Free A Long December by Donald Harstad

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