Accustomed to the Dark Page 10

  “Mr. Cronin is perhaps a half a foot shorter than you are, and perhaps a foot wider. He seems in fairly good shape. Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  Another smile. “You’re welcome to change your mind, if you like.”

  “Would I still get the job?”

  It was his turn to shrug. “I’d take it under advisement.”

  I nodded. “Where do I pick up the van?”

  He grinned at me and reached for the telephone.

  Two and a half hours later, I was knocking on the office door once more. He called out for me to come in. I did, the door sighing behind me again, and I walked across the room to the desk and put the five hundred dollars on the blotter. I was showing off a bit, but I wasn’t the one who’d set this up.

  He picked up the money, counted it, grinned. He looked at me. “Have a seat. Tell me the story.”

  I sat down and I told him.

  After a while, he was laughing. It was a good laugh, and I decided that maybe I did like him after all. “Wait,” he said, and held up a hand. “Wait. I want Rita to hear this.” He leaned to the side, pushed a button on his intercom. “Rita? Can you come in here for a minute?”

  He sat back, grinning at me. After a moment, the door to my right opened.

  There are some women who immediately own every room they enter, who take it over simply by the force of their presence. They seem to attract the available light and somehow crystalize it around their bodies, so they move through space and time within a bright, clear, immutable nimbus. They don’t need to be beautiful, but they all share a kind of intensity that comes from a rock-solid sense of their own identity and purpose. This woman had that, and she was also beautiful.

  She was wearing a pale blue silk blouse, a black skirt, a pair of black pumps. Her long hair, black as the wings of a raven, tumbled loose and thick to her shoulders.

  Mondragón and I stood up. “Rita, this is the man I told you about. Joshua Croft. Joshua, my wife, Rita.”

  Smiling, she held out her hand. I took it, half-expecting to receive an electric shock when my flesh touched hers. I didn’t. Her eyes were large and black and her stare was difficult to meet.

  “I’m pleased to meet you,” she said.

  “Mrs. Mondragón,” I said.

  “Grab a seat, Rita,” Mondragón told her. “You really have to hear this.”

  She smiled at him, looked at me, raised an eyebrow expectantly, and then she sat down, crossing one slim tanned leg over the other.

  Mondragón and I sat. She was still looking at me, still expectant.

  I said to her, “It’s not that big a deal.”

  I’d be shuffling my feet next, like Jimmy Stewart, and blushing, and scratching at the back of my befuddled head.

  “I told you,” said Mondragón, “that I sent Croft out to talk to our friend Cronin.”

  She nodded, turned to me, smiled. “Why the white van?”

  “He painted a sign on it,” Mondragón said, grinning. “Black watercolors, both sides, in big letters. ‘Jack Cronin is a liar and a welsher.’ Then he drove it out there and parked it in front of Cronin’s house.” He turned to me. “How long did it take for Cronin to notice it?”

  I turned to face him, but along the skin of my face I could still feel the pressure of Mrs. Mondragón’s presence, as though I were sitting along the edge of some force field she gave out. “Cronin’s wife noticed it first. I saw her in the window. Then Cronin came out to discuss it with me.” Barreling across the lawn at about thirty miles an hour with a sledgehammer held at port arms.

  “To discuss it,” said Mrs. Mondragón.

  I turned back to her. “He felt that I should move the van. I told him that I planned to. That I planned to drive it around the neighborhood all afternoon. And maybe all day tomorrow, too.”

  She smiled.

  “It was fairly simple after that,” I said. “His wife convinced him to pay up.”

  “What’s that?” said Mrs. Mondragón, lightly touching the tip of her fingers to her own cheekbone. “On your face. It looks like the beginning of a bruise.”

  I rubbed at my cheek. “I banged it on something.” On the handle of Cronin’s sledgehammer, when I took it away from him.

  “I see,” she said. “Mr. Cronin isn’t bruised, too, is he?”

  “No.” The knee I’d planted in his stomach probably hadn’t left any bruise at all.

