Davie moved closer. “What kind of misunderstanding?”
He raised his head and stared at her. “We slept together. I wanted to keep seeing her and I wanted her to write to me while I was away, but she was afraid of Felix. She said if I told anyone about what we did, he’d kill both of us. At first I said okay, but later I wanted to tell her I was going to fight for her. That’s why I showed up at Javi’s place.”
Vaughn moved to the side of the bench to cover him from a different angle. “And was she there?”
“Yeah, with Javi. They were smoking weed and drinking beer.”
Davie took a step toward him and lowered her voice. “Did you know Ms. Velez was pregnant with your child?”
He leaned his head back and stared at the treetops. “No. I just wanted to talk to her.”
Davie softened her tone. “What happened, Daniel? How did Javi die? You’ve been carrying this burden for a long time. Let it out.”
“I didn’t kill Javi,” he said, his anger building. “My brother was high, lying on a filthy mattress like a pig. I was pissed and I told him so. He just laughed.”
“What did Alma say?” Vaughn asked.
“Nothing.” His voice sounded raw and bitter. “I could tell all she wanted was for me to leave. Javi kept asking me why I was there. I told him I came to say goodbye, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. So, I left.”
Davie felt her phone vibrate with an incoming call, but she didn’t dare look for fear it would interrupt Daniel’s train of thought. “Your brother was stabbed fifteen times. You must have heard the screams. Why didn’t you go back and help him?”
“I was listening to music on my headset. I didn’t hear anything. Then I left for Afghanistan. I didn’t even know Javi was dead until two weeks later.”
“When did Alma tell you the baby was yours?” Davie asked.
“She didn’t. I figured it out myself. She hadn’t even seen Felix for a couple of months. He was in Texas and didn’t come back until after Javi was dead. Manny couldn’t have been his kid.”
Davie shifted from one foot to another but didn’t take her eyes off Daniel. “Does Alma even know?”
“Look at my son and tell me you’re not sure. She knows but she doesn’t want to be with me. She’s afraid.”
“Do you think Alma killed your brother?” Vaughn asked.
“Why would she do that?”
“That’s what I’m asking you,” he said.
He hesitated before responding. “Maybe she did, but I don’t know why.”
39
Davie and Vaughn left Daniel Hernandez on the park bench and were heading back to the car when she remembered the phone call. She pulled the cell from her pocket and found a message from her grandmother.
“You think he’s telling the truth?” Vaughn said.
“I’ll reserve judgment for now but I’m inclined to think so. We’ll know more after we talk to Alma Velez—if we can find her.”
Vaughn slid into the passenger seat. Standing behind the car, Davie tensed when she read the voice message transcript: Davie, this is grammy. Come over right away.
“You getting in?” Vaughn said.
“I have to make a call first.” Davie’s hands felt clammy as she pressed in Grammy’s number. As soon as she answered, Davie said, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s about that case of yours, the girl who disappeared on the sailboat.”
Her stomach clenched. This was about a case? “What about her?”
“I have somebody here who might have information. Can you come over?”
Maintaining a calm she didn’t feel, Davie said, “Who’s in your apartment, Grammy? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just come as quick as you can.”
The line went dead.
Davie had encouraged her grandmother’s amateur detective skills. Now she questioned whether that had been a good idea. It seemed unlikely Grammy had anything of substance to offer, but she had told her about Fort Lauderdale’s shallow water and she seemed genuinely alarmed by whatever this new information was. Davie needed to make sure she was okay.
She opened the car door and slid behind the wheel. “I have to stop by my grandmother’s place for a few minutes. Something’s going on. She won’t tell me what.”
“A few minutes? I doubt that. Your grandma’s a talker. Drop me by the station. I want to check out Natalie Salinas.”
She couldn’t help the eye roll. “Thanks, Jason. The entire law enforcement community will be grateful for your sacrifice.”
He smirked. “Good to know somebody recognizes my superpowers.”
