Kissing Arizona (11 page)

He rang some distant bell in Sarah's mind, but she couldn't place it until he turned his bright, urgently searching gaze on Cokely and demanded, ‘Now, is Sarah authorized to deal? Because I'm not giving out any free samples, y'know.' He followed that ridiculous burst of arrogance with a nervous little grooming motion on his soul patch, and abruptly she remembered where she had seen him last.

‘Calvin Inman.' She sat back with a satisfied smile. ‘Of course. How could I forget you?'

‘Well, you've certainly changed since I saw you last.' He peered at her badge. ‘Detective Burke, is it now?'

‘Yes. It's been a while, I was Officer Decker when we met before.' She told Cokely, ‘I pulled him out of a bar on East Speedway one night about ten years ago. The bartender called 911 and said his customers were about to kill a guy and he was damned if he'd lift a finger to stop them.'

‘Calvin did something naughty?'

‘He moved in with a group that had a lot to drink and started picking up their change. The one who wasn't as drunk as the rest noticed and blew the whistle. His buddies picked up this little dandy by his too-tight three-piece suit and pinned him to the wall with kitchen knives.'

She remembered how pasty-faced scared he had looked hanging on the wall. Other details came back to her: the thread that dangled from the lost button on his right sleeve, the way he kicked his badly scuffed wing-tips at three feet of empty air. ‘By the time I got there they were using him for target practice. They'd started with bar glasses but the man at the end of the line had a heavy glass ashtray in his hand.' She told Calvin, ‘You had a couple more teeth then. Your hair's still nice, though.'

He patted it and said, ‘So now I'm supposed to thank you? You had to call for back-up the way I remember it.'

‘You were too heavy for me to get off the wall by myself. What have you done this time, Calvin?'

‘I haven't done a thing. It's all a mistake.'

‘OK,' Sarah said, getting up. ‘In that case I'm wasting my time.'

‘Well wait, wait, wait.' He twirled the curly ends of his mustache. ‘Rather than go to all that trouble and expense in court . . . I have a better idea.'

‘Tell me about it.'

‘As soon as you promise me immunity.'

‘From what?'

‘From any of the serious crimes I'm going to tell you about.'

‘You have to make that kind of a deal with a prosecuting attorney. I'm just a homicide detective.'

‘You're the homicide detective that found that box of bones in the alley, aren't you?' He asked Cokely, ‘Is this the right Sarah Burke?'

‘Yup,' Cokely said. ‘This is the famous Sarah Burke who found the bones.'

‘OK, famous Sarah Burke,' Inman said. ‘And when I tell you who's in that box I can also tell you who killed him and why, and I bet you can connect that crime with the two dead guys in a stash house on Camino Seco.'

‘One thing about you, Calvin,' Sarah said, ‘you do keep up with the news, don't you?'

‘I make it my business to, yes.' He preened.

‘Let's get specific. The crime you want to tell me about is not directly connected to the two dead guys in the stash house, but is involved in the drug trade?'

‘Sure. What else is going on in this quaint western village?'

‘Large quantities?'

‘More than enough to kill for. Obviously.'

Oh don't I wish I could show you how obvious it was, Inman.
She sat still and held her breath for a few seconds, surprised by how much she wanted to rub Calvin Inman's smirking face in that dreadful scene, make him acknowledge for once what the carefree self-indulgence of marijuana scofflaws cost this city. The once-attractive bodies of young men and dogs had been sprawled in pools of blood in several devastated rooms of the house on Camino Seco. Trails of their blood showed where bales of weed had been dragged across them and out the door. And just as Sarah was thinking there was nothing more pathetic than a dead animal, Oscar Cifuentes turned over one of the dogs and found something worse – a child's doll, the sequins in its blood-soaked ruffles winking forlornly on the morning light. The whole crew wasted a stomach-clinching hour after that, searching under beds and in all the closets, in the crawl spaces and under a weed-choked porch. They never found a child and finally decided that some lucky girlfriend must have taken her daughter home just in time.

