The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

  I rolled a plastic bloodshot eyeball around on my desk while dialing numbers to find out which real estate firm she worked for. The eye’s green iris wobbled within the sphere.

  “He’s home,” she said when I finally reached her. “Sleeping. I know you put him up last night. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Her voice was modulated but I could sense the tension in it. I heard her puffing a cigarette. “He’s just had it with that roommate,” she said. “He’s been bouncing between friends’ apartments. Now he can stay with me. He says he doesn’t want to bother me. Bother me? How can you raise a kid his whole life and then have him say something like that?”

  “I guess they feel once they move out, they’re out.”

  “The only revenge for parents is that the kids will get theirs someday, right?” she said with a nervous laugh.

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “I’m going to urge him not to take so many classes next term. I think that’s a contributor. He’s so stressed. And now this with his father. You don’t have any children, do you? I mean, if you did, they wouldn’t be old enough for this type of thing, I mean.”

  “I don’t have any children, no.”

  “I thought that’s what Joe said. I couldn’t remember.”

  “No, I don’t have any.”

  “They can break your heart. I guess that’s a cliché. But it’s true, definitely true. Oh, there’s my other line.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, the light went off,” she said. “What were you saying?”

  “Your son seems like a terrific kid, Jennifer.”

  “Oh, oh yes, he is. I didn’t mean that. Unless you have one of your own though, there is no way you can really understand. Children can just drive—”

  “When you talk to him, Jennifer?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I’d be listening real hard between the lines.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “Just, he needs you.”

  “Okay-y-y. Nothing more than that?”

  “I think I’d just be real open to him.”

  “He’s told you something. What is it?”

  “He…he’s just real confused.”

  “As if he’s the only one. That’s the thing about kids. No one else has any problems. They are so completely self-absorbed. David is not usually like that, but it can come out sometimes.”

  “I see.”

  “Thanks for calling. We’ll be all right. If I can repay you in any way…”

  “Don’t worry about it. Take it easy now.”

  “I might see you at the hospital,” she said. Her voice trailed off. “I don’t know when exactly.”

  “I hope so, Jennifer. Take care.”

  David had his father’s looks and his mother’s high-octane emotions. I sat thinking about how David looked as he pleaded to be believed, his hair too cute-curly for a grown man and too flecked with gray for a young one, his eyes too stricken for anyone.

  The eyeball on my desk bumped against the taxidermy book I had not yet brought back to the basement library. I can’t say why I took that book out to begin with, except that most of us here are just of the curious sort. The last thing I looked at was a chart of glass eyes for installing in the heads of critters. Gruesome, in a way, but at least these creatures had a type of immortality. For the anonymous victims of homicide there were no reminders of their time on earth at all. It was as if they had never been.

  The closed folder for Froylan Cordillo was on my desk also. I sent the wobbly eye over to it. How would Jennifer feel, I wondered, getting a call from homicide investigators wanting to speak to her son? Lost in my moral quandary, I delayed picking up the phone to do what I knew I should. Again I flicked the plastic eyeball and watched it roll and shudder.

  A forensic tech named Mitchell came into the bullpen where we have our desks, carrying a soft drink and a sheaf of papers. He sat sideways to his desk and put his feet up on a chair. He lipped a pencil fiercely as he studied a photo.

  “Mitchell,” I said.

  “Whassup?” His ponytail caught between his neck and collar as he swung his legs down and reached for a stapler.

  “You’ve heard about all those Doe cases lately?”

  “Yeah, a couple. Irvine, right? Sounds serial to me.”

  “Sanders thinks it doesn’t exactly fit a serial.”

  “Yeah? How’s he doing, by the way?”

  “Pretty good. I saw him yesterday. I’ll see him again tonight.”

  “Bummer-and-a-half,” Mitchell said.

  “Yep,” I said. “What are you working on?”

  He leaned his steno chair back to rock on its spring tension. “Vietnamese guy capped his girlfriend and little girl. Males kill daughters more than sons, females kill sons more than daughters. That’s what the new D.O.J. stats say. Wild.”

