Red Man Down(18)

It was shady under the tall trees, darker still under the thatched ramada, and too cold, this late December afternoon, to be lying outdoors in a hammock. But the man who lay there had solved the problem by wrapping himself in an electric blanket. His features were hard to see in the gloom, but Sarah got an impression of a big mustache under a shock of white hair. As they watched, he lifted a beer can to his lips and drank the last swallow, sighed happily and pitched the can over his left shoulder toward a trash can. It landed inside with a jolly clink.

Oscar knocked on the wooden upright of the open patio just as the man turned to reach for the handle of the cooler, on the ground by his right side. Its cord, and the one for the blanket, ran together to a power outlet that snaked out from an outlet on the patio. The man had put serious effort into his comforts.

‘Whoa,’ he said, peering toward the noise. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s Oscar Cifuentes, Chico.’

‘You big bad boy!’ He spread his arms. ‘Too long since I’ve seen you, man. How you been?’

‘Better than ever, can you believe it?’ Oscar bent for a big abrazo. ‘And this is my partner, Sarah Burke.’

She held out her hand. The old man covered it with both of his and said, ‘My pleasure, Officer. Detective, is it? Well!’ He beamed at them both equally. ‘Do cops drink beer?’

‘We do, but unfortunately we’re still working,’ Oscar said.

‘So late? Well, come back sometime when you’re off-duty, huh? Sit, sit.’ He waved at chairs and they each pulled one closer as he opened the cooler, rattled ice, and came out with a dripping can of beer. ‘Meantime, please pardon me, my thirst won’t wait.’ He popped the cap, swigged, belched contentedly and lay back.

The two men batted some small talk back and forth, neighborhood news, and then Oscar said, ‘Cecelia suggested we should talk to you about Eddie.’

‘She did, huh?’ He scratched his ear. ‘Cecelia is good at deciding what other people should do. You know’ – he fished a pack of Marlboros off a small table by the trash can and lit one with a huge flame from a lighter while Sarah held her breath, expecting his mustache to go up in flames – ‘when she was not much bigger than a Chihuahua I used to carry her on my shoulders to the bodega and buy her a popsicle. She thought I was wonderful then. Now she wants to tell me what to eat and drink, and can’t understand why I won’t follow her orders to the letter.’

‘I’m sure she has your best interests at heart,’ Oscar said.

‘Oh, absolutely. Mine and everybody else’s.’ He puffed a while, drank again and sighed. ‘She wants me to dish the dirt on Eddie, so she won’t be heard speaking ill of the dead.’

‘Is there some dirt on Eddie?’

‘Well, he was a … when he was little, he was kind of a pain in the neck.’

‘How so?’

‘Anxious and demanding … always wanting something. “Will you give me that, can I have one of those?”’ His imitation of a child’s voice was very funny strained through his big white mustache. ‘His mother didn’t really want to be bothered with him, you know … after her husband left her she was always after boyfriends and Eddie slowed her down. So the kid was angry and … what’s that word they use all the time now? Needy. I didn’t like him myself, tell you the truth. But after he went to live with Frank, he straightened out.’

‘Cecelia said how proud you all were when he joined the department.’

‘Oh, sure. And you can ask anybody, he was a nice man and a damn good cop for years and years. But then …’ He studied the ocotillo fence along the street side of his yard for a while. When he turned back to Oscar his face was sad. ‘He kind of lost it there at the end, didn’t he?’

‘Seems like it,’ Oscar said. ‘It’s funny, but I never knew him, really. He was too much older when I was a kid down here, and in the department he was always working someplace I wasn’t. What was so nice about him, especially?’

‘He was always helping people. Learned that from his uncle, of course. Frank spent years driving for Meals on Wheels, dishing up Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless. Señor Do-Good, working his way into Heaven, I used to think. After Eddie grew up, the two of them for years were the go-to boys when anybody needed a timekeeper for a charity bike ride, or somebody to help out at the wounded bird shelter.’

‘So what do you think happened to change them?’

‘What happened to Eddie, I think, is he felt so bad about what happened to Frank he couldn’t stand it, so he started using drugs and alcohol to kill the pain, and before long he was a dead man walking. Long before those bullets found him, the Eddie I knew was gone. What happened to Frank, though … I can’t explain that and I don’t know anybody who can.’