He began tidying up the bedroom until Nell said, "Fin, put away the Dustbuster. They already made the Joan Crawford story."
Then he came over to the bed, sat down, and kissed her lightly on the nose, saying, "I adore that bent beak."
"I might just keep you as a love slave," she said, tracing his chin dimple with her fingernail. "I only hope you weren't acting."
"If I was I deserve an Oscar," he said.
"Can I come back tomorrow?" Nell asked. "For an encore?"
"Okay," he said. "Can I cook that pasta for you?"
"Yeah, but I have to leave by Monday morning if only to keep Bobbie from using a flamethrower on Jules Temple and everyone he knows."
"I was thinking," he said. "Forty-five ain't such a cruddy age after all, is it?"
They looked at each other for a moment; then they nodded their heads, and Fin said, "Yeah, riiiiiiight."
The phone rang, and Fin reached across Nell to pick it up. "Hello," he said. Then, "Yes, this is Finnegan. Yes? Bobbie Ann Doggett?"
Nell jumped out of bed and started looking for her panties and bra as soon as Fin snatched a pencil and pad from the nightstand drawer and said, "Yes? What? No! WHAT?"
When he hung up, he could only gape at Nell for a moment. She was getting into her jeans when he said, "That was a sergeant at the Chula Vista Police Department! Bobbie's blown away Jules Temple!"
Thirty minutes later, Fin's Corvette squealed into the parking lot of Chula Vista P. D. He and Nell ran into the station, where they found a tall man in a green sweater and chinos standing in the lobby with a uniformed Chula Vista P. D. sergeant.
The tall man said, "You must be Detective Finnegan and Investigator Salter?"
Fin nodded and said, "Where is she?"
"Talking to detectives," the tall man said. "This is Sergeant Harvey. He was the first one on the scene."
"It was pretty gruesome," the cop said.
The tall man said, "I'm Captain Fontaine, USMC. Assistant director of security at North Island. I got to hear most of the story when Bobbie told it to the detectives. All about how you two've been working with her. I wish she'd told me."
"She was going to on Monday," Nell said.
Fin stared for a moment and said, "I guess this means she was right all along about Jules Temple."
Captain Fontaine said, "Yeah, looks like he was involved in a conspiracy to steal from our warehouses."
"It's just incredible/" Nell said. "A man like Jules Temple stealing shoes?"
"Maybe they stole a lotta things from us," the marine said. "Who knows how long it's been going on. We assume Temple and Pate had a falling out over sharing the loot, and Temple decided to kill him."
"She shouldn'ta been there," Fin said, shaking his head, utterly bewildered.
"No, but that's the way she is," the marine said. "When we took her on, I said to my boss, 'This little sailor's gonna be an amazing detective.' "
"But I don't get it!" Fin said. "Why would Jules Temple steal shoes? Why would he commit murder? Kee-rist! This is more mysterious than the register at the Show 'n Tell Motel!"
The marine said, "Maybe he just wanted more. Don't you read about big Mafia guys getting nailed for some petty little offense? People like that can't do anything legit. But I don't have to tell you about people like Jules Temple."
"Face it, Fin," Nell said. "With all our police experience it was so simple it took a kid to figure it out."
That's when the marine broke into a grin wider than the Halls of Montezuma. "That kid," he said, "is one gung-ho, stainless-steel, U. S. Navy issue, baaaaaaaad dog detective!"
Later, when they were alone in the police station lobby waiting to give their statements, Fin said, "Well, if Ross Perot doesn't get elected next Tuesday, I'll write and suggest he drop Admiral Stockdale as his running mate in ninety-six. Bobbie'll probably be an admiral by then and ready for public office."
"I'm gonna call the psychic advisory network," Nell said. "The high priestess tarot pendant holds the key to all that is hidden and mysterious."
"I'll never figure it out," Fin said. "I guess I got no talents whatsoever. So maybe I should go to law school?"
