‘Good. So do I.’
When the four men were gone, Sarah said, ‘Mabel called me yesterday because she remembered something.’ She told him about the hurried phone call that had ended her day.
‘Interesting,’ Delaney said. ‘Have you asked Jack Ames if he remembers that incident?’
‘Not yet. I’ll call him today. Now what’s your question?’
‘Mine also concerns Jack Ames. He called my office yesterday afternoon to lodge a protest. Got the information officer first and said he needed to talk to “whoever’s in charge of detectives.” So we talked and he said he wanted to file a protest. Said he felt the two detectives who’d just left him were kind of arrogant. Especially the black one, he said, who was “uppity.” He didn’t actually say “uppity nigger,” but it was clear that’s what he meant. I managed to get off the phone without calling him a bigot, but I have to ask, what went on during that interview?’
‘Actually it was all very cordial till the end.’ Sarah told him about the final exchange, when Ames questioned what Jason was doing there. ‘Jason hadn’t said one word until then. When Ames questioned his reason to be there he gave – we both gave – kind of humorous answers, I guess. But I don’t think we were out of line. It’s not up to us to explain what we’re doing to everybody we question, is it?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Good. That brings me to my question.’ She told him about Jason’s feeling that Jack was leaving something out of his story. She left out Jason’s family details but included his later suggestion. ‘He thought I ought to try jerking his chain a little, see if he’d get angry enough to blurt out something more about Poppy.’
‘So, now you’ve talked to him, what do you think? Good idea to try a little rough stuff?’
‘Sure. This is a homicide case – anything’s fair that works. And if he’s that touchy … Jack Ames has never been on my suspect list for the murder of Calvin Springer, but after that conversation yesterday I’d be glad to put him there.’
She called Ames as soon as she got back to her cubicle, got no answer and left a message.
He must not have liked getting reprimanded by Delaney’s friend in Marana PD. He called back in four minutes. From some noisy place, he said, ‘I bet you want to talk about that phone call from Mabel yesterday, don’t you? But I just realized it’s so noisy in here I can’t hear you. Can you hold on a second while I step outside?’
There were other voices and a door slammed. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Nice and quiet out here but very hot.’
‘I’ll be quick. Mabel called about an incident at the farmer’s market on Convento when her husband disappeared into the crowd and you found him and brought him back. You remember it?’
‘Vaguely. It was just one of many times during his last two years when I rescued Fred from disaster. He went through a kind of unruly two-year-old stage where he kept wandering off.’ He sighed. ‘That seemed very troubling at the time, but now I remember those as the good times. Later on, he couldn’t walk at all. At the end, he couldn’t eat.’
‘It must have been very hard.’ She waited a beat before she said, ‘Mabel remembers that he kept saying he’d seen “Old Bill.” She seemed to think he might have seen Bill McGinty. But you were the one who found him that day and you never mentioned that.’
‘No, because it never happened. It was like a hundred other times when he imagined he saw something. Or heard from somebody he used to know. Sometimes his body wandered; other times he stood still and his mind left the room. He would see a neighbor he saw every day and call him a name from childhood. Alzheimer’s is a very unpredictable disease.’
‘I understand that. But when you retrieved him out of the crowd that day, was he talking to a man named Bill?’
‘Oh, let’s see, I think by the time I got there he was talking to the wall. People around him were kind of edging away.’ He sighed again.
‘So you didn’t see anybody that day that reminded you of the Bill McGinty you knew in Mexico?’
‘No. And I didn’t expect to. Mabel’s prone to remembering Fred’s last two years a little better than they were. It’s hard for her to accept that she put all that effort into caring for a man who didn’t know, by the end, who she was.’
Sarah was trying to think of a way to transition to Poppy McGinty after that but he went right on. ‘By the way, did you see the stories in the paper and on TV? About those drug dealers killing each other down in Agua Prieta? Looks like they shot an American agent, too.’
‘We heard about it.’
