Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  After my dad’s big pistol, Catherine’s little snubnosed .38 had felt like something a Barbie doll would shoot.

  Ted Dresden, the prosecutor in my murder trial, had told the jury that Walter Racine had been killed with a .38, and that his niece Catherine had had one and could have given it to me before her death. He was right about all of that. What he couldn’t prove was that her .38 was the murder weapon, and that I was the one who’d used it.

  That was because he couldn’t find it.

  I could. And I needed it now.

  I waited until after midnight, when the moon had set and I had a better chance of not being seen. I plugged a Charanga Cakewalk CD into the player, opened the windows, and headed east. The plodding-horse rhythm of “Belleza” made me feel like I was making the trek by mule. No moonlit shadows. The saguaros stood as dark and still as an army of surprised soldiers in surrender.

  I parked in the lot and took the steep dirt path that led down to lower Tanque Verde Falls. There was water running in the creek bed—shallow and slow, none of the monsoon flooding and crashing waterfalls that had given it life in August. Halfway down the trail I spotted the three dark red boulders in a pile that were my signpost. I squatted beside the bottom one and dug with the garden trowel I’d brought from Bonita’s house.

  It had been three years since I’d last been here and the dirt was hard-packed and dry with the smallest tuft of thorny grass covering my prize—my shame.

  After only ten minutes of digging I felt a corner of the freezer bag I’d left behind. The contours of the gun were clear, even the little triangular piece of hard rubber missing from the grip. The three .38 rounds I hadn’t needed that day rolled around the bottom of the bag like pebbles.

  I knew how stupid it was to dig up evidence for Sabin. What if he found the gun on me and could prove that he’d been right all along?

  Hell, he already knew he was right. And he knew he couldn’t nail me for a crime I’d already been tried for.

  Fuck him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Guillermo picked me up at Bonita’s house at noon. The old Camaro he drove was dented and primer gray, but the engine hummed like a turbine.

  It took a little more than an hour to traverse the empty stretch of road between Tucson and Nogales. Plenty of time for me to sneak sidelong glances at his face, at that right eyebrow bisected by a thick scar that almost reached his eyelid. He stared forward, his mouth taut with worry.

  “With a family as big as the Ochoas,” I said when we passed the exit for my friend Beverly Ochoa’s house, “I thought you’d have an army of people out looking for Carlos.”

  “They’re all asking around. They’re looking. We’re going to try some of the places they haven’t been yet.”

  “The Braceros?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “How’d you two wind up in the gang?”

  He pushed his hair back with his fingers. “It’s a long story. The short version is that we were safer with them than against them. They have a lot of power in Nogales and the cops don’t have the money or the manpower to control it.”

  We drove through the checkpoint at the border and showed our passports to the Mexican officer at the booth. There’s not much scrutiny when you head south; no one cares about terrorism or illegal immigrants going in that direction.

  “I thought when you came north it was to the Arizona half of Nogales.” The two cities straddled the U.S.-Mexico border, but were more fraternal twins than identical. Even the vegetation lost hope on the Mexico side.

  “My family got papers and moved across when I was in my teens, but our first house was on the Mexican side so we’ll start there.”

  “What about the Braceros?”

  “They’ll be there, too. The drinks are cheaper.”

  We stopped at a red ALTO sign a block down. The tinny thrum of a mariachi’s cheap guitar leaked through an open door.

  “How many times do you suppose that guy’s had to play ‘Cielito Linda’?” he asked, locking the car. “It must be like reading the same bedtime story to your kids every night.”

  Some of those old songs were still my favorites. “When’s the last time you heard ‘El Niño Perdido’?” That plaintive trumpet solo was as sad as the lost child it represented.

  “Too long.” He opened his wallet and took out a photo of a young man with wild, dark hair. His mouth was turned down on the left side, looking weighted by the thick mustache.

  “That’s Carlos?”

  “Yep. Keep an eye out for him or his car, Okay?”

  “What does he drive?”

  “A Ford Escape, maybe three, four years old.”

