Inside the tape is a smaller throng of men and one woman in uniform. I recognize one of the Homicide dicks. They must have plucked him from his bed. He is wearing exercise pants and a gray sweatshirt that looks like something from a Knute Rockne movie.
“You better let me do the talking.” Lenore does sign language as she speaks to me, the kind of gestures you expect from someone who gets giddy with a couple of drinks. I am here for that very reason. In the moments after Tony’s phone call I seized her keys and made arrangements with a woman on my block, a friend and neighbor, to catch a few winks on my couch while Sarah sleeps upstairs. I was not about to let Lenore drive. Right now Kline would like nothing more than to see her arrested for drunk driving.
I can see Tony Arguillo milling a hundred feet down the alley. Well inside the familiar yellow ribbon, he is beyond earshot unless we want to make a scene.
“Stick close,” she says. And before I can move around the car, I hear the click of her heels on the street as she crosses over. I am trailing in her wake, trying to catch up so that she doesn’t get hit by a car. Without her prosecutor’s I.D., Lenore is banking on the fact that the cops won’t know she has been fired. That news may take at least a day to trickle down to the street.
Before I can catch her, she cozies up to one of the uniforms at the tape.
“Where’s Officer Arguillo?” Her best command voice under the circumstances, and not much slurring.
A familiar face, the guy doesn’t look too closely, or smell her breath. Instead she gets the perennial cop’s shrug. Lenore takes this as the signal of admission, and before the man in blue can say a word she is under the tape. For a moment he looks as though he might challenge her, then gives it up. Why screw with authority?
“He’s with me,” she says, and grabs me by the coat sleeve.
A second later I find myself tripping toward the crime scene, following a woman who, if not legally drunk, is at least staggering under false colors.
Thirty feet down the alley Tony is chewing the fat with another cop. Seeing us, he stops talking and separates himself from his buddy.
He seems a bundle of nervous gestures tonight, over-the-shoulder glances, anxious looks at the other cops down the alley closer to the garbage bin, as if he knows that if he is caught here talking to us his ass is grass. Though he shakes my hand and says hello, Arguillo seems put off seeing me here, his own lawyer.
“I thought you were coming alone.” He says this to Lenore, up close, but I can hear it.
“Paul wanted to drive,” she says. She asks him who’s heading up the investigation. He gives her a name I do not recognize, and motions down the alley to where some guys dressed in overalls are pawing through mounds of garbage by the handful.
“Has Kline been around?” says Lenore. Self-preservation. First things first.
“They have a call out. Ordinarily they wouldn’t bother,” says Tony. “But seeing as she was a witness in a case. They caught him somewhere on the road to San Francisco for a meeting tomorrow morning. Word is, he’s on his way back.”
“Then we don’t have much time,” says Lenore. “What happened?” she presses.
“Maybe we should talk over there.” He points to the other side of the tape.
“We’re not going to ogle the body,” says Lenore. “Just tell us what happened and we’ll get out of here. Who found the body?”
“Some vagrant, less than an hour ago. He flagged down a squad car driving by.”
Tony tells us that he wasted no time in calling Lenore, the first call he placed from his own squad car after picking up the computer signal that the body had been found. Squad cars now use computer transmissions to cut down on the number of eavesdroppers in delicate calls.
Two cops in overalls have drawn the less desirable duty. They are inside the Dumpster, passing items out as others sort through piles of trash they have assembled in the alley. Every few seconds I can see a flash of light from a strobe inside the bin, pictures being taken to preserve what might be evidence. There are two detectives huddled over a mass of bumps covered by a white sheet. There are no obvious signs of blood.
“Did he see anything? This vagrant?” Lenore asks.
“Like who dumped the body?” says Tony. He shakes his head. “Our man was too far into a paper bag and the bottle inside of it to notice. Cars come and go in the alley. He says he doesn’t pay any attention.”
“Maybe he’s afraid,” says Lenore.
“This guy’s too far gone for fear.”
“How did he find her?” says Lenore.
“You kiddin’?” Tony gives her a sideways glance. “A metal Dumpster, roof over your head, and four walls. Street of dreams. Half a dozen bums sleep in there on any given night. If a truck picks it up and dumps it that day, the place is Triple A approved.”
“Only today it wasn’t empty?” I say.
“No.” Tony eyes me warily. I think perhaps he has been counseled by Gus Lano so that I am now persona non grata, no longer to be trusted.
“He found the body just dumped in there? Must have been quite a shock,” I say.
“It was wrapped.” Tony says this as one would describe a tuna sandwich in a lunch box. “Rolled up in a blanket. They pore through the shit like rodents.” He’s talking about the homeless men who make this particular metal box home.
“He thought maybe he found some treasure when he saw the blanket,” says Tony. “We’re lucky he didn’t sleep with her for a couple of nights before he called us.” Tony does not think much of the underclass.
“How did she die?” asks Lenore.
“Could be strangulation. Some marks on the throat. The M.E. hasn’t made a call yet. She wasn’t exactly overdressed,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“She was wearing a pair of panties and a cotton top. Had a small towel wrapped around her head like a turban.”
“Washing her hair, perhaps?” says Lenore. “Maybe she was going out, or getting ready for bed.”
Arguillo raises an eyebrow, a little tilt of the head, as if to say, “Read into this whatever you want.”
“Any evidence of sexual assault?” says Lenore.
“Your guess,” he says. “Half-naked woman, dumped in a trash bin, young, good-looking. I wouldn’t put it out of my mind,” he tells us. “But we’ll have to wait for the M.E.,” he says.
He motions for her to come a little closer, something private.
“If you have a second I wanna talk to you alone,” he tells Lenore. He motions her to one side of the alley, just out of earshot, where they talk. This exchange seems to take a while, and it is not a monologue by Tony. At one point there is a clear display of some surprise by Lenore. This, followed with more animated gestures by Tony and then raised voices that I can almost hear, until they both look in my direction. Finally Lenore seems to end this, walking away, leaving Tony standing there.
When Lenore comes back her face is more ashen. I am thinking that perhaps Tony has imparted a few more grisly details of death, the sort of particulars in a criminal case that you don’t want floating in the public pool of perceptions.
“There’s nothing more he can tell us right now.” For Lenore this is a little white lie. She tells me it’s time for us to go.
“I wanted to give you the heads-up,” says Tony, following.
“Right,” says Lenore.
“I thought maybe you’d be handling the case,” he says.
“I doubt it,” she says. Lenore hasn’t told him she’s been fired. More deception.
Tony starts to walk us toward the tape and my car.
“I knew you’d be interested,” he says. “You worked with her, in the Acosta thing. It’s too bad. She was a good kid.” Tony starts to turn a little teary. “We’ll get whoever did this. She knew a lotta guys on the force. They’ll be out for blood, turn over every stone.” This is becoming Tony’s mantra. One more reminder that cops take care of their own.