"Wanna go to the beach next Saturday?" Nell asked. "You're pretty good at building sand castles. Then we could go to my place afterward so I can find out if tonight was a fluke or if you have real love-slave potential."
"Okay," Fin said, "it's about the only way I can still get applause, I guess. And I been wondering, do you think it's remotely possible that you might share the rent with me someday? I mean, if I promise not to do something zany like marrying you?"
"Share rent where? In south Mission Beach?"
"No, I got roaches you could lasso for prize money with a number on your back. I was thinking maybe we could share your place in Pacific Beach. That way we could save a few bucks for our old age, which is right around the corner. I don't wanna be living alone when I can't even spoon chicken soup down my own neck."
"Here I go again," Nell said with a sigh. "I'll think about it and give you an answer after I feel you perform one more time. Which, by the way, I keep thinking about."
"I wish I could invite you to share my place, but there's barely room to turn around if you leave toenail clippings on the floor. Which of course I don't do. But if I did you could smack me with a wooden spoon, which coming from you I'd probably appreciate."
"Can you really cook?"
"Yes indeed. And maybe I can't promise you a satellite dish on your roof, but I wouldn't take up much space 'cause I'm not very big and all my belongings fit in a couple of those handkerchiefs my sisters always made me carry. Can't you decide now? I'm getting real anxious, especially since I'm fighting an old compulsion to propose marriage right this minute."
"Before I decide," Nell said, "do you know of any good support groups for stage mothers?"
Chapter 28
The next day. El Dta de los Muertos, the mother of the thief, Pepe Palmera, honored his memory at the graveyard. She brought flowers, and a photo of him that she'd put inside a cheap pewter frame. She gazed at his photo for a long time that day.
The mother of Porfirio Velasquez Saavedra, a. K. A. Juan Soltero, spent the day praying on her knees to the Virgin of Guadalupe while a mortician negotiated with family members for the price of a splendid funeral, as befitting his position.
Abel Durazo's mother did not put out a bottle of beer or anything else for her son's ghost. She was so shocked and grief-stricken to have learned of his murder that she was disconsolate, and refused to leave her bedroom.
The mother of Jaime Cisneros baked some sweet breads for her lost little boy. Also, she put out a few of his favorite toys, along with his asthma inhaler, even though her husband said that it seemed foolish to leave an inhaler for their dead son. Jaime's twelve-year-old sister, Socorro, swore that she saw Jaime that night, walking along the path that leads from Colonia Libertad to the north, and crawling through the hole in the fence like thousands before him.
EPILOGUE:
Three months after the resolution of the strange and baffling warehouse theft conspiracy that led to the deaths of two Americans and four Mexicans -- during the first weeks in office of the forty-second president of the United States -- the new owner of Green Earth Hauling and Disposal received a communication from Sacramento inquiring about some waste that had been manifested from NAS North Island but had never arrived at a disposal site. The mid-level bureaucrat in Sacramento was informed by telephone that the load of waste had been stolen along with the waste handler's copies of the manifests, and that the stolen load included a drum of Guthion from Southbay Agricultural Supply.
That same civil servant then telephoned Burl Ralston at Southbay Agricultural Supply to ask why in the hell he'd mailed them a donation to the American Red Cross, but not his manifest copy for the Guthion that later went with the stolen truck. Burl Ralston explained that his entire office had been disrupted by his secretary being off sick, and that he'd sent all sorts
of documents to the wrong places and made a thousand stupid mistakes with paperwork. He guessed that his copy of the Guthion manifest had probably gone to the American Red Cross and was now lost forever.
Burl Ralston apologized, and told the civil servant that he was seventy-four years old, and was making so many mistakes he thought it was time to retire to a little place he was thinking about buying in Mexico, just south of Rosarito Beach. He told the bureaucrat that with the NAFTA agreement apparently a done deal, the Baja Peninsula might just end up being a kind of Mexican Riviera. And that any sharp American would be wise to take advantage of the Mexicans while he still could.
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