Bad Intent

Chapter 9

The telephone rang deep in the small hours of the night. Startled out of my sleep, I made a quick accounting of my near and dear as I rose to the surface of wakefulness: Michael and Casey were both safely tucked into bed, Mike was wrapped around me. Panic abated.

Mike reached through the dark and picked up the phone, muttered something, then tapped me with the receiver.

“It’s for you,” he said, and fell face down into his pillow.

I managed, “Hello?” expecting to hear my mother or father with dire news.

“Miss MacGowen? It’s me, Etta Harkness. You ax me to tell you if I know anything about Hanna Rhodes?”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Hanna just got herself shot. Up on Hunnerd-twelve. Baby Boy say she still lyin’ up there on the sidewalk. The ambulance only just got there.”

“Where is this?”

“Hunnerd-twelve and Wilmington.”

“Is she badly hurt?”

Etta coughed. “She dead.”

I was awake, but I felt disoriented, still unaccustomed to waking up in Mike’s bedroom. I reached over and gave his shoulder a nudge. “Etta says Hanna Rhodes is dead.”

Mike took the phone from me and grilled Etta for a few minutes. He said good-bye and turned on the light to dial Southeast Division. He asked for the sergeant on duty and grilled him, too. When he finally hung up, he sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall.

“What happened?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Don’t know. Southeast only got the shooting call twenty minutes ago.”

I slipped out of the warm bed and shuffled, yawning, toward the closet.

“Going somewhere?” Mike asked.

“Down to 112th Street and Wilmington. I never got a chance to interview Hanna. Now it’s too late.”

He had that deep crease between his brows. “Is Guido going with you?”

“You aren’t coming?” I stopped and looked up at him dumbly.

“I can’t go. I want to, but I can’t. Department orders.”

“And you aren’t going to argue about me going?”

“Would it do any good?”

The answer was no, but I still wanted some argument. Even with Guido, I doubted I would feel safe about going back into Southeast. I was going, but I wanted Mike with me. I said, “What does this mean, you’re tired of me and sending me down there is easier than hiring a hit man?”

“I’ll never get tired of you, baby.” He hugged me as a matter of punctuation. “I’m hiring Guido to go with you. And don’t worry, I’ll have Southeast Division watching for you.”

“You call Guido. He loves to roll out in the middle of the night.”

When I came back from the bathroom, more or less dressed and alert, Mike was lifting a hard leather gun case from the top shelf of the closet. He unlocked it and took out a little.38 with a two-inch barrel and the hammer filed off. He inspected it, loaded five rounds into the cylinder, and offered it to me.

I wouldn’t accept it. “I’m not licensed to carry, and that filed-off hammer is strictly illegal.”

“If you get into a position where you have to use this baby, the legality of it will be the last thing we worry about. It’s powerful, and you know how to use it. I filed off the hammer when I was working undercover so I could conceal it and still pull it out without snagging on everything. It’s the best thing for you to carry.” He pulled up the back of my shirt and tucked the little revolver into my belt, with the barrel lying along my spine.

He kept talking as if I was embarking on some expedition into the war zone. “Guido’s on his way over. You’re going to take my car because it has a phone. When you get to the scene, pull in among the black and whites as close as you can. And don’t go anywhere on your own. Don’t stop for coffee, don’t walk off looking for a bathroom. Stay in tight at all times. Got it? Stay tight.”

“My God, you’re bossy,” I said, adjusting the revolver in my belt. “I can take care of myself.”

“And another thing,” he said.

“Shut up, Mike.”

“Get me a camera shot of everyone there. Try to get cars, too.”

I smiled, looking at the misery on his face. “I know you’re being so agreeable about me going only because it’s next best to you going yourself. Right now, though, cupcake, it’s time for you to back off. You have to trust me. I’ll try not to get blown away. I’ll find out everything I can. In the meantime, don’t work yourself into a coronary.”

He pulled me against him. “You’re such a smartass.”

“Half right,” I said. “The part about smart.”

I went out by the garage to wait for Guido because I didn’t want him to knock on the door and awaken Michael. I did a lot of yawning; in police parlance it was 0300-as they say it, oh-three-hundred hours. Or, as they say in civilian parlance, too fucking early.

