Accustomed to the Dark Page 14

  “Mr. Croft,” he said, and I thought I could hear a smile in his voice, “you overestimate the small sphere of my very small influence. I know only a few people in Texas, acquaintances only, and I know no one at all in Florida.”

  “The people in Texas,” I said. “Would they know anything about Lucero?”

  There was a pause. “Possibly,” he said at last. “I shall make inquiries, of course. What leads you to believe that Lucero and Martinez will be going to Texas?”

  “They’ve got to go somewhere. So far as I know, Martinez doesn’t have any bolt-holes. Lucero used to work in Dallas.”

  “So I understand. Ah, something occurs to me. My nephew, George—you remember him?”

  “Yes.”

  “George has spent considerable time in Miami. Perhaps he knows someone. I shall ask him.”

  “Lucero was working for a Miami drug family, the Ortegas.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Colombians,” he added, the way a czar might’ve added serfs. “I shall speak with George,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome,” he said. “But perhaps you should save your thanks until such time as I accomplish something.”

  “I appreciate the effort.”

  “It is nothing,” he said. “Good-bye, Mr. Croft. And good luck.”

  “Thanks. Good-bye.”

  The big Cherokee swayed slightly as a gust of wind slapped at it. The sky out there was growing lower and darker. I wouldn’t be outrunning this storm.

  I made another call that I should have made earlier. It was just after nine in California.

  Ed Norman was in. “What’s up?” he said. “How is she?”

  “The same,” I told him. “I need some help.”

  “Anything.”

  “I need the name of a good investigator in Dallas, and one in Miami.”

  “Teddy Chartoff’s in Dallas. Small agency, just him and his partner, but they’re top notch. Hold on. Okay. In Miami, there’s Dick Jepson. I’ve never met him, but I hear good things. What do you need them for?”

  I told him what I needed them for.

  “I’ll call them,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t care what it costs,” I told him.

  “Forget that. Teddy owes me. And we’ll work something out with Jepson. You want their numbers?”

  “Yeah.”

  He recited them, I wrote them down.

  “One other thing,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “Could you ask Chartoff to find what he can on a man named Thorogood, Thomas Thorogood? Residence in Carlton, Texas.” I spelled the name, gave him the street address.

  “I’ll tell him,” he said. “What’s the matter with your phone?”

  “It’s a cellular. The signal’s breaking up. Wait.” I slowed down, drove the Jeep to the side of the highway. “Ed, you there?”

  “Give me your number.”

  I gave it to him. “I’ll talk to you later,” I said.

  “Fine. You take care.”

  “Thanks.”

  Just as I hung up, the storm suddenly broke. Fat round raindrops shattered against the windshield and hammered against the rooftop. I turned on the wipers, turned on the headlights, pulled the lever that changed the drive to four-wheel, and drove back onto the highway.

  I stayed below sixty miles an hour. On either side of me, the prairie had vanished behind swiftly shifting curtains of gray. Beneath me, the tires sizzled. Ahead, the raindrops blasted through the headlight beams like tracer bullets.

  It was in the summer, a year and a half after I first met him, that I met Ernie Martinez for the second time.

  By then I had worked with William and Rita Mondragón for over two years. I had learned a few things about both of them.

  William was one of those people who are sometimes resented because they believe they’re smarter than everyone else. They’re also sometimes resented because they’re usually right about this.

  Personally, I liked him. He left me alone.

  I had gotten to know Rita better, and I suppose we had become friends. I liked her, too, and there were times when I almost forgot that I felt something more. There were times when I thought about nothing else.

  Occasionally, with the keen eye of your trained detective, I noticed tensions between them. No matter how charming he could be, and he could be very charming, William lived inside an impregnable solitude. There was a part of him, isolate and private, which I don’t think even Rita ever reached, and I think this bothered her. From the other office, very rarely, I heard her snap at him. Once, when the two of them were in there, I heard her stalk from the room and slam the door behind her. No one ever said anything about the incidents. No one ever acknowledged that they’d actually occurred.

