Wrong Place, Wrong Time Page 6

  It was obvious that the admission hurt her, but Maria held her chin high. That stupid bastard Luis didn’t know what he’d given up.

  “Maria,” I said, “are you absolutely sure—”

  “I am sure,” she said. “When Margarita came to me, I said there must be a mistake, Luis would not do this thing to me. But Margarita’s brother took me one day in his Ford after I lied to the credit union and said I was sick and must go home. You see what sort of woman I have become? Anyway, we followed Luis, and I saw for myself the places he went.”

  She shrugged. “We could not follow him at work. I did not see him at the swimming pool of the rich puta. But I know it was true. That afternoon when Luis came back and saw his things outside the door, he, too, said, ‘Oh no, there is a mistake.’ I told him to kneel down and hold the cross and swear to me he had not done such a thing. He could not. Even Luis could not tell such a lie with the cross in his hands.”

  She rose to her feet with great natural grace and dignity. I had a sudden flash of her as a Mayan princess, serene in gold and jade, on a stone throne in a jungle temple.

  I handed her the photo I had found in Luis’s room at Aqua-Tidy. “Who are these people?”

  “This is Luis. When he was younger, of course. And his family. They moved to California a year ago. To Los Angeles.” She said Los Angeles with the Spanish pronunciation.

  “I thought they might know of any enemies Luis had.”

  She looked down at me and said, “If you wish to find the man who killed Luis, I think you should visit the husbands of the putas in the big houses with the swimming pools.”

  She might be right, I thought. And the gambling angle might have legs, too. Especially if Toby Wells was a contract hitter.

  “This is a matter of great shame for me,” Maria Hermosa said. “My friend at the counseling center says I must accept it and look ahead now. Telling you of my foolishness with Luis is a way to do that, I think. But now you must go before I embarrass myself more by crying before you like a silly girl.”

  I let John from next door hustle me out. He came, too, and when Maria closed the apartment door behind us, John whirled and grunted, “That son of a bitch!” He punched the concrete block wall with his right hand. Then he slumped against the wall, drew in an agonized breath, and began to suck on his bloody knuckles.

  “Fella could get hurt that way,” I said.

  He stopped sucking long enough to say, “You find the guy who killed that motherfucker Ortega, you shake his hand for me.”

  “From what Maria says, Luis was a real bastard, all right.”

  John waved his lacerated hand and grimaced. “Hah,” he said. “You want to know about a bastard? I’ll tell you about a bastard. She’s four-and-a-half months pregnant with Ortega’s kid.”

  Then his eyes misted over with something more powerful than the pain from his battered hand. “And she won’t let me take care of her,” he said. He trudged into his apartment and closed the door.

  I went down to the street, opened the Mustang’s doors, and waited for the bake-oven heat to dissipate. While I waited, I carefully considered my next move.

  Drinking lunch seemed to have a lot going for it.

  Chapter 13

  “Sure, a jealous husband might have had Ortega whacked,” I said around a mouthful of rare roast beef. “Hell, to judge from the way Maria talked—and from the underwear trophy wall I saw in Ortega’s room—there might be whole herds of hubbies out there.” I shook my head. “There are better angles, though.”

  “Name two,” Hilda Gardner said. She took a bite of quiche, put down her fork, and touched her lips with her napkin. Great lips.

  “Oh, gambling, for openers, with the mystery bounty hunter as muscle for whomever Ortega owed. That assumes more action than I’d expect from the snake-pit joints where he supposedly hung out, but it’s possible.”

  I sipped my beer; Corona this time. I’d never believed those rumors, anyway, and I had drunk Corona all the way through their troubles. I was even considering it for the next Rafferty beer of the week. Which made me wonder: Would they give a discount for brand loyalty?

  “You were saying?” Hilda prompted. She slipped another forkful of quiche into her mouth. Great teeth, too.

