Wrong Place, Wrong Time Page 17

  Ten minutes later, I was only eight blocks away, pushing the Mustang through a steady drizzle and suddenly slow and cautious mid-afternoon traffic. Which was reasonable enough; the streets were like ice.

  Then I realized we didn’t “have him now” at all. I slid to a stop across from a newsstand with a pay phone. Horns honked through the rain sizzle as I bailed out and ran inside.

  But the pay phone was broken, and a chuckling man with dirty glasses held me up for five bucks to use the phone behind the counter. While I dialed, I watched and heard one car after another slip and slither around the double-parked Mustang. Some of them didn’t miss it by very much.

  Larry Davis answered on the eleventh ring. His voice was flat. “Yeah?”

  “It’s Rafferty,” I said. “Look, I should have told you this before. Call the cops right now, as soon as I hang up, and tell them about the guy. Give them his home address if you have it. Because now that he’s running, he’ll only go home once, if at all. The cops can get there fastest; I’m still downtown. Got that?”

  “Uh, yeah, I got it, but—”

  “I’m on the way,” I said, and hung up.

  As I stepped outside, a gray Daimler slid toward the Mustang with an ominous air of inevitability. It finally oozed to a stop an inch short of expensive noises. As I opened the Mustang’s door, a superbly dressed woman of perhaps sixty lowered the Daimler’s window and suggested I do several things that ladies of her generation weren’t supposed to know about.

  “I called them,” Larry Davis said, “but I don’t know if it did any good.”

  He sat in his wheelchair uneasily. He wriggled and fidgeted and seemed to hang on to the armrests more than usual. He’d been pushed over, he told me, chair and all. It had taken more than twenty minutes to get the chair upright and work his way back into it. When I had phoned him from the newsstand, he was still on the floor.

  I tried to imagine how naked and defenseless he must have felt. I don’t think I could handle that.

  “Have the cops been here?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. They said they’d send somebody, though.”

  We were in Larry’s office this time. He was drinking bourbon; I was looking at a business card. Wesley Tasot, it read. Larry pronounced it Tass-oh. According to the card, Tasot was a “field accounting consultant” for an Oak Cliff firm.

  “It’s a small company,” Larry said. “A CPA runs it, I think. They have this package deal where a guy comes around to balance the books, work up the figures for all the dumb reports you gotta do, prepare tax returns, all that stuff.” He pointed at Wesley Tasot’s card. I hadn’t realized before that his fingers were as long and skinny as his wasted legs. “He was the one who did my work. Every Monday, regular as clockwork. And Wes seemed like a nice-enough guy. Man, I sure hope he hasn’t fucked up my taxes or anything like that.”

  “What made you realize he was the fake bounty hunter?”

  Larry took a big swallow of his drink. “What didn’t? Once I finally woke up. Mostly, though, it was his hand. He had a glove on his left hand. The glove was full of cream or antiseptic, don’t know what. Smelled medicine-y, anyway. Wes said he’d been playing with a German shepherd he has, and it got too excited and chewed up his hand.”

  See what I mean about “dog bites”?

  “That hand hurt, too,” Larry went on. “I could see how tender it was, from the way he jumped when he bumped it. Then on the phone you said that about the bounty hunter dude getting shot in the hand and … well, boom! Everything was so clear all at once. Wes doesn’t talk country like you said, but he’s the right size and looks. His initials, too. Wesley Tasot. Toby Wells. W. T. and T. W.”

  He took another drink. “Anyway, I just knew, that’s all. I guess I gave myself away, though, because he looked at me funny and then he pushed me over and ran.” He looked at his watch. “Where are those cops? How long can it take?”

  “His house is the important place. You did give them his address?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t have it, but he’s in the book. In DeSoto, though. Will they go way out there before they’ve come here? Because I don’t think they understood what I was telling them.”

  “Uh-oh. With another police department involved, I don’t know. And it might be too late, by now.”

  What the hell. I dialed Tasot’s number and listened to the phone ring.

