by Louise Ure
The South Tucson City Hall still had the pale, flaky remains of a painted mural clinging to the side wall: a starlit night, an Indian chief, and what looked like a giant headless lizard. I stuck my left arm through the canvas sling and crossed the parking lot.
Three clerks were available at the counter. I chose the young, round-faced woman on the left, the one with her eyes on the countertop and a despondent slump to her shoulders.
“Can you help me, please?” The clerk glanced up, her eyes widening when she spotted the eggplant shadows on my neck. My right hand cradled my canvas-covered left elbow.
“I’m trying to find out the name of the person who owns the bar called Juanito’s.”
She turned to a rack of plastic shelves on her right, plucked paperwork from the third tier, and directed her reply to the countertop. “Fill in this form and you can come back tomorrow for the information. It’s a ten-dollar fee for duplication and it’s twenty dollars if you need it notarized.”
I let my eyes well with tears. “I don’t have ten dollars. And I don’t need a copy anyway. Just a name.”
She raised her eyes again, as if checking the shadow of a new bruise seen in her own mirror. “What is it, honey?”
“I can’t make him pay until I know his name.” I tried unsuccessfully to move my bandaged arm; a broken-winged mourning dove who had somehow found her way indoors.
The woman looked right and left, then leaned toward me. “He hurt you like this and you don’t even know his name?”
“It was…he said…I thought he was going to be nice.”
I didn’t need to see her reaction. Her voice already said that she understood the intentional humiliation of a casual encounter, and the gut punch of misplaced trust.
She only hesitated a moment. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll look it up right now.”
I gave her the address of the bar.
“Juan Villalobos,” she said, coming back from her computer search. “There are two mailing addresses: the one you gave me and this one on Silverlake.” She shoved a scrap of paper across the counter.
I nodded gratefully and tucked the note into the sling. “Thank you.”
“And honey?” the woman said, placing her hand over mine on the counter. “Please tell me you’ll go to the police. He can’t get away with this.”
Chapter Seven
Back in the truck, I ripped the Velcro strip apart and took the sling off.
The bartender may not be the bar owner but at least the name could give me a place to start. And if it was the same guy, and if Felicia was his daughter, I now had two addresses for them.
I checked my watch. Just noon. Felicia had looked like a high schooler to me, so she probably wouldn’t be at either address right now, but I was willing to wait until she showed up.
I called my friend Mad Cow up in Phoenix. She wasn’t due into work at HandsOn until this evening.
“Hey, I got a winner last night,” she said. “Maybe not a Dumb Question, but certainly a Dumb Criminal. Guy phones in, wants directions to his own house. So I ask him for the address. Says he forgot. Turns out he’s one of the valet parkers at this swanky restaurant and, as long as he had the house keys along with the car keys, he thought he’d go rob the house while the owners were still dining.”
“If he’d had a brain in his head, he would have just looked for the registration in the glove box. Or gone to the address book in the GPS. Most everybody plugs in their address as ‘home.’”
“If he were a brain trust, he wouldn’t be parking cars,” she said.
“What about Mario?” I reminded her, referring to the guy she dated last summer.
“Mario’s brains included several other muscle groups. Hey, are you coming in tonight? I’ve got a mean salsa I can bring in.”
“No, I’m going to be down here in Tucson for another day.” I told her about the meeting with Deke Treadwell. “You said you had a friend at the Motor Vehicle Division.”
“Yeah, an old high school buddy.”
“Can you find out what make and model of car a couple of people drive?”
“Sure, but the cops can do that, too. Why don’t you just give the names to this detective?”
I’d already asked Deke Treadwell to believe in me one more time than I should have. If I had any curiosity about Felicia or the guy who disappeared from Markson’s car, it would be better if I satisfied that urge privately.
“I’m just double-checking something. If it pans out, I’ll definitely take it to the cops.” I gave her the four names I was interested in.
I stopped at a Circle K for a six-pack of Diet Coke and looked up the Silverlake address on a street map.
“Hey, you gonna buy that?” the guy at the counter yelled as I refolded the map and stuck it back in the display.
“Just browsing,” I said, turning toward him.
He swallowed hard and looked down. I realized that I hadn’t cleaned any of the eye shadow bruises off my neck and face. I must have looked more like a fighter than an abused woman.
Back in the car, I spit on a paper napkin and wiped away as much of the purple as I could. There was nothing I could do about the tight shoulders, the steely gaze, or the pent-up anger. They’d been there so long that they were part of me now. I started the truck and headed for the Silverlake address.
It was a wide street without curbs or sidewalks, and had only a half dozen homes on the block, spread out like a jack-o’-lantern’s gap-tooth smile. The lots in between the houses were bare dirt littered with glass shards, a healthy crop of McDonald’s wrappers, and an abandoned toilet that sprouted a tumbleweed crown.
The Villaloboses’ house was ochre-colored brick, with a bright turquoise front door and a cyclone fence that guarded a yard of dead grass. There were no cars in front of the house or in the plastic-roofed ramada at the side, and the curtains in the front window were closed.
