Hot Schemes (17 page)

“Maybe,” he agreed, but he sounded doubtful.

“I could go into the store and try to catch some of his conversation.” She already had her hand on the door.

“Forget it. It would tip him that we’re following him.”

“The man looked straight through me the whole time we were sitting there. I doubt he’d even recognize me.”

“Don’t kid yourself. He could probably give you a detailed description of every single person seated near us in that restaurant. I watched him. He missed nothing.”

Molly recalled her own first impression of his alertness. Even though he appeared to have ignored her, Michael was probably right about his generally sharp observance of both her and his surroundings. “So what do we do now?”

“When he gets off that phone and into his car, you go over and take down the number. Then call the operator and say you were disconnected on a long distance call and ask if she can reconnect.”

“He made the call. Won’t she think it’s odd that I can’t tell her what number I made that call to?”

“Bluff. Do the best you can. At the very least, we’ll have this number and perhaps the long distance carrier he used. Perhaps later we can trace the call, if it becomes necessary.”

“How will we know the carrier?”

“Because I counted the numbers he dialed. He didn’t need an extra access number to reach his carrier, so whatever company the phone is linked to is his carrier. It probably says on the information card on the front of the phone.”

Molly kept her awe at his observation skills to herself. “Can I assume that while I’m on the phone, you won’t be waiting here patiently?”

“That’s right. I’ll be following him. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, take a cab back to Pedro’s and I’ll pick you up there.” He glanced toward the pay phone. “Okay, this is it. Be careful. Don’t let him see you.”

“Would you like me to lie down on the sidewalk until he’s passed by?”

Apparently he missed her sarcasm, because he nodded without taking his eyes off his quarry. “Good idea.”

Molly climbed out of the car and hunkered down, inching her way to the van parked two spaces up. Standing behind that, she was sufficiently out of view from the street, but could see the exit from the convenience store lot. She watched as Herman pulled out of the lot and headed west, just as Michael had anticipated. Michael waited until there were several cars in between, then pulled away from the curb and into traffic a few cars behind him.

When they were out of sight, Molly strolled across the street to the pay phone. Unfortunately, all that caution had left the phone unattended. Someone else had taken advantage of the opportunity to grab it. Molly paced impatiently behind the woman, who seemed in no hurry to conclude her astonishingly graphic tête-à-tête. Must have been a lover, Molly decided. Women almost never sneaked out to a pay phone to make calls like that to their husbands, not after the first year of marriage anyway. When the woman finally did hang up, she didn’t even spare Molly a glance. Apparently she wasn’t the least bit concerned about having the details of her love life overheard.

Molly jotted down the number on the phone, saw that it was an AT&T hookup, then punched the “0” to get the operator. “Hi, I don’t know if this is possible, but I’m at a pay phone and I placed a call to someone a few minutes ago. I’ve managed to lose the piece of paper the number was written on. It’s probably in my purse, but I sure can’t find it. Isn’t it amazing how things can get swallowed up in a woman’s handbag? Anyway, we were cut off in the middle of our conversation and I have no idea how to reach him.”

She took a hint from the conversation she’d just overheard and threw herself on the operator’s mercy. “It’s really important. It’s this guy. I’m really crazy about him, but I’m beginning to think he’s married. I think he had me call him at a pay phone. Can you check for me or maybe get him back on the line? If it was a pay phone or something, I’ll know he’s cheating on a wife or girlfriend.”

She was rather proud of the barrage of words. She waited to see if they’d been effective.

“Hon, I sympathize, but I can’t do that.”

“You mean because it’s illegal?”

“You’d have to have a real emergency and even then I don’t have the equipment to do it. Somebody’d have to authorize the check on the outgoing calls from your pay phone.”

Molly sighed dramatically. “Oh, well, it was worth a shot.” She was ready to hang up, but the operator wasn’t through.

“Next time you talk to this guy, hon, you tell him you want to know how to reach him and if he won’t tell you, you dump him. Don’t waste your time, okay?”

