Blood Line (9 page)

“Any names mentioned?”

“Not to me. Maybe one of those three out there know something.”

“Anything you can tell me about them?”

“They hung around with John here at school; I don’t know how tight they were away from here. In fact, from what I can learn John didn’t have too many close friends his own age. He seemed to hang around after school with an older crowd, which would go along with what you believe.”

“Any place I can talk to them privately?”

He hauled himself out of his creaking swivel chair. “Use this office—I got a class anyway.” He locked his desk drawer and filing cabinet and then opened the door to point a large finger at the nearest boy. “Go on in, Londe.” Hoyer turned back to Wager, speaking over Londe’s head. “I hope these boys can help you, Detective Wager. John Hocks didn’t deserve what happened to him—he never really had a chance.”

Londe Straight was the boy’s name. It wasn’t the kid Wager wanted to start with, but the choice had been made; he was the one who had stared a challenge, and, slouching in the chair across from Wager’s, he kept it up. “I don’t have to tell you nothin’.”

Straight was right; he was given a lot of protection from accessory-after-the-fact by the juvenile laws, which, Wager guessed, the lad knew as well as any judge or lawyer. It was an education but not exactly the kind the schools touted. “You know John Erle’s mother, don’t you? You’ve been over to their house, talked with Coley and Jeanette, right?”

The bony shoulders beneath the loose-fitting plaid shirt rose and fell. He wore his cloth windbreaker tied by its sleeves around his hips. An LA Raiders baseball cap, its pirate popular with several gangs, was jammed into one of the soiled pockets. Students were forbidden to wear gang colors and clothes to school, but the principal couldn’t do much about what they wore coming and going home.

“You think Mrs. Hocks was very happy about burying her son?”

“Quit it!”

“How about you? Would your mother be happy about burying you?”

“Hey, man, we all got to die sometime!”

“Yeah, but how about making it later than sooner? You heard what Mr. Hoyer said: John never had a chance.” Wager waited; in the building the final bell rang, and the traffic noises from the hall died away. “You think John Erle wanted to die? You think he didn’t give a shit about living another day?”

“He talked the talk and he walked the walk. He knew what he was doing.”

“And so that makes it all right for somebody to kill him.”

“He knew what he was doing, man!”

“What was he doing, Londe?”

The boy’s thick lips shut tightly.

“Did he tell you who he was working for?”

Nothing.

“Are you afraid of Big Ron?”

“I ain’t afraid of nothin’!”

“You’re afraid of talking to me.”

“You a cop—nobody talks to cops.”

Wager figured Londe was about Hocks’s age—thirteen, maybe going on fourteen. Eager to be away from childhood, hungry for the big adventures talked about by kids two, three years older who were cool, man. And those kids—despite all they did talk about—knew other things that were only excited whispers that stopped when Londe showed up. “Hocks is going to be dead a long time, Londe. He’s never coming back to see his mama and his sisters. Never.”

The eyes blinked, and Wager saw a tiny tremor in the boy’s fist.

“Only thirteen years of living—thirteen Christmases, thirteen candles on his birthday cake. And now he’s dead until the end of time. That sound fair to you?”

“Man—!”

“I want to know who killed him.”

His answer came in a wrenched whisper, “I don’t know who done it!”

“I’m not saying you do. But I can find out a lot sooner if I know all about John Erle—what he did on the streets, who he did it for.”

“Who said he was doing anything on the streets!”

Wager waited. A lot of people, including kids this age, once they started talking, had a hard time with silence.

“Who said that, man?”

Wager waited.

“How long you going to sit there like that? I got to get to class!”

“Was Hocks in the same class, Londe? How late you think he’s going to be?” Wager settled more comfortably against the hard angle of his chair. “And how much do you think he’d want his killer to get away with what he did?”

“But I don’t know who killed him!”

“Was Hocks selling?”

Londe sighed. “’At’s what he say. I don’t know. He had him some money, though, and he was talking a lot more where that come from.”

“Did he say who he was working for?”

“Not right out, no. But he was hinting around about how he just might be in with Big Ron and all. You know, talking like he know more but we was too little to tell it to. And everybody knows what Big Ron does. Even you cops.” The boy’s lips twisted. “He pays off the cops to let him alone, like.”

