by Louise Ure
He turned, picked up the book on Francis Bacon, and thumbed it open. “‘A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green.’” He still had a taste of the barrio in his accent.
“‘Revenge is sweet and not fattening.’ Alfred Hitchcock,” I countered.
He smiled but didn’t move to hand over the knife.
I reached for his arm and he stiffened. “Miguel, it’s for Carlos. You’ve got to trust me. It won’t come back to you.”
He finally gave in. “All right. Take it. But I’m not taking that butter knife of yours. I’ll get another one.” He drew the knife from its sheath and handed it to me.
I tucked it into a pocket in my purse.
Back in the car, I took Miguel’s knife and depressed the lever near my thumb. A black blade shot out of the front, razor sharp on both sides, with a wavy line of serrations on one edge. It was shorter than the knife I’d tried to give him but looked twice as deadly. He’d made a good attempt at cleaning it, but there—under the cross guard and inside that hidden channel—was what looked like a spot of dried blood. It would have been enough to hang him. I hoped it was enough to hang somebody else.
I wiped any prints off both the blade and the handle, then used a Kleenex over my thumb to depress the lever one more time and retract the blade.
There were a couple of ways I could plant this knife on the Braceros. Maybe I could get it inside the black truck we’d stolen yesterday, and then get the cops to tow the truck in for some violation. If the truck was still there, of course. I wished that I’d come up with this idea before we’d abandoned the damn thing on South Fourth.
I circled the block four times, hoping that I’d misremembered a landmark or a cross street. The truck was gone. Damn, our open-door policy had worked too well.
There was another, more difficult option, and for that I needed Guillermo. He wouldn’t be back for hours, but there was something else I could do in the meantime.
Felicia’s notebook had listed the details for six day-care centers funded by Darren Markson in Tucson and Nogales. I no longer believed that Markson was a saint who was paying for the day-care centers out of the goodness of his heart. And if the Braceros were tied in with him in stealing or selling children, I’d bet those facilities were somehow involved.
The oldest of the facilities was out by the airport. I parked the Subaru next to a blue Taurus in the lot. The day-care center looked like an elementary school that was short on classrooms and long on recess. Sandboxes, swings, and slides dotted one corner of the dusty yard like Christmas gifts in the Sahara. There was a blacktop basketball court and a soccer field with chalked sidelines drawn into the dirt. Two picnic tables with umbrellas were the only places to rest rather than run.
All the kids in the yard looked like Latinos, but the massive woman watching them was black.
“I’m interested in enrolling my little one,” I called to her. “Is there someone here I could talk to?”
She fanned herself with a People magazine. “I don’t know if we have any more space, but Mrs. Pogue is inside. You can ask her.”
I followed the sidewalk to a metal door in the dun-colored building. There were bathrooms marked BOYS and GIRLS on the right, and two window-walled offices on the left, then the hallway opened into a big gathering room/play area. The first of the offices was dark, with the blinds pulled down, but light and voices came from the second.
“You’re going to have to keep them a little longer,” a woman said.
“That’s not possible. The children—” Another woman’s voice sputtered to a stop when she turned in my direction. “May I help you?”
“What are you doing here?” Emily Markson said.
Emily occupied one of the two guest chairs in the office. I couldn’t see past her to see the other person.
“You know her?” the older woman on the other side of the desk asked. She was middle-aged, with thin lips, gray-rooted blond hair, and the posture of a dictator. She tapped her forefinger on the desk with impatience. The nutritionist I’d worked out with at a gym in Phoenix would have diagnosed those white lines across her nails as a liver problem. My mother would have said that each white line indicated a lie.
“She works for that car navigation company—HandsFree or something,” Markson said. She didn’t seem particularly unhappy to see me, just surprised.
“No she doesn’t,” the third woman said. “She’s the journalist who came to interview me. Remember, Em? I told you all about it.”
