She crinkled her brow. "Pardon me, but did you actually fight with Tex? I thought it was more like sitting down in a chair and tipping over."
"You wound me, Nikki. You lash me with your mockery."
"No," she had said with undisguised lust, "that was the sash from my robe." It only made him ache all the more to share another night with her. But, as ever, Nikki Heat was protective of her independence. He'd taken a sulking cab ride back to Tribeca, his writer's imagination filling his head with possible consequences of reunited college sweethearts exchanging phone numbers.
He slid a volume of his Oxford English Dictionary into its home and said, "I almost didn't call. I was afraid I'd wake you up." He put another blue OED next to its companion before he added, "Because you said you were going to sleep."
"Are you checking up on me?"
"Me? Get real."
"I'll tell you if you want to know."
"Nik, I don't need to know."
"Because I wasn't home asleep when you called. I was out." For an avid poker player, he was masking his tells about as well as Roger Rabbit after a swig of whiskey. At last, she said, "I couldn't sleep so I went to the precinct. I wanted to run a check through an FBI database searching specific weapons and duct tape and persons with a history of torture. Sometimes an MO will jump out. I got nowhere last night, but I connected with an agent at the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico who's going to stay on it and see what kicks. I also got them the fingerprint partials we pulled off the typewriter ribbon."
"So all that time you were working?"
"Not all that time," she said.
So there it was. She had seen the Google screen. Or maybe she hadn't and she actually had connected with Petar. "Are you trying to torture me, Detective Heat?"
"Is that what you want, Jameson? Do you want me to torture you?" And with that, she finished her coffee and took her cup back to the kitchen. "It's the code, man," said Ochoa. "It's that stupid code that keeps people from helping us." He and his partner Raley sat in the front seat of their unmarked across the street from the Moreno Funeral Parlor at 127th and Lex.
The door to the funeral home was still idle, so Raley let his gaze wander up the block to watch a MetroNorth train on the elevated tracks slowing for the Harlem station, last stop before depositing its freight of morning commuters from Fairfield County at Grand Central. "It makes no sense. Especially when it's family. I mean, they must know we're trying to find whoever killed their own kin."
"Doesn't have to make sense, Rales. The code says you don't snitch, no matter what."
"But whose code? Padilla's family doesn't show any banger ties."
"Don't have to. It's in the culture. It's in the music, it's on the street. Even if snitching doesn't get you whacked, it makes you the lowest. Nobody wants to be that. That's the rule."
"So what can we hope to do then?"
Ochoa shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe find the exception?"
A black van pulled up to the receiving door of the mortuary and honked twice. Both detectives looked at their watches. They knew OCME had released Esteban Padilla's body at 8 A.M. It was now a quarter to nine, and they watched silently as the rolling metal door rose and two attendants emerged to offload the gurney and the dark vinyl bag containing the victim's remains.
Just after nine a white '98 Honda pulled up and parked. "Here we go," said Raley. But he cursed when the driver got out and the uncooperative cousin from the night before went inside the building. "So much for finding our exception."
They waited ten minutes without talking, and when nobody else arrived, Raley started the car. "I was thinking the same thing," said his partner as the Roach Coach pulled away from the curb.
Nobody answered their knock at Padilla's row house on East 115th. The detectives were just about to leave when a voice came through the door, asking who it was, in Spanish. Ochoa identified himself and asked if they could have a word. There was a long pause before a security chain slid, a deadbolt shot, and the door opened a crack. A teenage boy asked if he could see badges.
Pablo Padilla brought them to sit in the living room. Although the boy didn't say so, it seemed the invitation was not so much about hospitality as to get them all in off the street. Ochoa reflected on how this no-snitch thing was supposed to be about solidarity, but the eyes of the kid looked more like those of victims of terrorism he had seen. Or the townsfolk in some old Clint Eastwood Western who were scared of the tyrannical outlaw and his boys.
Since he was the Spanish speaker and was going to be doing the talking, Ochoa decided to go gently. "I'm sorry for your loss" was a good place to start.
"Did you find my uncle's killer?" was where the boy started.
"We're working on that, Pablo. That's why we're here. To help find who did this and arrest him so he can be sent away for good." The detective wanted to paint a picture of this person off the streets, impotent as a source of vengeance to anyone who cooperated.
The teenager absorbed that and looked appraisingly at the two cops. Ochoa noticed Raley was keeping a low profile, but was being eyes and ears. His partner seemed especially interested in numerous garment bags hanging on the back of a door. The boy picked up on it, too. "That is my new suit. For my uncle's funeral." The sound of his voice was broken but brave. Ochoa saw the water rimming his eyes and vowed never to call the vic Coyote Man again.
"Pablo, what you tell me here will be between us, understand? Same as if you called an anonymous tip line." The boy didn't respond, so he continued. "Did your uncle Esteban have any enemies? Anybody who wanted to harm him?"
The boy slowly shook his head before he answered. "No, I don't know anyone who would do this. Everybody liked him, he was always happy, a good dude, you know?"
"That's good," said Ochoa, while thinking, That's bad-at least for what he needed-but he smiled, anyway. Pablo seemed to relax a bit, and as the detective delicately asked him the usual questions about his uncle's friends, girlfriends, personal habits like gambling or drugs, the boy answered in the short-form way teenagers do, but he answered. "What about his work?" asked Ochoa. "He was a produce driver?"
"Yes, it wasn't what he liked, but he had experience as a driver, so that was what he got. You know, a job's a job sometimes, even if it's not as good."
Ochoa looked over to Raley, who had no idea what they were saying but could read his partner's look signaling he had hit a point of interest. Ochoa turned back to Pablo and said, "I hear that." Then, "I notice you said 'not as good.' "
"Uh-huh."
"Not as good as what?"
"Well… It's sort of embarrassing, but he's dead, so I guess I can say." The boy fidgeted and shoved his hands under his thighs so he was sitting on them. "My uncle had a, you know, classier job before. But a couple of months ago… well, he got fired all of a sudden."
Ochoa nodded. "That's too bad. What did he do when he got fired?" Pablo turned when he heard the keys in the front door, and the detective tried to get him back. "Pablo? What job did he get fired from?"
"Um, he was a driver for a limo company."
"And why did he get fired?"
The front door opened and Padilla's cousin, the one they had left at the funeral home came in. "What the hell's going on here?"
Pablo stood up, and his body language needed no translation even for Raley. It said this interview was over. Even though Detective Heat didn't have an appointment, Cassidy Towne's editor at Epimetheus Books did not make her wait. Nikki announced herself in the lobby, and when she and Rook stepped off the elevator onto the sixteenth floor of the publishing house, his assistant was waiting. She keyed the code into the touchpad that opened the frosted glass doors to the offices and escorted them through a brightly lit hallway of white walls with blond wood accents. This was the nonfiction floor, so their path was decorated by framed covers of Epimetheus books, each a biography, expose, or celebrity-rant best seller encased side by side with a reprint of its peak New York Times list.