Heavy on the Dead

by G. M. Ford

  “Never had the urge again?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I figured . . . you know . . . my judgment was so bad the first time around, maybe I just ought to give it a rest.” She took a hit of coffee. “After that, I buried myself in my career. I more or less became what I did. I passed the sergeant’s test, and . . . like they say, life goes on. Next thing you know you’re fortysomething and so entrenched in your ways it’d be a miracle if you found anybody else who could fit in the box with you. And worse yet, all that time you’ve been doing a job and seeing things that are pretty much guaranteed to erase any romantic ideals you might still be carrying around in your pocket.”

  I knew what she meant. Twenty some-odd years working as a private investigator had made quite a dent in my romantic idealism too. Shattered dreams and severed limbs have a way of doing that. “I used to tell myself I just wasn’t needy enough for permanent relationships,” I said, “but you know . . . long-term . . . that’s got a real self-serving quality about it, so these days I just content myself with I don’t know.”

  “You and the medical examiner . . .” She let it trail off.

  “Believe it or not, the subject of marriage never came up.”

  “Weird. In all that time?”

  “I think we both knew—right from the beginning, back when we were kids—I think we both knew that on some level, our life dreams were so far apart that sooner or later our relationship wasn’t going to work out. But . . .” I stifled a shrug. “We enjoyed each other’s company, most of the time anyway, and we’re both real good rationalizers . . .” I stopped picking at it and left it at that.

  The waitress saved the day by arriving with the food and coffee refills. For the next ten minutes, we traded inane pleasantries regarding the weather and local politics.

  I watched as she forked in a bite of omelet. Some women pick at their food. I’d never been altogether sure whether they were on a perpetual diet or if they merely wanted to appear refined. With Saunders here, it’d be a good idea to keep your hand out of the eating zone—assuming, of course, you wanted it back. This was a woman of strong appetites.

  “You know what I was thinking?” she asked.

  “I’ll bite.”

  “If whoever’s behind that little boy’s death has something to do with that house—if that’s true—and if, like you guys think, it’s part of the same organization as that house in Lemon Grove that Reeves lives in, then they’ve got you and Gabe on CC tape. More than once. They’re probably already looking in your direction.”

  I swallowed a bite of toast. “Could well be,” I allowed. “We’ve been made for sure. No doubt about it. They know by now that we’ve been poking our noses into their affairs.” I waved my piece of sourdough toast like a semaphore flag. “Gabe and I are working on it.”

  “Working how?”

  I told her about renting the apartment and about Gabe and I setting up the camera to keep track of what went down at the cliff house next door. I put a set of keys to the new surveillance apartment on the table in front of her. “You know,” I said. “Just in case.” She left them on the table for a long minute before shoveling them discreetly into her clutch purse and snapping it shut.

  Then I told her about my call to Carl regarding Allied Investments. About how the minute Charity and his “cousins” started hacking their asses to pieces, Allied was gonna know somebody was asking impertinent digital questions and how, from that point on, we were figuring things had the potential to get serious in a hurry. “Either that, or these people have nothing to hide, or nothing much will happen.”

  “You guys need to be careful,” she said.

  I nodded my agreement and went back to the bacon and eggs.

  “Is that what finally drove her off?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “That you seem to have an almost casual disregard for either the law or for your own safety.”

  “To a great degree . . . I guess . . . yeah, that was probably a big part of it.”

  By the time we’d both finished eating and the staff had cleared the rubble, she leaned her elbows on the table, leveled those blue eyes at me, and asked, “Why should I get involved with you?”

  “I’m rich.”

  She laughed. “Besides that.”

  “Well . . . ,” I hedged. “You know . . . Other than such tawdry considerations as material wealth . . . I am still able to form complete sentences. I believe I have retained most of my sense of humor and some of my good looks. And you don’t have to worry that I’m not the person I claim to be. You know, like in digital dating. Like you said earlier, you’ve read my file.”

