“If I say this is off the record …?” One plucked eyebrow rose.
“Then it is.”
Some people think speaking to a reporter “off the record” is like speaking to an attorney or a priest. I wouldn’t quote her. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t make use of whatever she told me.
“I want you to find my gardener.”
“What do you think I am, an employment agency?”
The cougar glinted briefly in her eyes, but she kept it on the leash.
“John Jaramillo. He’s been supplying my daughter with drugs from Mexico. Now he’s gone and I have a dead botanist in my swimming pool. Think there’s a connection there, Sherlock?”
“Yeah. Maybe not the same one you’re thinking of, though.” I took the photo out of my pocket and laid it on the table.
“Crap,” she said, sounding exactly like Tyrone. She frowned at the photo. “I really need to get to the gym.”
“Connection?” I prompted. “Like between you and the good doctor?”
She made a pfft! sound and flicked the photo back at me.
“He was better in bed than you’d think from his looks,” she said. “I hadn’t seen him since the night this was taken, though, until he turned up in my pool.”
“Right. And you don’t think the cops would like to know about this?” I tapped a finger on the photo, and the server, who was setting down my glass of Riesling, glanced at it.
“Wow,” he said. “Nice butt.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” she drawled, leaning back in her chair and giving him a laser eyeball. He glanced from the picture to her, and did a double-take.
“Is that you? Er … ma’am?”
“Meet me in the parking lot after work and find out.” The cougar stretched voluptuously, flexing her shiny pink claws. The server, who might have been nineteen, turned purple and fled.
She laughed, but was dead serious when she looked back at me.
“The cops know. I was rattled when he turned up in the pool, but once I had a minute to think, I realized that as soon as they identified him, they’d head for the DBG and find out I knew him. So I called them and fessed up. I didn’t know about that—” She cast a displeased glance at the photo. “And if I get my hands on the little shithead who took it—but never mind …” She waved a hand. “It’s Chloe.”
“Chloe took the picture?” It hadn’t looked as though Chloe were in any shape to hold a camera.
“No.” Pamela gave me a sharp look. “Chloe is why I want you to find John Jaramillo.”
Noticing that Chloe’s glazed eyeballs coincided with Chloe’s clubbing, Pamela had figured logically that she was getting drugs at one or another of the clubs, and thus had put on her cougar costume and gone prowling with her daughter.
“What did Chloe think of that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “If I didn’t go, she didn’t go. Besides, I took dates along—” She glanced at the photo of herself and ap Gruffydd. “I wasn’t following her around all night. Or at least I didn’t let it look that way.”
I’d already figured that Pamela was much shrewder and more observant than I’d originally thought. She was shrewder than Chloe too, and it didn’t take long for her to tumble to the fact that Chloe wasn’t getting drugs at the clubs—she was taking drugs to the clubs.
“I caught her dealing in the restroom one night.” Pam was rolling her empty wine glass slowly between her palms, looking down into the dregs. “Dragged her out into the parking lot and … made her tell me where she was getting it.”
“From the gardener.”
“Yep.” She looked up, fixing me with a hard gaze. “You have a reputation for digging things up, Kolodzi. And you’re a little less sleazy than the average private detective.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“And you want to know who killed Griff.”
“Griff?”
She sighed impatiently.
“It’s spelled Gruffydd, but it’s pronounced Griffith. He didn’t like Howarth.” For the first time, her voice betrayed a little emotion over the Welshman’s death. I was a long way from trusting her, but I was beginning to like her a little.
She shrugged. She was wearing a sleeveless pink top, and the hairs on her forearms were standing up in the chilled air.
“So. You find John Jaramillo, the cops convict him of murdering Griff, he goes down, Chloe’s source dries up, and you get a story—a story that doesn’t include Chloe.”
I considered that—but the other picture, of Chloe by the ladies’ room, bleary and undressed, with her sweet young breast adrift and vulnerable, was still resting in my pocket.
