The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

  “He’s too smart for that.”

  “Are you willing to talk to investigators?”

  “I can’t do that!”

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not! The reason is lying in the hospital not two miles from here.”

  “How would you feel about talking to Ray Vega?”

  “He’s a cop!”

  “David, he’s a friend. He can give us ideas.”

  I don’t know quite how I did it. Maybe he was just ready. He agreed to let me phone Ray.

  It took seventeen minutes to get to the station off Junipero Serra, where Ray was sitting in for a sergeant. At the front counter inside, a frowzy woman was showing her proof of insurance so she could get a towed car out. A senior citizen volunteer in a blue shirt went to get Ray. While we waited, David read the framed Certificates of Valor on the walls.

  Ray came out, shook David’s hand, and brought us to an office jammed with four desks, metal filing cabinets, a water cooler, metal bookcases, and footlockers. Once we were seated, Ray said, “Gotta move forward, my man. We can help.”

  A female officer came in and started to sit at her desk but glanced at our tight faces, asked if we needed anything, and left.

  David took a deep breath, then told Ray what he told me, but added more about the sister of the victim from San Juan Creek. “Her name is Angela. She’s got a friend,” he said almost inaudibly. “Her friend barely speaks English. I think she’s in trouble.”

  “How so?” Ray asked.

  “Because…because I saw her.”

  “Saw her what?”

  “Saw her.” David hung his head.

  “Hey, man,” Ray said. “We all—”

  “This girl is a slave! Indentured, like, to Greg Cheng and this coyote guy.” He looked at me then, could read skepticism in my face. “It’s true! She’s supposed to pay off the coyote, this lizard named Lizzaraga. He farms her out. God!”

  “Easy, man,” Ray said, and put a hand on David’s shoulder.

  “She’s like a slave and I used her. And it makes me sick. Sick. How can I tell that to Dad, huh? What will he think of me? Worse, what will it do to him? I didn’t know in the beginning. I thought…I thought she liked me.” His face distorted in anguish.

  “You’re telling us—” Ray began, but was interrupted.

  “I didn’t know in the beginning. I mean, I thought it was girl/boy stuff. But it was sleazy even then. It was in this motel by the club. I wouldn’t take a girl there. But I just didn’t put two and two together. Greg and me and Vic were all at this club…cantina, they call it…and I met Vic’s sister and then met her. Binky’s her name.”

  “Binky?” I said.

  He nodded. “Cheng wants me involved. He wanted to lure me in, get his claws in me some way. I see that now.”

  I got him a cup of water from the cooler.

  Then he continued: “I drove up there. I was going to get her. But I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t know if she’d come with me and I can’t make her, you know? I didn’t even go in. If I blow the whistle, what happens to her? It would be like Greg to have Lizzaraga ship her back to Mexico. Or kill her, I swear. Cheng’s an evil, fucking, soulless asshole, but he doesn’t pull the trigger. He’d have someone else do it.”

  “But what’s the motive?” I asked. “If he’s such a good business man, why would he waste his investment.”

  David sagged. “Greg would order it done if he thought somebody screwed him over. Either way, I know they did it. It’s illegals and theft and credit card schemes. That’s what it is.”

  I gave Ray a glance but couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “You haven’t heard the worst,” David said. He raised his pained eyes to ours. “When I did find out? When I knew after a while that Lizzaraga made Binky take on guys? It didn’t matter. I saw her again. And this time I paid. Knowing what was going on,” he said with a miserable laugh, “I did it again. And I paid. I’m a shit. A fucking filthy shit!”

  Ray touched his shoulder again. “That makes you human,” Ray said. “That sure just makes you human, man.”

  David stared at the floor as if he found something amusing there. Then he said, “Nothing’s going to stop Greg Cheng. That slime is going to rule the world.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ray and I stepped out into the hall for a moment, leaving David.

  “Okay, Vega, come up with something brilliant,” I said.

  He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was within earshot. “I say you turn this over to the investigators and quit messin’ around,” he said. “And we run a background on him,” Ray said, tipping his head toward the room we just left.