A light breeze stirred the early morning air, but it was still warm. The driveway and the stucco walls radiated heat, so I stepped onto a patch of lawn where it was cooler.

Mike came outside with a Thermos of coffee just as Guido pulled up. We helped Guido transfer equipment from his car to Mike’s Blazer.

“One thing you need to keep in mind, Guido,” Mike said, handing over his car keys. “If anything happens to Maggie, I’ll have to kill you.”

“Fair enough.” Guido palmed the keys. “Save me the effort of doing it myself. Be too dull to live without her.”

“My heroes,” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. First thing, Guido handed me a loaded 9mm Smith and Wesson automatic. Feeling like Annie Oakley, or maybe Che Guevara, I took out the clip, zipped it inside my bag, and stowed the pistol under my seat. Then I did something essential for survival: I poured us both some coffee.

Wilmington Avenue is one block west of Grape Street, nine blocks south of the Jordan Downs projects. All of the police activity was on 112th, halfway between Wilmington and Grape. We followed the coroner’s van around the corner and parked close beside it among the police cars.

The crime scene was defined by portable floodlights and yellow police tape: an irregular Z beginning on the porch of a small woodframe house, stretching diagonally across the street, encompassing some sidewalk on the other side, and ending at the fence around an elementary school playground. Roughly down the center of this no-entry zone, in a jagged, drunken trajectory, was a trail of bloody footprints on the pavement, punctuated here and there by full hand prints and circles I suspected showed where the victim had fallen to her knees a few times. The trail ended on the porch of the house, where Hanna Rhodes lay under a pink flowered sheet.

Guido, always hyper when he sees a cinematic scene, hopped out with a videocamera at the ready, and began taping Hanna’s route from the school to the house. There were enough people in uniform around that I decided he was sufficiently chaperoned to go off without me. I had my own agenda.

It was nearly four when we got there, but we beat the two detectives in suits-a man-woman team that had come to take over. Right away, they went to the sergeant in charge of the crime scene to get the first report. I wanted to hear it. With my little tape recorder running in my pocket, and a 35mm camera in my hand, I sidled up beside the detectives.

The sergeant’s nameplate said Chan.

“We got the call at 0215 hours,” Sergeant Chan said. “The resident, Mrs. Kennedy, heard two shots fired, heard a car drive off, then a few minutes later heard someone on her porch calling for help. She looked out and saw Hanna Rhodes collapsed where she is now. Mrs. Kennedy called 911 before venturing outside. The victim expired prior to the arrival of officers or paramedics at 0221 hours. Paramedics applied CPR, but there was no victim response. They ceased efforts and declared the victim dead at approximately 0230 hours. Paramedics observed a through and through gunshot wound to the chest area of the victim, and a superficial, defensive-type wound to her right forearm.”

“Uh huh.” The woman detective had been taking notes. “Mrs. Kennedy see the shooter, see the car?”

Sergeant Chan shook his head. He glanced at me, but didn’t question why I was there. No one did.

The neighbors, in various forms of nightclothes, clustered around the edges of the scene, knowing to stay back. There was some curious chatter among them, now and then some laughter. My race, or my attire-boots instead of bunny slippers-maybe the fact I had come by car and moved about with a purpose and a camera, I don’t what it was, but I was set apart from the neighbors. Without challenge, I had free access to the crime scene.

I walked up to the porch, leaned over the police tape, and took a few frames of Hanna’s covered body, the pool of blood seeping from under her sheet and the pile of clothes the paramedics had left in the coagulating mess: yellow stretch pants, a striped tube top with a black hole through it, a cheap white cotton jacket.

Guido followed the coroner’s people up the porch steps, recording their movements as they photographed Hanna. Any fragile evidence that might have been on her person or on the porch would have been destroyed by the paramedics. So, while they were meticulous, they were not delicate. Hanna’s shrouded corpse lay in the middle of their activity, no more honored than the pile of clothes beside her.

When I zoomed in on Guido’s face and snapped a few frames, the woman detective decided to notice me.

“You with the coroner?” she asked. She had a pen poised over a metal clipboard.

