by Tyler Dilts
“Nothing yet.”
“This is too much of a coincidence. I think they were gunning for Jesús. The addresses are screwed up on the houses. From the street, you can’t tell which one’s 1070 and which one is 1072. They’ve got both numbers on the front. You can’t tell which is which until you get to the back and see the numbers on the porch. I only knew because I checked it out on Google Maps before we rolled.”
Marty thought about it. “So you think somebody wants to be sure this Jesús kid keeps his mouth shut?”
“If they do, this goes deeper than we thought,” Jen said. “Had to be somebody with some serious juice to call in a hit like that.”
I said what we were all thinking. “We’ve got to find Jesús.”
Patrick was still processing the murder scene when we arrived. It would take a long time to process everything. The crime-scene technicians would attempt to account for every bullet. And it was likely that they would. A scene like that takes time and patience. The neighborhood, too, was so densely packed with residents that the canvass would be daunting as well. That’s what never shows up in the movies and on the TV shows: the hours and hours spent with a laser pointer and hundreds of feet of string, calculating bullet trajectories. Or the days spent knocking on each door in a three-block radius and hearing everything from the unanswered echoes of your door-pounding fist to “I don’t know” and “Fuck you” and the unfathomable digressions about lost loves and dying puppies and that time on spring break in Mexico to push the day into unapproved overtime. Or the repetition and the mundanity and the endless details, each of which must be entertained and examined because of the very real possibility of some minute bit of information buried in all of the other noise that might be the one that makes all the difference, the one that breaks the case open, and the one that brings with it that fleeting sense of closure that is the nearest we ever really get to anything resembling justice.
Ohio Avenue was still cordoned off, so we parked on Eleventh, made our way to the corner, and badged the uniforms, and they lifted the yellow tape so we could duck underneath it. The house was four doors down.
I walked out into the middle of the street and looked at the front house again. There was a fence in front with a gate on each edge of the property and a driveway on each side. The curb numbers were next to each one—1070, the back house, on the right, and 1072, the front house, on the left. As I studied the addresses and the fence and the driveways, I tried to imagine that I’d never seen the property before. With the victim’s work truck parked on one side and obscuring the garage, it was impossible to tell which driveway and address number went with which house.
We stopped on the porch and looked inside. Patrick was in the living room talking to a crime-scene tech who was examining a bullet hole in the wall.
“Hey, guys,” he said as he turned and came to the door. “What’s up?”
“We think we might have a motive for you,” I said. We told him about Jesús and his family.
“Shit,” he said.
“Did you talk to the mother?” I asked.
“I took a statement from her.”
“You didn’t catch the name?”
“Solano?”
“Yeah.”
“No. That’s not the name she gave me.” He pulled a notepad out of his shirt pocket and thumbed through the pages. “Felicia Gonzales is what’s on the lease.”
I looked at Jen. “We know if she was married before?”
“No.” Jen thought about it. “Maybe the kids have different fathers. There’s almost a ten-year gap between Jesús and Maria.”
“I wonder if she’d have any reason to use an alias. If she was undocumented you think she might use another name to help hide the tracks?”
“Give me a few minutes.” Jen was already dialing her phone when she went out the front door.
I turned back to Patrick. “Marty gave us the rundown. Anything new come up after he left?”
“No. Just lots and lots of bullet holes.”
“How much do you have on the victim?”
“Basic background,” Patrick said. “No known gang affiliations. Neighbors all apparently liked him. He did handyman stuff for the old couple next door for free.”
“I think they were gunning for Jesús.”
He considered that. “Makes sense. You didn’t know this place, it would be easy to get the addresses confused.”
“I’ll talk to Ruiz. We should be working these together.”
“You’re right.” He held his laser pointer out to me. “Want to help me record bullet trajectories?”
I looked at the device in his hand. It didn’t look like any I’d seen before. “Is that a miniature lightsaber?”
His face fell in disappointment. “If you have to ask,” he said with a sigh worthy of an exasperated Wookiee.
As soon as I got outside, I dialed Jesús’s number, but the call went straight to his voice mail. I left a message asking him to call as soon as he could and then sent a text saying the same thing.
Jen was on her phone too, searching for information on Mrs. Solano/Gonzales.
I made three more calls, all requests. The first, for a BOLO to be put out on Jesús; the second, for a meeting with Pedro Solano; and the last to get the ball rolling for a court order to obtain Jesús’s cell-phone records.
“They’re all documented,” Jen told me in the car a few minutes later. “And Solano is her first ex-husband’s name. Gonzales is the second husband. Apparently, they’re still legally married, but she’s gone back to “Solano” to match the kids’ name. And she’s the only one who has official standing with the school district. He’s not allowed to pick up the kids.”
I’d been talking to the uniforms while she was on the phone. “Nobody knows where she went. She was told it would probably be a day or two before she could get back in the house.”
“We have a cell number for her?”
“Not yet.”
Jen made another call.
