A Murder Too Close

by Penny Mickelbury

  “Maybe that’s why he’ll keep himself from doing anything to get sent back.”

  Mike grunted a grudging acknowledgement. Arlene came down the hall with a tray and I opened her office door and followed her in. Raul jumped up from the table when the door opened but sat back down when he saw it was just me and Arlene. He watched her, watched her put down bowls of food.

  “Raul’s never eaten here, Arlene,” I said.

  “I hope you won’t be disappointed, Raul,” Arlene said.

  He tore his eyes from the food to look at her, as if he expected she was joking. When he saw that she was serious, he let a real smile crack his face. “I don’t think you have to worry about me being disappointed, madam,” he said. “This already looks and smells better than anything I’ve ever experienced.”

  I looked at Raul like he was a new life form. In the first place, I’d never heard that many words come out of his mouth at one time. And madam? Experienced? Not that the guy couldn’t be literate and well-spoken. I’d just had no reason to think he was. I looked from him to Arlene and thought maybe he didn’t think I was worth the effort. Arlene Edwards, despite the fact that she was a grandmother, definitely was the kind of woman a guy would make an effort to impress. If he wasn’t going to haul out his erudition but a couple of times a year, when Arlene Edwards was serving him lunch would be one of those times. But not only did she bring out the good manners in him, she also was having a calming effect. He didn’t look or act quite so squirrelly and jumpy and he watched Arlene like he’d just discovered oil beneath the Union Square subway station, and he owned the station. And as hungry as I knew he was, he looked sad when she left. “I’ll come back in a little while to check on you,” she said, and left, not quite closing the door all the way. I hoped that Raul wouldn’t notice.

  He didn’t; he was too starry-eyed about her. “That’s one classy lady,” he said, piling food onto his plate. “Pretty, too.” I nodded. Arlene was indeed classy, but she was an awful lot more than pretty. I didn’t feel the need, though, to share my thoughts and ideas about women with him. I’d made the mistake of doing that with Carmine. Once was more than enough. Besides, the guy had enough on his mind and we’d deal with all of it, one item at a time. Getting some food into him was the first priority, and he was making real progress on that front. I held myself back out of guilt; Mike was standing in the hallway waiting for us to talk. He couldn’t eat until we finished. The least I could do was wait.

  “Think you can talk some now, Raul?”

  “Yeah.” He wiped his mouth on his napkin and gulped some water. “I don’t eat when I’m scared or worried or upset, and then I forget I haven’t eaten. Goes on for days sometimes. It’s not so bad since I’ve been working at the diner, being around food all the time. But since I haven’t been there for a couple a days . . .”

  “What’s he look like, Raul?”

  “Fat, stupid-looking white boy. Big, though.”

  The one who’d come to my office with information about the fires to sell, who then got mad when I wasn’t buying and threw a chair against the wall. Good thing Yolanda insisted on keeping the door locked. “Start from the beginning, Raul. How you know—knew—Jackie Marchand, all the way to why you were at his place the morning he was killed.”

  He did as I asked. He was a very cautious and observant man, habits picked up, he said, in the joint, so he had a memory bank full of names and places and dates and practically verbatim conversations with Jackie to share. “That was one smart kid. He wanted to go to work for the UN. He spoke languages, you know? He was born speaking French, up in Canada. He learned English in school up there. Then he learned Spanish when he got here—just learned it. And he was studying Chinese. Used to go to Chinatown all the time and talk to people. There’s different kinds of Chinese. Did you know that? Depending on where a person’s from?”

  “Dialects,” I said.

  He nodded. “Right. Dialects. He could speak two or three of ’em. Wanted to learn Japanese, too.” He talked on about how brilliant Jackie was and I let him; I knew it was to keep from talking any more about the rough stuff, the painful stuff. He wound down.

  “Did you ever meet Thomas Kearney? Ever see him?”

  He shook his head. “I just know Jackie didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, said he was a drunk, and mean.”

  “Do you have any of this, any of what you’ve told me, in writing, Raul? Did Jackie have any papers or documents from the insurance company that you saw?”

