A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (8 page)

“No. He never seemed different. I think that might be what I liked most about him, you know? He was always the same. Consistent.”

“Did you know you were coming here?”

“Not for sure.”

“Did you tell Bishop about it?”

“Yeah, told him I was hoping. He said, ‘That’s good. Real good. You don’t want to be out here too long.’ Like he knew from experience.”

“Any idea how long he
was
out there?”

“Long time. A lot longer than me. I told him if I got in here, I’d still play chess with him. That just made him laugh.”

“Why do you think that was funny to him?”

“Because he knew I wouldn’t. I mean, I meant it when I said it, but once I got here, I never really looked back. Now I wish I had.”

“I know,” Jen said. “I know.”

7

O
NE CAN
D
EL
M
ONTE
F
RESH
C
UT
S
WEET
C
ORN
, C
REAM
S
TYLE
.

“Well,” I said when we were back in the car, heading east on PCH passing Long Beach City College’s Pacific Coast campus, “that wasn’t as fruitful as I hoped.”

“What did you expect? That Nichols was hanging onto Bishop’s wallet with a driver’s license and Social Security card? Something like that?”

“I guess I was just hoping.”

“We got plenty. Give MUPS a chance. You said it yourself, we’ve got three murderers in jail with a rock-solid case against them. We’ll figure out who Bishop really was.”

I knew she was right. The impatience I was feeling was not something I normally experience with a case, and the frustration was expressing itself as a twisting pain running from my elbow up into my shoulder. I took a few deep breaths. At the next stoplight, she studied me.

“Six?” she asked.

I took a brief inventory of my pain at the moment and said, “Yeah. That’s just about right on the nose.”

In the time I’d been dealing with chronic pain, Jen had heard me vent my frustration with the diagnostic tool everyone in the medical field calls the pain scale. Every time you see a doctor or nurse, they ask you to assign a number between one and ten to your level of pain. The higher the number, the more you’re hurting. Somewhere along the way, Jen had realized that she could read my symptoms from my physicality—the tightness in my neck, the way I held my arm, the rolling of my shoulder, and any of a dozen other characteristics—and place me on the scale with an astonishing degree of accuracy. She claimed it was because of her years of training in aikido and jujitsu, that those particular martial arts had so sharpened her ability to perceive stress and tension in someone’s body that it was really just a more subtle version of what she did on the mat every day. I knew that was most of it, but I was also certain that she knew me better than anyone else, and I liked to think that it was our friendship as much as anything she brought with her from the dojo that allowed her to see me the way she did. Maybe, though, I just needed to believe that. To believe that I wasn’t alone.

“Jesús didn’t go to school yesterday. Think he’s there today?” Jen asked.

“Let’s find out.” I found the number for the Solanos’ landline in my notebook and dialed it. A young man answered.

“Doug?” I said.

“No,” he said. “There’s no one named that here.”

I read him back a phone number that was one digit off from his.

“No, that’s the wrong number.”

I apologized and cut the line.

“He’s home.”

In the late-morning traffic, we made it to their house in less than ten minutes.

From the porch I could see Mrs. Solano’s semiconscious form collapsed on the couch in the same position she had been in yesterday. I tapped on the door and tried to get her attention.

“Mrs. Solano?” I said.

She didn’t seem to hear me.

I hadn’t noticed the sound until it stopped, but the water had been running in the kitchen. Through the rusty security door, I could see a young man come into the living room, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. He froze and eyeballed me through the screen. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but if I’d been a betting man, I would have put down a good chunk of money that he was calculating his odds of making it out the back door and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard before I could catch him.

“If you’re thinking about running, stop now,” I said.

He slung the towel up over his shoulder and let it hang there as he approached the door.

“What do you want?” he said.

I held up my badge and said, “We need to talk to you.”

He looked at his semiconscious mother on the couch, unlocked the bolt, and stepped out onto the porch with me. The space was tight enough that it was easy to make him feel crowded.

Jesús was small and thin, maybe five-six, one-forty, and looked like he was dressed for school in dark-blue pants and a white polo shirt.

“Can we come inside?”

He looked over his shoulder. “My mom’s not feeling too good right now.”

“It’s not a good idea for us to do this out here. If you’d rather, we can go to the station and talk there.”

“I have to be here for when my little sister is done with daycare.”

I didn’t say anything, and he thought about it, pulled the security door open, and let us follow him back into the living room. The house was small—the living room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath. Standing near the door to the hallway, I could see almost all of it with a glance over my shoulder. It must have been close to a hundred degrees inside. The windows were all open in a futile grasp at comfort. Above our heads, a ceiling fan was spinning and churning the hot air, but the only effect it had was to make me think again of convection ovens.

“Mom!” Jesús said. “Get up, you got to go in the bedroom.”

She opened her eyes and tried to sit up but didn’t make it.

“Cops again?” she said, looking at Jen and me. She was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the day before, and it sounded like she had a mouth full of toothpaste.

“It’s okay, Mom. Just get up.” He took her arm and pulled her to her feet. She was shorter than him and probably about thirty pounds heavier.

“What did you do?” she asked as he dragged her past us. I caught a whiff of her breath as she went by. I was wrong about the toothpaste.

Jesús put her in the bedroom at the front of the house and came back into the living room. I could already feel the sweat gathering along my forehead and at the back of my neck.

“What’d you want to talk about?”

“You know where your brother is?”

He looked at my face and then at Jen’s. I suspected that he knew the answer to my question. “No,” he said. “Where is he?”

“Sit down,” I said. He sat on one end of the couch and Jen sat on the other. I stayed on my feet.

“Did your mom tell you we were here yesterday?”

“She said something about cops. She’s been drunk for two days. It’s hard to know what she’s talking about.”

“I’m going to ask you again. Do you know where your brother is?”

“He in jail?”

“You know the answer.”

“I didn’t for sure until now.” I couldn’t tell yet if he was lying. We hadn’t talked enough for me to get a feeling for how he sounded telling the truth, so I had no baseline to compare with his statement.

“What can you tell us about why he’s there?”

“Nothing.”

“You answered that pretty quickly. I think you must know something.”

“I don’t.”

“Where were you two nights ago? On Monday.”

“Here.”

“Where were you supposed to be?”

“Supposed to be? I don’t know what you mean. I’m always here. Somebody’s got to take care of my sister.”

“What about your mom?”

He tilted his head and looked at me as if I’d just suggested he take the yacht out for a sail or challenged him to a game of polo. I didn’t push that one any further.

Jen said, “That’s good the way you take care of your sister.”

He allowed himself the barest hint of a smile at that. He knew that it was good, and he was proud of the fact. It made me want to go easy on him, but I didn’t.

“I think you’re a good kid, Jesús. I do.”

His face iced over. He knew something was coming.

“But that’s not what Pedro says.”

Nothing.

“Pedro says you were supposed to be with him on Monday night.”

“I don’t care what Pedro says.”

“That’s not what I’ve heard. Everybody says different.”

“Who’s everybody?”

“Francisco, for a start.”

His jaw tightened, and for maybe a second before he caught himself, his eyes narrowed. He didn’t like Francisco. “Is Francisco lying about you?”

“I barely know him. He’s my brother’s friend.”

“But you wanted to be his friend, too.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Why? Because he’s connected? He could help you make your bones?”

Still nothing.

“You’re a good kid, Jesús,” I said. “I know that. But you’ve got to talk to us, or everybody’s going to believe Francisco. The shit he’s saying about you. You’ll wind up in there with them.”

I kept expecting him to look away, to break my gaze, but he didn’t. He was studying me the same way I’d been studying him. After what seemed like a long time but surely wasn’t, he shook his head, and I knew that we were done. At least for the time being.

“Okay, you want to play it that way, that’s your call. But you’re going to change your mind, and I really hope it won’t be too late.” I handed him my card, and to my surprise, he took it without hesitation and held it carefully between his fingers as if he were afraid of damaging it. Then I got out my iPhone and dialed the number Jen had found earlier on Pedro’s cell. A banda tune sounded from his pocket.

“You got my number?”

“Yeah. And now you’ve got mine.”

We showed ourselves out and left Jesús sitting on the couch and looking at the business card in his hand.

In the car, Jen said, “You think he’ll come around?”

“Don’t know,” I answered. “But I didn’t hate him nearly as much as I wanted to.”

“You two having fun out in all the sun and fresh air?” Patrick asked us when we came back into the squad room.

“It’s about a thousand degrees out there, so no, not really,” Jen said.

“You went to see Jesús Solano, right?”

I nodded.

“What did you think?”

“Seemed like a good kid,” Jen said.

“He knows something,” I added. “But he thinks he’s got to stand up.”

“I checked him and the other three out on social media, looking for connections. None of them are big on Twitter, but there’s some interesting stuff on Facebook.”

“Yeah?” I wheeled my chair toward his desk.

“Omar and Francisco are neck-tattoo deep in gang associations. They might as well have an East Side Longo fan page. Pedro’s got a few, too, nowhere close to as many as them, though. But Jesús? Nothing. I need to go deeper, but it looks like the only connection he has to anything even vaguely questionable is his brother. Kid looks clean. You know what most of the pictures he’s posted are?”

“What?” I asked.

“His little sister.”

Patrick spun his laptop around so we could see the screen. Jesús had an album titled “Maria’s Birthday.” There were a dozen or more photos of a happy little girl with five or six of her friends, celebrating in the backyard of the bungalow on Ohio. There was a little cake and a little piñata and lots of laughing. It looked like Jesús was the closest thing to an adult in attendance.

“You have to hack into his account?”

“He’s sixteen. Everything’s set to ‘public.’ Hardly anybody under twenty sets anything to ‘private’ these days.”

I thought about that. My Facebook page was locked down tighter than a submarine. What did I have to hide that was so much more secret and privileged than Jesús’s life? What was I trying to protect?

Patrick straightened up his desk as if he were getting ready to leave. “I haven’t eaten. You guys want to go grab a sandwich at Modica’s?”

Jen said, “I’m up for it.” She looked at me. “Danny?”

“You guys go ahead. I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”

Patrick was about to close his browser window, but I stopped him.

“Can I look at that a bit more?”

“Sure,” he said. “Just be sure to shut it down when you’re done.”

I pushed Patrick’s chair to the side and rolled myself in closer for a better look.

Seeing those pictures made me want to like Jesús. They made me want to believe that he really was the good kid who refused to let his brother pull him down into the darkness. I wondered, too, what might have motivated Pedro. Why would he commit such a horrendous crime?

After closing the Firefox window on Patrick’s desktop, I wheeled myself back over to my own computer and clicked on the icon for the murder video from the Samsung. I watched the whole thing again, from start to finish. I’d seen it so many times at that point that I knew every moment before it came, but I focused just as intently as I had the first time I’d watched. I didn’t expect to discover anything new, but I wanted to confirm some of my observations about the three suspects.