I can see Tony Arguillo milling a hundred feet down the alley. Well inside the familiar yellow ribbon, he is beyond earshot unless we want to make a scene.
“Stick close,” she says. And before I can move around the car, I hear the click of her heels on the street as she crosses over. I am trailing in her wake, trying to catch up so that she doesn’t get hit by a car. Without her prosecutor’s I.D., Lenore is banking on the fact that the cops won’t know she has been fired. That news may take at least a day to trickle down to the street.
Before I can catch her, she cozies up to one of the uniforms at the tape.
“Where’s Officer Arguillo?” Her best command voice under the circumstances, and not much slurring.
A familiar face, the guy doesn’t look too closely, or smell her breath. Instead she gets the perennial cop’s shrug. Lenore takes this as the signal of admission, and before the man in blue can say a word she is under the tape. For a moment he looks as though he might challenge her, then gives it up. Why screw with authority?
“He’s with me,” she says, and grabs me by the coat sleeve.
A second later I find myself tripping toward the crime scene, following a woman who, if not legally drunk, is at least staggering under false colors.
Thirty feet down the alley Tony is chewing the fat with another cop. Seeing us, he stops talking and separates himself from his buddy.
He seems a bundle of nervous gestures tonight, over-the-shoulder glances, anxious looks at the other cops down the alley closer to the garbage bin, as if he knows that if he is caught here talking to us his ass is grass. Though he shakes my hand and says hello, Arguillo seems put off seeing me here, his own lawyer.
“I thought you were coming alone.” He says this to Lenore, up close, but I can hear it.
“Paul wanted to drive,” she says. She asks him who’s heading up the investigation. He gives her a name I do not recognize, and motions down the alley to where some guys dressed in overalls are pawing through mounds of garbage by the handful.
“Has Kline been around?” says Lenore. Self-preservation. First things first.
“They have a call out. Ordinarily they wouldn’t bother,” says Tony. “But seeing as she was a witness in a case. They caught him somewhere on the road to San Francisco for a meeting tomorrow morning. Word is, he’s on his way back.”
“Then we don’t have much time,” says Lenore. “What happened?” she presses.
“Maybe we should talk over there.” He points to the other side of the tape.
“We’re not going to ogle the body,” says Lenore. “Just tell us what happened and we’ll get out of here. Who found the body?”
“Some vagrant, less than an hour ago. He flagged down a squad car driving by.”
Tony tells us that he wasted no time in calling Lenore, the first call he placed from his own squad car after picking up the computer signal that the body had been found. Squad cars now use computer transmissions to cut down on the number of eavesdroppers in delicate calls.
Two cops in overalls have drawn the less desirable duty. They are inside the Dumpster, passing items out as others sort through piles of trash they have assembled in the alley. Every few seconds I can see a flash of light from a strobe inside the bin, pictures being taken to preserve what might be evidence. There are two detectives huddled over a mass of bumps covered by a white sheet. There are no obvious signs of blood.
“Did he see anything? This vagrant?” Lenore asks.
“Like who dumped the body?” says Tony. He shakes his head. “Our man was too far into a paper bag and the bottle inside of it to notice. Cars come and go in the alley. He says he doesn’t pay any attention.”
“Maybe he’s afraid,” says Lenore.
“This guy’s too far gone for fear.”
“How did he find her?” says Lenore.
“You kiddin’?” Tony gives her a sideways glance. “A metal Dumpster, roof over your head, and four walls. Street of dreams. Half a dozen bums sleep in there on any given night. If a truck picks it up and dumps it that day, the place is Triple A approved.”
“Only today it wasn’t empty?” I say.
“No.” Tony eyes me warily. I think perhaps he has been counseled by Gus Lano so that I am now persona non grata, no longer to be trusted.
“He found the body just dumped in there? Must have been quite a shock,” I say.
“It was wrapped.” Tony says this as one would describe a tuna sandwich in a lunch box. “Rolled up in a blanket. They pore through the shit like rodents.” He’s talking about the homeless men who make this particular metal box home.
“He thought maybe he found some treasure when he saw the blanket,” says Tony. “We’re lucky he didn’t sleep with her for a couple of nights before he called us.” Tony does not think much of the underclass.
“How did she die?” asks Lenore.
“Could be strangulation. Some marks on the throat. The M.E. hasn’t made a call yet. She wasn’t exactly overdressed,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“She was wearing a pair of panties and a cotton top. Had a small towel wrapped around her head like a turban.”
“Washing her hair, perhaps?” says Lenore. “Maybe she was going out, or getting ready for bed.”
Arguillo raises an eyebrow, a little tilt of the head, as if to say, “Read into this whatever you want.”
“Any evidence of sexual assault?” says Lenore.
“Your guess,” he says. “Half-naked woman, dumped in a trash bin, young, good-looking. I wouldn’t put it out of my mind,” he tells us. “But we’ll have to wait for the M.E.,” he says.
