A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (27 page)

By the time we finished for the night, it was after midnight. But Jen and I needed to make one more stop. We drove north on the 710 and cut back down the 405 to Lakewood Boulevard. At the Residence Inn, we checked in with the uniforms in the parking lot and went upstairs to room 217. We knocked softly on the door. They were probably asleep inside.

“Call,” Jen said.

I did. When he answered, I said, “It’s Danny. Open the door.”

A shadow moved across the peephole, we heard the deadbolt unlock, and the door eased open.

Jesús looked at us and tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes.

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I said.

He didn’t look like he believed me.

30

K
NUDSEN
L
OWFAT
C
OTTAGE
C
HEESE CONTAINER
,
WITH SEWING NEEDLES
,
MISC
.
BUTTONS
,
THREAD
.

The next day, I took another run at Siguenza. He didn’t give us much more than he had in the first interrogation. There were a few more details—he fleshed out some facts, dotted i’s and crossed t’s. He swore up and down that he didn’t have anything on Benny War, that Benny had only made the introduction with Rudy and didn’t have any other knowledge about their enterprise. Benny made the same claim. I didn’t believe them, of course. There might have been a slim possibility that it was true, that Benny had kept himself in the dark deliberately, but I was betting on one of two things: either Siguenza was a lot more worried about Benny than he was about Rudy, or he was holding onto information in hopes of bargaining with the ADA. At one point, he even asked me about witness protection. I pretended like I thought that was within the realm of possibility and said I’d talk to the prosecutor about it. Either way, he didn’t offer up anything on the man we believed was calling the shots, and for the time being, it didn’t look like we could make anything stick. Benny War would almost surely walk away from the whole ordeal unscathed.

After we wrapped things up, Jen, Patrick, Marty, Ruiz, and I gathered in the squad room.

“I just got a call from ATF,” Ruiz said. “Apparently we cracked a big case for them. They’ve been chasing those AKs for months. Who wants to liaise with them so they can elbow their way in and claim all the credit?”

After a few seconds of us all sitting there in silence and refusing to make eye contact with him, he said, “Thanks, Patrick. I appreciate it.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t—” Patrick cut himself off in midsentence.

That afternoon I tried to come up with leads on Rudy Guerra. Because we had virtually nothing on him prior to the current case—no criminal record, no known associates or affiliations—there was little to work with.

I spent half an hour on the phone with his manager at the car dealership, and the only complaint he had was that Rudy had a way of inconveniently flexing his work schedule, but his shifts were always covered and other than that he’d been a model employee for the eighteen months he’d been there.

And I spoke to his next-door neighbor, an elderly woman who had nothing but nice things to say about him. When her arthritis was acting up, he took her trash out. “Such a nice boy,” she said. “I hope he’s all right.”

The next morning, with a fresh search warrant and backup from the Brea PD, Jen and I tossed his condo and found nothing that would indicate he was anything other than a mild-mannered Orange County Infiniti salesman.

We talked to other people he worked with, and to more of his neighbors, to see if we could turn up anything, but it came to nothing. He’d done such a good job of staying off of the law-enforcement radar for so long that it wasn’t surprising he’d never let himself slip up while going through the motions of his upstanding-citizen routine.

We had nothing. We’d keep trying, but it was becoming clear that Rudy had disappeared and that unless he made the kind of mistake he seemed too smart for, like making a withdrawal from an ATM or getting pulled over in a traffic stop or using his burner again, our chances of finding him were diminishing with each passing day.

That evening I once again waited for Benny in the parking garage beneath his office. When he found me leaning against the door of his Jaguar, he said, “Hello, Detective.”

I tried to read his expression but couldn’t. When I didn’t say anything he added, “I still don’t know where Rudy is.”

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said. “Jesús Solano isn’t going to testify. He doesn’t know anything. He wasn’t involved in any of it.”

“Are you going to threaten me again?”

“Do I need to?”

As he smiled, the overhead fluorescent light shone on the scar beneath his left eye.

31

T
IMEX
I
RONMAN WRISTWATCH
:
BLACK AND GRAY W
/
ORANGE HIGHLIGHTS
.

