Prologue
Some would call it an embarrassment of riches. Me, well it
was just embarrassing. I mean, how am I to deal with an airport farewell of
two beautiful women, both of whom love me, but only one who I love. They were
fussing over me. "Are you comfortable?" "Do the stitches hurt?" "I’ll tell the
stewardess, do they still call them that, to give you special treatment."
"Won’t the change in air pressure affect you?" "Can I get you some coffee?"
"You sure you don’t want me to fly down this weekend?" It made my face feel
warm. It must be a guy thing.
Now, the two of them got by it, but then, that’s because
they’re women, and they understand stuff like that. The one I love, Becky
Tomay, all five-one, ninety-five flat-chested pounds of her took it all in
stride. She’s had a lot of ups and downs in her life. I’m one of the ups. We
don’t live together, but we share our three households like they were extra
rooms in a single large meta-house. We’re in love, still in the early stages,
but it’s one of those things that won’t end while we’re both alive to share
it. Becky, well, she doesn’t doubt me for a minute. And I’m worthy of her
trust. All the time. She knows it. She even understands Denise, which is more
than I’ll ever admit to.
And Denise Richards, well, she doesn’t really love me, but
she has a way of putting the moves on me that just goes with her equipment,
like she’s made that way. She stands a tantalizingly shapely five-eight,
one-thirty, with hair she tells me is auburn ... like it means a thing to me.
She’s courting her fourth husband. He won’t be her last. She’s not made that
way.
Sometimes I think deep down, Denise really loves me, but
that’s more my fault than hers. She’s a temptress. I’ve been tempted. But I
keep a close rein on my hormones. She acts like getting by that is a final
exam. For what? I don’t know.
Thankfully, Denise isn’t my secretary. No, she’s the queen
legal secretary for the lawyers of Whitman, Howard, Ormand, Masters and
Edmonds, known affectionately as WHO-ME?, with the question mark in the tone.
It’s a place where they practice law, but it’s got nothing to do with justice.
Denise is the only one in the place that knows that. It’s just one of the
reasons I like her, a lot. But not the important one ...
Denise is a walking encyclopedia of Portland pop culture,
and its legal profession subset. She’s only twenty-eight, but she knows
everybody, and everything that’s going on. And if she doesn’t know it, she
knows where to find it. She’s a girl who lives life two levels closer to
what’s really happening than I do, and I’m better at it than your normal
oblivious male. It makes her pretty special. Add to that the good looks, a
glib tongue, pretty ears that hear it all, eyes that miss nothing, and an
eclectic group of high school friends sprinkled throughout the legal halls of
Portland, and she becomes the best source this private investigator has.
And, Denise knows what other people think, maybe. Me, I
haven’t a clue, but then,
that’s what this was all about ... sort of.
Chapter 1 - Friday Night
I first met Willie Lopez twenty years ago, when I hired him
as a the inventory manager for our maquiladora plant in Nogales, Mexico, in my
previous life. Willie, according to the then current story of his life, had
just gone bankrupt in the used car business in Tucson. This followed,
time-frame indeterminate, a forced bankruptcy by the IRS of three bars he’d
owned in Los Angles. His checkered past was dotted with a series of
manufacturing jobs like moorings at which he stabilized his life after his
unsuccessful forays into more dangerous waters. If his resume was to be
believed, Willie didn’t much care for manufacturing, but it was the only thing
he did well. So, ignoring the obvious red flags, I figured Willie could do
what was called for. What the hell, I needed him just long enough to cut
through the bureaucratic red tape and get my product out the door, a perfect
match to Willie’s bull in a china shop mentality.
Working with Willie tested my then rudimentary, and since
forgotten, management skills. I was constantly smoothing the feathers of
peers, his and mine. They either loved him or hated him, depending on the
week, and, of course, on whose ox he was goring at the time. There was no
middle ground with Willie, you were either with him or against him, no tepid
sign-ons in Willie’s world. So I spent a lot of time gluing the china back
together.
While I was right about the one thing, Willie got the
product out the door, I was wrong about the other. Willie lasted four years,
and looking back with the certainty of twenty-twenty hindsight, there were
long stretches where I spent more time cleaning up in his wake than doing my
job. I often thought that if I’d only fired Willie, my life would have been
easier, but that wasn’t true. Breaking the logjam of production in our
facilities required an ever present belligerence in both English and Spanish,
and Willie was born with an extra supply of each.
Willie was blustery and bragging, aggressive and pugnacious,
sometimes mean, sometimes fearless, but always fast and loose. He had a way of
doing a hundred things, at once, none of them all the way, never dotting the
i’s and crossing the t’s. It was the people behind him, the ones in total fear
of impending imminent failure, they always finished it off for him, for their
own sakes, not Willie’s. With time, I’d actually come to view this as a
special talent, but mine was probably a singularly held point of view. Still,
that was Willie’s style, blowing through life with the governor turned off,
and that was the essence of his usefulness to me. The fact that he eventually
left the plant on his own two feet was a testament to the forbearance of those
around him.
Willie was one of those guys, we all know them, who knew
more than you did about anything. He was always saying he had more courage
than you did, played better tennis, and took more chances. If you had the
temerity to talk about your accomplishments, Willie followed it up with
another you can’t top this story, pushing the edges of credulity, stopping
just before you’d ask for proof, or call him a liar. He was good at that.
Yes, Willie was forever trying to be more than he was, a
puffer fish among the sharks of big business. But poor Willie was constrained
by reality. He was just another low level employee in a giant corporation
barely cognizant of his existence. Sure, Willie could look momentarily
important as he highjacked some executive rich meeting, but such moments were
more often embarrassing than influential. It wasn’t like the battle scarred
executives I worked for hadn’t seen the genre before, the smoke blowers, but
Willie, well he was ‘blinders on’ oblivious.
