Hot Start (6 page)

We’d met three years earlier in San Diego, where I had been hired to do some freelance work for a fellow former air force pilot. The attraction between us was undeniable. The stumbling block was that I was trying to reconcile back then with my ex-wife and had essentially put Alicia on hold. Much in my life had obviously changed since. Though we saw each other as often as two people can when they live in cities 200 miles apart, I was hardly prepared to call her my steady squeeze. I was certain she felt the same way about me. Neither of us, however, could deny there was something potentially promising between us.

Kiddiot jumped off as I sat down on the bed beside her.

“So what were you doing in here, getting ready to bust a cap in me or what?”

“Bust a cap in you?
You’re dating yourself, Logan. Nobody says that anymore.”

“OK, you were fixing to clip me. To
gank
me. Whatever. You were racking a round. I heard it, out in the yard.”

“Actually I was clearing the chamber. I don’t like leaving a live round in there when my gun’s not on me. Too easy for some little kid to sneak in and squeeze one off.”

“I have no kids, Alicia.”

“I’m just saying. Firearms safety at all times, you know?”

“Copy that.”

Savannah was pregnant when she died. Alicia’s mention of children brought it all back, the surreal horror, the grief that consumed me as I stared down at her naked body in that cold ditch. I quickly covered over the memory with thoughts of my own gun, a .357 Colt Python, a souvenir from my years with Alpha. I generally kept the little snub-nose revolver under my bed.

“You seem distracted,” Alicia said, rubbing my shoulders.

“Do I?”

“What’re you thinking about?”

“Nothing—other than what a pleasant surprise it is to see you and what a complete mess I must look like.” My sweat-covered neck felt like somebody was dripping warm water down it. “Sure is getting hot in here.”

“Not as hot as it could be.” She leaned over and kissed me.

“So, Detective Rosario, to what do my cat and I owe the pleasure of your unexpected presence?”

“I bought you something.”

She reached under my pillow like she couldn’t wait and handed me what looked like a compact music disc gift-wrapped in bright red “Happy Kwanza!” paper.

“Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure Kwanza comes after Christmas, and Christmas isn’t for months yet.”

“It was the only paper I could find.”

“Gotcha.”

“Aren’t you gonna open it?”

I undid the paper with my thumb, revealing a two-disc set entitled, “Zen Serenity.”

“Find serenity and a sense of well-being while exploring relaxing, Zen-inspired compositions,” I said, reading aloud the description printed on the cover of the box.

Alicia sat beside me, waiting expectantly for me to say something else like, “What a kind, thoughtful gift,” only I was too engrossed in the goofy names of the songs listed on the back. From “Pebbles on the Pond” and “Perception of Oneness,” to “Emanating Light” and “Secret Places,” I couldn’t decide which tune title sounded cheesiest.

“You drove all the way up here to give me this?”

“I was hoping you’d like it more than you obviously do.”

“I
do
like it, Alicia. It’s great. Really. Thank you.”

We kissed again, though there was little passion in it. Cicero said that gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, it is the parent of all others. My problem wasn’t being grateful. I
was
grateful. The problem was that deep down, if I were completely honest, I was never grateful enough. A psychoanalyst probably would’ve had a field day. Blame it on my roots. Abandoned by my drug-addled, teenage mother. Raised as a ward of the state. Shunted from one foster home to the next. A kid growing up in that environment has one of two choices. He can accept his lot and succumb to it, or he can turn overachiever, never satisfied with second best, showing the world how wrong it was about him. I’d traveled the latter route and paid a price for it. Rarely, if ever, was I truly happy with anything or anyone. Especially me.

“I’m sorry, Alicia. I didn’t mean to sound like I’m not appreciative. I am.”

She pulled away from me and slipped her left sandal on.

“Where’re you going?”

“I was here at seven o’clock and you weren’t,” she said curtly, buttoning her blouse. “I called you last night, to tell you I was coming up, so it wouldn’t be such a surprise, because I know how much you hate surprises. I called you early this morning from the road. You didn’t answer your phone. So screw it.” She strapped on her other sandal.

“Where are we going with this, Alicia?”

“Where were you last night? Why didn’t you answer?”

