Frank Zafiro - Some Degree of Murder

The rookie was stuffing Toni into the back seat of the patrol car as his training officer dropped back into the passenger seat. The rookie climbed into the car, turned off his emergency lights and backed out of the alley. The tires chirped slightly as they drove away.

TOWER

“Gonzalez, huh? Lots of them down here.”

The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Salinas Police Sergeant Roger Kraemer.

“Could you run a local check on my victim, Sergeant? I got her identified off fingerprints and the flag on the hit said something about a misdemeanor arrest in California.”

“Gimme her info,” Sergeant Kraemer grunted.

I gave him her name and birth-date and could hear him typing it into his computer. He asked for the address on her driver’s license. I told him.

He stopped typing. “Her address is on Grant Road? Well, that narrows things down.”

“What do you mean?”

Kraemer coughed away from the phone receiver. “What I mean is, we got ourselves a group of Gonzalez pukes that live on Grant Road who are in trouble all the time.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Stolen property, mostly. They run chop shops once in a while, too.”

“Do you recognize Serena’s name?”

“No,” Kraemer answered. “But I wouldn’t recognize many of them..”

“How about a Lucinda?”

“Nope. Here’s the computer return on your vic, though. Serena Gonzalez. Same date of birth. She shows that address on Grant Road. One arrest at age sixteen, three years ago.”

“Prostitution?”

“Nope. Simple Theft. Victim was a store at the mall.”

“She was fingerprinted off of that?”

“I imagine that whoever popped her for the shoplift saw the last name and the address and figured that if we had a chance to get a Grant Road Gonzalez printed and pictured, we’d better do it.”

“Makes sense.”

“Yeah. Listen, I’m going to have Detective Ernie Williams give you a call back in a little bit. He’s in Auto Theft and Burglary right now and I think he’s been working the Gonzalez family for a while.”

“That’d be helpful. Thanks.”

He grunted and hung up.

I reached for my pen and scribbled some notes. Serena belonged to a family of criminals. My experience with people born into a family like that was that they go one of two ways. They either embrace that lifestyle wholeheartedly and join in the fun, or they reject it utterly. Either way, having the same last name is a curse of sorts. It identifies them forever with that group of criminals, which hampers a criminal career and sullies a straight one.

I paged through my case file to the autopsy photos. They were arranged chronologically, so the early pictures showed Serena in an almost peaceful repose, as if she were asleep with an unnatural stiffness. Her arms lay at her sides and the skin tone was too gray. The stab wounds on her chest and the bruising on her throat were like angry punctuation marks.

I picked up her driver’s license photo and examined it. It showed a sixteen-year-old Serena. Her thick, jet-black hair was teased up and she flashed an excited grin. There was a light in her eyes. Her face still had a slight chubbiness to it, almost as if she hadn’t shed all of her baby fat. Glancing back down at the close-up of her face on autopsy table, she was noticeably thinner, though not unhealthy. But her face held the lines and edges of a woman. The picture on the license was of a girl.

Staring at a picture of her dead, naked body, I tried to envision her alive. I thought of what George and Gina had said about her at the Tip Top. How popular she was. It was plain that she had a nice body. Even in death, her breasts were pert and her stomach flat. I imagined her flashing that same smile from her license photo to the customers at the Tip Top. Any one of them would think he’d hit the lottery. Young, built and with a killer smile. And for a five-dollar drink, she’d spent twenty minutes talking to you.

So this girl, with a criminal family, left Salinas and ended up here in River City. How long did she knock around before she ended up here? Or did she come straight to River City? Did she have friends here?

I thought about the last question. Probably not, I decided. Would she be staying at a motel for a month if she had friends in town? So chances were she came to town knowing no one.

Why? Was she running from something? Someone? Was she trying to leave her family behind? Start fresh? If so, why was she dancing at the Club Tip Top? And lying about it to her cousin?

I fished through my file and found a photocopy of the postcard. Her lie was written on the back with confidence. She wanted them to think she was making good. She was definitely trying to leave her family behind and start something new.

Matt Westboard’s field contact report said that she was a prostitute. I flipped to my copy of that report and read it again. He didn’t describe her flagging down cars or making contacts. Just walking back to her motel from the Tip Top. If she were wearing her work clothes, she’d look like a prostitute. I could see what Westboard would’ve thought. Dressed like a prostitute and walking right down the East Sprague corridor, smack in the middle of Hooker Row. After all, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…

I stood up and poked my head around the cubicle. Browning’s desk was empty. I used his phone to dial Westboard’s department voice mail and left a message for him to call me when got the chance. As I was reciting my telephone extension, I heard my own phone ring.

I hustled around the corner and grabbed it on the third ring. After four, it goes to voice-mail.

“Detective Tower.”

“Detective Tower? Detective Ernie Williams here, Salinas PD. I understand you’re investigating one of the Gonzalez girls.”

“Yeah. Serena Gonzalez. She was murdered.”

He whistled softly. “That’s too bad. She was one of the decent ones.”

“What do you know about her?” I asked.

“Let’s see. Well, she was about eighteen or nineteen. As far as I could tell, she stayed out of the family business.”

“Sergeant Kraemer said she had an arrest for shoplifting a few years ago.”

“Yeah, he mentioned that. But that was just a Simple Theft. No big deal, compared to the rest of her family.”

“I was wondering if she had a lot of contacts with police, even though they didn’t end up being arrests.”

Williams considered for a moment. Then he said, “I would guess she had a few more contacts than your average teenage girl, just because of her name and family. But I don’t remember her being in trouble much.”

“Any prostitution?”

“Huh? No, never. Why?”

“She was stripping at a bar here and living at a motel,” I told him. “Both are in our local red light district.”

“Well, the stripping part doesn’t surprise me. She was working at the Las Estrellas down here for a couple of months last year, after she turned eighteen.”

“Strip club?”

“Not really. Topless joint. Girls on stage strip off their top and wear thongs, but there’s no touching that goes on. It’s a fairly clean place.”

“The girls don’t hook out of there, then?”

“Nah. There’s better places for them to work for that.”

“How well did you know Serena?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know. Okay, I guess. I spoke to her a few times on cases I worked. She was always polite, but dummied up about her family.”

“So she wasn’t part of their business, but she wouldn’t roll on them, either?”

“Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, she was no saint. I dumped out more than a couple of forty-ouncers that she and her friends were drinking. Plus, she was stripping. She just wasn’t into anything heavy, is all.”