  It rang for a long time. As I was about to hang up, a woman answered. “Hello,” she said in a lethargic tone.

  “Afternoon,” I said. “Mr Wesley Tasot, please.”

  “He’s, uh, he’s not here right now,” she said.

  “What time do you expect him?”

  “I, um, I’m not sure. He … well, he may not be coming back.” There was a long pause when I could hear her breathe, then she hung up with a gentle click.

  “He’s been and gone,” I said to Larry.

  “Well, shit!” he said, and pounded his chair’s arm with his fist.

  “Don’t worry about it. Tell me what you can about him before the cops finally show up and get in the way. What’s the connection between Wes Tasot and Luis Ortega?”

  “Luis and Wes’s wife, I’d say. Wes used to … look, I can’t recall a specific remark, but the way he talked about his wife, I’ll bet that’s it.”

  “Okay, but how did Luis crack on to Tasot’s wife?”

  “Like you thought! He cleaned their pool. Look at this.” He wheeled himself over to his desk and picked up a hard-bound desk diary with a torn slip of paper sticking out of it. The diary cover had been labeled ORTEGA.

  “Each of the pool cleaners has one of these,” Larry said. “It’s a payable hours log, job assignment form, and daily work sheet, all rolled into one. Here now—” He opened the ORTEGA diary where the slip of paper was. The left-hand page was a day almost three months ago. Two-thirds of the way down the page, someone had written WES with a smeary felt-tip pen. There were other names and addresses written in a different hand with a ballpoint.

  “See, I write these up every morning,” Larry said, “so the cleaners know what they’re doing for the day and what order to do it in. Otherwise, some of those dummies would be going back and—never mind that, the point is, I wrote in those customers’ names, and Luis added this WES note.”

  He clapped the book shut and tossed it onto the desk. “I remember it now. I’d screwed up the ledger somehow; posted a batch of receivables wrong, I think. Wes put in a couple of hours overtime sorting out the mess. The next day I told Luis to clean Wes’s pool when he had the time. Free, naturally. It was a way to say thank you. So Luis had a chance to get something going with Wes’s wife, like you thought. And it was a one-time, non-billable job so Wes never showed up on the customer list. Hell, even if I’d made up the list I gave you instead of having Wes do it, his name wouldn’t have been on it.”

  “Did he know why you wanted that list?”

  “Oh, sure. You can thank ole motor-mouth here for that; Wes knew you were going to investigate the people on the list.”

  I said, “That was last Monday, right?”

  “Yeah,” Larry said. “When Wes made his regular Monday stop.”

  “By Thursday morning he was shooting at me.” I realized with a sudden fright that I’d spent that Monday night with Hilda. And another night … uh, Wednesday. And Friday night, but that was after the battle at the motel, so …

  “Okay,” I said finally, “I think I’ve got it now. He knew—knows—about my office, obviously. That’s where all this started. He also has to know where I live because I’m in the phone book, for Christ’s sake. But for some reason he hasn’t tried anything there. And he may or may not know about Hilda.”

  The thought of Tasot lurking around Hilda’s house made my stomach roil, but when I thought about it …

  “He’s an amateur,” I said, more to myself than to Larry Davis. “That’s why he has left me alone at home. He just doesn’t know how to assault a house. Plus, when you t
hink about it, both the mall and the motel shootings were pretty sloppy. And both those times I’d just been to the office. That’s where he’s been picking me up.”

  “He’s been working, too,” Larry said. “He showed up here today just like normal.”

  “Of course! He has a boss and a schedule to keep. That’s slowed him down a lot.” The thought of Tasot out there, hunting me, was a little unnerving, even if he was doing it on a restricted schedule.

  Rafferty’s Rule Two: Be lucky.

  Rafferty’s Rule Three: If you’re going to be stupid, see Rule Number Two.

  Larry’s drink was long since empty, and being stupid makes me thirsty. I built Larry a fresh bourbon and Seven, found a beer for myself, and answered the door when someone knocked on it.

  The cops had finally arrived.

