"He doesn't respect you as a person."
"How do you know?" Vikki whined.
Carr stood up and walked to the stereo-system wall unit. He took the cassette tape from his shirt pocket and popped it into the tape player. He fiddled with the dials and turned up the volume to loudspeaker quality,
"If Vikki's there with the stash, she gets arrested. Do you want to get her involved?"
"What the fuck do I care? She's just a dumb hype bitch. A friend of mine gave her to me. If you go there and find counterfeit money, it's hers, not mine."
Carr turned off the tape player and removed the cassette. He put it in his coat pocket and sat down next to Vikki again.
Her expression was the same as in the Polaroid photographs.
Kelly rambled through the bedroom, slamming drawers.
Vikki began to cry again. "I want to see my little boy."
"Who did Pleach give some of the counterfeit money to?" Carr said.
"Nobody. He was holding the stash for a printer who went to the pen. He didn't want to pass the money because the Feds had the serial numbers. That's all I know. How much time am I going to get? The bag is Pleach's. Not mine. Honest to God." A tear rolled off the end of her nose and landed on the front of her housecoat.
"Think back, Vikki. Did he give even one or two of the twenties to anyone?" Carr's voice was soothing, soft.
"He gave a couple of them to a red-haired guy. 'Bout fifty years old, balding. He came over a few days ago. Told Pleach he needed a couple of the bills for a scam or something. I was in the kitchen, and I heard them talking."
"What kind of a scam?" Carr leaned closer.
"He didn't say, and Pleach didn't ask."
"What was the man's name?"
"Red. That's what Pleach called him. That's all I know. Honest to God."
"Does Pleach know anybody named Ronnie?"
"Not that I know of." Vikki grabbed her stomach. "I think I have to throw up…right now." Carr followed her to the bathroom. She gagged and wretched into the sink violently.
"The mating call of the hype," Kelly said.
Carr leaned against the bathroom doorjamb.
"We might have just run out of luck," Carr said,
"What?"
"She says the only bills went to somebody named Red. That's all she knows. I believe her."
"Unless we can come up with a 'Red,' we're at the end of the road," Kelly said.
Carr nodded.
TEN
At the East L.A. County women's jail, Carr had written "Possession of Counterfeit Notes-Federal Arraignment" on Vikki's booking sheet while Kelly had squirted her vomit off the back seat of the G-car with a garden hose.
After finishing the usual booking procedures, Carr phoned Delgado and filled him in. It was 9:30 P.M.
On the way to the field office, Kelly stopped at a taco stand on Brooklyn Avenue.
They got out of the car and walked to the painted hut. GOMEZ BROS TACOS CARNITAS. A freckled face came to the window and asked for their order in Spanish. Carr and Kelly looked at one another before ordering. The taco man had red hair and was balding. Carr shook his head. It had been a week since Rico had been killed and there still were no real leads. He knew as well as any cop that the longer the investigation took the less chance there was for success. Kelly ate five tacos with extra sauce, and they headed for the field office.
Delgado was waiting in the records room, sitting at a long table covered with stacks of five-by-eight arrest cards, Styrofoam coffee cups, and dirty ashtrays.
"The guys that pulled this caper had to know about how a counterfeit deal is done," Delgado said. "I think it's best if we go through the arrest cards, starting at the most current, and work backward. I've got people at LAPD records checking for the same thing. The arrest card has the color of hair and the date of birth." Delgado picked up a stack of cards and began thumbing through them.
The cards of red-haired men began to pile up in the middle of the table as the night wore on. By 3:30 A.M. they had compiled one hundred forty-six arrest forms of persons fitting the general description. Kelly, using a clerk's push cart, pulled the one-hundred forty-six arrest packages from file drawers, and the three agents dug out photographs of each man, tossing them into a pile.
"Listen to this," Kelly said. He read from an arrest card: "Identifying marks: Tattoos of devil shoveling coal on each buttock." Kelly laughed hysterically. "This freak has tattoos of the devil shoveling coal into his ass!" They roared.
An hour later Carr rubbed his eyes. "Let's catch a couple of hours," he said. Kelly's head was already down on the table.
Arriving home a half hour later, Kelly parked his car in the driveway, because the garage was filled with bicycles of various sizes. He went in the kitchen door, switched on the light, and took lunchmeat and a beer from the refrigerator.
Sitting at the kitchen table, he chewed slowly, as if in a trance. He was exhausted.
He looked up as his wife walked into the kitchen buttoning her housecoat, removing her long braids from inside its collar.
"Do you want me to fix you something?"
He shook his head and took a long pull from the beer bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
"What's new around here?" he said.
"Stevie got an F in spelling. Jimmy and junior took their bikes apart and left them all over the garage floor. That's about it."
"Uh-huh."
She would not ask him about work. That issue had been resolved early in their marriage. He didn't like to talk about the job, because there were too many things to explain, too many impossible translations. It had been easier to sever the ties between the two worlds.
Such things had really never been a problem between them. They had never tried to change one another.
Removing a crayon and coloring book from a kitchen chair, she sat down, softly rubbing her eyes.
"Do you want to talk?"
"Yeah, uh, sure," he said with lunchmeat in his mouth.
"This is the earliest you've been home since it happened."
"I guess you're right." He stopped eating momentarily and unloosened his tie.
"I went to early Mass this morning and prayed for Rico. I've had nightmares about it. I've been worried about you, too." She stared at her folded hands.
"God bless you, Rose." He patted her hands. "Everything will be back to normal pretty soon."
"How could they do that to someone? Take someone's life…a young man like he was. He'll never be able to have…raise children, to have a family."
He looked away from his wife's eyes.
"Are you going to come to bed?" Rose said.
"Can't sleep right now. I think I'll watch TV for a while." He put things back in the refrigerator.
Rose got up and went into the bedroom.
Kelly fell asleep after watching ten minutes of a Richard Widmark movie. He awoke an hour later and telephoned Carr at his apartment. No answer. He phoned Sally's place. Carr answered.
"Just thought of something," Kelly said. "There used to be a red-haired stickup man that hung around that bail-bond place on North Broadway…"
"He's in San Quentin."
"You sure?"
"Yes. Delgado thought of him and had him checked out."
"Oh. Uh. Sorry to wake you up."
"Good night, Jack."
"Good night."
Carr hung up the phone on the nightstand.
"Who was that?" Sally said.
"Kelly."
"Do you feel like playing?"
"I don't know. Do you?"
She rolled over away from him and mumbled something.
"What say?"
"I said never mind."
Carr thought about the Sunset Motel again.
It was 8:00 A.m. Driving back toward the women's jail, Carr wondered if it would have been better not to try to sleep at all. The fatigue had set in.