  “Well,” she said, “that was very enterprising of you, Mr. Croft.” She smiled, and suddenly I got the feeling that she’d seen everything that had happened at Cronin’s house as clearly as if she’d watched it on television.

  I shrugged. I think that probably I was blushing.

  Her husband said to me, “How’d you like to start work tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Tomorrow would be fine.” But I knew that tomorrow wouldn’t be fine. I knew that by tomorrow I’d be on my way to Oregon. I would call Mondragón later today and tell him.

  She said, “Is it Josh or Joshua?”

  “Joshua,” I said.

  She smiled. “Welcome to the firm, Joshua.” She held out her hand again, and again I shook it. Her fingers were slender but her grip was firm.

  I wondered how long it would take me to get to Portland.

  15

  THE DENVER POLICE Administration Building was on Cherokee Street, a six- or seven-story complex of tan buildings that took up a whole block between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Avenues. I presented myself at the desk at eleven o’clock exactly. The policeman behind the counter made a phone call, listened into the receiver, then hung up and told me to wait down here until Labbady arrived.

  I thanked him and then I wandered around the huge lobby. Beneath the high ceiling, along the walls, in the corners, displays had been set up to provide little snippets of Denver Police history. In one corner there were three motorcycles, among them an old Harley trike. On the north wall, behind glass that looked reinforced, there were rows of weapons—including a 30.06 Sedgeley rifle, a 12-gauge pump Winchester, some lethal-looking tear gas grenades.

  On the west wall hung a chart that described how various drugs affected their users. I was reading how marijuana, after six hours, caused paranoid anxiety and suicidal tendencies, which wasn’t exactly the way I remembered it, when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned.

  “Croft?” He was maybe five foot ten and he was maybe fifteen pounds overweight. His receding black hair was wired with gray and there were dark pouches under his small brown eyes. A blue suit, a white shirt, a blue tie. Basic Cop, down to the thick soles of his black brogues.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Labbady?”

  He nodded glumly. “C’mon.”

  I followed him out the front door and to the right across the sunlit concrete plaza. The headquarters building also housed the Pre-Arraignment Detention Facility—the jail—and it was surrounded by old private homes, frame houses two and three stories tall, that had been converted into offices for bail bondsmen. Some of the buildings were painted in bright festive colors, blues and pinks and yellows, presumably to make arranging bail a merrier affair.

  Not saying a word and not looking back at me, Labbady led me a block or two down Thirteenth and up the stairs of a small restaurant. The hostess knew Labbady, gave him an affable smile, then seated us at the bar. There were a couple of other cops, plainclothes officers, sitting in there already. For all I knew, everyone in the place, including the hostess, was a cop.

  The bar was decorated to look like a British pub. The walls were dark and one of them held a dartboard. We sat in a booth beside a mural of old sailing ships. A cardboard tent on the table advised me that Guinness was available on tap. But for some reason I didn’t feel as though I had been transported to Picadilly Circus.

  “You’re paying,” Labbady told me, and picked up his menu.

  “A pleasure,” I said.

  He glanced over at me, to see if I were mocking him
. He decided that I wasn’t, apparently, but he frowned anyway. “You’re not off the hook,” he said. “That was a dumb move, calling the house.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  He said, “I talked to your friend in Santa Fe again this morning. Ramirez. He filled me in a little, about you and your partner. She still in a coma?”

  “Last I heard.” I’d called this morning, before leaving Pueblo, and again when I arrived in Denver.

  “Tough break,” Labbady said. “But she’s lucky, in a way.”

  This was the second time someone had said that, and I didn’t like it any more than I had the first time. “In what way?” I said. I was careful, once again, to flatten the level of my voice.

  “Most of the people who run into Lucero,” he said, “the ones he doesn’t like, they end up dead.”

  “I don’t think it was Lucero who shot her. I think it was Martinez.”

  He nodded. “The other one. Ramirez says you brought him in, what? six years ago?”