  As infrequent as they were, however, they produced small blips on a radar screen at the back of my mind. I noted them, wondered how William could cause her even the slightest unhappiness, wondered how Rita could put up with even the slightest unhappiness, but I tried not to linger over them. Mostly, I succeeded.

  I wasn’t thinking about William and Rita, though, or at least not any more than usual, on that sunny Friday morning in June. I was parked on San Francisco Street, six blocks west of Vanessie’s in the Hispanic barrio that runs between Guadalupe and Paseo, beside a low chain-link fence that surrounded a small run-down adobe house. The tiny yard was hard-packed dirt, tufted with weeds. A pair of dusty lilac trees braced the tiny wooden portico. Shades were drawn at the window. The house looked empty. But inside it, I was pretty sure, was a young woman named Nancy Gomez.

  She had run away from home a week ago. She was eighteen, no longer a minor, but her father had hired the agency to find her. I had traced her here with information I’d obtained from another young woman, Rosa Sanchez. Rosa had taken the money I’d offered, but she had given me the information more out of jealousy than greed. She had been involved with Ernie Martinez before Martinez became involved with Nancy. The renter of record for the house on San Francisco was Ernie Martinez.

  I had been parked outside for fifteen minutes. There were no other cars parked nearby. No one had entered or left the house. I could sit there all day, practice making stern detective faces in the rearview mirror while I waited for something to happen, or I could try a more direct approach.

  I got out of the car—I was driving an old Ford back then—and walked through the opened gate of the fence, up the crumbling concrete walk. The warped floorboards of the portico creaked as I crossed them. Through the closed door I could hear the sounds of a television set. The Price is Right. “Lucille Baker, come on DOWN!”

  I knocked on the door. After a moment it opened, and Nancy Gomez stood there. Five foot six, one hundred and thirty pounds. Her black hair was straight and shiny, hanging past her shoulders and cut in sleek bangs at her round forehead. She hadn’t lost her baby fat, and maybe she never would. Maybe no one would ever suggest that she should. Like the forehead, the rest of her face was round, but it was very beautiful—poreless skin, almond-shaped dark-brown eyes, a small Indio nose, a wide red mouth. Beneath a clean white T-shirt that reached to her thighs, her breasts were plump and proud.

  “Yeah?” she said. The beautiful face was slack with boredom.

  “Hi, Nancy,” I said. “Your father sent me.”

  The slackness tightened and she slammed the door on me, but it bounced against the steel-reinforced toe of a Justin mule-skin boot that had somehow wandered over the threshold.

  “Go away,” she said. She held the door with both hands. “You can’t do nothin’ to me. I got a legal right to be anywhere I want.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But your father asked me to talk to you. So here I am.”

  “I don’ wanna talk to you. Or anyone else. You tell him that.”

  “Look, Nancy,” I said. “Just give me ten minutes.”

  “I don’ gotta give you nothin’.”

  “Nancy,
if you don’t talk to me, your father will only send someone else.” I put on my stern detective face.

  She turned to her left and hollered over her shoulder, “Ernie?”

  I should have practiced in the car.

  “Hey Ernie!”

  I heard him answer from somewhere within the house. “Yo?”

  “Ernie, this guy’s botherin’ me.”

  “What guy?”

  She turned again, looked back at me triumphantly, then swung the door wide open. “Him,” she said.

  Ernie Martinez stood there, blinking sleep from his eyes. His pompadour was flattened on the right side, as though it had been ironed. His right cheek was creased. Tucked into his jeans was a T-shirt that matched Nancy’s, except for the dirt. His feet were bare and they weren’t any cleaner than the shirt. He had put on weight since I last saw him, but it was beer flesh, loose and pale. “Hey,” he said, and pointed a finger at me. “I know you.”

  “Hello, Ernie,” I said. “I’m working for Nancy’s father. He’d like me to talk to her. Deliver a few messages.”

