For a scumbag, Jimmy Fernandez wasn’t bad looking: twenty-eight, curly black hair, big almond-shaped eyes the black-brown of Greek olives, a bit of a swagger in his walk, and a smirk that never quite disappeared, even when he asked if I thought Joey was dead.
“We don’t know, but we haven’t found a body, so we’re hoping he’s still alive,” I said. “What can you tell me about Crystal?”
Our sit-down was at a Starbucks not far from Fernandez’s apartment. It seemed he didn’t want me dropping in. I wondered why, until I noticed his wedding ring. From that point on, his reluctance to talk about Crystal Warner in his living room made sense. “My wife will kill me if she finds out about this,” he said, the smirk growing longer, revealing a glimmer of pride at the thought of a woman killing over him. Odd, I thought, since he was predicting he’d be the victim. “I could tell that Crystal hag was trouble. She’s been calling my cell all morning. I had to turn the damn phone on vibrate, so my wife didn’t catch on. If she finds out, like I said, I’m dead meat.”
“I’m sure you exaggerate, Mr. Fernandez,” I said, thinking that his wife probably understood he wasn’t worth killing. But then, you never know. After all, I’m often amazed at the insignificant motives folks have for murder. “Of course, the simple solution is not to mess around. Then you don’t have to worry about strange women interrupting family time with your wife and…I suppose you have children?”
“Two,” he said. “A boy and a girl, six and two and a half.”
He flipped open his wallet, and I looked down at the faces of children who bore a striking resemblance to the man seated across from me, same dark eyes and hair. Maybe I was simply jumping to conclusions, but it struck me that the youngest, the son, already wore his father’s less-than-endearing grin. “They’re darling,” I said with a smile. “How sad it will be if you and your wife split up over your inability to keep your pants zipped.”
Fernandez frowned for the first time during our meeting but didn’t seem to take offense. Perhaps he’d thought about the same thing over the years but never put enough stock in it to change his behavior. As he described it, the previous Saturday night, about ten thirty, he was cuddled up to the bar in his favorite country-western joint on Houston’s north side, a place called Spurs, hobnobbing with the bartender, a guy he’d once worked a security job with, and watching the women come and go, when Crystal approached him and asked for a light for her cigarette. The only catch was she held up two fingers as if she were holding one, but they were empty. No cigarette. When he asked where it was, Crystal put her hand down, laughed, and said, “I don’t smoke. But I do lots of other naughty things.”
The girl was obviously a card. Such a soft, subtle sense of humor. “What happened after that?” I asked.
“Pretty much we talked,” he said with a shrug. “About an hour. She’s pretty. Nice figure. A little ways into it, I started doing a little exploring, just some touching. She was primed all right. Ready for some action. Problem was, we had no place to go.”
“No place to go?”
“She said her parents couldn’t babysit like they usually do. She was really teed off about it. So instead of at her parents’ house, the kid was at home. I had a wife in my bed,” he explained, eyebrows lifted in an expression of what I interpreted as resignation. “No money for a room. I’ve been unemployed for about six months. Lost my job over some missing tools, a bullshit charge since I wasn’t involved.”
“Of course you weren’t,” I said, shutting down the topic. “But for now, let’s focus on Saturday night and Crystal. What happened next?”
“She said she was tight for cash, too. Her ex was holding the money hostage. She figured he had a bunch, just wasn’t giving it to her. His parents are loaded, or at least that’s what she said. They hate her. She figured once he dumped her and moved back home with them, they’d open up their wallets, happy he got rid of her. Really teed her off, big-time.”
“Cars don’t work anymore?” I asked. When he appeared confused, I added, “For sex.”
“Not comfortable,” he said. “I threw my back out doing that once. Crystal is hot, but I didn’t want her that much.”
“Ah, I see,” I said as a picture I tried to erase flashed in my mind. “This is all fascinating, but what I need to know is what Crystal Warner said about her son. Did she mention Joey?”
“Mention him? He was all she talked about,” he said, taking a sip of his latte and leaving behind foam in the corner of his mouth. I pointed at the corresponding spot on my face, and he wiped off his upper lip with one of those earth-friendly, recycled paper napkins. “But she didn’t talk about the kid in a motherly kind of way, if you know what I mean.”
“No, actually I don’t, Mr. Fernandez.” I couldn’t believe this guy. He needed to move it along. “Please recount the conversation as accurately as you can. What did Crystal tell you about Joey?”
“I told her I had kids, and she said she had one, too. But she said she was sick of taking care of him. She never got to go out partying. She was always stuck at home with the kid, and she said she was tired of it,” he said with what I interpreted as empathy for Crystal’s predicament. “She talked for a long time about the kid. I could tell she was getting ticked just thinking about it. At one point, she said she wished her son would just disappear, so she could live her life and not have to worry about taking care of him. I didn’t believe it at first, but then she said it again.”
“She said that?” I asked, openly skeptical. I wondered if this guy was to be believed. After all, what were the odds a mother would say that on Saturday and her kid would be missing on Wednesday? Unless she had a plan to make that happen. “This is important, Mr. Fernandez. I need you to be as precise as possible. Tell me exactly what Crystal Warner said to you.”
“She said it twice, and I already did,” Fernandez insisted, looking hurt by my doubt. “Crystal said exactly what I just told you, that she’d be better off if the kid disappeared, because then she’d be free to do whatever she wanted.”
Considering what I’d just heard, I tallied up the evidence. From all indications, Crystal had both prepared for a polygraph and, five days before Joey went missing, mused about him disappearing. The odds had to be infinitesimal that both those facts were true and she wasn’t somehow connected to the boy’s disappearance. The more I heard about this mom, the worse it looked for her. “What else did she say?”
“That was pretty much it. A lot of the time, we weren’t talking. We were making out some, and she was trying to talk me into getting a hotel room. She was kind of busy being persuasive.”
“How?”
“Nothing too wild. Just kissing and stuff,” he said, chuckling. He moved forward, this time whispering, “Maybe a little touching.”
“Ah,” I remarked.
Sitting back in his seat, he took a swig of the latte and then gave his mouth another swipe with the napkin. “She seemed pretty needy, like she was looking for someone. I had the impression she was shopping for a replacement.”
“In your case, someone else’s husband?”
“I don’t wear my wedding ring on Saturday nights,” he said with a vague nod. “We talked about my kids, but my wife never came up.”