‘Wow,’ she said, as they walked together into the kitchen, ‘no wonder you don’t want to take time off from work.’
Sarah laughed. ‘Jason’s a cute guy, all right, but – oh God, I just remembered what a mess I left out there on the patio. As soon as you change clothes, will you help me … let me show you.’ She tore out the door with Denny at her heels.
Aggie was dozing in the shade on the big chaise. The tools were all put away; the shed was locked. The hose rack was back on the side of the house, not quite so far under the bougainvillea. The pile of gravel she had raked out of the space by the door was put away, in two cardboard boxes against the shed. The bare space where she had cleared the gravel was damp, and the top layer turned.
‘You promised me you wouldn’t do this!’ Aghast, Sarah leaned over her mother. ‘How did you manage to do all this by yourself?’
‘I didn’t,’ Aggie said, sitting up. ‘I was out here, dithering around, trying to put away the tools – do you know,’ she turned indignant eyes on her daughter, ‘I’m almost too wimpy now to even carry a shovel? How did I ever think I was going to dig up all these flowerbeds? Why don’t you stop me when I get these crazy pipe dreams?’
‘I don’t understand,’ Sarah said. ‘How’d you get all this …’
‘I just told you, I didn’t. Stanley waved over the bushes and started in about what a nice day it was, and I said I guessed it was but I’d got myself into a heck of a mess, and he said why don’t you let me help you with that? And oh, Sarah, I tell you, he may not be much for conversation but that man, when it comes to work, I never saw anything like him.’
She told the rest of the story in the kitchen, where she perched on a stool and played pit boss, reminding Sarah where to find pasta, sauce, and salad makings.
‘What would you say,’ Aggie asked between directions, ‘if we split that bulb order with the Pettigrews? Stanley could help us do the kitchen-side plot and the bed in front of the carport, and take the rest of the bulbs over to their place, which really needs a little sprucing up.’
She was pretty sure, she said, that she could make that deal with Stanley.
‘Aren’t you the canny trader?’ Sarah said. ‘Where do I sign?’
TEN
Wednesday–Friday
‘Newsflash, guys,’ Sarah said as she sat down to breakfast Wednesday morning. ‘I’ve made a resolution.’
‘Oh, drat,’ Denny said, ‘I suppose this means we’ll all have to improve in some way.’
‘Not you, just me. I thought about it and realized Mom is right. I should be making use of this paid leave to do some of the things I never have time for.’
‘Good for you,’ Will said. ‘What’s first – Aggie’s booklist?’
‘Yes. As soon as she shows up in here today, I’m going to call her bluff about this all-time best list she claims to carry in her head. She’s sure she can come up with at least fifty great books if she takes time to think about it.’
‘Wow. Fifty, really?’
‘That’s what she said. I think they’ll be mostly novels and memoirs, but still … here and there a biography, maybe even a history – she reads pretty good stuff.’
‘Well, that should keep you entertained for the summer,’ Will said. ‘What other wonderful things are you going to do in the next two weeks?’
‘Remodel the kitchen. The three of us have faithfully added to the savings account every month since we moved in. So now the money goal is in sight and it’s about time to start planning the makeover.’
‘Already?’ Will began making his evasive moves, checking his watch, patting his wallet. ‘I’m glad that part’s up to you and your mother.’
‘And me, me, me,’ Denny said, bouncing in her chair. ‘I know I didn’t put in any of the money, but you said I could be on the planning committee, Aunt Sarah.’
‘Absolutely. You do your share of kitchen chores and then some, so you have every right to say what you want in the kitchen. Not that we’ll all get everything we want, but we should all be thinking about what we’d like to have in this big sunny family room we’re hoping to create.’
‘We are?’ Will said. ‘Big sunny spaces get pricey – have you thought about that?’
‘Well, see, that’s what we need you for, Will. You have the know-how for the planning. I don’t know what materials are called or how to talk to a builder.’
‘Oh, and I do? I’m just a fix-it man.’
‘That’s close enough. More than I know.’
