Accustomed to the Dark Page 11

“And that whacko Miller woman. How’d you get onto her?”

  “An informant.”

  “Pretty good work,” he said. “Too bad you blew it by calling the house in Denver.”

  “I made a mistake. It won’t happen again. Do I get the phone number?”

  “You know, Croft, you really are a major pain in the ass.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “I’ll bet. Look, I’m busy right now. How do I get back to you?”

  I gave him the cellular phone number. He hung up.

  I flipped the phone shut and tossed it to the mattress.

  The two beers at lunch had made me slow and fuzzy. I lay there, staring up at the dingy false ceiling, listening to the sound of the traffic whizzing through the thin walls. After a while, I thought back to the time I’d been lying in my room in the De Vargas Hotel in Santa Fe.

  The De Vargas used to be on Water and Don Gaspar. It doesn’t exist any longer. It’s been gutted and refurbished and transformed into the Hotel St. Francis, a sleek and stylish place where you can order your breakfast in French. Back then, when it was the De Vargas, it had been the only cheap hotel in downtown Santa Fe. My small room had cost something like thirty dollars, but even at that price I had been overcharged. The grimy window looked over a service courtyard littered with garbage. The air was tainted with the smell of old cigar smoke and Pine Sol. The bedcover was as thin and frayed as the prospects of the hotel’s guests.

  It hadn’t really mattered to me. By tomorrow I would be gone. I had already called Mondragón to tell him. Neither he nor his wife had been there, and I had been cowardly enough to feel relieved. I had left a message on his machine. It was early evening now and the nightstand lamp was on, casting a jaundiced yellow light through the thin shade, imitation parchment decorated with clumsy paintings of cowboys busting broncs. I was lying there in my clothes, trying to decide what to do with myself. I could go to the Bullring or the Pink Adobe, over on the Old Santa Fe Trail, and have a drink. Or maybe stop by the Palace. Back then there weren’t as many places to get drunk as there are now.

  I had decided on the Palace when someone knocked at the door. I was puzzled. I hadn’t been expecting anyone.

  I got up, crossed the tiny floor, and opened the door.

  She stood there in the hallway, wearing the same pale blue blouse and the same black skirt she had worn earlier today. She held a flat black leather purse under her right arm.

  “Mrs. Mondragón,” I said.

  She smiled. “May I come in?”

  There was no polite way to refuse her. “Of course,” I said, and I stepped aside to let her pass. As she did, I could smell the fragrance she wore, something faintly astringent and faintly sweet that reminded me of citrus flowers.

  I was abruptly conscious of how cramped and shabby the room was. The thin bedspread, the worn brown rug, the peeling wallpaper—everything seemed to have become, in an instant, even more sleazy and pathetic than it had been before. I turned to her, leaving the door slightly ajar. I didn’t know who I was protecting by doing that, or what I was protecting them from.

  She stood in the center of the room. Over the years, maybe a hundred times, I’ve thought about this scene. Rita Mondragón standing in the center of that small seedy room.

  She smiled again. “Joshua—”

  The telephone rang, hurling me from one cramped room to another.

  I grabbed Leroy’s phone, flipped it open. “Yeah?”

  “Croft? Hernandez. You ready? I got that information.”

  16

  IT WAS A gated suburban development to the west of Denver. But probably the home owners here would take umbrage at the word development. Probably the home owners here would take umbrage at a lot of words. Like poverty, and hunger, and desperation. The houses were mostly huge mock-Tudor castles and they sat comfortably back among imported trees on bright green landscaped lawns that looked as though they should be crowded with pavilions and banners and jousting knights, and with motion picture cameras.

  I found the house I wanted, drove the Jeep into the circular driveway, parked under a tall maple. I climbed up the flagstone walk, up the flagstone stairway, thumbed the buzzer. The door was pine, roughened and stained to look almost exactly like old oak, and it was banded with strips of anodized aluminum hammered to look almost exactly like wrought iron. There was a small casement window set into the wood, and through the artistically pebbled glass I could see someone moving toward me, like a fish gliding through murky water.

