by David Cole
I wrote out a name and a date.
"Look for this," I said.
"Where will you be?"
"I'll wait outside."
A wedding was taking place in the grassy main square of the Lodge, with a chuppa positioned in front of the wall behind the swimming pool. The ceremony had just finished, and the bride and groom were kissing to wild hoots and applause.
The bride wore a white wedding gown, off the shoulders, and the groom grinned proudly in a traditional tuxedo. With a shock I realized the bride was Joanna, who worked the front desk.
"Laura?"
One of the guests stood in front of me, wearing a powder blue two-piece periwinkle dress, holding a champagne flute. She pulled off her sunglasses and I saw it was Donna, one of the servers at the restaurant.
"Laura?" she said again. "Is that really you?"
I shrank back against a sumac, nodding. The eighty or ninety guests were all dressed so well, they were so elegant, so perfect that I felt sloppy and out of place.
"Hi, Donna," I said.
"Are you staying here? I didn't see your name on the guest list for breakfast."
"No," I said. "I mean, I'm just visiting a friend. In room nineteen."
"Isn't this grand, this wedding? Don't they look happy?"
"Grand," I said. "Um, look, I've got to leave. Nice to see you, Donna."
"Okay. Sorry to bother you."
"It's not a bother."
But she stepped away from me, put her sunglasses on, and turned back to the party. I stared at the party, the bride, fascinated by the happiness of the wedding, wondering what it would be like to get married again.
A fantasy, I thought.
I went back to Don's room just as paper finished chugging out of his printer.
"You'll love this," he said.
I read what he'd found.
"What are you going to do now?"
"Going to a dinner party," I said.
Don frowned at my wrinkled jeans and yellow tee.
"You'd better dress up."
"No time," I said. "Besides, I won't be staying there very long."
35
Driving into Tubac after sunset, I saw the first monsoon of the summer working its rainy way up from Nogales. Still forty miles away, the monsoon dominated the southwestern sky. Dark, gunmetal-black clouds, webbed with yellowish-white veins of lightning.
South of the Tubac art colony, Dance's house stood off-road from US 19. After two miles of a smoothly graded dirt road, I crossed over a cattle guard and onto a paved surface. His entire property was surrounded by high fencing, with video cameras stationed every hundred feet. Double-parked cars filled his circular driveway. I parked my rented Ford Escort between a Ferrari and a Lamborghini.
The house looked glass-sheeted and framed in steel, much of which had rusted to a burnished yellow color. The front door stood open. Live jazz came from a central room, which was surrounded by a three-story atrium walled on two sides entirely with glass. One wall looked east, where the sky was still clear and spectacularly cobalt blue. The other wall directly faced the monsoon, already much closer, although I couldn't tell if it would move west of the house or flood us with rain.
I had no idea how many people were at the party, nor did I recognize anybody. The servers were dressed in rodeo cowboy clothing and extraordinary red boots by Paul Bond, the Nogales boot maker. Some women wore diaphanous sheaths, others strapless gowns, some just jeans and tees. A very mixed crowd, except all of them looked rich.
"Laura, honey."
Jake Nasso pushed a glass of red wine into my hand.
"What are you doing here, Laura?"
"I need to talk with Dance."
"Don't think he's much in the mood for that."
Setting the wineglass on the carpet beside my feet, I hoisted my briefcase a few inches and ducked my head toward it. A young couple tangoed by, the woman kicking the wineglass over without realizing what she'd done. The reddish stain blossomed on the carpet, but Nasso didn't even bother to look at it.
"He will be."
"What have you found out, honey?"
"I know it all," I said, looking up at the balcony two floors above the atrium. "I'm going up there. Away from the noise. Tell him to look for me in one of the rooms."
"Okay. I'll bring him."
"No. Him only. I want to look over that railing and see you standing in the middle of this floor. Stand right on the wine stain, so I can find you. Clear?"
