A World the Color of Salt (6 page)

“I do things
right
here. The boy who saw anything is Emilio. Your deputy already talked to him, right?”

“Sergeant Svoboda, from the sheriff's department, did talk to him. But we may have to ask the same questions more than once, of everybody. You understand that investigations take
time, particularly for a homicide, don't you, Mr. Smith? We have to do as thorough a job as possible.”

“Sure, sure, a homicide.” Red blotches formed on his nearly translucent skin. “I got Emilio washing dishes. But how do I know I'm talking to you he doesn't just hang up his apron?” Mr. Smith shifted to see behind us into the kitchen, where I imagined tortillas were being painted with refried beans and tacos slopped with filling. He shifted in his seat and rested both hands on the table, rolled into one-potato, two-potato fists. “Could be me next time. I mean, I watch myself when I'm taking receipts. I watch myself all the time.”

Joe was nodding. He said, “That's a good idea.”

“It's just I invest a whole lot of time in these people and I don't want them spooked. A lot of them can't, see, handle more than one thing at a time. You can understand that, sure. They're what you call simple.”

I said, “What are you paying them, Mr. Smith, an hour, I mean?” Maybe I shouldn't have interrupted the flow of things. Then again, it seemed to me the man needed to play defense awhile.

“You want a job?” he answered. The voice was low enough but the stare told me it was hostile. His blue eyes were so pale they were almost white, with dark rims at the edge of the iris, hard to look into because they make a guy look crazy. He immediately turned his attention back to Joe. Dusted her off, he'd be thinking. In my career, I've been put down by experts.

“No, thank you, Mr. Smith. I have a job.” I took out my notepad and pen, started writing and talking at the same time. “Let's see now, you've got how many employees here? Six? Let's say six, I can see.” I twisted around to look over my shoulder. “And they all have their green cards, you say. You have your regular health inspection, too, I suppose. Say, every couple of months?” I started looking around, checking how clean the place was. “How about grease disposal, Mr. Smith? You conform to EPA guidelines for grease?” I kept my head down, writing, waiting for an answer. These issues have nothing to do with us. When I looked up, there was a changed expression.

“Emilio's English is not that great. Talk to him. Go ahead.
But ten minutes, okay?” He wasn't asking me. He was asking Joe.

“Let's get to that later,” Joe said. “Right now, am I to understand you yourself saw nothing yesterday around the time of the robbery and murder?”

“Nothing. I heard—I think I heard—some popping sounds, real fast together. I was setting some rags out back.” He glanced at me with his spooky eyes, said, “We can do that,” meaning put the rags outside to dry without an inspector jumping him.

Joe said, “What time would you say that was?”

“Maybe one-thirty.”

“Not a car? You didn't hear a car backfiring?”

“No. Popping—like firecrackers.” His hands slid forward on the table, body English for, I have nothing to hide. He said, “I didn't know those people over there. I saw the young one once, twice, maybe. That's all. Big blond kid, right?” He looked at me then. I nodded, along with Joe.

“Can we talk to Emilio, then?”

“Would you go around, talk to him out back? We don't need everybody stopping their work now to listen, do we?”

At the rear of the restaurant we stood waiting for the door to open, looking, I guessed, at the same stiff rags Mr. Smith draped over blue plastic crates a day earlier. I said to Joe, “I hope this isn't a waste of time.”

“You never know.”

The door sucked open and a tiny little person in a black shirt emerged, Indian facial structure, sunken cheeks, a slightly horsey mouth, but a softness in his expression nonetheless. He was maybe thirty-five, and his skin bore a yellow-brown cast, except for his hands, which were as pink as if he'd been scalded. He stepped out, looking back and forth at us while rubbing his palms up and down on his thighs as if they never could get dry. Mr. Smith was behind him in the doorway. I acknowledged him and said, “Thank you,” and he shut the door.

Joe's tone was respectful. Straight off he told Emilio we weren't police, just from “the office.” I don't think Emilio understood
office
, but I think that since Joe wasn't a uniform, and he had me with him, Emilio relaxed. Joe asked him if he
saw anything yesterday concerning what happened next door.

