Falling Down

by David Cole

  “I’ll help you,” I said immediately.

  “Oh. God. Bless you.” Fingering the religious medal.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Oh.” She reached behind her neck, opened a clasp, folded the medal in my hands. “Mother Teresa medal.”

  About an inch round, made of silver, hung on a silver chain. A somewhat familiar Mother Teresa in three-quarter profile. On the back, a flattened reddish irregular object, either a bone or a stone, probably a garnet.

  I handed the medal back.

  “I didn’t know she was a saint.”

  “She’s not. But she’s who I pray for. That stone on the back, I don’t really know what it’s supposed to be. They call it a third-class relic, but I don’t think it’s a bit of her bones.”

  Giggled, refastened the medal around her neck.

  “Plus she went to an Irish convent. I’m part Irish. Did you know that when Mother Teresa died, India gave her a state funeral in Calcutta? Her body was carried through the streets on the same gun carriage that bore the bodies of Gandhi and Nehru. Are you Catholic?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Sorry I’m rambling here. I’m sorry.”

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t apologize for your beliefs.”

  “So you have news?”

  “Other than that I’ll help you, not really. It’s early days. There’s something, but it’s so intangible, I don’t want to tell you about it yet.”

  “Something you got from that website? The online casino?”

  “Do you know the man who visited the website?”

  “Yes. Ken told me. One of our part-time staff, I didn’t know him.”

  “He was murdered this morning.”

  Both hands flew to her chest, a finger touching the medal, her breath drawn in so long and held forever I thought she’d turn blue.

  “You didn’t know?” I said. She shook her head. “Don’t be frightened. As far as we know, it’s just coincidence.”

  Her control returned in degrees, face and throat muscles gradually relaxing. I looked carefully away during all of this, studied her walls, the odd mixture of things spread around the office. A black rubber mouse, four inches long, his whiskers and red eyes peering around the doorway. A baseball cap with the traditional 9/11 letters FDNY. A reproduction of Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting. A card with a black and white photo of what looked like an old man, bent against the wind and age, walking beside a wall. I stood up to look at the card closely, and the man’s shadow projected on the wall showed he was playing a saxophone. The caption read: Some things have to be imagined to be seen.

  “Believed,” I said to myself.

  “What?”

  “I think the actual quote reads, ‘Some things have to be believed to be seen.’ A psychic friend of mine said the writer believed in ESP. I don’t really know.”

  “Belief, imagination,” she said. “They’re not so far apart. Wishes. Prayers.”

  “If wishes were horses,” I said, “lovers could ride.”

  “Psychics,” Mary said. “I’ve always wanted to learn more about alternative belief systems. Look out this window. Over there is the old children’s garden. Some days, if I’m here early enough, I watch this family of coyotes, mom, dad, five pups.”

  “Mary?” A woman’s voice from down the hall.

  “Kim,” Mary said. A cheerful blonde poked her head in the doorway. “Kim Miller, this is a friend. Laura Winslow.”

  “Welcome to the park,” Kim said.

  “I’ve been coming here for ten years,” I said.

  “Are you a member?”

  “No.”

  “You should sign up. I’m the membership coordinator. Well. You two look busy, I just stopped by for something I forgot last night. See you both. Mary, give her a membership packet, get her to sign up.”

  “She’s great,” Mary said. Kim was gone. “I hate lying to her about you, I know it’s just a small lie. I’m really uncomfortable with lies.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “If I have to tell a white lie, even a black one, I’ll do it.”

  Mary considered that, but just shrugged.

  “Whatever works,” she said. “Everybody here is great, it’s a wonderful place to work. So you’ve come here for ten years? Is this a personal thing, or do you come with your girlfriends?”

  “Girlfriends?”

  “Like, who do you hang with?”

  “My daughter. My…” Trying to get some word out about Nathan, unable to talk about him. “And you? So you’ve got a lot of girlfriends.”