  “Josh-you-ah,” he said. He was still pointing the finger. He grinned. “Josh-you-ah, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, good to see you.” Nancy was looking up at him with a kind of vacant puzzlement. Still grinning, he stood back and waved a hand at me. “Come on inside, bro.”

  I wasn’t puzzled. Once I was inside, he could claim that I was an intruder. Legally, he was allowed to defend his home by any means he chose. There are some Santa Fe cops who’ll tell you that when you shoot a burglar in the front yard, you should drag him inside afterward.

  “Maybe some other time,” I told him. I turned to Nancy. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “No you won’t, motherfucker,” he said. He leaned toward me. He was pointing a finger again. “You stay the fuck away, you hear me? She’s mine, bro, and she’s street legal. You got that?” He stood upright and he wrapped his meaty arm around her shoulders. “You tell her father to fuck off.”

  Nancy smirked at me, proudly, and then she looked up at him again, with pleasure in her big sloe eyes, and admiration. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.

  I had a notion that I could somehow shatter her admiration for the man, smash the image she held of Ernie Martinez. So I smiled and I said, “How’s the wrist, Ernie? Slowing you down any?” And then I turned and walked away, offering him my back. I thought it was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  I was right.

  20

  THE TELEPHONE STARTED chirping at about a quarter to one in the afternoon, just as I was approaching Interstate 40, south of Wheeler. I was able to see the green highway signs through the wavering sheets of rain, but nothing beyond them.

  I lifted the phone from the passenger seat, flipped it open.

  “Hello.”

  “Josh.” Hector Ramirez. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”

  “I was out of range.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the road.”

  “Where?”

  “Texas.”

  “Texas? What the hell are you doing in Texas?”

  “Checking something out.”

  “You’re thinking Dallas? You’re thinking Lucero’s bringing Martinez and the woman back there?”

  “I don’t know, Hector. I’m looking into it.”

  “Forget it, Josh. You don’t know Dallas. Even if they’re there, you’d never find them. And the place is probably crawling with Feds already. You’re wasting your time.”

  “I’ve got time to waste. Has anyone spotted that RV of Sylvia Miller’s?”

  “Nope. It probably got dumped in a garage somewhere. But we ran a check on RV registrations, and had Motor Vehicles cross-check them against new licenses. We’ve got an RV registered to a Susan Sanborn, and three months ago, the same Susan Sanborn applied for a driver’s license. The picture on the license is Miller. So now we know her name, and we know what kind of an RV she bought. For what that’s worth.”

  “What kind was it?”

  “An eighty-four Tioga. Twenty-two feet. But it’s not on the road. Someone would’ve seen it.”

  “What did Miller use for ID when she got the license?”

  “Passport. According to the Feds, she got the passport with a birth certificate.”

  “A dead baby.”

  “Yeah.” You find the grave of a child born at about the same time you were, request a copy of the birth certificate from the Department of Records, and use that to obtain other ID.

  “Oh,” said Hector. “The Denver cops picked up something about Lyle Monroe. You remember—the guy in the house? When you made that stupid phone call?”

  “I remember.”

  “According to his girlfriend, he was one of Lucero’s investors.”

  “Investors?”

  “Monroe would drop five, ten grand on Lucero every couple of months, according to her. Lucero used it to buy coke. He’d pay back Monroe double the money.”

  “Why would Lucero need Monroe’s money?”

  “He probably didn’t. Denver cops figure he took the money to keep Monroe on a string. It never hurts to have a buddy with connections. You knew that Monroe was old money up there? Old family?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He wasn’t doing too well with that movie business of his. The money from Lucero probably helped out. Assisted him in maintaining the extravagant lifestyle to which he had grown accustomed, it says here. According to the girlfriend—her name’s Heidi, by the way—Monroe thought Lucero was the bee’s knees.”

  “The bee’s knees?”

  “That’s a paraphrase.”

  “So why did Lucero shoot him?”