Willie worked in a corporate class system where he was
relegated to a subservient status. He couldn’t understand and wouldn’t accept
that others didn’t agree with him, or that he might be wrong, but he wasn’t in
a position to do anything about it. With just a little patience, Willie could
have grown in the company, but he didn’t have it in him to wait. It was like a
Twilight Zone story line where Willie began at the bottom and just as
he was poised to reach a higher rung of the ladder, maybe even skip a few
rungs, he angrily threw in the towel and went somewhere else to start at the
bottom again.
Outside of work Willie had no such arbitrary constraints as
he indulged a rich fantasy life. Most days, after working from five to five,
he would drive like hell from the Mexico plant to get to the Cove Inn in
Tucson before seven o’clock. If he was going
to be late, he’d call a friend to hold his place. The dark
bar disguised the worn cuffs and the cheap bagging polyester suit as he
ensconced himself at his table, geographically centered just off the dance
floor. His demeanor would change from angry in your face frustrated business
type to composed nothing bothers me mafia boss type, waiting for his ring to
be kissed. I can say, even remembered many years later, it was a hoot.
Without asking, the waitress brought over his tall seven and
seven with a splash and a twist, as if, after thirty plus years of smoking
three packs a day, his body could taste the difference, but then it was part
of the persona. At least once a week he’d tell the girl she’d forgotten the
splash. She’d return to the bar, then probably bring it back without any
change. Willie knew it. She knew he knew it. They’d pass knowing winks. Willie
would thank her and admonish her not to do it again. And as the night wore on,
Willie’s entourage would grow as he held a passive court from his tiny table,
dispensing favors and drinks as required by his position.
Though at the time I didn’t know it, there are lots of
Willies at lots of bars, a thin royal hierarchy based on the dubious quality
of presence, self-serving largess, and scrupulous attention to the details of
their subjects’ needs. From nine to five these Willies are tiny fish in the
big pond of life, but some driving force pushes them like mating salmon to
find the largest pond small enough for them to be the big fish. Once found,
they scouted the territory, making sure no one else is sitting in the sultan’s
chair. They never went head to head for hegemony, it’s not that kind of
position. They just look for the vacant seat, take an uncontested possession,
then start the long slow process of being there, making friends, doing favors.
Willie attracted an eclectic group of hangers-on and pretty
girls, the kind of people that in the bright light of day without a snoot full
wouldn’t admit to knowing each other. Secretaries and exotic dancers,
sheet-rockers and builders, red necks and car salesmen, assemblers and
managers, all currying the favor of the sultan, just because everyone else
did. He was the center of attraction by habit, with no person able to recall
when he showed up the first time, or how he’d attained his exalted position.
He was just there. Many of those who hung around him for months still didn’t
know his last name. He was just Willie. He’d installed himself as their
monument, their touchstone of acceptance. Willie needed them to shore up his
ego, what they needed from him was less obvious, but seemingly no less
necessary. Even the memory of it was sad.
Willie always finished his night the same way, blowing more
obfuscating smoke down the hall of mirrors that comprised his life. While the
bar was still crowded, the limo driver came to his table, talked briefly.
Willie would buy him a drink, then accept the ride home. Ostensibly this was
Willie’s way to avoid a DUI, but its sole purpose was to further cultivate the
sultan persona, by having his next door neighbor pick him up for free at the
end of his shift. Yes, being Willie was a full time job.
Now Willie was no cutie, and when it came to his bar life,
he was an unexpectedly patient guy. He whiled his time as he became important
to the ambiance of the place, more important than the bartender, more
important than the good looking guys, more important than the tipsy girls
who’d let him wrap a too often pawing arm around their waists. Yes, in that
dark room, for those few hours, Willie was the local big shot.
That was how he appeared to me the first time I met him
there, at his invitation. He looked to be the center of attention as the
waitresses fawned, and everyone called him Willie. I was young, I was
impressed. He called over the pretty girls to say hi and dance with me, more
than willing to take credit for any favors they might bestow upon me. Such was
the largess of the sultan. So I became a too frequent member of the entourage.
But being sultan was more than just giving. It was having
subjects, lives to mess with, a kind of noblesse oblige. And too often
this royal Willie abused his putative friends, like the divorced lonely men,
especially those who had done better than he had in life’s lottery. Willie not
only felt their pain, but he often caused it. I watched him play with their
lives, humorously twisting their faces into the muck with nasty asides
disguised as joking banter, diddling them for his singular enjoyment. Still,
Willie was careful not to be overtly, obviously mean. No, that could produce a
tawdry fight that might destroy the repose of the court, when all he really
wanted was to shame them, lower them, say, ‘look, you’re no better than I am.’
It was Willie’s one chance to reign supreme over his betters, by displaying
the wondrousness of his life when compared to their boring existence. Since
then I’ve become a lot less naive, but at the time I was in awe of the
importance of Willie Lopez, a carefully constructed awe that he meant to
inspire at that first meeting.
I sometimes wonder if Truman Capote, Willie puffed up a
million times, started out the same way. I mean, you couldn’t be a guy like
that and start at the top. So he too must have found that small pond to look
big in, currying his perceived bigness into the biggest of ponds. Or maybe he
was just rich. Maybe he owned the pond. Most though, like Willie, never reach
any higher status in life, nor do they desire it. They are happy as the
potentates of their small tribes from which they could bestow inclusion, or
cut you out. With their targeted drink buying and small time pimping, they
gained your esteem instead of your money. But like all things cheaply bought,
that esteem tarnished easily.