Emilio looked at me for help. “You understand? You understand what he asked you?”

“
Sí
.”

“You saw a truck?” I said. “You told the officer—”

“
Sí. Verde
.”

“Green.”

“
Sí
.”

“Where was it, Emilio?”

He pointed over toward the store. “
Allí
.”

“Where, exactly?” Joe said.

He pointed again.

“Not in front? In one of the parking places?”

“No.”

“You saw it leave in a hurry?”

“Bery hurry,
sí
. Yes.”

“What were you doing when you saw it?” I asked.

He glanced around to the side of the restaurant as if he could see himself there, and told us he was taking out the trash, the sack, as he said, demonstrating then with two hands clutched higher than his shoulders, and I realized that at about five feet he'd have a struggle all right, not dragging it along the concrete.

“They bery hurry,” he said.

“About what time was that?” I asked, tapping my wrist.

“One o'clock. I do one o'clock.”

Joe asked if Emilio could tell what kind of truck it was and he said, “Like my father. Chebrolet,” heavy on the
ch
. I grinned. I liked him. He smiled back, one tooth at the side missing, nice long crow's feet at his eyes.

“Your father has one? Same kind? About how old? What year?” Joe said.

“Sixty-seben Chebrolet, half-ton.” Emilio's face lit up. He seemed very proud. “Half-ton.”

“That's what your father has, right?”

“On farm, half-ton. Big focking half-ton.” He was nodding happily now, pleased Joe understood, rubbing his palms again on the front of his thighs.

“A half-ton is still a big truck in Mexico, I guess,” Joe said for my benefit. “If you get your four-by-four stolen around
here, it winds up in Mexico pulling a plow.” He asked Emilio, “On the farm, what's your father grow?”

“
El algodón
. Uh, cotton.”

I looked at Joe. Cotton in Mexico?

“By Durango our farm,” Emilio added. “Cotton.” He was smiling as if he were proud, and a light came to his eyes.

I said, “The men, Emilio. You saw these men?”

He reached high over his head to indicate height, said, “Big. Bery big. Hat. Red bazeball cap. One habe”—hooking his hand behind his head in a motion to indicate the ponytail—“tail,” he said. “He dribe.”

Joe said, “What color was their hair?”

Emilio didn't know the word for
brown
. We worked with him. He also said one of the men wore a Lebi jacket. Good. He couldn't remember what shirt the other had on. Both of them wore boots. Better. How many people in SoCal wear cowboy boots? I asked if he could tell the men's ages, how old they were. He shook his head but then said, “Nineteen?”

Before we left, Joe asked if he could show us exactly where the truck was parked. He led us to a break in the hedge and we stepped through. I expected him to lead us down to the front, nearer the marked parking places, but he didn't. He walked straight along the hedge a few feet and then stopped. “Back here,” he said, squashing one hand downward as if he were bouncing a basketball. “Front here.”

“The back was here,” Joe said. “Then, you mean the truck was headed out toward the street.”

Emilio nodded. “I see twelve-fifteen, too. Truck here twelve-fifteen.”

“It was here at twelve-fifteen, and then it came back?” Joe asked.

“No. I see at twelve-fifteen too. It here long time, long time. That's why I say, “Oh! It go out . . .” and be blew a whooshing sound into the air above his scooping hand.

Joe and I looked at each other. I said, “That truck was here a long time, then, forty-five minutes.
Then
it decides to book out of here? Why the hurry if it's been there already forty-five minutes? I don't know, Joe. We probably don't have anything. Vaporware,”

Joe asked him what hours Emilio worked. He said someone
else might have to talk to him, and would that be all right? Oh, yes, Emilio said, assuring Joe with a big smile, and then he gave us his home address, which was probably the same address for sixteen other illegals, or false, or would change next week. “And how old are you, Emilio?” I asked, jotting this down.

“Nineteen,” he said.

