The Color of Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  The question seemed to baffle him, but after a moment he pointed toward the ceiling. “I keep it where I can put my hands on it quick if I need to. I checked it when I heard the sirens, just in case, you know. It’s where it’s supposed to be. You weren’t thinking my gun—”

  “Just making sure,” I said.

  “Is that what Chuck was yelling about out there earlier, someone ask him about his gun?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I could’ve gone out and shot him myself when he started in. I’d just got Karen calmed down—you know how Karen likes to keep up on her neighborhood and she was not one bit happy that the cops sent her home—but as soon as we heard him, she wanted to go out there and get into the middle of things, probably make a nuisance of herself. I know my dear wife rubs some people the wrong way, Maggie, and a lot of folks think she’s just plain nosy. But Chuck, he tells her what’s going on and lets her talk his ear off. The comings and goings at your house the last couple of days have kept their jaws pretty busy.”

  “I can only imagine,” I said.

  “You gotta give Chuck credit though. He’s been keeping an eye on your place all summer. Says he’s worried about squatters. Vacant house, you know, can be a magnet for mischief. And he wasn’t wrong. That Nordquist character was hanging around, and no one wanted that, least of all Chuck. You know, because of the boy’s criminal background.”

  “Did Chuck ever confront Larry?”

  “Funny thing,” George said, shaking his head about something he obviously did not find funny. “But it happened the other way ’round. They had a pretty good shouting match out here one day, but it was Nordquist who confronted Chuck. Chuck told Karen the guy was just venting an old grievance about an arrest Chuck made years ago when Nordquist was still in high school. Happens to cops all the time; some people just can’t seem to let go of bad feelings, you know.”

  Under the table, Jean-Paul squeezed my knee. Larry had apologized to me, but he also wanted me to make amends for pain I caused him. Did he ask Chuck for an apology? Or did our Peeping Tom have something else on his mind to discuss with Chuck? I covered Jean-Paul’s hand with mine and smiled at George; Karen wasn’t the only Loper who could talk your ear off. I did not interrupt his flow.

  George reached around for the coffeepot and topped off our mugs. “Chuck told me that the other day when he was on duty at the bank he spotted Nordquist hanging around Bartolini’s deli. He said he went over and told Nordquist to scat, but Beto came out and said it was okay, said the guy was waiting for you. Well, that made Chuck nervous, thinking about what the con would want with you. So when you showed up he caught Nordquist’s eye and made like he was going for his gun and the guy took off running. Chuck got a kick out of that.”

  “I wondered why Larry ran away,” I said, remembering Larry lurking along Shattuck behind me; he was dodging Chuck, not me. I had a hunch Chuck was more worried about what Larry might say to me than he was concerned for my safety.

  “Did Chuck ask you to keep Larry away from me?” I ask.

  “Well, sure, honey. We look after our neighbors, you know. There was no reason for you to be bothered by that overgrown delinquent. I can’t tell you how many times I had to shoo him off the property.”

  It was so easy to get information out of George that I almost felt guilty—almost—when I fed him another question.

  “Your roses are beautiful this summer,” I said. “Did you ever meet Dad’s friend Khanh Duc?”

  He furrowed his brow, shook his head, and then the light dawned. “Duc? The guy with the big wholesale nursery?”

  “Yes, Duc.”

  “Sure.” He nodded with some enthusiasm. “Whenever I want anything for the garden, Chuck takes me down to Duc’s nursery, gets me a good price. Have you seen his place, south of San Jose? It’s huge, covers lots of prime real estate. That Duc’s a real enterprising guy, gotta give him credit for putting together something like that. The specialty there is roses, but he carries just about everything you can imagine. If you need some plants to fix the mess all those people trampling in the yard made of your Dad’s flower borders, you go ask Chuck to hook you up with Duc.”

  “Chuck and Duc are good friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say they’re good friends exactly,” George said. “Not backyard-barbecue good friends, anyway. Chuck told me he was an early investor in Duc’s business and he didn’t mind letting Duc show his gratitude from time to time. But friends? No.”

  “Interesting,” I said, squeezing Jean-Paul’s hand. “Very interesting.”

  From somewhere above us, Karen called out, “George?”