Davie dropped Vaughn off in front of the station before heading to her grandmother’s assisted living apartment. She arrived, signed in at the front desk, and took the ancient elevator to the second floor. She tapped lightly on the apartment door before entering. Grammy stood in the middle of the living room, leaning on her walker.
Sitting on the loveseat in front of the sliding glass door was a thin woman in her seventies wearing a chic red dress that matched the polish on her long fingernails. Her hair had been molded and sprayed into a blonde helmet.
Grammy rolled her walker toward the woman. “This is Kathleen Newell. She lives down the hall.”
Davie stepped closer and offered her hand. “I’m the granddaughter, Davie Richards. Good to meet you.”
“You don’t look much like a detective,” Newell said. “I thought you’d be bigger.”
“My life’s goal is to defy expectations. Keeps people off guard.”
“We think alike,” she said. “Me, too.”
Davie helped her grandmother into her blue recliner and then sat at the other end of the loveseat with Newell’s oversized purse wedged between them.
Grammy pulled her housedress over her knees. “Kathleen is my new tablemate. I told you about her the other day, remember? She moved here from Florida to be closer to her daughter.”
“What your nana is trying to say is my daughter forced me to sell my condo on the water and leave all my friends behind after my husband went to prison. He was a good provider but he was also a gambler. He tried to stop but couldn’t. Once he left for Club Fed, my daughter told me I was broke, so bye bye Florida. I hate this place—except for your nana, of course. The food sucks.”
Most of her grandmother’s friends felt the same way about the cuisine, but Davie figured it had more to do with a loss of control than it did with leathery pot roast. She’d eaten in the dining room many times with her grandmother. The food was low salt and low fat: palatable but boring.
“I’m sorry you had to leave your home,” Davie said.
Newell flipped her hand as if she were batting away a fly. “I doubt that. You don’t even know me.”
So much for the sympathy cliché, Davie thought. “My grandmother says you might have information about a case I’m working on.”
“I told you,” Grammy said. “Kathleen is from Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. It’s close to Fort Lauderdale.”
“But a hundred times better,” Newell added.
“Anyway, she knew Nate Gillen, the man who was killed in the hit-and-run accident.”
Davie turned to Newell. “Is that right?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly know Mr. Gillen. I met him at my going-away party. A few of my girlfriends took me to lunch at his restaurant.”
“Had you ever been there before?”
“Nope. Just that one time. My friend Ruthie made the reservation. Mr. Gillen himself showed us to our table on account of the hostess was sick that day.”
“How did the place look?” Davie asked. “Did anything strike you as unusual?”
Newell wrinkled her nose. “The menus were greasy. I hate that. Makes me wonder what’s going on in the kitchen, if you know what I mean.”
Davie hated gre
asy menus, too. Just imagining the germ count made her cringe. “Did you notice anything else?”
“They gave a discount if you paid in cash. That was odd. I’ve never heard of a restaurant doing that. We paid by credit card. Split the bill four ways.”
Davie didn’t know if a cash discount at a restaurant was odd or not. It could be a way to hide income from the IRS. Whatever the case, it didn’t appear Newell had valuable information to offer.
Davie felt let down as she rose to leave. “I have to get back to work. Great to meet you, Ms. Newell, and thanks for the information.”
“She has a picture, Davie,” Grammy said, “if that helps.”
That stopped Davie in her tracks. “Really? Can I see it?”
Newell reached inside her purse and extracted a crumpled photo of her and three other women around Newell’s age, sitting in a booth. Leaning over the table with his arm around Kathleen Newell in that same Hawaiian shirt he’d been wearing in Sabine Ponti’s photo was a smiling Nate Gillen. The dimples in his chin and cheeks gave him a cherubic look, but his squinty, calculating eyes told another story.
Newell pointed with a long red fingernail. “That’s the owner, Mr. Gillen. When he found out it was my going-away party he kicked in free dessert for everybody. I had the flourless chocolate cake. Not bad, but I’ve had better.”
