Santa Fe Dead

by Stuart Woods

“I’ll find a city directory and see who J.C. is.”

  “You know, boss, if you could get a federal warrant, I could intercept the envelope and open it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, Dixon.”

  “You want me back on Long’s house?”

  “Well, yeah. It seems to be working, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay, I’m gone.” She got back into the car and drove back to the Long house, very pleased with herself.

  DETECTIVE FIRST GRADE Tom Evans started to call the U.S. Attorney’s office about the search warrant but realized the time. Nobody would be there just yet. He wrote a note to himself to call them and put it in a little tray where he kept reminders, since his short-term memory had started to go. He had only a year before his thirty years were up, and he wasn’t about to get dumped on a non-work-related medical by reporting his memory loss. He could fake it for a year. He went back to work.

  DIXON FINISHED HER shift at four o’clock and drove back to the station house to leave the patrol car and pick up her own. As she walked past the front desk to leave the keys, she saw Detective Evans. “Hi, boss.”

  “Hello, Dixon.”

  “What’s happening with that federal warrant?”

  Evans looked a little startled. “Huh? Oh, that’s in the works,” he replied.

  “I’d love to go out to Studio City in the morning and serve that warrant,” she said. Anything would beat sitting on Mrs. Keeler for another day, watching her shop and go to the beauty salon.

  “I’ll let you know,” Evans said. What the hell was she talking about? He went back to his desk and went through the notes to himself in the tray on his desk. “Shit!” he said aloud. He turned around to see half a dozen detectives looking at him.

  “You,” he said, pointing to a cop. “Get your ass over to the U.S. Attorney’s office and get me a federal warrant to search a mailbox in Studio City.” He grabbed a form for the warrant and filled it out; then he handed it to the detective and explained the circumstances. “Here’s the request.”

  “Right, boss.” The detective got his coat and left.

  Evans looked at his watch: four thirty. “And move your ass!” he shouted after the detective.

  42

  DETECTIVE ALEX REESE had the weird feeling that he was starting a new investigation that was really an old investigation. Granted, the circumstances of the two cases were very different; granted, the weapons used were different; granted, he had not the slightest evidence to connect them. Still, they felt connected.

  He had two people checking the airline schedules for likely killers- either one male or two males traveling together-and for forty-eight hours before the murder there had been a dozen single males traveling, and every one of them had checked out as legit.

  Reese was driving in to work when he passed Airport Road, and he had a sudden thought. He made a quick U-turn and drove to the airport. He parked and walked into Santa Fe Jet, and approached the young woman behind the counter. “Hi,” he said, showing her his badge. “Did you work this past weekend?”

  “Yep, one weekend a month,” she said.

  “Do you remember any general aviation aircraft coming in with a single male pilot or two males?”

  “Well, let’s see,” she said. “Best way would be to go through the fuel tickets to remind me. Here’s a Learjet with two guys, in from New York; here’s a Bonanza with one guy, in from Austin, Texas; here’s a guy in from Albuquerque in a Cessna 182. Everything else was groups, I think. The guy from Austin was kind of a hoot: a standard-issue Texan with a big hat and a big moustache. He looked kind of familiar, like that actor, Sam Elliot?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Sam Elliot?”

  She flipped through the fuel tickets. “No, he was a Carl Timmons.” She showed him the signature. “He flew in Friday night and left at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning.”

  “How’d he pay for his fuel?”

  “In cash. That was kind of unusual.”

  “How often do people pay in cash?”

  “Never, since I’ve been here. It’s always a check or credit card.”

  “Did he rent a car?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “And how’d he pay for that?”

  “Again, in cash.”

  “Where’s the car?”

  She looked at the list. “It’s been rented again, not due back for a week.”

  Reese made a note of the address in Austin of Carl Timmons and of the tail number of the Bonanza.

  “Has Timmons ever been in here before?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “How about the airplane?”

  “Could be; we get lots of Bonanzas-very popular airplane.”

  “Is there anything else you can think of about Timmons? How was he dressed?”

  “Like a cowboy: jeans, western shirt, cowboy boots. Alligator boots, come to think of it. Those things are expensive.”

  Reese handed her his card. “If you remember anything else about the guy, will you give me a call? It’s very important.”

  “Sure, be glad to.”

  REESE LEFT THE airport and drove back to his office. He went online to the website of the Federal Aviation Administration and checked the tail number of the Bonanza: It was registered to an Anthony DeMarco, M.D., of a Brentwood address in L.A. He found the office number of the doctor and phoned him.

  “Dr. DeMarco’s office,” a woman’s voice said.

  “Good morning, may I speak with Dr. DeMarco, please?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Detective Alex Reese of the Santa Fe, New Mexico, police department.”

  “I’m afraid Dr. De Marco is in surgery all day today,” she said. “I can take your number and ask him to call you when he gets a break.”

  “Yes, please,” Reese said. He gave the woman his number and cell number. “Any time of day. By the way, what sort of medicine does Dr. DeMarco practice?”

  “He’s a cosmetic surgeon; he operates three days a week, and this is one of them.”

