A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  “Maybe we’ll get a DNA hit.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. “But we’ve still got a few threads we can pull on.”

  “There’s something different about this victim for you, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it because he burned? You thinking of Megan?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But that’s not all of it, is it?”

  “No.”

  She waited for me to go on. Jen was always better at interviews than I was.

  I watched the traffic, waiting for the crosswalk signal to change, and thought about why Bishop’s identity seemed to mean so much to me. All I could come up with was this: “He had three pairs of shoes and none of them fit.”

  5

  KEY RING: PLASTIC FOB W/ BLUE ABSTRACT DESIGN. ONE VW AUTOMOBILE KEY. SIX OTHER KEYS, MISCELLANEOUS.

  Pedro and Jesús Solano lived in a neighborhood called Zaferia, which was just east and north of Cambodia Town. I’d never heard the name until a year or two earlier, when the city started hanging up banners on the light poles along East Anaheim Street that said “Stop Shop Dine, Historic Zaferia District, Est. 1913.” The drill was familiar—hang up banners everyplace the city council hoped had a shot at gentrification. It didn’t seem to be working around Ohio and Tenth, though, and especially not for the Solano family. They lived in a run-down bungalow that was hidden behind a larger though equally aged home that fronted the street. If I hadn’t checked the place out first on Google Maps, it would have been hard to find it.

  Jen and I parked on the street half a block away, in the closest empty spot we could find. Next door was a four-story apartment building. As we walked up the long and narrow driveway past the front house on the lot, someone on one of the balconies said “Five-oh” in a matter-of-fact voice that wasn’t quite loud enough to qualify as a shout. I couldn’t tell if it was a warning or a greeting.

  Thirty yards in from the street, there was a small porch up three steps from the driveway. To the left, with doors perpendicular to the front of the house, was a shed that wasn’t quite big enough to qualify as a one-car garage. There was a large ash tree in the small space between the two structures, and its roots were pushing one side of the shed so far out of square that there was a six-inch gap above the left-side door, and a similar one beneath the right. The two sides of the padlock hasp didn’t line up, and a bike chain slipped through the handles was all that secured the doors. It didn’t look like the wood frame could withstand much more displacement from the ash.

  Jen leaned against the short stairway’s railing, looked up, and scanned the balconies as I climbed the steps up onto the porch and knocked on the rusty metal security door. The dull, hollow clanging echoed through the small house. Even though visibility through the screen was poor, I could see that there was a couch along one wall of the living room. A small woman in a zip-up hoodie and sweatpants, who I hadn’t realized was there, struggled to her feet and lurched toward the door. I couldn’t get a good read on her, but she appeared to be under the influence of alcohol or something else.

  “Mrs. Solano?”

  “What do you want?”

  I held up my badge. “Are you here by yourself?”

  “Yes. What do you want?”

  “Where are your kids?”

  “Jesús is at school still. Maria’s at the daycare. What do you want?”

  I thought about asking her more about Jesús, but it was clear she was wary of police, and I didn’t want to tip her off to the real reason we were there. And she gave me a good opening. “What about Pedro?”

  “Pedro?” She raised her voice. The slurring became more pronounced as she grew angrier. “He’s in your jail! You don’t know that? You already have him.”

  I faked surprise. “We do? Since when?”

  “Last night.” The anger dissipated as quickly as it had risen. Then, sounding vaguely hopeful, she added, “You do have him, don’t you?”

  I turned to Jen. “Mrs. Solano says Pedro’s already in lockup.”

  Jen played along. “Seriously? What are we doing here, then?”

  “I don’t know.” I turned back to the screen door. “I’m sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Solano. Our mistake.” I spun around and started down the stairs.

  Behind us, Mrs. Solano was shouting, “You have Pedro, don’t you? You have Pedro?” By the time we got to the sidewalk, we couldn’t hear her anymore.

  As Jen drove west on Anaheim, she said to me, “Think maybe you were a little hard on her?”