Damn. What was Aloma Willard doing here, too? And how could I be both a journalist from Tucson and a HandsOn operator from Phoenix?
“Hi, Mrs. Markson. Mrs. Willard. What a coincidence. I was just following up on your husbands’ charitable work building these day-care centers—for a magazine article.”
“You’re a journalist? But I thought—” Mrs. Markson started.
“I left HandsOn. This is a new job. Sorry to interrupt you. I’ll come back when it’s more convenient.” I backed out faster than I’d come in.
“Make an appointment next time,” the woman I assumed was Mrs. Pogue called after me.
I raced back outside and ducked around the corner of the building, still keeping an eye on the Taurus in the lot. They didn’t know my brother’s car; hopefully they would assume I’d gone.
Emily Markson and Aloma Willard came out ten minutes later, their voices low but urgent. Markson shrugged off Willard’s grip on her elbow, spinning her away. The fight continued after they got in the car, first with pointed fingers and steely glances, then finally reconciliation of a kind I hadn’t expected. Aloma Willard reached across the front seat and took Markson’s face in her hands. She spoke directly and softly to her, brushing Markson’s cheekbones and eyebrows with a gentle finger. Then she leaned forward and kissed her slowly on the lips.
Guillermo had a bench and a full set of weights under the ramada at the back of his house and I made good use of them, although I still couldn’t do anything like a squat with the tear across my calf.
Had I totally misread the adultery I’d imagined when I saw Paul Willard leave the Marksons’ house at dawn? Who was Emily Markson having an affair with? The husband? The wife? Both?
I was still feeling the burn in my biceps when Guillermo pulled into the driveway.
“Where did you leave the Delgados?”
“There’s a church in Phoenix associated with the same group Eldon and Polly Dallas belong to. As long as the church members can say they didn’t help anyone get across the border, and they don’t know for sure that they’re here illegally, they can help them.”
“Are the Delgados still going to try for the San Fernando Valley?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. They’ll stay in Phoenix a few days, then make a decision.” I hoped they’d find someplace safe. The life of an undocumented worker wasn’t easy, whether it was in the fields or in the back room of a restaurant.
“Do you know where Chaco lives?” I asked, changing the subject. I knew where the Bracero leader’s uncle’s house was, and where he drank, but not where he slept.
“I think Esteban does. Chaco moved up here to Tucson about six months ago, but still hangs out in Nogales most of the time. Why?”
“I need to get into his house.”
“Are you nuts? We killed one of his men, Jessie.” He opened the refrigerator then shut the door, not finding what he wanted. I handed him my half-full bottle of cold water and he drained it in one gulp.
“I’ve got a way to put Chaco right in the cops’ crosshairs, but I’ll need that address.”
He shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Not if he’s not there.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“Look, the cops are already after me. There’s nothing I can do about that except turn their attention to someone else. I don’t want that someone to be you, to have them thinking you had something to do with Carlos’s death. Go see your mother. She needs you right now. I’ll be fine.”
He sighed. “Let me make a call.”
A few muttered moments later he had the answer. “He’s got a place in the Tucson Mountains.”
“But he’s probably down in Nogales right now, right?”
“Friday afternoon? I guarantee it. He’s drinking and getting ready for Friday-night business.”
I hoped he was right.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
If I had a lot of money and lived in Tucson, the Tucson Mountains west of the city is where I’d live. Just as tony as the residential areas in the Catalinas, but far more private, with houses a half mile apart and backing up to the protected Saguaro National Park lands. Dark volcanic rock ripped through the dirt into sawtoothed ridges. It was a world of brown and gray and merciless sun.
Chaco’s house was a good indication of his arrogance. Single story, mortar-washed burnt adobe, with no perimeter fence, no cameras, and no guard dogs that I could see. It sat alone on the far side of a dry gully that looked as if it had last seen water during the Middle Ages. The house bespoke a man with nothing to hide and that was probably true on this side of the border. I didn’t think Chaco would keep anything here that would incriminate him in a U.S. courtroom, and I wasn’t going to change that. I wasn’t here to leave something; I was here to take it.
