Suspect, p.28
Suspect, page 28
Walter also visited the station Wednesday morning, and Tonya used the patter we had discussed about the tiger mosquito and how to get DNA from Walter’s tenants. In response, he was more visibly shook than she expected, and maybe because of the talk about DNA seemed to realize that Tonya might actually be trying to get his. He took his cup to the sink in the break room and washed it out, right in front of her, even while she told him several times that she’d take care of it and finally tried to take it away from him.
And then the goof, like bad guys always do—or the ones that get caught, as Pops would say—messed up. Tonya’s office looks right out on the parking lot, and she watched as Walter, in his cowboy boots and page boy, sauntered back to his car. But he was undone enough by what he’d heard inside that he made a quick turn and headed for the little clutch of officers and civilian employees that’s on the far end of the lot in every season—a rotating cast, but all there for a cigarette break. Walter still knew everybody and bummed a stick and stood around listening to the gossip while he sucked the ciggie down to the filter, then flicked it in the bushes. Tonya was out there with an evidence tech within two minutes of when Walter peeled out of the lot in his antique GTO. They found the butt safely lodged between the branches of the privet. She took it straight to the Bureau, who got the thing to the lab at Marine Base Quantico by the following morning. With a quality reference sample—which the cigarette butt, uncontaminated by anyone else’s DNA, was—they could do automated DNA, meaning that in about two hours, the core loci in a specimen are analyzed and catalogued in CODIS, the national DNA database. By nightfall Thursday, they reported a 100 percent hit on the comparison between the mosquito blood and the saliva from the cigarette, meaning only one white man in two billion shared the same combination of alleles (which is more white men than there are on earth, by the way).
My role this morning, as Toy has explained it, is to sit there and shut up until she asks me for something. We are in another detective’s cubicle with the half-height partitions of rimpled plastic—it’s not quite an interrogation room, but more formal than having coffee in the break space. Walter looks worse for wear since I saw him at Blanco’s, heavier and with a bleary look around the eyes, which does my heart good, but he’s got more than enough arrogance to have plenty on hand for this occasion.
He stops dead when he catches sight of me, just like the night they found Frito’s body.
“Well, well,” he says, “look who’s here again. The nasty nail. You two seem to be joined at the hip,” he says, “although maybe I missed the point of connection by about six inches.” The one problem with crawling through the bushes for the cigarette butt, Tonya told me, is that Walter still has pals around the Central Station. Tonya asked for this meeting, well aware that Walter might now realize he’s between the crosshairs. When he agreed to come in, she thought there was a chance he was still in the dark, but his open hostility is not a good sign. Given that, it’s a little hard to figure why he’s here.
“Sit down, Walter,” says Toy, when he asks about me. “She’s an occurrence witness. Just like you.”
“Yeah, okay.” He plops down. “No more coffee?” he asks with a sick smile. “I knew you were working me,” he says.
“Walter, since we seem to be letting our hair down, let me tell you something you should have realized a while ago: You’re not as smart as you think you are. The Ritz doesn’t need anybody else to be the brains of the team—and you’re not. To him, you’re the same kind of toadstool as Primo.”
Tonya is good at this, going for the vulnerable gaps between the armor, and Walter actually changes color.
“We’re only going to need a sec, Walter. I just wanted you to know we solved our DNA problem with the mosquito.”
“Oh yeah?”
“The DNA? It’s yours. Now, the way I have this in my notes, you told us you hadn’t been in that apartment since you rented it to Frito. And that you hadn’t even been in the building for several days.”
“I think you got that wrong,” Walter says.
“Well now, you’ll see why Ms. Granum is here. What’s your memory, Pink?”
“The same. Not in the apartment since you showed it to Frito. And about the building, I think what happened, Walter, is that Detective Eo asked if there was any chance that you’d been around yesterday—meaning the day before they found Frito’s body—and you said none, and that you hadn’t been in the building all week.” I’m good at this stuff, the word for word. I have a hard time processing in the present, but I can bring the past back in detail.