"You got some plastique in that briefcase?"
"Just paper."
"You don't mind if I have a peeksee?"
"Not a chance."
"Why are you here?"
Nasso was intensely serious, troubled, wary. I saw the stairway up and turned toward it.
"Tell Dance I'm upstairs."
Nasso watched me climb to the second balcony, but when I got to the top floor, he'd disappeared. I opened doors at random. Master bedroom. Guest bedroom. Guest bath. Office. On the wall facing the monsoon. I sat in his antique Eames chair. The desktop was cluttered with documents of all sizes and colors, but I didn't bother to even glance at them. A gold pocket watch sat on a jade stand, next to the hooded green library lamp. I turned it on, walked over to turn off the two floor lamps.
Thunder echoed in the distance.
I waited.
Dance stopped at the doorway, leaning against the jamb, holding a squarish glass of what looked like bourbon. He wore a dark blue blazer over an off-white pleated cotton shirt, the neck band buttoned. Designer jeans tapering into a fabulous pair of boots, the uppers colored dark red with elaborate tooling, the bottoms a faded-leaf yellow. He saw me looking at them and cocked his left leg so that the boot lay against his right knee.
"Paul Bond. Sharkskin. Fourteen inches long, bulldogging heels."
"Boots hurt my feet."
"Paul can make you some that feel so good you won't want to take them off."
"Pass."
He uncocked his leg and went to sit on a leather director's chair. I set my briefcase on top of his desk.
"Get you something to drink?"
"Pass."
"Right to business, then. What have you got?"
"The people who run the smuggling ring," I said as I began pulling out papers.
"Which one?"
"The one that made a lot of money for all of you."
He grinned.
"Laura, Laura, Laura. This is so noirish. The monsoon, the rain and the thunder and the lightning and the way you've made things dark. Listen, kid. You're on your way back into one of those dinky little rooms with metal toilets. I'm going back downstairs."
A monster clap of thunder rattled the glass window. I could see it shimmer, like being in a window seat on an airplane in bad weather and watching the wingtips wobble up and down. Five streaks of lightning zigzagged a few miles away.
"I love standing outside in these monsoons. It's like, I mean, did you ever stand right next to a railroad track, let the train rumble by and you want to get as close to the train as you possibly can?"
"No," I said.
"Want to stand out on the deck? Grab hold of the railing when the storm hits? This house is built to stand up to any kind of weather. I'm built that way too."
"Can I clear off your desktop?" I asked. "I need a little room."
"Don't think so. In fact, let's just stop your dog and pony show before you let the animals out of your bag. I'll get Jake, he'll deal with you."
I set the briefcase on the oak parquet floor, extended both my arms straight out, and swept everything except the lamp off the desktop. The pocket watch burst open, shards of glass flying clear across the room.
"You dumb fuck," he said, and started to get up.
"Look at these."
I laid out a dozen colored satellite recon photos.
He hesitated at the door, but couldn't resist coming to look.
"San Rafael Valley," I said. Tank trucks. Water trucks."
I la
id a sheet of paper beside the photos.
"Smuggling trucks. How many women can you get inside?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Let's say, twenty-five women. Packed in, maybe thirty-five. And why not pack them in, just like jamming women into shipping containers. So, thirty-five women. Five trucks a day. We're talking up to a thousand women in a busy week."
"So that's how they were smuggled across. Very good, Laura. But these recon photos, I can't see any names on the trucks. Where do they come from?"
I pushed the paper toward him.
"Zamora's place. The maquiladora. All but one of the trucks go out with women, only one of them comes back filled with water."
"Zamora? I don't believe it."
"Forget Zamora. Let's talk about ... Niue."
He blanched, almost staggered. I didn't give him time to recover, didn't give him time to say anything, although his mouth was opening in protest. I took out more paper.
"Here's your money. At least, what we found in bank accounts on the island of Niue. We're looking at banks on Naura, but we don't have that information yet."
