Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde

by Loren D. Estleman

  “About her daughter’s health? Probably. You said you were told she’d died of infantile paralysis when you bought her birth certificate. The mother told me all this in church. People lie in church like they lie other places, even the devout ones. But I couldn’t find a hole. One rough spot, but not a hole.”

  “What was it?”

  “In a minute. Did you catch the news today?”

  “I saw a black detective on television saying Hector isn’t a suspect. Muy fiero. Ferocious.”

  “That one I could have figured out.” It was as good a description of John Alderdyce as I’d heard in any language. “Not the local news. International.”

  I watched her get sad. Maybe it was sad enough. She was in show business, so I was just wasting my time. “Poor Nico,” she said. “He was a bad general, I’m afraid. His one military victory was the work of his colonel, Fulgencio. Fulgencio died in the fighting. Had he not, the war might have ended differently.”

  “No tears for Nico? He died in his cell.”

  “He was the same as dead when they captured him. I did my crying then, when the news got here. It was Salazar, the Judas, who sold him to the government troops. Salazar was Fulgencio’s replacement.” You can spit a name like Salazar a long way. She got distance on it. “Nico was a healer. He walked out of medical school to organize a hospital strike. That was the beginning. He never went back. Even when he was living in the jungle he was a humanitarian first and a warrior second. That was why I loved him, not because he saved me from the troops at the radio station. People said it was because he was my hero, but I knew his weaknesses. I loved him for his strengths. He planned the prison escape, the one I cannot use to clear my name of his whore’s murder. Beyond that, beyond the courage of his convictions, he was a weak man, easily fooled. The whore would have betrayed him had she lived that long.”

  She stopped talking. She’d seemed about to say more. She tossed her hair and looked at the window, as if she expected the little fellow in the red car to be peeping in from the ledge.

  I said, “It’s a good thing you’re talking to me instead of the cops. You just gave them another motive for killing Angela Suerto.”

  “I did not kill her. I would prove it to you, if I could. You are not the United States government. You would protect me.”

  “Uncle Sam’s more flexible than you think. Immigration fraud isn’t murder. Does the name Miguel Zubaran mean anything to you?”

  She looked at me. No recognition there. “Should it? It is old Spanish, that much I know.”

  “Very old. I looked up the surname in the encyclopedia. I’d heard it before, but didn’t know the details. Francisco de Zubaran was a Spanish Baroque painter during the seventeenth century. Religious subjects were his specialty. I thought you might have come across it sometime.”

  “You said Miguel.”

  “No relation, according to Miguel.” I moved a shoulder. “It’s not important. It was a long time ago—I’m talking about Miguel—and you said yourself you didn’t use names in the resistance. But if you knew of the original Zubaran and happened to hear the name again you might have remembered it.”

  Her pupils got very large. They made her eyes true black. She leaned forward and her nostrils seemed to flare. They didn’t, of course, but they wouldn’t have looked out of place if they had. “You spoke to someone.”

  “Just briefly. We’ll have a longer conversation tomorrow. Like I said, there’s no reason you’d have heard the name if the revolution was so tight-lipped. But he seemed to know the name Mariposa Flores.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Who is Zubaran?”

  “That’s not my information to give away. I can tell you who he was. A university professor in your country.”

  She seemed to expect that. She was still leaning forward. “How did you find him? Where is he?”

  “Same answer. Right now I’m trying to find out why he knew your name if you didn’t know his.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t tell him. Our training was specific about that. You never knew who was your friend, or how long he would remain a friend. Even those who did, once they were captured—”

  “Yeah. What you didn’t know you couldn’t tell Abe Lincoln. Someone told Zubaran. It wasn’t my go-between. His history makes yours and Jillian Rubio’s play like the Olsen twins’.”

  “You mustn’t meet with Zubaran.”

  “Uh-huh. Why not?”

  “It’s a trap.”

  I considered it. “Okay, say he’s some kind of undercover spook sent here to pose as the man you helped escape from prison, find out what became of Mariposa Flores, kidnap her, and take her back to stand trial. What makes her worth the trouble? In this country, women of easy morals are killed every day in double digits. Your population is a lot smaller, but the percentage would be about the same. Why risk an international incident to bring back Suerto’s killer?”

  “Perhaps they know I’m not her killer. They want me for what I did that night.”

  “Same question. The revolution’s as dead as Nico. You don’t put down a rebellion and then turn around and antagonize a major world power just to scoop up the little fish that swam through the holes in the net.”

  “You don’t know this government. It has a long memory and no concept of mercy.”

  “It also has to worry about mundane things like the budget and road repair and moustache wax for the minister of information. Even Hitler didn’t spend all his time chasing Jews and crushing Poland. He had to make sure the Gestapo had enough rubber stamps. What makes you important enough to disrupt the daily bureaucratic routine? With apologies to university professors, that kind of government doesn’t rate them much higher than the Suertos of the world. When they step out of line, they just throw them in the dungeon, and when they escape, where they went and who helped them takes on less significance with time. That leaves only one reason why you don’t want me to meet with Zubaran. Your alibi won’t hold up if I do.”

