The House of Wolfe (14 page)

We spend the next half hour with Rigo and Mateo and Rayo in a private side room, where we're shown a folder of photographs of the Belmonte and Sosa family members. Portrait photos, school pictures, newspaper and magazine shots taken at one or another soiree or sporting event or civic function.

Partly in English, partly in Spanish, sometimes in both languages within the same sentence, Rayo tells us everything she's already told the Jaguaros several times. She says she was fooling around with a guy in a room in the Belmonte house when the bridal parents unexpectedly entered an adjacent office and she overheard them talking about the kidnapping. “Fooling around” is her phrase, spoken without hint of embarrassment. Which is another thing I've always liked about her—she's as forthright as they come. She's absolutely sure of what the parents said because they kept repeating things to each other, comparing their memories of what Mr. X had said to them.

“When I checked my landline messages this morning,” she says, “there was one from Sosa. Me díjo que JJ had gone with the rest of the wedding party a un rancho en Cuernavaca for another day of good time. Pero she lost su teléfono and so asked him to please give me a call and let me know she wouldn't be home till tonight. He was covering for her absence.”

Rigo's going to post men at the banks where Belmonte and Sosa will get the money. Lookouts for anybody shadowing either man. Mateo nods at Rayo and says, The kid and I will watch Sosa's bank. It's closest to the Belmonte house. Anybody looks right, we tail
him
. If he keeps on looking right, we grab him, see what he has to say. Same for the lookouts at Belmonte's bank.

That'll be me and Rudy, Charlie says.

Rigo nods like he was expecting that. If you wish, he says. Mateo will assign another man to you, too, just in case.

Duarte, Mateo says. Good one.

Charlie shrugs.

Rigo tells us that so far all the kidnapping items his communication techs have received have been in reference to snatches no more recent than two weeks ago, and the file searches on Huerta and his security company have uncovered nothing more than repetitious data attesting that Angeles de Guarda is a fully registered business with impeccable financial records and client evaluations that universally laud the company's good service. Except for the bureaucratic data relating to his proprietorship of the company, there's nothing on Huerta himself but a single police record of arrest for fighting in the streets when he was sixteen.

Something will come up, Rayo says. It's hard to keep a secret in a small town, and you know what they say about Mexico City. It's a small town of twenty million people.

Rigo goes off to the suite, and Mateo and Rayo take us into a room furnished with only a couple of long bare tables in its center and rows of lockers along the walls. Mateo opens one of the lockers and extracts a pair of cell phones and hands one to Charlie and one to me. Their directories contain no names and only three numbers—the first is Rigo's, the second his, the third Rayo's. All the phones are equipped with trackers. He withdraws a wallet from the locker, takes a gander in it, and hands it to me, then gets out another and gives it to Charlie. The wallets contain two kinds of identification with our picture and physical description—a Federal District driver's license and an ID card for employees of Montoya Investigaciones SA, a private Mexico City investigation company. Montoya Investigaciones is a real company, Mateo tells us, owned by the Jaguaros through a combination of fronts. Its owner of record is a retired and highly venerated naval captain named Alejandro Montoya whose nephew is a ranking attorney in the mayor's office. The company's office is on a lower floor of the building we're in.

If you should have to deal with the police, Mateo says, show them the card. The federals don't care for private investigators, but they know Captain Montoya and give his people some latitude.

There's a knock at the open door and one of the computer guys beckons Rayo. She excuses herself and goes off with him.

Mateo takes a pair of pistols from the locker and places them on the table and beside each one sets two 13-round double-stacked magazines and a shoulder holster. Beretta .380 Cheetahs. He asks if they'll do or if we prefer something else.

Truth to tell, I prefer revolvers, big ones like my Redhawk. Revolvers don't jam. Plus I hold with the view that if you need more than six shots to hit something, you really shouldn't risk getting in a gunfight in the first place. But Charlie likes pistols and regards the Beretta highly. They'll do fine, he says.

