New River Blues (18 page)

‘I quit even trying to follow, it was just ranting. After a few minutes I said, “You seem upset. Why don't we try this another time?” I stood up and pulled my keys out of my pocket, and oh, my God, you would have thought I kicked her pet cat. She started to cry, floods of tears, held on to me, and kept wailing, “You mustn't leave me, I'm so lonely, I need somebody to talk to.”

‘We were in a hotel room downtown, there were people coming and going in the hall, I expected a knock on the door any minute. I didn't know what to do, so I . . . sort of peeled her off me and got out of there. I mean how would I give aid and comfort to Eloise Henderson even if I wanted to? It struck me like that Christmas question, what do you give a woman who already has everything? Rich broad getting her rocks off fucking a cop, what should I say to her? “I'm sorry bottom-fishing is not enough?”'

But he felt bad about leaving her all strung out like that, he said, she had her car but he didn't think she was in very good shape to drive. He remembered the couple working that party at her house. He thought they acted as if they worked there full time. It was mid-afternoon, her husband wasn't likely to be home, so he called her house, and a woman's voice with a Sonoran accent answered.

‘I said, “Mrs Henderson is in room so-and-so at the Four Corners Sheraton, I think she might need help.” She didn't even ask me who I was. She just said, very calm, “OK. We get her.” She hung up and I hung up and that's the last I ever heard of Eloise Henderson till the morning Homicide got called to her house.'

‘So she didn't seem surprised. The housekeeper.'

‘Not a bit. Sounded like she knew just what to do.'

‘So what did you think of that? I mean,' she said, into his blank stare, ‘how did you account for Eloise's behavior?'

‘Why should I account for it? I'm a cop, not a psychiatrist.'

‘Don't give me that. You've seen just as many freak-outs as I have. You walked away from a woman you intended to go to bed with, you must have had some idea what you were leaving behind you.'

He turned his hands up, thought a minute, and said, ‘Off her meds.'

‘OK.' She checked her notes. ‘Why didn't you tell Delaney on the phone that you were going to have to recuse yourself?'

‘I wasn't home when he called. I was . . . with a friend.' He cleared his throat.
So busy and complex, the life of the stud.
‘They paged me from downtown. When I recognized the address I started calling Delaney. His phone was busy for a solid half-hour. Finally I decided, I better get dressed and go in, or he'll be on my tail about being slow to respond. So I went to see him and he blew up in my face about polluting his crime scene.'

‘Boy, didn't he?' Sarah wiped up their crumbs and dumped napkins and coffee cups in the wastebasket. ‘Enough to make you wonder if Homicide is really a step up from Auto Theft, huh?'

‘I've wondered that every day since I got there.'

‘You serious?' Sarah had genuinely hated her time in Auto Theft, which had felt to her like being trapped in a thug-infested revolving door.

‘I spent five happy years there and I'd go back in a heartbeat if I could. I
love
cars,' Cifuentes said, looking dreamy. ‘I'm a stone expert, I can look at almost any car on the road and tell you what's under the hood. And if you give me an hour to poke around it I'll tell you exactly what's been done to it since it rolled off the lot.'

‘Have you asked to go back?'

Cifuentes shuddered delicately. ‘TPD frowns on going back.'

‘That's true. Onward and upward, that's our motto. OK.' She turned a page in her notebook. ‘You ready for this?' She read off a case number and he wrote it down. ‘Let's find it to make sure it's here.' They hunted along a shelf till they found January, pulled down the box with the right case number and carried it to the table.

‘Verna Talbot.' Sarah lifted off the lid. Dust flew up and she sneezed. ‘Widowed, lived alone, kept a cat. Helped out at the food bank, played the organ for the choir, mentored slow readers in grade schools, did one afternoon a week at the wild-bird sanctuary. A helper bee. Many friends, no enemies. Disappeared on a Tuesday, found on Friday. She was upright behind the wheel of her car in the parking lot at St Stephen's Methodist – not her church, by the way – wearing a hat with a veil. Nobody admits to knowing how long she'd been there. The weather was cold, below freezing at night, so the body was . . . well preserved. But a parishioner finally noticed this car that hadn't moved.

