiles. “I’ll remember for next time.”

  Back downtown I go through the boxes of task force paperwork, hunting for the Willowbrook Mall surveillance footage, or at least some stills. Aguilar, sensing my excitement, wanders over and dives in. A minute later, Lorenz joins him, and then Bascombe and Ordway walk by wondering what’s going on. Before long, we’re all digging through boxes side by side, stacking the contents on the floor, my chair, and any empty space we can find.

  “Got it,” Bascombe says, lifting a sheaf of paper from the bottom of his box.

  We spread the stills out on the conference table, scrutinizing the grainy images.

  “Does that look like a ladder to you?” I ask, pointing to a pixely shadow alongside the van.

  They all take turns looking. The consensus is that it might be, though Ordway has to spoil the moment by pointing out it could also be a long dent, a streak of paint, or even a missile – basically anything. Look long enough and you see what you want to.

  “You have the address,” Bascombe says. “Why don’t we go check it out?”

  “All of us?” I ask.

  He smiles. “Why not? You want to keep the glory all to yourself ?”

  “Let’s roll.”

  On the drive over, convoying in three cars, I can’t help remembering my last outing in force, the pointless kick-down of Keller’s door. Hopefully this one will turn out better. We pass the apartment complex and then circle around, cruising slowly through the parking lot. At the front of the line, Bascombe sticks his arm out the driver’s window, pointing up ahead. I crane my neck, gazing along the length of vehicles parked under the complex’s corrugated shelter. At the end of the row, a white van sits, with a long, paint-spattered ladder knotted to the roof rack. The lieutenant parks right behind it, leaving me to pull ahead while Aguilar takes up a spot behind. We all get out at once, donning sunglasses, adjusting gear.

  “You know what to do, ladies,” Bascombe calls out.

  We’re detectives, so we do what we always do. Knock on doors. Ask questions. Throw our weight around. It’s not hard to find out which door belongs to Tito the Painter, or that his real name is Tito Jiménez, and he has a little cousin who sometimes stays with him. We congregate in front of his door, ready for anything.

  “March,” the lieutenant says. “You do the honors.”

  Jiménez opens right away, throwing the door wide, no apprehension. He shields his eyes from the sunlight, confused by the sudden appearance of so many hpd detectives on his doorstep, but he doesn’t panic or run, doesn’t try to slam the door on our faces. He’s older than I expected, in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a belly that strains against his white T-shirt, and skin the same shade of yellow-tan as a shade-grown Connecticut cigar wrapper.

  “Is this your van out here?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Is your cousin here?”

  “Frank? He don’t stay here no more.”

  “No?”

  He pushes his bottom lip out. “I told him to leave. He had this girl here living with him, and I said, ‘If you’re man enough for a live-in girlfriend, you’re man enough to pay your own rent.’ I didn’t like her here, always messing everything up.”

  A glance over his shoulder suggests the standards of tidiness haven’t improved. I flip through my notebook, pulling a photo of Evangeline Dyer – not the postmortem snap Thomson took, but one Robb provided, Evey and Hannah in happier times, before the Dyers returned to Louisiana. It’s folded over so only Evangeline’s face shows, the part not obscured by her hair.

  “Is that the girlfriend?” I ask.

  He pauses to study the picture. The silence is so intense over my shoulder I know I’m not the only one holding his breath. Jiménez hands the photo back, nostrils flaring.

  “Yeah,” he says. “That’s her.”

  I ask him where Rios and the girl went after he kicked them out, but he claims to have no idea. According to him, they aren’t that close, him and his cousin. Rios showed up one day saying some dudes he owed money to had taken his car and ransacked his old apartment, stealing a lot of his stuff. Before that, they hadn’t had anything to do with each other.

  “Who did he owe money to?” I ask.

  He shrugs, not because he doesn’t know, but because he doesn’t want to say the name, afraid of getting involved. I push him, and when that doesn’t focus the man’s attention, Bascombe steps forward, all six foot four of him, lowering his sunglasses in slow motion.

