Breach of Trust

13

That afternoon, I put in a call to Joel Lightner, private eye extraordinaire-just ask him-and put in for a favor. Then I stared at the ceiling and thought about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez. I had to start with the safe assumption that their murders were related. And the federal government had more or less conclusively fingered Wozniak’s actual killer. It was that teenage Cannibal-Eddie Vargas was the name, if memory served. But a sixteen-year-old gangbanger didn’t commit that murder without say-so, without some direction. And that same person saw Ernesto as a threat and ordered his death.

Good. I had mastered the obvious. Also, one plus one equals two.

What had Essie said? She thought my initial visits with Ernesto had been successful. I’d appealed to him. But then one day he returned home upset. Decepciono. Disappointed. Upset. La verdad no importa, he’d told his wife. It wasn’t worth prison, he’d told her. Prison-for Ernesto? Had he been part of something illegal? I didn’t know. But clearly, my powers of persuasion had moved him to talk to somebody. And more to the point, somebody had talked to him. Threatened him. He’d gone from wanting to come forth with his information to sealing the vault. He’d cut me off at the knees when I’d called him.

The truth doesn’t matter. It’s not worth prison.

Whatever it was, clearly someone, at that point, knew that Ernesto had information and had discouraged him, to put it mildly, from sharing it with me.

And then I’d returned. I caught him at the YMCA working out with some friends. I walked into Liberty Park and slapped a subpoena against his chest. Highly visible, each of those encounters. A mistake on my part. A fatal mistake. Born of necessity at the time, I thought.

I had three avenues of pursuit. One was to figure out who ordered the hit on Bert Wozniak. Find him and I’d find Ernesto’s killer. No problem, right? Piece of cake. Except that the federal government had marshaled all of its considerable resources and couldn’t pin it on anyone. Christ, they even knew who the shooter was, and still they couldn’t crack that nut. And that’s to say nothing of our investigators, led by one Joel Lightner. We would have loved to come up with an alternate theory for Wozniak’s murder, obviously, and we’d come up dry.

The second line of pursuit was to figure out what information Ernesto possessed. Same result, if successful. But difficult. He didn’t tell his wife, presumably for her own protection. Maybe he told a friend. But if that person were any kind of friend, he would have told the policia investigating Ernesto’s murder. Even anonymously. One way or the other, he would’ve gotten the word to the cops. So it felt unlikely that Ernesto had told anyone at all.

The third avenue was to forget about Wozniak and answer this question: Who knew that I was hounding Ernesto at the end of the trial? That was a critical two-day period of time. After all, nobody killed Ernesto after I first spoke with him. It seemed, in fact, that someone gave him a stern warning. But they didn’t kill him. Then, suddenly, come Friday, June 22, they take him out in a drive-by at Liberty Park. The intervening cause was me. So they got word, somehow, that I reinitiated contact.

I remembered two gangbangers, Latin Lords, standing with Ernesto at the basketball court at Liberty Park. One stockier guy in a tank top with a scar across his forehead; one younger, scrawny kid in blue jeans. Could I remember their faces if I saw them again? Maybe. Then there was the YMCA. A handful of guys there, at least one of whom knew Ernesto well enough to be spotting him during bench presses. I didn’t know their faces well at all. But I could find them again easily enough and get their names, unless they dropped out of the Y.

And what about that diagram Ernesto had written on the back of my business card:

ABW > PCB > IG > CC?

“ABW” was Wozniak’s company. “CC” probably meant the Columbus Street Cannibals. Other than that, I was at square one. I don’t like being at square one.

“Hello, Sunshine.” Joel Lightner strode into my office, pulling a wheeled cart that held three bankers’ boxes of papers bound together with a thick elastic strap. “If there’s anything, it’s in here,” he said. In the workup to Hector’s trial, we had pulled records of every phone call made by Wozniak in the six months preceding his death; every document from his corporate and personal computer; every website he’d ever visited; every contract his company, ABW Hospitality Supplies, had ever entered into. Any of that information, theoretically, could have been a lead, but only if you had some hint of what you were ultimately seeking. We didn’t. We’d taken several shots. Employee grievances at ABW. Disputes with other contractors, even a couple lawsuits over time. Nothing that panned out. Nothing worth killing over.

But now, at least, I had something. Cryptic initials on the back of a business card, but at least something.

“Say thank you to Riley for this,” said Joel, pulling a laptop computer out of his shoulder bag. “This is the database.” High-tech firm that Shaker, Riley was, we’d had a paralegal scan in every document obtained from ABW and put them on a searchable database. “The hard copies are there if you need them, but the computer should be all you need. Return it in good condition. He says hello, by the way.”

The database made my job infinitely easier. I could do word searches for the initials Ernesto had written down and see what hit.

“So, you were right about that guy Ramirez? He had some information?”

“Never felt so wrong to be right.”

Lightner nodded and appraised me. I don’t like being appraised. “You didn’t put the information in the guy’s head,” he informed me. “You just asked for it. That was your job.”

“Roger that.”

“Not your fault, I’m saying.”

“Heard you the first time. Understood you the first time.”

“Yeah, well, aren’t you full of piss and vinegar today.” He looked around the office. He didn’t look impressed. I wasn’t, either. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go have a pint across the street. My treat.”

“Joel, in contemporary American society, the phrase ‘my treat’ indicates that you are willing to pick up the tab for the other person. I realize there’s a first time for everything, but I wanted to make sure you intended to convey that message. Would you like to rephrase?”

He hitched his thumb toward the door. “Before I change my mind.”

I patted the computer lightly.

“C’mon, Kolarich. It can wait. It’s got nothing to-well, anyway.”

I could have finished the sentence for him. It’s got nothing to do with what happened to your wife and daughter. He wasn’t completely off base here. I was motivated to investigate this by Ernesto’s death, because it sure seemed like he had correctly feared retribution if he gave up his information, and I forced him past the point of no return with the subpoena. But it wasn’t lost on me that the reason Ernesto never got back to me on that fateful Friday was that someone put a few bullets into him, and that delay led to my waiting pointlessly in my office instead of traveling with my wife and daughter.

Yes, that was part of it. But not all of it. This morning, I looked into the eyes of a woman who lost the love of her life, and who would now raise her two children alone. Ernesto Ramirez had the right to keep whatever information he had to himself. But I publicly confronted him and got him killed.

“Have it your way.” Lightner stopped on his way out. “Okay, so you’ve never taken my advice before, but I’ll give it, anyway. Have that hot little partner of yours handle this matter. Let this one go.”

“That’s probably good advice,” I conceded. “And I’m sure Shauna will be flattered beyond words.”

As soon as he walked out the door, I booted up the computer.