A Long December. Donald Harstad

       CHAPTER 03 TUESDAY, DECEMBER 18, 2001 18:11

      JUST AS SOON AS LAMAR WAS ABLE TO round up enough deputies and reserves to secure the crime scene, Hester and I headed for Battenberg. We took the scenic route, because we had to go back the way we’d come to avoid driving through the area where the lab crew was working. Or, as Lamar put it succinctly, “Don’t go traipsin’ through the scene.”

      The six miles to Battenberg, therefore, turned into fourteen. It gave me time to think, and I needed it. Our primary objective was an interview with our rural mail carrier, one Hank Granger. The tire track, which was being cast in plaster even as we drove, might allow us to ID the getaway car. The emphasis was on “might.” Regardless, it was one thing to identify a car, and another thing altogether to identify the people in it. I was counting on Granger for at least a number of occupants. Assuming that the car had caught his eye, of course.

      Great.

      Then we were going to have to talk with Norm, the Battenberg chief. He had my sympathy, but it would have been really nice if he’d gotten out soon enough to give us at least an idea of some of the cars that might have come into town from the north.

      He might, though, have some ideas regarding suspects.

      Battenberg, in the late 1980s, had been a town of about fifteen hundred people—pretty much minding its own business, and trying to go gracefully through the decline that was hitting most of the rural areas. Then they got lucky. A meatpacking plant in town had changed hands and really started taking off. The plant was bought by a Jewish family, who started producing kosher meat products and shipping them to the East Coast. It was an excellent move on their part. Not having to build a plant from the ground up, they were able to produce for less, transport for less since they did their own shipping, and maintain complete quality control over the entire operation. Smart. And when asked why they’d chosen Iowa, one of the corporate officers had replied, “There wasn’t a plant available over in Jersey.”

      After the plant got refurbished and up and running full tilt, things began to change in Battenberg, and mostly for the best. And due to the no-union, low-wage situation at the plant, it had suddenly become one of the most culturally diverse communities in the United States. Originally, Hispanics came in as inexpensive labor. That was a first in our area, and suddenly Spanish could be heard in stores all over town. With the large number of rabbis required for the kosher end of things, Yiddish could also be heard just about everywhere. In fact, it was rumored that, per capita, Battenberg had a higher ratio of rabbis than any other U.S. city.

      Within fifteen years, the population had more than doubled. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian Jews began to arrive, along with Georgians, Ukrainians, and several other Eastern European ethnic groups. As the word got out, Guatemalans, Colombians, and several other South and Central American countries were also represented. There were a few Israelis, to boot. At last count, in fact, there were eighteen languages spoken within the Battenberg city limits.

      Adjustments were not easy, and for a while things got sort of strained. They’d begun shaking themselves out, but they still had a way to go. The first drive-by shooting had caused quite a stir, for instance. That was when we were first truly aware that many of the Hispanics were illegal aliens. When we’d gone around trying to interview witnesses, there was nobody there. They’d fled or gone into hiding because they were afraid they’d be deported. Even the plant had to shut down for a couple of days, until it became evident that the Immigration and Naturalization Services wasn’t going to be directly involved. Interviews went better as time passed, and the shooting turned out to be gang-related, involving some dope dispute. The perpetrator had been identified, arrested, tried, and sent to prison. All without ever saying why he’d done it.

      We’d had a crash course in Spanish, but found that the Mexican Spanish we’d been exposed to (taught would be giving us too much credit) was unintelligible to the Hondurans and Guatemalans. Who’d a thunk, as we say. About all we could do was advise them of their rights in our brand of Spanish, and hand them a brochure. The Russians, the Central Europeans, and the Thai were on their own until we could arrange an interpreter. Yiddish wasn’t a problem, as all the Jewish residents were fluent in English.

      It really wasn’t that we weren’t willing to try to adapt. It was more to do with our budgets being very restricted. We were having a tough time replacing our tires, let alone budgeting for language courses. There was also a matter of instructing all three shifts. Our attempt at Spanish, for example, had the instructor trying to teach three classes of three or four officers each. One class at 07:00 for the night shift as they came off duty, one at 13:00 for the day crew, and one at 18:30 for the evening shift. It was pretty tough on the high school teacher who was doing it for some extra pay, it consumed our entire “continuing education” budget for the year, and at the end we were not much further ahead than before.

      All of which made it a very interesting place to be a cop. Hell, it made it downright fascinating at times. More than once the chief, Norm, had made references to resigning and turning his job over to the U.N. We got a lot of mileage out of that, and even went so far as to get him a pale blue beret. But I could understand his frustration.

      Which brings me right back to the current case. Jacob Heinman had said that one of the shooters had spoken Spanish. Wonderful. Or something that sounded to Jacob vaguely like Italian. Okay. The other had been “Norwegian”-looking. Ya. You betcha. Around here, that could be just about anybody.

      Not a lot to go on.

      The upshot was it was pretty damned hard to get informants, like I said. Hard, but not altogether impossible.

      As we were getting out of our cars at Mail Carrier Granger’s place, I stood outside for a minute, dialing the cell phone of one Hector Gonzalez, a twenty-two-year-old packing plant laborer whose acquaintance I’d made at a domestic call about a year ago.

       “Bueno?”

      “Hector, hey, this is Houseman.”

      “Oh, no.”

      “Oh, yes. Really, it is.” I liked Hector. I made him nervous.

      “Not now, man. I cannot talk now…”

      When I’d gotten to that domestic call, I’d found a young Latino who turned out to be Hector defending his sister Selena from her boyfriend. The boyfriend was trying to beat Selena because she wouldn’t give him her savings that she kept in a jar in the kitchen cupboard. It turned out to be all of sixty dollars. Hector was winning, but it had been a near thing. Both young men had black eyes and multiple abrasions. So did Selena. The Battenberg cop and I had hauled all three of them in, since they were all yelling at us and each other in Spanish, and we couldn’t tell at the time just who had done what. Since none of them were speaking any English, even when addressed by us, we assumed they were illegal aliens. As we shook them down prior to putting them in the cars, I found a small bag of what we euphemistically call a “green, leafy substance” in Hector’s pocket. After we’d sorted things out at the police station, and everybody had calmed down enough to communicate, we found that Hector and his sister spoke English very well, indeed. It turned out that both of them had been born and raised in Los Angeles. The boyfriend spoke no English at all, and Hector and Selena offered to translate for him. Right. I thought something a bit more unbiased might be needed, but I have to admit it would have been fun to hear what Selena would have come up with. While we waited for an interpreter, I’d taken Hector aside and told him that we were both going to stand in the rest room and watch the “green, leafy substance” go down the toilet. We did. I told him I appreciated what he’d done for his sister, that all three of them were likely to be charged with a minimum of disturbing the peace, and that I didn’t think it was going to be in the interests of justice to hang an additional charge on him for the small bit of grass he had in his pocket. He’d asked why I was being so nice, and