Red Man Down (21 page)

‘What? Are you sure? An eleven-year-old Toyota Camry with automatic shift, just over fifty thousand miles?’

‘Chico knows the car – he says this is it. Got more miles on it now. It’s in this row of cribs he’s got along the back of the yard – the ones we saw when we visited.’

‘Hang on a minute, Jason.’ Sarah turned to Leo. ‘I want to talk to Chico about this, Leo. You want to come along?’

‘I can’t – I’m waiting for a call from those big-shot forensic accountants. What are you looking to learn from Chico?’

‘Wait …’ Sarah put up her hand like a traffic cop. She turned to the phone and told Jason, ‘Hold everything, will you? I’m coming over there right now.’

They rang off and she told Leo, ‘It just seems … very unlikely. They were all so down on him, nobody with a kind word to say for him. So why give him the car? I want to hear how that happened. And now the family’s talking about bailing him out.
And
I’m thinking about the tire print that robbery division took from the yard of that home invasion last winter. Joey’s in jail because he got caught in a home invasion – doesn’t that give me enough probable cause to impound that car?’

‘At least three burglaries on his record, and he’s got no fixed address? Sure it does.’

‘Good. So I’ll get that going while I’m looking at the vehicle. And while I do that will you call Judge Mary Kahler and ask her if she’ll raise Joey’s bail?’

‘OK.’ He looked up over his half-glasses. ‘You do remember I’m tasked with finding the money?’

‘How could I forget when my jaw hurts so much?’

‘Quit gritting your teeth then. There aren’t any lives at stake today.’

‘Are you sure? This family seems to be very … unpredictable.’

‘You know some families that aren’t?’

Sarah made good time to the south end of town, telling herself there was no use being an overworked detective with heavy responsibilities if you couldn’t push the speed limits around once in a while.

A
n hour later, she was helping Oscar and Jason, plus Chico and the driver’s helper, do sweaty manual labor in Chico’s gloriously messy yard. They were all pulling spare parts and old tires out of the way so the driver from West Valley Towing could back his enormous vehicle far enough inside to hook up to the Camry.

‘It was either this or tear down the shed,’ Jason said. ‘And Chico just about shit purple when the driver suggested that.’ He jumped to help Oscar move a radiator caked with dust, wheezing into the gauze mask he’d dug out of his first-aid kit. He held his end at arm’s length, his pecs stretching the seams of his shirt. Ever since his initial coughing fit he had been preoccupied by the amount of dust that had settled on Chico’s junkyard.

‘I’m destroying my lungs in this place,’ he said. ‘I can feel my future in law enforcement getting shorter every minute.’

The tow truck inched backward a few inches, knocked over a wheelbarrow and stopped. The detectives jumped to help, setting the wheelbarrow aside in a pile that included a rocking chair with no seat, two piles of glass bricks and a ladder.

‘What are you ever going to do with all this stuff?’ Jason asked Chico, who was trotting from one pile to another, trying to save his priceless junk from destruction.

‘Listen, this is all good stuff from yard sales. Fix it up a little and I can sell these things. You’d be surprised.’

When the two vehicles were finally hooked together, Sarah signed the charge slip and took the vehicle voucher the driver gave her, while Jason dug the records out of the glove compartment and copied the maintenance stickers out of the driver’s-side doorway.

‘Well, there it goes,’ Chico said a few minutes later, as the tow truck snaked its hazardous way back to the street with the Toyota following. ‘You ever see such a wreck? The interior looks like one of those TV shots of towns after tornadoes.’

‘It’s not as much of a wreck as it appears, though,’ Oscar said. ‘I took a look under the hood while we were waiting for the tow. That motor looks clean as a whistle, ready to go another fifty thousand easy, and the dipstick comes up with nice fresh oil. Got almost new tires on it too.’

‘Is Joey always this hard on his car?’ Oscar said.

‘Beats anything I’ve ever seen,’ Chico said. ‘He always gets the interior looking like a pigsty. Everybody says, “Oh, he’s wrecked another one.” Yet he can keep one running almost forever. That car you see there had fifty-five thousand miles on it when he got it, and looked as good as new. It’s only a little over ninety thousand now, and it looks like it’s been through a war.’ Chico groped his way back to his hammock. ‘Oh, my,’ he said as he settled, ‘that’s better. Do you think you could slide my cooler over this way a little, Oscar? Good boy.’ He fished a beer out of the ice, held it up in mute invitation, and popped the top with a sigh as they all refused.