  “That’s Joe’s son.”

  “How many cops’ sons you ever hear who went sideways?”

  “You can’t background somebody unless he’s suspected of a crime. You want to lose your job?”

  His tone changed and he looked at me a second and said, “You been to a fire? Either that or you been smokin’ some powerful shit.”

  “You got it right the first time. A storage place in Costa Mesa.”

  “Listen, you want to go try and find this girl? That ought to cheer up our little buddy. But if she’s a wetback like he says, she’s gonna have to hike up her skirts and slosh back across the river, partner.”

  At least we’d be doing something. I said okay, let’s do it.

  “I have an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Bring my friend Tamika along.”

  “You lost me there.”

  “Tamika can speak Spanish. I’m…well, not that good at it. Tamika can go with the program, is what I’m sayin’. She’s just got a way about her.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “You’re a little rough around the edges.”

  “What?”

  He ran right over that. “I was going to go see her tonight anyway. I’ll take some vacation. Cloverfield can cover for me.”

  “You said you were covering for your sergeant.”

  “Cloverfield can handle it.”

  “You’re something, Ray.”

  At the front desk a white-haired volunteer was working with a citizen who needed to know how to change his car registration over from Idaho. The man was wearing a white T-shirt with a busty woman in an orange bikini sitting on a river bank holding a fishing line, and under the picture were the words, “Bite my Lure.” The volunteer was patient. The citizen was not. Ray listened to the guy tell the desk volunteer what a paradise he gave up to come to California.

  “Go back to Idaho, ya pud,” Ray said under his breath while he held the door open for David and me.

  Ray had changed into his civvies. The three of us took off in his new blue SUV, headed for Oceanside. “What would a guy like Cheng be doing in college?” Ray asked when we were underway.

  “He’s very smart. He’s older, twenty-nine, but he wants a degree, wants to be respectable. Then he’ll have more tools and access to rip people off. He’s from Taiwan. He was helping his parents in their computer business over there. Now he’s into counterfeiting those seals, you know, that go on software boxes, to show they haven’t been tampered with. Then he sells ’em, big-time. I didn’t know for a long time. To tell the truth, I didn’t even want to know what-all he was into. I had my own things, you know. I had…my life.”

  Our headlights lit a reflective yellow road sign depicting a silhouette of a man, woman, and child holding hands while they run. Close to the immigration checkpoint, the signs are intended to warn drivers against people who jump from vehicles to flee across traffic lanes before Border Patrol can snare them.

  We were nearing the nuclear stations at San Onofre. The twin domes gleamed softly in the moonlight like monstrous white breasts with nipple projections. Every man I’ve ever ridden with down this way remarked about it, except this time.

  We made the turn-off to Oceanside, a mainly blue-collar town near Pendleton Marine Base. Several stores along t
he main street had their windows boarded up, casualties of Pentagon belt-tightening as military bases close or shrink. We parked by a chiropractor’s shop with a skeleton in the window wearing a U.S. Marine cap on its yellow dome. Around the corner was the club where Tamika worked: Roulée. It meant “stacked,” Ray said he’d been told.

  Inside was dark and beery, and scattered with patrons in shavecuts. We took a table in back and ordered beer and a Coke. When the server came back we asked if Tamika was around. “Only two girls on tonight,” she said. “She’s next.”

  The one onstage wore a butch-blonde haircut and enough black eye make-up to make it look like only sockets were there. She strode around lashing a whip to the strains of “I’m a Soul Man.” When it came to the part where the singer says to grab a rope and I’ll tow you in, she thrust the whip-butt at a guy in the audience. I said to Ray, “You could give her your cuffs.”

  “Not my style,” he said.

  I asked David, “You okay?”

  He gave a nod and looked straight ahead with no expression but rocked his Coke bottle to the music.

  I hadn’t told David about my unglamorous past. There was no reason to. I wondered now if I should. So I could be heard over the music I moved closer and said, “David, did your dad ever tell you I once worked in a place like this?” He looked over, trying to figure what I meant. “Not serving drinks,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Well, I did. You might guess it was a long time ago. I just want you to know sometimes you can do screwball things in your life and still find your way home.”

