The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  “Well,” Seth says, laughing, “guess whose van got broken into last night, all their equipment stolen?” He pauses for effect. “Homicide’s.”

  “No fuckin’ way.” I gasp. Now I’m laughing too, and it feels good to dispel the darkness of home invaders and dismembered body parts showing up in otherwise peaceful neighborhoods with some crazy-ass, reckless news. “Those guys are going to be so pissed. Do we know yet who did it?”

  “Yeah, Craddock called me. A couple of stupid crackheads got arrested trying to pawn the stuff. But I have a feeling it’s going to take a long time to get it processed out of our evidence room. Probably not until after the big game this weekend.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Seth,” I tell him. “But I love you.”

  I disconnect and I’ve started getting into my car when my phone rings again. It’s Maclin’s number and at first I think he’s calling to bitch about the stolen football gear. But he tells me that Tony Ha is in his office and wants to talk to me.

  “Me?” I say, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. “Why the change of heart?” I knew that Tony had hired a lawyer within minutes of being questioned at Bender’s place following the murder of Lana Yu and also that he’d made bail.

  “We’ve leaned on him hard, threatening to charge him with accessory to murder, but the guy’s been a wall,” Maclin says, his voice sounding crisp and self-assured. “All he would say was that he had been in the laundry closet. He heard nothing, he saw nothing. Then today he has something to say about Lana’s murder. He came in to make a statement but insists he’ll only talk if you’re here. The guy looks like he’s about to shit himself all over the interrogation room.”

  I call the sergeant and tell him I’m going to be in Maclin’s office for a new statement from Tony Ha.

  There’s a pause, and Taylor asks, “Why do I have the feeling that this is going to further muddy the waters? If he’s got new information, Mr. Ha needs to tell Homicide, not us.”

  “What can I say?” I tell him. “The guy won’t talk to Homicide without my being there.”

  Taylor sighs impatiently. “Okay. Give it twenty minutes and then get back here. You need to get Ryan to the high school.”

  The sergeant’s stress is palpable over the phone.

  I crimp my lips to keep from snickering. “Did you just tell me not to be late for carpool?”

  “Look,” he says, with withering sharpness, “I don’t know what happy gas you’ve been sucking on this morning, but we’ve got kids dying from heroin funneled through that high school. I want you back here within the hour, you got that, Detective?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say after he’s already hung up. The happy gas that I’ve been sucking on all morning evaporates before I make the entrance to the Tollway.

  I drive to the North Central Division, on Hillcrest and McCallum, a large, squat, pale brick building where the Homicide unit is housed.

  Maclin meets me in the hallway to his office, file folders under his arm.

  “Hey,” I say warily, both hands resting reflexively on my hips.

  “Thanks for coming in.” He reaches out to take my hand anyway, shining on the smile that’s supposed to make me forget that only yesterday he backed me into a corner like he was a muskrat in heat. He ducks his head in a boyish, apologetic way.

  Asshole.

  “Tate’s waiting with Ha in an interview room,” he says, dropping his hand and leading me through the warren-like hallways.

  We pass several desks, and one of Maclin’s colleagues, a shaved bull of a detective, calls out, “Hey, Mac. We processing male impersonators for Vice now?”

  “I’m ready whenever you are,” I prompt Maclin, ignoring the talking bowling ball.

  Maclin opens the door to the interrogation room, which reeks of stale garlic and an overabundance of sports cologne. Tate barely gives me a nod, less than thrilled with my being called into the unit. He sniffs a few times, says in his best East Coast townie accent, “Good mawning, Detective,” and goes back to whatever notes he’s been scribbling on a pad on the desk. But his apparent lack of attention is not fooling me. He can stare at the paper in front of him all day long, but I know the guy sees everything.

  It’s Tony’s ragged appearance that gives me pause. He’s evidently gotten less sleep than I have; his eyes are swollen almost shut. The skin on his face is drawn tight as a drum across his cheekbones, and his lips are dry and scaly. His breathing is erratic and shallow, and he’s still wearing the same plaid jacket that I’d seen him in days ago. I imagine that Maclin and Tate have been scraping him hard for whatever information he wants to impart to me.

