Never Look Down

by Warren C Easley

  I handed him a card. “Here’s a list of treatment centers. Your biggest problem isn’t this bust, it’s your habit, man.” I looked him in the eye. “You need to clean yourself up, or that shit’s going to kill you.” He left but not before giving me a look that said that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

  After dealing with the next client, I locked up, hung the “Back in 15” sign on the door, and took Arch for a walk. He pulled at his leash and sniffed the crisp fall air, as if he were smelling the river on the shifting breeze. We were down by the Lan Su Chinese Garden when my cell went off. “Cal? This is Esperanza.” Esperanza Oliva was the secretary at Nando’s detective agency. Her strained voice caused me to tense up. “Something terrible has happened.”

  “What?”

  She sobbed once and caught herself. “Cal, it’s Claudia, Nando’s fiancée. She’s, she’s dead.”

  “My God! No! What happened?”

  “She was found dead early this morning. That’s all I know.”

  “Where’s Nando?”

  “He’s here. In his office. Can you come, Cal?”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Located in Lents, a diverse, blue-collar neighborhood in Southeast Portland, the Sharp Eye Detective Agency was just off Powell Boulevard, on Ninety-second. Nando’s building once housed an independent pharmacy that had stubbornly survived into the third millennium owing to strong neighborhood support. But when a huge chain pharmacy opened a block away, the octogenarian owner, who was also the druggist, sold the building to Nando.

  A sign reading “Closed” hung in the storefront window, and the blinds were down. I rapped on the door and Esperanza let me in. Petite, competent, and always fashionably dressed, her eyes were puffy and red as she offered herself up for a hug. “Oh, Cal, I’m glad you’re here. He’s in his office. He won’t talk to me.”

  I knocked softly, and when Nando didn’t respond, let myself in. My friend was sitting at his desk, shoulders slumped, head down. He looked up when I entered, a dazed expression on his face. “I’m going to have to call my mother in Cuba, tell her the wedding is off. I told her Claudia and I would marry there, in Havana. She was so excited. How can I tell her about this?”

  “I’m so sorry, Nando. What the hell happened?”

  He propped an elbow on his desk, closed his eyes and began massaging his forehead like someone with a migraine. “The police came to my place at six forty-five this morning. They said the body of a woman had been found in Old Town, on Third Avenue, and that my phone number was in her recent call log. They wanted me to come with them to help identify the body. Lots of women have my number, so I was more curious than worried.” He stopped for a moment, as if the next words were stuck in his throat. “It was Claudia. She was just lying there. In a parking lot.” He looked up in utter bewilderment as tears filled his eyes. “She had been shot twice in the head. Executed, Calvin. How could this happen?”

  I shook my head, feeling like he needed some kind of answer. But there’s just no explaining this kind of inhumanity. “Who found her?”

  “Some woman who pushes her belongings around in a shopping cart. She was still there when I arrived.” Nando kneaded his brow some more with his thick fingers. “Of course, the police have the hard-on for me. You know, the boyfriend is always the first suspect. They have requested a second interview.” He glanced at his Rolex. “I have to leave in a few minutes.”

  “Do you have an alibi?”

  He shrugged. “I believe so, but it depends on the time of death. I was up most of the night watching Real Madrid play Barcelona with my crazy soccer friends. I returned home about four-thirty and went to bed.”

  “Who caught the case?”

  “Scott and some new detective. A guy I don’t know named Ludlow.”

  I nodded. “Good.” Nando and I had been involved in a murder investigation with Harmon Scott a couple of years ago. He was a good detective and a decent man. “What’d you tell Scott?”

  “I told him to pick up Anthony Cardenas.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Claudia’s ex-husband. He still has the thing for her. A very jealous man. Not Cuban. Mexican.”

  “You didn’t tell me Claudia had been married.”

  Nando gave a half shrug. “She didn’t tell me until recently. It is something she is not proud of. Cardenas is a lowlife, a gambler. He is known as Tony the Card at the casinos and poker clubs.”

  “You think he did this?”