Davie studied the photo. Several wrapped gifts were stacked on the table, forming a centerpiece. The desserts were in the photo so it must have been near the end of the lunch. The photographer had captured a woman in profile walking past the table just inside the frame. She had spiky bleached-blonde hair, a prominent nose, and a daisy tattoo on her neck. It wasn’t Sabine Ponti, so it might have been a customer looking for the restroom, except she had a laptop computer tucked under her arm.
Davie pointed to the blonde. “Who’s the woman walking by your table?”
“She wasn’t our waitress, but I think she worked there. Mr. Gillen told her not to charge for the desserts, so she must have been a cashier or something.”
Davie pulled out the photo of the three men she’d found at the storage locker. “Do you recognize these men?”
Newell wrinkled her brow and squinted at the photo. “The man in the Hawaiian shirt is Mr. Gillen. Can’t say about the others.”
“Can I take a photo of your party picture with my cell?”
“Sure, but it might be easier to download it from my Facebook page.”
40
As soon as she got back to the station, Davie noticed the faxed copies of Detective Brooks’s witness statements sitting on her desk. She put them aside to review later and logged on to Facebook, downloading Newell’s photo at the Seaglass Cafe. Unfortunately, the photo of the woman with the spiky blonde hair was only a side view and probably not enough for the LAPD’s facial recognition analysts to identify her.
Davie had just printed out a hard copy of the picture when her desk phone rang. It was Reggie Banker in the Gang unit. “You ready? We’re starting our briefing in thirty minutes.”
Davie glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. She’d lost track of the time. She was scheduled to go with Reg on the undercover drug buy and wasn’t ready. The clean thrift store clothes were in her locker, so she told Giordano where she was going and raced upstairs to change once again.
The transformation took fifteen minutes and when she finished, Davie had on a thigh-high mini skirt and a tank top with a plunging neckline. Underneath was a push-up bra that transformed her breasts from a size B to a B-plus. She’d applied heavy black liner above and below her eyes with cat-eye extensions. Her lips were lined with black pencil and filled in with dark maroon lipstick. She’d teased her red hair into a do that resembled a nuclear cloud over the Nevada desert—if you had red hair, you either camouflaged it or you owned it. As a final touch, she pasted a fake diamond stud on the right side of her nose. Davie estimated the weight as just shy of half a carat. She thought about applying a temporary tattoo to disguise her snow-white arms, but there wasn’t enough fake ink in the world to cover that territory. Instead, she put on a black hoodie bought at the thrift store.
When she arrived at the Gang unit upstairs, the people in the room greeted her with a chorus of hoots and groans. Reggie Banker sat on the edge of his desk, bare-chested except for a sleeveless denim jean jacket covered with patches from a local motorcycle gang. With him was another Gang detective and four officers—two uniformed and two from the undercover Narco unit.
Reggie’s eyebrows shot upward when he saw her. “Huh-uh. That hair has got to go. I want you to blend in, not blow our cover.” He reached into his desk drawer and handed her a Dodger ballcap. “Hide that red under Dodger blue.”
“Everybody’s a critic,” Davie said, twisting her hair into a knot and shoving it under the cap.
Reggie laughed when he noticed the fake diamond in her nose. “Wicked cool. Loco will look at that rock and think it’s cloudy and the cut is too shallow, but I guess he isn’t going to inspect it with a loupe. If he notices it’s a cheap paste-on, he’ll just think his coke is better than your stone. Where’s your piece?”
Davie patted her lower back where her gun was concealed in a hidden pocket under her tank top.
“Good. Here’s what’s going to happen.” Reggie went through the tactical plan and assigned each person a position. He warned that Loco should be considered armed and dangerous. “Davie, you’ll come with me but I’ll do the talking. In case I don’t recognize Alma Velez, scratch your nose to let me know if you spot her. We’ll take her down, too. If she’s not there, you can ask Loco about her but only after we’re done interrogating him.”