‘You understand, we'd been looking for her, we thought everywhere, since the afternoon after she disappeared. She was due to drive a delivery for Meals on Wheels. When she didn't show up they phoned, then somebody went to see about her because she was never late. All her friends called each other, then they called 911. By the next day it was our case because – oh, you'll read it in there. The plants weren't watered, the cat wasn't fed, the garage door was left open. Four dozen or so of her closest friends called and insisted that you could set your clock by Verna, she would never let you down, she always did what she said . . . this department sounded like an answering service for a couple of days, all the phones were ringing.

‘The morning we found her, the ME determined she'd been hit on the head with something heavy. He also thought, and the autopsy later confirmed, that she'd been asphyxiated. Smothered with a pillow or a plastic bag, something like that.

‘Later the same day, the Burger King on North Oracle was robbed at gunpoint just as a Dodge van full of illegal immigrants was being chased north on I-10 by a carload of rival coyotes.'

‘I remember that day.'

‘We all do. Three people shot at the Burger King, one fatally. Eleven serious injuries when the van rolled over. Not to mention the mishaps caused by several foot chases, and one K-9 dog killed in traffic.

‘We did the best we could, but it was a very cold trail by the time we got back to Verna Talbot. Her friends held a big memorial service with a lot of hugging and weeping. Two daughters came from out of town. Half the speeches mentioned “shoddy police work,” and “miscarriage of justice.” Delaney was mortified. He flogged this case for many months before he admitted it was a dead horse.'

‘You got any ideas where I should start?'

Sarah drained the last of her coffee, leaned back in her chair, and remembered. ‘I never got a chance to prove this, but what I remember about this woman was that her house was full of very pretty things – porcelain figurines, several sets of china, elaborately decorated sterling table silver. It wasn't a big house, she wasn't rich and her friends weren't either, but she'd evidently spent a lifetime collecting and it was all in her house. Pretty clothes and jewelry, too, and she had lovely taste.

‘The house was full of photographs, too, of her husbands and children and her, and what I noticed during the first half-day we spent there before we got called to the other crime scenes, and the one time I got back there before the daughters took over and dismantled it, was that in almost every picture she was wearing a four-strand pearl necklace – it was evidently one of her favorite things. But she wasn't wearing it when we found her and it wasn't in her jewelry box. I tried to ask about her jewelry when we got back to the case, but by then everything was scattered and her daughters didn't seem to remember her pearls or care about them.

‘So . . . I know it isn't much to go on but I've always had the feeling somebody got to wanting some of Verna's nice things. There's a list in there somewhere of the items I wanted to chase down. But we're all so busy – other people got kidnapped and run over, and off we went.'

‘Information on the daughters is in here?'

‘Yes. And the telephone numbers of dozens of friends. Try the one named . . .' She drummed her fingers, thinking back. ‘Brenda something. She'll talk your arm off, but she seemed to really care about Verna and know a lot about her.'

‘Well, hey,' Cifuentes said, smiling, showing his charm. ‘Muchas gracias.'

‘De nada.' Sarah put her chair back on the stack in the corner. She reflected, as she walked away, that for a man whose stated avocation was cars, Cifuentes told a story very well.

EIGHT

A
fter he parked the Party Down vehicle Nino scuttled, almost too scared to breathe, into the bus depot. Nobody grabbed him so he bought a ticket to Albuquerque. He had no reason to go there, but it was the next bus leaving, and the cost of the ticket left him enough for a few meals.

He hid out in the rest room for a while and then, as departure time neared, stood close to an exit and nervously scanned the room. He had no idea how badly Zack had been hurt by his fall on to the pavement. If he was in fair shape and able to get a ride he would surely think to look in the bus depot, so Nino knew he could be toast any minute. When the bus was announced he got into the last seat in back and crouched down, trembling with anxiety until they pulled away from the depot.