  “Yeah.”

  A waitress materialized at the table. Labbady ordered a cheeseburger and a salad and a Fat Tire beer. I ordered the same. I still wasn’t hungry but I knew that I needed the fuel. And the beer might help with the headache and the dehydration that had come after sleeping with a bellyful of Jack Daniel’s.

  When she left, Labbady said, “Tell me about Martinez.”

  I told him about Martinez. By the time I finished, the food had arrived.

  I took a sip of my beer and said, “You know anything about Lucero?”

  Leaning forward, Labbady had the cheeseburger halfway to his mouth, holding it in both hands with his elbows on the table. He smiled glumly and he said, “What I don’t know about Lucero, it isn’t worth knowing. I been following his career with interest for years.” He took a huge bite of the burger.

  “Which part of it?” I knew he was either Homicide or Narcotics.

  He chewed the food over to one side of his mouth, and out of the other side he said, “Drugs.” He swallowed, washed it down with a long gulp of beer. “You know he was a Marielito?”

  I nodded, took a bite of my hamburger.

  Labbady dipped a french fry in ketchup, popped it into his mouth. “He did real well for himself in Miami when he showed up there. Got himself hooked up to a Colombian family, the Ortegas. Part of the Cali cartel. Started pushing, street level stuff. Then he found his true calling. Shooting people.”

  He took a bite of cheeseburger, chewed, swallowed, drank some beer. “Luiz is real good at shooting people. He does this little trick, where he shoots them in the eyes and the forehead? You know about that?”

  “Yeah. A trademark.”

  Labbady nodded. “Yeah. Anyway, he started off by wiping out a couple of soldiers from another family of Colombians. He moved up the ladder after that. He’s a maggot, Luiz, he’s crazy as a loon, but he’s no moron. He’s got some real administrative skills. Aside from shooting people, I mean. But shooting people, that can be a good administrative skill, right? Helps motivate the troops.” He took another bite.

  I nodded, sipped again at my beer.

  “They sent him to Dallas,” he said, “in nineteen eighty-six, to handle their distribution here. They were having problems. Lucero shot some people and solved the problems. He came here in nineteen ninety-one.”

  “What kind of a record does he have?”

  He drained off his beer. “None at all. Officially. Not till he got busted down in Albuquerque.”

  “If he’s no moron, how did that happen?”

  “He doesn’t like being cheated, Luiz. He gets very upset about that. The guy in Albuquerque, guy named Carlyle, another maggot, he stiffed Lucero on a big order. Luiz went down there, to take care of it personally. Thing is, Carlyle heard he was coming. He got the sweats and he talked about it. Cops down there heard the story and staked him out. Even so, Lucero almost got away with it. He made his way in there, into Carlyle’s house, shot the guy, and almost managed to make it back out.”

  The waitress materialized again and asked us if we’d like another beer. Both Labbady and I said yes.

  “Tell me about this Miller bimbo,” Labbady said. “On paper she looks like a straight civilian.”

  I told him what I knew about Sylvia Miller. The waitress brought two more beers, cleared away the plates. I told him some more about Sylvia.

  “So she’s a filbert,” he said. “A gun groupie.”

  “Looks like it. What’s the story on Lyle, the man who was shot?”

  He lifted his beer, took a long swallow. “Lyle Monroe. We don’t have much on him. No record. Some kind of film producer. Documentaries. He had money, but he didn’t make it off any kind of movies. It’s family money. His house was over by the country club, near Cherry Creek. You know the area?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Big old stone house, fifteen or twenty rooms. Lawn the size of Nebraska.”

  “What was his connection to Lucero?”

  He shrugged. “No idea. Drugs, probably, but we haven’t nailed it down.”

  “Did any of the neighbors see the RV there?”

  He shook his head. “There’s a stone wall around the property. You can’t see jack from the street. But I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Lucero dumped the RV before he got there. Neighborhood like that, an RV would stick out like a sore thumb. He probably had a car waiting for him somewhere. Him and the others.”

