I let him take that one on out. I didn’t have anything half as good.
The ducts buzzed when the furnace in the basement kicked in. Apart from that the room was quiet. Then Alderdyce scraped out a chair and sat down opposite me, resting his hands in his lap. He looked like a grizzly waiting at the base of a tree with a camper in it.
I said, “The intercom switch used to be under the table. Where is it now?”
“It’s off.”
“Yeah. No law against lying to a suspect. What about that?” I tilted my head toward the video camera.
He got up, went over to it, studied it for a moment, then pushed a button. The tape cassette licked out into his hand. He put it on the table and sat back down.
I took the cigarette out of my mouth and started to put it back into the pack. The filter end was sodden. I flicked it into a corner. Ohanian would probably have had something to say about that. “She under arrest?”
The inspector shook his head. “Too early. You can’t jump the gun with these celebrity cases. If the Simpson case taught us nothing else, it taught us that.”
“Good. She’s had a harder time than you know.”
“Harder’s coming.”
“You don’t know that until you know what’s been.”
“So tell me.”
I did. When it came down to it I wasn’t any stronger than the guy on Pilate’s divan.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I hate mysteries,” Alderdyce said. “You know how many trees have to die just for the paperwork?”
He was back in his seat. Shortly after I’d started talking, he’d gotten up and taken the scenic tour of all three blank walls, avoiding the one with the mirror set into it. No one likes looking at his reflection when there might be someone looking back. He’d stopped pacing only once, when I was telling him what had happened in the kitchen of the house on Adelaide. That story was going to get me free drinks for the rest of my life.
“I didn’t know you liked trees. That why you became a cop instead of a forest ranger?”
“Damn straight. Most of the time the killer’s sitting there with the body when the uniforms show up, or he steps in the blood on his way out and they just follow the footprints, the shoes are right there in his closet. Or he gets high and rats himself out to his buddies. My next favorite, he thinks he’s cute and sprays some phony clues around to send us off in all directions at once. You can break a case in record time in a situation like that. Files we don’t close, we know damn good and well whodunit; the witnesses won’t cooperate. This Ellery Queen shit just gums up the works.”
“DNA’s supposed to do away with all that.”
“It could, if the lab rats didn’t brag it around. Fingerprints did the job until every sneak thief who could read Frank Merriwell figured out a tencent pair of gloves made him invisible. Couple of years ago some suburban cops found the body of a lady psychiatrist washed down with bleach, and they’d still be working it if someone hadn’t talked. Nobody would’ve ever thought of bleach if some geek criminologist hadn’t spilled his guts to Popular Science. The next generation of sex killers will wear radiation suits and pack douche bags.”
“That ought to make them easy to spot.”
“What we need here is an Official Secrets Act like they got in England. First time some sleazebag TV producer has an actor hold forth on blood patterns and oblique trajectories, the feds arrest him and shut down the show. Half the audience is criminals taking notes.”
“Chill out, John. It’s entertainment. If your idea catches on, all we’ll have left is quilting shows and celebrity wrestling. We beat England twice. No one else has since 1066 and I like to think it’s because of our leisurely arts.”
“Who do you like for Rubio?” Change-up.
“Your boy Ohanian just about convinced me I did it.”
He lifted a hand. “Ohanian’s uncle’s a philanthropist. The police lab got an electron microscope and we got Ohanian. We looked out the window when he walked under the ‘You must be this tall’ sign. He’s short, but enthusiastic. He makes sure nobody nips a cup of coffee without feeding the kitty.”
I tipped my head toward the mirror. “He’s watching us right now, isn’t he?”
“I don’t think he reads lips. He has a point where you’re concerned, you know. You’re an obstructor of justice and damn near an accessory after the fact.” He made it sound casual. Alderdyce was never more dangerous than when he was being your friend.
“You official types get me. You start out thinking you’ve got the corner on justice and wind up believing you’re justice itself. That’s how dictators get made.”
“Listen to yourself, Che. Couple of hours with Barbara Fucking Fritchie and you’re ready to strap on bandoliers and overthrow the system. Meanwhile you’ve got fifteen grand of hers in the bank. What else is she giving you?” “Go boil your head.”
He barked a laugh. “Where the hell’d you come up with that?”
“Fellow named Fleeman. He and Ohanian probably belong to the same chat room. I’ve had it in for the system ever since I found out Lassie was a boy, ditto the system for me. It happens I have a positive balance for a change. It’s not against the law yet, Cromwell.” I took out another cigarette, and this time I lit up. “The system’s okay. I’m prepared to let it go on a while. It’s just slow to start, and once it starts it’s impossible to stop. You work for it, you’re prejudiced in its favor. Most of the people I work for are prejudiced the other way. It rubs off. Where Gilia comes from, you don’t go to the police. They make house calls, and if you know they’re coming you try not to be at home.”
“Which Gilia we talking about?”
“Legally speaking, Jillian Rubio wasn’t Gilia Cristobal anymore. For the sake of this conversation, let’s just let the one who’s still using the name go on using it for now. You can always take it away later.”
