J Bertrand - Back on Murder

“You know what to do, ladies,” Bascombe calls out.

We’re detectives, so we do what we always do. Knock on doors. Ask questions. Throw our weight around. It’s not hard to find out which door belongs to Tito the Painter, or that his real name is Tito Jiménez, and he has a little cousin who sometimes stays with him. We congregate in front of his door, ready for anything.

“March,” the lieutenant says. “You do the honors.”

Jiménez opens right away, throwing the door wide, no apprehension. He shields his eyes from the sunlight, confused by the sudden appearance of so many hpd detectives on his doorstep, but he doesn’t panic or run, doesn’t try to slam the door on our faces. He’s older than I expected, in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a belly that strains against his white T-shirt, and skin the same shade of yellow-tan as a shade-grown Connecticut cigar wrapper.

“Is this your van out here?” I ask.

He nods.

“Is your cousin here?”

“Frank? He don’t stay here no more.”

“No?”

He pushes his bottom lip out. “I told him to leave. He had this girl here living with him, and I said, ‘If you’re man enough for a live-in girlfriend, you’re man enough to pay your own rent.’ I didn’t like her here, always messing everything up.”

A glance over his shoulder suggests the standards of tidiness haven’t improved. I flip through my notebook, pulling a photo of Evangeline Dyer – not the postmortem snap Thomson took, but one Robb provided, Evey and Hannah in happier times, before the Dyers returned to Louisiana. It’s folded over so only Evangeline’s face shows, the part not obscured by her hair.

“Is that the girlfriend?” I ask.

He pauses to study the picture. The silence is so intense over my shoulder I know I’m not the only one holding his breath. Jiménez hands the photo back, nostrils flaring.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s her.”

I ask him where Rios and the girl went after he kicked them out, but he claims to have no idea. According to him, they aren’t that close, him and his cousin. Rios showed up one day saying some dudes he owed money to had taken his car and ransacked his old apartment, stealing a lot of his stuff. Before that, they hadn’t had anything to do with each other.

“Who did he owe money to?” I ask.

He shrugs, not because he doesn’t know, but because he doesn’t want to say the name, afraid of getting involved. I push him, and when that doesn’t focus the man’s attention, Bascombe steps forward, all six foot four of him, lowering his sunglasses in slow motion.

“Dude by the name of Octavio Morales,” Jiménez says. “Bad dude, but not anymore.”

“He’s dead now.”

Jiménez nods uncomfortably.

“What do you know about that?”

Up to now, he’s been forthcoming, but the painter suddenly loses all interest in talking. I can’t tell if he knows something and doesn’t want to say, or if he’s just afraid of being dragged into a court case, running the risk of having to testify. Either way, he’s obstinate, so Bascombe decides to wrap things up.

“Mr. Jiménez, we’re gonna have to ask you to come downtown. We’re seizing the van, too. Detective Lorenz, you wanna call us a tow truck, son?”

“On it, sir.”

Before he knows what hit him, Jiménez is cuffed for his own safety and baking in the back seat of my parked car. We take a quick look inside – we’ll be back soon enough with a warrant for a more thorough search – and then gather at the van, not opening the doors or even touching the handles, leaving everything for the forensics team to go over in detail. But we can’t help peering through the glass. Ordway goes around back, using his flashlight to peer inside.

“Boys,” he says.

We join him, taking turns glancing through. A sheet of plywood lies in back, a makeshift floor, with ladders and buckets and rollers stacked high. Along the side, though, near the sliding door, there’s a crawl space cleared from front to back. The white metal between the plywood and the door is marked with specks of dried liquid that look black from here.

“That could be paint,” Aguilar says.

“Yeah.” Bascombe adjusts his sunglasses. “It might also be blood. Anybody want to bet?”

Nobody does. We’re all thinking the same thing. We might not have found our killer yet, but we’re standing just outside the crime scene.

“You look good in orange, Coleman. It suits you.”

He responds to my jibe with a tug of the wrist, drawing the handcuffs securing him to the interview table taut.

“At least loosen them a little bit,” he sighs.

“Sorry about that, but last time we met, you got pretty rowdy. It’s for your own good. I don’t want all those deputies outside to have to come in here. They didn’t look too fond of you, to be honest. Here I was thinking you were a trusty, some kind of model prisoner.”

“You the one who put me back in here,” he says. “Don’t expect a man to make your life easier when all you do is make his harder.”

“I’m not asking you to make my life easier. I just want you to make it harder for Frank Rios. Remember him?”

Coleman’s brow lowers and his cheeks puff up. He remembers.

“Looked to me like you knew him pretty good,” I say. “Where’s he stay, huh?”

He smiles at the question, shakes his head. “Hey, send that other cop back in here, man. At least she’s pretty to look at.”

“I would, but she’s sensitive. I don’t think she appreciated what you said.”

“It was a compliment, man.” He gives a one-handed shrug, jiggling the handcuff again. “You can’t lock a man up like this and expect him not to say nothing when a piece of that walks through the door.”

“Oh, I’m sure she was flattered.”

It’s been five minutes since Cavallo walked out, either feigning offense or really feeling it. Either way, we’d been getting nowhere and he was using her presence as an excuse. Things needed a little shaking up.

“The way it’s supposed to work,” he says, “is I have something you want, so you give me something I want in return. Like a trade, man. Why I gotta explain all this?”

“I thought I had something you want. Revenge. You told Rios he’d be dead, so as long as he’s out there enjoying life, he’s making a fool of you. Now, if I knew where he stays, then he’d be in here, too, and maybe the two of you could work out your issues.”

“Our issues? You mean, like therapy?”

“Something like that.”

“So let me get this straight. The trade you’re offering is, I tell you where to find him, and you’ll send him to jail so I can shank him? They gettin’ all this on tape, man?” He laughs at his joke. “Here’s what I don’t get, though. When they made it a crime to snitch out your homeboys? You ain’t gonna send a man to jail for that. So what he done, man? You at least gotta tell me that.”

“You want to know what he did?”

“Man, how many times I gotta say it? Yeah, I wanna know.”

“You want me to tell you?”

He throws up his free hand, slumping back in his chair. “Mr. March, you didn’t used to be this slow. What happened, you have a stroke or something? Can’t you understand plain English no more?”

“Murder,” I say.

He sits forward, eyes narrowing. “Who he killed?”

“Nobody you know.”

“That boy Octavio? I heard about that.”

“No, not him.”

“Who then?”

“A girl, Coleman. He killed a teenage girl.”

His eyebrows raise. “He killed her? You talking literal or metaphorical? ’Cause I don’t think literally he killed nobody. It’s Little Evey you talking about, right? The one always followin’ him around.” He shakes his head. “I mean, what he done, it’s bad, but it ain’t the same as killin’.”