To Bring My Shadow

by Matt Phillips

  “Call me Chato.”

  “Alright, Chato. That’s fine. But me and Slade here, we work all our cases together. I’m just going to tell him what you tell me, or he’ll watch it on the closed circuit.” I motioned at the tiny camera hanging in the room’s corner.

  Chato shrugged, sniffed. “Tell those homeboys to turn the camera off then. Or I’ll walk out of here.”

  I nodded at Slade. He left the room. Me and Chato stared at each other. Slade came back after fifteen seconds or so and took his seat.

  He said, “We’re all good.”

  “Okay, then. What can you do for us, Chato?”

  “You got a murder yesterday, I heard.”

  I leaned back in my seat, crossed my own arms. “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Shit, streets are talking about it already. I heard you guys put it out there anyhow.”

  Slade said, “Trying to find out who the man belongs to—that’s all.”

  “Next of kin, eh?” Chato smirked. He lowered his boots to the dirty, tear-stained carpet, leaned on the table. “Look, the thing is…I’m Enrico’s people.”

  Slade said, “Castaneda is your brother?”

  “Simón.”

  “What did you want with me?” If Chato wanted to claim his brother—fine. But he mentioned talking to me. That was the crux of the issue here.

  Chato said, “I’m supposed to tell you that it’s over with now.”

  “What is?”

  “The bodies. No more bodies coming.”

  “Did you kill your brother?”

  Chato shook his head––no. “My brother got what he deserved. For what he did. You know, these streets got mean revenge. I can’t take that away.”

  “Who told you to come here?” I heard a strained anger in my own voice, felt it hum in my throat.

  Chato tapped the pendant in the center of his chest. “Santa Muerte. In my prayers.”

  Slade chuckled. “The cartel did your brother and you’re here to tell us to let it go. That it won’t happen again. That something went wrong, and maybe that’s why he got done here.”

  Chato shrugged. “I’m not saying nothing about no cartel. That’s how you end up with your webos in a jar, no?”

  Me and Slade looked at each other—fucking streets did talk.

  Chato said, “I’m saying I’m here because of prayers. What I want, it’s to take my brother home.”

  “And where the fuck is home for you?” My anger simmered, boiled.

  “Chiapas.”

  Slade said, “You’re so far from home. Tell me what it is to know your brother’s dead. That doesn’t make you want some revenge? I hear there’s a code for you, for people like you.”

  Chato’s chair creaked. “It’s nothing to be far from home when you have a pistol. Maybe a machine gun in the trunk.”

  I said, “Should we follow you and take a look?”

  Chato rolled his eyes. “You think I’m stupid? You’re the one who’s stupid, Detective. You don’t even see things like you should. You believe in nothing.”

  “Who the fuck,” I leaned close enough for Chato to smell my breath, “do you believe in? Some bullshit folk saint?”

  He laughed and said, “What do they call you? Hardboiled, right? That’s what this is? From those little books at the farmacia.”

  Slade cleared his throat. “If this wasn’t the cartel, who?”

  Chato shook his head again, looked at us like we were, as he said, stupid. “How many Mexican guys you know run shit in Los Estados Unidos? Tell me that. Maybe I can answer it for you: None that I ever seen, amigos. Like I said it before: No more bodies.” He raised his eyebrows. “Can I take my brother home now?”

  “Back to Chiapas?” I sighed and knew I wanted to follow this motherfucker wherever he went. Mexico sounded good, but maybe not that far south. Too long a trip. Too hot. Too this, and too that. God, my eyelids wanted to shut down tight.

  Chato added, “Shit. My brother was an anchor baby. He’s from Oxnard.”

  Slade tapped the table with his thumbs. “Your brother, did he—” His eyes prodded at the pendant around Chato’s neck.

  Chato fingered the miniature saint, studied it for a long time. “She’ll answer all your questions, you know? But sometimes…Even our saints can fail us.” When his eyes lifted and settled on us again, I saw the slightest tinge of grief.

  I said, “They cut off your brother’s fingers, too.”

  “With his junk,” Slade said.

