by Tyler Dilts
From the porch I could see Mrs. Solano’s semiconscious form collapsed on the couch in the same position she had been in yesterday. I tapped on the door and tried to get her attention.
“Mrs. Solano?” I said.
She didn’t seem to hear me.
I hadn’t noticed the sound until it stopped, but the water had been running in the kitchen. Through the rusty security door, I could see a young man come into the living room, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. He froze and eyeballed me through the screen. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but if I’d been a betting man, I would have put down a good chunk of money that he was calculating his odds of making it out the back door and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard before I could catch him.
“If you’re thinking about running, stop now,” I said.
He slung the towel up over his shoulder and let it hang there as he approached the door.
“What do you want?” he said.
I held up my badge and said, “We need to talk to you.”
He looked at his semiconscious mother on the couch, unlocked the bolt, and stepped out onto the porch with me. The space was tight enough that it was easy to make him feel crowded.
Jesús was small and thin, maybe five-six, one-forty, and looked like he was dressed for school in dark-blue pants and a white polo shirt.
“Can we come inside?”
He looked over his shoulder. “My mom’s not feeling too good right now.”
“It’s not a good idea for us to do this out here. If you’d rather, we can go to the station and talk there.”
“I have to be here for when my little sister is done with daycare.”
I didn’t say anything, and he thought about it, pulled the security door open, and let us follow him back into the living room. The house was small—the living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath. Standing near the door to the hallway, I could see almost all of it with a glance over my shoulder. It must have been close to a hundred degrees inside. The windows were all open in a futile grasp at comfort. Above our heads, a ceiling fan was spinning and churning the hot air, but the only effect it had was to make me think again of convection ovens.
“Mom!” Jesús said. “Get up, you got to go in the bedroom.”
She opened her eyes and tried to sit up but didn’t make it.
“Cops again?” she said, looking at Jen and me. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before, and it sounded like she had a mouth full of toothpaste.
“It’s okay, Mom. Just get up.” He took her arm and pulled her to her feet. She was shorter than him and probably about thirty pounds heavier.
“What did you do?” she asked as he dragged her past us. I caught a whiff of her breath as she went by. I was wrong about the toothpaste.
Jesús put her in the bedroom at the front of the house and came back into the living room. I could already feel the sweat gathering along my forehead and at the back of my neck.
“What’d you want to talk about?”
“You know where your brother is?”
He looked at my face and then at Jen’s. I suspected that he knew the answer to my question. “No,” he said. “Where is he?”
“Sit down,” I said. He sat on one end of the couch and Jen sat on the other. I stayed on my feet.
“Did your mom tell you we were here yesterday?”
“She said something about cops. She’s been drunk for two days. It’s hard to know what she’s talking about.”
“I’m going to ask you again. Do you know where your brother is?”
“He in jail?”
“You know the answer.”
“I didn’t for sure until now.” I couldn’t tell yet if he was lying. We hadn’t talked enough for me to get a feeling for how he sounded telling the truth, so I had no baseline to compare with his statement.
“What can you tell us about why he’s there?”
“Nothing.”
“You answered that pretty quickly. I think you must know something.”
“I don’t.”
“Where were you two nights ago? On Monday.”
“Here.”
“Where were you supposed to be?”
“Supposed to be? I don’t know what you mean. I’m always here. Somebody’s got to take care of my sister.”
“What about your mom?”
He tilted his head and looked at me as if I’d just suggested he take the yacht out for a sail or challenged him to a game of polo. I didn’t push that one any further.
Jen said, “That’s good the way you take care of your sister.”
He allowed himself the barest hint of a smile at that. He knew that it was good, and he was proud of the fact. It made me want to go easy on him, but I didn’t.
“I think you’re a good kid, Jesús. I do.”
His face iced over. He knew something was coming.
“But that’s not what Pedro says.”
Nothing.
“Pedro says you were supposed to be with him on Monday night.”
“I don’t care what Pedro says.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard. Everybody says different.”
“Who’s everybody?”
“Francisco, for a start.”
His jaw tightened, and for maybe a second before he caught himself, his eyes narrowed. He didn’t like Francisco. “Is Francisco lying about you?”
“I barely know him. He’s my brother’s friend.”
“But you wanted to be his friend, too.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Why? Because he’s connected? He could help you make your bones?”
Still nothing.
“You’re a good kid, Jesús,” I said. “I know that. But you’ve got to talk to us, or everybody’s going to believe Francisco. The shit he’s saying about you. You’ll wind up in there with them.”
I kept expecting him to look away, to break my gaze, but he didn’t. He was studying me the same way I’d been studying him. After what seemed like a long time but surely wasn’t, he shook his head, and I knew that we were done. At least for the time being.
“Okay, you want to play it that way, that’s your call. But you’re going to change your mind, and I really hope it won’t be too late.” I handed him my card, and to my surprise, he took it without hesitation and held it carefully between his fingers as if he were afraid of damaging it. Then I got out my iPhone and dialed the number Jen had found earlier on Pedro’s cell. A banda tune sounded from his pocket.