“Yeah, well,” says Walter, “that’s what I said and all, but it’s not true. After I was over here to see you Wednesday, Ritz reminded me. Some jamoche who got evicted the week before, an asswipe named Turnberry, came in the office fussing about wanting his security deposit back. And on what turned out to be the day Frito bought the farm, that day, I came over to the building with another guy, just so Mr. Turnberry could remind himself of the holes he’d kicked in the walls and the number he’d done on the plumbing. Back at the office, we’ve got the records of Ritz sending me out. So I guess that’s when that mosquito bit me. When I was downstairs with Turnberry.” He smiles thinly. Now we know why he showed today. He heard about the cigarette butt on Wednesday, and the Ritz helped him cook up this weak-ass alibi.
“The guy who came with you,” I say, “who’s going to back your story, any chance that was Primo?”
Walter gives me a little tight f-you grin, and says, “Funny you should mention it.”
“Funny,” I say.
“And Turnberry, any idea where we find him?” Tonya asks.
“You’ll have to check under every viaduct in the Tri-Cities metro area.”
Toy nods.
“Walter,” she says. “You have until the close of business today to save your life. You come back here, with or without a lawyer, and say you’re ready to spill, no holding back, and tell us what happened in Frito’s apartment the night he died, where we all goddamn well know you were—”
“Neh, I don’t know that,” says Walter.
“Well, the fingerprints say otherwise, Walter. They also put you in the apartment the night before. But we can skip that for the time being. You come back, say you’re ready to roll, and I’ll take you over to see the US Attorney personally, who might even cut you a deal for immunity.”
“Immunity,” says Walter, “means you don’t got enough to prosecute. Otherwise you’d be offering reduced time.”
“Immunity,” says Tonya, “means you can walk out of this today, and only today. You know how the Feds work, Walter. They’ve got tons of resources and they’re going to focus a lot of them on little old you. Your ass will be on an ice floe a month from now. But I promise, Walter, when we put you in on Frito’s murder, you’ll do state time, not federal. No country club life for you, Walt. You go to Rudyard where the big boys take a number for the chance to turn your rectum into a wide ditch.”
Walter listens to her with the same simpering smile and holds up two fingers. He touches the first with his other hand.
“Number one, you got no proof Frito was murdered,” he says, folding down his index finger. “And number two, you’re never gonna get any proof I was involved, cause I wasn’t. Next time, call Mel Tooley Jr. He’ll be my lawyer.”
Walter leaves his middle finger extended for several seconds before he gets up to leave.
30. Dead End
With Walter flipping us off, Tonya and the Bureau are pretty much at a dead end concerning Frito’s death. As Cornish said, we still don’t even have proof that Blanco was murdered.
Instead, I spend the rest of the day Friday trying to figure out what the Ritz’s interest is in Vox VetMeds. I’m behind on assignments from Rik, but I’ll catch up over the weekend.
I call the outside law firm where Rik sends real estate closings for our clients. I ask one of their paralegals, who I’ve worked with before, for some help. But him and I don’t get very far. All the property in the Tech Park was originally transferred to the city before being sold to the current owners like VVM, as Vox VetMeds is known. The identity of the seller or sellers to the city is behind the blank wall of a land trust, which you can’t get around without a subpoena. Why Ritz was even referred to as the developer of the second round, after Northern Direct took what they wanted, is not completely clear.
As for VVM, there’s not much I can figure out about the firm either. It was incorporated in Delaware, but the shares are not traded on any exchange, and none of the big pharma mutual funds list any ownership in the company. On the incorporation papers, the president/secretary listed an address in Baltimore, and when I search the web, I learn that he’s a former VP with one of the big pharmaceutical companies, who worked in their pet medication division.
I call him at VVM from my TracFone. I say I’m a reporter working on a piece about veterinary pharmaceuticals for a business publication, and he says, very nicely, that they never talk to the press.