Thus began a long relationship, and sometimes friendship,
with a man I barely knew. Over the years, I learned about the real Willie in
unintentional dribs and drabs, viewed through the chinks in his armor left by
the normal battles of daily life. I helped finance his next business, fought
off his pleas to take an active role in managing it, and watched it grow from
a safe distance. I was best man at his wedding, I thought his second, in Reno,
to a Canadian girl half his age. I saw his business mushroom in a year to
three million, then fall apart in one week when the house of cards, built on
stiffed creditors, bad debts and unhappy customers, crumbled to the ground. I
learned about ex-wives and ex-kids, about debts to the IRS, about bad business
judgment. If I had cared enough, or had enough influence, I might have changed
something, warned Willie to a safer path through life. Then, no, Willie would
be Willie. I was only a bit player in the life of Willie Lopez. We all were.
It was always about Willie. I mean, he never had the slightest idea I was
color-blind. I would have been surprised if he had.
Willie was an aggressive, in your face kind of guy, someone
I found it hard to be around more than an hour at a time. He was always
testing the envelope of our relationship, then backing off, like some kind of
wild animal trainer. Like too many people I’d met through the years, Willie
was better remembered than he was experienced, but I still liked Willie. Even
when he stiffed me for a five thousand dollar loan, a lot of money at the
time, I just figured he’d pay it back one day, when he was in the chips. But
that was in the past, and, as I was to learn, in Willie’s mind you never paid
for yesterday’s debts with today’s assets. He just didn’t think that way.
Well, Willie was once again moving up in the world, although
not exactly in a straight line. He’d landed a Sunday filler right leaning talk
show on one of the little stations in Tucson, a tiny Rush Limbaugh in an
unbelievably small pond. He preached high morals and pro-family life,
something he must have read about at some time in his past. He even had plans
to run for Congress, as if the lineup of skeletons in his closet were just
Halloween decorations. And Willie was again mixing with higher life forms,
used car dealers.
Willie always had great plans, a predecessor of the New
Agers who believe that dreaming about a thing is equivalent to working for it.
Willie’s dreams had that quality of twenty percent effort and eighty percent
wishful thinking, but he could make you think that other eighty percent was in
his grasp. I was always willing to give Willie the benefit of the doubt, to
help where I could, to lend a hand. I saw a needy Willie beneath the blustery
exterior, but even that was just a show, one of the many faces available when
the circumstances called for it. That was a time when I thought I knew him
well enough to think I’d seen the real Willie, that I’d glimpsed the Willie he
hid even from himself. I’ve since lost that kind of hubris.
Willie crossed a line when he started living with a mutual
acquaintance, although he didn’t know we knew each other at the time. Willie
was down on his luck and needed a place to crash, someone who could take care
of him, someone to sponge off. When, after a long Willie-less period, he
called me to discuss a new business opportunity, he apologized for being out
of touch for so long. He was afraid I would think less of him because he was
living with an older woman, not the usual young chickadees. Willie, twelve
years Carrie’s senior, was embarrassed by her wrinkles! He just couldn’t
reconcile Carrie with his self-centered ever youthful view of himself. Well, I
knew Carrie, though at that time not so well, but over the last four years she
became the good friend as Willie became more estranged.
So the outwardly conservative, family values, political
mover and shaker Willie Lopez, just before he got married for the fourth or
fifth or whatever time, charged Carrie’s MasterCard to the max to upgrade his
computer. Sure, he’s a traditional family values type guy like myself, all for
honesty, but when push came to shove, he had to have the computer. Then he
tried to stiff her with the bill. Now, more than two years later, using his
debt to exact some kind of cruel vengeance, he had the gall to make her come
to his house every month to pick up the paltry minimum, even as his financial
status started to soar again. That was just Willie. Whenever his character
cracked, the mean little man that showed through wasn’t very pretty.
Three years ago, Willie started a new company to provide
consulting services to the Air Force and the other defense based businesses
that dotted the Tucson landscape. He was wheeling and dealing to build another
house of cards as he took one last shot at the big time. He wanted to let me
buy in on his new future, but I opted out without giving him a reason. The
next time I saw him, about fourteen months ago, he was in a new bar, Wilmot
Station. It was a step down from Smugglers, but that didn’t matter. Willie was
again in the seat of power, this time with his adoring new wife, Esmerelda,
and the fawning guys and gals at whose youth he lapped. But it was now for me
a punctured facade, badly constructed and poorly worn. Willie Lopez at
sixty-seven had played out his hand in my life, and I think he saw it in my
eyes. It was a short meeting. I bought my own beer, my esteem not purchased so
cheaply these days. I didn’t even drink the beer.
I thought I’d learned a lot about Willie Lopez over the
years, by watching him, sharing friends, sharing enemies. Still, his built up
artifice and reality were so intertwined, I was at a loss to know where the
real Willie Lopez began, or the paper-mache Willie Lopez ended, but then, that
was what Willie intended. Suffice it to say, Willie was Willie, but I no
longer counted him a friend.
I was in Tucson on a forced six week vacation, recovering
from a past indiscretion. I hadn’t seen Willie in the two weeks I’d been
there. I had no intention of calling. Over the years the things I knew about
Willie Lopez had become more ephemeral, and if I touched them, they might
burst, or just fade away. So I just let him be, before he evanesced to
nothing. All he had left was what I didn’t know about him.
That Friday night there was a scratching at the door,
followed by a short cough and a soft thud. When I opened it there was at least
one certain thing I knew about Willie Lopez. Willie Lopez was dead.
Chapter 2 - Friday Night
Willie sprawled across the door jamb, soundless, motionless.
It was like a crime scene photo, except the black blood was moving, pooling on
my tile. Steam rose from it as the cold breeze swept into the house. I put my
hands under his armpits, tried to lift him, then turn him on his back. He
didn’t budge. He was heavy like wet cement. I backed off as I felt the
stitches in my chest stretch.
