by Mike Knowles
*
Woody pulled up to Burgers, Burgers, Burgers ten minutes late. The parking lot was mostly full, and he figured it meant the food was halfway decent. There was no obvious police car in the lot, but that didn’t mean Ramirez wasn’t inside. He was likely using one of the many vehicles the police seized in busts. Woody walked around to the trunk and got out his trench coat. His body was less damp and his hands were steady. He exchanged the sweat soaked jacket for the coat, popped a piece of gum in his mouth, and walked across the lot to the restaurant. Woody looked at each car as he crossed the asphalt. The fourth car he passed belonged to Ramirez. Most cars were clean and accessorized with baby seats and cell-phone holders. The black Pontiac Sunfire was bare of baby items and electronics. What it did have was trash. The back seat was littered with takeout wrappers and empty cans of Red Bull. It was a safe bet that the car had been on a few stakeouts. The car could have belonged to a messy teenager, but it was the only mess on four wheels in the lot, so Woody pegged it as Ramirez’s ride.
Inside the restaurant, the walls were lined with vinyl seats and the centre of the dining area contained sixteen booths on either side of a six-foot-tall wooden divider. Whoever designed the place had decided to give up seating for comfort. Judging by how full the seats were, they could have made people sit on the floor and they probably wouldn’t have lost that many customers.
Woody gave the room a quick once-over. There were two Latino men inside. One was with two other people and eating from a half-empty container of fries. The other was staring right at Woody. Woody walked straight to the second booth and sat down.
Ramirez brought his hand off the table and presented it for Woody to shake. “Oscar Ramirez. You Woodward?”
Woody took the hand. “Everybody calls me Woody, Oscar.”
“Ramirez then.”
“Alright.”
“Weren’t there supposed to be two of you coming?”
“Partner got held up,” Woody said.
Ramirez was a skinny guy. His coat was on the seat beside him and the short sleeve shirt he wore was baggy. Woody guessed that the man was wearing a medium. The forearms on the table were mostly bones covered with a network of thick veins. The veins continued up Ramirez’s neck and ended at his temple. His nose was crooked and his hair was tall like he was just a bit too chickenshit to go for a pompadour. He kind of reminded Woody of Roberto Duran. He had the same wiry frame and rugged good looks of the former seventies lightweight champ.
“I started without you,” Ramirez said, gesturing at the tray of food in front of him. The burger was still wrapped and fries were scattered over the paper placemat on top of the plastic tray. Most of the fries that came with the burger still looked to be there.
“No, you didn’t,” Woody said.
Ramirez looked at the tray. “I guess not, man. It’s Julie. That shit hit me hard. She was like a sister to me.”
“Partners long?”
“Few years.” Ramirez looked away to hide the fact that he was welling up. Woody let him have the minute he needed to compose himself. He was happy to sit and wait—he felt good. The waitress mistook the silence at the table for something else and came over to ask Woody what he wanted. The burgers on the tables around him all looked good, but he asked for more time. He knew it was a bad idea to order while Ramirez was trying not to cry. After the waitress left, Ramirez looked at Woody again, “Me and Julie came on together when the GANG unit expanded. We were partnered because nobody wanted one of the newbies. I was lucky—Julie was good police.”
“Ken Raines says you guys were working a case on a Vietnamese gang.”
“Yeah, the Yellow Circle Gang. They’ve grown over the last year or so. Dealing, a lot of assaults, a few murders.”
“A few?”
“We hear word about people disappearing—immigrants staying with family illegally. None of them file police reports because there are probably more illegals in the home. But we find bodies that aren’t in the system, and no one claims them, so we start passing pictures around. We hear whispers that they had some dealings with the Yellow Circles and we put two and two together.”
“And come up with zero,” Woody said.
Ramirez nodded. “Yep. Cases with anonymous bodies and no witnesses get cold faster than these fries.”
“I hear you had something going for you. Raines said Julie was trying to close her case before she had the baby. What changed?”
Ramirez snorted. “That what he said?”
“Something change?”
“Problem had always been the Yellow Circle; they’re a tight-lipped crew who are smart enough to know their place. They stay out of the way of bikers and the Italians and focus only on their own people. They got into the meth business and figured out how to pressure other immigrants into making the stuff for them. The drugs started flowing and money followed. The Yellow Circle Gang started to expand, and they got into it more and more with other local gangs after the same market. All that drug money meant the Yellow Circle had the resources to come out on top of all the gang wars they started. The violence was cranked way up, but no one was talking to outsiders. And it wasn’t like we could infiltrate them. We don’t have any fourteen-year-old Vietnamese cops to wire up and send in. We were sitting on our asses waiting for them to slip up, until Julie saw Tony Nguyen’s new girlfriend showing a bump.”
“Tony Nguyen?”
“He runs the Yellow Circle Gang. He’s thirty-five, a citizen since two thousand two, and on the books he’s a DJ. He works clubs downtown on weekends, but on weekdays he’s sitting in Pho Mekong holding court—it’s a restaurant downtown. Three of those unclaimed bodies are dead on his say so. We know it but can’t prove it.”