  “Dude by the name of Octavio Morales,” Jiménez says. “Bad dude, but not anymore.”

  “He’s dead now.”

  Jiménez nods uncomfortably.

  “What do you know about that?”

  Up to now, he’s been forthcoming, but the painter suddenly loses all interest in talking. I can’t tell if he knows something and doesn’t want to say, or if he’s just afraid of being dragged into a court case, running the risk of having to testify. Either way, he’s obstinate, so Bascombe decides to wrap things up.

  “Mr. Jiménez, we’re gonna have to ask you to come downtown. We’re seizing the van, too. Detective Lorenz, you wanna call us a tow truck, son?”

  “On it, sir.”

  Before he knows what hit him, Jiménez is cuffed for his own safety and baking in the back seat of my parked car. We take a quick look inside – we’ll be back soon enough with a warrant for a more thorough search – and then gather at the van, not opening the doors or even touching the handles, leaving everything for the forensics team to go over in detail. But we can’t help peering through the glass. Ordway goes around back, using his flashlight to peer inside.

  “Boys,” he says.

  We join him, taking turns glancing through. A sheet of plywood lies in back, a makeshift floor, with ladders and buckets and rollers stacked high. Along the side, though, near the sliding door, there’s a crawl space cleared from front to back. The white metal between the plywood and the door is marked with specks of dried liquid that look black from here.

  “That could be paint,” Aguilar says.

  “Yeah.” Bascombe adjusts his sunglasses. “It might also be blood. Anybody want to bet?”

  Nobody does. We’re all thinking the same thing. We might not have found our killer yet, but we’re standing just outside the crime scene.

  CHAPTER 28

  “You look good in orange, Coleman. It suits you.”

  He responds to my jibe with a tug of the wrist, drawing the handcuffs securing him to the interview table taut.

  “At least loosen them a little bit,” he sighs.

  “Sorry about that, but last time we met, you got pretty rowdy. It’s for your own good. I don’t want all those deputies outside to have to come in here. They didn’t look too fond of you, to be honest. Here I was thinking you were a trusty, some kind of model prisoner.”

  “You the one who put me back in here,” he says. “Don’t expect a man to make your life easier when all you do is make his harder.”

  “I’m not asking you to make my life easier. I just want you to make it harder for Frank Rios. Remember him?”

  Coleman’s brow lowers and his cheeks puff up. He remembers.

  “Looked to me like you knew him pretty good,” I say. “Where’s he stay, huh?”

  He smiles at the question, shakes his head. “Hey, send that other cop back in here, man. At least she’s pretty to look at.”

  “I would, but she’s sensitive. I don’t think she appreciated what you said.”

  “It was a compliment, man.” He gives a one-handed shrug, jiggling the handcuff again. “You can’t lock a man up like thi
s and expect him not to say nothing when a piece of that walks through the door.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she was flattered.”

  It’s been five minutes since Cavallo walked out, either feigning offense or really feeling it. Either way, we’d been getting nowhere and he was using her presence as an excuse. Things needed a little shaking up.

  “The way it’s supposed to work,” he says, “is I have something you want, so you give me something I want in return. Like a trade, man. Why I gotta explain all this?”

  “I thought I had something you want. Revenge. You told Rios he’d be dead, so as long as he’s out there enjoying life, he’s making a fool of you. Now, if I knew where he stays, then he’d be in here, too, and maybe the two of you could work out your issues.”

  “Our issues? You mean, like therapy?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So let me get this straight. The trade you’re offering is, I tell you where to find him, and you’ll send him to jail so I can shank him? They gettin’ all this on tape, man?” He laughs at his joke. “Here’s what I don’t get, though. When they made it a crime to snitch out your homeboys? You ain’t gonna send a man to jail for that. So what he done, man? You at least gotta tell me that.”

