“Sounds right to me,” she said. “Now can we get back to the point, which is Palomino didn’t kill Vladik. Which makes you wonder why Boris told us that.” Luz was wearing her scary look.
“Because Boris killed Vladik himself!” I guessed, having caught the drift of her reasoning.
“It’s sure worth investigating. Want more coffee?”
“I think I’ll make some breakfast. Your coffee is—ah—strong. Very strong.”
“Wimp,” Luz said laughing. “Boris claimed he was at Brazen Babes when Vladik died. We should check that out.”
“We could ask the Russian girls—women.” I had no idea whether Luz was interested in feminist, politically correct designations for women. She probably was. “They’re in the university dormitory now, and I’m sure they’d be glad to help.”
“Okay. And I think we should look up that bouncer. Then when we get some information, we’ll head for Brazen Babes, later tonight. First, we talk to the dancer Boris claimed to have slept with—Carmen, he said. Then we ask him why he lied to us.”
“I’d really rather not have to talk to him again.” That preference didn’t do me much good, nor did the statement that I needed more sleep. Luz said we wouldn’t be hitting Brazen Babes until late, so I could catch some sleep before we went. Then she offered to make breakfast while I called the Russian sopranos.
I had the telephone number for their floor at the dormitory, but another student answered. She said Polya and Irina were out in their new car with a couple of “jocks” from the dorm. That did not sound good to me. New car? Jocks? Perhaps those huge young men who had helped carry in their belongings? Perhaps I needed to have a talk with the girls about preserving one’s good name—wait. Had they decided that they weren’t lesbians? I asked the student when they might be back and was given a cell phone number. They had cell phones? I’d been soliciting help from the ad hoc opera committee, and the objects of our charity had already acquired cell phones and a new car?
I was somewhat reassured to find that the cell phone belonged to one of the athletes, who promptly put on Irina, who was so excited that she could hardly talk. Evidently Ray Lee Cleveland had arrived that afternoon in person with a 1985 convertible of some sort. The girls were stunned by the fact that it was a convertible, which they evidently considered the ultimate in American chic. I thought nothing could be more dangerous to one’s skin than daily exposure to El Paso’s continuous and powerful sunshine.
Even more exciting than the fold-down top, according to Irina, was the fact that the car started every time they turned the key. They had tried it ten times already, and the ignition had never disappointed them. They could have gone out by themselves, without their large neighbors on hand to push when necessary, had they realized what a treasure the car was.
Irina thanked me. Polya thanked me, and she was driving so I cut that short. Irina said that as soon as they had jobs—and they had an interview on Monday with the maquila person who needed translations from and to Russian—they planned to buy the ingredients to bake something (the name was Russian and the description was not promising) for the Clevelands and for me.
Evidently my earlier worries, except for those concerning skin cancer, were unfounded. I no longer felt it incumbent upon myself to warn the girls of the sexual dangers of association with brawny athletes. I finally managed to break into “Car Talk—Russian Style” to ask at what times, if any, they had seen Boris Stepanovich on the night Vladik died.
“He is being very angry with us that we do not dance for him anymore,” said Irina, sounding much less exuberant than before. “He threaten to turn us in to immigration peoples, but we say we have friend, Mrs. Blue, who is protecting us and seeing we have food and car and nice place to live.”
Wonderful, I thought. Now he’s probably very angry with me. “Can you remember if he was in the club that night?” I asked again.
Irina and Polya conferred. I could tell that they had restarted the car several times since our conversation began. If they weren’t careful, they’d burn out the ignition. Even I knew that. “Boris Stepanovich is there when we come to work because he complains how late we are, but he knows why we are coming late. Because of opera party,” said Irina.
“And after that?” I asked.
“He send for Carmen after she dance, and we are not seeing them again before we are going home to trailer.”
After hanging up, I passed this information on to Luz, who said, “We need to talk to the stripper before we go into Boris’s office.”
“But I don’t want to go into his office. He’s mad at me because I lured his dancers into respectability. He’s threatening to turn them into the INS.”
