Some Degree of Murder (15 page)

My pager went off in the middle of our game of hearts.
I snatched it off my belt and turned off the sound. A phone number appeared on the LED screen. I recognized it immediately, but couldn’t remember who it belonged to. Then I realized it my own number at my desk in the detective’s division.

I looked up to see Ben and Teri both eyeing me with long faces.

“I’ve got to answer this. It’ll just be a minute.”

Laying my cards on the table, I went into the kitchen and dialed my number. It picked up on the second ring.

“Detective Tower?” the male voice asked.

“Yeah. Who’s this? Did you page me?”

“It’s Paul Hiero. I paged you.”

“What is it?”

There was a long silence. Then, “I got someone down here who wants to talk to you. It’s about your case. The Bingo lot girl.”

“Who?” I asked, but I knew.

“Toni Redding.”

“I already talked to her.”

“I know. She told me. But there’s been some…developments.”

“What kind?”

“It’d really be better if you came down here,” Hiero said.

I considered.
It was the weekend and the last thing I wanted to do was police work. Reluctantly, I told him, “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Thanks.”

“Yeah.” I hung up the phone.

As I walked back into the dining room, I could see that they’d overheard enough to know I was leaving. I didn’t say a word, but went to my bedroom and pulled on my tennis shoes. I grabbed my shoulder rig and slipped it on, then clipped my badge onto my belt. On my way out, I grabbed my ID card.

When I returned to the living room, Teri was putting a Sprite in front of Ben. I raised my palms up in a shrug. “Duty calls,” I said lamely.

Both nodded that they understood, but the silence was cold.

“Can you stay?” I asked her.

She nodded. “No problem. I was going to ask you about that, anyway.”

“About what?”

“Staying.”

I opened the closet door and took out a windbreaker. When I turned back around, she was looking at me again. With a look I couldn’t quite place.

“What?” I asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about staying here.”

I slipped on my windbreaker. “I’ll pay you for it.”

She shook her head. “No, that’s not it.”

“What then?”

Teri took a deep breath and let it out. “I’ve just been thinking a lot lately about things. I already spend more time here than at my own place. You guys are my only customers and I like it that way. Your schedule and Ben’s schedule works pretty good with my school classes and everything.”

I patted my pockets for my keys.

“They’re on the table next to the front door,” Teri said.

“What are?”

“Your keys.”

“Oh. Thanks.” She was still looking at me, so I asked, “What are you getting at?”

“I was just wondering if…well, since things are going so well, and you have the extra room…maybe I could stay here.”

I was stunned. “You want to move in here?”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I mean, I’m paying rent for an apartment I hardly ever use. I’m here or I’m at school. I’m hardly ever there. All my plants are dying.”

I stood still and didn’t answer. My silence must have prodded her to continue.

“I’ll pay rent, of course. And then it’ll be easier for you with work and all. You’ll always have someone available to take care of Ben.”

“You think Ben would be all right with it?” I asked her.

She smiled. “Ben loves me to death. I’m like the big sister he never had.”

I nodded. She was right.

“Let me think about it a little bit,” I told her.

Her face fell. “It was just an idea,” she said quietly.

“It’s probably a good one,” I assured her. “Just give me a little while to think about it.”

“All right.”

“I gotta go.”

“I know,”
Teri said. “Duty calls.”

It was Saturday, so I parked in Lt. Crawford’s parking space right next to the building. The executive parking lot was almost empty anyway. I walked into the building and it was silent. With the exception of the Records division, which also supports patrol, the entire investigative division shuts down on weekends. If it was important enough, they’d call out detectives and pay them overtime to do the work, but the daily grind took a pause. I reflected briefly at how ludicrous it was to impose a nine-to-five order on a group of people whose adversaries worked twenty-four-seven. Such were the wisdoms of the department and its leaders, I guess.

I walked straight to my desk and didn’t pass anyone on the way. I immediately recognized the hooker, Toni, sitting in the chair next to my desk. She was facing away from me, but I knew it was her from her hair. It was cleaner than the last time I’d seen her and had a sheen to it that was almost beautiful. Officer Paul Hiero stood behind her, leaning on the cubicle partition. His hand rested on her shoulder and when he saw me, he pulled it away.

“Thanks for coming, John,” Hiero said.

“This better be good.
You paged me out to talk with a witness I’ve already interviewed and wouldn’t tell me what it’s about. This better be worth it.”

“I think you need to hear what she has to say.”
I looked at Hiero and wondered just how badly he’d messed up. That’s when I saw the bruising on his cheek and both eyes were blackened.

“How’d that happen?”

“Let my mouth overrun my ass in a bar after work the other night.”

I didn’t believe him, but
turned my attention to Toni, whose left side of her face was bruised.

“What happened
? You run your mouth, too?”

She started to open her mouth to respond, but I held up my hand. “Wait.” I pointed to the empty interview room. “Let’s talk in there.”

Toni rose reluctantly and shuffled toward the room. She cast a slow, backward glance at Hiero. He took a step to follow her.

“Wait here
,” I told him.

