Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  A loudspeaker boomed across the half-empty parking lot and cheers erupted from the tiered stadium to the west. Empty cardboard boxes and grimy, loose papers swirled and eddied across the asphalt.

  I circled the eastern edge of the parking lot twice before I saw the tow truck and the South Tucson police car tucked behind a Dumpster on the other side.

  What made them notice the car in the first place? Was it parked in an illegal space? Had it crashed into something? Maybe Guillermo had filed a missing person’s report and some sharp-eyed cop had spotted the license plate.

  I didn’t have to get any closer to see the damage. The front and back bumpers were crumpled like blue wrapping paper and both headlights were broken out. One light dangled almost to the ground like some monster’s eye in a horror film, but it was clear that the damage hadn’t been caused by the Dumpster. I didn’t know how old the dents in the back were, but the front-end damage matched the collision Markson had described.

  Guillermo pulled up alongside my car, got out, and approached the South Tucson cops.

  “Tell them to call Detective Treadwell,” I said before he got too far away. “This may have been the car that hit Darren Markson that night.”

  Guillermo grimaced and turned back toward the two policemen. One of the officers leaned into Carlos’s car and pulled a child’s car seat from where it lay on the floor of the back seat. I joined them next to the Dumpster.

  “What would he have been doing with that?” I asked.

  Guillermo shook his head. “I don’t know. It wasn’t hooked in or anything. Just laying there.”

  “My God.” There was a bloody handprint on the plastic seat, just below the soft yellow duck-patterned fabric.

  It took Treadwell almost an hour to get there, and when he did he was quick to draw the same conclusion I had.

  “Get this car towed to Forensics,” he said. “And have them dust the child’s car seat for prints right away.”

  He turned to Guillermo. “Is your brother friends with anyone who would need an infant or toddler’s seat?”

  Guillermo shook his head. “Not that I can think of. But there’s lots of kids in the family.”

  The crowd roared from the stadium. It was either a close race or a big winner.

  “We’ll check the paint—see if it matches what we found on Markson’s—” Treadwell was interrupted by the arrival of Len Sabin, bringing his sedan to a brake-destroying stop just a few feet from my back bumper. Sabin hitched up his pants and joined the group, turning his back to me and facing Treadwell.

  “What are these two doing here?”

  “They’re the ones who called us in. No sign of the car’s owner, but it looks like this could be the vehicle involved in the attack on Darren Markson.”

  “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Sabin said, somehow suggesting that anything I was involved in must be nefarious.

  I ignored him and turned toward Treadwell. “Did Emily Markson say anything about her husband having a child’s seat in the car?” A twenty-pound seat, plus the thirty or thirty-five pounds of a toddler, could have been the weight of that seat-belted something I’d seen on the HandsOn printout.

  Treadwell said no, but made a note in a spiral-bound notebook.

  If there had been a child in Markson’s car, who was it? And where was he now?

  The police dismissed us and roped off the area around Carlos’s car. I leaned into Guillermo’s window as he clicked his seat belt into position. “Follow me back to my place.”

  He started the car, the radio coming to life with the engine. An Amos Lee song was playing, the sad resignation in his voice asking, “What in the world has come over you? What in heaven’s name have you done?”

  “Ah, Carlos.” He sighed, and his eyes filled with tears.

  Guillermo parked behind my truck in Bonita’s driveway and followed me inside, his eyes taking in the shabby, impermanent condition of the living room.

  “Are you moving in or out?”

  “Neither.” I explained about my sister’s departure to South America.

  I opened two beers and we tap-danced around the fear in the air for a few minutes.

  “What do you think happened to Carlos?” I finally asked.

  He hung his head. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t look good.”

  I perched on the edge of the yellow chair and put my arm around his shoulders. He moved back against my body, muscles knotted by either training or tension. “Tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  He told his story to the floor, as if I wasn’t even there. “He came by the rental yard to ask me to come work on his house. But he was really antsy, spacing out in the middle of the conversation, all wild-eyed, like somebody was sneaking up on him.”

  “Was he back on drugs?” Drugs and the Braceros would be a bad mix. And could be reason enough for someone to have gone after Felicia.

  “Just a little blow. Nothing like we’d been doing before.”

  “Did he say anything? Was anything bothering him?”

  “He was always talking about Felicia—how she was going to come live with him. He said he wanted to go back to school, maybe get into the construction business. He’d get quiet sometimes, but I didn’t get the idea anything was bothering him.” He hunched his shoulders, dislodging my hand.

  I couldn’t let it go unspoken anymore. “Do you think Carlos is the victim here—or the killer?”

  Guillermo bristled at the thought, then sighed.

  “Maybe both.”

  I heard the throaty roar of a big V8 outside, bragging on its horsepower and torque. I pulled the curtain to the side.

  It was the black low rider again, this time the song blasting from the windows was about the hazards of smuggling: “They take the load to the border but they won’t be paid. They’ll only get stopped at the checkpoint.” The four bandanaed bobbleheads in the car nodded and swayed to the beat. The guy in the front passenger seat stared at Guillermo’s car, then finger-shot me the way he had at the intersection on Friday.

