Home Free

by Sonnjea Blackwell

  Also not a good night for my brother and Danny. They were the prime suspects, although Junior Salazar’s name was being mentioned as well. Danny’s fingerprints had been found in what was left of the office, he was a fireman with a master’s degree in fire science and knowledge of how to set fires, and he and Kevin were found at the scene of the crime. Kevin, the mechanic, had access to certain chemicals, including commercial solvents, that had apparently been used. There was no motive that anyone could come up with, and Tom Jenkins and the gun that had made the hole in the watchman’s head were nowhere to be found, so for now at least, no arrests had been made.

  I tried to catch up on work, but it was difficult with the phone ringing off the hook. I screened, letting voice mail handle all the calls from my mother and Brian and numbers I didn’t recognize. I figured Kevin was being bombarded with calls at work as well, so I didn’t phone him. I answered when Pauline called wondering if there was anything she could do to help. Unless she knew who had started the fire, I didn’t know what that would be.

  Kevin showed up around dinnertime Monday night, still looking like hell. I was on the phone when he came in. I had finally caved in and answered. I mouthed the word Mom, and he shook his head no and went in search of food.

  Twenty minutes later, I joined him on the patio.

  “That was painful.”

  “Sorry, I’ve been avoiding her all day. What’d she say?”

  “Well, the upshot was that it was really inconsiderate of you to get yourself implicated in a murder investigation in the middle of Brian’s election campaign.”

  He rolled his eyes and sipped his beer.

  I woke up the next morning and threw myself into work again, trying to take my mind off of the obvious. The phone calls had subsided but my concentration hadn’t improved. It had only been a couple days since the fire, and already the police investigation seemed to have stalled. The paper reported that Kevin and Danny were still the only suspects. I was frustrated that the cops seemed content with that idea without any concrete evidence. I doodled on scratch paper, scanned some images into Photoshop and played with some lettering. I looked at the computer screen after awhile and saw that, for the Harbor Area’s Garden Tour poster I had designed a cemetery with flames shooting out of a newly-dug grave. I sighed. Probably not the look they were going for. Murphy came by about that time and asked how I was doing.

  “Shitty, you?”

  “Fair to middlin’. Weird stuff going on around here lately.” The master of understatement. He asked if I wanted to have dinner later and I accepted, and he lumbered away to do something handy.

  I could see I wasn’t going to be able to work until I had some answers, so I called Pauline at work. She was an account supervisor at the telephone company. Until the end of the cold war, there had been an Air Force Base about seven miles from Minter. When the government downsized defense and the base was closed, a federal prison and the west coast regional office of the telephone company had moved onto the property. Pauline had been transferred from San Francisco two years ago when the move took place, despite vows similar to mine of self-mutilation rather than ever returning to Minter. Her office was now where the officer’s club used to be, and she complained that at the end of her workday, she smelled of beer and cigars.

  “Pauline Horowitz.”

  “If I wanted to find out if somebody called somebody else at a certain time, what would I have to do?”

  “Hello. First of all, have a warrant. Then, the phone number of the person who was called. With that, you could get a list of incoming calls for a particular time period. You could cross-check those numbers to come up with the name of the person who the account is registered to, but of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s who placed the call.”

  “Okay, thanks. Hey, I’m having dinner with Murphy tonight. That okay with you?” They had dated, after all, even if it was over a decade ago. It seemed polite to ask. I figured the first date was more of a business meeting and hadn’t required explicit permission.

  “Fine by me. You know that giant truck he drives?”

  Oh boy. “Yeah?”

  “He’s not compensating.”

  Oh boy.

  I minimized the Photoshop screen and clicked the internet explorer icon and went to Google. I found an online white pages directory, typed in Salazar, Daniel in the name box and Minter, California in the location box. A few seconds later, I had the listing, showing two phone numbers and an email address, but no street or mailing addresses. I copied down the phone numbers and logged off. I called Pauline’s cell phone and left a message on her voice mail. You can’t trust those phone company people.

