Cool in Tucson (11 page)

In two hours they were loading Perkins’ laptop and the contents of his desk into Sarah’s backseat.  Sarah gave her card to the manager as she fastened a Crime Scene lockbox on the door.  “I keep the key.  This apartment’s impounded till further notice.” 

“How long—”

“I can’t say.  It takes as long as it takes.  You’ll see various forensic scientists here, dusting for prints and collecting DNA and so on.  They’ll take some articles of clothing, they’ll leave you a list of anything they take.  They’ll have the key and they won’t need any help.”

“I really have to know—”

“Mr. Clark.  I know it’s disturbing.  We only do what we have to do.  You have a deposit, don’t you?  Use that if you have to.  By the way, did Perkins list his next of kin?”

“No.  I said, ‘You must have somebody you’d want notified in case of emergency,’ but he insisted, no, there wasn’t anybody.” 

“That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?”

“Unheard of.  Everybody’s got somebody.”

“Well…if you hear from anybody will you call me at this number, please?”  

In the car headed back downtown, she asked Ibarra, “Did you notice the man in the Escalade parked in the turnaround?”

“The one we passed on the way out, you mean?  Uh…not particularly.  He wasn’t parked, was he?  I thought he was just leaving.  What about him?” 

“I don’t know.  His face didn’t quite match the car, did it?  Big beat-up looking guy, looked like a brawler.  Elegant car.”

“Jesus, do we have to match our cars now?  You can be very demanding, Sarah.”

“Okay, forget it.  What grabbed you about the apartment?”

“Just what we said at the beginning, too neat and clean.  Not enough
stuff
.  No pictures but those three stupid prints, I asked the manager and he said they came with the place.  A few paperbacks, no music.  The cheap TV goes with the rental.  Three fishing magazines in a little row, like a dentist’s office.  Even the closet has too few clothes.”

“Yeah.  Good clothes only—like what you’d take on a trip.”

“The refrigerator—six bottles of Gatorade and two of Bolla Soave.” 

“Uh-huh.”  Sarah squinted into the punishing afternoon sun, remembering.  “Trader Joe’s wine, did you see the sacks in the cupboard?”

“Neatly folded and stacked just so.  Must have got his Gouda there too, and his ship’s biscuits.  Nothing on hand for a real meal, though.  Peanut butter and two apples.”

“Granola bars in the cupboard and a jar of instant coffee.  I looked under the sink, it was as clean as the living room.”

 “Unreal.”  Ibarra was flipping through his notes.  “Either he’s the most extreme neat freak I ever saw or he really lived somewhere else.  How much do you bet there isn’t a fingerprint in the place that isn’t his or the cleaning crew’s?”  Sarah gave him an “oops” look and he said, “I’ll do it,” and added “cleaning crew prints” to their wants list.  

“His bill file looks neat and complete, though,” Sarah said.

“Uh-huh.  Like it’s all ready for the auditors.”

“So where does a pusher go to turn in his scrupulous records?”   

“Wouldn’t we like to know that?” Ibarra scratched the side of his nose thoughtfully, staring west at the purpling slopes of the Tucson Mountains.  “A systems wonk pushing drugs on the street?  The man’s personality is all
mixed up
.” 

Ibarra was fun to work with at the beginning of an investigation, when all the balls were up in the air.  So long as alternative tales could be spun out of the early facts at hand he stayed fully engaged and happy.  Wrap-up time, when the likely suspect had to be caged inside the available evidence, Ibarra’s inner worry-wart surfaced and he went nuts re-checking his lists.

“We’ll understand him better after we’ve been into his computer,” she said.  “He never had a chance to delete anything.”

“How do you know?”

“Think about the crime scene—he wasn’t expecting an attack, was he?  Looks to me like he was taking care of business when some bozo jumped him with a knife.”

Ibarra rolled his large brown eyes toward the roof of the car and said, “Nobody much stands around and lets it happen, do they?”

“I’m just saying we probably have a virgin computer here.”

“Oh sure,
now
you talk dirty, when we’re almost back at work, what a tease.”  He watched her maneuver into a cramped space beside the Stone Avenue station.

“Come on, you know what I’m saying, he never got a chance—”

“To dump any files.  I know.  But you have the autopsy tomorrow, right?  And I have that goddamn report.  Why don’t you get Harry Eisenstaat to have a look at the computer?” 

“That’s what I’m thinking.  Harry’s fast and he notices all the whadyacall it, anomalies and stuff.”

“And Delaney told him to lend us a hand if we needed it.  Not that he gives a fiddler’s fart what Delaney says.”  He yawned.  “Man, it’s a long day when you start before sunup, huh?”

“Maybe your kids will let you sleep tonight.”

“Maybe I won’t give ‘em a choice.”  He yawned three more times while they unloaded the car, which started Sarah doing it.  

“Come on, cut it out,” she said, “you’re making me sleepy, and we’ve still got all this stuff to take in.”   

“I’m gonna phone upstairs and get Harry to come down,” he said, “Why should he sit on his ass while we sweat?”  The thought of passing some of the pain around perked him up a little.  But even though it was only two loads, he was wilted again, drenched with sweat by the time their boxes were piled by the freight elevator.

