Sarah's List

by Elizabeth Gunn

  ‘We have systems in place to prevent this happening, of course,’ he said. ‘Business has been slow and the staff got complacent, ran the revenue for the eighteen cars they had contracts for and skipped a couple of walkarounds. The keys were all where they belonged on the rack, and it’s hot out there, isn’t it? So they were very surprised when your detective turned up with another identical key, and the Nissan that turned out not to be here.’

  ‘Plus these two other keys that must be house keys. Did you find the place?’

  ‘No. I was busy, and I figured the detective would do that.’

  ‘He was started on the search when the gunfight broke out at the bank. All our detectives are working on that now, so I came back off leave to handle this job.’ No need to tell him about administrative leave.

  Sarah took a walk across the hot asphalt to look at the Nissan, all cleaned up now and back in its slot. It was the pale sage that was ‘this year’s hot color,’ Dunbar said, with racing stripes and Texas plates. ‘A repo from Houston,’ he said. ‘ABC is a relatively new chain, small and opportunistic. The guy who owns it is a genius at cutting costs while keeping quality high. The chain is growing fast, and has a great future if we can get smart enough to stay out of kerfuffles like this one.

  ‘Obviously somebody copied the key,’ he said, ‘and I had no way of knowing how many more they might have copied, so I arranged for a new shipment of cars before I left Denver. Hired an off-duty cop to guard this lot for three nights till I got my new inventory in place, and sent the existing stock back with the same drivers.’

  ‘Must have been a busy time around here,’ Sarah said.

  ‘You bet. Pricey too.’

  ‘Did your night guards see any lurkers?’

  ‘No. I’m beginning to think the thieves aren’t interested in the car business, they just wanted one car for some reason. But I didn’t know that, so … this quick change-out wasn’t cheap, but better than taking a chance and maybe losing more cars. We have to be concerned about our underground image, too – you don’t want to let the word go around that ABC is an easy mark.’

  ‘You think your staff’s involved?’

  ‘No. My manager’s been with me five years – she moved here to open this place for me. I had to lay her off to satisfy the home office, but I’m paying her salary out of my own pocket because I don’t want to lose her. She’s got two kids sick with flu so she was delegating to the part-timers she was training, and they failed her.’

  ‘Who’s around to look at?’

  ‘Well, we use a cleaning service. They work at night, mostly use college kids but hire a lot of part-timers; probably don’t check references much.’

  Sarah took names and addresses for the cleaning service and a supplier that serviced the coffee services and coke machine. ‘These searches don’t often yield much but we can try. I’ll let you know if I find any addresses at the squat these extra keys might let us into … when and if I find it.’

  Back at the station, typing the data from ABC into the file, she noticed a note on her desk pad that said, Ricky’s clothes in her own handwriting. When did I put that there?

  She called the lab, got through to Lois in fingerprints, and asked about Ricky’s clothing.

  ‘I’m done with them, you can get them any time,’ Lois said. ‘It isn’t going to help you much. This guy lived poor. Ragged boxer shorts, a worn-out wallet with his expired driver’s license and twenty-three dollars. One credit card with a thousand-dollar limit and a few family pictures.’

  ‘I’ll stop in and pick it up this afternoon. I expect you need all your space now, for the new stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m buried in here. Tried to fix a paper cut this morning and couldn’t find my band-aids.’

  Sarah put down the phone and pondered. Doesn’t sound like Ricky’s stuff will yield much. She took a deep breath and decided, DeShawn Williams, you’ve rested long enough. She called the intake phone at the prison hospital, learned that DeShawn was still a patient and that his status had been upgraded from critical to serious to post-op, and asked to be put through to the guard on his floor.

  ‘Oh, sure he can have a visitor,’ a jaunty young male voice assured her. ‘He’s been on solid foods since yesterday. He’d be out in the ward by now if he didn’t have that hold Delaney put on him. We can’t keep him in here much longer, though – we’re short of beds after that shoot-up at the bank.’