  “What color?”

  “Blue.”

  Aw, shit. That matched the paint on Markson’s bumper.

  We drove through Nogales, south to the neighborhood where the Ochoas had first lived, leaving the tourist areas behind. Sturdy houses perched like lookouts on the rocky hills, and small shacks with tiny ramadas crowded the flatland. A carnecería graced one corner, with skirt steaks and chorizo hung on hooks in the window. A small taquería anchored the right side of the intersection.

  “There were six of us living here,” Guillermo said, pointing at a concrete block building the size of a lean-to. He knocked on the door but there was no answer. “Let’s try the taquería.”

  We walked across the intersection, took seats at a rickety wooden table, and ordered two horchatas.

  Guillermo introduced himself to the old man behind the counter.

  “Juan Pantera,” the old man said in reply. “I know your name, but never met anyone in your family. I took this place over from my cousin just a couple of years ago.”

  Guillermo placed Carlos’s photo on the table. “Have you seen him in the neighborhood recently? Maybe with some of the Braceros?”

  Pantera opened a bottle of Tecate for himself and joined us at the table. He was Yodalike, with a bent spine and a cobweb of straggly white hair. His hands were oversized on long, thin arms, and moved in slow wiping motions across the clean tabletop.

  He nodded. “He was here this week. Maybe Wednesday? I gave him a plate of food.”

  “He had no money?” Guillermo asked.

  “No money. No identification. He said he’d been mugged.”

  “Was he badly hurt?”

  “Bad enough. His eye was the color of a sunset.”

  Guillermo’s eyes dimmed with the knowledge of his brother’s pain. “Did he say where he was going from here?”

  “He left with two Braceros—bastardos.” Pantera spat toward the doorway.

  “Do you know these men?”

  “One of them. Ricky Lamas. He’s like all the rest—criminales, traficantes.” Pantera moved back behind the bar.

  I’d heard Lamas’s name before. “Felicia’s friend said she met him with Carlos in Tucson.”

  “I guess Carlos didn’t get as far away from the gangs as I thought he had.”

  “Where to now?”

  “The Braceros’ clubhouse.”

  The “clubhouse” turned out to be a noisy, dark bar called El Gallo Rojo, on a narrow street that paralleled the main drag, Calle Obregon.

  Music blared from this bar, too, but not the old mariachi ballads we’d heard earlier. This was the trumpet-snare polka style of narcocorridos, the songs that take traditional Mexican music and twist it into a paean to drug traffickers.

  “Me apodan El Sinvergüenza…” the voice sang in tribute to a man who robs and kills without shame. I understood the killing part, but not the shamelessness of it. It’s nothing to celebrate.

  I had expected the Braceros to be in leather jackets. Net snoods over long hair or bandanas in gang colors, folded over foreheads. None of that here. This wasn’t the street side of the Braceros; it was management.

  There were ten or fifteen Latino men, some sitting and drinking, some standing at the bar. Two of them looked like bodyguards, one at each entrance, with a hand tucked deep inside
a jacket.

  Talk stopped when we came in and somebody turned down the music.

  They were older than I’d expected, too—midtwenties, early thirties. Cowboy hats and bright-colored shirts, and their cell phones either on the table in front of them or clipped to their belts.

  “Hola, hermano,” one seated man said. “Long time no see.”

  “Chaco,” Guillermo said with a nod. “I’m looking for my brother.”

  Chaco must have been the leader here, although only body language would have told you so. He wasn’t the oldest, strongest, or nastiest-looking of the crowd.

  “You can’t even say hello to your compañeros first? Ask how we are?” There was a dark, pumpkinseed tattoo under his left eye.

  Guillermo took two steps closer to the table, but ignored the question. “I want Carlos. Where is he?”

  A sinewy little guy next to Chaco whose soul-patch beard had grown into a long tangled dreadlock put his hand under the table. His forearm was marked with a three-inch XI tattoo. This must be the famous Bob Eleven that Stacey Kronwetter had mentioned.

