Red Man Down (19 page)

‘I noticed it when we found her and then forgot. There’s so much to … But why would she get a fresh haircut if she was thinking of killing herself?’

‘God, I don’t … Add it to the list, I guess. Are you getting anything useful from the family members?’

‘Kind of, but they’re not all saying the same things … except when it comes to Frank being a do-gooder. That’s unanimous.’

‘Oscar made an interesting observation about that farewell letter. What was Frank so sorry about? I think you should print a copy of your own and go talk to everybody you can find who knew Frank well enough to have an opinion. Why would he feel he needed to apologize to Ed? See if you can find anybody who ever asked Ed about it and what he said.’

Sarah said, ‘Also, I need to talk to the employer, Marjorie Springer, about Angela – I can do that today.’

‘Fine. Ask her about the haircut – did they talk about it? Women talk about hair, don’t they?’

‘Sometimes. And soon I’d like to bring Joey in here and get him on the record.’

‘Oh? Isn’t he just a petty thief? What do you expect to get from him?’

‘I’d like to find out what he was going after when he got caught. And I wish you could see one of his sudden bursts of anger. His family keeps saying he only does non-violent crimes, and they all treat it like it’s just a phase he’ll grow out of, almost a joke. But I think he’s way past pranks – to me he seems about ready to explode.’

‘Well … when we get to it, you can ask and I’ll watch. But right now I’ve got all these meetings I can’t get out of.’

‘I know. It’s not a problem,’ Sarah said. ‘We’ve got enough digging ahead of us to keep us busy for weeks.’

‘This is the homicide department, remember?’ Delaney said. ‘We don’t get weeks.’

‘I know. We’re digging as fast as we can.’

W
aiting for Marjorie Springer in the lobby, Sarah went over her list of questions again. Angela had worked for this employer three times at least – what was that all about? She seemed to be able to hold better jobs, and her descriptions of working conditions in the used rag business sounded pretty grim. But something about this person, or the business she ran, seemed to keep pulling her back.

Marjorie had sounded cordial enough on the phone. In case she was not forthcoming, Sarah wondered where the pressure points were – licenses and taxes – was she up to date with her taxes?
I should have looked it up
. She hated the ham-handed end of interrogation, but sometimes, if you had to …
I should know more about this woman.
At the last minute she added one last question, sideways along the margin of the page, about the evening investigations Angela had mentioned once. Something about Lacey DNA, but had she found something more?

Knowing only her voice, Sarah had expected the wrinkled face of a heavy smoker, with perhaps a drinker’s rueful expression as well. But Marjorie strode into the lobby at 270 South Stone looking sturdy and fit. Sarah was waiting for her, led her to the elevator and rode up with her guest.

From the lack of frown lines, Sarah guessed that Marjorie was usually cheerful too, but today she looked pretty serious. Her voice, she explained, was due to an industrial hazard she couldn’t fix: hustling old clothes raises a lot of lint.

‘Over the years I’ve developed an allergy. I sound a little better when I remember to take my pills. Thanks for talking to me, anyway,’ she said. ‘Some people get scared off because I sound like a thug.’

‘Oh, you sound a lot better than most of the people I talk to,’ Sarah said. ‘And if you tell me everything you know about Angela Lacey I won’t care how you sound while you say it.’

‘Believe me, I’ll be happy to do that. I feel so bad about Angela – if there’s any way I can help you find her killer, I’m grateful for the chance.’

‘Uh … you know, Marjorie, so far we haven’t proved it wasn’t suicide.’

‘Oh? Well, I suppose you have to do that for the lawyers, don’t you? But you don’t need to bother for me.’

‘Oh? You know something about that day that I don’t?’

‘No, but I know Angela. If she was the kind to give up on life, she’s had plenty of reasons to do it before now. But she never did because she wasn’t a quitter. She came from tough, strong people who’d been through hell in Europe and survived to get to America, and that’s what she was, too – a survivor.’

‘You’ve known her a long time?’

‘All her life.’

‘Oh, is that so? Excuse me, in that case I have a colleague here who I think ought to meet you. He’s been searching for details about her life … he’ll be so glad to hear what you have to say.’

