She didn’t respond. The brief look she cast down at her clothes said more than enough.
I groped mentally for a second, then shrugged off my jacket and handed it to her.
Her eyes snagged momentarily on the butt of the .45 under my left arm, but then she took the jacket. I turned my back and went to look for the knife. I found it a few feet away, snapped it closed and dropped it into my pocket. Then I started to rouse the dude.
While I was shaking him to his feet and she was getting herself covered as best she could, I asked her how she’d happened to run into this clown.
I liked her—she had spunk. Now that her fear was over, she was just mad. But it was a controlled mad, cold and vehement. I was glad about that, because it meant she wasn’t going to back out on me, refuse to press charges. In a tight, even voice, she told me she worked as a domestic out in the Heights, where a lot of professional people live. She was on her way home to her mother and two younger sisters, but the bus she had to take didn’t go into the old part of town, so every evening she had to walk this way home in the dark. The Anglo had been on the bus with her, and when she got off he followed her, giving her some sort of speech about how girls weren’t safe on the streets alone at night. It only took him three blocks to start treating her like a hooker, and when she gave it to him to understand that he was mistaken, he turned nasty.
The whole thing made me want to hit him again. While I was getting him up, I saw his penis still hanging out of his open fly. I was tempted to leave him that way. But on second thought, for the sake of Teresa Sanguillán’s dignity, I tucked him in and zipped him up. Then I lifted him to his feet and dragged him along. The three of us went out to the street.
In that part of town, you can’t find a unit at night if you go looking for it with a bloodhound. I didn’t feel much like lugging the dude all the way back to Cuevero Road in hopes of spotting a cop or a working phone booth, so we went on down Eighth Street and turned in at the first bar we came to. The few lethargic drinkers in the place looked at us with only momentary interest despite our far-from-tidy appearance. The barkeep knew me and let us use his phone. First I called the cops. Then Teresa called a friend who had a phone, so the friend could take a message to her mother. Then we went back outside to wait. It would’ve been nice to sit down in the bar for a rest, but considering the shape I was in, I didn’t want to stay in such close proximity to all those bottles.
It was an easier decision than it should’ve been, almost twenty-four hours since my last drink. I was wearing my white armor—knight rescues maiden—which helped. But that was only part of it. Vanity is no match for alcohol. If it were, half the distilleries in the country would go out of business. No, the main thing was that I was working, doing something I believed in. While we stood out there on the sidewalk I almost didn’t regret that I wasn’t back in the bar having a drink.
I passed the time by shaking the dude every time he started to fade or shutting him up whenever he started to groan, and by asking Teresa questions—simple questions, the kind she could answer without having to forget that she was mad. After about five minutes the cops arrived. There were two of them in the unit, and they drove up quietly, trying not to attract attention.
Once they heard what had happened they didn’t seem very eager to make an arrest. They inspected Teresa and the dude and me, and shuffled their feet, and asked us a bunch of questions without writing any of the answers down, generally making it clear that they wanted us to forget the whole thing. I suppose I could understand their situation—in this city, Anglo versus Chicano was every cop’s nightmare. But I wasn’t having any. Teresa Sanguillán and I were citizens, the dude had committed a crime, and we had a right to have him arrested. I handed over the knife, and finally the cops gave in. They piled us into the back of their unit and took us over to the Municipal Building.
The building is just as bad at night as it is during the day. It’s always disorienting. During the day you have the impression that the sun set hours ago, and at night you end up thinking it’s noon outside. But this time I didn’t let it bother me. As long as Teresa had her chin up, I didn’t intend to let anything get in my way. I knew it could turn out to be messy, but I didn’t care.
The so-called arresting officers took us to the duty room, where all the detectives had their desks. The person who designed the room was either a drunk or a real joker—the place looked like the embalming room of a mortuary. For a while we were ground along by the usual routine of police work. The arresting officers made a statement to one of the detectives. He tried to ask the dude a few questions, but the dude was hurting too bad to make sense, so the detective put him in the tank to wait for a doctor. Then a couple of detectives took Teresa and me to opposite sides of the room—so we couldn’t check our answers with each other—and made us tell our stories a few times. After that, we were given the opportunity to sit around and wait.