  “Are you good in bed?”

  “Doesn’t everybody think they are?”

  “Probably.”

  “Tell you the truth, it’s been so long I don’t remember.”

  She sat back, folded her arms over her chest, and was silent.

  I filled the void. “And don’t forget I’ve been declared positively virginal by prominent medical authorities.”

  “I know,” she said. “I read your medical history too.”

  I must have looked aghast.

  She shrugged. “Just checking,” she said.

  We shared a laugh. She insisted on splitting the check.

  I’d tried my best to talk her into spending the day with me, but she’d already set up an afternoon meeting with her union rep and had to beg off. She said she’d stop by the apartment when the meeting was done.

  I ran a half a dozen errands in Point Loma, grabbed a prime rib sandwich at Liberty Station, then took Cañon back over the hill to O.B., and as I was tooling up Sunset Cliffs, almost as an afterthought, I stopped by the new apartment to make sure everything was working according to plan.

  Not only was it working but the blue light was blinking, which, according to the directions, meant the setup had recorded something going on downstairs.

  Took me a couple of tries, but I eventually coaxed the pictures out of the camcorder. Two things became immediately clear. Security had increased significantly. There was somebody in front of the house trying to look busy all of the time now, not just when the cameras told them someone was in the street, which led directly to the realization that watching all of this stuff was going to take a whole lot more of my time than I’d figured.

  I quickly learned to fast-forward, racing through what must have been three hours of Hispanic security types mucking about the front of the house, until 11:13 in the A.M., when a UPS truck arrived with half a dozen packages, followed almost immediately by three women in matching yellow T-shirts.

  They were still inside the house three hours later when an older gentleman arrived at the door wearing what was in all probability the only twilly tweed sport coat in Ocean Beach and carrying a battered gladstone bag.

  I couldn’t see who let him in the door either, but Tweedy stayed for a little over an hour. I was about to give up binge-watching when the yellow T-shirt women reappeared on the front stairs. Whoever let them out was wearing a wristwatch the size of a Chevy hubcap and a shirt with French cuffs. When one of the women turned toward the camera to let one of her companions pass her on the stairs, I could see that the shirts had a logo on them. I stopped the action. Backed up a little. Zoomed in. And then in again. A half circle with the image of somebody swinging a mop and the words BUSY BEE CLEANING SERVICES.

  The rest of it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Not until the very end of the show anyway. Just before it got too dark for the camera, I got my first look at the guy with the French cuffs. He came out onto the front porch and had a few words with a security guy who was pretending to garden the flower boxes.

  Maybe six-two. Hundred eighty pounds. Great shock of styled white hair. Fiftysomething. Dressed to the nines. Whatever he said to the inconstant gardener sent the guy scuttling around the side of the house and into the alley between the house and the nearest shed. A minute later, a different guy came out of the alley and took his place. Mr. Smooth sa
id something to the new guy, surveyed the street for a long moment, then disappeared back inside the doorway. Another five minutes of fast-forwarding and it got too dark for the camera to function properly, so I closed up shop and headed back home.

  Gabe had the yoga mat spread out on the living room floor and was in some pose that looked like it hurt. Knowing that Gabe preferred to be alone during yoga sessions, I fetched a San Pellegrino from the fridge and then cleaned up my bedroom before deciding to take a gander at my email.

  I’d gone through a bundle of the usual spam and sales pitches before I came to the one with no address. Charity and his “cousins” had been hard at it. Allied Investments of San Diego was an umbrella of private trusts and shadow corporations designed to obscure the fact that Allied was the family trust of the Haller family, specifically the widow of the late Hiram Haller, whose father, Peter, had accumulated the family pile through a highly successful commercial fishing company back in the forties. Florence Haller, now eighty-one years young, was listed as the executor of the estate but appeared to be taking less of a personal hand in the operation in recent years and divorcing herself from the day-to-day operations.