  They took a statement from Larry because Wes Tasot had assaulted him, but they weren’t particularly interested in much else. Once they found out that Tasot was long gone—from here and from home—and that this was only a subparagraph in a continuing homicide investigation, it was all over. They made a note to refer their report to Ed Durkee; he could decide whether or not to involve the DeSoto cops.

  “That’ll be tomorrow,” I said, “and you’re already too late for today. Forget it.”

  The younger cop didn’t like that much. He had his fists on his hips and mouth open when the older cop butted in. “One more thing,” he said to me. “Don’t you go out there and bother this Tasot guy’s wife, okay?” He was round-faced and plump, with a button nose and twinkling eyes. He looked like a butcher, not a cop.

  “Me?” I said, aghast. I even put my hand on my chest; how’s that for aghast?

  “You. The detectives won’t want you yapping at that poor woman first, confusing her, and screwing up the evidence.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  He squinted at me, nodded, and walked out.

  I drank the last of my beer, stood up, and said to Larry, “Don’t worry about Tasot. He won’t be back.”

  “I know,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “To question Tasot’s wife. What else?”

  Chapter 39

  DeSoto is a little town south of Dallas. In some ways it’s more of a suburb than a separate town, though it is separated from Dallas by three concrete barricades: the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway, the R. L. Thornton Freeway, and the J. Elmer Weaver Freeway.

  Seriously. I wouldn’t kid about a thing like that.

  DeSoto consists of small pockets of suburban development surrounded by countryside. Some of that countryside is pure north Texas boondocks; some of it has been carved up into the three- and five-acre blocks hearty real-estate hawkers call “ranchettes” or “farmlets.”

  Wesley Tasot lived in a ranchette. Or maybe it was a farmlet. City boys don’t know that kind of stuff.

  Whatever it was called, it was a medium-sized brick house with a gravel driveway that needed more gravel or more raking or better yet, both. The house was set well back from the road. It looked lonely and out of place, a dollhouse plunked down on a worn pool table.

  Someone had made a feeble attempt at landscaping; a half-dozen young trees stood in a row across the front yard. The largest tree was six feet tall and slightly bigger around than the stake to which it was tied.

  I parked halfway up the driveway and sat, cradling the comforting weight of the .45, occasionally working the wipers to keep the windshield clear. Waiting. I waited because Tasot was an amateur and amateurs do not wait well. The seconds ticking by gnaw at them; they want to get out there and get the dying done.

  Everything told me Tasot was gone, but I’d already screwed up too much on this case. It was time to do the right thing for a change. And then, too, I hadn’t brought Cowboy as a backup, which may have been yet another mistake. We’d see.

  I waited.

  The house was quite and still. In what was probably a living-room window, the drapes had been pulled on one side, but not the other. There was a curving concrete sidewalk from the drive to the front door, then up two steps. One corner of a hairy welcome mat hung over the top step.

  There was no sign of life.

  There was an equally quiet three-car garage beside the house, but detached from it. One of the garage doors was up; the space beyond was empty.

  Behind me barbed-wire fences left the road at right angles and passed each side of the house and garage, then continued away out of sight.

  In the back, just visible between the house and the garage, there was an odd building with no walls. It had a high, flat roof—tilted a little, but flat—held up by six telegraph poles. I finally worked out that it was where ranchetteers stack bales of hay. When they have hay. Then I wondered why Tasot didn’t have any hay.

  Waiting’s not so bad if you keep busy.

  After fifteen minutes there had been no sign of anyone hoping to commit mayhem upon the tender body of Mother Rafferty’s favorite son. I waited a little longer, anyway.

  The feel of the place began to seep in, and I wondered if Tasot owned this place or rented. There was an air of malaise, a feeling that no one who lived in this house cared about it very much.

  After waiting thirty minutes, I started the Mustang and drove the rest of the way up the drive. Duty called.

  I parked in front of the closed, middle garage door and got out. There were no sounds from inside. I squatted down and stuck my head into the garage a foot above the ground. It’s an old cop trick. If anyone is in there, waiting to shoot you, they will expect you to be standing up. Unless it’s a cop who’s waiting to shoot you, in which case you’re in big trouble.