He motions for her to come a little closer, something private.
“If you have a second I wanna talk to you alone,” he tells Lenore. He motions her to one side of the alley, just out of earshot, where they talk. This exchange seems to take a while, and it is not a monologue by Tony. At one point there is a clear display of some surprise by Lenore. This, followed with more animated gestures by Tony and then raised voices that I can almost hear, until they both look in my direction. Finally Lenore seems to end this, walking away, leaving Tony standing there.
When Lenore comes back her face is more ashen. I am thinking that perhaps Tony has imparted a few more grisly details of death, the sort of particulars in a criminal case that you don’t want floating in the public pool of perceptions.
“There’s nothing more he can tell us right now.” For Lenore this is a little white lie. She tells me it’s time for us to go.
“I wanted to give you the heads-up,” says Tony, following.
“Right,” says Lenore.
“I thought maybe you’d be handling the case,” he says.
“I doubt it,” she says. Lenore hasn’t told him she’s been fired. More deception.
Tony starts to walk us toward the tape and my car.
“I knew you’d be interested,” he says. “You worked with her, in the Acosta thing. It’s too bad. She was a good kid.” Tony starts to turn a little teary. “We’ll get whoever did this. She knew a lotta guys on the force. They’ll be out for blood, turn over every stone.” This is becoming Tony’s mantra. One more reminder that cops take care of their own.
The details of Tony’s face are suddenly lost in the glare of headlights on high beam, a car nosing into the alley at the other end, large and dark.
“I’ll keep you posted,” he says, moving down the alley now, back toward the fold.
“Hey. We need to talk,” I tell him.
“Yeah. Later.”
“It’s time we should be getting along,” says Lenore. She’s at my sleeve again, retreating to the tape, as I see the tall, slender silhouette exit from the rear of the vehicle, with uniforms trailing behind, it as though on the tail of a comet: Cole
man Kline.
“There’s something I have to see,” she says. “Turn here.”
I’m on my way home and Lenore wants to take a detour. It’s late and I have Sarah. I tell her this, but she insists that it will take only a minute. I follow directions down Harris, away from the downtown area toward the interstate.
I ask her what it was that she and Tony discussed.
“I can’t say right now,” she tells me.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Make a left at the next intersection.”
I do as I’m told. She’s checking the painted addresses on the curb as I drive, and a few seconds later she has me pull over under an aging elm, massive and looming, home to a million crows. Their saturation bombing of the street gives it a dalmatian-like quality.
It is one of those older neighborhoods, with turn-of-the-century homes, most of which have seen better days, elevated for the floods that once inundated the city each year, pilings concealed behind a facade of rotting latticework. There are a few apartments and a four-plex or two mixed in, built during the late sixties and early seventies, when the city made a brief attempt at renaissance, before crime and white flight nailed a stake through the heart of urban America.
Three men or boys, I cannot tell which, are at the corner, hoods up, doing various renditions of the pimp roll, talking to someone in a car, engine running with parking lights, the commerce of the night.
Before I can say a word Lenore’s door is open.
“Where are you going?”
Her only response is a slammed car door, as she heads across the street. Left with the accomplished fact, there is nothing I can do but follow. By the time I lock the car, Lenore has disappeared into a dark passage up a narrow walkway, the ground floor of one of the four-plexes. If I hadn’t turned to look in time I would have lost her completely. As it is, I follow her across the street.
In the dark, deep in the bush of somebody’s front yard, I cannot see her, but I can hear her fumbling in her purse, the rattle of keys.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Shhh.”
“Who lives here?”
“Put a cork in it.”
Then, suddenly, a faint beam of light, like Tinkerbell in an inkwell. Lenore has found what she was looking for, a small penlight on her key ring. I approach down the walkway.
“I hope this is a good friend,” I tell her. I glance at my watch, with its luminous dials. It is nearly one A.M.
Lenore is working the handle of the front door. It is not until I see the handkerchief lining her hand that my apprehension runs to fear. The sobriety of the moment settles on me like white-hot phosphorus, and as the door latch clicks, dark intuition tells me who lives here.
In a neighborhood like this, that anyone would leave their door unlocked is a curiosity on the order of fire eating and sword swallowing.
“We’re in luck,” she says.
Not any kind that I would recognize.
Lenore slips through the door and pulls me in after her.
“We shouldn’t be here,” I tell her.
More shushing, a finger to her lips as she closes the door, à la handkerchief. I have visions of sirens and red lights.
“It can’t take them long to figure this out,” I tell her.
“We won’t be here long.”
“We shouldn’t be here at all.”
“Then go sit in the car,” she says. With this I am left in darkness as Lenore moves and takes the dim illumination of the penlight with her.
In an instant, in the dark, I am playing bumper cars with her behind.
“Keep your hands in your pockets,” she whispers.