  He took it in, then looked back toward the stage. The set ended and the tough girl went behind the blue velvet curtain.

  Then Tamika came on.

  Some women are beautiful, and you say, yes, she’s beautiful. And then there can be a row of dancers or a lineup of beauty queens, and one will stand out from all the rest. I’ve tried to analyze it and can’t, except to say their limbs flow. They have muscles formed by wind. Muscles that happen, not those which are molded. This was Tamika.

  Eyes: languid. Skin: the color, under these lights, of dark honey. Hair: to the shoulders and shiny as a grand piano.

  “She’s black,” I whispered to Ray, when I saw her.

  Cupping his hand to his mouth, he said, “I never noticed.”

  “It just surprised me, is all.”

  Ray looked at me with pride. “Mexican, Black, Irish. Her birth name is Maureen Conaty. Maureen Modesto Conaty. Tamika fits her better. Is she gorgeous or what?”

  “Hollywood is cruel, I know,” I said, “but here?”

  She was wearing a gold sequined costume she shed within a few bars of Sting’s “I’ll Be Watching You.”

  Be watching you. Every move you make. I gave Ray’s forearm a squeeze. “Sump’n, huh?” he said.

  I glanced at David, saw his appreciation but a sad distraction as well.

  Every move you make.

  I wished I hadn’t agreed to this. I started to say so to Ray. Then Tamika removed her sequined top and let the flesh spill forth. Thick-necked marines bellowed their hearts out.

  Watchin’ you.

  Ray let loose with a piercing whistle and Tamika flashed him a smile. The next song eased in and Tamika danced in golden spikes and G-string; and you could say nothing else, watching as she went through some of the moves I’d done when I was that limber. So long ago…it was me; it wasn’t me.

  Then the butch girl came on stage with Tamika, and they did their thing to “Money” by Pink Floyd, and the boy-marines spit blood out their eyes.

  When the DJ announced a break, Ray said no to an offer of another drink by the server with the ringlets and riot-red heels, and in a moment Tamika was out, making her way to us in a violet slip-dress and straw flats. She gave Ray a peck on the cheek.

  “Dynamite,” Ray said.

  She winked at David and me.

  Ray introduced us and she reached to shake our hands, then sat down. Ray laid it out pretty quickly, how he wanted her to come with us to Santa Ana to ask around for her long lost cousin named Binky.

  “I don’t know, baby. I’ve got school tomorrow.” She looked at me and David and said, “I’m in nursing school.”

  “How about that? Beauty and brains,” Ray said proudly. He said he’d have her home by twelve.

  “I could do it better tomorrow night,” she said.

  David surprised me by saying, “This is real important, if you could.” The earnestness in his face reached her.

  She said, rubbing Ray’s back, “I got my he-man here. What could go wrong when you got your he-man?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Tamika tried not to be beautiful. She dressed down, she said: black jeans and ankle boots and a turquoise tee covered by a salmon-colored denim jacket. Her hair was in a braid pulled to hover over one ear. She could pass for Amer-Indian or East Indian, Latina, Iranian, Hawaiian, or Lebanese. “So what’s the plan, m’man?” she said.

  It wasn’t Santa Ana we went to, as it turned out, but Anaheim, in the same bleak area where a few years back an insane father with a soft voice and limpid eyes doused his son with gasoline after a day at Disneyland, set him on fire, and locked the motel room door. The nine-year-old survived but with scars that made him look like something from another world. I’ve seen him around town on his bike, a thin, courageous teenager now, who takes books by the armload out of the library, and I have wondered what he wants to know about the world that he doesn’t already.

  We found the place, El Buho de Noche, The Night Owl. It sat across from El Perro Jefe, the chief, the top dog. Its window was lit with a red neon canine wearing a gold crown.

  David said, “Angela may not be there. I don’t see her car. She drives an old maroon job.”

  “So we’ll go in and find out when she does come on, okay, champ?” Ray said. “If she isn’t there, we ask somebody else.”