“Why so secretive?” I ask.
“This is a regulated industry, as you know. We’d rather communicate with the FDA and the FDA only.”
“But you’re not trying to hide your shareholders, are you?” I ask.
He laughs and says, “We’re privately held,” and adds, “Goodbye.”
Having gotten nowhere, I decide to go out and take a quick look at the place in the daylight. It sits on what I’m sure is regarded as the worst site in the Tech Park. It’s in the rear corner, with the highway roaring directly overhead. To get to VVM, you have to drive all the way around the park, an extra half mile. Northern Direct has such a huge security perimeter that VVM barely has a parking lot. There’s a twenty-foot chain link topped with razor wire between the two companies, and a smaller fence on the highway boundary, which doesn’t need much protection since it backs up to a steep overgrown embankment leading down from US 843.
On the other hand, it’s a great site if you don’t want anybody to see what you’re doing. The rest of the Tech Park stretches several blocks to the north. Direct’s installation obscures VVM’s entrance on the western side of the building. And the southern boundary of VVM’s site is next to the off-ramp from 843—there is more weedy undergrowth and scrub bushes underneath.
There is no place to park if I don’t want to be seen, so I leave the Cadillac at Rik’s office and hike several blocks out of the way, until I can approach on the south side from beneath the off-ramp. I cut through the weeds, finally reaching a point where I can duck in beneath the steel undergirding, and then whack my way forward. It’s an incredibly junked-up area, full of the crap people throw out their windows as they’re flying off the highway, especially beer and soda cans and the wax cups from the Big Gulps that everyone who litters seems to get. There are old cartons of all sizes, and the kind of shit people have nowhere else to dispose of—rusted pieces of rebar, a used air conditioner and a mattress that somebody must have snuck in here after dark. The local dogs have clearly found the place, and it smells of poop, and the ground is a mixture of gravel and mud. I keep an eye out for rats as I camp out on the other side of a heavy bush, so I’m at least partly obscured from the cameras behind Northern Direct. I quickly find that the mosquito abatement people don’t bother with treatments under here—it’s like the bugs have sent out an APB saying, ‘Free lunch.’
I’ve got my hat and mustache again, and have lost my nail, just in case the Direct surveillance cameras pick me up behind the greenery. It’s pretty dim here under the off-ramp, and I doubt that even equipment as sophisticated as what Direct uses can both focus in today’s strong sunshine and simultaneously record clear images in the shadows. If I’m wrong about that, some Fed will be yelling at me shortly, but in the meantime, I have positioned myself on the same line as Northern’s eastern fence, an angle from which I can see the front doors of VVM and the red logo on the building.
A couple cars come and go, but there is not much activity until we approach closing time. With the summer weekend ahead, people start bouncing around 4:15, dribbling out over the next hour, and I photograph all of them with my EOS and a telescopic lens, so I can blow up the faces later. Near five, the night security guard arrives in his blue uniform, and for some reason he catches my attention, maybe just because I figure he’s the one on duty when the panel truck arrives in the middle of the night. Conveniently, he stops to say hello to several of the departing employees in the parking area, and I machine-gun maybe thirty images of him before he disappears. He’s a good-sized white guy with a belly, and he reads as retired law enforcement or something like that, maybe an ex-firefighter. From the start, I have this feeling that I’ve seen him before, and after he enters the building, I flip through the pictures I’ve taken of him on the camera’s digital screen.
It’s five minutes later, while I’m watching the last people depart from the front doors of VVM, when the circuits in my brain finally connect. Now I remember! I’ve seen the security guard out of uniform, ambling across Hamilton in the center of Highland Isle, facing the noontime traffic with the indifference of a moose. He was part of the beefy, too-loud lunch group seated behind Koob. That’s who he is. He’s a member of Ritz’s squad.
“Him?” Tonya says, when she comes to visit me at Rik’s office on Monday morning. “That’s Secondo DeGrassi. Primo’s brother. They call him Sid.”