Before I had figured out what to say, I felt a firm hand grip my elbow. I turned to find one of Mike’s former partners, Hector Melendez, with his detective shield showing over his jacket pocket.

“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said to me, and winked. The woman detective still had her pen poised. To her he said, “Excuse us,” and walked me back toward the sidewalk.

Mike often talked about Melendez and their adventures together on uniform patrol as rookie cops, and in bars after hours, then, later, when they had families, working part-time security jobs to earn enough to cover their first mortgage payments. I knew all I needed to know about Melendez: Mike trusted him.

Melendez had a tall, spare frame that carried no excess; a distance runner, like Mike. I thought he looked awfully sharp for a middle-of-the-night roll-out, loafers with a spit polish, crisp shirt, silk tie carefully knotted, a professorial tweed jacket. Certainly a few cuts above the generic cheap suits favored by most of his colleagues.

He took me around to the far side of his plain city car. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Never mind,” Melendez said. He tucked a large manila envelope under my arm. “Don’t open this now. Give it to Mike. I’m going to hang around for a while. You need anything, whistle.”

Melendez walked away into the shadows. I knew Mike had called him out to keep an eye on me. I didn’t mind being watched over, and my brief conversation with him seemed to have been sufficient to establish my credentials with the detectives.

Various official types arrived in groups, most of them forensics lab people. They were all, like me, sleepy-eyed and casually dressed. I stayed out of their way.

Another black and white car pulled up. The driver officer was a big woman, looked like a power lifter. She and her partner could have passed for twins in the inadequate light. They were about the same height and weight, and the body armor under their shirts gave them nearly the same chest; flattened hers, padded his. The standard police equipment hanging from their Sam Browne belts made them walk with the same heavy, wide-armed gait every uniformed cop has. I found something very sexy about their androgyny and lifted my camera to capture them.

They had escorted to the scene a painfully thin, scantily attired young woman. She looked like a hooker, but she wasn’t under arrest. At least, she wasn’t handcuffed. Guido, with his videocamera taping, went straight to the newcomers, leading the detectives. I managed to maneuver myself in beside him.

“Get the officers with the girl,” I said to Guido. “They look good, don’t they? Mr. and Mrs. Cerberus guarding the gates to hell. Or, in this case, guarding one tiny flower of the night.”

The woman detective conducted the field interview. “What is your name?” she asked the young woman.

“Gloria Griffin.” Very straightforward. This flower had been through police questioning before.

“What can you tell us about what happened to Hanna Rhodes?”

Looking straight into Guido’s lens, and without much prompting, this is the story Gloria Griffin told:

“Me and Hanna been partying at a rock house on Hickory Street. We were there, off and on, for three days. She said someone was looking for her and she was laying low, you know, staying off the streets a while.”

“Did she say who was looking for her?”

Gloria shook her head. “I figure she owe some dealer. Around midnight, one o’clock, somewhere around there, she went out on the street to make some money, to buy her some more crystal. I went out with her. She walk up one side of Wilmington, I walk up the other, you know, going in opposite directions, but close enough so we could holler back and forth. I got me a date first and drove away with him.

“I was gone fifteen, twenty minutes when my date left me off again. I saw Hanna was talkin’ to some dude in a blue car. Then she started to run away. She come down here by the school, lookin’ for a way to get through the fence into the school yard. The blue car followed her. I see the dude get out of the car. I hear him lettin’ two off, I see the flames shoot outta the end of his gun. Hanna don’t say nothin’, she just fall right down. This man, he revved up some and then he was gone. Then I see Hanna get up and start runnin’ again. Come here across the street. That’s all I saw.”

I was close enough to Gloria Griffin to smell something like ether on her breath, the sharp doctor’s-office smell of the cocaine freebaser. I asked, “Did you see the driver of the car?”

“Not close,” she said, gazing across the street where the shooting had occurred before she turned her attention back to me. “When Hanna start runnin’, I don’t want to get too close. I’m thinkin’ maybe this guy she owe money to has come collectin’. Somethin’ like that.”

The detective gave me the evil eye that meant she was in charge. She resumed the interview. “What did you do when you realized Hanna Rhodes had been shot?”

“Girlfriend was scared. I run back to the house on Hickory Street. I had me some money then, so I got me some rock and smoked it.”