“Okay,” I said. Reminded of photos, though, I pulled out the third one I’d brought—the shot of Cooney Pratt glaring at ap Gruffydd. “You seem pretty convinced that Jaramillo’s responsible. And I could see it happening by accident, maybe—the Welsh guy comes by to see you, and stumbles into the middle of a drug deal, maybe. But your husband would seem to have an actual motive.”
Pamela stared down at the wildflower in the photo, then flicked the shot back at me and stood up.
“Forget Cooney,” she said, and putting a hand on my shoulder, leaned down and whispered confidentially in my ear, “He really is a prat, you know.”
Not much happened for two days. The police released driblets of information, nothing helpful. A crane fell into a hole on a light-rail construction site. The D-Backs lost two games in a row. And Cooney Pratt’s alibi developed holes big enough to swallow a backhoe.
Pamela’s alibi was solid; she’d been at a killer bridge tournament at the Hyatt Regency Gainey Ranch, in sight of eighty other people. But Cooney had been with the noncombatants, who’d spent the night in the lobby bar, the spa, the giant heated pool … or one of the bedrooms. People had seen him, all right—but there were gaps. And it was a five-minute drive from the hotel to his house.
Meanwhile, John Jaramillo had dropped off the face of the earth. His wife refused to be interviewed, though gossip in his neighborhood said she wasn’t that broken up over his absence.
I was debating whether to try some of Jaramillo’s other gardening clients, or invite Cooney Pratt out for a drink and show him pictures, when the phone rang.
“I’ve found him!” Pamela’s voice was high, and nervous, for her.
“Who, Jar—”
“The gardener, yes.” She swallowed, audibly. “Do you want a story? Come right away—meet me at my house. Come now.”
“It was the damn squirrels,” she explained, leading me down her front drive. “I kept trapping more and more of the little buggers, and finally realized they were coming from the house next door, crawling through the breeze blocks in my wall.”
“Yeah?”
“So I looked at the house next door.” I looked too. The next-door house was vacant, with a realtor’s sign.
“And?”
“The morning it happened? The murder? I had a hangover, and I was drowning those fucking squirrels in the garage, and I was so irritated by the racket from the air conditioner next door. Then, of course, there was lots more racket from the pool deck, and I forgot all about it.”
I looked up at the roof. The AC unit now was off. The yard of the empty house was spiked with fried weeds sprouting through pink gravel. There wasn’t a soul in sight, bar a garbage truck cruising slowly, picking up the big round turquoise dumpsters, tossing the trash, then slamming them back on the pavement. Half the dumpsters had fallen over from the impact and lay on their sides, wheels spinning.
“Class warfare,” Pamela said, seeing me look. “The garbage guy hates rich people. Wait till he’s gone.”
We did, and she filled me in rapidly on her deductions. The house wasn’t being shown; nobody would show a house with the yard in that condition. But if the house was empty—why run the air conditioner?
“Jaramillo,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the empty house. “It’s got to be him. That’s where he keeps the drugs.”
It was possibl
e. Obviously nobody was there now; not with the AC turned off. On the other hand, the cops took a dim view of breaking and entering. I mentioned this, and Pam pulled out a key, flourishing it under my nose.
“We traded keys with the people who used to live here—you know, in case of emergencies.”
The key was for the kitchen door. The house was unfurnished and silent, but I stopped dead, the back of my neck prickling. I’d thought she was imagining things, but she wasn’t. The air was thick and stifling and probably at least 115°, but it didn’t have that dead feel that abandoned houses have.
What it did have was one very bad smell. I thought it was time to call the cops right then, but Pam had gone ahead of me, through a door, and she gave a strangled scream.
I went after her and found myself in a narrow room furnished with a washer, a dryer, and a corpse.
There were flies and he’d been dead long enough that the flesh was sagging off his bones and had a greenish tinge. Pam was standing behind the body, holding a gun.
“Told you I found him,” she said.
“Yeah. Let’s put the gun away, shall we, and call the cops.”