  “Yeah, but it was the right way to play it. We got lucky that we didn’t tip our hand and she didn’t figure out we were looking for Jesús. I don’t know if he’s laying low or what, but if there’s any doubt about where he stands, where he thinks Pedro stands, that’s going to work in our favor.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If his mother’s got some doubts about what’s going on with Pedro, and Jesús has to figure it out, then he’s going to have to be talking to people, asking questions.”

  “And everyone he talks to is another potential lead.”

  We slowed for the red light at Gundry, and I looked out the passenger’s window at the Mark Twain branch of the Long Beach Library. It was only a few years old, opened just before the recession hit, one of the newest in the system. Its contemporary architecture stood out against the older and more run-down buildings in the area, like Tech’s Tires and La Bodega #4 across the street. The gleaming new building, though, told only half the story. Inside, they offered tutoring services for neighborhood kids and the area’s best Internet access. The branch also housed the largest collection of Khmer-language literature in the United States. The first time I’d seen the new library, I’d been troubled by its presence, thinking the cutting-edge design not only seemed out of place in a poor neighborhood but that it also sent the wrong messages about where the city was placing its priorities. Now, though, looking out the window as Jen accelerated, I realized this ostentatious building named after one of literature’s most famous dead white males in a neighborhood filled with poor Asian and Latino immigrants was actually a symbol of the best of Long Beach’s Frankensteined urban stew. The cultural and socioeconomic jumble of pressure and influence and privilege and poverty don’t often come together in any productive way, but on those rare occasions when they do, I try to let the cracks in my preconceived notions widen and let in a little bit of light.

  When we got back to the station, I called Robert Kincaid, the ADA who’d be prosecuting the case. He’d already seen all the case files we had so far. After I told him about our visit with Benny War, I asked him about Hector Siguenza.

  “He’s part of Benny’s cabal,” Rob said. “Him and four or five other guys. All lawyers. They’ve got a standing tee-time at the Virginia Country Club every week.”

  “You figure Benny’s calling in a favor?”

  “Yeah. No way Benny would touch it himself, but he wants to stay close. Makes sense that he’d pull in one of his cronies.”

  “Think he might be pulling Siguenza’s strings?”

  “Benny’s usually too smart to get directly involved, but I’m sure there’s some influence there. Why?”

  “Just trying to get a sense of things,” I said.

  “Keep me in the loop.”

  “I will.”

  Maybe I was wrong about Benny, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d been trying way too hard to seem like he didn’t give a shit.

  That evening I felt like I needed to get my head out of the case for a little while, so I stopped at Ralphs for some beer and drove to Belmont Heights.

  “You been practicing?” Harlan Gibbs asked as he led me into his living room. I took the first bottle of Sam Adams out of the six-pack, popped the cap off, and handed it to him.

  He was a retired Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy whom I met on a murder investigation a few years earlier. The victim had been an English teacher who rented a small house from Harlan. The first
time I saw him, he was pointing a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum at me. He’d mistaken Jen and me for intruders. We’d been friends ever since.

  “Yeah.”

  “How often?”

  “Every day.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Seriously.”

  He stood up, went into the next room, and came back with a banjo. It was one I didn’t recognize. He checked the tuning, made a small adjustment to the third string, and handed it to me.

  “This looks nice.” And it did. It was a Gibson. I couldn’t identify the model, but it looked top-of-the-line with an ebony fingerboard, a figured maple resonator, gold hardware, and pearl inlays. Probably worth ten grand or so. It looked new, but I knew that with Gibsons, new wasn’t always as good as old. “You just buy this?”

  “Got a deal.”

  Almost a year earlier, when my physical therapist told me I needed to start playing the guitar to treat my chronic pain, Harlan had made a gift to me of a beautiful Deering Saratoga Star and told me it would be even better for rebuilding the strength and dexterity I’d lost with my injury. It was every bit as valuable as the instrument I was holding in my hands, and I thought he’d resigned himself to giving in to the stomach cancer he’d been stricken by. I never figured out if I was right, but Harlan kept fighting, and he was closing on nine cancer-free months. The new banjo seemed to me a good sign, an investment of sorts in the future.

