Kill the Messenger (8 page)

                        
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Speed Couriers. Stylish logo. A forties deco look. All caps, letters slanted steeply to the right, a series of horizontal lines extending to the left to suggest fast movement. The sign had probably cost more than a month’s rent on the dump it hung over.

The space had once been an Indian restaurant, and still smelled like it, Parker noticed as they went inside. The stale, sour ghost of old curry had permeated the royal blue walls and gold- painted ceiling. Ruiz wrinkled her nose and looked at Parker like it was his fault.

“Welcome to our house.” The guy who opened the door and stood back to let them in was tall and thin with the dark, shiny eyes of a zealot.

A punked-out kid with three nose rings and a blue Mohawk sat smoking a cigarette at a small table near the front window. After a furtive gaze at Parker and Ruiz, he put on a pair of curved silver shades, slipped out of his chair and out the door as they moved into the room.

“All guests are welcome, all sinners redeemed,” their doorman told them. He arched a brow in disapproval as he looked down on Ruiz and the red lace bra playing peekaboo out of her black suit jacket. “Are you familiar with the story of the wife of Heber?”

Parker looked around. The wall going down a long, narrow hall was covered with cheap, staple-riddled fake wood paneling and served as a giant bulletin board. Playbills and political propaganda. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE—WAGE WAR AGAINST THE CAR CULTURE. A flyer advertised a messengers’ race that had happened two months previously. A poster recruited blood donors for cash. Snapshots showed a motley assortment of messengers at parties, on their bikes, clowning around. Hand-scrawled notes on torn scraps of paper advertised stuff for sale. Someone was looking for a nonsmoking roommate. Someone was moving to Holland, “Where the weed is legal and the sex is free. Bye-bye you cocksuckers!”

Parker showed his badge to their spirit guide. “We need to speak with your dispatcher.”

Their doorman smiled and gestured toward a scratched-up Plexiglas and drywall cubicle, where a large woman with a head of braids held back by a bright-colored scarf and a phone sandwiched between her shoulder and her ear was taking notes with one hand and reaching for a microphone with the other. “Eta, Queen of Africa.”

The woman’s voice boomed over a tinny speaker. “John Remko! Get your crazy ass on a bike! You got a pickup. Take this manifest and get the hell out of here!”

Frowning, the man went to the window cut into the hall side of the cubicle. “Miss Eta, such language—”

The woman’s eyes were bulging. “Don’t you give me no lip, Preacher John! You ain’t my cousin’s uncle’s son. You get out of here or you ain’t gonna be nobody’s relative no more, ’cause I will have done killed you!”

Preacher John took the manifest and disappeared down the dark hall, a retreating specter.

Parker stepped up to the window. The woman didn’t look at him. She slapped her note up on a magnet board. The magnets each had a word printed on them—MOJO, JC, GEMMA, SLIDE. She secured the note to the board with PJOHN.

“You want a job, honey, fill out the yellow form. You got a job for us, fill out the top of the manifest,” she said, reaching for the ringing phone. “You want something else, you ain’t gonna get it here.

“Speed Couriers,” she barked into the phone. “What you want, honey?”

Parker reached inside the window and slipped his shield into her line of sight. “Detective Parker, Detective Ruiz. We need a few minutes, ma’am. We have some questions.”

The dispatcher looked at the badge, not at Parker, as she listened to the person on the other end of the call.

“Well, whatever you got, Todd, babydoll, you better die of it. I’m already short a messenger. . . . Walking pneumonia? I don’t need you walking, honey. I need you on a bike.” She listened for a moment, huffed in offense, and said: “You don’t love me. That’s all there is to it.”

She slammed the receiver down, swiveled her tall wheeled stool around, and faced Parker with an imperious glare. “I got no time for you, Blue Eyes. You ain’t nothing but trouble. I can see that comin’ now. A sharp-dressed man with a hat ain’t never nothin’ but trouble. You gonna cost me nothin’ but time and money.”

Parker swept his fedora off, grinned, and held his raincoat open. “You like the suit? It’s Canali.”

“I’ll like it better from a distance. Aks what you gonna aks, honey. This ain’t the offices of
GQ
magazine. I got me a real business to run.”

“Did you send a messenger to the office of Leonard Lowell, Esquire, for a pickup last night around six-thirty?”

She stuck her chin out and didn’t blink. “We close at six
P.M.
”

“Good for you,” Parker said with a hint of a half smile. A dimple cut into his right cheek. “But that’s not what I asked.”

“I send out a whole lotta messengers on a whole lotta runs.”

“Do you want us to interview each of them?” Parker asked politely. “I can clear my calendar for the rest of the day. Of course, they’ll have to come down to the station. How many are there? I’ll have my partner call for a van.”

His nemesis narrowed her eyes.

“What do you call those notes you put up on that board?” Parker asked.

“Floaters.”

“Every order gets put on a floater. The floater goes on the board under the name of the messenger going on the run. Is that how it works?”

“You want my job?” she asked. “You need another line of work? You want me to train you? You can have this job. I’ll go file my nails and watch Oprah and Dr. Phil every day.”

Her fingernails were as long as bear claws, with metallic purple polish and hand-painted pink rose details.

“I want you to answer a simple question, ma’am. That’s all. You can answer me, or I can take all the floaters you wrote yesterday back to the station and go through them one by one. And what about the manifests? I’m guessing you match the two things up at the end of the day. We could take them too. Let you get on with your business.”

“You can get a damn warrant,” Eta barked. She grabbed her radio mike by the throat as incoming static and garbled words crackled over the speaker. “Ten-nine? Ten-nine, P.J.? What the hell do you mean you’re lost? You ain’t gone but two minutes. How could you be lost? You’re lost in your brain, that’s where you’re lost. What’s your twenty? Look at a damn street sign.”

The messenger answered, and Eta rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly across the damn street! I swear, John Remko, if you ain’t taking your meds, I’m gonna feed ’em to you my own self! Get yourself turned around and get gone before I got Money chewing on my tail.”

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.