by Joel Goldman
Simon opened a desk drawer and handed me a cell phone. “It’s clean and prepaid for a thousand minutes. Turn off your cell phone. That way Jennings can’t monitor your calls and texts and he can’t use cell towers to ping your phone and keep track of your movements.”
I slipped the phone in my pocket. “Nice touch. I’ll call you if I need you.”
“What am I supposed to do while you and Lucy are running around saving the world?”
“Do what you always do,” I said. “Something brilliant.”
Chapter Fifty-six
I found Kate pacing the sidewalk, phone glued to her ear. When she saw me, she turned and walked the other way, leaving me to wait next to her rental.
“Everything okay?” I asked when we got into the car.
“Sure, fine. Where to?”
“I mean your phone call. It must have been important. You left in the middle of a pretty intense conversation.”
She swept her hair back with one hand, turning the key in the ignition with the other. “Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.”
“You always do that, you know, sweep your hair back whenever you’re uncomfortable. I know it’s not one of those gone-in-a-flash micro facial expressions that prove Oswald shot Kennedy and Ruby shot Oswald and the cop who shot Ruby was really a mob guy working as an undercover double agent for the CIA and Castro. But you always do it and it means you’re uncomfortable, and like you always tell me, lying makes people uncomfortable.”
“Unless they’re very good liars.”
“The good ones don’t sweep their hair back. So, are you going to tell me the truth or tell me that everything is okay?”
She pursed her lips. “I hope everything will be okay. How’s that?”
“Fair enough. Anything I can do to help?”
“No more than you’re doing, especially calling me on the hair-sweeping part. Now, where to?”
“While you were on your call, I tried Roni’s cell phone again, but she’s still not answering. Let’s swing by her office first. If she’s not there, we’ll try Nick at the grocery, then Roni’s house.”
Roni’s office was unlocked, the lights on and nobody home. There was no sign of a struggle, no drops of blood, no desk drawers and client files scattered across the floor. The cup of coffee on her desk was still warm, a bite missing from the bagel sitting on a napkin next to the cup. Her computer was open to her Google homepage, her calendar blank, her e-mails a junk buffet, an icon visible at the bottom of the page showing that she had opened another window.
I clicked on the icon, her homepage trading places with an Excel spreadsheet laying out the dismal figures for Staley’s Market. Roni had either left in such a hurry that she’d left the door unlocked and forgotten to close out of her client’s confidential files or she thought she’d be right back. She wouldn’t be happy if she walked in and caught me thumbing through her files, but, at this point, I cared more about keeping her alive than keeping her happy.
I studied the numbers for Staley’s Market. It was dead in the water, its debt dwarfing its assets, its expenses guzzling a vanishing income stream. Nick hadn’t taken a salary for three months, and he’d cut the fifteen hundred a month he’d been paying Brett to half that. Staley’s file included financial statements for a company called Forgotten Homes LLC, which I guessed owned his soon-to-be-foreclosed-on rental properties. He’d used the rental income to keep the grocery afloat, but it wasn’t enough and now he was losing both, the last rents paid three months ago, expenses continuing to accrue.
Scrolling through her client list, I pulled up Frank Crenshaw’s records, his numbers worse than Nick Staley’s. Kate was watching over my shoulder.
“Check to see if she did any work for Jimmy Martin.”
She did, preparing a joint tax return for Jimmy and Peggy for last year. Their income was half of what it had been the year before, the downturn in construction taking a toll.
Roni was a witness to the economic meltdown in her corner of the world, delivering terminal financial diagnoses to people with whom she’d grown up. The numbers were one-dimensional, incapable of capturing how it must have felt for Frank Crenshaw to tell his wife they were broke, for Nick Staley to shove his son below the poverty line, and for Jimmy Martin to sweat about how he’d keep a roof over his kids’ heads.
“All of them, Crenshaw, Staley, and Martin were going down at the same time,” Kate said.
“I wonder if they were going down together.”
Frank Crenshaw had let Roni break the news to Marie Crenshaw at LC’s Bar-B-Q and then leave them alone to talk it over while she went to the bathroom, Frank saying something to Marie that bought him a slap across the face, a blow he answered with a gunshot. I’d asked Roni if she thought Frank was doing something illegal to earn money he needed to keep his scrap business afloat. She’d said Frank was too honest to try and that Marie was too honest to let him, but I knew that honesty was no match for desperation.
If Frank or the others had made that leap, they would need a legitimate business to launder the money or they’d have to bury it in their backyards. I searched her client list, looking for another business or partnership owned by all or some of them, finding none, realizing that there was another reason to doubt that scenario. If they had had any extra cash, Crenshaw and Staley would have used it to keep their businesses alive, and Martin would have used it to pay his mortgage instead of stealing copper tubing from a construction site.
I quizzed the tenants on either side of Roni’s office. One of them said she’d been there earlier in the morning, but he hadn’t seen her leave and hadn’t seen anyone going into her office. We’d been there long enough that she should have been back if she had planned to be gone a short time. I called her again.
“She hasn’t answered any of your calls. What makes you think she’s going to answer now?” Kate asked as we headed for Staley’s Market.
