by Baxter Clare
“He come by the night he kilt my Uncle Julio. He tol’ us about it. Said it looked like my Uncle Luis done it and wasn’t it too bad that he’d kilt hisself over it. My mom was all busted up but she wouldn’ do nothin’. Just said we had to do whatever he tol’ us. Then he found out Placa was gonna talk to you and he kilt her too. He was really mad after that. He was laughin’ when he tolt us about my uncles, but he was real mad about Placa. He said he’d come after the babies if we made anymore trouble. So we couldn’t say nothin’. Now I done it. I tol’,” he sobbed.
Frank watched a latte-skinned woman tug three children in front of the car. She had another one in her belly. Ike called Mexican women milk makers. That was the nicest thing he called them. Lighting another cigarette, she said dully, “You did the right thing.”
She smoked, giving them both time to calm down. When she started the car, he looked alarmed.
“Where we goin’?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“Wha’ you gonna do?”
“I’ve gotta think.”
Tonio turned toward her, all the fear back.
“You promised you wouldn’ tell nobody.”
She studied him, seeing so much of Placa in the high cheekbones, the pretty mouth.
“I won’t,” she responded.
When she walked him into the house, Gloria was on the couch watching a novella with her friends. Their kids tumbled on the floor like puppies. Claudia came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. She looked at her son, then at Frank.
“Where you been?” she asked with unusual concern.
He waved an arm at her and started shuffling down the hall, but Frank grabbed him.
“Uh-uh. Gloria you might want to ask everyone to leave.”
“Fuck you. This is my house.”
“Whatever. Your brother wants to tell you something.”
His chocolate-colored eyes filled with fear again. Gloria saw it, and said, “Tell me what, pendejo?”
He turned to Frank, pleading, “You promised you wouldn’ tell nobody!”
“I’m not.”
She turned him toward Gloria, who was rising off the couch, coming toward him.
“Hijo?” Claudia asked.
Gloria was shorter than Tonio, but wider, thicker of arm. She stood under her half-brother’s chin. “Chingado,” she warned making a fist. “Que lo dijiste?”
“Nada,” he quavered. “I didn’t tell her nothin’. Esta loca, ella.”
“Tell them, Tonio.”
Gloria growled in Spanish at her friends. They grabbed their babies and left in a hurry. She turned back to her brother and shoved him. He stepped backwards and she followed, shoving him again.
“Que hiciste? “she shouted at him.
Putting his forearms up as if to block a blow, he insisted he hadn’t done anything. Claudia came between them, staring up at her son. She said something Frank couldn’t hear and Tonio answered, “Mami, I had to. She knew!”
“Hijola!” Gloria screamed, launching herself at him like a heavy-weight contender. She slapped his head with arms like windmills and when he tried to defend himself she pummeled his belly. Dazed, Claudia walked back to the kitchen. The kids froze in their play, mouths loose and eyes wide. Frank followed Claudia. She was sagged over the sink.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What could you do?” she shrugged, resigned always to the worst.
“I could have helped you.”
“Like he helped?” she hurled. “Like any jura ever helped us?”
“Maybe no other cop’s helped you, but I did. I cut you plenty of breaks, you know that’s true. I’ve never jacked you, Claudia, or any one in your family. I’ve always been firme with you.”
“You’re still a cop. Just like him.”
Gloria screamed into the kitchen, raging at Frank, “There! Are you happy now? You got your answers, eh? Are you happy? Eh? Eh? Is that what you wanted?”
For a crazy second it looked like Gloria was going to swing at her, but before she could, Claudia snapped, “Bastante!”
She ordered her daughter to leave them in peace, to go from the room. Eyes rabid, Gloria backed out. The two women stood alone in the kitchen. All the babies were crying and they listened to Gloria soothe and scold them at the same time.
“What you gonna do now ?” Claudia asked tiredly.
“I don’t know yet. This is all your word against his. I’ve got to check some things out.”
