Steeled for Murder (26 page)

“I see you were released both times. Anything you want to tell me about what’s going on?”

Definitely not.

Mr. Ramirez was waiting. I had to say something. “Just that there was a problem at work, sir. But I wasn’t really involved.”

“Yes. I would say one of your coworkers being murdered qualified as a little problem at work. Where were you when this happened?”

“I was working, sir. In the plating room.” Thank goodness for Hank’s meticulous record keeping. “Group leader and foreman could testify to that.”

“So they have. Yet apparently Detective Belkins still considers you a suspect.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you care to comment on that?”

Not at all. “I was just working in the same building, sir. And since my conviction was for murder, I think he just figured it was likely to be me.”

“I see. I haven’t spoken to him yet,” Mr. Ramirez said. “I imagine that if they thought they had enough to hold you, they would have done so.”

“Yes, sir.” I was relieved he was thinking that way.

“So you want to switch to day shift?” he asked, abruptly changing to the original subject.

“Not what I want, sir. What I’m being assigned to.”

“I thought day shift was the preferred shift. You haven’t been there long enough to get on the preferred shift.”

“No, sir. I think this would just be temporary. They want to train me to drive a forklift.”

“I find that very interesting.” Mr. Ramirez paused.

I remained silent.

“Wasn’t the man who was murdered a forklift driver?” he finally said.

“Yes, sir.” An uncomfortable thought.

“And you’d be his replacement?”

Another uncomfortable thought. “Yes, sir.”

“I suppose it’s a little far-fetched to think that you might have killed someone so you could get their job as a forklift driver, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. I didn’t ask for the job, sir. The plant manager is assigning me to it.”

“The plant manager? The plant manager decides who’s going to be the lift driver? I’d have thought that would be up to the shift foreman.”

“I don’t know, sir.” I rubbed my forehead nervously. “All I know is he wants me to report tomorrow morning at eight a.m. for training. Work days until the training’s done.”

“But you’re supposed to report here at ten a.m. on Thursdays. Won’t that interfere with your shift?”

“Yes, sir, I suppose it will. I don’t know what I can do about that.”

“You say this is a temporary assignment?”

“Yes, sir. Just until I qualify on the lift. Maybe a week or two.”

“Do you even have a driver’s license?”

“No, sir.”

“Seems strange to me that they should want you to drive the forklift. You can’t even drive a car.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll tell you what. You come in later this morning for this week’s appointment. I have to be in court this morning, but you can report to the secretary if I’m not back yet. Then we can figure out what to do for next week. Okay?”

A relief. “Yes, sir. I’ll come right now.”

“I’ll leave instructions to change the time you’re monitored. Have you got the fee for this week?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” The phone was silent for a minute. “Is there anything else I should know about?”

“Not that I can think of, sir.”

“When you get here, just sign in. Since you don’t have an appointment, you might have to wait until someone’s free. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

We hung up. I’d have to take a quick shower and change my clothes; my shirt was soaked with sweat.

Kelly apparently hadn’t called in to accuse me of child molestation. At least so far. If she had, Mr. Ramirez wouldn’t be so casual about my appointment. I hoped she didn’t change her mind.

Unless, of course, they were playing the old “Why bother to look for him when we can tell him to just come in and report?” game.

No way for me to know that until I showed up. And no way to tell what kind of time restrictions I’d end up with after I met with Mr. Ramirez. Anticipating the worst, I looked at my dingy surroundings with a fond appreciation. Might be the last time I ever saw it.

I gathered up the library books I’d finished. If I dropped them off on my way to the parole office, they wouldn’t get overdue, whatever happened. And if my new monitoring schedule would allow for visits to the library, I could stop on my way home to get some more.

Chapter 15

More people were in the parole office waiting room late on a Tuesday morning than there were early on a Thursday. The heat and humidity were worse with so many people jammed together. The smell of unwashed bodies and clothes hit me as soon as I opened the door.

I signed in on the clipboard, took off my jacket, and looked for an empty space on one of the benches. There weren’t many. I sat down next to a muscular black guy with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. At least he seemed to have showered recently.

Name after name was called. Lunchtime approached, and finally, I was the last person sitting there. The overly curvaceous clerk who I’d seen last time looked at the clipboard, looked at me waiting there, and frowned. This time, she had the remains of a jelly donut in her hand. Powdered sugar covered her bosom.

“You got an appointment?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. But Mr. Ramirez told me to come in,” I said.

“Really. Weren’t you just in last Friday?”

“Yes, ma’am. Thursday, actually.”

“I thought they locked you up on a violation,” she said, narrowing her eyes and staring at me.

“Just had a couple of questions they wanted to ask me,” I said.

She snorted. “A couple of questions? Looked a lot more serious than that.”

“Yes, ma’am.” No point arguing with her.

She spun around, her rubber-soled ankle boots squeaking on the hard damp floor. The door swung shut behind her.

She returned in a moment. “Mr. Ramirez will see you now. He’s in his office.” She swung the door wide.

Clutching my jacket, I followed her.

Mr. Ramirez was coming down the hall toward us.

“Here you go,” she said. “I’m going to lunch now.”

“Fine. Thank you.” Mr. Ramirez’s bottomless black eyes snapped through his thick glasses.

I stood a good six inches taller than Mr. Ramirez, but he probably outweighed me.

He escorted me back to his office. His desk chair groaned as he lowered his bulk into it. “Have a seat,” he said to me.

