“All right, tell me what to do.”
Vera separated two bundles of pink-colored delivery tickets. “Check those and I’ll rummage through this set. You’ve been making chicken and pineapple pizzas for a man who lives in the area. Unless you have more than one customer who orders it at least twice a week, they’ve all been called in by none other than,” she started to say before being cut off.
“Sin Johnson, I’ll be damned,” he said awkwardly. “Wow, lady, I can’t believe it. I’d have remembered that name.”
“Just check your stack. If anything else jumps out at you, tell me. I’ll be out of your hair as quick as I can.” Vera watched the stumpy man thumb through the thin sheets of paper like a bank teller counting money. Obviously he’d sorted through them often and kept the delivery copies on hand to discourage thefts by his drivers, explaining how they’d been jacked after selling the pies wholesale to their friends and family.
“Miss, ain’t no Sin Johnson here at all,” Lester informed her. “I took out the orders for chicken and pineapple, all phoned in by the same customer. Hmmm,” he grunted. “This fella’s got three different addresses, though. Says the name is Warren Sikes.”
Vera dropped her bundle on the desk when she heard the name of the slain police officer. She almost smiled when it occurred to her that Sinton still had his legendary sense of humor, using the name of the man whose death he’d caused. No one would ever think to go traipsing in a black ghetto for a white man who’d been dead for two years. Vendetta said Sinton was hiding, that explained why he jumped apartments periodically. Now she had three places to search, three good places. She thanked the manager for his assistance and assured him that if he did get busted, the call wouldn’t come from her. With a heavy dose of gratitude, Lester sent her off holding a special pizza pie with his compliments.
The sun was setting as Vera parked by the curb near a run-down building on the main drag. Since no one had answered when she knocked at one of the other two addresses on her list, Vera had a fifty-fifty chance to fall in on Sinton without someone tipping him off. The problem was both of the remaining apartments faced one another across a narrow courtyard and he could have looked out of the window to see her if she made the wrong selection. She caught a break when a woman scantily clad in a short sweater dress two sizes two small and over the knee boots exited the staircase near the end of the hall. “You on the stroll?” Vera asked, to be certain she was approaching a prostitute and not just some resident with bad fashion sense.
“That depends on who’s asking?” the dark-skinned lady asked, with a curious expression.
“I’m asking,” Vera replied, while holding the pizza box as if it were a tray of gourmet delights. “Are you working or not? I ain’t got all day.”
The woman sucked her gold teeth then adjusted the dress riding up her full thighs. “I ain’t either. Time is money after all.” That was her way of admitting to the oldest profession known to man. “What you got in mind? I can get with some girl-on-girl action.”
“Well, I can’t, so you need to back that up. How about you tell me something I don’t know and I pay you for your time nonetheless? What do you charge for a date?”
The woman scratched at her red wig then gave Vera another once-over. “Sure you don’t want to talk things over up at my place?”
“Hell, yeah, I’m sure. It’s nothing personal but I’m running late as it is.” Vera smiled cordially as not to offend the hooker. The lengths to which she had to go to get an answer for Rags had come to this, flirting with a streetwalker.
“I usually get thirty bucks to lockup with females. Paid in advance,” she added, with her hand out. Begrudgingly, Vera slapped forty in her palm. “Cool, what you want to know?”
“Which of those apartments is Sinton Johnson staying in? And don’t lie because don’t nothing go down in the hood without working girls knowing about it.”
“You’re right, we keeps the four-one-one on things. He’s been staying in that one over yonder,” she answered politely. “How about you drop that box off and come see me about your change from this forty?”
Vera waved her off and pulled her gun. “Uh-uh, you should get gone. This might get ugly.” Before Vera crossed the dirt courtyard, the prostitute was in the wind. Poised with a pizza box in her left hand and a pistol in the right one, she tapped the barrel of the gun lightly against the door with 2G stenciled on it. Vera held the box in front of the window when someone peeped out of the crease in some of the filthiest drapes she’d ever seen.
“What you want?” someone asked, while purposely staying out of sight.
