A Place Beyond Greed (Part 4)
Eddie Ramirez has been arrested! The detective hurries to the interrogation room to uncover the truth.
Don’t get spoiled! Read Part 1 first!
They kept Eddie in an interrogation room handcuffed to the table. He stared at the one-way glass as if he could burn a hole through it. The corners of his jaw flared when I came through the door. He glanced once then wouldn’t look at me. They’d given me a manila folder on him. I set it on the table and eased into a chair. He looked so pitiable, like a teenager caught on websites he shouldn’t visit for another 15 years, when he was in a sexless marriage.
“How are you, Eddie,” I said.
Eddie looked at the ceiling like he hadn’t heard me. I looked at the glassy one-way mirror and sighed. “Let me ask you something,” I said in Spanish. That got him to look at me. I continued. “If you just wanted to burgle the place, why kill Frank?”
“Is that supposed to make me talk?” he said in English. “Just because you can speak a little Spanish? Because it won’t. Your Spanish sucks. You sound like a fag.”
“Better get used to it. From what I hear, Orlando Prison has a lot of fags.”
If it bothered him to hear about prison, he hardly let it show on his face. I thumbed through the file. Inside was a labeled photograph of everyone in Eddie’s family celebrating a birthday together. I set it on the table. Eddie tried not to notice it.
“Listen, Eddie,” I said. “The facts point in some damning directions. First, we got the 911 call from Frank. He knew he was going to be killed. We find your gun and his jewelry—”
“What call? Frank didn’t own a phone.”
“Yes he did. He had a cell phone.”
Eddie scoffed and looked at the walls. “Sure.”
“Would you have killed him if you knew he had a cell phone?”
Eddie stopped talking to me, then. I tried a few more things on him, everything short of bashing his head into the table. It got me nowhere. I took a more relaxed position in my chair. I was hoping to save my theories for cross-examination in the court room, but unless I could get something from Eddie today, that day would never come. I swung for the fences.
“Mummy man,” I said, almost to myself. “That’s what your daughter called me when I visited. I had to think on that one. Who’s the money man, Eddie?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes were very hard. I kept going.
“We know Frank paid you in direct deposit. You didn’t get checks or cash. Hell, nobody sends checks in the mail anymore, especially not for a job. So why would you be waiting for something like that in the mail? Your new job doesn’t pay you like that. We already checked. And a man doesn’t talk money around his kids unless he just won the lottery. Am I right? So you were expecting a lot of money to come in the mail.”
He shrugged and pushed out his lower lip at me. I was losing my patience.
“Alright,” I said, and I drew out the golden eagle statue and slammed it down on the table.
“Fuck,” Eddie breathed. His eyes were wide.
“Yeah, fuck,” I growled. “Now let me ask you something, again: if you were going to burgle the place, why would you kill Frank?”
Eddie stammered before blurting out: “He scared me! He just scared me, is all. I just wanted the cash, man. I didn’t expect to get jumped. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t like that,” I said. “You put a bullet through his eye.”
“I didn’t go in trying to blow his head off! Are you crazy? I just said he scared me.”
I stared at him and made my face as cold and tight as I could. It was pretty easy. I felt like getting particularly nasty. I picked up the statue and slid it and the photograph of Eddie’s family into the center of the table so he could see them. Then I stood and walked behind him.
“What were you going to do with the money? Move to a better neighborhood? Get your wife an education? Maybe fix up that shitbox car of yours? How long did you think it’d last before you got found out?”
“Look, man. I broke into the house. I wanted the money. Yeah, I shot Frank, but it was an accident. Okay? There was nothing…” He paused for just a second longer than it took to take a breath. “Nothing premeditated.”
“That’s a big word,” I said in Spanish. “Does that make you feel smart?”
“Your Spanish still sucks.” Eddie wrenched around trying to see me. “I said I killed him. Just throw me in jail already and get it over with.”
I didn’t like how fast he was moving. I wanted him to move at my pace. I paced slower, talked slower, just to drag him down.
“So here’s how it went,” I said to the room. “You left Frank over a disagreement in pay. Maybe you were making enough at your next job, and maybe you weren’t. But you knew Frank was loaded, and you knew he trusted you. So you burgled the house, but when the old man surprised you, you shot him dead. What happened next? I’ll tell you what I think. I think you realized you were too hot. You were carrying evidence of a crime, including that statue. Everything else you could pass off as yours, but not that. You couldn’t be seen melting it down, either. So you drove out and threatened Lottie Pryce to do the work for you, and to fork over a little cash for your troubles. You got a friend of hers to mule that money until the cops laid off. Was that the plan? Get a little more money in the bank, take a handy check and skip town? You’re stupid if you thought that’d work. We’d have tracked you down in a day.”
“I didn’t threaten nobody.”
“Look at this.” I slapped the picture of his family on the table in front of him. “Look at them, you greedy son-of-a-bitch! What were you thinking? You’re going to leave them penniless and without a father for the rest of their lives.”
“I’m doing the right thing,” Eddie said. He was unmovably cool. “I didn’t threaten nobody. I shot Frank on accident while I was robbing his house. That’s all there is.”
“No, that’s not all there is. Tell me why you did it, Eddie. Tell me why you’d throw away everything you had in life just for a little cash.”
“You wouldn’t get it,” he said. His face was stone and his eyes were obsidian. “You wouldn’t get it because you’re not a father. What are you, thirty-two? Thirty-six? And yet you’ve got no family. I’m twenty-seven, man. I’ve got six kids and a girl I love. When I did what I did, I did it for my family. Yeah, I’ll go to jail. But my kids will have money. They can visit me. They’ll still have their mom and they’ll have money. I guarantee it.”
“And where are they going to get the money, Eddie?”
He glared at me. At the moment it was infuriating, but looking back, I realized the reason it made me angry was because I knew I had been asking the wrong questions. Of course none of it made sense. In hope for a simple solution, I’d tangled myself up in a web of my own design. Eddie was guilty of murder and robbery. In the state of Florida he’d just narrowly miss the death penalty. He’d never see the free world again—and despite all that, I still knew that he shouldn’t be handcuffed to the table.
“I want a lawyer,” he said, and then he leaned back and didn’t talk to me again.
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