  “Yes,” Mary said. “Well. Actually, I don’t have many really close friends. Two, maybe. Or three. But I know a lot of people. I call them friends, even though I don’t see many of them often. My Christmas card list is about three hundred names long. But close friends? I mean, like, soul-sharing friends? Heart-baring friends? Only two of those. But what I’d call a girlfriend? Lots of them.”

  “Where do you and your girlfriends hang out?”

  The question dangled between us, not the thing either of us really wanted to talk about, but then neither of us wanted to talk about violence.

  “First off,” Mary said, “it’s a matter of your time schedule. You’ve only got half an hour, so you’ll go to one place. Second consideration, money. Your wallet’s feeling kinda slim, you go to another place where the drinks are less expensive. So, say we want a quick drink. We’ll go to Basil’s, or Wildflower, a few blocks from the park. Or maybe Risky Business, if there’s more than two or three of us, so we can sit out on the patio, same as Old Pueblo Grill on Ina.”

  Cocked her head. Closed lips turned down at the edges, two small vertical lines popping up a bit between her eyes.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “In Tucson?”

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “Three, four years.”

  “You don’t have…” She didn’t quite know which word to use. “Girlfriends?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t have friends to…like we’re doing here, you don’t have friends to talk things over? With? You don’t?”

  Whoa, I thought. This woman doesn’t hesitate boring into my soul. “I’ve had girlfriends.” Thinking of Meg Arizana, thinking of…I couldn’t really think of another woman friend. “Do men count?”

  “Sure men count,” Mary said. “But…they’ve got their own stuff, sports, how are the Cardinals doing, who’s the next best NFL quarterback…the women in their lives. I don’t believe this,” she said. “You really, I mean, honestly, truly, you don’t have a bunch of girlfriends you hang with?”

  She saw my face shutting down, realized I’d shuttered off talk about emotions, about my personal life, and she made a quick decision and that glorious smile bloomed across her face as she extended her right hand to me.

  “You want to be my girlfriend?” she said.

  Whoa. Nothing else to do but take her hand and shake it and nod. She wouldn’t let go of my hand, she put her left hand out, held my single hand with both of hers. “It’s not a blood oath,” she said. “But I would like to be your friend.”

  However can you say no to somebody like that?

  “I’m gonna say something really, really dumb here,” I said to her.

  Gave a slight tug on my hand, but she wasn’t going to let it go. Not yet.

  “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be a girlfriend.”

  “Oh, pooh,” she said. “Listen. Tonight I’m calling a few women, okay? We’re going to make a date, okay?”

  “Uh,” I said. “Sure. This is an even stupider question. What should I wear?”

  Mary laughed and laughed, not an insult or an insider joke or anything but sheer delight. “Whatever,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got this huge, huge bucket of margaritas in my freezer. We’ll go somewhere outside, I know, we’ll go to Ric’s. Not far from you, actually. You live at Sunset and Swann?” I nodded. “Pe
rfect. We’ll grab an outside table, we’ll get there late enough so we’ll pay for one drink and eat something, and then, here’s the thing, when the wait staff sees you’re not going to leave, they close up the restaurant and just leave you there. And then I go to my car, I get the margaritas, which by this time have melted just enough so they’re still cold but they’re not frozen. And we sit around and drink ’em all. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said. “But I’ve got to make sure my daughter’s okay if I leave her.”

  “Get a babysitter.”

  “She’s twenty-three.”

  For the first time, Mary looked totally puzzled, her mouth opening and closing like a guppy, I could sense a thousand questions trying to work their way from her brain to her mouth, but she finally just pumped my hand, flashed that smile, and nodded.

  “I’ll call you,” she said. “I’ll see who wants to come. Cathe for sure, maybe…so I’ll call you, maybe, no, let’s say, definite for tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow night,” I said. “Sure.”

  But I didn’t know if I really meant it, or more honestly, what excuse I could come up with so when she called I’d say, I’d already figured out what I’d say, I might as well say it right now.