“How do you feel right now?” I asked her.

“Mellow,” she said, smiling. I hoped that it wasn’t so dark that the tape wouldn’t pick up the unfocused look she gave me. “I feel okay.”

The detective asked, “Can you describe the car? Make? Model? Age?”

“That’s the one.” Gloria turned and pointed to Mike’s blue Blazer.

I knew where Mike was at the time of the shooting, snoring beside my ear. Still, I felt very uneasy about Gloria pointing out his car. I felt very uneasy about anything that tended to tie Mike to this mess of a situation. Gloria was bombed, kept snapping her head up to hang in with us. The Blazer was the only civilian car within her range of vision: how easy to tag it when she didn’t have another answer. I said, “Late model, American-made, four-wheel-drive car.”

“Whatever you say,” she said. “It was that one.”

As Guido turned the camera toward Mike’s car, I put up my hand and stopped him. He gave me a funny look, but he turned back around.

“Thank you, Miss Griffin,” the detective said. “I know it’s unpleasant, but we need you to identify the body.”

The officers who had brought Gloria walked her up on the porch and had her look at Hanna’s face. I stayed back because I didn’t want to see it. Guido went right in with Gloria, his lens following her point of view, then pulling back to catch her reaction. I was still worried about the lighting. Guido and his techno friends at UCLA could do some computer enhancement, but low light punched up electronically always came out looking artificial. Flat.

Hanna must not have looked like a party under that sheet, because Gloria Griffin was nearly overcome when she took her look. With her hand over her mouth, she fled the porch. The roots of an old sycamore tree pushing up through the sidewalk tripped her, made her fall against the trunk of the tree. I heard her swear, and I saw her take something from the pocket of her shorts and put it into her mouth. Could have been anything, but it seemed to make her feel better.

Hector Melendez had seen her take it, too. When I sort of ambled in her direction, Hector Melendez sort of ambled along with me.

Gloria’s hand shook too much for her to connect the match in her hand with the cigarette she put between her lips. I took the matchbook from her and lit the cigarette.

“Pretty bad?” I asked.

“Shit,” she exhaled, leaning against the tree for support. “How well did you know Hanna?”

“I know her my whole damn life. We grow up in the same neighborhood.”

I caught Guido’s eye and motioned for him to come over. When he was ready with his camera, I said, “You grew up with Hanna Rhodes?”

Gloria nodded. “Know her my whole life. She was my play sister. Our kids is friends, too.”

“Tell me about her children.”

“She have just one little girl. Yoandra. She’s about ten now. Live with her grandmother.”

“How old was Hanna?”

“Twenty-five, about. Same as me. We used to go to that school over across the street. But they never used to lock the gate all the way, you know. They let us go in and play. Guess Hanna didn’t know they was locking things up these days so she couldn’t get through.”

“What a shame,” I said. Hector’s touch was warm through my sleeve. “I was wondering, Gloria,” I said. “This date you had, he must have seen the shooting.”

“He didn’t see nothin’,” she said, adamant. She lit a new cigarette from the glowing stub between her fingers.

“I’d still like to talk to him. Men notice cars better than we do.”

She took a long drag. “I don’t know nothin’ about him. He just a date, you know?”

“A regular date?” Hector asked. “You’re very pretty, Miss Griffin. You must have regulars.”

She smiled in spite of herself, flipped her hair up off her neck, flirting with him. “Maybe I do.”

“Was he a regular?” I asked. “Do you know where I might find him?”

“Maybe.” She gave the three of us a keen appraisal. Then she looked down, dropped her cigarette, and stubbed it out with her toe. She took so long doing this, I thought she had forgotten about us. Finally, she said, “What I know will cost you two dead presidents.”

The only dead presidents in my pocket were some George Washington. I looked up at Hector. “Two dead presidents, is that two hundred dollars?”

“That’s what I say,” she said. “Two of ‘em.”

Hector had glanced away, seemed to be smiling at something. Mike tells me a lot of war stories about things that go down on the job. I remembered one he had told me about Hector and dead presidents. I took hold of Hector’s sleeve and said, “Hey, Gloria, you ever play Monopoly?”

