New River Blues (6 page)

‘You take the one on the corner,' Ollie said, when she found him. ‘I'm just about to start on the one next door.'

The Ortman house stood well back on freshly raked gravel around neat brick walks and patio. The front door opened as she walked up to it. A large, florid-faced man stood inside, wearing a robe over pants and an undershirt. He held on to the latch, blocking her way. Sarah, who because of her careful grooming sometimes got mistaken for a Mary Kay rep, held up her shield as she said good morning.

‘You're the detective?' He looked dubious, but he put out his hand. ‘Mike Ortman. My wife, Yvonne.' She was behind him, tense, wearing what Sarah guessed was her best robe. She'd had time to put on light make-up, but her hair still hung tousled to her shoulders.

They both wanted details. Sarah convinced them quickly that there were none she could share yet. ‘But I need to hear from you,' she told Ortman, ‘exactly what you saw and heard.'

They both began talking at once, finishing each other's sentences and arguing over tiny details. One convenient fact soon emerged out of the tangle of half-sentences: Mrs Ortman had slept right through the gunshots and screaming.

‘He snores, so I have to wear earplugs. I didn't hear a thing until Mike woke me up,' she pushed her limp hair behind her ears, taking her anxiety out on her hair and her husband, ‘slamming doors and making phone calls.'

‘One lousy 911 call, Yvonne,' her husband protested, ‘how else do you call the cops?'

‘And all your golfing buddies, talking on and on—'

‘Just Mel to tell him we might have to delay the game. Then everybody from a block around here called
me
. Nothing I can do about that. People are curious,' he explained to Sarah. ‘They want to hear the details.'

Tell me about it.
Sarah opened her notebook and said, ‘I need to talk to you one at a time so we don't mix up the two stories. Mrs Ortman, will you wait upstairs till I call you?'

Yvonne didn't want to go. She tried pleading and then outrage. The story of the year was unfolding in her living room and she didn't want to miss a word. Sarah shook her head dolefully and mentioned the possibility of going downtown. When Yvonne's pink mules had finally clumped up the stairway, Sarah asked her husband, ‘The first thing you heard was a shot?'

One shot, very loud, and then a terrified scream.

‘Man or woman screaming?'

‘Woman. I think. Although, screaming, it's harder – but I think a woman.'

So the woman was shot last?
Her mind said that was wrong but she didn't want to distract the witness with an argument.
Press on, get it while it's fresh.

By the time the second shot sounded, Mike Ortman said, he had rolled out of bed and was across the room, peering out the window, with his phone in his hand.

‘Any idea what time that was?'

‘Yeah, I looked before I dialed 911. It was one forty-five.'

The Ortman house, on a corner lot, was turned about sixty degrees from the Henderson house. From his master bedroom, Ortman's side window looked almost directly across the street at the Henderson house.

‘I opened the window,' he said, ‘and watched and listened while I talked to the police. The man who answered asked a lot of questions, and I watched the house the whole time I answered them. After I hung up I stayed there, by the open window. It was a nice night, I wasn't cold, so I stayed there and watched, but nothing moved. I finally turned away to go to the bathroom, and then I heard the second scream.'

‘This was how long after the second shot?'

‘Ten minutes . . . maybe closer to fifteen. I never thought to look at my watch that time. Because . . . maybe it was just because I was fully awake, but something about that second scream almost stopped my heart. Just talking about it . . . shall we sit down?' He led her to a pair of sofas in the middle of the room. ‘The first scream was just a loud noise, you know, the sound you make when you're startled. But that second one . . . I thought it sounded like a word.'

‘What word?'

‘Something like . . . Molly? Or Polly. But none of the Hendersons have those names, so maybe not. Anyway it started the dogs barking louder than ever, and I guess about then Yvonne started to wake up. I had to tell her what was going on and of course she was very upset. The dogs were still barking like crazy and the phone was ringing off the hook by then, Yvonne answered one of the calls and I walked over to look at the house again. I heard a motor start up somewhere nearby, I was scanning the area and I saw a large, light-colored vehicle pull away from the back of the house. It went out the back driveway and I saw the lights go on west.