I put a finger to Willie’s neck, feeling for a pulse. There
was nothing. His profile held the marks of fists, a bloodied right eye swelled
tightly shut, even in death. There was black blood on the front of his shirt,
the seat of his pants, and down his left leg. It was puddled in his dark gray
shoe which had slipped off when he toppled forward. The coppery smell was
mixed with the odor of urine as his body relinquished control, like a last
ignominy to his departed soul. If I believed in a god, I’d have said a prayer,
but I could only muster a hope that he hadn’t suffered, despite the obvious
appearances to the contrary.
It was almost six and a barely glowing gray remnant of the
setting sun lit the clouded December sky. I flicked on the outside light. I
followed the bloody left footprints, each connected by a thin black dotted
line in the artificial light. The shoe marks were at right angles to Willie’s
progress, each less than a foot apart, as he took his last painful steps to my
door. Another wavy line of blood drops was sprinkled a foot to the left of the
prints as Willie, doubled over, used what was left of his strength to reach
me.
I didn’t think Willie knew where I lived. He hadn’t been to
the townhouse before, and once through the front gate it wasn’t that easy to
find. Yet, he’d chosen to die here, probably pressed into the steering wheel,
scanning the buildings for my address. Why? Yes, I knew why. As he hung onto
consciousness, Willie Lopez had ticked through his list of hanger-on friends
and stopped on me, maybe his one proven commodity. It wasn’t the first time
he’d made me the friend of last resort, but it was the last.
I blocked out Willie’s pain as I made my way along his dark
spoor. An edited movie of his misspent life ran unbid and unwelcome through my
mind. The big black Caddy was parked an inch from my garage, with its door
open and the engine running. The front window was down. The white leather of
the driver’s side seat was pooled in black. I reached in and turned down the
blaring radio. Willie’s black address book was on the passenger’s seat, the
open page sprinkled with a fine mist of black drops. I leaned over further and
nudged it with my fingernail for a better view. There was my name and address
with five stars next to it, and written at an angle, in a lighter gray ink,
‘private investigator.’
In the pool of blood on the seat, I just made out the
tarnished jewelry hasp. Using a pencil from Willie’s dash, I pried it out just
a little, the metal a translucent shine beneath the blood. It was an half inch
wide cross-linked gold-gray chain, the expensive kind Willie liked to wear. I
could see where the links had stretched apart and gapped, breaking near the
hasp.
In my mind’s eye I pictured Willie driving, the cold air
rushing through the open window keeping him conscious, his hands pressed
against the wheel to keep him upright, his breathing bubbling black with his
blood, his blustery face overcome by the fear. He’d get out of the car and
stumble, or rock unsteadily before the sideways scrabble to my door. A bloody
hand print showed a wet black against the black car door, another against my
white stucco. Whatever Willie wanted so badly to tell me needed another minute
of life.
When I got back inside, I pulled down the back of Willie’s
collar. The chain had cut an already scabbed over line across his neck.
* * * * *
I called 9-1-1. They told me to stay where I was. I said I
wasn’t going anywhere.
I covered Willie with a new gray paint tarp from the pantry,
turned off the heat and opened the back slider so the smell would clear. I
pulled on thick wool socks and a sweatshirt.
I sat on the upstairs steps and collected my thoughts. I was
a detective for six years now. I am one of the lucky ones, I don’t need to
make money to survive. I retired when I sold my business, and financially,
well, I don’t look back. Still, like that baseball player with the no cut
multi-million dollar deal, I didn’t take my work any less seriously. I was
born to do this, to serve justice in my own small ways. And I’ve made good
things happen.
Much of my work comes from a large law firm in downtown
Portland, WHO-ME?, the one Denise works for. I only bill them for results, and
my results were always sooner, more thorough and a whole lot less costly than
the competition. As it was though, I never really expected to make a living
doing something I enjoyed so much, but then life seldom meets one’s
expectations. I hadn’t touched my nest egg in the six years, not since I
bought the three flat in Portland, despite two very expensive bullet holes.
Anyone would think divorce work a pretty safe beat for a PI,
and usually it is. But not always. It was one of the normal days. I was
interviewing a battered wife to lay the groundwork for an immediate keep away
injunction. The girl was no more than eighteen, and even the bruises sullying
her pretty face didn’t dim the bright gray eyes. She was pregnant, about seven
or eight months, and she wanted to live to see the baby born. She was afraid
of her husband, and his drug induced paranoia and jealousy. Her eyes would
have told me, but I was too focused on the words, on getting it all down on
paper. I just didn’t see it.
It’s always hard to tell in these situations what the
perpetrator really means to do, so much is just blind fury soaked in alcohol.
The first shot entered the cabinet behind her head and shattered something
glass inside. I can still recall the tinkle after the explosion. I reached out
for the girl and pulled her into my body. The next shot hit me between the
ribs on the right side of my body, barely nicking the lung. It spun me to the
floor, my blood spreading in a thin red arc across the kitchen wall. The girl
sprang to her feet, anger wiping the fear from her face. She rushed the
suddenly deflated man and grabbed the gun out of his hands. Like a penitent,
"Mary, I’m sorry." Her face closed up as she bared her teeth, "Get out of
here, Judah. Get out now before I kill you." She pointed the gun at the man
and pushed him with the barrel out the door.
She dialed 9-1-1 while she put a pillow under my head. The
anger and fear were drained from her voice as she spoke to herself, "This is
what I get for marrying someone so bone stupid." It was the last thing I
remembered before I awoke in the hospital. Judah is in jail for what looks
like a minimum of eleven years, but who can be certain these days. Three weeks
later the baby was born. Mary named him CB. It was just a coincidence, but her
unmarried name was also Green.
Dennis Doyle and Maureen McMartin, cops I know, stopped in,
said I was too stupid to be on the street. They said it was for nothing. I
didn’t think of it that way. It’s just what I do. They understand that.
