by Louise Ure
I had to get rid of my clothes and shoes before the cops showed up. First, I ran my jeans and sweatshirt through a commercial laundry on Campbell, then dropped them into two separate Goodwill bins five miles apart. The bloody Doc Martens got tossed into a pile of burning tires at the city dump.
I was back home by eight o’clock, with a big cardboard cup of coffee and a dozen donut holes in hand. Grief demanded sugar and fat.
The next few hours would be the hard part—acting normal until I heard that things weren’t.
Guillermo called at one o’clock.
“They’ve found Carlos.” I wondered who else was in the room with him. I waited.
“They say he’s been dead at least three days. They won’t know exactly how long for a while.” The autopsy would confirm his time of death, but that Brazil nut-colored skin, and that fetid, thick smell of decay made me think he’d been dead a long time.
“I’m so sorry,” I said for the benefit of anyone else listening. “Do you want me to come over?”
“Not right now. The police want to search Carlos’s house and mine. Just to make sure there’s nothing there that can help them.”
“Of course.” We hung up, each cocooned in our web of misery and lies.
Treadwell and Sabin got to me at three o’clock. Standing side by side in the living room, they looked like a basset hound and a weasel had made friends.
“Sorry I don’t have more chairs,” I said, seated on the one remaining dining room chair from Bonita’s set. Treadwell eyed the beanbag chair with distrust and shifted his weight from foot to foot.
“We found Carlos Ochoa’s body this morning,” he said.
“His brother called me a couple of hours ago. Where was he?”
“Behind a house on the east side of town. It looks like the Braceros might have been involved.”
“Does that mean they killed Markson, too?”
“Maybe, they—”
“Where were you last night, Ms. Dancing?” Sabin interrupted. “From say midnight till six this morning.”
“I was here. I had some friends over earlier, but they left by midnight or so.”
“We’ll need their names and numbers,” Sabin said, not giving away the fact that he probably just got the same list from Guillermo. He handed me the search warrant as casually as if it were a cocktail napkin.
“Getting better about getting your paperwork in order, huh, guys? No more forgotten subpoenas?”
Treadwell looked at his hands. “It has to be done, Jessie. Just so we can clear you and move on.”
“Right. I’ll be out back. Let me know when you’re done.” The gash across my calf was throbbing and it was all I could do not to groan as I stood up.
Sabin was entering the tiny bedroom by the time I hit the back door. I hoped their search warrant didn’t extend to the vehicles out front. Since I hadn’t fired the new LadySmith at the Braceros’ place, I didn’t think I had to get rid of it. But it wasn’t licensed, so I still didn’t want them to find it. After Guillermo had left this morning, I’d hunkered down next to the honeysuckle vine where I couldn’t be seen by the neighbors, and tucked it inside the hubcap on the right front wheel of the VW.
The wait was excruciating. I wished I were a smoker. A magician. Anything to keep my hands busy. “Hey, Deke, can you bring me a beer?” I called over my shoulder.
“Get it yourself,” he said, coming to the screen door. He backed away as I came in, and watched me take out the beer and twist off the cap like he’d never seen such an operation before.
“Sure I’m not screwing up any evidence here, Deke?” I took a long swig from the bottle. This was the guy who was supposed to have believed in my innocence, at least in Walter Racine’s death. I guess that courtesy didn’t extend to any other unsolved murders in his jurisdiction.
He shut the refrigerator door. “I don’t know you anymore, Jessie. Where did this anger come from? You’ve got this chip on your shoulder that’s gonna knock you over if it gets any bigger.”
“Being suspected of murder will do that to you.” He was right about the rage, but being accused of murder was only part of it. It had started when I couldn’t get the cops to help protect Catherine’s daughter. It had built when my mother pushed me away. It had taken on boulder-size dimensions now that there seemed to be another child in danger out there and no one seemed to care.
I took a deep breath. “Can you arrest the Braceros for killing Carlos?” I asked.
“Arrest who? There were two dead bodies there, Carlos and another Mexican guy. Maybe he was a Bracero, but if he was, who killed him? This may be part of a gang war or it may not.”
Sabin came out of the bathroom and shook his head, then moved out to the front yard.
“This truck yours?”
I tried not to limp as I followed him out. “Yes.”
“I’ll need the keys.”
I lobbed them to him underhand. He pawed through the toolbox and the cab of the truck, reaching deep beneath the seats to unearth a McDonald’s wrapper and a forgotten packet of tissues. I would have thrown away the length of chain and the bolt cutters, but Guillermo’s cousins had taken both with them. I hoped they didn’t turn up in any search; the police might find my fingerprints on them, or be able to match the blade of the bolt cutter to the broken chain-link fence.
“The VW’s yours, too?” Sabin said, approaching the little car.
“No. That’s my sister’s.”
“It’s not part of the warrant,” Treadwell offered.
“I don’t see why not. The house is her sister’s, too, and we can search that.” The frustration was clear in his voice.
Treadwell met him at the VW’s door, but his voice still carried to me. “The warrant’s pretty clear. The house and her car.”
“Then let’s get it amended to include the other car.”
“There’s no indication she had anything to do with this, Len.” Treadwell looked back over his shoulder at me.