  “Braceros. Did they follow us back here from Greyhound Park?” I asked Guillermo over my shoulder.

  “Maybe. If they’re holding Carlos then they probably would have had a watch on where they dumped his car, too.” He tossed his empty bottle into a cardboard box in the corner, unphased by the appearance of the gangstas in the street. “They probably followed me from the house. I told you they know where I live.”

  “Should we tell the cops?” I may have done jail time, but that didn’t mean that I was blasé about armed felons hanging around my house. In some ways, I was still a regular citizen.

  “Tell them what? That the Braceros have moved their influence north to Tucson? They already know that. And I don’t come from a background that’s particularly comfortable running to the cops with information.”

  Just like Raisa Fortas’s young Latina client who wouldn’t give up the names of the coyotes who helped her cross the border.

  “Are the Braceros still bringing in illegals?”

  He rolled his eyes at my naiveté.

  “Anything to do with kids?” There had to be some reason that Carlos’s car had a child seat in it.

  He grabbed my hand. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m serious. The Braceros bring across illegals. Carlos was hooked up with them again. And now there’s this bloody handprint on a child’s car seat.” This was a whole different kind of sin against children than I’d faced with Walter Racine, but it made my skin crawl just thinking about it. Kidnapping for ransom? Illegal adoptions? The child slave trade? Pedophile rings?

  Guillermo took my face in his hands. “Listen to me. We don’t know anything yet. We don’t know where that car seat came from. We don’t know who last drove Carlos’s car. We don’t know if it had anything to do with Markson’s death or Felicia getting blown up. We don’t know if it has anything to do with children at all.”

  “And we don’t know where Carlos is,” I finishe
d for him.

  “I’ll find him.” The screen door slapped shut behind him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three separate mysteries and I didn’t know enough about any of them. Who had killed Darren Markson? Who had blown up Felicia Villalobos? And what had happened to Carlos Ochoa?

  I didn’t have the resources or capability of the police force, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t ask questions.

  One of the directions I’d been sidetracked from was learning more about Felicia. Okay, she was doing well in school. She wanted to be a lawyer. She had a lover she had to hide from her father. I wondered if there was any more family around. Any siblings? And what had happened to her mother? I called Juan Villalobos.

  “I’m the teacher who came by the other day. We’re planning a memorial newsletter about Felicia and I wanted to make sure we had all the details right.”

  “Uh-huh.” His voice still sounded dull and slow with the pain.

  “Did Felicia have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Two sisters. They’re with their mother in Chihuahua. Her abuela has cancer, and they’re all staying to take care of her.”

  “Of course…”

  “I couldn’t take care of all three girls myself. The little ones are only seven and nine. They’re going to come join me and Felicia when—” He hiccupped a half-sob.

  “I understand.”

  “Felicia, she was almost an adult. Such a good girl.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Villalobos. We’ll be in touch when—”

  “Oh, Miss…um…could you return some books for me?”

  Books? Had his grief focused on the tiniest things—those that he thought he could handle without splintering under the weight? Don’t deal with the funeral arrangements. Stay arm’s length away from thinking about the blast that tore your little girl apart. Don’t look at the scorched earth in front of the house. But make sure you return Felicia’s overdue library books? My own version of focus-on-the-stuff-you-can-deal-with was to put pennies and nickels in rolls. Somehow, those paper tubes gave me a sense of order and peace in an uncontrollable world.

  “Of course, how can I help you?”

  “She had some office binders here, you know, for her internship. Some project she was working on for her sponsor. They may want it back.”

  That’s right. Somebody (Her father? That homeroom teacher?) had said something about Felicia having an internship. “I’d be happy to deliver it for you. Who’s her sponsor?”

  “I don’t have a person’s name, just the company. It’s a law firm. Willard, Levin and Pratt.”

  Holy shit.

  “Detective Treadwell,” he answered.

  “Deke, Felicia Villalobos was doing an internship at Paul Willard’s law office.”

  To his credit, Treadwell didn’t ask who was calling, but it did take him a second to catch up.

  “She was?”

  “Yep. Remember, she was in prelaw classes at Cholla? And she wanted to be a lawyer? Well, guess what? She wound up doing work for the guy who’s fucking Darren Markson’s widow.”

  “Language, Jessie. Language.”

  I had to smile. Deke Treadwell would never think of me as an adult.

  “What are you going to do about it? There’s your link between Darren Markson and Felicia Villalobos, right there.”

  “I’m going to ask Willard about it. Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  I thought it was much more than that, but had to remind myself that I’d used that same argument with Detective Sabin, urging him to understand that my proximity to both Markson’s and Felicia’s death was just bad luck. “Can I be there?”

  “No.”

  “Will you tell me what he says?”

  “No. Thanks for digging this up, Jessie. If there’s anything to it, you’ll hear about it one way or another. But stay out of this.”

  “Why? Len Sabin thinks I’m already up to my neck in it.”

  “Then don’t prove him right.”

  He hung up without saying good-bye.

  Who could help me find out more about Willard’s law firm? Another lawyer, that’s who. I called Raisa.

  “Serves me right for giving a client my home phone number,” she said. “I used to have Sunday nights to myself.”