‘My first thought was it was Roger's car. He drives a light-tan Yukon and I thought . . . but the more I think about it I believe it was more like a minivan than an SUV. Anyway I guess it couldn't have been him, could it? If they're both . . .' He rolled unhappy eyes away, not wanting to say ‘dead.'

Sarah didn't confirm or deny. She knew that her question about the gender of the screamer gave away one important fact about the crime. Two bodies, one of each sex. Soon enough they'd identify the second victim's prints and then everyone on the street would know the most titillating fact about the killings on Avenida Santa Teresa, that the man in bed with Eloise Henderson was not her husband. Soon enough, Patricia would be jumping to turn off the TV set when that story came on.

‘Then two police cars stopped in front of the Henderson house, I stepped out to talk to them, and by the time I got back inside my phone was ringing. I've been on the phone most of the time ever since, it's crazy.'

‘Listen, I just can't stay upstairs by myself, I'm too
nervous
.' Yvonne Ortman came back down the stairs, talking fast. ‘I'll wait in the kitchen and I won't say a word, I promise. I don't really have anything useful to add anyway. But I need to hear voices near me or I'm going to jump out of my skin. Honestly,' she turned on Sarah, indignantly, immediately breaking her promise not to talk, ‘what on earth is happening to this town, anyway? I mean, right here on our own street, who'd ever expect . . .'

‘Always hard to believe when it's close to home.' The usual bromide only made Yvonne more indignant.

‘Well, but for Heaven's sake, this isn't just any street, this is El Encanto!' Vaguely aware she sounded elitist, she added lamely, ‘Most of these people have lived here for years!'

‘I know.' Sarah held the woman's own kitchen door open and waved her through it. Half expecting a reprimand she asked Mike Ortman quickly, ‘Have you lived here a long time too?'

He shrugged. ‘Eight years. Always wanted to live here. Moved in as soon as I could afford it.' She took a fresh look at him, liking his blunt, straightforward answer.

‘Do you know the Hendersons well?'

‘Roger and I play golf occasionally. Our wives have never mixed much. Eloise is kind of a . . .
social butterfly . . .
I guess you'd call it. Gives a lot of parties. Serves on boards, does all those charity and theater things that get your name in the paper.' Having made social prominence sound vaguely disreputable he tried to take it back. ‘Don't get me wrong, they're, you know,
nice
. Like everybody here.' He jingled the coins in his pockets and added, ‘This is the first time we've ever had any . . . rough stuff.' Like his wife, he seemed anxious to defend the neighborhood.

Sarah's phone rang. Delaney said, in an ominously calm voice, ‘Sarah, can you leave what you're doing there and come back over here, please?'

‘Sure.' She closed the phone and told Ortman, ‘I'm sorry, I'll have to finish this later – or somebody else will. My boss needs me back at the house.'

‘Well, I can't sit here all day,' Ortman said.

‘Of course not. But will you wait just a few minutes till I find out what's going on? Then I'll either come back or send someone.' She took his phone numbers and hurried next door, found the owner talking to Greenaway in front of his half-open door. Greenaway gave her a little ironic nod that said plainly,
Not going to get much out of this one.

‘When you're done here,' she said, ‘will you finish up next door there? Delaney just called me back.'

‘On it,' Greenaway said, and turned back toward his rock-faced witness as Sarah walked away.

On her way back through the Henderson house, she ducked through the kitchen and looked in the garage. One white Mercedes convertible stood alone in the stall nearest the kitchen door.
Looks like the wife's car.
Jason Peete was in the kitchen, poking his bald head into cupboards. She hurried upstairs.

Delaney stood facing Oscar Cifuentes in the dressing room. Both men were red in the face and looked ruffled, like fighting birds.

Cifuentes was the new man in Homicide, a replacement for Eisenstaat, the over-the-hill detective who had retired a couple of years too late to ever be missed. In his place they got Cifuentes, who came so highly recommended by his new female supervisor in Auto Theft that Sarah suspected she was trying to offload him.