Eisenstaat stepped off when the doors opened, grumbling, “My God, what did you do, bring the whole apartment?  Don’t we have work crews for this?”  A lean, irascible man nearing retirement, he hated physical exertion of any kind.  His long face grew mournful over the weight of his box; he began talking at once about suing the department if this donkey labor gave him a hernia.

“It’s just one stinking box,” Sarah said, “quit bitching, Harry.  Any progress on Perkins’ car?”  She had asked him to call DMV.

“Of course.  Where Eisenstaat goes there’s always progress.”  Eisenstaat preened over the top of his box.  “I already put out an APB.  But can you believe it, Adult Probation can’t locate his parole officer?”

“What are you saying, they’ve lost a parole officer?”

“Probably not, but they’ve lost the record.  In their vast and no doubt scrupulously correct filing system, there is no record of a parole officer for Adolph Alvin, a.k.a. Ace.”

“Devastatingly weird.  Well, it’ll surface soon.”  They reached their floor and begun sliding cartons noisily down the hall.  “Meantime, will you take that computer you’re carrying into your workspace and pick its brains?”

“I suppose I can crowd it in.  You want bank accounts, customer lists, what else?”    

“Well, let’s see now,” Sarah said, pausing to wipe salty sweat out of her eyes, “a pusher and a murder victim, I probably don’t need his recipe for chicken soup.” 

 “Oh, my.  You get mean after you’ve been out in the weather, don’t you?”  

“Hundred and three degrees on that asphalt, Harry.  Don’t mess with me.”

Sarah had once presented Eisenstaat with a T-shirt that read, “I kvetch, therefore I am.”  Burned out long ago by the explosive growth and relentless flow of illegal immigration always threatening to swamp the resources at 270 Stone, Harry Eisenstaat was just waiting to get his ticket punched.  He actually complained at least fifty per cent more than the rest of them, which was really saying something, endless rants being the default response to their heavy workload. 

Sarah was worried right now about what Delaney might be going to do to her career, but she had no complaints about the city she worked in.  She saw Tucson as a revolving door filled with opportunity, a constant flow of needy people clawing their way up from the south, well-off seniors moving optimistically down from the north, and greedy hyenas waiting to pounce on any opportunities that surfaced in the dysfunctional interface between the two societies.  A smart cop’s dream city, in fact.  And the door turned a little faster every year, pushed along by the drug trade, the engine with no off switch.  

CHAPTER NINE

Rudy’s tire store was a perfect place to hide an illegal business in plain sight.  It had stood on the same block on Fourth Avenue for so long it had become part of the street, like the curbs and the bushes.  People hardly saw it any more unless they were hunting cut-price tires. 

Rudy’s grandfather Raymundo started it with two partners in 1949, three Mexican-American vets using GI loans, all of them married and so poor it took everything they could scrape together to buy a few tires and rent the space.  For the next dozen years, Raymundo busted his hump in the tire shop, his wife cleaned houses for the Anglos and raised a houseful of kids.  Somehow they managed to save a little something every month, so when their oldest son Alberto turned sixteen they bought out the other two partners and put up the sign,
Ortiz and Son
, that still hung out front. 

Alberto was not the great tire salesman his father was, but he followed orders and worked hard, so when he got a girl pregnant a few years later the family was able to set him up in the tiny house on Eighth Avenue where Rudy grew up.  The store and both houses were in South Tucson, the square-mile city-within-a-city that was swallowed by urban growth during Rudy’s childhood.  It was almost downtown now and much smaller than the sprawl of houses below I-10 that the locals called south Tucson without the capitol S. 

Vanloads of illegal immigrants arrived in South Tucson every week.  The ones that didn’t get caught and sent back stayed till they got established and then usually moved on.  But Rudy’s family stayed in the barrio.  In fact there had been Ortizes living in that part of the Tucson valley since the days of the first missionaries, his grandfather once told him proudly.

“How come we ain’t big shots, then, like Ronstadts and them?” Rudy was young then and said whatever came into his head.  His own grandchildren did the same thing now and he could hardly bear to listen to them.  They made him realize how foolish he had been once, never considering the wonderful possibilities of silence.

            That day when Rudy blabbed his first thought, Raymundo had been deeply offended.  Turning to Alberto he said, “Perhaps you could take the time to explain to your son how discouraging it is to work hard all these years, starting from nothing, and become the owner of a thriving business only to hear disrespect from one’s own grandson.”  He had never liked Rudy, who resembled his mother, the woman Raymundo still considered a slut for her moment of weakness in Alberto’s arms.  Raymundo didn’t speak to Rudy again until the middle of the following year, when Alberto lay dying of cancer. 

That day he sent Rudy’s uncle Manuel to the house on Eighth Avenue, so crammed with Ortizes now that Rudy and his sisters never came home except to sleep.  Standing in the doorway, looking guiltily out the window because he could not bear to see how Alberto lay suffering, Manuel told Rudy, “He wants to talk to you.”  Manuel was too cowed by his father to call him by name. 

Rudy followed him back to Raymundo’s house.  Manuel stopped on the sidewalk by the front door, said, “He’s in the parlor,” and went on around to the kitchen door in back to let himself in.     

“
Bueno
,” Raymundo said when Rudy stood in front of him, “Alberto has always been my right arm, my other sons are worthless.  Now it must be you.  I have never seen any sign of intelligence in you, but your mother and sisters have no one else, and your father insists that you can learn.  So you will come to my shop tomorrow morning.”