We join Rigo in the suite, where a table in the outer room is set with platters of sandwiches and bowls of fried chicken and baskets of pastries. There's a large urn of coffee, and the refrigerator holds juices and soda pop and beer. Mateo fills a plate with pieces of chicken and cracks open a beer and sits at the table to eat. Rigo's slumped on the sofa, watching a weather channel with the sound off. He says he likes the maps, the colors of the temperature bands. It's very soothing, he says, the weather channel.

A radar map shows a pulsing bright green swath, wide and ragged, extending from South Texas down through central Mexico and all the way to a strip of coast that includes Acapulco. The forecast is for the rain to continue into the night.

Charlie says he's going to take a fast shower, but as he starts for the bedroom, Rayo comes in with a printout paper in her hand and says, We got something on Huerta.

Everybody looks at her.

Nothing big, but it's something, she says, suddenly looking a little nervous with so many expectant eyes on her. She tells us that just two weeks ago Huerta was seen coming out of the Alameda park in the company of two unidentified men, one of whom had a spike haircut. Huerta departed on foot, and the two men were picked up at the curb by a silver Grand Cherokee driven by a man of distinctly Asian extraction. The spider reported it because he knew Huerta owns a security company and such people are often of interest. The third man was said to be as tall as Huerta and wore a wide-brimmed hat and expensive white suit.

We stare at her.

And?
Mateo says. The spider get a name? A plate number?

Well . . . no, she says. But the man with the spike hair . . . he has to be the one the parents mentioned, no?

It could well be, Mateo says. So now we know for certain that the parents can identify a spike haircut when they see one. And that one of the kidnappers dresses well. Was there anything
else
in the report?

No, sir, Rayo says. I just thought . . . no sir.

Thank you, Rayo, Rigo says. Attach it to the file, please.

It's
something
, isn't it? she says, a little flushed.

“It's
nothing
,” Charlie says in English, getting up and going off to shower.

I don't care for their tone. She was just trying to help.

When she leaves the room, I follow her out and say, “Oye.”

She looks back and stops, her eyes bright with anger and injured dignity.

“Listen,” I say. “It
is
something. It shows that the parents' accounts are pretty accurate and reliable, which is a good thing to know.”

She nods and gives me a small smile. “Yeah, well . . . thanks.”

I watch her walk off. God, that rump.

When Charlie's done with the bathroom, I take a turn in the shower and get into a pair of jeans, a sweater, the Beretta shoulder holster, a water­proof Windbreaker. Charlie's dressed the same way. The spare magazines go in an outer zip-up pocket, the wallet with Mexican ID in an inner one.

In the dining room we help ourselves to sandwiches and coffee, then sit on the couch with Rigo and Mateo, who are talking about a pal of theirs who's about to get married for the third time. The guy never learns, Mateo says.

He's hardly the only one, Rigo says. Men tend to remember the best things about the women they've loved and to forget the worst, which is why so many men make the same mistakes with women again and again. Women tend to forget the best things about the men they've loved and to remember the worst, which is why so many women are so bitter about men.

I can see Charlie's not listening. He just stares at the pulsing green colors of the TV weather maps and checks his watch every two minutes.

16

Hardly anybody really knows Charlie Fortune. It's not that he's aloof or closed-mouthed. He enjoys kidding around and batting the breeze as much as the next guy, and he's always liked swapping jokes with me and Frank. It's just that he's never been one for
sharing his feelings
, as they say. The truth is Frank and I probably know him better than anyone else does, even his daddy, if only because nobody else has spent as much time with him as we have. We've worked for him for around a dozen years now and have lived practically next door to him for the last sixteen, ever since he took us in when our parents died.