  The door opened and the lady of the manor appeared. She was a blonde, and had been since at least Friday. Her face had the healthy glow that comes from a good diet, a good conscience, and an excellent bank account. She was probably in her mid-fifties but she was very fit and she wore a bright red blouse and a short black skirt that proved it. People probably told her fairly often that she had good legs. They were right. She had good arms, too, strong and wiry below the carefully back-folded cuffs of her blouse. It was my guess that there was a tennis racquet lurking around somewhere.

  “Mrs. Albert?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and with the back of her slender hand she brushed away a lock of hair that had slumped a couple of millimeters out of place. Her nails were long and flawless and, like her lips, they were painted the same color as her blouse. “Are you Mr. Croft?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I see some identification?”

  “Certainly.” I slipped out my wallet, showed her the ID. “Did you call Robert Hernandez at the New Mexico State Police?”

  “I did, yes. But you can never tell, can you? Someone could be wandering the streets, pretending to be you.”

  No one was that stupid, I thought. But I smiled pleasantly.

  “Please come in,” she said.

  I tucked the wallet back into my pocket and I stepped into the foyer. She glanced swiftly down to make sure I hadn’t tracked any socialism onto the parquet floor. “This way,” she said. “He’s upstairs. He has his own suite of rooms.”

  I thought that must be very jolly for him.

  I followed her along the edge of a living room that wasn’t quite as large as the L.A. Coliseum. Stone walls, square beams overhead, a huge fireplace, dark wooden floors brightened here and there by throw rugs that had probably been woven in quaint Third World countries. Off in the distance a short Hispanic woman was plumping up the cushions of a white sofa the size of a tugboat. Mrs. Albert told me, “The policeman who came here before said that it was a waste of time.”

  “You can never tell,” I said. Words to live by.

  We came to a broad balustraded stairway, more pine, more stain. Mrs. Albert turned to me. “You won’t take terribly long, will you? The house is a mess and we’ve got some people coming over tonight. Consuelo and I are trying to get everything ready.” She brushed her perfect hair back again. This time I realized that the gesture was designed to demonstrate that her competence, usually invincible, was a tad harried at the moment.

  I smiled pleasantly again. It’s easy when you know how. “I doubt it,” I said. “I’ll try to be out of here as quickly as possible.”

  She nodded, not at all surprised that life would proceed as she expected it to proceed. “He’s just up there,” she said, pointing up the stairs. “The door all the way at the end, on the left.”

  At the end of the long hallway, I knocked on the door to my left.

  It was opened by an elf. He had to be at least seventy years old, and possibly he was older, but he looked about sixty. He was a thin inch over five feet tall and he wore a double-breasted gray wool suit with the jacket buttoned shut, a white shirt, and a neatly knotted black tie. His face was shiny and red and his wavy hair was thick and white. So were his eyebrows. His eyes were blue. “Are you the PI?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Joshua Croft.”

  “Terrific,” he said, and beamed at me. “Terrific.” He held out a small red hand and I took it. The small red hand wrapped around mi
ne and crushed it. “Charlie Niederman,” he said. “Come on in.”

  I stepped into a small parlor filled with antique furniture that seemed too bulky for the space it occupied. A rambling upholstered sofa printed with a floral pattern, a pair of bulky matching club chairs, an elaborately carved coffee table, matching end tables, tall matching bookcases along one wall. It reminded me for a moment of the furniture in Sylvia Miller’s house in Las Vegas, but all of this had been lived-in, for a long time. And probably it had been lived-in somewhere else, before it had been crowded into this room.

  “I dressed up for the occasion,” said the elf, cocking his head and running his thumbs along the broad lapels of his jacket. “Whatty ya think?”

  “Very dapper,” I said.

  “Yeah? You think dapper?” He turned to look at himself in a full-length mirror mounted on the wall. “Dapper, sure, why not?” He nodded to the mirror. “Dapper’s good.” He raised his head slightly, giving himself another half an inch of height, turned to the side, and lightly ran his hand down the front of the suit coat as though he were stroking a cat. “Forty years I got this suit, and it fits me like I only bought it yesterday. Like a glove.” He turned to me. “You know why?”

