I found her in my garbage can. I turned on the outside
lamp. She didn’t look like anyone special, but under the circumstances, who
would? She was seventeen, possibly younger. She looked like she was in
pain, but of course she wasn’t, never would be again. I’d heard the spinning
of wheels as the car sped down the street. I was just coming out of the back
entrance to my office, but I didn’t see it.
A line of black blood was dried from the corner of her
mouth to her right eye, defying gravity. She’d been dead a while, but not
long enough for rigor to set in. She might have been pretty once, but that
was before the beating, the broken nose, the black eyes, the bloody ear, the
dirty black hair. She was naked, and her body held more depredations than
one could imagine being dealt to one human being, by another.
I went upstairs and called the cops. Maureen McMartin,
detective, showed up with a tall, uniformed cop, Diane Simpson. A girl I’d
wanted, a girl I’d had. They were about the nicest cops in Portland, and
being women, among the best. McMartin worked with the evidence people, and
Simpson went around to check with the neighbors, see if anyone saw anything.
McMartin finally got to me. "So, CB, what’s with them
picking your place to dump the body?"
I shrugged. "Don’t know. Coincidence?"
She smiled and shook her head. "Not a chance. Who’s
going to pick out the only private dick within a half-mile and put the body
in his garbage can?"
I felt the same way, but what do I know? "If it’s got
anything to do with me, it’s news to me."
She shook her head like she didn’t believe me, her eyes
said otherwise. She’s a bright girl. She turned her attention to Simpson who
was making her way up the sidewalk. Simpson had a man in tow, a short,
white-haired man of about fifty. He looked reluctant. I’d seen him before.
He lived in the building next door, the lower flat. He had a daughter about
seventeen. Could have been the girl.
"Detective, Mr. Martinez here needs to see the dead girl."
McMartin told me to wait. That’s not me. I followed them
out to the ambulance. I knew as soon as the man sunk to his knees. He cried
into his hands. McMartin hadn’t a clue what to do, but Simpson bent down and
put her arm around his thin shoulders. She talked to him. He talked to her.
McMartin sort of backed out of the picture.
"You know him, CB?"
"Yes, my neighbor. Didn’t remember his name."
She gave me one of those down under looks, the kind that
would be sexy in a different setting, but just kind of skeptical now. "His
name’s Manola Martinez. They call him Dollars. Daughter’s name was Fuscia."
Dollars Martinez, I’d heard of him. Didn’t know he was in
my area. Would never have guessed the guy and the girl were Hispanic. "So
he’s a big shot bookie, it still doesn’t mean a thing to me."
She nodded like she agreed. "I think they got the wrong
garbage can. That’s what I think. A message killing, just sent the message
to the wrong house."
The guy on the other side of me, a lawyer, came up the
sidewalk. He was wearing a robe over silk pajamas. He had a daughter the
same age as Fuscia Martinez. Now that I knew who she was, geographically, I
put the two of them together. They were nice girls, always together, same
hair, but different shades of black. I knew the lawyer’s name since he had a
plaque on the front porch, Anthony Lewis, Attorney-at-Law. He also had an
office downtown.
Lewis pulled on McMartin’s sleeve, said something, she
said something back, and he ambled back away. He nodded when he recognized
me. "What’s going on?"
I told him. No reason not to. Like an afterthought, he
said his daughter was going to take it pretty hard. He looked like his head
was somewhere else. When I returned my attention to him, he was gone.
It was one of those situations, we all have them, when the
answer was staring me in the face, but it was one of those things you never
look at, even though you’ve looked at it a thousand times. I
couldn’t even blame it on the confusion of color.
* * *
There was nothing for me in it. I mean, it was my garbage
can, but nothing more. I went up to my apartment, couldn’t get rid of the
feeling that I should be doing something, so I made my way down the inner
passage to the office.
I answered the ringing phone. "Green."
"Mr. Green?"
I made an appropriate sound.
"This is Manny Martinez," a pause, "your neighbor."
"Yes, Mr. Martinez," an awkward moment, then, "I’m very
sorry about your daughter."
"Yeah, that’s why I want to talk to you."
I told him the office door was open. I opened the office
door.
He did a double-take when he first entered the office,
like he had stepped through a barrier into a black and white movie. It’s the
first sign my clients have that I’m different. It’s disconcerting. It
usually puts them ill at ease. Martinez, despite the tear-stained eyes,
smiled like he’d recalled something funny.
"Fuscia said this was a strange office, all grays, no
colors."
I put a question on my face. I’d never met the girl.
He answered, "When the painters were in. They had some kid
from her class working for them. His father was the contractor. Fuscia would
come over for lunch, bring him a sandwich. He was a nice kid. I liked him.
He liked Fuscia."
I recalled the kid, one of those eighties’ names. "Yes,
Ryan. Nice kid."
Martinez seemed to get even sadder. "She was thirteen
then, he was fourteen. They just started dating a couple weeks ago. I don’t
know if I can tell him about this, but I can’t just let him hear it on the
news."
He was doggy-paddling around whatever it was he came to me
for. I waited through it.
"I’m a fifty-year-old man with no prospects. My only
daughter ..." He looked up like he realized for the first time we didn’t
know each other. He reached over the desk and extended his hand, "I’m sorry.
It’s not so easy getting away from the memories. My name’s Manny Martinez.
The cops, I saw you talking to them, probably told you who I was?" He made
it a question.
I nodded. "Yes. Dollars Martinez."
A cold edge tinged his voice, "I don’t care for nicknames.
They trivialize the subject. You can call me Manny."
