by Don Travis
Throughout the day, Hazel had been on the phone, pestering me with requests. We had a new worker’s comp surveillance case, which I told her to give to Charlie. One of my regular clients, a large life insurance company, wanted us to look into a death claim they suspected was suicide. That one could wait since they’d be in no hurry to pay the claim anyway. She also needed my signature on a few things, not the least of which was her paycheck. I’d suggested placing her on the main account—she already had her own petty cash account—or getting a signature stamp for her, but she declined. According to Hazel, she handled everything else in the office but didn’t want to be responsible for the money too. On her last two calls, she’d mentioned Charlie’s paycheck, which caused me to smile. Something was definitely developing there.
As the day wore on, I recovered from last night’s drinking, but that merely made me hungry. I ate the sack lunch I hadn’t wanted when I made it, and emptied the car of every candy bar, cracker, and crumb I’d left in it. Then I tried to concentrate on Del’s problem, but the memory of last night kept intruding. Paul was an odd mixture of youth and maturity. At times he was aggressively virile, totally dominating me. In the next moment, he could be achingly gentle, anxiously begging to know if that—whatever that was at the moment—was okay.
The thought he might not be what he seemed—at least in our relationship—kept intruding. I’d lost him once, thanks to my ham-handed handling of Steve Sturgis, and I recalled the despair of believing he was gone from my life forever. Now he was back, and I wasn’t sure I was prepared to face another estrangement. That shook me. Had I sunk so low I was willing to compromise a case to satisfy a personal need? Had my ethical standards flown out the window at the appearance of a handsome young man with an easy, charming manner—and great sexual prowess?
Giving in to a growing sense of unease over sitting motionless on a darkened street for hours at a time, I terminated my vigil just before midnight and headed home. Halfway there I changed my mind and turned south. I’d rather take care of things now than try to beat Hazel to the office later this morning.
Headlamps in my rearview mirror kicked up my pulse rate. A tail? As I caught Lomas Boulevard and turned west, the other car turned off on a side street. Why was I so damned jumpy? Maybe a better question was why had I opted to go driving downtown in the middle of the night?
The parking lot at the corner of Sixth and Copper NW was quiet, disturbed only by the faint sounds of revelers a block east on the mall. Mine was the only car in the lot when I switched off the lights and killed the engine. Still anxious I sat for a moment in the darkness, studying my surroundings uneasily.
Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all. I hesitated, weighing my options. Thirty minutes now would save me a couple of hours later. I hadn’t been followed—that car had gone its own way long before I reached the office. APD headquarters was only a couple of blocks away with cops coming and going at all hours. Maybe I was working myself into a lather for nothing. I was here, so I might as well get it done.
Making sure my .25 was tucked in my belt, I got out of the car, unlocked the door to the building, and entered through the west lobby without encountering a guard or anyone else. Management had part-time security, meaning that on certain unspecified nights, an after-hours guard was on duty. At other times we made do with a roving security patrol. Once inside my footsteps rang on the tile floor, the hollow sound rising five stories before echoing back, an eerie phenomenon that occurred only at night when the building was more or less deserted.
A sudden clang from somewhere above sent my heart rate soaring until I realized one of the cleaning crew had dropped a broom or a mop.
I opted to walk up the two flights of stairs, and when I emerged from the stairwell my hand automatically went to the little pistol at my belt. The balcony running around the perimeter of the entire third floor was empty. I glanced over the banister. There was no one in the lobby far below.
Tomorrow I’d buy some stronger firepower. Gene still hadn’t returned my 9 mm pistol, and there was little possibility of getting it back anytime soon since the labs were backed up—a euphemism for seriously underfunded.
As the door to my office suite clicked behind me, I gave an involuntary sigh of relief. I’d been more worried than I’d realized. Hazel had been busy piling my desk high with things requiring my attention. I reviewed the reports she’d drafted and looked over a couple of new assignments that had come in today. After making a few changes to the documents and signing the checks she was so anxious about, I flicked off my desk light and swiveled to face the wall of windows behind me.
I liked this view. The abject darkness, broken by pools of light receding into mere pinpoints gave the illusion of serenity. Under that calm cloak, I could almost believe the good citizens of Albuquerque were safely tucked in bed, sleeping soundly and dreaming of peace and goodwill.
I called home and picked up the messages from my answering machine. Most were duplicates of messages left at the office. Del wanted to know if there was anything new. Gene said they’d traced Milt Zorn to a Southwest Airlines flight to southern California. Stealing mail from the postal service is a federal offense, so Kyle Hewitt’s people were handling things at that end.
Then Paul’s baritone came over the wire wanting to make sure everything was all right. He planned on hitting his own bed early in deference to the calisthenics in mine the previous night. Paul had my cell phone number in case of emergency but never used it. Influenced by television gumshoe programs, he claimed to be afraid the phone might ring at an inopportune moment, placing me in danger.
The last message really caught my attention. Mrs. Gertrude Wardlow, my plucky neighbor across the road, had noticed a suspicious car passing up and down the street two or three times earlier in the evening. She suggested I use extreme caution in returning home. Wondering why she hadn’t alerted me by cell, I checked and found I’d switched to vibrate after I got tired of Hazel’s calls while hunkering down in the car. Mrs. W had left a message and then doubled down by calling my home phone. What a wonderful old gal.
If this mess kept up much longer, my staid and stolid neighbors would ask me to move. On second thought, most of them hadn’t had this much excitement in ages. Safe, or presumed safe, behind their windows and drapes, the old geezers probably scanned the street every night to check on “that private investigator fellow” down the street before going to bed.
Resisting the temptation to sack out on my office couch, I got up, stretched, and started to leave. An indistinct noise from the landing—a footfall, a shoulder brushing against the wall, something—stayed my hand on the doorknob. The door was a solid plank of heavy oak, but a panel of frosted glass to the left darkened momentarily as a shadow passed across it. After five minutes of inaction, I cautiously cracked the door. A quick look up and down the landing revealed nothing alarming. If anyone was on this floor, he wasn’t visible, but a side hall leading to the restrooms lay between the elevators and me. Was someone waiting in ambush there? I stepped out onto the landing, locked the door, tugged the peashooter from my belt, and turning away from the elevators, made for the stairwell.
I did not hear my assailant’s sneakers on the carpet behind me until it was too late to face him, so I dropped to all fours. He tripped over my legs and fell, landing with his body sprawled halfway across mine. Before he had time to recover, I gained my feet and sagged against the metal banister at the outer edge of the landing. Clinging to my back, he came up with me, flailing with a knife. When the blade nicked my right arm, I panicked, twisting away from the blade and straightening to throw him off my back.
Time switched to slow motion. The man clawed at my shirt for a moment. Then his center of gravity shifted. He slid over the railing. I clutched at his legs but couldn’t hold on—he fell with a terrified scream. I leaned over the railing and watched him flip on his back during the forty-foot drop to the hard, polished tiles below. He landed with a terrible suddenness and a sickeni
ng thud. A dark corona haloed his head. The blood and the clatter of his knife across the baked clay squares kick-started my brain and released my frozen muscles.
Twisting around, on guard for other assailants, I spotted the weapon I’d lost during the attack, so I scrabbled across the floor and snatched up the Colt. Pressed against the wall, I frantically swept the landing in both directions.
Voices! From above.
I aimed two landings above me—too far for accurate shooting—but maybe the killers didn’t know that.
But there were no killers, only a frightened cleaning crew jabbering in excitement and cringing as I pointed my weapon at them. The prudent thing would have been to retreat to the safety of my office and call the police. Instead I fished my cell out of its holder and dialed 911.
By the time the cops arrived, I had wits enough to go downstairs and let them in. The sergeant in charge was Walker Robins, an old police academy classmate. He took one look at me, grimaced, and placed a call for Gene. Then he grabbed my shoulder and turned me around.
“Hell, Vinson, you’re bleeding. Somebody call an ambulance.”
“I’m okay. It’s just a scratch.”
“Well, your scratch is filling up your shoes. Get the docs here pronto,” he ordered one of his uniforms.
Robins turned to view the body sprawled on the lobby floor, running a fleshy hand through what had been a bright carrottop. Now it was thinning and fading to a rusty brown. “You know him?”
“No. But he came up from behind and attacked me as I left the office.”
“Wonder how he got in?”
“It wouldn’t be hard to hide in a broom closet or someplace like that until the building was locked up for the night.”
“You’d think some of the cleaning crew would have stumbled over him, wouldn’t you? Cardenas, you ’n’ Hooker go round them up and see what they know. All right, BJ, you wanna tell me what happened?” He checked the small slice on my right arm as I talked.
I’d finished relating the events of the evening about the time Gene arrived and then had to do it all over again. The officers had trouble finding a knife until I recalled the sound of metal skittering over tiles and directed them to the other side of the open atrium. The blade had come to rest beneath a big green leaf drooping from a terracotta pot.
Eventually an ambulance arrived. A couple of EMTs bandaged me up but lost interest when I rejected their suggestion of stitches. They cautioned me to get a tetanus shot and went on their way.
Gene insisted on being Gene, that is, a careful and thorough policeman. We walked the scene step by step, he confidently, me on increasingly feeble knees. After I’d gone through the whole thing three more times, he plopped me down on a chair in the lobby. The crime-scene team arrived on the heels of the OMI people and chased everyone away.
After Gene wrapped things up, he insisted on a patrol car delivering me home. I balked but agreed to allow a cruiser to follow me. Exhausted but afraid sleep wouldn’t come, I tried dictating a report to bring Del’s file up to date, but made a mess of it. Tired of reliving these last tragic hours, I tumbled into bed without even undressing and promptly zonked out—only to hear the nauseating sound of a bursting pumpkin again and again in my restless dreams.
Chapter 28
THERE WAS no avoiding the news media this time. A shootout on a quiet North Valley street and a murder in the South Valley piqued their interest, but a gruesome death in a downtown office building was more than they could stand. I was forced to run gauntlets of reporters at home and at the office.
Hazel handled them better than I did. Her snarled “no comment” had a finality to it that even the most intrepid understood.
My responses must have been more tenuous because one novice news puppy kept peppering me with the stupidest questions imaginable—how did it feel to send a man tumbling to his death?
How did she think it felt? That query was as bad as wanting to know if it hurt getting shot. You bet—like a son of a bitch.
It was almost noon the next day—make that later the same day—before we gathered for a consultation in my office. Gene Enriquez of the APD, Kyle Hewitt of the US Postal Service, and a deceptively mild-mannered little man named Henry Young from the district attorney’s office joined Del and me. On the speakerphone, Artie Hartshorn represented the Santa Fe Police Department. No one believed I had committed a crime in the early hours of this morning, and that was reinforced by the fact we were meeting in my office, not at APD. But we needed to make sense of the whole tangled affair, including last night’s attack.
Gene got things going. “The bozo who tried to knife you was a character named Alonzo Johnson. He sometimes went by the moniker of Lonzo Villarreal. Johnson was his daddy’s name, Villarreal his mother’s. Ring any bells?”
“Nope. He have a record?”
“Long one. Mostly minor stuff. Some drug dealing, an assault or two, but they were bar fights, not assassinations.”
“Get anything from the cleaning crew?” I asked.
“Not much. A couple of the women got nervous when they were cleaning the rest rooms on your floor but swear they didn’t see anyone.”
“I don’t understand it, Gene. Nobody knew I was coming back to the office last night, although I had the feeling I was followed downtown. It was strong enough to spook me and put me on my guard.”
“We found a cell phone on the guy set to vibrate,” Gene said. “My guess is he hid out and was prepared to wait until you showed, whenever that might be. Even overnight if need be. You probably were followed until they were certain you were headed to the office. Then they broke off and alerted Villarreal.”
“And if I didn’t show, he was going to wait all night?”
“Probably. That’s how determined these people are. That ought to tell you something.”
“Was the man a gang member?” the assistant district attorney asked.
“Associated with some gangs, but there’s no clear evidence he was a member of one. He always denied it. He was more of a freelancer, I guess you’d say.”
“Who’d he pal around with?”
Gene named members of two or three local gangs, but none of them were connected with the Saints.
“Any contact with the Iron Crosses?” Artie’s disembodied voice asked.
“Not on the record.”
“Was he a biker?”
“We don’t know that much about him, but we’ll find out for you,” Gene said.
“Mr. Dahlman, what’s your take on all this?” Artie again.
“Well, Detective, I’d say your double-murder trial will proceed as scheduled. With all that’s happened, even the extortionists must realize they can no longer compromise me. Things are far too public now. My law partners are aware of the blackmail attempt. You gentlemen know what’s involved, and we all understand the motivation for the threats.”
“Agreed,” Artie answered. “We know everything except the who.”
“I have a few ideas about that,” I said. “If you look hard enough, you’re going to find a connection between this Johnson—or Villarreal—and the Brown Saints.” I ignored Artie’s exasperated grunt. “And when Inspector Hewitt runs Milt Zorn to ground, he’s going to find a connection there, as well.”
Artie couldn’t contain himself. “That’s crazy, BJ. The Crosses and the Saints were at one another’s throats, have been for years. There’s been so much blood spilled between those two groups, there’s no way one is doing a favor for the other.”
Gene agreed. “That’s my intel too. In fact Puerco Arrullar and this fellow Whiznant have butted heads before. Puerco’s got a nasty scar on his belly, and Whiznant’s got one in his shoulder. They exchanged those four years ago right here in Albuquerque. Both of them served a little time for that.”
“Come up with a better answer,” I said. “Emilio Prada was more or less running with the Santos Morenos. He was getting protection from them in exchange for some favors—like renting those mailboxes, for ex
ample. Their association was a new development, and frankly, a bizarre one. Arrullar’s crew would have nothing to do with a queer hustler unless they needed him.” I paused. “Emilio was probably telling me the truth when he said he didn’t know who stole the negatives for the blackmail pictures. But when I started questioning him, he put two and two together.”
“So this Prada fellow figured it out and wanted in on the action, is that it?” Young, the ADA, asked.
“That makes sense. When I started showing up to ask Emilio questions, it was the Saints who helped him pack up and get out of town.” I thought for a minute. “Gene, why don’t you check out a fellow who runs with them by the name of Jacques Costas.”
“The Haitian? Why?”
“I was at the C&W Palace the other night. The Saints keep a table there, and the usual group was drinking and having a grand old time. But Jackie was missing. That was the day after Tarleton was killed.”
“You’re thinking it’s Haitian blood on the victim’s bayonet?”
“It’s worth checking out.”
“When you find him, I think we have enough to get a warrant for his DNA,” Young said.
“If we find him.” Gene came back at him. “There was a lot of blood on that bayonet. Whoever got stuck, got stuck good.” He nodded at me. “What’s your take on Tarleton’s murder?”
“More or less what you spelled out the other day. He was a danger to them because he could finger whoever ordered those prints. Maybe he tried to cut himself in for a piece of the action, or was afraid the Saints would start slamming doors behind them.”
“You think Tarleton killed Emilio?” Del asked.