“Half right,” I said. “The part about smart.”
I went out by the garage to wait for Guido because I didn’t want him to knock on the door and awaken Michael. I did a lot of yawning; in police parlance it was 0300-as they say it, oh-three-hundred hours. Or, as they say in civilian parlance, too fucking early.
A light breeze stirred the early morning air, but it was still warm. The driveway and the stucco walls radiated heat, so I stepped onto a patch of lawn where it was cooler.
Mike came outside with a Thermos of coffee just as Guido pulled up. We helped Guido transfer equipment from his car to Mike’s Blazer.
“One thing you need to keep in mind, Guido,” Mike said, handing over his car keys. “If anything happens to Maggie, I’ll have to kill you.”
“Fair enough.” Guido palmed the keys. “Save me the effort of doing it myself. Be too dull to live without her.”
“My heroes,” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. First thing, Guido handed me a loaded 9mm Smith and Wesson automatic. Feeling like Annie Oakley, or maybe Che Guevara, I took out the clip, zipped it inside my bag, and stowed the pistol under my seat. Then I did something essential for survivaclass="underline" I poured us both some coffee.
Wilmington Avenue is one block west of Grape Street, nine blocks south of the Jordan Downs projects. All of the police activity was on 112th, halfway between Wilmington and Grape. We followed the coroner’s van around the corner and parked close beside it among the police cars.
The crime scene was defined by portable floodlights and yellow police tape: an irregular Z beginning on the porch of a small woodframe house, stretching diagonally across the street, encompassing some sidewalk on the other side, and ending at the fence around an elementary school playground. Roughly down the center of this no-entry zone, in a jagged, drunken trajectory, was a trail of bloody footprints on the pavement, punctuated here and there by full hand prints and circles I suspected showed where the victim had fallen to her knees a few times. The trail ended on the porch of the house, where Hanna Rhodes lay under a pink flowered sheet.
Guido, always hyper when he sees a cinematic scene, hopped out with a videocamera at the ready, and began taping Hanna’s route from the school to the house. There were enough people in uniform around that I decided he was sufficiently chaperoned to go off without me. I had my own agenda.
It was nearly four when we got there, but we beat the two detectives in suits-a man-woman team that had come to take over. Right away, they went to the sergeant in charge of the crime scene to get the first report. I wanted to hear it. With my little tape recorder running in my pocket, and a 35mm camera in my hand, I sidled up beside the detectives.
The sergeant’s nameplate said Chan.
“We got the call at 0215 hours,” Sergeant Chan said. “The resident, Mrs. Kennedy, heard two shots fired, heard a car drive off, then a few minutes later heard someone on her porch calling for help. She looked out and saw Hanna Rhodes collapsed where she is now. Mrs. Kennedy called 911 before venturing outside. The victim expired prior to the arrival of officers or paramedics at 0221 hours. Paramedics applied CPR, but there was no victim response. They ceased efforts and declared the victim dead at approximately 0230 hours. Paramedics observed a through and through gunshot wound to the chest area of the victim, and a superficial, defensive-type wound to her right forearm.”
“Uh huh.” The woman detective had been taking notes. “Mrs. Kennedy see the shooter, see the car?”
Sergeant Chan shook his head. He glanced at me, but didn’t question why I was there. No one did.
The neighbors, in various forms of nightclothes, clustered around the edges of the scene, knowing to stay back. There was some curious chatter among them, now and then some laughter. My race, or my attire-boots instead of bunny slippers-maybe the fact I had come by car and moved about with a purpose and a camera, I don’t what it was, but I was set apart from the neighbors. Without challenge, I had free access to the crime scene.
I walked up to the porch, leaned over the police tape, and took a few frames of Hanna’s covered body, the pool of blood seeping from under her sheet and the pile of clothes the paramedics had left in the coagulating mess: yellow stretch pants, a striped tube top with a black hole through it, a cheap white cotton jacket.
Guido followed the coroner’s people up the porch steps, recording their movements as they photographed Hanna. Any fragile evidence that might have been on her person or on the porch would have been destroyed by the paramedics. So, while they were meticulous, they were not delicate. Hanna’s shrouded corpse lay in the middle of their activity, no more honored than the pile of clothes beside her.
When I zoomed in on Guido’s face and snapped a few frames, the woman detective decided to notice me.
“You with the coroner?” she asked. She had a pen poised over a metal clipboard.
Before I had figured out what to say, I felt a firm hand grip my elbow. I turned to find one of Mike’s former partners, Hector Melendez, with his detective shield showing over his jacket pocket.
“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said to me, and winked. The woman detective still had her pen poised. To her he said, “Excuse us,” and walked me back toward the sidewalk.
Mike often talked about Melendez and their adventures together on uniform patrol as rookie cops, and in bars after hours, then, later, when they had families, working part-time security jobs to earn enough to cover their first mortgage payments. I knew all I needed to know about Melendez: Mike trusted him.
Melendez had a tall, spare frame that carried no excess; a distance runner, like Mike. I thought he looked awfully sharp for a middle-of-the-night roll-out, loafers with a spit polish, crisp shirt, silk tie carefully knotted, a professorial tweed jacket. Certainly a few cuts above the generic cheap suits favored by most of his colleagues.
He took me around to the far side of his plain city car. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Never mind,” Melendez said. He tucked a large manila envelope under my arm. “Don’t open this now. Give it to Mike. I’m going to hang around for a while. You need anything, whistle.”
Melendez walked away into the shadows. I knew Mike had called him out to keep an eye on me. I didn’t mind being watched over, and my brief conversation with him seemed to have been sufficient to establish my credentials with the detectives.
Various official types arrived in groups, most of them forensics lab people. They were all, like me, sleepy-eyed and casually dressed. I stayed out of their way.
Another black and white car pulled up. The driver officer was a big woman, looked like a power lifter. She and her partner could have passed for twins in the inadequate light. They were about the same height and weight, and the body armor under their shirts gave them nearly the same chest; flattened hers, padded his. The standard police equipment hanging from their Sam Browne belts made them walk with the same heavy, wide-armed gait every uniformed cop has. I found something very sexy about their androgyny and lifted my camera to capture them.
They had escorted to the scene a painfully thin, scantily attired young woman. She looked like a hooker, but she wasn’t under arrest. At least, she wasn’t handcuffed. Guido, with his videocamera taping, went straight to the newcomers, leading the detectives. I managed to maneuver myself in beside him.
“Get the officers with the girl,” I said to Guido. “They look good, don’t they? Mr. and Mrs. Cerberus guarding the gates to hell. Or, in this case, guarding one tiny flower of the night.”
The woman detective conducted the field interview. “What is your name?” she asked the young woman.
“Gloria Griffin.” Very straightforward. This flower had been through police questioning before.
“What can you tell us about what happened to Hanna Rhodes?”