“Less effective.”
“Maybe, but I’m good at it.”
Since he couldn’t move his neck properly, Maines had to tilt his torso back in the wheelchair to look up at me. “Not always.”
My guts wrenched, but then I caught the glint in his eye.
“Really?” I said. “Emotional blackmail? That’s low, Maines.”
“Desperate times,” he said.
CHAPTER 37
I called Maines’s daughter from the truck, and she gave me her address and told me I could come out immediately.
The house was outside town, in the ring of new suburbs. It was a starter model, freshly painted, the front yard littered with brightly colored plastic kids’ toys. A young dark-skinned woman with liquid brown eyes and a baby on her hip answered the door. Her tightly curled black hair was up in a pouf, the bridge of her nose scattered with charcoal freckles.
I told her I was there to see Audra Maines, and, to my surprise, she said that’s who she was. I sneaked a look at some family photos on the hallway wall as she led me into the house and spotted one with a much younger Maines and an elegant-looking black woman, both of them in full wedding drag. Now I understood why he seemed to have more liberal ideas than the average local white guy.
Audra led me into the kitchen, where another child of six or seven was enjoying a sandwich at a cluttered table. The little girl looked a lot like her mother except for her hair, which was braided into a collection of colorful barrettes that reminded me of the toys on the lawn. The house had that lived-in smell of warm bananas and laundry and human beings.
Audra put the baby down into a walker and said, “Have a seat. Do you want some coffee?”
“I’m fine,” I said, joining the kid at the table.
The six-year-old watched me with suspicion. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Julia. What’s yours?”
“None of your business!” she replied.
“Ella, be nice,” her mother said, then, to me, “Dad’s stuff is upstairs. Can you hang down here for a minute?”
I said I could, and she disappeared through the kitchen door. Ella kept a jaundiced eye on me. I didn’t try to make any more nice with her.
A clickety-scratch noise preceded her mother’s returning footsteps, and Steve bounded into the room. He paused when he saw me, then tapped over and sniffed my knee, looking up into my face. Audra followed him in with a cardboard file box.
“I forgot y’all knew each other,” she said, smiling at the dog.
Ella frowned at me. “You don’t know Steve. He’s Grandpa’s dog.”
“I took a little trip with your grandpa last week,” I said, glancing at Audra. She met my look evenly. She was made of the same stuff as her dad.
The kid made a skeptical noise around her mouthful of sandwich and looked away.
“He said to give you all of this,” Audra said, sliding the box onto the kitchen table. “Are you really going to take over his detective practice?”
“Not permanently,” I hedged. “I’m just helping out for a little while, until he gets back on his feet.”
“He’s never getting back on his feet,” she said. Her voice didn’t shake. Her eyes didn’t water. She was sticking to the facts.
“Sorry,” I said. “Figure of speech.”
Steve had gone around the table and was eyeing Ella’s sandwich. “Mom!” she said.
Audra exhaled a harried sigh and snapped her fingers at the dog. “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do with this animal after Dad moves in. He lets him get away with everything.”
“Maines is moving in with you?” I said.
“Where else is he gonna go? My brother lives in a one-room apartment on the other side of the world, and I can’t afford to put Dad in some rehab place.”
I tried not to be obvious as I looked around the small kitchen with its boxes of cereal and crackers crammed into the corners, dishes in the sink, pots and pans stacked on the stove.
“It don’t matter,” Audra said. “It’s always the girls. We end up taking care of everybody.”
“What about your mother?”
She gave me an appraising look. “I guess Dad didn’t talk to you about the divorce.”
“Not so much,” I admitted.
“Are your folks still around?”
The idea of my mother living with me got me out of my chair. “Yeah, but I don’t see them very often.”
“Sometimes that’s a good thing.”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
Audra gave me a sharp smile. I lifted the box and said, “If you need anything—”
“You’ve done plenty,” she said.