  I take a desk chair and position it closer to Tony so we’re not separated by a piece of furniture. Maclin, I decide, likes to use the desk as a prop—a physical and psychological barrier between the “good” guys and the “bad,” an intimidation factor. But Benny always said that, unless the interviewee was dangerous, you should remove any barriers and just talk, person to person. Maclin places the files on the desk and I sit facing Tony, waiting for him to speak.

  “I have to tell you something,” Tony says to me. “About Lana’s killer—”

  “Okay,” I say quietly. “But before you start, I have some questions I need to ask you.”

  Tony blinks rapidly at my interruption, and I can almost hear the lids shuttering painfully over his inflamed eyeballs. Obviously, the guy is scared and needs to spit out whatever toxic secret he’s been holding, but I don’t want him controlling the interview. I also want to learn some details that Maclin may not have seen fit to share with me.

  Tate is impatiently tap-tapping with a pencil on the desk, letting me know the clock is running.

  “How did you and Lana come to have a key to Bender’s house?” I ask, taking out my own small notepad. I could antagonize Tony from the get-go, wind him up with forceful questions, but I need his goodwill and that will take some finessing. Tony, like most men, will begin to balk at being word-spitted by a female, and though he may be a lowlife pimp, he imagines himself to be his own boss, the master of his own fate, the captain of his own soul, and all that crap.

  “It’s my understanding that Lana was Ruiz’s girlfriend,” I say, keeping my tone polite, deferential. “Did she know William Bender as well?”

  His eyes slide to both Homicide detectives, but they give him the thousand-yard stare, and he tells me, “Lana was Mr. Bender’s friend first. He introduced her to the Mexican.”

  I scribble something on my pad. Tate’s tapping pencil is getting louder. “What were you and Lana doing in Bender’s house the night she was murdered?”

  Tony pauses before saying, “The Mexican told Lana there was a lot of cash in the house.” He looks again at Maclin and adds, “We were promised fifty thousand each if we found the money.”

  There’s no reaction from Maclin when the money is mentioned, so he must already know why Lana was there.

  “Where was Ruiz the night that Lana was killed?” I ask.

  “In some bad hotel, Lana said. I’d never met the Mexican face to face. Only on the phone.”

  I give him a close look but decide he’s telling the truth. Tate’s tapping is now like a metronome. I reach over, snatch the pencil from him, break it in two, and hand him back the pieces.

  Tony smiles unpleasantly at the look of surprise on Tate’s face. Lots of contempt for the good Homicide detective in that fixed countenance.

  “Be careful, Officer,” Tony warns him, “or she’ll put the cuffs on you as well.”

  No doubt Tony’s been treated harshly by Homicide, and that’s apparently worse than being cuffed aggressively by my partner. He crosses his arms and looks away, dismissing Tate as a presence. Maclin starts to say something, but I cut him off.

  “Okay,” I say to Tony. “When you’re ready, tell me what happened the night you and Lana went to Bender’s house.”

  He looks unguardedly down at his hands for a few seconds, and then he yawns
. But the yawn, I know, is not from being exhausted. It’s nervous energy, rippling up from his neck into the muscles of his jaw, a fright reflex that many interrogators mistake for gaping apathy. Benny had clued me in to the fact that both killers and victims of a crime will sometimes fall dead asleep in an interview rather than face the horror of what they’ve committed or experienced.

  “Lana and I drove to the house, and we sat in the car for almost an hour looking for lights inside,” he begins. “When we were sure no one was there, we drove to the alley and went through the rear gate. Lana used her key on the back door into the kitchen. It was dark, and we used the light on Lana’s phone to see.”

  He dry-swallows a few times trying to clear his throat, and I turn to Tate and say, ever so politely, “Detective, could we please get Mr. Ha some water?”