I took us down Long Beach Boulevard and turned west on Third. But instead of turning into the LBPD lot, I continued to Ocean.
Jen pulled the phone away from her ear. “We’re not going back to the squad?”
“I want to look at something.”
She had seen enough of my spur-of-the-moment distractions and digressions to give me some slack, and she went back to her conversation.
A few minutes later, we pulled into Palm Beach Park, the place where Nichols and Bishop used to meet to play chess.
Jen finished her call and said, “This is why you never drive.” She hadn’t been paying attention to the passing scenery, and it took her a moment to get her bearings and figure out where we were.
“Have you been here before?” She caught herself and added, “Before the case.”
“I’ve walked around the path a bunch of times and out on the little pier there.” I gestured toward the concrete quay that jutted out into the Catalina Express marina. “But this is the first time I’ve ever parked here.”
Palm Beach Park really wasn’t much of a park at all. There was more parking lot than there was green space. The trees and grass made a band around the white-gridded asphalt taking up the center of the small peninsula upon which the park was situated. The peninsula separated Golden Shore Marine Biological Reserve, at the mouth of the Los Angeles River, from the rest of Rainbow Harbor and Shoreline Village. It was a small transitional blip of land that divided the industrialized harbor area to the west and the downtown tourist-centric waterfront.
There were a dozen other cars in the lot, but no one else in the “park” itself except a lone man in a dark suit at the end of the concrete jetty, facing away from us and looking out at the water.
Jen and I walked over to the strip of grass and stopped in the shade of a tall palm tree. I thought I could understand the appeal the place had for Bishop. It wasn’t hard to feel alone here. With the Long Beach skyline at our backs and a giant container ship slowly drifting a
cross the horizon, it was impossible not to feel the urban world surrounding me, but there seemed to be a stillness here in the center of everything that made me feel an almost overwhelming sense of solitude somehow comingled with a sense of connection to the city around me.
“You still with me?” Jen asked.
“I think I get it,” I said to her.
“What?”
“Why Bishop liked it here.”
“Why?”
I explained it to her as well as I could, but I knew I wasn’t able to satisfactorily translate what I was feeling into words.
She surprised me with her response. “I think I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of what randori feels like.”
I’d watched her train and teach many times. I knew randori was a form of sparring, and I’d seen her, in front of a dojo full of students, being attacked simultaneously by four or five other black belts. In all honesty, those sessions were some of the most impressive physical displays I’d ever seen. There was a violence in them, to be sure, but there was a fluid and powerful kind of grace as well.
“What does it actually mean? I know I’ve seen you do it, and it’s a form of sparring, but what does the word actually mean?”
“I’ve heard it translated different ways. The one I’ve always liked best was ‘seizing chaos.’”
“That’s good.”
“It was, until I heard an MMA douchebag visiting one of my classes tell an orange belt that’s what his kanji tattoo meant. I looked at it and told him he had it wrong. It really translated as ‘egg drop soup.’”
“It did?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea what it meant. But he started to tear up. And later, on the mat, that same orange belt had him tapping out.”
The laugh that escaped me then felt like the first genuine sound I’d made in a long time.
11
RALPHS PLASTIC SHOPPING BAG CONTAINING THREE USED PAPERBACK BOOKS: LONESOME DOVE, BY LARRY MCMURTRY; TRUNK MUSIC, BY MICHAEL CONNELLY; SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, BY KURT VONNEGUT.
Roberto Solano, father of Jesús and Pedro, lived in Riverside.
“Think a shot in the dark is worth a three-hour round trip on a Friday night?” I asked Patrick and Jen.
“We could just call it a night,” Jen said.
“I’m worried about Jesús.” I tapped the eraser of a pencil on a yellow writing pad on the desk in front of me.
“I know.” She looked at Patrick. “What do you think?”
“You’ve got dinner with your folks, right?” he asked.
She nodded. “They’ll get over it if I cancel.”
“They have all seventeen thousand other times,” I said. That had sounded funnier in my head.
But Patrick stepped up and rescued me from my own awkwardness. “I’ll go. Let’s do it.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’m waiting on forensics and ballistics results anyway. Why not?”
We knocked on Ruiz’s office door and told him what we were planning.
“You think it’s worth the drive? A phone call won’t do it?”
I said, “I thought about that. Not sure it’s a good idea to give them a heads-up. If Jesús is there, he might spook. Don’t want to lose him.”
“Well, it’s your Friday night. If you two want to spend it on the freeway, be my guest.”
On the way back to our desks, Patrick said, “That means no overtime, right?”
By the time we hit the 91, rush hour had peaked. We’d done rock-paper-scissors to figure out who would drive each way. I’d won, so Patrick got stuck behind the wheel in the bad traffic. It would be a breeze on the way back to Long Beach. I wondered how we’d manage if we ever partnered regularly. We must have been the only two cops in Long Beach who never wanted to drive.
“I might have to move,” I told him.
“Why?”
