A Tooth for a Tooth Page 4

  “How about we go inside and check your cameras?” Broward said.

  “We?” I said.

  6

  Both cameras caught the entire incident, but the footage wasn’t very useful. We could tell that the man in question was rather large, and he was probably white or Hispanic. He hadn’t shaved in several days. But the light was too low and there were too many shadows across his face to make out more than that. He could grab a shave and walk right past me on the street and I wouldn’t be able to positively match him to the video.

  So, the next morning, I made a note to mount a camera directly over the front door, and to install additional lights, motion activated, around the exterior of the house, including the back.

  Then I sat down and made a call I couldn’t put off any longer.

  Mia answered on the second ring. “Hey there.”

  “Am I calling too early?”

  “No, we’re all up.”

  “How’s it going down there?”

  “Good. I’ve been eating and drinking way too much. We went to a place called Pao last night and it was amazing. The pork belly was incredible. They even flash grill the salad.”

  “I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds all fancy-schmancy.”

  “It is. Then we had dessert, of course, and I was so stuffed.”

  “Are you still nubile?”

  “At the moment, I don’t feel nubile,” she said.

  “I’ll feel you when you get home and let you know,” I said.

  “I’m ready to be home, to be honest,” she said. “This has been fun, but I’m worn out. And I need to start planning a certain event.”

  “My bris?”

  “I know firsthand that has already been taken care of.”

  “I miss you,” I said. “A lot.”

  “Ah, I miss you, too.”

  “And I need to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “You got ten minutes?”

  “Uh-oh. What’s going on?”

  I told her what had happened in the past twenty-four hours, starting with the new case and ending with the incident on the porch last night. I didn’t leave anything out.

  First thing she said was, “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I should come home right now.”

  “You’ll be home in three days,” I said. “I’ll be fine until then.”

  “How do you know for sure?” she said.

  “The guy is going to lay low for a while to see if the cops ID him,” I said. “And his buddy driving the car, too. They lost the element of surprise and now they can’t afford to make another move without knowing if they blew their cover or not.”

  Mia remained silent for a moment, then said. “I should be there to help.”

  “I appreciate that, and I’d feel the same way if the situation was reversed, but I’ll feel awful if you cut your vacation short. Please stay in Miami Beach. Hey, it just occurred to me that ‘Miami’ has your name right in the front of it.”

  “You are getting weird.”

  “Maybe.”

  I walked over to a window and looked outside. It was dreary, with a low-hanging carpet of gray clouds.

  “Any guesses on who it was, or why?” Mia asked.

  “None,” I said. “I’m lovable. Forthright. An all-around good citizen. Who would want to do such a thing?”

  She didn’t laugh and I didn’t blame her.

  I added, “Of course, we know that anyone we’ve ever busted could be looking for some payback.”

  I could hear other voices in the background—Mia’s friends moving around the condo they’d rented for the week. Oh, to be a fly on the wall there. South Beach would never be the same. I could only imagine how many oiled-up bros and dudes had hit on them—and been rejected. I was afraid to ask.

  “Payback would be a busted windshield or, worst case, maybe a black eye,” Mia said. “This guy wanted to take you somewhere else. We both know that wasn’t going to end well.”

  There was no use in arguing, because she was right.

  “If it’s any consolation,” I said, “there’s a very good chance I broke his jaw. Minimum, he won’t be eating with much enthusiasm for a week or two. I have you to thank for that.”

  She’d taught me some basic self-defense moves.

  The line was silent for a moment.

  “I’m guessing you were tempted to keep quiet about all this until I got home, but I’m glad you told me now,” she said.

  “I also forgot to take the garbage cart out to the street this morning. Do I get a pass on that?”

  “It’s like I go away for a few days and everything goes to hell,” she said.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Promise. Just have fun, and maybe send me an occasional intriguing photo, if you know what I mean.”

  “Perv.”

  “This is news?”

  “If anything else happens, call me,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “Or if you learn who the jerk was.”

  “I will.”

  “I don’t care what time it is.”

  “Okay.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. I didn’t want to hang up. This was the first time we’d been apart for an extended time since we’d been a couple.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  “You already said that,” she said. “Now you’re just getting repetitive.”

  By ten o’clock that morning, neither of Lennox Armbruster’s cars had moved, according to the GPS app on my phone, so I placed a call to Sarah Gerstenberger, the witness who’d been nearby when Armbruster got hit by Joe Jankowski’s car. She worked at the library at the intersection of Bee Caves Road and Cuernavaca and said I could swing by anytime before five o’clock for a chat. I agreed that I would be there in the early afternoon.

  I stepped onto my front porch and looked around, checking for any small piece of evidence that might remain. Ursula Broward and I had missed nothing the night before. Or if we had, I was still overlooking it.

