Sixteen
A
s Vera pulled away from the curb near Sinton's apartment, she held a clenched fist up to her mouth. She wouldn't have had the words to describe what she'd witnessed if her life depended on it. Not only did she leave with an indelible picture of a dilapidated man tattooed on her brain, Vera also left with two major holes in her case. Every time she grew closer to locking the case airtight, another gap turned up like a bad penny. There wasn't one eyewitness to the police officer's shooting and no death certificate existed to authenticate Detective Sikes's murder. If only his body had stayed put long enough for the medical examiner to pronounce him dead on arrival at the hospital, but no such luck. Someone had to go and snatch it; or was it something else instead? With a sick feeling in her stomach, Vera remembered what Sinton said about Sikes's turning state's evidence and working with the FBI. The next and only logical place to go for further information concerning the missing body was the agency that had nothing to do with the crime but couldn't seem to stay away from it.
Vera slammed on the brakes then hit a U-turn several blocks from downtown. Rush hour traffic poured out into the streets as nine-to-fivers made beelines toward the freeways while she sailed past them in the opposite direction. “Yogi Easterland,” she said into her cell phone when someone answered on the other end. “My name is Vera Miles. Please tell her it's important.” The operator asked Vera to hold after explaining it was after hours. Vera turned her lip upward smirking at the idea of federal agents punching a time clock.
“Special Agent Easterland speaking,” hailed someone who sounded professional and tired.
“Oh, hello,” Vera said, when the woman took her call sooner than expected. “You don't know me but I think we really need to talk. I'm a private investigator with one question no one has been able to answer.”
“May I ask why you think I'm the one who can?” asked the agent, again professionally standoffish.
“Because I just left a funky ass apartment rented by Sinton Johnson where he told me you were chummy with a narcotics officer named Warren Sikes who got himself clipped before you could pimp him to roll on his partner and the Mexican drug lord Bolda Guzman,” Vera rattled off quickly, leaving no doubt how serious and tired she was. Her chest heaved out while waiting on the agent's response.
“If your objective was getting my undivided attention, you succeeded. Surely you know where to find me, Ms. Miles. How quickly can you get here?”
Vera killed the motor in the parking lot across from 1 Justice Way and stared at the FBI regional headquarters building in front of her. “I'm already here. Meet me in the lobby.”
“Will do,” agent Easterland replied sharply, “One thing. Unauthorized firearms are not permitted. I'll have to ask you to leave yours behind.”
Smiling wearily, Vera sighed, “Will do.”
A heftily built security guard greeted Vera at the door, waved her through a metal detector then signed her in at the reception desk. She collected her purse, after he'd rifled through it. It was a mere precaution, she assumed, so she didn't argue. When Vera snapped her bag shut, she heard someone call out her name. Expecting an FBI agent with a linebacker's frame, she turned toward the elevators. Vera found it difficult to hide her surprise. The woman with an outstretched hand was gorgeous. Her sleekly fitted navy slacks were tailored, Vera guessed, and her button-down blouse had to have been plucked from a designer store rack. At nearly Vera's height and two sizes smaller, Yogi Easterland looked like a fish out of water. Her cinnamon-hued skin was flawless and full-bodied shoulder length hair put Vera in mind of a fashion model playing a role. Although she would have been considered more cute than pretty, the agent gave her visitor an inferiority complex. “Yogi Easterland,” she said, after a thorough once-over.
“Yeah, come on up, Vera,” the attractive woman replied, with a firm handshake. On the elevator ride to the sixth floor, Vera chuckled to herself or so she thought. “Something funny?” Easterland asked, her hands situated on her narrow hips like they were nailed there.
“No, it's just that you weren't what I expected. Uh-uh, not by a long shot.” Easterland's hands fell to her sides as her defensive smirk faded likewise. “Sorry, but I bet you get that all the time.”
“You don't know the half of it,” she confirmed lightly. “This is our stop.” The elevator doors opened to a command center. Computers and cubicles lined the floors throughout. Several agents, all of whom resembled well-dressed insurance salesmen, fiddled with telephones and paperwork. Each one was oblivious to Vera's presence.
“Wow, this is it, huh?” she marveled. Vera knew that anything she wanted to know about anybody could have been accessed via any one of those computers. “Nice.” She followed the agent into a glassed-in office then took a chair opposite her at a desk cluttered with files. Moments after they were both seated, Easterland shrugged silently.
“Like I said on the phone, you got my attention, now what?”
Vera wrestled to get comfortable in her chair. She frowned, leaned forward then slumped back in her seat. “Agent Easterland, can I call you Yogi?” The agent nodded that it was okay. “See, Yogi, I'm working for a man who thinks he's killed someone. He has these terrible dreams replaying it in his head. Only thing is, I've busted my rump trying to find a gunshot victim fitting the bill.” Vera explained what Rags told her about the overweight white man he believed himself to have shot and that Sikes was the closest to a possible match.
“So,” Yogi said, shrugging again. “What does that have to do with you ending up in Sinton Johnson's rat's nest and how does that factor into my business with Warren Sikes, Frank Draper and Bolda Guzman?”
“That's what I came here to ask you,” Vera told her, with a befuddled expression. “I've exhausted every possible lead, one right behind the other, and your outfit keeps coming up on the tail end. I know you visited the diner involved with Detective Sikes's murder. I know you interrogated the EMT who pulled him off the streets that night and later hustled to the morgue searching for the body.” Vera was bluffing on the last tidbit of information but it made sense that the FBI wouldn't take anyone's word that Sikes, their prospective witness, was dead. They were more thorough than that.