“I wasn’t getting fresh. Honest.”
“I’m worried about fingerprints,” she says.
“Right.”
I am wondering about the cutting-edge frontiers of science, and whether they can get DNA footprints off the leather soles of my shoes. Though in this place I need not worry. There is so much shit on the floor that if I work it right, I will not have to step on it.
It is one of the immutable rules of dating, learned in pubescence: the better looking the woman, the messier her apartment. This is one of those places where you might eat off the floor, only because the dishes are dirtier.
There is a stream of light through windows off the street in the front.
In this I can see papers strewn across the kitchen floor and what looks like the remnants of someone’s meal, part of a yogurt container spilled across them waiting for a culture to take hold. The sink is filled with dishes, pots, and pans, more clutter than the average junkyard. One of the chairs is turned catawamptious, blocking the way through the kitchen, so we take the course of least resistance, down the hall toward what I assume is the living room.
Here there is not just mess, but destruction.
A picture in its frame is on the floor. This appears to have been pulled from the wall, its glass shattered, the scarred and bent hanger remaining. As I turn into the living room I see dirt on the carpet near a metal-and-glass coffee table, some potting soil from an indoor plant, the greenery on the floor near another, larger dark stain that has settled into the carpet like oil on sand.
I am thinking that clutter is one thing, this borders on the ridiculous, when it settles on me that what I am seeing is not the usual random chaos of life. There is some desperate design to all of this. Here, in Brittany Hall’s own home, is the place of her death.
It takes several seconds before Lenore can move. Then finally, she walks around the debris. Her flashlight catches the glint of metal, something gold, partially covered in potting soil on the floor. She takes her flashlight close for a better look. In the light I can see that the stain on the carpet is glistening moist, and red, matched by a similar flow that has not yet entirely congealed on the sharp metal corner of the coffee table. In an hour, maybe less, there will be evidence techs crawling over this place like locusts. I tell Lenore this.
“Right,” she says. “I had a hunch it happened here.”
“Clairvoyance is a wonderful thing,” I tell her. “Now let’s go.”
“See if there’s anything down the hallway,” she says.
“I think we should go.”
“Just take a look. Whoever did this is long gone,” she says.
It is easier to comply, and less likely to attract the attention of a neighbor, than to argue with her. So I do it.
The hall is dark, lit only by a small night-light plugged into an outlet near the floor. There are two open doors at the end, one on each side, with a bathroom in between through which some light shines. I step quickly but carefully down the hall.
Halfway down there’s a door open about an inch. I peer around and look inside through the open crack, just enough to light a shelf high on the wall. It’s a closet of some kind, dark and small. I leave it and move on.
The first room I look in faces on the street at the front of the apartment. It appears to be Hall’s bedroom. The bed is stripped to the sheets, but except for the tossed pillows and the missing blanket, everything here seems in its place. There’s a closet in the corner, the door closed.
I turn to look at the other room across the hall. This is a different story. There is another, smaller bed, the clutter of a little child. There are dolls and the plastic parts of toys, little snap-on things a child can build with, and a set of wooden blocks. A pink coverlet is on the bed. A little girl’s room. But there is no sign of her. I ease around to check the other side of the bed. No one.
I’m back down the hall. Lenore is still canvassing the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the evidence.
“I didn’t know she had a kid.”
“Little girl,” she says.
“Where is she?”
“Being baby-sat,” she says. “Grandparents.”
“How do you know?”
“Saw a note in the kitchen.”
She’s been nosing around while I’ve been down the hall.
“Fine. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Back out the way we came,” she tells me. “Check to make sure we didn’t touch anything.”
As I start to go back suddenly I am without light. Lenore has gone the other way, toward the dining room and the kitchen beyond.
“Where are you going?”
“Meet you at the door,” she says.
Arguing with Lenore is fruitless. I figure anything that will get us to the front door and back to the car in a hurry is fine by me. I retrace my steps. This takes me all of three seconds. When I get to the kitchen I see Lenore, who has barely made it through the door at the opposite end. She is studying a large calendar hanging on the wall just inside the door, her back to me.
“Let’s go.” My voice jogs her from some reverie. In a moment such as this it is like Lenore to be checking the victim’s social calendar.
She does a delicate dance over the yogurt, avoiding the blitz of papers, and puts her hankied hand on the back of the chair that is blocking the way. She slides this gently out of the way and then repositions it as accurately as she can. With this, I’m to the door and out, Lenore right behind me. She closes it and we hoof it to the street and my car on the other side. Once inside, I waste no time putting two blocks behind us, before I utter a word.
“If any of the neighbors saw us I just hope to hell they have a good clock,” I tell her. Two people skulking about in the apartment of a murder victim while her body lies in an alley surrounded by the cops.
Then the question that is gnawing at my mind: “What the hell was that all about?”
“What do you mean?”
The Judge Page 7