“I’ll talk with you. Why not? Fuck, you got me, don’t you?” Curtis said.
Maybe it’ll be easy for a change. That’d be nice, Colin thought. Aloud, he said, “Are you confessing you robbed the convenience store and threatened Mr. Leghari with a pistol?”
“The raghead guy in there? Yeah, I done that.” Curtis nodded. “Weren’t no bullets in the gun, though.”
Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. If it was, the kid had a few loose screws, or more than a few. An awful lot of convenience-store clerks packed heat of their own, commonly in a drawer under the register. Either Cedric had got the drop on Ahmed Leghari or he was one lucky fellow. Well, either way this did look like an easy one. “Would you care to tell us why you knocked over the Circle K, Mr. Curtis?” Colin asked.
By the way Curtis looked at him, he was the dummy. “On account of I didn’t have no money,” he said.
Thank you, Willie Sutton ran through Colin’s mind. He didn’t bring it out. Cedric Curtis wouldn’t know Willie Sutton from a hole in the ground. He did say, “Plenty of ways to get money where you don’t end up talking with us.”
“Like what?” Curtis was openly scornful.
“They call them jobs,” Gabe Sanchez said dryly. Colin shot him a warning glance. Even that might be skating close to the edge. You never could tell what a gung-ho defense attorney could build from a crack like that. Look at the racist cop disrespecting my client! he’d thunder.
But Curtis wasn’t offended. He threw back his head and guffawed. “Jobs? For me? You gotta be jivin’, man. Ain’t no jobs for me. Ain’t no jobs for nobody like me. Weren’t no jobs for nobody like me even before that fuckin’ thing blew up. Only got worse since. So I can deal rock-an’ you’ll bust me. Or I can do this shit-an’ you’ll bust me.”
“You don’t look like you’ve missed a lot of meals,” Gabe said, which was true enough.
“I got two kids to feed. I got an old lady, too,” Curtis replied. Whether she was his children’s mother, he didn’t say. “Like I told you, gotta get Benjamins some kinda way, law or no law.”
A gung-ho lawyer could make something out of that, too, especially with things the way they were nowadays. Plenty of potential jurors might be out of work themselves. Even ones who weren’t would have cousins or brothers-in-law who were. In tough times, they might not want to come down hard on a guy who stuck a gun-an unloaded gun, the lawyer would insist-in a scared clerk’s face so he could feed his little children.
Well, that wasn’t Colin’s worry, or not very much of it. He had the arrest. Now he had a confession to go with it. The DA would carry the ball from here.
In the meantime, he nailed things down as tight as he could. He asked Cedric Curtis to describe the crime. Curtis did, with almost as much detail as the Circle K surveillance camera showed. Whatever a defense lawyer did, he wouldn’t be able to claim his client hadn’t done it.
When Curtis finished, Gabe said, “Odds are you’ll do some time. That’ll keep you fed, anyway, even if prison rations aren’t anything to write home about.”
“I know about jail food,” Curtis said. “There’s enough of it, no matter how shitty it is.” No, he hadn’t worried about getting caught.
“Okay,” Gabe said. “So you’ll have three squares and a cot for a while. But what about your kids? What about your girlfriend? Who’s gonna take care of them while you’re in the pokey?”
Cedric Curtis looked astonished, as if that had never occurred to him. Probably never did, Colin thought sadly. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen reactions like that way too many times before. One of the things that made criminals what they were was an inability to look ahead. Everything that happened after they did what they did came as a complete surprise to them. Even after they got busted, did time, got out, and pulled another one, they were amazed all over again when they quickly turned into two-time losers.
“Aw, fuck,” Curtis said softly. Maybe he could learn after all. But what lesson would he draw from this? Don’t knock over convenience stores? Or Don’t get caught after you knock over a convenience store? Colin couldn’t be sure. He knew what how he’d guess, and didn’t like it.
Well, Cedric wouldn’t be his problem for a while. The uniformed cop came back and took the robber away. “Nothing left of this one but the paperwork,” Gabe said.
“Yeah.” Colin wished he sounded-and were-happier.
“Lighten up,” Gabe told him. “He will do time. If he’d lifted canned goods, unh-unh. But no jury’s gonna buy that he stuck a gun in a guy’s face just so he could buy groceries for his brats. I mean, juries are dumb, but not that dumb.”
“You hope. We hope,” Colin said.
“Honest to God, they aren’t,” Gabe insisted. “Me, I’m going outside to celebrate with a cigarette.” He grinned wryly. “Way to party down, huh?”
“If you say so.” Colin went back to his desk. He stolidly started working on Cedric Curtis’ file. The more you did now, the less you had to do later. But he hadn’t got far when his phone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson. . Say what?. . Are you sure?. . Aw-fudge. . Okay, what’s the address?. . Right. I’ll get there soon as I can. ’Bye.” He slammed the phone down.
Gabe Sanchez was just coming back from his nicotine fix when Colin stood up. His face must have been all over thunderclouds, because Gabe blurted, “Jesus! What hit the fan now? Your family okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, they’re fine,” Colin answered. “But there’s a little old lady dead over on 139th Street, and the cop who found her says it sure looks like the Strangler got her. I’m on my way there now. Wanna ride along?”
“Shit, I’m dying to,” Gabe answered. But he walked out to the parking lot with Colin. Colin had known he would. They wasted a couple of minutes filling out the required forms for getting a car: like a lot of Southern California towns, San Atanasio had really tightened up as gas got scarce and expensive. But no one would say boo to this trip, not when Colin scribbled South Bay Strangler on the line labeled Reason for utilization of automotive vehicle.
The sun shone as brightly as it ever did since the eruption. The sky tried to be blue, but didn’t quite seem to remember how. It was somewhere in the high sixties. Seattle summer? It could have been worse. It had been last week, and no doubt it would be again before too long.
North on Hesperus to Braxton Bragg. East on Braxton Bragg to Sword Beach. Left onto Sword Beach, then a right at the next light and onto 139th. The corner there had a liquor store and a seafood restaurant that charged too much for some of the most mediocre dinners Colin had ever regretted ordering.
Once you turned the corner and headed up 139th, you fell back in time. Most of the houses on the little street had gone up not long after the war to give the kids of the Baby Boom bedrooms of their own. Some were even older: they looked like adobe even if they were stucco, and had roofs of Spanish (well, Spanish-style) tiles. They’d been moved here when the Harbor Freeway pushed through to San Pedro at the start of the Sixties.
Back then, San Atanasio had been white and Japanese. Oh, a few Mexican-Americans, but from families that had been in the States for generations. (Colin’s secretary, Josie Linares, came from a family like that.) Now there were whites and blacks and Mexicans and Salvadorans (the Cubans in San Atanasio mostly lived farther south and east) and Koreans and Vietnamese (the Japanese had moved south to Torrance and Palos Verdes when the blacks started coming in) and. . everything under the sun.
What there wasn’t was a lot of money. Not in this part of town. The cars that sat in driveways and on the street-and, here and there, on lawns-looked as if they’d been sitting a long time even before the supervolcano did its number on gas prices. A couple of them were up on blocks. The rust they showed argued they’d been on blocks quite a while, too.