A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  Her name was Mary, and like most of the people we’d talked to about Bishop, she’d been homeless for quite some time. She’d been in and out of shelters and transitional housing for almost a decade. Most recently, though, she’d been on the street. Lauren and Stan found her through the Centro Shalom food bank. It was luck, mostly. On their most recent swing by the location to check on the copies of the photos they’d distributed, one of the volunteers mentioned that he had seen Mary earlier and that she had commented on the photo of Bishop. They canvassed the area and found her a few blocks away at a picnic table under a large shade tree in Martin Luther King Jr. Park. She didn’t want to come to the station, so I took an unmarked cruiser and met Stan and Lauren there.

  The park was fairly large, with a community center and soccer and softball fields. Their unit was in the parking lot about twenty-five yards from where Mary sat. They saw me pull up and park next to their car. Lauren left Stan with the woman and came to meet me. While she was walking toward me, I took several bills out of my wallet and slipped them into my shirt pocket.

  “She have something good?” I asked.

  “I don’t know about evidentiary value, but Stan and I thought you’d want to hear it from her.”

  That made me curious. So we walked past the bronze statue of MLK and a playground with new multicolored plastic equipment on a gray rubberized ground cover and approached them.

  “Mary,” Stan said. “This is the detective I told you about. His name is Danny Beckett.”

  She looked up at me, and the creases spiderwebbing her brown face deepened as she squinted. Even though we were in the shade, she lifted a dirty hand to her brow to shade her eyes.

  “Mary has some vision problems,” Lauren said.

  “I haven’t been able to get my glasses fixed,” she said. It looked like she was missing all the teeth from the incisors back on the left side.

  “Well,” I said. “We might be able to help you with that. May I sit down?”

  She was facing outward with her back against the edge of the table. She twisted around and hefted a tote bag overflowing with soiled clothing items off of the bench and up onto the table to make room for me. “Please.” She smiled politely at me and gestured to the empty space next to her. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thank you. My friends say you knew a man named Bishop.”

  “Yes,” she said, her gaze drifting toward the playground. “I did. So sad to hear the bad news.”

  “Me too,” I said. “What can you tell me about him?”

  She liked to keep to herself. Tried not to go to the mission unless she had to. Didn’t like the way they were always preaching at her. But it was the Fourth of July. She hated the Fourth of July. The sounds of all those fireworks going off, all those little explosions. It reminded her of being a girl in El Salvador and how scared she was when the soldiers came.

  Last July she was able to get a bed, and she hoped she’d be able to get one this year too. They gave you seven days. She could get cleaned up and get a few good nights’ sleep. It would be good. It had been a long time.

  She got there early on the third, before breakfast, hoping that she’d be able to get in ahead of everybody who’d be looking for a place. That one with the beard, the young one, said he’d see what he could do. What was his name? Mike? Matt? Something with an M.

  After the runny oatmeal, she got cleaned up as much as she could and went back to see Mark.

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” he said. “I managed to get you up to number eight on the waiting list, so there’s a chance, but not a very good one.”

  Mary nodded. “Thanks,” she said.

  “You can wait and see, or come back at dinner.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s the holiday. We always have more people wanting to be inside.”

  “I know. Don’t like to be out there with all the bombs exploding.”

  He took his glasses off. Rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “If we can’t get you in here, Saint Andrew’s is having a dinner and keeping their multipurpose room open late, so you won’t have to be outside.”

  She went back in the late afternoon and found out that she didn’t make it to the top of the list, so on the afternoon of the fourth, she made her way to the church and pushed her folding cart across the parking lot and found a place near the door. There was already a line, but it wasn’t too long yet. Six people ahead of her, waiting along the wall next to the double doors that led into the church’s auxiliary room. They did meals most holidays. Not bad.

  Mary was surprised that there weren’t more people. She didn’t know anybody ahead of her. None of them had a wagon or a cart. Maybe they were staying in cars. Maybe they had places and just couldn’t afford food. A woman was reading a book while a little girl sat next to her and played with some kind of a Barbie doll. Some stupid thing with blonde hair that didn’t look a thing like the child’s long black ponytail. The two of them didn’t look street, but they did look hungry. She watched the little girl for a long time and tried not to remember the things that were trying to get into her head.

  By the time they opened the doors, there were several dozen people in line. Not as many as Mary expected, but more and more families came. She never used to see so many families. The great recession was what did it. There were some familiar faces. Nobody she’d say anything to, but she nodded at people more than a few times.

  Toward the end of the line, she saw Bishop. If he’d been closer, she would have talked to him. Not much, just a “Hi, how are you” or something. He’d given her a whole Subway sandwich once. Turkey and ham and everything. It was on the wheat bread, but she didn’t complain about that. Honestly, it was so good she hardly noticed. She’d heard a few other people say things about him. About things like that sandwich. People don’t talk like that about other people very much. It’s always Stay away from him and Watch out for that one. She made up her mind to say hello to him if she had the chance.