Most of the scene work at the stash house was blood and fingerprints, so once the crime scene units and the narcotics detectives got busy, Delaney's crew was free to canvass the neighborhood. Identification of the victims turned out to be easy – several neighbors knew them well, or had thought they did. Affable young men with big shiny vehicles and high-end sports equipment, what was not to like? Everybody was shocked – such nice young men, who knew? God, right here in the neighborhood, what was this town coming to?

Identification of the guilty parties was going to be tougher. The killers had worn gloves and picked up all their casings.

‘Pros,' Delaney said.

All his detectives gave him their ‘well duh' look.

‘But plenty of people know who did this,' he said. ‘Greenaway, it's your case. Keep turning over rocks. Find their family members and girlfriends. Find their car dealers and doctors and lawyers and bank accounts.'

‘Sure.' Ollie waved a paid bill he'd pulled out of a drawer. ‘Hey, I already found their vet. Case is practically solved.'

The stash house job needled them all into flip remarks like that. It was gross and disgusting and pushed the waste and loss of the drug business right into their faces. There was no satisfaction to be had out of gathering evidence – they could not ‘solve' cases like the stash house. The border was where it was; the appetite for drugs was bottomless; other well-built houses would soon be smeared with the blood of clever young men and their blameless, beautiful dogs.

But now here was Calvin Inman, a liar for all seasons, wanting to finger the Camino Seco assassins to bargain his way out of jail. She watched his face as she asked him, ‘And you, who did nothing wrong, know about this how?'

Calvin rubbed two fingers of his right hand against his thumb. ‘Got to pay to play, Sarah.'

‘Detective to you. I've got another meeting to go to in five minutes, Calvin, and I'm trying to decide between coming back here tomorrow with some serious heat to hear your statement, and not coming back ever. So before I walk out that door in four minutes and thirty-six seconds your task is to convince me you're not just blowing smoke.'

Calvin switched his little butt around on the hard round seat, looked imploringly at Cokely. ‘Damn, a hard woman's enough to make you cry, ain't she?'

‘You think Sarah's hard,' Cokely said, ‘wait till you see what I'm going to do to you if you don't convince her.'

‘All right.' Calvin Inman puffed up his cheeks and blew a blast of air out, to relieve the intolerable stress of speaking one whole true sentence. ‘I'll tell you the name of the person in the box, and that's absolutely all you get till you come back with a signed statement that holds me harmless for the rest of what I have to tell you.'

‘Like what?' Sarah kept her eyes on her watch.

‘Like how you can prove it.' He leaned close to her face and hissed, ‘
Like
fucking whodunit.
'

‘Three minutes and ten seconds,' Sarah said. ‘Who's in the box?'

‘Chuy Maldonado,' Inman said. Sarah's head came up abruptly. Inman met her eyes and smiled.

‘You serious? The Chuy Maldonado who's a close associate of Huicho Valdez and Rafi Soltero?'

‘Not as close as he used to be,' Calvin said. ‘Does that get me an extra minute?'

‘Maybe. Be careful, now, Calvin, I get really cranky when somebody tries to jerk me around.'

‘No bullshit, Detective.'

‘You're really talking about Chuy Maldonado, the well-known drug smuggler whose family claims he's been missing for quite a while and they have no idea where he is, so we all figured he had voluntarily deported himself?'

‘That's the fella.'

‘Uh-
huh.
' Sarah met Ed Cokely's eyes and sighed. ‘Why do I answer my phone all the time? From now on I'm just going to let it ring.' Her headache was gone, though. She leaned across the small table toward the improbable little poser in the orange suit. ‘I really do have to go to a meeting, now, Calvin. I'm going to try to persuade a guy I know at DEA to come back with me tomorrow and see what he thinks. If you've got what you say you've got, it's worth a deal, no question. Be ready to tell him some very convincing details.'

‘I promise you, Detective, you won't be sorry.'

‘I'm already sorry. I wish I never had to see you again. The only question is, are you going to make me look bad to my friends in the federal agency?' She stood up, patted her Glock a couple of times and told him, ‘I never forgive a guy who does that.'

Calvin shook his head sadly. ‘Jesus, Sarah, your job's turning you into a regular Nazi, you know that?'

‘Remember that,' she said. ‘Keep it firmly in mind.'