She called Ollie, who came in smiling all over his amiable freckled face, pulling his own chair. He introduced himself, at the top of his benign cop game. In two minutes he had established himself as a Friend of Marjorie.

‘We sure appreciate your coming in here to tell us Angela’s story,’ he said. ‘You’re really a lifelong friend? Was the long life here in Tucson?’

‘For Angela and me, yes. Our grandparents all came from Poland. After they met at the Polish church in Milwaukee they became good friends.’

‘Your names don’t sound …’

‘They changed them – nobody could pronounce their names and they had trouble getting jobs, so Zboynevicz turned into Springer and Golbiewski got to be Goodman.’

‘Did you know your grandparents?’

‘They were around when I was little. I was the daughter of their oldest son, the first grandchild. I was a little princess for the first couple of years, till the others started coming along. Angela was twelve years younger. She was only two years old when her parents left her with her grandparents one Friday night, just to go to the movies, and got killed in a car accident on the way home. Both of them wiped out in one careless minute.’

Preparing for this interview, Sarah had thought about the picture she’d found in Angela’s apartment, nested in underwear in a drawer. She had checked it out of Evidence, and showed it to Marjorie now, asking, ‘Are these Angela’s grandparents?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, yes, that’s Anna and Boris. How’d you get this?’

‘It was in the drawer in her bedroom.’

‘Imagine her keeping that funny old picture. Boris was so proud that he got accepted in the Army. He never got sent to Vietnam, though, just served in a support group at Fort Huachuca. They were still living in Milwaukee when he went in the Army, but when he got out he talked Anna into moving out here to Arizona. Said he liked the desert and he knew he could get a job in a copper mine. After they got settled they persuaded my grandparents to come for a visit, and I guess they liked it too. By the time I can remember much, we all lived here in Tucson.

‘Anna and Boris were a lot older than that – a whole generation had grown up by the time they got stuck with Angela. Not that they ever said it like that. They loved her and did the best they could with raising her. But they were pretty old-country, you know. Anna never learned much English so Boris spoke Polish to her at home and that’s all Angela spoke till she went to school. She had to work hard in school to catch up, and some kids made fun of her accent.’

‘I thought I heard something … just on a few words,’ Sarah said.

‘Yes. She got rid of most of it – we all did. She was an A student in high school and won a small scholarship to Pima College. She worked in a Kmart and later in a restaurant to support herself while she studied. I was married by then, had two babies. Angela would come to see me and say, “I’m glad you’re happy, but I want to get some more schooling and have a career.”

‘She was only a few courses from her associates’ degree when she went on a date with a boy she met at school. He said he was taking her to a movie, but instead he parked the car in an empty lot and raped her. Afterwards he said, “You know very well you led me on, so don’t try to complain.”

‘My husband and I were opening this store at that time – we were crazy busy. So I didn’t notice that I hadn’t seen her for some time. When I did I knew right away that something had happened. She looked … like somebody had turned her lights out. I said, “Tell me what’s wrong.” She didn’t want to tell me, but she did, too, you know what I mean? Needed to tell somebody in the worst way.

‘The way she looked, I thought she must be pregnant and having morning sickness, but she said no, she’d just lost her appetite. She had been raised very strictly by elderly Catholics, and this rotten boy had treated her with contempt and transferred his guilt to her. She couldn’t handle it – her self-respect was gone.

‘It was the craziest day and night! I had to talk and talk to her, to get her to see it wasn’t her fault. She was too distracted to study, so she’d flunked the course she was taking, and that didn’t help. She helped me feed the kids and put them to bed and then we talked almost all night. My husband got outraged, kept saying, “You need your sleep.” He was used to having all my attention … that’s another story.’

Ollie smiled cordially and said, ‘Husbands are hell, aren’t they?’

‘Can be, yes. I’m single now and I miss him sometimes. But I’ve got the store so I don’t have much time to pine – enough said about that.’ She waved away husbands and pining with a motion like shooing flies. ‘Angela dropped out of school for a while and came to work for me in the store.’

‘I noticed,’ Ollie said. ‘She’s worked for you three times, right?’

‘Yes, every time her life’s gone to hell she’s come back to me for a while. Something about heaving used clothing around, doing that uncomplicated job, seemed to help her get her head straight. When she was healed up enough, she’d get a better job and try again to build a decent life.’