  “You want to know what he did?”

  “Man, how many times I gotta say it? Yeah, I wanna know.”

  “You want me to tell you?”

  He throws up his free hand, slumping back in his chair. “Mr. March, you didn’t used to be this slow. What happened, you have a stroke or something? Can’t you understand plain English no more?”

  “Murder,” I say.

  He sits forward, eyes narrowing. “Who he killed?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “That boy Octavio? I heard about that.”

  “No, not him.”

  “Who then?”

  “A girl, Coleman. He killed a teenage girl.”

  His eyebrows raise. “He killed her? You talking literal or metaphorical? ’Cause I don’t think literally he killed nobody. It’s Little Evey you talking about, right? The one always followin’ him around.” He shakes his head. “I mean, what he done, it’s bad, but it ain’t the same as killin’.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I want to pounce on him, dragging out everything he knows, reaching down his throat with my fist if I have to, but the worst thing I can do is let on that I’m excited, or even interested.

  “So you’re sticking up for him now, Coleman?”

  “I ain’t stickin’ up for nobody, but if you was in the same kind of bind, you might see it different. You say he didn’t kill Octavio, but if anybody had a reason, it’s him. Man, he loved that girl for real. Drove all the way to New Orleans to get her back, that’s how much. Somebody take your woman like that, like she just another installment on the payment plan, what you gonna do then? Yeah, he killed him.”

  “He didn’t,” I say.

  Now he looks confused. “He told me he was gonna. I talked to him right after he left Octavio. He said he gave over the money – not all he owed, but a nice chunk he got from moving some product – and Octavio, he goes, ‘That’s a pretty little thing. She can stay here and work some debt off, too.’ And I go, ‘What you gonna do?’ I thought maybe he was wanting me to back his play, only that’s not my thing, right? But he’s all like, ‘I got it handled already. I got it taken care of.’ ”

  “You thought he meant he was going to kill Octavio?”

  He looks at me like I’m wearing a dunce cap. “What else you think he meant? Like I said, you’d do the same thing.”

  “Where’s he stay, Coleman?”

  “Listen,” he says. “Since I been in here, I been thinking. So what if he’s snitching to the police, huh? He’s all right. What I said, that was words spoken in anger, without due consideration. I don’t wish nobody no ill. There ain’t no hate in me at all, not no more. It’s wrong to be a snitch, and it’s for sure wrong to leave that girl behind instead of throwin’ down right there, but what’s he gonna do? Answer me that. He said there’s, like, four or five of ’em, and they got guns.”

  “Coleman, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen good. I’m not talking about Octavio Morales, and I’m not talking about Little Evey, either. The girl he killed was somebody else, a friend of hers. He shot her. He shot her three times with a .22. Right here” – I mark the spot on my own body with a fingertip – “and right here. And then he put the barrel against her temple and put the last one right here. In cold blood, Coleman. Now, are you going to sit here and try to defend that, or are you going to tell me where he stays?”

  But he’s not ready to roll over yet. “Why he done it?”

  “Does it matter why?”

  He clamps a hand over his mouth, looking down at the table through slitted eyelids. I sit there and let him stew. Whatever I can say, I’ve said it already. The rest is up to him. If Cavallo were back at the table, she could try to work on his sympathies. She could whip out that cross of hers and tell him if he wants to get right with Jesus, it’s time to talk. But all I can do is level with him man to man and hope it’s enough. Part of me wishes she would walk back in so the burden wouldn’t rest on me alone. But she’s not going to sit here and be spoken to like that any more than I could sit through Hannah Mayhew’s funeral, thinking of my own girl in the casket the whole time.

  “Listen,” he says, then lets out that sweet long sigh every interrogator will tell you is music to the ears, the sound that means he’s about to give it all up. “The thing is, there ain’t no one place he stays. But I know a couple you can check. He’s got this cousin named Tito – ”

  “We know about that. He isn’t there.”