  The neighborhood was quiet—a mid-morning lull. No traffic. No walkers or joggers. The air felt damp.

  I walked down the street and stopped in front of the home that had had its mailbox run over. Nothing much to see here, either. Just a dented black mailbox mounted on a black metal pole that was now bent parallel to the ground. I managed to bend it straight again—good enough for mail delivery—and then I went to the front door and knocked. Nobody answered. I’d exchanged waves from a distance with the young couple living here, but they hadn’t been here long and we’d never met. I left a note. I’m going to replace your mailbox and post. Sorry for any hassles. Please call me if you have any questions. I jotted my phone number underneath. I snapped a photo of the mailbox and the post.

  Last night, Broward had searched for pieces of broken taillight lens and come up empty. Likewise, she’d found no automotive paint on the mailbox, indicating that an unpainted steel bumper had likely done the damage. Not much chance of identifying the type of vehicle without any evidence.

  I studied the house itself for surveillance cameras. None that I could see. Same with the houses on either side, and the ones across the street. Didn’t these people realize that security cameras were cheap and easy to install nowadays? Then again, mine hadn’t done much good, had they?

  Broward had knocked on some doors last night, but nobody had seen anything. Here at the house with the damaged mailbox, the young couple had heard the squealing tires but didn’t know where the noise had come from and didn’t go outside to investigate.

  Unless Broward got a hit on AFIS, it appeared my assailant was going to get away clean, for now.

  “Thanks for t
aking the time to talk,” I said to Sarah Gerstenberger three hours later.

  “Oh, no problem,” Gerstenberger said. “I’m happy to help however I can. I feel bad for that poor guy. I could tell that he was in a lot of pain. But I’ll admit I’m a little unclear as to your role in the investigation. You said you were with the insurance company?”

  She’d sounded about thirty years old on the phone, but in person, she appeared to be in her mid-forties. She had a wide, friendly smile, medium-length sandy hair, freckles, green eyes, and deep dimples. She was dressed in a white sleeveless blouse and a denim skirt that hit mid-thigh.

  I said, “That’s right, and we just want to make sure we understand how everything happened. It’s pretty basic.”

  We’d found a table near the back of the library. So far, I’d seen only six or seven people browsing the stacks or using the computer.

  “Okay,” she said. “But do you mean you’re with the insurance company for the man in the SUV or the man who was hit?”

  Smart. The majority of people wouldn’t even think to clarify the distinction. It might also present a roadblock.

  “I’m a freelancer hired by Joseph Jankowski’s insurance company,” I said.

  “He was the driver, right?”

  “Right.”

  She was shaking her head, confused. “I’m afraid I’m a little slow today. I still don’t understand what’s going on. You’re a videographer?”

  “That’s right, yes.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “I can see that you’re hesitant to talk, and that’s completely understandable. I’d be hesitant to talk to me, too. I mean, come on, just look at me. I have ‘disreputable’ written all over my face.”

  The levity didn’t work. She smiled, but she said, “Is the insurance company trying to avoid paying the claim? Is that’s what’s happening?”

  “I wouldn’t categorize it that way,” I said.

  “Okay, humor me. How would you categorize it? What exactly did the insurance company hire you to do?”

  “Sure,” I said, all breezy-like. “Have you ever seen clips of people committing insurance fraud? They’re usually all grainy, because they are shot from a distance and—”

  “Because somebody follows them around with a camera,” she said.

  “Right. Well, that’s part of what I do. I try to catch people who are committing insurance fraud. But sometimes the opposite is true—sometimes I report back to my client that the person in question appears to have a legitimate injury.”

  “Your client is under the impression that this man, Lennox…”

  “Armbruster.”

  “They think he’s committing fraud?”

  “Not at all. They just want to rule that possibility out.”

  “But how is it even a possibility? The man got hit by a car.”

  Now I realized I was dealing with someone who was naïve about the lengths to which criminals will go to earn a dollar.

  “You’d be surprised what some folks will do,” I said. Then I added, “But that doesn’t mean that’s what’s happening here. In fact, it makes my job easier if everything happened exactly the way it seems. Then I can move on.”

  She was looking at me, wondering if I was simply telling her what she wanted to hear. Finally, she decided to talk.

  “Okay, well, I’ll tell you the same thing I told the police. I was leaving the Randall’s, walking out to my car, which was in the row nearest Exposition, when I heard someone scream. So I looked up, and by then I’d already heard a big thump, and I see a body flying through the air. It was kind of dark over there, but I could still see it clearly, and it was pretty gruesome. You don’t expect something like that to happen, and I was just frozen for a moment. You never really know how you’ll react in a situation like that, and I was basically sort of hypnotized, like…Did that really just happen?”