It sliced me. I admit it. She saw the blade go in, and put a quick hand on my wrist. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. If she knew how many times I’d dodged my just deserts, she wouldn’t have given it a second thought.
CHAPTER 38
When I got back to the bar, I went upstairs, fed the cat, changed into shorts and a tank top, then sat down on the bed and opened the box of Maines’s stuff.
There was only one folder, the one for Rachael’s case, lying on top of some miscellaneous office supplies, a holstered Smith & Wesson, a cell phone, and a half-full bottle of dry vermouth.
Maines’s handwriting was as weird as he was, a gnarled cursive interrupted at intervals by big block capitals and random punctuation having nothing to do with the rules of grammar. It was all in pencil, but nothing had been erased—changes were made by crossing out old information and noting new stuff in the margin nearby. It made for some exhausting reading, despite containing precious little actual information.
He’d started with Rachael’s coworkers, who had nothing interesting to say about her, except for one who’d waxed voluble about the state of her marriage and confirmed that Orson had left town “last summer” for a job in Washington, D.C. The coworker referred to Orson as a “piece of work,” and Maines had made a note to follow up, but nothing anywhere else told me that he’d done so.
Behind this were his notes from several phone calls to the mysterious “H” in Mexico, establishing Rachael’s appearance at the clinic. Maines seemed to have gotten access to Rachael’s computer at that point, and apparently her private effects, as well, because there was a collection of photos in the back of the folder.
A couple of loose sheets from a small notebook rounded out the collection. One of them was the beginning of a timeline, which consisted of only two items:
Dec 5—(?—confirm) R. to clinic
Dec 10—death blood clot?
I went and got a notepad out of Hector’s desk and made out my own timeline:
May 1—Demonstration El Paso, Floyd sisters kill cop
Jun 10—Jenny Floyd dead (find newspaper article)
Jun?—Mikela starts job at clinic
Dec 5—Rachael to clinic
Dec 10—Rachael dead
date?—Mikela plastic surgery
ca. Feb 15—Orson dead
I left room between each item, thinking I’d go back and add stuff in as I found it. It seemed kind of stupid, but I was winging this being-a-detective business. I had no idea what I was doing.
The political thing that had tweaked Maines must have been Orson’s job in D.C., though I didn’t see anything in the notes to suggest why. Was Maines thinking about the demonstration the Floyd sisters had been involved in? I added a note to my timeline to find out where and when Orson was supposed to have gone to work.
The coworker’s characterization of him, which tracked with the tidbits that I’d heard from others, was provocative, but if he was the asshole people said he was, talking to everyone who disliked him enough to kill him would be a lot of footwork and didn’t really appeal to my inner arsonist.
While I thought about a more efficient way of getting the fire going, I went through the pictures, putting them in chronological order as best I could, based on Rachael
’s apparent age and other visual cues. There was a high-school graduation photo, a couple of wedding pictures, and half a dozen casual snapshots—outdoors in shorts and a T-shirt, at her desk at work, that sort of thing. When I got them all lined up, I looked through them again in order, noticing that while she had gained some weight over time, the most remarkable change was in her face. She’d had a look of basic contentment in the earlier pictures that gradually disappeared after the wedding. In the last couple of images, she looked definitively miserable.
Maybe she’d gone for the lap-band hoping that it would fix that. I knew plenty of women who invested their various appearance-altering efforts with magical antidepressant powers. She’d have had to go to Mexico to have it done because she certainly didn’t qualify, medically speaking, for bariatric surgery by U.S. standards—in the later photos I guessed her weight at about 175 on a frame of slightly taller than average height. She was well-fleshed but nicely proportioned, and probably didn’t even need to shop in the plus-size section.
I put the photos down and got the cell phone out of the box. Not surprisingly, the battery was dead, and there was no charger. In any case, it probably wouldn’t have anything pertinent on it, since I’d drowned Maines’s previous phone while we were in Mexico.