‘I hope you and your crew are looking out for each other?’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Ames, we always do that.’ Then outrage put a red halo around the desktop screen she was looking at. What hypocrisy pretending to care about their well-being after he had just done his best to get Jason in trouble. In the bright light of her anger she saw, as if she were looking down from a height, the two of them talking to each other politely without communicating at all. Maybe Jason’s right, she thought. Let’s try rude. ‘It’s really good of you, though, to be concerned about our safety.’ He made a sort of purring noise. ‘But listen, while I’ve got you on the phone, I’d like to go over your story about Poppy McGinty again.’
‘Oh. What part of that—’
‘The relationship part. Because frankly I find it incredible that a red-blooded sailor like you would hang around a beautiful, neglected woman for so long just for the fun of helping with the snack trays. Some of those nice long afternoons on your boat, now, come on—’
‘No,’ Jack Ames said. ‘You are not going to talk any filthy talk like that about her, not to me, ever. In fact, we are not going to talk about the McGintys any more.’ His anger grew as he spoke. ‘You are a very rude woman and if you ever call me again I’m going to lodge a complaint with the Tucson Police Department. You got that? Never. Call me. Again.’
After the line went dead Sarah put her phone in the cradle and stared at it for some time, thinking, well, that went well. Didn’t it? She was roused from her concentration by a commotion coming off the elevator. There was a lot of thumping and the smell of dust and engine oil, then Ollie’s voice, loud and triumphant, ‘Didn’t we tell you this was the day?’
She poked her head out and saw him, very dusty but gloved up and grinning beside a pile of dirty hard-sided suitcases. Ray Menendez, equally grubby and gloved, had his foot in the elevator doorway, holding it open while they dragged out the suitcases and one transparent plastic box.
Ollie held up a #10 business envelope with a strip of tape along one end. ‘This was taped to the bottom of the light switch,’ he said. ‘I think these are all the keys to these cases.’
‘Excellent,’ Delaney said, pulling on gloves. ‘Let’s get Leo out here to help. He deserves a treat.’
‘Tell me quick,’ Sarah said as she gloved up. ‘Where was it?’
‘Two blocks from where we started, goddamn it,’ Ollie said. ‘In a storage unit at the back of the gas station where he probably went every week. We’d passed it on the first day and speculated about it, but the doors all face the back of the lot so the address was wrong for what we took to be the entrance. We thought we were looking at a gravel yard.’
‘Well, it is a gravel yard,’ Ray insisted. ‘They sell some gravel and some of that decorative paving stone, and some slate—’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Ollie said. ‘It was dumb we didn’t drive in and take a closer look that first day.’ He handed the keys to Delaney and said, ‘We still got that long table around here somewhere?’
When it was set up they put all the cases on it. ‘The keys all have tags with a number but I can’t see any numbers on the cases, can you?’
They turned one case, looking and looking. Ray lost patience and began trying keys on another case until he found one that fit. When the lid came open the detectives all made the same sound, a gasp like, ‘Whoa!’ Ollie stopped grumbling over his case and turned to look. It was full of large b
ills. So much money in such a small space, it seemed to raise the temperature in the room.
They shared the task of counting that first cache. The grubby little case contained half a million dollars.
‘Jesus, and there are, what, eight of them?’ Leo said. ‘Do you suppose they all—?’
Delaney had two lawyers and a couple of security guards in the room by then. The lawyers got pretty jazzed by the money – the tall one’s childhood stammer came back and the short, stocky one sweat so much he kept fogging his glasses – but they both worked at keeping their voices matter-of-fact. The guards were a special detail out of the chief’s office, doing what guards get paid to do: look brain-dead while they notice everything, especially hands.
‘You just never see this, do you?’ one of them said. ‘It’s kind of like a thousand-year storm.’
When they had all the money uncovered and were halfway through counting it, Delaney turned to Ray Menendez and said, ‘Now let’s see what you’ve got in that plastic box.’
‘Just records, I guess.’ Ray pulled the cover off. ‘We could see it wasn’t money so we just loaded it up. Shall I?’ He put on gloves and got a knife out.
