Accustomed to the Dark Page 9

  Hector said, “Sixty-eight thousand dollars, they figure.”

  “Pretty big money for a small town bank.”

  “Friday, payday, they carry a surplus. I called the honcho at the bank right after I talked to you. Like you said, Monday was slow, no need to check the vaults. He called me back about a half an hour ago. Not a happy camper. But he sounded less angry about the money being gone than he was about Miller taking it. A huge betrayal of trust, is the way he put it.”

  “The money was insured. His self-esteem wasn’t.”

  “Sixty-eight grand, that could take a pretty big chunk out of your self-esteem. Something else.”

  “What?”

  “Sylvia’s personal account. She’s been depositing some hefty checks lately. Hold on.” I heard the rattle of paper. “Five thousand last week, seven thousand the week before. A total of twenty-three thousand over the past month and a half.”

  “Who signed the checks?”

  “Different name every time. But they were all drawn on Denver banks.”

  “Lucero’s been running his money through her account.”

  “Or maybe she’s been selling Mary Kay.”

  “Did she clean it out before she left?”

  “What do you think?”

  “What about a safety-deposit box?”

  “She’s got one, there at the bank, but the Staties need a court order to open it. Won’t take them long to get it, I figure. Anyway, Lucero and Martinez have probably dumped the RV. That much cash on hand, they can buy themselves a couple new cars.”

  “Maybe they already had one lined up.”

  “Maybe. Looks like they thought this thing through. So when are you getting back here?”

  “When Lucero and Martinez are on ice.”

  “Come on, Josh. The FBI is working on this. We’re working on it, down here. And now the Denver cops are working on it. You think you can get something that everybody else can’t? Never mind. I forgot who I was talking to. Look, you’re on your way to Denver?”

  The road kept climbing and climbing, winding higher and higher into the trees as though it wouldn’t stop until it had left them and pierced the faraway blue film of sky.

  “Yeah.”

  “Guy to see up there is a Sergeant Labbady. He’s expecting you. Says he can’t wait to talk to the hotshot private detective. Your reputation precedes you, it seems.”

  “Okay, Hector. Thanks.”

  “You know she’s still the same? Rita?”

  “I called a little while ago. And the hospital has my number.”

  “All right. Listen. Keep in touch.”

  “Yeah. Thanks again.”

  I flipped the phone shut, tossed it to the seat.

  A good cop, Hector. And a good man. Over the years he’d been a better friend than any private detective had a right to. Not too long ago I had shot a man. The man hadn’t given me much choice, and he had survived, but for a while I had felt the weight of his life, and his death, on my soul. Hector had walked me through it.

  I looked around. The forest was dark and thick, impenetrable. Not just pine trees now but oaks and elms. It was as though I had entered not only a different landscape but a different planet.

  I remembered the first time I’d driven the Raton Pass. It was in September and I’d been coming from the other direction, riding down the long slide of the slope through the lush green forest when suddenly the flat brown prairie opened up like an enormous fan beneath me, stretching off to the edge of the world. I had been on my way to Santa Fe then. To live there this time, and not merely visit.

  When I arrived in town after I got myself a room at the De Vargas Hotel, downtown, Hector had been one of the first people I’d spoken to.

  “Croft, right. I got a phone call from my cousin,” he’d said.

  I nodded. “Bernie said he’d call.”

  “Sit down.”

  I sat.

  We were in Hector’s old cubicle in the Violent Crimes Division. This was back when the police station was on Washington and Marcy, where the public library is now.

  The man sitting on the far side of the worn wooden desk was squat and muscular. His jet black hair was short and curly and combed back from a blunt widow’s peak. His dark, hooded eyes and his drooping mustache made him look a bit like the Frito Bandito. I decided not to mention this.

  He wore a pulled-down blue silk tie at his opened collar, and a white-on-white striped cotton shirt that had been cut to display the clean line of powerful pectorals. The sleeves were rolled back, maybe to display the clean line of powerful forearms. Bodybuilding is hard work, painful and tedious, and sometimes the people who do it like to show off what they’ve accomplished.

  “Bernie says you used to be a cop,” Hector said.

  “A long time ago.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “I didn’t like the hours.”

  “That’s not what Bernie says.”

  “What does Bernie say?”