  “Thank you. I look forward to hearing from him.” Reese hung up and went back to work.

  JACK CATO WAS shooting his first scene on a new movie, so he rose early, shaved and showered and had breakfast. The mailman arrived just as he was leaving the house, so Cato took the mail inside. A fat manila envelope was among the bills, and he took a peek inside. What he saw caused a wave of relief and elation to wash over him. He put the envelope into his briefcase and closed and locked it.

  He was about to leave the house when the doorbell rang. He looked out the window and saw what appeared to be an unmarked police car. He put his briefcase into a drawer of a chest in the living room, then answered the door. A man and a woman stood there.

  “Good morning,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Lucy Dixon, LAPD, and this is Detective Watts.” She handed him a document. “This is a federal search warrant to search your mailbox.”

  Cato looked at the document. “Well, okay, but I’ve already taken the mail out. You want to see it?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “Then come inside.” He led them into his little home office and pointed to the desk. “There you go, that’s everything that came. You just missed the mailman.”

  The woman went through all the envelopes. “Are you sure this is everything, Mr. Cato?”

  “That’s it. Mostly bills, I’m afraid.”

  Dixon opened each envelope and perused the contents. She was particularly interested in the bill from GMAC. “Mr. Cato, are you acquainted with a Mrs. Eleanor Keeler, widow of one Walter Keeler?”

  “Nope. I mean, I know who Walter Keeler was, because I use some equipment he made, and I read about his car accident a while back.”

  “You’ve never met Mrs. Keeler?”

  “Not to my knowledge. A lot of people come on tours through the movie studio where I work, so I suppose she could have come through.”

  “Which studio?”

  “Centurion. That remi
nds me, I’m shooting this morning, so I gotta go. Anything else I can do to help you?”

  “I guess not. We’ll be here again tomorrow morning, so don’t open your mailbox; we’ll do it for you.”

  “Okay, no problem. Can you tell me what this is about?”

  “I’m afraid not.” The two officers thanked him and left. He gave them a moment to get away, then retrieved his briefcase, put it into the toolbox bolted to his truck, locked it and drove to work.

  Cato knew exactly what they were looking for: the money. How the hell could they know about that? He would have to be very careful with his spending. One good thing, though: Now he knew the name of the woman who had hired him. That might come in handy.

  DIXON AND WATTS were driving back to their station, empty-handed.

  “Anything of interest in his mail?” Watts asked.

  “I thought it was interesting that there were no past-due balances on any of his bills,” she said, “and his bill from GMAC showed he had recently been three months behind on his truck payments, but he had brought the account up to date in the past week or so. Still, he had only a little over three hundred bucks in his bank account. I think we should pull a credit report on Mr. Cato.”

  43

  JACK CATO TOOK his golf cart over to the studio commissary at lunchtime. He looked around the dining room and spotted Tina López and Soledad Rivera at a table together. He went through the cafeteria line, took his tray over to their table and sat down.

  “Hey, Jack,” Tina said.

  “Hey, Tina, Soledad. How was Tijuana?”

  “You tell me,” Tina said. “You were there, too.”

  “Drunk, I guess.”

  “You got something for me?”

  He picked up her napkin, stuffed an envelope into it and put it in her lap.

  She groped around, found the money and smiled.

  “Need any help down there?” he asked, nodding at her lap.

  “Thanks, but I’m all fixed up for that.”

  “He’s back, huh?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ll see him at poker tonight, then.”

  Soledad spoke up. “Am I going to hear from that cop again?”

  “What if you do?” Cato asked, digging into his lunch. “You know what to tell him.”

  “Everything turn out all right this weekend?” Tina asked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cato replied, shoving a chunk of meat loaf into his mouth.

  LUCY DIXON SAT down at her sergeant’s desk. “Boss, we came up dry at Cato’s house; he got to the mailbox first.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Cato. That’s his name. J.C.?”

  He shuffled through some slips of paper in a tray on his desk. “No money, huh?”

  “Well, I think it came, but like I said, he got to it first. The mailman comes early in Studio City; we were about a minute late. I went through what mail there was, mostly bills and a bank statement. All his bills are current, but he’s only got a few hundred bucks in the bank.”

  “So what? That’s all I’ve got, too.”

  “I pulled a credit report on him: very spotty, lots of payments a month or two late. And yet, everything is current now. What does that tell you?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It tells me that all his bills are paid because he came into some money.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I checked with the studio. He’s on a base salary of fifty-two grand a year, but he gets paid for doing stunt work in movies on top of that.”

  “So, if he makes two or three movies a year, he’s flush, huh?”

  “He hasn’t worked on a film this year, until this morning, when he started one.”

  “All this makes sense to me, Dixon, but you’ve got nothing that the D.A. would want to take to court. Stay on this woman, what’s her name?”

  “Keeler.”

  “Like Ruby Keeler. I liked her movies when I was a kid.”

  “I’ll stay on her, boss.” Dixon went back to her patrol car and drove back to Beverly Hills.

  CATO THOUGHT ABOUT it for a while, then he picked up the phone and called the cell number she had given him.

  “Yes?”

