‘It never hurts to lock your doors,’ Officer Hannigan said.
SEVEN
The initial appearance for Chico Flores took place the next morning, a Sunday, in the justice court over by the county jail. Lupita, Lupita’s nana, Ariana, and Malcolm sat on the hard wooden benches inside the courtroom. They were the only people in the courtroom except for a prosecutor from the County Attorney’s office, a court reporter and the judge, a Judge Harvey. Chico, looking like a pale ghost, was on a television with a defense attorney who was out of view, except for one arm that appeared from time to time as the judge spoke.
They listened as the judge read the charges. Two counts of first-degree murder, one count of public intoxication. A drunk, a stupid drunk, thought Malcolm, no matter how smart Lupita and Ariana had assured him Chico was as they waited in the courtroom. Bail was set at one million dollars, causing gasps of horror from Lupita and Ariana. Then it was over.
First-degree murder was unlikely to stick, Malcolm was thinking. Cops always overcharged. Negligent homicide was what he was thinking, from his experience as a cop and also his year of law school, before being Cindy’s husband had taken away his focus. That’s probably what he’d end up pleading to: two counts of negligent homicide. After the brouhaha died down.
Except this was a murder in a tourist town. Lots of pressure. No one outside the system would want a plea bargain.
They went outside and sat on a bench, waiting for Chico’s lawyer to show up. Ariana sniffled softly, and Lupita sat pale and rigid.
‘I thought his lawyer was going to get him out,’ Lupita said finally. ‘A million dollars! Who can come up with that?’
‘Actually, it would be ten percent of a million,’ Malcolm said. He explained.
‘A hundred thousand then,’ said Lupita in a voice of despair.
It was still early and, even though they were in the desert, muggy. Tiny gnats nipped at their skin. Malcolm was still trying to process how he, a cop, had ended up out here with the relatives of a man accused of committing a double homicide.
‘Chico is a very good artist,’ Ariana said to Malcolm. ‘He always was good at drawing, and then a couple of years ago these artists in town, they saw what he was doing, and they helped him out, gave him a studio for free so he could work.’
‘He’s even in a show downtown right now,’ said Lupita. ‘At the Sail Rabbit Gallery.’
‘Really?’ Malcolm said with interest. ‘The Sale Rabbit Gallery? What kind of name is that? They sell rabbits too along with the art?’
‘No, it’s spelled S-A-I-L. Chico said it’s a postmodern name; that means don’t ask me what it means,’ said Lupita.
‘That’s all he cares about, being an artist,’ Ariana said. ‘This—’ She threw out her hands. ‘This whole thing is not … it’s not possible. It is a mistake.’
Lupita patted her on the back.
‘Excuse me. I must use the restroom.’ Ariana stood up. She walked carefully, with dignity, back inside the building. She was dressed in black pants and a black and white silk blouse, as if about to go to work in an office.
Lupita watched her go. ‘My poor poor nana.’ She sniffed sadly. ‘He hasn’t even used that gun for months,’ she said, ‘years. It was just an accident.’
‘What gun is that?’ Malcolm asked.
‘It was this twenty-two. He got it when he was sixteen. ’Cause of our father. He would drink a lot and then try to hurt nana. So Chico got this gun at an estate sale. It was this gun-guy’s widow, you know, and she hated guns so she was happy to sell it to Chico. He even took a class about how to use it.’
‘A twenty-two, you said?’
Lupita nodded. ‘Our father died, a couple of years ago, so Chico didn’t need the gun any more. He put it some place.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know where.’
And took it out one night, went to a bar, got really drunk, waved the gun around and accidentally shot two tourists? ‘A twenty-two semi-automatic,’ Malcolm mused. ‘It would have ten rounds. He must have fired them all. Still—’
Then a car pulled up in front, and a man with a briefcase got out. ‘Miss Flores?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
He strode over, hand out, a roundish man, balding, in khakis and a tan sports jacket that appeared to have been slept in. ‘Stuart Ross. I’m Chico’s attorney.’ He glanced at Malcolm.
‘Just a friend,’ Malcolm said.
‘Bail is one million dollars,’ Lupita said in outrage.