“Maybe I did,” she said, wary, as if she was afraid I was making fun of her.

“In Monopoly they have something called a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the game, the card’s worth two hundred dollars,” I said. Hector, on cue, took out one of his business cards with its big silver detective shield and his office phone number on it, and handed it to me. I passed it to Gloria. “Here’s your getout-of-jail-free card. Next time you get picked up on the street, you give this card to the officer, tell him to call Detective Melendez. It’s a whole lot better than dead presidents.”

She studied the card before she tucked it into the front of her halter top. Then she looked up and said, “His name’s Tiny and he hangs up at the Bayou Barbeque. I see him there all the time.”

“Thanks, Gloria,” I said. The androgynous officers were walking toward us. “Thank you very much. If we want to talk to you again, where can we reach you?”

She smiled, coming on to Hector again. “You know where my office is. Up on that corner. You want to talk to me, just call my pager number.”

She walked off to meet her escorts, swaying her narrow hips for Hector’s benefit.

When Guido took the camera off his shoulder, he was laughing. “You two should go on the road with that card routine.”

“It’s already been on the road,” I said. “Part of the Mike Flint repertoire, right Hector?”

“What other stories he tell you?” Hector asked. He was blushing furiously.

“Tons of them. When he told me about the get-out-of-jail-free card stunt, he said, ‘Got us what we needed and no one laid a hand on the whore. That’s called good police work, my friend. Good police work.’ “

“That’s called bullshit,” Guido countered.

Hector laughed. “Same thing. With Flint, it’s an art form.”

Guido, who lives most of his professional life within the confines of university-directed tenets of political correctitude, visibly winced when I said “whore.” He was suddenly not very amused.

“Can we go home now?” Guido asked me. “I’ve got the crime scene, the victim, the cops, the witness.”

“Get the bystanders,” I said. “And the cars on the street.”

“Except the Blazer?” he said, sarcastic.

I reached into my pocket and switched off the tape recorder. “Everything except the Blazer. You have a problem with that?”

“No,” he said, jutting out his chin like a defiant kid. “I don’t have any problems. I’m having more fun than I’ve had since we camped out in the jungles of Salvador. At least here there aren’t any biting bugs and at the moment no one’s shooting at us. Just perfectly dandy. Doing this arty, interpretive shit is so much easier than working hard news: we don’t even have to pretend we’re looking for the facts as long as we get some hot footage. I always think patterns of light and shadow are more important than story content.”

I ignored the insult, put it down to an unguarded flash of jealousy. Best friends often feel pushed out when a lover comes on the scene, comes between them. I had been noticing ever since I moved down that Guido seemed to bristle every time Mike’s name came up. I walked away from him to give him space to cool off, but he followed.

“Hanna grew up in this general neighborhood,” I said, moving past the tantrum. He had stung me deeply, and he knew it. Why belabor the issue? “She went to that elementary school across the street, little girl with pigtails, maybe. I like the way this is all coming together. With some luck and persistence, we may be able to hook up with Hanna’s mother, or maybe the school administration, and find some old pictures of her. Little kid with gaps in her front teeth, cut to the body on the porch. That would be beautiful, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know if beautiful is the right word, but it would be powerful.” Guido, chagrined suddenly, dropped his gaze, did an unnecessary battery check. “Very powerful.”

“I love you, Guido,” I said.

“I know.” He looked at me through his long lashes. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

Gloria was driven away. She waved to us from the backseat of the patrol car as she went past. I knew she faced an all-nighter, what was left of the night, under questioning at Southeast Division. I hoped they would at least buy her breakfast when it was over because she looked as if she hadn’t eaten for a long time.

The forensics people would probably be around the crime scene most of the day with their tape measures, chalk, and little plastic bags. I overheard them discussing whether a gouge on a metal fence post was a bullet impact or some other sort of collision, maybe a hard encounter with a bicycle handlebar. None of it seemed essential to our needs. Once Hanna had been taken away in the coroner’s van, there was no reason for us to stay.

Guido, still chastened, walked me back to the Blazer, where Hector was waiting. I had the envelope Hector had given me tucked under my arm.

“Hector,” I said, “did you know Wyatt Johnson?”

