Thin Air s-22

by Robert B. Parker

"I don't know, really. I mean, he was younger than she was, and he was, you know, Hispanic, and I don't know what kind of job he had. But boy, he was compelling. Looks. Charm."

  She shrugged.

  "On the other hand, boy toy is one thing," Typhanie said. "Husband's a whole different ball game."

  "You married?" I said.

  "Not right now," Typhanie said. "You?"

  "No."

  "Ever been married?"

  "No."

  "You gay?"

  "No."

  "With someone?"

  "Yeah."

  "I shoulda stayed with my second husband. Now every time I meet somebody interesting they're either taken or gay. You fool around?"

  "No. But if I did I'd call you first. The name Vaughn mean anything to you?"

  "Stevie Ray Vaughn," she said hopefully.

  "Un huh," I said. "You know where Luis Deleon is now?"

  She shrugged. "Proctor, I imagine."

  "You know what he does?"

  "Like for a living?"

  "Un huh."

  "No, I never did know. I always kind of wondered."

  "Why?"

  "He seemed to have money, but he never said anything about his job."

  "What'd he talk about when you were with him?"

  "Lisa, theater, movies. He loved movies. Had a video camera. Always had a video camera."

  "You wouldn't have a picture, would you?"

  "Of Luis? No, I don't think so. I'm not one for keeping stuff, pictures and all that. I just keep right on moving, you know?"

  "How is Luis's English? He speak with an accent?"

  "He speaks very well, only a slight hint of an accent, really."

  The yellow cat rolled over and onto his feet and padded away from me to a plaid upholstered rocker across the room and jumped up in it and curled up and went to sleep.

  "Thanks," I said.

  I took a card out of my pocket and gave it to her.

  "If you hear anything or think of anything, please call me."

  "You don't think anything bad has happened, do you?"

  "I don't know what has happened," I said.

  "What are you going to do now?"

  "I'm going to go find Luis Deleon," I said.

  Typhanie's eyes widened.

  "Because of what I told you?"

  "Because of what a couple people have told me," I said.

  "Don't tell him I said anything."

  "Okay."

  "Luis is, ah, kind of scary," Typhanie said.

  "Scary how?" I said.

  "He's so passionate, so… quick. I wouldn't want to make him mad."

  "Me either," I said. "But you never know."

  He had not touched her yet. She didn't know if he would. He had her. He could force her. Why would he not? What he felt for her wasn't love. She knew that. But maybe there was love in it. Maybe it kept him from forcing her. Yet, of course, he was forcing her. Forcing her to be here. Forcing her to wear his stupid outfits and live in this cartoon set of a room. Still he had not forced her sexually. And he had not physically hurt her. The air-conditioning hummed, the monitors played. The sound track was on and she heard herself again and again giggling at the beach, struggling in the back of the truck. There was no way for her to tell time. No light, no dark except as he turned the lights on and off, no television except the mocking images of her own bondage, no radio, no clocks. She saw only him, and now and then the young-faced serving woman who never spoke. The food offered her no clues; what she ate was not specific to any meal, and she wondered if it were deliberate on his part, a kind of brainwashing. It underscored how captive she was. She could not choose to eat. She had to wait to be fed. Or was it simply a part of how she knew he was enveloped in make-believe, creating still another artificial environment, pretending to be a bandit prince, pretending to be her lover. She felt the shame of her situation, how she had so freely taken up with this man, so carelessly put aside what she had learned so painfully in California, knowing as she felt the shame that it was not a matter of shame, that she had been drawn to him by needs she hadn't yet mastered, as she had drunk with him, before she mastered that once more as well. And she would master this. He would not pull her back down. She had been too far down. She had struggled too painfully up. She had lapsed again and escaped again and she would escape this. She wouldn't go back. She would be Lisa St. Claire. She was Lisa St. Claire, and because she was, she was also Mrs. Frank Belson. Frank would find her.