“You almost had me, Vera,” Yogi said, chuckling under her breath, “then it occurred to me. If you knew for a fact we were at the morgue the night Warren Sikes got dropped, you wouldn't be sitting here now or have subjected yourself to, as you put it, Sinton's funky ass apartment, now, would you?” She let out a deep sigh, staring out over the illuminated Dallas skyline. “Before I tell you what you really want to know, it needs to be crystal clear that what I divulge is strictly off the record. You were never here.”
Vera was sitting then, alert and salivating for what had eluded her the entire time she'd been working on Rags's behalf. “Understood,” she said, agreeing fully.
Agent Easterland clasped her thin fingers together, settling them on her desk. “First of all, none of this is any longer privileged information because the case involving Sikes, his partner Frank Draper and Bolda Guzman was dropped when the old man fell on a knife, seventeen times. Guzman's younger brother got tired of sitting on the sidelines watching Bolda have all the fun. I guess you could say he took over the family business.” It was Vera's turn to shrug, when she failed to grasp what Yogi's story had to do with her case.
“And that affects my client how?”
“I'll lay it out, then you can draw your own conclusions. True enough, we were dogging Sikes's steps. He was on our witness list and about to leave his cheating wife to flip on that dirty partner of his when he was wounded.” The crafty agent let the last comment float in the air trusting that Vera had the wherewithal to take it and run. She grinned when Vera did exactly that.
“Wounded?” Vera queried, with her brow furrowed. “You said wounded, not killed.” That was the first time she'd heard anyone say without one-hundred-percent certainty that Sikes was dead, real dead.
“Yes, I did,” Yogi acknowledged. “We tried to stay close to Sikes, knowing there was a leak in our department. Guzman had deep pockets, deep enough to get at one of our own. There was a hit out on Sikes, a big one. We were set to grab him ourselves and stash him in a safe house until the trial, then he went down.” Vera's mind was working overtime. She closed her eyes to get a clearer picture.
“Are you saying that Sikes didn't die and that you still have him? With Bolda Guzman off the chopping block, he's not worth much anymore. Hmmm, at least that gets my client off the hook.”
“Well, it's a bit more complicated than that,” Agent Eastland said matter-of-factly. “This is where things get tricky.” Yogi fixed her eyes onto Vera's like a snake charmer, with a straightforward and compelling gaze. “Not long after Sikes's body was taken to the hospital, we located him, mainly to check his clothing for vital information, mind you, then I saw his eyelids flutter faintly. There were so many automobile accident victims needing attention that no one noticed me and my partner wheeling him to the back freight elevator. I made a call, had Sikes transported to another hospital and operated on as a John Doe.”
“So that nobody would know if he survived?” Vera concluded correctly.
“Now you're catching on. Miraculously, Warren Sikes pulled through by the skin of his teeth. Because we didn't know who to trust, after the life-saving surgery, I had him transported to a hideaway in the country for safekeeping. There're a lot of people capable of murder when the price is high. We even went to great lengths to conceal his identity. It was my idea to requisition plastic surgery on Sikes's face. He wasn't a bad looking guy but we couldn't take any chances.”
“So what did you do with Sikes once Guzman got clipped?” Vera asked, following the story as best she could.
“Someone must have discovered where he was. We had two agents babysitting him when they were lured back to the city with manufactured orders. They left him in the safe house alone for five hours before learning they were duped. When they returned, Sikes was a ghost. No one's seen him since.”
The smile on Vera's face ached it was so big. “Thanks, Yogi. Now there are two people I know who're going to sleep a lot easier tonight. I owe you even though I was never here.”
“I'll remember that,” Yogi replied softly. “It's funny how the police never caught on to our little ruse with Warren Sikes. You must be one heck of a P.I. to get this far.”
“I try,” answered Vera. “Lawd knows I do try.”
“It's a shame about Warren Sikes though. He was very good with his hands,” the agent added, as she thought back on a time past. When she caught Vera looking at her sideways, she backpedaled quickly. “Oh, not like that, Vera. While his face and wounds were healing, he made these intricate origami animals out of one-dollar bills, even with his entire face bandaged. It was the most peculiar thing.”
Vera thanked her newest associate, then caught the elevator going down alone. She grinned again thinking, how Yogi would have been thoroughly impressed with what Sikes could do with one-hundred-dollar bills. Telling Rags that he hadn't killed anyone didn't come close to the kick she planned on getting when sharing what she didn't go to FBI headquarters for and didn't hear first hand from Yogi Easterland. It was almost laughable the way Vera had been chasing her tail when the answers to Rags's nightmares had always been right in front of him. The laughing stopped immediately once Vera had settled into her car, shoved her gun back in her purse, and put on the turn signal to exit the deserted downtown parking lot.
The thunderous sound of glass shattering from her front passenger window nearly caused her heart to seize. Instinctively, she threw her arm up as tiny fragments of glass flew her way. Vera grunted with her other hand clutching the steering wheel. “Ehhhh, get out! Ggget Ouuut!” she screamed, clawing at Frank Draper's arm.
He tossed Vera's purse on the floor board then shoved his pistol against her temple. “Shut up and drive, bitch!” he growled. “All of your goddamned snooping around ends tonight. I'd just as soon put a bullet in your head right here but you're gonna take me to the man who hired you.”
With her gun inside the bag on the floor beneath Draper's legs and his revolver pointed at her, Vera had to think fast. She couldn't lead him to Rags even if she wanted to because she had no idea where he was. If there was going to be any bullets flying, Vera wanted a shot at leveling the odds. She clenched her teeth and pretended to do as instructed. “Okay, just keep that cannon out of my face. I'll take you where I'm supposed to meet with him. It's a little ways but he'll be there, at a bar called The 3
rd
Round.”