“Wayne Gretzky.”
“Hockey? You’re a hockey fan? You never told me.”
“Never watched a game from beginning to end, but I’ve liked Gretzky ever since I heard him say that you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”
I braced myself, one hand on the dash, as I shimmied and grunted, collapsing against the car seat.
“Left turn onto Lexington,” I said, as if nothing had happened.
“You don’t quit, do you?”
“Try not to.”
“It’s heroic, but only to a point. You can’t keep it up, and sooner or later you really will shake when you should shoot and you won’t be able to shake that off.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Notice that I left my hair alone. I’m telling you the truth, and you know it. You can’t spend the rest of your life asking for do-overs for Kevin and Wendy. First there was Lucy, fresh out of jail. You got her a job and a boyfriend and ended up with her house. Not a bad deal in the redemption sweepstakes, but you should have quit while you were ahead because Roni Chase is up to her eyeballs in who knows what and Evan and Cara Martin may, God forbid, be past redemption.”
It was as if she had read my mind the moment before she left to make her phone call.
“So what would you have me do? Walk away? Hope Adrienne Nardelli and Quincy Carter and Braylon Jennings handle it?”
“It’s their job.”
“And they don’t have the time or resources to do it. Nardelli and Carter have too many other cases, and Jennings is too busy trying to save his ass.”
“That doesn’t mean it always has to be you. Next time say no. Go fishing. Take up golf, photography, or painting. Or write a book. That’s what everyone does when they can’t think of anything else to do.”
“I’d rather shake.”
“I know. That’s what scares me.”
The things in life you can’t consign to memory’s dustbin fall into three categories: first, last, and best. Stick the modifier in front of most any noun, and you’ll see what I mean-friend,
dog, job, child, lover, and sex. Kate scored on three out of six of these forget-me-nots.
“Why are you here?” I asked her.
“You don’t drive much, remember?”
“That’s not what I mean. Why did you take this case?”
“I told you. I owed Ethan Bonner.”
“Why?”
We stopped for a traffic light. She looked at me, deciding what to say, until the light changed and the driver behind us honked at her to get moving. She jumped on the gas, the car jerking into the intersection.
“Six months ago, Alan got into some trouble.”
Alan was Kate’s ex-husband, a skinny, humorless, short, hairless, chinless man who crawled under my skin and never left because Kate found something in him that she fell in love with that I couldn’t see, didn’t have, and wished I did even though she and I weren’t together.
“Alan who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful?”
“No. Alan who is the father of my son, Brian.”
“What did he do?”
She sighed. “Went crazy the way middle-aged men do when they think their belly is growing and their dick is shrinking. A woman he met at a speed-dating event accused him of putting something in her wine so he could have sex with her when she was passed out. I called Ethan, and he dropped everything, flew to San Diego, and got it cleared up before it made the paper.”
“How?”
“He was able to prove that she passed out because of a reaction between the wine and a couple of different medications she was taking and that she’d made up the rest.”
“They didn’t have sex?”
“Before she passed out, not after.”
“Why’d she make the accusation?”
“She got mad when Alan didn’t ask her out again.”
“Boy, Brian didn’t deserve that.”
“Neither did Alan.”
I smiled at her. “You’re good to the ones you love.”
She smiled back. “And now you know why I’m here.”
Chapter Fifty-seven
Traffic was blocked off at both ends of the block, police barriers and uniformed cops keeping us from getting close to Staley’s Market, a small crowd forming along the line of sawhorses. I got out, gripping the open car door, and scanned the street. A squad car, an unmarked Crown Vic, and two ambulances were parked in front of the market, a body lying in the open doorway too distant to make out race or gender.
“Oh, my God,” Kate said. “Who do you think it is?”
“No way to know from here. Could be someone was trying to rob the store and ran into Nick Staley and his nine-millimeter.”
“Why rob a store that’s out of business?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You don’t think it could be…” She stopped, unable to complete the sentence.
“Roni?”
Kate nodded, echoing the fear that was turning me inside out. Everywhere I went in this case, I got there too late.
I signaled to one of the cops on the line. When he turned, I recognized him from the hospital.
“Fremont!”
He hesitated a moment, matching my face to his memory, meeting us at the center of the intersection. “Agent Davis. What are you doing here?
“We were on our way to see a man named Nick Staley. That’s his grocery. What’s going on?”
“Double homicide.”
“Any ID?”
“None yet, one older and one younger, that’s all I know. I just got here.”
“Who’s got the scene?”
“Detective Carter.”
“I may be able to identify at least one of the victims.”
“I’ll call him, see where he wants you,” he said.
“He’s probably pretty busy. Don’t worry,” I said, patting him on the shoulder, “I’ll tell Carter you weren’t here yet.”
It was all I could do not to run down the block, visions of Wendy lying on a New York City street, face against the curb, telling me she knew I would come for her as I scooped her into my arms, hugging her, watching her die. Fearing my nightmare’s renewal, I held myself in check. I’d get there soon enough.