“You know this or you hear this?”

A shrug. “He still in business, ain’t he?”

“When did all this start to happen?”

“Couple weeks before he was killed.” Londe’s brown eyes looked out the window. “I reckon he didn’t have much time to enjoy all that money.”

“Do you know Big Ron?”

“I seen him around. Everybody seen him on account of he can’t do no business without being seen. John Erle, he say you cops either getting paid off or you got to be dumber than Big Ron not to catch him.”

“He thought Big Ron was dumb, did he?”

“Man, he is dumb! I mean John Erle told me he almost can’t even write his own name! John Erle told me he have to read things for him because Big Ron can’t do it hisself.”

“Did Big Ron send John into somebody else’s territory?”

Londe looked at the worn carpet and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

He didn’t know the answers to the rest of Wager’s questions either, but what he’d said confirmed what Wager had been thinking. The other two boys, although more willing to help, couldn’t give any information about why Hocks would be shot. But what they did say filled out the picture of Hocks as a sharp kid with big dreams who suddenly had a lot of money to back up his bragging, enough to buy all the CDs and videos and clothes any of them wanted, and who acted both proud and secretive about where that money came from. So out of the time spent with the witnesses, Wager came away with a few more names, a clearer picture of the victim, and a rough idea of Hocks’s last few days of life. And the same questions that faced him with Julio’s murder: why and who?

I
T WASN’T HIS
case, and perhaps he should not have stopped by the DIA worksite. But Golding said he’d welcome any help he could get, so Wager decided to give him some. The decision wasn’t so much the happy gift to the rest of humankind that Golding wanted but the result of a telephone call from Wager’s mother. She asked about progress on Julio’s murder. She said she wasn’t nagging him, though neither of them believed that; she just wondered if there was any good news she could bring when she visited Louisa this evening. Wager didn’t have any, so she thanked him in a tone of voice that asked him why not.

Danny Aragon drove a low-slung Chevrolet Belair old enough to belong to Wager’s father. Its rusty panels were held together by strips of duct tape and hope, and the license plates were the blue-and-red Collectors Car issue. That was a way owners of older vehicles got around the emissions inspection law. But Wager figured the clunker was the kid’s first automobile, because he stopped off at an auto parts store and even a car wash. Wager was mildly surprised to see the vehicle hold together under the pummeling brushes, but Aragon seemed happy, pulling to the side of the concrete apron to wipe the excess water off the patches of rust and primer paint before heading down I-25. Wager followed the gently smoking car to the Jefferson Park neighborhood and past blocks of two- and three-bedroom bungalows. Finally Aragon turned into a Taco Bell and parked. Between the bright poster-paint ads covering the plate-glass windows, Aragon spent a long time talking with one of the girls at the serving counter. Then he took a paper-wrapped meal to a vacant table. When he sat down, Wager went in after him.

“Hello, Danny.” He slid into the molded plastic chair across the small table with its sprinkle of cheese and lettuce fragments.

The youth’s eyes widened with surprise. “What you doing here, man!”

“I followed you.” Wager glanced at the girl busily carting an armload of food to the drive-up window. She had large breasts and tightly curled blond hair that fought against a baseball cap. “Nice-looking girl. She your
chunda
?”

“Yeah.” His eyes strayed to the kitchen area. “We’re, you know, planning on getting married.” He added, “Soon’s I get a real job and she finishes school. You say you followed me?”

Wager nodded. “I got the feeling there was something you wanted to tell me about Julio, but didn’t want your friends out at DIA to know about.”

The young man stared at Wager for a long moment and then dipped his face under the painted advertisement for a ninety-nine-cent taco special to search the street outside.

“Nobody else tailed you,” said Wager. “I’ve been with you since DIA.”

“You were behind me all that time?”

“Checkers Auto Supply, Robowash, here.”

“Man, I didn’t even know you were back there!”

“You weren’t looking, were you?”

“No, but—” He glanced out again.

“You worried about something?”

“No! I’m just, you know, surprised. …”

“What’s your girl’s name?”

“What? Oh—Lisa. Lisa Klovstad. Why?”