  ‘I hear you. Don’t let him get moved anywhere till I get down there, please.’ She gave him her badge number, described the workload at the station, and asked for his help.

  ‘You’re preaching to the choir,’ he said. ‘We got a big rush right after the sirens stopped screaming. I’ll do all I can. But you’ll be here soon, right?’

  ‘Give me an hour.’ She printed out the pages in the file that pertained to DeShawn, read through them quickly, put them in a folder and stuffed that in the day pack she was taking along.

  The desert southeast of the city looked lush after a better than average rain year, but the end of the monsoon had been disappointing and she thought as she drove past tall stands of desert broom and tamarisk, If this dries up now we’ll be sitting ducks for a wildfire. The desert angst. Always too much or too little, we’re never quite satisfied.

  DeShawn was sitting up in bed, reading a sports magazine. All his bubbling and hissing attachments were gone – there was just one IV tube hanging from a bag, feeding him whatever boosters the county medics thought he needed, through a needle in his arm.

  The scrapes she had noticed on his face earlier had blossomed into a beautiful shiner around his left eye. Otherwise, he seemed surprisingly fit for a man who’d been through so much trauma – in fact, he looked younger than she remembered. Then she realized his caretakers had shaved off his elaborate facial hair, and his hyper-sexy look was gone with it. Now he just looked like the most appealing young male athlete she was going to see today.

  She had already put in her request for some extra nursing in the recovery ward where he’d have 24/7 supervision. Not a luxurious recovery, but the best she could get for him here.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Sarah asked him – not the way you usually start a prisoner interview, but the man was in a hospital gown.

  ‘Thirsty,’ he said, ‘all the time.’ He was drinking from a tall glass of ice water on the tray table that covered him. ‘And hungry about five times a day. But they tell me I’ll catch up in a day or two.’

  Sarah gave him her bona fides, showed him her badge. Drew up a chair to the side of the bed where his ankle chain showed beneath the cover, clipped to the bedrail. Took out her tablet, entered the date and time.

  ‘Let’s get some facts agreed on first,’ she said, and they began to go over his place and date of birth, parents, schooling – all review, the first part, but it got the silent ones talking. She knew most of his duties at his current job, they didn’t spend much time on that – what about the one before that? She watched his face as he answered. There wasn’t a tremor as he recited the name of the hotel in California, the source of the reference he’d given Letitia.

  ‘I called there,’ Sarah said. ‘The person on the desk and the manager she switched me to never heard of you.’

  ‘Not surprising,’ he said. ‘I heard it changed hands. Happens all the time with those chains, that’s why I got my manager to write that letter I carry. I asked that nice girl in the office where I work now, what’s her name, Amanda? I asked her if she could write me one like that for the Fairweather and get Letitia to sign it …’

  ‘You were thinking about leaving?’

  ‘Well, no, I hope not. I’m really happy there, but you never know.’ He drank some more water and sighed. ‘I mean, look at me now. I certainly didn’t plan this.’

  His story agreed with Letitia’s as to how he got his job at Fairweather Farms, and he professed to be very satisfied with the place and his duties there. About the accident that put him into St. Mary’s, he said he remembe
red almost nothing – a bright light, noise and then terrible pain.

  ‘You sure it was an accident? Not somebody out to get you?’

  ‘Where’d you get that idea?’ He chuckled. ‘I haven’t been in this town long enough for anybody to work up a grudge.’

  ‘So you think it was just some crazy drunk?’

  ‘Sure. And a lot of first responders did their jobs right or I wouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘I’m already walking, they tell you that? Every time anybody can spare time to unchain me and bring the walker, I walk as long as they’ll let me. I’m a big nuisance to these folks here, but they’ve sure been kind to me.’

  Sarah listened to his story, thinking, Sweet as honey. Typical jailhouse manipulative persona. She asked him, ‘How did your drug dealer find you, DeShawn? Or did you bring that connection with you when you got the job?’

