“I guess so,” she said in a weak, little girl voice.
“That could really be a help. Now can you tell me how tall this guy was?”
“I couldn’t tell. But he was taller than the driver. And thinner. He was slender.”
“Tattoos?”
“I don’t remember any.”
“Can you describe the car?”
“Not really.”
She was cooperating with me. She was answering my questions. Still, I had the feeling that she was holding back on me. But I didn’t want to polygraph her and alienate her further.
“What did you see after they got into the car?”
She looked embarrassed. “Nothing. I turned my attention to my… my,” she said, struggling for the right word, “my business transaction with the guy on the corner.”
“What happened after you bought the drugs?”
“I never bought that night. I got spooked and split. This guy I was with, he kind of persuaded me to go back again on Sunday night. That’s when my problems started.”
Everything she said was consistent with what the black junkie had told me. I was more determined than ever now to find the Mexican partner.
I drove her to the Piper Technical Center-where the department’s Scientific Investigation Division is based- and introduced her to Vicky Ochoa, a civilian sketch artist the department contracts on individual cases. She uses a computer program to help witnesses construct the features that match the suspect’s. I told them I would be back later in the morning to pick up a copy of the sketch.
I headed to the Nickel Diner on South Main for a late breakfast, but I had no appetite and just took a few bites of my eggs. I thought of Martinez, sitting across from Ochoa, working on the sketch. She was probably safe now, but what if I arrested a suspect? I would have to convince Martinez to testify in court. Then she certainly could be at risk. I would relocate her. I would try to protect her. But could I really protect her?
You work homicide because you want to get killers off the street, because you want to protect people. But to do the job right, sometimes you have to gamble with people’s lives to save other lives. And when you lose, you have to live with it. For the rest of your life. That’s as real as it gets. You have to have the stomach for that kind of brutal calculus. I thought I did. Until Latisha Patton. No wonder so many cops at the divisions transferred out of homicide after a few years.
Pushing my plate away, I shook out three Tylenol and downed them with a swig of coffee. I returned to Piper Tech and thanked Martinez for cooperating and reminded her that she could call me if she was worried about anything. She nodded, lips tightly pursed. After I climbed inside my car, I studied the sketch. It wasn’t much to go on, just a drawing of a Mexican in his twenties with a broad forehead and narrow eyes, wearing a dark watch cap.
I sped down to the Harbor Division, gave the sketch to the captain and asked if he could run off a few hundred copies and pass them out to patrol cops and detectives. If the officers could show them to snitches, street sources, hookers, drug dealers, and the inmates in the division’s jail, maybe someone could ID the suspect for me.
When I finished, I sped back up to Lancaster, hitting almost a hundred on Interstate 5. When Sandy came to the door, I was surprised that she was carrying a cup of coffee; this was the first time I had seen her without a beer in her hand. I followed her into the breakfast room and sat down. After she poured me a cup of coffee, I pulled a pouch from a flap in my murder book, opened it, and rolled the netsuke and ojime onto the kitchen table. “Ever seen these before?”
She shook her head. “What are they?”
I explained where I found them and what they represented.
“The only art Pete was familiar with was that picture of the mountains on the side of a Coor’s can,” she said. “I have no idea what he was doing with those things.”
I then told her about the gun I found. “Was it a throw down?”
“Might have been,” she said. “But he wasn’t involved in any questionable shootings, any cases where there was any doubt that the guy was armed. So I doubt he used it.”
“I also found under those tiles about five thousand in cash. Any idea why he had that?”
“No.”
There was something about her response that troubled me. Maybe she answered too quickly. Maybe I was just looking for something that wasn’t there.
“It just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “He was so hard up for cash, he couldn’t make his child support payments. Why didn’t he just grab some of that money? Or why didn’t he just sell those Japanese figures? The two of them are probably worth more than ten thousand bucks.”
“Maybe he just recently got the cash and those little thingamajigs.”
“Think about it for a moment,” I said. “You sure you don’t have any idea where he might have got all that cash and why he stashed it under a tile?”
“It could have had something to do with the divorce,” she said, twirling a cameo ring. “He might not have wanted me to know about it.” She sniffled, coughed, and blew her nose. “This has been very hard for me. First I find out some maniac with a gun threatened Pete while my little girl was there. She could have been killed for God’s sake. And then you tell me about the little Jap figures, the gun, the money. It’s all so crazy. I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Her eyes welled with tears and she dabbed at them with a Kleenex.
I realized I wasn’t going to get much more out of her. I still wanted to have another go at her and press her about the cash. Maybe in a few days. When she stopped wiping her eyes, I apologized for intruding on her, and she walked me to the door.
I drove back downtown and returned to the squad room. After searching art-theft Web sites, I called a few netsuke collectors, but I still couldn’t trace the provenance of the netsuke and ojime.
For the next few hours I slogged through the tedious process of examining San Pedro hot prowl reports and pressing the crime lab, unsuccessfully, for fiber and DNA results. I then received the disappointing news on the fingerprints lifted at the scene-negative. No matches.
In the late afternoon, Nicole Haddad called me. My mood was immediately buoyed.
“I need some good news,” I said.
“I wish I had some for you,” she said. “I checked all the sites, talked to several collectors, and even called the Art Loss Register’s New York office. They’ve got one of the biggest databases of stolen art in the world. Nothing. That netsuke and ojime might have been smuggled out of Japan. I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“Well, thanks for trying. I really appreciate you taking the time to help me out on this.”
After I hung up, I caught Ortiz’s eye and called down, “Let’s go downstairs.”
I poured two coffees in the break room, and we took the elevator down to the ground floor. As we stood in front of PAB, blowing on our burnt coffee, I told him about the netsuke s and ojimes and my meeting with Haddad.
“I’ve never gone out with any woman I’ve met on an investigation-until the investigation was over. But I’m kind of wavering now.”
Ortiz wagged a forefinger at me. “That kind of wavering is gonna get I.A. on your ass. You’re not supposed to date someone connected to a case. You know that.”
I stared into my coffee. “Yeah, but I’m in bad shape. I’m in such bad shape I was even thinking of hitting on Relovich’s ex-wife when I was out there.” I extended my arms. “And she’s pretty damn hefty.”
“You’re a pathetic motherfucker. You’re single; you’re straight; you got a good job; you live in L.A.” Ortiz slapped me on the chest. “You’re meat on the hoof, prime-grade USDA beef. There’re millions of available women out there. Yet you’re gonna hit on the one girl who can get you tagged by I.A. Why you have to chase this one? Does she have a gold-plated pussy?”
I thought about her brown eyes with the glittering flecks of green, the jab of her finger on my chest. “I don’t know. I just kind of felt a jolt when I was with her.”
“That’s ‘cause you’ve been holed up in that cave of yours the past year. You’d wanna jump any halfway