“Yeah, right. Like he’s going to tell INS he’s got two girls working without green cards and not getting paid.” She set plates of toast down on the table and picked up the Sunday paper. “Take a look at this. We hit the front page.”
My heart sank when I saw the picture right in the center—in color. Luz and I, leaving the jail. “Look at my hair,” I cried. “There should be a law against photographing a woman who looks that bad.”
“Hey, I think it’s cute. All those pieces sticking up every which way. Makes you look younger. Except for the circles under your eyes. But don’t worry about the picture. Get a load of the copy. We’re both quoted.”
The headline said, “Ex-Cop and Food Writer Kidnap Wanted Drug Dealer in Juarez.” I sighed and skimmed the copy. Luz was quoted as saying, “It’s always a pleasure to see evil people brought to justice.” I was quoted as saying, “I’m tired, and I want to go home. If you and your microphone don’t get out of my way, I’m going to box your ears with it.”
“I couldn’t have said that,” I groaned.
“Oh, but you did. I heard it. You scared that TV guy half to death. He fell over a camera cord trying to get away from you.”
32
The I-Got-Kids Excuse
Luz
Carolyn didn’t think much of the breakfast I produced: two slices of toast each, spread with some jelly I found in the refrigerator, and another cup of coffee. She said the preserves were for canapés. Like I cared. Then she apologized, admitting that she was just grumpy and that she’d used the preserves on toast herself.
We tracked down the bouncer by calling the Russian girls again and asking for his name, which was Marcus Finnegan, aka Fats. Finnegan was listed in the phone book, so we got his address and visited his house across the mountain off Copia without telling him we were on our way. So much for elaborate detective work.
We found Finnegan in his front yard, a patch of yellow, scraggily grass in front of an adobe house that needed paint everywhere paint could be applied. He had a defunct refrigerator and some discarded furniture decorating the front porch, and he himself was sitting in a sagging lawn chair set in the middle of dead grass, sunning himself and his tattoos and protruding belly in his undershirt and grease-stained pants. A pretty sight.
“Hey, Marcus,” I called, climbing the cracked cement steps to his yard. “We came to ask you a couple of questions.”
“Piss off,” he replied, but with no particular animus. He was drinking beer from a can and promptly laid a newspaper over his face when I spoke to him.
I removed the paper, which had a story I hadn’t seen that morning. I hadn’t read much beyond the piece about us on the front page and our picture. On page two, section B, I learned that the Border Patrol had raided the Pinon Trailer Park on the Westside and caught fifteen illegal aliens, presumably in transit away from the border, and Ramona Islas-Barrientos, who was arrested for smuggling illegal aliens. Handing the article to Carolyn, I leaned over Fats and poked him in the chest. The man might have impressive arm muscles, but he also has tits that are bigger than mine.
“Let’s start again, Mar-cus. You being an important employee at Brazen Babes, which is to say their bouncer, and tight with your boss Boris, that asswipe Russian entrepreneur and purveyor of naked—”
; “Hey, shut up, will you? I got kids. They’re right there in the house.”
I could hear them, galumphing around and shrieking. “Like I care, Mar-cus. You don’t want your kids to hear the questions, get your fat ass outa that chair. The three of us can take a stroll down the street and have our chat in private.”
Carolyn cleared her throat and discreetly nodded toward the porch where the noise had shut down, and two kids were peeking out the screen door. Obviously she thought I should watch my language in front of the children. How did she think he talked at home? Like he suddenly changed from a dirty-mouth bouncer to a clean-spoken daddy. Marcus saw them too. His beady little, fat-encased eyes jumped back and forth between us and the offspring, one of whom was yelling, “Hey, Ma. There’s two ladies out . . .”
Before Mrs. Marcus could respond, we were all crowding down the cement steps and heading away from the house with Marcus in the lead. We got as far as a stone-and-weed-choked arroyo at the end of the street, where Marcus sat down on a rock and said, “So what d’ya want? I’m a family man. I don’t take my work home. Ain’t the kinda thing a man tells his wife and kids about.”