At least, everybody assumed they died. All anyone's ever known for sure is that on a fine spring day of ideal weather and mild seas, they went out for a weekend sail one Friday morning in their sloop, the
Annie Max
, and never came back. When nobody had heard from them by Monday morning, the Coast Guard was notified and air units made a wide search for the next three days without spotting any sign of them. No flotsam, not a life jacket, nothing. After another two weeks, the family accepted their death as a fact. There was a memorial service for them and plaques were set in the family graveyard.

Frank and I were our parents' only children, seventeen and sixteen years old at the time, but both of us heading into our senior year of high school by dint of our parents' finagling my enrollment in first grade when I was only five so that Frank and I could be in the same grade all the way through school. They had willed us the house and we wanted to continue living in it, just us two, but some of our relatives were very much opposed. They said it would be unseemly and irresponsible of the family to permit any of its children to live without adult supervision while they were still in school. Frank and I said we weren't children and could take care of ourselves quite well, thank you very much. So they took the matter to the Three Uncles. Whenever there's a family conflict that the principals can't settle on their own, the Uncles are asked to decide it. In this instance they ruled that we had to live under direct adult supervision until we graduated. Either an adult relative moved in with us or we moved in with an adult relative. We didn't like the choice worth a damn, but in our family the rules are the rules, and one of the most basic is that a decision of the Uncles is final. Most of our relatives were willing to take us in, but the only one willing to move in with us was our spinster aunt, Laurel Lee. She's a nice person in many ways and a real whiz with digital gadgetry, but she's got some rigorous views about the proper governance of the legally underage, and the idea of being under her authority was as appealing as a yearlong stretch in reform school. Still, it was a better option than moving in with another household. We intended to inform her of our decision right after the memorial ceremony, but as soon as the service ended, Charlie Fortune came up to us to express his condolences and ask how we were doing.

We didn't know him very well then. He'd gone off to Texas A&M when Frank and I were in elementary school, but even as little kids, we knew about his athletic achievements in high school. He had set a state broad jump record that stood for five years and he twice made all-state in football as a running back and three times in baseball as a catcher. He went to A&M because he wanted to stay in-state and preferred College Station to the other university towns. He majored in history, took full-time coursework even in the summer sessions, and got his degree in three years. He has many times said he would've gone on to law school except he didn't meet the entrance requirements because he'd been born of married parents. You wouldn't think that old joke would continue to get as many laughs as it does in a family with a half-dozen lawyers in it, including Harry Mack. As soon as he graduated, Charlie came home and went to work for our daddy, Henry James Wolfe, whom everybody called HJ, and who by that time had been chief of the family shade trade for about ten years, since shortly after I was born. Daddy had promised him a position as soon as he met the rule that requires any family member who wants to work in the shade trade to get a degree first, which is why Charlie had matriculated year-round at A&M, to get it over with as soon as he could. Frank and I would do the same thing at UT Austin. Charlie quickly became Daddy's number two operative, behind Uncle Harry Morgan Wolfe, but even then Frank and I still didn't see much of him. Unlike Daddy, who commuted daily from Brownsville to the Landing, Charlie lived out there from the day he entered the shade trade and but infrequently came into town. The only times we saw him were at family gatherings on holidays or birthdays, and our exchanges with him were pretty much limited to “hey” when we arrived and “so long” when we left.

Frank and I were in junior high when he got married. Her name was Hallie Rheinhardt and she was nineteen years old and the marriage lasted exactly eight days. Frank and I never did meet her. Nobody did except some of the folks who lived or worked at the Landing back then, including Daddy. All he ever told us about it was that Charlie met her in Galveston and married her two days later, then brought her home to the Landing, where they mostly kept to themselves for a week before she lit out while Charlie was making a gun run to Laredo. When he got back and found out she'd left, he went looking for her and was gone for almost three weeks before he came back and told everybody the marriage was over and done and he did not ever want to hear a word about her. Daddy said everybody was wise enough to take his warning to heart, and nobody ever mentioned Hallie Rheinhardt within earshot of Charlie again. So far as I know, that's still true. It's a whole story of its own, Charlie's marriage.