by Justice
“Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Decker shook his head. “Mike, go into the coffee shop. I want a list of everyone who was working last night. If they hassle you about giving names of cash-only employees, tell them we’re not interested in calling either the INS or the IRS. But we’ll call both if we have to.”
“I understand, Sergeant.”
“Yeah, make sure they understand as well. Be back soon.”
Decker slipped on his jacket and headed for high school.
11
North valley was a bust.
Central West was a different story. Decker took out the Polaroids and laid them on the principal’s desk. The rotund black man winced distastefully, but there were no sparks of recognition in his eyes.
Not the case for the girls’ vice principal, Kathy Portafino. One glance turned her a putrid shade of olive. She was about Marge’s age and height—early thirties, around five ten and hefty, with a square jaw and a no-nonsense face that said, “I’ve seen it all.” But there was something uniquely ugly about postmortem photos. A cold finality combined with clinical sterility brought out emotions in even the most jaded.
“Who is she?” Decker asked.
The woman covered her mouth. “I think it’s Cheryl Diggs.”
“You think?”
“No, it’s her. She just looks so…different.” She wiped her forehead and swallowed weakly. “Excuse me, but I’m not feeling—”
“Go,” Decker said.
The woman fled the room. Decker turned his attention to the principal. He was staring at the top of his paper-piled desk.
Decker said, “Do you know this girl, Mr. Gordon?”
The principal ran his hand over his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “Now that Kathy has identified her, I know who she is.” He sat down in his chair. “This is just…terrible.”
Decker took out his notepad. “Did the school hold its senior prom last night?”
The man nodded, rubbed his forehead. “All of a sudden that seems like years ago.”
“And Cheryl Diggs was there?”
“I suppose.”
“Do you know who she went with?”
“No, I couldn’t tell you that.”
“Then tell me about Cheryl.”
“Ms. Portafino would know more.”
“What do you know, Mr. Gordon?”
“What do I know?” His pause told Decker he didn’t know much. “Cheryl ran with the wild crowd. Wild over here doesn’t mean homeboys mowing each other down. This is still a predominantly white, middle-class, gang-less school. But we have guns here.” He took a deep breath. “We have guns, we have knives, we have drugs, we have pregnancies, we have diseases, we have suicides and overdoses. We have every urban problem you can think of, including violent crime—theft, robbery, rapes, assaults. But this?”
“Never any murders before?”
“One in the five years I’ve been here. Two boys fighting over a parking space. One of them just pulled out a thirty-two and shot the other in the head. You don’t recall that?”
“I wasn’t in Devonshire five years ago,” Decker said.
“I thought we’d hit rock bottom then.” Gordon sighed. “Even though we beefed up our security afterward, it took a long time to calm jittery nerves. Lord only knows what this is going to do.”
“Tell me about Cheryl’s crowd.”
“Cheryl’s crowd…” He hesitated, trying to formulate his thoughts. Just then, Kathy returned to the room. Her face had been splashed with water. She was pale but no longer green. Gordon turned to his ally. “Kathy, who were Cheryl’s friends?”
“Lisa Chapman, Trish Manning, Jo Benderhoff—”
“Boyfriends,” Decker interrupted.
“She hopped around.” Kathy sat down. “Steven Anderson, Blake Adonetti, Tom Baylor, Christopher Whit—” She stopped talking. “I think she went to the prom with Chris Whitman. At least I saw them there together. I remember them because they made such a beautiful couple.” The VP tapped her foot. “You know, I think something was wrong. Cheryl looked upset.”
Decker wrote as he spoke. “Is that hindsight talking or was there some definite incident you remember?”
“Nothing precise. She just looked…sad. I noticed it because it marred her otherwise stunning appearance.”
“Did the boyfriend seem upset?” Decker asked.
She shrugged. “Chris is always hard to read. Also I’m more tuned in to the girls. All I remember about Chris is that he looked great. He always looks great.”
“He’s a handsome boy,” Gordon added. “A gifted cellist.”
