by Ben Rehder
Wylie’s face turned a vivid red.
Garza spoke up again: “Cool it, both of you. I don’t need you at each other’s throats right now.” He turned to Marlin. “John, it sounds like you did what any of us would have done. Now let’s see what you found.”
Marlin led them to the fenceline and the three men crossed the barbed wire. Marlin pointed out the makeshift blind under the cedar tree, drawing their attention to the puddle of tobacco spit.
“There’s our DNA,” Garza said, giving Marlin an approving smile. “Hell of a job. Anything else?”
“I saw a partial boot print over there between a couple of cedars. That’s all, so far.” He looked at Wylie. “I decided to leave the area and wait for reinforcements.”
“Great,” Garza said. “Good work.” He turned to Wylie. “Wylie, you’re the lead dog on this one. You’ve got the most experience in this area, and I’m hoping we can all learn a couple of things. So, how do you want to proceed?”
Wylie looked around and made an exaggerated gesture with his hands. “My first question is, where is Lester Higgs?”
Marlin said, “Took off about twenty minutes ago. Said he had some ranch work to do. I think he went back up to the barn for some supplies. I told him a deputy would be in touch.”
Wylie snorted. “You let our first witness just wander off? He could be on the phone right now, telling half the county what happened.”
Marlin swallowed the anger that was rising in his throat. “Listen, I asked him not to discuss—”
“Yeah, right,” Wylie interrupted. “I’m sure that’ll stop him. Smart move.”
Marlin opened his mouth, but once more Garza interceded: “Wylie, would you just back off a minute? Lester’s a good man. If John asked him to keep it under his hat, that’s what he’ll do. We can stop and interview him again if we need to on the way out.”
Marlin could tell that Wylie didn’t like it. “All right, the first thing I need to do is a more thorough search,” Wylie said. He looked at Marlin. “I’d prefer it if everyone just stayed out of my way.”
Wylie turned and made his way back toward the fence, returning to Garza’s patrol car for equipment. After he was gone, Marlin looked at Garza and said, “That boy needs his cinch tightened a little.”
“We gotta clean dis shit up and quick, before your mother gets home,” Sal said, placing the handgun on his desk.
“But, Pop, what the hell happened?”
“Never mind dat shit now. Go out to the garage, grab dat tarp on the shelf above the washer. Bring a bucket and a bunch of rags. We don’t got much time,” Sal said, glancing at his wristwatch. It was three-twenty. Angela had said she and Maria would be home by six at the latest, when her Crock-Pot dinner would be ready.
Vinnie hustled to gather the items, and both men went to work cleaning up the scene.
First they wrapped Slaton in the tarp, bound it tightly with duct tape, and dragged him into the garage. Vinnie hopped into his Camaro in the driveway and backed it into the garage, parking in his mother’s usual spot. Fortunately, the Mameli home sat on five acres, and this provided plenty of privacy. Vinnie easily hefted the corpse and plopped it into his trunk.
For the next hour, the men attacked the grotesque residue in Sal’s den. They scrubbed, washed, wiped, and sponged, and the evidence was quickly disappearing—except for a large oval bloodstain on the carpet where Slaton’s body had fallen.
“Dis ain’t workin’,” Sal muttered, rubbing the rust-tinted carpet. “Fuck! Dis ain’t workin’!”
“Want some more water?” Vinnie asked, holding the bucket.
Sal pondered the situation for a moment. “Naw, we’d be here all night. Look, what you gotta do is run down to the Super S and rent a carpet cleaner, one-a dose portable jobs. Take my Lincoln, and get your ass back here pronto!”
“What about his truck, Pop?”
Damn it to hell! Sal had forgotten about Slaton’s Ford out front. “Why didn’t you remind me!” he shouted, Vinnie shrinking back. Sal thought things through, gears spinning. “Okay, listen. I’ll take my Lincoln, you follow in his Ford and we’ll ditch it somewhere along the way.”
He turned and grabbed something off the shelf behind him. “Put on dese gloves. We don’t need your fuckin’ prints all over the place.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By five-thirty, U.S. Marshal Smedley Allen Poindexter was wolfing down his fifth Twinkie, sitting in his nondescript sedan, bored out of his mind. That was the thing about this job—there were times when you sat for hours doing nothing but watching and waiting.
Unfortunately, Smedley had a habit of combating the tedium by eating; there was always an assortment of packaged cookies, donuts, chips, and salty snacks on the passenger seat beside him. Sometimes a quart or two of Big Red soda, which tasted just fine to Smedley even when it was warm. In the past eleven years, he had packed a total of seventy disgusting, blubbery pounds onto his already pudgy body. He now tipped the scales at a whopping 280, way too much for his five-ten frame.
The worst part of it all was that he shared a name with a certain cereal-loving pachyderm. When the Cap’n Crunch folks had come out with Smedley the Elephant decades ago, Smedley Poindexter had been a skinny boy of thirteen. Sure, he had gotten razzed because of the name, but it would have been much worse if he had been overweight. He had had other problems to deal with—acne, shyness, a mild stutter—but thank God he hadn’t been fat!