  There was no background noise on the call. No TV, no music or laughter, no banging pots and pans. I wasn’t sure I’d interrupted much of anything. Not risking annoying her, I put my curiosity on hold for twelve hours.

  “Can I buy you breakfast before work in the morning?”

  We met in the Blue Willow parking lot at seven and were the fourth group in, even though they were just opening the doors. A thin woman with a ponytail and a peaceful smile showed us to a corner table in the sunny, brick-floored patio. Birdsong and the sound of a fountain greeted us, but no other diners were close by. I asked for the tofu scramble and fresh salsa. After decrying her cholesterol level, Raisa ordered the massive avocado and jack cheese omelette.

  “What can you tell me about Willard, Levin and Pratt?” I asked after the food arrived.

  “They’re major-league pricks. They pay well. They want your soul. They never settle out of court.” She buttered a piece of toast and took a bite.

  “Are they really jerks or just tough negotiators?”

  She put down her fork. “They were defending this pharmaceutical company against damages for a side effect from its drug to treat Parkinson’s disease. This guy, a normal family man, had only gambled once or twice a year, maybe on office pools or at a local casino. But right after he started taking this drug for his Parkinson’s, he turned into this compulsive gambler. Couldn’t walk away, even when he knew it was time to quit. He lost everything—his house, savings, everything he owned. Anyway, WL and P wanted to nip it in the bud before it became a class-action suit, so they brought in all these experts, and dug into the guy’s life. Came up with every other time that this guy had ever gambled—even if it was just church raffles—and showed that he made really lousy bets. They said he was such a bad gambler that he would have wound up losing his savings anyway. The jury bought it. The guy committed suicide the next day.”

  “Because he lost the case?”

  “No. His wife said somebody had left him notes about his family being better off with him dead. That he’d ruined them with his bankruptcy and this was the only way to fix it.”

  “Was there any proof it was WL and P?”

  She shook her head and took another bite of the eggs. “Nothing they can prove. But I overheard Marcus Pratt in the hallway the next day joking about suicide being the next side effect they’d be accused of. He got a big kick out of it.”

  “Do you know anything about the other principals? Levin? Or Willard?”

  “Levin comes from a family of German Jews that emigrated to Sonora, Mexico, almost a century ago, but I’ve never worked with him. And Willard doesn’t do criminal cases so I haven’t been up against him in a courtroom, but he sure knows how to turn on the charm at the ABA meetings.”

  I told her about Willard’s connection to Felicia Villalobos and to the wife of the murdered man I’d overheard at HandsOn that Friday night.

  “I would have thought he was too savvy to get involved with a client’s wife. Just goes to show, nobody’s immune to love.”

  “Have you ever met Willard’s wife?”

  “She’s a former Miss Mexico City, or something like that. Gorgeous. And she’s supposed to have a temper.”

  “Is Willard the kind of guy who would oversee a high school intern directly?”

  “Probably not. None of the principals would, really. Felicia was probably doing some filing or transcription for one of the secretaries.”

  “But she would have been around the office.” That proximity was enough for me. Markson-to-Willard-to-Felicia was less than six degrees of separation.

  Raisa surreptitiously rubbed her hip and thigh.

  “Leg acting up?” She’d been born a few years too early for the arr
ival of the polio vaccine to the Ukraine.

  “Just a bit.” She scootched her legs to the side and levered herself up.

  I paid the bill and helped her into her car. She attached the seat belt and stopped to light a cigarette before starting the car.

  “You’re not getting involved in this investigation, right, Jessie? We don’t need one more reason for Len Sabin to think you’re in the middle of this.”

  “I won’t get involved at all,” I lied.

  Lying came easier these days, I thought, resting between five-minute punishments with the bungee-cord jump rope. It was the prosecutor, Ted Dresden, who had first dubbed me the Queen of Liars Anonymous. His case had been thorough, his evidence damning.

  His witnesses testified that I had threatened Racine. He could prove that I knew where Catherine’s gun was, and that I knew how to shoot it. He had my fingerprints on Walter Racine’s car from when I leaned in the window to console Katie.

  Worst of all, the cops on the witness stand said Walter Racine was innocent; he’d done nothing to Catherine or her daughter. Horseshit. I had seen him in the playground with Katie just the week before I killed him. His hands had lingered too long when he straightened her tights, hadn’t they? And his eyes had been too glassy and wistful as he watched her pump higher on the swing. It wasn’t proof, but after Catherine’s chilling tale of her childhood, it was enough for me.

  Dresden’s summary to the jury left me red-faced with shame, but still not enough to confess. “She’s lied to you about everything,” he said. “About believing that the system would take care of Walter Racine…about not returning to Catherine’s home for the gun…about not taking the law into her own hands. If there was a twelve-step program for liars like there is for alcoholics and gamblers, Jessica Gammage would be its queen and founder and president. And now she wants you to become liars, too. Lying to yourself about who killed Walter Racine. There is no reasonable doubt here, ladies and gentlemen. There’s not even the shadow of a doubt. There is nothing here but Jessica Gammage’s lies.”

  I denied it, of course. Not the part about trying to stop Racine, but the part about pulling the trigger.