Matters of Doubt by Warren C Easley

Eleven
    The apartment felt unheated when I stepped in, and Milo’s body was as cool to the touch as the room. Clad only in a pair of navy blue boxers, he was slumped to the right side of the commode, face up. His skin was the color of wet plaster, and with closed eyes, he looked like he’d just fallen into a peaceful sleep. A greasy syringe dangled from his arm where the vein, now collapsed, had apparently carried a lethal fix to his heart and brain. A Bic lighter, a soup spoon, and a small red party balloon with its stem cut off sat on the rim of the sink. The bottom of the spoon was blackened with carbon and the inside stained with a dark brown residue. There didn’t appear to be any dope left in the balloon.
    The residue in the spoon smelled faintly of vinegar, a dead giveaway for black tar heroin. I knew the drug when I smelled it. I knelt down next to him and gently nudged his arm. It was rigid. I saw no needle marks on either arm. His right leg was twisted awkwardly under his body, affording a view of the back of his leg. A trail of red dots, some fainter than others, ran up his calf, tracing his saphenous vein. Anna was right—he was using, and he was going to great pains to hide it from her.
    I stood up and shook my head, struck by the senseless waste of it all. His young face was a mask of serenity now, almost innocence, but the silver discs piercing his earlobes reflected in the harsh light like garish mirrors. There’d be no growing back of the holes now, that’s for sure.
    As the radio blasted away in the living room, I took a quick look around. On a small plastic end table next to a thread-bare sofa bed, I found a baggie with a half dozen white pills spilling out of it. I had no idea what they were. I put one in my shirt pocket. I saw nothing else out of the ordinary except a half-dozen long necks in an otherwise clean trash can. Either Milo was a beer drinker as well, or he could’ve had a visitor the night before.
    I wiped my prints clean and as far as I knew, got out of the building without being seen. After clearing the neighborhood, I called Nando. “What are you doing?” I asked when he picked up.
    â€œSlaving in my office.”
    â€œWhich one?”
    â€œMy detective agency.”
    â€œI’ll be right over.”
    The office was in Lents, a diverse, blue collar stronghold in Southeast Portland. It was in a storefront just off the Max Green Line next to a used book store. A sign in the window said, Se Habla Espanol. Nando’s long-time secretary, Espinoza, waved me through to his office, which reflected his belief in low overhead. It was small and sparsely furnished and the walls unadorned except for a framed copy of his license, and a large photo of Barack Obama hanging next to one of Fidel Castro. Nando saw absolutely nothing incongruous about that. The only exception to his frugality in the room was the top of the line MacBook he was frowning at when I entered.
    â€œComo fastidian estas computadoras!” he muttered as he snapped the lid down, turned to me and forced a smile. “So, what is up, my friend?”
    I slumped down on a straight back chair and sighed. “I went to talk to the kid who gave Picasso the message to see Conyers. He works the desk at the clinic. I found him dead in his apartment with a heroin needle in his arm.”
    â€œHmm. Another coincidence?”
    â€œ Right . Looked like an overdose. Trouble is, he’d been shooting up in his leg to conceal his habit. So, why the needle in his arm?”
    â€œI see. Any idea when he died?”
    â€œThe body was cold, so he’d lost maybe twenty, twenty-five degrees. That’d make the time of death around, let’s see, fourteen hours ago, give or take. And that fits with the fact that he was in full rigor mortis.”
    â€œExcellent. You and the young artist were guests of the police last night, so you have an alibi.”
    â€œWe were due a