Never Look Down (3 page)

Chapter Four

Cal

It's never easy to schedule my pro bono clients at Caffeine Central, so I work on a first-come, first-served basis. Three clients were already queued up when I came downstairs from the little apartment above my office. The graffiti on the outside of the building was still intact, although three weeks had elapsed since I first noticed it. When I asked Nando about it, he said, “I have heard nothing from the city, and the cost of removal is robbery, simple and pure.”

“Well, it's not bothering me,” I told him, “but if the city contacts you, you better get it scrubbed.”

First up in my office that morning was a feisty, elderly woman with hair that looked like a pewter helmet. Her name was Thelma McCharles, and she had just received a notice of foreclosure on her house. She was angry and confused since she was also in the middle of negotiations to modify her mortgage with the same bank. “It's a pretty common occurrence,” I told her, “the right hand not knowing what the left is doing.” I collected Thelma's information and told her I'd contact the bank on her behalf.

A thirty-something man with a bad case of meth-induced jitters was up next. His face was scabbed and blotchy, his teeth so crusted I couldn't look at them. The cops had planted a quantity of crystal meth in his backpack, he told me. I explained that I didn't do criminal defense, that he should contact the Public Defender's office. He groaned. “The Public Pretender? No thanks. I've been there, done that.”

I handed him a card. “Here's a list of treatment centers. Your biggest problem isn't this bust, it's your habit, man.” I looked him in the eye. “You need to clean yourself up, or that shit's going to kill you.” He left but not before giving me a look that said that wasn't what he wanted to hear.

After dealing with the next client, I locked up, hung the “Back in 15
”
sign on the door, and took Arch for a walk. He pulled at his leash and sniffed the crisp fall air, as if he were smelling the river on the shifting breeze. We were down by the Lan Su Chinese Garden when my cell went off. “Cal? This is Esperanza.” Esperanza Oliva was the secretary at Nando's detective agency. Her strained voice caused me to tense up. “Something terrible has happened.”

“What?”

She sobbed once and caught herself. “Cal, it's Claudia, Nando's fiancée. She's, she's dead.”

“My God! No! What happened?”

“She was found dead early this morning. That's all I know.”

“Where's Nando?”

“He's here. In his office. Can you come, Cal?”

“I'll be right there.”

Located in Lents, a diverse, blue-collar neighborhood in Southeast Portland, the Sharp Eye Detective Agency was just off Powell Boulevard, on Ninety-second. Nando's building once housed an independent pharmacy that had stubbornly survived into the third millennium owing to strong neighborhood support. But when a huge chain pharmacy opened a block away, the octogenarian owner, who was also the druggist, sold the building to Nando.

A sign reading “Closed” hung in the storefront window, and the blinds were down. I rapped on the door and Esperanza let me in. Petite, competent, and always fashionably dressed, her eyes were puffy and red as she offered herself up for a hug. “Oh, Cal, I'm glad you're here. He's in his office. He won't talk to me.”

I knocked softly, and when Nando didn't respond, let myself in. My friend was sitting at his desk, shoulders slumped, head down. He looked up when I entered, a dazed expression on his face. “I'm going to have to call my mother in Cuba, tell her the wedding is off. I told her Claudia and I would marry there, in Havana. She was so excited. How can I tell her about this?”

“I'm so sorry, Nando. What the hell happened?”

He propped an elbow on his desk, closed his eyes and began massaging his forehead like someone with a migraine. “The police came to my place at six forty-five this morning. They said the body of a woman had been found in Old Town, on Third Avenue, and that my phone number was in her recent call log. They wanted me to come with them to help identify the body. Lots of women have my number, so I was more curious than worried.” He stopped for a moment, as if the next words were stuck in his throat. “It was Claudia. She was just lying there. In a parking lot.” He looked up in utter bewilderment as tears filled his eyes. “She had been shot twice in the head. Executed, Calvin. How could this happen?”

I shook my head, feeling like he needed some kind of answer. But there's just no explaining this kind of inhumanity. “Who found her?”

“Some woman who pushes her belongings around in a shopping cart. She was still there when I arrived.” Nando kneaded his brow some more with his thick fingers. “Of course, the police have the hard-on for me. You know, the boyfriend is always the first suspect. They have requested a second interview.” He glanced at his Rolex. “I have to leave in a few minutes.”

