I took a fresh sip of Steinlager. “Is there a point to this?”
“A couple, maybe. We’ll get to them.”
“Ever Google ‘Horace Hobbs’?”
Hobbs shrugged. “No. Why?”
“Because it’s like Mary said. You’re a famous man—or used to be. You were a detective with the Philadelphia PD, not quite out of your twenties when you first got notoriety. You turned a cold case, an old homicide, into your ticket to the fast track. A sensational story—tabloid stuff. A rich industrialist had murdered his wife twenty years earlier and bought off the investigating detective by giving him a cushy job as head of security for his company. You dug up enough evidence to convict them both. You were off and running. Newspaper accounts at the time said you had an encyclopedic mind and a photographic memory. So you took on big, tough, major cases. Even went to England for one. You were something of a folk hero. Then, ten years ago, it all ran out on you. You caught the homicide case of a U.S. Congressman’s daughter, and because no one involved in the investigation—that includes you—ever spoke about what really happened, it’s pretty much just all supposition. A material witness died in your custody, or so the stories go.”
I took a sip of beer and caught Hobbs’ eye in the mirror. He seemed uninterested. “What is it they call it when the police stick together?” I continued. “The blue wall. Yeah, well there was no blue wall for you. No one came to your aid. Word is no one liked you. Word around the campfire was that you were a prick—the kind of prick who takes credit for other people’s work. And the kind of cop who manufactured evidence when he wasn’t destroying evidence. The kind of cop who suborned perjury and intimidated witnesses—whatever it took to close a case.”
As I finished my beer, Hobbs looked at me with a bored expression.
“According to an article in some Philadelphia magazine at the time,” I went on, “you went before a police trial board about the case of this congressman’s daughter. An unnamed senior police official was quoted as saying that you were ‘an unprincipled man with the ethical standards of a wharf rat with a hard-on.’ I couldn’t find out what was really said or determined at that trial board, but I do know that you had your thirty years in and you retired quietly. No one paid much attention—outside of police circles—when you took the job here. You were once a famous detective and now, if anybody knows who you are, they don’t really care. So goes the legend of Horace Hobbs.”
He was quiet for a long moment before he spoke. “In your research, how many of my cases got overturned because of DNA, new evidence, coerced confessions, or anything else?”
“None that I know of.”
“None. Because there are none. So, what else have you got?”
“Well, there’s your personal life.”
“What about my personal life?” he asked curiously.
“You don’t have one.”
Chapter Four
I was starting my second Steinlager as Hobbs finished his second double rye and signaled for a third. The whiskey seemed to affect him little, except to give the left side of his face the type of slight smirk that you often see on stroke victims. He was still supercilious and terminally boorish.
“Now that we’re done with the bonding process, let’s focus on your late friend, who could also be enjoying a drink tonight, except for the fact that they don’t serve liquor in the morgue. There are some problems with this case so basic that even sorry-assed Detective Sergeant Manners can see them.”
“Where is he, by the way?” I said. “Out finding the killer by himself?”
“Manners couldn’t find a hand job in Chinatown. But even he sees the trouble with the victimology.”
“Victimology?”
“Yeah, like who’s our victim? What do we know about him?”
“I know what the term means, Hobbs.”
“Good. So shut up and listen. We know he was a thirty-five-year-old Hispanic Catholic priest. We have the records to show that he’d been in this country just slightly more than three years and one month. Before that, it’s a blank. He supposedly went to a seminary in Nicaragua but records from there are difficult to get and unreliable when you do get them. He’s from Mexico, according to his passport and other papers, but that’s a country where forged documents look more genuine than the real thing.” He turned on his stool to face me.
He was waiting for me to speak, so I said, “But you know the story of his childhood and how he became a priest.”
“I would rather have some facts than the story. But the story is that Cortez was born and spent the first thirteen years of his life in a little village in Mexico, in the Baja. A village with no name.”
“There were villages like that in Mexico thirty-five years ago. Probably still are. No infrastructure. No records.”
“I know that,” Hobbs snapped, “and I know the story about how the village was wiped out by an epidemic of cholera. I know that is also possible, but the Red Cross has no record of any such epidemic anywhere in Mexico the year he would have been thirteen. Anyway, moving on … a traveler passing through Baja finds the orphaned Cortez and drops him off in Tijuana. He ends up just another boy, begging on the streets of a border town, and one day he meets an American priest. So he begins discussing the Bible and theology with the priest who says, ‘Hey, this isn’t just a bright boy, this is a prodigy.’ Now this priest turns out to be the bishop of the diocese of San Diego. He sponsors Cortez, who ends up going to a seminary in Nicaragua. Now the chancery office here tells me it’s church tradition: you sponsor someone for priesthood if he comes to your diocese after he’s ordained. So Jesus Cortez does. He spends two years in San Diego at St. Martin’s Parish and then up here for a year at St Peter’s Parish in San Pablo. According to my research, he should have been ordained when he was twenty-six. No indication anywhere of what he did with the six years between the seminary and San Diego.”
The drinks arrived. I sipped from a fresh Mason jar and said, “So what?”
