Steve Martini - The Rule of Nine

“Lemme get this straight.” Snyder’s looking down at the pad in front of him, scrawled notes. “If the fingerprint found at the scene here in Southern California belongs to this guy Liquida, then he also owns the print on the back of your card in Jimmie’s wallet. If so, that means he did both murders.”

I shrug my shoulders. “I assume that’s what the cops are operating on. But your guess is as good as mine. Now you know everything I know.”

“Not quite,” says Joselyn. “What’s your connection to this man?”

“Who?” I look at her like a spotted owl caught in the headlights of a lumber truck.

“This Liquida. What’s your connection to him?”

“None. What makes you think there’s a connection?”

“Well, he didn’t take my card and put it in Jimmie’s wallet,” she says. “Why would he pick you?”

“Who knows?” Any second she’s going to lean over and sniff the sweat on my forehead, analyze the acid content in her gas chromatograph, and her buzzer will go off.

“It’s possible he could be an unhappy former client,” she says. “Didn’t like the result, got out of prison, and used your card as a kind of consumer complaint.” Joselyn looks at Snyder. “Sorry. I don’t mean to make light of your son’s death.”

“No. I wanna hear.” Snyder is all eyes at me.

“No. I don’t think he’s a former client,” I say.

“Why not?” she says.

“Yeah,” says Snyder, both of them waiting for an answer.

Harry looks at me as he fills his face with another bite of sandwich. I know what he’s thinking: “You got yourself into this with one lie; you’re going to have to get yourself out of it with another.”

“The thought crossed my mind. We checked our records. But there’s no one we can think of.” Then the afterthought, like a stroke of genius. “Besides, if it was a disgruntled client, someone unhappy with my services, they would have been booked and finger printed at the time of arrest. Their prints would be on record with the FBI.” Take that!

Harry gives me a wink, good job.

“Right. Of course. How stupid of me,” she says.

“All I have is a name-Liquida. No physical description. So that’s it. That’s everything. That’s all I know.” I’m still smiling when she says it.

“That’s too bad.”

“Why?”

“Because it must be hard on you.”

“What do you mean?” It’s one question too many. What they teach you in law school is to stop when you’re ahead.

“Because that thumbprint on your card is no accident,” says Joselyn. “It may be your business card, but it’s his calling card on the back of it. You did say the print was on the back of the card?”

“It’s what the FBI told me,” I say.

“You must have done something to really piss this guy off,” she says.

I refuse to ask why. I don’t want to play in her sandbox anymore.

“Do you have one of your business cards on you?” Joselyn looks at me.

“Yes.” I’m gritting my teeth as I say it.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure.” What else can I say?

I reach into my pocket and pluck a business card from the small cardholder I carry. I reach over to hand it to her.

“You just proved my point.” Joselyn doesn’t look up from her salad or take the card from my hand. Instead she leaves me there, my arm extended, holding the card, as she sweeps a small piece of lettuce into her mouth from her fork. “Do you see…” She wipes her mouth with her napkin.

“You see how you’re holding the card, thumb on one side, first finger on the other? I never practiced much criminal law, but anyone handling a business card, unless they held it by the edges, in which case they won’t leave any prints, would hold it like you are, front and back, thumb on one side, finger on the other. Even if they were smudged, you would still find two smudged prints, one on each side of the card, not one clear thumbprint. To get that you would probably put the card on a table or a hard surface and press down with your thumb. Besides, isn’t it normal for a professional to wear gloves at a crime scene? Wouldn’t that be part of the uniform of the day? And yet he left thumbprints at both scenes. It’s a conscious act.” She punctuates this statement of fact with a sip of wine she had ordered in a stemmed glass and then places it back on the table next to her unfinished drink in the tumbler. “I wouldn’t want to worry you unnecessarily, but it seems to me he’s sending you a message.”

“Is that why he killed my son?” says Snyder.

“I don’t know. But then it wasn’t my card that he used.” Joselyn looks at me with a Cheshire-like grin. “Do you have any ideas?”

“No.” I slip the business card back into my pocket.

“What could you have done to make him that angry?” says Snyder. “I wanna know how you know this guy. What’s the connection between you and him?”

“I told you. I don’t know him. I don’t have a clue. I wish I did.”

“That doesn’t tell me why my son was killed,” says Snyder. “He wasn’t involved in drugs. That I know. So how would he come in contact with someone like this-this Liquida?”

“Maybe he didn’t,” says Harry. “Maybe this man Liquida came looking for your son. It’s how he earns his money. He’s hired to kill.”

“No. Why would he be hired to kill Jimmie? My boy wasn’t involved in anything that would put him in that kind of danger.”

“Obviously he was,” says Harry, “or else he’d be alive.”

“What do you mean by that?” Snyder starts to get out of his chair.

“Relax.” I put a hand on his arm. People at the other tables are starting to look at us. “Harry didn’t mean anything.”

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” says Harry. “If what you say is true, then Jimmie was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. For all we know he could have been killed by mistake. The information we have on Liquida is sketchy at best, only that he works for the cartels and hires out. The people employing him would have the moral judgment of a cancer cell. If they thought the rain was a threat, they’d shoot the weatherman. So it might not have taken much for your son to get killed. If he saw something, heard something, and he may not even have realized it.”

“They would kill him for that?” At this moment Snyder has the look of a clerk who has rung up a sale and is calculating the change.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing,” says Snyder. “Only…”

“Only what?” I ask.

“It was just a minor problem, trouble he had at work. It’s why I thought he might have come to see you.”

“What was it?” says Harry.

“Jimmie violated some security protocols in the building where he worked. At least that’s what I’m told. He took someone into a secure area without authority, and apparently he got caught.”

“Your son told you this?” says Harry.

“No, the FBI, when they interviewed me. They showed me some pictures, Jimmie and another man. They didn’t tell me that this was the actual event, but I have to assume…”

Snyder reaches into the leather portfolio next to his elbow and pulls out what appear to be three glossy prints. He hands them to me. I look at them. I recognize Jimmie Snyder from the death scene photos shown to us by Thorpe that day at the FBI office. The other man is pudgy looking, a little shorter than Snyder’s son, wearing a baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, and a polo shirt.

I hand the photos to Harry. “Did they say anything else?”

“No. They showed me the photos in hopes I might recognize the man. They let me have them so I could run them by Jimmie’s friends to see if anyone knew who the man was. I thought that if Jimmie talked with you about the problem at work, he might have told you who he was.”