The Perfect Suspect

by Margaret Coel

  “Tell ’em to stick it.” There was the sound of booze and some kind of narcotics in the muffled voice.

  Ryan walked down the hall, jammed herself between the man and the door and gripped the knob. She threw the door open onto a room packed with more debris, piles of dirty, worn clothes, chairs pushed together, a narrow bed nearly lost under tossed blankets and pillows. Devon sat against the headboard, a blanket pulled up to his waist, a girl with dyed blond hair beside him, both swallowing the smoke from the reefers between their fingers. Clouds of marijuana smoke rolled around the room.

  “Get out,” Ryan said to the girl who might or might not be a juvenile. It was hard to tell, with the hollowed face and the black raccoon heroin eyes.

  The girl let out a little whimper, like a lost puppy. It was pitiful the way she glanced up at Devon who had pulled his back straight against the headboard, shoulders at the top of the girl’s blond head.

  “Do it,” he said, not bothering to look at her. He waited until she had slid off the bed, skinny arms and legs and knobby spine, cutoff jeans and a cropped Rockies tee shirt that exposed her belly button. She moved like a cat, slinking around the dirty clothes that littered the floor, almost jumping for the door. Smoke curled out of the fist she had made over the joint.

  “What right you got comin’ around?” Devon said. “I ain’t done nothing.”

  Ryan kicked the door shut behind her. “How you been?” she said. “Haven’t seen you for a while. What? A good two months now since we talked about that gang shooting over on Lincoln Street. Terrill Monroe and Lee Balsam. Remember them? Cutting into your territory, right, so they had to be stopped.”

  He reached around to a small table and snuffed out the joint on a chipped saucer. “You said we had a deal. Nobody needed to know what went down there.”

  “You remember the condition, Devon. I said I might be needing your help some time.”

  “You want me dead? That why you come around now? They see you come in here . . .” He threw his head in the direction of the front of the house. “I’m a walking dead man. I’m gonna be in the Dumpster tomorrow.”

  “You tell ’em I’m looking into random assaults on the mall and up and down LoDo. Got the citizens and tourists real upset, thinking about black gangs roaming around assaulting folks just because they happen to be white. That’s got businesses real upset, too. People might get reluctant to go to restaurants downtown. Now that’s a shame. Anything you might know about that?”

  “I never heard nothing. Maybe they come out of Aurora. You think about that?”

  “I’m thinking it could be you and your buddies outside,” Ryan said. “Just like you and your buddies took care of the problems on Lincoln Street.” Sweat had started to bubble on his forehead, and Ryan pushed on. “Detective Bustamante, you know who I’m talking about? He went to L.A. to talk to your homeboys. He’s on to what went down, Devon. That should give you the shakes. He thinks somebody gave the order to take out Monroe and Balsam, and he thinks you and your boys know who it is and you’ve been covering up.” She was bluffing, guessing at all of it. “Things are going to hell for you soon as he gets to the bottom of it. Conspiracy charges, accessories to homicide, impeding a lawful investigation,” she said, pulling her fingers one at a time. “You guys have been running wild. You think you’re unstoppable. I can have you all pulled in tonight, see who wants to save his dirty soul by giving up everybody else. All I have to do is call Bustamante, give him some names, tell him what you told me last time we talked.” She waited a moment, giving the threat time to work its way past the sweat-bathed forehead. “Or you can do me a favor and maybe I won’t help Bustamante with his investigation.”

  Devon lifted his eyes and stared at her. White flecks of light shone in his black pupils. “I told you before, don’t come around. I’m not snitching.”

  “Come off it, Devon,” she said. “You’ve already snitched out your buddies. You want to take your chances with Bustamante down at headquarters? He’s gonna be real unhappy to learn he went all the way to L.A. for information he could have gotten from you, right here under his nose.”

  “What do you want?” He shifted about, gathering the blanket and pulling it closer, and she realized he was naked.

  “A gun. .38 or bigger. Pistol, revolver, I don’t care, as long as it’s loaded and untraceable.”

