Houston Noir

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  “Hey,” he said, “you the new guy?”

  I cracked the window. “Yeah,” I said. “Unless there’s more than one new guy.”

  He swiped the rain from the window and motioned past the Chrysler with his head. “The body’s down there. The sergeant’s waiting on us.”

  He backed away from the car and I shouldered open the door. It creaked and hitched, but opened wide enough for me to climb out and onto the pavement. I slammed it shut with my hip but didn’t lock it. What was the point?

  The detective offered his hand. “I’m Bill Waters. Homicide.”

  “John Druitt.”

  Waters smiled and led me from the parking lot across Allen Parkway to the aluminum statue of a kneeling figure called Tolerance that overlooked Buffalo Bayou. The milky light that glowed at its base cast an eerily judgmental form, so I looked away and trudged closer to the bayou’s muddy edge.

  Waters slowed his pace, digging his heels into the mud for balance. “You were vice before?”

  “Yeah. Five years. Handled sex trafficking. Takes its toll.”

  Waters chuckled. “So you moved to dead people?”

  My foot slid in the grassy mud and I skated a couple of feet down the embankment. “Dead people don’t feel anything,” I said.

  Waters shot me a glance with a furrowed brow. His lips curled upward and his nose crinkled like he smelled something rotten. I’d seen that look before. It came from people who thought they had me figured out. He didn’t, even if he thought he did.

  As we descended the slope toward the coffee-colored bayou that snaked through Downtown and Buffalo Bayou Park, I used the cuffs of my consignment-shop blazer to wipe the droplets from the swell under my eyes. The rain gave the wool blend a sooty odor that lingered in my nose.

  “According the sergeant, she was weighed down,” said Waters, “but all this rain must have shook her loose. The bayou’s up a good couple of feet.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair and shook free the water. “Who found her?”

  “Jogger.”

  “In this weather?”

  “Marathon’s coming up in a week,” said Waters. “People are obsessed.”

  The closer we got to the bank of the bayou, the louder the rush of water. Above us was a split bridge called Rosemont. The steel-and-concrete spans crossed the water in a V shape and resembled a train trestle more than a pedestrian bridge.

  Under the bridge, within the confines of flapping yellow tape tied to a bridge piling and two young pine trees, was a hive of activity. A drenched rat of a man stood shivering off to one side. He had the narrow frame of a runner and the anxious disinterest of a man detained.

  Past him, in the sloppy bank of the rising water, was a trio of wetsuit-clad divers. One was bent over, his back heaving as he worked for air. Another was on his knees next to the woman’s body. The third stood watch, as did half a dozen rubbernecking patrol officers. Dead bodies attracted flies.

  I stood there for a moment, lost in the rush of the bayou. It was hard not to listen to the gurgle and wash of a swollen bayou and not wonder, in the muddy parts of my mind, if the water would ever stop rising. I’d heard others voice the same fears over bitter coffee and undercooked migas. They’d huddled close to each other, leaning on the chipped laminate of late-night greasy-spoon bar counters. They’d absently stirred their half-and-half and whispered about the rain as if it could hear them, while lightning had flashed and the feeder roads had filled with oily water.

  “I called the dive team on the way here,” said Waters, shaking me from my thoughts. “Gets us a head start.”

  The woman was on her back. Her dark hair covered her face. She was clothed in a torn pink dress that clung to her body in a way that would have been unflattering on a breathing woman.

  Waters planted his hands on his hips and faced me. “So,” he said, “I don’t know if they told you this when you applied for the posting or when they interviewed you, but in homicide, we split the duties. One of us takes the scene, the other takes witnesses. What do you want?”

  “Scene.”

  Waters pursed his lips. “All right, I’ll talk to the jogger.”

  He slopped over to the thin man. A uniformed sergeant wearing a wrinkled vinyl poncho waved me to the body. Angry raindrops slapped the bayou with a growing intensity. I stepped close to the sergeant.

  “You the new guy?” he asked.