There had been no complaints in Homicide about his work, he did his share and got his reports in on time. But the man was so sure of himself, so macho and serenely condescending to women, that she knew from the first week she'd guessed right about his transfer.

Oscar Cifuentes, it turned out, could make her angry by saying, ‘Good morning.' Or by not saying it. Recognizing the unreasonable nature of her reaction to him and ever vigilant about her performance evaluations, she was careful not to get overtly hostile toward him. She just found ways to stay away from him as much as she could, and treated him, when they worked together, with strictly controlled civility.

Right now, it amused her to see, he looked about ready to jump off this bedroom's elegant balcony.

‘I've just finished talking to Mertz,' Delaney said. ‘I'm waiting for him to call me back with his opinion.'

‘I'm sorry, remind me,' Sarah said. ‘Mertz?'

‘Our legal advisor.' Looking about as grim as a man could without bleeding, Delaney closed the door between the dressing room and the bedroom.
Doesn't want the crime-scene specialists to hear this, oh my.
‘It seems that Oscar here is going to have to recuse himself from this case because of a previous intimate acquaintance with the female victim. He didn't tell me about it before he came over here and poked his face into the crime scene, so now I'm trying to find out if prompt and full disclosure of the problem will be sufficient, or if he's tainted the case so badly we might have to surrender it to County.'

Sarah didn't need to ask what the prospect of passing off a high-profile homicide case to the Pima County sheriff was doing to Delaney's digestive system. Reluctant to meet Cifuentes' eyes for fear her own might show how pleasant it was to see him in the weeds, she stood vacantly inspecting the shower curtain for the longest ten minutes in world history. Finally Delaney's phone rang, and she continued her scrutiny of the shower curtain through a long dry crackle of lawyer's terms, broken by Delaney's occasional monosyllable.

‘Yes. No. Mmff. Right.' Finally he closed the phone and told Cifuentes, ‘Go back to the station and wait till I tell you what comes next.' He added, as the hapless detective turned to go, ‘Do not speak to anyone on the way out, do you understand? Do not discuss this case with anyone, at work or anywhere else, today or ever.'

Despite the obvious unenforceability of Delaney's last order, Cifuentes said only, ‘Yes, sir,' and walked stiffly away.

Sarah waited again while Delaney consulted his watch for several seconds, chewing gum ferociously and blinking as if the time was too incredible to be believed. Apparently satisfied at last that it was in fact 7:42.19, he raised his head and calmly started over.

‘Mertz thinks we can salvage this case if we build a firewall and keep Cifuentes on the other side of it. So let's figure out what we have to do. You've got, what, two other cases where you're primary?'

‘Yes,' Sarah said, ‘but the drive-by, you know, we're probably never going to get much on that. None of the eyewitnesses will talk. The other one, though, the domestic that we think's a murder-suicide? That's going to take some work.'

‘Mostly lab work, though. I'll get you all the help I can with that one if you'll take the lead on this case, Sarah. It's going to need very careful handling. All the physical evidence I see here is the kind that gets questioned endlessly by busybody jurists who know zilch about the subject but they've seen this thing on TV . . . blood evidence and gunshots with no casings, could you design a deeper swamp?

‘And what's worse,' he said, scratching his sun-ravaged cheeks, ‘the victims are upper-crusties and so are their neighbors. All these witnesses are used to being in charge. They're not going to like it one bit, us all over the place asking questions. They're going to want it handled
their way
. But you're good at dealing with people like that, Sarah. You grew up here and you understand them.'

No need to slather it on, boss. You know perfectly well I'll bust my butt for one good word from you.
When the time came for her to be considered for his job, Sarah was going to need Delaney's endorsement. He knew that and took advantage, piling work on her so he could build a reputation as the Homicide boss who closed more cases than his predecessor with the same number of detectives – as good a way as any to get your name shortlisted for Chief.

They had built a nearly perfect symbiosis, she reflected as she watched him walk away. She accepted, without complaint, his unreasonable demands on her time and energy. He pretended not to know she was making a list of things she thought she could do better when she got his job.