Wendy didn’t immediately respond, but eventually she rolled up the sleeves of her white uniform and showed me her arms, palms down.
“Could you turn them over, please?”
She complied, and there it was. A deep two-inch-long scratch on the inside of her wrist. “What happened there?” I asked as I pointed at the fresh-looking wound.
“I took that silly bird”-she gestured at the parrot-“out of his cage and he lost his balance. He scraped me with his claw.”
“You remember when that happened?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Probably about two weeks ago.”
“The day Ronald got arrested?”
“Right around there,” she confirmed.
A young woman in tights and leg warmers came in. Wendy waved to her. “Go on back, Riley. I’ll be right there.”
Wendy watched her go, then looked at me. “You done?”
“I am.”
She started to go, then stopped. “Ronald didn’t do it, you know. You got the wrong guy,” she said defiantly.
“I know,” I replied.
This caught Wendy by surprise, and her eyes got big. “You know?” she asked, incredulous. “Then why don’t you let him out?”
“We are,” I replied. I glanced at Bailey, who nodded. “Today, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh.” She took a moment to regroup after the unexpected response. “Well, good,” she retorted. “Never should’ve arrested him in the first place.” And with another insouciant flip of the ponytail, Wendy went back to work.
Bailey made the call to the county jail. I was supposed to get in touch with Eric. Instead, I waited for her to finish.
“The minute I tell Eric we cut Yamaguchi loose, the case goes back into the hopper,” I said.
Bailey agreed. “I’ll probably have to give it up too. I only got it because we had a suspect in custody and they needed someone to babysit it through the preliminary hearing.”
“So it’ll wind up an unsolved, probably forever,” I predicted.
Bailey nodded unhappily.
I couldn’t drop this case into oblivion without a fight. John Doe deserved at least that much.
“Technically, Yamaguchi’s still in custody, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Bailey answered slowly, guessing where I was going.
“So technically I don’t have to give up the case just yet.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s not even noon. That gives us a whole day and night to do…something.”
“That’s still not a lot of time. We need a tight game plan.”
My loudly growling stomach told me what we’d do first.
Bailey heard it and smiled. “Since we need to regroup anyway, we may as well do it over lunch.”
To save time, we went back to the coffee shop. I ordered a spinach salad with the dressing on the side, and Bailey, Queen Sadistica, ordered a cheeseburger and fries. They served us and we ate quickly. We had to pull a rabbit out of a hat in mere hours. At this point, we didn’t even have a hat.
I finished my salad and began to pick at Bailey’s fries-an endearing sign of trusting friendship, as I’ve explained to her on many occasions. Bailey says it really isn’t so endearing, but I know she doesn’t mean it.
“Other than nailing the perp, what’s the one thing you’d like to figure out before we have to let this case go?” I asked.
Bailey thought a moment. “Why the hell you had to call me when you got it refiled?”
“Close, but no,” I replied. “The burning question of the day is our victim’s identity.”
“Yeah, that too.” Bailey took a deep breath, then blew it out. “But that’s a tall order, Knight. This guy shows up nowhere. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Agreed,” I said. “But we have a clean photo of him from the coroner, don’t we?”
Bailey nodded, knowing where I was headed. “Yeah. But showing it around and hoping for an ID is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack.”
“Except I just might happen to have a magnet.”
22
Bailey raised an eyebrow. “Which would be?”
“Cletus.”
Bailey blinked. “What’s a Cletus?”
“My homeless buddy. Used to be a minor-league pitcher.”
“And he wound up homeless, how?”
“He tore a rotator cuff and had to stop playing for a while,” I said. “Then his wife decided it was a good time to find another man, and Cletus decided it was a good time to find a bottle.” I gestured toward the street. “Now he lives out there.”
“You know where to find him now?”
“On Wednesday nights, he’s usually on Hill Street or Broadway.”
“This is Thursday,” Bailey pointed out.
“Thus, our dilemma,” I admitted.
“You ever run into him on any other days?”
I thought back. Had I?
“I think I remember seeing him on Spring Street on a Monday. Or was it Main?” I shook my head. “I’m not sure. But doesn’t it seem likely that he’d be staying somewhere nearby?”
In my experience, the homeless aren’t completely so. They don’t usually stray far from a familiar circumference.
“So what’re we going to do, just start walking up and down the streets looking for Cletus?” Bailey asked.
“You got a better idea?”
“Yeah. Tell Eric you need a few more days and wait till Wednesday, when you know where to find Cletus,” Bailey retorted.
“Won’t happen.” I shook my head. “It’s now or never.”
Bailey sighed. “Okay.” She threw down her napkin and stood up. “Better get the lead out. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
“And while we’re at it, we can show around our photo of John Doe,” I said. “See if someone recognizes him. Since this is our day for long shots, we may as well go for broke.”
“In for a penny…,” Bailey agreed.
We decided to start in Skid Row, home to one of the largest stable homeless populations in the country and just a little more than four square miles. It was within walking distance from the courthouse. Skid Row dwellers aren’t allowed to sleep on the sidewalks during daylight hours, but the street is their home, so the area is always filled with people sitting, eating, talking…surviving.
It makes me nervous to drive through there-I’m always afraid of hitting someone-but walking the area is far worse, though for a completely different reason. It’s heart-wrenching to see so many human beings living so hard. The streets are perpetually littered with crushed cans, broken bottles of cheap alcohol, fast-food wrappers, cracked glass vials, and used needles. The stench of urine permeates the alcoves and sides of every building, and the air is thick with the mix of old grease, cheap food, unwashed bodies, and dirty clothes. The feeling in the air is more than abject poverty. It’s the sense of overwhelming despair and defeat. On Skid Row, people didn’t even aspire to living; they struggled merely to exist.
As we walked the streets, I fought to keep from sinking into the misery of it all. Back and forth we walked, up one street and down another, looking for the familiar pile of blankets I knew as Cletus, asking if anyone had seen him, showing the photograph of our John Doe to anyone who looked relatively alert.
We approached a short, squat woman of indeterminate age and race who wore a knitted cap with ears and unlaced army boots. She pushed a full shopping cart.
“Don’t know no Cletus, and I ain’t never seen that dude, nohow. Nohow, no way…” She wandered off, continuing to mutter to herself.
A middle-aged black man in glasses and a torn overcoat seemed fairly together, so we showed him the photograph of our John Doe. “Do you recognize this guy by any chance?”
He looked at the photo carefully. Hope rose in my chest.
“He doesn’t look like any chance to me,” he replied. “Does he look like a chance to you? I see no chance. No chance in France, and not in pants.”
My heart sank back down. “Thank you, sir.”
We walked on. After another two hours, feeling defeated, footsore, and tired, I was beginning to concede that this was a fool’s errand. It was five o’clock and we were losing light. Pretty soon, it’d be too dangerous for two women-even two like us-to be out here.