He shook his head. “I think he worked out of Hollywood or maybe Hollenbeck. I don’t know what he was doing down here.”

“Maybe there’s something in his file.”

“Could be,” he said.

“What they’re saying Mike did,” I said, but Hector held up his hands, stopped me from saying anything more.

“Mike Flint’s the best,” he said. “Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.”

“Thanks for coming out,” I said. I offered him my hand, but he gave me a long hug.

“Look after Mike,” he said. “Because trouble is always looking out for him.”

“I do my best. We’ll have you and your wife to dinner as soon as we get settled in.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll take you both out.”

I kissed his cool cheek and pulled away. “Go home. Get some sleep.”

It was a good idea. Guido talked all the way back to the Valley, on and on about a new video disk recorder he was trying to get a grant to buy for his department. He must have memorized all of the support literature, because I heard so much arcane technical detail that, had I tended at all toward the suicidal, I would have done myself in long before we reached the downtown interchange. I knew he was taking the responsibility for filling dead air space, atoning for his earlier outburst. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Mike, it was that he wouldn’t have chosen Mike for me.

Guido declined my offer of breakfast when he dropped me off. It was still awfully early. I went into a quiet house, hoping for company. Someone was in the shower-I could hear the hot water pipes. There was fresh coffee in Mr. Espresso. But no one was walking around.

I put eggs on to boil, dropped a couple of slices of bread into the toaster, poured some coffee, and sat down at the table to look through the folder Hector had slipped to me.

Just as my toast popped, Mike came in the back door wearing running shorts and shoes and dripping with sweat.

He rubbed his salty, unshaven chin across the back of my neck as he looked over my shoulder. “What do you have?”

“Hanna Rhodes’s rap sheet.”

“Good.” He pulled out the chair next to me. “I asked Hec to run it.”

“And you asked Hec to come to the scene to watch over me.”

“Didn’t have to ask. He’s my old partner. He takes care of me.” He kissed my shoulder. “And mine.”

If I hadn’t been so tired, I would have challenged that “mine” remark. I wasn’t in the mood for an argument, so I began reading to him from the rap sheet.

“Booked under five versions of her name: Rhodes, Hanna S.; Rhodes, Hanna Sue; Rhodes, Hannah; Rhodes, Sue; Farmer, Demetria. The charges begin with possession of a controlled substance, detained and released for lack of probable cause.

One year later, arrested for petty theft and trespass: occupying property without consent. Convicted, sentenced to jail, sentence suspended. Two months later, arrested for burglary. Convicted. With a prior, Hanna went to county jail for six months. Another theft charge, robbery this time. With priors, given a year in jail. Out on probation, arrested for disorderly conduct: prostitution, solicitation. Pled nolo contenders, convicted, sentence suspended. Again, picked up for prostitution, plea-bargained sentence to time served. Four more disorderly conduct/prostitution charges, all of them bumped or plea-bargained for a total of maybe six months time in the slam. Finally, felony theft with a prior, sent to state prison for eighteen months, got an early release and hit the streets again last Friday. End of record. What does it tell you?” I asked.

“She was a junkie. Hooking, stealing to buy shit. She has a juvenile record, too. But it’s sealed. So, this paragon of veracity-if you believe the D.A.-has ten misdemeanor convictions and one felony over a six-year period. She’s out of prison three days and she takes one through the chest. I’d say the miracle here is that she didn’t take one a long time ago.”

“How did you know she took one through the chest?”

“Talked to Hector.” He pulled my by-now cold toast out of the toaster, buttered a piece, and began to eat it. “What bothers me is the timing of the shooting. I always have to look real hard at coincidence.”

“If it wasn’t a coincidence, who shot her?” I put in more toast.

“Hell if I know.” Then, just when my coffee was finally cool enough to drink, he drank it.

I took the little revolver from my belt and laid it on the table between us. With my hand over the gun butt, I said, “Don’t touch my eggs.”

He put the revolver in his shorts waistband and poured more coffee. “But I like your eggs. I even like the dark circles under your baby blues. I’m really happy to see all of you safely back in this kitchen.”

“Good,” I said. I crossed my arms on the table, rested my head on them, and fell asleep.