  “Pauline, it’s me. I need you to check these numbers for calls made Saturday night between nine and eleven o’clock.” I gave both numbers and hung up. I assumed she wouldn’t listen to her messages until her lunch break, but that would give me time to check out something else. I wondered if I knew anybody on the police force.

  I got up and went over to the bookshelf that occupied one wall of the office. I scanned through the books. I hadn’t arranged them in any particular order when I unpacked them, so it was slow going, but I finally found my high school yearbooks. I took out the one from my senior year and opened it up to the senior portraits, scrutinizing the faces and trying to remember the names before checking my work against the listing at the bottom of each page.

  I hit pay dirt when I got to the Cs. I’d gone to school with Jimmy Chang since first grade. That year, there’d been four Jimmy’s in my class, and the teacher had called them by their first names and the first initial of their last names to differentiate between them. After that year, three of them went on to be Jim, Jimmy and James. But Jimmy C had remained Jimmy C. He’d been in my trig class in twelfth grade, and I remembered how excited he was when he found out he’d been accepted to the Police Academy for the following fall.

  I thought this seemed like a face-to-face kind of conversation, so I showered and did my makeup and hair and put on a pair of jeans and a stretchy t-shirt. I hadn’t seen Jack in awhile, but his truck was parked in my driveway when I left the house. The black cat was in the front yard, crouched in the crunchy grass, ears forward and tail twitching, ready to devour something. I got in the car. It was already heading towards the hundreds, so I flipped the AC up to max and made my way across town.

  The police station is on McKinley Street between Twenty-first and Twenty-second, across from Mercy Hospital. It’s a blocky white concrete building that would scream government even if it didn’t have big blue letters that screamed Police. The jail is in an adjacent building, and the courts are about a block away. I parked in the parking lot and walked inside, wiping the sweat and much of the makeup off my face with a napkin I’d found in the glove box of the SUV.

  It’s funny, but in the eighteen-odd years I’d lived in Minter, I had never been inside the police station. Come to think of it, I’d never been in any police station, ever. There was a counter with a little bell on it, and some wooden benches bolted to the walls that served as a waiting area. A uniformed cop was behind the counter, and there were phones and computers and fax machines around him. The walls were pale, institutional-green cinder blocks. There was a half-door that led to the area behind the counter and a closed door behind that leading, I assumed, to the offices and men’s rooms and interrogation rooms.

  I approached the counter and the uniform said, “Yep?” without looking up from the fax that was coming in.

  “I’d like to see Jimmy Chang please.”

  “Name?”

  “Alexis Jordan.”

  The cop picked up the phone and said something into it, then waved me towards a bench. A minute later, Jimmy C came through the closed door over to where I was waiting. He looked the same as he had in high school. Straight black hair cut short and spiky, round wire frame glasses over almond-shaped black eyes, medium build and a killer smile. He was wearing a suit, so I assumed he was a detective. On televisi
on, the ones in suits are always detectives. I stood up and we hugged.

  “Alex, hey, long time. You look better than I’d expected.”

  “Hi, Jimmy C. Well, most of the rumors aren’t true -- I’m not dying.”

  “Jack Murphy?”

  I stifled a scream. “Doing some work on the house.”

  “I assume you want to take a walk?”

  I nodded and we went outside. The station is about two blocks from a little, tree filled park in front of the historic old courthouse. It’s cleverly named Courthouse Park, and because of the intense shade, it was about ten degrees cooler than the surrounding area. We headed towards the park.

  “You know anything about the body shop job?” The paper hadn’t mentioned any detectives by name but simply attributed all information to “department personnel.” For all I knew, Jimmy C wasn’t even on the case. On the other hand, how many detectives could there be in a town with only two Starbucks?

  “Yeah, Morrissey and I caught that one.”

  I assumed Morrissey was his partner. The only Morrissey I knew was Abigail Morrissey, who graduated a couple years after Jimmy C and me and whose claim to fame was that she had so many clothes she never wore any outfit to school more than once. Maybe she had a brother?