The cops do stuff like that on purpose. They try to put pressure on the people filing the charges. Most of them don’t actually want the people to back out, but from a cop’s point of view, if a victim is going to back out, the sooner the better. Saves wasted effort and frustration later on. So they give you a chance to reconsider. A long chance.
While we were waiting, we saw the doctor come in. He examined the dude, then went away muttering to himself. A few minutes later, two paramedics arrived with a stretcher and carted the dude off on it. Teresa watched them go, but the anger in her eyes stayed.
After another half hour or so, a different detective came over and introduced himself as Captain Cason. He was a short, fleshy man with hands like shovels and eyes so flat and pale that from the side they looked like the eyes of a blind man. His voice had a particular rasp with which I was all too familiar—the hoarseness of a man who does a lot of interrogating. He took Teresa across the duty room into his office and shut the door.
They were in there a long time. When they came out, she looked shell-shocked, like she was about to faint away right there on the floor. I had a sick taste in my mouth as I hurried toward her.
Cason tried to stop me. He put himself between us, steered her over to a nearby desk and told the detective there to arrange a ride home for her. Then he took my arm and tugged me in the direction of his office.
I slapped his hand off and stepped around him. For one second Teresa looked straight at me. Her face was as pale as if she were bleeding internally, but there was a hot red spot of color on each cheekbone, and her lips were tight. Her dark intense eyes didn’t flinch. Half her anger was aimed at me.
Cason barked, “Axbrewder!” But I ignored him long enough to tell her in Spanish, “I will put him in prison by myself if you do not speak against him.” Then I turned away. Cason was getting ready to muscle me, and I didn’t want that to happen. I said to him, “Tell your detective I want my jacket back.” Then I strode straight into his office and dropped myself into one of the chairs.
He followed me in, shut the door, and sat down. He put his hands on the desk and kept them there as if they were too heavy to carry around. Or maybe he just didn’t want me to forget how strong they were. With that harsh rasp of his, he demanded, “What did you say to her?”
The bad taste in my mouth was getting worse, but I made an effort to keep my vocabulary polite. “The opposite of what you said.”
“Huh?”
“You told her I wasn’t going to testify for her.” That was what I’d seen in her eyes. I didn’t need her to explain it. “You tried to scare her off by telling her she’d have to carry this alone in court. You must’ve had a fine old time describing how ugly a rape trial can get.”
“Is that so?” Cason growled. For a second there, he didn’t sound quite so sure of himself. Then he rallied. “Well, I’ve got news for you, smartass. You aren’t going to testify.”
“How do you figure that?” I said, hoping there wasn’t something important about all this that he knew and I didn’t.
“You’re a known
alcoholic. You were in the part of town where you do your drinking. The arresting officers found you outside a bar. Who’s going to believe a thing you say?”
“That’s cute.” The taste in my mouth made me sound like him. “The only problem is that I’m sober.”
“Is that a fact?” he drawled. “How do you propose to convince a jury?”
I almost laughed at him. “You’re wasting my time. I’ll call you as a character witness. Even you won’t be able to explain why you didn’t give me a blood-alcohol test.” He blinked at that a couple of times, but didn’t say anything. “Come on, Captain,” I went on. “You’re playing games with me. Why don’t you cut out the bullshit and tell me what’s really going on?”
His fingertips began to touch each other lightly. “The man’s name is Charles Saunders, and he’s from Cleveland. We’re trying to get in touch with his wife. The doctor says he may have a ruptured kidney.” Then his hands jumped into fists. “Goddamn it, Axbrewder! Haven’t you ever heard of minimum force?”
“‘Minimum force?’” I countered. “What’s that?”
“He could sue you for every penny you ever had!”