  They had hot dogs and burgers and potato salad and baked beans. It was good. She had seconds on the beans and potato salad because they didn’t get as many people as they’d expected, and that stuff was easy to chew on the right side of her mouth where she still had a few good teeth.

  By the time everyone finished eating, even after the vanilla ice cream they had for dessert, it was getting dark. Firecrackers and bottle rockets and all sorts of other things had been going off sporadically for a few hours. But the frequency was increasing. So was the intensity. Everything was getting louder. Closer. She saw the first flash of light in the windows high up on the wall.

  She took her cart and moved across the room into the corner farthest from the door, the wall that backed up against the church itself. She wanted to get as far away from it as she could. She pulled one of the folding chairs away from the table and backed it up against the floor-to-ceiling cupboards. She had put as much distance as she could between herself and the noise and commotion outside. It wasn’t enough.

  She started digging through her cart, looking for her cube. Sometimes it made her feel better. Spinning the colored squares around. She knew the point was to make each side the same color, to make all those little squares match, but she never really bothered with that. She just liked to twist it around and watch it change. But she couldn’t find it. She dug deeper and deeper and tried not to notice the sounds.

  That’s why she didn’t hear him at first. She knew from the way he said her name that he was repeating it. He said it again and she finally looked up.

  “Hi, Mary.” Bishop looked so tall to her. Was he tall? She tried to remember. Maybe it was just because she was sitting down. “Can I join you?” he said.

  She nodded, and he went to the closest table and got a chair for himself.

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay,” she said, knowing he could see the lie.

  “You thirsty? They’ve got some soda pop and some punch.”

  She didn’t say anything.
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  “I checked it.” He grinned at her. “It’s just plain punch.”

  She smiled back. To be polite. Kept her mouth closed so he wouldn’t see how many teeth were missing.

  He sat there with her. She wasn’t quite as scared.

  “The sound’s the worst part?”

  She nodded.

  He looked at her for a minute, like he was thinking about something, trying to make a decision.

  “Wait right here, okay?” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She didn’t want him to go.

  “Really,” he said. “Right back.”

  As she watched him walk out the door, the flashes in the windows got brighter and the explosions got louder. She looked down at her feet, closed her eyes, and put her hands over her ears.

  The touch on her arm startled her. She opened her eyes and looked up. It was Bishop. He was standing in front of her, doing some kind of little dance, shuffling his feet and swaying back and forth. It took her a few seconds to notice the headphones he was wearing. They were the old kind, not those ones the kids use now that stick right in their ears. These ones had the foam earpieces and the wire that goes over your head.

  Bishop grinned at her again and motioned for her to stand up.

  She didn’t want to, so he took her hand and pulled gently. When she stood, he removed the headphones from his own ears and put them on her. She recognized the song immediately. “Moon River” from that old Audrey Hepburn movie. Mary couldn’t remember when or where she’d first heard the song, but she knew it.

  Bishop took the old Discman out of his vest pocket and put it in her hands. She held it in front of herself, and he took her elbows and swayed back and forth with her. It was almost like they were dancing.

  When the song ended, he showed her how to work the controls and told her she could hang onto it until he saw her again.

  “You sure?” she said, surprised.

  He nodded. “I hardly ever use it anyway.”

  They sat back down and she listened to the song. She didn’t forget about what was going on outside, but for a while, at least, it wasn’t quite as frightening as it had been.

  She closed her eyes for a few minutes. Did she fall asleep? She must have, because Bishop was gone.

  She found one of the volunteers and said, “Have you seen Bishop?”

  “I’m sorry,” the young woman said. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  She turned on the park bench next to me and looked through the aged tote bag she had put on the table. “I never got to give it back to him,” she said, holding it up for us to see.

  “You shouldn’t worry about that,” I said. “He would have wanted you to have it.”

  “I used up the batteries,” she said.

  “Here,” I said, handing her the four twenties that I had folded into my shirt pocket. “Get some more.”

  “You’re a kind man,” she said to me. “Like he was. Gave me a whole Subway sandwich once.”

  When we’d left Mary on her bench and walked back to the cars, Stan said, “I didn’t know if we should call you. The rookie insisted.”

  I looked at Lauren. “You did?”

  She nodded and looked back at me. I tried to read her expression. She had gotten pretty good at deploying her inscrutable cop face, but I thought I saw a glimmer of pride and confidence there.

  “Good work.”

  She let go of the neutral expression, and the left side of her lip curled up. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Stan said. “Get in the car.”

  “How’s she doing?” I asked.

  “Best rookie I’ve trained in five years.”

  “She’s the only rookie you’ve trained in five years.”

  “Good point,” he said.

  I sat in the car for a few minutes after they drove away. Lauren had good instincts. She knew I’d want to hear Mary’s story. Even though it wouldn’t help us crack the case, it told us something about Bishop, it humanized him. Most uniforms would have just taken a statement and forwarded that to me, letting me decide if I wanted to take it further. I tried to remember the conversation we’d had at Jen’s house. How much had I talked about Bishop? She was perceptive. I was starting to think she might make a good cop.