“More than gifted,” Kathy added. “He was professional quality.”
“He didn’t belong here,” Gordon continued. “He should have been in Juilliard.”
“Then why was he here?” Decker asked.
Both Gordon and Kathy shrugged ignorance.
“Don’t tell me,” Decker said. “He’s a quiet boy. A loner with social problems.”
“Not at all,” Kathy said. “He has friends. As a matter of fact, he’s quite popular. Very well liked with the boys as well as the girls.”
An ember ignited in Decker’s brain—a familiar profile. He said, “You said he was hard to read. What did you mean by that?”
Kathy thought a moment. “Chris is very…even-tempered. A trait like that stands out when you’re dealing with a thousand hormonally imbalanced adolescents.”
Decker said, “More adult than the rest of the kids?”
Kathy nodded. “Yes.”
Gordon suddenly spoke up. “Kathy, isn’t Christopher an emancipated minor?”
“I think he’s eighteen now, Sheldon.”
“But he came in as an emancipated minor,” Gordon said. “I remember that clearly. Despite all the divorce and broken homes, very few kids have their own apartments.”
Bingo! In his notepad, Decker wrote: WHITMAN, CHRIS. NARC? CALL VICE. “So Christopher Whitman has his own place?”
“I believe he does,” Gordon said.
“Is he a druggie?” Decker asked.
Gordon looked at Kathy. She said, “I don’t recall him ever getting busted, but he hangs out in the druggie crowd.”
“But as far as you know, he isn’t a user.”
“As far as I know, yes.”
“And you saw him with Cheryl at the prom last night,” Decker said.
“Yes. I couldn’t swear he came with her. But he and Cheryl were hanging out together.”
“And she looked sad. Any idea why?”
Kathy shook her head no.
Decker was quiet. According to Jay Craine, the coroner, Cheryl was probably pregnant. If Chris Whitman, her supposed boyfriend, was a narcotics officer and knocked her up, he’d be finished as a cop.
Talk about motivation for murder.
“I’ll need Chris Whitman’s address,” he said. “Cheryl’s address as well. I’ll also want all the addresses of her friends—male and female.”
Gordon looked at Kathy. She stood up. “I’ll pull those for you right now.”
“I’d like to come with you,” Decker said. “Take a look at Whitman’s transcript.”
Kathy eyed Gordon. He waved his hand. “Let him see it.”
Decker followed Kathy into the registration room—a long, cavernous hall filled with banks of metal files. She went to an area marked CURRENTS, sifted through the ws and pulled out Whitman’s file.
“Here you go.”
Decker studied the particulars. According to the files, Whitman was almost nineteen—old for a high school student. He had transferred as a junior from St. Matthews High in Long Island, New York. All that was listed from his prior education was about a year’s worth of mediocre grades. Nothing written in the space reserved for PARENT OR GUARDIAN. Though he had provided the school with his current address and phone number, there was no emergency listing. He showed the papers to the girls’ vice principal.
Kathy took the transcript. “He came as a junior, mid-semester. Sometimes the schools just send a partial. The rest of the transcripts usually follow.”
“Anything else in his file?”
Again, Kathy plowed through racks of folders. Finally she shut the file and shook her head, a troubled expression on her face. “There’s nothing else listed under his name.”
“In other words, the boy’s a cipher.”
Kathy gave him a sheepish smile. “We have lots of kids here, Sergeant.”
Decker said nothing. He went back into Gordon’s office and gathered up the Polaroids still resting on his desk. The rigor-laden corpse had turned into a person named Cheryl Diggs, a victim snuffed out by a madman. Since she could no longer speak for herself, Decker would have to be her voice.
He regarded Sheldon Gordon. Elbows resting on his desk, the principal sat with his head in his hands.
“This is going to be so traumatic for the kids.” He raised his eyes. “It’s going to scare the wits out of the girls here. Every single boy is going to be seen as a potential rapist/murderer.”