Molly decided the operator had read too many pop psychology books or maybe she’d just seen too many weird episodes of Geraldo and hated to think of anyone getting caught up in some bizarre romantic triangle. “Thanks, I’ll do that,” Molly promised.

Just as she hung up, she spotted Michael’s car turning into the lot.

“What did you get?” he asked.

“Advice,” she said with disgust. “How about you?”

“Lost. He drove into Coral Gables and the next thing I knew, he’d taken a couple of fast turns and disappeared. The way those streets twist around in there, I was lucky to get back out again. I don’t know where the hell I was. I wish they’d put their street signs up on poles where you can read them like any other civilized place.”

“They think they’re more civilized right where they are, discreetly placed at curb height.” She couldn’t resist taking a poke at his tailing skills. “So the bottom line is you lost Herman, huh?”

He shrugged. “Probably doesn’t matter, since he clearly wasn’t heading to see Paredes after all.”

“You’ll never know that for sure, unless we drive out there and check. Could be Herman just knows his way around the Gables.”

Michael looked doubtful, but he turned the car west. It was a good thing he did, too. They arrived in front of Paredes’s house along with three squad cars and an ambulance.

“What’s going on?” Michael demanded of the first cop he saw.

“Somebody tried to murder the guy who lives here, blasted the hell out of the house with some kind of automatic weapon.”

“Is he okay?”

“The lucky son of a bitch wasn’t even home. From what the neighbors say, he moved out yesterday.”

With police everywhere, the neighbors—mostly women with small children—began slowly emerging from their houses. While Michael continued to talk to the investigating officers, Molly wandered over to a cluster of housewives, all dressed in shorts and tank tops regardless of their size. On one or two, the choice was unfortunate.

Several of the young women were clutching babies in their arms. She observed them for several minutes, trying to pick out the one who was most talkative. The unofficial spokesperson appeared to be in her late twenties, slightly older than the others. Her two children were toddlers, one of whom was clinging to Mommy’s leg and whining. The women appeared oblivious to the noise.

Molly nodded at several of the women, hoping she appeared to be a new neighbor, rather than someone there on official business. Actually, given her lack of official status, she supposed it wasn’t exactly a stretch to be considered just another nosy passerby. “What happened? I saw all the police and walked over.”

As she’d expected, it was the oldest of the women who replied. “I was in the back with the kids and all of a sudden I heard these shots. I looked around, didn’t see anyone, so I dragged the kids inside. That’s when I finally peeked out the window and saw this car sitting in front of the house over there. Some guy was just blasting away. Scared the hell out of me. I dialed nine-one-one and kept the kids on the floor in the back of the house.”

“Has anything like this ever happened around here before?” Molly asked.

“Good God, no. I’d have made my husband move, if it had,” she said.

Several other heads nodded in agreement.

“I’m Molly DeWitt, by the way. I don’t know a soul around here yet. Who lives there?” she asked.

The women were either cautious enough or distracted enough not to bother offering their own names. Molly’s chatty source, however, didn’t hesitate over her reply. Like a lot of people who’ve just gone through a crisis, she was anxious to share the experience. Fortunately she didn’t seem suspicious at all of Molly’s interest.

“The people only moved in a few months ago,” she told Molly. “They stayed to themselves. I hardly ever saw the wife. We went by once to ask her if she wanted to take her kids to the park with us, but she refused. We didn’t try again. She was a real pretty woman, way too young for him. I got the feeling that husband of hers kept her on a pretty tight leash. And those dogs of his …” She shuddered. “I used to wonder what would happen if they ever got loose. We all told our kids to stay as far away from there as possible.”

Having had a close encounter with the dogs herself, Molly understood their concern. “Did they have a lot of visitors? Had you ever seen the guy who shot at the place today before?”

“I suppose it’s possible he’s been around. The guy seemed to have friends here at all hours. We thought maybe he was into drugs or something. I mean, that’s what I told my husband the very first week they lived there, what with all the coming and going. In fact, when I first heard all the gunfire, I thought maybe it was the start of one of those cocaine lab explosions I’ve seen on the news.”

“And you’d never reported your suspicions to the police?”