  “I got your package this morning,” Cato said. “Thanks.”

  “Then we have nothing further to talk about. Good-bye.”

  “Wait! I’ve got a heads-up for you.”

  “What?”

  “About a minute after I opened your envelope, two LAPD cops showed up with a federal warrant to search my mailbox. Fortunately, I had already put it away, but they opened all my mail. I think you can guess what they were looking for.”

  “How would they know about that?”

  “Well, they didn’t hear about it from me, Mrs. Keeler. You’d better look to yourself.”

  “What did you call me?”

  “It’s what they called you. They asked me if I knew you.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “What do you think I told them? I blew them off. Now I’ll say good-bye; I just thought you ought to know about this.” He hung up.

  BARBARA PUT THE cell phone away and retraced her steps for the past couple of days. That female cop had followed her to the post office, and she must have seen her mail the envelope. But how did she know it had been sent to Cato? Then the penny dropped. Oh, shit, she thought. She waited for the box to be opened and found the envelope, and I have no one to blame but myself.

  And, as a result, Jack Cato now knew her name, and he must think that she was very, very rich.

  CATO’S FIRST SCENE wrapped late in the afternoon, and at six, he went over to Don Wells’s offices. Grif Edwards and a couple of other players were already there. Wells came in from the set, and the poker table was set up.

  “Give me five hundred,” Cato said to the banker, tossing five hundreds onto the table.

  Wells looked at him sharply but said nothing.

  Cato won two hundred and twenty dollars, and when the game wrapped at midnight, he got into his golf cart and went back to the stable to get his truck. As he got out of the cart, a Mercedes with its headlights off pulled up next to him, and the window slid down.

  “You’re getting careless, Jack,” Wells said.

  “What do you men?”

  “Throwing hundred-dollar bills on a poker table. Did that money come from my safe?”

  “No, Don, it didn’t.”

  “Then where’d you get it?”

  Cato shrugged. He realized now that he had made a very big mistake.

  “A guy owed me some money, and he paid in hundreds.”

  “You find a bank where nobody knows you, and you get some small bills, you hear me?”

  “Okay, Don.”

  “Don’t be caught anywhere at any time with anything bigger than a fifty in your pocket, and not many of those.”

  “You’re right, Don; I should have thought.”

  “Think more, Jack. The cops have already talked to you once.”

  “My alibi is tight, Don.”

  “Yeah, I heard about how Soledad cut and ran when the cop showed up.”

  “Tina’s got her straightened out.”

  “Yeah, I know. She’d better stay straightened out, and so had you.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Don.”

  “I will, Jack. I will,” Wells said. Then he put up his window and drove away.

  Cato stood looking after him, sweating.

  44

  EAGLE PICKED UP Susannah at the hospital and drove her to her house to pick up some clothes. Her shoulder-length hair covered the bandage on the back of her head. “Are you in pain?” he asked.

  “No, they gave me something for it, but I haven’t had to take it. I have a nice little bald spot on the back of my head, though.”

  “Susannah, I’m so sorry I let you stay here alone.” They pulled into her driveway and went into the house.

  “Ed, you don’t need to say that to me a
gain. It’s not your fault; it’s her fault.” She walked into her bedroom and looked at the window. “Where’s the bullet hole?”

  “I had the windowpane replaced.”

  “Thank you, Ed, that was very thoughtful.” She filled a large suitcase with clothes and cosmetics, then a smaller case. “I think that’s it. Let’s get out of here.”

  Eagle put the bags into his trunk and started the car. “I’m not letting you out of my sight until this is over,” he said.

  “And when will it be over? Do you know?”

  “Soon,” Eagle said.

  DON WELLS CALLED Ed Eagle.

  “Good morning, Don,” Eagle said.

  “Ed, what’s going on with the investigation? When are they going to clear me?”

  “I don’t want to ask Bob Martínez about that, Don; he’ll think we’re getting nervous, and we don’t want that. I’m sure they’re still investigating, but when their leads don’t turn up anything, they’ll drop it.”

  “Will they send me a letter clearing me?”

  “I think the best we can hope for is that they’ll release a statement to the press, saying that you’re no longer a suspect.”

  “When?”

  “Don, it might be a few days; it might be a few weeks. If I don’t hear from them in, say, a month, I’ll get somebody from the press to call and interview Martínez. That will give him an opportunity to clear you.”

  “Should I proceed to probate with my wife’s will?”

  “Of course. Do anything you’d normally do in the circumstances.”

  “What sort of leads do you think they’re following?”

  “Well, we know they’re looking for anyone you might have hired to do the job. Detective Reese has already interviewed your two stuntmen, and I’m sure he’s checked their alibis.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I know you want to be out from under this, Don, but you’re just going to have to be patient.”

  “All right, Ed. Let me know if you hear anything.”

  “Of course I will. Goodbye.”

  EAGLE HUNG UP. He was beginning to think that Don Wells was awfully nervous for an innocent man.

  ALEX REESE WAS momentarily stumped. He’d checked out all his leads; now he was waiting for a break. Then he remembered something he hadn’t checked out. He called a friend of his at the NYPD.