After discussing logistics, Reggie went through what to do in case the operation went sideways. After the briefing ended, Davie and Reggie headed to the parking lot and slid into an unmarked Vice junker parked near the gas pumps. The ten-minute ride was spent in silence. Once they arrived in Venice, Reggie parked the car a couple blocks from the location where Loco was known to hang out. As the two of them headed to the alley behind a row of shops just off the boardwalk, the rest of the team took their assigned places out of sight. They found Loco pacing near a Dumpster, twitching and snapping his fingers.
He was Latino, early twenties, five-eight, 140 pounds. His right hand was wrapped in a bandage. His dark sunglasses failed to hide black and blue bruises beneath his eyes and a swollen nose—evidence it had been recently broken. It had been dark in Mar Vista Gardens that night, but Loco was definitely the man who had attacked her. Davie wanted to alert Reggie, but he’d warned her to stay invisible unless she spotted Alma Velez, so she pulled the ballcap down lower to hide her face. The last thing she needed was for the drug dealer to recognize her.
Loco pivoted as he saw Reggie heading his way. “What’s going on?”
“Just out looking for some blow.” Reggie sounded casual but Davie suspected he was anything but.
Loco smacked his lips in search of saliva. “Where you from?”
Davie didn’t know why he was asking that question. If Loco thought they were gangbangers, he might want to find out what neighborhood Reggie was from to avoid a territorial war with a rival gang. More often than not, survival meant giving the right answer. But they were a little old for that.
Reggie flashed a wide grin. “I’m from Detroit, but I live here now. You do business with my cousin. He told me you were solid.”
Loco’s jaw muscles pulsed as he gritted his teeth, looking directly at Davie. “You a cop?”
Her body froze to stone. She hoped Loco was being paranoid rather than psychic. She studied his face but didn’t see recognition reflected in his expression. She guessed he was paranoid or high, or both.
“Come on, man,” Reggie said. “Why you do me like that?”
The dealer turned again to Reggie, staring at him as if considering what to do next. A moment later, Loco nodded, signaling
they had passed some sort of test.
“Let’s walk.” Loco swiveled and jerked forward. “You got the scratch?”
“Three Jacksons.”
Loco stopped and threw up his hands. “Three? I can’t walk no two blocks for less than four.”
Reggie frowned. “You’re not in New York, man. Three. And you didn’t say nothing about no walk, either.”
“Four, or I walk and you stay.”
Reggie’s frown deepened. “Shit, man. Okay.”
“Show me.”
Reggie dug into his pocket and pulled out four twenty-dollar bills.
Loco held out his hand. “I want the cheese before we do the walk.”
Reggie withdrew the money. “The dust first. Then the scratch. That’s the deal, or we walk and you stay.”
Loco’s gaze darted from Reggie to Davie, evaluating his options. Davie didn’t like the idea of a drug dealer luring them to another location. It could be a set-up. She could tell by Reggie’s rigid posture that he was thinking the same thing. She put her right hand on her hip, slow enough not to make Loco any twitchier than he already was but strategic enough to position herself in easy reach of her weapon.
Reggie stood unyielding and ready. “If you don’t have the bump, dude, just say so. I got other options.”
Loco wiped sweat from his upper lip. “I got what I say I got.”
Reggie was intimidating. She hoped Loco knew he was in over his head.
“C is in my car,” Loco said. “I don’t keep it on me. Too many cops cruising the boardwalk. You want snow, you got to do the walk.”
Last time Davie had seen Loco he wasn’t in a car, he was on a bicycle. She didn’t want to call attention to her presence, so she didn’t say anything. They weren’t going to arrest Loco until he produced the drugs, so Reg agreed to follow him to the location. The dealer hurried along the bike path until Davie saw a woman on the bench on the edge of the sand. Her jaw clenched when she recognized it was Alma Velez. If she was a drug dealer it didn’t appear she used the products. Her skin was clear, and she looked healthy.
The Second Goodbye Page 18