“He’ll kill us if he thinks you know.”
“Claudia, if this is true, I don’t want him to know. But I need your help with that. I have to know everything you know. I can’t help you — or protect you — unless you talk to me.”
Frank pulled out a chair. “Tell me everything. From the beginning.”
Chapter Twenty-six
A sleepy voice answered, “Hello?”
“Hey, Joe. It’s Frank. Did I wake you up?”
“Matter of fact you did. It’s … four o’clock your time. What’s up? Must be serious for you to call me.”
“It is. Listen.”
She told her old boss who Tonio had implicated as his sister’s murderer, continued after he’d whistled.
“I was with Claudia and the kids all night. This started years ago, when he was with Narco. He had the contacts, Barracas had the dope, and Claudia and her brothers ran it. Claudia’d send the kids out on deliveries. Gloria did it until she had the babies, then Placa had to do it. Over the years he and Barracas got pretty big — Christ, I don’t even want to know how big. By now Barracas knew the contacts and he wanted to muscle our boy out. That ended with Barracas and his family dead on ground.
“So now all the running’s left up to Claudia and the kids. Well, to Placa really. She was doing most of it. She hated it and he’s made it pretty clear what’ll happen if they didn’t say ‘How high?’ when he says ‘Jump.’ But she was gonna rat him out. She was always so fucking proud.”
“Tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you believe them? How do you know they just aren’t throwing shit at you?”
She told Joe how she’d been at the Estrella’s until two in the morning. They were whipped, even Gloria, who’d cried, then lashed out at Tonio again. In a monotone, Claudia narrated what had been happening all these years. As she talked, Tonio or Gloria would throw in a detail. Frank hadn’t wanted to believe them, but everything fit, and after a career spent weeding truth from lies, she was convinced.
“Got any wits?”
“No. That’s the bitch. Seems she’d just gotten home Saturday from making a big delivery for him when he calls and says he’s got a client in Hollywood who needs dope pronto. Placa was pissed. She’d just gotten home and now she had to go out again. Claudia gave her the stash and she slammed out of the house. That was the last they saw her. He must have picked her up on the way to the bus stop. She probably knew right off she was fucked, but she got in anyway. First mistake. Should’ve run then. But she didn’t. He drives her where he wants her. Takes her .25 away. Fucks her. Then somehow she gets away from him but she’s a loose cannon now and he knows it. Grabs the .25 right there. Pops her. Just another drive-by. Only two wits saw he was parked there. Couldn’t make the car, but they said it had a round back, not a square one. Guess what he’s driving this year. A brand new Lincoln.”
Frank paused.
“He called her out of the house, Joe. Premeditated.”
“You can’t prove that.”
“Not yet,” she repeated. “I pulled a search warrant. Bobby and Nook confiscated a bunch of her stuff. They went through some of it but got derailed by a redeye last week. I came back to the office after I got done with the Estrella’s. I’ve been going through the rest of it. She had two notebooks from school. They’ve got hexes and curses all over about ‘the fucking pigs’ and ‘chotas die, 187 LAPD, the LAPD struck out. Then I saw this really heavy impression on one of the pages. I sh
aded it real light with a pencil. His name was all over the page. She was furious. She had the motive to cheese him out, and knowing her, she would have. And the motherfucker knew,” she sighed.
Frank explained how Claudia had produced two photos of him taking money from Placa. Tonio had taken the pictures and though the quality was poor, both subjects and their activities were clear. Gloria had found them under her sister’s underwear, snuggled next to a .22. When she’d found them she’d come screaming to her mother, threatening to kill her brother for being so stupid. Tonio hadn’t wanted to take the pictures, but Placa made him, calling it their seguro, their insurance.
“I’m thinking that was what she wanted to show me Sunday morning. If they were insurance she was keeping for a rainy day, they’d have been hidden somewhere safe, not right next to her gat.”