I turned away and strode into the interview room. I slipped off my windbreaker, letting her see the badge and shoulder holster. I wasn’t wearing a suit and tie and she needed to see some official emblems to put her in the right frame of mind.

“What happened to you?” I repeated.

She looked up at me, her eyes filling with tears. “What’s it look like? I got the shit kicked out me!”

“I can see that. Did a john do this?”

She shook her head.

“Your pimp?”

“I don’t have a pimp,” she said, frustrated.

“Then who?”

Toni sighed and looked down at her hands again. They continued their random twitching.

“I’m not going play twenty questions, Toni. If you’ve got something to tell me, then let’s have it.”

“It was some guy I’d never seen before. He acted like he wanted a date, but when we got into the alley, he started asking questions about Fawn.”

“Do you think he killed her?”

She shook her head again. “This guy wanted to know if she was working and who she was paying off. I tried not to say anything, but this guy scared me.
So I told him.”

“Told him what?”

“That the BSC collected from me and from Fawn.”

“The Brotherhood is running girls?”

She nodded. “Everything west of Altamont, they take a cut.”

“What about that big guy that used to run things? Rolo?”

She shrugged. “Pushed east of Altamont.”

“Into the secondary market,” I noted. “You pay off the Brotherhood to work the corridor?”

“Yeah. Everyone does.”

“Including Fawn?”

“Like I said. Everyone.”

“They supply dope, too?”

Toni fixed her eyes on mine.

“
The BSC collects from the working girls and then supplies these same girls with their dope?”

She nodded.

“What else did you tell this guy?”

“I told him about Fawn working and paying the BSC.”

“You tell him about Fawn doing dope?”

She shrugged. “I don’t remember if he asked.”

I slammed my hand down on the desk. Toni jumped.

“You told me before she wasn’t doing dope.”

Toni sighed. “She wasn’t doing smack with me. But she was already gone on crack when she started down there. Some kid got her hooked on it. That’s what she said, anyway.”

“She tell you his name?”

She shook her head. “No, she called him M. M this and M that, all the fucking time.”

“You ever meet him?”

“No. I know he’s black and skinny is all. She never described him more than that.”

“So why was she working for the BSC?”

Toni rolled her eyes at me. “Jesus, how long have you been off the street?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“She didn’t want to work for Rolo, so she worked in BSC territory. Sometimes she paid them, sometimes she dodged them. She didn’t need them, ‘cause she got her crack from M or some guy M knew.”

“
You telling me this back when we first talked would’ve been really goddamn helpful.”

Toni shrugged.

“What else did this guy want to know?”

“Who collected for the Brotherhood.”

“And who’s that?”

“Sammy G.”

“He collected from you and Fawn?”

“And the others.”

“What’s his real name?”

Toni looked at me, incredulous. “It’s all over the news.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sammy G. is dead.”

I leaned back in my chair, the hard drive in my head grinding. “Dead?”

“I thought you’d know. They found his body a few hours ago.”

“When did this other guy approach you?”

“Same day you let me go. That night.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, working out the timeline. First this guy gets information from Toni, then the guy she fingers turns up dead.

Or was he the killer, trying to cover his tracks?

Why kill Sammy G, then? Did he see something?

I shook my head.
Just what I needed. Another mystery.

“What’d he look like?”

“White. About your age, I guess,” Toni said, with a shrug. “I didn’t pay much attention at first. They all look the same after a while.”

“Try a little harder.”

Her brow furrowed. “I dunno. Medium height. A little thick in the chest and neck, maybe. Remember that mafia guy in New York? The one that they busted a few years ago?”

“Gotti?”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. Who’s the one that snitched on him?”

“Sammy Gravano,” I said. “Sammy the Bull.”

“Yeah. He reminded me of that guy.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“I dunno.”

I took in all that she had told me. She watched me as I stared at her and thought. After a few moments, she looked away. After glancing back at me a couple of times to find me still staring at her, she finally asked, “What?”

“What do you want from me?”

“Huh?”

“You didn’t come in here to do your civic duty. Last time you talked to me, it was to beat a solicitation rap and keep us from finding the heroin in your panties. What’s it for this time?”

She drew a wavering breath and met my eyes. “I see sometimes on these cop shows where a witness comes forward, you know? And the cops have a fund, like a special fund, where they can give that person some money, enough to catch a bus out of town and get started somewhere fresh. Somewhere safe. So I was thinking –“

“Unbelievable,” I said and stood to open the door. “Sit tight.”

After leaving the interview room,
I met Hiero’s worried eyes and held them as I walked back to my desk.

“What’s up?” he asked me as I sat down in my chair.

“What’s up?” I parroted. “I think this is a little more serious than ‘what’s up,’ don’t you?”

He continued to meet my stare, but I could see his hand trembling in my peripheral vision. “What do you mean?” he asked, his voice shaky.

“How deep are you in with this girl?” I asked him quietly.

“Deep
,” he said.

“She thinks we’ve got some kind of fund set up to relocate witnesses.”

“What?”

“She said she saw it on TV.”