"What are you talking about?"
"This is what I do for a living, remember? I track money."
"What makes you think it's my money?"
"I don't."
He'd recovered enough to pull the director's chair to the desk opposite me. It was a stall, the elaborately slow movement of the chair, sitting in it, getting up to adjust its position, sitting again, tucking his jeans into the boots.
"Somebody's set up a very elaborate scam," he said finally. "Used my name on these accounts. The name means nothing."
"I agree."
"So why are you bothering to show me these things?"
"Here's what I figure. I've got account information for Zamora and Garza, but there's not much need to show that to you. I figure, they're making a whole lot of money with their smuggling scheme, and you decided that what they were paying you wasn't enough. You got me to look for this financial information so you could pressure Zamora. Get more money from him."
"This is ridiculous."
"You're not reading me at all. I don't care what they pay you. I don't care how you're involved, what you do or don't do, who you prosecute or don't prosecute."
"It's not really his money," Nasso said from the doorway.
He held a small Beretta loosely in one hand and shut the door with the other.
"You want a taste," he said to me. "But you're shaking down the wrong man."
"Call it whatever you want. I don't care. But yes. I want in. Pay me, and I'll go away. An untraceably long way away."
"Garza was greedy. You've got most of it right, except that I never dealt with Zamora. Garza set up the smuggling ring. He had connections with the El Chapo drug cartel. Garza also had connections with the Russian mafia. He knew about how they used banks in Naura to launder their money. But he was greedy. He wouldn't give me what I asked. So I set you against him. I threatened him with you."
"So how much?" Dance said quietly.
"Oh, a million dollars?" Nasso shifted his weight onto his left leg. "Two? Five?"
"You'd give her five million dollars, just to make her disappear?"
"Ten million. There's just so much money in this. Ten million is nothing."
"I've seen your Niue bank accounts," I told him. "You've got forty million in one account alone, twenty-seven million in another."
"Niue, Naura, Panama, I've got money in all those places." Dance cocked his head. "How many of my accounts do you really know about?"
"Actually, none."
"What?"
I turned over the left collar flap of my blouse, showed him the microphone.
"Jesus! What are you doing?" Dance said.
Reaching into the briefcase, I took out a digital recorder and set it on the desktop. He ran both hands through his hair, staring at the recorder, his mind incredibly transparent, thinking how quickly he could grab it. I took a small black aluminum box from the briefcase.
"Transmitter. You can take the recorder. That's what you're thinking right now, you'll grab the recorder, remove the memory card, nobody will know. But this box is a transmitter. Right up to a satellite. The entire conversation is being recorded."
"Wheatley," Dance said.
I nodded.
"Never trusted lesbians," Nasso said, raising the Beretta.
"Jake, Jake," Dance said excitedly. "Let's work something out here."
"I've already got it worked out. Outside, boss. Come on, get up, get up."
"Jake, don't be a fool."
Nasso tucked his free hand inside Dance's jacket collar and squeezed on a nerve. Dance gasped in pain and rose out of the director's chair. Nasso shifted his hold on Dance's neck and pushed him rapidly toward the door.
"Nasso, wait!" I said. "Wait!"
But he'd already pushed Dance through the doorway and backed him against the balcony railing. When Nasso moved back into the doorway, out of sight of anybody two floors below, he leveled the Beretta at Dance. I suddenly realized what Nasso was going to do, but I couldn't get to him in time. Just as I reached out to him, he shot Dance twice in the chest, the gunshots astonishingly loud and rebounding off the huge atrium walls.
"Here," Nasso said, thrusting the Beretta into my outstretched hand.
I took the gun before I even thought what I was doing.
"Michael!" Nasso shouted, rushing out of the doorway to Dance, who was clearly dead. Nasso propped him up, maneuvering his body over the railing as though he was trying to hold Dance from falling, but instead pushing him over the railing. Women screamed as Dance's body floated two stories down and landed with a bloodspattering thud on the marble flooring. I saw Nasso wringing his hands together, no, he was pulling off latex gloves and shoving them into his pocket.