Decker thought of his daughter. For a decade plus, Decker had worked juvenile and sex crimes in the Foothill Substation of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Every so often, he had unwittingly exposed his daughter to the horrors of angry, unbalanced men. He often wondered if he had skewed her perception of the male gender.
He glanced at a Polaroid of Cheryl Diggs. At the moment, with Cindy being alone in New York, a campus rapist on the loose, he wondered if her skewed perception wasn’t an asset.
Whitman lived on a nondescript side street populated by twenty-year-old apartment buildings that had made it through the earthquake. Sundays were usually quiet, but to Decker’s eyes, the neighborhood seemed exceptionally sleepy—perfect camouflage for a secret narcotics agent. After giving Whitman’s door a firm knock, Decker waited a beat, then pounded the sucker until his fist turned red.
Either no one was home or Whitman wasn’t answering. Decker left a business card with his phone number, instructing Chris to call the station house immediately. Then he rode the elevator back to the first floor and studied the place’s directory.
No on-premises manager, just a small-print phone number that had been inked out and replaced with a set of new digits that were written in barely legible pencil. Decker copied the phone number down, called and got no answer.
He took the staircase down to the apartment’s underground parking lot. Whitman drove a red Trans Am. Ten minutes of searching produced no such animal.
He left the building, walking over to his unmarked Volare, cramming his legs under the steering wheel. Left hand drumming the dashboard, he put in a call to Devonshire Detectives. Luckily, Scott Oliver answered the Homicide desk—working Sundays to avoid his wife.
“Hey, Rabbi,” he said. “I hear you bagged a good-looking babe.”
“Good-looking but dead, Scotty.”
“Bring her over anyway. She couldn’t be any worse than my last girlfriend.”
“I need you to run a name through department files for me. Christopher Sean Whitman. Find out if he’s working Vice. If nothing pops, see if he has a yellow sheet. If you still draw blanks, run the name through NCIC.”
“Why are you running a name through Vice, Pete? Was the stiff a hooker?”
“Whitman was the victim’s boyfriend. I think he might be a narc. Also, do me a favor and put a lookout call for Whitman’s red Trans Am.” He gave Oliver the license number. “Call me if you come up with something. If not, I’ll call back later.”
From his jacket, Decker pulled out the address list of Cheryl’s friends. He’d check them later. Unfortunately, there was dirtier work to be done first. Though no one had called in to ask about Cheryl Diggs’s whereabouts, the girl wasn’t an orphan.
It was time to pay the dreaded call to her mother.
12
The apartment house was an iffy—one of those buildings that suffered cosmetic cracks from the earthquake but was still structurally sound. Unfortunately, the landlord didn’t think enough of the place to give it a face-lift. It was coated with dingy brown stucco, large chunks missing at corners and window frames. The planter boxes held more weeds than flowers. The directory was posted on the outside of the building, but Decker knew Cheryl’s unit number. He took the staircase up to the second floor, knocked on the corresponding door. He heard shuffling, but that was all. Someone was taking their own dear time.
Weekends. Everyone slept late except him. On Shabbos, it was up early for shul. Since he worked his schedule around his Sabbath, he picked up the slack on Sundays. Which effectively meant he worked six days a week.
Not that he minded his job. In fact, he got antsy if he stayed away too long. But everyone needed a break. Especially from dreaded things like grievance calls.
He knocked again. Finally, someone answered. As soon as he saw her face, he knew what had caused her delay. She was either newly drunk or nursing a bad hangover. Watery blue eyes, puffy lids and mouth, and a nasal drip. She sniffed, then rubbed her nose. Medium-sized, voluptuous build. Not unlike her daughter except Mom had gone to seed. She wore loose cotton shorts and an oversized T-shirt that did little to hide her unbound pendulous breasts.
He took out his badge. “Police, ma’am. I’m looking for Mrs. Janna Diggs.”
“Gonzalez,” the woman answered. “Janna…Gonzalez! You got the name wrong.”
“I’m looking for Cheryl Diggs’s mother. Would that be you, ma’am?”
“Depends on what you want.”
Decker said, “May I come in, Mrs. Gonzalez?”