She swallowed, and pointed the gun directly at me.
“Oh, come on!”
“I’m sorry,” she said, though she didn’t sound sorry. “I can’t let Chloe be arrested for killing him. Everybody knows you’ve been looking for him. So you found him, and he shot you, and you shot him. By the time anybody finds you, nobody will be able to tell how long either of you’s been dead, and …” Her voice was shaking, and so was her hand.
A shadow behind the door moved. My eyes flicked to it, and Pamela made a little throaty noise. “Oh, don’t even try that …” she began, and then went “Uk!” as a slender Hispanic guy in dark jeans and a black T-shirt stepped out and hit her on the head with the butt of his gun.
Pamela’s weapon spun out of her hand as she went down and hit the washing machine with a booming noise, but I didn’t try to dive for it.
“Who the hell are you?” the Hispanic guy said, looking me over.
“A newspaper reporter. Should I ask who you are?”
“No, that wouldn’t be a good idea.” He spoke good English, but it wasn’t his first language. He glanced at the body and shook his head, then peered back at me, thoughtful.
“Okay,” he said, making up his mind. “You going to help me get him out of here, all right?”
“Er …” I raised an eyebrow at Pamela, who was groaning on the floor.
“Yeah, right. Put the lady in the closet.” He waved the gun toward what looked like a broom closet—though you don’t usually see broom closets with deadbolts on the outside.
Pamela was bleeding from her scalp, and vomited when I dragged her up onto her feet. It was a messy business, but I got her in the closet and the door bolted. I was streaming with sweat by the time I finished, and wondered whether there was any air in the closet. Then I looked up and saw small holes drilled through the wood—ventilation.
“For troublemakers,” the guy said with a shrug. “Just in case, you know?”
I looked at the body, and wiped the back of my hand across my mouth. His stomach had swelled up like a balloon, and it was too damn easy to imagine what it’d be like if he popped.
My friend was thinking along the same lines.
“Garbage bags,” he said, gesturing with the gun toward the door to the garage. “Move slow.”
The garage was crowded with filled garbage bags, some of them broken and spilling. Fast-food wrappers, fragments of stale tortillas, empty refried-bean cans. Several small furry things scuttled out of the pile, and the guy kicked at one but missed.
“Rats,” he said with a shrug.
“Ground squirrels.”
My pal shrugged and motioned to an open box of giant leaf bags. I took two, and, holding my breath and keeping a grip on my belly muscles, slipped one over Jaramillo’s head and the other over his feet. The guy with the gun tossed me a set of keys.
“Back the truck into the driveway.”
The truck might have been Jaramillo’s; it was a pickup with a ratty trailer made of white wire mesh, rakes and shovels in holders at the back, piled with garden trash. I wrestled Jaramillo’s body into the trailer, then got behind the wheel, at my friend’s urging.
“Drive.”
Within ten minutes we were headed south on the 101. The pickup had good AC and my hands and arms were freezing in the blast of cold air, but I was still drenched in sweat.
“How did you get them in there?” I asked at last, breaking the silence. A SWAT negotiator I’d interviewed once told me that what you do in a hostage situation is get the perp talking. Keep them talking, because if they’re talking, they aren’t shooting.
My captor blinked.
“The illegals,” I said. “You’re a coyote, right?”
“Yeah,” he said softly.
“Heck of an idea. Hiding them in Scottsdale, I mean. How’d you get them in and out of the house?”
He lifted one shoulder, off-handed.
“Yard trucks, hoopties. You drive a truck like this down any street in Scottsdale, three, four Mexicans in the back—who looks at yard guys? Everybody’s got yard guys. A beater car pulls up at the end of the street, two women get out—domesticas, nannies.” He smiled, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “They belong here.”
“How many people were in that house when the cops came?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Jesus.” Sixty-three people huddling in that house, afraid to move for fear of making a sound. Probably afraid of more than the cops too.
“Was he—” I jerked a thumb toward the trailer behind us, “in there, then?”