‘Ah,’ Will sighed, ‘the things I do for love.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Time to go.’ He got up. ‘You ready to go, Denny? Got your lunch money? Got your books?’
‘Um, well, I am brilliantly prepared except for those two things. Plus my homework.’ She giggled and flew around the house filling her backpack, and in five minutes was out the door, trotting toward the bus stop, waving to friends. The two adults watched her indulgently. She had been managing much more ominous problems than the contents of her backpack when Sarah rescued her from her drug-addicted mother. It was a pleasure, now, to see how she blossomed with a little support.
When they were both gone, Sarah cleared the table quickly, eager to start her day. It would be an hour, at least, before Aggie came in from her casita, and Sarah wanted to use the interim for some planning of her own. She took her laptop to the desk in her bedroom and set up two lists, titled KITCHEN and BOOKS. She made no entry in either list, but set each up in a folder, ready to share with Aggie.
Now for the real deal. The actual resolution she had made yesterday concerned her work on the Fairweather Farms case. They can tell me not to meddle in the work, she had decided, but they can’t tell me not to think about it.
And the items I need to think about are all here in this list.
She pulled up the case list she had started ten days ago. It was longer now. She had added the names of all the employees she’d met at Fairweather Farms, as well as the two she hadn’t: DeShawn Williams, who was still recuperating, and Enrique Lopez, who was dead. Now she had some other items to add, and she wanted to think about them as she typed them in.
24.Gray DodgeXMZ? How disappear so fast?
25.Do we have a new chop shop that nobody knows about? Talk to drivers of chase cars.
26.Why DeShawn target? If he’s in the game, why shoot him?
27.Were WKman &WCman the Monday shooters?
Number twenty-four made her so yearn to hit the streets that she could hardly stay in her chair. Instead, she moved to number twenty-five and sat thinking, watched a minute scroll by on her desk clock. Finally she told herself just put it down any damn way.
Quickly, she typed, DeShawn is usual driver, money was in DeShawn’s jacket, ergo, DeShawn is middleman in drug deal. If hit-run was an accident, his gang should know why he couldn’t deliver the goods, so why punish him now? If hit-run not an accident, somebody was already after him before he missed the Friday run. Why?
Thinking about DeShawn made her feel very deep in the weeds. Afraid of getting too discouraged to type, she set her jaw and looked at number twenty-seven. Quickly again, before discouragement stopped her, she typed the question she hated most because it seemed fantastic yet had to be asked: Were WCMan and WKMan the shooters who chased after the van on Monday? The gardeners said those shooters spoke Spanish. The men in the ICU never spoke, but they didn’t both appear Hispanic. Is it possible we’ve got two teams of bad guys chasing the same money?
That fantasy seemed to turn her loose, and she typed in several more questions quickly:
28.If not, who? If so, why Spanglish?
29.What’s up with Amanda’s attitude?
30.Car keys from WCman – where was he headed?
31.What’s Henry’s problem?
32.Who is DeShawn’s buddy @work?
33.Why is Delaney anxious?
She was staring at the next blank line on the page when her mother knocked discreetly on her open door.
‘Ah, there you are,’ Sarah said, switching to the BOOKS page. ‘I’ve got something for you.’ She made two copies and handed one to her mother.
Aggie lit up with delight. ‘Wonderful! We can start this morning, but we’ll have to keep an eye on the clock. This is our day for early lunch, remember? This afternoon’s my appointment with the podiatrist.’
‘Oh, my bad, I forgot! Remind me, what time?’
‘Two o’clock. But it’s way out east, in that medical center on Palo Verde Street …’
Sarah saved all her lists and closed her computer. She didn’t think about her own list again until late afternoon, when her phone rang as she was helping her mother into the house. Aggie’s right foot was encased in a surgical shoe, the bone spur was gone from her right second toe and she was foggy from a pain pill. Sarah let her phone call go to messages while she got her mother seated at the table and helped Denny dish up the dinner she had cooked. Will was out of the house, working late; the three women finished their meal quickly and split, Denny to homework, Aggie to bed in her casita.