  “All right. Did that cousin tell you he’s gotta van? Frank borrows it sometimes, and when they was looking for him that’s what he’d do, just pull over somewhere and sleep in the van.”

  “We’ve got the van,” I say.”

  He nods. “Before he start paying him again. That’s why he went, to get clear of the man. He was like, ‘I’ll pay you, but you gotta leave me be.’ Only that ain’t how it worked out, I guess.”

  “Besides the van, where would he stay?”

  “There’s some motels he’d go when he had money. And a couple of people he might stay with sometimes – including me, before this happened.” He jerks the cuffs again. “Give me that notepad and I’ll write some things down.”

  I slide the legal pad across to him along with a pen. He hunches over and starts writing. I should feel relief, even optimism, but the longer it takes the less likely it is that Rios will be holed up at any of the locations. I was hoping he’d have a fixed abode, some kind of hideout known only to him and Coleman where we were sure to find him.

  He hands the pad back.

  “Now, Mr. March, on account of all this cooperation here, you gotta do something for me, right?”

  I stand and head for the door. “I can put in a good word – ”

  He laughs. “Whatever. That ain’t what I mean. Listen here. My grandma, every Saturday morning she walks over to Emancipation Park and sits on a bench there. She reads her psalm and she prays, probably for me. She can’t come up here, and me . . . well, I don’t like to call from here, neither. But you could tell her a message for me.”

  “What message?”

  “That everything’s all right,” he says. “Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I go to church every Sunday and sing in the choir.”

  “Do you?” I ask.

  He rolls his eyes. “You can tell her that, man. I helped you out.”

  “Fine,” I say, tapping the edge of the pad against the table. “I’ll tell her.”

  Cavallo waits outside, arms crossed, still steaming from Coleman’s earlier baiting. She asks what I got out of him and I tell her. When she hears I’m supposed to assure the grandmother that he’s a choirboy, she snorts in derision.

  “There must be a different definition inside.”


  While detectives from my squad work Coleman’s list, trying to bring Frank Rios to heel, and Lieutenant Bascombe sweats Jiménez personally in Interview Room 1, I pay a visit to the crime lab garage, where the white panel van has been carefully gone over, every surface scrutinized, every fascia removed for testing. The technician walks me through the results. The dried specks we saw through the window are indeed blood, and Luminol tests show smears all over the interior, especially under the plywood.

  “He scrubbed it out pretty good,” the tech says, “but when I shined the black light on it, the floor just lit up.”

  Removing the plywood, he also recovered a single spent shell, a tiny, crimped .22 caliber casing. Rios knew to collect them, but missed one in the rush.

  “When we unloaded the painting supplies, we also found rolls of plastic they use as drop cloths. We’re seeing if we can match the ragged edge up with the sheet her body was rolled in. Might not work, but it’s worth a try.”

  I nod in agreement. “What about the gun?”

  “No sign of it.”

  Back upstairs, a group of spectators is camped out in the monitor room, watching Bascombe’s performance.

  “How’s he doing?” I ask.

  Ordway sits up front, paws folded over his belly. “He’s just staring at the poor man. It’s unbelievable. Tito talks and the lieutenant just stares him down, so Tito talks some more.”

  “Anything good?”

  “He’s admitted to keeping a Ruger .22 under the seat of the van.”

  “It’s not there now.”

  He nods. “He says it’s got to be Rios who took it.”

  “Does he know where Rios is staying?”

  “Naw, but he offered to go undercover and find him.”

  “For real?”

  “The man’s desperate at this point. He also says Rios might have hightailed it back to Old Mexico.”

  “I doubt that. Remember, I spoke to him. The kid’s got no accent. If he wasn’t born here, he definitely grew up here. It’s not like he just crossed the border. I saw his driver’s license.”

  “And illegals can’t get those.” Ordway smiles at my naiveté.