“I’ll get to the ‘so what.’ But if you think cops stick together, try finding a priest who will say something negative about one of his own. In the last twenty-four hours I have received blessings and prayers from three priests, one monsignor, two bishops and a secretary to a cardinal. Plenty of prayers and blessings, but nothing of what I believe in.”
“What do you believe in, Captain Hobbs?”
“Evidence. Evidence and causality. And what is evident here is that Cortez’s background is a series of closed doors. You talk to the priests that should have known him and they say they didn’t really know him but they knew he was a scholar and a fine priest. And what about the bishop who found him on that Tijuana street? Dead. What about the pastor of his old parish in San Diego? Left the priesthood. No forwarding address. What about his pastor here? He’s got Alzheimer’s so bad, when you ask him about Cortez he starts talking about miracles. He doesn’t know his former assistant from Christ that died on the cross. Then there’re the parishioners. We’ve interviewed a dozen here and half a dozen in San Diego. What do they say? Every goddamn one says Father Cortez was not an ordinary priest. He was a saint. We don’t have any physical evidence to support his being a saint, but we have nearly a quarter of a million in cash that supports the fact he was no ordinary priest. Was he a saint? Was he a bagman? Or both? Maybe it’s St. Jesus Cortez, the patron saint of bagmen.”
I raised a palm to shut him up. “Whatever Jesus was, whoever he was, he was decent guy. He didn’t deserve a bullet in his brain, and be doesn’t deserve to be insulted by some burnout case looking to relive his glory days.” I stood up to leave and he grabbed my upper arm. He had enormous hands for a man his size and they were exceptionally strong.
“Sit down.”
“Take your hands off me.”
“Sit the fuck down,” he said, releasing his grip. “You need to talk to me more than I need to talk to you.”
Mary came over to Hobbs. “Didn’t I tell you not to start your bullshit?”
“Why don’t you go fuck a rolling doughnut, Mr. Policeman?” Mary leaned close to Hobbs’s face and tapped the end of a sawed-off Louisville Slugger baseball bat on the bar. “Any more shit from you, and policeman or no policeman, I’ll beat you like a rented mule.”
Hobbs chuckled and then laughed out loud. “I didn’t know they manufactured them like you anymore, Mary.”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know, dickhead,” she said, walking away.
I smiled after Mary. As predictable as she was, she never ceased to amuse me.
“Look, Holiday, I don’t make Cortez a wrong guy.” Hobbs spoke in measured tones as I sat back down. “No, I think he was like a lot of guys who want to do the right thing. Want to make a difference. But they never learn the facts of life about the world.”
“The facts of life about the world?”
“Yeah, the fact that the world isn’t flat, round, or even pear shaped. No, the fact is, the world is just plain fucking crooked. Easy to get lost looking for a straight way in a crooked world. Easy to get dead. Which brings us back to victimology. We don’t really know who he was, where he really came from, who he was hooked up with, or who his people are. Without that we can’t follow the money, and that makes the percentages move against us. Your friend, Jesus, lived like a ghost and moved around like a shadow. He left no address book, no laptop, no blueberry—blackberry or whatever they call it—no personal correspondence. No mail or email. Made no long distance phone calls. Had no incoming phone calls but those directly related to parish business. The phone he called you on was a disposable cellphone that he had just purchased. In fact, he had a number of disposable cellphones in his room. The cell he used for parish business had no one on speed dial. And most of the calls on that phone were either from parishioners or from untraceable disposable cellphones.”
On the jukebox, an old Merle Haggard song paid tribute to the indomitable spirit of the American workingman. Three stools down the bar, two regulars carried on a noisy discussion about how one might never run out of unemployment extensions.
Hobbs finished his drink. “That’s what we don’t know. What we do know is that Jesus helped both the San Pablo and Richmond police in a couple of touchy situations with a couple of his parishioners. The Richmond police liked him and the San Pablo police said they wouldn’t hesitate to call on him again. The night he died, he drove within a few blocks of three different police stations and went almost fifteen miles to make a series of urgent text messages to you. He showed up dead, with an attaché case full of money. We had it run for drug residue and found none, and we had Treasury look at it and found it was coin of the realm, but whether the money is from a single crime, a series of crimes, organized crime—whichever—that money is as dirty as a well digger’s ass.”
He took a final swig of his beer chaser.
“So what’s the last thing our frightened, desperate priest does in his sweet short life but show up at the front door of a guy who has been black-balled from banking? No, our good priest doesn’t go to the police with his problems, or go to the bank with his money. He brings the money to you and then shows up dead. Robbery isn’t the motive, and no evidence points to a crime of passion. No. No, he was assassinated, executed. Whoever his killer is, and whoever his people are, they knocked over a Catholic priest wearing his Roman collar, in broad daylight, one block from a very busy city street. How much are they going to sweat icing a guy like you if they start thinking that maybe Jesus confided in you?”
I started to respond, but he cut me off.
“Good question? Here’s another: Why did Cortez drive fifteen miles one way once a week, every week, since the first month he arrived here, to drink in a last chance saloon shithouse like this? Somehow, some way, you’re linked to him. Someone, his people maybe, said, ‘Get acquainted with Holiday, who is a pragmatic kind of guy, and if things run out on you he’ll be your safe house.’ ”
Hobbs was reaching, and I told him so.