I pulled into the U-shaped driveway, parked by the front door, and rang the bell. A hollow echo from inside was the only response.
There was no other house within sight, but just in case somebody with binoculars could see me, I pretended to check the time on my watch and tap my foot impatiently for a moment, before “remembering” that I was supposed to go around back. I scuffed my way around the side of the house, obscuring my footprints as much as I could. A scorpion, looking like a tiny lobster with a cramp in his tail, scuttled sideways out of my path. I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.
There was no easy entrance on the north side, nor the back of the house, although the sliding glass door back there was tempting. Too obvious. I’d have to leave broken glass everywhere.
I was in luck on the south side of the building. Someone had left a bathroom window cracked open two inches with only a screwed-on screen for protection. A little jimmying with my Swiss Army knife and a slit along the edge of the screen was enough to get my hand in and on the window crank.
Once it was open, I hauled myself up and in. The house was so quiet you could hear the refrigerator hum. I tiptoed down a dark hallway and into the living room. Chaco had a taste for modern furnishings, all black leather and sharp angles against a concrete floor dyed bloodred. Bright woven throw rugs were the only nod to his Mexican ancestry.
I tried the kitchen first, using sleeve-covered fingers to open cupboards and drawers. Everybody has a spare set of car keys. Where would Chaco keep his? The kitchen drawer that I would have used as a catchall held only coins—both American and Mexican—and menus from takeout restaurants downtown. The cupboards had four of everything—mugs, glasses, plates—but there were no fancy pots and pans or exotic appliances. It looked like he did most of his dining as takeout. There were no drawers in the sleek modern tables in the living room.
The bedroom was more reflective of the gangbanger I’d met in that Nogales bar: a furry tiger-stripe bedspread on an unmade bed, a set of weights including an Olympic barbell with a hundred pounds of plates fastened on it, and a velvet painting of an Aztec warrior with his shield and arm raised in a victory cry. I skirted a metal footlocker at the end of the bed and headed to the small table on the far side of the room.
I’d found Chaco’s catchall drawer. I pulled my shirtsleeve down over my hand again and opened the drawer. A fifty pack of banana-flavored Durex condoms. The receipt for a car stereo with a ten-inch subwoofer. Two comic books about Araña Verde—the Green Spider. And there, tucked under the paper and magazines, two sets of keys.
One set were house keys, maybe to his uncle’s place or a storage unit, but the other was what I was looking for: the spare keys to his Cadillac.
I shoved the keys into my pocket and backtracked through the hallway and out the bathroom window, winding it almost shut just like I’d found it.
I stopped for a cold drink at a convenience store on Stone, making sure that my brother’s car was outside the range of the store’s camera, but that I was caught on their video, to give myself time-stamped proof of being in Tucson. Then I headed south.
As much as I wanted the car near me for a quick getaway, I couldn’t afford to have any record of the trip to Nogales this afternoon. I parked in the same lot where we’d left Guillermo’s car before.
I’d been concerned about an ID check at the border. Our last visit to Nogales would have been shown as an entry, but no return to the U.S. since we’d walked through the desert to get north. When a scan of my passport on the U.S. side didn’t result in any alarms going off, I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried through the Mexican security area.
I stuck to the side streets to get to the Braceros’ hangout. A block away, I hunkered down in an alley with a narrow view of the bar’s parking lot and front door. The smell of rotting tomatoes and moldy beans rose from the dumpster at my side and I sweated in the still air, almost screaming when a fat brown rat crawled over my shoe. Nobody went in or out of the bar, but there, in the second row of parked cars, sat a midnight blue Cadillac like the one I was looking for.
With no traffic from either direction, I ran across the street, then hugged the buildings to stay out of sight of the bar. Getting down in a duck-walk made my calf scream, but it was the only way to reach the Cadillac unseen. I inched my way down the row. Yep, the same key scratch ran down the side of the car.