  “Flashy,” I said. “You run into some pimp with buyer’s remorse?”

  “Bought it for the sound.”

  I adjusted the banjo in my lap and picked a forward roll across the strings. Sounded very nice. I tossed a knowing nod in Harlan’s direction.

  “Please,” he said. “Like you could recognize a decent sound.”

  He was right, of course, but I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of indicating I knew it.

  “Okay, Béla,” Harlan said, “show me a basic chord progression. G, C, D7.”

  It wasn’t pretty, but I managed a slow and clumsy alternating roll through all three chords, relieved that I managed the C without the dead plunk from my poor fingering on the fourth string.

  “That was lovely,” Harlan said and took a long pull from his beer. “Thought you said you were practicing.”

  “I have been. Half an hour every night before bed.”

  “Well, it’s not working. You need some lessons.”

  I’d tried to weasel some lessons out of him when he’d given me the Deering, and he made an effort, but he wasn’t a teacher. Didn’t have it in him. And because I’d hoped the lessons would be as good for him as they were for me, I hadn’t pushed him to continue.

  “I’m taking lessons.”

  “With who?”

  “Tony Trischka.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Seriously. Tony Trischka’s Online Banjo School.”

  “Online? You’re learning banjo on the computer? Jesus.”

  “It’s the best I could do. Maybe if I knew any real banjo players, they could help me find some decent lessons.”

  The jab landed and earned me half a snort. “All right,” he said. “I’ll ask around.”

  We drank in comfortable silence for a bit, and then he said, “Saw the homeless guy on the news. You caught that, right?”

  I nodded. Then we talked about banjos and music and old movies for two hours, and I went home.

  The heat had been building in my ground-floor duplex apartment all day, and even though the sun had gone down hours earlier, it still felt like a blast furnace when I stepped inside. I had intentionally kept the ceiling fan on when I left, but it hadn’t made any noticeable difference in the temperature. All it did was move the hot air around like a convection oven. On the way back to the bedroom, I opened every window I passed, even though I suspected the air outside was too still to provide enough cross ventilation to cool the place down.

  I went into the kitchen to get myself something to drink. Years ago, the previous tenant, a graphic designer, had painted the room in a bright, Caribbean-flavored color scheme—all primary colors, yellow and red and blue—and I still liked it. It’s not the kind of thing I’d ever come up with myself. If I had to choose the colors to paint a room, I’m sure my choices would range from ecru all the way to Navajo white.

  The message light on my landline was flashing. It was my landlord, saying that in the next week or so, someone would be stopping by to work on the plumbing and to install new low-flow fixtures. I didn’t like the sounds of that. One of my favorite things about the duplex was the fact that it still had all the original hardware. I thought of every hotel shower I’d taken in the last few years and made a mental note to ask him if he’d skip my place.

  Even though there hadn’t been a Grey Goose bottle in there for two months, habit still made me reach for the freezer door first. I didn’t even have it all the way open before I pushed it closed and opened the refrigerator for a Diet 7Up.

  After a year of juggling Vicodin and vodka to deal with my pain, I finally succumbed to the horrible notion that had been nagging at the back of my head like a fly in a dark room, and I combined the two.

  The result was terrifying.

  The combination of the alcohol and painkillers was so effective in treating the burning ache that twisted from my wrist up through my arm and into my neck and shoulder, the corrosive hurt that tormented me, that it felt like an amazing deliverance. The first time I did it, I told myself it would only be once. Only once. The second time I did it, I told myself it would only be twice. Each time, I’d add a little more vodka and the relief would be a little bit deeper, the sleep a little bit more sound.

  But every silver lining has a cloud.

  I give myself credit for cutting myself off after night number six. Even then I knew that if I didn’t stop soon, it would be harder.