“Is that a fact?” Deliberately I imitated Cason’s tone.
“We can probably get you off the hook if you let this thing drop.”
I felt like it was my turn to get angry, but I held back. “So let him sue me. That’s my problem. I don’t give a shit what he does as long as he does it in jail.”
“Smart-ass!” Cason barked. “I wish you still had a license, so I could get it pulled for this.”
“Yeah, well, I appreciate your consideration. But I’m just a private citizen. I saw a crime being committed, and I intervened. I went in hard because there wasn’t time for anything else. He had a knife. I didn’t have a chance to ask him if he was going to use it.” I tried not to sound too angry, but I couldn’t swallow all of it. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You like rape? You want clowns like this Saunders running around loose?”
“Shut up, Axbrewder,” he said softly, “or I’ll stuff it down your throat.”
“Just what we need around here,” I shot back. “More police brutality.”
“All right.” He was furious. “That’s enough. You want to be cute? I’ll give it to you straight. This Sanguillán”—he made her name into an insult—“is just another Mex chippy who tried to back out when she didn’t get enough money. It happens all the time. That’s why she was out on the street alone at night. Saunders just got sucked in. He’s a tourist here, and he deserves an even break. A ruptured kidney is a hell of a price to pay for not having enough cash on him. This won’t go any farther. You’re not going to testify.”
“Because he’s Anglo,” I said carefully.
“If that’s the way you want to put it.” His hands were flat on the desk, as if everything was settled.
I got to my feet. “Teresa Sanguillán has a perfectly respectable job as a domestic in the Heights. That’ll be easy to prove. She was on the street at night alone because that’s the only way she can get home. But even if she is ‘just another Mex chippy,’ it doesn’t make any difference. She was being raped!” I couldn’t stop myself. I hammered my fist onto the top of his desk so hard that a couple of files fell off onto the floor. “If you try to sit on this, I’ll go to the DA.” District Attorney Martínez was notoriously unsympathetic toward racist cops. “He might like to find out how many rape investigations you’ve quashed since you got your promotion.”
Captain Cason was standing behind his desk, and his hands were twitching, and he was saying, “You sonofabitch, you—!” But I wasn’t listening. I’d had enough of him. I threw open the door and went out into the duty room.
I’d been in there longer than I thought. Teresa was gone, and my jacket waited for me on the corner of a desk. Everybody in the duty room stared at me, but I ignored them. I shoved my arms into my coat, moving fast to hide the way I was shaking. Then I stalked out of the room.
I was in no mood to be interfered with, so when a woman in the corridor behind me called my name, I didn’t pay any attention. No, thanks—not interested. I’ve had enough. But she was determined. “Mr. Axbrewder!” I could hear her hurrying to catch up with me. Oh, hell. I gritted my teeth, shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket so that she wouldn’t see them tremble, and turned to face her.
Policewoman Rand, from Missing Persons.
“Mr. Axbrewder,” she repeated, “Sergeant Encino wants to see you.”
Encino. Just what I needed. Another racist, like Cason only on the opposite side of the fence. I didn’t feel like putting up with him. I had my mouth open to tell Policewoman Rand where Sergeant Encino could stuff it when my right hand found a piece of paper in my jacket pocket. I shut up long enough to take it out and look at it.
It was just a scrap of paper. On one side there was something in Spanish that looked like a grocery list. On the other side, in awkward childlike handwriting, it said, “I am indebted to you. Teresa Mara Sanguillán y Garca.”
That made a difference, somehow. All of a sudden, Cason didn’t seem to be worth the emotion I was spending on him. I folded the note neatly, put it back in my pocket. Then I asked Policewoman Rand, “Where is he?”
She nodded back down the corridor. “In the office.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go see him.”
She didn’t come with me, but continued on the way I’d been going. Maybe it was time for her coffee break. I went back to Missing Persons alone.
Encino was the only one there. As soon as he saw me come in, he got up from his desk and came to stand at the counter, facing me. We stared at each over for a moment across the Formica. Then he said, “I hear that you have stopped a rape tonight.”
That took me by surprise. I nodded stupidly.
His sad eyes didn’t waver. “I hear that the woman is Chicano.”
I didn’t say anything to that either. Something was going on here, I couldn’t even guess what it was. As a way of answering him, I took out my scrap of paper and let him see it.
“Ah.” He read it, then looked back up at me. He was too good at hiding his emotions—I couldn’t find anything in his face. After a moment, he said, “So you have spoken with Captain Cason.”
For the sake of not acting like an idiot, I mustered up enough voice to growl, “Yeah.”
Carefully Encino asked, “What have you said to him?”
It was none of his business, but I was glad to tell him anyway. “I told him to blow it out his ass.”
Suddenly Encino’s whole face smiled. He was so happy that even his hair looked like it was grinning. He turned serious again a few seconds later, but by then everything between us was different.
“Señor Axbrewder,” he said formally, “I’ve been unjust. Men such as Cason”—he said the name bitterly—“blind me. Accept my apologies.”
Before I could respond, he went back to his desk, picked up a stack of manila folders, and brought them over to the counter.
“The truth is that you upset me when you said there is a connection between Alathea Axbrewder and Carol Christie. I had not considered that. So I have been reading the files for two years back. I found these.” He tapped the stack of folders. Then he shrugged. “They were investigated. There is no apparent connection.”
He didn’t let me interrupt him. “I can’t permit you to read these. But”—he sighed eloquently—“I must leave the office for a short time. How can I know what happens behind my back? Please use my desk.”
Five seconds later, he was gone, and I was alone with his files.
Now I was more than just surprised. But I didn’t have time for it. I wanted to read those files, and I didn’t know how long the office would be empty. I grabbed up the stack, straightened it in front of me, and got started.
There were seven folders. Carol Christie’s was on the top, and I took it first.
Before I finished it, I felt so weak that I feared I was goin
g to fall down. I couldn’t help myself—I had to go sit in Encino’s chair.
After Carol Christie’s, I read the other six files straight through. Then I went back to the beginning and started over again. This time I took notes. Halfway through, Sergeant Encino came back. But he was alone, and I didn’t stop.
By the time I finished, I was dripping sweat on his blotter. My shirt was soaked and sticking to my back, along with most of my jacket. I didn’t ask Encino’s permission to use his phone—I just grabbed it and dialed as well as I could with my hands shaking like cowards. I held on while Ginny’s answering service tracked her down. When she answered, they patched me through.
“Brew,” she started, “what’s wrong?”
I brushed past her anxiety. “I’m at Missing Persons. You’ve got to get down here.”
“Why? What’s happened?”
“There are seven of them,” I said. “Not counting Alathea. I don’t care what the cops say, this is no accident.”
“Make sense, Brew! Seven what?”
“Seven thirteen-year-olds. No, five. Two of them were twelve.” I knew I wasn’t getting through to her, but I couldn’t help myself. I was too upset to pull it together.
“What the bloody hell are you talking about?”
I pushed the phone against the side of my head as hard as I could, trying to make that damn inanimate plastic steady me. I wanted to howl, but I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. “Carol Christie didn’t drown because she couldn’t swim. She drowned because she OD’ed on heroin. And that’s not all. Before she drowned, she—” But I couldn’t say it over the phone. Carol Christie was only thirteen. Just like Alathea. There are some things you can hardly say out loud at all.
“I’m on my way,” Ginny told me. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” Then the line went dead, leaving me with nothing but an empty phone to hang on to.
PART TWO
Wednesday Night/Thursday
6
Ginny made good time, but it was long enough for me to get a grip on myself. I couldn’t afford to fall apart just because this case had turned messy all of a sudden. Alathea needed help in the worst way. So I muttered curses at myself for a while, and finally managed to give Sergeant Encino his desk back. By the time Ginny arrived, I was standing at the counter where I belonged.
The Man Who Killed His Brother Page 6