  Nando looked at me without answering, his eyes smoldering like hot coals. We sat there for a while with only the noise from Ninety-second Street filtering in. Finally, he said, “I have to go, my friend. Thank you for coming.”

  I followed him out, and when he got into his car, I said, “You’re not going to do anything stupid about Cardenas, are you?”

  He shut the car door without answering, which was an answer of sorts and not the one I was looking for.

  Chapter Five

  Cal

  I left Nando’s office and drove back over the Willamette to Caffeine Central, the death of Claudia Borrego hanging heavily over me. Nando’s heart, as big as the island of Cuba, had been shattered, and I worried about what my friend might do if he caught up with Claudia’s ex-husband, Anthony Cardenas. My wife’s suicide down in L.A. had taught me all too well what a blow like that could do to a person. Nando wasn’t a violent man, but on the other hand, he was big and strong and volatile.

  Since I’d closed for the day, I leashed up Archie and walked over to the crime scene, only a few blocks away. The body had been removed, but yellow crime tape still cordoned off a large section of the parking lot, where a couple of techs in white coats were milling around. A cherry picker had been brought in, the kind used to trim high trees. Fifty feet up in the basket, another tech examined the brick wall at close range. An image with large red letters below it covered an upper section of the six-story wall.

  I stood there, taking in the scene. The tech in the basket seemed very interested in what looked like divots in the brick. He examined them, photographed them, then took several samples of something by gouging the divots with a tool. I walked around to get a better look at the image, which was partially obscured by the cherry picker. It was a blue sphere against a black background, the iconic “blue marble” image of Earth as seen from space, except that it had wavy, red lines rising off of it, a suggestion of radiating heat. Below the image, the tagger had sprayed “THERE IS NO PLA” in large, red letters.

  The hair on my neck tingled a little. It was the scale, boldness, and difficult placement of the image that struck me. “Huh,” I said aloud, causing Arch to look up at me, “that’s gotta be by the same guy who did Caffeine Central.” I paused to think of the moniker. “K209, that was it, right, Arch?” My dog looked up at me and wagged his stump of a tail in apparent agreement.

  Judging from the uncompleted text and the absence of a signature, it looked like the tagger had been interrupted. And those divots were caused by bullets, I was sure of it. The divots were vertically elongated, suggesting the shooter fired up from the parking lot.

  Arch and I walked around the building where more crime tape blocked off the narrow alley between it and another structure. A technician, crouched up on the landing of an old fire escape no longer in use, was busy dusting for prints at a broken window. Shading my eyes, I looked up into the bright morning. High above the alley a black iron ladder connected the roof of the building with the landing. The shooter was on the ground, so it must have been K209 who broke into the building on his way down. Maybe he was trying to evade the shooter. If so, did he make it? If he did take refuge in the building, the cops might have him now. Or, maybe he somehow got away clean. I wondered which it was.

  On the way back to Caffeine Central, I called Nando, but he didn’t pick up. I beat back a twinge of anxiety. It was only an hour and a half since I’d
seen him, so no cause for alarm. The grilling from Scott and his partner could run well into the afternoon. Murder interviews had a way of doing that. To be on the safe side, I called Esperanza and told her to call me the minute she saw or heard from Nando.

  I could have left it there, but I wanted to know more about the tagger who called himself K209. I called a young man who might be able to shed some light on the matter. His name was Danny Baxter, but everyone called him Picasso, a street name that reflected his considerable artistic prowess. I’d helped him solve his mom’s cold-case murder, an effort that nearly got us both killed but bonded us forever. We agreed to meet at the Black Rooster, a little coffee shop on South West Tenth. When Archie saw Picasso sitting at an outdoor table, he squealed and strained at his leash. Picasso was one of Archie’s favorite people.

  Picasso got up as we approached and dropped to one knee to embrace Arch in a bear hug before rising again to shake my hand. He was tall with an angular face and dark, liquid eyes, not unlike those of his namesake. A black turtleneck covered the vivid tattoo of a coral snake on his neck, a relic of his life as a homeless teen. His shirt choice could have been a nod to his new, straighter life as the manager of a hip art gallery in the Pearl, but I doubted it. The tattoo craze in Portland showed no signs of waning, particularly among the creative set. We ordered at the counter—a green tea for him, a double cap for me—and with drinks in hand went back outside, where it was bracingly cool but sunny.