I parked down the block, not at all circumspect in my surveillance. It was hard to be covert in a neighborhood with no retail outlets, no handy trees to hide behind, and with so few houses that the residents probably knew the names of each other’s dogs.
It must have been 110 degrees in the truck, even with the windows down. Some autumn weather. After two hours, all I had to show for my effort was a sweated-through shirt and a swollen bladder.
At two o’clock, Mad Cow called back with the information I’d asked for. Felicia and Juan Villalobos had the same address and were both licensed drivers of a white 1995 Honda. Emily Markson drove a Jaguar, and her neighbor and lawyer, Paul Willard, had two cars registered in his name, neither of them a blue Ford. Of interest, though, Willard’s wife, Aloma, drove a blue Taurus. Mad Cow said her driver’s license photo was a stunner.
At three o’clock I gave up my post. Felicia might be coming home soon, but it couldn’t be soon enough. I’d try again tonight. I threw the last empty can of Coke into the bed of the truck and was headed back to Bonita’s when I hung a left without thinking.
Muscle memory, I call it—when the body does what it is used to doing, through habit or custom or ease. Like the flex and curl of weight lifting, or the hand-to-mouth gesture of a longtime smoker. It’s the muscle that kicks in when you turn onto your parents’ street without any intention of doing so.
I pulled to the curb a good fifty yards from the house and put the truck in park. Sat there looking at what I’d lost, although it had been here all along.
The front door opened and a tall thin woman came out. Her hair was shorter than the last time I’d seen her and it looked like she’d lost weight. She still held herself straight, but her posture eased as she picked up the hose, canted her hip to the left, and began watering the ironwood tree in the front yard.
I wondered if my mother ever thought about me at all or if she’d erased my image from her mind as easily as she’d taken my pictures out of the family album. I’d watched her grow more distant each day as the prosecution added details about my role in the death of Walter R
acine. Watched as her mouth drew taut and her eyes steeled themselves against me. Watched as she approached me after the jury verdict and said, “I don’t care what they said. I know you did it.”
She’d pushed me against the wall outside the courtroom, blocking the view of her hurled accusations from passersby. “You are not my daughter. I’m sorry we brought you into our lives. You are an evil seed. We should have seen it when we took you in.”
That was the moment that it all made sense to me. “First there was Jessie. Then we had three boys. Then three girls.” Once she’d had her own children, the adopted child became less important and could be pushed away—shuffled into the role of caretaker.
Now that long-ago Easter Sunday made sense, too. We’d all been groomed and preened, hair slicked back and shoes tied, ready for church. “Let’s get a picture of the family,” my mother said, handing me the camera. “You take it, Jessie.”
I should have known then.
“I only have six children,” my mother said to me that day outside the courtroom.
I waited in the truck outside the house, watching the water soak into the ground around the ironwood, until she’d gone back inside. I started the engine and drove away.
Shoving memories of my mother’s anger aside, I stopped at El Con Mall and bought a sleeveless tunic and a pair of yoga pants to replace the shirt and khakis I’d been wearing for two days. I’d already stayed longer than I expected to. But I had to be back at work tomorrow night so one more set of fresh clothes would do me. I was ready to go back to a world where no one associated my name with murder.
My cell phone rang as I trudged back across the parking lot. “Jessie, it’s Nancy Horowitz.” Click click click of rabbit teeth all the way from Phoenix.
“Hi! I’m taking that comp day you offered, but I’ll be back in tomorrow night.”
“Don’t bother. I’m phoning to let you know that we’re letting you go.”
“What?” My performance reviews had been fine, and I hadn’t taken a lot of days off.
“We got a call from Len Sabin in the Tucson Police Department. He was just following up on the theft of Mr. Markson’s car, but he told us about your real name and your background.”
I felt my cheeks redden, and it wasn’t the heat.
“Jessie Dancing is my real name. I haven’t lied to you about anything.”
“You weren’t completely honest with us, either. We aren’t interested in employing someone who was accused of murder.”
“Accused, maybe. But also tried and found not guilty.” I tried to keep the snarl out of my voice but I didn’t succeed.
“Where would you like your last paycheck sent? I’ve already alerted the management of the house-sitting company you used as a reference, so I’m not sure your current address will be available much longer.”
Fuck. Losing my job was one thing, but that house was the best place I’d had in two years. I wasn’t even sure that what she’d done was legal—firing me for no reason and then alerting my landlord—but that investigation would have to wait.
“I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
Who was this asshole Len Sabin, and why was he ruining my life?
By the time I got to Juanito’s bar I had almost been able to put a positive spin on things. If I helped identify the car thief, maybe HandsOn would be grateful—maybe think twice about firing me. It was five-thirty, earlier than I’d arrived the previous night, maybe early enough that a teenager checking in with her father would still be around.
I parked around the corner, with a clear view of the back door through a tiny slice of space between a tree and a three-bay body shop. Felicia probably wouldn’t recognize my truck from here and, parked behind the tree the way I was, she wouldn’t be able to see my face, either.
I’d been there a half hour when the garage closed. Two of the mechanics made a beeline for Juanito’s, but there were no other new arrivals.
