Rizzoli & Isles: Listen to Me Page 3

  “Can she tell us more about the computer? What color? Was it old, new?”

  “Jamal,” the grandmother said. “He help her buy.”

  “Okay,” said Frost, jotting down the name in his notepad. “Which store does Jamal work at?”

  Mrs. Leong shook her head. In frustration she turned and spoke to her granddaughter.

  “Oh, that Jamal,” said Lena. “That’s the boy down the street, Jamal Bird. He helps a lot of the older ladies in the neighborhood. You know, the ones who can’t figure out how to turn on their TVs. You need to talk to him about the computer.”

  “We will,” said Frost, closing his notebook.

  “And she says you should use cold green tea and calendula, Detective.”

  “What?”

  “For your sunburn.”

  Mrs. Leong pointed to Frost’s painfully red face. “Feel much better,” she said, and for the first time she managed a smile. Frost would be the one to finally coax a smile from this sad woman. Silver-haired ladies always seemed to treat him as their long-lost grandson.

  “One other thing,” said Lena. “Grandma says you need to be careful when you talk to Jamal.”

  “Why?” asked Jane.

  “Because you’re police officers.”

  “Does he have something against cops?”

  “No. But his mother does.”

  “Why do you want to talk to my son? You people just assuming he did something wrong?”

  Beverly Bird stood guarding her front doorway, an immovable barrier against anyone who dared invade her home. Although shorter than Jane, she was as solid as a tree stump, her feet firmly planted apart in pink flip-flops.

  “We’re not here to accuse your son of anything, ma’am,” Frost said quietly. When it came to cooling down arguments, Frost was the crisis whisperer, the voice Jane relied on to bring down the temperature. “We’re just hoping that Jamal might be able to help us.”

  “He’s only fifteen. How’s he supposed to help with a murder case?”

  “He knew Sofia, and—”

  “So did everyone else in the neighborhood. But you folks are zeroing in on the only Black kid on the block?”

  Of course that’s how it must seem to her, and how could it not? To a mother, the whole world seems like a dangerous place, and when you’re the mother of a Black son, those dangers are only magnified.

  “Mrs. Bird,” said Jane, “I’m a mom too. I understand why you’re anxious about us talking to Jamal. But we need help identifying Mrs. Suarez’s computer, and we heard your son helped her buy it.”

  “He helps lots of folks with their computers. Even gets paid for it sometimes. Look around the neighborhood. How many of these old folks you think can even figure out their own phones?”

  “Then he’s the perfect person to help us find her missing laptop. Whoever broke into her house took it and we need to know the make and model.”

  Mrs. Bird eyed them for a moment, a mama bear weighing whether these intruders constituted a threat to her cub. Reluctantly she stepped aside to let them into her house. “Just so you know, I’ve got a cell phone and I’m not afraid to film this conversation.”

  “If it makes you feel better,” said Jane. Who didn’t have a cell phone these days? This was the world the police now had to navigate, their every move recorded and second-guessed. In this mother’s place, she would do the same.

  Mrs. Bird led them up the hallway, her pink flip-flops thwacking her feet, and called through her son’s doorway: “Honey, it’s the police. They want to talk to you about Sofia.”

  The boy must have overheard their conversation because he did not react to the announcement, did not even turn to look at them. He sat at his computer, shoulders slumped, as if already demoralized by their visit. Scattered around his room was typical teenage boy clutter: Clothes on the bed, blue Nike shoes on the floor, plastic action figures crowding the shelves. Thor. Captain America. Black Panther.

  “Mind if I sit down?” Jane asked.

  The boy shrugged, an answer she took as a yes. Or maybe just a whatever. As she scooted another chair beside him, she noticed a Ventolin inhaler lying on the seat. The boy had asthma. She set the inhaler on his desk and sat down.

  “I’m Detective Rizzoli,” she said. “This is Detective Frost. We’re with Boston PD Homicide, and we need your help.”

  “It’s about Sofia. Isn’t it?”