That reminded me of Benny’s phone call and his mention of Orson’s job. I went and got my own phone and called Benny’s number.
“Find out what the job was?” I said when he answered. “What was it?”
“Yeah, baby!” Benny laughed. “You’re on it!”
“Don’t make me come over there and beat you,” I said.
“OK, wait, hang on.” Papers shuffled. “Yeah, it was with the ‘Baxter for President’ campaign. Jesus.”
“Baxter? You mean the wingnut who’s been running these ‘biblical democracy’ ads?”
“That’s the one. He runs for president every four years, like clockwork. Orson was gonna be his ‘media contact manager,’ whatever the hell that means.”
“You got a number for them?”
Benny recited one and I wrote it down. I thanked him and hung up, going over to the computer. A quick search on Baxter yielded the basic neocon positions on just about everything. Not surprisingly, he was a big public supporter of the border fence. He was listed as being from San Antonio, but his hometown was El Paso.
I warned myself against drawing a connection with the Floyd sisters just because they were from the same city, and on opposite sides of the border-fence issue, but it didn’t make many ripples sliding into the narrative I was making up in my head. If Baxter ran for president every four years, he had lots of spare change lying around. Could he be one of the hypocritical “powers behind the throne” that Jenny Floyd had uncovered?
I looked up his position on immigration reform, but he seemed to have avoided that specific issue entirely, which tweaked my radar. Opposition to illegal immigration and/or amnesty was a typical corollary to supporting the border fence, and most of the talking heads who occupied that ideological territory didn’t make a big secret of it. Especially the ones from districts closer to Mexico, which naturally included San Antonio and El Paso.
Deciding that at this point it wouldn’t hurt a thing to have all the facts I could find about Jennifer and Mikela, I went back to the Internet, put their names into the search box and hit “enter.” That took me on a side trip to the news articles about the cop they’d killed. His name was Mike Reardon. He’d been on the El Paso force for twelve years, married, no kids. Half an hour of Internet searching turned up nothing about him that could conceivably make him worth killing, except by accident. He’d died on May 2, the day after the demonstration.
I couldn’t find any newspaper article, Mexican or otherwise, about a dead white woman being found near Juarez on June 10. I tried all the Internet searching hacks I could think of: putting the Floyd girls’ names in with Reardon’s, singly and together; combining each name with the search term “border fence”; including “feminicidio,” “Juarez,” and “El Paso” in the search; and all combinations of the above. None of it produced anything but frustration. Casting the net wider, I tried including Baxter, Darling, Orson, and Rachael in my searches. Still nothing. I added “Kokoi.” Bubkes.
Giving up, I backed out of the search engine and did online background checks on the whole crew. Darling’s record took almost ten minutes to read all the way through, but nothing in it set off my radar. Reardon was clean as glass, and Orson’s only black marks were all misdemeanors, including several acts of vandalism against Rachael’s property. Baxter’s record had been sealed, not surprisingly. If you’re going to run for president every four years you don’t want people looking up your DUIs and parking tickets. There were plenty of pictures of him online, though, surrounded by his adoring wife and passel of kids. I guessed that they were Catholic by the sheer number, which was somewhere between four and ten, depending on which photos you used to count them. There was also the usual gossip that seems to follow any candidate for public office—that he’d been involved in any number of shady financial dealings, that he was gay, that he’d been the second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.
I got up and took a walk around the apartment to clear my head and had a thought that required another call to Benny.
“Did you guys ever figure out what kind of bullets killed Orson Greenlaw?”
“Not specifically,” he said, “but the wounds were typical of standard pistol rounds, like a .38 or 9 millimeter, nonexpanding. Basic street ammo.”
“Do you have access to crime reports for El Paso?”
“Sure.” I heard him hit a key on his computer keyboard. “What am I looking for?”
“The cop the Floyd sisters killed, Mike Reardon. Just wondered if the rounds that took him down fit into the criteria for the ones that offed Orson.”