“Do you have an alibi?”

He shrugged. “I believe so, but it depends on the time of death. I was up most of the night watching Real Madrid play Barcelona with my crazy soccer friends. I returned home about four-thirty and went to bed.”

“Who caught the case?”

“Scott and some new detective. A guy I don't know named Ludlow.”

I nodded. “Good.” Nando and I had been involved in a murder investigation with Harmon Scott a couple of years ago. He was a good detective and a decent man. “What'd you tell Scott?”

“I told him to pick up Anthony Cardenas.”

“Who's he?”

“Claudia's ex-husband. He still has the thing for her. A very jealous man. Not Cuban. Mexican.”

“You didn't tell me Claudia had been married.”

Nando gave a half shrug. “She didn't tell me until recently. It is something she is not proud of. Cardenas is a lowlife, a gambler. He is known as Tony the Card at the casinos and poker clubs.”

“You think he did this?”

Nando looked at me without answering, his eyes smoldering like hot coals. We sat there for a while with only the noise from Ninety-second Street filtering in. Finally, he said, “I have to go, my friend. Thank you for coming.”

I followed him out, and when he got into his car, I said, “You're not going to do anything stupid about Cardenas, are you?”

He shut the car door without answering, which was an answer of sorts and not the one I was looking for.

Chapter Five

Cal

I left Nando's office and drove back over the Willamette to Caffeine Central, the death of Claudia Borrego hanging heavily over me. Nando's heart, as big as the island of Cuba, had been shattered, and I worried about what my friend might do if he caught up with Claudia's ex-husband, Anthony Cardenas. My wife's suicide down in L.A. had taught me all too well what a blow like that could do to a person. Nando wasn't a violent man, but on the other hand, he was big and strong and volatile.

Since I'd closed for the day, I leashed up Archie and walked over to the crime scene, only a few blocks away. The body had been removed, but yellow crime tape still cordoned off a large section of the parking lot, where a couple of techs in white coats were milling around. A cherry picker had been brought in, the kind used to trim high trees. Fifty feet up in the basket, another tech examined the brick wall at close range. An image with large red letters below it covered an upper section of the six-story wall.

I stood there, taking in the scene. The tech in the basket seemed very interested in what looked like divots in the brick. He examined them, photographed them, then took several samples of something by gouging the divots with a tool. I walked around to get a better look at the image, which was partially obscured by the cherry picker. It was a blue sphere against a black background, the iconic “blue marble” image of Earth as seen from space, except that it had wavy, red lines rising off of it, a suggestion of radiating heat. Below the image, the tagger had sprayed “THERE IS NO PLA” in large, red letters.

The hair on my neck tingled a little. It was the scale, boldness, and difficult placement of the image that struck me. “Huh,” I said aloud, causing Arch to look up at me, “that's gotta be by the same guy who did Caffeine Central.” I paused to think of the moniker. “K209, that was it, right, Arch?” My dog looked up at me and wagged his stump of a tail in apparent agreement.

Judging from the uncompleted text and the absence of a signature, it looked like the tagger had been interrupted. And those divots were caused by bullets, I was sure of it. The divots were vertically elongated, suggesting the shooter fired up from the parking lot.

Arch and I walked around the building where more crime tape blocked off the narrow alley between it and another structure. A technician, crouched up on the landing of an old fire escape no longer in use, was busy dusting for prints at a broken window. Shading my eyes, I looked up into the bright morning. High above the alley a black iron ladder connected the roof of the building with the landing. The shooter was on the ground, so it must have been K209 who broke into the building on his way down. Maybe he was trying to evade the shooter. If so, did he make it? If he did take refuge in the building, the cops might have him now. Or, maybe he somehow got away clean. I wondered which it was.

On the way back to Caffeine Central, I called Nando, but he didn't pick up. I beat back a twinge of anxiety. It was only an hour and a half since I'd seen him, so no cause for alarm. The grilling from Scott and his partner could run well into the afternoon. Murder interviews had a way of doing that. To be on the safe side, I called Esperanza and told her to call me the minute she saw or heard from Nando.

