Kissing Arizona (23 page)

‘You are a devil,' Luz whispered.

‘Exactly.' Vicky smiled. ‘Remember that.'

Tía Luisa had a long talk with Marisol, put the phone down, sighed, and seated Vicky on a stool by her feet. ‘Very well, you can stay here for the present if you will do everything I say. Everything, you hear me? Now I will tell you the rules.'

She said Vicky could work on one of the cleaning crews if she kept her mouth shut and caused no trouble. ‘Marisol says you are done with school. That's good. One scholar in the family is enough.'
Ah, someone else is tired of Santa Luz of Tucson.
‘You must pay cash for everything. No checking accounts, no charge accounts or subscriptions, nothing to leave a paper trail to this house, you understand?

‘Be careful what you say to gringos. You talk like one yourself, that helps. Get rid of those sandals, anyone can see they are Mexican. If you get caught I will not help you, don't call me. Say you have been living on the street, don't carry anything with this address on it.'

The American child she had once been would have felt cruelly treated. But Vicky, fresh from Ajijic where she had shared a cot in a room crammed full of many cots, looked at plentiful food on a table where the dishes matched, saw several pairs of shoes in each closet under rows of clean clothing, and felt her heart swell with pride.

She had made it, she was home. Tucson was her city whether it wanted her or not.
I got here on my own, surely I am
clever enough to find a way to stay.
And the last weeks with her mother and aunts in Mexico had taught her how to ingratiate herself quickly with hard-working older women.
Take something off her back.

‘If you give me a job,' she said, showing Tía Luisa her most sincere face, ‘I will show you I am worth my keep.'

She took all the hardest jobs without complaint, worked extra hours if somebody failed to show. She took separated days off instead of two together, and often worked one or both of those to replace a worker who was sick. The other women on the crews, mistaking her willingness for hick stupidity, whispered behind their hands that she ‘
no sabe ni como canta el gallo
', and maneuvered her into the dirtiest houses, the ones with small children and a couple of dogs. She saw what they were doing but said nothing. Tía Luisa would hear no complaints from her.

She knew that Tía Luisa paid her lower wages than the rest of the crew and took out a generous cut for board and room. One advantage of being paid under the table, though, was that she did not get a pay stub showing payroll tax deducted for social security she would never collect. She remembered how her father used to rage about the money he suspected his employer of pocketing.

For the present, she put all of that out of her mind. Her task was to survive in a society that both did and did not want her. This town would keep her as long as she was useful and discard her when she was in the way, because there were ten more behind her trying to take her place.

She had very little spending money, but she no longer felt poor, as she had when she was growing up in this neighborhood. Ajijic had taught her what real poverty was all about – hard labor with no hope for improvement. She was in Tucson now, where better times were always just around the corner.

‘I just got a call from my guy in North Carolina,' Phil Cruz said. ‘Lucky we made this deal with Inman when we did, Sarah. Those dealers called Rafi Soltero yesterday and said, “Enough foreplay, let's fuck.”'

‘So a big load's going soon?'

‘Later this week. If everybody does his job right the whole outfit will be in custody by the end of the week.'

‘And just as soon as they tell you they've got that end secured, we're going to pick up Huicho and Rafi here, right?'

‘That's the next step, sure. You got your warrants ready? You got enough people?'

‘You bet. Judge Galsworthy says she'll sign warrants any time, day or night, whenever I'm ready to go. Bless her, she holds a grudge the same way I do, she's been wanting to get that crew off the streets for years. Depending on what else is going on, I might need some help for our uniforms – you got some bodies?'

‘Say the word, Sarah, we'll come running.'

But the next day he was in her workspace, speaking very softly as he explained that a team of DEA agents would be coming down from Phoenix to help Phil arrest the Soltero gang and transport them to North Carolina. It was felt, Phil told her, that it would ‘make more sense', and ‘play better for a Grand Jury' to have them charged there for the cocaine smuggling – there where the load was going to be seized. They wanted to have the story run in all the big East Coast papers, with photos of the drugs seized, the weapons laid out on a table, a row of uniforms smiling behind.

‘How come they get what they want instead of us?'

‘Three big metro units involved. Lotta clout. And they
are
making the arrests there.'

‘What about the head, though? Chuy's head in the riverbank? Are they going to come and take the big river walk with José?'

‘No, but they promise, soon as they've got him indicted on the coke charge, we can get him back here to help us find the head.'

‘And if we find it, we get to try Rafi and Huicho here for the murder?'

‘We'll see. They're mainly interested in seeing them go away for a long time on the drug charge, you know. I mean, there's so much money involved in that.' Phil Cruz kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling light over Sarah's desk. ‘They're thinking if we prove the homicide they might want to fold that into the drug case, make it a federal crime so it's got a little more weight.'

‘I could make it plenty heavy right here in Tucson. I could make it Murder One.'

‘I know how you feel, Sarah. I'd rather have the whole case come back here where we did all the work. Unfortunately at my pay grade I don't make those decisions.'

‘I understand,' she said, and booted up her screen. She held her breath to keep from saying any more.

‘So,' he said, turned sideways in the door of her cubicle, examining his shoes, ‘you want me to call you when it's time for the river walk?'

‘Sure,' she said, ‘I'll bring my binocs, make it a birding day.'

‘I got my lease cancelled at the end of the month,' Will said. ‘
This
month. Did you hear me, Sarah? Five days from now. So I'm going to take as many furlough days as I can next week and move my stuff into the Bentley Street house.'

‘Fine,' Sarah said. She had just come in the door after still another futile search of Frank Cooper's office, and her head wasn't really in the game. ‘You don't have much to move, do you?

‘Going to get the rest of my tools and stuff out of that storage space where I've been keeping them. And I hope you're going to approve of the trade I made yesterday,' Will said. ‘Come and look.'