“Yeah, I looked into that,” Benny said. “His coffin nails were 9 millimeter Parabellums, which are, like, an incredibly common round. To match ’em up we’d need the actual bullets that went into both guys and, as you know, all we got in Orson is the holes.”
“But it’s possible the same gun killed both of them.”
“Yeah. Possible.”
“I don’t suppose Jenny or Mikela had a license for a 9 millimeter?”
“Way ahead of you on that one, too,” Benny said. “Neither one. But ya know, most criminals don’t register their firearms.”
“What did she tell you about Reardon in your interview?”
Benny made a derisive noise. “Ah, she clammed on everything. Won’t say a word until her lawyer gets here. She’s due in a few hours.”
“You want me over there for the festivities?”
“Nah,” Benny said. “I doubt the lawyer will change much but the smell of the room. If Mikela gives up anything interesting, I’ll let you know.”
After we hung up, I moved toward the computer again but realized that I was just spinning my wheels. Searching the Internet probably wasn’t any more efficient than going through the Azula phone book from A to Z. I picked up the slip of paper I’d written the Baxter campaign number down on, but I’d already made as many phone calls that day as I could stand. It was four thirty, which meant it was past quitting time in D.C. anyway.
I wasn’t ready to call it a day yet though, and after some thought, I decided to see what I could sieve out via the local gossip mill. Plus, I was hungry. I got dressed and headed over to the cafe.
CHAPTER 39
It was biscuits and gravy today, which, before I’d taken up residence in Azula, meant a couple of lumpy white Frisbees covered with some thick gray spackle. Lavon Roberts’s biscuits and gravy were as far from that as Pluto is from the sun. His cooking was one of the few things that made me regret the fact I’d be moving soon.
His teenaged daughter, Neffa, brought me my silverware and a glass of tea a few minutes after I sat down. It was the tail end of the lunch rush and there were only a few other tables occupied, so she paused to chat, like she us
ually did when the restaurant wasn’t running her ragged.
“Was it really Orson Greenlaw in your house?” she said.
“Yep.”
“Man, that is harsh. But you know what? Someone was gonna do it. That man was a hot mess.”
I’d never heard the term applied to a guy before and gave her a quizzical grin. She waited for her father to pass by, not letting him succeed at catching her eye, then said, “Orson used to come in here and pinch my ass black-and-blue.”
“I don’t see him getting away with that for long,” I said, watching Lavon come back our way.
“Oh, I called him out,” Neffa told me. “Every damn time. Daddy just about tore him up, too, but the fool would not stop.”
A thought occurred to me. “You didn’t happen to notice anyone coming onto my place around the middle of February, did you?”
Neffa started to shake her head, then brought a finger up quickly to her mouth.
“Oh, you know what? There was one night. I couldn’t get to sleep, and some lights kept flashing over there. When was that?” She thought a minute. “Yeah, it would have been February 13. I remember because it was Daddy’s birthday the day before and I had got up to have some of the cake that was left over.”
“What kind of lights?”
“Car lights. Like somebody drove down your driveway.”
The back of my neck thrilled. “You mean like just turning around? Or did they stay awhile?”
“They stayed awhile. Maybe a half hour. Their lights went on and off a couple of times while they were there.”
“You didn’t happen to get a look at the car, did you?”
Neffa shook her head. “I didn’t pay it any mind, really. I thought it was you.”
I hadn’t been out to the Ranch after dark between November 8—the day Connie was arrested—and the beginning of March, when the weather had warmed up enough to make working at night comfortable. Between her trial and recovering from my near-fatal stabbing, I’d had way too much on my plate to even think about the house.
That car had to be the killer, transporting Orson’s body out to my place. Without a description of the vehicle, though, knowing the date and general time wasn’t that useful, unless I somehow miraculously stumbled across somebody who’d been MIA at the right moment. Still, it was gratifying to know that some of what had been put together about Orson’s death was correct.
South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) Page 18