I sat down. The temperature back here in the offices was much cooler than in the waiting room. The air smelled much better, too.

“Now,” Mr. Ramirez said, tugging his shirt cuffs, “let’s go over what’s been happening in the last two weeks.”

I had no idea how he expected me to respond. I just sat there, willing my hands to lie still in my lap.

Mr. Ramirez leaned back in the old wooden desk chair. Its wheels squealed as it moved under his weight. His gaze rested on my face.

I looked down at my hands. They were still a little raw from being out in the cold, but with the gloves I’d gotten from Mitch’s house, they were getting better. The scar across my right palm itched.

“Got anything you want to tell me about the last few weeks?” he asked.

That one I could answer honestly. “No, sir.”

Mr. Ramirez laughed. “Let me rephrase that,” he said. “Anything I should know about happen in the last two weeks? Like this fellow at work who was killed. Any idea of what happened?”

How many times were we going to go over this? Probably until I tripped up and contradicted myself. Encouraging thought. “No, sir. Just they think somebody killed him.”

“I see. And who do ‘they’ think killed him?”

I shook my head.

“Come on. You must know something.”

“I’m not sure, sir. Detective Belkins, sir, he thinks maybe I had something to do with it.”

“And did you?” Ramirez pushed his chair away from the desk, crossing his ankles in front of him and leaning farther back in the chair. He stared down at his hands clasped over his belly. They were square and heavy, just like the man.

“No, sir. I was working. The group leader can vouch for me.”

“And did he? What’s his name?”

“His name’s Hank. He could see me pretty much the whole time.”

“Has Hank got a last name?” He scratched his nose with a blunt finger.

“He must have. But I don’t know it,” I said.

“And you couldn’t have just snuck away for a little while?”

“No, sir. Hank would have noticed.”

“Why is that?”

I blinked. Hard to describe the plating room operation to someone who’d never seen it. “The plater I was operating would have been stopped, sir. Hank and the other three plater operators couldn’t have missed that.”

“Even if you’d just run to the men’s room or to get a drink of water?” He was leaning even farther back in his chair. I wondered if he would flip over backwards in it. Probably hit his head on the file cabinet back there. Get a traumatic head injury. If that happened, of course I’d be charged with assault.

“Yes, sir. I’d have had to get Hank to take my place if I left it at all. He’d have known.”

“I see. So why does Detective Belkins think you were involved?”

“I’m not sure, sir. Mitch and I had a few words before the shift started. And there’s my record.”

“Ah, yes. On parole for murder. That would make anyone investigating a murder take a second look at you if you were in the vicinity, wouldn’t it? Especially if you’d, as you say, ‘had words’ with the victim that evening.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Mitch is the man who was murdered?” He was deliberately using the word murder repeatedly, undoubtedly hoping to unhinge me a bit. It was working.

“Yes, sir.”

“And these ‘words’ you had with Mitch, what were they about?”

“He thought I was looking at his wife. But I wasn’t.” Now we were getting into very uncomfortable territory. What would I say if he asked me if I knew the wife?

“And what happened? Did it come to blows? Or near blows?”

“No, sir. John, the foreman, stepped in. He sent Mitch off to start work.”

“I see. And what did you do?”

“John assigned me to the plating room, so I went there. Hank can vouch for me most of the rest of the night.”

“Most?”

“I had my two breaks and lunch. But that was before Mitch was killed.” I wished he would listen to Hank, not Belkins.

“You sure about that?”

“Pretty sure.”

“What do you mean, ‘pretty sure?’” His intense black eyes didn’t blink.

“I don’t have any way of knowing exactly when he was killed. And I don’t remember if he came by after my last break.”

“Were you brought in for questioning that night?”

“Yes, sir. It was more like morning by then.”

“By Detective Belkins?” Mr. Ramirez shifted in the chair. It squealed alarmingly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Anyone else?”

“You mean brought in for questioning? Not that I know of. But it’s not something anybody’d be likely to tell me.”

“No. Did anyone else question you?”

“Detective Montgomery was there, too.”

“I see. Anything I need to know come out at the interrogation?”

I resisted the urge to bring my hand up to touch my cheek where it had been swollen and bruised. “Not that I can think of, sir.”

“You weren’t monitored for almost a week and a half. Anything happen I should know about then?”

Should I tell him about the time I spent at Tiffany’s house? Montgomery knew something had gone on there. But he might be keeping his mouth shut about it. And, heaven help me, I didn’t want anybody inquiring into what went on at Kelly’s house. Or what Kelly thought went on. “I don’t think so, sir.”

Mr. Ramirez sat up and focused his eyes on me. The chair groaned. “Sure about that? I’d much rather hear things from you than from someone else.”

I shrugged. He either knew everything Belkins and Montgomery knew, or he could find out easily enough. “I think you know everything, sir.”

“Any additional sources of income besides the job?”

What was he getting at now? “No, sir.”

“So the only place you got any money was from your paycheck.”

“Yes, sir.” I tried to think.

Tiffany’s sixty dollars. I hadn’t stolen that; Carl had given it to me. For babysitting. He didn’t have to, but it wasn’t like I hadn’t earned it. Should I mention that? I didn’t see how I could do that without going into the whole thing about being at her house with the kids. Wouldn’t be doing me any good. Especially if Kelly got it into her head to call and talk to Mr. Ramirez. It’d sound like I’d set myself up to be with another bunch of kids. Unsupervised. Best keep my mouth shut.