Whenever I’ve had time over the weekend, I’ve tried all kinds of Internet searches, with no luck putting a name to the security guard’s face. I’m reluctant to ask for Tonya’s help, but when she called to say she was on her way over to talk about something important, I decided that I have no choice, even though I know she’ll demand to know why I was taking his picture.
“Why do you have an eye on him?” is what she says.
“Is he a former copper?” I ask.
“Tried to get on. But he’s”—she roughens her voice and drops it two octaves—“‘not so good with the reading and writing shit.’ Primo is the bright child in that family.”
“No way.”
“Way. I think Sid got sworn in some burg upstate, but he didn’t last long. But second time, Pink: What’s the deal with him?”
“Can’t say.” She’s sitting in a wooden chair next to my desk, and she gets that hard angry face, which is part of the core Tonya.
“Bullshit. This more Secrets of the Boyfriend? I told you I had to hear everything.”
“I told you I’d share everything he said about what happened in Blanco’s apartment. That’s what you asked for, and that’s what I’ve done. And if I connect Sid to Blanco, I’ll tell you why I was sitting on him. But I don’t have that yet.”
Her nostrils flare. “Don’t play me, Pinky. I love your ass and all that shit, but if I decide you’re shining me on, you’ll have a federal grand jury subpoena faster than you can say those words.”
That threat has always been in the background, but she’s never said it out loud.
“Toy, you’re my friend, okay? My good good friend. One of the few I have. You don’t need to shake a stick at me, or whatever you think you’re doing, because I don’t cheat my friends. Period. But let’s be honest. I’m in a tight position here. One dude is dead and this person, my source, he’s afraid that Vojczek will try to kill him, too. And based on everything I know and you know, he’s not thinking crazy. So cut me a break, because I made this guy promises, too, and they begin with saying that I—and you—will try to keep him alive.”
She unclenches her jaw and breathes.
“Okay,” she says, “but I’m the police, you’re not the police, and I’m the one who has to decide what’s reasonable.”
“I can’t tell you anything more about Sid right now.”
She ticks her head a little.
“You said you had something urgent to talk about, right?” I remind her.
“Right,” she says eventually. “And it kind of relates.”
“To Sid?”
“To what we were just arguing about.”
“Okay.”
Tonya shifts her shoulders to get herself back to her subject.
“I went to church yesterday and Paulette Cornish literally stepped on several people so she could sit down next to me before the service started. And she’s all like, ‘Where were you last week? I needed to talk to you.’ And I told her, I had a very late night that Saturday.”
“Like a hooking-up late night?”
“I’m seeing somebody,” says Tonya. She tries to keep a straight face, but there’s a smile leaking through. I reach out and give her a little rap on the shoulder.
“Good thinking, Detective.”
“She’s young,” Tonya says. “In college. Rising junior.”
“Okay, so old enough.”
“And definitely mature.” She stops, seemingly distracted by her feelings about this woman. “I never knew I liked young.”
“That’s because that’s what we were.”
She laughs. That hadn’t quite dawned on her apparently.
“Okay, back to Paulette,” I say.
“Right. She was like super stressed, and I said, ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ and she was like, ‘I can’t call the station, people know my voice. This is the safest place for us to talk. Only you can’t tell anybody that I told you about this.’ I’m like, ‘Wai-wai-wai-wai wait.’ She had all kinds of conditions, something about her kids, and I have no clue what she wants to tell me, except I ask, ‘Is this about Walter?’ And she says, ‘Definitely.’
“And there is no way I can enroll this woman as a CI. The commander won’t like another CI, because I’ve already enrolled you. And the Bureau will throw a fit, thinking I’m hiding information from them.
“Plus,” she says, “Walter still has friends around the station, like we saw when he showed up on Friday. If Walt learns she was dishing on him, he’d find somebody in a ski mask to break her arms and make sure her jaw was wired shut. Literally.”
