Michael Connelly - The Poet

"You the manager?" Rachel asked.

"That should be obvious, shouldn't it, Officer?"

A wise guy, I thought. He was about sixty and he wore green fatigues and a white sleeveless T-shirt with burn holes on the chest through which a crop of gray chest hair protruded. He was balding and had a drinker's red face. He was white, the only white person I had seen so far in the park.

"It's Agent," she said, showing him the inside of her badge wallet.

"FBI? What's the G care about a little car break-in? See, I read a lot. I know you people call yourselves the G. I like that."

Rachel looked at me and Thompson and then back at the man. I felt the small tingling of anxiousness.

"How do you know about the car break-in?" Rachel asked.

"I seen you out there. I got eyes. You was lookin' at the glass. I swept it up into a pile. Street cleaners only come 'round here maybe once a month. More in the summer when it's dusty out."

"No. I mean, how did you even know there was a car burglary?"

" 'Cause I sleep back there in the back room. I heard 'em break the window. I saw them messing about inside that car."

"When was this?"

"Let's see, that'd be Thursday last. I was wondering when the guy'd report it. But I didn't think no FBI agent would be coming out. How 'bout you two, you with the G, too?"

"Never mind that, Mr.-what is your name, sir?"

"Adkins."

"Okay, Mr. Adkins, do you know whose car got broken into?"

"Nope, never saw him. I just heard the window and saw the kids."

"What about a plate?"

"Nope."

"You didn't call the police?"

"Don't have no phone. I could see Thibedoux's over to lot three but it was the middle of the night and I knew those cops wouldn't come running on a car rob'ry. Not here. They got too much to do."

"So you never at any point saw the owner of the car and he never knocked on the door to see if maybe you heard the break-in or saw anybody?"

"That's right."

"What about the kids who broke in?" Thompson asked, robbing Rachel of the payoff question. "You know them, Mr. Atkins?"

"Adkins. With a D, no T, Mr. G."

Adkins laughed at his command of the alphabet.

"Mr. Adkins," Thompson said, correcting himself. "Well, do you?"

"Do I what?"

"Know who the kids were."

"No, I don't know who they were."

His eyes strayed past us to the television. On the program they were now selling a glove with small rubber bristles on the palm for grooming pets.

"I know what else you could use that for," Adkins said. He made a masturbation motion with his hand and winked and smiled at Thompson. "That's what they're really selling that for, you know."

Rachel stepped over to the TV and turned it off. Adkins didn't protest. She straightened up and looked at him.

"We're investigating the murder of a police officer. We'd like your attention. We have reason to believe the car you saw burglarized belonged to a suspect. We are not interested in prosecuting the boys who broke into the car, but we need to speak to them. You were lying just then, Mr. Adkins. I saw it in your eyes. The boys came from this park."

"No, I-"

"Let me finish. Yes, you were lying to us. But we're going to give you another chance. You can tell us the truth now or we'll go back and get more agents and police and we'll go through this dump you call a trailer park like an army laying siege. You think we'll find any stolen property in those tin cans? You think we might run across some people wanted on warrant? How about some illegals? What about safety code violations? We passed one back there, I saw the extension cord going out the door into the shed. They've got somebody living in there, don't they? And I bet you and your employer charge extra for that. Or maybe just you do. What's your employer going to say when he finds out? What's he going to say when the receivables go down because the people who are supposed to be paying you rent cannot because they've been deported or they're in lock-up on warrant holds for not paying child support? What about you, Mr. Ad-kins? You want me to run the serial number off that television on the computer?"

"The TV's mine. Bought it fair and square. Know what you are, FBI lady? Fucking Bitch Investigator."

Rachel ignored the comment, though I thought Thompson turned away to hide a smile.

"Fair and square from who?"

"Never mind. It was those Tyrell brothers, okay? They're the ones what robbed that car. Now if they come in here and beat the shit outta me, I'm suing you. Got that?"

With directions from Adkins we arrived at a trailer four units in from the main entrance. Word had spread that the law was in the park. There were more people on stoops and sitting on the outdoor couches. When we got to Number 14, the Tyrell brothers were waiting for us.

They were sitting on an old glider beneath a blue canvas awning extending from the side of a double-wide trailer. Next to the door of the trailer were a washer and dryer set beneath a blue canvas cover to keep the rain off. The two brothers were teenagers, maybe a year apart and of mixed race, black and white. Rachel stepped to the edge of the shade provided by the awning. Thompson took a spot about five feet to her left.

"Guys," Rachel said and got no response. "Your mother home?"

"Nah, she not, Officer," the older one said.

He looked at the brother with slow eyes. The brother started rocking the glider back and forth with his leg.

"You know," Rachel said, "we know you're smart. We don't want any trouble with you. Don't want to give you any trouble. We promised Mr. Adkins that when we went in there to ask where your trailer was."

"Adkins, shit," the younger one said.

"We're here about the car that was parked out on the road last week."

"Didn't see it."

"No, we didn't see it."

Rachel walked over close to the older one and bent down to talk directly into his ear.

"Come on now," she said softly. "This is one of those times your mother told you about. Think now. Use your head. Remember what she told you. You don't want trouble for her or for yourselves. You want us to go away and leave you alone. And there's only one way we're going to do that."

When Rachel walked into the squad room at the field office, she carried the plastic bag like a trophy. She set it down on Matuzak's desk and a handful of agents gathered around to look. Backus came in and looked down at it as if he were looking at the Holy Grail. Then he looked up at Rachel with excitement plain in his eyes.

"Grayson checked with the PD," he said. "No record of any break-in reported at that spot. Not on that day, not on that week. You'd think a legal citizen who gets his car broken into would make a report."

Rachel nodded.

"You'd think."

Backus nodded to Matuzak, who picked the evidence bag up off the table.

"You know what to do?"

"Yes."

"Bring us back some luck. We need it."

What the bag contained was a car stereo stolen from a late-model Ford Mustang, white or yellow depending on which of the Tyrell brothers had better eyesight in the dark.

It was all we got from them but the feeling, the hope, was that it was enough. Rachel and Thompson had interviewed them separately and then switched sides and interviewed them again, but the radio was all the Tyrell brothers could give. They said they never saw the driver who left the Mustang at the curb in front of Sunshine Acres and they took nothing but the stereo in a quick smash-and-grab. They never bothered to open the trunk. They never looked at the plate to see if the car was even registered in Arizona.

While Rachel spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork and preparing an addendum on the car to be transmitted to all field offices, Matuzak fed the serial number of the stereo to the Automotive ID unit at Washington, D.C., headquarters, then gave the stereo itself to a lab tech for processing. Thompson had taken prints of the Tyrell brothers for elimination purposes.