Falling Down

by David Cole

  “Wow!” I said.

  “Yeah, like wow,” Alex said. “But Laura, what are we doing here? We’re not looking at animated cockfights for fun or education. Who’s the client? What does the client want, even if it is pro bono?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t go out on limbs anymore, Laura. What’s up here?”

  “Don’t really know. But I have to make a decision tonight.”

  “Why tonight?”

  “I have to decide if I’m leaving tomorrow. Or staying.”

  “Leaving?” Alex said. “Is it Nathan again? It is Nathan.”

  “Um,” Kelle said. “I’m going out to get some Mountain Dew. You guys want anything?” We both shook our heads and Kelle closed the door behind her.

  “Nathan’s…well, he’s left for the rez. He wants me to join him.”

  Alex sagged against the desk, head in hands. She knew everything there was to know about me and Nathan. Young in body, Alex had grown up with a mother dying of cancer and, as they say, she was older than her years. She waited for me to say something. I called up the video image again, logged in to the screens, and worked halfway through another match.

  “I don’t really know what to do,” I said finally. “But I can’t leave yet.”

  “There’s one more surprise in this. Are you, uh, well, no easy way to ask this, are you romantically involved with the client?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But the client is somehow involved with these cockfights?”

  “Somehow, yes.” Thinking of the diary, the pink teenager’s diary that Mary gave me. “I’ve got to review something tonight. Talk to the client tomorrow, then maybe I’ll know who’s involved with what.”

  “’Cause if you, or the client, are directly involved, here’s the kicker. I traced down the website to its origin, you know how easily we can do that.”

  “Mexico? Some island, Costa Rica?”

  “Tucson,” she said. “I’ve already probed the online casino’s web server. Back door, a quick in and out. But I left it at that, I don’t know, like, what is this about, Laura?”

  “I thought it was money laundering.”

  “Easy to find out where deposits are made to the casino. You know, work back from the credit card numbers, although I’m not sure they’re all legit. Bank deposits, I can easily work back from them.”

  “Follow the money,” I said. “That’s all we can do for now.”

  “You want to really think about this one, Laura. I don’t know where you are with Nathan, I don’t know what’s up with that possible job for us with TPD, but take care, Laura. There are really some sick people out there. Don’t get personally involved.”

  “You’re the second person in the last hour who’s told me to walk away.”

  “It’s good advice, Laura. I don’t mean give up, I don’t mean that we shouldn’t work this job. But…you’ve got this stubbornness, a lot of times you put yourself way out there. Personally, you go beyond computers. This isn’t about some white-collar crime, where we find the embezzled money or discover the truth behind fake identities. These are vicious people.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said, “but I’m not walking out.”

  “Out?”

  “Not walking out.”

  “You just said ‘out’ not ‘away,’” Alex said. “So Nathan’s walked out on you? Is that what this stubbornness is all about?”

  “Out, away, whatever,” I said. “But I’m not leaving this alone.”

  “Don’t let personal anger at some guy dictate the job,” Alex said. “When we first started working together, when my mom had cancer, you said don’t let personal anger get in the way of the job.”

  “That was then,” I said. “This is now.”

  16

  My cell rang at four in the morning. Thickened with sleep, I’d taken two Dolmaines, but jolted awake so fast I remembered I’d been dreaming of Nathan and as much as I wanted to just sleep, I had to answer. It might be him.

  “Nathan?” I mumbled. “Sweetie?”

  “It’s Ken.”

  “Uhhh?”

  “Ken Charvoz.”

  “Ken?” I mumbled. Not Nathan, only Ken.

  “Uh…what?”

  “About that gardener,” he said.

  “Gardener?

  “The part-time gardener. At the park.”

  “The gardener?” I said. It’s no metaphor, having a voice thick with sleep. I could barely understand my croak.

  “Well, ground staff.”

  “Ken. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “When your people looked at my computer so see who was logging into that gambling site. It was a gardener.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Except at the park, we call them ground staff. Even if they work on plants, or in the nursery, or whatever, we don’t call them gardeners. They’re ground staff.”