  I smiled. “You had it altered?”

  “Altered! Whatty you, a jokester? Fitness,” he said, and thumped his fist against his chest. “Fitness. I take care of myself, fella. You don’t take care of yourself, who’s going to, huh?” Squinting at me, he raised his hand and twitched a finger, beckoning. “C’mon, Mr. PI. Lemme show you something.”

  We went into the next room, smaller than the parlor and set up as a home gym. Plastic mats on the floor, a stationary bicycle, a rowing machine. Beneath the window, an orderly row of gray dumbbells, pairs of them in weights from fifteen pounds to forty.

  He pointed to the plastic mats. “Every day,” he said, “one hundred sit-ups. And one hundred push-ups. Every day.” He eyed me thoughtfully. “You look pretty healthy. You work out?”

  “I swim a little.”

  He nodded. “Swimming’s good. Cardiovascular. Good. Weights are good, too. You do weights?”

  “Not if I have a choice.”

  “Weights are good. Here. Look.” He danced over to the dumbbells, bent over at the waist, grabbed a forty-pound weight in each hand, straightened his body and did a quick, smooth curl with his right arm, then another with his left. His face went from red to purple. “Muscle mass,” he said through clenched teeth. He lowered the dumbbells. “Muscle mass is good.” He curled his right arm. “Muscle tissue burns calories all day long.” He curled his left arm. “Fat just lies there. Not good.” I thought I saw a bead of sweat suddenly blister his forehead.

  “Mr. Niederman,” I said, “I came here because I was told you might have information about Luiz Lucero.”

  “Lucero, okay. Forget the weights.” He lowered the dumbbells to the floor, then turned to me. He was puffing slightly, but both of us ignored it. “I’m a nutcase,” he said, and he grinned. “But I know I’m a nutcase. When you know it, it’s good. When you don’t know, not so good. Okay. You want information. Follow me, Mr. PI.” He twitched the finger at me again.

  I followed him into the third room. This was a bedroom. Against the far wall stood a huge four-poster. Just inside the door, carefully positioned atop a small white table, was a computer setup—keyboard, monitor, printer, some other equipment I couldn’t identify. To the left of the table was a black wooden rocker. In front of the table sat a gray swivel chair. To the right was a white metal file cabinet.

  Farther to the right was the window. He led me there. From a hook beside the sill, on a leather strap, hung a Minolta camera with a long telephoto lens.

  Mr. Niederman pointed out the window to the mock-Tudor castle across the street. “See there?” he said. “That’s his house.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Whose house,” he said, and snorted. He squinted up at me. “How long you been a private detective?”

  “I’m just starting out.”

  “I can believe it. Whose house, you ask me. So who’s the guy you wanna know about? Luiz Lucero, that’s who. That’s his house. He moved in there about five years ago. And I been doing surveillance ever since.”

  “Surveillance.”

  “Look at this baby.” He lifted the camera off its hook, cradled it gently in his small hands. “I can shoot a fly from half a mile away. I can watch him drool.”

  “But Lucero’s not living there.”

  He scowled with impatience. “What am I, a dummy? Lucero was in prison, I know that. Where he belonged, the pig. But see, one of his henchmen is taking care of the place. Another drug pig. Fella named Carillo. He’s Lucero’s right-hand man, see. He moved in when they put Lucero in prison, down in New Mexico. And I been keeping records.”

  “What kind of records?”

  Carefully, he hung the strap over the hook. “C’mon.”

  He danced over to the computer. “Grab a seat,” he said, and pointed to a black wooden rocking chair to my right. “Make yourself at home.” He jumped into the swivel chair, rolled it forward, and tapped at the keys. “You know computers?” He grabbed the mouse on the tabletop and began to skate it around the white surface.

  “I’m just starting out,” I said. I maneuvered the rocker closer to the table and sat down in it.

  He was leaning forward, peering into the monitor. “Yeah? Whatty ya got? What kinda chip?”

  “A Pentium, I think.”

  He looked at me as though I’d stolen his dog. “You got a Pentium?”

