I saw the hippie’s head swivel to follow as we passed him going in the opposite direction. I watched in the sideview mirror and, like I anticipated, he flipped us the bird again. “What’s the kid got, Slade?”
“He said we need to meet him over at Bobo’s. Got something he’s keeping out of the report.”
I said, “It’s probably nothing. QB still has a lot to learn.”
“I’m not so sure. QB’s a smart cookie, Frank. Don’t let his age fool you.”
I shrugged, ran my palms across my thighs. My slacks were stiff with sweat and overuse. “I need some new clothes, Slade.” I looked down at my tie, lifted it to my nose—pasta sauce and cheap liquor punched me in the nose, all that mixed with perpetrator sweat.
“Tell you what,” Slade said, “we get through this and I’ll take you downtown, a little place I know. Get you a few tailored suits, three-piece jobs that’ll make you slick.”
“Let’s do that.”
Slade took a right turn onto a street lined with windowless barrooms. It was a favorite block for the night crawlers. By that I mean the hookers and johns and lowdown pimps. This was one of those streets where we kept the problem contained. Most tourist cities do this kind of thing. You quarantine the homeless to a few square blocks, or the drug addicts, or the hookers. You let it happen, but you control where, keep it out of the brochures. The idea: If it’s going to happen, all we have to do—as servants to the public—is put it out of sight. Because, you know, out of mind.
We pulled into an alley adjacent to the street, slid alongside Bobo’s, and Slade shut off the engine. The bar was a cop favorite for finding confidential informants. Slade told stories about day drinking in the place. All a narc had to do was wait and, sure as shit, a junkie needing a twenty-spot would wander up, ask what you wanted to know, and who you wanted to know it about. Smart cops make decorated careers out of that sort of shit. The drug war: An ambitious cop’s path to the promised land…
Inside Bobo’s, QB was hunched in a booth along the far wall, past the neon-lighted bar. Me and Slade dodged the high cocktail tables in the center of the room and slid in beside QB. His eyes were red and I swore his hands shook. He lifted a beer bottle to his lips and drank in nervous sips.
“Thanks for coming, Slade. What’s up, Frank?”
“What’s going down, QB? You look like shit, buddy. Been drinking too much?”
QB gestured with his head at the beer. “First drink I’ve had since I started following that teenager. Not the last one I’m going to drink today, though.”
Me and Slade traded looks—odd, to see the rookie shaken like this.
QB lifted three fingers at the bartender. A slump-backed, middle-aged woman in cutoff Levi’s and a strapless white blouse placed three beers on the table. QB handed her a twenty and she left us.
“What’s so fucking special you can’t put it in the report, QB?” I was annoyed at wasting time on this. I always loved doing business in a bar, but this one had a cruel stink to it. I smelled day-old cold cuts and stale bread, the dead dreams of a hundred All American hookers—it got me sad.
QB looked over his shoulder, scoured the bar like his shiny eyeballs were sandpaper, and leaned across the table toward us. “Your pal Turner is a rich kid, Slade.”
“What do you mean, rich kid?” Slade’s surprise was modest.
As was mine.
QB said, “Turner Malcolm, stepson of a guy named Regis Decassin. He’s Decassin’s wife’s kid, from a previous non-marriage. Out-of-wedlock, as it were.” The rookie leaned back in the booth, satisfied with his fine detective work.
I said, “Who the fuck is Regis Decassin?”
Slade chuckled and said, “Frank doesn’t keep up with the news, QB.”
“I read the sports page.” And I glanced at headlines, but I didn’t say that.
Slade continued, “Decassin is a property developer, Frank. He’s one of those guys that had to do with the stadium proposal. P&J Associates, I think is the firm.”
QB nodded and crossed his arms. “Decassin wheels and deals, sits on a ton of committees, boards, all that shit. But he plays it really cool.”
“He likes to make his money on the sly, keep it quiet.” Slade drank his beer, looked at mine.