  “Gee. Mary. I’m so sorry, I totally forgot. There’s this client, he wants me to turn in a project by midnight tomorrow. I don’t think, probably I’m not going to be able to make it tomorrow.”

  “Laura Winslow,” Mary said. “About this client, and about the job and the deadline and I think, I’m not trying to judge here, and I could be all wrong, but the truth? About your tomorrow night, it sounds like, I’d bet my best hat, and I’ve got fifty hats, that what you just told me was one outrageous awesome lie.”

  And yeah. She was right.

  Embarrassed, I looked at a picture of a man in civvies sitting beside her computer monitor, a black and white photograph in a silver frame.

  “Ken told me about your husband,” I said.

  “Ken is sweet.”

  She held the frame, turned it so I could see the picture.

  “A fishing boat,” I said. “San Carlos, right? Down near Guaymas?”

  “We’d scuba down there,” Mary said. “When he had leave, he’d always come directly to me, wherever I was, he’d wrap his passion for me around my soul. In San Carlos, I’d gone there with Cathe, she’s my best girlfriend, we wanted a weekend to ourselves, and Jim ran down to the dock just when Cathe and I boarded the dive boat, and just like that, he jumped into the boat, hugs and kisses, wow, could that man hug. As the boat pulled away from the dock he’d already shucked his clothes, standing there in his boxer shorts, not his military issue, a special pair of shorts he’d bought in some airport just to wear for me in San Carlos, lots of fish swimming around, and with no hesitation flung himself into the water and launched into his powerful sidestroke, swimming alongside the boat and laughing up at me. Oh, my good sweet mother of Christ, I loved that man so.”

  She carefully placed the framed photo next to her monitor, beside a Zuni fetish of a mountain lion, carved from Baltic amber.

  “You’ve been to San Carlos?” she said.

  “Yes. It wasn’t, for me, it wasn’t peaceful. This park,” I said. “This place is a conundrum to me,” I said. “Why do we talk about violence in such a peaceful place?”

  “Peaceful, yes, serene, yes,” Mary said. “But violence is out there in the world. Those coyote pups? At one time there were eight. Now there’s only five.”

  “And how do you stay serene, with all that?”

  “The park,” she said. “My Catholicism, and Ana Luisa. My adopted child. What are you doing later this afternoon?”

  “I don’t know, but I think I’ll pass on the bucket of margaritas.”

  “Do you swim?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I have my own pool.”

  “Your own pool? How fantastic. You can get out of bed and run down there, dive right in even before you’re awake?”

  “Sure.”

  “At four this afternoon, come to Ana Luisa’s swim meet.”

  “I didn’t realize she was in school here,” I said, fumbling.

  “She’s not. It’s a private swim club. Just for girls who have learning disabilities. A special needs high school. Today, our team has a swim meet with a Catholic high school. Please come.”

  “I think I can,” I said.

  “Here’s a map. Here’s the pool. We’ll see you at four.”

  20

  “Captain?” Kligerman asked. “You want to start off?”

  Bob Gates chuckled.

  “She could tell me my computer was directly connected to the moon and I wouldn’t have any idea if it was true or not. It’s your show, Jordan.”

  Now there’s a verbal tell.

  Gates was playing the executive manager role, although not like some chiefs might play it, as a bumpkin who knew nothing about computers. Gates might know a whole lot about computers, but that wasn’t his issue here. Gates wanted to see how Kligerman dealt with me, which told me, here’s the real tell, Gates hadn’t really made up his mind that Kligerman was actually going to be promoted to captain.

  “So, Laura,” Kligerman said. “May I call you Laura?”

  I nodded.

  “Your résumé, mmm, I guess this twenty-two-page document you sent us is a few streets ahead of being a résumé. You’ve been working with computer crimes for about ten years? Give or take?”