I was back in the Kwik Stop parking lot when Joe left me to go talk to two more of our people who'd just arrived—Billy K. again, and it looked like the rookie too. I thought of Billy K. explaining to Joe why he violated scene integrity by using the restroom. And then something else flashed on me and my stomach began a slow twist. Because I stood there thinking, If Emilio could eye the pickup through the divided hedge, if the front was there and the back was here, then that meant, picturing my car the way it was parked last night, the truck would have been nosed into mine, driver's side to the store. Close enough so that when the truck swung out sharply toward the driveway, a small, brass round thing could theoretically drop out, hit the asphalt, and roll into the grass.

Joe was coming up the incline, the sun bringing out the coral shade of his shirt and the brown of his wool suit.

“Joe,” I said. “You're going to hate me.”

“What else is new?” he said, a smidgen of a smile in his eyes.

I was suddenly sweaty in my gray leather jacket, thinking how bad-ass I thought I had been last night telling Joe off. Picturing the brass object sitting in my desk drawer instead of Property, the custody of a potential piece of evidence compromised. Jerkhood, never forget it, cuts both ways.

I said, “I think I maybe have something for you.”

Ass-chewing is always harder on me than it should be. I do stuff, then get surprised when the consequences turn out different than I expected. Naïve I am not, so what's the problem, except maybe a case of terminal good intentions. Because I
mean
well.

Joe gnawed rather than chewed. Here, he says, here's my lawyer's number. He wrote on the back of his own business card in black ballpoint while I stood there. “Tell him he can take that trip to Cancun.” I looked at him, not getting it. “Soon as he sues your surgeon for excising your brain.”

Not nice, not nice at all. People told me Joe could get sarcastic—but in three years working with him I hadn't myself seen it. Maybe I wasn't paying attention. Funny how things roll off when it's not your back. Or, I don't know, maybe Billy Katchaturian pissed him off again when Joe went over to the car.

Now I was on my way to the coroner's, and hardly paying attention to my driving. I must have done something wrong, because a guy in shades and a blue baseball cap turned backward flipped me off when he passed me. I was going sixty-two, but he must have thought I was going too slow for the second lane. And before I knew it, I was on Santa Ana and Shelton.

Set into the ivy ground cover next to the sidewalk is a low stone block with unobtrusive letters;
SHERIFF
-
CORONER FORENSIC SCIENCE CENTER
, which spells
morgue
if you know how to read it. A few yards away is the building itself, a narrow belt of glazed orange ceramic tile coursing around its middle. Opposite,
a four-story fiercely white building glares like a glacier in a tar pit: Building 42, the jail. North of 42, a smaller structure, Building 44, houses the women. I have not been in either one, since I am not a cop in Orange County and I've never had reason to go there. But whenever I come to the morgue, I imagine the prisoners looking down from cell windows, seeing their buddies hauled out of the vans and wheeled in through the automatic doors in the back, and later their buddies' families walking out the front all squeezed together, hands cupped over their mouths.

I crossed the red pavers at the entrance and went in the front door. Janetta, the records clerk, and pretty, was cloaked in her two cardigan sweaters, a white over a pink, and under those a navy blue polka-dotted dress. Janetta caught a glimpse of me and said, “Hi,” a big smile looking pretty on her Hispanic features. “It's always cold in here,” she said, and hugged herself. I smiled sympathetically, and wished she wouldn't dress that way. A Beatles song was playing on the intercom: “If I give my heart”—thump-thump—“to you-oo-oou . . .”

She walked to one of the antique wooden cabinets that still held the records not yet converted to the automated system, pulled open a drawer, and started flipping through files. In the back of the room a woman I didn't know sat working at a desk, asking Janetta, “Now, what do we do with the Does? File 'em by number also? Or do they go in a separate file?”

Janetta said, “Just a minute, Smokey,” and tucked something down in the drawer. She's as nice to women as she is to men, and knows her job. Going for her degree in business administration. That's why I wish she wouldn't dress the way she does. I
want
people to take her seriously. I leaned on the shelf of the customer window. I always felt strange here, at the window, because it's got a foot-wide lip to it, as if anyone might at any moment slide a hot apple pie onto it and invite me to wait for dessert to cool down, there'll be coffee later.