  “His laptop. He had a laptop. The freak who killed him took it with him.”

  I felt all the air seep out of me. Whatever had been in Jackie Marchand’s laptop computer was history now. I tried not to wish too hard that I had that computer; Raul had told me enough that I could do some serious dot-connecting and I was grateful. That’s what I wanted him to walk away thinking and remembering. That and knowing that I knew that he didn’t have to talk to me at all.

  He’d said something and I missed it. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  “That it’s not what you think. Me and Jackie.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Prison changes some men, you know? Emotionally, psychologically, sexually. I changed the first two ways but not the last one. That’s not what it was with me and Jackie.” I must have looked as dumbfounded as I felt because Raul gave me a totally disbelieving look. “Aw, come on, Rodriquez. Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought that.”

  I was shaking my head. I hadn’t, not for one second. But immediately I knew that Mike and Eddie had. “I didn’t, sobrino. Not once. Not even a passing thought.”

  He looked at me for some more long seconds, looking for the truth in my words. I guess he found it because he continued telling his story. “I wanted to help him because he was smart. I was smart like that when I was a kid and I had nobody to help me. My family—my parents and grandparents and brothers and sisters—they all laughed when I told them I was going to college. I was accepted, too. Even had a partial scholarship. But it wasn’t enough for everything, and my papi said if I wanted to keep living under his roof I had to get a job, pay some rent. I couldn’t pay rent and buy books.” He shook himself, trying to slough off what must have been a more than twenty-year-old memory that was holding onto him like last night’s bad dream. “So I moved out. I was going to college and nobody was going to stop me. That first semester I was living in the basement of the student activity center and everything was okay until the first night it got really, really cold. I snuck into the boiler room to keep warm and fell asleep. The janitor found me the next morning and that was it.”

  My papi wasn’t convinced that I was really smart enough to go to college, and the idea of me in a college classroom really tickled him, so he got a second job to help me out. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have made it. I tried feeling what Raul must have felt, the despair, the anger, maybe even a little hatred. Then I tried turning all that inward—and understood instinctively that that’s how some junkies get made. Not all of them, but probably way too many. “How were you going to help Jackie? You can’t be making that much at the diner.”

  “I’m not, but I’m living at my parents’ place now. Big two bedroom over by East River Park. I couldn’t even go visit my mami until the old man died, then she let me move into the second bedroom. Then she died. Finally gets rid of that mean ass fucker and she ups and dies. Anyway, the place is mine. Rent controlled, right? So I told Jackie he could have the second bedroom, rent free. That’s why he wasn’t in school this semester: He was working two jobs so that in the fall he could go to school full-time.”

  Raul looked so proud when he said this it made my heart hurt. “That’s one of the most decent things I’ve ever known one person to do for another.”

  He shrugged it off. “No damn good now, is it, being decent? The dude’s dead. Never got a chance to live it.”

  “But he got a chance to feel it, Raul, to feel hope and joy. And that’s somethi
ng.”

  He looked at me again. This dude could really look at you, like he was trying to read something written on your face, or trying to read something on the screen inside your head. “I hope you’re right, Rodriquez. I really hope you’re right.” He stood up. “I gotta go to work. If I don’t show up today, I’m out of a job.”

  I stood up, too. “I meant what I said earlier: Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  “You can’t be with me all the time.”

  “I can put a man on you twenty-four seven,” I said.

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Yes, I would,” I said, and was greatly relieved when he refused the offer; with Eddie damn near dead and Mike attached to me like a shadow to keep me from getting as nearly dead as Eddie, I didn’t have anybody to put on him for half an hour to say nothing of around the clock.

  “I appreciate that, Rodriquez, but it won’t be necessary. I can’t hide for the rest of my life. Jackie wouldn’t like me being a coward. I don’t even like me being a coward.”

  I had an inspiration: “How about this: I’ll put you in a cab from here to the diner, and have a car pick you up when you’re off and take you home. At least until I can find this fat, dumb white boy and whoever hired him and put them both out of their misery.”

