by Frank Zafiro
Staring at a picture of her dead, naked body, I tried to envision her alive. I thought of what George and Gina had said about her at the Tip Top. How popular she was. It was plain that she had a nice body. Even in death, her breasts were pert and her stomach flat. I imagined her flashing that same smile from her license photo to the customers at the Tip Top. Any one of them would think he’d hit the lottery. Young, built and with a killer smile. And for a five-dollar drink, she’d spent twenty minutes talking to you.
So this girl, with a criminal family, left Salinas and ended up here in River City. How long did she knock around before she ended up here? Or did she come straight to River City? Did she have friends here?
I thought about the last question. Probably not, I decided. Would she be staying at a motel for a month if she had friends in town? So chances were she came to town knowing no one.
Why? Was she running from something? Someone? Was she trying to leave her family behind? Start fresh? If so, why was she dancing at the Club Tip Top? And lying about it to her cousin?
I fished through my file and found a photocopy of the postcard. Her lie was written on the back with confidence. She wanted them to think she was making good. She was definitely trying to leave her family behind and start something new.
Matt Westboard’s field contact report said that she was a prostitute. I flipped to my copy of that report and read it again. He didn’t describe her flagging down cars or making contacts. Just walking back to her motel from the Tip Top. If she were wearing her work clothes, she’d look like a prostitute. I could see what Westboard would’ve thought. Dressed like a prostitute and walking right down the East Sprague corridor, smack in the middle of Hooker Row. After all, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…
I stood up and poked my head around the cubicle. Browning’s desk was empty. I used his phone to dial Westboard’s department voice mail and left a message for him to call me when got the chance. As I was reciting my telephone extension, I heard my own phone ring.
I hustled around the corner and grabbed it on the third ring. After four, it goes to voice-mail.
“Detective Tower.”
“Detective Tower? Detective Ernie Williams here, Salinas PD. I understand you’re investigating one of the Gonzalez girls.”
“Yeah. Serena Gonzalez. She was murdered.”
He whistled softly. “That’s too bad. She was one of the decent ones.”
“What do you know about her?” I asked.
“Let’s see. Well, she was about eighteen or nineteen. As far as I could tell, she stayed out of the family business.”
“Sergeant Kraemer said she had an arrest for shoplifting a few years ago.”
“Yeah, he mentioned that. But that was just a Simple Theft. No big deal, compared to the rest of her family.”
“I was wondering if she had a lot of contacts with police, even though they didn’t end up being arrests.”
Williams considered for a moment. Then he said, “I would guess she had a few more contacts than your average teenage girl, just because of her name and family. But I don’t remember her being in trouble much.”
“Any prostitution?”
“Huh? No, never. Why?”
“She was stripping at a bar here and living at a motel,” I told him. “Both are in our local red light district.”
“Well, the stripping part doesn’t surprise me. She was working at the Las Estrellas down here for a couple of months last year, after she turned eighteen.”
“Strip club?”
“Not really. Topless joint. Girls on stage strip off their top and wear thongs, but there’s no touching that goes on. It’s a fairly clean place.”
“The girls don’t hook out of there, then?”
“Nah. There’s better places for them to work for that.”
“How well did you know Serena?” I asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know. Okay, I guess. I spoke to her a few times on cases I worked. She was always polite, but dummied up about her family.”
“So she wasn’t part of their business, but she wouldn’t roll on them, either?”
“Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, she was no saint. I dumped out more than a couple of forty-ouncers that she and her friends were drinking. Plus, she was stripping. She just wasn’t into anything heavy, is all.”
As he spoke a uniformed patrol officer appeared at my desk. I glanced up at him. He was black. His uniform was creased sharply and his hair was shaved to a quarter inch. He smiled nervously and lifted his face to me in greeting.
I held up my hand, then showed him two fingers. He nodded and stepped a couple paces to the wall and sat down in a chair there.
“When did you see her last?” I asked Williams.
“I couldn’t tell you for sure. Her last computer entry for any contact is seven months old and that was as a witness to a fight. I know I haven’t seen her for at least four and a half or five months.”
I considered that. It sounded like she probably kicked around a bit before landing here in River City.
“Something else you should know, Detective. Her pops, Jorge, was mighty pissed at her for leaving, from what I heard.”
“Really? How pissed?”
“Very. He found out she was down in L.A. about three months ago and sent his oldest boy Javier down to get her. Apparently, she blew town first and he didn’t find her. Which just pissed Jorge off even more.”
“You think they’d hurt her, if they found her?”
“Not in a million years. Are you very familiar with the Mexican family structure?”
“Not really.”
“It’s very tight. And the girls are the jewels of the family. They’d drag her back kicking and screaming, but never hurt her.”
“How about someone else hurting her?” I asked. “She have any boyfriends? Stalkers?”