  “Go somewhere else.” He held a wad of blanket at his waist. “Go talk to some fool that don’t know that soon’s the cops get their claws in you, you’re a dead man.”

  “Bustamante’s real disappointed. I saw him after he got back. Ten days in L.A. and nothing definite to show for it? You can see how eager he’ll be to get some solid information. He pulls you in, your buddies are gonna think you’re talking, even if you keep your mouth shut. Guy that gave the order will probably give another order, only your name will be on it.”

  “I get you a gun, you give me your word you don’t come around again?”

  “Now, Devon, why would I ever do that? I’ll give you my word that every time I come around, there will be something in it for you. I like fair, and that’s fair.”

  He was looking at her with slit eyes, hatred shooting out like laser beams. “I need a week,” he said.

  “You have an hour.”

  “You’re smoking, Beckman. What planet you live on?”

  “One hour. I’ll be waiting at the Tiger Diner. You know the place? I’ll be inside trying to choke down the swill they call coffee. The black sedan out in front will be parked at the side where there aren’t any lights. I’m going to make it real easy for you. The passenger window will be rolled down. You show up at exactly—” She glanced at her watch. “At exactly eleven-forty and drop the package onto the seat. You don’t drive to the diner. You walk up the alley where you won’t be seen. You leave the same way. Got it?”

  “It’s gonna cost you a grand. It better be on the seat.”

  “No. No. No.” Ryan folded her arms and shook her head. She felt as if she were a teacher with a particularly dim student. “Let’s go over it again. You bring the package, and in return, you won’t be arrested for the gang shooting or any of the assaults on the mall or in LoDo your boys have been up to. Look at it like a stay-out-of-the-way-of-Bustamante ticket. I’m buying you time to clean up your acts, get your stories straight, work out your alibis so if Bustamante ever does come calling . . .”

  “You just said you’d call him off.”

  “Wrong again. What I said was I wouldn’t sic him on you.”

  Devon didn’t say anything, his bare chest rising and falling. He was like a trapped animal, shifting about, as if he wanted to jump off the bed and run out of the room. “Bitch,” he said under his breath.

  “I’m your best friend,” she said. “I’m the only thing between you and Detective Bustamante.”

  “What difference does it make whether it’s you or Bustamante talking to me. I’m a dead man.”

  “Fifty-six minutes now,” Ryan said. She swung about, pulled open the door and walked back through the house, looking straight ahead past the gang members stationed around the trash in the front room, the wiry, black-eyed blonde. There were others out on the porch. She went down the steps and looked back: “I’m putting the word out on the street that you’re all snitches,” she said.

  She took her time walking across the dirt yard and sliding into the black sedan. She could feel their eyes drilling into her back. The adrenaline rush pounded through her. She felt high, weightless. It was all she could do not to throw her head back and laugh.

  15

  Ryan took the far corner booth where she had a clear view of the parking lot in front of the diner and the nighttime traffic streaming past. The lot was empty except for a semi parked at the corner and a brown sedan with cardboard stuck in a rear window. The trucker worked on a plate of fried eggs and bacon and sipped on coffee at the counter. In the booth near the door, a young couple sat with their arms stretched around hamburger baskets and soda gl
asses, hands clasped together in the middle of the table. Teenagers, with a weary, hangdog look, worn jeans and tee shirts and straggly hair, and a deadness of experience about them.

  She felt invisible, a hidden camera watching life unfold in the diner, parsing the stories. Behind the counter was a big-stomached woman with thin gray hair tucked back in the kind of hair net Ryan remembered her mother wearing when she went off to work at the bakery. The trucker just off I-70 on a cross-country run with a load of lettuce or chickens or tires or lumber or who knew what. The teenage couple, broke and desperate, on their last dime, the type that might rob a bank tomorrow, if they didn’t rob the diner tonight. The idea of squad cars, sirens and firing lights converging on the parking lot and Detective Ryan Beckman on the premises gave her a sharp twinge, as if she’d been jabbed by the point of a knife. She forced herself to look away, as if she might transfer the idea by watching the couple, and sipped at her coffee. A stale, bitter taste coated her tongue. She had pulled on the sweatshirt she kept in the office for undercover work, tied her hair into a roll at the base of her neck, and bunched the hoodie around her neck. The woman behind the counter had hardly glanced her way when Ryan ordered coffee, black. She had carried the full mug over to the booth. She was nobody.