“So Julie sees his girl.”
“Yeah, Bertha.”
“Fat chick?”
Ramirez laughed. “I thought the same thing, but she’s hot. A lot of immigrants go for really old-school names, thinking it will make them sound like lifelong citizens.”
Woody nodded and Ramirez went on.
“So Julie sees Bertha with a bump while we’re watching Tony at the restaurant. You ever sit stakeout with a pregnant chick?”
“No.”
“It’s unreal. The eating and the peeing is off the charts. Anyway, she makes me follow her and we wind up at a midwife’s office. Bertha’s going there and paying cash to do everything off the books ’cause she’s not legal. The next day, Julie is a new patient of the midwife. On Bertha’s next appointment, Julie is in there with an appointment of her own. They get to talking and, within a few weeks, they’re friends. They went out a few times and Julie worked her way inside. Took her a month to get Bertha to admit she was scared of her boyfriend, Tony. Said he was a bad guy, and the only reason she was still around was because she was pregnant. She didn’t have any money to live on her own, and she was afraid of being deported. Plus, she was terrified that he would try to take the kid away from her. She didn’t want him anywhere near the baby—him being such a bad guy and all.”
“So Julie says she can get Bertha somewhere safe if she testifies against Tony. Maybe mentions she could get citizenship worked out too,” Woody said.
Ramirez shook his head. “That’s how I would have played it, but Julie went another way. One day, while they were out looking at strollers, she told Bertha who she was. Told her if she didn’t co-operate, she’d turn her over to immigration the day after she had the baby. She’d be deported and the baby would stay here with its father. It was her worst nightmare come to life.”
“Shit,” Woody said.
“Julie was hard,” Ramirez said, nodding his head. “She didn’t care about Bertha or the baby. She saw the kid as a serious bargaining chip, and she used it.”
“Did it work?”
“Hell yeah, it worked. Bertha added another appointment a week to her schedule—only the app
ointment was with us, not the midwife.”
“And Julie winds up cut to pieces in her apartment. You figure Bertha told Tony what was happening?”
Ramirez’s eyes misted up again, but he didn’t look away. “We’re on this guy all the time, not every minute, but we’re there a lot. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.”
“Were you guys on him last night?”
Ramirez nodded. “Until ten. The budget doesn’t allow us to go round the clock.”
“So, he could have gone after you guys rolled out. Or he could have ordered it done,” Woody said. “The body could have been a message. Tells us what he thinks about Julie using the kid as leverage.”
Ramirez’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, it does.”
“What do you know about the baby?”
“Bertha’s?”
“No, Julie’s.”
“Nothing. She kept that part of her life off limits.”
“What did you know about her personal life?”
“She didn’t have one,” Ramirez said.
“Had to have a bit of one if she was having a kid.”
“She didn’t like to talk about it.”
Woody gave Ramirez a serious look.
“I’m not kidding, man. It shut the conversation right down. And I didn’t push it either. You heard what she did to Bertha; she wasn’t even mad at her. Hell, she liked her. They were friends and she turned ice cold on her in a heartbeat. I knew better than to piss her off. She’d talk about baby stuff—crib costs, Lamaze, cravings—but not about the dad. She was doing the pregnancy alone, and she was clear about that.”
“Bad break up?”
“Bad relationship,” Ramirez said.
“What makes you say that?”
“One time, she came in all banged up. Said it was from a self-defense class, but she wasn’t in no self-defense class. I pressed her about it pretty hard, and she let me have it.” Ramirez pulled his lower lip out to show his teeth. He pointed to a tooth and said, “Still loose.”
“So, you think the baby’s father did it?”
“Maybe,” Ramirez said. “But she never said so. Like I said, she was private about her life. But we found out about her being pregnant soon after that.”
“Who was the guy?”
“Dunno,” Ramirez said.
“You’re a cop. That makes you a serious busybody with the right to carry a concealed weapon. If you’re good cop, and being on the GANG unit makes me think you are, you think something about everyone. You probably have a theory about the waitress.”
Both men looked over at the woman clearing the mess out of a booth. They looked away when she bent over to get a rag from a bucket on the floor.
“Do you?” Ramirez asked.
Woody looked back at the woman and was happy to see her ass wasn’t on display anymore. He kept his eyes on her while he spoke. “Shoes are old orthopaedics—makes her a lifetime waitress. She’s not wearing a brace on either wrist and her nails are long—looks like a professional job. I’m guessing part-time for years. Judging by the rings she wears, she’s married to someone with a bit of money. Not a company man—something independent. Company men have orthotics plans and that means new shoes every year.”
Ramirez ate a fry. It was the first thing he had put in his mouth since Woody sat down. “You didn’t mention the hair. The cut is expensive. All those layers aren’t cheap, neither is the dye job. She’s tanned too. Way too tanned for this time of year. Tanning and good haircuts would cost most of her salary. I bet her paycheque goes to her and the second income pays the bills.”