  “Oh, right, well, I wonder about relatives. Hil, you should see this Hermosa girl. Ortega dumped on her pretty badly; she’s hurt by it, but she’s working it out, plugging right along. She has so much class you wouldn’t believe it. But there could be a brother or father or uncle out there with revenge on his mind. A hot-blood intent on upholding the family honor. It happens.”

  “I’m sure it does,” Hilda said, “and you seem to know every arcane honor code you men have ever devised. But I thought that sort of thing was personal. If this Maria had a brother or whatever, wouldn’t he go after Ortega himself? Hiring someone else doesn’t sound like Latin machismo to me.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “That’s the problem with that theory.”

  Hilda frowned. “That bounty hunter, Wells. He couldn’t have been Hispanic, could he? Disguised, maybe?”

  “No. Besides, a disguise and the con he ran on me doesn’t fit the Latin firebrand image, either.” I picked up my roast beef sandwich—Rare and Juicy on a Crusty French Loaf, the menu had said, a Continental Luncheon Treat Par Excellence—and took another bite. It was crusty, all right; crusty like having a grenade go off in your mouth. Crumbs drifted down on each side of my plate.

  Hilda said, “What about Maria’s neighbor, uh, John whatsis-name? He sounds very protective.”

  “You’ve got that right. He would have loved to rip out Ortega’s heart and spit in the hole. Trouble is, your argument about not hiring it done applies to him, too.”

  Hilda grimaced. “You don’t have to be quite so graphic,” she said. She poked around in her spinach salad. She was probably trying to find something edible in there. “Are you going to tell your police friends about him.”

  “I don’t know. I think Maria needs him, even if she doesn’t realize it yet. And he definitely needs her. I’d hate to interfere with that by setting him up for a roust.” I bit into my sandwich again. Another explosion of crumbs.

  “Hey,” I said to Hilda, “why does this always happen. Whenever we eat in a classy place, your side of the table stays super-neat; my side looks like I’ve been pushing the food up through the tablecloth.”

  Hilda smiled like Jane Pauley. That was a bad sign. It usually meant there was a zinger headed my way. She said, “Perhaps you should order different food. There are dishes that are light, elegant, cohesive. And—wonder of wonders!—many of them are actually good for you.”

  “No. Hold it. You’re not going to get me on to that wimpy stuff you eat. Not out in public, anyway.” I leaned over the table toward her and said in my most serious tone, “It’s not that I object if people want to eat those things in the privacy of their own homes. Not at all. But when they make a public display of their—”

  Another Jane Pauley smile from Hilda. This one was even broader. “Your tie is dangling into the juice that leaked out of your caveman sandwich.”

  Dammit, she was right.

  I lifted the tie clear and mopped at it with my napkin. The process didn’t do the tie much good, but it gave the linen napkin a nice mottled look. Tough. It hadn’t been my idea to wear a tie in the first place.

  “Stupid house rules in this joint,” I said. “How about I beat up the maître d’?”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Hilda said. Then she frowned thoughtfully. “Check back with me on that if they’re out of Black Forest cake again.”

  After lunch, Hilda and I walked around for a while. She window-shopped; I enjoyed being with her. At one point I rolled my soggy tie into a ball, took one step, up and zap! Plunked that tie into a curbside trash can without ever touching the side.

  Hilda put her arm around me. “Sign up with the Mavericks,” she said. “They’d never pass up a jump shot like that.”

&n
bsp; “Only my retiring nature and innate modesty restrain me.”

  Hilda laughed and squeezed. I squeezed her back and watched the wind ruffle her hair.

  There could be no better way to spend a sunny afternoon.

  But there were worse ways, and I found one of them an hour later, when I drove out to Thorney’s house.

  Chapter 14

  Thorney sat in a cane armchair on his front porch. He watched a heavy blond man tease a pane of new glass into a front window frame. The man wore a uniform shirt with the name of a glass company on the back.

  Thorney had a sizable goose-egg on the right side of his forehead, a bandage on the center of the goose-egg, and a sour look on his face.

  The look didn’t improve when he heard me step onto his porch. “’Bout time you showed up,” he grunted. “Remember all that crap about how you were gonna stop this?”