  “So you didn’t see the actual moment of impact?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you see or hear the SUV—Jankowski’s vehicle—before you heard the scream and the thump?”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice Lennox Armbruster before then?”

  “No, I had no reason to look in that direction. I was walking to my car, answering a text at the time.”

  “And how did you react when it happened?”

  “As I said, I froze for just a moment, and then I ran over there to see if the guy was okay. He was still on the street, right near the curb, sort of just piled there. I could hear him moaning, so I knew he was alive. I knelt beside him, checking for bleeding, in case I needed to apply pressure to a wound, but all he had was one small cut to his forehead. His arm, on the other hand—I could tell right off it was broken. So I figured the first thing I should do is call 911, which I did.”

  “And where was Jankowski’s SUV during all this?”

  “Right when I reached Lennox, the SUV was still moving down the street, slowly, and then he eventually pulled over.”

  “Were you close enough to the street to get a good look at him right after the accident?”

  “At Jankowski?”

  “Right.”

  “Not really, no. The inside of his vehicle was too dark, and by then he was already down the street.”

  “Could you ID the make and model?”

  “You mean if he hadn’t stopped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe if I had photos to compare it to.”

  I knew that it was a Land Rover Discovery.

  “Would you have been able to get the license plate?” I asked.

  “If I’d thought about that, yeah, I probably could have.”

  “Do you think he saw you?”

  “Probably, yeah. The parking lot at Randall’s has some lights.” She looked at me more closely. “Wait a second. Are you thinking he stopped only because I was there?”

  Sharp lady.

  “I try not to think too much,” I said. “It makes me dizzy.”

  “Cute, but you’re dodging my question,” she said.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “The truth is, I’m just asking questions right now, and then I’ll see where it leads. I do know that some people zone out after a wreck, almost like they’re in shock, and they just keep driving until it sinks in what happened. Then they stop or turn around and drive back to the scene. That might be what happened with Joe Jankowski.”

  7

  She told me more, but nothing that wasn’t already in the file.

  Joe Jankowski pulled over, but he didn’t get out of his vehicle to see if Armbruster was okay until three or four minutes later. By then, a patrol cop had already arrived, responding to Gerstenberger’s 911 call.

  When Jankowski walked back to the scene from his car, he didn’t appear particularly distressed or traumatized from having hit a fellow human being with his car. Truth is, some people react that way in stressful situations. They zone out.

  Jankowksi freely gave a statement and checked on Armbruster as he was loaded into the ambulance. Armbruster responded with agitation and asked Jankowski how fast he’d been going, which matched what Jankowski had told me when I’d interviewed him the day before.

  It was entirely possible Jankowski had been tempted to keep driving, even if he had zero culpability in the accident. It’s a natural instinct to flee from trouble.

  According to the officer, Jankowski showed no signs of impairment from alcohol or other drugs—but what if he’d had just a drink or two a few hours earlier? Wouldn’t that have made him panic, even if the accident would have happened anyway?

  Why was I letting myself get sidetracked with this? If Jankowski had been on the verge of hauling butt, what did it matter? It had no bearing on whether or not Armbruster had intentionally steppe
d in front of the car. My objective remained the same: determine if Armbruster was committing fraud.

  Oh, and catch the bastard who’d held a gun to my neck.

  I called Ursula Broward, got voicemail, and left a message.

  “Good afternoon, Officer Broward. This is Roy Ballard calling to light up your day. Assuming you haven’t already captured the notorious scalawag who accosted me last night, I’m wondering if a detective has been assigned to that case. I know I might seem pushy, but I prefer to think of it as proactive. Sure would like to know if you get a hit on the serial number from that Ruger, or if you can pull any prints. Thanks for your time and for being a valuable asset to our community.”

  What to do next?

  I was still wondering where Lennox Armbruster had been going on the night of the accident. I was also curious about his new Alfa Romeo. Where had he gotten the money for that?

  I checked the GPS app on my phone just to make sure it wasn’t malfunctioning. Nope. Working fine, and Armbruster still hadn’t gone anywhere in either vehicle. Not surprising. There was a slim chance he might be doing things around his apartment complex that would prove useful to me—carrying a loaded basket of clothes to the laundry hut, for instance—so I returned to his apartment complex and parked in the same spot I’d occupied yesterday.

  And I waited. One hour. Then two.

  The gray clouds had grown thicker, and then a light drizzle began to fall on the van’s windshield. No arguing couples wandered past to keep me amused.

  I was dozing off—sure, I’ll admit it—when Broward called me back and informed me that a detective named Billy Chang was now assigned to my assault case. Not great news. Chang was a good detective, but he was tight-lipped and was unlikely to share any information with me. Still, I called his number and left a message, indicating that I’d love to talk when he had a moment. I knew he wasn’t going to call me back, but I’m an optimist. What can I say?