Liars Anonymous

by Louise Ure

  “What did you find out about Carlos’s car?” I asked after a moment of silence.

  “Jessie, don’t put me in the middle of this—”

  “You’re already in the middle of it, and so am I. I don’t want to be flying blind if there’s something I ought to know.”

  He sighed and rocked another three times. “The paint on Ochoa’s car matches what we found on Markson’s Cadillac. He was involved in the rear-end collision.”

  “Do you know if Carlos was driving?”

  “His prints are all over the car, but there are others, too.”

  “Maybe Guillermo should listen to the HandsOn call. He’d recognize his brother’s voice. Maybe he’d know the third guy, too.” I looked sideways at him. “There really were three, right?”

  “Yeah, the forensic team says it’s three voices. Maybe—”

  “What about the child seat?” I interrupted.

  “There’s no reason that Carlos needed one and no proof that he ever bought one. But Darren Markson bought a car seat just like the one we found and put it on his company credit card a month ago.”

  “What did his wife say?”

  Deke kept rocking. “More of nothing. She had no idea…He never mentioned it…They didn’t need one…Maybe he bought it as a gift for an employee.”

  “Well, maybe he did. But why would he have had it in his car on the way to a business meeting in New Mexico?” Until I heard a better answer, I was assuming that the sixty-pound weight that HandsOn had recorded in the back was a child’s seat. A child’s seat with someone sitting in it. Who was that child and where was he?

  “Any more news on Felicia’s internship? What did the guys at the law firm say?”

  “Willard says he knew about the internship but never had any dealings with her. She seemed to work in Levin’s group, but even there it was just filing and stuff.”

  I still wasn’t willing to shrug aside her internship as “just a coincidence.” I had only glanced at the Willard, Levin and Pratt documents that Mr. Villalobos had given me. But if Felicia was just doing filing, why did she have the law office documents at home at all? They deserved a closer look.

  “Jesus, Deke. This is getting scary. Darren Markson is found dead more than two days after I talk to him. Felicia gets blown up right after I meet her. And now there may be a child involved? What are you guys doing about it?” I rocked our glider faster and it protested with a high-pitched dry squeak.

  “Leave it alone, Jessie. We’re working the case.”

  “Did you check Markson’s other phone calls through the HandsOn system? Maybe one of the earlier calls—”

  “Give it a rest, Jessie.” He stood up and walked to the leafy mulberry in the center of the backyard. “Emily Markson’s lawyer is trying to restrict our use of the HandsOn information. Says that all that data is owned by the Marksons, not HandsOn, and any use of the information would be like forcing the Marksons to testify against themselves.”

  “But you got a subpoena that night, right?”

  Silence. Deke kicked at the tree trunk.

  “You didn’t?”

  He shook his head. “We got the nine-one-one information from your call, then contacted HandsOn and asked you to come down. Your bosses probably shouldn’t have released the information without a subpoena or approval from the Marksons.”

  “You were looking for a man who was in danger. Isn’t there something about exigent circumstances?”

  “Nothing exigent in calling you the next day, I guess.” He stripped a small branch of its leaves and littered them on the dry grass. “Anyway, a judge is looking into it now.”

  “And Emily Markson is trying to keep you from getting the information.”

  “Yep.”

  What was she hiding? The HandsOn information couldn’t implicate her—she said she was home at the time of the attack. And it couldn’t implicate her husband; he was dead. Unless they were both involved in something they didn’t want the cops to know about.

  It looked like I had already passed along the HandsOn information illegally, so I might as well keep going. I told Deke about listening in to Markson’s car a second time on that call.

  “That scenario matches somebody stringing him up from his feet and beating the shit out of him,” he said.

  “Is that what his body looked like?”

  He nodded. “There were rope burns around his ankles and he’d taken a beating before he was killed. Broken arm, cheekbone. Broken ribs. The bruises had had enough time to show up, anyway. But he would have lived if somebody hadn’t put a bullet in his head.”