“How old are your children, Mr. Finnegan?” Carolyn asked, ever the polite conversationalist. Pretty soon she’d have him discussing the weather.
“That’s touching, Mar-cus,” I cut in, “and we got no designs on screwing up your happy family. Just answer a few questions, and you can go home and finish your beer.”
“Shit.” He looked at his hand and realized that the can wasn’t in it.
“Our questions have to do with Mr. Ignatenko and his whereabouts last Saturday night and Sunday morning,” said Carolyn. “Did you see him that night?”
Marcus gave her a duh look and said he saw his boss every night. “I work an eight-to-four shift. That’s when we’re open, so that’s when we’re there, me an’ Boris, the girls, waitresses, bartenders. Everyone.”
“Right, but was Boris there the whole time?” I asked.
“Where else would he be?” Marcus looked confused. “It’s his place.”
“Answering a question with a question is not helpful to us, Mr. Finnegan,” said Carolyn sternly.
“Right. Maybe we should go back to your house,” I put in. “Your wife might have heard you say—”
Marcus belched. “He was there, okay? In his office. On the floor if there was any trouble, not that I ain’t up to takin’ care of anything them guys can dish out.”
“Would you have known if Mr. Ignatenko chose to leave the building for, say, an hour or more?” Carolyn inquired.
Damn. The woman had a notebook out.
“Yeah. Sure. I stick my head in every half hour to report. Unless he’s got company.”
“What company?” I asked. “What company did he have that particular night?”
“Well, he called Carmen in about two, and they was going at it—you know what I mean. She come back in when we closed, so I guess they had another—uh—” He glanced at Carolyn. “Meetin’.”
“Who else?” I asked.
“Just them two. Boris don’t usually go for threesomes.”
I noticed that Carolyn was embarrassed at talk of threesomes, but if she wanted to investigate scumbags, what did she expect? Those other murders she said she’d looked into—they must have been classier than this one. “Anyone but Carmen go in to see him when Carmen wasn’t in there for their meeting?”
Marcus scratched his bald head, puzzling over the question. “Manny. Manny come in around midnight.”
“Who’s Manny?”
“He does hits, an’—like that. Muscle. You know? Only he don’t necessarily use his fists like me, not that I don’t use a bat if I gotta. But I just work in the club. Manny works outside. Like a freelancer.”
Now, Manny was of interest to me. If he came in at midnight before Vladik was killed, maybe Boris had hired a hit. “How long was he there? Did Boris give him a job?”
“How the hell would I know? Boris don’t tell me about his business with Manny. I just work inside, like I said.”
“How—long—was—Manny—in—there?”
Marcus shifted uncomfortably on his rock, evidently catching on that I was getting pissed with the lack of information. “Fifteen minutes?”
I kept staring at him.
“Whyn’t you ask Manny. He went in right after I did my twelve o’clock check with Boris, an’ he was gone by twelve-thirty.”
“Fine, I’ll ask Manny. Where do I find him? What’s his last name?”
Marcus scratched his head again. Many more questions and he’d have a scab there. “Diaz? I heard he got a place over a pool hall downtown, but I ain’t never been there. Listen, can I go back now? The kids an’ me is gonna watch 1001 Dalmatians. It’s on cable. They’ll be pissed off if I ain’t there when it starts.”
I let Marcus go, and when he was out of earshot, Carolyn said, “Poor man. I think he’s retarded.”
“Or maybe that’s what he wants us to think.” I watched Marcus shamble down the street. Looked like he couldn’t hurt anyone unless he fell on them, but I knew he had fast fists and a mean temper.
“You’re thinking that Mr. Ignatenko hired a hit man to kill Vladik, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Smothering someone with a pillow isn’t your usual hired-hit weapon of choice. More like a weapon of opportunity.”
“I think we should investigate this Manny,” said Carolyn, as if that idea wasn’t obvious.
“Did I say we weren’t?”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic about it,” she retorted as we walked the half block between the arroyo and the car.