  Chapter 11

  I started at Proctor Police Headquarters. It was a gray granite building, near the gray granite City Hall. It had been built in the British Imperial style of the nineteenth century when a lot of American public buildings were being erected by people filled with swagger and destiny. It had been shiny and new once, when the WASPs ran the city, and the mills pumped money into everyone's pockets. But now it was hunched and crumbled like the city, buckling beneath the weight of impoverishment. There was graffiti on most of the walls, and litter washed up against the gray stone foundation. The windows were covered with wire mesh, and one of the glass panels in the front door had been broken and replaced with unpainted plywood. It looked like it wasn't exterior plywood either, because it had already begun to blister in the damp spring air, and the ends were starting to separate.

  There was a sign on the duty officer's desk in the high lobby. It said Officer McDonogh. Behind the sign, seated at the desk, reading a newspaper, was a fat cop with his tie down and the neck of his uniform blouse unbuttoned. He seemed to be sweating a lot even though it wasn't hot, and he had a white handkerchief tied around his neck. A cigarette sent a small blue twist of smoke up from the edge of the desk, where it rested among the burn marks.

  I said, "You McDonogh?"

  He looked up from his paper, as if the question were a hard one, stared at me for a minute, and shook his head.

  "Naw. Sign's been there since the war. What do you want?"

  "Billy Kiley still Chief of Detectives?" I said.

  "Naw, Kiley retired three, four years ago. Delaney's Chief now. You know Kiley?"

  He picked up the cigarette, spilled some ash on his belly, and took a drag.

  "I used to," I said, "when I was working for the Middlesex DA."

  "Well, he's gone. You want to see Delaney?"

  "Yes."

  The fat cop jerked his head down the corridor behind him. "Last door," he said and picked up the phone as I walked away.

  The corridor had once been marble, and some of it still showed above the green-painted Sheetrock that had been layered onto the lower walls like an ugly wainscotting. Threadbare brown carpet covered the floor. The corridor was long and on each side of it were pebbled glass doors with the names of the occupants stenciled on the glass. Identification and Forensic. Traffic. Juvenile. Delaney's office was at the end, a big one, with palladian windows on two sides. The ceilings were high. There were a couple of yellow oak file cabinets on the wall to my right. Near the left wall, a conference table was littered with crumpled Coke cans, overturned foam coffee cups, some ash trays full of cigarette butts, and the faint traces of powdered sugar where someone had polished off a donut. Beyond the conference table was the half-ajar door to a private washroom. I smiled when I saw it. They don't build them this way anymore. Delaney was just putting the phone down when I came in. He looked a little surprised, as if people didn't come in very often.

  "My name's Spenser," I said.

  "So, what's the Middlesex DA want with me?" Delaney said.

  He was a tallish man, gone soft, with a lot of broken blood vessels in his cheeks, and an ugly red vinyl hairpiece on top of his head. It didn't match his sideburns, but it probably wouldn't have matched anyone's sideburns except maybe Plastic Man's. He or the guy out front had confused the part about I-used-to-work-for-the-Middlesex-DA. I decided not to clarify it.

  "Looking for information on a guy named Luis Deleon."

  "You try 411?" Delaney smiled. He had big yellow teeth like
a horse.

  "He's not in the phone book," I said.

  "Why you asking about him?"

  "Missing persons case I'm on," I said. "Woman named Lisa St. Claire. I thought Deleon might know something about her."

  "Why do you think that?"

  "She's married now to somebody else, but they used to date."

  "He a Cha Cha?"

  "Yeah."

  "She's Anglo?"

  "Un huh."

  Delaney shook his head. He glanced over toward the washroom and then glanced back at me.

  "You think she's with him?"

  "I don't know," I said. "I just thought I'd talk with him. See what he knew. You ever hear of him?"

  "Deleon don't even sound spic, does it? Doesn't matter. Fucking cucarachas change their name around here every other day."

  He looked at the washroom again and licked his lips. "You wanna excuse me," he said. "Got to use the facilities for a minute."

  "Sure."

  He got up and headed for the lav. The door closed. I heard him cough, a deep ugly sound, then some silence. Then the flush of the toilet. The door opened and Delaney came out. He looked calmer, and as he passed me on the way to his desk, I smelled the booze on him. He sat down at his desk, his eyes bright. Booze was what he'd gone to the lavatory for. The toilet flush was just camouflage.