  Very slowly she straightened in her chair. Her face lost all expression. She rose.

  “You were hired to find Jillian Rubio,” she said. “You did that, and were well paid. There is no longer any business between us.”

  “Sit down.”

  She didn’t move. Standing there with her chin raised she looked tall. She looked tall onstage as well. I didn’t know how much of her was Mariposa and how much Gilia.

  “Sit down, I said. I was ribbing you. I’m lied to a lot. Every now and then I’ve got to whack the pinata and see what comes out. If you’d gone on trying to convince me, I would’ve shown you the door.”

  “You believe me?”

  “The part about being afraid Zubaran’s a ringer. I guess when you’ve declared war on tyranny a little paranoia goes with the territory. The other part will have to wait until I’ve met with the professor.”

  She sat down, her spine straight. “If you’d accused my great-great-grandfather of lying, he’d have invited you to the field of honor. I suppose it’s more civilized to take such insults without protest.”

  “Miranda Guzman gave me almost the same speech. What neither of you has said is both your great-great-grandfathers bathed every other Easter, peed at the dinner table, ate with their fingers, and wiped the grease off on the servants. We have manners now, noble and peasant. We use paper napkins and antibacterial soap and when we run someone through for calling us a dirty so-and-so we do it with the knowledge we’ll answer for it later. I can’t fence, but I’m a pretty good man in an interview. That’s what you bought for fifteen thousand dollars. You probably spent that much greasing the help at the Hyatt to smuggle you out past the great unwashed, but it’s ten times the minimum I charge for a missing-person investigation. I can either spend some more of it trying to untangle your little immigration problem or refund all but fifteen hundred and expenses and you can throw it at a lawyer. It should cover his telephone calls for a couple of days. Get one anyway is my advice. If you have one already—Matador d
oes, so I’m sure you do—tell him what’s going on. Otherwise he’ll have to start cold when INS comes calling.”

  “If I do this, will you continue to investigate?”

  “He might call me off. He probably has his own detectives, any one of whom keeps his fish in a tank bigger than this office.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “I’m a nail biter. I get nervous when there are more questions floating around than answers. I’m also a community booster. Detroit had fewer homicides last year than it has had any year since before the riots in sixty-seven. I get more nervous still when a visitor is killed here. When there’s reason to suspect the killer commuted here to do it, whether it was from Milwaukee or sunny California or the third world, I get downright peeved. Another such incident and I might just lose my composure. Yeah. I’ll continue to investigate, lawyer or no, until you call me off. Maybe even after that. My profit margin is so thin now I could operate for a year in the red before my creditors noticed anything unusual. I haven’t a thing to lose.”

  “Except what Jillian Rubio lost.”

  “I wouldn’t light any candles for her. She had some bad breaks. She would have anyway, whether you took her identity or not. She abandoned it, remember; you didn’t take anything she needed or wanted. She only became angry because you made better use of it. Nobody else put that chisel in her hand. It was her decision, and she paid for it. The job now is to find out who collected.”

  “Even if it’s me?”

  “Especially if it’s you. An attorney can afford to take on a guilty client. It’s considered part of due process. A private eye just looks like a chump.”

  “It isn’t me.”

  “I hope not. It’s hard enough getting the innocent ones to pay once expenses eat up the retainer.”

  She shook her head, throwing off haloes. “You talk the good game, hombre. You don’t convince me you’re in it for money.”

  “I didn’t try. The free exchange of currency for goods and services is what brought you to this country. I need some to keep the wolf from my door. If I needed more I’d be making my way through the classifieds. Hector Matador told me this morning my job will be extinct in five years. What do you think?”

  “I think the same has been said of soldiers.”

  “I’d be okay with it if it were true, about P.I.s and soldiers. There isn’t a good cop around who wouldn’t welcome becoming unnecessary. That’s the theory behind smart bombs and DNA fingerprinting and the Internet. But when all the indoor work is done somebody still has to wade in and clean up.”

  She sat back in the chair and rested her hands on the arms. When she did that her beauty hit you like a blow to the heart. “You mentioned a rough spot in Miranda Guzman’s story.”

  I was back on the clock. I tapped the typewritten report. “She said her daughter came to spend Thanksgiving with her. Then she announced she had an urgent appointment, borrowed an overnight bag, and left. That was November 12, one day before she was to meet Matador in Milwaukee for her monthly bite. She only got half a block from the house, but that isn’t the point. Why interrupt her stay for a date that had been prearranged for months? Why not wait until after she’d collected, then come for the holiday? It was still two weeks off. She could have shaken down everyone in the Top Forty and still been here in time for pumpkin pie.”

  “You said in your report she was mentally disturbed.”

  “Disturbed. Not challenged. Ted Kaczynski was as screwy as a waterspout, but he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and he kept the feds busy for seventeen years. And we only have Guzman’s word she had emotional problems of any kind.”

  “Ask Señora Guzman.”

  “After I charge a side of beef to expenses. Her dogs won’t even look at a pound of ground sirloin. Meanwhile I’m meeting Zubaran.” That reminded me of something. “You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of Mariposa Flores.”