  “You could see it that way,” I said. “But since computer crimes have morphed so quickly, especially in the past four years, you’d be better informed if you didn’t try to fit things into a time frame, but into categories.”

  “Such as?” Kligerman said. Rifling through his papers. “Credit card theft, for example? Or what? That’s the key to this preliminary interview. How would you organize these new criminal activities?”

  And in that instant I just knew how little Kligerman actually understood about computer crimes. I cut my eyes to Gates just in time to see him cutting his eyes back and forth between me and Kligerman.

  “Starting with credit cards,” I said. “Most people don’t bother with that anymore unless they’re hacking into a major database and stealing thousands, probably tens of thousands of credit card numbers. But the truth about credit cards is that some people, some really clever people, don’t even need to steal card numbers. They steal information. Computer crimes is all about stealing and dealing information.”

  Kligerman started to uncap his Mont Blanc pen to make a note, but caught himself and fiddled with the pen, a distraction as he thought through a question.

  “Yes, of course, Laura. We know that. Like all law enforcement agencies, we have all kinds of databases. Our own, for Pima County. The sheriff’s department has theirs. And a lot of other people.”

  “The G,” I said.

  “The G?” Kligerman said. “Oh, you mean, The Man. Like what we call the feebs, chief,” he said to Gates. “Except some people don’t say The Man, it’s just the G these days.”

  “We’re our own G,” Gates said to me.

  “Of course,” I said. “But on the largest scale possible, the Homeland Security mess, there are so many federal databases that partially duplicate information, or don’t even talk to other databases. I have a friend who works for U.S. Customs, down in Nogales. She tells me stories….”

  But I didn’t want to share her down-to-earth curses about Homeland Security.

  “So,” Kligerman said. “When the city of Tucson authorized us to create a special Computer Crimes Division—”

  “Department,” Gates said. “Not a whole division.”

  “Of course. Department, it doesn’t really matter what we call it, though. Right? Anyway”—rifling his papers—“we’ve looked at a few hundred resumes, contacted Private Investigators in Phoenix, Los Angeles, a few other cities, trying to get a handle on what we’d need to set up. Laura, did you know that a lot o
f MBAs are hiring out to PI firms?”

  “Because these young MBA kids know a lot about computers,” I said. “And about computer searches and coding.”

  “Yes. Well. When we looked here, in Tucson, almost everybody we talked to gave us the name of the best person for the job. For our job. You. Some people tell us, you’re one of the very first Tucsonans with a PI license who uses the term Computer Forensics? Not crime scene forensics, or post mortems, although I understand that you’ve also been hired from time to time to shoot crime scene videos. But Computer Forensics. We hadn’t even thought of calling our department anything but Computer Crimes. Computer Forensics, now, that puts us on some kind of cutting edge technology.”

  “It’s just a language thing,” I said. “You could just as easily call it digital monkey business.”

  Gates laughed, a mouth-wide-open laugh. Kligerman smiled and nodded.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you have names of suspected drug smugglers?”

  “Yes. That will be supplied to you, along with a list of suspect bank accounts, both here and offshore.”

  “No,” I said. “Do you have names of anybody who employs drug mules?”

  “That’s just a detail,” Kligerman said.

  “Anybody who uses teenagers as drug mules.”

  His body stiffened, even Gates sat up straighter in his chair.

  “Where are we going with this?”

  “Something personal,” I said.

  “Well. Not many teenagers have bank accounts. And our plan is to have you tracing financial records.”

  “You don’t have these names?” I said.

  “Jordan doesn’t work the streets,” Gates said. “But I’ll have somebody look into teenage drug mules. If that’s what it will take to get you working for us.”

  “Yes. It will take that.”

  “Deal.”

  “Sure,” Kligerman said. “I’ll get a list of TPD personnel for that.”

  “I want somebody specific.”

  “Who?”

  “Christopher Kyle.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Kligerman said finally. “Bob?”

  “No problem. I’ll get Chris on board today.”