  He was shaking his head but smiling. “Thanks, man, but no thanks. I’m really okay. Maybe I just needed to eat something, you know?” He gathered up all the dishes from the table and stacked them along his arm. “Get the door for me, will you?” I did and followed him out, down the hallway and into the kitchen. Mike was nowhere to be seen.

  “My goodness!” Arlene exclaimed when she saw Raul. “You’re a waiter?”

  He bowed from the waist, still holding the plates up his arm, and he was so smooth the silverware didn’t even rattle. “Yes, ma’am. And if you ever need any help, let me know. I’ll work for food. You don’t have to pay me money. Just let me inhale these aromas and eat once a week and I’m your slave. And if you teach me to cook food that smells and tastes like that, I’ll slay a dragon for you.”

  Arlene was laughing. I was speechless. Raul put the dishes on a long counter that was stacked with dirty dishes and I followed him through the jam-packed restaurant and out the front door, catching Mike’s eye along the way. I was keeping an eye out for a taxi but I had one more question for Raul. “Why did Jackie let him in, Raul?”

  “He said he had a message from Kearney. About some extra work. I heard that much through the closed door, so I eased back into the bedroom. Out of the way, you know? That was business, after all.” He closed, then opened his eyes. “How many people would be alive, would be healthy, would be sane, if only they’d had enough money?”

  I whistled a taxi over to the curb, put Raul into it, dropped some money on the seat beside him. “Thank you, Raul,” I said.

  “Thank you, Phil,” he said.

  Mike and I were at the table in Arlene’s office eating like we hadn’t consumed a dozen doughnuts a couple of hours earlier. I guess that’s what’s meant by empty calories. Mike had been strangely quiet. Never shy about expressing an opinion, he hadn’t voiced a single one about my conversation with Raul. I’d even asked him whether the receiver and transmitter had functioned properly; he told me they did, that he’d heard every word. And now not a word from him? “I know who the guy is who killed Jackie Marchand,” I said. That got his attention.

  “Know him how?” he demanded. I told him. “I agree with Yo. No way you can have people like just walking in off the street like that. And she’s gonna have to get over her dislike of firearms, too. Son of a bitch like that just needs shooting.”

  “Not gonna happen, bro. Anyway, the door’s locked now.”

  “Jackie Marchand’s door was locked. He unlocked it and let his killer in.”

  “How do you think they knew Jackie was going to talk to me before they killed him and took his laptop?”

  “And why tear up the place if the laptop was right there on the table, in plain view?” I watched Mike retrieve the mental picture of Jackie’s ransacked apartment. “Mr. Dumb Fat Boy definitely was looking for something else, the way that place was tossed.”

  “A printout!” I said. “That’s how they knew! He must’ve printed out a copy of what was in his computer and taken it to work with him at some point, in his backpack along with his school papers, and somebody saw it.”

  “Then you might have it, Phil. It might be with that stuff I took from his place. We thought it was just class papers—essays and term papers, things like that. But suppose...?”

  I was supposing. I was also imagining. Imagining police captain Bill Delaney making good on his threat—his promise—to lift my PI license because, in his words, I walk too close to the line and my toes keep crossing over. He wasn’t happy that I was the one who had discovered Bill Calloway’s murdered body in the back door of the site of an arson investigation. I wasn’t too happy about it myself; but Delaney still was chafed and rubbed raw about my involvement in identifying the guy who was raping and murdering little girls a few months back. The parents had hired me after months of no response from the police, and another raped, murdered little girl. That one was personal because it was Arlene Edwards’s granddaughter. But I also found out that the cops knew who the perp was and if they’d stopped him then, Arlene’s granddaughter would be alive. Then the perp took an ass-whip that put him in the hospital for more than a month. Delaney wanted to believe that I’d done it but I hadn’t and I could prove it. But I knew who did do it and so, to divert Delaney’s attention, I gave him a multi-million dollar theft, fencing, and dope dealing ring on a silver platter. It had been operating out in the open, from a barber shop, for years, and Delaney and his cops had never known it. I hadn’t either, but then I didn’t get paid to notice criminal activity in a public place. I got paid to do things that some citizens felt the cops didn’t care too much about, like who was calling them terrorists and burning down their businesses.