Sarah called the number on the message and reached Jason’s cell.
‘Hey, I went by the hospital to check on Judy,’ he said, ‘and guess what? She’s on paid leave too. Looks like she was hurt worse than we realized in that mess.’
‘Oh? What, the wheelchair—’
‘The nurses on the floor told me she was OK from that first knock-down, but the second bozo, the one you shot, kicked her really hard to get her out of the way and her hip hit the floor in a bad way. She thinks she cracked a bone, has very sore hips, hasn’t been able to work since.’
‘What a shame – such a nice, helpful person. But my bad guy really did her dirt, huh?’
‘And she knows how to make it run downhill, apparently. She’s put in a hefty work comp claim and the hospital is already talking to the city about shifting the insurance claim onto the police department.’
‘What?’
‘Yeah. They’re saying it’s our fault, we never should have been conducting police business in a hospital.’
‘That is such a crock,’ Sarah said. ‘If we hadn’t been there at that lucky moment they’d have been calling us a few hours later to help find a missing patient.’
‘And when we found him he’d probably have been dead,’ Jason said. ‘Those lads weren’t playing beanbag.’
‘For sure. Anyway, this answers our question about Delaney, doesn’t it?’
There was some breathing on the line and then Jason said, ‘Which question was that and when did we ask it?’
‘We’ve been wondering why he’s so tense about my hearing, remember? I said it was so unlike Delaney, grilling us about details when he’s usually ready to go to bat for the team, but now we see why, don’t we? You can get over being so mad—’
‘I might not get over that,’ Jason said. ‘Delaney owes me a few tantrums for being such a stiff-necked nitpicker all the time.’
‘Jason,’ Sarah said, ‘I’ve had a long day and so have you, so let’s give it a rest. Thank you for calling to tell me about Judy, and I wish us both a better day tomorrow.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Jason said, ‘there in your hammock.’
‘You can put War and Peace on the list if you want to,’ Sarah said the next morning. ‘But I don’t want to start with a door-stopper like that. Find me something easy to limber up on.’ Gratified to find her library card still current, she had been abashed to see she hadn’t checked out a book in the three years she’d lived on Bentley Street.
‘Well, you’ve been going on a high lope ever since we moved into this house,’ Aggie said. ‘But you’ve got a little breather here and you should take the time to enjoy yourself. How about an amusing historical fiction called News of the World, that should warm you up.’
‘OK, I see it, I’ll put a hold on that.’ Sarah had brought her laptop to the round table in the bay window where most family life centered. She was bouncing between the booklist and her library account.
‘Now wait, while you’re in there – have you read all the Jane Austen novels? How about Emma? That’s the best one, I think.’
Aggie was having fun, sharing her major source of pleasure. She had a pile of book reviews on the table in front of her and a stack of handwritten notes she’d been compiling for years. Always an active reader, she’d become a voracious one now that age and illness had rendered her mostly chair-bound.
‘Let’s think about John Updike,’ she said. ‘Have you read all the Rabbit stories?’
‘The what?’
‘Right, we’ll start with Rabbit Run.’
Sirens had begun to scream in the distance. Sarah noticed them first but didn’t interrupt Aggie’s happy flow until her cell phone dinged.
‘It’s a robbery,’ Will said, ‘at the Chase bank downtown. No details yet but we know there was shooting. Talk to you later.’ He rang off without a goodbye, then called back in half an hour to tell her, ‘A big gun battle, six injuries and two fatalities. One bank teller and one TPD patrolman – a ten-year veteran named Ed Nelson. You know him?’
‘Long time ago. We were on the same shift on the East Side for a while. I know he had a wife, and I think some children …’
‘Two,’ Will said. ‘Middle school.’
‘Damn.’
‘Yes. Gotta go.’ They both felt it like a death in the family. It deepened the frustration of being on leave. Cops at work today would stop at a desk, or roll down a window in a patrol car, and ask each other quietly, ‘You hear about Ed Nelson?’ Sharing the grief and the unspoken dread. Next time it could be me.