‘Wouldn’t expect less with a double homicide,’ said Stuart Ross. ‘I’ll work on getting it lowered, but today was just pro forma stuff. Right now I can tell you law enforcement thinks the killings appear to be drug related.’
Drug related, Malcolm thought, beginning to regret being there at all.
‘I’ll have more to tell you when the reports start coming in,’ Stuart Ross said. ‘Here’s my—’ he fumbled in a pocket – ‘card.’
‘My nana’s inside. She’d like to ask you some questions, and we’d like to know when you can get him out of—’ Lupita started to say.
But he was gone.
‘Drug related is stupid,’ Lupita said. ‘Chico didn’t do drugs. And what does pro forma even mean?’ she asked Malcolm.
He explained.
EIGHT
‘I don’t kill any of them,’ the woman was saying at the table next to Dakota and Kate’s at Poco’s Vegan Cafe.
‘Not even scorpions?’ said her companion.
‘Not even scorpions. Or spiders. Or centipedes. What I do is get a glass jar, put it on top of them, then kind of slide some cardboard underneath and take them outside. They’re innocent. Not like humans—’ A note of disgust crept in. ‘Humans just kill and kill for no reason at all, just the fun of it.’
‘What about mosquitoes? You don’t kill them?’
‘Chico’s a gentle soul,’ Dakota was saying. She took a bite of her gluten-free deep fried Brussel sprouts burrito. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. The only good coming out of this whole thing is that if people think he’s a murderer, they’ll probably buy some of his pieces.’
Dakota wore a black tunic and skinny black jeans, her hennaed red hair in a soft frizz around her face. She and Kate were having lunch at Poco’s then going over to the Sail Rabbit Gallery to see some of Chico’s work.
‘But if he was drunk when he did it, it probably wasn’t on purpose,’ Kate pointed out.
‘Nobody thinks he did it, actually.’
‘Why would they arrest him then?’
‘Come on,’ Dakota said. ‘Chamber of Commerce? Arrest someone right away so the tourists won’t get scared off.’
Kate finished off her quinoa taco and took a sip of healing coconut water. It tasted uninteresting.
‘God,’ said Dakota. ‘I still can’t believe you talked to her. That is so destiny or something.’
‘I didn’t really talk to her. I just showed her where the melatonin was,’ Kate said. Her hand was shaking, just a bit. ‘I keep thinking about her, dead, just like that. Everything all over, forever.’
There was a pause.
‘If it wasn’t Chico,’ Kate said, ‘whoever did it is still out there. It just kind of freaks me out.’
‘Look,’ Dakota said, ‘if you’re so nervous, you can come stay with me again for a while till this blows over. The guy next door – you met him, remember? Biker Bill. He’ll look out for us.’
‘That’s okay.’
Dakota regarded her for a moment. ‘You know what you need, is some super sublingual vitamin B. It’s fantastic for stress and anxiety. I’ve got some; I carry it with me all the time.’ She reached in her purse, took out a small bottle and shook it vigorously. ‘Here. It has a dropper. You squirt it under your tongue, and it goes to work right away.’
Kate squirted. It tasted sweet and bitter at the same time.
‘It’s that guy,’ said Dakota. ‘The one you ran away from, Harry. He’s made you into a nervous wreck.’
The Sail
Rabbit Gallery was down on the Gulch, between Spokes, a bicycle shop and VaVa Boom, a vintage clothing store. A KOLD-TV Channel Thirteen van was parked up a little way from the gallery, and a cameraman was panning a view of the street.
‘Hey, Kate!’ Windsong swerved towards her, teetered-tottering on his bicycle. He was wearing a tattered vintage bowling shirt with the name PHIL embroidered on one pocket and looked a little dreamy; he probably smoked a number before hitting the streets on this fine day.
‘What?’
‘The press is looking for you.’
‘What press?’ She gestured toward the Channel Thirteen van. ‘Them?’
‘Not them. It was the Arizona Daily Star guy. I don’t see him right now.’
An artfully hand-lettered sign in the gallery window said: ‘Chico Flores: Lost Innocence’.
‘Lost innocence. Can you believe it?’ Dakota said. ‘Let’s go in. I want you to meet Melody. She’s one of the arts collective members.’
