Ruiz stuck her nose into the mix. “We can get a warrant,” she said aggressively. “We can make your life hard. Do you know the meaning of obstruction?”
Eta looked at her as if Ruiz were an annoying child. “Sure I do,” she drawled. “You ought to take some Metamucil for that, honey. There’s a Sav-on Drugstore the next block up.”
Ruiz flushed red. The dispatcher sniffed her disdain. “Honey, I worked dispatch for the New Orleans Police Department for eight years. You don’t scare me.”
The phone rang again, and she snatched it up. “Speed Couriers. What you want, honey?”
Parker cocked a look at Ruiz, one corner of his mouth tugging upward. “She’s something.”
Ruiz was pouting, angry, offended at being made the butt of a joke.
“Don’t push too hard,” Parker murmured. “We want her on our side. Finesse beats force every time with a woman.”
“Like you would know,” Ruiz grumbled. “You threatened her first.”
“But I did it politely and with a charming smile.”
The dispatcher moved from phone to microphone, one hand scribbling out the order. “Base to Eight, Base to Eight. Gemma, you there, baby?”
The messenger answered, and was dispatched to pick up a package from a downtown law office and deliver it to an attorney at the federal building on Los Angeles Street. The floater went up on the board under the GEMMA magnet.
“I’m curious,” Parker said, leaning on the counter with both elbows, settling in. “You haven’t asked once why we want to know if you dispatched a courier to this office. Why is that?”
“It don’t concern me.”
“A man was murdered there last night. His daughter told us he was waiting for a bike messenger. We’re thinking the messenger might be able to tell us something that could be valuable to the case.”
Eta heaved a sigh. “May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”
“The victim? Or the messenger?” Ruiz asked.
“You’re making me suspicious, you know,” Parker said casually, giving her the up-from-under look—intimate, as if they had known each other for years and he had gotten his way with this look before. “Being difficult like this. Makes me think you’ve got something to hide.”
The woman looked away, thinking. Maybe weighing pros and cons, maybe realizing she’d made a mistake taking the hard line.
“We’ll find out one way or the other,” Parker pointed out. “Better for everyone if we do it the friendly way. You don’t want us to get warrants, haul away half your office and all of your messengers. Do you own this business, Ms. . . .”
“Fitzgerald. No, I do not.”
“So you would have to answer to your boss, explain to him why he’s losing a day’s income, why his files are being confiscated, why the police want to look at his employee files and payroll records.” He shook his head sadly. “That won’t be good for you.”
She stared at him, hard, maybe wondering if she dared call his bluff.
“I know these kids,” she said. “They march to their own drummer, but they ain’t bad kids.”
“We just need to ask him some questions. If he didn’t do anything wrong, he’s got nothing to worry about.”
Eta Fitzgerald looked away and sighed again, her presence deflating as she admitted defeat to herself. The phone rang, she picked it up and politely asked the caller to hold.
“It was a late call,” she said to Parker, staring down at the counter.
“Where’s the manifest?”
“The messenger’s still got it. He didn’t make it back to match up his paperwork. It was raining. I closed up and went home to my kids.”
“And is he working today?”
“He ain’t been in yet.”
“Why is that?”
She made a sour face. “I don’t know! I’m not his mother. Some of these kids drift in and out. Some of them got other jobs besides this one. I don’t keep track of them.”
Parker pulled his notebook out of his inside coat pocket. “What’s his name?”
“J.C.”
“What’s J.C. stand for?”
“It stands for J.C.,” she said, perturbed. “That’s what we call him: J.C. Number Sixteen.”
“Where does he live?”
“I have no idea.”
“Must say something in his employee file.”
“He’s 1099. We got no file.”
“He’s an independent contractor,” Parker said. “No paperwork, no health insurance, no workers’ comp.”
“That’s right.”
“I’ll hazard a guess and say he might even get paid in cash.”
“That ain’t my department,” Eta snapped.
“Do you want me to call for the warrant?” Ruiz asked Parker, taking her cell phone out of her purse.
Parker held up a hand to hold her off. His attention was steady on the dispatcher. “You have his phone number.”
“He don’t have no phone.”
Ruiz sniffed and started punching numbers.
“He don’t! I got no number for him.”
Parker looked dubious. “He’s never called you? Called in sick, asked for something, let you know he’s running late?”
“He calls on the two-way. I got no phone number for the boy.”
Ruiz spoke into her phone. “Detective Renee Ruiz, LAPD. I need to speak with ADA Langfield regarding a warrant.”
“Maybe I got an address,” the dispatcher said grudgingly.
The phone was lighting up like a pinball machine, one call on hold, another coming in. She grabbed up the receiver, hit the second line button, and said, “You gotta call back, honey. I’m in the middle of a police harassment.”
She went to a file cabinet in the corner of the cubicle and dug through a drawer, pulling out what looked like an empty file folder.
“It’s just one of those mailbox places,” she said, handing it over. “That’s all I know. I wouldn’t say any different if you tortured me.”
Parker raised his eyebrows. “I hope we won’t have to find out. Can you tell me what he looks like?”
“He looks like a blond-haired, blue-eyed white boy.”
“Any pictures of him up on that wall?” he asked, nodding toward the paneled wall.
“No, sir.”
“Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Fitzgerald. You’re a good citizen.”
Eta Fitzgerald scowled at him and grabbed her ringing phone, dismissing him. Parker opened the folder, scanned the single sheet of paper—a job application—for pertinent info.
NAME: J. C. Damon
Parker closed the folder and handed it to Ruiz. Instead of turning for the front door, he started down the hall toward the back of the restaurant-cum–courier service. The dispatcher jerked the telephone receiver away from her head and shouted at him.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Parker waved her off. “We’ll let ourselves out, Ms. Fitzgerald. Don’t worry about us. We’re parked closer to the back.”
He glanced into what used to be a small private dining room, now converted to office space for Speed’s executives, neither of whom had yet made it in to work. By the state of the place, it was safe to assume there was no high ladder of success to climb and nowhere lower to go. There were two beat-up desks littered with paperwork, and a dirty, bottle-green ashtray sitting on a coffee table in front of a sofa that looked like it might have been found along the freeway.
Farther down the hall, what had been a coatroom now was a dark red closet crammed with file cabinets.
Parker hit the swinging door into the kitchen, where conversation and cigarette smoke hung in the air, along with the slight, sweet, faded scent of pot. The kid with the blue Mohawk was sitting on a stainless-steel prep table. He froze like a small animal that knew it had been spotted by a predator that would kill it if it moved. A wild-looking Rasta man stood leaning back against a sink, smoking a cigarette. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed to see a pair of cops walk in.