  I was back to my original hypothesis that Markson had been held for ransom. But now I had more questions. Where was the child who had been in the backseat? And why didn’t Emily Markson want us to find out?

  Chapter Twenty

  Sunday was always a good day for resolutions, and on this Sunday I resolved, once again, to get back to my workout schedule, to find a way to expend my energy in something other than rage. I found another gym on the east side of town offering free introductory sessions, so I took myself, caffeineless, over for punishment.

  A kickboxing class and a solid hour of weights got my blood moving again after that lethal pot roast, and worked out some of my aggression.

  I couldn’t ask Darren Markson and Felicia Villalobos what had happened. Carlos Ochoa could probably help, but I couldn’t find him to ask, and the Braceros only seemed to be peripherally involved because of Carlos’s participation with them. If Emily Markson and Paul Willard were putting up a fight to keep the HandsOn data confidential, they wouldn’t be of any use, either.

  The weak link here might be Aloma Willard, Paul’s beauty contest-winning wife. If she didn’t know about her husband’s affair, I could use that as leverage against him. I had to find a way to get her talking.

  All I knew about Aloma Willard was that she drove a blue Taurus, she was beautiful, and she was from Mexico City. That may be all I needed to get started.

  A quick log-on at Kinko’s confirmed that Aloma Willard (née Sauza) had won the Miss Mexico City crown ten years ago. The photo they used on the Web site, if it was anywhere near current, was a knockout. Lustrous hair, the kind of big eyes you only see on velvet paintings, and clavicle definition that was sharp enough to cut paper. She’d made it to third runner-up in the national pageant.

  I used another fifteen minutes of Kinko’s computer time to mock up fake business cards while I was there.

  Not willing to chance that Paul Willard would be around the house on a Sunday, I put off my plans to meet his wife until the next day. That left me enough time to go over Felicia’s notebook from the law office.

  I settled into the new beanbag chair with an iced coffee and Felicia’s black three-ring binder.

  It wasn’t an official document from Willard, Levin and Pratt, just a notebook Felicia had used to gather all the background, names, and numbers she’d need for her internship. The first tabbed section included a phone list, an organization chart, and a floor plan for the law firm. Their offices were in an old converted adobe house, so the layout wasn’t very complicated. There was a star next to the name Serena McDowell, the assistant and secretary to the partner Robert Levin. Felicia hadn’t paid any particular attention to Willard’s name on any of the lists, although his office and Serena McDowell’s desk space looked like they’d both been carved out of the same space, maybe a previous dining room.

  The next section included PR releases and newspaper clippings about the law firm, and a copy of a speech one of the lawyers had given about immigration law. The newspaper clippings were nothing special: announcements of promotions and partnerships, and a photo of the partners at a groundbreaking ceremony.

  The third tab of the book, however, held the contracts for Darren Markson’s firm to build and manage six day-care centers, four in the city and two more on the Arizona side of Nogales. I didn’t understand a lot of the legal language that WL&P had included, but it looked like
the cities were paying for the land and Markson’s development company was paying to build and manage the centers. I couldn’t see how he’d make a lot of money that way, but maybe it was his way of tithing.

  I flipped back to the newspaper photo in the previous section. Yep, the groundbreaking ceremony was for the first of the day-care centers, including a complete recreation facility for kids from the newly built low-income housing area near the airport. Interesting that the law firm was represented there as well as their client. A short, smiling Darren Markson was the guy with his foot on the shovel, but his lawyer, Paul Willard, was right there beside him. And the caption said that the dark-haired man with the ox-bow hairline on his right was Levin, the L part of WL&P.

  I jotted down the addresses for the other five facilities.

  If Felicia had access to the Markson contracts, and Paul Willard represented Markson at the law firm, maybe she’d had more business dealings with Willard than he’d told the police. And if she hadn’t worked directly with him, what was she doing with Markson’s contracts?