  The glass man turned, too. According to a patch on his left chest, his name was Ronald. He had the glass pane in place now, and he began to push metal wedges into the frame to hold it there.

  Every window up and down the porch except one had been broken. At least they all had little glass company stickers on them now. There was a cardboard box containing glass fragments, and bits of old, dried putty scattered across the porch. After the window Ronald was working on, there was only one more to do: a small, pebbled glass panel in the front door.

  The pebbled glass had a circular hole in the center of a star-shaped pattern of cracks. It was a big hole, .50 caliber size or damned close to it. Near the broken panel, in the wooden part of the door, there was a round, smooth crater. The crater was a good quarter-inch deep, maybe a little more.

  Ronald saw me studying the crater, shook his head in a “how ’bout that?” gesture, and kneaded a ball of glazier’s putty in his hands.

  I said, “Thorney, what the hell did this?”

  There was a drawstring bag on the table beside the old man’s chair. He picked up the bag and shook it. Whatever was inside made a clunky metallic rattle.

  “Nineteen of ’em,” he said. “May still be some more around here, too.” He dipped into the bag and came up with three ball bearings. They looked small at first, but that was only because Thorney’s hands were so big. The bearings were larger than marbles; they were chromed, solid spheres. They had a certain science-fiction-movie menace about them.

  I picked one off Thorney’s palm and hefted it. Moving at a decent speed, it was heavy enough to kill if it hit you in the right spot.

  “Did they throw ’em or use slingshots?” I asked.

  “Slingshots. Piss-weak little bastards couldn’t throw hard enough to do this.” He waved vaguely at his forehead.

  Behind him, Ronald the glass man pursed his lips and frowned.

  Thorney said, “And before you start mother-henning me, the doc’s already seen it. I’m not hurt. The little puke didn’t hit me square-on.”

  I bounced the ball bearing in my hand. “When I saw that window, the first thing I thought of was a .50 caliber slug.”

  “Not far off,” Thorney said. “I put my micrometer on one of ’em; .472 inches.”

  “Do Beth and Ron know about this?”

  Thorney shook his head doggedly. “Not yet. Maybe I’ll give them a call tonight. If I feel like it.” He looked up and dared me to make something of it.

  “Okay,” I said. I handed the ball bearing back to him. It made a solid thunk when he dropped it into the bag with the others. Ronald the glass man finished puttying the window and started work on the front door. I leaned against a porch column near Thorney’s chair and crossed my arms and feet. “Tell me about it,” I said.

  Thorney squirmed and absently touched the lump on his head that he said didn’t hurt. He winced and pulled his hand away. “It was this morning,” he said. “All of a sudden there was this banging noise, like somebody pounding with a hammer. Then I heard a window break, and then a couple more right after. I came out here, saw the rotten little pukes over there, hunkered down by the hedge.

  “There were three of them, maybe four, I’m not exactly sure. They got me with one of those bearings right off. Made my eyes water pretty bad.” He made a smacking noise with his mouth and seemed unable to fix his glance on any one thing.

  I thought Thorney was having a blackout or something, then I realized he was embarrassed because he hadn’t stopped them or caught them or done whatever he thought he should have done.

  He jerked his head up to face me and said, “By the time I could see again, they’d run off. Chickenshits!”

  I said, “I’m glad you didn’t chase them. Did you see the dent in that door frame? With a solid hit, one of those things would kill you just as dead as a small handgun.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, waving one arm at me. “That’s not the point. What I want to know is, what are you gonna do about it?”

  “You recognize the kids?”

  He nodded. “Couple of ’em. One was that Gortner brat from a couple blocks over, the one I told Beth about. And one was a pal of Gortner’s. I’ve seen him before. Not sure about the other one or two. Anyway, I figure they were on their way to school and decided to break something. For fun, probably. Sorry little rat-fuckers.”

  Ronald froze for an instant when Thorney said “rat-fucker,” then continued his work. I hoped Ronald never did any window repairs for Hilda. The two of them might form a committee to advise Thorney and me on our language. And wouldn’t that be a pain in the ass?