  I knuckled water from the corners of my eyes and nodded. “New to homicide.”

  “Crime scene folks are on their way,” he said.

  I thanked him and moved past him to the body. Her stomach was bloated under the dress in a way that made her appear pregnant, almost. Her skin was grayish green, and something had nibbled at her bottom lip and hanging tongue.

  The skin was loose at her fingers and on her feet. There was the beginning of a scar on her left shoulder—a small, partially healed burn in the shape of an X. There was a two-foot length of orange rope tied around her right ankle. The rope was knotted at one end, torn and frayed at the other.

  Her neck was a different color than the rest of her mottled body: varying shades of purple, concentrated in a thick line that ran across her throat.

  I pulled a wet notepad from my coat pocket, made some rudimentary notes, and pressed myself to my feet. Waters was standing behind me.

  “Not much from the jogger,” he said. “We’ll have to canvas the apartments across the bayou for witnesses or surveillance cameras.”

  I wiped my nose with the back of my hand and looked at the dim outline of multistory buildings through the curtain of rain. They stood watch over the bayou. A couple of the windows glowed yellow from the lights inside; rich people living above the muck, warm and comfortable in their castles. They never flooded. They never waded against the current of rising water, holding their lives above their heads in trash bags.

  “She’s a hooker,” I told him. “Probably trafficked.”

  Waters’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?”

  I pointed to the wound on her shoulder. “That’s a brand. There’s a group that runs a house off of White Chapel. It’s industrial and they have one of the buildings there. Maybe a block east of the Southwest Freeway. There’s a cantina in the front, girls in the back. All of them have those marks on their shoulders. We keep busting them. Doesn’t matter. They find a way.”

  Like the bayous.

  Waters rolled his eyes. “Lucky SOB.”

  A sharp breeze swirled around us, whistling against the frame of the bridge and sending a chill from my neck to my lower back. I shivered and pulled the soaked jacket collar against my neck.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “You call scene,” he said, “and in five minutes you’ve got good information on who she was, who the perp might be, where we go for leads. It’s almost like you handpicked it.”

  Almost.

  Waters’s phone chirped against his hip. He wiped the screen with his thumb and answered the call. While he talked, I stepped back to the body and examined the rope at her foot.

  The knot was good. It was a bowline, the type of knot that held its shape and didn’t shrink or expand. The other end, the frayed end, was ragged. It probably rubbed back and forth against something sharp until it gave way. The killer couldn’t have anticipated that. The local weatherman hadn’t accounted for three days of nonstop rain, the most since four feet fell in four days during Harvey. That storm was the stain you couldn’t wipe clean.

  Waters slid his phone back onto his hip and crouched next to me. “CSU pulled up,” he said. “They’ll start snapping pictures, taking videos. They’ll do all the measuring. You think we need to expand the scene?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. She didn’t drown. At least not here. She’s got ligature marks on her neck. She was dumped upstream. The killer didn’t think she’d break loose. We’re not going to find anything here.”

  “I agree,” said Waters. “Good call. Once CSU is finished, they’ll call the medical ex
aminer. They’ll send a team to finish up here. Then she’ll go to the morgue.”

  “Then we get out of the rain?”

  Waters chuckled. “Something like that. Hey,” he said, thumping me on my arm, “since it’s your first case, you get to buy me coffee.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Coffee. Beer. Jack. Whatever you want.”

  “I like you already, Druitt.”

  * * *

  Delete. My favorite key on the computer is delete. It erases all my mistakes. There should be a delete key in life, something that helps hide from the rest of the world the things you’ve done but regret. Something that masks the errors with your real intent.

  I was holding down they key, racing the cursor back to the left side of the screen, when Waters sidled up to my desk. It was three thirty in the morning on Friday.

  He toasted me with his cup of coffee, the Styrofoam stained brown at its edges. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said. “You need to go to Lake Charles and gamble, brother. Your luck is ridiculous.”

  I’d been to Lake Charles. I’d gambled there. I’d lost.