  “It wouldn’t be safe. I left behind everything to do with my past when I came here. You have guessed that the professor would not recognize Mariposa if you showed him a picture of Gilia. That is the whole point. Ask him if he remembers the problem of the birds.”

  I drew a pencil and scribbled the words on the pad. They didn’t mean anything more on paper than they had out loud. I waited, but she didn’t add anything.

  “Great. Another mystery.” I socked the pencil back into the cup.

  She laughed. “The professor will clear it up. Then he will know I am genuine and you will know he is not an imposter.”

  “Spy stuff.”

  “Another extinct profession the world cannot seem to do without. You said you spoke to the police this morning. Did you learn anything that is not in your report?”

  “Only what killed Jillian Rubio.”

  Her face didn’t change. It’s all in the pupils if you know what to look for. Hers got small, as if I’d shone a bright light into them. “Not Stelazine.”

  “Yeah. Funny how you can go your whole life never hearing a word, and then suddenly you can’t get away from it.”

  “I am cursed by God.”

  “Let’s set our sights a little lower. The world’s full of poisons and most of them are easier to get than this one. Anyone who would go to the trouble must have had a good reason. Tying you to the Rubio killing would be one; you already had a tag out on you back home involving the same poison. So the killer is someone who knew about Angela Suerto, and that you’re not Gilia Cristobal.”

  “I cannot think who it would be.”

  “You told Matador.”

  “It is not him. I know what you think about him. It may all be true, and yet I know it is not him. I think he has a crush on me.”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “No. The thing is impossible. He is an intelligent man and must see that.”

  “Beverly Hills is full of geezers and their baby brides.”

  “It is not age. When I marry, I will probably marry a man with skyscrapers named after him, who is on his third pacemaker. After he dies it will amuse me to fight with his grown children in court. But that is years away. Also Hector is too good a business manager to lose. Right now I am a property. Marriage would make me his property, and he would make mistakes.”

  “Love never stopped a killer, if he thought he couldn’t have the victim. But I can’t fit that to Matador. He hasn’t the passion for it. His idea of murder is something you take care of between the dry cleaners and Wal-Mart. You might want to get ready for another round of blackmail.”

  She stiffened as if I’d slapped her. “Yes?”

  “Maybe. Probably. If those papers don’t turn up in a couple of weeks, someone has them. Rubio was killed for them, in a way that would destroy whatever chance you would have to strike a deal with the State Department. If that doesn’t sweeten the pot, I don’t know what would. And whoever did it isn’t likely to be satisfied with five thousand a month.”

  “It gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not finished. Inspector Alderdyce found out you and Matador are neighbors. He wants an autograph.”

  She nodded. “I knew they would come sometime. Shall I lie?” “Lie or tell the truth. Truth is better, but if you give it to them it won’t be your truth anymore. Whatever you do, don’t cage around. Cops love a tricky witness. They’ll tie you up in your own evasions until you trip square into the truth. If they have to get it that way they won’t cut you an inch of slack.”

  “I’ll play the foreign card.” She made her eyes round. “‘I am still learning the English, Officer, I do not know what you are asking.’”

  “They’ll get a cop who speaks Spanish.”

  “Then I’ll be a celebrity.” She smiled heartbreakingly. “‘Yes, Officer, Hector is my manager. No, I don’t know why he would hire a private detective. I’d like to meet him. I play a private eye in the Bond film. Jillian Rubio? I don’t know the name. I have all these lyrics to memorize, so many steps to learn. I haven’t even time to balan
ce my checkbook. Hector takes care of that.’”

  “That’ll work until they check Rubio’s background and find out her real name is Gilia Cristobal. When they come back, they’ll leave the charm at headquarters.”

  Her face flattened out. “In my country they are never charming. You and Hector are taking the same chances. I carried my weight in the revolution. Don’t ever think I didn’t.”

  “I never thought so. Go easy on the accent when you talk to Alderdyce. Lose the dumb blonde. You’re not that good an actress.”

  She gave me a real smile this time. “Hombre, that’s the best compliment I’ve gotten since I came to this country.”

  “One more question. Where was the mole on your upper lip?”

  She hesitated, then placed a forefinger to the right of the dimple. There was no trace of a scar. “You’ve been talking to Hector. Is it important?”

  “You never know. I once broke a case over a grain of sugar in a gas tank.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but I’m sure someone did somewhere. What’s the plan for sneaking back into the hotel?”

  “I don’t have one. In my set, you put more thought into sneaking out of places. Is he still there?”

  I got up and looked out the window. The snow had picked up; the Geo was almost white. As I watched, a hole appeared in the frost on the passenger’s side and irised out into a wide circle, cleared by a pale palm. “Did you expect him to go away?”

  “I hoped a policeman had arrested him or something. He doesn’t care which side of the street he parks on, or any other laws he breaks. Can we call and turn him in?” She sounded eager.

  “A cop would just tell him to beat it. He’d drive around the block and come back.” I sat back down, lifted the receiver off the telephone, and dialed. When a wheezy accent came on I asked the owner to come up. I put down the receiver and waited. Gilia lifted her eyebrows. I shook my head.