  “I was wondering why you guys like my brother and Danny Salazar for that.”

  “I figured. Well, the obvious thing is the arson. Danny’s a fireman, and firemen and pyros are often synonymous. It appears to have been a professional job, and Danny has the know-how. Kevin has access to the accelerants.”

  “But what would their motive be? I mean, just because they can do it, doesn’t mean they would do it.”

  “Look, I know you’re worried about your brother, but you need to stay out of this. It’s a police matter.”

  “I know, and I’m not getting involved. I’ve been gone a long time, you know. I’m totally out of the loop, and I’m just trying to piece together some information so I understand what’s going on. Please? I promise, I never heard any of this from you.”

  He looked to the sky, shading his eyes from the sun with his hands and thought for a second. Then he nodded.

  “Okay. We’ll call it old time’s sake. You know Junior Salazar is out, right?”

  I nodded.

  “He got out earlier this year, and he’s running the gravel yard. Says he’s legit,” Jimmy C rolled his eyes before continuing, “and wants to expand. Apparently, he was in negotiations with Jenkins to buy the body shop. He wants the land to enlarge his operation. Jenkins has been looking to retire, and Junior offered him a decent price, not fantastic, but fair. What we think is that Jenkins decided to up the ante and Junior didn’t like it and decided to send him a message. Evidently, the watchman interrupted the festivities and got himself shot.”

  “There’s no way Danny or my brother shot that watchman.”

  Jimmy C nodded, agreeing. “Chambers - he was ID’d this morning - was shot with a forty-five. Danny has a thirty-eight and a hunting rifle, all nice and legal. We searched Junior’s apartment and the gravel yard office, and we didn’t find a weapon. Of course, being a convicted felon, any firearm Junior had would be illegal. Your brother doesn’t have a gun registered to him, and we found nothing when we searched his place. I agree Danny doesn’t seem like a killer. But blood is thicker than water, as they say, and if Junior needed someone, who else do you think he’d turn to?”

  “I don’t know why you aren’t looking at Junior himself. He was the one who wanted the land and had the motive. And let’s not forget, he’s killed before.”

  “We are looking at Junior. I told you, I think Junior was trying to send Jenkins a message. I just don’t think he sent it personally. But what we have on Junior is a lot of speculation. He doesn’t personally have the know-how to put together the kind of explosion that was used at the body shop. It was a fairly sophisticated job. And so far, his alibi checks out. There wasn’t enough of Chambers left to determine time of death, but he called his mother at a little after eight. We know the building exploded at about eleven-thirty. So whoever it was showed up between eight and eleven-thirty, and Junior was at the Clampers dinner Saturday night. Several people saw him there.”

  “Junior is a Clamper?” The Clampers were a sort of fraternal organization whose uniform consisted of garish red shirts under black vests, and whose mission consisted of drinking copious quantities of cheap domestic beer. Fifty year olds were the youngsters of the group.

  “Hunh-uh, the old man is. Anyway, the dinner is a charity thing, you know. Open to anyone with twenty-five bucks and a complete disregard for his or her liver.”

  I thought about all this as we cut through the park near a hot dog vendor. It smelled delicious. I motioned Jimmy C to stop and fished some money out of my pocketbook. I bought us a couple of dogs and sodas. I smeared mine with mustard and relish. Jimmy ate his plain. It was a little before noon, so the park wasn’t yet filled with hungry attorneys and clerks and court reporters from the nearby court buildings, and we walked without passing anyone else.

  “If Danny and Kevin set up the explosion, why would they hang around, waiting for it to go off and then waiting some more for your boys to show up? That’s idiotic.” I licked relish off my hand and sipped my Dr. Pepper.

  “People have done stupider things. Last year Mo and Mark Thompson poured about twenty gallons of gasoline on the 7-Eleven on Childs Avenue because they ran out of nacho sauce. The fire department pulled up and found Mo standing there with an empty gas can. Mark had gone back inside for gummy bears.”