  He sat still and straight against the pillows with his good-boy face full of innocence and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Oh, sure you do. Let me tell you how much we already know about it.’ She told him about the chase, the van in the garage door, and then about finding the thumb drive and the money in the jacket. ‘So there’s no use tap-dancing around this – we’ve got all we need to hold you for dealing. But much worse than that is Ricky’s murder, and the chief is hot to go after you for aiding and abetting in a homicide, too.’

  ‘Oh, whoa, wait now …’

  ‘Why not? You set up this drug ring, so you’re just as responsible for Ricky’s death as if you shot him yourself. Lawyers can make that connection; it’s what they get paid all those big dollars for. But if you were to help us out with the names of the buyers and sellers in this deal, so we could put away some of these outlaws … well, that might make all the difference in the world, you see? But we need to see that you’re ready to work with us, DeShawn.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what you expect to get from me. I mean, I got hit in traffic on Sunday night and for days I was out, blotto, just a piece of meat getting experimented on by interns – you ever see who gets stuck with the duty on Saturday night in those emergency rooms? Looks like the deli counter at the Safeway store.’

  ‘These are the same folks whose kindness you were just extolling to me?’

  ‘I mean, I just don’t get – what does that mean, estrolling? Sounds like the Mexican word for walking around.’

  I bet he can play this artful dodging game all day long. Let’s cut to the chase. ‘Who puts the money in your jacket, DeShawn?’

  ‘Boy, I wish I knew,’ he said, with a little soft cackle. ‘I’d try to get to know him better.’

  ‘What do you mean? You’re finding money in your jacket every so often and you don’t know who puts it there?’ She got ready to poke holes in that ridiculous story.

  Which turned out not to be the one he was telling. ‘Detective,’ he said, leaning forward off the pillows to look earnestly into her eyes, ‘I been working at that old folks’ home going on four months now’ – his speech gets folksier when he presses his sincere button – ‘and this is the first I heard about cash in that fancy jacket she give me – hell,’ he waved his one loose arm dismissively – ‘up until now I didn’t even know the damn thing had an inside pocket.’

  ‘So your story is that this one time, when the bus got wrecked and Ricky got shot, is the first time anybody ever put money in your jacket?’

  ‘That’s my story because it’s what happened.’ Sincerity shone out of his undamaged brown eye on the right, and even glimmered a little out of the one with the raccoon surround on the left.

  ‘Well, DeShawn, that’s really hard to believe.’

  ‘Ain’t it, though? And to think I slept through the whole thing. I mean, it almost makes you think about the tooth fairy, don’t it?’

  Oh no, now, you’re not going to ruin the tooth fairy for me too. Sarah turned off her tablet and stood up. ‘All right, DeShawn,’ she said. ‘You’ve had a rough time lately, getting wrecked in traffic and beat up in bed, so I guess you figure it’s time you had a little fun mocking the cops. But think about this while you convalesce in the ward out there: I’m your only ticket out of here. Homicide means it’s this cold cell or another one like it for the rest of your life. All my colleagues are busy with that massacre at the bank downtown. Nobody but me gives a damn right now how you got that money. And you won’t give me anything to work with, so you’re going to take the fall for being part of the gang that shot up the Fairweather Farms van and murdered Enrique.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Ricky Lopez. The nice man everybody loved who was driving the van you should have been driving.’

  ‘How could I when I was in the hospital after I got T-boned in traffic? How come I can’t get any sympathy out of you?’

  ‘Because I’m the hard-hearted detective who thinks you lie like a snake. So here’s my card.’ She put it on his tray table, beside the water glass. ‘When you get ready to do yourself some good, you can call me.’

  The last she saw of him as she walked out of this spartan recovery room that was so much better than what he was going to get next from Pima County, he was leaning toward her in the bed wearing his most appealing expression.

  Think hard, Romeo, she thought as she walked away. It isn’t always as simple as making somebody fall in love with you.

  Driving back toward the station, she asked herself, Why does this bozo annoy you so much? She shifted restlessly in her seat several times, trying to get comfortable, until her tireless inner critic, the part of herself she called the Hall Monitor, told her, He’s one of those people who think they can always beguile their way out of anything, and as usual you have to prove him wrong. She knew why she had this twitch: her sister and her ex-husband had both been greatly loved beguilers who had left her feeling short-changed and resentful.

