Wendy Hornsby - Bad Intent

When I zoomed in on Guido’s face and snapped a few frames, the woman detective decided to notice me.

“You with the coroner?” she asked. She had a pen poised over a metal clipboard.

Before I had figured out what to say, I felt a firm hand grip my elbow. I turned to find one of Mike’s former partners, Hector Melendez, with his detective shield showing over his jacket pocket.

“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said to me, and winked. The woman detective still had her pen poised. To her he said, “Excuse us,” and walked me back toward the sidewalk.

Mike often talked about Melendez and their adventures together on uniform patrol as rookie cops, and in bars after hours, then, later, when they had families, working part-time security jobs to earn enough to cover their first mortgage payments. I knew all I needed to know about Melendez: Mike trusted him.

Melendez had a tall, spare frame that carried no excess; a distance runner, like Mike. I thought he looked awfully sharp for a middle-of-the-night roll-out, loafers with a spit polish, crisp shirt, silk tie carefully knotted, a professorial tweed jacket. Certainly a few cuts above the generic cheap suits favored by most of his colleagues.

He took me around to the far side of his plain city car. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Melendez said. He tucked a large manila envelope under my arm. “Don’t open this now. Give it to Mike. I’m going to hang around for a while. You need anything, whistle.”

Melendez walked away into the shadows. I knew Mike had called him out to keep an eye on me. I didn’t mind being watched over, and my brief conversation with him seemed to have been sufficient to establish my credentials with the detectives.

Various official types arrived in groups, most of them forensics lab people. They were all, like me, sleepy-eyed and casually dressed. I stayed out of their way.

Another black and white car pulled up. The driver officer was a big woman, looked like a power lifter. She and her partner could have passed for twins in the inadequate light. They were about the same height and weight, and the body armor under their shirts gave them nearly the same chest; flattened hers, padded his. The standard police equipment hanging from their Sam Browne belts made them walk with the same heavy, wide-armed gait every uniformed cop has. I found something very sexy about their androgyny and lifted my camera to capture them.

They had escorted to the scene a painfully thin, scantily attired young woman. She looked like a hooker, but she wasn’t under arrest. At least, she wasn’t handcuffed. Guido, with his videocamera taping, went straight to the newcomers, leading the detectives. I managed to maneuver myself in beside him.

“Get the officers with the girl,” I said to Guido. “They look good, don’t they? Mr. and Mrs. Cerberus guarding the gates to hell. Or, in this case, guarding one tiny flower of the night.”

The woman detective conducted the field interview. “What is your name?” she asked the young woman.

“Gloria Griffin.” Very straightforward. This flower had been through police questioning before.

“What can you tell us about what happened to Hanna Rhodes?”

Looking straight into Guido’s lens, and without much prompting, this is the story Gloria Griffin told:

“Me and Hanna been partying at a rock house on Hickory Street. We were there, off and on, for three days. She said someone was looking for her and she was laying low, you know, staying off the streets a while.”

“Did she say who was looking for her?”

Gloria shook her head. “I figure she owe some dealer. Around midnight, one o’clock, somewhere around there, she went out on the street to make some money, to buy her some more crystal. I went out with her. She walk up one side of Wilmington, I walk up the other, you know, going in opposite directions, but close enough so we could holler back and forth. I got me a date first and drove away with him.

“I was gone fifteen, twenty minutes when my date left me off again. I saw Hanna was talkin’ to some dude in a blue car. Then she started to run away. She come down here by the school, lookin’ for a way to get through the fence into the school yard. The blue car followed her. I see the dude get out of the car. I hear him lettin’ two off, I see the flames shoot outta the end of his gun. Hanna don’t say nothin’, she just fall right down. This man, he revved up some and then he was gone. Then I see Hanna get up and start runnin’ again. Come here across the street. That’s all I saw.”

I was close enough to Gloria Griffin to smell something like ether on her breath, the sharp doctor’s-office smell of the cocaine freebaser. I asked, “Did you see the driver of the car?”

“Not close,” she said, gazing across the street where the shooting had occurred before she turned her attention back to me. “When Hanna start runnin’, I don’t want to get too close. I’m thinkin’ maybe this guy she owe money to has come collectin’. Somethin’ like that.”

The detective gave me the evil eye that meant she was in charge. She resumed the interview. “What did you do when you realized Hanna Rhodes had been shot?”

“Girlfriend was scared. I run back to the house on Hickory Street. I had me some money then, so I got me some rock and smoked it.”

“How do you feel right now?” I asked her.

“Mellow,” she said, smiling. I hoped that it wasn’t so dark that the tape wouldn’t pick up the unfocused look she gave me. “I feel okay.”

The detective asked, “Can you describe the car? Make? Model? Age?”

“That’s the one.” Gloria turned and pointed to Mike’s blue Blazer.

I knew where Mike was at the time of the shooting, snoring beside my ear. Still, I felt very uneasy about Gloria pointing out his car. I felt very uneasy about anything that tended to tie Mike to this mess of a situation. Gloria was bombed, kept snapping her head up to hang in with us. The Blazer was the only civilian car within her range of vision: how easy to tag it when she didn’t have another answer. I said, “Late model, American-made, four-wheel-drive car.”

“Whatever you say,” she said. “It was that one.”

As Guido turned the camera toward Mike’s car, I put up my hand and stopped him. He gave me a funny look, but he turned back around.

“Thank you, Miss Griffin,” the detective said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but we need you to identify the body.”

The officers who had brought Gloria walked her up on the porch and had her look at Hanna’s face. I stayed back because I didn’t want to see it. Guido went right in with Gloria, his lens following her point of view, then pulling back to catch her reaction. I was still worried about the lighting. Guido and his techno friends at UCLA could do some computer enhancement, but low light punched up electronically always came out looking artificial. Flat.

Hanna must not have looked like a party under that sheet, because Gloria Griffin was nearly overcome when she took her look. With her hand over her mouth, she fled the porch. The roots of an old sycamore tree pushing up through the sidewalk tripped her, made her fall against the trunk of the tree. I heard her swear, and I saw her take something from the pocket of her shorts and put it into her mouth. Could have been anything, but it seemed to make her feel better.

Hector Melendez had seen her take it, too. When I sort of ambled in her direction, Hector Melendez sort of ambled along with me.

Gloria’s hand shook too much for her to connect the match in her hand with the cigarette she put between her lips. I took the matchbook from her and lit the cigarette.

“Pretty bad?” I asked.

“Shit,” she exhaled, leaning against the tree for support. “How well did you know Hanna?”