I pulled the bottle toward myself across the table, lifted it to my lips. It was slightly warm, but still good. “So, Turner’s the guy’s kid. We got a rich man’s kid found a cartel hit down under the bay bridge. It’s still not much. I mean, talking to Turner, I know he didn’t chop off Castaneda’s wang. Am I right?”
QB said, “You’re right. But the thing is that Decassin has some other ties, down in Mexico.”
“Drug ties,” Slade said.
“Legitimate drug ties. All the names you see in the Mexican dailies—I checked. From what I can tell, Decassin runs a bunch of investment operations for third-party businessmen. He’s got investments in a casino project in Vegas, Carson City. He’s got a boat yard down in Logan Heights—”
“Right near where we found Castaneda,” I said.
“—and he’s been soaking up property wherever he can. Mostly, right here in the metro area.”
Slade cleared his throat, watched the slump-backed waitress shuffle past us toward the bathroom. “Okay, it’s no coincidence that Turner found the body, maybe because he’s tied in with Decassin, runs errands or whatever. But the point here is something bigger: Decassin plays with the cartels, at least one, probably more than one, and he’s digging in here in the States.”
I said, “He’s washing the money.”
QB nodded. I’d set my beer on the table and he leaned forward to grab my bottle. He lifted it to his lips. He gulped the entire bottle, belched. “That’s right, Frank. He’s washing the money. And there’s something else: He’s washing it through more than just gambling and property and dry-cleaning shops. Regis Decassin is a major campaign contributor to Ronald J. Applewhite.”
I might spend most of my time on the sports page, but I was a murder policeman. I knew that name. “That’s the guy running for the county district attorney slot.”
Slade’s leather jacket creaked as he tightened his biceps and leaned toward QB.
The rookie bit his bottom lip, grinned. He said, “Decassin is washing money through Applewhite’s campaign. How’s that for a breaking news story, Slade?”
Chapter 21
Two blocks down Broadway, around the corner from the station, there was a small bar called Goodwin’s. It was a sports pub, really—somehow, they made good business playing all the Blackhawks hockey games. I never understood that, but show up on a game day and every smarmy Chi-town native banished to San Diego would be drinking beer and spitting peanut shells onto the floor. We used Goodwin’s as an office away from the office. Slade had the Castaneda case file with him and I had my department-issue laptop. We were sitting at the bar, under a giant flatscreen TV barking baseball scores, and waiting for images of Chato’s body—and the crime scene—to upload onto the homicide unit’s private server. You could judge us for looking at this shit in public, but it wasn’t hockey season. We were alone except for Raymond, the ex-Navy barman, droning on about his Chicago White Sox. Beside him, a squat, bowlegged line cook with a sideways hat and too clean white apron listened without interest.
Here we all were, punched in and on the clock. And with plenty of bourbon and beer. Not bad, unless you were dead. And looking again at the crime scene images of Castaneda’s body, being dead meant torture and mutilation.
Slade flipped through the images, got frustrated. He shuffled them to the bottom of his file and pulled out his notepad, flipped to a blank sheet. “We have jack shit, Frank. Not one suspect. No leads. We don’t even have a murder weapon on either of these. The best we have is the eyewitness in Chato’s killing. That’s all. How are we going to move forward on this?”
I checked my email again—no images yet. “Let’s write down what we know, think all this s
hit through.” I sipped from my glass of bourbon, ran my tongue over my plump lips. Like Slade, my frustration pressed against the inside of my head, but I also knew QB gave us a lead worth thinking about. All you need—those times when you’ve got nothing—is one small fact. “We got Applewhite at the top, okay. And that’s a maybe. But it’s still at the top.”
Slade wrote the man’s last name on top of the blank page. Below that, he wrote down Regis Decassin’s name, next to that came Turner Malcolm. He put Celeste’s name next to Turner’s, but in parentheses. “You don’t think the girl’s involved, not for real?”
“Even if she’s not involved, she might know something. She might know something she doesn’t know she knows. That’s what I’m thinking.”
Slade jotted Rambo’s name, too. Just above that, he listed Chato and Castaneda.
