A Song to Die For (12 page)

Hooley sighed. “You always staple a receipt to the bag?”

The kid screwed his face into a look of confusion. “Yeah…”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “That's just the way we do it.”

A horn honked from behind.

“So it's company policy, at all these greasy little joints?”

“Sir, there's people waiting, and your boat's taking up a lot of room. Nobody can even order behind you.”

Hooley flashed his Texas Ranger badge and ID. “Hooley Johnson, Texas Rangers. Where's corporate headquarters for Jack in the Box?”

“I don't know,” the kid said, looking nervous.

“Get the manager.”

After some scuffling around inside, and more horn honking, which Hooley ignored, a middle-aged, sweaty man ventured up to the window. “What's the problem here?” he demanded.

Hooley flashed the badge again. “Where's corporate headquarters for Jack in the Box?”

“San Diego,” the manager said, his tone of voice suggesting that Hooley must have been some kind of ignorant idiot if he didn't know that.

Hooley looked at window boy as he put his truck in gear. “Kid, you're surrounded by food all day long in that place. You need to get out of there and get some exercise. I'd look for another line of work if I was you.”

As the kid and the manager looked at him as if he were a sideshow freak, he pulled aside in the parking lot to look the bag over. He smelled the burger, but the odor of a recently caught fish on his hands overwhelmed it, so he left it in the bag. He took the lid and the plastic straw off the cup and drank a few gulps of the cold Coca-Cola. He didn't care much for the taste, but it felt good going down. He briefly thought about adding a splash from his whiskey flask in the glove box.

A Ford Pinto pulled up next to him and honked. Hooley rolled down his window.

“Hey, asshole,” said the driver, a lanky, bushy-haired, redheaded youth wearing a karate uniform. “You're not the only one in line, you know. It's supposed to be fast food.”

“What do you plan to do about it?” Hooley asked.

“Maybe I'll open a can of whoop-ass, grandpa.”

Hooley stepped out of his truck with his hand on his service weapon and his badge leading the way into the open passenger window of the Pinto to give the youth a good look. “Listen here, Kato, you're interfering with a police investigation and you just committed a verbal assault against an officer of the law. You want to rethink your attitude?”

The driver's eyes bulged, and his mouth dropped open. “Sorry, man. I saw the boat, and thought you were some redneck.”

“I
am
some redneck. You're lucky I don't have time to haul your ass to jail. You'd be real popular there in those pajamas. Now, get the hell out of here.”

*   *   *

Later, in the men's room of the Department of Public Safety headquarters in Austin, Hooley tried his best to wash the smell of largemouth bass off his hands. Always mindful of tainting evidence, he aimed to be scrubbed like a surgeon before he touched the items collected from Rosa's car. The case was fresh enough that the evidence was still in the office Hooley used at D.P.S., awaiting cataloging and storage.

Entering the office, he hung his felt Resistol on the hat rack, and gazed briefly at the items spread out on the Formica top of the folding table against the wall. His eyes fell on the Jack in the Box bag. That piece torn off the top had intrigued him from the get-go. Often, missing pieces of evidence tended to drive an investigation, and Hooley sensed that might be the case here. His eyes drifted to the ballpoint pen found in Rosa's car. Somebody in the lab had tagged it:

“Solid gold Cross ballpoint ink pen.”

If Rosa had written something on the bag, she would have used that pen, for it was the only writing implement found in the Corvette. “There's a month's salary for me,” he grumbled, looking at the gold pen.

Hooley thought of the person Rosa had by all accounts been before the trouble befell her: a beautiful and talented young designer who appreciated stylish things like the Vette, the gold Cross pen, the Calvin Klein jeans she had been wearing when she died. The Jack in the Box meal seemed completely out of character, and reaffirmed that she must have been in an awful hurry that day as she fled Las Vegas. He had her figured for more of a health food nut under normal circumstances.

