Ramona stared him down.
Pearce Byers came out of the kitchen and advanced quickly on Ramona. Dressed in a linen shirt and wool slacks, he had a scowl on his face that pinched his eyebrows together. “What can I do for you, Officer?” he asked.
“I’m Detective Sergeant Pino,” Ramona said as she handed him her business card, “and I need a few minutes of your time.”
Byers glanced at the card and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Certainly. A few minutes. Sorry to be so rushed, but I have a party of twenty arriving any time now and a number of early pre-concert bookings for the piano recital at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.”
Ramona surveyed the dining room. All was ready for the alleged onslaught and there wasn’t a customer in sight. “I need to talk to anyone on your staff who might be able to put me in touch with Brian Riley. He worked as a busboy here last summer.”
Byers looked thoughtful. “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“He was here for a very short period of time,” Ramona said. “No more than a month. I was told he was fired for tardiness.”
“Oh, yes,” Byers said, touching his finger to his lips. “I tend to forget the problem children we hire who slip through our screening process. As I recall, we took a chance on him because his father was a police officer. But he wasn’t fired for tardiness; he was canned for coming to work stoned.”
“On drugs or alcohol?”
“Does it really matter?” Byers answered. “But to answer your question, not only did he show up stoned, but he was caught smoking pot on breaks behind the building with an apprentice cook. We fired them both.”
“Who was the cook?” Ramona asked.
“Randy Velarde. He was enrolled in the culinary arts program at the community college.”
“I need to see Velarde’s employment application. Riley’s also.”
Byers looked past Ramona toward a large group of people who’d arrived at the hostess area. “Can’t this wait until later?”
“No, it can’t,” Ramona answered.
Byers sighed in frustration, called one of the servers over, asked him to seat the waiting party, and told Ramona he’d be right back with the employment applications.
The pretty-boy bartender, who’d been listening with great interest, leaned over the bar. “If you can’t find Randy at home, he may be in class at the community college.”
“Do you know that for a fact?” Ramona asked.
Pretty Boy nodded. “When I ran into him a month or so ago, he said he was working days as a grocery store stocker and taking classes at night and one morning on his days off.”
“Did he say what store he was working at?”
“No.”
“Thanks,” Ramona said.
Pretty Boy didn’t answer right away. He was distracted by a very attractive woman with long brown hair who hurried up the stairs and joined the just-seated party. He gave the woman a thorough once-over before returning his attention to Ramona.
“Yeah, no problem.”
“Do you know where I can find Brian Riley?”
“Nope, that I don’t know,” Pretty Boy said as he went to the end of the bar to take drink orders from a couple with Palm Springs tans.
Byers returned with the employment applications, slapped the papers on the bar in front of Ramona, and hurried away to greet arriving customers at the hostess area. Ramona copied down the information she needed and made her way to the kitchen, where she asked the executive chef and several of her assistants about Randy Velarde’s work in the kitchen. They characterized him as moody, inconsistent, and a pothead. The one cook who vaguely remembered Brian Riley put him in the same category.
Byers came bursting through the double doors just as Ramona was writing down names and phone numbers.
“You can’t be in here,” he sputtered angrily. “This is unacceptable.”
“I’m done,” Ramona said with a smile.
“Next time, come back after we’re closed.”
Ramona closed her notebook. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tranquilo Casitas, Space 39 was the address Randy Velarde had listed on his job application. It was a run-down trailer park on Agua Fria Street just inside the city limits, located between a sand-and-gravel operation and a small subdivision of “starter homes” on tiny lots. Hardly a tranquil place to live, it was a well-known trouble spot. Patrol officers were frequently called to the location to quell domestic disputes, break up gang fights, and investigate break-ins and burglaries that were usually drug-related.
On the way to the trailer park, Ramona ran a check on Randy Velarde. He had a clean sheet, but given the fact that he’d been fired for smoking marijuana on the job, Ramona doubted that Velarde was an upstanding citizen.
She pulled into Tranquilo Casitas and bumped her way down a paved asphalt lane that had so many potholes it resembled a bombed-out Baghdad roadway. All of the mobile homes in the park were older single-wides, and many were in disrepair. Some had plastic sheeting on the roof held in place by automobile tires. Others had broken windows covered with scrap plywood. A few were missing the skirting used to hide the concrete blocks that elevated the trailers off the ground.
The single-wide at space 39 was no better or worse than all the rest. On one side of the trailer jutted a half-finished covered porch made of plywood. Scrap lumber and construction trash littered the area. The hulk of an old Japanese subcompact pickup truck sat in the mud ruts of the parking space. Ramona climbed three rickety wooden steps that rose to the plywood front porch, and with her badge case open to display her shield and police ID, she knocked on the door. A young teenage girl, no more than five-one and a hundred pounds, opened up. She had an infant riding on her hip. The distinctive smell of grass wafted out the door.
“I’d like to speak to Randy Velarde,” said Ramona, who wasn’t at all interested in making a misdemeanor arrest on a pot possession charge.
“My brother’s not here right now. Why do you need to see him?”
Ramona studied the girl’s face. She looked clear-eyed and seemed alert to her surroundings. “I’m trying to locate someone Randy worked with last summer, Brian Riley.”
The girl pushed the baby’s tiny hand away from the front of her blouse. No more than four or five months old, the infant had a dirty face and a urine-stained diaper. “What did Brian do?”
“Nothing,” Ramona replied. “Do you know him?”
“Yeah, sort of. He stayed here for a couple nights last summer before he left town.”
“Where did he go?”
The baby started to cry. The girl pulled a pacifier from her pants pocket and stuck it in the baby’s mouth. “I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him much.”
“Why was he staying here?”
“I think he had a fight with his father or his stepmother. Something like that.”
“Would Randy know where Brian went?”
The baby spit out the pacifier. The girl picked it up, put it in her pocket, and shifted the baby to her other hip. “Maybe. Look, I’ve got to feed him.”
Ramona heard a toilet flush. “Where is Randy?”
The girl put her hand on the door. “In class at the community college. He doesn’t get home until after nine.”
“Is the baby’s mother working?”
“I’m his mother,” the girl said, jiggling the baby on her hip. “He’s my little hijo.”
“Where’s your mother?”
“Working.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a housekeeper at the hospital.”
“Is there anyone here with you?”
“Javier, my hijo’s father.”