“You got my number?”
“Yeah. And now you’ve got mine.”
We showed ourselves out and left Jesús sitting on the couch and looking at the business card in his hand.
In the car, Jen said, “You think he’ll come around?”
“Don’t know,” I answered. “But I didn’t hate him nearly as much as I wanted to.”
“You two having fun out in all the sun and fresh air?” Patrick asked us when we came back into the squad room.
“It’s about a thousand degrees out there, so no, not really,” Jen said.
“You went to see Jesús Solano, right?”
I nodded.
“What did you think?”
“Seemed like a good kid,” Jen said.
“He knows something,” I added. “But he thinks he’s got to stand up.”
“I checked him and the other three out on social media, looking for connections. None of them are big on Twitter, but there’s some interesting stuff on Facebook.”
“Yeah?” I wheeled my chair toward his desk.
“Omar and Francisco are neck-tattoo deep in gang associations. They might as well have an East Side Longo fan page. Pedro’s got a few, too, nowhere close to as many as them, though. But Jesús? Nothing. I need to go deeper, but it looks like the only connection he has to anything even vaguely questionable is his brother. Kid looks clean. You know what most of the pictures he’s posted are?”
“What?” I asked.
Patrick spun his laptop around so we could see the screen. Jesús had an album titled “Maria’s Birthday.” There were a dozen or more photos of a happy little girl with five or six of her friends, celebrating in the backyard of the bungalow on Ohio. There was a little cake and a little piñata and lots of laughing. It looked like Jesús was the closest thing to an adult in attendance.
“You have to hack into his account?”
“He’s sixteen. Everything’s set to ‘public.’ Hardly anybody under twenty sets anything to ‘private’ these days.”
I thought about that. My Facebook page was locked down tighter than a submarine. What did I have to hide that was so much more secret and privileged than Jesús’s life? What was I trying to protect?
Patrick straightened up his desk as if he were getting ready to leave. “I haven’t eaten. You guys want to go grab a sandwich at Modica’s?”
Jen said, “I’m up for it.” She looked at me. “Danny?”
“You guys go ahead. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”
Patrick was about to close his browser window, but I stopped him.
“Can I look at that a bit more?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just be sure to shut it down when you’re done.”
I pushed Patrick’s chair to the side and rolled myself in closer for a better look.
Seeing those pictures made me want to like Jesús. They made me want to believe that he really was the good kid who refused to let his brother pull him down into the darkness. I wondered, too, what might have motivated Pedro. Why would he commit such a horrendous crime?
After closing the Firefox window on Patrick’s desktop, I wheeled myself back over to my own computer and clicked on the icon for the murder video from the Samsung. I watched the whole thing again, from start to finish. I’d seen it so many times at that point that I knew every moment before it came, but I focused just as intently as I had the first time I’d watched. I didn’t expect to discover anything new, but I wanted to confirm some of my observations about the three suspects.
Omar, I could believe, was a monster. Watching him in the video of the crime made that possibility clear. He enjoyed the killing. The pleasure he took in the violence was obvious in his gleeful excitement.
Francisco didn’t share in the monstrosity, but his cold and calculating response made me think of a veteran soldier with a job to do who was getting it done.
Pedro was the least enthusiastic of the trio. He held the Galaxy and, as the cameraman, was the least visible. But I could hear his voice. “Oh, man,” he said. “Oh, man.” If there wasn’t regret in his voice, there was at least a realization of the magnitude of their actions. In those four syllables was the recognition of an unalterable change in the course of his life. Even before the sirens and the flashing lights and the uniforms, Pedro knew that nothing would ever be the same again.
We were back in the squad room after lunch. A stubborn piece of pastrami had wedged itself between two of my molars, and I was using the tip of my tongue to try in vain to work it free.
Jen was telling Patrick about some remodeling ideas she saw on HGTV.
“Everything on there is crap,” I said.
“Not all of it,” she said.
“Are you kidding? Those shows where they have to race to get everything done in time for the big finish?”
“They’re not all like that.”
“Maybe not, but they’ve always got to come up with some fake bullshit conflict to liven things up two-thirds of the way through. I wouldn’t trust any of those guys with my house.”
“You don’t have a house. And you can’t compare everybody to Norm.”
“Who’s Norm?” Patrick asked.
“From This Old House,” Jen and I said almost simultaneously.
“Oh,” he said. “Of course.”
I added, “Don’t forget New Yankee Workshop. Norm’s amazing.”
“Nobody watches those shows anymore,” Jen said.
“It’s not my fault the world’s going to shit,” I said. “You don’t need all that fake HGTV tension to make things compelling. It drives me up the wall. Just show us how to do quality work the right way. Don’t give us a bunch of bullshit over-the-top drama.”