  “So you’ve heard what happened.”

  He nodded, still not looking at her. “I saw the police cars.”

  Mrs. Bird said from the doorway: “He stayed inside and I went out to find out what was going on. I told him not to go out, ’cause I didn’t want there to be any mistakes made. You police, sometimes you assume things.”

  “I try not to assume anything, Mrs. Bird,” said Jane.

  “Then why are you here?” asked Jamal. He finally swiveled around to face Jane and she saw moist brown eyes with impossibly long lashes. He was small for fifteen, and frail looking. The asthma, she thought.

  “A few items are missing from Sofia’s house, including her laptop. Mrs. Leong said you helped Sofia buy that computer.”

  He blinked, his eyelashes glistening. “She was a nice lady. Always tried to pay me for stuff I did.”

  “What did you do for her?”

  “Just stuff. Like helping her figure out her TV. Setting up her new computer. I felt bad for her, after her husband died.”

  “We all felt bad for her,” said Mrs. Bird. “It’s like the worst shit always happens to good people.”

  Frost said to Jamal: “Tell us about Sofia’s laptop. When did you help her buy it?”

  “It was maybe two months ago. Her old one broke, and she wanted a new one to look up some stuff online. She didn’t have a lot of money, and she asked me what she should buy.”

  “Lot of ladies on the block ask him for help,” said Mrs. Bird, with a note of pride. “He’s the neighborhood tech guy.”

  “So where did she buy this computer?” asked Frost.

  “I found her one on eBay. It was a pretty sweet deal. A 2012 MacBook Air for a hundred fifty bucks. The graphics didn’t matter to her, and I figured four gigabytes of memory was all she needed. She was just gonna use it for research.”

  Frost jotted in his notebook. “So, a MacBook Air, 2012…”

  “Thirteen point three inches diagonal. One point eight gigahertz Intel Core—”

  “Hold on, you’re going too fast. Let me get this all down.”

  “How ’bout I just print up the technical specs for you?” Jamal turned to his computer and tapped on the keyboard, pulling up the information. Seconds later, his printer whirred to life and a sheet of paper rolled out. “It was silver,” he added.

  “And you said it was only a hundred fifty dollars?” said Jane.

  “Yeah, she had the winning bid, and the seller had good ratings. When she got it, I went over there and helped set up her Wi-Fi too.”

  “Gee,” said Jane. “I could use someone like you on speed dial.”

  For the first time Jamal smiled, but it was a tentative smile. He didn’t yet trust them. Maybe he never really would.

  Mrs. Bird said: “Some of the ladies do pay him, you know. So his help wouldn’t come free.”

  “But I never asked Sofia to pay me,” said Jamal. “She was gonna give me some tamales instead.”

  “That woman, she cooked some mighty fine tamales,” said Mrs. Bird.

  The tamales that never got made, thought Jane. Sometimes it was small things, like tamales, that bound a neighborhood together.

  “What about her cell phone, Jamal?” asked Frost. “You remember it?”

  Jamal frowned. “Is that missing too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Weird. ’Cause it’s just some old Android she had forever. She was having trouble surfing on it, ’cause of her eyesight. That’s why she needed the laptop for her research.”

  “What kind of research?”

  “She was trying to track down some old newspaper articles. That’s hard to do on a little phone when your eyes aren’t good.”

  Frost flipped to a new page in his notebook and kept writing. “So it was an old Android. What color?”

  “I know it had a blue case with all these tropical fish on it. She liked fish.”

  “Blue case with tropical fish. Okay,” said Frost and he closed the notebook. “Thank you.”

  Jamal heaved out a sigh, clearly relieved the interrogation was over. Except it wasn’t. There was one more question Jane had to ask.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Jamal,” she said. “But I need to be thorough. Can you tell us where you were last night, around midnight?”

  In an instant, a cloud seemed to pass over his face. With that one question, she’d just destroyed any trust they’d built with him.