  She glanced at her watch. Five more minutes and the package should be on the passenger seat. She had left the car in the shadows next to the building. No one driving past would notice a man darting out of the alley and dropping a package across the rim of a car door. Devon would deliver. He had no choice. He’d spilled his guts to her after the killings—a conscientious snitch, Devon. Asked for a meeting in an alley, strung out, needing a fix bad. She’d given him fifty bucks and he’d laid out the whole scenario with names, dates, places. Who gave the orders, who carried them out. She had told him to sit tight, keep his mouth shut. She had no intention of passing on the information from her snitch to Detective Bustamante. Let him chase himself around. Devon wouldn’t last a day on the streets if word got out he was pulled in for interrogation, and Devon was worth more to her alive than dead.

  She left some bills on the table and walked past the couple still clasping hands, past the thick, curved back and stubbly neck of the trucker. Outside she hurried around to the sedan. She could see the package on the seat as she got behind the wheel—bulky, wrapped in newspaper. It might have been five pounds of sausage. She fingered the hard rounded edges of the barrel, then drove down the alley, out onto the dark, empty side street, and headed for the tall buildings with lights blinking against the midnight sky.

  Jeremy Whitman’s building stretched over a corner in LoDo. Glass-door entry under a canopy, flare of lights. Traffic was almost nonexistent, and only a few stragglers still out on the sidewalks. Most of the bars would be closed soon; the restaurants had stopped serving an hour ago. The dead time of night, she thought. She slowed past the entry and glanced past the glass door. A uniformed security guard sat behind the counter across the entry. She rounded the corner and turned up the alley in back of the building, peering over the steering wheel for a door she might be able to unlock. The door was there, wedged between a Dumpster and what she took for a mound of trash, until the trash moved and she realized a homeless person had bedded down for the night. It didn’t matter. A building like this, with security at the front, would be wired throughout. She might open the door without waking the homeless person, but the siren would wake the entire building.

  She circled around toward the front door again, weighing her options, none of which looked good. She could hardly march into the entry, flash her badge and tell the guard she wanted to see Jeremy Whitman. Not only would the guard know who had come looking for Jeremy, she would be caught on the security cameras that probably covered the entry. There were other security cameras in LoDo, she knew. The HALO, High Activity Location Observation, video cameras the department had placed around the neighborhood after the outbreak of random assaults. She had to be careful and park beyond the range of the cameras.

  She could phone Jeremy and ask him to come outside. Tell him that she and Detective Martinez wanted to speak with him. Jeremy wasn’t likely to agree to see her alone, not after he had recognized her this afternoon. She had to believe he wasn’t stupid. And what if he weren’t alone? Some wide-eyed, David Mathews volunteer up in the loft—male or female; it could be either with Jeremy, she suspected—mourning the death of the almighty leader, trying to comfort each other. Jeremy would tell the volunteer who he was going to meet, which wasn’t acceptable.

  She pulled the hoodie up over her head and low on her forehead as she circled through LoDo, playing out the scenarios in her mind. Jeremy Whitman lived in a castle, an old brick building with concrete floors and two-foot-thick brick walls with Hudson splashed across the south wall, as impenetrable as if a mote of alligators circled outside. There was no way to get inside without being caught on some camera, no way to make it look like a home invasion gone bad where Jeremy Whitman happened upon the invader and ended up dead. She had to lure him outside the mote.

  She was on the outskirts of LoDo. Somehow she had wandered into Five Points, Denver’s historic black neighborhood with jazz clubs and barbeque joints, the whole neighborhood undergoing rejuvenation now, Victorian homes looking new and stately. She pulled into the deserted parking lot of a strip mall, her headlights running like fire across a row of black windows. For a second, words came to life: “Pizza, Nails, Insurance, Used Books.”