I liked him. I liked the way he thought. I liked the way
he smiled when he entered my world. "How can I help you, Manny?"
"Find out who killed my Fuscia."
"The police think it is some kind of message killing."
The thin man with the prematurely gray hair shook his
head. "No, they got it wrong. The people I work with, they don’t send
messages that way." He seemed to search inside for more. "No, they know you
don’t kill a man’s only child and expect he’ll somehow get the message." He
shook a finger at me. "They know I’d search to the ends of the earth until
they’re dead. My enemies aren’t that stupid." His finger traced a circle on
my desk, then, "It looked like the work of drug guys. It’s how they send
messages."
"They don’t know you?"
His voice acted surprised, but he hadn’t the face for it,
"I’m a gambler, Mr. Green. I survive because I give better odds than the
race tracks and the state. It’d be tough if they were competitive, but
they’re not. Drugs are filth." He rolled that idea around in his mouth,
then, "I got nothing to do with filth, Mr. Green."
I said he could call me CB.
We talked a while. I learned a lot about the bookie
business. I learned a lot about Fuscia, the good girl. Even if there was a
side to her that her father didn’t know, I knew the murder had nothing to do
with Fuscia. I didn’t learn anything I needed.
Once he was gone, I put my sized-sixteens up on the desk
and leaned back in my chair. My lips pushed in and out, until I realized I
was pulling a Nero Wolfe, so I stopped the lip thing. Something in my head
told me I knew everything I needed to already.
I called the police station and got connected, after five
minutes on hold, to Maureen McMartin.
She sounded like she was in a bad mood. "What do you want,
CB?"
"You got my garbage can."
Incredulous, "You want it back?"
"No, you guys can keep it. I’ll get another."
Sudden interest, "So?"
"I need to know the number on the can."
"It’s not your can?"
"Hey, detective, I didn’t look. Anyway, they all look
alike."
"Hang on."
I tapped my fingers for another five minutes.
"Twenty-three-sixty-seven. What’s your address, CB?"
"Twenty-three-sixty-one."
"It was Martinez’s can?"
"No, Anthony Lewis’s."
"Who?"
"The lawyer on the other side of me."
"What were you doing with his can."
I thought on that before answering, "Pick up was this
morning. We set our cans out about ten feet apart. Maybe the garbage guys
got them switched around."
"Yeah, like they left you the one with the body in it."
"No, detective, but the guys that killed her left the body
in the right can, wrong address."
"So why’re the crooks going to kill Martinez’s daughter to
send a message to some lawyer?"
"They got the wrong girl."
"You’re losing me, CB."
"Lewis has a daughter same age as Fuscia Martinez. They
were friends. They looked alike, a little." As my thoughts traveled
downstream with the logic, the next words stuck in my mouth, "They grabbed
the wrong girl."
I could almost hear her thinking on the other end of the
line, then, "Don’t go anywhere, CB. I’m on the way over."
Well, I’m not made that way.
I knocked on the door. No answer. The attorney’s car, a
white-gray Lexis, that new super-sized SUV, wasn’t parked on the street.
I sat on the attorney's front step and waited for McMartin.
It was a half-hour before she showed up with Diane Simpson
and another uniformed cop in tow. She focused on me. "I thought I told you
to wait."
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Not here?" she asked.
I shrugged again.
She knocked on the door, rang the bell, looked in the
windows. She’s a decisive girl. She made an executive decision. To Simpson,
"Tell the captain we’re going in."
Simpson spoke into the walkie-talkie on her shoulder,
waited, then talked some more. She nodded to the detective who’d returned
with a crowbar.
I said, "Wait with the tools, eh, detective."
In my office I got my lock picks. When I started on the
door, the detective said, "Those aren’t legal."
"So arrest me."
The door clicked open. I slipped the pick-locks into the
pocket of my jacket. They’re not so easy to replace these days.
We made our way through the house. At the bedrooms we
could see clothes strewn on the bed, and the closets were pretty much
rifled. The bureau drawers were open.
I put my finger to a white gauze lining the bottom of the
bedside drawer, then smelled it. "Gun oil."
* * *
Lewis didn’t get far. He stopped at his office to gather
up his files. By that time the hoods must have realized they’d sent a
message to the wrong man, but then, he’d gotten it anyway. So he was sent
running, and they looked like fools. Not good for business. They shot him
and sent a stream of bullets into the wife’s SUV. Those Lexis’s must be made
to take it though, because she stepped on the gas and she and her daughter
got away with barely a scratch.
I never saw either of them again.
I took a walk over to Manny Martinez’s house. We had some
coffee and I told him what happened to his daughter. I told him mistakes
were made.
The bookie was sad. The bookie was mad. When the two came
together there was going to be a hell of a storm.
When I got back to my office, I saw the corner of the
envelope under the area rug that butted up against the door jamb. It’s flap
wasn’t glued shut. I opened it. It was a handwritten note, "Dear Mr. Green,
I would like you to be one of my sponsors in the Heart Run next month. I
will stop again later. Thank you, your neighbor, Fuscia Martinez." So I knew
why she was picked up coming out of the house with the wrong garbage can out
front. It broke my heart.
* * *
About three weeks later three Columbian killers were found
stuffed in Lewis’s garbage can outside another lawyer’s house, like a
message. Yes, the same garbage can. Someone had stolen it from the police
evidence, or maybe it was just discarded. I don’t know. I’ll have to ask
Detective McMartin someday. Probably won’t.
I’m glad I’m not a lawyer though. There’s just too many of
them, and what with attracting those really money-flushed clients, it’s
gotten to be a really cutthroat business these days.
- the end -
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bill.capron@tds.net