  “The Thompsons still eat paste and find booger jokes hilarious. I don’t see Danny and Kevin quite the same way.”

  Jimmy C shrugged. “Maybe the explosion went off before it was supposed to. It wasn’t on a timer, it was a mechanical fuse. It could have malfunctioned, surprising them by going off early. The county fire department is a block away, so they probably didn’t have time to get away.”

  I thought about my brother’s Harley, and I had no doubt they’d have had plenty of time, if they’d been guilty and trying to escape.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, as a new thought filtered through my brain. “What about Jenkins? What does he say? Kevin told me Danny said Jenkins was the one who called him to go out to the shop Saturday night.”

  Jimmy C nodded. “That’s what Danny told us, also. Unfortunately, we still haven’t been able to locate Jenkins. Which is not a good sign. He’s divorced, lives alone. But no one has seen him. And we haven’t found his car.”

  Well, crap. I didn’t know what else to ask. Finally, I said, “Did that Chambers guy have any enemies? Maybe somebody just didn’t like him.”

  “I’m pretty sure everybody just didn’t like him. Hell, he sold drugs to kids. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a whole passel of evidence here.”

  “A whole passel, hunh? Well, shit-howdy, Jimmy C, that is convincing.”

  Jimmy C grinned and looked at his watch. I took the hint and thanked him, and he disappeared up the stairs into the courthouse. I walked back to the police station parking lot, finishing my hotdog, feeling as frustrated as I had when I arrived. I didn’t think Junior’s alibi sounded that convincing. The Clampers dinners were crowded, alcohol-soaked affairs. Junior could have been there and left and returned later, and no one would have been the wiser. I smushed the hotdog wrapper into the ashtray and started the car.

  When I pulled back into my driveway, Jack’s truck was gone. I ambled up to the door and screamed when I almost stepped on a dead mouse. It was hot enough to melt gummy bears accidentally left in the car, so I guess it would be more accurate to say I almost stepped on a dead, cooked mouse.

  I considered leaving the mouse on Debbie’s porch, since her stupid cat had killed it. But that would necessitate carrying the gruesome thing even farther, so instead I went in the kitchen and got a Tupperware bowl and lid, donned a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and tied a bandana around my nose and mouth. Call me
crazy, but I knew for a fact that rodents carry the plague. I was a little iffy about Ebola, but better safe than sorry. I went to the porch and scooped the little body into the bowl, using the lid as a shovel. Then I sealed the lid and, holding the bowl as far away from my body as my arms would allow, carried it to the trashcan. I dropped the plastic coffin in the can, peeled the gloves off and threw them inside, then untied the bandana and threw it away too. I went inside and scrubbed my arms and hands, then left a message for Debbie to call when she returned from work.

  I found a post-it stuck to my computer screen that read, “Dinner seven o’clock”. I crumpled it up and threw it across the room, missing the trashcan by a good three feet. I checked my cell to see if I’d missed any phone calls while I had it muted for my meeting with Jimmy C.

  The first message was from my mother. Something about how, under the circumstances, we should pull together and have a family dinner tonight. The second was from Kevin. Something about how, under the circumstances, he would sooner pull out his fingernails with pliers than have a family dinner tonight.

  The third was from Pauline. “The first number is a land line, and there were no calls to it at all Saturday night. The second number is a cell phone. There was one call, at ten fifty-four, originating from a pay phone at a liquor store on Martin Luther King near the movie theater. I’ll be by after work. We need to have a talk about Danny Salazar.”

  Damn. Anyone could have called from the pay phone. It could have been Jenkins, but it could have been just about anyone else, too. And I’d venture a guess that Danny had never spoken to Jenkins before and could not identify him by voice, but had simply taken the man at his word. Jimmy C had to have known about the phone call when I’d talked to him earlier. He wasn’t telling me everything, obviously.