J Bertrand - Back on Murder

The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I want to pounce on him, dragging out everything he knows, reaching down his throat with my fist if I have to, but the worst thing I can do is let on that I’m excited, or even interested.

“So you’re sticking up for him now, Coleman?”

“I ain’t stickin’ up for nobody, but if you was in the same kind of bind, you might see it different. You say he didn’t kill Octavio, but if anybody had a reason, it’s him. Man, he loved that girl for real. Drove all the way to New Orleans to get her back, that’s how much. Somebody take your woman like that, like she just another installment on the payment plan, what you gonna do then? Yeah, he killed him.”

“He didn’t,” I say.

Now he looks confused. “He told me he was gonna. I talked to him right after he left Octavio. He said he gave over the money – not all he owed, but a nice chunk he got from moving some product – and Octavio, he goes, ‘That’s a pretty little thing. She can stay here and work some debt off, too.’ And I go, ‘What you gonna do?’ I thought maybe he was wanting me to back his play, only that’s not my thing, right? But he’s all like, ‘I got it handled already. I got it taken care of.’ ”

“You thought he meant he was going to kill Octavio?”

He looks at me like I’m wearing a dunce cap. “What else you think he meant? Like I said, you’d do the same thing.”

“Where’s he stay, Coleman?”

“Listen,” he says. “Since I been in here, I been thinking. So what if he’s snitching to the police, huh? He’s all right. What I said, that was words spoken in anger, without due consideration. I don’t wish nobody no ill. There ain’t no hate in me at all, not no more. It’s wrong to be a snitch, and it’s for sure wrong to leave that girl behind instead of throwin’ down right there, but what’s he gonna do? Answer me that. He said there’s, like, four or five of ’em, and they got guns.”

“Coleman, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen good. I’m not talking about Octavio Morales, and I’m not talking about Little Evey, either. The girl he killed was somebody else, a friend of hers. He shot her. He shot her three times with a.22. Right here” – I mark the spot on my own body with a fingertip – “and right here. And then he put the barrel against her temple and put the last one right here. In cold blood, Coleman. Now, are you going to sit here and try to defend that, or are you going to tell me where he stays?”

But he’s not ready to roll over yet. “Why he done it?”

“Does it matter why?”

He clamps a hand over his mouth, looking down at the table through slitted eyelids. I sit there and let him stew. Whatever I can say, I’ve said it already. The rest is up to him. If Cavallo were back at the table, she could try to work on his sympathies. She could whip out that cross of hers and tell him if he wants to get right with Jesus, it’s time to talk. But all I can do is level with him man to man and hope it’s enough. Part of me wishes she would walk back in so the burden wouldn’t rest on me alone. But she’s not going to sit here and be spoken to like that any more than I could sit through Hannah Mayhew’s funeral, thinking of my own girl in the casket the whole time.

“Listen,” he says, then lets out that sweet long sigh every interrogator will tell you is music to the ears, the sound that means he’s about to give it all up. “The thing is, there ain’t no one place he stays. But I know a couple you can check. He’s got this cousin named Tito – ”

“We know about that. He isn’t there.”

“All right. Did that cousin tell you he’s gotta van? Frank borrows it sometimes, and when they was looking for him that’s what he’d do, just pull over somewhere and sleep in the van.”

“We’ve got the van,” I say.”

He nods. “Before he start paying him again. That’s why he went, to get clear of the man. He was like, ‘I’ll pay you, but you gotta leave me be.’ Only that ain’t how it worked out, I guess.”

“Besides the van, where would he stay?”

“There’s some motels he’d go when he had money. And a couple of people he might stay with sometimes – including me, before this happened.” He jerks the cuffs again. “Give me that notepad and I’ll write some things down.”

I slide the legal pad across to him along with a pen. He hunches over and starts writing. I should feel relief, even optimism, but the longer it takes the less likely it is that Rios will be holed up at any of the locations. I was hoping he’d have a fixed abode, some kind of hideout known only to him and Coleman where we were sure to find him.

He hands the pad back.

“Now, Mr. March, on account of all this cooperation here, you gotta do something for me, right?”

I stand and head for the door. “I can put in a good word – ”

He laughs. “Whatever. That ain’t what I mean. Listen here. My grandma, every Saturday morning she walks over to Emancipation Park and sits on a bench there. She reads her psalm and she prays, probably for me. She can’t come up here, and me… well, I don’t like to call from here, neither. But you could tell her a message for me.”

“What message?”

“That everything’s all right,” he says. “Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I go to church every Sunday and sing in the choir.”

“Do you?” I ask.

He rolls his eyes. “You can tell her that, man. I helped you out.”

“Fine,” I say, tapping the edge of the pad against the table. “I’ll tell her.”

Cavallo waits outside, arms crossed, still steaming from Coleman’s earlier baiting. She asks what I got out of him and I tell her. When she hears I’m supposed to assure the grandmother that he’s a choirboy, she snorts in derision.

“There must be a different definition inside.”

While detectives from my squad work Coleman’s list, trying to bring Frank Rios to heel, and Lieutenant Bascombe sweats Jiménez personally in Interview Room 1, I pay a visit to the crime lab garage, where the white panel van has been carefully gone over, every surface scrutinized, every fascia removed for testing. The technician walks me through the results. The dried specks we saw through the window are indeed blood, and Luminol tests show smears all over the interior, especially under the plywood.

“He scrubbed it out pretty good,” the tech says, “but when I shined the black light on it, the floor just lit up.”

Removing the plywood, he also recovered a single spent shell, a tiny, crimped.22 caliber casing. Rios knew to collect them, but missed one in the rush.

“When we unloaded the painting supplies, we also found rolls of plastic they use as drop cloths. We’re seeing if we can match the ragged edge up with the sheet her body was rolled in. Might not work, but it’s worth a try.”

I nod in agreement. “What about the gun?”

“No sign of it.”

Back upstairs, a group of spectators is camped out in the monitor room, watching Bascombe’s performance.

“How’s he doing?” I ask.

Ordway sits up front, paws folded over his belly. “He’s just staring at the poor man. It’s unbelievable. Tito talks and the lieutenant just stares him down, so Tito talks some more.”

“Anything good?”

“He’s admitted to keeping a Ruger.22 under the seat of the van.”

“It’s not there now.”

He nods. “He says it’s got to be Rios who took it.”

“Does he know where Rios is staying?”

“Naw, but he offered to go undercover and find him.”

“For real?”

“The man’s desperate at this point. He also says Rios might have hightailed it back to Old Mexico.”