  “What?” I said. “I’m almost finished with the rep—”

  “We got somebody who knows our girl. Says she saw her Monday night.”

  “I thought we weren’t heading over to White Chapel until after we have cause of death,” I said. “Then going there with a warrant. Don’t want to blow our wad needlessly. Right?”

  Waters sat on the edge of my desk and drew a sip of the coffee. He was slurping what had to be his fourth cup. “We didn’t go. She came to us.”

  “What’s her story?”

  Waters smacked his lips and set the coffee cup on my desk. “Got picked up in a sweep,” he said. “Had a scar on her arm. Mentioned White Chapel to the arresting officer. Buddy of mine downstairs tipped me. I had her moved for a Q-and-A.”

  I saved my unfinished report and followed Waters to the elevator. We rode it to the floor where we do interrogations, talk to witnesses, and argue about the designated hitter and instant replay.

  The woman was waiting for us in a small room with gray walls and a rectangular two-way mirror. She was rocking back and forth in her chair, one knee bouncing up and down. She was picking at her cuticles with her teeth. She had stringy brown hair that looked wet even though it probably wasn’t. There was a faded tattoo of Betty Boop above her left shoulder blade. On her arm, there was a thick X-shaped scar.

  I stood off to the side and let Waters start the conversation. He spun a chair around and straddled it, leaning on the back with his forearms.

  “My name’s Bill,” he said. “This is my partner John. I heard your name is Annie. I also heard that you know about a girl who went missing. One of your friends.”

  The woman stopped chewing on her finger but kept it in her mouth. Her red-tinged eyes danced back and forth between the two of us, seemingly unable to focus on either. Her pupils were dilated.

  “You high?” I asked.

  The woman pulled her finger from her mouth and sat on her hands. She curled her lower lip between her teeth and bit down.

  Waters gave a disapproving glance. I guess this wasn’t how we were supposed to start. He softened his voice and tried to hold the woman’s gaze. “You’re not going to get in trouble. We really just need your help.”

  “It’s Spice, isn’t it?” I asked. I could spot a synthetic marijuana user like nobody’s business. She had the jitters, the paranoia, and the sallow skin color. “You’re using right now. I can see it.”

  Waters leaned back from the table and glared at me. He swung his leg over the chair and motioned me into the corner of the room. His jaw was set. His eyes were wide with anger. He spoke through clenched teeth. “What are you doing?” he asked. “We’ve got a lead here and you’re intimidating her. You think she’s gonna talk if she thinks we’re gonna lock her up?”

  I looked past Waters at the woman. She ran her fingers through her greasy hair and then picked at a small black gauge in her right earlobe. She swallowed hard and raked her teeth along her bottom lip. She couldn’t sit still.

  “Good cop, bad cop,” I said. “Always works.”

  Waters raised an eyebrow. “So I’m the good cop?”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “I don’t think that’s what we’re doing here,” he said.

  He shook his head and resumed his one-sided conversation with the woman. He kept offering her useless niceties, promised her some cigarettes or coffee. Maybe a Shipley’s donut or a hot dog from James Coney Island down the street. Whatever she wanted.

  “How about another hit, Annie?” I said. “That help?”

  She glanced at me, checked with Waters, who was frowning, and then looked back at me. She nodded.

  “No problem,” I said. “You just need to help out Bill here. He thinks you might know something about the woman we found in the bayou last night.”

  Annie stared at me. Her lips were pursed. She was stuck in pause mode for a moment, fixated on me, and then she nodded again.

  Waters pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. He sucked in a deep breath of air and exhaled. “Okay,” he said begrudgingly, “you tell us what we need to know and we’ll see about getting you some of what you need. Deal?”

  She nodded once more and Waters pulled his phone from his pocket. He unlocked the screen, tapped it a couple of times, and slid it across the table to Annie.

  She glanced at the phone and closed her eyes. “Her name was Mary Ann,” she said. Her voice didn’t match her appearance. It was timid, almost sweetly apprehensive, the product of a life spent at the behest of others. She looked younger when she spoke. “She was new.”