I hadn’t planned on leaving for my annual four weeks in
Tucson until February, and in fact was seriously considering not going at all.
But my girlfriend, Becky Tomay, with Doyle and McMartin, packed me up and put
me on the plane, safely away from my job. But then, it’s not the kind of job
you can just get away from.
Tucson has been my home away from home for twenty years.
Outside of my four years in San Francisco, this is where I have the most
friends, and good memories of Rhonda. Back in my wunderkind years, I spent two
weeks a month for three years in Tucson managing the company’s manufacturing
facilities in Nogales. Then I worked a year long re-engineering project for
the company, before starting my business in San Francisco, with Rhonda.
Although I didn’t know Tucson when it was small, I knew it before it got big.
The boom of the early eighties was east of the city, where my townhouse was.
The boom of the nineties was to the west of the city, now stretching up
towards Phoenix. I’d been on the west side shopping once in the last four
years. It was a little too much like the suburbs of LA, or Phoenix. I didn’t
go back.
My three bedroom townhouse on the east side off Sabino
Canyon is large and airy, with an expansive view of the Catalinas. Rhonda
picked it out, and I approved. Like I had a choice. We were going to spend
three months a year there, to get away from the never ending rains of
Washington and recharge our batteries. She never got the chance. It broke my
heart. It got me into the new line of work.
Still, my parents, brothers and sisters, they all vacation
here to escape the more vicious mid-west and eastern winters. It’s one of the
perks of money.
I spent my first day cleaning out the sand, dust and dead
insects, fried by the sun as they beat against the windows. I found termite
trails in the garage and got the exterminator in. I took my truck down from
the blocks and backed it off the prophylactic tarp that had enclosed it like a
Christmas present, protecting it from pack rats and the like. I drove it to
the nearest service station to be oiled, lubed and tuned, all for ninety-nine
dollars. On the third day I started walking a couple of miles to stretch my
recovery atrophied muscles. I figured I could start running in about a week,
right after the stitches were pulled.
Mike Belling and his wife had me over the first night to a
home cooked supper, and I provided entertainment to their five and two
year-old sons. In ten minutes they ignored me. I’m not that entertaining. I
took Mike’s parents out the next night. We talked about Rhonda. After all this
time, they still miss her. I spent a few bucks on the slot machines at Desert
Diamond Casino. My friends make me feel at home, and I’ll feel badly leaving
them this time. I wasn’t expecting to spend any more extended vacations in the
desert.
Carrie took me out to eat the first Friday night and caught
me up on Willie Lopez and our other shared friends and acquaintances. We
continued a conversation from the previous year, about selling my townhouse
and finding me something more secluded in one of the gated communities that
dotted the city’s outer ring. Townhouse living was too much like apartment
living, too dependent on the quality of neighbors I couldn’t control. I told
her the new family was a lot quieter, so we back burnered the house search.
Anyway, there were too many memories of Rhonda, and my heart wasn’t in it.
Carrie and Rhonda were good friends, so she understood.
In downtown Portland I own a three story office and
apartment in the Northwest, but most weekends I tried to get home to my
fourteen acres north of Vancouver. The twenty-five year-old house with its
mature landscaping bordering on rain forest needed more than the ten hours a
week I got from one of the neighborhood kids, but then it would have to do.
I’ve been complemented on the color schemes and what not, but it had nothing
to do with me. Unlike my office, I haven’t redecorated in black and white and
grays. The house is packed with memories, colored memories.
The siren brought me back to the present. The gray and gray
flashers alternately lit the window above my door. My night of pandemonium was
just beginning. I put on my game face.
Chapter 3 - Friday Night
A short stocky white gray haired female patrolman with bad
skin knocked on the door jamb before stepping over Willie’s covered body. I
noted her gun holster flap was folded back into her pants. She said her
partner was securing the premises. She pointed to the dining room table and
told me to wait until someone was ready to talk to me. She lifted the corner
of the tarp. She held her breath. She did not touch the body. She looked a
long time, like she maybe recognized his face, then shook her head. When she
dropped the tarp, she fanned her hand to dispel the odor.
She stepped back outside, spoke to another policeman, then
returned her attention to me. She asked me if I’d killed him.
I shook my head. "No."
She nodded solemnly, non-judgmental, like only women can do.
She did not leave the room.
There was a squealing of tires as more cars arrived. Their
lights lent a certain carnival atmosphere to the occasion. I could hear one of
the cops telling the neighbors to return to their homes. Then there was the
belligerent voice of my red neck, Beverly Hillbilly neighbor across the way,
obnoxious, intrusive and nosy. He’d stop by the next day, hand tightly
clutched around a long neck, and try to pump me. I was already thinking of
ways to avoid him.
I and my personal cop sat without a word through it all. It
was like listening to the radio, but too jumbled to make any sense of it.
Still, I like watching cops at work.
I said, "Let them know I turned down the radio. My prints
will be on the knob."
She nodded and scratched in her little black notebook. She
remained watchful, a little tense. I’m sure that somewhere in her case
profiling training, she’d learned that the guy who found the body didn’t put
it there, or was it the other way around? Still, just in case, she rested her
hand near her gun. She light eyes flicked back and forth between me and the
other cops the whole time.
I asked if I could make some coffee, but she told me to stay
where I was, someone would be there in just a few minutes. I could see
flashlights in my back yard through the drawn drapes as my lot was searched.
It was ten minutes and no one had seriously looked at the body yet, unless my
personal cop’s peek counted.
What if I’d been wrong about Willie being dead? No, I knew
he wasn’t alive. So did my cop.
The tall thin dark haired man poked his head into the open
door. He looked at the cop, then to me. "Hi, I’m the assistant coroner, Bob
Roberts."
I introduced myself, but didn’t get up.
He turned to the cop. "Officer, can you remove the tarp?"
The woman put on her gloves this time and carefully lifted
the tarp, folding it at the foot of the stairs away from the body. The smell
immediately filled the room, then dissipated as a gust of wind pushed through
the door. The cold breeze was chilling, despite the sweatshirt. I moved to the
coatrack under the watchful stare of my cop and pulled on my windbreaker, then
took my seat again.
The coroner stepped over Willie into the room. He was
followed by a short, very pretty Hispanic woman, no more that a hundred
pounds, dressed conservatively in a blue knee length skirt, matching jacket,
and a white silk blouse. She had a raincoat over her arm, like the cold found
no purchase on her. Long thick black hair was cinched loosely in the back. The
clean white sneakers looked casual, out of place.
As she sidled around the body, she said to me, "I’m with
homicide, Detective Jesse Wallace. You the homeowner?"
I nodded, introduced myself again.
The uniformed officer took her aside. They whispered below
my hearing level, the cop referencing her notebook. The detective talked at
her for a little bit, then the cop went outside.
The detective pulled out a chair, folded her coat across the
back of it, then sat down across from me. She asked, "You know the dead man?"
I nodded, then said, "Yes."
She made a sympathetic face. "It’s going to be a long night,
Mr. Green."
She turned her head when two uniformed patrolmen knocked on
the jamb. She waved them into the room
She asked me, "Is it all right if we search the premises?"
I knew that I was, until proven otherwise, the only suspect.
"I’d probably rather you didn’t, but I understand." I waved my hand. "Go
ahead."
She took the two men aside and whispered instructions. They
pulled on paper boots and rubber gloves, then one headed upstairs while the
other started at the back, in the garage.
The detective and the coroner spent the next ten minutes
peering at and prodding Willie Lopez’s inert body. They spoke very softly
while a third man marked the body’s location on the tile and sidewalk. A
photographer with a digital camera took pictures from every conceivable angle.
An evidence man took fingerprints from the door knob and outside door jamb.
When two more men arrived with the body bag, Willie was
packed up and moved out. More pictures were taken. The detective and the
coroner inspected the floor, talked some more. When he left by the door, she
made her way back to the chair.
The detective started with an apology, "Sorry about being
late, but there was a pretty nasty accident at Kolb and Speedway." She
motioned towards Willie’s outline on the floor, then answered my previous
unvoiced question, "We generally tell the uniformed cops that if there’s no
chance to save the victim, then don’t touch the body."
She pulled a tape recorder from her purse. "Any problem with
this?" she asked.
I shook his head.
She also brought out a notebook, then dived in, "So why
don’t you start by telling me who you are."
We were interrupted by the upstairs cop, "Hey, detective,
got a bloodstained bandage from the master bathroom." He held the red streaked
cotton in his gloved hand.
I answered, "It’s mine."
Her eyes turned to me. Suspicion.
I lifted my shirt to expose the new bandage on his ribs.
"Gunshot wound in Portland. Two weeks ago. I bumped into the door this morning
and split one of the stitches."
The detective was deciding whether to be respectful. "You a
cop?" she asked carefully.
There was no getting away from the truth. I turned and fixed
on her eyes, "No, I’m a private investigator."
Her lip curled with an reflexive snarl as her knees twisted
away from me. Her reaction was so obvious she grayed, then visibly rearranged
herself.
"So what are you doing here, Mr. Green? You working for the
dead man?"
I tried some humor, "I’m relaxing, can’t you tell?"
She didn’t smile.
I shifted to a more sympathetic pose. "I’m recovering. This
is my townhouse. I come down every year, for four weeks, in February. This
time I’m just trying to get well."
She scanned the room, not overtly decorated, but
nevertheless expensive. "I didn’t know being private heat paid that well. I
must be in the wrong profession," she said, testing to see where it might lead
her.
I played submissive, trying to dispel a tension I felt
building between us. "I retired from a real job, detective. I decided this was
how I wanted to spend my golden years."
The woman shook her head, her face marked by equal amounts
of wonder and disbelief. "Obviously you’re not looking for social security,
Mr. Green," she pointed her index finger like a gun barrel at my wound,
"probably won’t live to see it anyway. All the more for me, and no one’s going
to find me entertaining dead men at my door."
She scratched something in her book.
I waited until she looked up from her notes. "Willie didn’t
look like he’d been entertained to me, detective."
She got sad, draining some of the building electricity from
the air between us. "Sorry, he was your friend. When you see as much death as
I do, you can forget it’s real people involved."
She looked down at the table, thinking before speaking,
deciding. "I don’t really care for private heat, Mr. Green. In this state that
too often means bounty hunter. I got a cousin killed by those guys, a mistake
they said. The courts said murder. You don’t belong to that group?"
I shook my head. "No, I mostly interview victims and
witnesses, an amateur version of you." I do a lot more than that, working for
justice, but I wasn’t about to voice it and ruin our budding relationship.
She made an almost friendly offer, "Christ, we’re almost
comrades. Why don’t you just call me Jesse."
"Hey, Jesse ..." one of the policemen joked.
She turned to him with a grin, and pointed, "And you
can call me Detective Wallace."
Returning her attention to me, minus the smile, she asked,
"So, you got anything to do with this?"
I leaned forward, steepled my fingers and supported my chin.
"You mean other than my name being in Willie’s black book?"
A hint of irritation crossed her face. "So, you didn’t just
turn down the radio?"
I sensed again the bubbling resentment, and she didn’t even
know me yet. I didn’t want to make her any angrier, so I tried a little
self-deprecation. You learn early as a PI that you can’t get anywhere if the
cops are against you. I wanted this woman on my side. "Look, detective, Jesse,
I’m a curious fellow. I haven’t seen Willie in almost a year, and I didn’t
even know he knew where I lived. I was just being thorough. If I did wrong, I
apologize. I’ll make it up to you someday."
She fixed me with a hard stare. "Well, that won’t be
necessary, Mr. Green. I’m sure we won’t be seeing any more of you after today,
if you keep your skirts clean."
I left a vacuum, I had no intention of making any
commitments.
"Why don’t you tell me what you know about the very
interesting Willie Lopez."
It took me an hour to cover the details of Willie’s life, as
far as I knew them. I had the feeling watching her body language, and noting
which of my statements caused her to write in her little book, that it wasn’t
all new to her.
She turned her black eyes to mine and asked, "So, who killed
him, and why?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "No idea."
She stared at me, silent.
I gave it serious thought before asking the next question,
"So, how long have you people been investigating Willie?"
The initial surprise was immediately replaced by a blank
ignorance. "Investigating? Why would you think that?"
I was getting a little tired of the verbal jousting. "Have
it your way, detective, I’m just a stupid PI."
Jesse sort of bobbed her head, very becoming, then, "You’re
right, of course, Mr. Green, we will have it our way. I’d appreciate it if
you’d just remember that."
Again, no commitments, I kept silent.
"So why the five stars next to your name? The next highest
was three."
I put my hands on my knees and leaned forward. "It’s only a
guess, mind you, but Willie might put stars next to people who could be of use
to him. It’s the way he’d think. He and I weren’t exactly friends anymore, but
if push came to shove, I’m the guy he’d have gone to. Yes, knowing Willie’s
friends, I’d be his five star go to guy."
She mulled that over, then, "He had one star next to his
wife. What’s that mean?"
I was confused and it must have showed. That wasn’t like
Willie at all. "Don’t know, detective, only met her once. Nothing meant by it,
but I find it hard to believe he’d give any woman a star. Willie wore women,
he didn’t trust them. To Willie, women were like jewelry, and who relies on
his jewelry. Maybe I’m wrong about the stars."
She gave me a look from down under as she made a note. "You
hold the same opinions as Willie Lopez, Mr. Green?" she asked, a touch of
coldness in her voice.
I laughed aloud as I fell back against the chair, "Call me
CB, comrade, and no, I don’t. If they don’t have to carry a two hundred pound
man out of a burning building, they’re at least equal. When it comes to being
thorough, they’re more than equal. My guess is your job requires being
thorough. More thorough than the average man."
We’d passed a point, not best buddies, but a little more
respectful. "Good answer, Mr. Green. My husband, George, would rather I was a
corporate executive. He says I’m wasting my education. He doesn’t care for
what I do for a living. He calls it dangerous." She smiled. "He’s a fireman,
and I call that dangerous."
Conversation! "My girlfriend understands about my job. She
knows I’m doing what I like, that it’s important to me."
She switched off the tape recorder and slipped it into her
purse, then folded her notebook into a pocket on the inside of her jacket.
"I can find you when I need you, right?"
I stood up with her. "Sure? Where are you going now?"
She turned her head, then raised her eyes to meet mine.
"Downtown, headquarters, to start to make heads and tails of this."
I tested the building trust, "Can I get a ride downtown. I
loaned my truck to a friend. I’d like to pick it up."
She looked at me hard. "Not getting nosy, are we?"
I gave her a who me look.
She said, "I’m not a taxi service, you know."
I fluttered my right hand. "Okay, so I’ll take a taxi." But
I didn’t move.
She laughed as she shook her head. She wasn’t used to be so
easily manipulated. "Come on," she said, "let’s go."
I called Carrie on her cell phone and told her I’d meet her
at her downtown realty office. I locked the door behind us. Willie’s car had
already been towed away, but the yellow tape was still in place.
The detective changed into comfortable looking black loafers
before she got in the unmarked car.
* * * * *
The detective’s cell phone rang. She scrounged around in her
purse until she found it. She slapped my hand when I tried to help.
"Hello." She kept her eyes on the road as she listened, then
said, "So, Bob, what condition was the bullet in?" Another pause before, "The
other one must be buried in the seat." She hung up and put the phone on the
console between us.
"You going to be able to use the bullet?" I asked.
She reached into her purse again and came up with lipstick.
"No, it was splintered by a rib after hitting the heart. A second shot went
through a kidney and exited his back. The evidence guys probably already have
it."
She applied the lipstick while looking in her rear view
mirror. My legs started to tense against the floorboards.
Without looking at me, she said, "My husband does the same
thing," then snapped the top on the lipstick and returned her attention to the
road.
I joked, "Yeah, well I don’t want to die this way."
Women don’t have much of a sense of humor about driving.
"You men are all alike, never think a woman can do what a man can."
I held my hands up, palms away from me. "Hey, not me,
detective. I can’t change the radio station and keep the car on the road. Just
call what I was feeling awe, tinged by a healthy dollop of fear."
She parted with a forgiving smile. "Okay, I’ll accept the
awe part."
I loosened the seatbelt and turned to her. "So how did
Willie drive if he was hit in the heart."
She explained, "The coroner said the bullet only nicked his
heart. He just oozed to death. Bob thinks if he’d driven to a hospital,
instead of to your place, they might have saved his life, fifty-fifty. He was
probably navigating okay right up until the end. It wasn’t until he stood up
that the loss of blood really hit him"
She turned off Congress.
I recalled Willie’s face, "It looked like he’d been beaten?"
The detective made a right hand turn on the downtown street,
busy with the typical Friday night post-happy hour crowd. "Bob thinks he was
knocked around by some professionals. Did you notice, they broke the fingers
of his left hand."
I shook my head.
She said what I was thinking, "Seems like a waste of a good
beating to kill him. All in all, we were lucky he didn’t kill someone else on
the road."
She drummed her fingers while she waited at the stop light.
"Where would you like me to let you off?"
"At the station is fine."
Suspicion colored her voice, "And you’re meeting a friend?"
I answered, "My friend works two blocks west, for Tucson
Acres Real Estate. I don’t want her hearing about Willie on the news first,
that’s all, detective."
A conciliatory, "All right."
She pulled up to let me off in front of the police station.
A stately looking Hispanic woman was being escorted up the steps by a large,
hulking man with slicked back black hair, like a fifties ducktail. He was
built like a linebacker gone to seed.
I stopped with one foot on the curb. I motioned with my hand
towards them. "Esmerelda."
Jesse said, "The loving wife?" The tone of her voice and the
raised eyebrows made it a question.
"Yes," but loving was not the word I would have used. The
unprotected look on Esmerelda’s face was one of irritation, anger, not
sadness. "I’d love to be in on this conversation."
She leaned over the console and pushed me out the door. "Not
a chance, Mr. Green."
I walked around to Jesse Wallace’s side of the car. We shook
hands through the window. I said, "I’ll be seeing you."
"I hope not," was all she could muster.
* * * * *
I dropped Carrie off at her home. Her daughter was back in
Tucson after a two month acting gig on location in Montana. I’d called Linda
at her house and told her about Willie. She said she’d wait at her mother’s
until I got her home. Carrie cried at the office, and snuffled for most of the
ride to Bear Canyon. To my thinking, Willie had mentally mistreated her beyond
the pale, but then I’d given up trying to figure out women. I told myself it
was just shock, or she was just being a normal woman. Even odds in my book.
I’ve got nothing against women. Sure, they’re more emotional
than men, but that’s not so tough. And, anyway, they’ve got a lot going for
them. Especially in the cop business. It makes me jealous. What I mean is, I
believe that to be a good investigator, I needed to think more like a woman. I
had to see and remember life in detail, not just its texture which is the
level at which most men, myself included, perceive and deal with their world.
I hope I’m not deluding myself, that I’m getting pretty good at it, seeing the
details, that is, but I have no hope of ever understanding their feelings.
I parked my truck in the garage around ten-thirty and pulled
the crime scene tape down. The smell of blood still permeated the whole house.
I opened the windows and let the cold breeze blow through until it dissipated.
I used a spatula to scrape off the congealed blood, then Spic N’ Span to clean
the last vestiges of Willie from the entrance. Then I hooked up my hose and
washed the blood off the concrete.
When I was done, I still had the smell, and there were
vestiges of blood everywhere I’d cleaned. I recalled an article I’d seen in
the local paper the previous year. I found the number for Crime Sweeps, a
service specializing in completely cleaning up the blood and the like. Just
like death, they has no set hours. They’d be right out. I like that about a
company.
I did a quick walk through of my rooms to put things back
the way I liked them, to erase the unintended violation of the search. The
Crime Sweep guy showed up a half hour after the call. I told him I’d be
working in the back, that he should interrupt me when he was done.
I connected my laptop into the fifteen inch monitor and full
sized keyboard, then switched on the computer. I neatened up my office while
the machine booted, then created a file named ‘Lopez’. For the next three
hours I entered everything that had happened that evening, the people I met,
the things I saw, the substance of the conversations. I recorded everything I
could remember about Willie, what I knew, what I’d heard from others, what
he’d told me. It was a veritable brain dump, much more thorough, if not more
informative, than my verbal outline to the detective.
My thoughts were laid down in the rawest form, without
sequence, without connections, just as they came into my head. It’s the way I
work, using the computer as my female brain to capture those detail events,
memories, ideas, even opinions, before they faded into a disremembered male
past, the kind of past a person in my profession can’t afford. I saved the
file in a folder labeled ‘raw thoughts’, my unedited first impressions. Then,
every day, I would cut and paste, rearrange, clarify and organize. The file
would grow, until I knew the answer, or I gave up. I’ve got one just like it
for Rhonda. I never give up.
At two in the morning, I printed my notes, sent a backup
copy to my brother in Chicago, and turned off the computer.
I surveyed the cleaning job, not a spot. I sniffed the air,
only disinfectant. It was like Willie hadn’t really died on my doorstep, like
I’d only imagined it.
I took myself to bed, but getting to sleep wasn’t so easy.
I called Carrie to refix Willie in my head. She was still
up. Linda warned me she wasn’t so coherent, but she sounded better than she
had four hours earlier. Carrie had known Willie a lot more intimately than I
had. I discussed my notes and scratched her observations in the margins. After
an hour we both ran down. Sleep came easier then.
* * * * *
I slept four hours before the sun, peeking around the edges
of my light darkening shades, pried my eyes open and pushed me out of the bed.
I splashed cold water on my face, but the bags under my eyes wouldn’t tighten
up and go.
I decided it was time to end the lull in my exercise
routine. I pulled on my running shorts and loped around painfully for about an
hour, each stitch declaring its painful presence. I focused on the mountains,
and Tucson, and the pain, while I kept Willie at the outer edge of my mind,
letting a level lower than thought cogitate on him for a while.
I was already missing Tucson, and I wasn’t gone yet, but I
wasn’t coming back for a long time. I’m not much of a hiker, but one of the
attractions of Tucson is the scenery. I’m told, from a distance anyway, it’s
pretty much the same in black and white as color. It’s a majestic setting. I
click my eyes like a shutter and the Ansel Adams tableau is captured, just
like he’d meant it. It’s a special ability I have, this color-blindness, but I
sometimes think it would be more special if I could see colors for just a day.
Then again, maybe not.
I let my body cool down for an hour while I went scanned my
notes again, removing, adding, rearranging, organizing my computerized
thoughts. I hadn’t really made a decision yet, but I was already acting like I
was committed to finding Willie’s killer.
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