“Rambo’s still around,” I said, “best we know.”
“That’s true, but he’s a street dealer, right? You and me could both see that.”
“That’s right,” I said and waved at Raymond to come and fill my drink. “We got word out and I think the street cops will bring him in.”
“If he didn’t bounce.”
“Sure. He’ll get scooped up. I can feel it. Where we have to go—I’m thinking out loud here—is to have a talk with Regis Decassin. You want the answers to these murders? I think we get the answers when we follow the money.”
Slade nodded, scratched a line beneath Decassin’s name. “We show up at the man’s residence, say we need to talk to Turner. ‘What’s this about, detective?’ ‘Well, since you asked, Mr. Decassin…’ That’s how we use Turner.”
Raymond poured some more liquor into my glass, looked at Slade, who was intent on his map of names. I nodded for my partner and the bartender topped off Slade’s glass, too. He moved back down the bar, lifted the TV remote and raised the volume. More baseball—in-depth analysis from your resident hall-of-famer.
“And we get in there and, somehow, we chat about all the man’s investments, his dealings. We start to talk about the money, see where it comes from.”
I said, “I think you just pretend to admire Decassin. Make it seem like we see him as a big city type, Mr. Fucking Important. We’re not going for some kind of admission.”
“Right, we want his trust,” Slade said. “We want him to think we’re stupid.” Slade chuckled. “Maybe we are.”
I thought about how the Jacoby case might tie in and groaned.
“What is it?” Slade circled Decassin’s name now, drew an arrow to Applewhite’s entry.
“I just remembered I forgot to ask Richie and Donovan about the Jacoby case, how it got taken from them. If Decassin is tied to Jacoby through business dealings, I see no reason why we don’t bring that up with him. Give him our regards, you know? Man’s business partner gets put down, I imagine he feels some way about it.”
Slade licked his lips, sipped from his glass. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “That’s true and, fuck, maybe Richie and Donovan know something about Decassin.”
I left Slade at the bar and stepped outside to give Donovan a call. Me and him went back a few years. I worked a few cases with him when I first joined homicide. I listened to the rushing, ceaseless traffic pass on Broadway, found Donovan’s last name in my phone, and dialed his number. He picked up after three rings.
“This is Detective Donovan Dillahunt.”
“Hey, Donovan: It’s Frank.”
“Frank Pinson. No shit? What’s going on, partner?”
“Ah, caught two bodies this weekend. I’m running around a house of mirrors, buddy.”
“Man, I picked a good time for cashing in on vacation days. I heard about the one under the bridge. You got another one?”
I paced back and forth on the sidewalk, rubbed sweat off the back of my neck. “Yeah. It’s related. Neighborhood thing in the hood. Looks like a cartel hit. What I’m calling about, though, is the Jacoby case.”
Donovan whistled. “Shit, they found the Jacobys out near Jacumba. It’s looking like the feds screwed the pooch, missed something. Can’t say I didn’t see that coming.”
I said, “Me and Slade found the Jacobys, Donovan. After a tip from the kid who ran across Castaneda’s body.” I waited for Donovan’s silent surprise to end. A city bus hummed past me followed by a cyclist and two motorcycles. A line of cars stopped at the nearest streetlight. On the sidewalk, a group of men with briefcases brushed by me, none of them talking to each other.
“You’re shitting me—that was you two? You didn’t call me about it.” His anger showed through in his pronouns. “Why the fuck didn’t you call me?”
“We thought it was bullshit, Don. Went out there because that was what the kid who found our body gave us—”
“I’m gone two weeks and I don’t exist, huh?”
“I should have called,” I said.
“No shit, Frank.”
“Look, Don, you remember why it was the feds swiped the case from you? And who it was?”
He grunted and cleared his throat. “You’re an asshole, Pinson.” He was pissed, but he kept talking. “Jackson served it up, as I remember. We fought about it for a minute, but then I thought, ‘Who gives a shit? Might as well let the feds take the red ball.’ You know how that is.”
“You have a contact over there? Who took the case?” I listened to the dead sound of Donovan thinking with his booze-addled brain.