Patrick took a long drink of his iced tea. “Think maybe you’re getting a little too worked up over this?”
“No, I don’t. You should be on my side, Patrick. This is all about authenticity. That’s totally a hipster thing.”
He and Jen just looked at me.
“No offense,” I said.
“None taken,” he said. I think that was true, too, which was a shame. We’d been giving him crap about being a hipster for years. If his skin had finally gotten thick enough that it didn’t bug him anymore, then we’d have to come up with something else to needle him with. He was still the newest member of the squad. Until someone else transferred in and moved him up a notch on the totem pole, letting him off the hook simply wasn’t an option.
Jen got a call. It was quick. When she hung up, she said, “That was Stan—he came up with something on the canvass.”
8
THREE CDS: FAIRYTALE, DONOVAN; THE DEER HUNTER: ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SOUNDTRACK, VARIOUS ARTISTS; REMAIN IN LIGHT, TALKING HEADS.
Julia Rice was a photographer with a background in sociology. She’d worked for the city for several years and had even taught in the MSW program at CSULB for a few semesters. According to her website, she’d given up the day jobs to focus full time on her photography. She’d had half a dozen shows in the last three years all over Southern California. Her name came up during Stan Burke’s canvass of the shelters. She’d done a lot of social work with the homeless in her old job, and recently, according to one of the food-bank administrators, she had started a photography project taking portraits of street people in an effort to raise awareness and, ultimately, of course, money. The man running the shelter had said he thought she was there on one of the rare days he’d seen Bishop.
When Jen had called her earlier to arrange a meeting, Julia had told her to stop by her studio—which was actually a loft in one of the newish buildings that had opened on the Promenade downtown with the most recent spurt of redevelopment.
We walked into the lobby and ogled the concrete and glass and metal. “Seems upscale for a social worker,” I said.
Jen corrected me. “A former social worker. Now an artiste.”
I was never comfortable around people with lots of money, especially if they felt the need to be hip and cool about it. Something felt off about going to one of the trendiest and most expensive buildings in town to investigate the murder of a destitute victim. I tried to swallow my disdain.
Before we had the chance to find Julia’s number on the intercom system, the elevator opened and two young women with enormous breasts, carrying yoga mats rolled up in earth-toned tote bags, passed us in the lobby and went out the gray-glazed glass door into the heat. I was still watching them walk away when Jen said, “Hey.”
She stood in the elevator with her hand extended so it wouldn’t close, until I boarded too.
“You know the apartment number?”
“Yeah. Fourth floor.”
We rode up and found ourselves wandering the halls in order to figure out which way the unit numbers ran. Two wrong turns later, we found Julia Rice’s apartment and, out of courtesy and general niceness, gave the door a normal civilian knock. It’s rare that we do this when we’re on the clock. We’re so conditioned to pounding on every door with the heels of our hands—and the resultant booming echoes—that it feels anticlimactic to just to give a door a run-of-the-mill tap. But that’s what I did.
From behind the door, we heard a muffled voice. “Yes?”
Jen held her badge up to the peephole and said, “Ms. Rice? I’m Detective Jennifer Tanaka. We spoke on the phone earlier.”
We heard the sound of the deadbolt and the door opened.
“Hello, Dete
ctive.” Then she realized Jen wasn’t alone and said, “I beg your pardon, Detectives.” She smiled at me, and, without thinking, I smiled back. “Won’t you come in?”
She wore old-school Levi’s and an olive-colored T-shirt. Her light-brown hair was pulled back into a loose ponytail. It looked like she’d done it that way for convenience rather than for style. “Let’s sit in here.” She led us into a living area with a large brown sofa and two matching chairs that faced each other in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked Alta Way and the square. Jen and I took the sofa, and Julia sat in the chair closest to the window.
“This is a very nice view,” Jen said.
“It’s okay. I’m looking for a new place.”
“Why?” I asked. “This place looks great.”
“The apartment’s nice enough. But the people here are all pretentious assholes.” I must have smiled again, because she looked at me in a curious way. “How can I help you?”
“We’re investigating a murder,” Jen said.
“Is this about the man who was burned to death by the river?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s horrible. What can I do?”
I let Jen answer.
“We don’t know who he was. The director of the Rescue Mission said you have a lot of photos.”
“I do. If you don’t know who he was, how do you think we might find him in the pictures?”
“We believe he went by the name of Bishop, but we suspect that’s not his real name.”
“That doesn’t ring any bells. Can you give me a physical description?”
We did. “Doesn’t sound too unusual, but I can start looking through what I have. I get names whenever I can, but a lot of my photos are just faces.”
“How many do you have?” I asked.
“Thousands. Only about a dozen of the portrait series I’m working on, but I’ve been taking pictures of the homeless for years, trying to document the conditions on the streets. I used to be a social worker.”
Jen nodded. “We have someone who used to play chess occasionally with the victim. So far he’s the only person who would be able to recognize his face.”