‘Memo predicted this when Joey begged for the car. Three years ago, Memo was still talking – isn’t that sad, that disease with the strange name?’

‘Alzheimer’s,’ Oscar said.

‘Yeah, that. No matter how many times I hear it I can’t remember it.’ He laughed. ‘Actually that’s funny, isn’t it?’ He giggled behind his cigarette smoke. ‘Can’t remember how to say Alzheimer’s, haha.’ All the detectives began rolling their eyes up, shaking their heads, while they waited for Chico to get over himself.

‘Memo didn’t always make sense, toward the end of his talking days, but he sure called it that time. He said Joey will just wreck it the way he did the one his mother got for him before. Kept saying, “This is a nice Toyota Camry, seven or eight years old but those cars are very well built. And Frank was always very careful with his vehicles.”’ Chico sighed. ‘Memo always had a keen eye for value, you know. He was a great loss to us.’

‘How come you all gave in though?’ Sarah asked him. ‘If you were all so sure Joey would trash the car?’

‘Well, Cecelia said, “You all have good cars now – do you really want to drive around in that seedy old Camry that Frank was sitting in when he killed himself?” Nobody had thought of it that way; we all said, “No, of course not.” But Luz said, “We could sell it and split the money.” And Cecelia said, “Sure, the market’s going to be brisk for an eight-year-old Toyota with blood on the seats. Who wants to be the seller?” So in the end everybody voted to let Joey have it, although it turned out the little screw-up didn’t even have a current driver’s license. Cecelia had to take him to the sheriff’s office to renew his license. She even paid the fee.’

‘Is she usually so generous?’

‘Not with anybody else, but sometimes she does favors for Joey. Then she tries to boss him around, which by now she should know is hopeless. He is slippery as an eel, that boy.’

‘But then why did you let him keep it in your yard?’

Chico’s face curled around his mustache in a rictus of conflict. ‘I didn’t want to! But he doesn’t really
live
anywhere. Cecelia kept saying, “He has no place else to put it, and you have room in your yard. Where’s your family solidarity?” I told you, she loves to tell everybody what’s right. I said, “Why don’t you try a little solidarity at your place?” But she said, “My tiny yard? I don’t have an inch anywhere.”

‘And to tell the truth it hasn’t been as much trouble as I expected. Joey’s cash flow is very uneven, so often he goes two or three weeks without using the car at all. But when he does take it out, man, sometimes he really puts some miles on it. He comes back and it looks like him and the car both been running on fumes. Then, every two or three months, he takes it to the shop to get it tuned up. Real regular – not like him at all.’

‘Where does he take it?’

‘Oh, he’s found some cheap-o place down below Valencia, an indy who charges much less than the dealers’ places. Probably doesn’t have all his papers in order, truth be known. But somehow he keeps the old crate running.’

‘Where does Joey go on these long journeys?’

‘He never wants to tell me that. Maybe you tough detectives will sweat it out of him, there in that big scary prison, huh?’

‘We don’t do that anymore,’ Jason said. ‘Lawmen got laws now too.’

‘Sure, sure,’ Chico said, winking. ‘Regular ladies’ aid society these days, I understand.’

Oscar stayed in Chico’s yard to talk about the farewell message some more. Sarah and Jason went back to the station to tell Leo about the worn-out Toyota Camry with four almost new tires that they had just sent to the city impound lot.

‘Alert detectives are beginning to wonder,’ Leo said, ‘what complex and difficult journeys are undertaken by the nogoodnik who can’t even do home invasions without getting caught?’

‘Yeah. This nogoodnik who has some magical way with rolling stock that enables him to wear out automobile bodies completely in only forty thousand miles, yet keep the power train almost like new,’ Sarah said. ‘Jason and I were talking about that on the way back.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. We find the concept of inconsistent automotive wear highly suspect.’

‘That sounds like bullshit language to cover a shaky theory.’

‘Well, you know,’ Jason said, ‘while we have the vehicle sequestered I
could
slide a tracker up under the chassis where it would be very hard to spot, and when Joey gets out of the slammer we could maybe find out where he goes.’