  Some nights, when the pain and the insomnia are particularly rough, I think about the relative ease with which I stopped, and I think that maybe just one more time wouldn’t hurt. And I know that’s probably true. I also know bargaining when I see it.

  The first full night at home after taking on a major case is always an ordeal. Insomnia has been a problem for me for years, for far longer than the chronic pain, and especially so when my mind is racing with the details of a new murder investigation. The inability to disengage, though, is a double-edged sword. I discovered that fact a year earlier on a triple murder case, the first upon my return to active duty after the long medical leave for my injury. The excitement of a new case was a balm for my pain—it occupied my mind and being in a way that nothing else could, and that forced my attention away from the chronic affliction of my injury. When I became immersed in work, I forgot to hurt, and even now it’s the only real relief I can count on.

  But in the brightness of one of my many insomniac midnight-to-dawn struggles, the magic fades and the pain mixes with the befuddlement of the sleeplessness and makes those few brutal hours stretch out in front of me like an unending march toward a forever-receding horizon.

  It’s kind of like watching a Terrence Malick movie.

  The way I deal with it is by working the case. It’s actually a good chance to get squared away and organize the mass of information compiled in the first hours of an investigation. This case, though, was different. Sure, it was high profile, but we had suspects in custody, and it was as close to an airtight case as I’d seen in all my years of working Homicide. Once, several years earlier, I’d worked a killing that was recorded on the surveillance camera of a Circle K mini-mart, but the images had been relatively low-resolution and the tape wasn’t the definitive evidence in the trial. With this case, though, the recording would be crucial. Not only were there shots in which the suspects were unmistakably identifiable, there were also multiple incidents of them using each other’s names, and footage of the preparation and lead-up to the murder as well as the act itself. There was also a considerable amount of forensic evidence tying them to the crime and the crime scen
e, and multiple LBPD officers could testify to their presence in the immediate aftermath of the incident. They were going down for this.

  Aside from motive, there was only one question that seemed urgent: who was the victim?

  I couldn’t answer that question with the information I had at hand, but, as with most cases, I knew that the better I knew the evidence, the more likely I’d be to make connections down the road. So I went back to the murder book.

  The list of contents from the shopping cart was the one item that kept drawing my attention. It was the only thing we had that allowed for any speculation or interpretation. I didn’t know it then, but I would spend so much time with that list that I would virtually commit it to memory. That night, though, it was still fresh and new, and it seemed to me that if I studied it and looked deeply enough into it, that it just might hold the key to unlocking the universe of our victim. I looked at it as if it were a puzzle, and if only I could figure out how to properly assemble the pieces, I’d be able to unlock some meaningful truth about our victim. Bishop? I couldn’t help but wonder if that name was actually useful information or just the rambling of a man who wasn’t able to make any more sense of my questions than I was myself.

  I read through the inventory again. It seemed only a random collection of items, the debris and the dregs of a life that was slowly waning away into insignificance. But I couldn’t let myself believe that. If I did, I’d be no better than the community and culture that had ignored and neglected him long enough for him to meet the fate he had met.

  No.

  I wouldn’t let that happen. I needed more. I needed to know who he was and where he came from.

  In my experience, it’s actually a very rare thing for homicide detectives to feel as if they affected any real closure or resolved anything of great significance for those left behind by the victims of murder. The truth of the matter is that when someone dies of anything other than extreme old age and natural causes, and often even then, the death leaves a great void in the lives of the survivors, an emptiness like an abandoned mine that can never be filled. A deep chasm. If you’re lucky, you might be able to cover it with plywood and rebar, to surround it with chain link and “Danger” signs, but at best, these are only ever temporary remedies, patches that might briefly hold up to the storms that will come and come again until the ground around the chasm grows so weakened and diminished that to approach the emptiness becomes ever more dangerous. And that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re not, then the loss leaves a void as dark and desolate as a black hole, with a gravity so great that no light can escape.