  “Yeah, uh…yeah?”

  “He’s been found.”

  “Okay. I’ll talk to him in the morning.”

  “Laura. He’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Murdered.”

  “So?”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  I yawned.

  “I thought…” Ken said. “Well, I thought you wanted to know, I guess I thought you wanted to be involved.”

  “I don’t want to be involved with you, Ken.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No.”

  “You sound…are you drunk?”

  “No.”

  “What did you mean, not being involved with me? This isn’t about me.”

  “Uh,” I said. “Right. Wrong.”

  “Look, just forget it, okay?”

  “No,” I said, fighting up to consciousness, the sleeping pills holding me down, I felt like I was talking underwater, like I had to really concentrate on every word. “No, I’m sorry…Ken? I’m sorry. I want to help Mary.”

  “You really sound like you’re drunk.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the crime scene,” Ken said. “It’s in a vacant lot. Not far from the park. You should, well, Laura, I really think you should come here.”

  I turned on the light, read the clock, rubbed gum from my eyes.

  He waited through my silence, then gave me directions when I said I’d come to the scene. He hung up without telling me any more and this was it, this was the time to make my decisions.

  17

  “Bodies,” I said to myself. “More bodies.”

  “Didn’t get you here to look at a body,” Ken said.

  Four TPD patrol units at the scene, turquoise and cherry lights still flashing, two unmarked detective’s cars. Several battery-powered lights about fifty feet into the vacant lot, no trees or landscaping, just scrub desert bushes limping low over the hardpan caliche ground. Under the lights, I saw Christopher Kyle maneuvering around on his arm crutches.

  “I’ve seen bodies,” I said.

  “All right.”

  Ken ducked under the yellow tape and had me sign the entry log.

  “If we’re lucky, we’ll be out of here before Kligerman arrives.”

  Crunching along slowly and uncertainly on the desert floor, using the floodlights to illuminate where we walked, we neared what looked like a jerry-rigged barbeque pit, nothing more than odd stones and a few bricks in a three-foot-wide irregular circle.

  Kyle saw us coming, shielded his eyes from the lighting glare, came forward a bit.

  “Ken. Laura. This is bad. You really want to see it?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Several officers were already pouring fixative into molds of shoeprints. All kinds of debris around the barbeque pit, plastic wrappers from junk foods, used condoms, a typical lowlife hangout, typical debris belonging to nobody known.

  “Not a chance for a usable footprint,” Kyle said. “But we’re taking them all. All we know is that sometime after t
wo o’clock, somebody brought the vic out here, smashed his head apart, arranged ignitable materials in the pit, dragged the vic so his head lay in the pit. Set him on fire.”

  “After two?” Ken said.

  “Teenagers had a party here, they left about that time. One of them was coming back with a case of beer, he got delayed, showed up with the guy on fire, was too drunk to just run, so he dialed nine-one-one. You don’t have to look, Laura. Except, there’s something not right.”

  “After that house yesterday, after that dead child…”

  I went to the far side of the pit and bent over and almost vomited.

  A brutally disfigured body, its face battered beyond recognition, both arms and legs badly broken, like drumsticks and chicken wings, and the face and hands burned in the pit.

  “Torture?” Ken said.

  “That. Or revenge. We’ve got some ID,” Kyle said, leaning on his canes, holding up a wallet. “Why I called you. A green card. Probably phony, made out to Carlos Cañas. Plus a card saying he was employed by Tohono Chul Park. Is this the guy? Carlos…Carlos Cañas?”

  “Jesus,” Ken said. “How would I know? His face is unrecognizable, not that I’d know him anyway. The curator of plants would know. Probably no fingerprints on file. No known address, but I can get it from park records. You said, something’s not right?”

  “Burned fingertips, smashed-in dentals,” I said. “Almost as though somebody wanted to make sure we couldn’t be really sure who it is.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said. “A little too funky. But. A dead end. I’ve got seven open homicides this month, my captain will never let me work this case.”

  “Nothing else in the wallet? In his pockets?”