Crime scenes are organized chaos, everyone doing their jobs, no one paying much attention to anyone else, assuming that whoever is there belongs there. No one stopped us, asked us who we were or what we were doing until I reached the body in the doorway, taking a deep breath, bending over, hands on my knees when I saw Eberto lying in a pool of blood.
“Eberto Garza,” Carter said.
I hadn’t seen Carter; I was too relieved that the dead body wasn’t Roni, imagining the sorrow of Eberto’s mother that it wasn’t someone else.
“I didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“His last name, Garza.”
“But you knew him. How’s that?”
I ignored his question, relief giving way to anxiety. “Who’s the other victim?”
“Nick Staley. Owned the grocery. Now what are you doing in the middle of my crime scene, and how do you know this no-account gangbanger?”
I stepped around Carter, over Eberto’s body and into the grocery. Nick Staley’s body was propped up on the floor, his back against a crimson stained wall, his chest a bloody mess, his legs folded beneath him.
“They shoot each other?”
“Doubtful.”
I looked at Eberto’s body, his feet inside the door, the rest of him lying outside on the sidewalk. He was on his stomach, his head turned to the side, arms extended over his head as if he had been shot while in flight, an entry wound visible in the middle of his back.
“The bullet could have severed Eberto’s spinal cord, struck his heart or another major artery, or all of the above. Staley was an ex-Marine who’d seen combat. He knew how to shoot to kill. Eberto could have surprised him, fired first and ran. Staley could have lived long enough to return fire, taking him down.”
Carter said. “The kid wasn’t armed. The only gun we found was a nine registered to Nick Staley. Preliminary indications are that it had been fired recently, but there are no powder burns on Staley’s hands. Ballistics will tell us for certain if Staley’s gun was the murder weapon, but that seems likely.”
“The way that Eberto is laid out, it looks like he was shot in the back, probably while he was trying to get out of the store.”
“Coroner says Staley was killed during the night, an hour either side of midnight. Eberto was shot later, probably around dawn.”
“You think the shooter spent the night in the store and killed Eberto on his way out this morning?”
“The timing works, but why stick around after killing Staley?”
I thought of his son, imagined him on the run, coming back to the store for more money or to get even with his father for smacking him and for a lifetime of other slights. It was easy to picture them arguing, Nick reverting to form, belittling Brett, his son pulling a gun, Nick laughing, daring him to shoot, both of them astounded when he did. Brett could have been drunk, high, or both and passed out until Eberto woke him.
“Maybe he had no place else to go.”
“What killer wouldn’t have a better place to go than the murder scene?”
“Brett Staley,” I said, telling him that Nick had caught his son trying to rob the store and laying out my scenario.
Carter listened, interrupting with the right questions. “That’s as good a take as any. What were you talking to Nick Staley about in the first place?”
“You know the missing-kids case Adrienne Nardelli is handling, the Martin kids?”
“Yeah. She told me how you broke the case on that other missing kid, Timmy Montgomery. Makes me almost want to take back all the things I’ve said about you. How did you get from there to Staley’s Market?”
“Peggy Martin was cheating on Jimmy. She filed for divorce, got a restraining order against him so he couldn’t see his kids except with court supervision. The kids disappeared, and Jimmy refused to answer any que
stions about what happened to them. Peggy thinks he took the kids to punish her, but she wouldn’t give us the name of her boyfriend. I was trying to find out who he was.”
“You figured if she was cheating on Jimmy with his best friend, that would make him even angrier.”
“Right. And Jimmy told his lawyer the two of them were buddies. Nick acted like he hardly knew the guy, but I think Jimmy was telling the truth.”
“Only it turns out the wife was banging the neighbor kid, so it was a wasted trip.”
“Not entirely.”
I told him about seeing Eberto on the bus on Monday and outside the grocery yesterday along with Cesar Mendez.
“And you don’t think Mendez stopped by the grocery to pick up a carton of milk?”
“I think he was looking for Brett Staley.”
I explained Brett’s relationship with Frank Crenshaw and Mendez, and my theory that Brett had acted as the middleman on Crenshaw’s purchase of a gun from Mendez and that Mendez had forced Brett to kill Crenshaw so that Crenshaw’s lawyer wouldn’t offer Mendez in a trade for his client’s life.
“I worked gangs for a while. Mendez is smart enough not to get blood on his hands and cold enough to make sure someone else does. But I don’t think he’d take any chances on a white boy like Brett Staley. He’d get someone he trusts to pop him.”
“Someone like Eberto.”
We watched as paramedics rolled Eberto into a body bag, zipped it closed, and carted him away.
“You tell all that to Braylon Jennings?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d he say?”
“He’s real sensitive on the subject of Brett Staley. I think Staley was his CI.”
“Which puts Jennings’s balls on the chopping block if his CI has graduated to murder.”
“Jennings used his ATF clout to get the charges against Roni Chase dropped so he could use her as bait to draw Brett out, make it easy on Mendez.”
“Son of a bitch,” Carter said, biting off the words.
“No fun to get played, huh?”
“You talking about what I did with Roni and her gun? Tell me you would have done it different. You’ve forgotten what it means to be a cop. So has Jennings. Where’s Brett Staley now?”