He was afraid to get off the bus in Willcox when they stopped there, so he waited till they reached the small town of Lordsburg, across the New Mexico border. When he came out of the men's room there, he stood in a line of men fishing coins out of pockets in front of the Coke machine. The man ahead of him looked part-Indian or Mexican, had a broad dark face and rough, hard-working hands. But his jeans were new and he had sturdy work gloves in his rear pocket, so when he turned holding his Coke, on an impulse Nino said, ‘I'm looking for work. You know where the jobs are around here?'

‘Oh,' the man said, slow and quiet, ‘what kinda work you lookin' for?'

While his Coke rolled out of the machine Nino did his best to arrange his face in an imitation of Pauly's open, guileless expression. He told the man with the gloves he wasn't particular. He said he had been picking tomatoes back in Willcox and got laid off when one crop ended and another wasn't ripe yet. ‘I live paycheck to paycheck,' he said, ‘I can't afford to lay off.'

‘Know what you mean, bro,' the dark man said. He took a long swig of Coke, belched thoughtfully, and finally said, ‘You could get on out to Utley's if you don't object to some stoop labor. Mmm? Up near Hatch. There's work in the pepper fields there.' He looked at Nino, skinny in his ancient jeans. ‘Ain't easy work, though.'

‘Hey,' Nino said, ‘what is?'

‘Well, I'm going out there if you want a ride,' the man said, and Nino ran and got his nearly empty gym bag off the bus. Carlos, that was his name, said he was a crew boss at Utley's and had an open spot for Nino, ‘if you can keep it moving, man, you know what I'm saying? I got quotas to fill.' He drove the big pickup fast along the Interstate to Deming, a little slower on the almost-empty two-lane to Hatch, where he stopped to pick up supplies. Waiting in the truck, Nino watched a brown-skinned man patching a tire in a garage, two others loading sacks of cement on to a flatbed. Down the quiet street, a woman with braids was selling strings of peppers out of a little stand. He liked the quiet way they talked to each other and the deliberate way they moved.

‘The feds make me check this database here,' the foreman at the farm said, ‘just hang on a sec.' Nino got ready to run. But he was not on a list of illegal aliens or wanted criminals, so they took his social-security number and assigned him a bunk in a long building under some trees.

By Tuesday night he was so tired his legs trembled as he walked to the tent where they were fed. There was chili with something in it he decided to believe was meat, plenty of rice and beans on the side, and heavy, crusty bread. Afterwards he sat on the long porch that fronted the bunkhouse, watching the stars come out. Listening to the slow-talking men around him, he nodded off sitting up.

Just before he went to sleep in his narrow bunk, in spite of his aching muscles he thought that this life might be OK for a while and even kind of fun if Pauly was here. Once again he felt a great surge of sorrow and asked himself,
Why'd I have to go and kill that silly little turd?

Alone in her cubicle, Sarah pawed through the chaos of reports heaped on her desk, looking for Ollie's witness report, the next thing she wanted to put in the Henderson file.

‘I was carrying it around, where did I put it?' She could hear Ollie on the phone in the next cubicle, talking to somebody about expediting a grand jury subpoena. Tobin had gone back to his work space to finish the rest of his crime-scene report – the expanded search of the house and grounds – and was making phone calls, on the hunt for the family of Paul Thomas Eckhardt. With a grunt of disgust, she pushed away from her desk, talking to herself. ‘This desk is too crazy. I need another table so I can sort things out.'

She went out on the floor and found Elmer the Grump, the janitor/handyman. Before he even heard what she wanted, he began protesting that he was already overworked. ‘They pile too much on me so's I can't do nothing right,' he said, leaning on his mop. Sarah surreptitiously timed his complaints: forty-eight seconds. When he paused for breath, she jumped in with her request for a folding table. ‘Just the small size, nothing heavy.'

A few minutes later he stood at the door of her cubicle holding it, saying, ‘Why'd you waste my time for? Ain't no way this thing's going to fit in there.'

‘Just a minute, now,' she said, ‘be patient.' While he ranted about the folly of wasting more of his time when he already had too much to do, she slid her desk closer to the file cabinet, and set her two extra chairs in the hall. ‘Now,' she said.