“’Pose so.”
Janna cleared the doorway; Decker stepped inside the living room. Though he kept his face impassive, his stomach did a back flip. It was almost impossible to see furniture because it was covered with garbage—dozens of empty beer bottles, squashed aluminum cans, crumpled newspapers, rotting food, discarded paper plates and utensils, and heaps of dirty clothes. The couch had been opened into a bed. The pillowcases were uncovered, sheets wet and stained. The woman scratched her cleavage.
“You want some coffee, Mister…” She looked confused. “Or is it Officer?”
“No coffee, thank you, ma’am.”
Janna pushed aside the unwashed sheets and sat on the open mattress. “Okay then. Whattha little bitch do?” She sniffed deeply. “How much is it gonna cost me?”
Decker tried to keep his voice gentle. “Ma’am, early this morning, police discovered the body of a young teenaged girl. We have reason to believe that it might be your daughter, Cheryl.”
Janna froze, then blinked but didn’t speak. Decker waited for another reaction but nothing came. He said, “Mrs. Gonzalez, if there’s someone you’d like to be with, someone you’d like to call, I can do that for you.”
Janna remained silent. With great effort, Decker forced himself to park his butt on the dirty bed. “Is there something I can do for you right now, Mrs. Gonzalez?”
She still didn’t answer.
“Maybe pour you a drink?” Decker offered.
The woman nodded mechanically.
Decker went over to a small card table. Among the scattered debris was an open bottle of Wild Turkey. He held it up. “Is this all right?”
Janna looked in his direction but said nothing. Decker found a dirty cup, rinsed it in a food-encrusted porcelain sink, and poured her a shot of bourbon. He brought it over to her. She took it, then raised it to her lips. She wiped her nose on her T-shirt.
“Howchu…you know it’s Cheryl?”
“Someone has initially identified your daughter from photographs taken at the crime scene. When you’re ready, and feel strong enough, we’d like you to come down and make a definitive identification.”
“You want me to look at the body?”
“Yes,” Decker said. “We want you to look at the body.”
Janna rubbed her nose. “From pichures, you c
ould tell it was Cheryl?”
“Somebody thought it was your daughter, yes,” Decker answered.
“You have the pichures?”
Decker kept his face flat. “I think it would be better if you witnessed the body in person. Less chance for a mistake.”
“But you have pichures.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You have them on you?”
Inane to lie. Decker said, “They’re in my pocket.”
Quietly, Janna said, “Lemme see.”
Decker paused. “Mrs. Gonzalez, they were taken at the crime scene. They’re hard to look at even for a veteran like I am.”
“That bad, huh?” Janna rubbed her eyes. “I’m stronger than I look. Lemme see.”
Decker hesitated, then reached in his pocket and pulled out the Polaroids. Janna stared at the first one. Instantly, tears ran down her pallid cheeks. She went through the snapshots one by one, her eyes overflowing each time she studied another pose. Finally she blotted her face with her T-shirt and handed the pictures back to Decker.
“It’s her…Cheryl.”
“You’re sure?”
She nodded, her lower lip quivering.
“Can I get you a glass of water, Mrs. Gonzalez?”
“Nothin’.” Her voice had dropped to a whisper. She touched her mouth, then pulled her hand away. “Is that it?”
“I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
Though she shrugged indifference, her face had set in a mask of grief. “Go ahead.”
“Do you know where your daughter was last night?”
Janna shook her head no. “I haven’t talked to Cheryl in…’bout a week.”
Decker took out his pad. “What do you know about your daughter’s friends?”
“Not much anymore. Cheryl and me haven’t been getting along so hot.” She blinked rapidly. “Not that I didn’t try, but…you do the best you can, you know? Sometimes it’s not enough.”
“Has Cheryl been living with you, Mrs. Gonzalez?”
“In and out.” Again, the tears started flowing. “She’d eat my food, steal my booze…then she was gone. Sometimes, when I would go away or be with my boyfriend, she’d bring her friends over. Cheryl had lots of friends.”