  "So you think some spic's got your girl," he said.

  I shook my head.

  "I don't know if anyone's got the woman," I said. "She may be in Augusta, Georgia, for all I know, listening to Ray Charles records. You got any paper on this guy Deleon?"

  "Paper? You mean like a rap sheet? Like a record?" Delaney laughed and the laugh turned into a cough and he coughed until he had to spit in his handkerchief. Still coughing, with his handkerchief pressed to his mouth, he stood and went back into the lav. He was gone a couple of minutes and when he came back he was carrying a bottle of Bushmill's Irish Whiskey. He sat down and put the whiskey on the desk near him.

  "Fucking cough," he said when he got himself back to breathing. "Whiskey's only thing that'll stop it. You want a pop?"

  "No thanks," I said.

  Delaney took a cup from the side table by his desk and blew in it to clear the dust and poured maybe three inches of whiskey into the cup. He drank some. He downed about half of it and licked his lips. His eyes were bright now, and his face, reddened with broken veins, was brighter red.

  "Ahh," Delaney said. "Mother's milk."

  I knew the feeling. I'd never been a drunk, but I'd drunk enough to know the feeling, the sense of wellbeing as the whiskey eased through your system. It was a feeling that was hard to keep balanced and Delaney had the look of a man for whom it was getting harder. Keep the buzz without getting so drunk you couldn't function. It could be done, and Delaney was sort of doing it, living a life of never quite drunk and never at all sober, nursing the bottle in hidden sips until he got to the point where he couldn't hide the sips. It was no longer pleasure for him. It was need. Booze was no longer recreation. It was medicine.

  "Where was I?" Delaney said.

  "I asked if you had any record on Luis Deleon, and you laughed so hard you started coughing, and coughed so hard you started to spit up and then you went and got your bottle and now you're happy. You got any record on Luis Deleon?"

  "What is this, spic fucking central? They all got records, and they all got twenty names and fifty addresses. You want to find out about some spic in Proctor, you talk to Freddie Santiago, or you go over to San Juan Hill. That's where it's happening for all the spics around here, man, Freddie or San Juan Hill. That's spic central, pal."

  He drank the rest of his whiskey. And poured himself some more.

  "Tell me about San Juan Hill," I said.

  The whiskey was making him expansive. He leaned back in his chair. The bottle on the table now, no more pretense. He eyed the bottle. It was a new one, nearly full. He was able to relax. He knew where the next drink was.

  "The spics are divided into two factions. One of them is San Juan Hill, the other one is Freddie Santiago."

  "Is San Juan Hill a place?"

  "Yeah, north end of the city. It used to be Irish and when it was we called it Galway Bay. My mother was born there. Then the Cha Chas came in and we moved out and now it's San Juan Hill."

  "And Freddie Santiago?"

  "Guy runs a place called Club del Aguadillano in the south end of town. He's the establishment, you know what I mean, sort of a spic Godfather. Kids in San Juan Hill broke with him maybe five, six years ago, and we don't know how organized they are, but you're in San Juan Hill, you're on the other side of whatever fight Freddie's in."

  He sipped some more whiskey, held it in his mouth, then tilted his head and let it trickle down his throat. "You got anybody in there?"

  "Anybody in where?"

  "In San Juan Hill, in with Freddie Santiago."

  "Shit no, man, Anglo won't last ten minutes under cover with one of the spic outfits, fuckers don't even speak English, most of them."

  "I was thinking you might have some Hispanic officers."

  Delaney laughed, started to cough, and swallowed some whiskey. The coughing subsided.

  "His-pan-ic officers?" he started to laugh, caught himself, and drank again. "You think we're going to give one of those assholes a badge and a gun? They'd pawn the badge to buy dope and stick up the pawn shop afterwards."

  "Any Spanish-speaking officers on the force?"

  "Shit no. Freddie speaks English. We get along good with Freddie."

  "I'll bet you do," I said.

  Delaney paid no attention.

  "Freddie's a businessman," Delaney said. "Runs a tight ship."

  There was admiration in Delaney's voice.