  “You’ll have to excuse me, folks,” George said, pushing himself back from the table. “I better go see what the wife wants. When she takes a sleeping pill she wakes up a little disoriented. Don’t want her to fall again.”

  We thanked him for the coffee, apologized for dropping by unannounced at such an early hour, and saw ourselves out the back door.

  “So?” Jean-Paul asked when we were outside, headed home.

  “Now we know where Duc got that gun,” I said. “We keep tripping over Chuck Riley, don’t we?”

  “He seems a bit of a bungler, but I think he is an adept manipulator of people,” Jean-Paul said. “Perhaps dangerously so, yes?”

  “Yes.” I held my phone on my open palm; the connection to Chief Wasick’s phone was still open, still on speaker, as it had been during the entire conversation with George. “Chief, you there?”

  “I am.”

  “Did you get it?”

  “The whole confab,” he said. “Interesting.”

  “Where is Chuck Riley?” I asked.

  “I heard enough to send a squad to pick him up.”

  Happy to hear that Chuck wouldn’t be out loose for a while, I closed the connection and slipped the phone into my pocket. Our front door opened just as we reached the porch and crime scene technicians, apparently finished, filed out past us carrying their gear and bagged evidence. With no fanfare, Duc’s body, zipped into a green plastic body bag, was wheeled out among them and deposited into the coroner’s unmarked white van. Almost as reflex, Jean-Paul and I both turned to see if anyone was watching from the Loper house, but saw no one.

  The last man out handed me a certificate releasing the scene and a card with the numbers of local crime scene cleaners. I dialed the first number on the card and arranged with the dispatcher for a crew to come as soon as possible. For a small additional payment, I was told, a crew could be at the house in an hour. I said, fine, whatever, peachy, just come. Now would be good.

  Chief Wasick, standing in the open front door, eavesdropped on the transaction.

  “Any word on Kevin?” I asked as we walked up the steps.

  “Doc says he should be okay.” Wasick crossed his arms over his chest and sagged against the doorjamb, weary, ashen-faced, as he watched the coroner’s van pull away from the curb. “Until we bring in Riley, I’ve posted men at the ICU.”

  “Until you bring Chuck in?” I said, thinking that Chuck should be in custody by now. “He lives just down the street.”

  “Yeah, but he seems to have stepped out. The wife said she doesn’t know where he went. The logical place for him to go is the hospital to check on Kevin, but he hasn’t turned up there, yet.”

  “When you find him,” I said, “might be wise not to tell him right away that Duc is dead. Let him worry that Duc is talking.”

  He smiled grimly, “Hey, who’s the cop here, you or me?”

  “You sound like Kevin,” I said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment; Kevin is our best investigator.” His voice cracked when he said Kevin’s name. “I should have paid more attention when he told me he was reopening the Bartolini murder. A favor for a friend, he said. There was so little to go on—a thirty-year-old case—that I never thought he’d get anywhere with it. Poke around, make his friend happy. But now, Jesus.” He canted his head toward the bloody mess visible through the open door; I dreaded goi
ng back inside. “What did he set in motion?”

  I said, “Ask the original investigator.”

  “Yeah, Riley.” Wasick went over and sat on the porch rail, gazed out across the long shadows of early morning stretching across the lawn. “For all of his problems, Riley had a good record as an investigator. But he sure did a piss-poor job on that one. I thought maybe he was off his game because he was too close to the case, lived across the street from the victim. But now...”

  He shifted his focus to me. “Was Riley covering his own butt? Did he shoot that woman?”

  “I don’t know if he pulled the trigger,” I said. “But I’m very sure he had a hand in it. Trinh Bartolini was being extorted for sex and Larry Nordquist, the neighborhood Peeping Tom, knew who the guy was. Riley didn’t want Larry to talk to me. And now Larry’s dead.”

  “What was Riley’s hold on her?”

  “Fear for her sister’s safety,” I said. “Wouldn’t you expect that if a woman were murdered not long after she and her husband went to the police to report that they were being extorted by the local agent for the people holding their relative for ransom in Vietnam, the homicide detective assigned to her case would pursue that lead?”

  “Sure.”

  “There’s not one word in Trinh Bartolini’s murder book about the ransom demands or a police inquiry about it.”