Now, however, he was fat. Way too fat. And when you’re an overweight guy walking around with a name like Smedley—well, plenty of people can’t resist a setup like that. In Smedley’s office, there was this marshal named Todd—a GQ-looking jerk—who would press his cheek to his shoulder, toss his arm in the air like a trunk, and make a trumpeting noise when Smedley walked by. Everybody just laughed and laughed at that. Including Smedley. He pretended it didn’t bother him, but he secretly envisioned bitch-slapping Todd into early next week. Smedley just couldn’t assert himself enough to tell those guys to shut the hell up. He daydreamed about it, though. A lot.
What the hell, Smedley thought, as he crammed the remainder of the cream-filled delight into his mouth. Maybe he’d start a diet next week. It was never too late, right?
With his hands free now, he twirled the radio dial. He preferred talk radio. Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, even those two goobers who yakked on and on about car repair. Those guys were pretty funny, even if they did have weird accents. Smedley found some sort of program about horticulture and sat back in his seat.
A car came bouncing down the rutted street in front of the Mamelis’ house. Could be a Mercedes. It looked kind of gray, too. Kind of hard to tell yet... nope, it was a Lexus, and it kept on going down the road.
Smedley had knocked on the door when he first arrived, but nobody was home. Looking through the garage windows, all he saw was the kid’s Camaro. So Smedley parked out on the road, a hundred yards down, waiting. A few minutes later, Sal’s Lincoln came ripping along with Sal and the kid inside, returning from who-knows-where.
It was Smedley’s job to drop in on the Mamelis on occasion, maybe a couple of times a month. Kind of keep an eye on them, make sure everything was kosher. Granted, Sal didn’t have a lot to gain by running at this point, but with some of these guys, you never knew what they’d do.
Smedley remembered Gino Riccotto, a wiseguy who had turned federal witness. Late in the game, Riccotto decided he’d made a mistake, he wasn’t a rat, and it was time to kiss and make up with the men he was going to send to prison. So, the day before the trial, Gino slipped away from the safe house while Smedley was asleep on the sofa. Not much you can do for him now, Smedley’s boss had said. He’ll turn up eventually. Three days later, a security guard found what was left of Gino oozing out of a bus-station locker. Maybe that’s how Sal will end up, Smedley thought. Then he realized he was smiling.
Angela and Maria drove along in silence in Angela’s gray Mercedes, the only sound the hum of the tir
es and the soft classical music on the stereo.
There were times when Angela could hardly stand to look at her housekeeper. She didn’t hate Maria, exactly; in fact she didn’t hate her at all. After all, deep down, Angela knew it wasn’t Maria’s fault. If something was going on between Maria and Sal, Angela felt certain it was all Sal’s doing. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Sal’s infidelity had left Angela plodding through life in a state of despair and regret for twenty years. She didn’t love her husband, and wasn’t sure if she ever would again. Sure, she had loved him at one time, back when they first met. Those days seemed like a fairy tale compared to the last two decades.
Sal had swept Angela off her feet in 1983. She was a secretary working for the New York building inspector’s office, leading a dreary life, living in a dreary apartment, hanging out with dreary friends.
Then one day, in walked a good-looking young man with thick black hair, playful eyes, and a beautiful smile. Tall. Charismatic. In an expensive suit. He had an appointment, he said, and his name was Roberto Ragusa. (Angela couldn’t get used to his new name, Sal. She still slipped sometimes and called him Bobby. Sal always looked around nervously and said, What, you trying to get me killed? It’s Sal, goddammit—Sal!)
While Sal had waited for his meeting, he flipped through magazines and flirted with Angela. She played coy, but inside, she ate it up. He seemed so lively and fun, so different than anybody she had ever met.
They had their first date that night and were married six months later.
They were the toast of the town, attending Broadway premieres, rubbing elbows with important politicians and captains of industry, going to the hottest clubs and dancing till dawn.
Then, fourteen months after the wedding, Vinnie was born.
That’s when things changed.
Angela knew, with a newborn, that she and Sal couldn’t do the things they had done when they were courting. The wild, exciting ride was fun while it lasted, but now it was time to settle down and raise a nice family.
Sal had other things in mind.
While Angela stayed home with the baby, Sal still caroused until all hours of the night, often coming home drunk, sometimes with the lingering scent of perfume woven into his clothing.
He always claimed she was imagining things—but he had affairs, the bastard, and she knew it. He was cold to her, treating her like a nanny and a maid. Their sex life vanished.
But what was she to do? Disgrace herself by divorcing the son of a bitch? Her mother would simply die if that happened. Her new friends—wives of men with money and power—would pity her at first, then slowly stop calling. She’d be out of the loop, dropped from the inner circle, and the extravagant lifestyle she had grown accustomed to would slip away.
There was also the baby to consider. She could never support herself and a child if she returned to her job as a secretary. Also, Vinnie deserved a father—and Sal, Angela bitterly admitted, was a good father. Hell, he spent more time with the boy than he did with Angela.