  “Isn’t it?” I said flatly.

  “Hey, now that I think of it, I believe there was a Doe found at the end of Sand Canyon yesterday.”

  “He’s not a Doe,” I said. “Believe me, I checked.”

  “Well, if I can help, give a yell. Hey, you see Joe, greetings from me.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Tell him I heard he’s so hard on the nurses they went out and bought him a Get-Well card.”

  I went downstairs to put the taxidermy book back on the shelf. From behind a rack of books came Trudy Kunitz. Dangling from her ears were two enormous blue hockey pucks with Mighty Ducks lettered in white. I mentioned them.

  “I decided: Dress happy, be happy,” she said. “Now, how do you like these?” She pointed a boot toe at me after lifting a long black soft-cotton skirt. They were red.

  “Enough to borrow,” I said.

  “Nothing doing.” She lowered her voice. “By the way, you’ll be happy to know I have found a place, a spa, where they do holistic health for people like me. Herbs and things. Meditation.”

  “Trude, are you sure this is where you should be going?”

  A frown sped over her face. Then she looked at me with tight, earnest eyes, and said, “Help me think positive, Smokey.”

  Someone coming down the stairs called her name, and she told me she’d see me later. She was off, her skirt wending its way around her legs like a mob of cats at feeding time.

  I successfully avoided calling Will Bright until almost noon. When I tried, he was out. Lucky me. I stopped by Stu’s to say I was going to see Joe at the hospital. He said it would be all right to be late. Not that I cared. He asked if I’d take along a block of pound cake his wife baked.

  “What’s that you have there?”

  “Pound cake, from Stu Hollings.”

  “Yeah, like the doc will let me have that,” Joe said.

  “I know. What shall I do with it?”

  “The door needs a stopper.”

  I glanced at his lunch tray. “You hardly ate anything. You need to eat.”

  “Fillet of skunk fat? No thank you.”

  “It can’t be that bad.”

  “Yes it can.”

  “Mitchell says he heard the nurses are sending you Get-Well cards to get you out of their hair.” Joe laughed at that. “King Davis told me to stick a fork in you: if you’re done, get the hell back to the lab.”

  He laughed again, the old twinkle asserting itself in his eyes. Then he said, about David, “I put him through somethin,’ didn’t I?”

  “Cruel and usual.”

  “I told him not to make a special thing of coming to see me. He’s got school…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So. How’s Mahatma Sheriff?”

  “Fuhgeddaboutit. If you think you’re going to get me talking about work, you’re wrong.”

  He said to come nearer, and slipped a hand somewhere, and I laughed and told him he was well, he could sign himself out now.

  Investigator Bright had just sat down in Stu Hollings’ office when I walked in. I took the ch
air next to him.

  Stu asked me, “How’s the man?”

  “Doing well,” I said. “He said thanks for the cake.”

  Will had on a pearl-gray suit, white shirt, and a black tie with red and gray diamond design. His shoes were polished till they looked like plastic. He had a classy-looking black watch and a hand covered in dark hair. He may be an A-H at times, but I couldn’t help appreciating the aesthetics.

  With nary a preliminary, he launched in. Looking at Stu, he said, “We have an association with that rape-murder on Dresden last month and the Juan Doe at Turtle Rock.”

  “Dresden,” Stu said. “Bombed to the ground in WW-Two.”

  “The Estevez case?” I said. “You’re kidding.”

  “That one,” Will said. “You and Sanders got the print ID for the Doe at Turtle Rock…” He turned a sheet of paper on Stu’s desk so he could read it. “Froylan Estancio Marcos Cordillo. Cordillo was picked up for driving a stolen. He had a passenger.”

  “I am aware of that,” I said.

  “Turns out the arresting officer on the stolen wrote her name in his report: Juanita Rosa Estevez.”

  Stu said, “So this Cordillo knew the girl and she was a murder victim too.”

  “That’s right, but the MOs are entirely different. She was raped, strangled, and mutilated.”