  I put my hands to my sides, glancing behind me to make sure I was still more than an arm’s length away from the bodyguard at the door.

  “What do you want with that pussy? Is his mama calling him? Oh, Carlos! It’s time for dinner!”

  Guillermo lunged, upturning the table and twisting a handful of Chaco’s shirt at the neck. The kid with the XI tattoo wrenched Guillermo’s head back and jittered a knife against his bared neck. The bodyguards held their positions, but had their guns drawn and aimed at Guillermo’s heart.

  I reached slowly under my shirt and slid the little snubnose from my waistband. The gun was steady, just inches from Chaco’s head. “Basta! Let him go.”

  Surprise registered on Chaco’s face, but he nodded to the bodyguards and the guy with the knife. Guillermo got up, dusted himself off, and took the gun from me. He gestured to the three men between us and the door. They cleared a path and we backed out of the room.

  “I want Carlos,” he repeated at the door. “Nothing else.”

  “Hurry,” I said, looking back in expectation of a dozen armed men on our tail. My hand was still frozen into a shooter’s grip, unwilling to admit that I wasn’t holding the gun anymore.

  “No rush,” Guillermo said, handing the LadySmith back to me. “They know where to find me.”

  Stuffing the gun back into my waistband, I almost tripped over the dark car in front of me.

  “Careful,” Guillermo said with a smile. “Wouldn’t want to scratch Chaco’s new ride.” He raked a key from the front door all the way to the Cadillac’s taillight.

  We drove north, back through the center of the city. Three blocks shy of the border, my heart finally slowed to a normal rhythm.

  “Stop here,” I said.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Come with me. We need a dose of old Mexico.” I pulled Guillermo through the door and into a dark restaurant on the corner, bypassing the maître d’ and stopping a mariachi with a gourd-shaped guitar.

  “Do you know ‘El Niño Perdido’?”

  The man smiled and held out his hand. I gave him a ten and he waved one of his trumpeters off into the next room. A moment later, I heard the lonesome notes of the “lost child” coming from the distant trumpet. The nearby musicians repeated the phrase, calling the lost child home.

  “I wish it was that easy,” Guillermo said.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The strains of that trumpet still echoed in my head on Sunday morning.

  I missed my friend Catherine like she was a country I could no longer visit. We’d met in college, swimming mile after mile in adjacent lanes at the university pool at dawn, the water—that most precious of commodities in the desert—cradling us, wrapping us, pushing against us as we swam. Then we’d move into lazy backstrokes, taking turns to tell our stories, our dreams. I stood beside her when she married Glen. I wept when I first held her baby girl.

  It was beside another pool just three years ago that Catherine first told me about the abuse. Her marriage to Glen had disintegrated earlier in the year, leaving Catherine rudderless.

  “For years, I tried to tell myself it was all innocent, that Uncle Walter didn’t know what he was doing and how it hurt me.”

  “Are you saying your uncle abused you?” Catherine had only mentioned her aunt and uncle in passing, as the people who had raised her when her parents were killed. Good people. Churchgoers.

  She nodded. “It started when I was six. Katie’s going to be six soon.”

  How could I have known Catherine all these years and not known this? My stomach ached with the knowledge that she had kept the horror to herself for so long.

  “You’ve got to go to the cops.”

  Catherine shook her head.

  “What does your aunt say? Does she know what a danger he is?”

  “She never believed me. No one did.”

  “I believe you.”

  We’d go to the cops and to Children’s Services, I said. I didn’t know if they could charge Racine for molesting Catherine; it had been so long ago. At a bare minimum we could get their attention. They could put him on a watch list so that it didn’t happen again. Force the family to get him treatment.

  None of that had happened by the time Catherine died.

  Three weeks later, after I’d seen little Katie in Walter Racine’s arms, I did what Catherine would have wanted me to do.

  I needed sunshine and caffeine to shake off the memories of my last days with Catherine. I did a quick workout in the backyard, then sat on the porch with a café con leche.