  “New to what?” asked Waters.

  The girl shrugged. “Everything.”

  Waters leaned in, his voice softer, matching hers. “Drugs? Sex?”

  “She was from Connecticut,” said the girl. “New London. They brought her last week.”

  “Who?”

  The girl hesitated. She peered over at me, as if I could give her approval. As if I was the one holding sway over her. She bit on her cuticle, nibbling on the loose skin before working it free of her nailbed.

  I nodded.

  She looked back at Waters and ran her hand through her hair. “EastEnders,” she mumbled.

  “The gang?”

  She lowered her head and tugged at the gauge. “Yeah,” she said. “They have places where they keep us.”

  “Like White Chapel?” asked Waters.

  She nodded.

  “How would she get out?” he asked. “I mean, if they put you in these places, they must keep an eye on you. How did you get out?”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. “They keep some tied up. But most of us, they keep us high. You know, they give us stuff. For free. So we stay close.”

  “What if you try to run?”

  “Nobody does,” she said. “They’d kill us. I’ve seen them kill girls. You know, give ’em too much stuff. OD ’em on purpose.”

  “Did Mary Ann try to run?” asked Waters. “How’d you know she was missing?”

  Annie glanced at me and then shook her head. She looked back at Waters and her eyes widened. Her head tilted to one side and she shook a finger at me. “I think I know you,” she said. “I’ve seen you.”

  Waters swung his attention to me, a quizzical look on his face. He leaned back in the chair and folded his arms. “You know him?”

  She wagged her finger again and narrowed her beady little eyes. “It’s the hair,” she said. “And the eyes. I know I’ve seen you. On White Chapel. You’ve been in there. Drinking at the bar.”

  She was right. She’d probably seen me. She might have handed me a Jack and Coke. She might have given me more than that. Sex trafficking. Takes its toll.

  “Yeah,” I said, unfazed by the accusation. “I’ve been in there. I worked trafficking for five years.”

  “Drug trafficking?” Annie asked.

  �
�Human.”

  Waters, apparently satisfied with my explanation, shifted in the chair and planted his elbows on the table. “How did you know Mary Ann was missing?” he asked.

  “I heard people talking. Nobody had seen her in a couple of days. They’d dropped her off. She got picked up by some dude in a beater. Never came back.”

  Waters scratched his chin. “Did she run away?”

  Annie shrugged. “I don’t think so. I don’t really know. We worked different spots. I’m Old Spanish Trail. She’s Third Ward.”

  “You think you could show us where in Third Ward she worked?” I asked. “What corners?”

  Waters nodded his approval. “That’d be great, Annie.”

  “You think I could get a bump?” she asked, scratching the Betty Boop above her shoulder blade. “I’m coming down.”

  “If I get you the bump,” I said, “you’ll take me there? The spots where the EastEnders drop off the girls?”

  Annie checked with Waters. “Sure,” she said. “As long as nobody sees me in a cop car. I don’t want nobody seeing me with cops.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Waters hopped up from his seat. “Can I talk to you?”

  He motioned for me to leave the room and led me into the hallway. Annie just sat there picking at her cuticles.

  Waters stood uncomfortably close to me. “Couple of things,” he said under his breath. “I can’t sanction you giving her synthetic pot. I don’t know what kind of crap you got away with in vice, but that’s not what we do here. She’s already a shaky witness. You give her drugs and she’s toast. The DA will never let her testify.”

  I stepped back from Waters, gaining some space. “What’s the other thing?”

  “Why do you need her to show you where the EastEnders drop the girls? You know these guys, right? Don’t you already know the spots they control?”

  He was right. I did know.

  I knew where to find the girls, and the boys, run by Barrio Azteca, Sureños, Tango Blast, Mara Salvatrucha, Bloods, and Crips. I knew their turf. I knew their methods. I knew the legit businesses that fronted their operations. I knew their trafficking routes. I knew the EastEnders were rapidly growing, given their backing by a dominant Mexican cartel.