“Got a pizza, man,” she barked rudely, “Say here it’s for Warren Sikes.”
There was a string of silence on the other side of that door before the knob turned to open it. “I don’t ’member calling for no pizza,” came the answer from what appeared to be a disease riddled old man on his last leg. “It’s right on time though. I didn’t want to get out in the cold tonight.”
Vera stared at him, a shell of a man too sickly to be a detriment to anyone but himself. She nearly apologized for barging in on the wrong apartment until something in the frail man’s eyes spoke to her. “Sinton Johnson?” she called out, in a sorrowfully subdued tone. “Sinton Johnson, that is you.” She couldn’t believe her eyes. His once smooth skin was dry and ashy; all of his appeal had faded away. The ostentatious drug dealer who often boasted of having been in more women than a retired gynecologist had diminished into a diseased cripple. Vera hadn’t seen a great deal of AIDS victims although the toll it had taken on Sinton seemed uncharacteristically devastating. Her heart sank into her stomach. All of the vile insults she wanted to level him with vanished into thin air. The flamboyant, good-looking ladies man she despised had become a humbled weak skeleton afraid of his own shadow. His dark sunken eyes dimmed even more when it finally occurred to him that Vera wasn’t the pizza delivery lady.
Sinton took a deep breath then gazed at Vera’s hand holding the gun. “You come here to kill me? Go on ahead and get it done.” After Vera holstered her weapon, he lowered his head and shuffled back inside the poorly furnished hovel he camped in for the time being. Vera stood at the open door uncertain which way to proceed. “If you ain’t gonna shoot me, bring that pizza in here. I’m hungrier than a hostage.” Vera entered the small one-bedroom rental, holding her breath as much as she could. The stench of urine was overwhelming. “Put that box on the coffee table and tell me why you came after me. I hurt lots of people. You one of ’em?” He puttered around in the kitchen area, in a pair of brown run-over house slippers for a moment before returning with paper plates. Vera passed on dinner, respectfully.
“Sinton, I didn’t know about the . . .” she uttered compassionately, feeling that his nickname seemed cruel at this point in his life.
“The bug,” he said for her. “Yeah, I got it bad. I probably passed on worse than I got. Most of my old friends is gone.” He slowly reached in the box for a slice. His eyes brightened when discovering it was his favorite combination. “How’d you know what I liked?”
“Sinton, look, I’m sorry to impose. I’m a PI and I looked you up because of the brick wall I’m against concerning a shooting from a couple of years back.” Vera still couldn’t believe how low on the ghetto totem pole he’d fallen. Mixed emotions circled in her head about going forward with her questioning. However, she had jumped through hoops getting to this point. “Sinton, you were an informant for Frank Draper and Warren Sikes, the man whose name you’re using.”
He steadied his paper plate on his knees and wiped at his mouth with a dirty napkin. “Yep, I snitched for ’em. Sikes is dead though.”
“Did you kill him, Sinton?” Vera queried, softly. He took his eyes from hers, shook his head then nibbled at the corner of the slice like a baby bird. “You know who did, though?”
“Wish I could help, but no,” he whispered, like a repentant soul. “I was the one set him up for the fall.” Sinton went on to explai
n how he, Sikes and Draper were all on the Guzman drug cartel payroll. He remembered how sweet life was with police protection and more money than he could spend. Eventually, he informed Vera that things got gritty when Frank Draper got too greedy. That’s when all hell broke loose. Warren Sikes caught wind that Draper wanted to cut him out of the association and bring in another cop with a smaller share of the profits. Sikes had been seen having meetings with an attractive black woman, who turned out to be an FBI special agent. “After he started getting cozy with that agent, Yogi Easterland, we agreed he had to go,” Sinton said. “Holding up that diner wasn’t my bag at all but it did the trick.”
Vera hadn’t ever been closer to learning what actually happened and who pulled the trigger. All of her snooping culminated in the very next question. “Who put in the work?”
