Kissing Arizona (10 page)

She certainly was. Jaime always met her by the fish taco stand two blocks from Yolanda's house, carried the laundry basket to the lake and helped her hurry through the washing. He got his reward, after a couple of frantic kisses and some fumbling with undergarments, in the back seat of a derelict Dodge behind an auto repair shop two blocks from the lake. He was ardent and new to the game so his climax came quickly, which was all Vicky asked of it.

Carrying the heavy basket of wet clothes back to the taco stand, he would ask her happily if it was good for her too and she assured him that it was ‘
esplendido, glorioso
.' It was not at all glorious but it was a revelation. She had not realized how quickly a man could be enslaved by the pleasure of sex.

But now that he was her slave, she decided as she hung the wet clothes on the line at home, it was time to move the plan along. The next time they crept furtively out of the old car body and made their way back to the dirt lane that led home, Vicky said, ‘Let's sit on this rock and talk a while.'

Jaime said, ‘Talk?' Even a novice lover has instincts. ‘About what?'

Vicky looked around casually, saw they were not being watched, and put her hand under his shirt, on the side near her, just above his waist. ‘Let's talk about fun.'

‘OK,' Jaime said, ‘but I'd rather do it than talk about it.' He reached for her.

‘Wait, wait, wait!' She drew back, moved away.

‘For what?'

‘We have to be so careful here,' Vicky pouted. ‘My mother will stop letting me out alone if anybody tells her I'm meeting you. But what I keep thinking, we could have fun all the time if we were in Tucson.'

‘Whoa,' he said. ‘You planning a trip?'

‘I'd like to. With you.' In a flash, she leaned over and put her tongue in his ear. He groaned and reached for her again.

‘Think about it,' she said, standing up. ‘We have to go.'

As they walked home carrying the basket between them, he said, ‘You really want to go back up there? Why?'

‘Think how sweet it could be if we were alone together. And the possibilities for work are endless there.' She knew they were not, but she also knew they were better than here. So the next time they did the laundry she asked, during their quiet post-coital stroll home, ‘So, when we going to Arizona?'

‘That's kind of dangerous,' he said. ‘How about a couple of days in Guaymas?'

‘
Oh, por favor
.' She let him see her contempt. ‘And then come back here and take a beating from everybody, get fired and grounded?
No, gracias
.'

‘Well, what? You talking about really going for it?
El norte
?'

‘
Exactamente!
' She put her end of the basket down and danced around him. ‘I want a man with the
cojones
to get me over that wall!'

‘You are so crazy,' he said, but laughing – it excited him that his woman, as he now called her, was wilder than the girls he had known.

‘This hurts my back so much,' she told him over the soapy shirts on their next trip to the lake. She was tired that night, grumpy. ‘I ever get back to Estados Unidos where I can live decent, I am going to kiss the ground.'

‘Aye, Querida, why would you kiss that old desert when I am here?'

‘I have plenty of kisses,' she said. ‘When we finish this rinsing you will see.' She gave him a ravishing hot look like the girls in the movies, and a few minutes later in the Dodge she was pleased to hear him groan.

‘Wait till you walk through those big malls they got up there,' she told him on their next laundry day. ‘You can buy shoes in a store where they got hundreds of pairs to choose from.'

He looked at her sideways. ‘You talking about spending real money now.'

‘Anything wrong with that?'

‘Only that . . .' He wrung out a garment. ‘We have no money at all.'

‘We'll make it after we get there, don't you see?'

‘
Quizás
,' he said. ‘Anyway,' he finally admitted, ‘anything would be better than rinsing your auntie's panties twice a week.' He wrung out a pair and held the leg openings up to his eyes like goggles. Vicky laughed so hard she fell into the water.

Pulling her out, Jaime noticed the women at nearby boulders watching them, and hissed, ‘Stop laughing, quick.' They finished up silently and packed the basket. As they walked home, slower than usual to give Vicky time to dry off, Jaime said, ‘I know a guy named Carlos who says he's thinking of going soon . . . I'll talk to him.'

