“Coroner’s office?”
“We’re going to look at a body found in an abandoned car earlier this morning, see if you can identify it. Victim of homicide, evidently.”
“Why me?”
“One good reason,” Fuentes said. “The abandoned car belongs to Jay Cohalan.”
13
The dead man in the refrigerated morgue locker had been badly used before he was murdered. Facial bruises, nose broken, upper lip split in two places. Beaten and then, at some point, shot in the back of the head. The body lay face up so the entrance wound wasn’t visible, but the ragged hole below the right eye was plainly an exit wound.
The two cops stood watching me from the other side of the sliding table. A study in contrasts, those two. Lieutenant John Fuentes was a little guy, stringy, in his early fifties, slow-moving and deliberate, wearing a perpetual half-smile that hid a suspicious mind and an abrasive personality. The mole on his cheek was the size of a garbanzo bean; I wondered irrelevently if there was much risk of it becoming cancerous. Inspector Harry Craddock, SFPD Homicide, was a broad-beamed black man pushing forty, eight inches taller than Fuentes, fidgety standing or sitting, serious-meined and dedicated to the point of obsession — your classic Type A. I’d had dealings with Craddock before and we’d always gotten along. Fuentes was another matter. It was obvious he’d taken a dislike to me, for whatever reason; every time he aimed a question or comment my way, the words seemed underscored with accusation and grated on me like sandpaper.
He said when I lifted my head, “Well?”
“Jay Cohalan.”
“Uh-huh. What we figured.”
“No ID on him?”
“Would I have called you if there was?”
“Why did you call me? Must be somebody else who could have ID’ed the body.”
“Why do you think?”
“I don’t know anything about this.”
“No?”
“No.”
Craddock said, “Let’s continue this upstairs.” He chafed his hands together, blew into them. “It’s too goddamn cold down here.”
He gestured to the coroner’s attendant, who slid what was left of Cohalan back into the locker, and the three of us went out to the elevators. Craddock’s office was in the main Hall of Justice building, second floor. On the way there we passed an alcove of vending machines; he stopped, saying, “I can use a cup of coffee.” Fuentes didn’t want anything. Neither did I.
“Christ, I hate going to the morgue.” Craddock again, when we were settled around his desk. Both his big hands were wrapped tight around the foam cup of hot coffee. “Chill down there goes right to your bones.”
“Didn’t seem cold to me,” Fuentes said.
Craddock tipped him a look. “Maybe your blood’s thicker than mine.”
“Maybe it is. You know how hot-blooded us Latinos are.” Craddock didn’t bite on that, and the false half-smile swung my way. “So you don’t know anything about what happened to Cohalan?”
“That’s right. The last time I saw him or talked to him was Thursday night at Annette Byers’ apartment. How long has he been dead?”
“Coroner’s estimate is minimum of thirty-six hours,” Craddock answered.
Fuentes said, “Killed sometime Friday night, before or after the Carolyn Dain homicide and the attempt on you. Probably after.”
I had no comment on that.
“Who do you think killed him?”
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Shot execution style the same as Ms. Dain.” The same as me. Click. Click. “If the slug was recovered, Ballistics’ll prove it came from the same gun.”
“We’ve got it,” Craddock said. “It was inside the trunk of the car. Looks like Cohalan was stuffed in there alive and then shot.”
“Where was the car?”
“Out near Candlestick. Security patrol spotted it and called us. Trunk lid was up — somebody’d jimmied it open, neighborhood kids or adults, and then run like hell when they saw what was inside.”
“Any sign of Byers?”
“No. Nothing in the car but the corpse.”
“Prints?”
“Wiped clean.”
“Whose car?”
“Registered to Cohalan. Three-year-old Camry.”
Why did Baldy take his wallet, then? I wondered. Confuse the issue, possibly, make it look like a robbery homicide. He might’ve wanted Cohalan’s credit cards, too. Baldy was a greed-driven psycho, and not very smart; a walletful of credit cards could be an irresistable temptation to a man like that.
Fuentes asked me, with that suspicious edge in his voice, “You know Annette Byers — where does she fit into this?”
“I don’t know her. I’ve only spoken to her the one time.”
“Accessory or victim?”
“Could be either one.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Look, Lieutenant, I don’t know any more about this than you do. Why pick on me?”
“Make a guess about Byers.”
“What good is guesswork?”
“Make a guess,” he said.
I held onto my temper. “Okay, a guess. Accessory. Mixed up with the bald man in some way.”
“Lovers?”
“Maybe.”
“She was screwing Cohalan, wasn’t she?”
“Evidently.”
“Well?”
“What do you want me to say? That maybe she was working with Baldy all along, just using Cohalan to get hold of the seventy-five thousand? That he found out the truth and squawked, and that’s why he was murdered? It could’ve happened that way. But it’s just one possible scenario.”
“And you can’t identify the bald man.”
“If I could, I’d’ve done it Friday night.”
“No idea where he and the woman might be?”
“Same answer.”
“You wouldn’t be having notions, would you?”
“Meaning what?”
“You know what. The personal, payback kind.”
Too close to home. The smart thing for me to do would be to give him and Craddock everything I’d come up with so far — Steve Niall, Charlie Bright, Jackie Spoons, the Dingo message, the plastic “Remember the Alamo!” chip. But I’d known coming in here that I was not likely to play it smart, and nothing I’d seen or heard had changed my mind. I didn’t like Fuentes or his attitude any more than he cared for me or mine, and besides, all I really had were possibilities and conjecture — no direct link to Baldy or Byers or the missing money or the two murders. Withholding evidence is a criminal act; withholding prospective knowledge is a nonactionable sin of omission.
I said, “You’re way off base, Lieutenant.”
“I’d better be.”
“I’ve cooperated so far — I’ll continue to cooperate. The only thing you should know that I haven’t already told you is that there’s a probable drug connection in all this.”
That bent his smile out of shape. “What kind of drug connection?”
“Cohalan was a crankhead; so is Byers. They were stoned before and after I took the money away from them Thursday night. I figure Baldy’s cut from the same cloth — user, supplier, or both.”
“I didn’t see anything in your case file about drugs.”
“It wasn’t germane to the job I was hired to do. Carolyn Dain knew her husband was using, but she didn’t tell me about it up front. I found out in the course of my investigation.”
“Why didn’t you report this to me before now?”
“I would have if I’d been thinking clearly. Almost getting killed has a way of making you forgetful, among other things.”
“Damn straight,” Craddock said. “Ease up on him, John. He’s as much a victim here as the two morgue cases.”
“That doesn’t earn him any special favors.”
“He’s cooperating, isn’t he? Like he said?” There was an edge in Craddock’s tone. Fuentes’ suspicious nature was wearing thin on him, too. “Cut him some slack.”