  Tate gives me the you’ve-got-to-be-out-of-your-mind look, but, with a sigh, he unwinds himself from the desk and walks out of the room.

  “Go on,” I prompt Tony.

  “Lana thought the cash might be in the master bedroom,” he says. “She saw him put something in the safe once. He had a little book in his desk where he kept all his passwords and the combination to the safe. We were in the bedroom searching for it when we heard a noise downstairs. So…Lana went to see what it was.”

  “Lana went downstairs to check out the noise by herself?” I ask. I try to keep my voice neutral because I’m thinking that he was the guy who’d trained in the army. Benny once told me that if you wanted a tough job done, send a man. If you wanted an impossible job done, send a woman.

  “She asked for my gun,” he says, “which I gave to her.”

  “And what were you doing while Lana went downstairs?” I ask, thinking that he was probably testing the second-floor windows, looking for a way to crawl out.

  “I stood at the top of the landing,” he continues, “and watched her go down the stairs to the hallway. She called someone on her phone—”

  “What time was this?” I ask.

  “It was after nine o’clock.”

  It was me that Lana had called, at nine thirty, the night I’d been to Slugger Anne’s with Seth.

  Tate walks back into the room, the sound of the opening door startling Tony, and sets a small Styrofoam cup of water on the table. Tony picks up the cup and drains it in a few swallows.

  He holds the Styrofoam in both hands. “I saw something come out of the shadows and take Lana. A big man. He grabbed Lana from behind and took away the gun. He saw me standing at the top of the stairs and told me he would shoot me if I didn’t come down.”

  The two detectives’ interests are now heightened, and both of them are leaning in toward the table, making notes. This part of the story is new to them.

  “So you came down the stairs?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says, beginning to pull nervously at the rim of the cup.

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “It was dark. He was wearing a mask. But he was a big man wearing plain, dark clothes. And a baseball cap.”

  “Could you see any insignia on the cap? Any logo on the shirt?”

  “No.”

  “What kind of a mask was he wearing?”

  “Like a cloth sack. It had no features. Only holes cut out for the eyes and the mouth. He ordered me to get into the laundry closet in the kitchen, and then he closed the door. He told me that if I opened it he would kill me.”

  “What did he do with Lana?” I ask, remembering vividly her face crusted with dried blood, the eyes partially open, the lips pulled back as though in interrupted speech.

  “She was yelling, struggling with him. He threw her to the floor. I could hear their voices through the bottom slats in the door. They were close, only a few feet away. He wanted to know where the Mexican was. She kept swearing and spitting at him.”

  Tony looks down at his hands again and picks at already-brutalized cuticles. “She was a very stubborn girl.”

  “Did her attacker ever ask about the money?”

  Tony shakes his head.

  “For the interview record,” Maclin says loudly, “Mr. Ha has signified no by shaking his head.”

  Maclin is making notes again, but he wanted to remind me, officially, that it’s his witness making this statement.

  Tony now shreds the rim of his cup, letting the pieces fall to the floor in weightless slivers. I have a renewed admiration for Lana. She had taken Tony’s gun and had died struggling with her attacker, a man much larger than herself, yelling and cursing at him. My kind of woman.

  Tony looks up from his Styrofoam snowmaker. “Then she started screaming. It went on for a long time. She finally told him where the Mexican was.”

  It’s quiet in the room, Maclin and Tate waiting for me to ask the next logical question: Where did Lana say Ruiz was hiding?

  I open my mouth but Tony stops me before I can speak. He stares at his feet, but he’s straightened his back, as though prepping himself for something unpleasant. “I knew from the moment he started speaking to her that she was going to die.” He looks up at me. “I just didn’t know it would take so long. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he was humming the whole time. Like a man happy at his work. She kept screaming until he cut her throat.”

  Maclin opens one of the files in front of him and pulls out a crime scene photo of Lana lying on Bender’s kitchen floor, the blackened pool of blood surrounding her body like a dark corona.