  On Monday, I waited until ten o’clock to call the Willard house, to make sure that the lawyer would have already left for work. I wanted to give Aloma Willard enough notice of my visit to give me some legitimacy, but not enough time that she could thoroughly check out my credentials.

  “Aloma Sauza?” I asked when she answered the phone.

  “My last name is Willard now.”

  “Of course. But your public still thinks of you as Aloma Sauza, Miss Mexico City.”

  When she didn’t hang up, I knew I had her. “I’m with Round Up magazine. We don’t just focus on current celebrity lifestyles. Our readers want to know what’s happened to all their favorites…how the rest of your life has turned out.”

  “My life?”

  “Of course! Our readers want to know what other fabulous things you’ve been up to since you won your crown.”

  “Like a ‘where are they now’ story, right?”

  “That’s it. Anyway, one of our reporters is in Tucson today and would like to come by for a short interview, if that’s okay. I know it’s not much notice, but we’re on a deadline. Do you have some time available this morning? Maybe at eleven?”

  She agreed.

  I arrived at the house just a few minutes before eleven. My old pickup was pretty distinctive, especially with its now blackened hood. I couldn’t take a chance that her neighbor, Emily Markson, would remember it from my first visit so I parked around the corner and hoofed it to the Willards’ front door.

  Aloma Willard wore thirty-something well. Her skin looked like it would taste of cinnamon, and her ankles were those of a racehorse.

  “My name’s Laura Dunn,” I said, offering one of my newly minted Round Up business cards. She ushered me in.

  The house, like her voice, held nothing of her Mexican heritage. A rose-patterned couch in cream and pink faced the wall of windows looking over the city, and a baby grand piano graced the far wall.

  “Do you play?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Yes,” she said slowly, “that was my talent in the competition.”

  Uh-oh. A little more research into her glory days would have stood me in good stead. “Of course it was. I meant do you still play?”

  “A little.”

  We took seats on opposite ends of that garden bed of a couch and I flipped my notebook open to an empty page. It took thirty minutes of reminiscing about her pageant days before I could bring her around to current day topics.

  “I understand that your husband is a lawyer.”

  “Yes, he’s a senior partner in his firm.”

  “I imagine that gives you the opportunity for lots of good works in the community. Charity balls, special projects.”

  “That hasn’t changed since my pageant days. I still take charitable work seriously. But now, of course, I’m representing both Mexico and the United States.”

  “Can you give me some examples?” I drew a series of squares on the small page, as if getting ready to record a long list.

  She poured us both glasses of sparkling water before replying. “Well, we support the arts, of course. The symphony, the opera.”

  I made small notes.

  When she couldn’t come up with any other charitable ventures, I prodded her. “What about your husband’s business? Is there anything there that our readers would like to know about? Any charitable works or projects that you and he are proud of?”

  “Well, the day-care centers, of course. Paul is—I mean Paul and I are—in partnership with a few others to build day-care centers here in southern Arizona where they’re most needed for new immigrants and struggling families.”

  “That’s a coincidence. I met someone at a Career Day presentation I did at Cholla High School who told me about a project like that. Felicia Villalobos, I think her name was. Do you know her?”

  “She works at Paul’s office. A sweet kid—on some kind of work-study program, I think. I met her at one of their office parties. Paul has really taken her under his wing.” She patted a rosy cushion into place under her arm as if it, too, belonged under a wing.

  She didn’t seem to be aware of Felicia’s death, or of Paul Willard’s denial of having worked closely with her. If the police really were following up on the coincidence of Felicia’s internship with the law firm, they hadn’t gotten to Willard’s wife yet.

  We chatted about other celebrity issues: fashion, favorite restaurants, and world peace. There was no need to use her husband’s philandering as leverage to get her to talk. She’d just confirmed his involvement not only with Felicia but also with the day-care centers.

