Okay, I’d gotten Troy Pepper to open up a little, maybe more than he had to anyone else so far, and yet I couldn’t shake the image of him lunging at the barrier when I’d prodded him. That outburst hinted at the possibility that he had done what he was accused of. No one can push our buttons like someone we love, or believe we do. It was time to find out more about Flora Nuñez.
I drove over to the Lower Highlands and found the address where Flora Nuñez had lived. It was a triple-decker with gray asbestos siding and a sagging porch. I paused just to look, then headed back downtown.
At my office I shuffled among the papers in the file folder and found the photocopy of the restraining order again. A mistake, Pepper had called it … his mistake. The form was filled in and witnessed. There was Pepper’s name, written in the proper space. And the reason Flora Nuñez had given for filing the request: “He’s angry with me on account I don’t want his babey.” She hadn’t bothered to file for an extension of the order when, after six months, the term had lapsed. Significant? Perhaps, though not uncommon. Men and women fooled themselves all the time, about all sorts of things. Or maybe it was just a case of out of sight, out of mind. The signature of the witness to the document was Carly Ouellette.
I got the work number that Lucinda Colón had left and dialed it.
She sounded surprised to hear from me, and a bit cool when I said I had a few follow-up questions for her. I asked, “Did she tell you that she might get married?”
“I already told you everything what I know”
“Okay. You said that Flora seemed frightened or nervous when you spoke with her. Did you wonder why?”
“Maybe I did, but she didn’t splain nothing. I just thought she was a-scared, but maybe I was wrong. We wasn’t really close friends, you know? We just knew each other from night classes at the community college.”
“Did you get the idea that it was Pepper she was scared of?”
“Who else? He was her boyfriend, no? But I got to go now. The boss he don’t like us taking personal calls here.”
I thanked her and hung up wondering if Flora Nuñez was the only one who was a-scared.
Courtney had commented on my investigative “method,” as though it were a protocol of careful steps and procedures. In truth, it was pretty scattershot. You thought about what you wanted to know, imagined ways you might find out, and then you made your approach. A lot of the time, I felt as if I were climbing tall, rickety ladders in the pitch dark.
There was still the option of trying to track Pepper’s military service record, but in strict time-value terms, it didn’t add up. I hunted in my Rolodex for a name, which I found, but there was no phone number. Only an e-mail address.