It was also about this time when Angela reluctantly admitted to herself that her husband wasn’t a mere businessman. Despite his claims to the contrary, Sal was nothing more than a thug. He ran a concrete business, but from snippets she heard while Sal was on the phone, the business was far from legit. There appeared to be kickbacks, strong-arm tactics, and laundering involved. Not to mention the way some of Sal’s associates tended to disappear suddenly. Here one day, gone the next, never to be seen again. She always wondered if Sal had anything to do with those disappearances.
So, for twenty years, Angela had resigned herself to a lonely, bleak existence, the wife of a common criminal.
Then, three years ago, Sal had finally come clean. The federal investigations and upcoming trials forced his hand, and he told her everything. Or at least he said he did. The newspapers referred to Sal as a hit man, but he never confessed to that, despite the mounds of evidence against him. I bent a few tax rules, Sal would say, but kill somebody? Never.
Now she thought Sal was screwing the housekeeper.
It made Angela furious.
When their family had been relocated, Angela, oddly, had been elated. She looked at it as a fresh start, an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and begin a whole new life. A chance to gain respectability, make up for Sal’s evil deeds in the past. And maybe now, away from the circles that had turned Sal into a corrupt, heartless man, they could fix their broken marriage.
But it wasn’t working out that way at all.
Sal, so far as Angela knew, was staying inside the law, even with his new brush-clearing business. But his womanizing—the thing that hurt her most—had returned.
Wheeling into the driveway now, Angela was on the verge of tears. She shouldn’t let her mind wander like that, because it always made her upset. And angry…oh, so angry.
Twenty yards from the garage, a black cat ran out in front of the Mercedes and froze. Angela’s foot immediately rose from the gas pedal, and lingered over the brake.
In a split second, though, something dark and macabre in Angela’s psyche took over. It was Maria’s cat, she knew, and here, finally, was a way for Angela to spread a little of the pain around, to share some of the misery. It was nonsense, of course. Sal was the one Angela wanted to hurt, not Maria. But Angela wasn’t thinking clearly; she was merely looking for a way to release some of the torment in her soul.
She lightly pushed the accelerator. The fine German engine responded, and the cat seemed to be swallowed up like a piece of lint in front of a vacuum cleaner.
“Mi gato!” Maria cried, as they both heard the thump beneath the wheels.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Another thirty minutes went by and Smedley was dozing off behind the wheel, his head bobbing to his chest every twenty seconds or so. Then, just as he was reaching for the bottle of Big Red, needing a caffeine jolt, he saw Angela Mameli’s car glide into her driveway. He thought he could see the pretty housekeeper—Maria was her name—in the passenger seat.
Finally. Smedley preferred to drop in when Angela and Maria were home. Angela was much nicer than the Mameli men. Sal Mameli could be a real bastard, and that smart-ass son of his wasn’t much better. They always brought up that tired bit about how their taxes paid Smedley’s salary, looking smug about it. But both men seemed to behave a little better when Angela was around. And she sometimes invited him to stay for dinner.
Smedley decided to give Angela a few minutes to get settled before he paid a visit.
Maria sprang from the car in a panic. She was dumbfounded. It almost seemed as if Mrs. Mameli had hit her cat on purpose. Maria knew Mrs. Mameli was a sad, angry woman, but surely she would not take out her emotions on a defenseless animal.
Behind the car, Tuco lay broken and bloody. Maria went to one knee and cradled the cat’s head, but it was obvious there was no life left in him.
“Maria, I’m so sorry!” Mrs. Mameli was behind her, looking over her shoulder. “I meant to hit the brake but I hit the gas. I don’t know what happened. It was all so quick.”
A tear ran down Maria’s cheek.
“You poor thing,” Mrs. Mameli said. “I know that cat meant a lot to you. I feel just awful.” Mrs. Mameli patted Maria’s shoulder, then returned to her car and continued up the driveway.
Alone now, Maria gently lifted the mangled body—and saw something that surprised her: a small tuft of white hair on the cat’s chest. Tuco had no such patch. It was not Tuco!
Maria was momentarily elated, then was washed over with guilt for feeling happy while this innocent animal lay dead in her hands.
Sal placed the steam cleaner in the trunk of his Lincoln and slammed the lid just as the gears of the garage-door opener groaned and the door began to lift. Jeez, that was close, he thought.
The door open now, Sal could see Angela sitting out there in her Mercedes. She made an impatient gesture that said, What’s Vinnie’s car doing in my spot? then killed the engine and climb
ed out.
Sal planted a fake smile on his face and walked over to greet her, trying to gauge her mood; she had been such a bitch lately. He could already hear her carping about having to park in the driveway, asking why Vinnie had parked in the garage. Sal had a good lie ready: Vinnie was vacuuming the inside of his car and needed to be close to an outlet.
But Angela let him off the hook by speaking first. “What a goddamn day!” she moaned. “Poor Maria, I just ran over her cat.”
Sal looked down the driveway. “You hit her cat?” As far as he was concerned, that was good news. He wondered why he had never thought of that himself.
Angela jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Not to mention, we got company again out on the road.”