  Chato’s facial expression didn’t change in the way we hoped. Plain-faced and without sadness, he said, “It’s what you get for stealing. Can I take those pieces home, too?”

  My turn to laugh. “Just the man’s dick,” I said. “We never found the fingers. No te preocupes, Chato—it’s not too much to carry.”

  Chapter 15

  The case I think about most—the one that made me a real murder police—was the first case I worked alone, before Slade got his promotion. It was a senseless beating down in the Gaslamp District. An accountant visiting from Minneapolis got twisted up with a couple navy cadets after a night of drinking and dancing.

  What I found out, from assorted witnesses and two pieced-together surveillance tapes, was that the navy guys thought the accountant was hitting on them. Sure, he ran around with some effeminate mannerisms and a pink polo shirt, but that didn’t make the man a sexual predator. On one tape, from a camera outside the club, I saw the accountant shake hands with one of the cadets. The other cadet, a tall kid with his navy buzzcut and prominent biceps, walked over and pushed the accountant. It came out in court the accountant asked them back to his hotel room for a drink. Mr. Seaman decided to defend his masculinity by shoving the accountant into the gutter. From there, it was a stompfest—Doc Marten boots do a good job when it comes to breaking facial bones. Or maybe it was the hatred inside the Seabees.

  Either way, Mr. Accountant ended up with a crushed skull and permanent brain damage—until he died, that is. I still remember watching him in the hospital room. All those wires attached to him, and those monitors beeping like a chorus of mechanical heartbeats. Odd thing, to see a man pass from this world into the next. And all because he liked the company of other men. All because two small town losers couldn’t deal with that. My stomach turned when I thought about it. I’m no activist, but when you work homicide you see every heartbeat as a small miracle to protect. And when one gets snuffed out—for no goddamn reason—it makes you murderous yourself.

  About six months after I booked the two navy punks for second-degree murder, the accountant’s father called me. He was an ex-janitor with a Midwest accent. He thanked me twice for doing what I did for his son. And then, for the next ten minutes, he sobbed.

  What do you do with that?

  Keep solving murder cases—that’s what.

  Even when, and if, the victim is a cartel sicario, or a gangbanger, or an entire wealthy family.

  I sat at my desk and stared at the images of Enrico Frederico Pablo Castaneda’s dead body. In an email, the coroner said the tool most likely used on the man’s hands and Johnson was, as Slade posited, a set of semi-sharp garden shears. Bolt-cutters would have been more humane.

  I stared at Enrico’s bloody face for a long time. What was behind those glazed brown eyes? What kind of man gets himself chopped up and stuffed in an oil drum? But worse than that, what kind of man does it take to give the order: Chop Enrico’s dick off. His fingers, too. Dump him in the bay. And beyond that, what kind of man sends a message to the murder police that they should drop the case? Hell, to me, that’s the kind of man who needs to get got himself. These reasons, among others, were what kept me up at my desk. And Slade, too.

  From his desk beside me, Slade said, “I bet the son-of-a-gun who did this is American.”

  “Enrico’s American. Or, shit, he was. Not sure if citizenship transfers to heaven.”

  “But, I’m saying…” Slade sig
hed. “Maybe it’s more than drug business. Maybe it’s something besides that. More than that.”

  I stood, walked over to the small coffeemaker in the center of the office. I poured a fat cup and sipped it down by half, refilled. No cream. No sugar. Just bitter black tar and unanswered questions. I said, “Think about the Jacoby family: How’s that lead to this?”

  Slade started tapping at his computer keyboard. I walked over to my desk, fell into my wobbly chair. Everything squeaks in an empty office. The night detectives—Rombauer and Radicchio—decided to get some pasta and meatballs. They’d been at their candle-lit dinner for the past few hours. I guessed they found their way to a dive bar.

  I didn’t blame them.

  I was on my way to that, too. If Slade didn’t stop me.

  Everybody else was home for the night.

  Slade said, “You know Jacoby was on that stadium committee?”

  “That bipartisan thing…What was it, trying to get a new stadium measure passed?”

