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“Maid?”
“Uh-huh. A maid of Central American origin. Poco Ingles. Tiene miedo de los policias.” He threw out the Spanish casually, with a pure South Central accent.
I whistled. “When did this happen?”
He shrugged. “Gotta talk the talk if you gonna walk the walk.”
“You mean the walk up the ladder?”
“You know it. So anyhow, the maid say a man showed up and took away all the papers. I asked her what man? Very nice man, very good. Polite. He showed a badge. Oh, so the Señora let him in? Oh, no, she says, the Señora was at the funeral. Que lástima. What kind of badge, I say? She say a badge. Like the poor señor’s, but different maybe.”
“The papers are gone?”
“That’s the bad news.”
I let out a long breath, some of it wrapped around a bad word. “What’s the good news?”
He hoisted both eyebrows all the way up to his hairline and looked at me with mock surprise. “Why, Billy,” he said, “good news is we know there really is something in those papers. ’Cause I checked all over the damn department, and nobody the LAPD knows about was anywhere near those papers.”
“Which means the killer grabbed ’em.”
“Yeah-huh.”
“That isn’t very good news.”
He smiled. “Sure seem like it, way things been going.”
Chapter Nineteen
I was up early the next day and into my new routine: run up the hill, run back down the hill. Shower and shave, and then go downstairs to experiment with the menu in the coffee shop. I tried waffles, Canadian bacon, and a fruit cup.
The waffles were frozen; one was still cold in the middle. The fruit cup was from a can, except for one slice of really sour grapefruit. On the plus side, none of it actually killed me.
As I finished a second cup of the pale, soapy coffee I realized that without thinking about it I had decided to concentrate on Hector’s murder. It made sense to me that Roscoe was killed to cover up Hector’s death. It was theoretically possible that the two deaths were unrelated, but it seemed a lot more likely that I would become the next king of Norway.
With Roscoe’s papers missing I had a couple of choices, and none of them were very good. But since I was not tied down by police investigative procedure, the best idea seemed to be to skip trying to prove anything and just assume I was right.
I thought about my three suspects: Chismond, Tanner, Doyle. I knew almost nothing about them. I needed a starting point. All I really knew was that the killer was pretty good with a rifle. But with three cops for suspects, that wasn’t going to help much.
Of the three, which one had anything to gain from Hector’s death? Come to think of it, what had anybody gained from his death? The black community had lost a promising young leader—who could possibly profit from that?
Chismond seemed unlikely. He was black, too, and this was looking like a racially motivated crime. But if he was guilty, he’d had help; Spider had seen a white man.
Still, Chismond had been a radical in his youth and might still be. On the old theory of the worse things are the better, he could have arranged for someone to shoot Hector. Or he could have thought the kid was taking the movement in the wrong direction. It was possible; it seemed pretty unlikely.
&n
bsp; Doyle was almost as unlikely. There wasn’t a more squeaky-clean officer in the history of the department. With his rank, his wealth, and his standing in the community, I couldn’t see what he might possibly have to gain from a couple of murders. Besides, his whole life had been dedicated to improving the city, and a strong black leader in the figure of Hector would have helped.
That left Tanner. He was relatively new to the department, and I knew less about him than the other two. He was an appealing suspect in a couple of ways. First, he was primarily a bookkeeper, and I have a lifelong prejudice against bookkeepers. Second, by reputation he was so dull and ordinary and gray I couldn’t help thinking of the old saw about how ordinary evil has become in the twentieth century. And I knew Miami was a place where racism flourished.
I could picture it perfectly: the quiet, boring man, sitting at his desk with a blotter and a neat In basket, carefully plotting out the survival of the white race in a double-entry ledger.
Even if the picture was a cartoon, I had to start somewhere. I would start with Tanner.
Now the question was, how would I start?
One way would be to go through my contacts on the LAPD and get a look at Tanner’s personnel file, try to get any kind of handle there might be to get. But I didn’t want to strain my favor account too early. I might need it later.