  “Sylvia had a Ford.”

  “We found it. She sold it, weeks ago. They had another car.”

  “But no one saw it,” I said.

  “We haven’t found anyone yet.”

  “Where do you think they are now?”

  He shrugged. “Texas, maybe. Florida, maybe. Lucero’s got connections in both places. I had to put money on it, I’d say he’s on his way to Florida. That’s where he started. That’s where he hung out the longest.”

  “Do you think they’ll try to leave the country?”

  “Nah. I don’t think so. Not Luiz. To him, that’d be like running away. Like going back to his beginnings, when he was nothing.” He shrugged. “But who knows? Things are pretty hot for him right now. Maybe he’ll take off for South America.”

  “Colombia?”

  “I don’t think Colombia. He’s a Cuban, don’t forget. The Colombians are all pretty tight with each other. Luiz was always kind of an outsider, even when he was a honcho. That’s the way I read it, anyway.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Sergeant. I appreciate all the help. Would you mind if I poked around in Denver for a while?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I would mind that a lot.” He smiled and leaned forward and clasped his hands together on the table. “You know why I’m being such a prince of a guy here?”

  “No,” I said. “Why’s that?”

  “I’m giving you a break because your friend Ramirez says you’re kosher. And because of your partner. I got a partner, too. So I can understand how you got a personal involvement in all this. But that also means you can make mistakes, right? Like you already did when you called up Monroe’s house. That was primo, pally. That was classic. So here’s the deal. I don’t want you hanging around and maybe screwing things up again. You go on back to Santa Fe. Or go to Texas. Go to Florida. Go anywhere you want, but get out of Denver.”

  “Or what happens?”

  Raising his hand off the table, he sat back. “Hey, who knows? It’s a complicated world, right? Almost anything could happen. What I’m saying, things could get difficult for you. In general, you know?”

  “Right.”

  “Right,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want to think that you and me, we screwed up this fantastic rapport we got established here. You follow me?”

  “Like a caboose.”

  “Good. And like I say, I’m sorry about your partner. I mean that sincerely. I hope it all works out.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. He stood, I stood, we shook hands. He no
dded toward the bill. “Don’t forget,” he said. “You’re paying.”

  I needed a place to operate from, so I drove up to Colfax and followed that east, until I found a generic motel a few miles past Monaco Parkway. After I hauled the computer into my room, I used the cellular phone to call the hospital. No change.

  I called Leroy. He told me that the photos were ready, and I hung up. I connected the phone to the computer, turned on the machine, and brought up the fax software. In just over two minutes, the phone rang and the computer answered it. The machine hissed and beeped, whirred softly for a maybe a minute, hissed and beeped some more, went through the cycle again, then clicked off.

  A few minutes later, after I’d told the computer what to do, and it had sent the information to the portable printer, I had fairly good paper copies of photographs of Ernest Martinez, Luiz Lucero, and Sylvia Miller, all facial views. As Leroy had told me, the photo of Sylvia was less clear than the other two. He had gotten a copy of her photo from Motor Vehicles and enlarged it. Although he had used his own computer to enhance the enlargement, the picture was still blurred and grainy.

  I called Leroy, told him everything had come through all right. Then I lay down on the bed, called the New Mexico State Police, and asked for Robert Hernandez. He came on the line gruffly. “Yeah?”

  “This is Joshua Croft.”

  “You don’t listen good. I don’t have anything else to say to you.”

  “Right. But you already said something. When we were talking before.”

  “What?”

  “You said that after the breakout, you were getting phone calls from all over.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “One of them came from Denver, you said.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m in Denver. Do you have a record of who made the call?”

  “It was junk. The Denver PD already checked it out.”

  “Then they won’t mind if I check it out again.” This was something less than the truth, but Hernandez didn’t have to know that. “If it’s junk, what difference does it make? But if it isn’t, it might help me locate Martinez and Lucero.”