by Rex Burns
“I only met the man yesterday.”
“That’s what you say. We’ll see what he says.”
“You’ve warned me of my rights, Agent Roybal. Does that mean you’re putting me under arrest? I want to have this clearly stated: You are arresting me for visiting a detained illegal alien who telephoned me with your permission and—with your prior knowledge—asked me to come down here to talk to him. Is that right?”
The man’s brown eyes studied mine. To stop me for questioning, to use the Miranda to try and frighten me—that was one thing. But to make the legal move of actual arrest with all its related laws governing due process and entrapment was something else.
“Be damned sure you want to do this, Agent Roybal. Because a false arrest charge won’t look good on your record.”
“You’re, by God, threatening me?”
It was my turn to smile. “I’m explaining the ramifications of what you’re trying to do. Any lawyer can see the possibilities of entrapment and false arrest in this. Of course, you will be called as a witness at the trial and asked to state your probable cause for my arrest. And we both know you have none. Now, am I under arrest?”
The man leaned back in his chair, and I could see the deep anger that comes when arrogance of office is denied. His plan, so clear and effective at the outset, had suddenly been muddied and snarled by an uncooperative prey.
“Just what the hell is your relationship with Frentanes, Mr. Kirk?”
“I’m a private investigator. He asked me to find his wife.” I added, “Nobody needs a green card to talk to a PI.”
“When was this?”
I told him. “She was seven months pregnant—eight, now. Frentanes is worried that when he gets shipped south, he’ll never see her again.”
“He knew the risks—they both did when they sneaked into the country.”
“It’s the man’s pregnant wife, Agent Roybal. And you know why they came here.”
“I hear a lot of sad stories, Mr. Kirk. But my job is to catch them and send them back. And to pop anybody who aids and abets them while they’re here.” He leaned forward on his desk, heavy shoulders pushing his collar up around a thick neck. “Now, why don’t you just tell me the fucking truth and stop crapping around. You do this on commission, don’t you? You deliver people for employers to hire, don’t you? You get so much for each body you deliver and a cut of the chicken’s paycheck, don’t you?”
Deliberately I pulled out my wallet and showed him my PI identification card. In Colorado that doesn’t mean much, because the state doesn’t have a licensing program for the business. But it did look impressive and it did say I was a member in good standing of the Private Investigators Association and the World Association of Detectives. “Check the Yellow Pages, Roybal. And the DPD. Here.” I tossed him a business card. “Call my office; check with my landlord and see how many years I’ve been renting an office; check with my bank and see how long I’ve had an account. Hell, if you’re not going to believe what I tell you, then you go out and do it the hard way.”
He rested his chin on a meaty fist as he stared at me another few seconds. Then he scratched a thumb in the bristles under his jaw. “What did you find out about her?”
“Nothing, yet.”
It was an answer he seemed to expect. “That woman is an illegal alien too, Kirk. It’s your duty as a citizen to notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service if you know her whereabouts.”
“Is that how you found Felix? A citizen did his duty?”
The brown eyes narrowed again. “No. An anonymous tip. It happens all the time—some illegal gets pissed off at another illegal or owes him money, they drop a dime.” He added, “And then the deportee scrambles around with his coyote to cover his job until he can sneak back, Mr. Kirk. Or makes arrangements for his wife and kids to hide out while he’s gone.”
“I don’t know where Frentanes’ wife is, Agent Roybal. I don’t have any leads at all. She simply disappeared. For all I know, you people have already rounded her up and deported her.”
He kicked back in his chair, and swiveled to a computer terminal, and punched in a code. “Frentanes. First name?”
“Serafina.”
“Date of birth?”
“She’s around twenty, maybe eighteen, and she disappeared about a month ago.” Felix wouldn’t like it, but la migra either had her or they didn’t, and there was only one way to find out. If they’d already arrested her, it made no difference if I spilled her name. If they hadn’t, then it was up to me to find her before they did.
Roybal scrolled a series of names across the screen and then shook his head. “We didn’t process her, not in the last two months anyway. You have a physical description?”
