After I updated Lutz in his office, he and I returned to the bullpen together and found that Frank was still on his call with the courthouse. He covered the receiver with his palm and said he was on hold but had gotten through to the property records department. They were checking out who the owner of that address was.
Lutz dropped to my guest chair with a groan. He winced then rubbed his knees. “Damn arthritis.”
Seconds later, Frank resumed the conversation on his end as he jotted down a name. “Okay, thanks a lot.” He hung up, lifted the sheet of paper from his desk, and waved it in the air. “Apparently Trevor Botty, aka Trey Botty, is a tenant who has lived in that dump for two years. The slumlord’s name is Alfred Dolan.” Frank thumped the pen’s tip on his desk pad and stared at Lutz. “Where should we go with Botty, Boss?”
“You’re sure Tammy was watching him?”
I nodded. “Without a doubt. As soon as he started down the sidewalk, she began trailing him. I had binos on her the entire time.”
Lutz knuckled his eye sockets. “And you know without a shadow of a doubt Botty was dealing on that street corner?”
“That’s affirmative,” I said.
“Okay, go knock on his door and have a chat with him. If you bring him in, he might clam up. See what he’ll say in a casual conversation. All I want to know is if he’s acquainted with Tammy. If he is, it makes me wonder why his name wasn’t on the list she gave us. Don’t threaten him with arrest for drug dealing—the seventh district can worry about that later. For now, we’re going to surveil Tammy daily. I want to find out what her connection or curiosity is with Trevor Botty and how she knows his name.”
“On it. Should we have a talk with the landlord too?”
“No. We’ll save that for later if it’s needed. Frank, you go along. That neighborhood isn’t a one-cop area.”
We were back in Englewood a half hour later, but that time, we took Frank’s truck. We didn’t want to spook Botty and send him running at the sight of a cruiser pulling up to his house, and had we taken my truck, it would have been stripped to the frame in ten minutes.
Frank parked in front of the vacant lot, and we walked to Trevor’s house. With a hard rap against the sun-faded door, we waited on the stoop and watched the windows.
When I heard footsteps, I leaned in closer. “I’ll be damned. He’s actually going to answer the door.”
Trey cautiously opened it, but when he saw two men in sport jackets and my badge pointed in his face, he tried to close the door. My foot blocked his attempt.
“Trevor, we need a word with you. We aren’t here for any other reason, I swear. Just give us five minutes of your time. Don’t make us force open the door.”
He let out a few choice curse words then relented. “What do you want? I didn’t do anything.”
I could have argued that point, but it wasn’t why we were there. “We need to run a few names past you.”
“I don’t rat people out.”
“And we aren’t asking you to. We only want to know if you’re acquainted with them—nothing more. Five minutes and we’ll be out of your hair.”
He opened the door fully, and I was positive he was the same guy from that morning. He had greasy dark-blond hair and wore shredded jeans and a stained wifebeater. Trevor did a double take when he put eyes on Frank. “Jesus, dude. Work out much?”
“Yeah, so don’t do anything stupid that you’ll definitely regret later.”
He shook his head. “Don’t worry. I won’t. So what do you want?”
“Do you know anyone named Tammy?”
He rubbed the back of his neck as he stood in the doorway. “Tammy, huh? Not to my recollection.”
I wagged my finger at him. “Think harder. You answered that question way too fast.”
“Okay, yeah, maybe. I’m pretty sure there’s a hooker in the neighborhood that goes by that name.”
“Describe her,” Frank said.
“Um, long black hair, tall, skinny. Kind of skanky-looking—you know, pimply face. She smokes a lot and shoots up.”
“She sounds really appealing, but that’s the wrong answer. How about a guy named Dwayne?”
“Dwayne? Yeah, I know Dwayne. We’ve done business in the past.”
“How long ago was ‘the past’?” Frank asked.
“Okay, we do business often, but I haven’t seen him this week.”
“What does he look like?”
“Jeez, man.”
Frank balled his fist and cracked his knuckles. “Answer the question.”
“Okay, okay. He’s big, but fat big, not roid big, like you.”
“Watch your mouth, jackass.”
“Yeah, whatever. Dwayne has a big gut, dark stringy hair, and dingy teeth. He’s not very friendly.”
“Age?”
“I don’t know, man—”
Frank cut him off. “If you call me man one more time, I’m going to hurt you.”
“Sorry. He looks older than me—maybe late thirties or so, but like I said, I haven’t seen or talked to him at all this week.”
“Know anybody else that hangs out with Dwayne?”
“Nope. I kind of keep to myself, you know?”
I snickered at him. “So that’s what you’re doing on the street corner by the bodega—keeping to yourself?”
“Um, I—”
“Forget it. Ever meet Dwayne’s wife?”
“Wife? Honestly, I didn’t know he had one. Hell, we’ve never even exchanged last names.”
“Okay. That’s it for now.” I handed him my card. “You see any suspicious shit going down around here, other than your own, give me a call.”
He chuckled. “Then I’d be on the phone with you every day. This is Englewood, remember?”
I grunted out a thanks, and we left.
Back at the station, I updated Lutz about the fact that Trevor knew Dwayne yet didn’t seem aware of his murder. “He told us he didn’t even know Dwayne was married, and the only Tammy he was acquainted with was a black-haired, skanky hooker.”
Lutz’s face contorted, and he waved off my comment. “Don’t need the details. Okay, starting tomorrow, you two will be tasked to follow Tammy around. With luck on our side and some suspicious activity on hers, she could break the case wide-open for us purely by her stupid behavior. We’ll give her a few days to hang herself, gather undisputable evidence against her, and then haul her ass in. Even if she isn’t the person behind the acts, she likely knows who is. That, my friends is called leverage, and we can use her actions against her.”
I grinned. “Sounds good to me. Any hits since the press conference?”
Lutz’s sigh told me it wasn’t going as he’d hoped.
“Without a face or even a grainy video image of the guy, it’s like we’re paddling upstream. We’ll be chasing leads that go nowhere until the day I retire.”
“That long?”
Lutz flipped me the middle finger. “Yeah, that long.”