Guilt By Degrees

82

We briefly explained who he was and what we were hoping to find.

“I’d guess Tran Lee was posing as her son so he’d have a place to stay,” Teresa concluded. “And you’d like to talk to Diane about it?”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ll take you up to her, but I can’t force her to talk to you. I hope you understand.”

Teresa led us upstairs to the living quarters. As we walked down the hallway, I counted the doors and saw that the house had been converted to make eight separate rooms, each one presumably for a separate family. Teresa stopped in front of the fifth door and knocked sharply.

“Diane?” she said. “Are you there? I need to talk to you.”

“Just a minute,” said a soft voice.

We heard some rustling and a drawer shutting, then a few light footsteps moving toward the door.

It was opened by a petite Asian woman.

“Yes?” she said, looking from Teresa to Bailey to me with a slightly alarmed expression.

“There’s nothing to be worried about, Diane,” Teresa said gently. “Nothing is wrong. These women just have a few questions for you. Do you mind if we come in for a moment?”

Diane’s face immediately relaxed. With a tentative smile, she stood aside and gestured for us to come in. The small room was neat as a pin and sparsely furnished with a bed, a dresser, a table, and chairs. But the colors were bright and cheery, which gave it a nice, homey feeling.

My heart was thudding loudly as I prayed that our theory would pan out, but I tried to act cool and calm so I wouldn’t spook Diane. Bailey and I introduced ourselves and reassured her again that she was in no trouble at all, and then I dived in.

“Did you ever know someone named Simon?” I asked.

Diane looked at me blankly. Slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t know anyone by this name.”

This could not happen. I knew I was right. I could feel it. “Maybe you called him by a different name,” I suggested. I pulled out Simon’s photograph and showed it to her.

She took it from me and looked at it carefully. Then she smiled. “Oh yes,” Diane said. “But his name is Zack.”

I felt my scalp tighten. It made a weird, emotional kind of sense that Simon would use Zack’s name. “We think he might’ve given you something to hold for him. Does that ring a bell?”

Diane regarded us closely but made no response.

“Diane,” Bailey intervened, speaking gently. “Zack isn’t coming back. Someone…killed him, and we’re trying to find the person who did it.”

Her face froze and she sat perfectly still for several long minutes. Then tears slowly began to slide down her cheeks. I moved to put an arm around her, but she reflexively shrank back, out of reach. I’d forgotten who I was dealing with. The world was not a gentle place for anyone, but it was particularly harsh for a homeless woman. I sat down and waited, my hands clasped in my lap to keep them still. After a few more minutes, she wiped her cheeks with her sleeve.

Then she got up and went to her dresser. She took the clothes out of the bottom drawer and set them on the bed, then turned back to the drawer and retrieved a small yellow canvas tote bag.

“This is what he left with me,” she said, presenting the bag to me.

I took it, not even daring to breathe. I swallowed hard and steeled myself for disappointment. I could feel Bailey next to me, tension radiating from her body in pulsing waves.

I looked inside. And found it all. One shoe, one pair of prescription glasses, a police report-listing Lilah Rossmoyne as the victim of a car theft, a card bearing the address of this housing shelter, and a photograph of Tran Lee with Diane. Zack must have lifted the card and photograph out of the evidence locker before the reports were prepared. Who’d notice if something as minor as that went missing? After all, it was just a homeless crackhead who’d done a swan dive in a stolen car.

This was the evidence Simon had found, and it led him straight to this shelter. It took a Herculean effort to keep my reaction restrained.

“Diane, thank you so much,” I said.

She nodded and gave us a tremulous smile. “He was a good man,” she finally said. “I hope you will get his killer.”

Elated by the breakthrough, I was in a hurry to get outside and tell Gary that he wouldn’t have to endure days and nights of sifting through piles of papers. We trotted down the stairs behind Teresa and stopped just outside the reception room, where a young woman in frayed jeans and an army jacket was talking on a cell phone.

“Teresa, I so appreciate your help,” I said.

“I take it this is what you were looking for?” she asked, gesturing to the canvas bag.

“It’s everything we were looking for,” I replied. “And more than we ever expected to find. I can’t thank you enough. But it would be best if you didn’t mention this to anyone for a while.”

“I understand. I wish you the best of luck,” she said warmly.

We stepped out onto the porch and I waved to Gary, the bag tucked under my arm. He took another look up and down the street, then moved up the sidewalk toward us. When he saw my ear-to-ear grin, he smiled.

“It’s been pretty quiet, so I let Stephen take an early lunch,” he said. “What’d you get? From the looks of you, it must be pretty good.”

I gave him the bag, and he peered inside. I watched Gary’s eyes grow big as he inhaled sharply. He looked from Bailey to me, and I nodded. We had the gold.

“You know, I was starting to doubt whether there was anything to find.” He shook his head with a rueful smile. “Congratulations, you two. Why don’t we meet the guys for lunch and give them the news? They’re all going to Joe’s.”

It did feel like some kind of celebration was in order. Joe’s, a no-frills-looking box that served top-notch food, had been around for twenty years, but I’d never had the chance to check it out. “Great idea,” I said.

“You know how to get there?” Gary asked.

“Yep,” Bailey said.

“Okay, then you lead, I’ll follow.”

As we turned to head for Bailey’s car, Teresa walked out onto the porch with the young woman who’d been in the waiting room. Teresa waved to us, and we waved back. We got to the car just as Gary pulled up. We moved out in front, heading down the narrow street toward Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

“We might just have found the linchpin that’ll nail Lilah for the hit-and-run and as an aider and abettor in Simon’s murder,” I said. I was jubilant.

“Seems so,” Bailey said.

I started to tell her to unwind and enjoy our big score, but it was slow, careful going on the narrow street that was made more so by the parked cars that lined both sides, and I could see she was focused on the road. But when she stopped at an intersection and peered around me to look for oncoming traffic, I saw that she was grinning like a kid with an ice-cream cone.

As Bailey pulled forward, I chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve seen you smile like that since-”

But my next words were cut off by the high-pitched screech of tires behind us. I turned and saw an old-model Chevy roar out of the narrow street we’d just crossed and slam into the front passenger side of Gary’s car. It spun on impact, and over the sounds of shattering glass and crumpling metal came the thunderous noise of gunfire, many shots in rapid succession: bang, bang, bang, bang!

The blasts were still ringing in my ears when I saw the Chevy’s passenger window slide down and the muzzle of a handgun turn toward our car. “Get down!” I screamed. Shots exploded through the trunk and back window. The whine of bullets whizzed right past my ear. I reached down for the gun in my purse, and I’d just wrapped my hand around the grip when Bailey suddenly threw the car into reverse and floored it. We flew backward and crashed into the side of the old Chevy, driving it into Gary’s car. The force of the impact threw me forward against my seat belt and knocked the air out of me, but I had to get out, get to Gary. I managed to unbuckle and throw myself out of the car just in time to see the Chevy wrench itself out from between our cars and turn toward us. I took a steadying breath and, using our car as a shield, emptied my clip into the Chevy as it squeezed past us and then sped off.

I leaned into the car to tell Bailey. And the world shattered into a million jagged shards.

Bailey was slumped over the steering wheel, her face covered in blood.