  “How’s the art biz?”

  He blew on his tea, then frowned before taking a sip. “Slow, man. My mural commissions are keeping us afloat. People aren’t buying much hanging art.” Then he looked at me more closely. “What’s the matter, Cal? You don’t look so good.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “Nando’s fiancée was murdered last night.”

  “No. I didn’t even know he was engaged. What happened?”

  Picasso listened as I unpacked the whole story of the graffiti at Caffeine Central, the murder of Claudia Borrego, and the unfinished words left behind on the building on Everett. When I finished, I said, “You ever hear of a tagger in Portland using the name K209?”

  Picasso shook his head. “Don’t know the moniker, but I don’t keep up with the street art as much as I used to. Dude sounds interesting, though, mixing tagging with a little buildering.”

  “Buildering?”

  “You know, like bouldering, but on buildings. Urban climbers. Why go all the way to Smith Rock or Half Dome when there’s plenty of climbs right here in the city?”

  I nodded. “Is there a Portland buildering group of some kind?”

  Picasso chuckled. “Nothing official, but I know some dudes. I’ll ask around. By the way, some graffiti artists would call this guy a writer, not a tagger.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Taggers are less evolved, you know, haven’t proved themselves yet. Writers have skills and props. You gotta earn it.”

  “What’s this guy, then?”

  Picasso shrugged. “Still a tagger, I’d say, since I haven’t heard of the dude. Of course, the distinction only matters with the people into this on the street. He could be the next Shakespeare or da Vinci, but if he does a wall in this town, he’s condemned as a tagger by the powers that be. A paid-for ad on the side of a building is no problem, but put something up without permission, and they send in the flying monkeys.” He sipped his tea and looked at me over the cup. “So, this guy saw the shooting go down?”

  “Yeah, it looks that way. If the shooter didn’t get him—and I haven’t heard anything to suggest that—then the cops are probably looking for him as we speak, but you know as well as I do that he won’t be easy to find, especially for the cops. I was thinking maybe you could connect me.”

  Picasso sat back in his chair. “If I find this guy, there’s still a problem. No way he’ll want to come forward. He runs the risk of being busted for the graffiti. And if he’s trying to stay anonymous, it’ll blow his cover.”

  I nodded. “I realize that. But we’re talking about the murder of an innocent woman here.”

  Picasso tugged absently on the silver ring piercing his eyebrow for a moment. “You’re one of the few people in town he might trust, Cal. Everybody on the street knows about Caffeine Central. If he came to you, could you shield him somehow?”

  I shook my head. “Not his identity. If he witnessed a murder, he needs to come forward. I paused for a moment. “Tell him I’ll try to trade his cooperation for any legal problems with the graffiti he’s left around town. Best I can do.”

  “Okay. I’ll have a look at the piece on Everett and compare it with the one on Caffeine Central. If I agree K209 did them both, I’ll see if I can find him.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Picasso shook his head and smiled. “Listen to us. K209 could be a her, you know.”

  I feigned a forehead slap and laughed. “You’re right. My daughter would kill me for making that assumption.”

  Chapter Six

  Cal

  Archie and I were walking back to Caffeine Central when my cell chirped. “Cal? It’s Esperanza. Nando came back to the office, then left again, in a hurry.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He had me look up the address of someone named, uh, Anthony Cardenas. I gave it to him, and he took off without saying anything else. Cal, he…the way he looked at me…it frightened me. What does he want with this man?”

  I had Espinoza read me Cardenas’ address and took off in a dead run. When I reached my building, I put Archie inside and left in my car. Cardenas’ place was in Northeast, near Wilshire Park, on Thirty-third. I took the Burnside Bridge and was there in under ten minutes. As I approached his block, I saw a patrol car sitting up ahead in my lane with its blue strobe pulsing. My own pulse ramped up. “Oh, shit.” I parked a block away and hurried up the street. A uniformed cop stood behind the double-parked patrol car.