  "Gets a lot of dope and pussy traffic from the prep-school kids come in from Andover, and he don't want to scare them away. Walk around the south end, the streets are clean, the street lights work. There's zero street crime in Freddie's area."

  "How about San Juan Hill?"

  Delaney shook his head.

  "Dodge City," he said. "Bunch of coked-up gang bangers. All we can do is pen them in up there, keep it on the Hill."

  "You think Deleon might be connected to Santiago?"

  "Deleon." Delaney shook his head, fumbled on the desk for his bottle, poured a little more into his cup. "What kind of fucking Spanish name is that? De-le-fucking-on?"

  "Probably one of Ponce's offspring," I said.

  "Well I don't know nothing about him."

  "Could he be on San Juan Hill?"

  "Sure, he could be up there, pal. Fucking Elvis could be up there singing `You ain't nothing but a hound dog,' you know?"

  "Think Freddie Santiago would know?"

  "Got no way of knowing, pal. Whyn't you go ask him?"

  "Probably will," I said.

  "You better ask nice, state cop or no."

  "I'm not a state cop."

  "You said…"

  "I said I used to work for the Middlesex DA. I don't anymore. I'm private."

  "Private? A fucking shoofly? Get the fuck out of here before I bust you for impersonating a police officer."

  "Or vice versa," I said.

  "Beat it," he said.

  I took his advice, and as I went out the door I looked back and smiled a friendly smile and said "Skol." and closed the door behind me.

  The fat cop at the desk was still sweating as I passed him.

  "How is he?" he said.

  "Gassed," I said.

  The cop nodded.

  "He wasn't a bad cop, once," the cop said.

  "He's a bad cop now," I said.

  The fat cop shrugged.

  "His brother's a City Councilman," he said.

  Chapter 12

  San Juan Hill, when I found it, made you think maybe God liked cinema noir. The streets were narrow and the three-deckers crowded down against them. The buildings were uniformly stoop-shouldered and out of plumb, as if age and sequential squalor had sapped
the strength from the wooden framing. The buildings were immediately on the sidewalk, there were no yards. There was no grass or trees, no shrubs, not even weeds, pushing up through the asphalt. Between each building was a hot-topped driveway, some with new cars parked there, some with rusting hulks that had been parked there since San Juan Hill was Galway Bay. The graffiti was intense, and brilliant; an angry, aggressive plaint of garish color on almost every surface. Somebody see me! Anybody! A swarm of young kids on mountain bikes flashed out of an alley and swooped by me. One of them scraped something, probably a 20d nail head, along the length of my car as he passed. I thought about shooting him, decided it could be construed as overreaction, and chose instead to ignore it in a dignified manner. I wondered how these impoverished children could afford bright new mountain bikes. Depended, I supposed, on one's priorities. There were trash cans out on every corner, but no sign that the city had been by to pick them up. Many had been tipped over, probably by the fun-loving kids on the mountain bikes, and the trash was scattered on the sidewalks and into the street. There were dogs nosing in the trash. They were mostly the kind of generic mongrel that seems to have bred itself back to the origin of the species, twenty, thirty pounds, gray-brown, with a tail that curled upward over their hindquarters. They were so similar they looked like a breed. They all had the low-slung furtive movements of feral animals. None of them looked friendly. Most of them looked like they didn't eat regularly. And what they did eat they probably foraged. The shades in all the windows appeared to be drawn. There were a lot of kids on the streets, but very few people over the age of twenty. Occasionally there was a storefront with hand-painted Spanish language signs in the window. Cosnidas, cervezas. Most of the kids had on colorful warmup jackets, and baggy jeans and expensive sneakers. Probably traded the mountain bikes in on the sneakers as they passed through puberty. Under the weak spring sun, the graffiti, the warmup clothes, and the sneakers were nearly the only colors in San Juan Hill. Everything else was the color of the dogs.

  Near the center of San Juan Hill stood an ugly pile of angular gray stones which had blackened with time. It was a Roman Catholic church with a wide wooden door painted red. The door and most of the church walls were ornamented with graffiti. There was a sign out front that identified the church as St. Sebastian's, and listed the scheduled masses. The sign was covered with graffiti. I parked out front of the church. In San Juan Hill you could park anywhere.