  But you promised me you were going to get over that, the Hall Monitor said, and the good Sarah, the dependable sidekick who believed in reasonable answers, said I am over it, mostly. Almost entirely. And to prove it I’m going to show you I can do a fair and balanced assessment of DeShawn Williams.

  Probably ought to start with the people who were most recently beguiled. She turned off the highway at Grant Road and followed Silverbell toward Fairweather Farms.

  ELEVEN

  Friday–Saturday

  The garage door had been replaced and a new van, a duplicate of the one that had been wrecked, was unloading a half dozen passengers under the porte-cochère. Henry stood by it with his arms out, helping an elderly woman down the steps. Maybe not as zealously attentive as Ricky had been, certainly not as sexy as DeShawn would be, but he was doing a nice, professional job, and everybody looked pleased. Including Henry, which was a nice change of pace, Sarah thought, nodding as she passed him. She went inside to find another brown-clad attendant at the maître d’s stand in the hall.

  ‘So, is Henry driving the van now?’ she asked as she showed her badge to the attendant, whose pocket read, Anna.

  ‘Yes. All but the weekends when the college boy comes for the relief.’

  ‘What about all that yard work?’

  ‘There’s a new man named Francisco on the maintenance crew with Jacob.’

  ‘Henry’s got the driving job for good? DeShawn’s not coming back?’

  ‘Not likely.’ Anna lowered her eyes discreetly to the calendar on the dais in front of her. ‘Help you with anything else?’

  ‘I’m hoping to have a word with Letitia, is she in her office?’

  ‘Leading some folks on a tour right now,’ the woman said, ‘but Amanda’s in her office, will she do?’

  ‘Well, I can start with her,’ Sarah said, and walked the dim quiet hall, past Letitia’s closed door, to find Amanda. It was twenty minutes past eleven, which in this venue meant almost lunchtime, and most of the clientele were in their rooms, getting ready. Behind the door marked Supplies, a busy tapping sound was accompanied by the whir and squeak of a printe
r duplicating a page. The door was ajar, so Sarah tapped lightly and pushed it open.

  Amanda was typing, keeping a brisk rhythm, a little frown of concentration creasing the space between her eyebrows. She did not pause as she looked up, just said, ‘Hang on a minute,’ and typed on to the end of the page. Even then she didn’t offer a greeting, just stopped moving her fingers and raised her eyebrows as she said, ‘Help you?’

  ‘I have a few questions,’ Sarah said, ‘about DeShawn Williams.’ She found the folding chair, turned it to face Amanda and sat down, pulling her tablet out of her day pack.

  ‘I’m raging busy,’ Amanda said. ‘Can it wait a day or two?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ Sarah said. ‘But I won’t take much of your time.’ Ignoring Amanda’s sigh, she opened a page on her tablet. ‘When DeShawn came to work here, what was he driving?’

  ‘I don’t— Why do you need to know that?’

  ‘Amanda, I’m a homicide detective. I don’t have to tell you why I ask the questions I ask. DeShawn came here in his own car, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was it?’ His elaborate haircut and beard had given her a conviction, DeShawn is concerned about his image; he will drive the best he can afford.

  Amanda treated Sarah to her coldest stare and said, ‘He had an old beat-up Volks with replacement doors that didn’t match. But I don’t suppose there’s enough left of that car to drive now.’

  ‘Ah. So he must not have been flush with cash when he got the job. And Fairweather Farms gives a free meal every work day but they don’t have a housing allowance, do they? So even if some of these people tip him fairly well, DeShawn is just about breaking even, not much over, right?’

  ‘Nobody here is getting rich. Did you really think we were?’

  ‘No. Does he have another job, do you know? Moonlight for Uber on his days off, anything like that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Why is everybody always asking about DeShawn?’

  ‘Who else is asking?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, it seems like … that cute black detective, is his name Pete?’