Williams laughed. “Boyfriends? Sure, lots of ‘em. At least, lots who were probably trying. But she doesn’t have any protection orders or domestic violence entries in our system here. And I never heard of anyone steady.”
“It was a long shot, anyway,” I admitted.
“How’d she die?” he asked.
I gave him the barest details.
He whistled again. “That’s a shame.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “Can I ask you a favor?”
“Go ahead.”
“Would you be able to do a courtesy interview for me down there?”
“I could, if you want. I can make notification for you, too, if you like.”
“That’d be great. I was going to call our chaplain’s service today for that.”
“No problem,” Williams said. “I’ll have our chaplain call up there to yours and get the details. Then I’ll go with him. But I have to tell you, Jorge and his boys aren’t going to tell me diddly. The most you’ll get is some very pissed off cholos up there, cruising your streets and looking for her killer.”
“I don’t want you to interview them. I want you to talk to Lucinda.”
“Lucinda?”
“I think so. Serena’s cousin.”
“You probably mean Lucia. That’s Jorge’s sister’s kid. She’s about fourteen. Why do want me to interview her?”
“I think Serena was writing to her. I found a postcard in her room addressed to her prima. That means cousin, right?”
“Yeah. Girl cousin.”
“Plus one of the girls at the bar said she didn’t talk about her family, except for her cousin Lucy or Lucinda or something. If she was writing to her, I might be able to fill in her travels before she arrived here in River City.”
“I see,” Williams said. “Yeah, I can do that. You know, Lucia’s mother is a real bruja vieja. Almost as bad as Jorge, with her Welfare scams.”
“Bruja Vieja? What’s that?”
“Old witch. Anyway, I’ll catch Lucia at school, away from her family.”
“That’d be good. Thanks.”
“No problem. Call you in a day or tw
o.”
We hung up and I turned to the patrol officer, who was already standing at my desk.
“Romeo McLaren,” he said, sticking out his hand.
I took it and he gave a firm shake. “John Tower. What’s up?”
He nodded toward the waiting area. I poked my head around my cubicle and saw Officer Glen Bates standing next to a blonde female in handcuffs. Bates was a veteran and an FTO.
“Who’s she?”
“Toni Redding.”
I watched him for a moment, waiting for him to go on.
“She’s a hooker. She’s claiming info on a girl that was just murdered a little while ago. She’s trying to get out of a prostitution charge.”
“What does she know?”
“She wouldn’t say. She said she’d only talk to the detective on the case. We called it in and they said it was your case.”
“It is. Fawn Taylor is the girl’s name.”
McLaren shrugged. “She didn’t even say that. Do you want to talk to her?”
“Put her in an interview room.”
“Okay.”
“Leave her cuffs on. Let me take them off of her.”
He nodded and left.
I returned to my desk and scrawled out my notes from my conversation with Detective Williams. I tried not to let my mind stray to the Taylor case as I wrote, but I could feel a tickle of anticipation.
I grabbed the Taylor file and a clean pad of paper and headed to the interview room. After a few steps, I stopped and returned to my desk and found the license photo of Serena Gonzalez.
McLaren stood guard outside the door to Interview One. Bates was standing a few yards away, making notes in a steno notepad.
I gave McLaren a nod and went inside.
Toni Redding sat sideways in one of the three chairs in the small room, her thin shoulders hunched over. She adjusted her flannel shirt by reaching her handcuffed left hand around and tugging on it. She looked up at me when I entered.
“You the detective?”
I nodded and closed the door behind me. I plopped the case file down on the table, followed by the notepad and pen. The sounds echoed around the tiny room.
“Turn around,” I told her.
She understood and turned around, offering her wrists up. I unlocked the cuffs and removed them, slipping them in the small of my back.
“Thanks,” she said, rubbing her wrists.
“You’re welcome.” I sat down and pushed the case file aside. I wrote her name, the date and the time at the top of the notepad. Then I looked up at her. Her long, blonde hair hung limply to her shoulders and her angular face would always be one step behind beautiful.
“The patrolmen out there think you might have some information for me.”
She nodded as she spoke. “First, I want to know something. If I give you this info, will you make those assholes out there drop this bullshit charge on me?”
“That depends on the information.”
She rubbed her upper arms with both hands. The t-shirt under her open flannel was a faded Disneyland souvenir. I looked for methamphetamine sores on her neck, but didn’t see any. Her face wasn’t broken out, either. My guess was that she was into heroin. “I might know something about Fawn, the girl they found at the bingo lot.”
“I’m listening.”
She bit her lip and looked down at the table. When she looked back up at me, she said, “Do you know Officer Paul Hiero?”
“Yes.”
“Well…he and I are…” she smiled slightly. “Friends.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Don’t even think about bringing an officer’s name into this conversation. If you do, you’ll destroy any credibility your story may have.”
She bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”
“How do you know the victim’s name?”
“If I tell you about Fawn, will you drop this new charge?”
“What do you have to lose? Either you don’t tell me and you go to jail. Or you tell me and maybe you don’t go to jail. It’s not like you can take your information down to the pawn shop and get ten bucks for it.”
“You better not screw me over.”
I pushed the file aside and put the notepad in front of me. “How did you know Fawn?” I asked her.
“I met her out on Sprague.”
“Was she working?”
“Not right away.”
“But eventually?”
“Kinda,” she said. “It’s more complicated than that.”
I tapped my pen. “Okay, let’s back up to when you met her. When was that?”
“A couple of weeks before she died. Maybe three. I don’t know exactly.”
“And how did you meet her?”
“She just appeared one night down on Sprague. She was walking around, talking to people. I figured she was a new girl. You know, from out of town? Anyway, she came up to me and we just hit it off. We talked and had coffee and stuff.”
“Did you know she was fourteen?”
Toni shook her head. “No. She said she was nineteen at first, but after we talked for a while, she said she was only seventeen. I believed her. She looked about seventeen.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“That she lived in Seattle and she’d run away from home.”
“She said Seattle?”
“Uh-huh.” She gave me a confused look. “That’s not true?”
“Why’d she say she ran away?”
Toni shrugged. “She didn’t really say. All she said was that her parents were assholes.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. I didn’t push it, you know? Her business. ‘Sides, I know how a lot of parents are assholes. Mine were.”
“How long was she hanging out around East Sprague?”
“Right up until…until she…” Toni’s eyes teared up.
I stood up and left the room. Glenda kept a box of tissues on her desk and I grabbed several and returned to the interview room. “Here,” I said, handing her the tissues.
“Thanks,” she said. She had stopped crying, but used the tissues to wipe her eyes and nose.
“Do you know where she stayed during those two weeks?”
She nodded. “I rented a motel room for her.”
“Where?”
“The Eastside.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why? Why did you rent her a room?”
“She paid for it. I just put it in my name because she said she didn’t have ID.”
“She paid for it?”
“Yeah,” Toni said. “She had a bunch of cash for the first week or so. She rented that room and even paid for dinner at Zip’s one night for both of us.”
“How long did the money last?”
“I don’t know for sure. But after about a week or so, she got kicked out of the motel”
“What did she do when she ran out of money?”
Toni took a long breath and chewed the inside of her mouth again. “She told me that she was out of cash and needed to work. I told her it wasn’t a good idea.”
“But she was persistent.”
“Yeah, she was. Told me she was a ‘ho in school and loved sex. I didn’t know if it was just talk or not. I told her that most of what we did wasn’t sex, anyway.”
“Did you show her the ropes, then?”
She shrugged. “Sorta. I mean, I didn’t tell her to do it. I just told her what I do. What I don’t do.”
“Why’d you take her under your wing?”
“I got to know her. And I could tell that the only reason she was pissed at her parents is because they had rules. Shit, she even had a stepfather who cared about her. All my stepfathers ever did was try to fuck me.” She stopped and looked away for a second.
“Go on.”
“I told her she should go home. She said she could never ask her parents for money. That’s when I told her she should work a week or two and earn enough to take the bus back to Seattle and just put all
this behind her. I told her she still had a chance at a normal life. She still had a chance for someone to love her.”
“What did she say?”
“She said okay. So we worked a few days together, then she just disappeared. I figured she listened to me and went home.”
“Without saying goodbye?”
“On the street, people leave all the time without saying goodbye.”
“What about when she turned up dead? Why didn’t you come forward then?”
“Because I didn’t know who killed her.”
“But now that you’re in a jam, your information is valuable?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Did you two ever work separately?”
“Some. I tried to keep an eye on her, but some of my dates took longer than others. Plus, she got a lot of business. Fresh meat and all.”
“So she just didn’t come back from a date?”
“No. She didn’t show up one night. The night before…”
“The night she was murdered.”
She nodded. “Yeah. I got out there around eleven and she wasn’t anywhere around. I figured she probably caught a ride already. When she didn’t show up around midnight, that’s when I figured she took my advice and went back to Seattle.”
I sat and thought for a while, running over our conversation in my mind. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask her about Fawn Taylor. I removed the picture of Serena Gonzalez from my stack and put it in front of her.
“You recognize this girl?”
She looked at the picture for a few seconds, then shook her head. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
I stood up and gathered my papers. “Wait here.”
“What about my charges?” she asked.
“You’re not going to jail today,” I told her. “We’ll see about the rest.”
She was visibly relieved as I left the interview room and closed the door.
McLaren was right on me. Bates looked up from his conversation with the secretary and ambled over.
“She give you anything?” Bates asked.
“Yeah.
“All right then. What do want to do about her?”