They went inside.
Melody was a pale woman with dense black hair and red-framed glasses. Behind the glasses her eyes were red too, as though she had been crying all night.
‘Hi,’ she said politely when Dakota introduced Kate. ‘Dakota’s talked about you a lot. It’s nice to meet you.’ She extended a limp hand, but clearly her heart wasn’t in it.
She faded away into the back somewhere.
A gaggle of people – from tourists in clean bright clothes and running shoes, to punks and Goths, all in black with hennaed hair and piercings – filled the gallery space. The white walls were hung with baby dolls painted bright colors and crucified on crosses decorated with rhinestones and glitter. Kate stood back to get the full effect – it transcended the materials, the crosses sad bright jewels on the gallery wall. That sounded like copy for a press release, something she might have written back in her community arts center days.
‘Excuse me?’ someone said.
Kate turned, and there was a young man with a dark beard and tiny wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you Kate Waters?’
She nodded.
‘Ben O’Malley. I’m a reporter with Arizona Daily Star. I was talking to Windsong, and he said he took a picture of you and Caroline with Caroline’s cellphone.’
‘So?’
‘Did you talk at all?’
‘Why, yes, she said to me: someone’s going to shoot me and my husband later on and there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘Jesus Christ! No kidding!’
‘Kidding,’ Kate said.
‘Hey,’ Ben O’Malley said, ‘give me a break here. I’m with a newspaper, for Christ’s sake. We need all the help we can get.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Kate, suddenly wary. ‘I really don’t have any comment for you.’ She turned away abruptly, almost running into a man coming in behind her.
‘Sorry.’ He bowed like someone from an eighteenth-century novel. Blue T-shirt under a sports jacket. A tired face with angular features, but a nice smile.
‘My fault.’ Kate smiled back.
Something zinged in the air. For a second they stared at each other like old friends. Kate felt her face flush.
‘Malcolm MacGregor,’ he said.
‘MacGregor,’ said Kate. ‘Like in Peter Rabbit and the flopsy bunnies.’ She couldn’t believe she’d said that.
But he laughed. ‘And all that soporific lettuce. I think I read that book to my nephew only a year or so ago.’
‘I’m Kate. Kate Waters.’
‘You like the show?’
‘I kind of do.’
‘And the artist? Chico? Do you know him?’
Why was he asking all these questions? Kate wondered suddenly. Who was he? Better check with Dakota. And that vitamin B stuff wasn’t working at all. ‘No,’ she said cautiously. ‘No, I don’t. I—’
‘Kate!’ Windsong was outside, waving his arms at her.
‘Excuse me,’ Kate said.
The Safeway was located out of town a way, near one of the newer developments. That afternoon on his way there, in his blue Chevy 1500 truck that was too big for a tiny town like Dudley, Malcolm thought about the woman he’d spoken to in the gallery. Kate Waters. She’d been talking to that reporter; he’d seen her through the gallery window. It had to be something to do with the murder of the tourists, that was why the press was there. He wondered what. She had a kind of – what? – undercurrent of unease that he’d always found attractive. And he liked the Peter Rabbit stuff, dumb as it might be, but that was neither here nor there. It was nowhere.
And where the hell am I? he wondered, passing Tin Town, a cluster of houses, tiny like toys, tiny church, big bar. To his left in the distance was a rusted structure from an old mining excavation, abandoned years ago. It looked like some ancient ruined Mayan temple, worshipers long dead in some bloody tribal ritual.
Get a grip.
At the Safeway, he bought a six-pack of Sam Adams beer, a pound of hamburger – eighty percent lean, even though his dead wife Cindy had always bought the ninety percent, ’cause you needed a little fat for the taste – and some Philly Cheese Hamburger Helper. Cindy would be appalled at the way he’d been eating. Yeah, right, Cindy, he thought as he trundled his cart out to the parking lot, your diet was so good, and where did it get you? Jesus Christ.
No more thinking about Cindy.
Better to think about Chico Flores. Much better.