  Inside, Latin music was playing. Ten or twelve customers were in the place, all men but one. The woman was seated at the bar, in her forties, smoking, one shoe hanging loose from her foot.

  We took a table, and Ray, in his jeans, black shirt, and shades, scooted down so his shoulders touched the back of his chair and his legs extended under the table and out again—cool dude, he. Shortly a girl with bowed legs brought a crock of warm tortillas, butter, and frosted mugs for beer.

  The doors to the kitchen opened. David gave a nod to the woman who came out and said that was Angela. She wasn’t assigned to our table. When she passed by once, Ray said, “Hey, hon, come over here a minute, uh?”

  “Yas?” Angela said, but stood a little away. Her dark hair had a purplish sheen and spilled around full shoulders, while an orange top revealed ample cleavage.

  Ray pulled himself up, lowered his shades, and said in his most becoming voice, “Come sit with us a minute?”

  “You do my work, den I come sit with you.” She looked at all our faces, coming back to David’s often. “I get your waitress.” She tooled away.

  I said to Ray, “That irresistible charm.”

  “Next time,” he said.

  David said, “She’ll be back.” He was tense, but still managed to scarf some tortillas and butter.

  Soon Angela brought a pitcher of beer. She looked at David and said, “You want somet’ing different?”

  “No, I’ll take the beer.” He nodded toward Tamika and said, “This is Tamika. She’s looking for Binky. Is she around?”

  “Hi, girl. You know my cousin?” Tamika said.

  Angela sent David a glance, then studied Tamika’s face and flashed a frown. “Your cousin? Yeah, mine too,” she said. “I got to go wait on a table.” Then Angela spied the folded twenty Ray had between two fingers, held in her direction, though subtly.

  She left to wait on a table but returned after saying something to our server. Standing next to Ray, her right arm was to his left beneath the table edge. He’d passed the twenty. Angela said, “Everybody happy here? You no order dinner?�
� She looked at Ray and dropped her voice. “You got sonthin’ on your mind?”

  Unsure of me, she glanced in my direction a few times.

  “I haven’t seen my cousin since we been, like, thirteen,” Tamika said in her soft, harmless way.

  “Yah?” Angela said.

  “Yah.” Smiling, Tamika picked up the pitcher and poured for each of us as if she had all the time in the world. Looked up to say, “You think she’ll come around tonight?”

  “Maybe,” Angela said, and started to move off.

  Ray caught her by the skirt, lightly. Flirting with his voice, soft, melodious: “That pito over there,” he said, nodding toward the man who came and went into the kitchen area, “you won’t let him fire you, will you, you talkin’ with us?”

  “He won’ fire me,” Angela said. “I be back.” She picked some empty bottles off another table and took them back into the kitchen. Minutes passed before she returned. Then, standing with her hands in front of her and perspiration shining on her forehead, she said, “You come wit’ me.”

  Tamika gave a smile that would entice a snake out of a bird’s nest. “You damn all right,” she said.

  Click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, click-clack, went Angela’s little feet on the sidewalk. She and Ray were in front. Tamika and I trailed, and David was in between. Angela kept glancing back at him. We passed a doorway of a closed business where a grubby transient grabbed his crotch as we walked by.

  Ahead, neon button lights chased around the office window of “The Bar None Motel.” We passed through an arch and into the courtyard and came up on the short leg of an L where only one window glowed with light behind a shade. Angela went to that door and knocked one-two, one-two.

  A small face, surrounded by dark hair, appeared as the door cracked open. It opened wider and the girl stepped back, her eyes darting from face to face.

  Ray smoothly jostled Angela sideways as David and Tamika went in, then walked her a few steps back toward the street.

  I followed the other two into the room. My cop training made me look in the bathroom. Behind the door on a hook was a white negligee. Over the shower rod a pair of white bikini panties were drying. A red silk rose lay on top of the medicine cabinet. And on the toilet tank was a slim plastic container holding salmon-colored condom packets. I picked one up and looked at it. Made in Japan.