  “They don’t know. The Denver cops. What they’re saying is, maybe Monroe balked at the game plan. Whatever it was.”

  “Or maybe Lucero’s gun went off accidentally, while he was cleaning it.”

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  “Did the Denver cops find her safe-deposit box?”

  “Yeah. Nothing in it. Tax records. Listen, Josh, why don’t you get on back here? You won’t be able to do anything in Dallas.”

  “I’m losing the signal, Hector.”

  “Asshole,” he said, and hung up.

  I flipped the phone shut.

  What Ernie Martinez lacked in subtlety he made up for in stupidity. I’d gone only two steps down the concrete walkway when I heard him roar behind me and come clomping across the portico.

  Ducking, I wheeled to my right, and as he blitzed past me I thumped a left into his kidney. He was moving too quickly in the same direction for the punch to do much damage, but when he spun around to face me, his face was twisted with rage.

  “What’s the matter, Ernie?” I said. “Wake up on the wrong side of the bed?”

  He came in at me, heavy shoulders lowered, fingers clawing at the air. If I’d let him grab me, he could’ve torn me apart. I didn’t let him. I got in a good jab at his nose, and then another. While he contemplated those, I hooked a right into his belly. Ernie hadn’t been doing his sit-ups. He gasped.

  I moved away, lowering my hands. “Come on, Ernie,” I said. “You can do better than that. Big tough guy like you?”

  From the portico, Nancy shouted, “Kill the fucker, Ernie!”

  My plan was working wonderfully so far.

  Martinez had seen too many movies. He lumbered in at me like a cowboy in a Western, his hands balled now, and he threw a big, sloppy roundhouse right. I stepped away from it and hooked him in the gut again. As he folded forward, I smacked my open palm against his ear.

  I moved back again. “Maybe we should do this some other time,” I said. “When you’re feeling better.”

  He was still bent forward. He dove at me and I stepped aside. He landed in the dirt.

  “Need a hand up?” I asked him.

  He rolled over onto his elbows. The T-shirt was brown with dust. “Motherfucker,” he said.
But he stayed on the ground.

  “You go away!” Nancy screeched at me. She hadn’t moved from the portico. “I’ll call the cops!”

  “What do you think, Ernie?” I said. “Think we should get the cops here?”

  Still supporting himself on his elbow, Martinez turned to her. His hair hung in thick strands down his forehead. “Shut up,” he told her.

  “Ernie, he’s got no right!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” he said.

  I turned to her. “Nancy? You want to leave? I’ll drive you. Your father just wants to talk to you.”

  Her eyes were slits. “You go to hell, mister.”

  I nodded. Mission accomplished. “Maybe we’ll talk later.”

  “Never!” she said.

  “Right,” I said.

  I went down the walkway and out to my car. Before I climbed into the Ford, I looked back at them. He was still on the ground. She was squatting down beside him, reaching out. He swatted her hands away.

  Later, when I told William and Rita what had happened, neither was overly impressed.

  “So,” Rita said, “basically, what happened was that you bullied the man in front of his girlfriend.”

  We were in William’s office, Rita in one of the client chairs, me in the other. She was wearing a lightweight pale blue top of knitted silk, V-necked, over a long flared skirt of dark blue linen. Behind the desk, William was wearing a pinstriped pale yellow Oxford shirt with a buttoned-down collar, a patterned red silk tie, and a gray suit vest. I was wearing sackcloth and ashes.

  “Basically,” I said, “yeah.”

  “Thereby,” she said, “provoking her sympathy for him. That was very cunning.”

  “If I’d known,” said William, “that you’d had an earlier run-in with Martinez, I wouldn’t have let you continue with the case.”

  I said, “I didn’t know until this morning that Martinez was involved.”

  He nodded. He was tapping a pencil lightly, distractedly, against the edge of the desk. “I think,” he said, “that we’ll let Rita handle this one from here on.”

  “Probably a good idea,” I said. I turned to her. “Watch out for that left of his.”