I could have left it there, but I wanted to know more about the tagger who called himself K209. I called a young man who might be able to shed some light on the matter. His name was Danny Baxter, but everyone called him Picasso, a street name that reflected his considerable artistic prowess. I'd helped him solve his mom's cold-case murder, an effort that nearly got us both killed but bonded us forever. We agreed to meet at the Black Rooster, a little coffee shop on South West Tenth. When Archie saw Picasso sitting at an outdoor table, he squealed and strained at his leash. Picasso was one of Archie's favorite people.

Picasso got up as we approached and dropped to one knee to embrace Arch in a bear hug before rising again to shake my hand. He was tall with an angular face and dark, liquid eyes, not unlike those of his namesake. A black turtleneck covered the vivid tattoo of a coral snake on his neck, a relic of his life as a homeless teen. His shirt choice could have been a nod to his new, straighter life as the manager of a hip art gallery in the Pearl, but I doubted it. The tattoo craze in Portland showed no signs of waning, particularly among the creative set. We ordered at the counter—a green tea for him, a double cap for me—and with drinks in hand went back outside, where it was bracingly cool but sunny.

“How's the art biz?”

He blew on his tea, then frowned before taking a sip. “Slow, man. My mural commissions are keeping us afloat. People aren't buying much hanging art.” Then he looked at me more closely. “What's the matter, Cal? You don't look so good.”

I sighed and shook my head. “Nando's fiancée was murdered last night.”

“
No
. I didn't even know he was engaged. What happened?”

Picasso listened as I unpacked the whole story of the graffiti at Caffeine Central, the murder of Claudia Borrego, and the unfinished words left behind on the building on Everett. When I finished, I said, “You ever hear of a tagger in Portland using the name K209?”

Picasso shook his head. “Don't know the moniker, but I don't keep up with the street art as much as I used to. Dude sounds interesting, though, mixing tagging with a little buildering.”

“Buildering?”

“You know, like bouldering, but on buildings. Urban climbers. Why go all the way to Smith Rock or Half Dome when there's plenty of climbs right here in the city?”

I nodded. “Is there a Portland buildering group of some kind?”

Picasso chuckled. “Nothing official, but I know some dudes. I'll ask around. By the way, some graffiti artists would call this guy a writer, not a tagger.”

“What's the difference?”

“Taggers are less evolved, you know, haven't proved themselves yet. Writers have skills and props. You gotta earn it.”

“What's this guy, then?”

Picasso shrugged. “Still a tagger, I'd say, since I haven't heard of the dude. Of course, the distinction only matters with the people into this on the street. He could be the next Shakespeare or da Vinci, but if he does a wall in this town, he's condemned as a tagger by the powers that be. A paid-for ad on the side of a building is no problem, but put something up without permission, and they send in the flying monkeys.” He sipped his tea and looked at me over the cup. “So, this guy saw the shooting go down?”

“Yeah, it looks that way. If the shooter didn't get him—and I haven't heard anything to suggest that—then the cops are probably looking for him as we speak, but you know as well as I do that he won't be easy to find, especially for the cops. I was thinking maybe you could connect me.”

Picasso sat back in his chair. “If I find this guy, there's still a problem. No way he'll want to come forward. He runs the risk of being busted for the graffiti. And if he's trying to stay anonymous, it'll blow his cover.”

I nodded. “I realize that. But we're talking about the murder of an innocent woman here.”

Picasso tugged absently on the silver ring piercing his eyebrow for a moment. “You're one of the few people in town he might trust, Cal. Everybody on the street knows about Caffeine Central. If he came to you, could you shield him somehow?”

I shook my head. “Not his identity. If he witnessed a murder, he needs to come forward. I paused for a moment. “Tell him I'll try to trade his cooperation for any legal problems with the graffiti he's left around town. Best I can do.”

“Okay. I'll have a look at the piece on Everett and compare it with the one on Caffeine Central. If I agree K209 did them both, I'll see if I can find him.”

“Fair enough.”

Picasso shook his head and smiled. “Listen to us. K209 could be a
her
, you know.”

I feigned a forehead slap and laughed. “You're right. My daughter would kill me for making that assumption.”