  But this time there wasn’t and they weren’t and I wasn’t. The garage was empty.

  Empty of people, anyway. There was a familiar red Pontiac parked in the middle bay. Almost two weeks ago Tasot (as Toby Wells) had jumped into that Pontiac’s passenger seat and bugged out. Well then, there now, as Cowboy would say.

  The empty slot, the one where the door was open, usually had a car parked in it; there was a recent oil droplet where the engine would be. Wherever that car was, I bet Tasot was in it. I hoped the road was rough and his goddamn hand hurt.

  The last bay of the big garage was an unused home workshop. A long heavy workbench had dusty cardboard boxes piled on it. Pegboard sheets on the wall were marked with outlines where tools had been hung. There was a table saw, too. Its blade was dark with rust.

  This had to be a rental house; whoever set up the workshop didn’t live here now.

  On my way to the front door, I went all the way around the house, rain or not. The backyard was big, ragged, and empty. If the barbed-wire fences hadn’t turned and met way out there, it would have been hard to tell where the yard stopped and the boondocks began.

  There was a large patio behind the house, with PVC outdoor furniture here and there. One of the chair seats was ripped. And there was the pool. It needed work, of course. The water was thick and green with algae.

  I went around to the front, rang the bell, then stood well off to the side, with the .45 handy. Not aimed at anything, just handy. After the door chimes had faded, there was no other sound. My shirt was wet through now. I shivered slightly in the late afternoon gloom.

  There had been no sound or sign of life since I’d arrived. Even when I’d circled the house, no one came out or appeared at a window or yelled or said a thing. I began to wonder what I would find inside.

  Finally, though, she came to the door and opened it. She was a slender blond woman, very plain, with her hair pulled back and no makeup. The flesh over her left cheekbone was scraped and puffy; that eye was halfway closed. She looked at me with a resigned expression.

  “What?” she said. Not angry, not inquisitive. Just “What?” in a flat, lifeless tone that didn’t really expect an answer.

  She wore a simple blue dress that resembled a uniform. It dropped straight from a high neck to well below her k
nees. She clasped her hands in front of her. Her nails were short and plain. Her only jewelry was a plain gold wedding band.

  “Mrs Tasot?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Who else is here?”

  She shook her head. “No one. Wes left.”

  I stepped forward; she backed away and stood against the foyer wall, like an obedient dog told to stay.

  I said, “I’m going to look around.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  It didn’t take long to check the house. It was empty. When l returned to the front door, the blond woman stood passively in exactly the same spot.

  “We’d better talk, Mrs Tasot. Would you like to sit down?”

  She led the way to the living room, walking with her head lowered and her arms close to her sides. She had a slight limp, favoring her left leg. There was an ugly yellow bruise on the back of her arm; it was days older than her newly blackening eye.

  In the living room she went to a couch and sat swiftly, demurely. She made absolutely certain her dress was tucked over and around her legs, then she picked up a photograph from the coffee table.

  She looked at the photo fondly for a long time, as if she were alone in the room. Then she said, “This is what I used to look like.” She didn’t let go of the photo, but she held it up for me to see. “He let me be pretty then.”

  It was a snapshot taken in a shadowy place where there were drapes and ropes and mechanical odds and ends. I finally figured it out; the setting was backstage at a theater. Wes Tasot and his wife hugged and laughed at whoever took the picture. Tasot wore the outfit he had used to run the Toby Wells scam. He had on the same fringed western jacket, the same hat. The only difference was the exaggerated stage makeup he wore in the picture. The bastard.

  “When was this taken?” I said.

  “Two years ago,” she said softly. “Wes played Curly in Oklahoma. That was during a good spell.”

  Wes may not have changed in two years, but his wife certainly had. In the photo she was relaxed and cheerful and outgoing. Her hair was stylish and her neckline was low and her fingernails were long and bright. She looked like she’d be the first one to go out and the last one to go home. She looked like party-time.