I gave him as much as I knew and he searched another file, this one shorter. “No local hospital or morgue filings either. Did you check with the police?”
“Yeah. No Jane Doe matching her description.” I was tempted to mention Nestor’s name, too, but thought better of it. The agent already suspected me of running a smuggling operation; no sense letting him know I had wider acquaintance among the illegals.
Roybal shut off the terminal and swung back. “Maybe she got tired of her old man and went off on her own.”
“She was seven months pregnant.”
“These things happen. My wife, she gets a little nuts around six months.” He stood, signaling an end to the interview. “There’s a whole anonymous population out there—nobody knows how many thousands of people live out of sight totally undocumented. Until they end up in jail or a hospital or we find them, they stay that way.” Opening the door, he nodded for me to leave. “Well, Mr. Kirk, I may or may not believe what you’ve told me, but you believe this: if you find that woman and if you in any way help her to avoid arrest, you’re going to jail. No ifs, ands, or buts, mister, you are going to jail. Is that clear?”
It was clear. What wasn’t clear was where Serafina went and just how I was to find a missing person who had no official existence anywhere.
The afternoon sun lay in a warm arc on the floor of the office. I lowered the Venetian blinds and tilted them against the glare before listening to the answering machine. The first voice was a crisp reminder about an overdue bill and made polite mention of ruined credit ratings and collection agencies. That was all Kirk and Associates needed: a knock on the door from one of our competitors whose life was brightened by chasing deadbeats. Vinny Landrum. With my luck, the skip-trace would be good old Vinny, who qualified as a PI because his immediate family spent a total of five hundred years in prison. I wrote out a check, calculating it would arrive at the bank one day after the retainer from Security Underwriters.
There weren’t many other calls. A few people wanted to give us something for nothing: the chance for a free car, a trip to Aspen to see time-share condos, a six months free subscription. This last was a computer voice that must have made a conquest of my answering machine because the whole spiel was taped. Only one caller was a potential client. He wanted an estimate for debugging his office. I wrote that one out for the firm’s electronics genius, Bunch. There were also several calls that left no message and clicked into silence at the end of the tape.
I had three months left on my health club membership, which stood a very good chance of not being renewed. There was no sense wasting it. And even less sense sitting around a silent office. Besides, I and the Healey both needed a workout, and it was a pleasure to lower the ragtop and have a little fun going through the gears and letting the pipes rap against the closed glass of the air-conditioned cars we wove among. The body of the Healey 3000 showed filigrees of rust holes, but beneath the hood, a Cinderella of gleaming chrome and polished aluminum charm purred sweetly. The twin carburetors demanded a lot of tinkering to keep them in sync—all SUs did—but when they were tuned, they were very, very tuned, and the smooth, head- snapping acceleration that came from a light jab on the gas pedal made it worth the time.
Susan, Bunch’s gi
rlfriend, used to say the Healey was my surrogate for female companionship, and I had come to realize that it would have been better if that had been so. Because the way things turned out, Susan was dead, and Bunch still hadn’t gotten over it. But that had been a couple years ago, and neither Bunch nor I talked about it anymore. Not that we talked much about it then. As Uncle Wyn told Bunch at the time, the ones you love live on in your heart, and you have them with you always. He didn’t have as much consolation for me—the one I had loved lived on in the women’s state pen, and all I had left in my heart was a bitterness and sense of betrayal I was still trying to get rid of. And gradually I was managing to. I learned that I couldn’t let someone like that influence the rest of my life; she had her shot at it once and that was enough. But sometimes, alone with the wind whistling across the cockpit and the rumble of the exhaust stirring memories of our good times in the Healey, I wondered what it might have been like.
Boring.
That’s what it would have been like. As boring and colorless as the cars we threaded among, and I was a lot better off by myself and doing what I wanted. Such as worrying about the future of Kirk and Associates. Such as sweating a stack of bills on the office desk. Such as thinking like a goddamn accountant. Maybe it wouldn’t have been all that different after all. But—and I shifted down to make the turn from Cherry Creek Drive onto Colorado Boulevard—it made no difference now. As Uncle Wyn had said, that ball game was over. It didn’t pay, he said, to lie there in the dark and play over and over the errors of a game that was already in the record books. It was something that had cost him a lot of sleep when he was a young catcher; but none of it did a damn bit of good once the umpire tossed the first ball for the next game.