“My landlord decided to sell the duplex. Every other one they’ve sold on the street in the last two years has been converted into a single-family house. So he’ll probably want to do that to mine.”
“Sorry, man. That’s a cool place.”
“I know. I really like it there.”
“You always lived there by yourself, right?”
“I moved in a couple of months after Megan died.” A twinge of anxious sadness curdled in my stomach. “I chose it because I knew she would have loved it there. Kind of weird.”
“Not weird at all. How long do you have?”
“Don’t know. The only thing he’s talked about doing so far is changing out all the old fixtures for new low-flow stuff. Seems like an odd way to renovate. Maybe he’s just trying to get the ball rolling.”
“You going to stay in the same neighborhood?”
“I don’t know.”
Patrick had moved last year as well. He’d lived in one of the few authentic lofts in Long Beach, an old mixed-use industrial building he’d converted himself. It was an impressive place, hipster living at its best.
“You miss your old place?” I asked.
“Sometimes. It was a bitch to keep up, though. You know how hard it is to vacuum a two-thousand-square-foot concrete floor?”
I laughed.
“How about the condo?” He’d moved into a bland townhouse on the edge of Signal Hill. It had a great view of the harbor and the sunset, but in every other way it was a virtual clone of thousands of others just like it all across the city.
“It’s okay. Nice to blend in. I don’t feel the same need to make a statement with my living arrangements that I used to.”
He’d never told me the reason for the change, but he’d been attacked in his old place in the course of one of our previous investigations, a disturbing multiple murder that involved a congressman, a dirty FBI agent, and a trio of Eastern European thugs. Whenever I thought about it that way, I thought it sounded like one of the absurd cop thrillers that Patrick and I had so much fun mocking. In reality, though, there was nothing funny about it. Patrick had spent several days in intensive care while the rest of us waited anxiously to find out if he’d ever regain consciousness. I understood changing your living arrangements to escape the trauma of violence and loss.
“You thought about buying something?” he asked.
“Jen loves her place,” I said. “Looks like I missed the window on that, though. The prices and interest rates are already going back up. And I don’t have the nest egg she did. If I was going to buy, I’d have to look at either condos or a crappy neighborhood.”
“Don’t knock condos. It’s not nearly as soul crushing as you think it will be.”
“I just don’t want to move.”
A few miles later, he said, “Did you ever check out that link I sent you?”
“No, not yet. It got pushed way down in my e-mail and I forgot about it.” I was never as good at managing my personal e-mail as I was with my work account. It happened a lot, and I was always apologizing to people. “Sorry.”
“You should be sorry. It’s going to change your life.”
“Really? Must be quite a link.”
“Remember who you’re talking to. How many shitty links have I ever sent you?”
“Good point.”
It seemed like hours of toll roads and carpool lanes, but we made it to Roberto Solano’s address in ninety-two minutes. He lived in a bad neighborhood in an old two-level, eight-unit apartment complex.
We drove past, turned right at the end of the block, and cut down the alley behind the building. It was a simple rectangle, four apartments on each level stacked one right above the other. There was an exposed walkway on the second floor that each upstairs unit opened onto. They probably had identical floor plans. While we were in back, Patrick slowed the car and looked up through the windshield.
“Can you see the number by the door up there?”
I squinted into the darkness. “It looks like 2D.”
“Well, that’s it,” he said.
The building was perpendicular to the street, and Solano’s apartment was all the way at the back, farthest from both the street and the stairway to the upper landing. If anyone saw us coming, the only escape route would be a jump from the second story to the ground and a climb over the six-foot barbed-wire-topped concrete block wall.
Our unmarked Police Interceptor wouldn’t fool anyone, especially in this part of town. So Patrick had pulled into half a space along the curb and didn’t worry about the front end in the red zone. We could have tried to hide the car by parking up the street or on the next block, but we decided the advantage of having the car closer outweighed any stealth we might gain. Besides, no one in the vicinity would be surprised by the presence of a cop car.
Before he got out, Patrick slipped his iPhone out of his jacket pocket and pulled up a copy of Roberto Solano’s driver’s-license photo. “Want to take one more look?”
“I had plenty of time to memorize it on the drive.”
The sign mounted on the front wall of the building identified it as the “el Ray.” The first letter was missing. “What do you suppose it used to say?”
Patrick examined the cracked yellow stucco where the missing letter should have been. “Been gone so long you can’t even see the fade marks. I bet it was a D.”
“Why?”
“Because slumlords in the desert an hour away from the beach think they can trick people into imagining an ocean breeze.”
“Marina Del Rey is spelled with an e.”
“Illiteracy just supports my theory,” he said with a grin.
There was a locking front gate, but it had been propped open with half of a broken concrete block. We started up the stairs. “Be careful,” I said. “The railing’s loose.”
Patrick shook it and the wobble was visible all the way up to the second-floor landing. “Nice,” he said.
In apartment 2A, someone peeked out from behind the curtain covering the front window next to the door as we passed. The heavy fabric moved back to its original position, and the light behind it went out.