I pushed the unlock button on the Cadillac key and the lock released. Opening the passenger-side door just wide enough to get my shoulders through, I made a small slit in the carpeting on the floor and tucked Miguel’s knife up tight against the car’s frame. Then I closed the door as quietly as I could and clicked the lock shut again.
Mad Cow, my buddy at HandsOn up in Phoenix, would never have believed my story if I had called and asked her to do a remote unlock on a car I didn’t have the title to. And even if I could have convinced her, there would have been a record of it. This was better all the way around.
I’d thought about leaving the knife in Chaco’s Tucson house, but that would have made the cops’ job more difficult. Chaco would have gone to great pains not to keep anything there that could be associated with his Bracero life. And it probably would have been tough for the cops to get a search warrant for the house, based solely on the anonymous tip I planned to phone in.
But I could make it easier for them. I picked up a fist-sized rock and tapped gently on the Cadillac’s right taillight until the bottom of the red plastic covering shattered and the bulb inside was visible. Now they had a reason to stop him, and once they ran his name and license information, Chaco’s Bracero affiliation would be enough to make them look a little more closely at his car. I crabbed back to the safety of the wall, then joined a group of tourists whose arms were loaded with the baskets, glassware, and serapes they’d bought as souvenirs.
At the border, we passed single-file through the U.S. Customs and Immigration area. The tiny, gray-haired woman in front of me groaned when the line slowed to inspect a package.
“Damn tourists.”
“You’re not just visiting Nogales?” I asked.
“I’m not that kind of tourist. I come down once a month to get my prescriptions filled,” she said, holding up a paper bag that rattled with a half dozen plastic bottles. “I call it Arizona Medicare.”
Neither of us got much scrutiny when it was our turn. As day visitors walking across, we didn’t need visas and didn’t have to go through the more rigorous screening given those folks who were traveling from farther south in Mexico, beyond the border tourist zone.
I headed back to the parking lot where I’d left the car.
It was after four o’clock when I got back to Tucson. I crawled
through the window at Chaco’s house one more time and put the keys back in the bedside drawer where I’d found them, then dropped Martin’s car off with him at the firehouse. From there, I took the bus back to Guillermo’s place, stopping to get cash at a Wells Fargo ATM so that I’d have another time stamp to offer the cops if they got curious.
Good thing, too, because Detective Sabin was waiting for me at the curb.
“I still don’t understand why I had to come downtown for this,” I said once the forensic technician had taken a mouth swab to test my DNA. “Couldn’t you have done it right there?”
“Why should I inconvenience our forensic team on a Friday afternoon when I can inconvenience you?” Sabin replied. “And this way we get a chance to talk.”
“I’d like to call my lawyer now.”
“Raisa Fortas? She’s up at a legal seminar in Phoenix for the weekend. What a shame.”
“You asshole. You did this on purpose.”
He ignored my characterization of him. “Did what? Pick up a murder suspect?”
“We’re ready for her,” a female officer said, sticking her head through the door.
Sabin took my elbow and escorted me into another room down the hall. Four other women about my age were already there, lined up against the height chart on the back wall. I glanced down the row. We all came in just under the five-foot eight marker, except the woman in the first position who looked to be more like five-six. All blondes, too, although only one had the spikes I did. Sabin handed me a long-sleeved white shirt and gestured for me to roll the sleeves down so my tattoos didn’t show.
A few moments later a disembodied voice came from the mirror in front of me. “Turn to your right. Now face forward.”
I stared straight ahead, holding my breath, willing the eyewitness behind the glass to develop myopia on the spot. A long two minutes later we were let out of the lineup area and Sabin took me back to the first interview room.
“Where’s Deke?”
He ignored my question and flipped through his notes. “We’ve got a witness who saw your sister’s car in front of the house where Carlos Ochoa and Reuben Sanchez were killed.”