  23

  ENERGIZER LED FLASHLIGHT (NO BATTERIES).

  Patrick was hunched over his desk and swiveling his head back and forth between his desktop computer and the open MacBook next to it. We’d been talking about the night before and his decoy plan. I’d thought it was a shot in the dark, but I tried to keep my doubts to myself. As we spoke, his attention, as usual, was divided between our conversation and the two screens in front of him. He was big on multitasking. Slowly his focus drifted and the conversation dwindled down to noncommittal “yeahs” and “uh-huhs,” and then I let it fade away completely as he was pulled deeper into whatever he was working on at the moment.

  Marty came in, looked at Patrick, and didn’t say anything. He turned to me and grinned. “I try not to bother him when he’s curating evidence.”

  “I’m not a hipster,” Patrick muttered without looking away from his screens.

  Marty and I laughed. Some days the most fun we had was goading Patrick into uttering that line.

  When Jen returned from her meeting with the ADA, I told her about Bishop and Mary.

  “You get anything solid?” she asked.

  “Background. A better sense of who Bishop was. I’m putting together his story.”

  “Does that mean ‘no’?”

  Patrick leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, sitting still, as if he was trying to get a better perspective on all the information in front of him.

  “What did you find?” I asked him.

  “Last night wasn’t a bust.”

  “It wasn’t?” Jen said, rolling her chair toward his desk. Marty and I did the same.

  “No,” Patrick said. “We got made, but the mystery phone made a call from a block away two minutes after Jen and Lauren left in the decoy.”

  “He was there,” I said.

  Patrick nodded. “But that’s not the best part.”

  “What is?” Marty asked.

  “The call he made.”

  “Who did he call?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. The number is for another burner.”

  “Then how does that help us?”

  “Whoever answered it was in Hector Siguenza’s house.”

  “Really?” I said, surprised that we finally had a viable link to the shot-caller and that it might not be Benny War.

  “Siguenza is the original three kids’ attorney, right?” Marty asked.

  “Yes, but it gets better,” Patrick said. “The number from Siguenza’s house is the same number the mystery phone called from Riverside before Jesús’s father was killed.”

  Later that day, we had another surprise. Omar’s DNA had been collected when he’d been processed into the system. It was standard procedure to see if arrestees might be involved in other open cases with unidentified DNA evidence. The results showed a familial match. Omar wasn’t Benny War’s nephew. He was his son.

  I’d already planned to have a talk with Benny. The new information just gave me one more reason.

  24

  SCARF: GRAY/BLUE STRIPED ACRYLIC FABRIC, FRINGE MISSING ON ONE END.

  In the parking garage under Benny War’s office building downtown, I slipped the attendant fifty dollars to let me back into a space close to the “Monthly Only” exit used by the building’s tenants.

  Earlier, I had checked out Benicio Guerra’s house so I could anticipate the route he might take when he left work. He had a five-million-dollar home on Naples Island that overlooked Alamitos Bay. Its private dock was big enough for a sixty-foot yacht, but the sport fishing boat moored there only measured thirty-seven. Maybe you really can’t have it all.

  The Which Way, LA? evening rebroadcast
on KCRW was half-over when I spotted Benny’s deep-blue Jaguar XJ drive past me. Following him out of the garage and around the corner onto Ocean, I hoped he’d stop somewhere on his way home.

  As we headed east, the last purple glow of the setting sun behind us, I thought again about the DNA results. Somebody involved in this mess had a secret big enough to kill to protect, and I was betting it was Benny. Could the fact that Omar was really his son be it? If so, how could Bishop have found out? How could the three killers have learned about it? Why would he suspect Jesús might know as well? I wondered what the ramifications for Benny might be. Most families wouldn’t kill people over something like that, but the Guerras weren’t like most families. Benny’s brother, Oscar, ran the Mexican Mafia in one of California’s biggest prisons. He carried serious weight. What would he do to Benny if he found out he was Omar’s father? Murder was nothing to him. I couldn’t imagine a week went by in which Oscar Guerra didn’t give an order to kill someone. Shit, for all I knew it wasn’t even a secret at all.

  Benny veered left onto Livingston and then onto Second Street. I kept following him, wondering if he’d stop somewhere along the way. Maybe grab some dinner or a drink. He didn’t. His Jag continued all the way over the bridge onto Naples Island. I waited for him to turn, but he didn’t. He passed the Toledo, Ravenna Drive, and even Naples Plaza. So he wasn’t going home. He crossed the second bridge at the end of the island and finally turned on Marina. Was he going to one of the restaurants on the east side of the bay?

  No. He took a left into the Whole Foods Market parking lot. Grocery shopping. I thought of Bishop’s shopping cart all the way on the other side of town.

  He parked the Jag, and I considered following him inside. I hadn’t been very careful tailing him. There’d never been more than one car between us, and a few times I’d been right on his bumper. I wasn’t concerned that he’d make me. Only that I’d be able to find a place to talk to him alone.