“Fuck me, man. It’s probably written down somewhere.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’ll do some digging and—”
“That’s right. I remember. It was Dames, Xander Dames. Some special fucking agent of something or the other. Gave me a call and demanded I give him everything I had. Didn’t even want to meet for a beer. Fucking feds, Frank.”
“Xander Dames? You’re sure?”
“That’s right.”
“And you ever run across a name in your investigation, man by the name of Regis Decassin?”
“We sure did,” Donovan said. “Decassin was in business with Jacoby. They sat on some board or some such thing together. Rich guy stuff…I think it was—”
“P&J Associates?” I said.
“You got it. We never talked to Decassin—he was out of the country on business. The feds took the case before I ever got to meet the man. It was just me chasing loose ends, though. Decassin was out of the country even when the Jacoby family went missing.”
I thought for a second and asked a question I knew Donovan didn’t have the answer for. But then again, sometimes you get a nice surprise in the mystery business. “We’ve been looking at this Jacoby thing being tied in with the Castaneda murder. You know what the P stands for in P&J?”
Donovan laughed, surprised. “That’s a funny question, but I do know what it stands for—it’s not a name. That’s what’s funny. I think this came from Decassin’s secretary, but it stands for a Spanish word…” He popped his tongue against his cheek a few times and said: “Pie-say-no, maybe?”
I got a funny feeling in my throat and my run-of-the-mill Spanish shot across my lips. “You trying to say…Paisano?”
“That’s it. Pie-say-no and Jacoby Associates. I wrote it down—all this shit is in the case file.”
“Thanks, Don. I’ll check it out. Thanks for answering my call.”
“Frank, do me a fucking favor?”
“What’s that?”
“You call and let me know the next time you find one of my fucking bodies.”
As I was about to walk back into Goodwin’s, a young man with wet brown hair wearing an ironed black polo shirt brushed past me. He was slightly shorter than me, but well-built and with a determined look on his face. What caught my eye was the gold pendant dangling from a gold chain around his neck—Santa Muerte. It looked a lot like the pendant Chato wore when we interviewed him, though his was attached to rosary beads. The necklace was still on Chato’s neck when we inspected his b
ody, the pendant somehow untouched by all the gunfire and blood. I sniffed the young man’s cheap cologne—it trailed behind him through the car exhaust and fast-food smells—and stopped myself. I decided I needed to know more about Lady Death, as popular as she seemed to be in these intertwined brutal murders. I whirled to follow the young man. I thought I might tap him on the shoulder, ask some general questions about Lady Death. But instead I fell back, hovered behind him as he made a quick right through a crowd of business men swinging briefcases, and hurried down an alleyway.
The alley was dark and cool, shaded from the sun by two buildings. A chain hotel stretched high above me on one side and an apartment building towered on the other. I looked up and saw the apartment building still had one of those ancient fire escapes, a metal stairway that zigzagged from floor to floor. I hunched next to the old-style brickwork of the building and watched the young man enter a doorway at the alley’s far end. The metallic crunch of machines came from the doorway when he opened it, collapsed into silence as the door closed.
I jogged down the alley, sidestepped two stagnant puddles of green water and weaved between three trash dumpsters. The alley looked like it served as the back entry for a series of businesses on the avenue, the food stalls and barbershop below the apartment building and, on the hotel side, the hotel laundry and kitchen. When I reached the young man’s doorway, I found I was correct—it was the hotel laundry room.
When I yanked the door open, a blast of heat smacked me in the face and I almost sneezed at the pungent odor of industrial grade cleaners—a smell like pine mixed with sulfur and soap and warm water. The metallic noise churned in my ears. I walked in and began to sweat beneath my long-sleeve dress shirt. A round woman with thick glasses and red hair piled high in a bun waved at me. She was stuffing hotel room sheets into a commercial-grade washing machine. I swore it looked like a huge silver space shuttle. I waved and slid past her, watched for the black fabric of the young man’s polo shirt.
To Bring My Shadow Page 10