I latched onto him in the west hall and told him I’d been doing a lot of thinking and decided I wanted to know more about Hector so I could get over picturing him as the guy I found in the Dumpster. Diron looked a little suspicious, and I couldn’t blame him—I had let quite a bit of time go by between then and now. Once he started talking, though, he poured out some pretty solid info.
Apparently, if you really got to know Hector, he wasn’t the shy kid you might have expected. He was funny, smart, and interested in all sorts of things. That sounded like a pretty good match for Ashton. Also, he had his sights set on going to college somewhere East Coastwards, then wanted to come back here and get into politics, do something good for the Hispanic community. He had a lot of family all over the city, some who had lived here a long time, some who arrived more recently—Diron didn’t say, but I took that to mean some of them might be illegals.
That was all interesting, but what I really wanted to know was whether Hector had had a rich blond girlfriend. Or if his cousin Beto did. Diron didn’t know about that, though. It seemed Hector hadn’t hung out with his friends so much after school hours this fall. Yes, he did have a girlfriend over the summer, but she was black-haired—Mexican American—and went to a different South Side school. They broke up, though, and afterward Hector kept making excuses not to hang around with his old crew at our school.
“I just figured he was taking the breakup bad,” Diron said. “He would’ve got over that, though—if he ever got the chance.”
“I’m sure he would’ve,” I told Diron, but I was actually thinking maybe Hector was over it. Because maybe he’d already moved on—to Ashton Browning.
I was definitely on to something, but Audrey didn’t back me up. She said I didn’t have one single fact that tied Ashton and Hector together. Just because I happened to run across Hector’s Hispanic cousin in a Hispanic neighborhood didn’t mean anything. No, her money was all on Rowan Adams.
“It has to be the ex-boyfriend,” she said.
“Hey, it still could be. Maybe Rowan hired this Beto guy to put out a hit on Hector, and then they had to get rid of Ashton because she knew about it.”
“A hit? Are you serious? You really do need to lay off the TV shows.”
Okay, that was deflating, but I wasn’t ready to give up on my theory. I just had to do some more research. I didn’t really know where to start, though. It wasn’t like I could walk up to Beto Hernandez and ask him about it. Especially if Oscar Tattoo Head was anywhere around.
But someone else could ask him about it—a cop. As much as I hated the idea of dealing with the police, I decided they needed to know about the Ashton-Hector connection. Of course, no way was I about to go back to Detectives Hair Gel and Forehead, but I figured the police at the main headquarters might be different from the ones at the outpost on my side of town. After all, wasn’t I the one who found Ashton’s running shoe for them? They were on the news almost every day asking for tips concerning the case; surely they’d listen to one from me.
So I went down to their huge palatial headquarters thinking I’d march right in and talk to the captain in all his starched-white-shirt splendor. Didn’t happen.
I waited and waited. Cops came and went. A guy with blood on his sweatshirt and his front teeth knocked out wobbled in and had to wait in a chair next to me.
“I hate my father-in-law,” he sputtered without looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
We waited some more. Then he got called in to talk to somebody before I did. About ten minutes later, a lady cop told me to follow her. She left me in an office with no decorations, not even a family picture or Don’t Do Drugs poster. It was like going to the doctor’s office—you sit around in the waiting area, and then you go to the examination room and sit around some more.
When the door finally opened, I was disappointed. Instead of the captain, a uniformed officer walked in, the same uniformed officer who tried to take credit for finding Ashton’s shoe on the search party.
“I recognize you,” he said, sitting behind the desk. “You were at the nature park when we did our sweep—the kid who watches Andromeda Man, right?”
I’m like, “Uh, yeah.”
“That’s a ridiculous show.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at me like he was expecting the punch line to a joke. “So you have a tip about the Ashton Browning case, huh?”
I started into how I’d been writing investigative reports about her, trying to establish some credibility, but he wasn’t interested in that. All he wanted to hear about was my tip. I’d already decided I wasn’t going to name any suspects—that was their job to figure out—so I just explained my theory about how Ashton and Hector might be connected while he jotted notes down on a pad.
When I was done, he set his pen down. “So let me get this straight—you think one of the richest girls in the city was romantically involved with this Hector Almarado, a Mexican drug addict.”
“It’s Maldonado. And he wasn’t Mexican—he was American—and he wasn’t a drug addict. That’s just the point. Someone must have poisoned him with some kind of drug. He didn’t take it himself.”
“I see. And can anybody confirm that Mr. Almarado and Ms. Browning were connected?”
“You mean like an eyewitness? Not exactly, but it just makes sense.”
“And why does it make sense?”
“Because I saw Hector’s cousin at a house down on the South Side right next to where the Ockle ladies live, and they were on Ashton’s FOKC route.”