  I said to Thorney, “If those kids went to school, they have to come back. Do they walk past here on the way?”

  “Not right in front,” Thorney said. “Up the other street, at the corner there. They’ll be going by about three, three-fifteen.”

  It was early, so I waited on Thorney’s porch. We watched Ronald the glass man do his thing. He finished, eventually, and presented the bill with a flourish. Thorney paid him and he left whistling something vaguely gospelish.

  Thorney grunted. “Guy probably hands out slingshots just to keep his business going.”

  “You’re a bitter old fart, Thorney,” I said.

  “You’re goddamn well right about that,” he said.

  After that, I still had time to kill, so Thorney and I had a beer. He got out his sextant and showed me how to check the mirrors for proper adjustment.

  Then it was three o’clock and time for me to go roust the kids. It was like too much of my work; it was something that needed to be done, but I wasn’t looking forward to it very much.

  Chapter 15

  When schoolkids began to pass the corner, I stopped the first one who fit Thorney’s description—“big for his age with curly red hair”—and said, “Are you Gortner?”

  The boy shook his head and pointed back down the block. “He’s coming now.”

  “Thanks.”

  Gortner was with another kid; they both wore baggy pleated pants and light-colored shirts that were too big for them. They—and most of the other kids passing—were dressed so alike, they might have been wearing uniforms. They wouldn’t have seen it that way, of course. We didn’t either when I was their age.

  Gortner and his pal also had what I considered goofy haircuts and, between them, an easy three hundred dollars worth of fancy shoes and watches. And they carried book bags.

  In my school days, we’d have pushed a wheelbarrow—hell, we’d have carried a wheelbarrow—before we used a book bag. These kids didn’t have that tunnel vision. They each had one of those soft synthetic shapeless bags that people use to lug clothes or sports gear or books. As Gortner sauntered past me, I reached and snagged his bag out of his hands.

  He stopped, amazed. “Hey, wha … you can’t do that!” he said. His partner stopped, too. He held his bag behind him.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Of course I can do that. I just did. You want to guess what happens next?”

  Other kids hurried past. They watched and put their heads together and looked excited, but they kept movin
g. No-one said a word to Gortner and his buddy. And no one stuck up for them. Very interesting.

  “Okay, man, all right now. Gimme the bag back, okay?” Gortner bounced and blustered and shifted from one foot to the other. He was trying so hard to be cool.

  I said, “What happens next is this. The three of us are going for a little stroll so that an old man can have a look at you two. Think of it as your first lineup.” I smiled at them. “You will doubtless have many more, if I decide to let you grow up.”

  The Gortner boy seemed to be a year or two older than his friend, but he was still only a kid, still carrying his baby fat and acne. Maybe lines like “if I decide to let you grow up” were a touch overdone. On the other hand, maybe not; I wanted him off-balance. And he was.

  Gortner bobbed his head rapidly and rocked it from side to side as he talked, like kids do when they’re caught off guard. “No way, man. I don’t know who you are, but you’re in trouble, man. You can’t make—”

  Gortner’s buddy butted in. “Are you a co—uh, a police officer? Sir.” This kid was thin-featured and dark-haired. He had more acne and less bullshit than Gortner. More brains, too, apparently.

  “I’m a private cop,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter whether I’m the sheriff of Tombstone or a cab driver. You have only two choices. One, you come with me. Two, I go to the cops and your folks and tell them about this morning’s ambush and what you have in here”—I swung Gortner’s book bag in a lazy circle—“besides your algebra homework.”

  I was only guessing the slingshot was there, but that seemed a pretty safe bet.

  It was. Gortner bounced and bobbed off on to a new tack. “Yeah, what the fuck, Eddie, let’s go see what this guy is talking about.”

  Eddie wasn’t too happy about that, maybe because Eddie still had his book bag. “Uh, Jerry, I don’t think—”

  Jerry Gortner whirled on him. “Come on, man! You’re coming too, Eddie. Or you’ll be sorry!”