“Outside. I slept on the hammock because it was too hot in here, which it still is. I went to get coffee this morning and forgot my phone.”

“I never forget my phone—
ever
.” Alicia grabbed her badge and gun and slipped them both into the waistband of her slacks. “Who is she, Logan?”

“There is no she.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Look, Alicia, if this is about me not being effusive enough in thanking you for giving me such a heartfelt gift, I sincerely apologize.”

“I asked you a question.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“I’m a cop, Logan. Cops don’t imagine. They
see.”

“You’re imagining things. I told you the truth. I was here.”

“I don’t believe you.”

I got up and poured myself a glass of water from the faucet at the sink. “You know, I didn’t realize our relationship, if that’s what you want to call it, had progressed to the point where we owed each other any explanations as to where we go and how we spend our time beyond those extremely rare occasions when we actually are together.”

Alicia stood with her eyes pooling. “You’re right,
pendejo.
I
was
imagining things.”

Then she left.

A better man might have begged her to wait, told her he hadn’t meant what he’d said about not owing each other explanations. He would’ve told her he wanted to spend more time together, to build on their relationship. He might’ve even told her that he loved her, but I knew none of it would’ve mattered. She was already gone. I doubted she was ever coming back.

G
IL
C
ARLISLE
knew that his nephew, Dino Birch, had been taken into custody even before I’d left a message on his voice mail.

“My sister calls and wakes me out of a dead sleep to tell me he’s been arrested, begging me to hire him a good defense attorney,” Carlisle said over the phone. “Then Dino calls. Swears he didn’t do it. Who the hell knows about people these days, kin included. You know what I’m saying.” As an afterthought, he added, “I didn’t mean you, Cordell.”

“I didn’t know you still consider me kin.”

“You were married to my daughter.”

“We were divorced, Gil.”

“But you were getting back together. That’s the important thing.”

I didn’t feel like talking about Savannah and what had happened to her, to us. I’m sure he didn’t either.

“Who’d Dino say was trying to frame him?”

“He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. We didn’t get down in the weeds very deep. He had two minutes to talk and he sounded pretty upset. I told him I’d—”

Silence followed.

“. . . Gil? Hello?”

Nothing. I walked outside and sat down in the shade of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s back porch. Within seconds, Gil called me back.

“Goddamned AT&T,” he grumbled. “They need to get more satellites up there in outer space and stop all this dropped-call crap.”

He was somewhere over the Atlantic, jetting to a summit in Geneva with other petroleum industry executives who were all worried about the wildly gyrating price of crude oil on international markets. The way things were headed, Carlisle said, he’d barely have any financial reserves left within a year, another reason why he was reluctant to pay for his nephew’s legal counsel, especially if the prosecution’s case was a slam dunk, which is how they were making it sound on the news.

I thought about sharing with him Congressman Pierce Walton’s possible involvement in the case, but I kept my mouth shut. The more I pondered it, the more I was inclined to believe that any notion of linking Walton to a double murder based on a pornographic snapshot of questionable authenticity was preposterous.

“Don’t ask me because I won’t tell you,” Carlisle said, “but I’ve pulled a few strings to get you in to see my nephew. Hear him out, listen to what he has to say. If you think Dino’s innocent and he’s got a legitimate alibi, I need to know that. If you think he’s guilty as sin, I need to know that as well.”

“What’s your opinion, Gil? You know him. Do you think he did it?”

“Dino? Hell, son, truth be told, I can’t even remember the last time I saw him. My sister, Marleen, and her brood, drove up from Midland to my place in Aspen on vacation one summer maybe fifteen years ago. Dino’s her oldest. Good-looking boy. Tall. Was into dirt bikes and guns, as I recall. I took him skeet shooting. I do remember that. I know he was overseas for a while with the army. Not sure how much action he saw. How he ended up getting into this whole ‘save the whales’ deal is beyond me.”

Carlisle was telling me how Marleen got divorced shortly after the Aspen trip, and how hard all three of her kids took it, none harder than Dino, when our connection began cutting in and out. Words grew sporadic, then sentences. Finally he was gone. I slipped the phone into the pocket of my jeans and walked out to the street in front of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house, where I normally park my truck.