He wasn’t having any. “So far it looks like you knew Cortez better than anyone. And so far it looks like you are holding out or holding back something.”
I stared him down. “This is the same horseshit routine from last night. Now, for the last time: I have made my statement. And it’s complete.”
Hobbs stared first into my left eye, then my right, and then back into my left eye. Finally he said, “I still think there is something you want to tell me.”
I didn’t look him in the eye at all; instead I just stared at the same atrocious necktie he’d been wearing the night before, and said, “You know, there really is something I want to tell you. For the record, Captain Hobbs, I’ve met blind men who dress better than you do.”
He stood up and tossed a crumbled bill on the bar. “You’re a funny guy, Holiday, and I don’t want you to think that I don’t appreciate a good joke. So when you show up with a bullet in your brain and your dick in your hand, I’m going to assign your case to Detective Sergeant Manners.”
Chapter Five
The tail I picked up the next morning was neither the police nor a pro, and it stuck out like a bottle of Pellegrino at an Irish wake. At 7:30 I pulled out of my driveway and drove one block west to the stop sign at San Pablo Avenue. As I turned right into the Friday morning commuter traffic, I saw a late-model brown Ford Taurus pull away from the curb. It had a gray primer spot on the left fender about the size of volleyball. I couldn’t determine if the driver was a man or woman, but as I turned and drove east on Ashby, the Taurus jumped a red light and barely avoided two near collisions to stay with me.
Still on Ashby I nicked a red light at Shattuck, sped past the Claremont Hotel, and pulled onto Highway 13 going south. The traffic seemed moderately light for that time of morning. I was in the fast lane doing seventy-five passing the exit to the Montclair District when I saw the car again. The Ford was a quarter of a mile behind me in my lane, keeping pace. When I exited at Edwards Avenue, the Taurus disappeared. I picked it up again in my rearview mirror as I passed the Oakland Coliseum and pulled onto Hegenberger Road on my way to my destination, the airport.
Pulling in to long-term parking, I grabbed a ticket and vainly tried to spot the Taurus. I parked and took my binoculars out of the trunk. I searched a sea of colorful rooftops, all corralled inside a perimeter of steel fence, until I found the Taurus pulling into a space in short-term parking. As the man got out of the car, I quickly made a series of mental notes. He was Hispanic, medium height, pudgy, and in his late twenties. He wore a long leather coat, tan chinos and a pair of athletic shoes with a fancy red racing stripe. His face was plain, round, and undistinguished: it looked like a giant thumb with a baseball cap on top.
Before he could see me, I put down the binoculars, picked up my garment bag, and walked to the terminal. I moved slowly enough to be followed, and once inside, caught sight of him peripherally while waiting in line to check my bag. After receiving my seat assignment I still had an hour before my flight to Portland.
I went into the men’s room—save for me it was empty—and I picked the second to the last stall all the way at the end, far from the entrance. I squatted on top of the toilet seat so that my legs and feet couldn’t be seen. My thigh muscles were starting to tighten, but it was less than three minutes before I saw the athletic shoes with the fancy red stripe moving slowly in front of the stall. I pulled open the door and jumped out, at once confronting and cornering the man.
His expression turned from surprise to a sneer. “What’s your fucking problem?” he asked in a thin, nasal Chicano accent.
“You’re the one with the problem,” I said.
He pondered that for a moment, and after some deliberation said, “Huh? What problem?”
“Your problem is how you’re going to get out of here without telling me who you are and why you are following me.”
He tried to move around me
but I had blocked him off. He was caught between me and the door to the stall I had been in. He took a half step back. While leaning against the door he seemed at once cocky and tentative.
“Don’t fuck with me,” he said.
“I won’t. Hell, I couldn’t even make the cut on my college boxing team.”
He just looked at me.
“You know why I didn’t make the cut?” I slowly extended my left arm in a non-threatening manner. “No left hand,” I said as my left hand slowly curled into a fist. As his attention was focused on my fist, I pivoted on my right foot and twisted my right hip and shoulder simultaneously, hitting his left temple as hard as I could with a straight right hand. He fell through the stall door. As he reeled backward, his head hit the concrete wall with a sickening thud. His unconscious body collapsed and fell sideways on top of the toilet. I straightened him upright and frisked him quickly. I came up with no gun, no other weapon, no wallet, and no ID. I only found fifteen dollars in cash, some change, car keys, and a folded slip of paper.
The paper had my name and address printed in ballpoint ink. I pocketed it. A big, black security guard was in front of me as I got out of the stall.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded.
“Why can’t you keep these creeps out of here?” I said as I moved past him and went to the mirror.
He looked into the stall and back at me.
“What the hell is going on?” The guard’s voice was louder this time.
I caught his eye in the mirror as I straightened my silk Hugo Boss tie. In my Armani suit I didn’t look like a man whose dentist had just turned his account over to a collection agency. No, as I straightened my tie, I looked like a man who was in town to give a lecture to a group of local mortgage bankers about the effect of the current inverse yield curve on long term interest rates.
The Big Bitch Page 2