I gave them my best liar’s face—no guile, no worry. If they got into the VW, they’d find the LadySmith. I didn’t want to lose a second gun or give the cops an excuse to hassle me for buying one illegally.
“Let’s see if her DNA matches the blood at the scene,” Sabin said, then turned to me. “We’d like you to come down to headquarters with us. Give us a sample of your DNA.”
My brain was speed-dialing Raisa.
“Look, guys, I’ve tried to be cooperative here. I never met Carlos Ochoa and have nothing to do with his death. Anything else you want to know, you can contact my lawyer, Raisa Fortas.” I started back into the house. The last thing I needed was a police photo of the gash on my leg and a match of my DNA to the blood in the garage.
“I’m not done with you yet,” Sabin warned. “This one’s a long, slow dance.” He was close enough that I could smell the butterscotch on his breath.
Treadwell shook his head and followed his partner back to their car.
I made it to the kitchen, rested my head against one of the thin wooden cabinets, and threw up into the sink.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“No, they didn’t contact me,” Raisa said over a takeout dinner at her house that night. “And they had no business asking for DNA. No probable cause at all.”
“They asked Guillermo, too. He gave them a sample.” I was sorry he had. It made me look guilty by comparison.
“I would have given him the same advice. You shouldn’t even have talked to them, Jessie. Don’t answer their questions unless I’m there.” She added salsa to the chile relleno in front of her, then put down her fork without taking a bite.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She pushed her plate aside and lit a cigarette. “It’s just too much of the same thing. I’ve got another defendant, a man crossing the border with his family. He killed the coyote that met them on the U.S. side and the prosecutor is going after him for capital murder. How do you say it? ‘Same circus, different clowns’?”
“What can you do for him?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe get him a plea bargain. I really don’t want to take this to trial with the way people are screaming about the border crossers right now. Even if he did have a good reason for killing him.”
“What’s that?” I could think of one reason that was good enough for me, but she didn’t need to know that.
“The coyote had taken their little girl away from them. Said she was part of the price of crossing.”
“Just like that other woman you were defending before. Isn’t that considered a defense of yourself or your family? Trying to stop a kidnapping?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes juries forget those little details when it’s an illegal immigrant on trial. Or they think the defendant’s lying, that he killed the guy to get out of paying for the crossing.”
“Were they part of a group? Maybe the others can confirm the story.”
“Most of them have already been deported. The rest aren’t exactly the best character witnesses.”
“I’m sorry to get you tangled up in my problems,” I said. “You’ve got enough of your own.”
She patted my hand, then lit the tip of a second cigarette from the one she had going. “You’re not a problem. You’re a challenge.”
I packed up the remains of our dinner. “How young a child?”
“Hmmm?” Her mind had already moved on to something else. The public defender’s office, while not shorthanded, was notorious for heavy caseloads.
“Your client. How old is his little girl?”
“Four, I think. No, five. Why?”
“No reason.” The Braceros had a reputation for bringing illegals across the border. And Carlos, a former Bracero who had some kind of problem with one of their operations, had had an unnecessary child’s seat in his car: a car seat that might have weighed sixty pounds if it had a five-year-old child in it. A car seat just like the one Darren Markson had purchased. And now they were both dead. It wasn’t ironclad, but the facts didn’t dispute a connection.
“Did the dead coyote have any ties to the Braceros?”
She looked up. “He was from Nogales, but I haven’t heard about any gang ties.”
“Maybe you should look into it.”
I told her about my thin chain of logic. “I’m not saying that this specific little girl had anything to do with Carlos Ochoa, just that it seems like part of the same operation.”
She nodded, thinking.
“I’d like to talk to him,” I said.
“Who?”
“Your client.”
“No way, Jessie. The police told you that a young Mexican man was killed along with Carlos, right? And they’re asking questions about that. So what do you want to do? Get right in the middle of another killing?”
She was right. Sabin would take that as a sign that our “long, slow dance” had just become a tango.
“Where did your defendant come across?”
She named a stretch of land west of Nogales that was still designated as “wilderness” on most maps.
I’d set my phone to Vibrate, and that’s what it was doing now. “Jessie?” Guillermo said. “I’m on my way over. I need to borrow something.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m on my way to see Jorge. Can you meet me at your place in ten minutes?”
Jorge, the guy who’d sent us to that red-tile roofed house. The one who swore that Chaco hadn’t put him up to it. The one who had betrayed Guillermo’s trust. I knew what he wanted to borrow.
“Make it fifteen.”
Guillermo was waiting in the shadows on the porch.
“About last night,” he started. “I hope I didn’t hurt you. I just…” His explanation trailed off in the evening air.
“Don’t worry. I understand.” In some ways I wished he hadn’t stopped himself last night. We both needed the release of fierce, urgent sex to drive back the darkness, to prove that life could go on. But it wouldn’t have been lovemaking, and that’s what I wanted from Guillermo.
“Jorge knew they’d be waiting for us,” he said, changing the subject. “He knew Carlos was already dead.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
He got up from his squat on the concrete porch. “Well, we’re going to find out.”