From his shirt pocket, Hooley took the pencil he usually sharpened with his pocketknife and stuck it into the electric pencil sharpener on his desk to get a machine-smooth lead tip. Carefully picking up the fast-food bag, he examined the top edge of the paper sack, comparing it mentally to the one he had purchased earlier and left in his truck. There was no staple on the bag, and no receipt had been found in the car. Hooley reasoned that the receipt had been torn off, taking the staple and part of the bag with it.

Carefully flattening the bag on his desk, he imagined how Rosa might have written something on the receipt with her pen, hopefully while it was still stapled to the bag. He formed an image in his head: Rosa, in a hurry, had stopped to get a burger and use the ladies room at a Jack in the Box somewhere between Las Vegas and Lake L.B.J. Spotting a phone booth, she had taken her burger into the booth to wolf it down while she made a call or two. She may have written down a phone number, an address, or directions.

So, just under the place on the bag where the receipt and the staple had been presumably torn off, Hooley used the side of the lead point of his pencil to lightly color the paper bag, hoping to reveal a trail traced by the pressure of Rosa's ballpoint as it pressed through the receipt and left an indentation in the paper bag below. His big hand held the pencil gently, like an artist with a paintbrush. He feathered it across the paper, just dusting the bag with graphite from the side of the sharpened tip.

His eyes widened as a faint set of markings began to emerge, reminding him of a whitetail deer stepping out of a fog bank. The message was incomplete, but started with a capital
C
followed by a blank area, an
l, i, n,
another blank, and an
a
.

The first thing that popped into his head was
Carolina
, but
a, r, o
wouldn't have fit into the small blank space between the
C
and the
l
.

“Celinda?” he asked, speaking to Rosa.

He continued to brush the paper bag with broad strokes of the pencil lead, causing a few numbers to emerge below what was presumably a name. The first three digits seemed to be “512,” the area code for Austin and a wide expanse of Central and South Texas. After that, only three or four digits were legible, but the second set of three looked as if it could be an Austin exchange: “444.” Two possible numbers came up in the last set of four, but the other two were too faint. The curve of one could have been a six, a five, or a zero.

Hooley started a long sigh that ended in a growl. “You couldn't bear down a little harder?”

He sat down and looked at his watch. It was almost 4:30. Only 2:30 in San Diego. Reaching for the phone, he called information and, after a few attempts, tracked down a woman at the Jack in the Box headquarters who seemed smart and interested enough to help a detective with an investigation.

“I need the address and phone number of every Jack in the Box between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Austin, Texas. I need to know if there's a phone booth at any of those places, and if there is, I need to know what the number of the phone is in the phone booth.”

“I have no way of knowing what the phone booth numbers would be,” the lady said.

Hooley rolled his eyes impatiently, but tried to remain polite. “Ask the managers at your burger joints to get those numbers. The number's usually printed on the rotary dial.”

The lady said she'd try to help.

Next, he called Glastron Boats, across town, and asked for his friend Bobby, who had specially designed Hooley's bass boat for him. He explained what he needed to know about the old-fashioned glass windshield that had apparently sliced Rosa's body as she flew through it.

“That's a tough one, Hooley. Those safer kinds of glass have been around a long time. You know, the laminated stuff and the tempered stuff. Different manufacturers started using them at different times, though. Most even before the government mandated it. So it's hard to say what year you're looking at, but it's probably going to be an antique boat, unless some do-it-yourselfer slapped a piece of glass into a windshield on a newer boat.”

“Thanks for nothin', Bobby. Hey, how's the fishin' on Lake Austin? I caught an eight-pounder on L.B.J. this morning…”

They talked angling for a while before they hung up. Hooley got out a map and looked at the route Rosa would have taken between Las Vegas and Austin. Most of it was desert interstate. There couldn't be too many talk-to-the-clown burger joints between here and there. What was taking that gal at corporate headquarters so long?

