Blood Line

by Rex Burns

  “Have you asked Julio’s mother about it? About any possibility that he could have been involved?”

  No, Wager hadn’t. It wasn’t something he would even mention to Aunt Louisa because he didn’t want the woman to know that Wager even held such a suspicion about her dead son. His own mother would be the same way: protective of Julio’s name and of her sister’s, angry at the idea of defaming the dead boy and his family with evil thoughts. All the warmth and appreciation that she had shown Wager for his having been thoughtful enough to call and warn her about his earlier wound would be blown away by his—in her eyes—acting like a cop and virtually accusing an innocent murdered child of a crime. “It’s not something she’d know about.” But who would? And where else might Julio have seen Hastings other than on the job out at DIA? Where had Julio gone, and who with, in the week or so before he was killed? Maybe Aunt Louisa knew that, at least.

  14

  FOR A CHANGE Fullerton was willing to talk over the telephone. “Jeez, I’d like to have you down for a cup of coffee, Gabe, and we could go over this in some detail. But I got to be in court in fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s OK, Norm. No problem, really.”

  “OK. Did you get a chance to look at those LA demographics yet?”

  “Yeah—thanks for the info. A hundred thousand gang members, that’s a damned scary number.”

  “And growing every day. They really have a recruiting program. They’re going after the nine- and ten-year-olds now. And those kids think they’re living in TV land, you know? Have no real idea at all about what killing somebody means.”

  “Norm. I’ve got some names for you. Maybe you can give me some leads.” He repeated what he got from LaBelle yesterday afternoon. “Any sound familiar?”

  “Rubberhead. That’s got to be James Sleppy. Last I heard he went down to Cañon City three or four years ago for assault with intent. Like his name says: crazy—beat his girlfriend half to death with a two-by-four because she drank his orange juice. She didn’t want to testify against him, but they were living together so the DA could arrest him under the domestic violence law without her complaint. I didn’t know he was out.”

  “That wasn’t one of Kolagny’s cases, was it?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I can look it up for you if you want me to.”

  “Never mind.” Wager checked the spelling of Sleppy’s name so he could pull the man’s jacket.

  “Don’t know which Wild Bill you want—there’s a lot of people around with that name. Ball Peen, now there’s a case: likes to work people over with a ball-peen hammer’s how he got his name. We thought we had him on murder one—splintered some guy’s head—but his lawyer got him off on self-defense. Heisterman.”

  “Who?”

  “Heisterman. A real shyster—works for the gangs. Gets big bucks for it, too. Son of a bitch is indirectly guilty of half a dozen murders that his clients committed after he got them off.”

  “Heisterman?”

  “Yeah. You know him?”

  “I suspect I’m going to run across him.”

  Attorney Dewing found it interesting, too. “He’s a lawyer for the gangs?”

  “Fullerton knows him. Says he’s a favorite with the OGs who can afford him. Bloods or Crips, makes no difference as long as they pay.” Wager asked, “Could that be grounds to dismiss the suit?”

  “No, Heisterman’s not the plaintiff. Neeley is. So I don’t see how it changes things materially. But it is interesting—it tells me more about the opposition. By the way, did I tell you Heisterman’s trying to move the trial date up? Wants to have it within three weeks.”

  Three weeks. Wager felt his chest tighten. “No. You didn’t.”

  “Claims that the current trial date is causing his client emotional damage that is aggravating to his severe physical injuries.”

  “What kind of crap is that?”

  “A crappy argument, but an argument: increasing mental stress caused by a sense of the injustice of his injuries, plus now an accusation that we’re trying to delay the trial.”

  “Who’s delaying it?”

  “Well, I did ask for a continuance. I want to see if we can find some other witnesses who might have been overlooked by the shooting team. If they missed one, they could have missed others.”

  That was true, given Maholtz was the team commander. “Is that Heisterman’s rush? He’s afraid you might find someone?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But he asked for the case to be moved up before I asked for the delay. The judge informed me when I petitioned him—in fact, he was just about to call me in to see if I had any objections to the plaintiff’s petition.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Counselor?”

  “You know what I know, Detective Wager.”

  Which was scary because it wasn’t much. “So will the date be moved up?”

  “I doubt it—with two conflicting petitions, the judge will probably let the original trial date stand.” Wager felt his breathing loosen with relief. “Unless one of us comes up with something a lot more compelling than our current arguments.”

  If the fact that Heisterman was a gang lawyer was interesting for Dewing, it was bothersome for Wager. It bothered him that Neeley should have Heisterman for his lawyer both at his trial that he lost as well as now; it especially bothered him that Heisterman might have connections to Hastings through his defense of Ball Peen.