A somewhat dented but solid-looking pickup sat behind her car in the driveway. ‘You rented a pickup?'

‘I traded my car for it. What do you think?'

‘But you loved your almost-new car that you finally got.'

‘This is more what we need now. Ford F-150, a very serviceable vehicle. We've got all these houses to move out of and I think I can do most of it myself. I can start taking some of your stuff next week too. Make it easier to get your house cleaned up for sale if it wasn't so crowded.'

‘Sounds like a plan. Next week's looking kind of like gangbusters at work, though. I doubt if I'll have much time for house-cleaning.' Besides the two homicide cases heating up, the extra drive times every day to get to work and school from Marana were wiping out what used to be her time off. She had all she could do to keep Aggie's house clean. And they certainly didn't want to make any work for Grandma, she kept reminding Denny, who was beginning to roll her eyes sideways at her aunt every time she put down a spoon or a cup.

‘And the week after that isn't going to be any easier,' Will said, ‘so you shouldn't even be thinking about cleaning, you've got too much to do as it is. But I called a couple of house-cleaning services today and checked out their prices. It's not as much as you'd think, Sarah, I can pay for it out of what I save on the storage space.' Will Dietz seemed to have discovered his inner cock-eyed optimist, he had all kinds of fuzzy math like that going on.

He didn't want money anxieties to spoil the fun of the new house, Sarah thought, but what she kept noticing was that neither of them had much cash in hand. She suspected Aggie of giving Will's wallet a boost now and then, and she was determined they must have a more detailed conversation about how this three-way split was going to work. But she wanted to do it when they were all calm and there was time to get it right – and chances for that occasion dissolved as she approached them.

‘What I really need,' she told Will Dietz later that night, when she walked him to his pickup, ‘is a twin.'

‘No you don't,' he said. ‘You've got me.'

Frank Cooper's corporate office occupied half the space in an office suite on North Campbell Avenue. Nicole's accounting offices took up the other half. Frank's side had been sequestered, and the connecting door between the two sides was locked. But Sarah wasn't very impressed with the soundproofing in the connecting wall – she could plainly hear all Nicole's office machines and phone calls.

The décor in Frank's office was even more nondescript than the Cooper house: gray carpet, laminated desks, serviceable chairs. It was strictly for work: good lights, plenty of power outlets, no extras. Frank's muscular computer with its several exterior hard drives and sexy flat-screen monitor had been the only impressive item in the room, and it was gone to South Stone. One of Tucson's most successful businesses had been run from here, but plainly, Frank Cooper didn't need a lot of shiny toys or even much comfort while he worked.

Which made it all the more interesting that he had felt the need for a second small computer to carry around and – what? Play games, amuse himself? Nothing in this office suggested he was a playful man.

‘It's not here,' Leo Tobin said.

‘Nicole said it wouldn't be. I'm convinced,' Sarah said, softly, mindful of the bad acoustics, ‘that Nicole is telling the truth when she says she never saw him use a laptop. She told me he used to shake his head when he saw college students curled up with their laptops, muttering about kids taking a brilliant machine and turning it into a toy.'

‘They do a lot of learning curled up like that.'

‘I know. Everything Nicole and Tom say about their father makes him seem crusty and old-fashioned. If Tracy's right about what's on that spare computer, it's going to come as quite a surprise to his children.'

‘Unless it isn't. You think there's any chance Nicole's hiding it so nobody can find out about the old man's hobbies?'

‘I don't think so. I told you before that I think Nicole is hiding something, but I'm pretty sure it's not her father's extra computer. I questioned her closely about that machine, and she seemed genuinely puzzled by my questions.'

Leo didn't question her conclusion. They knew each others' interrogation methods well and trusted them. He threw his hands in the air and said, ‘Well then, let's go take another look in his house.'

‘Didn't we toss that pretty thoroughly before?'

‘That little den where he had a home office, yes. I'm ready to swear there's nothing in there I haven't looked at. His bedroom, though . . . when we were looking there before, I wasn't even thinking about a second computer. Seems to me we were all looking for money, jewelry, or letters, something they might have been fighting about before he killed her.'

‘OK,' Sarah said. ‘Back to the house with no soul.'

It still had the crime scene lock on the door. The bodies were gone but the smell of death lingered faintly. It was a big handsome house, designed for pleasure, but the crippled marriage that occupied it had sucked out all the comfort and ease. The rooms looked like showrooms in a store run by people with no particular taste.

Frank's bedroom shared a bath with the bedroom on the other side, which he'd converted into a den. It was a nifty set-up, Sarah thought – and it could have been charming, if the rooms had been filled with family pictures, books being read, a hobby or two. But Frank's rooms looked as cold and impersonal as his wife's.

The closets were filled with suits of good quality but no elegance, predictable shoes, ties that said nothing. Like his wife, he kept everything neat. The walk-in closet, Sarah thought, was the most attractive thing she'd seen in the house. It was full of drawers and cupboards well-planned and built by a skillful carpenter. To give herself more time to enjoy it, she told Leo, ‘I'll take the closet if you'll do the bedroom.'

The shorter drawers on the left, full of socks and underwear, were the hardest, so she did them first. She took the many small pieces out systematically, left to right, so she could be sure when she'd looked through everything. The long drawers on the right would be shirts and sweaters, sports clothes – big pieces, easy to inspect. This little row of drawers in the middle, not much point in opening them, they were all too small – well, but in the interest of being thorough, just a quick look. A jewelry drawer, lined in velvet, the man actually had cufflinks and studs. The next held handkerchiefs, not as many as you'd think . . . she pulled them out, moved back a step and closed the drawer, measured the front with her thumb and index finger, pulled it open again and said, ‘Leo?'