  “It wouldn’t be so unusual that these two may know each other, uh?” Stu said. “They’re all of a klatch, so to speak.”

  “All of a klatch?” I said.

  He shifted and sat up straighter and spoke louder, and said, “Well, they run into each other, they may hang on the same street corners, the same jobs, who knows?”

  Will pushed his chair out to go. He said, “Well, that’s it, that’s all I have. But I figured you should know that. I’m over here to see Fred Singh. He around?”

  “Haven’t seen him,” Stu said.

  “Oh, and something else,” he said, now looking at me. “We made Doe One. The one off Alton? Desi Cono Blanco. Went by ‘Whitey,’ I understand. Blanco. Means white in Spanish. Blanco didn’t work at that place he had an employee badge for…what was it? Tri-Cycle Inc., on Marconi. The sketch did it. Anonymous tip, but the sketch did it. Your person did good. Tell him I said so.”

  I just nodded. I’d tell him, Trudy, what a good job she did.

  My mind was churning slowly, but something flickered in. Joe had made a quip about Marconi while we were working prints from Doe Three, the Turtle Rock: Froylan Cordillo—Freddie. The 3-4-5-6-7 address. The phony one. So, Doe One “worked” on Marconi, and Doe Three used Marconi for a fictional residence address. How the heck did I miss that? Well, I missed it and that was that.

  And now Will was saying Doe Three knew Nita Estevez.

  And I was remembering David Sanders knew Freddie.

  And Freddie knew Estevez. And maybe Cordillo.

  And David knew Freddie…and was afraid, torn, acting screwy.

  And Freddie knew Estevez…Little Crane…

  “We still have a long way to go on these,” Will said, at the doorway but continuing to yak. “Blanco actually worked at a computer company on Bake Parkway. No enemies as far as anyone knew, good worker, no absences.”

  “What kind of work did he do for them?” I said, stalling, stalling. Confused. Sick. Scared.

  “Assembly. They make instruments to measure high-pressure gas used in etching computer chips. Don’t ask me any more than that, because I don’t know any more about that shit than that,” he said with a small grin.

  “Me either,” Stu said, relieved.

  “Well, gentlemen,” I said, “I guess I have nothing to add to this discussion. Thanks, Will, for the additional information. I’ll be toodling off, go try to put some sense to my notes.”

  “Sounds good,” Will said. He turned to Stu and asked, “How are our friendly citizens’ groups lately?”

  “They came, they went, they vociferated. I haven’t heard any more about it.”

  But that was about to change.

  TWENTY

  Mitchell had a radio on when I got back to my desk. A news station cited that Sheriff-Coroner Matthew Trott met with a citizens’ group called HAFARC: Hispanic-American Fairness, Action, and Respect Coalition.

  HAFARC was demanding heightened action on the recent unsolved homicides of persons of apparent Hispanic origin. Sheriff Trott did his usual mouth-to-microphone attempt at resuscitation. It made me feel like crap. I left the area and paced down the hall and out the back door, then stood for a while breathing the air. A co-worker coming in from the parking lot with evidence bags asked if I was okay. “I know how it is,” he said. “Some days…man.” He gave a shake of his head and went on in.

  The thing was, here was my chance to get the whole force of the sheriff-coroner’s department involved…and I just couldn’t do it. I was sandbagging; not giving over information, however remote, on these cases. But where to start? What I really needed was Dave Sanders. I needed to talk with him without alarming his mother and, most of all, Joe.

  One thing I wasn’t going to do was run right to Stu or even Boyd Russell. Boyd had three of the cases, Will Bright two, plus Nita Estevez. I’d go to one of them as soon as I could.

  I went back in and made calls when Mitchell left the room and the other techs were off at the scopes or elsewhere. First I called Jennifer’s house, hoping to find David there. Then I called her office again. She said they had lunch together and David seemed much calmer now. I told her I thought he may have left a notebook at my place; could she let him know?

  “He’s got a friend he wants to stay with.” She sounded if she were smiling. “A girl, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, yes, I’ll call him tonight.”

