Central Europeans, and the Thai were on their own until we could arrange an interpreter. Yiddish wasn’t a problem, as all the Jewish residents were fluent in English.
It really wasn’t that we weren’t willing to try to adapt. It was more to do with our budgets being very restricted. We were having a tough time replacing our tires, let alone budgeting for language courses. There was also a matter of instructing all three shifts. Our attempt at Spanish, for example, had the instructor trying to teach three classes of three or four officers each. One class at 07:00 for the night shift as they came off duty, one at 13:00 for the day crew, and one at 18:30 for the evening shift. It was pretty tough on the high school teacher who was doing it for some extra pay, it consumed our entire “continuing education” budget for the year, and at the end we were not much further ahead than before.
All of which made it a very interesting place to be a cop. Hell, it made it downright fascinating at times. More than once the chief, Norm, had made references to resigning and turning his job over to the U.N. We got a lot of mileage out of that, and even went so far as to get him a pale blue beret. But I could understand his frustration.
Which brings me right back to the current case. Jacob Heinman had said that one of the shooters had spoken Spanish. Wonderful. Or something that sounded to Jacob vaguely like Italian. Okay. The other had been “Norwegian”-looking. Ya. You betcha. Around here, that could be just about anybody.
Not a lot to go on.
The upshot was it was pretty damned hard to get informants, like I said. Hard, but not altogether impossible.
As we were getting out of our cars at Mail Carrier Granger’s place, I stood outside for a minute, dialing the cell phone of one Hector Gonzalez, a twenty-two-year-old packing plant laborer whose acquaintance I’d made at a domestic call about a year ago.
“Bueno?”
“Hector, hey, this is Houseman.”
“Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. Really, it is.” I liked Hector. I made him nervous.
“Not now, man. I cannot talk now…”
When I’d gotten to that domestic call, I’d found a young Latino who turned out to be Hector defending his sister Selena from her boyfriend. The boyfriend was trying to beat Selena because she wouldn’t give him her savings that she kept in a jar in the kitchen cupboard. It turned out to be all of sixty dollars. Hector was winning, but it had been a near thing. Both young men had black eyes and multiple abrasions. So did Selena. The Battenberg cop and I had hauled all three of them in, since they were all yelling at us and each other in Spanish, and we couldn’t tell at the time just who had done what. Since none of them were speaking any English, even when addressed by us, we assumed they were illegal aliens. As we shook them down prior to putting them in the cars, I found a small bag of what we euphemistically call a “green, leafy substance” in Hector’s pocket. After we’d sorted things out at the police station, and everybody had calmed down enough to communicate, we found that Hector and his sister spoke English very well, indeed. It turned out that both of them had been born and raised in Los Angeles. The boyfriend spoke no English at all, and Hector and Selena offered to translate for him. Right. I thought something a bit more unbiased might be needed, but I have to admit it would have been fun to hear what Selena would have come up with. While we waited for an interpreter, I’d taken Hector aside and told him that we were both going to stand in the rest room and watch the “green, leafy substance” go down the toilet. We did. I told him I appreciated what he’d done for his sister, that all three of them were likely to be charged with a minimum of disturbing the peace, and that I didn’t think it was going to be in the interests of justice to hang an additional charge on him for the small bit of grass he had in his pocket. He’d asked why I was being so nice, and I told him that it wouldn’t be worth my time to charge him with such a small amount. I did make it clear that I could still do it, however, if he preferred it that way. He thanked me, and in a weak moment said that if I ever needed a favor…. That’s how informants are made.
“Now, I know you can listen, Hector. Just for a second.”
“Okay,” he sighed.
“There was a man just killed, out in the country, a couple of hours ago. Pretty close to Battenberg. Whoever did him blew his head off. He seems to be Hispanic. You with me so far?”
There was a silence, and then a faint, “Yeah, man?”
“We don’t know who it is, Hector. There wasn’t enough left of his face to even guess. Okay so far?”
“Holy chit, man. I doan know nothing about this.” He tended to shift into an accent when he was getting stressed.
“That’s gotta be a good thing. Look, Hector, all I want you to do is just give me a call if you hear who it was, okay?”
A pause, then, “Sure, man. I will do that.”
“I appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
I caught up to Hester as she was knocking on Granger’s door.
Most rural mail carriers know their districts like the back of their hands, and Granger was no exception. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual on the road back to Battenberg, though. Nope. Not a thing.
It pays not to rush. He offered coffee, and I accepted. Hester looked a little anxious to get going, but I needed a cup.
As we sat around the living room, coffee in hand, Granger said something that made it all worthwhile.
“But, you know what? At the old Dodd place, just past the hollow? There was a cream-colored Subaru there earlier today. Parked by the barn. It was gone when I came back by, but I’d never seen that there before. If it helps…”
“About what time?” I asked. I knew the old Dodd place. The house had been abandoned, but whoever farmed the land still used the sheds and other outbuildings. The fire department had burned the house in a controlled burn for practice about five years back.
“Oh, it was after lunch… I always take my northern route after I grab a sandwich, so that would be about one-ten or so.”
Punctuality is a trademark of the rural mail carriers. If he said 1:10, then he was within five minutes.
“Anybody around it?”
“Yes… couldn’t see who, but three, four people. They looked like they were headed to one of the sheds or for the barn. I was by before they got there, if that was where they were going.”
Cool. And there was still coffee left.
“You might want to check with Elmo Hazlett,” he said. “The milk hauler. He drives route out that way.”
“Thanks.”
Granger chuckled. “He’s got his head up his butt most of the time, though, so if he didn’t run over ‘em, he probably didn’t notice.”
When we got back in our cars, I checked in with the office on my radio. There was nothing new, the troops were still assisting the lab team at the crime scene, and Norm Vincent was waiting for us in his office.
Norm Vincent was really apologetic. The Battenberg chief was a decent guy, and like
