And I’ll put the word out to some of my snitches.”
“If you find anything, call me. I don’t care what time.”
CHAPTER 34
I returned to the squad room and spent the next few hours typing up the notes I had taken from Pardo’s murder book, compiling a chrono, and putting together my own murder book for part two of my investigation into Latisha’s murder. At ten, I left the station, stopped for some shabushabu and a Sapporo in Little Tokyo, and headed home.
My ringing phone woke me the next morning.
“One of my snitches has something for you.” I recognized the voice. It was Chester Pinson.
“You’re working early on a weekend, Sarge.”
“I need the overtime. Got two kids in high school. I’m saving for college. Anyway, I’m sure Felony Special will authorize it.”
“They will, but hold off.” I told him to wait until the end of the D.P.-the twenty-eight-day deployment or pay period-until he called Duffy.
“Why?”
“It’s a long story. So where do you want to meet?”
“Southeast.”
“I’ll head right over.”
“Not so fast, homeboy,” Pinson said. “With my snitch, you play you pay.”
“Okay,” I said, laughing. “On my way in, I’ll stop by the ATM.”
I parked behind the bland, blocky Southeast Division station on 108th Street and crossed the squad room. Pinson and his snitch, a stocky black man in his early thirties with long, filthy dreadlocks, waited for me in a corner interview room.
“This is Vernon Tilly,” Pinson said to me, nodding toward the snitch.
“Let’s get right to it,” I said, sitting on a metal chair across from Tilly. “Who’s this Water Nose?”
Tilly grinned sheepishly-revealing a few missing lower teeth-and rubbed his thumb against his index and middle fingers. “First, I need some remumeration,” he said, mispronouncing the word.
“Vernon, Vernon, Vernon,” Pinson said, as if he were mildly scolding a child. “You know it don’t work that way. Tell us what you know. We’ll evaluate the information. Then we’ll pay you what it’s worth.”
“It not about the coin,” Tilly said, sounding indignant. “My moms need medicine for her glaucoma, and I gotta pay for it. If it weren’t for that, I’d be jawin’ with y’all for free. They takin’ a life these days for nuttin’. I ain’t wit’ dat. So I just tryin’ to be a good citizen. Help make my ’hood a better place.”
“We’re both well aware of how seriously you take your civic responsibilities,” Pinson said, giving me a surreptitious wink.
Tilly tugged on a dread and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “This is on the down-low, right?”
“Always,” Pinson said. “And I can vouch for Detective Levine. He won’t reveal where he got the information.”
“Aiight,” Tilly said.
“Now be a good citizen and tell us who Water Nose is.”
“They ain’t no Water Nose.”
“That’s not what you told me on the phone,” Pinson said, irritated.
“That ain’t his street name,” Tilly said.
“Look,” Pinson said. “It is his street name. We know that because a confidential informant told us. We want to find out who Water Nose is. And we want to find out where he lives.”
“They don’t call him that.”
“You’re full of shit,” Pinson said.
I leaned over and patted Tilly on the knee. “Vernon, take your time. We’ve got all morning. Tell us what you know about the guy we’re calling Water Nose.”
“What a nose.”
“What?” I said.
“What a nose.”
Pinson impatiently drummed his fingers on a thigh.
“This is beginning to sound like Whose on First,” I said. Leaning forward, I studied Tilly for a moment. “So you’re saying his name is not Water Nose.”
“That what I tryin’ to tell you.”
“His name is What A Nose?” I asked, astonished. I had never heard a nickname like that before.
Tilly nodded excitedly and shouted, “Yes!”
“I assume he has a large nose,” I said.
“He do. He got a big monsta nose. It wide. It long. It ugly.”
“Unbelievable,” Pinson said. “I never thought I’d need a white boy to translate Ebonics for me.”
I turned to Pinson and whispered, “My informant thought they said Water Nose, so I didn’t get a computer hit.”
“Tell us a little bit about this What A Nose,” Pinson said to Tilly.
“I don’t mean to dog the dude out, but he a big dummy,” Tilly said.
“He’s slow?” I asked.
Tilly tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Not much here.”
“Does he live on the southside?”
“Yeah.”
“You know where?” I asked.
“Naw.”
“What’s his set?”
“Five Deuce Hoover.”
“What’s his real name?” Pinson said.
“Don’t know that.”
“Does he know who killed that Korean grocer last year or the woman who was a witness?”
“You tole me you just wanted me to ID What A Nose,” Tilly said. “And I ID him for you. I don’t know nuttin’ about what he see or hear. That ain’t my bidness.”
When the interview was over, I handed Tilly forty dollars.
Tilly stared at the cash, frowning, and said, “Ain’t you a little light?”
“What the hell,” I said, peeling off another twenty.
After we escorted Tilly out the door, I said. “His good citizen line was a load of horseshit. But what about him using the money to buy medicine for his mom’s glaucoma. Is that for real?”
Pinson flashed me an are-you-kidding look. “Ash, you been away from the southside too long. His mom died three years ago.”
• • •
“Don’t even need the computer for this one,” Pinson said, opening the metal drawer of the Southeast’s Moniker File. Flipping through a few cards, he immediately located What A Nose. He was a twenty-four-year-old gangbanger named Earnest Dupray who had been arrested a half dozen times and served three years at Tracy for robbing a gas station with a toy gun. He had a misspelled tattoo on his throat: Fuc It, which made it easy for police to identify him after the robbery.
Dupray lived in a tumbledown South Central duplex, with the address spray painted below the front window, next to an auto repair shop on a smoggy stretch of South Broadway lined with liquor stores and laundromats. At the door, Pinson and I could hear a cartoon blaring from the television.
“That’s the gangbanger acid test,” I said, knocking on the door. “If a kid over the age of twelve is still watching cartoons, he’s a banger.”