  He scowled. “Kevin told you that?”

  “I saw it for myself,” I said.

  “I’ll have a word later with Kevin about showing you the murder book, but it is interesting. You think Riley was in league with the extortionist’s local agent?”

  “Maybe not in the beginning, but from the time the police were brought in, yes. Old Chuck Riley, always on the lookout for a little spare cash, extorted the extortionist who, unless I am mistaken, is now zipped inside a green body bag on his way to the morgue.”

  “So far, that’s a lot of speculation,” Wasick said. “Have any solid evidence?”

  “That’s your department,” I said. “It’s your case. I have faith you’ll turn up something. Duc came out of Vietnam with nothing, but managed to turn that nothing into a very substantial business. It’s worth looking into.”

  Jean-Paul, who had been quietly listening in, said, “If you don’t mind, Chief, I will make a call or two. Records of Duc’s land purchases will not be difficult for you to find, but international bank transactions, especially very old ones, will require help of a certain sort. Maggie, shall I inquire whether the FBI has records of your parents’ report and any follow-up investigation?”

  “Can you do that?” I asked. A little Gallic shrug was the response. Jean-Paul was already punching numbers into his phone when he turned to go into the house; the man was full of surprises.

  Wasick seemed puzzled. “He said what?”

  “Jean-Paul has resources,” I said.

  “Who are you people?”

  I tried to imitate Jean-Paul’s shrug. “When Kevin gets the DNA report from Mrs. B’s shirt, with luck you’ll have your solid evidence.”

  “The DNA report came in from the lab yesterday,” Wasick said. “Whatever Kevin saw in it upset him enough that he ran out to talk to his priest.”

  “He ran out to get drunk with my uncle,” I said, turning to go inside. “Please excuse me.”

  The blood on the entry hall floor was congealing and beginning to smell. Taking shallow breaths, giving the mess a wide berth and keeping my eyes averted, I went looking for my uncle. I found him in the living room, asleep on a sofa.

  “Uncle Max.” When I shook his foot he opened one eye. “Kevin got the DNA profile from Trinh Bartolini’s shirt?”

  “He wanted to talk to you about it. That’s why he came home with me last night. That, and he didn’t have enough for cab fare; we put away a tidy bit of scotch after dinner.”

  “How did you get home?” I asked. I hadn’t seen the rented Caddy out front.

  “In a cab.” He yawned. “I offered to lend Kevin some money, but he said something about wanting a farewell tour on a leather sofa. He wasn’t making a whole lot of sense by then.”

  “What did he say about the DNA?”

  Max propped himself up on his elbows and yawned again. “He said he was an idiot and that you were right.”

  “About?”

  “Hell if I know. Maybe in vino veritas, but in scotch there’s just a lot of slurred words after a while.”

  Chief Wasick had followed me in.

  “Chief,” I said, “we need to see the DNA report. Where is it?”

  He addressed Max. “She’s kind of bossy, isn’t she?”

  “She can be,” Max said, smiling at me fondly. “And she can be a force of nature when she is on to something. I believe it would be wise if you produced that report.”

  “The report is at the station.” The chief bowed from the waist as he swept an arm toward the exit. “Shall we?”

  “As soon as the house cleaners come,” I said, turning Max’s wrist to see his watch. “About half an hour.”

  “Maggie?” Max managed to pull himself upright. “Lana called. The network funded your account at start of business this morning, New York time.”

  “So, that’s done,” I said. We were staying with the network for the Normandy project, and I didn’t know how I felt about that. There was relief that the project would go forward, of course, but also some disappointment that we were still entangled with the old network—a problem child—instead of making a fresh start with a new backer.

  “To tell you the truth,” Max said, “I was surprised that the network came through. Apparently the push happened when someone on the New York goon squad picked your name off the morning news feed. He immediately sent in the order to fund.”

  “Saw my name?” I said, puzzled.

  “Actually, this.” He took out his phone and flipped through his files until he found what he wanted, a photograph. He handed the phone to me. “Lana says it’s gone viral. I hope Jean-Paul doesn’t take any flak because of it.”

  “Holy crap,” was all I could think to say when I saw the image. There we were, Jean-Paul and I, standing shoulder to shoulder at the open front door, barely dressed and covered in blood watching paramedics wheel Kevin to an ambulance.