  I was not ashamed of killing Racine, but doing it while Katie was there didn’t rest as easily on my conscience.

  I’d gone to great pains to make sure I had an alibi. Signing up for that continuing education course in Phoenix. Making the supposedly boneheaded move of parking at a fire hydrant once I got there, and leaving my car in the police impound all weekend. Hitchhiking back to Tucson where I borrowed my brother’s car while he was out of town.

  It was all the easier because it was Halloween. I’d worn a mask and a ghostly sheet over white jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t stand out from any other trick-or-treater on the street, even though I’d had to wait almost a half hour for Racine’s car to pull into the driveway.

  I hadn’t known Katie was with him that night. She was tucked into the backseat when I approached the car. I made him kneel and I shot him twice in the back of the head. I was turning away when I saw the little girl, her eyes wide with fear.

  She didn’t recognize me behind the mask and costume.

  “It’s okay, honey. You stay put. I’m going to lock the door so you’ll be safe. And I’ll call someone to come get you,” I’d said.

  “Are you an angel?”

  “Sort of.”

  I called the cops from a pay phone two miles away. The prosecutor, Ted Dresden, had tried to use that 911 tape against me at trial, but they couldn’t make a clear voice match so it didn’t do much damage.

  The last time I’d seen Katie was in the courtroom. Under delicate questioning by Dresden, she’d still insisted that a guardian angel had come to help her when her great-uncle had been killed.

  Katie would be almost nine now. Her father, Glen Chandliss, had moved to Colorado after the divorce and hadn’t interfered when Catherine’s aunt Elizabeth said she’d raise Katie. I wondered if she still lived out by Davis Monthan Airforce Base. It was midmorning on a weekend—they might still be home.

  I stashed the little .38 in a bucket under the kitchen sink and piled rags and cleaning products on top of it. I didn’t want to be driving around with a gun today if Sabin was anywhere nearby.

  Although I’d changed a lot in the last three years—the spiked blond hair, the tattoos, the muscles—I didn’t want either Katie or her great-aunt to recognize me today. I remembered all too clearly Elizabeth’s rage at me from the witness box. I put on running shorts
, a baseball cap, and oversized sunglasses as a minimal disguise.

  When I reached their neighborhood, I parked around the corner and jogged past the house. There was a five-foot stucco wall around the front yard; I couldn’t see much unless I got close to the property line and peeked in. I saw nothing on the first pass, so I continued down to the end of the block and circled back.

  I jogged in place, this time hearing girlish laughter from the front yard. There was an inch-wide gap between the wooden gate and the wall, giving me a thin slice of the courtyard. I took off the sunglasses and pretended to clean the lenses on the hem of my T-shirt.

  Two girls were drawing a complex maze of pathways on the sidewalk with colored chalk. One child, a blonde, was clearly the director of the drama, the other a passive but willing game player. The quiet girl looked up at the gate, and I saw Catherine’s eyes, recreated here before me in the body of a skinny, almost-nine-year-old girl. I started to cry.

  “Are you okay?” Katie asked, approaching the gate. She put her face right up against the gap. “Do you want a glass of water?”

  “I’m okay.” I sniffled and wiped my nose with the back of my hand.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Don’t talk to strangers!” the other girl called, dropping the chalk and taking Katie by the arm, then stage-whispering behind her hand, “It’s not polite to ask people why they’re crying.”

  “Lizzie!” Katie whined, drawing out each syllable.

  “You can ask,” I said. “I was crying because you remind me of my friend, Catherine.”

  “That was my mother’s name,” Katie said.

  I nodded. “It’s a beautiful name.”

  Guillermo’s call caught me at a red light.

  “They found Carlos’s car.”

  “Where? Is there any sign of him?”

  “All I’ve got is a message that says they found the car at Greyhound Park.”

  “I’ll meet you there.” I hung up, not giving him a chance to contradict me. It was a straight shot down Golf Links Road to the dog track on the south side of town. Twenty minutes later, I was there.