“Hey, around here we try to mind our own business. It’s safer that way. Besides, none of us ever really saw anything. It wasn’t like he was collecting money in the street.”

Molly nodded. “I see what you mean. Just think how you’d feel if you turned someone in and the only thing he was guilty of was keeping late hours. So,” she added nonchalantly, “what kind of car was this guy driving today?”

The woman shrugged. “Are you kidding me? I can’t tell a Jeep from a Jaguar. Made my husband put a bright yellow sunflower on our antenna so I could find our car in the parking lot at the mall.”

“I think it might have been a Chevy,” a young Hispanic woman offered hesitantly. “My brother has a car that looks exactly like it, only his is that pretty bright blue color and this one was white.”

A white Chevrolet, Molly thought triumphantly. Exactly like the one Herman Gómez-Ortega had been driving when they followed him from Pedro’s restaurant.

She shook her head sorrowfully. “Jeez, it’s getting so no place is safe anymore, isn’t it? I think I’ll go talk to the cops and see if they think this was some random thing or a hit.”

One of the younger mothers shivered and held her baby a little tighter. “You think it could have been random, like somebody who might come back to the neighborhood?”

Molly immediately felt guilty. “No. I mean it almost has to be someone who was after the people who lived in that house, don’t you think?”

“I wonder if that was why they moved out?” another of the women speculated. “Because they knew someone was after them?”

“All I can say is it’s lucky for them they did,” Molly’s primary source observed. “This time of day, the kids were usually inside taking a nap in the front bedroom and the woman was watching some soap opera on TV right by that window that got blasted out.”

This time Molly shuddered right along with them. She glanced toward Michael and wondered if he’d found out about the car. She doubted it. All the witnesses were women and all of them were over here. Obviously the police were too busy inside to worry about chatting with the neighbors yet. She decided it was time to take her piece of information and go.

“I’ll let you know if I find out anything from the police,” she said, and walked back across the street.

When she finally got Michael’s attention, he joined her beside her car. “I think it’s time to run a Department of Motor Vehicles check on Herman,” she suggested.

He grinned. “Oh, you do, do you? Who died and left you in charge of a police investigation?”

She frowned at the sarcasm. “It just occurred to me that you might want to see where he lives and what kind of car he drives.”

“I know what kind of car he drives. I was following him, remember?”

“Oh, I’d be willing to bet that the car he was in today was not his,” she said, advancing a theory that had struck her as she crossed the street.

His gaze narrowed. “Why the hell would you say that?”

“Would you drive your own car if you intended to try to murder someone in broad daylight?”

He regarded her in stunned amazement. “What the hell did those women tell you?”

“Not much,” she said modestly. “They did describe the car of the assailant as being a white Chevrolet. Isn’t that the kind of car we were tailing?”

Michael’s approving expression lasted for half a heartbeat, before he looked more puzzled than ever. “But why would Gómez-Ortega want to kill Paredes? I thought they were coconspirators.”

“Guess not,” Molly said smugly.

“Unless he knew that Paredes had moved out, knew it was safe to blast away, and just wanted to create a diversion from whatever is really going on,” Michael said thoughtfully.

Molly sighed. “Damn, you’ve done it again.”

“Done what?”

“Turned all devious on me, just when I had things figured out all logically.”

“It’s not my deviousness you need to worry about,
amiga
. We’re trying to think like the bad guys.”

“That’s what worries me,” she said. “You do it so well. It’s bound to rub off.”

Michael called police headquarters and had Felipe run the DMV check on Gómez-Ortega. When Felipe called back as they were driving away from the scene, he confirmed Molly’s guess. Gómez-Ortega didn’t own a white Chevy or anything that might have been mistaken for one. He had, however, leased one from a small rental car agency on South Dixie Highway, an independent company that was less likely to ask questions or keep records. Unfortunately for Herman, the trail was still hot when Felipe called.

“Are we going to question him?” Molly asked hopefully.

“Nope. Felipe’s offered to have a chat with him. You and I are going to get all dressed up and meet José López.”