  Jean-Paul heard me and came in from the dining room to look over my shoulder. He muttered, “Merde,” and went back to his call.

  Chapter 21

  It was still early when we got to the police station, though we’d been up so long it felt like midday. The Civic Center was just coming to life, city workers beginning to straggle in, paper cups of coffee clutched in their hands as they dodged the cadre of young skateboarders who use the public sidewalks, ramps and stairs as their private skate park. And, of course, there was a fair cross section of street people drinking out of paper bags or sleeping off the night before on shaded benches. Max, Jean-Paul and I managed to negotiate our way through wheeled youth and panhandlers and get through the front door of the police station without incident.

  The rookie cop on front-desk duty expected us. He led us out of the police lobby and through a maze of cubicles in back. We passed Chief Wasick’s office door and went instead into the detectives’ bullpen. Tony Wasick was at Kevin’s desk studying the contents of the manila file folder open in front of him. He glanced up when we came in.

  “It’s interesting,” he said as the three of us peered over his shoulders. “Very interesting.”

  When Kevin sent Trinh Bartolini’s shirt to the lab for testing, he had also sent along a sweat-stained T-shirt belonging to Chuck Riley, the baseball bat belonging to George Loper, a plastic fork Bart Bartolini had used, and a chewed-on pencil he lifted from the pencil cup on Dad’s desk. Beto gave him a bamboo flute that he remembered his mother playing, from which her DNA sample was extracted. Of the five samples, only two matched the DNA on swatches cut from the bloody white shirt she wore when she was found. They were hers and Chuck Riley’s.

  When I saw that Chuck Riley’s
semen as well as some of his blood were found on the shirt, I felt like crying and laughing and maybe doing a rain dance at the same time; fatigue, let-down after a very bad night, both or neither, I didn’t know what all, made me feel just a bit giddy.

  I reached around Wasick and put my finger on a line in the lab report: a small amount of Chuck Riley’s blood was found on the back of her shirt. I said, “Riley was behind her when she was shot.”

  “Looks like it,” Wasick said. “She took a frontal hit, middle of the chest. The bullet passed through her and may have grazed him. So, the question is, if he was behind her, who pulled the trigger?”

  “Ask Riley,” I said.

  “When we find him, we will.”

  Max chimed in, “You certainly have enough to get a search warrant for Riley’s house, Chief.”

  “Thirty years after the fact, what am I looking for and where am I looking for it?”

  “Riley’s bedroom or whatever dungeon he took that dear woman into. Take up the carpets, check the walls, look for blood, a gun, a bullet hole. A souvenir he kept of her, maybe.”

  “More than thirty years, counselor.” Wasick rubbed tired eyes.

  “It’s a long shot,” I said. “But it is a shot. If Chuck Riley won’t talk, we may never know exactly what happened to Trinh Bartolini. Larry Nordquist is another matter. After all that I have seen and heard, I am just awfully damn certain that Chuck whacked Larry to keep him from talking. I have faith in you, Chief. You’ll find what you need to convict Chuck on that one.”

  “We’ll see,” Wasick said, closing the file. “We’ll see.”

  We had learned what we came to learn, and now it was time to go. I offered Wasick my hand. “Thank you, Chief.”

  He took my hand in both of his and looked directly, pointedly, into my eyes. “Like the murder book, you never saw this report. Got it?”

  “Of course.”

  He rose from his chair. “Now, if you folks will excuse me, I have a nap to take. I’m too old for all-nighters.”

  Jean-Paul, Max and I walked up to the Bartolini deli for breakfast. Beto’s wife, Zaida, was busy with customers, but she took the time to tell us that Beto was at the hospital with his dad and that Bart was having a pretty good day, all things considered. Beto had run into Kevin’s son at the hospital, so he knew in broad outlines what had happened the night before. And because Beto knew half the staff at the hospital from either school or the deli, he was able to get regular updates on Kevin’s condition. Zaida told us that Duc’s bullet had pierced Kevin’s lung and shattered a rib on the way out. He had lost a lot of blood, but no other vital organs were damaged. He was still in the ICU, still asleep, and his condition was stable. Good news all around.