Standing outside the two-story Tudor next door, with his suit coat hooked over his shoulder, chatting up Stan, the retired, neoconservative postal worker who lived there, was none other than local Congressman Pierce Walton. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Walton around town. Rancho Bonita isn’t exactly London. You can’t go anywhere, really, without running into somebody you know.

He was flanked by what I assumed were two of his aides. Both were young and blonde, wearing skirt suits tailored midthigh, and heels. Walton’s blue-and-yellow striped tie was loose at the collar and the sleeves of his white dress shirt were rolled above his elbows—both sure signs that he’d decided to seek reelection and was out campaigning early. Rolled shirtsleeves and a loosely cinched tie tell the voters that the man they sent to Washington is working tirelessly in their behalf. Walton had that look about him as he nodded his head in adamant agreement with whatever Stan was spouting.

“Hey, Logan,” Stan shouted, “come meet your congressman.” Stan loved nothing more than debating politics with anyone unfortunate enough to engage him in conversation. I sighed and walked over.

“This is Cordell Logan. He lives in the garage back behind Mrs. Schmulowitz’s place with the nuttiest cat you ever saw.”

“Congressman.”

Same blue eyes. Same bleached teeth. Carefully coiffed hair, graying at the temples. An earnest, approachable face that fell just short of handsome. Walton looked much like he did in his group sex photo, only clothed.

“Call me Pierce.” He shook my hand a little too enthusiastically, like he was trying to sell me something. “Hot enough for you out here today, Cordell?”

“More than hot enough, Pierce. I just saw two trees fighting over a dog.”

He laughed the way politicians and television news anchors do, like it was the funniest joke he’d ever heard, even if it wasn’t.

“Gotta remember that one,” Walton said, turning to his aides, who were both laughing too, though not quite so effusively. “Write that one down, will you, Gina?”

“Got it.” She jotted a note in a binder bearing the congressional seal.

“I was just telling the congressman how we fix the deficit,” Stan said. “Gotta cut big government, cut all these taxes, get all the welfare queens off the public dole and back to work.”

This from a man who’d spent twenty years getting paid by the taxpayers to sit on his hind end swilling endless cups of coffee in some moldy back room of Rancho Bonita’s main post office branch, whose lifetime pension and health benefits were paid for by Mr. and Mrs. America.

“Whatever you say, Stan,” I said.

Walton told us how much he enjoyed being back in his home district while Congress was in recess and “touching base with the real people who matter most.” He was going door-to-door, he said, to better understand the concerns of his constituents. Were there any issues I felt like he needed to discuss on my behalf with the president of the United States once he got back to Washington?

It was hard not to think of him in that photograph, all in flagrante delicto, as Caesar once might’ve described it. Tempted as I was to delve into his relationship with the late Roy Hollister, I didn’t. Standing on the steps outside crazy Stan’s house wasn’t the appropriate time or place.

“Actually there is one thing,” I said.

“Absolutely.” Walton glanced back at his note-taking aide. “Gina, take this down.”

Her pen stood poised as Walton turned back to me, wearing one of those overly earnest, I’m-Here-to-Listen-Please- Vote-for-Me faces.

“What I’d really, really like,” I said, “is for the president to intervene in Major League Baseball and outlaw the designated hitter rule. Pitchers may be pitchers, but they’re also baseball players. Allowing somebody else to hit for them is ridiculous. People have gone to Gitmo for less.”

He laughed like he wasn’t sure whether I was being serious or not, and promised to express my concerns to the president at the appropriate time. We both knew he was being patronizing.

I walked to my truck and drove to the county jail to see Dino Birch, wondering how much the congressman would be laughing if he knew what I knew about him.

FIVE

W
ith its whitewashed, stucco walls and red tile roofs, Spanish is the dominant architectural style of Rancho Bonita, along with municipal construction codes that some say border on fascist. Every building plan is slavishly gone over to ensure that it conforms to the community’s carefully crafted image of a Mediterranean-like oasis. The three-story Rancho Bonita County Detention Center, perched on a hillside north of downtown amid a warren of other nondescript county government buildings, was the opposite: a shrine to utility, all concrete and concertina wire. It reminded me a little of Abu Ghraib, only without the charm.