“That’s fine. Assigning them numbers was the sergeant’s idea.”
I passed up another chance to club that dodo. “Okay, the police here aren’t the police she’s used to, but like I said, the system’s the system. Proving she didn’t kill the Suerto woman would get her off one hook back home and onto another. Coming out as Mariposa Flores, which she would have to do if she went to the police here, would put her on a hook with INS and probably the State Department, which has a long history of sticking to the rules. More so this year. What’s waiting for her if she gets deported for bending those rules isn’t their problem. Remembering that she makes five thousand dollars in the time it takes to floss every morning, if you were in her shoes and somebody offered not to involve the authorities in your tangled past for the price of five grand per month, what would you do?”
“I’d pay it. I’m not so sure I’d commit murder.” He thought for a second. “No, I’m sure I wouldn’t. That’s what’s wrong with your example. I’m not Gilia.”
“You’re forgetting Rubio’s life insurance.”
“That’s almost always a bluff.”
“You know it, I know it. Maybe even Gilia knows it. Calling it is another whole thing. But say she did. Wouldn’t she use just about any method but the one that got her in trouble in the first place? Stelazine isn’t that easy to come by. You need to be part of the medical community, or have a prescription. Why go to the trouble, any sort of trouble, if by doing it you’d just be signing your name to a second murder? Why not just crack Rubio over the head?”
“Amateurs commit most murders. They hardly ever change their methods the second time. Rubio had a prescription, by the way. The cops in Minnesota talked to her doctor. Her death broke the Hippocratic seal. She was bipolar and some other things. There was no bottle in her medicine cabinet, so she was probably traveling with it.”
I smoked on that. I shook my head. “Mariposa wasn’t just sleeping with a revolutionary. She helped him fight. She didn’t leave her native smarts behind with her name. I don’t see her painting herself into that corner.”
“If she ha
d it done, which is likely, using the same poison would be a terrific way for the hired help to jam her up. It would sweeten the pot later. People who outsource murders never seem to stop and think about the market they’re creating for blackmail. Even the smart ones can be dumb. Go ahead, take a puff while I think about who the hire might have been.”
“No puff’s that short,” I said. “Hector Matador.”
“I like Matador. I like him a bushel and a peck. Don’t tell me you don’t.”
“Matador’s in love.”
“Uh-uh. For that you’ve got to have the equipment.”
“That’s pretty much what I said when he told me. I was trying to make him snap at the bait. He’d already bought my faith for a penny.”
“Oh, that. Another bluff. If he were serious, he’d have gone ahead and blinded you anyway. Those Colombians make bin Laden look like Count Chocula.”
“Except why go to so much trouble to find out what Rubio did with the papers that made her case? Even if he lost his head and killed her before she could tell him? What could they be, a copy of her birth certificate, some newspaper clippings on the Suerto murder, maybe a bootlegged police report? You found out everything that was in them with one telephone call. They were only a threat because they might bring official attention to Gilia’s immigration once Rubio was too dead to do it in person. If he wanted to go on bleeding Gilia, all he had to do was threaten to holler cop.”
“In which case we’d burn him down right along with her.”
“She wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t tell her. You’re not listening.” I laid a column of ash in an old burn canal on the tabletop. There were no ashtrays. It struck me then that the place had probably gone no-smoking along with every other government building. I couldn’t seem to avoid breaking the law that week. “But if you’re Matador, and you don’t want to jam her up, those papers are very valuable. You would blind a man, or anyway convince him you were going to, if you thought that would put them in your hands so you could set a match to them. The goon’s in love. It happens. It happened to King Kong.”
“He had to know we’d find out sooner or later. Even if Rubio was bluffing and there weren’t any papers, we’d dig up her real name and go from there. Which is what we did.”
“He’s a freebooter. He’d lop off the first head as soon as it showed, then wait for the next and lop off that one. That’s how he made it to the top the first time; ask Frankie Acardo. The only reason you got him is the heads outnumbered him in the end.”
“It fits the facts,” he said. “I hate that almost as much as I hate murder mysteries. There’s usually a gap or two.”
“That all you got?”
“That and the picture of Matador as Romeo. Macbeth, maybe.” He got up again, and this time he walked right up to the mirror. With his back to me he said, “I don’t owe Washington a damn thing except my taxes. What happens if I send them this information by way of the slow train to Newfoundland?”
“You might get that autographed CD for your kid on the Theodore Roosevelt.”
“Ronald Reagan. She already promised it. Your stories mesh, incidentally. Couple of gaps, like there ought to be in your theory. She’s a tough little butterfly. And damn nice. You didn’t hear me say that.”
“Who’d believe me? You wouldn’t tell me where the intercom switch is.”
“I need a statement. On videotape.”
“That go on the slow train?”
“Say it did. It’s not a trade. I’ve already got enough to break your license and put you on twenty thousand hours of community service. You dropping the investigation?”
“You telling me to?”
“I would have, before my boy shipped out.”
I didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to be finished.
He said, “It would’ve seemed important then. It used to seem important to fish hookers out of the river and tie them around some pimp’s neck and throw him in County. Plenty’s changed.”