  “He says you slugged a lieutenant.”

  “We disagreed about the hours.”

  He smiled faintly. “This is amazing,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “I was just sitting here, sending up a little prayer that God would deliver a wiseass PI into my life.”

  I smiled. I stood up. “Thanks a lot, Sergeant. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

  He grinned. “Bernie said you were kind of a hard-ass.”

  “Bernie said a lot.”

  “Well, he’s a talkative guy, you know. That’s our shared Hispanic heritage. We’re a very talkative people, we Hispanics.” He waved a hand at me. “Sit down and we’ll talk a while.”

  I sat again.

  “Bernie also says you’re okay,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “But Bernie’s wrong a lot of the time.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He told me you were okay, too.”

  He laughed, and then he looked at me across the desk with those sleepy eyes. “You’re a pretty tough hombre, are you, Croft?”

  “You’d have to ask Bernie.”

  He smiled. “You were a PI there in … where is it?”

  “Fairfield.”

  “Right, Fairfield, Connecticut.” He shook his head. “Beats me how a cousin of mine ended up in Fairfield, Connecticut.”

  “It’s not a bad town.”

  “Yeah, right.” He was clearly dubious. “You were there how long?”

  “Ten years. Two as a cop. Eight as a PI.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “I wanted something new.”

  “Why Santa Fe?”

  “It was something new.”

  He gave me another faint smile. “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we pretend that you’re not the clever guy you really are, and then you can go ahead and give me some straight answers. How would that be?”

  “I was here a few years ago. Passing through. I liked it.”

  “The Land of Entrapment.”

  “It came down,” I said, “to a choice between here and Oregon. I know some people there.” I shrugged again. “If this doesn’t work out, I can always go on to Oregon.”

  “Lot of redwood trees in Oregon. Nice, if you like redwoods.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You get a lot of work, over there in Fairfield, Connecticut?”

  “Enough to get by.”

  “Your license up to date?”

  “The license and the carry permit.”

  “No carry permits in New Mexico. No such thing.” He looked me over, casually but thoroughly, to make sure I wasn’t carrying a weapon now. It wasn’t something I usually did when I went into a police station.

  “How do I shoot the bad guys?” I asked him.

  “You don’t. You give us a call and we leap into a car and dash over and we shoot the bad guys for you.”

  I smiled. “What a deal.”

  “Or we shoot you, depending.”

  “Well,” I said,
“you can’t have everything.”

  He smiled again. “Let’s see what we can do here.” He reached out, picked up his telephone, dialed it. After a moment, he said, “William? Hector. Still alive, thanks, and you? … And how’s Rita? Good, good. Listen, you still looking for a hired hand? I’ve got a guy in my office, PI, just came in from the East. Connecticut license. My cousin Bernie’s worked with him … No, Carmen’s son, he’s a cop in Connecticut, in Fairfield. Says this guy’s okay … I don’t know, hold on.”

  He looked over at me. “You bondable?”

  I nodded. “And reverent and clean.”

  “Yeah,” he said into the phone. “He’s also kind of a wiseass … Right. Joshua Croft … Right, I’ll tell him. No problem. You take care. Say hello to Rita … Right, bye.”

  He hung up the phone. “William Mondragón,” he told me. “He and his wife run an agency here in town. They’ve been looking for someone. The office is over on Palace.” He picked up a scrap of paper, picked up a pen, scribbled something. He pushed the scrap across the desk. “That’s the address.”

  I leaned forward, took the piece of paper. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  He stood. So did I. He held out his hand and I took it. “I’ll tell Bernie you showed,” he said.

  “Give him my regards. And I appreciate the help.”

  He nodded. “Keep your nose clean.”

  14

  SOUTH OF TRINIDAD, ten or fifteen miles into Colorado, I dialed information, got the number for the Denver Police. I dialed that, asked for Sergeant Labbady. After a few long minutes of cellular charges, he came on the line. “Labbady.”

  “This is Joshua Croft, from Santa Fe. I was just talking to Hector Ramirez—”

  “Oh yeah, the famous private detective.” A New York accent. “You’re the guy that warned the scumbags, right? Let ’em get away?”