Finally, the fax machine kicked into gear and spit out a surprisingly useful list of company franchises located along Rosa's probable route, and the phone booth numbers for the ones that had phone booths nearby. Hooley had already thought about when Rosa might have gotten hungry enough to stop and order a burger. Probably mid-afternoon, which would have put her near Albuquerque. The list from corporate headquarters included a franchise in Albuquerque with a phone booth outside.

Hooley wrote the phone booth number and the date in question onto a scrap of paper and walked down the hallway to his favorite Department of Public Safety secretary, a black woman in her forties, named Lucille. Lucille liked getting involved with Hooley's investigations to break the monotony of her clerical work, so he often threw chores her way.

“Lucille, I swear you look younger every day,” he said, approaching her desk.

She looked at him over the tops of her glasses, her fingers continuing to type as she spoke. “Uh-huh. What do you want this time, Captain Johnson?” She yanked the page from the typewriter, put it facedown on a stack of pages, and fed a new sheet of paper into the machine.

“Well, there is one little thing. I need a record of all calls made from this number on that date.” He handed her his slip of paper. “It's an Albuquerque phone booth.”

“What are you looking for?” she asked, hungry for intrigue.

“I'm hoping to find a call made from that phone to somebody in Austin, possibly named Celinda. I don't have a last name yet. And, Lucille, darlin', I know you're busy, but I could sure use it pronto.”

“Public phone booth? Shouldn't be a problem. Is this for that girl they found dead on the lake?”

“Yeah. Have you lost weight?”

“You've already got me hooked, Hooley, don't push it.”

“I'm serious, you look thinner.”

Lucille smiled. “Well, I
am
taking Jazzercise.”

Walking back to his office, a question nagged at him. If Rosa had called someone named Celinda, why hadn't this Celinda come forward by now? Rosa's death had been front-page news for two days, and had been featured on all three local TV news channels, too. The fact that the mysterious Celinda had not emerged yet troubled him. It suggested that she might be somehow involved, scared, in danger, or worse. Then again, she might simply be out of town. There could be any number of explanations. There was no certainty yet that Rosa had even called the number she had written down. Maybe the name wasn't even Celinda, but Hooley couldn't concoct anything else that fit, given the letters on the burger bag. Maybe it was some weird business name, and not a given name at all. Maybe it was a town name, or some kind of shorthand only Rosa would be able to explain.

He found himself walking through that familiar cloud—the one that descended on every new investigation. It would give him glimpses of information occasionally, but refused to let him see the whole picture. It was frustrating and invigorating all at once, and it drove his imagination to concoct dozens of whirling scenarios, each of which had to be stood up to logic, motive, and common sense.

When he came out of the cloud, he was standing in his office. He grabbed the greater Austin area phone book and checked the businesses that started with
C
. No matches. Scenario eliminated. Back to Celinda.

In his office, Hooley had a book, updated annually, that cross-referenced phone numbers with names. You could look up a number and find the name of the individual or business that corresponded to that number. He didn't have Celinda's complete number, but he could guess the area code and three-digit exchange. There were going to be multiple possibilities for the last four digits.

He got the book out and identified the block of numbers that would include the fragmented combination he had lifted from the fast-food bag. There were hundreds of numbers in the block. He was hoping he could scan through the names, which of course came in no particular order, and eventually find a Celinda.

*   *   *

He had been combing through the names and numbers for several minutes, when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver.

“Johnson.”

“Gettin' anywhere?” It was the familiar voice of Doc Brewster, the county medical examiner.

“Spinnin' my wheels. Hopin' for some traction. You got anything?”

“Just an observation.”

Hooley marked his spot in the number book, threw his red pen down, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his eyes. “Enlighten me.”

“No one has contacted my office to claim the body of Rosabella Martini yet.”

“You're sure her next of kin have been notified?”

“My secretary left a message for her uncle, Paul Martini.”

“It's been less then forty-eight hours. Is that unusual?”

“Not for dead drifters or prostitutes. But for a society gal? Strikes me as odd.”