  “I knew it,” Mrs. Bird snapped in disgust. “Why do you want to go asking that? That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? To accuse him?”

  “No, ma’am. This is a completely routine question.”

  “It’s never routine. You’re looking for a reason to blame my son and he’d never hurt Sofia. He liked her. We all did.”

  “I understand, but—”

  “And since you want to know, I’m just gonna straight-out tell you. It was hot last night, and my boy doesn’t do well in the heat. He had a bad attack of asthma. Last thing he’d want to do is go down the street and hurt someone.”

  While his mother raged, Jamal said nothing, just sat with his back rigid, his shoulders squared, maintaini
ng his dignity in silence. Jane could not take back the question, a question she would have asked any teenage boy who lived in a neighborhood where there’d been burglaries. Who knew the victim and had been inside her house.

  Her next question would be even more hurtful.

  “Jamal,” she said quietly, “because you’ve been inside Sofia’s house, your fingerprints may be there. We need to exclude yours from any unidentified ones we find.”

  “You want my fingerprints,” he said dully.

  “It’s just so we know which ones we can discount.”

  He gave a resigned sigh. “Okay. I understand.”

  “An evidence technician will be here to collect them.” She looked at his mother. “Your son is not a suspect, Mrs. Bird. If anything, he’s been a very big help to us, so thank you. Thank you both.”

  “Yeah.” The woman scoffed. “Sure.”

  As Jane stood up to leave, Jamal asked: “What about Henry? What happens to him?”

  Jane shook her head. “Henry?”

  “Her fish. Sofia doesn’t have any family, so who’s gonna feed Henry?”

  Jane glanced at Frost, who just shook his head. She turned back to Jamal. “What do you know about goldfish?”

  In Jane’s experience, hospitals were where bad things happened. The birth of her daughter, Regina, four years ago, an event that should have been joyous, had instead been both terrifying and painful, an ordeal that had ended in blood and gunfire. This is where people come to die, she thought as she and Frost walked into Pilgrim Hospital, as they rode the elevator to the sixth-floor Surgical Intensive Care Unit. During the pandemic, when COVID-19 had swept through the city, this really had been the place where people came to die, but on this Sunday evening, an eerie calmness prevailed over the ICU. A lone unit clerk staffed the desk, where six cardiac rhythms blipped across the monitors.

  “Detectives Rizzoli and Frost, Boston PD,” Jane said, showing her badge to the clerk. “We need to speak to Sofia Suarez’s colleagues. Anyone who worked with her.”

  The clerk nodded. “We thought you might be coming by. I know everyone wants to talk to you.” She reached for the telephone. “And I’ll page Dr. Antrim too.”

  “Dr. Antrim?”

  “Our intensive care director. He should still be in the hospital.” She looked up as a nurse emerged from one of the patient cubicles. “Mary Beth, the police are here.”

  At once the nurse came toward them. She was redheaded and freckled, with flecks of black mascara on her lashes. “I’m Mary Beth Neal, the charge nurse. We’re all in shock about Sofia. Have you caught who did it yet?”

  “It’s early stages,” said Jane.

  One by one, more nurses joined them at the unit desk, forming a circle of somber faces. Frost quickly jotted down their names: Fran Souza, a fireplug of a woman, her dark hair cropped short as a man’s. Paula Doyle, blond ponytail, lean and tanned and fit as an L.L.Bean model. Alma Aquino, huge eyeglass frames overwhelming her delicate face.

  “We couldn’t believe it when we heard the news last night,” said Mary Beth. “We don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt Sofia.”

  “I’m afraid someone did,” said Jane.

  “Then it was someone who didn’t know her. God, the world has gone nuts.”

  The circle of nurses nodded in sad agreement. For those who pledged to save lives, the taking of a life, especially the life of one of their own, must indeed seem like an act of insanity.