As she walked out with Ed Cokely she said, ‘I really do have a meeting. I'll call you as soon as I see who's interested. I think Delaney's going to be glad to offload the box of bones. If DEA will take the case there'll probably be some kind of a deal in there for Inman.'

‘Thanks for coming over, Sarah. Ain't he a piece of work?'

‘Here's a mystery for you: why do people cash his checks?'

‘I guess they like his facial hair.'

‘It is pretty special.' She stood looking out at the sunshine, wishing so many beautiful days didn't have to be hurried through. After a thoughtful minute she said, ‘You don't often see the non-violent ones cross over, though, do you? How do you suppose Calvin the fraudster got into the big-time drug trade?'

‘With fear and trembling, I would guess,' Cokely said. ‘Somebody had him by the short and curlies and made him do an errand.'

From the terrible moment when her grandmother's voice went deep and creepy and she toppled into Aunt Sarah's arms, Denny Lynch had been getting ready to see her own life get stuck out in the weeds again.

It was a little over four months since her mother went postal in a grocery store parking lot, and she'd come to live with Aunt Sarah. Less than half a year of getting used to clean clothes and regular meals, homework done on time and grades going up.

She knew it came at a price. Right from the get-go she could see that the three of them – Aunt Sarah, Grandma Aggie and her – if they made lists, left plenty of notes, always told the truth quickly and did exactly what they'd promised to do right on time, they could just about make it through the days. The two grown-ups didn't talk about it in front of her, but Denny had been practically on her own the last year in her mother's house, so she knew what food cost and how much work went into keeping clean. Lately she'd noticed that Grandma's answers got sharper when she was getting tired. And she understood why a nerve twitched in Aunt Sarah's jaw when she arrived home still thinking about the work left on her desk.

Denny tried not to be a pest, did chores and homework without being told, got ready for bed on time. Even so, she knew that taking her in without notice had caused Aunt Sarah major overload. Her mother had complained plenty about how hard it was to be a single mom, and homicide detectives worked some crazy hours. Aggie never complained but Denny knew coming in from the ‘burbs to help every day had disrupted her grandmother's retirement, big time.

But there was only one other place for her to go: to the ranch where Mom and Aunt Sarah grew up. She liked the animals and there was plenty of room in the house, unlike here where she was crammed into one end of her aunt's bedroom. Uncle Howard tried to be kind. But lying upstairs in the ranch house, twisting in shame, she had more than once heard his wife tell him how much she resented having his sister dumping her kid on them ‘like I'm some free babysitting service.' Aunt Barbara gloomed up just watching Denny walk in the door, sighed over the extra laundry, talked about family plans that did not include her. Her daughters, who had known from their cradles where Denny stood in the pecking order, gleefully whispered private jokes and left her out of their games.

So even though life in a single hard-up detective's house was crowded, subject to jolting phone calls at weird hours, and scheduled to the tooth-gritting minute on school mornings, Denny was glad to be there and wanted to stay. It was worth doing a lot of chores to live with Aunt Sarah, who was smart and thought she was a cool kid, and with Grandma Aggie, who adored her and was often quite funny.

What she hadn't realized at first, as she stowed her socks and underwear in shoe boxes under the cot behind the curtain, was that Aunt Sarah had the one thing Denny despised most in the world, a boyfriend. Not that her aunt ever called him that; she referred to Will Dietz as ‘my friend', and never flirted and giggled with him the way Mom did with men she brought home. And Denny had to admit, he didn't come with beer and pot like her mother's leering boyfriends, to sprawl all over the kitchen getting wasted and scaring you half to death.

Will Dietz was just kind of a spooky cop, smallish, with a very quiet voice and odd scars. Aggie told her he'd been caught in a gun fight between thieves and almost died. Denny thought he hadn't quite recovered yet. Some days he seemed to have nothing to say, just came in and read the paper, hung out for an hour or two before his night shift. Good days he peeled potatoes or repaired something, or went out for milk – he was Aggie's main man for grocery runs. At first Denny wondered whose boyfriend he was, actually – Aggie was the one who was always saying how clever he was, so handy with tools.