He knew who, what, and where I was. I didn’t even know what he looked like. “Please, Astor, this is important,” I said. “Was he real tall? Did he have a beard? Was he Cuban? Black?”
She shrugged. “Just, you know,” she said, “a white man. He had glasses. Just a regular man. You know.”
I didn’t know, but I was saved from admitting it when Deborah yanked open the driver’s door and slid back into the car. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “How can a man be that dumb and still tie his own shoes?”
“Does that mean Officer Suchinsky didn’t have a lot to say?” I asked her.
“He had plenty to say,” Deborah said. “But it was all brain-dead bullshit. He thought the guy might have been driving a green car, and that’s about it.”
“Blue,” Cody said, and we all looked at him. “It was blue.”
“Are you sure?” I asked him, and he nodded.
“So do I believe a little kid?” Deborah asked. “Or a cop with fifteen years on the force and nothing in his head but shit?”
“You shouldn’t keep saying those bad words,” Astor said.
“That’s five and a half dollars you owe me. And anyway, Cody’s right, it was a blue car. I saw it, too, and it was blue.”
I looked at Astor, but I could feel the pressure of Deborah’s stare on me and I turned back to her.
“Well?” she said.
“Well,” I said. “Without the bad words, these are two very 260
JEFF LINDSAY
sharp kids, and Officer Suchinsky will never be invited to join Mensa.”
“So I’m supposed to believe them,” she said.
“I do.”
Deborah chewed on that for a moment, literally moving her mouth around as if she was grinding some very tough food.
“Okay,” she said at last. “So now I know he’s driving a blue car, just like one out of every three people in Miami. Tell me how that helps me.”
“Wilkins drives a blue car,” I said.
“Wilkins is under surveillance, goddamn it,” she said.
“Call them.”
She looked at me, chewed on her lip, and then picked up her radio and stepped out of the car. She talked for a moment, and I heard her voice rising. Then she said another of her very bad words, and Astor looked at me and shook her head. And then Deborah slammed herself back into the car.
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
“They lost him?”
“No, he’s right there, at his house,” she said. “He just pulled in and went in the house.”
“Where did he go?”
“They don’t know,” she said. “They lost him on the shift change.”
“What?”
“DeMarco was coming in as Balfour was punching out,” she said. “He slipped away while they were changing. They swear he wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.”