  The door to the unit hissed open and a doctor strode in, white coat flapping around his long legs. He made no move to shake their hands; in this postpandemic world, keeping one’s distance had become the new normal, but he stood close enough for Jane to read the name on his ID badge. He was in his midfifties with tortoiseshell glasses and an earnest face. That was what stood out most for Jane, his earnestness. She saw it in his furrowed brow, the anxious gaze.

  “I’m Mike Antrim,” he said. “ICU director.”

  “Detectives Rizzoli and Frost,” said Jane.

  “We kept hoping they got the name wrong. That it was someone else,” said Mary Beth Neal. “A different Sofia.”

  For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was the whoosh of a ventilator in one of the patient cubicles.

  “Tell us how we can help,” said Dr. Antrim.

  “We’re trying to get a time line of what happened on Friday.” Jane looked around at the staff. “When did you all last see her?”

  Fran Souza said: “It was the end of evening shift. We sign over our patients to the night shift at eleven p.m. We would have finished that around eleven-fifteen.”

  “And then?”

  “I headed home after that.”

  The other nurses nodded, with echoes of “Same here.”

  “And you, Dr. Antrim?” Jane asked.

  “Friday I was here, covering the unit.”

  “What time did you see Sofia leave the hospital?”

  “Actually, I didn’t see her leave. I was busy with the patient in bed seven. He kept crashing on us. We tried for hours to stabilize him, but I’m afraid he was gone by morning.” He paused, his gaze drifting toward cubicle number seven.

  “Bad luck bed,” said Mary Beth softly. “It’s where Tony died.”

  Frost looked up from his notebook. “Tony?”

  “Sofia’s husband,” said Dr. Antrim. “He was a patient in this unit for almost a month, after his operation. Poor Sofia, working her shifts in here, while Tony was vegetating in that cubicle. He was like part of our family.”

  “They both were,” Mary Beth said.

  Another silence. Another round of sighs.

  “It’s true, we really are a family here,” said Antrim. “When my daughter was admitted a few months ago, Sofia was her nurse and she treated Amy like her own daughter. We couldn’t have asked for better care.”

  “Your daughter—is she all right?” Jane asked. Almost afraid to hear the answer.

  “Oh, Amy’s fine now. She was hit in a crosswalk by some maniac driver. It fractured her leg in three places and she needed emergency surgery for a ruptured spleen. My wife and I were terrified, but the nurses here, they all helped her pull through. Especially Sofia, who…” His voice faded and he looked away.

  “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to harm her? An ex-patient, maybe? A patient’s family member?”

  “No,” the nurses said simultaneously.

  “No one would want to hurt her,” said Antrim.

  “That’s what everyone keeps telling us,” said Jane.

  “Well, it’s true,” said Mary Beth. “And she would have told us if she was being threatened by anyone.”

  “Was she seeing anyone romantically?” asked Frost. “Any new man in her life?”

  Clearly offended by the question, Mary Beth snapped: “Tony died only six months ago. Do you really think she’d be seeing another man?”

  “Did she seem worried about anything lately?” Jane asked.

  “Just quiet. Of course, she would be, after losing Tony. That’s probably why she stopped coming to our monthly potlucks.”

  Jane noticed that Antrim was frowning. “Doctor?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure if this means anything. It just struck me as odd at the time, and now I wonder.”

  “About what?”

  “It was last Wednesday, as I was leaving the hospital. I saw Sofia in the parking lot, talking on her cell phone. This would’ve been just before her shift started so maybe around two-thirty in the afternoon.”

  “What was odd about that?”

  “She seemed upset, as if she’d just heard some bad news. All I heard was, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure that’s right?’ ”

  “Did you hear any more of the conversation?”

  “No. When she saw me she hung up. As if she didn’t want anyone to hear the call.”

  “Do you know who she was talking to?”

  He shook his head. “You’d have access to her phone records. Couldn’t you find out?”

  “We’re still waiting for the call log from her mobile carrier. But yes, we’ll find out.”

  “It just struck me as odd, you know? We’ve all known her for ten, fifteen years, ever since she came to work at Pilgrim, and I have no idea why she’d be so secretive.”