He sighed and shifted his weight a little. “Yeah.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah.”
Conversation lapsed until we hit the 202 and turned west.
“You kill him?” I asked, trying to keep it casual.
“No.” His eyes widened a little in surprise, and he shook his head. “I don’t kill people. Unless I have to,” he added.
I figured a coyote probably had to, sometimes. I hoped he wasn’t figuring this was one of those occasions.
“Who shot him?”
“My partner. Go I-10, south.” He waved the gun at a highway sign. A big raindrop hit the windshield with an audible splat! and we both jumped. I pressed, to keep him talking.
“Did he stumble into it—Jaramillo? If anybody was going to notice extra yard guys in the neighborhood, I’d guess it would be a gardener.”
My friend made a little sound, maybe surprise, maybe contempt. “No, he was part of it. How you think we found those—that house?” He’d started to say “houses.” There were more of them.
“Dangerous, wasn’t it? For him, I mean. Having it so close?”
“Yeah, it turned out pretty dangerous for him.” He glanced through the rear window at the trailer. It was starting to rain in earnest now, and I switched the wipers on.
“He had an angle?” I guessed. “He was using your … er, your business, to bring in drugs?”
The guy stiffened a little. “If he did, I didn’t know about it,” he said, sounding defensive.
“What, you got morals about drugs?”
“What you think I am, chingadero?”
“Fine, you don’t smuggle drugs. Just people.”
“You think it’s the same?” He sounded incredulous, and I had to concede that he had a point.
“Nope. Just trying to figure out how Jaramillo got dead.” We were well out of the city by now. The rain was pelting down, and I had to slow the vehicle.
“Him,” he said in disgust. “You’re right, he got his own deal going, he don’t tell us. But not drugs. Flowers.”
What with everything, I’d temporarily forgotten about Dr. ap Gruffydd’s murder, but that word brought it back with a bang.
“What kind of flowers?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Like this.
” He pushed the button on the glove box. It fell open, and I glimpsed a bundle of brown burlap, with something yellow sticking out of it. I figured it was an orchid, but couldn’t take my eyes off the road to make sure.
“Where’d it come from?”
“One of the guys we bring over. Most of them, they’re from Sonora, Sinaloa, Michoacán … This guy, he’s from Quintana Roo. In the jungle.” He nodded toward the road ahead. “I don’t know where Johnny finds him, but he puts him in touch with … with my partner.”
The orchid smuggler had joined the group of illegals and been brought to the house in Scottsdale, next door to the Pratts. Jaramillo’s plan, insofar as my companion knew, had been to work late, then sneak into the supposedly empty house and get the orchid, which he’d take to the botanist.
But the good doctor had been too anxious to wait, fearing that his precious orchid would perish before he’d got his hands on it. So he’d picked up Jaramillo from his house and gone with him to the Pratts’ at night, sneaking into the backyard under cover of the nearby party. Ap Gruffydd had waited by the pool while Jaramillo hopped over the wall and went to get the orchid.
“But the guy who had it, he wanted his money, and Johnny, he don’t got it yet, because the guy—the other guy, who wants the flower—he couldn’t get it from his bank, because it was night.” He shrugged again.
So Jaramillo had hopped back over the fence to tell ap Gruffydd; and the botanist, inflamed by the nearness of an orchid, had declared that he’d go talk to the fellow himself, at least see the flower.
Jaramillo had tried to stop him, but couldn’t, and next thing anyone knew, the Welsh botanist was face to face with sixty-three illegal Mexicans—and a couple of alarmed—and armed—coyotes. The unnamed partner had pulled his gun, and Jaramillo, seeing his deal going south, had lunged to intercept him.
“So that’s how Johnny got dead,” my companion said with a sigh. Ap Gruffydd had run, of course, and made it back over the wall, but had made the mistake of turning—whether with thoughts of going back to rescue his orchid or just to see whether anyone was coming—and been shot in the chest by the coyote, aiming from the top of the wall.
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