By seven I was hot, thirsty, and bored. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Felicia walking out the back door of the bar. I started the truck and made a U-turn, just in time to see her buckling into the front seat of a white Honda that had been pulled up on the far side of the building.
She put her turn signal on and headed south. I followed, close enough that I could see her, far enough back that she didn’t think I was tied to her bumper. The Honda traveled under I-10, then jigged left and right until I was sure of her destination. She pulled to the side of the road and parked on the dusty verge in front of her house on Silverlake.
I eased to a stop behind her and got out without shutting the door behind me. Felicia was turned away, digging something out of an oversized purse when I reached the driver’s door of the Honda.
She reacted like a wildcat, battering me with her hands and purse, and slamming the door against my knees as she tried to get out of the car. I put all my weight against the door, reached in and put one hand on her shoulder.
“Calm down! I’m not going to hurt you.”
“How did you find me? I don’t know what you want. I don’t know anything!”
I reached across her and dug the keys out of the ignition.
“I just want to know what you were doing out there in the desert yesterday. Were you there to meet someone?”
She shook her head, but there was real fear in her eyes. What was she involved with? Drug trafficking? Gangs? A car-theft ring? She was scared of somebody else a lot more than she was of me.
“Felicia, I’m trying to help you.”
“You can’t help me.” She laced her fingers around the steering wheel so tight that her knuckles turned white.
“I’ll bet the cops would like to know what you were doing out there.” I hadn’t planned on telling Treadwell about the girl, but the threat was the only leverage I had.
“No! Don’t tell them. Please!”
She clammed up. Nothing I said made any difference. She could have been a stone. I shrugged, backed away from the door, and threw the keys back inside the car.
She picked them up off the seat, watching me with squinted eyes, until I was back in the truck.
The explosion turned my windshield to glass pebbles, and a wave of fire rolled toward me from where the Honda used to be.
“Did you see anybody else around when the car blew up?” Treadwell asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t even know if she had the keys in the ignition yet.”
“Then it must have been on a timer, otherwise it would have gone off when the girl first started the car back at the bar.”
I had asked the first cops on the scene to call him. A familiar face, even if it was one likely to look at me unkindly, was better than a stranger.
I had been moved back a half-block from the burning car while the firemen sprayed foam around the hulking black carcass. There had been no hope for Felicia.
My mouth was dry and there was a ringing in my ears. I felt like I’d swallowed a telephone, dial tone and all. A paramedic placed a thin, foil blanket over my shoulders.
“It could have…we were just…”
I felt the proximity of death, like a coiled snake at my feet. I shivered, then bent low and vomited onto the pavement.
“Sit down right here.” Treadwell guided me to the wide rear bumper of the paramedic’s unit.
The front end of my truck had taken the full force of the blast. The fire department had kept the gas tank from exploding, but the hood and front fenders were charred with the black lick of flames and the pebbled windshield had collapsed.
I caught a look at my reflection in the paramedic truck’s shiny paneling and laughed, a sound closer to hysteria than comedy. My eyelashes and eyebrows were singed off. Blisters had formed across the left side of my lips.
“I’m so sorry.” I didn’t know who I was apologizing to. To Felicia, for not seeing the danger? To Treadwell, for not giving him Felicia’s name? Or to the gods, in repentance for getting involved at all?
I handed Treadwell the beer co
aster, and told him about meeting Felicia by the arroyo and tracking her down at the bar. He took lots of notes.
“Stay out of this, Jessie,” he said, closing his notebook.
“I hear you.”
It wasn’t too late to back away from this. I was only tied to Markson’s car by a phone call. And that was for a job I no longer had. And who’s to say that my following Felicia had anything to do with her death at all?
I used to weigh the lives I’d saved—the people I’d helped—against the life I’d taken, hoping that somehow the karmic scales would tip in my favor. I didn’t think that was possible now.
The paramedics checked me out and gave me burn salve for my arms and face, but still wanted me to go to the hospital. Treadwell ushered me into the rear of the ambulance, promising to have my truck towed back to Bonita’s when they cleared the scene.
“Deke,” I asked before he could shut the door, “who’s this Len Sabin? Why was he checking up on me in Phoenix?”
Treadwell mopped his face with a handkerchief. “He was Jim Dougherty’s partner in the Walter Racine murder investigation.”
In my murder investigation, he meant.
“I remember Dougherty. He testified against me at the trial.”
“Yeah. Jimmy retired last year and Sabin’s my partner now. You know, with your dad leaving and all.” He paused. I hoped he wasn’t going to go into all the reasons my dad quit the force. His belief in my innocence, cashing in his pension and taking a second mortgage on the house to get me that lousy lawyer, Buckley Thurber, who took the money, then told me to plead guilty anyway. Dad’s depression when my mom first threatened to leave him if he continued to stand by me.
“Anyway, Sabin was real interested to hear about it when your name popped up in this investigation. It looks like he’s still got a hard-on for you, Jessie.”
I nodded but didn’t look him in the eye.
“He cost me my job, Deke.”
“I’m sorry. You know I never would have said anything to the folks in Phoenix.”
“I guess your partner didn’t feel the same way.”