  “Front right jeans pocket, a business card of some kind.”

  Handing the card, in a plastic evidence bag, over to Ken.

  agricultural products

  horses

  cows

  animal feed and supplies

  “Chicken feed?” I said.

  “You mean, this is crap?”

  “No. I meant it literally. Do they sell chicken feed?”

  “Yeah, I suppose.” Saw me biting my upper lip. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  A little too quickly, both men noticed.

  “You’re thinking,” Kyle said, “you’re thinking rooster food? Cockfight stuff, are you on that again?”

  “Cockfights?” Ken said.

  “That’s a dead end, Laura.” Kyle snorted, shook his head. “Walk away from this stuff. It’s just too random.”

  “Ken,” I said. “We need to talk.”

  “Hey,” Kyle said. “Hey hey hey, don’t be a stranger. What have you got?”

  “Nothing,” I said again. “Really, it’s more personal, not related. Can we stay until you wrap the scene?”

  “Sure. Okay. Coroner’s on his way, meat wagon probably will take the body within the hour. You’re sure? You don’t have something for me?”

  “Just too many bodies,” I said. “And too early in the morning. Once I’ve had coffee, I’ll be more alert.”

  “Got a readable tattoo here,” a CSU tech called.

  “Readable?” I said.

  “Most of them have either been lasered off, like the guy didn’t want them to be seen any more. But on his lower back, there’s a number. Letter E. Numbers two ten.”

  “Is that another maras tattoo?” I said. Kyle didn’t hear me, bending over to look at the tattoo himself, shaking his head. The assistant medical examiner rolled the body over.

  “Yo, yes sir,” the CSU tech said. “Got a death card here.”

  “No me jodas,” Kyle said. He looked at me. “Don’t fuck with this, Laura.”

  Another unmarked unit screeched onto the street, bumped over the curb, and parked adjacent to the scene. Kligerman got out slowly, dressed as though it were nine in the morning instead of five. He walked around the back of the scene, careful not to intrude without permission.

  “Anything?” he called to Kyle.

  “I’ll brief you.”

  Kligerman approached the back side of the scene, and Kyle ran quickly down what he knew.

  “Laura,” Kligerman said. Came around the pit, not getting close to the body. “Seeing you here, I’m enthused that maybe you’ll join the department?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” I said.

  “Well. I’ve called the team together for tomorrow afternoon. If you can spare us an hour, even less. I’ll run through the personnel, show you the routines, outline what we need you to teach us.”

  “Don’t push her,” Ken said.

  “And you are? Oh, my god. It’s Charvoz. You’ve been retired, Charvoz. You’ve got no business at a TPD crime scene.”

  “I invited him,” Kyle said. “The vic works for him.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I manage the part-time volunteers at Tohono Chul Park,” Ken said. “This vic has a name. Carlos Cañas was a staff member. Part-time, actually.”

  “A staff member. At the park.”

  “Ground staff. I’ve personally met the man two, three times.”

  “And you brought Charvoz along, Laura?”

  “Actually, he called me,” I said.

  “Quite a happy family. All right. I’ve got to leave, but Laura? See you tomorrow, I hope?” Smiling, not smiling, he went back to his car and sat in the front seat, flipping through a yellow pad.

  “What was that?” Kyle said. “See you tomorrow, he said.”

  “In his dreams,” Ken said. “Want some coffee?”

  “What happens next?” I said. “I mean, what happens here?”

  “Not much. They’ll run the guy’s name through databases, check with TPD narc detectives, check with DEA and NCIC. They won’t find anything.”

  “Let me buy you breakfast,” I said.

  “Can’t leave right now,” Kyle said. Knowing I’d asked Ken, not him.

  “Okay,” Ken said. “I’m riding that Harley, the one with the red tank and fenders. This would be the weekend I put my pickup on blocks. A Dodge crew cab. Diesel, a rod is loose and clanging a bit. I need to get the engine out, do an overhaul, but don’t have spare time.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said. “Why are you telling me about a truck engine?”