‘You see?' She ducked her head to plant a furtive kiss on a side of his arm. ‘Already we begin to have a plan.'

FIVE

‘
S
arah,' Ed Cokely said on the phone Wednesday morning, ‘you got a minute?'

‘Just about,' she said. Ed Cokely was an experienced detective and decent guy with a well-earned reputation for telling the longest, dumbest cop jokes in the TPD vice unit. If she let him get started she would never get her desk clear before this afternoon's conference on the Cooper case, so she said, medium-friendly, ‘'Sup?'

‘I got this total dickhead in a cell over here,' he said. ‘Calvin Inman, you know him?'

‘Don't think so.'

‘He thought you did. He's been hanging paper all over town.'

Sarah tsked. ‘Didn't he get the memo about that going out of style?'

‘This guy's retro in more ways than one, wait'll you see him.'

‘Why do I need to? He kill somebody who wouldn't cash his check, or—'

‘No, he asked me to call you to make you an offer. Because he saw the story in the paper about your box of bones.'

‘Shee, my in-box is full of messages about those bones. Why's everybody so hot for bones? I just happened to take the call, Ed.'

‘Yeah, well, congratulations, anyway – you got the case that's going to get all the ink. A box of bones is sexy, kid, and it never hurts to get your name in the paper.'

‘OK, from now on I'll watch out for bones. What's your paperhanger want?'

‘Well, he gets these brilliant ideas, see? Last week his brilliant idea was to plead not guilty and make us take him to court. Because he's sure we can't identify his handwriting—'

‘Oh, that's ridiculous.'

‘Well, everything he says is ridiculous, but it still takes up time. But now, today, my little fraudster reads about your box of bones and gets a new brilliant idea. He wants to plead guilty to the check charge and get the sentence suspended in exchange for telling you who's in the box.'

‘He just happens to know that?'

‘So he says.'

‘Maybe you're holding him on the wrong charge, huh?'

‘He seems confident he won't incriminate himself if he tells us what he knows. But he won't talk at all till he hears about the quid pro quo.'

‘Oh, now I'm excited. I hardly ever get a suspect who speaks Latin. He really said quid pro quo?'

‘No, what he really said was “tell me which hole everybody wants fucked and I'll bet I can make 'em all glow.”'

‘I had to ask. Have you talked to the chief?'

‘Out of town. I thought Delaney might be interested in clearing a case faster.'

‘What's the quid pro quo for you?'

‘I get this tiresome sociopath his reduced sentence, I can move him along to Safford and get him out of my sight.'

‘He's not an amusing bandit?'

‘Calvin Inman,' Ed said with a windy sigh, ‘could get the Pope to campaign for abortion rights.'

‘I'll ask Delaney. We do have enough going on here without that box of bones.'

‘Yeah, the Coopers and what else?' Ed liked to know the skinny.

‘Stash house last week on Camino Seco.'

‘Oh, yeah, that was a big one, wasn't it? What was the body count?'

‘Two men and three dogs.'

‘
Shee
. I bet those dogs are going to be hard to ID.'

‘Hang up now, Cokely.'

There was, for sure, plenty to do around the homicide division without wasting any time in a booth with a paperhanger. But Sarah had promised Cokely, so she went looking for Delaney. He was not in his office and the steno said he had walked out five minutes ago, talking, no surprise, on the phone.

‘When is he ever not?' Sarah said, and stood in the hall a minute, dithering, before she realized she knew what Delaney would have said.

She went back to her desk, called Cokely, and told him that Delaney said the hell with making deals. ‘He says we'll get DNA off the bones in that box soon enough, and when we do he's betting the victim has a record as long as your arm right here in the state. He wants me to concentrate on the two double murders we're already working, especially the Cooper case. He says that's the one everybody cares about.'

She was surprised how easy it was to channel Delaney, especially when he was supposedly saying what she wanted to hear.

Cokely said, ‘OK, if Delaney doesn't care about the ink.'