“All’s I was supposed to do was run up on that cracker jack diner and stick a gat in the lady’s face, so Sikes ’n’ ’em would be the first police to show up. I wasn’t in for killing no cop until Draper said he would handle the tough stuff.”
“And did he?” she pried.
“I made it around the corner and was on my way when I heard two shots. Something told me to just keep right on moving but I had to see it for myself. Quick as I could, I poked my head out and saw it. Draper was leaning over him in the street. Even though the rain was coming down pretty good, I could tell that Draper had his hands over his partner’s mouth. When that waitress chick started screaming, I booked out of there. I didn’t find out for a month that Guzman put out a half-million-dollar hit on Sikes. I think the onliest reason Draper didn’t take me out was because I never asked for my cut and let him keep it all to hisself.”
“Is there any chance a third person was in it with y’all?” Vera asked on Rags’s behalf.
“No way, couldn’t have been nobody else. In the road, under the street lamp was Frank Draper shoving that smoking gun into his coat pocket. Wasn’t nobody else could have done it.” Sinton told the truth, as he knew it, although he didn’t actually see the shooting. There was a slight chance that Rags could have been a party to it without Sinton having known. Either way, he was all talked out and wanted to be alone with his dinner. Vera left him with his favorite pizza and run over house shoes. She said so long to the contempt she’d felt for him after deciding it wasn’t worth the effort and Sinton couldn’t have cared less either way. He had enough troubles living with his declining health and personal pitfalls.
Sixteen
As Vera pulled away from the curb near Sinton’s apartment, she held a clenched fist up to her mouth. She wouldn’t have had the words to describe what she’d witnessed if her life depended on it. Not only did she leave with an indelible picture of a dilapidated man tattooed on her brain, Vera also left with two major holes in her case. Every time she grew closer to locking the case airtight, another gap turned up like a bad penny. There wasn’t one eyewitness to the police officer’s shooting and no death certificate existed to authenticate Detective Sikes’s murder. If only his body had stayed put long enough for the medical examiner to pronounce him dead on arrival at the hospital, but no such luck. Someone had to go and snatch it; or was it something else instead? With a sick feeling in her stomach, Vera remembered what Sinton said about Sikes’s turning state’s evidence and working with the FBI. The next and only logical place to go for further information concerning the missing body was the agency that had nothing to do with the crime but couldn’t seem to stay away from it.
Vera slammed on the brakes then hit a U-turn several blocks from downtown. Rush hour traffic poured out into the streets as nine-to-fivers made beelines toward the freeways while she sailed past them in the opposite direction. “Yogi Easterland,” she said into her cell phone when someone answered on the other end. “My name is Vera Miles. Please tell her it’s important.” The operator asked Vera to hold after explaining it was after hours. Vera turned her lip upward smirking at the idea of federal agents punching a time clock.
“Special Agent Easterland speaking,” hailed someone who sounded professional and tired.
“Oh, hello,” Vera said, when the woman took her call sooner than expected. “You don’t know me but I think we really need to talk. I’m a private investigator with one question no one has been able to answer.”
“May I ask why you think I’m the one who can?” asked the agent, again professionally standoffish.
“Because I just left a funky ass apartment rented by Sinton Johnson where he told me you were chummy with a narcotics officer named Warren Sikes who got himself clipped before you could pimp him to roll on his partner and the Mexican drug lord Bolda Guzman,” Vera rattled off quickly, leaving no doubt how serious and tired she was. Her chest heaved out while waiting on the agent’s response.
“If your objective was getting my undivided attention, you succeeded. Surely you know where to find me, Ms. Miles. How quickly can you get here?”
Vera killed the motor in the parking lot across from 1 Justice Way and stared at the FBI regional headquarters building in front of her. “I’m already here. Meet me in the lobby.”
“Will do,” agent Easterland replied sharply, “One thing. Unauthorized firearms are not permitted. I’ll have to ask you to leave yours behind.”
Smiling wearily, Vera sighed, “Will do.”