‘What brought her back the second time? That was about eight years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘Or nine. Yes. She was married for a short time in between, to a real-estate salesman. Moved to Phoenix. There was a housing boom, remember?’

‘Very well,’ Ollie said. ‘I was flipping houses and making a killing for a while. Then the bubble burst and I gave the last one back to the bank. Lost almost everything I’d made.’

‘Then you did better than most. I bet you’ll think harder the next time somebody offers to help you get rich quick.’

Ollie raised his hand as if testifying and said, ‘My wife has promised to kill me if I even think about it.’

‘Good for her. Angela’s husband was flipping houses too, in between all those easy sales. When the market went south, he consoled himself with booze. And when he got drunk enough, he took his disappointment out on her. The second time he beat her black and blue, she came back to me and my store. I was single by then and I always had an opening. Still do. I can’t pay enough to keep anybody happy.’

‘So the second time,’ Ollie said. ‘We’re getting closer to when she met Ed Lacey, right? How did that happen?’

‘She started volunteering at the food bank in town. I said, “Jeez, Angie, that’s no place to go to cheer up.” But she said, “I don’t feel like such a failure when I’m helping somebody out.” I was always trying to make her see she wasn’t the one doing the failing. But she came to feel she had a fatal flaw that made her susceptible to exploiters.’

Well, she did go dancing with Oscar Cifuentes and end up on the couch with his gloves.

‘But then she began to notice this other volunteer,’ Marjorie said. ‘He came with his uncle the first time, but then came several times by himself. Once he stopped by to check on something, while he was on patrol, in uniform. The next day at the store she said, “It was the most amazing thing, I could hardly believe my eyes!” I asked her, “What’s so amazing about somebody being a cop?” and she said, “Oh, I always think of them as very tough guys. But you should see how he treats the needy people. I think he’s the kindest, gentlest man I’ve ever met.”

‘I said, “Angela, be careful,” because she was looking, you know, all misty. But then he asked her out, and after the very first date it was obvious that there was no use telling either one of them to slow down. Ed Lacey was even mistier than she was – he was over the moon.’

‘So you met him before they were married?’

‘Oh, yes. He came in the store to ask … some little detail – just an excuse to see her, I thought. You know how people get?’ Ollie and Sarah both nodded, smiling inanely. ‘Yeah, right. Love.’ Marjorie shook her head. ‘We never really learn, do we? And I must admit, he did look nice in that uniform.’

Marjorie rested her chin in her hand and thought a minute.

‘For several years after they married, I thought luck had finally landed in the right place. Those two people just seemed to suit each other right down to the ground. Even though they lived with his uncle at first, which seemed like a great way to kill any romance, you only had to look at them to see they were happy.’

‘I wondered about that,’ Sarah said. ‘Cops may not get rich, but they make a living. Why couldn’t Ed and Angela afford a place of their own?’

‘Well, Angela didn’t have any money because she’d been working for me!’ Marjorie shook her head and laughed. ‘Poverty City, that’s my address. To make my rent and have anything left, I have to squeeze everybody else. And it turned out Ed didn’t have anything saved because that big, warm family that was always boasting about how kind they had all been to Frank Martin and little Eddie – turned out they were very good at getting the charity to run the other way. Angela told me, “Every time we get a little ahead, one of them has a crisis and Ed and Frank run to the rescue. I have to get it stopped.”

‘And to my surprise she actually did it. Angela the victim turned into Angela the Rottweiler on behalf of Ed Lacey. The next time Cecelia’s hot water heater went on the fritz, Angela said, “Sorry, we don’t have a nickel to spare this month.”

‘She put her foot down about Joey’s habit of stopping by to raid the refrigerator, too. When she found him sitting in her kitchen with a double-decker sandwich and a beer, she pushed him out the door, took the plate away and made him give her the key he’d begged off Ed. Can you imagine, he actually had a key to her house. He’d been spending time there, eating and watching TV. She’d been wondering about missing food and stains on the couch. She told Joey, “I catch you in my house again I’ll have you picked up for home invasion, and with your record you’ll spend a good long time in jail.”