  “Right,” Slade said. “Here it is.” He clicked his mouse and a website popped up—the local newspaper. “They wanted to take that land downtown, level a bunch of low-income housing complexes. Little immigrant neighborhood, too. All these old houses from the ’40s.”

  “Sure,” I said, remembering a series of news headlines from a few months prior. “Lots of those post-World War Two houses. And they were saying it’d all be paid for. No taxes. But wasn’t it…”

  Slade grunted, studied his computer screen. “They wanted the city to purchase the northern half, resell it to some developer for a song. Fucking pennies on the dollar. Mixed-use housing and economic development, they said. But for some reason…”

  I rolled my chair to Slade’s desk, read over his shoulder. “P&J Associates.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I thought for a minute, tried to envision the bit of land referenced by the news story. I knew the location, but I didn’t have the northern part in my head. “We might run over there, check out this part they wanted to pass to the developer. Wonder what that’s all about.”

  “Bay views?” Slade scratched his head.

  “You think?”

  “Could be,” Slade said. “If you build things right.”

  I finished my coffee, sucked air through my too-sensitive teeth. “The hell does Jacoby have to do with Castaneda?”

  “It’s this,” Slade said.

  “Drugs and property. These aren’t the same sport, are they?”

  Slade cracked his knuckles. “You can’t look at it like that, Frank. The sport…it’s making more fucking money. That’s the sport. Get. That. Money.”

  I thought about the accountant, how he died with all those tubes plugged into his body, weird machines beeping and humming all around him. Was that it for the man—did counting money make him human? God, I sure hoped not. Because if it did…Shit, that about reached the boundaries of my intellectual capacity. I erased the idea from my head.

  “You up for a walk in the city, Slade?”

  Still squinting at the news article, Slade said, “Why the hell not?”

  While we walked to the car, Slade got on his cell to QB. The young buck was back following Turner, our teenage wastelander, but there wasn’t much to report. The kid spent a lot of time at a head shop down off Market Street, near the plaza mall. He had a part-time job with a three-man moving company, and he smoked weed down at Seaport Village, where the tuna boats came in––that was about it: the stoner’s cycle. Slade told QB to stick with the kid for one more day, see what happened. After that, QB’s overtime—sad to say—was maxed out for the month.

  Chapter 16

  We drove fifteen blocks or so southwest on surface streets, parked next to a shuttered automotive shop called Barney’s. The sign out front said: Your car passes smog or we fix it for free. I laughed when I saw it. “Look at this, Skinny. You think anybody fails a smog test in this part of town?”

  Slade came up beside me, straightened his shirt collar, and chuckled. “Nice workaround for an oppressive law, huh? Just like a brown paper bag for a forty.”

  “Some laws are stupid—isn’t that the fucking truth?” And hell, I believed that with every cell in my big body. Nothing like a stupid law to make a lawman grin. Sometimes, though, stupid laws are useful. Like when you want to pull somebody over and get a look inside the car. Or maybe press somebody when they least expected it. We left the auto shop and sauntered along the sidewalk. Slade chirped the car alarm, pointing the key fob over his shoulder.

  This neighborhood—one I knew—was true blue collar. It used to hold a large population of fishermen and their families, before the tuna industry got shot to shit by globalization. Now, it was a few square blocks of tiny houses with wrought-iron bars on the windows, broken curbs lined by secondhand pickup trucks with Baja license plates. Immigrant families piled into two- and three-bedroom homes, piñata remnants strewn across yard after yard. In the distance somewhere, we heard Mariachi music and lingering laughter.

  As we walked, the ocean breeze touched us, but it was like a whisper in the night. I saw how the cityscape blocked the bay views here, though the neighborhood was some thirty or forty feet above sea level. I imagined the area back before skyscrapers and condo buildings dotted the horizon—it might have been the best view in the city: soft-rolling streets angled westward, moving down into flat city with the wide blue ocean forming a backdrop. But like a lot of things that are good for regular people, rich men got involved.

  Corporations. Companies. Capitalists with a capital C.