He turned to me with a smile and came back to the doorway. I raised the Beretta, but he grinned wildly and waved his finger at me.
"No bullets left. Of course, nobody down there knows that. Just hold the gun up high, run down the stairway. Nobody's going to want to come near you. I'll pretend I'm trying to catch you, but I won't."
I drew back my arm, relaxing my fingers, ready to drop the gun.
"She's got a gun!"
Nasso shouted down to the people staring up at us.
"She shot him."
Two men pointed at me and started to move toward the stairway.
"Let her outside," Nasso shouted. "I've got men out there, she won't get anywhere. Stay away from her. Let her get out of the house, so nobody else gets hurt."
"On your way, Laura Winslow," he said quietly to me. "Those old arrest warrants were nothing. But now thousands of people are going to look for a murderer."
I held up the transmitter.
"Wheatley knows the truth."
"Oh, she's not a problem. Better run now. Run as long as you can. But just remember, honey. As of tonight, you are absolutely, totally fucked."
36
"Can you please come closer?" Pinau asked. "I'm not wearing my contacts, and I broke my regular glasses yesterday. All I've got are these drugstore reading things. So I can't really see you very well."
"Not a problem," I said.
"You're being hunted by every law enforcement officer within a hundred miles. Do you know that?"
"Because I murdered Michael Dance?"
"Or so they say. I'm not so sure."
"It was Jake Nasso. If you want, I can tell you what happened. But I don't really have much time."
"It's not necessary." She bent over and tapped an immaculately red fingernail on the stack of papers. "I did read all of your documents."
"And?"
She pressed her back into the chair, moved into the circle of her hotel lamp. I hardly recognized her, and for a moment wondered if it was an entirely different person. A tired, older woman, sitting in her faded chenille bathrobe, all makeup wiped from her wrinkled face, and completely unconcerned how she looked.<
br />
Seeing me look her up and down, she smiled.
"I'm sixty-seven years old," she said. "When I'm out in public, I'm a very traditional Mexican woman. Always look your finest, always be presentable to the extreme, because you are a woman in a macho society that values women mainly for their beauty. Or maybe even just for their bodies. But this is the real me."
A cigarette burned in an amber ashtray, but she seemed unaware that it was even lit. I saw a pair of worn flannel pajamas laid out on the bed. All the papers I'd faxed her were stacked on the floor beside her chair.
"What do you know about Mexico's judicial system?"
"Corrupt."
"In many ways," she said, "that's unpleasantly true. Presidente Fox wants to make a difference. But the corruption of the last century, the pervasive influence of the drug cartels, the underpaid policia, dirty money, dishonest bureaucrats— it must seem very strange to you people from El Norte."
"We have our own problems. Um, Mrs. Medina, I'm not here to talk politics or morality. You've read all the financial stuff? The offshore bank accounts?"
"Yes. Most of the names—I wasn't surprised."
"You provided the names, so you can't be surprised."
"Yes. That is true. But Francisco Zamora. What can I tell you about Mexico's hopes for better citizens? Better wages? Even—yes, even better water."
"Did you suspect him?"
"Garza, most definitely. Garza was always a greedy man. But Francisco? No."
She took a pack of cigarettes and an old Zippo lighter from her bathrobe pocket. About to light the cigarette, she noticed the one burning in the ashtray.
"What can you do?" I asked.
"I am the chief officer of the Public Ministry. The prosecutorial arm of the Mexican judicial system. And yet there are many things I can not do. Hector Garza, for example. He works for me, but he does not work for me. I have the power to put him in prison, but I can not touch him. Fox may have won the election. But hundreds of officials from the old regime didn't stand for election. Their power is fading in some circles. In other ways their ancient power is absolute.