“Okay, okay. Maybe you can get him on extortion. How’s that prove he capped her?”
Frank squeezed the bunched muscles at the base of her skull.
“It doesn’t. I don’t have anything to pin his balls to the wall with. Not yet.”
Joe didn’t say anything and Frank asked, “Still there?”
“Yeah, yeah. Have you told anybody about this yet?”
“Only you.”
“Good, good. Don’t. This is some deep shit you’re wading in, my girl.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“And as far as you know, this is just him?”
“From what they’re telling me, but who the fuck knows what this could open up.”
“All right. Let me think for a minute.”
She heard the faint click of Joe’s Zippo then a long drag on a cigarette.
At length Joe said, “Okay. This is what we do first.”
At the briefing that morning, Frank pulled Bobby and Nook off Placa’s case. The squad looked at her curiously. Frank frequently worked cases with her detectives but she’d never taken one on alone.
“This isn’t going anywhere,” she shrugged. “We’re just beating a dead horse right now and you have fresher cases to work. The end of the month’s coming up and I want to concentrate on cases with better potential. I’ll keep working Placa. I’m not going to let it die. You guys keep an ear out, pass on anything relevant, but right now we’re focusing on more promising books.”
“Whatever,” Nook sighed, but Bobby shook his head silently at the ceiling. Amid some grumbles and protests, she reprioritized a few other cases. When the meeting was over, Bobby followed Frank into her office and closed the door. He bent his massive frame over her desk. It was an old wooden piece with inlaid leather, eight drawers, and two pull-outs for extra work space. Frank had bought it at a yard sale and lugged it in on a Saturday morning. It was almost six feet wide and took up most of her tiny office, but when Bobby stood next to it, it looked like something a preschooler would use.
“I don’t understand why you pulled us. We’ve still got some leads to work. There’s the whole cop angle, and we haven’t even begun to turn up the heat yet.”
She’d singed his pride, and Frank felt bad. She waved a hand, looked disgusted.
“I talked to Tonio yesterday. Made him cry. I thought he was made of sterner stuff, but he got all blubbery about harassment, and leaving the family alone. I worked him for over two hours. I don’t think he knows shit. Claudia does, but she’s not talking. And I don’t think I was right on the 187 angle. I pushed it some with Gloria last night but I didn’t get a feel for any police involvement.”
Frank tipped her chair back.
“And the bottom line is stats are down, have been the last couple months. Fubar’s getting pinched from upstairs, got his jockeys all in a wad, now he’s kicking my ass. That’s why I want to concentrate on the cases with the best chance of closure. Get them under our belts so I can get Fubar off us, then we can go back to these colder ones, before summer hits us even harder than it already has.”
Bobby stared at Frank.
“It’s nothing you’ve done, Bobby. You and Nook have been great on this. But right now we’re digging in granite. I’m just moving you around to softer dirt for a while.”
“When you hit granite, you use TNT,” Bobby said.
Frank asked playfully, “Got any on you?” He just held Frank’s gaze and she said, “Look. I know you want this. So do I. We just need to step back from it a little. I’m still going to keep working Claudia, work the homes some more. But our personal involvement can’t distract us from other cases. We’ve thrown a lot of time at this and we’ve dead-ended. For now. So we’ll take a break, try and close-out more promising cases, then come back to this. I’m not going to let it die, Bobby. I promise. I just want to switch gears for a while.”
“You’re the boss,” Bobby shrugged, leaving in obvious disgust. For a moment Frank listened to her squad working. She hated the lies she was telling them, the reason behind the lies. Frank sighed and fluttered a stack of phone messages. She returned the calls in order, first OSS at the Sheriffs department, then Morgan at Personnel, and somebody at Motor Transportation about gas allowances. While the MT clerk clicked through his computer, Frank frowned at the next message slip.
