“I… would… like… to… talk… to… Benjamin.”
“Oh. You want talk to Benjamin?”
“Yes. Benjamin.”
Johnny Wang cupped his hand over the phone and yelled something in Mandarin. I could hear Mrs. Wang yelling something back. Then Johnny Wang was back.
“Benjamin, he coming now.”
Savannah was frowning, trying to watch the road and me.
“What is it, Logan?”
“Hello?” Benjamin sounded out of breath.
I gave him my name and reminded him that Savannah and I had been in a few minutes earlier.
“You said something about your math teacher, Mr. Ortiz, getting shot a couple weeks ago. What was Mr. Ortiz’s address again?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“All I need is the address, Ben.”
“I’m not gonna get in trouble, am I?”
“Only if you don’t give me the address.”
There was a long pause. Then Benjamin said, “Elmira Avenue, 5442.”
“How old was Mr. Ortiz?”
“I dunno. Pretty up there. Like, fifty. Why?”
I thanked him and hung up.
Savannah braked at a four-way stop. A man with a mestizo’s leathery face and wishbone legs, who was probably younger than he looked, wheeled an ice cream pushcart across the intersection. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat and silver rodeo belt buckle as big as a pie plate. I punched the address into the Jaguar’s GPS:
Elmira Avenue paralleled Williston Drive.
One block over.
Jesus.
“A math teacher gets shot at 5442 Elmira Avenue. Less than a week later, Echevarria gets shot at 5442 Williston. The exact same address. One street away.”
“It’s a violent world, Logan. You said it yourself.”
“What if the math teacher was a screw-up?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“It’s dark, the houses in that neighborhood all look the same. The shooter’s after Arlo, but he confuses one street for another. Ends up at 5442 Elmira — only he thinks it’s 5442 Williston. Same address, one block over. I made the same mistake. The teacher’s the same approximate age as Arlo. Both Latino. Bang, bang, bang. The shooter splits, then realizes later, ‘I killed the wrong guy.’ He lays low for a few days, goes back to the right address when the heat’s off and takes out Arlo.”
“If there was any truth to your theory, I’m sure the police would’ve looked into it by now.”
“We’re not dealing with Scotland Yard here, Savannah. It’s the LAPD.”
I probably should’ve called Czarnek. But given his burgeoning case load and what a disaster Marvis Woodley’s tip about the junkie with the squirt gun had turned out to be, I doubted he would ever talk to me again.
I told Savannah to turn around.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m asking. Please turn around. Elmira Avenue. Maybe somebody there saw something.”
“I thought you were in such a big hurry to get to the bus station,” Savannah said.
“There’s always the next bus,” I said.
But for the black steel security grates covering the windows and front door, the retired teacher’s house looked like Arlo Echevarria’s. Same uninspired architecture. Same blighted lawn. Only the paint scheme was different: Green Bay Packers green with gold trim.
“Mr. Ortiz must’ve been a cheesehead,” I said.
“What’s a cheesehead?”
“How in the hell did I ever stay married to somebody for so long who knows absolutely nothing about football?”
“The sex,” Savannah said.
No arguments there. I tried the doorbell. Broken. I knocked. No answer. No sound or sign of life inside. There were sooty smudges around the knob and up and down the frame. Fingerprint powder.
Savannah followed me around back.
A kidney-shaped swimming pool drained of water took up most of the tiny backyard. There was a six-foot privacy fence of redwood slats, many of which were rotted and falling down. Through the gaps in the fence, across the alley and the street beyond, I could see the front of Echevarria’s house. It looked tranquil, undisturbed.
Not so where Mr. Ortiz had died. The back door had been booted off its hinges, the jam splintered. Someone had tried to secure the opening after the fact by slapping up a thin sheet of plywood where the door had been, then tacking it into place with a few roofing nails. I peeled back the plywood and peeked inside:
The back door led into the kitchen. The unplugged refrigerator was standing open, its shelves overgrown with moldy, unrecognizable lumps of fetid food and swarming with flies. A jumble of filthy cooking pots was heaped atop a harvest gold electric range. More dirty pans and dishes were piled in the sink. A rusty swath of dried blood trailed out from the green Astroturf covering the kitchen floor into the living room. From the way the blood had pooled at the base of the sink, it appeared as if Mr. Ortiz had been shot there, then dragged into the living room, or crawled.
“What do you see?” Savannah said.
“I see that Better Homes and Gardens won’t be doing any photo shoots here anytime soon.”
I pounded the plywood back into place with the palm of my hand.
Savannah followed me to the house next door, to the west. The front yard was littered with skateboards and a battered street hockey net. No one was home. We tried the house to the east. A large dog barked and snarled, pawing frantically from behind the door to get at us. No one was home there, either.
Of all the houses on the block, the one directly across the street was by far the most decrepit, which was saying a lot considering that preventative maintenance seemed to be an abstract concept among the late Mr. Ortiz’s neighbors. Much of the roof was covered by rotting canvas tarps held in place using bricks and dead palm fronds. An untended maze of bougainvillea vines clung to the wood siding and covered what few windows still had glass left in them rather than cardboard. There was a pear tree not much bigger than a sapling out front. The tree was pruned so severely that it no longer resembled a plant so much as it did an amputee: the end of each severed limb had been bandaged with a tiny round Band-Aid.
The front door opened as Savannah and I made our way up the front walk. A thin old man was standing in the shadows behind a steel-reinforced screen door, naked but for a pair of baggy boxer shorts adorned with little smiley faces. He was unshorn and wildeyed, like Howard Hughes in his recluse phase.
Savannah took refuge behind me.
“Are you Jesus Christ?” the man demanded.
“My ex-wife used to think so.”
My ex-wife jabbed me in the kidney.
“I don’t take Newsweek,” the man said, “and I don’t take the newspaper and I don’t take Girl Scout cookies, so don’t ask me cuz I ain’t buying nothing from nobody.”
“It’s OK, sir. We’re not selling anything. There was a shooting across the street several weeks ago. Your neighbor, Mr. Ortiz, a retired teacher, was murdered. Did you happen to see anything?”
“Hell, I seen everything.”
He spied something over my shoulder, blurted out “Goddammit!” and flung open the screen door, pushing past Savannah and me into the front yard, his old-man balls swaying under his skivvies like a pair of drunken sailors. Some Band-Aids had fallen from the branches of his pear tree. He picked one off the ground and tenderly reattached it as if the tree’s survival depended on it.
“They come along and do this just to torment me,” he said. “Kids today. Got no respect for anything.”
“Sir, can you tell me what you saw the night Mr. Ortiz was murdered?”
He peered suspiciously at Savannah, then leaned closer to me. “Who’s the skirt?”
“She’s with me.”