  “You can’t worry about what that asshole Delaney thinks,” Mike said.

  “You gotta stop doing that, bro.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Walking around inside my brain like that. Speaking what I’m thinking.”

  “It’s not like you’re that hard to figure out,” Mike said.

  “Ouch,” I said, really feeling stung.

  “Stop bleeding, bro. Didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was that you don’t ever weave a tangled web around yourself or anybody else, and you always do the right thing for your clients, even if it’s the wrong thing for somebody else. Like Bill Delaney and the police department.”

  “I won’t be much help to my clients if Delaney pulls my ticket, Mike.”

  “I told you, Phil, don’t worry about Delaney. I’ve got the antidote for him.”

  I envisioned a huge hypodermic sticking out of Delaney’s butt and laughed. So did Mike, no doubt because he knew what I was thinking. Arlene came in then with dessert—bread pudding. We looked at it and I said, “What doughnuts?” And we both laughed some more and ate the bread pudding. Arlene pulled up a chair and we spent some time talking with her, telling her as much as we could about why I needed to feed Raul in her office and why Mike was hiding in the hallway listening to the conversation.

  “Will he be all right?” she asked of Raul, and we told her we thought he would, that we’d do everything we could to make sure that he was. “Good,” she said, “because I really do need a waiter. Do you think he’d work out all right here?”

  I was about to answer when Mike jumped in. “I think, next to your own son, Raul would be about as good a guy to have here as you could find.”

  She nodded her head once. It was a done deal. “Would you give him my number and ask him to call me?”

  I left El Caribe wishing that Jackie Marchand could have lived to attend college full-time, could have lived so he could have a home in the spare bedroom in Raul’s apartment, could have lived to see Raul waiting ta
bles and cooking in El Caribe; and hoping that it wasn’t too late for Raul to reclaim some sense of his long-lost self. “Let’s go see Eddie.”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “I want to talk over this shitty case with him.”

  “He can’t talk back, Mike.”

  “That’s why I want to talk it over with him: He’ll have to listen for a change.”

  Eddie was awake when we got back to the hospital. Linda was sitting beside him, holding his hand, and a cop was standing outside the ICU suite. Not just any cop, though. This was Assistant Chief Eric “The Ace” Spade. I’d never met him but I sure as hell knew who he was. Every cop in the city knew who he was. He was in full dress uniform, standing at parade rest, feet apart, hands behind his back, hat in his hands, looking at Eddie in his bed. He turned when he heard Mike and me approach and his long, thin face broke into a smile.

  “Well just look at what the cat dragged in!”

  “How’re ya doing, boss,” Mike said, shaking hands with Ace Spade.

  Spade clapped him hard on the back. “I thought you two did everything together. How’d he get nailed and you didn’t?”

  Mike clapped me hard on the back. “ ’Cause I was covering his sorry butt,” he said, and introduced me. We shook hands.

  “Heard a lot about you, son. Pleased to meet you.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, too, sir, and the pleasure’s all mine.”

  “Do you know yet who shot Ortiz?”

  I hesitated, but only briefly. “I think I might, sir.”

  “But what? Can’t prove it?”

  “Can’t tie him to the paymaster. Not yet.”

  Spade’s blue-gray eyes narrowed and his lips compressed into a tight, straight line. “You saying somebody paid to have Ortiz shot?” Before I could answer him, though, he said, “The dead insurance guy in the back door. He was the target and Ortiz was just collateral damage? Is that how you’re looking at it?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, probably sounding as uneasy under his probing as I felt.

  “You were the target,” he said, the words sounding pinched off through his compressed lips. “And since all Spics look alike, Ortiz took the bullet meant for you.” Spade’s eyes turned a darker shade of gray and narrowed into mere slits and he turned them on Mike. “You see it that way, too?”