  “Wonderful. I’m glad to hear it. Listen, I’d best be getting off here. But I just wondered, did he leave a number?”

  “Uh, four-seven-one-two thousand. Sounds like a business number, huh? I guess individuals can have the thousand numbers. I repeated it back, so I’m sure it’s good.”

  “Thanks, Jennifer,” I said. “Take care.”

  “I will do that. That is one thing I do,” she said, puffing again.

  It was bum. No good. When I dialed the number for David, the piercing sound of a fax tone came on.

  Mitchell came back and put headphones on so he could listen to the radio without disturbing others. I felt a powerful need to talk to Ray Vega. I phoned him at home. “You’re there,” I said.

  “Where should I be?”

  “I didn’t know what your shift was,” I said. “Wondering if can I come talk to you tonight. About Dave Sanders.”

  “No prob. I’m on duty, though.”

  “Where will you be, say, eight o’clock?”

  “Buzz me back about then. You can ride with me, help me snag some idiots. Hey, I got one for you you’ll never believe. I had to go de-ghost a house yesterday.”

  “What?”

  “This Chinese lady. She waves me down, says there’s a baby crying in her house. ‘Don’t hurt it!’ she says, ‘just make it stop crying.’ I go in, take a look, don’t hear no baby. She says it’s a ghost-baby—like I should have known. I take out my cuffs and cup ’em in my palm just so, and tell her this is magic, this’ll do it. I go back in. Come out. She’s happy. Takes all kinds.”

  “It surely does, Ray. See you tonight.”

  Stu walked in. He glanced at Mitchell and Mitchell took his feet off the desk but didn’t remove the headphones.

  “Why don’t I have anything on these cases?” Stu said. “I want everything you have on my desk before you leave.”

  “There’s not that much.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  I felt my face flush. “Stu, I’ve been to sixteen scenes in the last two weeks. I can’t manufacture evidence.” One toe over the line. It showed in Stu’s face.

  He came forward a bit and said, “I’ll talk to you later,” then turned and walked off.

  I glanced over and saw Mitchell looking my way.
“Ah, shit,” I said, and went down the hall and got a stiff cup of coffee, came back and compiled an overall report for Stu, then made copies of my worksheets. I put it all in a small binder and delivered them down to Stu’s office. He hated traffic and loved his wife’s good cooking, so he was out the door already, which was best for both our sakes.

  I was walking to the stairway of my condo when Dave Sanders appeared through a cut between two of the buildings. “Can I come up?” he asked. I’d passed his small black car at the curb on the slope below and could see it now through the cut.

  “You gave your mother a wrong number,” I said, when we got in. He didn’t reply. “Why’d you cut out this morning?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sit down. Something to drink?” He nodded. I got him a Pepsi. “We have to talk, David.”

  “That’s why I’m here,” he said quietly.

  “You knew Freddie Cordillo.”

  “Barely, like I said.” He rubbed a knee; then it started bouncing. The old anguish was in his eyes.

  “Freddie Cordillo may have known two other people murdered this past month. Did you know that? Does that make any sense to you?”

  “There’s someone else,” he said. “Last Friday. His name was Vic Montalvo. I recognized him from the sketch in the paper, just like Freddie.”

  “You…Was he found near Capistrano?”

  “That’s the one.” He couldn’t keep his gaze on me then, but went haltingly on with his story. Victor Montalvo had a sister. She had a friend who worked in a cantina in the heart of Santa Ana to pay off her debt to a smuggler. Her name was Nita Estevez.

  I showed no emotion in my voice. “Did you know her?”

  “No. But I know she died.”

  “I thought she worked in a garment factory.”

  “That was after. First she worked there, at that place. And listen to me: My roommate, Greg Cheng, he knew them all.”

  “David, this sounds…kind of over the top.”

  “It’s not! This fucking Cheng is a fucking asshole!”

  “Is he doing the killing?”

  He shook his head, but I didn’t know if it was to my question or for the hopelessness of the whole thing.