Not that he would say life was fun and games—a cliché like that sent Uncle Wyn’s eyes rolling up until only their whites showed. But there was some truth for him in the idea of ending a thing with the neatness of a final inning. And telling yourself you could begin over with the scoreboard empty and waiting. It was a truth he tried hard to convince me of, anyway.
Midafternoon was a good time to work out at the health club, a remodeled supermarket that had been expanded to include a swimming pool and saunas as well as the usual arrangement of exercise machines. Most of the clientele wouldn’t arrive until after working hours, and those who were there tended to be models trying to stay in shape between gigs. Their shiny Lycra stretched where it should stretch, and their ponytails bobbed saucily as they ran around the indoor track. It sure beat watching television while you pumped iron, and it was sad to think all this might end in a few weeks.
Bunch was waiting by the time I returned. “That tall blonde—was she there?”
“Oh, yeah! Wearing this new skintight silver thing that just … wow!”
“You’re telling me she wasn’t there.”
He was right; she wasn’t. “What about the Hally job? What’d they decide on?”
“Nothing, yet. Coe said he’d call us in a day or two.”
“You showed him all the options?”
“Yes, Dev. I showed him all the options. And the prices. And the benefits of going with the better equipment. But I don’t think he was impressed. The guy’s cheap, that’s all.”
Well, I hadn’t really counted on any money coming from that direction anyway. “What about Senora Chiquichano’s friends?”
“I don’t think she’s got any.” He lurched out of the swivel chair and limped over to lean on the wrought-iron rail that guarded the lower half of the window. The traffic below in Wazee Street was heavy and loud with the day’s final deliveries, trucks returning to their garages, commuters taking shortcuts to and from the Valley Highway. Bunch closed the glass air panel against the noise. “Her neighbors don’t know much about her. She moved into the place maybe a year ago. Stays by herself, doesn’t cause any problems, keeps the house and grounds very neat. She didn’t return the visits a couple people made to welcome her to the neighborhood. She’s self-employed.”
“Doing what?”
“Runs a small-time janitorial service—Olympia Janitorial—and my guess is she uses a crew of illegals and pays them maybe fifty cents an hour and all the cigarette butts they can carry. One of the neighbors figures she has plenty of money because there’s always somebody working around the place—doing the yard, washing her car, handyman stuff. And she has a maid who lives in. That’s it.”
“That’s it? She doesn’t have any extra income from somewhere?”
“Aside from her apartment building? If she did, I’d know about it. I checked out the realtor who sold the house. She says Chiquichano financed her loan through Citizen’s Bank and Trust and paid a third down with a certified check. The people at Citizen’s wouldn’t give me any information from her loan application—said it was confidential.”
“We can fix that.” I thumbed through the stationery file for the Kirk and Associates Credit Service letterhead. Professional courtesy between moneylenders opened a lot of doors.
Bunch went on. “Public records lists her as the sole owner of the place where Frentanes lives, and they say she’s paid her taxes and assessments.”
“Lived. Felix doesn’t live there anymore.”
“What’s that mean?”
I told him and he stared at me for a long moment, putting things together. “Felix thinks Mrs. Chiquichano turned him in to immigration?”
“It makes sense. It’s a good way to get rid of him, and it happened just after we talked to her about Serafina.”
“But we didn’t say Felix told us. Maybe we found out from some of the people who live near the apartment—people she asked about Serafina.”
“And maybe that’s what she told Felix she did. Maybe she and Felix were the only two who knew Serafina was missing.”
He grunted. “She lies to you about Serafina. Now she gets rid of Felix. Why?”
“Why indeed.”
Bunch, restless and hobbling, went to the brick wall and leaned stiff-armed against it to do slow, one-armed presses while he pondered. “I’m beginning to get the feeling, Dev. I think we should have another talk with Mrs. Gutierrez.”