  He thrust out his right hand, the fingers trembling. “I thought I’d left all this behind, Laura. I haven’t been to a crime scene in years, haven’t seen a dead man in years. I don’t know what this is all about, but one look at your face right now, I know it’s something really hairy. I don’t know if I want breakfast or a drink, I don’t drink in the mornings at all, but this…this…”

  “Let’s have breakfast,” I said. Wrapped his trembling fingers in mine.

  “Yeah. Yeah. Okay, yeah, just follow me.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Chuy’s,” he said. “On Ina, near OldFather. My treat.”

  18

  Chuy’s. A lower-end Mexican food restaurant chain. I’d never been to a Chuy’s, couldn’t imagine a place like this already crowded with people stacked up in three lines at the order counter.

  “You want coffee? Or some breakfast?” Ken said.

  “Sure. Why not? Get me, whatever.”

  “I’ll get you the usual.”

  “Usual what?”

  “What I have, three, four mornings a week. Here’s an empty booth.”

  We slid into the booth just as the waitress flung a damp rag across the laminated counter, mainly wiping up spills and sweeping bits and crusts of food into a black plastic trash bag. Ken went off to order and I looked at where the other half ate.

  The Chuy’s on Ina had a very tall, vaulted ceiling, where all kinds of surfing and water stuff hung between fishnets and other water stuff. To order, you stood around a curved central order station, you got your beer or soft drinks or coffee there, but when you placed an order, the order-taker handed you this inflated sea creature. We got a whale, but I saw a porpoise and a
shark and half a dozen other unrecognizable inflatables.

  Ken slid gingerly into the booth, trying to find a comfortable position. Our booth had totally flat-back wooden benches, no curves of any kind.

  “Bad back,” he said. “Bad, bad back.”

  “That why you retired?”

  “Didn’t retire so much as they booted me out with a medical disability. My back locked up, one night. It’s quite a story, but I knew the next week I’d seen the last of being a detective.”

  “What happened?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. Unless the food’s coming right away.”

  Ken studied the action in what we could see of the kitchen.

  “My guess, since I’m a regular and know the process, we’ve got at least fifteen minutes.”

  He knew I didn’t want to talk about anything remotely personal, anything at all about reality. Nor did he. Small talk. First order of the day, before breakfast.

  “How do they serve food here?”

  “When your order is ready, the waitron just looks around the room for the inflatable, they’re all about two feet long, like this guy sitting right here on our table. When the order comes over, the waitron takes away the inflatable. And here’s Angelina with coffee and water.

  “You don’t want to hear cop stories,” Ken said to me. After Angelina set down two heavy china mugs and plastic glasses of water with straws.

  “Try me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Most of my really good cop stories are about one of two things. My body, or my gun. So. There was this Russian immigrant nutcase. He’d been tortured by the secret police, whatever alphabet-soup secret police were around in Moscow. This guy, he also liked to abuse kids. Not just slapping, but, like, kicking them. Dennise was my partner at the time. She’s also my longtime friend and cohort, now, you really want to hear stories about me, she could tell you things I’ve forgotten. Anyway. This Russian guy. We went to arrest him and he tried to slam the door on us. Dennise blocked it with her foot, and when he looked around the door to see what was blocking it, I stuck a can of pepper spray in his face and soaked him down. He was a little startled by that, judging from the scream, and he backed away enough for us to knock the door open and get in. We were there because of a call about his nine-year-old son. Dennise kept trying to get the kid out of the house, and to keep him out, but the fight was on between him and me, with Dennise helping when she could. We were all gagging, snotting, and crying from the pepper spray. That stuff gets everywhere. Anyway, I slugged it out with him, breaking his nose, closing one eye, and finally knocking some teeth out. When he got a little woozy for a second, we managed to get cuffs on him. We were all covered with blood and sweat and goo. It didn’t take long for him to recover. The backup units that came ended up having to suitcase him. That’s when you tie the feet together, lay them on their stomach, and tie the feet to the handcuffs behind the back. It’s also how a few suspects have developed serious and fatal breathing problems after the extreme exertion and stress.”