‘Jason Peete,’ Leo said, ‘you are a good man, and one after my own heart. But that idea is hellishly hard to get a judge to sign off on. You don’t ask you don’t get, though, so go ahead, try it.’

‘But then we got a different idea,’ Sarah said. ‘We thought that maybe while Joey’s all snug and quiet in Pima County, a pair of enterprising detectives like Jason Peete and me could use the methods we’ve already got to find out where that car’s already been.’

‘Oh, I like that even better,’ Leo said. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Wait. My phone is ringing.’

‘Let it ring,’ Leo said, but Sarah had already opened and answered.

Delaney walked into the workstations and said, ‘I’ve got a couple of hours away from the bureaucrats. Tell everybody to come in here and bring me up to speed.’

‘Delaney wants to talk,’ Leo told Sarah when she closed her phone.

Jason said, ‘Let’s tell him our ideas about the car, too.’

‘Wait, now,’ Leo said. ‘I’m not going to go in there and hype your idea till I know what’s in it.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s an idea for how to catch a thief,’ Jason said. ‘Who’s maybe a murderer, we’re starting to think.’

Leo raised his eyebrows and stared, still unwilling to move, till Jason gave him a don’t-try-my-patience look he must have learned from his mother, and said, ‘Trust me, OK? Isn’t that what you always say to me?’

Leo sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Promise you won’t get me into any crazy shit, now.’

When they lined up in front of him, Delaney said, ‘Where are we, guys?’

Sarah said, ‘We think we’re getting close to something hot. We just sent a Toyota Camry to impound that we believe contains evidence of where the credit union money went.’

‘Hell, you say,’ Delaney said. ‘Whose car is it?’

‘Used to belong to Frank Martin. Gifted to Joey García after Frank’s death.’

‘What kind of evidence?’

‘Trash. Receipts if we’re lucky.’

‘What’s that going to prove?’

Jason said, ‘Not entirely sure till I talk to the owner of a wildcat car service place called JR’s down in the south end. Chico says that’s where he always takes it.’

‘Chico who?’

‘Chico García. Joey’s older brother. The car’s been stored in his yard off and on since Frank died.’

‘But this mechanic is the one you need to talk to? What are you going to ask him?’

‘For starters, how come he gets paid to do first-rate regular maintenance on one of the most beat-up cars I’ve ever seen still running? What does he do to keep it going, and does he have any ideas about where it’s been?’

‘So you think Joey’s, what, taking money out of town?’

‘Or moving it around some way, yes,’ Sarah said.

‘You think he has some action going that involves the missing money from the credit union and Frank’s death?’

‘Isn’t that the thought that springs to mind?’

‘Maybe.’ He looked at them hard. ‘Why are you so excited about the stupid kid brother who can’t do anything right? I thought you told me he could just sit in jail while we sorted this out.’

‘So did we,’ Leo said, coming in like the string bass under the wailing horns to beef up the melody, ‘but now we’re getting worried because some members of this felon’s family are beginning to make noises about coming up with the bail to get him out of Pima County.’

‘He wouldn’t be the first home invader who ever exercised that privilege,’ Delaney said. ‘Why is this one a crisis?’

‘He has no job here and has never maintained a home. He drifts around.’ Leo stayed up to speed on all details of current cases by careful reading of each day’s case logs. ‘If he’s done what we begin to suspect, he might be motivated to drift away to Mazatlan, where they tell us he has many cousins – especially if he finds out we’re sniffing round.’

‘Guys,’ Delaney looked at his watch, ‘what are you proposing to do?’

‘Go after this wildcat mechanic and make him sweat a little. Chances are he’s undocumented and we can get him to tell us what he’s been doing to the car.’

‘And then?’

‘Maybe he chats with his customers. If so he could have some idea where Joey’s going, which must be where he’s stashing money.’

‘The troublesome kid is beginning to look like our chief suspect? This is quite a switch.’ He didn’t buy their idea all at once; he made them go over, in detail, what they expected to find and why they thought they could get JR to tell them what they wanted to know. He admonished them, ‘Tread lightly. Even Republicans are starting to love immigrants now if they’re Hispanic and look like they might vote any time in the next fifty years.’

Then he urged them to remember every hour they were spending on the three García cases was inevitably going to cheat some other investigation down the line, ‘because I don’t print the money, you do understand that, don’t you? I only get it to spend it after I sit in committee meetings and beg like a starving dog.’