“Not so fast. Did you see that note about the guy who wants a debugging estimate?”
“Yeah. I already called him. I go by tomorrow to take a look at his office.”
On the way over to talk to Nestor’s aunt, we discussed last night’s adventure and the possibility of recovering the battery pack. “Heard anything from the bikers yet?”
“No,” I said. “Some anonymous calls on the recorder, but that could be anyone.”
“Probably didn’t find it. It’s probably still there in the ditch.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Stiff and bruised, but no infection. I’m not worried about rabies.”
“It’s supposed to take a few days to show up.”
“How do you know?”
“I did some reading on it. Two, three days from now, after the wound starts to heal, bam! Then it’s the needle in the belly routine.”
“I hate needles worse than I hate dogs.”
“Then we’d better make some plans,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
Mrs. Gutierrez was in her forties, stocky, with glossy black hair and high cheekbones that showed a strong mixture of Indian. The hair, braided and then twisted up into a tight coil, showed no gray yet; and despite the worry in her eyes when we spoke of Nestor and Serafina and Felix, her face had the plumpness and color of good health. Bunch and I towered over the woman so much that we both had to be careful not to step on her. When she offered us a seat on the overstuffed couch facing the large television screen, we sat with relief.
“I wrote to his mother in case he went home, but she thought he was still up here.” From an end table, she lifted a flimsy air letter bright with foreign stamps. “They’ve heard nothing from him. They’re very worried.”
“Is it possible he and Serafina Frentanes went away together,
Mrs. Gutierrez?”
She gave that some thought, half listening to the sounds of children that filtered through the thin walls of the tiny house. Then the tight coil shook no. “I don’t think he even knew her. He never mentioned anyone who lived there except Senor Medina—the man who lives across the hall. They talked a lot about El Salvador. They played cards sometimes.” She added, “Besides, Nestor has a sweetheart in Ibarutu. Maria Cristina. He was always talking about her—how long it would be before he had enough money to return and buy a farm and marry her, how long the war would last, whether he should bring her to the States.” The head shook again. “He would not go with another woman, I’m sure.”
“We didn’t think so, Mrs. Gutierrez,” said Bunch. “It’s just something we have to ask.”
“I understand, but it’s impossible.” She went into a long amplification of what she’d said, describing the relationship between Nestor’s family and that of his intended. Maria Cristina Quiroga, whose line was related to Nestor’s by the marriage of his great-great-aunt to her great-great-uncle. “And besides, Nestor was very much worried about finding another job if he was fired from this one for not having the papers. He was working very hard to earn enough money so when things get better in El Salvador, he can go back and buy a farm. He just wouldn’t up and leave a good job.”
Bunch broke in. “What can you tell us about Mrs. Chiquichano?”
“Ah, that woman!” Mrs. Gutierrez settled back in the armchair with its patches of crocheted doilies. “She’s not from Ibarutu, I can tell you that. Her family lived on a ranch somewhere up in the mountains, and the only time they ever saw civilization was once or twice a year when they made the trip down for a saint’s day. They were poor—even for El Salvador, they were poor. But look at her now!”
She went on to describe Mrs. Chiquichano—born Hernandes—as a girl, growing up in feed sack dresses and shoeless as a chicken until she was in her teens. If the woman had any schooling at all up in those godforsaken mountains, it was only what little someone in the family could provide or what she could learn herself. There were rumors about her chastity or lack of it too, but then, those country girls were often treated like animals, so if they acted that way it was only to be expected, and Mrs. Gutierrez didn’t even want to think of what might have gone on. But when she was sixteen, she was given in marriage to Senor Chiquichano, a friend of her father’s and even older by a handful of years. His death during one of those quick, violent raids by either the army or the guerrillas left the young widow on her own. She quickly sold the property left by her husband and, wearing straw sandals and carrying her only pair of shoes in a plastic bag, boarded a bus headed north. Somehow she got her immigration papers and ended up in Denver, writing once a year to her family and sending occasional photographs of her car, her house, herself in the finest clothes. It was her success, in fact, that led many from Ibarutu and the surrounding province to come to Denver, including the younger Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez.