Hat Dance (Detective Emilia Cruz Book 2)

by Carmen Amato

  Lt. Rufino sighed noisily. “Detective Silvio, is this another of your delaying techniques?”

  “It’s a major lead,” Silvio said flatly. “We’ve now got a name and a probable list of places being targeted. Solidifies the army connection as well.”

  “You will arrest those restaurant owners,” Lt. Rufino sad. “And they will confess to complicity with Torrez Delgadillo.”

  Silvio stepped close to Rufino. “We’re not in the business of politics here, teniente.”

  Lt. Rufino blinked, then turned on his heel and went into his office.

  “Very smooth, Franco,” Macias said.

  Franco. It was catching on. Emilia wondered how long Silvio would let her live.

  Chapter 23

  From the arrest record Emilia knew that Julieta Rubia’s real name was Julieta Arana Vela and that she was 47 years old.

  Her arrest file made more entertaining reading than the mess that Castro and Gomez had made of the El Pharaoh files. Emilia found most of the original boxes they’d pulled out of the place, but they seemed lighter than she remembered. As she pawed through the contents, trying to match things up with the evidence spreadsheets, a few things quickly became clear.

  All the euros were missing, as were the crucial accounting ledgers.

  In contrast, all the counterfeit pesos and dollars were neatly catalogued, marked and bundled.

  No euro bills had been catalogued and there was no paperwork verifying that any euro bills had been marked. Emilia knew that they’d confiscated euros along with pesos and dollars, although she didn’t know the exact amount of any currency. Silvio would remember all three of the currencies, she was sure, but he hadn’t had time to count it or scan for counterfeits, either.

  “Neither Castro nor Gomez have mentioned anything about missing euros,” Lt. Rufino told her as Emilia stood in his office with a pile of spreadsheets in her hand.

  “I think that might be the problem, teniente,” Emilia tried to keep outright accusation out of her voice.

  “Call the state attorney general’s office and see what they’ve got.” Lt. Rufino took a sip from his mug as it sat on his desk amid the piles of papers.

  Emilia waited for him to realize his error. As far as the El Pharaoh case went, the state attorney general’s office was wholly reliant on information from the Acapulco police. More specifically, from the detective unit.

  Lt. Rufino narrowed his eyes at her. “What are you waiting for, Cruz?”

  Emilia looked down at the spreadsheets, ready to shout at him in frustration. This had been Rico’s case, his last case, and now she’d probably find that the remaining evidence was useless. Castro and Gomez had taken the euros, possibly because they were the only real currency, and had probably sold the ledgers back to the owners of the El Pharaoh. “I’ll do better than that, teniente,” she said. “I’ll go right over.”

  Lt. Rufino nodded. “Good, you do that.” He raised his mug to his lips again.

  Emilia realized that she’d seen him drinking from the mug all day, but not once had he filled it from the coffee maker in the squadroom. “Would you like me to make some coffee before I go?” she asked.

  Lt. Rufino looked at her coldly. “No, thank you, Cruz.”

  She knew he was going to say that.

  He waved her out of the office. Emilia closed up the El Pharaoh boxes, found Julieta’s arrest file, left the office, and drove to the Cereso de Acapulco, the massive concrete bastion that was the federal prison.

  ☼

  In person, Julieta Rubia looked half her age. She was on the heavy side, but it suited her, making her look lush and voluptuous. Her hair was nearly platinum blonde and worn long and straight. Her eyes didn’t have any crow’s feet, there were no creases between her softly feathered eyebrows, and her neck and jawline were firm. Her skin was flawless, with that lit-from-within luminosity touted in ads for French makeup brands that Emilia never bought, sold at department stores like Palacio de Hierro where Emilia never shopped.

  In fact, if Julieta hadn’t been wearing a cotton prison dress and plastic flip-flops, Emilia would have thought she was ready to have her picture taken for a magazine.

  They were in the women’s section of the prison. The visitor yard was a courtyard with backless wooden benches ringed around three walls. The fourth wall was chain-link fencing. The green-painted cinder block was the material of choice for the entire prison complex, which had been built years ago without regard to color, air conditioning, or sanitary conditions.

  A door with a small window was set into the middle of the end wall, and a male guard with a long gun stood in front of it. Emilia hadn’t been able to convince the prison staff that she needed privacy; the guard had been adamant that the women’s section had no private interview rooms and gave every indication that he wasn’t going to be more helpful unless she paid him to do so. Emilia had ended up in the visitor yard as she’d waited for Julieta to be brought to her. Four other inmates had visitors, including a crying child clinging to an inmate who was obviously the mother.

  The yard was hot and smelled like sweat and vomit.

  Julieta was led into the yard by a female guard. The two women exchanged a word, and Emilia saw the guard nod before Julieta stepped away from the doorway and into the yard. She looked down at the dirty concrete in disgust, and Emilia decided Julieta didn’t spend much time there.

  “Detective Cruz.” Emilia introduced herself by holding up her badge on its lanyard.

  “A girlie cop,” said Julieta and sat on the bench. “This is new.”

  “Do you recognize this girl?” Emilia laid the much-handled picture of Lila between them.

  She’d had to surrender her bag and gun at the outer prison perimeter guard post; they’d been stowed in a locker and she’d been given the key, attached to a large wooden disk that was now in her jeans pocket. In the guard room inside the women’s section, just on the other side of the door, the guards had another elaborate check-in procedure that included photocopying Emilia’s identification and making her fill out a two-sided form, which also had to be laboriously copied before she could be given a visitor pass. The picture and her badge were the only things she’d carried into the yard with her.

  “What if I do?” Julieta asked.

  “Maybe you’ll keep her from getting dead,” Emilia replied.

  Julieta smiled. Only her lower lip moved; the rest of her face stayed perfectly in place. “What do I care?”

  “Her name is Lila,” Emilia pressed. “She came to see you at Mami’s. Would have been a Thursday night. Said she was looking for a woman named Yolanda Lata.”

  Julieta’s lip pouted. “You think Mami’s is some lost souls agency?”

  Emilia felt sweat trickle down her neck. The woman’s air of amusement was infuriating, and the sobs of the child and mother on the adjacent bench were almost unendurable. “Lila,” Emilia prompted. “Lila Jimenez Lata. She was pretty enough to be an inside girl.”

  Julieta glanced at the picture and back at Emilia. “So if I talk to you, you’ll get me out of here?”

  “Sure,” Emilia lied. “I’ll see what I can do.” Even if she wanted to help Julieta, this wasn’t a sanctioned investigation and she couldn’t do much, maybe just find Julieta’s lawyer when the trial was finally scheduled and pass along the information that the woman had been helpful in an unrelated case.

  “You got nothing for me, puta.” Julieta’s coarse manner of speech didn’t match the beautiful face and crystal hair.

  Emilia’s head began to pound. The desire to get out of the stifling visitor yard was overwhelming. She felt an intense dislike for the woman next to her on the bench. The beautiful façade hid something rotten and diseased, a woman who’d used and abused other women for years, probably keeping them beaten and frightened and so loaded with debt they were afraid to leave her tightly controlled world.

  She put the picture of Lila in her jeans pocket. “Olga’s running things at Mami’s now,” she sai
d, trying to find some way to break through. “She said you’d tell me if you’d talked to Lila.”

  “Olga set me up.” Julieta looked around the yard, at the chain-link fence and the dirty concrete walls and the other inmates. She glared hard at them and they shrank away.

  It didn’t take a genius to see that Julieta was the queen of the women’s block. Emilia compared her prison dress with that of the other inmates; Julieta’s was fitted and of a finer cotton weave. And clean. Pressed. The other women’s prison dresses fit like flour sacks and were rough, dirty, and wrinkled.

  Not only was Julieta’s prison dress decent quality, but her hands were also perfectly manicured. One finger bore a thin tattoo like a wedding ring; it was a delicate line, not a crude prison tat. She wore the same dark red nail polish that Carlota had worn during the meeting in the mayor’s office. No chips or scuffs, which meant that Julieta wasn’t working at any of the menial labor jobs all inmates were supposed to perform. Emilia wondered what she’d find if she saw Julieta’s cell. Probably a maid and a flat screen television.

  The child across the yard cried even more loudly, red-faced now and close to hysteria. Julieta stood up and snapped her fingers at the door to the guard post. A minute later, the female guard opened the door to the cell block, detached the child from its mother, and dragged the woman inside. The child wailed even louder and was led out. Once the child’s screams faded the other inmates and their visitors resumed their whispered conversations.

  “You swing some weight around here,” Emilia observed.

  “See, puta?” Julieta said and made a flicking motion. “I got everything I need. You can’t do nothing for me. So you go home. Say a rosary for your little girl.”

  Emilia wiped sweat off her forehead. “I can mess up Olga for you,” she heard herself say.

  Julieta cut her eyes to Emilia, suddenly interested. “You’re one little chica with a badge. Olga knows lots of bigger people with badges.”

  “Tell me what you know about Lila Jimenez Lata and her mother and I’ll see what I can do.”

  As soon as Emilia said the last part of the sentence, the blonde woman snorted. “Again, you got nothing.”

  Emilia knew it was a losing battle. Julieta was simply toying with her, using the conversation to relieve the tedium of another dull prison day. There was one last card to play and it wasn’t a strong one. “You’re in jail for prostitution,” she said. “There will be a trial at some point, but at the end of the day it’s not that serious a charge. Murder is different. If this girl turns up dead, and you had the chance to tell me what you know . . .” Emilia let her voice trail off. The stink in the yard was making her nauseous.

  Julieta didn’t buy it. She crossed her legs as if she was wearing spike heels and bobbed her foot while staring at the opposite wall.

  Emilia crossed the yard and pounded on the guard’s door.

  Chapter 24

  Emilia collected her gun and her bag at the prison’s outer perimeter. There was a bottle of water in her bag; it was tepid, but she sloshed down half anyway as the guard gave her a stony get out look. She recapped the bottle and looked around the room. It was little more than a narrow counter shielded by a wall of bulletproof glass. Maybe she could make this trip a two-for-one.

  She dumped her bag and gun on the counter again. “I’d like to see Lester Torrez Delgadillo,” she said.

  The sign-in routine was repeated all over again on the men’s side of the prison, but with a great deal more scrutiny and security procedures. The contrast between how Julieta Rubia and Torrez Delgadillo were treated was like night and day. Emilia attributed it to the difference in their crimes. Julieta had been caught peddling a young girl. Torrez was charged with arson and murder and even more dire political motivations.

  It took an hour for her identification to be scrutinized and for Torrez to finally be led into the small interview room with a one-way mirror set into the wall. He was a well-built man in his forties, with wavy hair, a firm jaw, and intelligent brown eyes. He wore an orange prison jumpsuit with the word DETENIDO stenciled in black block letters across the chest, and his hands and feet were shackled, with a chain running between them. He was unshaven and his face was lined with fatigue, but otherwise he didn’t look too bad. Emilia pointed wordlessly at the shackles, and the guard released the chain running from hands to feet but didn’t take off the steel bracelets around either wrists or ankles before shoving Torrez into one of the metal chairs flanking the plain wooden table.

  The door closed and Torrez raised his eyebrows at her.

  “I’m Detective Cruz from the Acapulco Municipal Police,” Emilia said, sitting in the chair across from him. “I know you’re not responsible for the fire at the El Tigre.”

  Torrez blinked but didn’t speak.

  “It’s an extortion ring,” she went on. “They’re army or they want us to believe that they are. Asking high-end restaurants for cash and calling it an army tax.”

  “So why am I still here?” Torrez asked. He had a deep voice, like Silvio.

  “Because you don’t have an alibi and your truck matched a description,” Emilia said. “You’ve been in the army and might have contacts there with access to campo militar’s armory. Plus you work for Carlota’s political rival.”

  “You came out here to tell me that?”

  “I came here to get your alibi.” Emilia leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You know damn well that Carlota isn’t going to pass up this chance to get back at Macario Urbina for all the mud he threw at her during the election campaign, and she’ll use you to do it. I don’t know why she’s ready to take on the army as well, but I’m not going to deal with that right now.”

  Torrez looked away.

  Emilia wondered how much time she’d have before someone from Chief Salazar’s office was told Torrez was talking to a female cop and came to break things up. No more than 45 minutes, she decided. She clenched her fists on the table. “I want to catch an arsonist. As long as you don’t have an alibi you’re still at the top of Carlota’s list. You’re making it easy for them to sacrifice you so she doesn’t look bad. It also means that while the attention stays on you, we can’t get any traction on the real case.”

  Torrez put his manacled hands on the tabletop not too far from Emilia’s fists. She waited for the door to open and a guard to come in, but no one did.

  “I was the one who connected you and your truck with Macario Urbina,” Emilia went on desperately. “You don’t have any reason to trust me any more than you can trust the pendejos from Chief Salazar’s offices who have been trying to get something out of you. But I’ll be honest. I don’t want it on my conscience that I put away an innocent man for arson and murder.”

  Torrez gave a short laugh. “Is that the way women detectives operate?” he asked. “You going to cry next?”

  “I might,” Emilia replied. “How’s your wife holding up?”

  “She and the kids are still on the hacienda.”

  Torrez wasn’t some scared teen and he’d held up well, but the mention of his family had caused a little crack in his armor. Emilia saw his mouth tighten.

  “How come nobody on that hacienda is coming forward to say that you were with them that Saturday night?” Emilia asked. “It’s been over a week. You know Salazar’s people are going to haul in your wife next. And the kids. I’ve seen it before.”

  “It’s a big place, that hacienda,” Torrez said.

  “They can’t hide.” Emilia glanced at her watch.

  “Listen.” Torrez said the word softly but distinctly. “I meant that the problem is that the hacienda is so big. We get workers up from Guatemala and Honduras, migrants hoping to make it up to El Norte. Got a lot of locals, too. There are always jobs in the fields and with the cattle. Some of the ranch houses are in pretty lonely spots. Near the fields but nothing else.”

  Torrez had practically been whispering. He stopped and swallowed hard. Emilia waited.

  “We got the Sinal
oa cartel poaching the workers. They come at night, round up 20, 30 at a time out of our bunkhouses. Force them into hauling bales of weed up to El Norte.”

  “Most make it a hundred miles or so before they can’t go any further,” Emilia said in the same low tone. “Cartel kills them, dumps the bodies.” The practice was common knowledge.

  She thought she heard a noise outside the room, but the door handle didn’t turn. The room didn’t have any obvious microphones, but the one-way mirror meant that somebody was watching and almost certainly trying to overhear the conversation.

  Torrez looked relieved that she understood. “Exactly. At the next waypoint, the cartel grabs more workers from another hacienda or a busload of locals headed for San Diego. They’re just looking for mules to keep passing the stuff north.” He exhaled shakily. “Three times now I’ve driven into the desert, met up with a representative, and paid them not to poach our workers.”

  Emilia felt her stomach clench. “You know that they are Sinaloa?”

  Torrez nodded. “The last payment was the weekend of the El Tigre fire. The meeting place was a full day’s drive north, up in the Sierra Santa Rita de Casta hills. Every time they blindfold me, dump me in the back of a truck, and take me to their camp. I pay, we share some mezcal, they boast about El Chapo.”

  “You pay with Macario Urbina’s money?” Emilia asked. “He knows?”

  “Yes,” Torrez admitted. “We talked about it, decided we’d take the risk.”

  “They’ll crucify him if this gets out,” Emilia reasoned. Carlota would do anything to see her political opponent aligned in the press with the notorious Sinaloa cartel. “That’s why you haven’t talked.”

  “He’s been good to me,” Torrez said. “Good to my family.”