A heftily built security guard greeted Vera at the door, waved her through a metal detector then signed her in at the reception desk. She collected her purse, after he’d rifled through it. It was a mere precaution, she assumed, so she didn’t argue. When Vera snapped her bag shut, she heard someone call out her name. Expecting an FBI agent with a linebacker’s frame, she turned toward the elevators. Vera found it difficult to hide her surprise. The woman with an outstretched hand was gorgeous. Her sleekly fitted navy slacks were tailored, Vera guessed, and her button-down blouse had to have been plucked from a designer store rack. At nearly Vera’s height and two sizes smaller, Yogi Easterland looked like a fish out of water. Her cinnamon-hued skin was flawless and full-bodied shoulder length hair put Vera in mind of a fashion model playing a role. Although she would have been considered more cute than pretty, the agent gave her visitor an inferiority complex. “Yogi Easterland,” she said, after a thorough once-over.
“Yeah, come on up, Vera,” the attractive woman replied, with a firm handshake. On the elevator ride to the sixth floor, Vera chuckled to herself or so she thought. “Something funny?” Easterland asked, her hands situated on her narrow hips like they were nailed there.
“No, it’s just that you weren’t what I expected. Uh-uh, not by a long shot.” Easterland’s hands fell to her sides as her defensive smirk faded likewise. “Sorry, but I bet you get that all the time.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she confirmed lightly. “This is our stop.” The elevator doors opened to a command center. Computers and cubicles lined the floors throughout. Several agents, all of whom resembled well-dressed insurance salesmen, fiddled with telephones and paperwork. Each one was oblivious to Vera’s presence.
“Wow, this is it, huh?” she marveled. Vera knew that anything she wanted to know about anybody could have been accessed via any one of those computers. “Nice.” She followed the agent into a glassed-in office then took a chair opposite her at a desk cluttered with files. Moments after they were both seated, Easterland shrugged silently.
“Like I said on the phone, you got my attention, now what?”
Vera wrestled to get comfortable in her chair. She frowned, leaned forward then slumped back in her seat. “Agent Easterland, can I call you Yogi?” The agent nodded that it was okay. “See, Yogi, I’m working for a man who thinks he’s killed someone. He has these terrible dreams replaying it in his head. Only thing is, I’ve busted my rump trying to find a gunshot victim fitting the bill.” Vera explained what Rags told her about the overweight white man he believed himself to have shot and that Sikes was the closest to a possible match.
“So,” Yogi said, shrugging
again. “What does that have to do with you ending up in Sinton Johnson’s rat’s nest and how does that factor into my business with Warren Sikes, Frank Draper and Bolda Guzman?”
“That’s what I came here to ask you,” Vera told her, with a befuddled expression. “I’ve exhausted every possible lead, one right behind the other, and your outfit keeps coming up on the tail end. I know you visited the diner involved with Detective Sikes’s murder. I know you interrogated the EMT who pulled him off the streets that night and later hustled to the morgue searching for the body.” Vera was bluffing on the last tidbit of information but it made sense that the FBI wouldn’t take anyone’s word that Sikes, their prospective witness, was dead. They were more thorough than that.
“You almost had me, Vera,” Yogi said, chuckling under her breath, “then it occurred to me. If you knew for a fact we were at the morgue the night Warren Sikes got dropped, you wouldn’t be sitting here now or have subjected yourself to, as you put it, Sinton’s funky ass apartment, now, would you?” She let out a deep sigh, staring out over the illuminated Dallas skyline. “Before I tell you what you really want to know, it needs to be crystal clear that what I divulge is strictly off the record. You were never here.”
Vera was sitting then, alert and salivating for what had eluded her the entire time she’d been working on Rags’s behalf. “Understood,” she said, agreeing fully.
Agent Easterland clasped her thin fingers together, settling them on her desk. “First of all, none of this is any longer privileged information because the case involving Sikes, his partner Frank Draper and Bolda Guzman was dropped when the old man fell on a knife, seventeen times. Guzman’s younger brother got tired of sitting on the sidelines watching Bolda have all the fun. I guess you could say he took over the family business.” It was Vera’s turn to shrug, when she failed to grasp what Yogi’s story had to do with her case.
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