  “Don’t you want new pictures for the story?” she asked as I made my way back to the front door.

  “I’ll bring the photographer next time,” I promised, although the only new photo I wanted was a mug shot of her and her husband, if they were knee-deep in Markson’s death. I didn’t know how this day-care stuff fit in, but if both Willard and Markson had been involved with it, and Felicia kept a copy of the contract at home, then that was more than just coincidence, and had all the earmarks of a scam.

  Unless, of course, the day-care centers were part of Felicia’s commitment to improving the lives of newly arrived immigrants, a goal that fit her desire to be an immigration lawyer. Maybe she heard about the project at work and thought it was a good idea. Damn. How could something look both so angelic and so evil at the same time?

  I was idling at a red light when my cell phone went off.

  “Can you meet me right now?” Guillermo was almost out of breath with the question.

  “What is it?”

  “I got a call from one of the Braceros. He says he’s seen Carlos and he wants to meet at a bar in South Tucson.” He named a bar and a street corner.

  “I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”

  I peeled out when the light turned green, then turned on the blinker and pulled into a sandy turnout on Swan Road, where I retrieved the gun from the locked box in the back of the truck.

  “What does that mean?” I pointed at a neon sign that said EL ESPEJISMO, across the front window of the tiny building.

  “Mirage,” Guillermo said.

  The first four letters of the word were shorting out, sending a Morse code neon message out across the parking lot. I bet the regulars called it something more like the Gizmo.

  “And here I thought mirages were supposed to be seductively attractive images.” The building was made of cadaver-gray concrete blocks, pinged by enough bullet holes to make a connect-the-dots drawing. Rusty wrought-iron bars guarded windows so dirty that you couldn’t even tell if the bar was open.

  “Who’s this guy we’re meeting?”

  “Jorge. I don’t know him well; he joined up after I left the gang. But his aunt is my mother’s best friend, and he heard we were looking for Carlos.”

  “Why didn’t he come by your place?” I wasn’t sure why Guillermo had called me for backup. It sounded
like the guy was practically family.

  “He says he can’t be seen with me. That’s why he picked this place.”

  He got that part right. Nothing but empty lots and self-storage warehouses for a half mile around. At the end of the street was a small bodega with three tired plastic pennants that looked like they were signaling surrender in the hot wind.

  Guillermo pushed open the metal door and I followed him inside. The silence was disturbed only by the clink of glasses being reshelved and the sound of water running in a deep sink.

  There was only one customer, a square-jawed Latino with bad acne, sitting at a cigarette-scarred table in the far corner. He was one of the younger variety of Bracero, maybe sixteen or seventeen, wearing a dingy wifebeater, and baggy black pants riding low on his hips. Guillermo went straight to him.

  “Hermano,” he said, executing a complex, four-beat handshake that ended in a position that looked like arm wrestling.

  Guillermo pulled out a chair for himself and nodded for me to take a seat at the next table. I did, keeping my back to the corner and my eyes on the door.

  “You’ve seen Carlos?” he asked when Jorge didn’t volunteer any information.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender interrupted, approaching the table with a short stack of tiny paper napkins. He was a grizzled white man, wearing a twin of the shirt Jorge had on.

  “Two beers,” Guillermo said. I shook my head at the bartender’s invitation to make it three. He didn’t ask for the kid’s ID.

  Jorge waited until the beers were delivered and the bartender was back across the room flipping through the paper.

  “I haven’t seen him. But I heard.”

  “What?” Guillermo looked like he was ready to grab the kid by his scrawny T-shirt and shake him. “You said you’d seen him!”

  “He wanted out, is what I heard. He was trying to fuck up the deal.”

  “What deal? Where is he?”

  The kid lowered his voice, as if a host of eavesdroppers had descended upon the room. “I don’t know anything about it. But I heard they were keeping him on the east side of town. Someplace they called the Red Tile House. He’s in the garage.”