“Things will get back to normal,” I said. “The president says so. Your boy will come back from his hitch, get laid in San Diego, and marry some tramp. They’ll come to visit with their whiny little brood and hit you up for money. When they do, they’ll find you up to your ears in dead hookers, happy as Friday night.”
“Someone’s got to do it, right?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They don’t say.”
“Who the hell are they, anyway?”
“Everybody who’s not you or me.”
“That what they teach you in toy detective school? Always have an answer?”
Again I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have an answer.
He turned from the mirror. He was as calm as a lagoon. “Who killed Jillian Rubio? Same person who killed Angela Suerto?”
“No.”
“So you know who killed Rubio. You kind of left that out when you were talking.”
“I don’t know who killed Rubio. It wouldn’t be the same person who killed Suerto. That person spent the last year in a cell and hanged himself there last week.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The lagoon rippled. “The rebel boyfriend? Why him?”
“He had a medical background, and being a passionate and dedicated leader, he’d know how to use it to obtain the medicines you need to fight a dirty war with lots of casualties. Many of them are poisonous if not diluted, Stelazine more than most.”
“That’s how. I asked why.”
“Gilia said Suerto would betray him. She didn’t mean sexually; she was talking about spying for the enemy. She thought he didn’t know. Probably he was a better general than she gave him credit for. He identified the problem and eliminated it, with minimal loss.” I held up one index finger.
“How much of that is guesswork?”
“As much as needed. The revolution’s over, and so is Nico. Everything else is mop-up.”
Alderdyce rewound the tape, popped it out of the camera, and slipped it into his side pocket. He said he’d shelve it with the training videos.
I got up from the table. I felt like I’d been sitting in the bleachers for twelve innings. “What about the happy Armenian?”
“He’s been kissing his way up the chain of command since he made plainclothes. Inspector’s as far as he’s gotten this year. Forget him.”
“Now all we have to worry about is CNN, Entertainment Tonight, and People.”
“We had security problems with her video. If they see through that, we’ll tell ’em a bunch of new ones. Best way to keep a secret is tell a thousand lies. That way, whatever leaks out gets lost in the flood. You should understand that better than anyone.” He opened the door. “She wants to see you.”
I didn’t ask who. “Where?”
“Her hotel, I guess. I left word to kick her an hour ago.”
“I need to catch supper first.”
“I hear the room service at the Hyatt doesn’t suck.”
“No good, John. I like ’em tall and brassy with tattoos.”
“Try that on someone who hasn’t known you since the sandbox.”
“We still know each other?”
“Not just yet. You played this like a sucker from Day One.”
“I know. It wouldn’t have been my first choice if there were a way to play it smart.”
“It’s still happening. Matador knows you’re here. What do you think he’ll do now that Mariposa’s police property?”
“He’s tried to kill me before. The novelty’s run out.”
“I bet you said the same thing when he came at you with that hot penny. I’d have paid to see that.”
On my way out I saw the little sergeant talking to the goodlooking Domestic Disturbances detective in the red skirt. She was shaping her nails at her desk with a file attached to a key ring shaped like a miniature set of brass knuckles. He was in up to his neck and didn’t seem to notice me.
The snow had stopped, leaving co
ttony fluff on the streetlamps and my car, which was parked legally this time. When I reached in for the brush, Gilia was sitting on the passenger’s side in her costly counterfeit furs. The hat was a Russian shako type and she had the tall collar of her coat turned up for warmth. Her face looked small and almost calm. She smiled shyly.
“It looked like the car you would drive. I knew I’d find your name on the papers in the glove box. I expected a gun.”
“It comes up out of the hood at rush hour. Didn’t the cops offer you a ride?”
“I said I had one. Did I lie?”
“There’s a brush on the floor on your side. I need it.”
“Brush?” She looked down. The domelight didn’t reach.
“It’s like a big toothbrush. For the snow. In this zip code we need to see to drive.”
She found it and passed it across the seat. She had on snug black leather gloves with fur trim, but she was shivering and her breath curled. I got in, started the engine, and showed her how to work the defroster. The snow pushed off about as easily as wet laundry and I had to use the scraper hard on the clotted ice on the windows, but by the time I got to the windshield the heat from inside had begun to melt it. The car was toasty when I tossed the brush into the back and slid under the wheel. She’d removed the gloves and opened her coat, underneath which was a long red knitted wool dress that clung to her like poured honey.
“I never saw snow in my life until the first time I played Denver,” she said. “It’s still kind of alien to me.”
“That’s the way it looks to me every December.” I tugged on the headlamps. “Dearborn?”
“Where do you live?”
“Refrigerator carton on Livernois.”
“Seriously.”
“Someone lives in a refrigerator carton on Livernois. I bet he’s serious about it.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Nothing personal. My guess is you don’t invite yourself to addresses in Beverly Hills. You wait to be asked. Why you should think it’s any different here is the point at issue.”
“If you think I’m trying to take you to bed—”
Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 16 - Poison Blonde Page 19