‘Trust me,' Sarah said, ‘Delaney does not care about the ink.' That might have been stretching the truth just a little. Delaney knew as well as anybody that law enforcement lived or died at the pleasure of the public. But he had told her when she started in Homicide, ‘Focus on clearing cases and let the publicity take care of itself.' When she heard him say the same thing to Jason Peete later, she realized it was one of his favorite bits of Old Cop Wisdom. So why not use it now to get Cokely off her back? She really did have plenty to do without Ed's bad-check bozo.

She was a little testy today anyway, sleep-deprived, seeing jumpy haloes around the items on her desk and fighting off a headache. She'd stayed at the hospital with Aggie till well past midnight, leaving Denny at home with the door locked. Denny had been a champ, dished up her own dinner and cleaned up after it, had herself ready for bed by the time Sarah called at nine thirty.

Sarah gave her the news that Aggie had had a slight stroke but was resting comfortably now. It helped that they got her to the hospital fast and the ER doc got her on the right blood thinner in a hurry. She was scheduled for more tests and appointments with a couple of specialists in the morning.

Before Sarah went home Aggie had moved both arms and wiggled her toes a little. Sarah left her sleeping and apparently out of danger.

By seven the next morning she was awake, sitting up and talking to Sarah on the phone, her speech only slightly slurred. ‘What really makes me feel sick,' she said, ‘is the fix this leaves you in.'

‘Will you quit worrying about that?' Sarah said. ‘You'll make your blood pressure worse. We've got everything covered, we'll be fine.'

Thanks to Will Dietz that was almost true. He'd called just before Aggie, on his way home from his night's work.

‘I'll grab some sleep now and be at your house when Denny gets home,' he said. ‘I checked this out with Denny last night and she's OK with it.'

‘She told me that too. Thanks, Will. Get some sleep now.' They were talking softly, she realized, as if they were actually in the sickroom. Despite her assurances to Aggie about having everything covered, she felt as if she were holding her breath, waiting for the next blow to fall. Seeing unsinkable Aggie collapse had made all the other arrangements of her life seem fragile as spiderwebs.

And Will . . .
how will I ever thank him?
Then she knew very well how she would thank him, wished she could be thanking him right now, and went back to work feeling warm.

An hour later Ed Cokely was back on the phone saying, ‘Crafty Calvin's just determined to make a deal with you.'

‘Oh? What now?'

‘He wants to raise the ante. He says now that he's thought about it, he realizes he not only knows who's in the box, he can also tell you why he was killed. Chapter and verse, with back-up evidence and leads to several other big cases that he knows you have still open. You hear me, Sarah? I'm offering you another crack at the winner's circle!'

‘You really want to get rid of this guy, don't you? Hold on.' She put him on hold and thought a few seconds. What if he really had something and she turned it down without asking anybody? She went back on his line and said, ‘I'll try Delaney one more time but if he throws rocks at me, I'm holding a grudge.'

Delaney was still not in his office and the steno said he'd left for a meeting with the chief and didn't expect to be back until three this afternoon. After that, she knew, he would not want to talk about anything but the Cooper case.

She dithered again, back at her desk, which by now was marginally less loaded than usual. Her reports for Delaney's meeting were done, and she'd answered most of the emails. Ed Cokely had helped her get through the soul-eating grind of auto theft division, and she liked returning favors, maybe with a little bit over so you always had some markers out there you could call in.

She called Cokely back and agreed to meet him in half an hour at the Pima County Jail on West Silverlake. By the time she got there he already had Calvin Inman in the interview room.

Inman was a little more colorful than Cokely's description had led her to expect: a small, pot-bellied man with a carefully tended head of dark wavy hair and an ornate Van Dyke mustache and beard. The mustache was especially flamboyant, full and bushy, with the ends carefully curled up. From the shoulders up he looked like a Rembrandt portrait. From there down he was a pear-shaped loser in an orange jailhouse jumpsuit and flip-flops.