  Sitting at the small worktable in the Records section, he combed through the thick files on James “Rubber-head” Sleppy and Ball Peen, whose mother, thirty-two years ago, had named her baby Kwame N’Kruma Mitchell. They, too, had Los Angeles backgrounds and a series of arrests and convictions that mirrored Hastings’s life. Which, Wager guessed, was one reason they called each other brother. Their attorneys’ names, of course, didn’t show up in these files; to learn those, Wager would have to comb through court records, but it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that Rubberhead’s lawyer had also been Heisterman. And that was another thing that bothered Wager: if he talked to Heisterman about these other clients it could—would—be made to look as if Wager had a conflict of interest because of the Neeley suit. Especially since Julio’s case wasn’t even his. It was like a goddamn chess game; Wager felt himself being closed out of large areas of the board by moves that he had no control over. Yet he also had the feeling that the reasons for Julio’s murder lay in this area just somewhere off his fingertips … that with a little more digging, with a break or two … But now, where Hastings was concerned, he would have to walk like a cat.

  Aunt Louisa was ready for him, armed with almond cookies and a pot of coffee. The sharpness of her grief had dulled into an air of resignation, and she spoke softly in a way that reminded Wager of John Erle’s mother; he guessed that both women had a way of hiding things inside, of dwelling in silence on their hurts. “It’s good to see you, Gabe. You’re looking good.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Louisa. These galletas are good—muy sabrosas.” Actually, they tasted sort of dry and sugarless, the way a lot of Mexican dulces did. But what else could he say? The coffee, as usual, really was tasty. “I’ve got to ask you some questions about Julio. Things you maybe didn’t remember earlier.”

  “I understand, Gabe.” She settled herself a little more heavily at the other end of the small sofa. On the wall, freshly framed, smiled an enlargement of Julio’s yearbook picture; a cross made out of narrow strips of white felt was stuck to an upper corner, and on a small table under the photograph, a vela flickered in its red glass.

  “I need to know exactly what happened the time Julio quit his job out at DIA. Anything he said to you at all, anything you might have wondered about, everything that happened.” He added, “Start with, say, the week before he quit—did he come home from work upset in any way?”

  Her dark eyes went to the photograph, and Wager saw a faint tremor in the coffee that filled her cup. She sipped some out and put the cup safely on its saucer. “I’ll try.”

  A
t first there wasn’t much different from what she had told him a few weeks ago, and she was apologetic. She wanted to give him important details that she believed he would like to hear. He had to remind her several times that wasn’t the idea—just tell him what happened, no matter how small or unimportant something might seem. Even close her eyes if that helped her recall things. Just try to remember anything and everything—there wasn’t anything special he was seeking, he said. Which wasn’t entirely true; he had an idea, and it gave him some direction for the gently probing questions he asked now and then. But the story was Aunt Louisa’s—her reliving of the last weeks of her son’s life, and the more she talked about it the more she recalled, and, moving back and forth in time and place as association fed her memory, she finally gave Wager a fairly clear picture.

  Julio had been upset even before he stopped going to work; she had forgotten about that until Wager asked. About a week before, maybe a Thursday—he stopped going on the following Wednesday—he came home unsmiling and restless, but he wouldn’t say anything to her except it was nothing for her to worry about. Just some stuff at work. He went off the next morning, it must have been Friday, looking tired and said he hadn’t slept much. But she didn’t think anything of that—she had restless nights too every now and then.

  “Do you know how much money he was making out there?”

  “Money? Yes. He was doing real good. He made almost a hundred and eighty dollars a week. He gave me his paycheck to help with the bills and didn’t keep much for himself at all. Said he didn’t have nothing to spend it on anyway.”

  “Did he have any other income you know of?”

  She shook her head, puzzled. “Where would he get it?”

  Wager changed direction. “What did Julio do over the weekend before he died?”

  Well, come to think of it, not much. A lot of times he’d go to a movie with a friend or by himself or watch sports on TV. But, she remembered now, he didn’t even pay much attention to the television, she even said something to him about a program and he didn’t even know what he was watching. It was like he had been asleep staring at the screen.

  “Did he say anything about anyone? Mention any names at all?”

  “No … but whenever the telephone rang, he’d ask me to answer it. Ask who it was before he would talk. Remember, I already told you about that?”

  “Was there anyone he did talk with?”

  “Anthony. That’s his friend. The one he’d usually go to the movies with. He talked to him a couple times, but I don’t know what about. I didn’t want to listen, you know, and Julio wouldn’t talk loud.”

  On Monday of the week he quit work, Julio came home upset again—or at least worried. In fact, she asked him if he was feeling all right, if he was feeling sick or something, he was so quiet. But he said no.

  “Did he talk to Anthony then?”

  No. That was when he stopped answering the telephone altogether; and the next couple of mornings, he didn’t even want to go to work but he wouldn’t say why. She had asked him, but all he said was he didn’t like the job anymore—that all they had him do was move junk around and pick up scraps and it was a big waste of time. When he got the job they told him he would be learning a trade, you know, carpentry or cement work, that kind of thing. But they didn’t teach him nothing so he wanted to quit, and finally he did. …

  The interview took almost three hours, and when Wager finally went down the front steps of the bungalow, his trapezius ached but not from being shot. They both ached from tension. It had turned out to be as much therapy for his aunt as informative for Wager, and he felt drained from the effort to hold that narrow balance between making her remember and talk and preventing her from collapsing into tears. Una llorona. Even though she had a right to be sad, Wager was glad to be out of that small living room with its shadowy corners and the flickering candle and the almost suffocating air of ceaseless mourning.