By the end of the week, the worst of the heat had passed, and Long Beach was settling into a slow downward slide toward fall. I slept relatively well that Friday night and woke later than I usually do. Two cups of coffee and a shower stretched out and filled more than an hour. I dawdled around the house, checking the news online, trying to play a few bars on the banjo, watching
The Today Show
. Matt and Al and whoever that woman was who replaced Ann Curry were enough to put a sour spin on my enthusiastic aimlessness. So I put on some shorts and a short-sleeved plaid button-up and drove to Palm Beach Park.

I got out and walked along the bike path. The last time I had been there, the relentless heat that beat down onto the concrete and reflected up off of the slow-moving water had made it feel like the height of the summer, but now the cooler temperature and the light breeze blowing inland suggested we were well into autumn. It seemed to me as if Bishop’s death had occurred months ago, rather than just a few short weeks.

As I was passing the RV park, a small flock of five or six white birds floated on the water of the biological reserve. I knew they weren’t ducks or geese, but that was the closest I could come to identifying them. Some kind of egret, maybe? What did an egret even look like? I really had no idea.

Just when I had started walking again, I heard someone behind me say, “On your left,” and a cyclist on a sleek racing bike rolled by. As he rounded the curve that opened up onto the long straightaway north along the concrete river, I heard the chink of his chain upshifting, and he stood on the pedals and accelerated into the distance.

Two miles north, a small park was nestled in alongside the river. I lost track of the time and distance, and before I knew it, I was passing Pacific Coast Highway and wandering along the winding dirt pathway flanked by orange and yellow wildflowers and other indigenous plants. I found a sign that read, “Cressa Park: A Native Habitat.” How long had the park been there? I’d never even heard of it. Had Bishop? For some odd reason, I found it easy to imagine him there.

The company, even though it was only in my head, didn’t really suit me, so I walked back down the bike path all the way to my car at the river’s end.

“How’s the taco?” I asked Jesús. It was his last weekend before going back to school. He’d missed more than two weeks and was worried about returning, so I took him for lunch at Enrique’s. Carne asada makes everything better.

“When you said that thing about Jack in the Box,” he said, “I didn’t think you knew what a taco really was.”

“That’s why I brought you here. Had to prove I had some street cred.”

“It’s good.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

The DA was building the case in such a way as to keep Jesús’s involvement to a minimum. It was unlikely he’d need to testify. Once we’d gotten Siguenza in custody, Francisco and Pedro had opened up and given us what we needed. Jesús’s knowledge of the plan was so limited in relation to theirs that his testimony would add little to the case. Rudy Guerra seemed to have vanished, and I’d gone out of my way to make it clear to Benny that Jesús knew nothing of any value to the prosecution. Was that enough to keep him safe? I hoped so.

Watching him eat, listening to him worry about his little sister and his mom, about how far behind he was on his schoolwork, and even about his concern for Pedro, I thought maybe he had a chance.

After I dropped him off at home, I went to see the new Alfonso Cuarón astronaut movie everyone had been raving about. It looked pretty, but ultimately I just got pissed off by its failure to grasp the basic principles of middle-school-level physics and the completely gratuitous underwear shots.

Still, though, I was glad I went. It had been a good day. I felt a kind of unburdened and leisurely ease that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time.

I called Harlan. “Got any dinner plans?”

“There’s a Marie Callender’s chicken pot pie waiting for me in the freezer. Why?”

“How about if I pick up a pizza at Domenico’s and swing by?”

“You got yourself a date.”

Not only did Domenico’s have pepperoni, they had two kinds. Sliced
and
ground. Suck on that, Michael’s.

We’d finished eating and headed out to sit on Harlan’s porch with a couple of bottles of Sam Adams and give each other a hard time. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a slip of paper torn off of a real-estate agent’s promotional notepad. He handed it to me. There was a phone number written on it but nothing else.

“What’s this?”

“Banjo teacher. Call him.”

“He have a name?”

“Gary. I told him not to take your call, but he seemed really desperate. His kid needs new shoes or something.”

“Thanks, Harlan,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. Just practice.”