‘Go ahead,’ Delaney said.
Ray cut the tape on the box. There were two big manila envelopes inside. He opened one and dropped the contents on the table: a driver’s license, SCUBA certification, social security and Medicare cards and a set of fingerprints in a glassine folder. The second contained several passport books in the name of William F. McGinty.
The oldest passport picture showed a handsome, smiling man in early middle age, with plenty of well-tended flesh on his bones and a full head of curly black hair just turning silver at the edges. In subsequent passports he looked older and more serious, and he was completely bald.
‘For God’s sake,’ Sarah said. ‘That’s Calvin Springer.’
‘Wait, now,’ Ollie said. ‘I think I’m going into brain freeze. Didn’t we just decide Bill McGinty was the cartel bozo who got Calvin killed by the cartel?’
‘That was a guess,’ Delaney said. ‘This is evidence. Shall we all sit down a minute?’
They sat around the long table, listening to each other breathe.
Delaney said, ‘I have to hear you say it out loud. Why would Calvin Springer’s picture be on Bill McGinty’s passport?’
Sarah opened her mouth and closed it a couple of times, and finally said, ‘Because he is Bill McGinty.’
‘But he’s been Calvin Springer ever since he lived in that house under Signal Mountain. How could such a plain, ordinary man pull off a trick like that?’
‘I expect he had a lot of help from the guys who were setting him up to launder money for them. Don’t you think?’
‘Yes. With the part of my brain that isn’t too overloaded to think, that’s what I think.’
Sarah said, ‘May I have that curly-haired one and one of the bald ones to show Martina?’
‘Yes. And take this one to Gloria,’ Delaney said, handing them over. ‘Tell her to test it for prints and DNA. Oh, and here’s a full set of prints she can try for a match on. Why did he have this full set of prints, by the way?’
‘Because,’ Ray said, reading off the termination record that was attached to the prints, ‘are you ready for this? Because he was working for the First Federal Bank of LA, how’s that for the fox getting into the henhouse?’ He passed the record to Ollie.
‘Actually,’ Ollie said, waving another sheet of stationery, ‘it looks to me like the bank owned this real estate office and McGinty worked for the realty. Selling houses? The drug honcho must have gone through a tame phase.’
‘Oh, LA,’ Ray said. ‘I got a cousin who lives there. He told me by the nineties even the guys on the garbage trucks were moving cocaine on the side.’
‘Tell Jody,’ Delaney said, impatient as always with urban legends, ‘we need a match on those prints as fast as possible.’
‘I will,’ Sarah said. ‘Please tell me they’re going to prove that Calvin Springer was really Bill McGinty.’
‘If they don’t, I’m going to go work someplace else.’
‘Oh, please don’t leave now. Whoever he was, we still have to find his killer.’
‘Aw, hell,’ Ollie said. ‘I suppose now we’re back to Lois Johnson’s theory of cartel hitmen.’
‘For today, anyway,’ Sarah said. ‘So are we still traveling in pairs? Who’s available to go to Martina’s house with me?’
‘I am,’ Leo said. ‘I been inside long enough; I’m starting to grow mold.’
He stood up and began putting on his jacket, energized by the prospect of outside air. But just then Jason Peete and Oscar Cifuentes strode off the elevator, wearing expressions of extreme self-satisfaction.
‘Here you are, all together,’ Jason said. ‘How convenient. We brought home some beautiful pictures to show you. Let’s put them out here, compadre.’ He was so full of himself he didn’t notice that the table he was indicating with his triumphant ta-da! gesture was already littered with dirty old hard-sided suitcases and a great deal of dirty old paper.
As he turned back from Oscar, though, his eyes focused and he saw the money – piles and piles of cash money being counted by strangers in suits. He saw Ollie and Ray at full beam across the table, their faces saying plainly, We found the stash.
The air went out of Jason’s balloon slowly as he realized his great find was being upstaged by an even greater find. His cheeks took on the iron-hard consistency Sarah remembered from the day he felt the ICE lady’s condescension. Watching his anger grow, she thought, he’s going to kick another rock.