  He says to Tony, “This is just a reminder of what you didn’t see happening. While you were hiding in the closet.”

  Tony looks at it, his face a practiced blank. “When it was quiet,” he says, “the man came to stand at the other side of the door. I thought he was going to kill me next. But he only stood there, breathing. He told me to stay until morning or he would come to my house and cut the skin off my face and feed it to his dogs. He told me also that if I said anything to the police, he would come to the Blue Heaven and cut off the ears of every one of my girls and also of their children.”

  I shift slightly in my chair so Tony will look at me. “So why are you telling us all this now?”

  “More specifically,” Tate says, jabbing a thumb in my direction, “why are you telling this to her? Did we not interview you earlier, and did you not tell us that you hid in the closet before Lana was attacked?”

  “You gave us a false statement, partner,” Maclin says.

  Now it’s Tony’s turn to give Homicide the thousand-yard stare.

  “Last night,” Tony says to me, putting the cup down, “I woke up to him standing in my house, at my bed.” His hands, now clasped between his knees, are quivering, the knuckles bloodless with tension. “My doors have good locks, but it was the same man wearing the same mask. He said I was to find you and give you something.”

  “He asked for me? By name?” The same fear that assaulted me when I realized someone had been hiding in my apartment crawls its way up my intestines. Maclin and Tate are studying me now.

  Tony reaches into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. He starts to hand it to me, but Maclin gestures impatiently for him to lay it on the desk. It’s notebook-size white paper, loosely folded twice, and Maclin unfolds it using the tips of two pens. When it’s opened fully, it reveals a crude drawing in black ink of upswept, feathery wings transected by a sword. Similar to the image that Sergei had drawn of the tattoo on the man delivering the severed head to my door. My fingers find a choke hold on the Saint Michael’s medal, the downward tension threatening to snap the silver double-linked chain.

  Underneath the wings, printed in neatly formed block letters in the same black ink, is a passage from the Bible, Deuteronomy 32:41. When I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me.

  Tony takes a steadying breath. “Here’s what the man told me to say to you. ‘Tell the redheaded detective that she can come home now.’”

  Maclin walks with me through the h
allways to the exit. I had stayed another ten minutes in the interview room while the two Homicide detectives tried to pry more information out of Tony. But he’d delivered his message, and, other than insisting that the man did not sound like a Mexican and that Ruiz had been hiding in some run-down, off-ramp motel before he was killed, he had no more to tell them. When I got up to leave, for the first time, Tony looked at me with something approaching sympathy.

  I’ve got a stone-cold murderer telling me, via a cowardly little flesh peddler, that I can go home. No, actually the message was “She can come home now.” But which home?

  I veer off into the women’s bathroom, which is mercifully empty, and press cold water onto my face and neck with a paper towel, my head bent over the sink. My hair hangs in damp clumps, and the eyes that greet me in the mirror are darkly smudged with exhaustion. More than anything else, I want to return to my own home, but the new ASSA locks seem merely a thin cord between us little piggies and the wolf outside the door. Tony, snug under his blankets, woke to Lana’s butcher standing at his bedside delivering a note, much as he must have stood at our bed watching Jackie peacefully sleeping.

  I rejoin Maclin and let him escort me out of the building. But I happen to glance at the bullish, shaved-headed officer as we pass, and he’s leering at me, his tongue flattened obscenely against his lower lip, a hiccup of staccato laughter, and I decide to leave a message of my own. I check out his desk plaque for his name.

  “Detective Rice,” I say, stopping in front of him. From the size of him, he’s very likely one of the defensive linemen for the Homicide football team. At the very least, he’s going to follow the DPD game this weekend with fevered interest. I reach out and adjust the plaque, aligning it more neatly with the edge of his desk.

  “You know that police van that was broken into last night?” I ask him. “The one where the Homicide team’s football gear was stolen?”

  The detective’s grin loses a hint of its self-satisfaction, his eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly.