by J. A. Jance
I sank down on the narrow bench that probably served as a cot overnight. I leaned back against the gray-green cinder-block wall, closed my eyes, and gave in to what was nothing less than a fit of total despair.
They had taken my watch, which I had forgotten to remove, so there was no way to tell how much time passed. An hour? Two? Who knows? I was glad I’d made a restroom stop before all this happened. There was a stainless steel toilet bolted to the floor of the cell, but I resisted the urge to use it. Using it would have made the whole thing more real somehow, and this was already far too real to begin with.
At last a jailer came by—another of the Roundhouse’s occasional customers—and opened the door. “Right this way, Mr. Dixon,” he said respectfully. “We’re going to an interview room just down the hall.”
Said interview room would have been crowded with three people in it. With six—the two Peoria detectives, the two guys from Vegas, Harold, and finally me—it was a zoo. Harold seemed to have been transformed into a pint-sized tower of strength, and the local cops deferred to him in a way that made the out-of-towners wince. They, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more dismissive.
I found out much later that while all this was happening, on the far side of Peoria a new library building was then under construction, one scheduled to be called the H.M. Meeks Branch. In the hours I’d been cooling my heels in the holding cell, someone inside city government had evidently put the local cops in the know.
“All right, gentlemen,” Harold said, as if calling a business meeting to order. “Perhaps you’d like to tell us what this is all about.”
I now know that’s an old interrogation trick. You only ask questions to which you already know the answers, and Harold knew exactly what this was about. He already had it down in black and white . . . well, yellow and blue, if you want the exact truth.
Once again the story I’d been forced to tell over and over the previous day came back to me through the mouths of strangers, hinted at more than specified by the questions they asked, which on the advice of my attorney I mostly didn’t answer. I could see that was part of Harold’s game. He let me answer some of their inquiries—the innocuous ones—here and there, enough to keep the cops interested and enough to keep them asking more questions. All the while, I could tell by the notes Harold made, in that peculiarly indecipherable script of his, that he was gradually gleaning far more about their case than they realized.
An hour or so into the interview, Harold called a halt. Claiming he had a bad prostate, he told them he needed to use the john and suggested that I most likely needed to relieve myself as well. It was more than a need right then. It was straight out desperation, but the Peoria cops assented and allowed as how I’d be able to go to the restroom as long as a deputy accompanied me in and out. The cop stayed back by the door, while Harold and I did our duty at the urinals.
“You’re doing great,” he told me in a whisper covered by somebody else flushing a toilet in one of the stalls. “Not to worry.”
That was far easier said than done. Back in the interview room, a tray of sandwiches had suddenly appeared, ordered in by Harold. Subway sandwiches have never been my first choice for lunchtime cuisine, but hunger is the best sauce, and I was starved. With all the people marching through my life, it had been more than twenty-four hours since I’d last eaten. Although one of the Peoria guys dissected my twelve-inch tuna/pepper-jack sub before allowing me to eat it, he found no contraband inside, and no escape-enabling metal file, either.
The interview went on for another hour or so after lunch. It ended with Harold laying into Detectives Jamison and Shandrow and letting them know that he would be opposing any efforts made to extradite me to the state of Nevada. After that another jailer led me back to the holding cell area.
The Peoria Police Department has two holding cells. Before I went to the interview, the cell across from mine had been occupied by a pair of drunks peacefully sleeping it off, both of them snoring loud enough to wake the dead. When I returned, the drunks were gone. Now the cells held two new arrivals, a pair of scrawny old guys—both of them north of eighty and both wearing outlandish golf attire. Each was dressed in extremely loud plaid pants with a matching shirt. One was in orange, the other in brilliant chartreuse. They stood at the bars of the cells like a pair of colorful old parrots, yelling at each other across the polished concrete corridor that separated them.
“You’re a lowdown cheat,” one of them called. “You’ve always been a lowdown cheat. Why I ever agreed to play another round of golf with you, I’ll never know. I saw you move that ball out of the rough, plain as day. The Florsheim club.”
“The hell you say,” the other replied. “I never kicked a ball in my life. And even if I did, that’s no reason for you to come after me with a frigging golf cart. You could have killed me.”
“I wish I had. They could have buried you there right on the edge of the fairway under that mesquite tree. It would have served you right. And why the hell did you have to go and crack the windshield of the golf cart with your seven iron?”
“To get you to stop, you stupid old fart!”
“When they come after me to pay for the damages, I’m coming after you, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll pay up or else.”
Their fight, one that had most likely started on a golf course hours earlier, was still in full swing. No wonder the jailers had placed them in separate cells. From what had been said, I suspected they would soon face charges of assaults with a deadly weapon—a golf cart and a seven-iron, respectively. Any other time that might have been screamingly funny. Not right then.
“Settle down, boys,” the jailer cautioned. “You both need to cool off. I understand your attorney should be here soon. He’s evidently been delayed.”
The jailer opened the door that led into the cell occupied by Mr. Green Pants. The guard ushered me inside and then slammed the door shut behind me. There was that awful, ominous clang again. The metallic noise the locking door made rattled my nerves and chilled my soul. Leaving the two old guys to continue their shouting match, I went over to the stainless steel bench and sank down on it. I had barely closed my eyes when the shouting ceased suddenly as someone walked past me and joined me on the bench.
“You two take your golf way too seriously,” I said without opening my eyes. “It’s dumb to land in jail over a stupid golf game.”
“Well,” he said, “look who’s talking?”
That actually made me laugh. He was right, of course. Since I was in jail, too, I didn’t have much room to point fingers.
“My name’s Roger,” he said. “And don’t worry about Matt and me. Harold will have us out of here in jig time.”
“Harold?” I asked. “You mean Harold Meeks?”
“That’s the one. He’s an old pal of ours. He doesn’t play anymore because of his walker, but he usually rides along, drives one of the carts, and helps keep score. He called us when we were about to tee off on the third hole—the par five—after the cops took you away. He asked if I thought Matt and me could figure out a way to get ourselves locked up for the day so we could have a private chat. He said to wait for about an hour, so we staged the whole thing on the par three on the back nine. How’d we do?”
I remembered what Harold had said about not talking to anyone in the slammer. Had the Peoria detectives gone so far as to hire a couple of retirees as jailhouse snitches? That seemed unlikely, but still . . .
“Great,” I allowed. “But why would Harold do something like that, and why would you two go along with it?”
“Like I said, we’ve all been friends for a long time, and he asked us to do it as a favor. Said he forgot to ask you a question before they took you away, and he didn’t want to ask it when any of the cops might be listening in.”
“I thought conversations between attorneys and clients
were supposed to be private.”
“Sometimes what’s supposed to be doesn’t match up with what is,” Roger replied somberly.
“What’s the question?”
“Do you have a cleaning lady?”
I could see that in focusing on the employees of the restaurant, I had forgotten the one person who had total access to my home once a week, usually when I was downstairs working. Marina would show up early in the day, wrestling her vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies up the stairs. When she finished, my apartment would be spotless. She would pick up the hundred dollar bill I usually left for her on the dining room table and disappear, sometimes without my having even laid eyes on her. But the idea that Marina would be spying on me or going through my files? That was ridiculous. For one thing, she barely speaks English.
“Yes,” I answered. “Yes, I do.”
“What’s her name?”
“Marina Ochoa.”
“Where does she live?”
“In Glendale somewhere.”
“You don’t have her address?”
“No, I don’t. I pay her in cash. There’s never been any paperwork.”
“No references, no nothing?” my interrogator asked.
“Look,” I said, “my other cleaning lady quit several months ago. I was getting ready to place an ad for another one when Marina showed up asking for a job cleaning the bar and the restaurant. She spoke so little English that I had to have one of the dishwashers interpret for us. I explained that I have a commercial company that comes in to do the heavy cleaning in both the bar and the restaurant.
“When I told her that, she looked absolutely crushed and burst into tears—she was that desperate to find a job. Turns out she’s a single mom supporting two little kids, ages five and three. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and with her right there, ready and willing to work, I was happy to dodge the agony of having to place an ad and interview people. I asked her if she’d consider cleaning my apartment and hired her on the spot. She’s been cleaning my place ever since and doing a great job of it.”
“Tears,” Roger muttered. “They’ll sucker a poor guy every single time. How long has she worked for you?”
“Three months now, maybe. She started toward the end of August.”
“What days?”
“Sometimes on Fridays, sometimes on Thursdays, depending on her kids’ schedules. It doesn’t matter to me which day as long as she comes once a week. And like I said, she leaves the place spotless.”
“Who lets her in and out?”
That’s when I realized Roger wasn’t just an old duffer—he was a smart old duffer, too, just like his pal Harold.
“You were a cop, weren’t you?” I said.
He grinned. “Used to be,” he said, “homicide, but that was a long time ago. Harold and me used to be on opposite sides of the fence. He won more times than I thought he should have. I always suspected that he cheated, and now I know that for sure. These days, though, when someone needs a hand, we usually work together.”
“To help me?”
“Hell, I barely know who you are, you little whippersnapper. To help Tim, of course. Us old law enforcement types have to stick together—cops, attorneys, judges—you name it. The older you get, the less those old divisions matter. When somebody runs up the flag, we’re all there, Johnny-on-the-spot. So stop stalling and answer the question. Who lets your undocumented alien cleaning lady in and out of your apartment?”
“She parks out behind the restaurant, comes in through the kitchen, and goes up the stairs.”
“Is the upstairs door locked or unlocked?”
“Usually it’s unlocked. Look,” I added, sounding exasperated, “I’m right there the whole time.”
Roger replied by asking yet another question. “Does Marina have a cell phone?”
“Probably, but I don’t have the number. No point in my calling her. I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Which day did she come do the cleaning for the past several weeks?”
“She was there on Thursday this past week. I’m not sure about the others.”
“You got surveillance cameras?”
“You bet. Top of the line. They cover the front door, the back door, and both parking lots. There are also cameras over the bar and over the cash register in the dining room.”
“How long do you keep the files?”
“They go to my security company. As far as I know, they keep them indefinitely. After all, they’re just computer files. It’s not like the old days when there were miles of physical tapes taking up space.”
“Which security company?”
I gave him the name. If I’d had either my phone or my computer with my address book in it, I could have given him the phone number and the account number. Sitting in a jail cell, I didn’t have access to either one.
A new jailer came down the hallway. “All right, Mr. Holmes and Mr. Palmer. Someone has posted your bail. Can the two of you leave together, or do I need to take you out separately?”
“Don’t bother,” Roger said. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Matt? We’ve cooled our heels long enough to bury the hatchet.”
A pretend hatchet, I thought, as the two old codgers were led away to report their findings to their pal and mine, Harold Meeks. Once they left, I fell asleep—on the metal bench, with no pillow necessary. They woke me up at what the clock in an office outside the cell block said was three and led me into a courtroom in the building across the way to be arraigned. I pleaded innocent, of course, and then came the bail hearing.
Even though I could see Harold was tiring, he stood up, leaning on his walker, and made a good case for my being allowed out on bail. He told them I was an upstanding citizen with close ties to the community. He insisted that since my vehicle had been hauled away to the impound lot by the CSI investigators and since my passport had been confiscated as well, I was in no danger of fleeing the area to avoid prosecution. The upshot was, I was allowed to post a $500,000 bond, courtesy of Tim O’Malley. After that, they let me change clothes and gave me back my goods.
When it came time to leave the building, I walked out expecting to have to call for a cab. (Where’s a decent pay phone when you need one?) Instead, I found a spit-and-polished venerable old Lincoln Town Car complete with a uniformed driver waiting out front. The driver got out of the vehicle and hurried to meet me.
“Mr. Dixon?”
I nodded.
“This way, please.”
When he opened the back door for me, I slid onto the backseat and found Harold sitting slumped next to the far window. Out of sight of the detectives and the judge, he seemed to have shrunk. When he glanced at his watch, I followed suit and looked at mine, too. It was four-fifteen.
“Way past my bedtime,” he announced. “Let’s get me back to your place. I need my beauty sleep.”
In other words, I still had an overnight guest.
“By the way,” he added, “when we get back to the Roundhouse, your people are going to be full of questions. You can’t afford to talk to them anymore than you can afford to talk to the cops. I’ve got operatives looking into the Marina Ochoa situation, but we can’t risk taking any of your other employees off the list of suspects just yet. If they ask, tell them you’ve been advised not to discuss it.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Will do.”
In less than twenty-four hours of dealing with Harold Meeks, he had made a believer of me, right along with that search warrant crew he had held at bay on the stairway outside my apartment.
It turns out he was right to have warned me to keep quiet. The people at the Roundhouse greeted us as though we were the second coming with cheers, hugs, handshakes, and tears all around. I helped Harold up the stairs and into the guest room. When I turned around, expecting to go back down to fetch his wa
lker, I discovered Matty had beaten me to the punch and brought it upstairs.
“It was on the noon news,” she said. “They’re saying you murdered your ex-wife. I didn’t even know you had an ex-wife.”
“That’s because it’s not something I like to discuss. And my attorney—Harold here,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder toward the guest room, “says I’m not to talk about it now with anyone.”
“Mum’s the word, then,” she said, giving me a second fierce hug. “All I can say about Mr. Meeks is bless his heart.”
She left then. I went into the bedroom and showered. I needed to scrub the feel of that holding cell off my skin and out of my soul. No need to rub it out of my hair.
When I came back out to the living room, Charles Rickover had let himself in and made himself at home on the chintz sofa. He had somehow managed to talk his way around Matty and come upstairs with a cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand. Maybe I did need to keep my apartment door locked.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you were going to Vegas.”
“Did,” he replied. “Flew there and back, chop-chop. You ever hear of the Wright brothers?”
“So what’s up?”
“Katherine Melcher’s husband—her most recent husband—is in the clear, at least as far as doing the deed himself. He was out of the country on business. I’ve got airline records, car rental receipts, and passport control stamps coming and going. He could have hired someone to do it, I suppose, but as far as I can tell, Katherine had landed herself a fat cat and was determined to hang onto this one. According to him, after ditching the drugs, she became really serious about working her program. That’s when she changed her name from Faith to Katherine—when the two of them married. It was part of a joint effort on their part to put her past in the past. By the way, my reading on Melcher is that he really is heartbroken.”
“The woman would have dumped him sooner or later, and cleaned him out, too, in the process,” I said. “Knowing Faith the way I do, up close and personal, I suspect her husband probably just dodged a bullet.”