The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(42)

Two things surprised me. One was a photocopy of a Pablo Neruda love poem, "Te Recuerdo Como Eras." The other was a tiny framed picture of a female police officer who looked like a heavier, lighter-skinned version of Ana DeLeon. By the color of the photo and the style of the woman's hair and uniform, I placed the photo circa 1975.

"Your mom?"

DeLeon glanced at it, then shoved another folder across her desk. "Yes."

She kept sorting papers, her eyes glassy.

"You okay?"

She glared at me, then pulled a color photo out of a case file and flicked it up at me with two fingers. "This is how okay I am."

All I saw in the photograph at first were glaring browns and reds. Then my mind made sense of the shapes and I pulled back, repulsed. It was a young child, African American, murdered and displayed in a way my mind comprehended but refused to process into complete thoughts.

"Jesus."

She slid the picture back into the file. "Good thing I was called away from our wonderful evening. Between the Brandon case and a couple of other things the Night CID couldn't handle I got that lovely call. Girl was three."

I swallowed, closed my eyes. The image wouldn't go away.

"No mystery," DeLeon said. "What was it the lieutenant said, a two plus two? Stepdad was a crack addict. Started yelling at the mom because she was stealing his money. It went downhill from there. Young victims. That's why I got out of sex crimes. Now here I am again — otra vez."

DeLeon focused on her blank computer screen. "So what am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to get things in order and take a couple of days off. Simple."

"Hernandez is in a tough spot. Sure you don't want to catch some dinner?"

"Hernandez does what he can. And yes, I'm sure."

"If you needed a little help on the Sanchez follow-up—"

"I'd what? Share information with you? And every damn private investigator in town would be knocking on my door anytime he needed help. The newspapers would be screaming about how we couldn't handle our own cases. No thanks."

"We want the same answers."

"Great. You find out something on your own, come in and make another statement. That's all you are, Navarre: another witness with a statement."

"That why you brought me into the interrogation room?"

She paused. "It was a gamble."

"Gamble again. I have a friend who might help. People don't like talking to cops, they might talk to my friend."

"I don't like your friend."

"I don't mean George Berton."

"Neither do I. I know about Ralph Arguello."

I'd heard police officers speak Ralph's name many times, never lovingly, but DeLeon's tone held a lot more poison than I would've expected.

"You've had the pleasure of Ralph's acquaintance?"

She shot me another cold look, but underneath something was crumbling, eroding. "Will you get out of here, please?"

"Here's an idea. I'll ask if you're giving me a firm 'no' on poking around about the Brandon murder. You don't respond. I'll take that as a silent, completely off-the-record consent and we'll go from there. I'll keep you posted. So how about it — can I look around on the Brandon murder?"

"No."

"You're not getting the subtle innuendo routine, here."

She raised her voice a half octave. "Just go."

"Get some sleep one of these days, okay?"

"Leave."

I left her at her desk, shuffling through files and photos with what looked like aimlessness. A shudder went through my nervous system, the aftershock from the photo of the murdered child. I found myself reviewing lines from the Neruda love poem on DeLeon's cubicle wall, wondering how it had made its way there amid the paperwork of violence — "I Remember You As You Were."

I made a beeline out of the neutral gray and the fluorescents of SAPD homicide, heading toward the outside — toward smells and color and moving time. I wanted to see if it was nighttime yet. I had a feeling it might be.

TWENTY

Drifting along the sidewalk in front of police headquarters was the usual parade of undesirables — cons, thugs, derelicts, undercovers pretending to be derelicts, derelicts pretending to be undercovers pretending to be derelicts.

They collected here each evening for many reasons but hung around for only one. They knew as surely as those little white birds hopping around on the crocodile's back that their very proximity to the mouth of the beast made them safe.

Patrol cars were parked along West Nueva. Inside the barbed wire of the parking lot, in a circle of floodlight, five detectives in crisp white shirts and ties and side arms were having a smoke. Outside the fence a couple of cut-loose dealers were trading plea-bargain stories.

I walked across Nueva to the Dolorosa parking lot, got in the VW, and pulled onto Santa Rosa, heading north. I made the turn onto Commerce by El Mercado, then passed underneath I-10 — over the Commerce Street Bridge, into the gloomy asphalt and stucco and railroad track wasteland of the West Side. Ahead of me, the sunset faded to an afterglow behind palm trees and Spanish billboards. Turquoise and pink walls of icehouses and bail bond offices lost their color. On the broken sidewalks, men in tattered jeans and checkered shirts milled around, their faces drawn from an unsuccessful day of waiting, their eyes examining each car in the fading hope that someone might slow down and offer them work.