Detective Harris, Sheriffs Homicide, wanted her to return his call. Robbie Harris, better known as Bartlett, spoke maddeningly in quotations. The day was young but already wearing on Frank. She didn’t feel up to dealing with Harris or his irritating quirk, but unlike most of the other LASD dicks, Harris was always affable and willing to share information. Probably, she imagined, just so he’d have a fresh audience. Frank gritted her teeth after finishing with the MT and called him.
“Ah-ha!,” he answered. “You know what Nietzsche said about women don’t you?”
” ‘Fraid I’m about to find out.”
“If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her, and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.”
“Charming. Did you call just to tell me that or is there actually something I can help you with?”
“Brrr,” Harris responded, ” ‘Thou art all ice. Thy kindness freezes.’ Shakespeare,” he sighed. “Say, Doc Lawless tells me you got a stiff missing some body parts, few weeks back. That so?”
Frank took a patient breath. When he wasn’t speaking in quotes, Harris tended to sound like a cop from a 1940’s B-movie.
“You mean the kid missing his liver?”
“Yeah, that’s the one, sister. I got a vie over here missing his heart. Thought there might be a link. You mind if I come over and look at your notes.”
“Help yourself. I’ll tell Briggs you’re coming.”
“Ah, Briggs. A man I’m sure who believes that work is the curse of the drinking classes.”
“Anything else, Robbie?”
“Eliot said it, but it’s so true in our case, that in every parting there is an image of death. Let me leave you with this — ‘the individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.’ Whaddaya say?”
“Goodbye.”
Frank returned one more call, then Foubarelle slipped into her office with a pile of make-work designed to make Figueroa look proactive in community relations. After that, Noah and Johnnie needed case reviews. Johnnie requested a day off to take his son to Disneyland on his birthday. Frank denied it, coldly pointing out that Johnnie should have thought about that before he burned all his comp time and sick leave on hangovers. Between phone calls from seemingly every other jurisdiction in southern California, she helped Diego prep for court, talked to lawyers and PDs, and signed off on dozens of forms, requests and reports. This went on until the squad room had at last quieted and emptied, until Frank’s time was finally her own.
She was running through a list of things to do. First was to get his phone records. Second, she had to figure a way to get
a saliva sample from him. Then samples from his closet and his car. Her father had taught her that if she had to hit somebody bigger than herself, hit them so hard they couldn’t get back up. That’s what she intended to do now; hit this son of a bitch with so much evidence he’d be buried alive in it.
The phone rang a couple times but she ignored it. If it was important, the desk would know how to find her. When she heard the quick clack-clack-clack on the stairs she sighed and put her pen down.
“I understand you’ve reassigned your case load,” Foubarelle announced, walking into her office for the second time that day.
Frank nodded, wondering how the hell he’d gotten wind of that.
“And that you’re working that banger girl on your own.”
“Yeah.”
“Would you mind telling me what that’s all about?”
She gave him a version of the song and dance she’d given Bobby.
“I don’t like it, Frank. If this was a high-priority case, or something very sensitive, then that would be different, but it doesn’t look good that a lieutenant is actively working a run-of-the-mill drive-by. You’re not a Detective Three anymore, Frank. You’ve got a squad to run and I don’t want it to suffer because you’re off pursuing leads that are best pursued by the men under you. I want you to give that case back to the detectives who originally handled it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Oh really? Please enlighten me,” he said, spreading his hands expansively.
Frank massaged her ring finger. She wasn’t ready to tell him. She wanted a lot more ammo than she had right now so she tried stalling.
“This isn’t just a drive-by. I think it’s something a little bigger, little more volatile.”
Foubarelle tensed.
“How much bigger?”
“I’d rather not say yet. Until I have more facts I’m just shooting from the hip.”
“How much bigger and how much more volatile?” he repeated, his bluster evaporating.
Frank chewed on the inside of her lip. She’d have to tell him sooner or later. She’d just hoped it was going to be later.
“I think it might be an officer involved incident,” she gave up.