“So,” Woody said. “We’ve established that you’re a good cop. Means you have to have a theory on the baby. You just saw the waitress for a few minutes and you have theories about her. What did you think about the woman you sat in a car with regularly for hours on end?”
Ramirez ate another fry. “Has to be some cop’s kid.”
Woody nodded. Hearing Ramirez say it felt good. It was something in a blizzard of nothing.
“Now,” Woody said, “give me directions to Pho Mekong.”
“Why?”
“I want to pay a visit to Tony Nguyen while he’s holding court.”
20
Dennis found a parking space in the visitors’ lot of St. Joan’s. For six bucks an hour the space should have been better, but bilking loved ones is the easiest money to make. Who would argue that six bucks was too steep to see grandma? And how many of those people secretly loved the fact that they could cut visits short because no one wanted to go over time and be on the hook for another six dollars?
Dennis hiked inside and found the main desk. He put his hands on the counter and tapped out the theme to The Lone Ranger while he waited for the woman behind the desk to get off the phone. The woman was in her mid-twenties and wore loose-fitting maroon scrubs. She alternated glances at Dennis’s fingers and his face. Dennis ignored her silent rebukes and listened to the end of the conversation get choppier and choppier. The woman went from full sentences to single word responses. Then she hung up the phone and sighed.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking to speak with a resident. Last name, Owen.”
“First name?”
Dennis pulled his notepad and flipped through the pages to the name one of the clerks had pulled for him. “Miranda.”
“What is this regarding?”
Her tone made Dennis grind his teeth. He wasn’t used to being hassled and he didn’t like it. “It’s regarding what I have to speak with her about,” he said without trying to conceal his annoyance.
The girl sighed again. “We don’t allow solicitors.”
Dennis swore under his breath. He knew that he didn’t look like a solicitor and he knew that she knew it too. She was playing some kind of head game with him, thinking her side of the table made her powerful. Dennis was done playing games. He dug into his pocket and pulled his badge. He slammed the shield down on the counter and gave it a 180 degree turn so that the woman could get a good look at it. Checkmate. Game over.
“I’m no solicitor, honey. Now can you tell me where I can find Miranda Owen, or do I have to talk to your supervisor?”
The woman tapped on the keyboard in front of her. Dennis could tell she was taking her sweet time. Sore loser. Finally, she said, “Room four-twelve.”
“Thanks, which way to the elevator?”
“Follow the posted arrows,” she said.
Dennis was going to make her point the way, just to be a bad winner, but the phone rang and the woman went for it like a horse out of the gate. Dennis took his badge back and oriented himself using the posted directions on a nearby wall.
When he stepped off the elevator, another woman in maroon scrubs was waiting for him. She was older than the woman at reception, and her skin was much darker. Her hair was straight and she wore a shiny crimson lipstick that gave her lips a wax fruit appearance.
“You looking for Miranda Owen?”
The question was full of attitude. The woman at the desk must have called up. Dennis nodded and showed his badge. “Detective Hamlet. I need to speak with Miranda Owen.”
The woman crossed her arms. “Regarding?”
Dennis rolled his eyes and put his badge away. “Regarding some questions I need answered.”
“She can’t help you.”
“How do you know that? You don’t know what I want to ask her.”
The nurse made a tsk sound. “I know that today she thinks it’s nineteen-eighty-five and that you probably don’t want to know about that.”
“She thinks it’s nineteen-eighty-five?”
The nurse nodded. “Her mind jumps around. Sometimes it’s today, sometimes it’s ten or twenty years ago.”
“I’d like to see her anyway,” Dennis said.
“I don’t think that�
��s a good idea. I don’t want her to get upset or confused.”
Dennis was getting tired of being stuck in front of the elevator. “Frankly, it doesn’t matter what you want. I need to speak with her.”
“She’s not competent. Her daughter handles all of her affairs. I think she should be here if you want to question her.”
“Well, seeing as her daughter is dead, that might be tough.”
“Oh.” The word was small and sad. It was another checkmate for Dennis.
“That’s right—oh. And her daughter was a cop. So if it’s all the same to you, I’d like to stop bullshitting in the hall and get to solving the murder.”
“I had no idea.” The nurse stood there, shamed, looking anywhere but at Dennis’s face.
“The room,” he said.
“Right. Follow me.”
Dennis went down the hall to a large common room. The centre of the room was covered with a square section of hardwood. There were three old couples dancing to music playing off an old stereo. Several men and women watched the dancing from wheelchairs. Other spectators were bound to oxygen tanks. Everyone seemed to enjoy watching. Along a large window were tables with checkerboards painted onto their surfaces. Two games were going on; the third table was just being used to hold an old woman’s cup of tea. The nurse moved around the dance floor and walked towards a hall on the left. Room 412 was behind a plain green door. Beside the door, a plastic nameplate read Owen.