  Downtown, where the fancy people played, you had your bank buildings and condos, your fancy hotels and rooftop night clubs. I shrugged this off, too. You can’t expect your world to keep being what it is, or what it always was.

  Every single second an old idea dies.

  Stop grieving for what doesn’t exist, I thought.

  We reached a corner store and Slade put his hands to an exposed bit of glass on the barred front window, tried to see inside the place. “Closed down for the night. I guess everybody already did the nightly beer run.”

  That figured. It was about thirty minutes past midnight. Long past the workingman’s bed time. “This cross street here,” I pointed ahead at K Street, “is where the north half of the property boundary starts. At least, when you look at the map.” I pulled out a web-printed map on Xerox paper, unfolded it. I’d outlined the northern property area—the desired city seizure—with a yellow highlighter.

  Slade took the map from me, studied it. “Looks like you’re right. Runs three blocks up to Island Ave. And, let’s see, maybe four blocks wide?”

  Along K Street, the houses were similar. Square after square of fenced in yard. Simple, nice-looking houses set back from the street. I noticed lots of tinfoil covered windows and beware of dog signs. Also present were fútbol team banners and Mexican flags. Lots of well-tended flower beds and abundant gardens with bulbous red and orange peppers dangling like jewelry. Again, status quo in a blue-collar neighborhood. Back in the day, this was gang territory—tied up tight by the usual colors. Things had changed as the gangs moved east and south. Now it was—from the crime reports—all working-class crime. Your domestic disputes, paid for sex, and auto theft. Like my own neighborhood.

  Beside me, Slade said, “Look at this, Slim Fat.”

  Next to us, outside a house surrounded by a low cinder-brick wall, there was a shrine. Sure as shit, it was a small statue—about knee high—mirroring the pendant on Chato’s necklace. Saint fucking Death. The female face was half rubbed away, the other half shaded by a hooded cloak. She carried the reaper’s scythe, and her female form was clear of dust or mud. There were unlit candles next to the statue, and a few dried roses, stiff gray petals scattered like confetti. “There’s our totem, huh? What’d you say about her? She’s the—”

  “Narco saint. Or one, at least.” Slade said. He had his notebook out already and I watched him jot down
the license plate number from a lowered Chevy pickup truck parked in the yard. The house was dark. Slade jotted down the address—5743 K—and slipped his notebook back into his coat. Down the street, maybe a block and a half, I saw a shadow pass through the scattered light of the street lamps.

  “What’s that?”

  We both watched as a teenager on a BMX bike weaved down the street, reached us after a few seconds. He stood on the pedals and coasted past us, his chin lifted in defiance. As I swiveled my head to watch, I heard him call out to the neighborhood: “Five-Oh in the house.”

  Slade grunted, shook his head. “Little punk.”

  “Another young scholar with high-level powers of observation,” I said. Me and Slade had different ideas about kids. Slade got pissed off when kids talked shit to us. He took it as a sign of true disrespect. It was personal for him. Me, I took it as kids being kids. You can’t get mad at them for doing what daddy does, can you? If it’s real bad, you can. But still…I said, “Not like they didn’t know we were here.”

  We turned right—that’s south—down Twenty-Sixth and I spotted, over three blocks, five more Santa Muerte shrines. We rounded a corner and headed west. “Looks like we got ourselves some religious folks out here, huh?”

  Slade shook his head. “That, or they like them some tasty superstition.”

  “Makes sense that Castaneda came from around here, right?”

  Slade said, “Could be. His driver’s license put him in Arizona though.”

  We put Tempe PD on hunting down Castaneda’s address. I expected them to call the following morning. Funny, to have an Arizona license, but to have your brother come in and ask to pick your body up in San Diego. We’d guessed the address was just a place for Castaneda to have documents sent. Get yourself a buddy with an AZ address and you don’t have to renew your license for a long, long time. We saw this a lot with people who eventually had California warrants. That said, Castaneda was clean here in Cali, from what the system told us.

  We passed a trio of growling pit bulls. Their lower jaws dripped with spittle and their yellow teeth clanged against a metal enclosure. I said, “Castaneda lives here, maybe. We don’t have a known address for Chato?”