First checking the street for passersby or cops on surveillance, I retrieved the gun from its hiding place in the VW’s hubcap.
“Are we going back to the bar?” I asked, buckling myself into Guillermo’s car.
“No. He’s at his aunt’s house tonight. I had my mother make some calls.”
“Does she know why you were asking?” I’d never met his mother, but couldn’t imagine that she would countenance an attack on her best friend’s nephew, even if he did play a role in killing her son.
He shook his head.
I told him about dinner with Raisa, and my hypothesis that the Braceros were involved with taking children from their parents when they crossed the border.
“It’s not much of a leap from what they have been doing, muling both drugs and people across the border.”
“But if they’re taking the kids, either for sale or for ransom, that could be what Carlos and Felicia were trying to stop.”
He didn’t answer, but only because he had no answer to give. My hypothesis painted Carlos in a good light, but no reason was good enough right now for Guillermo to have lost a brother.
We parked on a narrow side street downtown, just around the corner from the purple and cinnamon-hued buildings of La Placita Village. What had once been a quiet, dark part of town after the sun went down was now home to outdoor movies on the plaza, with hundreds of visitors sitting in plastic chairs or lounging against the stone steps, miming the dialogue to The Maltese Falcon or The Wizard of Oz in the evening air.
The house looked like one of the original adobes built at the turn of the twentieth century, but was more likely one of the replicas that had taken their places just a decade ago. It was not as passionately colored as its neighbors, but a bright coat of whitewash made it glow like a pearl in the night.
I waited in the car while Guillermo went inside. He came out five minutes later, holding Jorge by the scruff of his neck, herding the teenager toward the car.
“Watch him,” he said, handing me the LadySmith. Jorge got in the front seat and I got in the back. Guillermo put the car in gear and glided back into downtown traffic. Moviegoers and downtown diners merged and eddied on the sidewalks. The air smelled of spicy beef.
“I’m telling you, I didn’t know about Carlos!” the kid complained. “I never would have sent you there if I knew they were waiting.”
“Forget it, hermano. I know you didn’t mean to do it. But I do want to know who was talking about the house with the red-tile roof.”
“I can’t—I don’t remember.”
Guillermo was silent for the rest of the ride, stopping once to buy a bottle of tequila at a liquor store on Speedway. We headed west, toward the darkness of Gates Pass. He parked at the summit and we scrambled around saguaros and over truck-sized boulders to claim a bird’s-eye view of the city from the peak.
“Here, Jorge. Take a drink.”
The kid, who looked like he hadn’t changed clothes from the baggy black pants and undershirt he’d been wearing when I met him, declined the offer.
“I said drink.” Guillermo pulled Jorge’s head back by the hair and upended the bottle in his mouth. The teenager sputtered and choked on the burning liquid.
“Now who was it that told you about the house?”
The kid fought him and Guillermo slapped him across the face. He forced more liquor down his throat.
“When they find your body at the bottom, they’ll think you were drunk—tripped out here in the dark.” He dangled Jorge over the edge by the back of his thin shirt.
“That’s enough,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“Sure
he does, don’t you, Jorge.” He backhanded him, sending Jorge sprawling into a low clump of cholla cactus.
The kid picked a fist-sized blade of cactus from his ear and gave up. “It was Chaco and Ricky Lamas. I don’t think they knew I heard them.” I’d met Chaco, but Ricky’s name was familiar, too, one of those that Felicia’s friend had given me that day at the mall.
“Oh, they knew, all right. What day did you hear this conversation?”
“I don’t know…” He searched around him for the answer in the sand. “Last weekend. Maybe Saturday.”
Guillermo kicked at the sandy soil, then flung the bottle of tequila over the edge of the cliff. It broke like childhood dreams on the rocky terrain below. “Carlos was already dead by then. You helped them set me up.”
He was already back in the car with the engine running by the time Jorge and I had picked and stumbled our way off the mountaintop.
The plaza wasn’t as busy with pedestrians when we returned. Late diners still strolled and window-shopped, but the cinema crowd was gone. We let Jorge out a block away from his aunt’s house.
“You set me up once, Brother, don’t do it again,” Guillermo warned. “If Chaco finds out about tonight, I’ll know.”
Jorge ducked his head and tucked his T-shirt back into his pants. “He won’t know from me. Hey,” he called back over his shoulder. “I really am sorry about Carlos.”
Guillermo didn’t even turn his head.
“We have to take the battle to them,” he said when we were halfway home.
“To the Braceros?”
“Right to their front door.”
Guillermo stayed the night and this time I could call it lovemaking. I left the electric fan on high but turned off the light. We rolled into each other’s arms as if it were a dance we both knew by heart. Guillermo’s wet tongue chilled me as he moved up from my ankle to my groin. I let it wash over me in sweet welcome waves.
“Are you ready for a trip?” he asked as we shared a beer afterward. “We leave in the morning.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
In the morning, Guillermo said he needed a couple of hours to get ready. While he was gone, I packed for survival, not knowing if I was going to be following him down an alley or across the desert. I loaded a backpack with water, beef jerky, and spare socks, but I left the gun at home. The switchblade I’d bought in Quartzsite rested inside my right boot.