J Bertrand - Back on Murder

“Your what? Jerry Lorenz is in a Bible study? You’re jerking my chain – ”

“No, really. He is. There’s a group of us that meets about once a month. You should come sometime.” She frowns. “Or maybe not.”

“Why were you congratulating him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just now, you said ‘congratulations yourself.’ ”

“Oh that. I meant the baby, obviously.” She stops in her tracks, realizing I have no idea what she’s talking about. “His wife just had a baby. A little boy. Don’t tell me you work with the guy and you don’t know that?”

I shrug. “I guess it never came up.”

We drive back to the derelict house, Cavallo taking advantage of the time to theorize on what it means that I take so little interest in my colleagues’ personal lives. Ignorant of Lorenz’s baby, unaware that her fiancé is overseas. She wonders aloud what else I don’t know, and how with so little curiosity I can honestly call myself a trained observer.

“I’m only interested in people when they’re dead.”

I mean it as a joke, but it doesn’t come out funny. She grows serious, remembering whose death sparked my interest in the current investigation.

The fresh canvass yields nothing, but we do find a small crew of construction workers across the street, trying to square away the damage left by the hurricane. The toppled trailer has been righted and now awaits replacement. In the interest of thoroughness, we have a chat with them, only to discover that half the men present aren’t on the list the contractor finally handed over.

“They might not be on any lists,” Cavallo says afterward, meaning like so many in the industry, they might be illegals.

When we’re done, I take her over to the Morgan St. Café, where the power’s finally back on, treating her over iced coffee to the story of Vance Balinski’s curbside assault. I show her Thomson’s sketchbook and the enlarged cell-phone photo, and seeing her interest is piqued, I take her back to the studio for a look at his intimidating series of busts. Locking up, I’m surprised to find Balinski himself in residence next door, a fat bandage on his nose, a line of stitches running along his bottom lip.

“I’m clearing my place out,” he says. “I can’t get any work done here now, not after what happened.”

His own studio is a tidy, squared-away affair, a couple of large abstract paintings along the wall, a table and stool, an easel for work in progress, and at the back an assortment of finished pieces. I can only see the one in front, which looks to me like a solid field of orange with two fuzzy reddish lines running vertically, dividing it into thirds. It doesn’t look too hard to do, but I refrain from saying so.

“When Thomson gave you that box,” I ask, “did he explain why?”

Balinski moves the paintings on the wall over to the stack in back. “Honestly, we were both pretty baked at the time. He’d been kind of morbid recently, I don’t know how else to describe it, even more obsessive than usual about things. Something had set him off, but I don’t know what. We’d been to a couple of bars, and on the way back over here he said he wanted to give me something. I thought it was a gift at first, and I was telling him he didn’t have to do that, but he said if he didn’t, they might find it. He said they were keeping tabs on him now, because he wasn’t reliable.”

“Who was keeping tabs?”

Balinski shrugs. “Joe never talked about things, and when he did, you couldn’t really ask for more detail, you know? He just said what he said and you listened. That’s what I did, anyway.”

“So he never said who was keeping tabs on him?”

“Well…” He glances around the studio as though he’s misplaced something. “That night he was kind of tripping. He said he’d gotten into something, and they started out dirty but went in clean. He kept repeating it, like he thought I was arguing with him. ‘No, we were dirty at the beginning, but not going in. Going in, we were clean.’ And he was really proud of it, too, whatever it was.”

“Did he say what he was going into?”

“I don’t know what he said, man. It’s not like I was paying close attention or anything. It was all kind of confusing. He was dirty but really he was clean. Whatever. The guy handed me a box full of blow. Then he shot his own head off. It’s not like he was sane or anything.”

We leave him to do his work. Back in the car, Cavallo asks for the sketchbook again, flipping absently through the pages.

“He meant the Morales house, right?” she asks.

“Going in clean? I guess so. They went into the house clean, whatever that means.”

“They went in for the woman. For a righteous cause.”

I nod. “Maybe.”

“But that’s not why they went in the first place.”

“They started out dirty, going for the money or maybe drugs, but they were clean when they went in, meaning their aims changed.” Castro’s computer-generated crime-scene sketches come back to me, the abstract figures transected by red lines. “According to one of the crime-scene investigators, the guys who hit the Morales house showed some tactical sophistication. Maybe they did a little recon first, got the lay of the land – ”

“And saw the woman tied to the bed.”

“Right,” I say.

“And instead of scrubbing the mission, they went in anyway. Not for the loot, but to rescue the victim.”

“Something like that.” I shake my head. “Only it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? The place they decide to stick up just happens to be the one where this woman’s being assaulted? They interrupt the crime in progress, decide to intervene. Seems like a long shot. Besides, these guys aren’t the type. We’re not talking about heroes here. Just the opposite.”

“Yeah, but isn’t that the point of the whole dirty-clean thing?”

There’s something to it, I realize, but Cavallo’s already put a human face on Lorenz. I’m not going to let her humanize Keller and Salazar the same day.

“The point is,” I say, “she’s dead. Whoever she is. And maybe she wouldn’t be if they hadn’t gotten involved. Maybe they’re the ones who put the bullet in her.”

The last time I was at Cypress Community Church, the parking lot was near empty. Now every space marked out on the vast plane of blacktop appears to be filled, with overflow lining the street. Cavallo, dressed head to toe in black, sits beside me in the passenger seat, rubbing her hands nervously against her thighs.

“I don’t think I can face her,” she says.

Maybe she means Hannah. Maybe the mother. I don’t know and I don’t ask.

“If what Bridger says is right,” I say, “there was nothing you could have done. Hannah was dead before you even started to look.”

She nods, but it’s one thing to see the sense in an argument and another to really believe it. The girl’s death has hit her hard, and Cavallo’s not the type to let herself off the hook. I can relate. I feel the same. For me, though, the territory is more familiar. To loved ones, the only promise I can fulfill is to deliver up a suspect. Cavallo works a job where it’s still conceivable to bring the runaways home and set the captives free.

We hike across the boiling pavement, blending in with the other mourners streaming between the rows of cars and trucks, of station wagons, minivans, and sport-utility vehicles, each one gleaming hot in the sun. In parts of the city, the power is back, though more for a visit than a permanent stay. It still flickers back and forth, forcing me to run my generator most nights, though it’s never enough to get the house truly cool. I’ve grown accustomed the past few days to always sweating, always feeling dirty, none of us being quite as presentable as we are when the electricity’s on. I am not as impervious to heat as I’ve always assumed.