He watched them stand beside Denise’s car and exchange phone numbers. Now if only he could be as good a matchmaker for himself. But something in him wasn’t ready for that yet.
And what else have you got in your life? the unwelcome thought came.
Work. Oh yes, the Jorge papers from the FEMA people.
Jorge had stuffed all sorts of things into the envelope. Receipts, check stubs, unreadables, some telephone numbers, a Mexican passport with a picture that looked a lot like the corpse.
He was stacking these when a thin slip fell out. A note written on a rubberstamped sheet from Bayside Boats.
It wasn’t that far to Bayside Boats. He went there at dawn and watched a shrimp boat come in. When he showed every man in the place Jorge’s photo, nobody recognized it. But the manager and owner, a grizzled type named Rundorf, hesitated just a heartbeat before answering. Then shook his head.
Driving away, he passed by the Busted Flush mooring. It was just coming in from a run and Merv Pitscomb stood at the prow.
His supervisor said, “You get anything from SIU on these cases?”
“Nope.” The Special Investigations Unit was notoriously jammed up and in love with the FBI.
“Any statewide CAPs?”
CAPs, Crimes Against Persons, was the latest correct acronym that shielded the mind from the bloody reality, kept you from thinking about the abyss. “Nope.”
“So you got two drowned guys who worked boats out of the same town. Seems like a stretch.”
McKenna tried to look judicious. “I want a warrant to look at their pay records. Nail when these two worked, and work from there.”
The supervisor shook his head. “Seems pretty thin.”
“I doubt I’ll get much more.”
“You’ve been workin’ this one pretty hard. Your partner LeBouc, he’s due back tomorrow.”
“So?”
A level gaze. “Maybe you should work it with him. This FBI angle, these guys coming up to you like that. Maybe this really should be their game.”
“They’re playing close to their vest. No help there for sure. And waiting for LeBouc won’t help, not without more substance.”
“Ummm.” The supervisor disliked the FBI, of course, but he didn’t want to step on their toes. “Lessee. This would have to go through Judge Preston. He’s been pretty easy on us lately, must be gettin’ laid again…”
“Let me put it in the batch going up to him later this morning.”
“Okay, but then you got to get onto some more cases. They’re piling up.”
He had boilerplate for the warrant application. He called it up and pasted in I respectfully request that the Court issue a Warrant and Order of Seizure in the form annexed, authorizing a search of premises at… And such as is found shall be brought before the Court, together with such other and further relief that the Court may deem proper. The lawyers loved such stuff.
Merv Pitscomb’s face knotted with red rage. The slow-witted Buddy Johnson, ex-con and tire deflator, stood beside Pitscomb and wore a smirk. Neither liked the warrant and they liked it still less when he took their pay company records.
Ethan Anselmo was there, of course, and had gone out on the Busted Flush, a night job two days before the body washed up. No entry for Jorge Castan. But some initials from the bookkeeper a week before the last Anselmo entry, and two days after it, had a total, $178. One initial was GB and the other JC.
Bookkeepers have to write things down, even if they’re supposed to keep quiet. Illegals were off the books, of course, usually with no Social Security numbers. But you had to balance your books, didn’t you? McKenna loved bookkeepers.
“Okay,” his supervisor said, “we got reasonable grounds to bring in this Pitscomb and the other one—”
“Rundorf.”
“—to bring them in and work them a little. Maybe they’re not wits, maybe these are just accidents the skippers don’t want to own up to. But we got probable cause here. Bring them in tomorrow morning. It’s near end of our shift.”
There was always some paperwork confusion at quitting time. McKenna made up the necessaries and was getting some other, minor cases straightened out, thinking of heading home.
Then he had an idea.
He had learned a good trick a decade back, from a sergeant who had busted a lot of lowlife cases open.
If you had two different suspects for a murder, book them both. Hold them overnight. Let the system work on them.
In TV lawyer shows the law was a smart, orderly machine that eventually—usually about an hour—punished the guilty.
But the system was not about that at all. The minute you stepped into its grinder you lost control of your life and became a unit. You sat in holding cells thinking your own fevered thoughts. Nobody knew you. You stared at the drain hole in the gray concrete floor where recent stains got through even the bleaching disinfectant sprayed over them. On the walls you saw poorly scrawled drawings of organs and acts starkly illuminated by the actinic, buzzing lights that never went out. You heard echoing yells and cops rapping their batons on the bars to get some peace. Which never came. So you sat some more with your own fevered thoughts.
You had to ask permission to go to the toilet rather than piss down that hole. There was the phone call you could make and a lawyer you chose out of the phone book, and the fuzzed voice said he’d be down tomorrow. Maybe he would come and maybe not. It was not like you had a whole lot of money.
The cops referred to you by your last name and moved you like walking furniture to your larger stinking cell with more guys in it. None of them looked at you except the ones you didn’t like the look of at all. Then it was night and the lights dimmed, but not much.
That was where the difference between the two suspects came in. One would sleep, the other wouldn’t.
Anybody who kills someone doesn’t walk away clean. Those movies and TV lawyer shows made out that murderers were smart, twisted people. Maybe twisted was right but not smart, and for sure they were not beasts. Some even dressed better than anyone he had ever seen.
But like it or not, they were people. Murderers saw all the same movies as ordinary folk, and a lot more TV. They sat around daytime making drug deals or waiting for nighttime to do second-story jobs. Plenty of time to think about their business. Most of them could quote from The Godfather. The movie, of course. None of them read novels or anything else. They were emotion machines running all the time and after a job they blew their energy right away. Drank, went out cruising for pussy, shot up.
Then, if you timed it right, they got arrested.
So then the pressure came off. The hard weight of tension, the slow-building stress fidgeting at the back of the mind—all that came home to roost. They flopped down on the thin pad of their bunk and pulled the rough wool blanket over their faces and fell like the coming of heaven into a deep sleep. Many of them barely made it to the bunk before the energy bled out of them.
But now think about the guy who didn’t do it. He knows he didn’t do it even if the goddamn world doesn’t. He is scared, sure, because he is far enough into the downstreet culture to know that justice is a whore and lawyers run the whorehouse. And so he is in real danger here. But he also for sure knows that he has to fight hard now, think, pay attention. And he is mad too because he didn’t do it and shouldn’t that matter?
So he frets and sits and doesn’t sleep. He is ragged-eyed and slurring his words when he tries to tell the other guys in the cell—who have rolled over and gone to sleep—that he didn’t do it. It would be smart to be some kind of Zen samurai and sleep on this, he knows that, but he can’t. Because he didn’t do it.