  More to follow, the email said. And a little personal note from Charity to the effect that the rest of the information should be easy to get, as Allied’s cybersecurity left a great deal to be desired, by current standards anyway. Said he’d get back at me tomorrow.

  I was still chewing on the information when Gabe knocked on the door.

  “Yeah,” I said. Gabe poked that big head in the room.

  “You see the tape from yesterday?” Gabe asked.

  “Maids always hate the people they work for,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Any idea about the guy with the valise?”

  “None except maybe he looked out of place.”

  “What about the guy in the Valentinos?”

  I must have looked dumbfounded.

  “The guy with the French cuffs,” Gabe said.

  “What about him?”

  “Those were Valentino trousers he was wearing.” Before I could ask, Gabe brushed me off and went on. “That’s what Joey used to wear all the time. I used to take them to his tailor up on Broadway to be altered.” Gabe smiled. “He always claimed they were making them smaller every year. Refused to buy the next size up. They’re sixteen hundred bucks off the hanger. By the time he paid that Chinese broad a few hundred to let ’em out a bit, he had the better part of two grand in a pair of pants.”

  Joey Ortega and I had grown up together. His father, Frankie, had been my father’s chief bagman and leg breaker. A guy whose claim to lasting fame was that he’d once cut off a guy’s ears in defense of my father.

  Joey and I had spent our formative years playing together in my old man’s backyard, while they plotted away inside my old man’s office. When Frankie died, Joey had taken over the ship and turned his father’s ill-gotten gains into a virtual empire of card rooms, strip joints, and massage parlors that specialized in what they liked to call “a rub and a tug.”

  Gabe had been Joey’s personal bodyguard for nearly fifteen years. We’d known each other for over a decade before we’d blundered into something we weren’t prepared for and had paid the price in blood—our own.

  “Interesting,” I said and then mentioned what I’d gotten from Charity.

  “What say we find the maids,” Gabe said when I’d finished.

  I felt the warm glow of familiarity rise in my cheeks. It was like old times again. I was on the phone lying like a motherfucker to somebody. A licensed PI spends quite a bit of time lying to people. People only hire private eyes out of desperation, after they’ve already tried everything that made sense, and desperation is real hard on the truth. Back people into a corner and they’ll lie their asses off. Every time. I hadn’t had occasion to outright bullshit anybody in quite a while, and to tell the truth, I found I’d sort of missed the thrill of it.

  I told the woman who answered the phone I was a neighbor of Mrs. Haller’s and gave them the address of the apartment building on the corner. I said I had heard simply fabulous things about her cleaning crew and wondered if perhaps we couldn’t schedule them to do my place after they got through with Mrs. Haller’s house one of these days. We had a brief chat as to the impossibility of getting good help anymore. And yes, of course I understood they were both licensed and bonded, but, equally of course, I’d need to vet them personally beforehand.

  Took a little cajoling and a bit of the mordida, but we eventually put something together. They got off at four. She’d call them back to the office in Chula Vista, and we could chat there at about four thirty. She’d be gone by then of course. Slip the envelope to the young man who’d be manning the desk.

  Ten miles south of downtown, Chula Vista was another of those citrus grove towns gone suburban. So many World War II vets decided to stay in the San Diego area after the war that places like Chula Vista had changed from rural to suburban seemingly overnight.

  Busy Bee had an office halfway down G Street from Third Avenue. One of those neighborhoods where crass commercial and ratty residential had been mixed together to create its own brand of urban squalor. The building used to be a gas station. They’d painted the outside in bold black-and-yellow bee stripes. Used the overhead gas sign for the bug eyes. The left side was a big rolling overhead door that at one time led into the service bay, which was now stocked floor to ceiling with cleaning supplies and such accouterments. The right side was still the office area. Out front you could see where the gas tanks had been wrenched from the ground and then patched over. An alley full of fifty-five-gallon drums separated the building from the Expert Hands Body Shop next door.

  We pulled up to the garage door about six minutes early and were surprised to find that the maid crew was already on hand. We handed the guy the agreed-upon envelope and traded pleasantries for ten seconds with Mr. Anonymous before he opened the door to an adjoining room and quickly walked away.

  Gabe and I had talked it over on the way down and decided to be straight with them. They introduced themselves as Felicia Gomez, Maria Hueso, Gloria Del Rio.

  Gabe walked around behind them and put a crisp new hundred-dollar bill in front of each of them. “We want to know about what goes on in the Haller house,” I said. “We’re not criminals. Nobody’s gonna get hurt. We just want to know what goes on inside the house.”

  “You the cops?”

  We said we weren’t.

  “Immigration?”

  No to that too.

  “Nothing said in this room goes anywhere else,” Gabe said.

  The women exchanged I’ve heard this shit before looks.

  “The money’s yours either way. No hard feelings.” Gabe then translated it into Spanish in case anybody didn’t habla. What followed was a forty-five-second Maalox moment, lots of darting eyes and low-key squirming, at which point the woman on the right began to babble in Spanish.

  “She’s scared,” Gabe said. “Wants to leave.”

  “Tell her she can go. The money’s hers. All we ask is that she doesn’t tell anybody about this.” Gabe translated and then put a finger across both lips.

  The woman snatched up the bill and fled, banging the door behind her.

  “She got no papers,” Felicia Gomez explained. “She scareda ICE.”

  I told her it was okay. That we weren’t here about that.

  “Those people . . . ,” Maria Hueso said. “They got a lot of secrets. Crazy private. We only clean part of the house. The rest of it they don’t never let us in.”

  “They keep some of it locked all the time,” Felicia Gomez added.

  “Got all kind of security guys all over the place. Tellin’ you where you can and can’t go today.”

  “What’s Mrs. Haller like?” Gabe asked.

  They both shrugged. “Never seen her,” they said in unison.

  “How long have you been cleaning
the house?” I inquired.

  They looked from one to another as if communicating on some psychic level.

  “Little under two years,” Felicia Gomez said. “Me and Maria anyway. Gloria . . . she’s new . . . maybe five months now.”

  “And, in all that time, none of you has ever met her?”

  They shook their heads.

  Gabe took out an iPhone, cued up last night’s footage, found the guy with the gladstone valise, and set the phone on the table in front of them. “Who’s that?”

  “The doctor . . . namea Trager,” Felicia Gomez said.

  “We call him tembloroso,” Maria said with a hint of a grin.

  “Shaky,” Gabe translated.

  Felicia held her hands in front of her and vibrated them like she was using a jackhammer.

  Gabe lifted the phone from the table, fast-forwarded to French Cuffs and the fabled two-grand trousers. “And this guy. Who’s he?”

  “El jefe,” Maria said. “Mr. Pemberton.”

  “He’s the major dodo.” They both laughed out loud.

  “Yeah,” said Felicia, smiling now. “He runs the place.”

  “Not a very nice man,” her partner added. “Got a mean spirit. Got all this money and don’t never give a tip. Not once. Not even at Christmas.”

  “Better than that Reeves pendejo,” Felicia snapped.

  “They got this big maintenance guy comes in sometimes. Always trying to catch us alone. Likes to feel us up whenever we get within reach. You give that fool a chance, he’ll stick his hand up your dress.”

  We stayed at it for another five minutes, didn’t come up with anything but household gossip, and sent them back home with a little extra pocket change. The question of whether they’d keep their mouths shut about our visit was very much up in the air, but the way we saw it, we’d already been made a couple of times, so the fact we were checking on them wasn’t going to come as much of a surprise to anybody.

  Gabe drove. I called Charity. Got the company machine and recited the names Pemberton and Trager and what precious little we knew about them. The machine thanked me. Traffic was passable until we got about a mile from home. Once we turned south onto Ebers, we got passed twice by a woman with a walker.