Negligent homicide, he decided, because there didn’t appear to be any intent, just a drunk waving a gun around like a total asshole, though of course he hadn’t read the police reports yet. According to Lupita, Chico owned what sounded to him like a twenty-two semi-automatic – it would have ten rounds in it, and he’d probably fired them all. Two counts of negligent homicide; hard to plead that down much more with two deaths and an outraged town that relied on tourists for a living.
Chico seemed like maybe an okay guy – whatever you decided about those baby dolls in the gallery as art, just making them had to have been a lot of work. But look what Chico’s carelessness had done – not just to the tourists, but to his sister and his grandmother.
Back home Malcolm checked his laptop for updates. The bloggers had jumped in already, he noted, blaming the deaths of Wes and Carrie Cooper on the Democrats, on the Republicans, on the Tea Party, on a lack of gun control, on inadequate security on the border and, by extension, on Janet Napolitano and President Obama, on illegal aliens, on the Mexican drug cartels, on vigilante groups, on terrorists cells lurking everywhere, and finally on Sheriff Joe Arpiao and Governor Jan Brewer.
Malcolm cooked up the hamburger with the Philly Cheese Hamburger Helper, ate it in front of the TV with a bottle of Sam Adams. He hadn’t slept well the night before, and he fell asleep on the couch while the Channel Thirteen weatherman was still talking.
He woke up hours later, to the ten o’clock news. They were playing an interview with Belen Acuna, the woman who had initially called the police after the Dudley shooting.
‘For a minute I didn’t know what was happening,’ she said. ‘I heard the shots – one, two – and I thought fireworks. Then I looked out my window. I could see the woman, poor thing, she was lying on the steps.’
Still foggy, Malcolm took a swig of Sam Adams, by now warm and lacking any fizz.
‘Pretty tough on you,’ said the interviewer. ‘Thank you, Belen Acuna. The alleged shooter, Chico Flores, is being held in the Cochise County jail on a million-dollar bond.’
Malcolm stood up, drained the rest of the beer and took his dinner plate and fork out to the kitchen. The window over the sink that looked out on to a cement wall was a dark blank. Wait, he thought suddenly, did I hear that right? He set the plate and fork in the sink, went to his computer, to the Channel Thirteen website, and replayed the interview.
Once again Belen Acuna said, ‘For a minute I didn’t know what was happening. I heard the shots – one, two – and I thought fireworks. Then I looked out my window. I could see the woman, poor thing, she w
as lying on the steps.’
Two shots, she’d said. Only two shots? Something was off here, seriously off.
NINE
‘The thing is, I thought he was going to get out right away,’ said Lupita, Monday morning.
‘Oh, honey,’ Attorney Stuart Ross’s secretary Ruth Norton said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ She pulled a Kleenex from the box she kept ever ready on her desk, got up and went to Lupita, who was sitting in the chair by the window, face scrunched up in a grimace, weeping silently.
Lupita took it and blew her nose. She looked at Ruth, who she’d hardly noticed before because she’d started crying as soon she was walked into the office. Middle-aged, thick reddish brown hair with a streak of white down the center. She reminded Lupita of a substitute teacher who used to fill in back when she was in junior high.
‘I can see you love your brother a lot,’ Ruth said kindly.
Lupita nodded.
Then Stuart Ross came out of his office and gestured at Lupita to come in. She did and sat down. ‘You couldn’t even get him out?’ she said accusingly. She sniffed, and a small tear rolled down her cheek.
He looked at his watch, as if he wanted to get rid of her as fast he could. He cleared his throat. ‘Before we lose sight of reality, don’t forget that just after the tourists were shot, he was found holding the gun that shot them.’
‘Isn’t he supposed to be innocent until proven guilty?’
‘Of course.’
‘So what next?’
‘They can only hold him for a week before either a grand jury indicts him or there’s a preliminary hearing, but I doubt there’ll be a PH.’
‘PH?’
Stuart looked overly patient. ‘The abbreviation for preliminary hearing. Look, there’s probably going to be an indictment, and I plan to file a motion to modify his conditions of release as soon—’
‘Modify conditions of release. What does that mean?’
‘I’ll ask the judge to lower his bail or release him on his own recognizance. The case stinks to high heaven, and the media’s swarming – we need to let them see just how lousy the case is.’
Empty Houses Page 4