  That’s when I saw him. Nando was standing with his arms folded across his chest in the shade of a dogwood across the street from the duplex bearing Cardenas’ address. I exhaled and walked over to join him.

  “I arrived a bit too late,” he said, keeping his eyes trained on the duplex. “The police were already here.”

  “What were you going to do?”

  He pulled a large, pearl-handled switchblade from his pocket and turned it over in his hand. “I was thinking along the lines of cutting his balls off after beating him senseless.”

  I knew my friend well but didn’t know whether to laugh or take him seriously. “Probably not the best idea you’ve ever had.”

  He didn’t laugh, but instead puffed out a derisive breath and shook his head. “Eso cabrón mató mi Claudia.”

  “How are you so sure this guy killed her?”

  He shrugged and continued looking straight ahead. At that point, the door to the duplex opened and a tall man in a dark, elegantly tailored suit and narrow tie appeared first, followed by Lieutenant Harmon Scott and another detective I didn’t recognize. The man had black, swept-back hair and sharp features and was doing his best to look cool and unconcerned.

  “That’s him,” Nando said. “That’s Tony the Card. They are taking him in for questioning.”

  “Looks like a banker, not a card shark,” I remarked.

  Scott marched the man to an unmarked patrol car and put him in. As Scott was rounding the car, he saw us, said something to his partner, and shambled across the street, stopping short of the curb in front of us. He’d packed on some weight since the last time I saw him, and his heavily furrowed forehead glistened with a sheen of sweat. “Gentlemen, can I help you?”

  Nando shifted his feet but didn’t speak. I said, “Hello, Harmon. We’re just, uh, watching the wheels of justice turn. We want to see Claudia’s Borrego’s killer put away fast.” Nando grunted at my last sentence.

  “
Well, so do we.” He narrowed his eyes, swinging his gaze from me to Nando, then back to me. “We don’t need any help, either. Are we clear on that?” He held my eyes until I nodded, then turned and headed back across the street.

  “I think I know the moniker of the tagger who witnessed the shooting,” I said to his back.

  He whirled around, “What?”

  I stepped into the street and Nando joined me. I could feel the heat of Nando’s questioning glare on the side of my face. “A tagger put some graffiti on our building on Couch a couple of weeks ago. Signed it K209. I was over at the murder scene this morning. Looks like the same person who did the piece above the parking lot, only he didn’t sign it because he got interrupted.”

  Scott put his hands on his hips. “You sure about that?”

  “Not completely. But the styles look very similar.”

  Grimacing, Scott took a ballpoint and a small notebook from his shirt pocket. “You know who the hell this K209 is?”

  “No, but I’ve got some feelers out.”

  Scott made a couple of quick notes and closed the pad. “Good. Stay in touch on that. And keep this on the down low, would you, gentlemen? I don’t want it to get out that we know about the witness.”

  As Scott walked away, I turned to Nando. “Sorry, man. I didn’t have a chance to fill you in.” I went on to explain what I’d seen, my conclusions, and the fact that I’d asked Picasso to see if he could find K209. It didn’t matter to me who found the tagger first, Picasso or the police.

  I followed Nando back to his office in Lents. Esperanza was sitting at her desk, her face showing a flicker of relief when her boss walked in ahead of me. She started to speak but apparently thought better of it. What do you say, after all?

  Nando glanced at his watch. “Please cancel any appointments, Esperanza, and take the rest of the day off.”

  We went into his office, where Nando extracted a bottle of Havana Club Gran Reserva rum and two glasses from a wall cabinet and placed them on his desk. I pulled up a chair and sat down across from him. It occurred to me that the last time we shared a drink like this was the day, some twenty-odd months ago, that Picasso was sprung from jail and murder charges against him were dropped. It was a case Nando and I had worked together. Good liquor can go either way, I observed—either a means of celebration or a balm in the face of unspeakable tragedy.