Sarah put down the phone and turned a stricken face to her mother, who said, ‘Bad, huh?’
‘Awful.’ Sarah told her as much as she knew. Aggie picked up her pile of book lore and said, ‘We’ll do this another day.’
‘Come back for lunch,’ Sarah called after her retreating back, ‘at twelve o’clock, OK?’
Aggie did come back for lunch, and found her daughter transformed – grinning at the big sandwiches she was composing.
‘Delaney called a half hour ago and said, “You heard about the shooting?” Then he told me they’re bending a few rules at South Stone today.’ She laughed, breathlessly. ‘It seems he called Moretti and said, “I need all hands on deck,” and Moretti said, “Whaddya say I write a memo that says I scanned the record and I find nothing to criticize?”’
‘Heavenly days,’ Aggie said. ‘Can he do that?’
‘Yes, when they’re up to their eyebrows in work like this. He says they’re interviewing everybody they can get to stop crying …’
‘And this is what you’re panting to get back to? I suppose,’ Aggie said, ‘he wants you back this instant.’
‘He probably does, but he said tomorrow morning would be fine. I need to do some laundry.’
‘Tell you what,’ Delaney said, Friday morning, ‘we talked to the most severely injured victims from the robbery yesterday, and today I’ll get the detectives going on the follow-up from what they told us. It will take a day or two for the forensic evidence to start coming in anyway, so I’ll help the three rookie detectives do the mop-up interviews while we wait.
‘Can you pick up where we left off on the Fairweather Farms case by yourself if I give you the master file?’
‘Sure,’ Sarah said. ‘I’ve still got my list.’
Delaney grew one of his bleak almost-smiles and said, ‘Always good to have one of those.’ The big desk in front of him was paved with lists, all covered with check marks and scribbled notations. ‘The file number’s 46539. I think you’re familiar enough so you can handle most of this on your own, but of course, any questions, you can call me.’
If I’m drowning in a cesspool and can’t reach a rope. Gotcha.
It took a few minutes to settle back into her workspace. Somebody had used her chair, lowered it a couple of inches. She put it back where it belonged, telling herself not to get angry, it was the department’s c
hair – but it felt like an insult. Not bad enough to get put on leave, I have to put up with some fathead who comes along and squats in my space. There were strange pens on her desk, too, and a wrapped piece of restaurant candy – she made a disgusted noise and threw it all in the trash.
She pulled up #46539 on her desktop monitor. It was already a big file – fifty-nine pages, with links to several other files. She paged through it for a few minutes, scrolling quickly to be sure she hadn’t forgotten any details. When she came to the page where they found the money in the jacket, she slowed and read to the end of the incident. Grinned at the pipe bomb caper, grew thoughtful over Ollie’s remark about the small amount of money.
She stared into the middle distance for a while then, reliving the crazy day at the senior living facility. Suddenly her eyes focused on a fat envelope in her in-tray, addressed to her in Jason’s handwriting. The note inside read, These are the keys I took out of wheelchair man’s undies, minus the car key. The ABC rental agency is the one on Roger Street. I’m assigned to victims from the bank heist, and I believe Delaney gave you the Fairweather Farms case. I did not have time to find the doors that these keys unlock – JP.
A steel ring held two keys, each stamped Weiser.
Front and back door. Wheelchair man’s keys. Good a place as any to start.
The regional manager at ABC auto rental was a crisp-voiced man named Dunbar, who said he could see her any time. Sarah noted the VIN of the missing car and the address of the agency and was at the lot in half an hour. Fifty spaces for cars on a lot with hedges on all sides, on a narrow old street near Auto Mall Drive, two desk people in a small office with a sign that wrapped around the building.
Dunbar was a fit man in his forties, in shirt sleeves, sweating out his introduction to desert weather. He offered bottled water and she accepted. They sat knee-to-knee on two stools in his tiny back office.
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