  The cell phone she dug out of her bag felt cheap and lightweight, a piece of innocuous plastic not made to last any longer than necessary, which was perfect. A trick she had learned from David, and hadn’t David mastered all the tricks? Pay cash for a cheap throwaway cell at some store where you never shop and no one has ever seen you before. Use the cell for calls you don’t want traced. After a week stomp the cell into pieces and ditch the pieces in a Dumpster. She tapped in the home number for Jeremy Whitman that she’d gotten at campaign headquarters and watched the small screen blink and fade out in the light from the dashboard.

  “Jeremy here.” The name was slurred and faint against the bar noise in the background. Undercurrents of conversations, clinking glasses, a ringing phone.

  Ryan hesitated. She had assumed he was at home, safely tucked away in the castle loft. But he was still at a bar. She shut the phone, aware of the adrenaline pumping through her. She pulled the hoodie low over her forehead, then jammed her foot on the accelerator, wheeled out of the lot and headed for the castle. The cell started ringing. God, Jeremy was calling back. She fumbled with the buttons and managed to shut it off. She would have to get rid of the cell tonight. Jeremy could be starting home now. She could picture him hurrying along the sidewalk, crossing the street at the corner, dodging under the canopy into the entry. Smiling and waving at the guard, stepping into the elevator. And she was blocks away. She pushed the accelerator to fifty, sixty, squealing around the corners, then forced herself to slow down. There couldn’t be any record of her being pulled over. How would she answer the questions? What were you doing in the neighborhood when one of Mathews’s staffers was shot?

  She kept the sedan at the speed limit through LoDo. The bars had let out, and groups of people were wandering about, weaving across the middle of the streets, calling to one another through the traffic. She looked hard for the tall, slim, muscle-knotted man with blond hair who had stared at her this afternoon and looked away, a mixture of recognition and fear blossoming on his pink face. He was nowhere.

  Ryan parked two blocks away from the Hudson building. The video cameras, she knew, stopped at the next block. She pulled back the layers of newspaper on the package until the .38 Ruger, black and shiny, new looking, was exposed and slipped it inside the pocket of her sweatshirt. For an instant, she stepped back in time. She was a rookie cop in Minneapolis, walking the streets and once in a while drawing a surveillance, the kind of assignment that had allowed her to prove herself and had gotten her promoted.

  She got out and, st
aying close to the buildings, hunched inside herself, she made her way toward the Hudson building. Even when the cameras picked her up, she would be nothing more than a dark shadow moving against brick walls. She had a clear view of the glass front door, the overhead lights flaring across the sidewalk, from the doorway she ducked into. After only a few moments, she saw Jeremy Whitman lurching down the sidewalk toward her. He was alone. Every few steps, he pressed his shoulder against the wall for a moment before pushing off. He was drunk, and that made things easier. She waited until he was at the doorway, then she stepped out. “Hello, Jeremy,” she said, keeping her shoulders hunched, turned in on herself, away from the cameras.

  He did a series of rapid eye blinks, as if he were trying to conceal the fact that he recognized her. The smell of alcohol poured off him like the odor of a wet cat. He took a couple of steps backward, then tried to lurch past, but she took hold of his arm and held him in place. The hard knots of his muscles meant nothing; he was drunk. She could topple him with one shove. She smiled at the idea, and that seemed to unnerve him even more. He rammed his arm toward her, as if he could push his way through a crowd. “Get away from me,” he said.

  “I want to talk to you.” Ryan stayed in front of him, still hunched forward. His eyes darted about, as if he expected someone to materialize out of the brick walls and whisk him away. “We have a great deal in common. We both loved David Mathews.”

  He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork. He licked at his lips, gathering courage, she guessed, before he said, “You were at his house when he was killed.”

  She could feel herself still smiling. “That is ridiculous.” He had surmised more than she anticipated. Somehow he had placed her at the house. The image of the dark figure on the sidewalk floated before her. Jeremy Whitman on his way to David’s house last night? Oh, this was perfect. She had thought there were two people who might link her to David, but there was only one, the scared, drunk guy in front of her reeking of alcohol and fear. Tonight she would solve both problems.