  It was a block and a half to Anthony’s and nearing dinnertime when Wager knocked on the door of a house almost identical to Julio’s. The homes along the wet, tree-lined street looked as if they had been built from the same plan: all brick, all small. Some were painted tan, others white, still others brighter colors like that Day-Glo purple house on the corner. Any differences in shape or size had grown gradually as rooms or even floors were added by one generation or another.

  A kid in his mid-teens answered the door and nodded when Wager identified himself and asked if he was Anthony Ortiz.

  “Got a few minutes to talk, Anthony? I’d like to ask you a few questions about Julio Lucero.”

  “Sure!” He came out onto the porch and shut the door against the cold air. “I don’t know what else I can tell anybody.”

  “Have you talked to any other detectives?”

  “Yeah. This guy came by a couple weeks ago was a detective, but I couldn’t tell him much.”

  Wager was surprised that Golding had been ahead of him. And mildly piqued. “Did he ask you how Julio felt about his job out at DIA?”

  “No. Just when I saw him last, if he was in a gang. If I could give him the names of other kids he ran around with, like that. If I had any idea who wanted to kill him.” He shook his head. “I didn’t. Still don’t. It’s … I don’t know … something like that just makes the world seem like it’s full of crap, you know?”

  More crap than this young man knew about—or, if he was lucky, would ever know about. “Did Julio have a lot of money after he started working out there?”

  “A lot of money?” Anthony’s black eyebrows pulled together and he shook his head. “He had a little, but it wasn’t a lot. He kept some out of his paycheck, but a lot of it he gave to his mother. He liked to think he was paying for his room and board, since he was working full-time. I guess she put it in the bank for him or used it for groceries, I don’t know.”

  “Did Julio ever talk to you about his job before he was killed?”

  “Yeah. He didn’t like it. He said he was thinking of quitting, but he knew his mother wouldn’t want him to.”

  “Did he say why he wanted to quit?”

  “Said they weren’t teaching him anything. He thought it was a way to learn construction, you know? Learn a trade.”

  “Did he say anything about being afraid of somebody out there? Or worried about somebody?”

  Anthony reached up and scratched under the small pigtail of straight brown hair gathered over the nape of his neck. “He did kind of say something like that. Not that he was really afraid of the guy but that some guy was hassling him at work—giving him a hard time, like.”

  “Did he say why?”

  Anthony shook his head. “Just a black guy. Didn’t like him because Julio was la raza, you know?”

  Wager nodded. “Anything else? Anything at all you can remember about that?”

  “Well, he wanted this guy to lay off him. Said if he didn’t he was going to get him in trouble.”

  “The black guy was going to get Julio in trouble?”

  “No—the other way around. Julio’d do for him.”

  “What was Julio going to do?”

  Another shrug. “He didn’t say. Just get the guy in trouble.”

  “Did you talk with him after he quit his job?”

  “No. I didn’t even know he’d quit. He never got home from work until late, and I work four days a week over at McDonald’s after school. I called a couple times but he wasn’t home. His mother always answered and said he wasn’t home. I don’t know where he was.”

  Wager asked a few more questions about other people Julio might have confided in, but Anthony had no names other than the ones Wager had already interviewed at West High: Ricky Gonzales, Henry Solano. When he dropped out of school, Julio had dropped out of what social life he led. No, he’d never heard Julio mention anyone called Roderick Hastings or Big Ron. No, he’d never ever heard of Julio getting mixed up with any gang, either in school or after he quit. Wager thanked Anthony and left a business card in case h
e remembered anything else.

  15

  SERGEANT BLAINEY, LIKE most of the cops in District Two, had the night shift. Wager’s telephone call caught the man as he was reporting in. “Doodle Bug? That’s what they called him?”

  “Because he was always writing in a notebook.”

  “I ain’t asked around about any Doodle Bug.”

  “I’d like to find that notebook, too.”

  “Awright. I see what I can find out.” There was something else on his mind. “What’s this I hear you pulled in Big Ron Tipton for shooting at you? He the one?”

  “I talked to him about it. I don’t think he did it himself.”

  “But maybe he knows something about it?”

  “Yeah. I do believe he might. Have you heard anything?”

  “No. But I’ll keep my ears open. Keep my eyes open, too, for that worthless bastard.”

  His next call was to Mrs. Hocks. A girl answered and said she wasn’t home right now but could she take a message.

  Wager identified himself and asked, “Is this Coley or Jeanette?”

  “Coley.”

  “Did your mother say anything about finding a notebook that your brother liked to write in?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well. I asked her if she’d mind looking for it. It might be important. Could you tell your mother I called and asked if she remembered to look for John Erle’s notebook?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He hung up and made a note to call again—the little girl might or might not remember to give her mother the message. The electric clock on the wall over a bulletin board crowded with notices and wanted flyers told him that Adamo might be reporting in about now, and he punched in those numbers. The V & N detective, sounding rushed, answered.

  “Hi, Gabe. I’m doing what I can with what I got about Big Ron. Apparently nobody was checking on him the night you were shot. Schuyler says he spent most of his time at that accident call and then responded to your call—how’re you doing, by the way?”