“She’s a real pretty girl. You’re a lucky man.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” Danny smiled, a mixture of happiness and wonder, as if the life that had aged his face prematurely had for some reason decided to reward him with a miracle. “She’s something fine, man.”

“Good luck to the both of you.”

“Thanks.”

“Did you tell Julio that you and Lisa are planning to get married?”

“Yeah.” He grinned at himself. “I guess I tell everybody. I guess I have a hard time believing it myself.” His dark eyes gazed dreamily past Wager toward the kitchen.

“You and Julio ever double-date?”

“Us? Naw. I didn’t see nothing of him off the job. On the job, yeah. We’re both the same age, and all. And like I told you, we talked music.” A half-embarrassed shrug. “I, like, play percussion, you know? We got a Latino band—it might go somewhere.” He snorted at himself. “We got a dream, anyway, and that job out at DIA ain’t going to last much longer. Mr. Tarbell says we’ll be done in six weeks more.”

“That sounds fine—sounds like a fine future.” Wager pushed some dried-up cheese into a little pile. “Was there something you wanted to tell me about Julio?”

Danny carefully unwrapped the happy-looking waxed paper from a burrito and bit into it, finally speaking around the lump in his cheek. “You don’t have to tell people about me, right? You know, if I do tell you something?” He added, remembering, “I seen that story on you in the paper. You and Julio. I didn’t know he was your cousin.”

“I won’t tell anybody. You’ll be what’s called a ‘confidential informant’—they’re protected by law from disclosure or testifying.” Or at least sometimes they were, but no sense worrying the kid with details. “Do you know who might have wanted Julio dead?”

He chewed slowly, his mind on something other than food and his fingers absently tapping the cigarette package in his shirt pocket. “I don’t know about dead. I mean, there’s some things that … well. …” He shook his head. “But dead!”

“What things, Danny?”

“Well, nothing like I want to say for certain. But Julio, like, said something to me a couple days before he quit coming to work.”

“Go on.”

“He asked me was I working with Hastings and I said ‘What you mean, working with him? We both work with him,’ and he said ‘No, I mean
working
with him.’ I asked him what the hell was he talking about and he just looked kind of funny at me and said ‘Nothing.’ He wouldn’t say no more about it, so I let it drop.”

Roderick Hastings. The heavily muscled black kid who didn’t like cops. The face Wager brought up to go with the name had a flat nose and wide, hairy nostrils, a narrow mustache and close-cropped hair, full pink lips. “What do you think Julio meant?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t even think much about it until I heard about him getting shot.”

“What do you know about Hastings?”

The shoulders of the youth’s frayed denim jacket rose and fell. “Seems about like everybody else. A lot of the time he’s off doing stuff for Mr. Tarbell, but he puts in his time like the rest of us.”

“Has Hastings worked there a long time?”

Another shrug. “He was there when I came. I think he was one of the first ones hired.”

“Did he ever have any run-in with Julio?”

Danny gave that some thought. “I don’t know about a run-in—not a, you know, real fight, but there was something. Hastings kind of said something now and then that made me think something had happened.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, something like, ‘You know what I mean, Julio, my man’ or ‘Julio, you a real smart one and you want to stay that way.’”

“Was this shortly before Julio left?”

“I don’t know—a week or two, maybe.”

“What did Julio say?”

“Nothing. Just went on working like Hastings wasn’t talking to him.” He added, “Julio didn’t want no trouble. He wasn’t that kind.”

“What did Hastings do then?”

“Laughed. Kind of a mean laugh, you know, like he was dissin’ Julio.”

“Hastings ever say anything to you?”

“No. Not like that. I don’t want him to, either.”

“Why’s that?”

“You see how big that sucker is? He’s had him some fights, too.”

“He talk about his fights?”

“Naw, but he’s got this knife cut on his shoulder and somebody flattened his nose for him. And the way he looks sometimes, you know, you can tell he don’t like us, man.”

“Hispanics?”

“Chicanos, yea.
La gente
.” He shrugged again. “But that’s his problem. I just do my work, you know?”

“Is that why he and Julio had trouble?”

Danny wagged his head slowly. “I don’t think so—it wasn’t that hot, like. It was more like Hastings was talking about something that only the two of them know about. Kind of secret, like.”