‘Jason,’ she said, ‘you can’t possibly know how much we need to see those pictures right now.’ She pushed a suitcase out of the way and cleared a spot on the table. ‘Put them right here, Oscar.’
Oscar laid them out the way he did everything – meticulously – in a neat, perfect set of two straight rows. They were all good, clear shots of Calvin Springer depositing cash into his bank account, filling out a deposit slip made out to William F. McGinty.
‘There you go, boss,’ she said. ‘How’s that for good ID?’
‘Jesus,’ Leo said. ‘That’s some camera, isn’t it? It even got the hairs in his ears.’
Sarah felt a deep need to sit with her crewmates in some clean, quiet space where they could talk all day about this day’s work. She wanted to ask, over and over, ‘Can you believe this?’ Hear them say how unlikely it was that on the same day they would find the money stash and the Medicare records they’d been looking for from the beginning and then get clear pictures from the bank in Benson that would really pull this case together.
She wanted them to take turns telling the story over again from the beginning. When she was sure she had every detail straight in her mind she would write her part into the case file.
But the money was there, the lawyers and the guards were still there and as usual there was barely time to do the necessary. They settled for high-fives all round and got back to work.
‘What do you say, gents,’ Delaney said, turning back to the attorneys. ‘Let’s get this money counted and put away before we all yield to our natural desire to grab some of it and go to Brazil.’
Leo drove Sarah to the crime lab and said he’d wait in the car while she ran upstairs.
‘Take your time,’ he said, tuning the radio till he found some golden oldies. ‘I’m about to retire, remember? I’m in no hurry.’
Gloria looked up from her cluttered lab table and said, ‘Girl, you look like you just struck gold. Whassup?’
‘Remember that crime scene we worked on the Fourth of July, down there under Signal Mountain?’
‘Who could forget that one? You got something?’
‘Quite a bit. Did you get any good pictures of the victim’s head that day? Can you bring them up?’
‘Right now? I’m in the middle of … Never mind. It’s a big deal, your stuff, huh?’ She moved to another computer and did som
e rapid-fire clicking. Ghastly crime-scene photos appeared. ‘Here we go. Whatcha want?’
Sarah held up a bald passport photo. ‘Anything close to this?’
‘These are all so beat up.’ She squinted. ‘This one, maybe. That’s not the right name, though, is it?’
‘He was Calvin Springer when you photographed him that day of the storm. But we think now he was also William F. McGinty. Look, I’ve got a set of fingerprints we found in a box of bank records – you don’t need to hear all of this right now. I’m going to give this set of prints to Jody and get her to compare them to the ones she took off Calvin Springer. If they match … This case keeps lurching along, getting more amazing as it grows.’
‘Uh-huh. I can’t stop to admire you much right this minute, though. I got a rush order for a child abuse case—’
‘Hey, I’ll leave you in peace now and go show this photo to another witness. First chance you get, will you crank this passport photo into your NCIC file and see if it matches anything you’ve got?’
She ran downstairs and hopped in beside Leo, who was nodding off over highway accident reports. He shook his head and said, ‘Ready to go?’
‘I am. Are you? You want me to drive?’
‘Nah. I’m just not firing on all my cylinders lately. That’s why I wanted to get outside. I don’t know if it’s because I feel retirement getting closer but these days when I sit still for a while I fall asleep.’
‘Well, drive me to Martina’s house, will you? Here’s the address.’
‘This is the woman who called in the fight on the Fourth?’
‘Yes. The mama with the mostest. Wait till you see this example of people making do with what they’ve got. It’s kind of balanced on a knife-edge between inspiring and tragic.’
‘Sarah, how long you been a cop? That describes half the south end of Tucson.’
They found Martina very busy, running the day-care center by herself. She had two babies drinking from propped bottles and a one-year-old holding his bottle without support and kicking his heels up happily, admiring his own toes.
‘Here you are with yet another man,’ Martina said. ‘No wonder you like police work.’
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