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“Billy was a valued part of my team,” Aguero declares, coming around a filthy desk and plopping his ass down. A mushroom cloud of dust bursts from the chair, proving it’s rarely, if ever, used. “I loved him like a son and would give him the shirt off my back any day. In fact, I have,” he adds as an afterthought. “And would do it again. Have you caught the asshole who hurt him yet?”
“Working on it,” Fletch murmurs. “That’s why we wanted to talk to you today. Get a fuller picture of the man you knew.”
“The folks on the news are saying his wife did it.” Aguero reclines back in his squeaky chair, not offering us anywhere to sit, and steeples his fingers. “I saw her on the telly.”
“Reporters tend to want to be the first to break a story,” I tell him, “with no care for the facts. We’ve talked to William’s wife, of course, and will continue to do so over the course of our investigation. Right now, though, we’d like to hear what you think.”
“I think…” As though giving my question genuine consideration, Aguero hums in the back of his throat. “I think Billy was a solid guy. Always working hard. Always the first to arrive and the last to leave. You can’t find that kind of work ethic much anymore.” He leans in his chair and glances around me to other men who wander in to start their day. They don’t come to us, and Aguero doesn’t call their attention. But he still watches. He observes. “I think Billy and Adrianna lived rough, but I couldn’t say why.”
“Rough, how?” Fletch wonders. “What exactly do you mean?”
“Billy would come in here, and it was like he was working through his demons. The drive he brought into this place, you knew he was thinking through some heavy stuff. Add in that he’d been here a few years already, so I’ve met Adrianna. I’ve met his kids. I knew the type of attitude she carried around with her.”
“What kind of attitude?” I perch my ass on a pile of tires and study the guy whose face reminds me of the Michelin mascot. Round, large, and overly inflated. “Good attitude? Bad attitude? Explain it to us.”
“Entitled,” he decides. “We work seven till four, Detectives. Typically. But some of the boys come in early, ‘cos they wanna get started. Sometimes, we work late, because the demand is there. Billy was always here, but if that clock hit six and he wasn’t home, she was blowing up the phone and asking where he was.”
“She was worried?”
He scoffs, loud and obnoxious. “She has a social life she wanted to get to. Well…” He smiles, as though he told himself a joke and has no wish to share it with the rest of us. “She was going to classes a couple nights a week. I think it’s new.”
I take out my pen and a small notebook from my back pocket. “Copeland U?”
“Nah. The uh…” He waves his hand in some direction, I’m not sure even he knows. “The community college over near Fifteenth. She’d started at the beginning of this year, I guess. Because that’s when her nagging got to be annoying as hell. No way I’d tolerate that bullshit.” Sitting back in his chair, he shakes his head side-to-side. “No way I’d wanna go home to a whining bitch who doesn’t appreciate how hard I work for my family.”
“She wanted him home to take care of the girls?” Fletch guesses. “Bedtime and dinner routine?”
“Seems that way. Though fuck knows, Billy busted his ass all damn day long. They had a status-quo, Detectives. But she changed it. She decided she wanted something else, and he was just expected to fall into line.”
God forbid the housewife, former teen mom, try to better herself.
I make a note in my book to find out which nights she was going to class. Who she was meeting there. What she was studying. What she planned to do with that education.
And was she there two nights ago, before William’s murder?
“Can you think of anyone else who might’ve held a grudge against William Alves?” Fletch asks. “Anyone he had beef with?”
“Nope.” Aguero crosses his arms. “Billy was a likeable guy.”
“He didn’t mess up a customer’s car?” I prompt. “Didn’t hit on someone’s girl? Nothing like that?”
“The only person I know in Billy’s life who was always giving him trouble, was his wife. And now that what she did is on the news…”
“Speculation,” I insert quickly. “Detective Fletcher and I have yet to formally charge anyone.”
“Yeah, well… I’m just saying, I figure she could have done it. She was mean enough for it.”
“Dude says she was mean.” I stalk out to the car after our discussion with Aguero and slide into the driver’s seat. “But Cassidy Nunes says Adrianna was sweet and quiet. Aguero says the wife was a nagger, but I’m hearing she was working on getting an education and needed help with the kids.”
“That’s the thing about lenses, I guess.” Fletch drags the passenger door closed and glances across. “An asshole is gonna think asshole things. And assholes tend to flock together. Aguero likes William, because William and him seem to think the same way. They’re both about the ‘women are to tend house and shut their mouth’ life. So Adrianna wanting help with the girls, to Aguero, would appear ridiculous.”
“So he doesn’t have a problem with his star employee smacking Adrianna around because, to him, that’s how married life looks.” I slip the key into the ignition barrel and turn the engine over, then backing away from the garage, I steer us toward Fifteenth Street. “And on the other side of the coin, women who share similar life experiences also flock together. Adrianna’s a battered woman in a shitty marriage, and Cassidy Nunes, too, knows that life. She’s a single mom now, which means she left the bullshit and chose to do it solo. She swears on Adrianna’s innocence.” I drag a hand over my face, the prickle of my stubble audible under my palm. “We still only have Adrianna at the scene of the crime, Fletch. She’s not man-sized, but I bet an angry woman could wield an eight-inch knife with enough oomph if she had the right motivation.”
“And a shiny black eye would motivate me,” he sighs. “A misogynistic, abusive asshole, holding me down when I’m trying to get an education. Using my daughters against me. That would give me oomph.”
“This might be one of those ‘we don’t like who we have to arrest’ kind of cases,” I admit. “Maybe we can sympathize with her. Even justify what she did.”
“We’re not supposed to do that.” He taps his jeaned knee as we come around the corner and slide into city traffic. “We’re losing objectivity.”