  “It was a gift,” I said. Apologetically.

  “A Pentium,” he said. It seemed to me that his shoulders had slumped within the suit jacket. “I been telling Moira for months I need a Pentium. Moira, my daughter. You met her? Downstairs?”

  “I met her.”

  “You gotta keep up, I tell her. You gotta keep abreast. How many megahertz?”

  “I’m not sure. What’s good?”

  “Anything over a hundred is good.”

  “Nothing like that,” I told him. “Twenty, I think.”

  “Oh, well,” he said, and he seemed to relax. “This is a 486-DX4-100, see. That’s the top of the line for the 486. Very fast. Faster than a sixty megahertz Pentium, even.”

  “A lot faster than mine.”

  He nodded happily, pleased with himself and his machine, and also with me. “But twenny megahertz is good. Don’t get me wrong. In a Pentium, twenny megahertz is very good. That’s a terrific little chip, that Pentium.” He turned back to the screen. “Okay. Here we are. Now watch.”

  I watched. I was looking at some sort of tabular arrangement, information arranged in rows and columns.

  He said, “On the left, see, we got dates. On the right, we got descriptions.” As he slid the mouse around the tabletop, the computer’s cursor zipped around the screen. “Okay, look, that’s Friday, right? Ten A.M. The day before the prison thing. The escape, right? Okay, so what does that say?”

  “Three men. Mercedes.”

  He nodded. “So now we know you can read. Good. That’s very good. Now watch. I click on this, right?”

  The tabular screen was abruptly replaced by a screen that held five small color photographs against a gray background. Three of the photographs were of Hispanic men, facial shots. The fourth was a shot of a silver-gray four-door Mercedes, one of the newer models. The fifth was a shot of the car’s license plate.

  “These are thumbnails,” he said, swinging the cursor around the screen. “All I got to do is click on one …” He moved the cursor over one of the facial shots, clicked the mouse. The thumbnails vanished and the screen slowly filled, from top to bottom, with an enlargement of the shot.

  “That’s why I need a Pentium, see,” said Mr. Niederman. “A Pentium, you wouldn’t have to wait.”

  The picture was slightly blurry, as though the camera hadn’t been completely still when the frame was exposed. But the man’s features were cle
ar enough.

  “Who is he?” I asked him.

  “Who knows?” he said. “Another henchman.” He turned to me. “That’s how come I called the police. This meeting, see? Carillo doesn’t get that many visitors. So when I see these guys on Friday, and then on Saturday I hear about the prison break,” he leaned toward me, winked, and tapped his forehead, “I put two and two together, right? These guys, drug pigs, they’re planning the prison break. Right there, right across the street.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “The police,” he scowled. “Whatta they know? The guy they sent out here was a dummy. Very polite, yessir, nosir, but I could see what he’s thinking—we got a nutcase here. Okay, so I’m a nutcase, I admit it, but I’m no dummy. The guy never even called me, afterward, to keep me abreast—I had to call him.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “Said he talked to the guys involved. Said it was only a poker game. Thank you very much for your assistance, sir. A poker game!” he sneered. “At ten o’clock in the morning?”

  I nodded. “Mr. Niederman, you’ve been taking these pictures for five years now?”

  “Right, right. Since Lucero moved in over there. I got a darkroom down in the basement, a very nice setup. Top of the line. I put it together myself. I print out the shots, see, then I run them through this baby here.” He reached out toward an oblong beige box on the desk, patted it paternally. “My scanner.”

  I nodded again and I took from my jacket pocket the photographs I’d gotten from Leroy’s computer a few hours ago.

  “What I really need,” he said, “is a digital camera. One of those new Canons. That way, see, I could download the pictures directly into the computer. That would be better.” He shrugged, held out his hands—what’s a guy to do? “I been telling Moira that for months now, too.”

  I handed him the picture of Sylvia Miller. “Have you ever seen this woman?”

  He studied it, shook his head. “Not a very good print. A blowup.” He looked at me. “What is it, off of some kinda ID thing? A driver’s license?”

  “A driver’s license.”