“Ever been in a pool hall?” I asked, feeling kinda mean.
“Yes, I have. In San Francisco. I helped question a tattooed criminal named Arana. It was a life-enhancing experience.”
“Now who’s being sarcastic?” I asked as she started the car.
33
The Hit Man’s Ex
Carolyn
We found the pool hall, but there was no Manny Diaz in an apartment above it. The proprietor downstairs and, evidently, the owner of the building said Manny had moved in with his wife and three children several months ago. He gave us an address in the Lower Valley. We found that too, although I feared for my car’s suspension on the pot-holed and, ultimately, unpaved road.
“Cold front coming in,” Luz remarked as we opened an iron gate and walked up to the door. She was right; the temperature had dropped perceptibly, and sunshine was intermittent rather than continuous, as I’d come to expect during 99 percent of the daylight hours. Mr. Diaz’s house was painted a deep blue green and had bars on every window and door. No doubt hit men needed extra security. I could hear the sound of children’s voices behind the house and had to wonder how much danger they were in because of their father’s profession.
“We’re looking for Manny Diaz,” Luz said to the woman who answered the door and peered at us suspiciously from between the intervening bars.
“What for?” she replied.
“Business,” Luz answered.
“Need someone to take out your old man?” asked the wife cynically.
“Exactly. My friend here wants to hire your husband.”
I was horrified, not only to be identified as a woman who wanted her husband killed, but at the wife’s easy admission of her husband’s business. Didn’t she realize that we might be the police? Luz had been the police.
“Well, you’re out of luck. Manny took off for Mexico Monday. Thought the cops was after him. And I’ll tell you, if he figures he’s coming back here when the heat’s off, he’s wrong. I’ll kick his ass right off the doorstep. I don’t need his customers and the cops showing up at my door. I got kids, an’ only one of ’em’s Manny’s. An’ he ain’t my husband. I never married him in church or nothin’. I’m too smart for that. I’m takin’ a computer course at the community college, an’ I got my eye on a new man. Me an’ my kids will do just fine without that p
endejo.”
There was that word again. “Tell me, Mrs.—ah—” If she wasn’t Mrs. Diaz, what was her name?
“Tell you what? You want the name of some other pendejo to kill off your old man, you gonna hafta ask someone else. I’m out of the hits-for-hire business.”
“No, I wanted to ask what pendejo means. My Spanish is minimal, but I keep hearing that word.”
“It means stupid prick. Pendejo means stupid prick. Spanish or English, don’t matter. That’s what it means, and that’s what Manny was, a stupid prick.”
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“Probably you old man is too.”
“Not at all,” I protested, forgetting that I was supposed to be a customer in search of a hit man.
“Okay, if we’re through with the language lesson,” said Luz, “I got a question for you. Manny had a talk with Boris Ignatenko Saturday night. You know what that was about?”
“Sure,” said the non-wife. “Boris wanted to hire him.”
“And did Manny accept?”
“Hell, yes. Offer him five hundred, he’d shoot me an’ the kids. He is one real mean bastard.”
“So who did he kill?” Luz asked.
“He didn’t kill no one. There was a guy makin’ book and sellin’ dope at Brazen Babes. Which wouldn’t make no difference to Boris. I know Boris. I used to dance there before I had the third kid, Manny Junior. But the guy wasn’t kickin’ back Boris’s share of the profits. So Manny beat the crap out of him. It was a lesson. Know what I mean? Don’t fuck with Boris. That was the message.”
“Was this Saturday night or Sunday morning early that Manny earned his five hundred?” Luz asked.
I was too bemused to join in the questioning.
“Nah, Manny caught him comin’ out of the can in some bar on Texas Sunday night, dragged him into an alley, an’ broke all his ribs an’ whatever. Guy recognized Manny and swore he’d set the cops on him, so Manny left him there, hopin’ he’d die. Then he thought about it all night. Woke up the damn kids about three times bitching about his bad luck the guy had made him and Boris didn’t want the guy killed. So he took off Monday morning. Good riddance, I say.”
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