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  “It’s a real honor to talk to you, pally.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my car. Just below Trinidad, on my way to Denver. Are you—”

  “That’s three or four hours away. I’m on my way outta here. You know where the main station is? Downtown?”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Be here tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  “Have you—”

  He hung up.

  It was only seven o’clock in the evening by the time I reached Pueblo, but the day had been a long one and I was tired and there was nowhere I had to be. I pulled off the Interstate at the Pueblo fast-food alley—a quarter mile of quarter pounders and fish fillets—and grabbed some food at a Wendy’s. The hamburger didn’t taste any better than the sandwich had tasted this morning. I stopped at a liquor store, picked up a bottle of jack Daniel’s, found a motel, asked at the desk for a wake-up call at seven the next morning, and unloaded everything into the room. Everything except the shotgun. Motel managers sometimes get a little nervous about shotguns.

  Inside, I poured myself a stiff drink, added a splash of water, and I called the hospital. Once again, there had been no change.

  I called Leroy and asked him to do some favors for me. I told him I’d call him again tomorrow.

  I lay on the bed. Sipping the drink. Remembering.

  Eight years ago, the office had been located in the same Palace Avenue complex in which it was located now. I climbed up the narrow stairs to the door at the second floor. Into the frosted glass, in a broad neat script, was etched THE MONDRAGÓN DETECTIVE AGENCY. I knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” a man’s voice called out to me.

  I opened the door and stepped in. The door sighed slowly shut behind me.

  He was sitting behind a large antique wooden desk in front of a window that looked up at the mountains. His features were somewhat obscured by the light behind him, and I was pretty sure that the desk had been put there for that reason. His elbow was notched against the desk’s green blotter as he leaned forward, his ear to the telephone receiver. He sat back and he smiled at me, an easy smile that seemed to hold a lot of teeth, then he waved me in with his free hand, waved the hand at one of the two padded leather client chairs. I sat down.

  “I understand,” he said into the phone. He sat back, smiled at me again, and held up a finger to tell me he’d be off the phone soon. I nodded.

  “I understand,” he said again. “But you hired us to do a job, Mr. Cronin. We did it.”

  I had heard discussions like this one before. I had been a part of them.

  I glanced around the room. All the furniture was antique—the desk, the chairs, a low sideboard, a bookcase filled with law and reference books. The carpeting was thick gray pile and it ran from wall to wall. Either the agency was doing well now or it had started out doing well.

  To my right was a wooden door, unmarked.

  “That’s an interesting observation, Mr. Cronin,” said the man behind the desk. “I’ll certainly bear it in mind. But I have company at the moment and I’m afraid we’ll have to continue this at some other time.” He glanced at me and he smiled—more to himself, I thought, than to me. “Perhaps I’ll send one of my associates out to discuss the matter with you. Yes, I’ll be sure to convey that to him.”

  He hung up the phone and he stood, holding his manicured hand across the desk. I stood and took it.

  “Joshua Croft?” he said. I admitted I was. “William Mondragón,” he said. “Please. Sit down.”

  He was slender and tall, about my height, and his broad shoulders and narrow hips were neatly gift wrapped in a tailored three-piece tropical-weight light gray wool suit. His silk tie was taupe, his silk shirt was cream. His thick black hair, nicely grayed at the temples, was swept evenly back from a broad square forehead. He had dark eyebrows, long dark eyelashes, dark eyes, and a dark mustache beneath a thin aristocratic nose. His mouth was wide and sculpted. His movements were graceful and fluid and he was good looking in a way that was almost, but not quite, feminine.

  He sat back in his swivel, lay his arms along the arms of the chair, crossed his legs comfortably. “You were a private investigator in Connecticut?”

  “That’s right.”

  “For how long?”

  “Eight years.”

  “With an agency or on your own?”

  “On my own.”

  “A lone wolf?”

  I shrugged. “It just worked out that way.”

  He smiled. “Do you think you can get along in an office, working with other investigators?”

  “I like to think,” I said, “that I can get along with just about anyone, more or less.” Which didn’t mean I had to like them. I was getting along with Mondragón, more or less, and I wasn’t sure yet that I liked him.

  He smiled again, nodded. “We’re not that large an agency. At the moment, there’s only me and my wife, Rita.” There was a hint of promise, or maybe merely a hint of hope, in his at the moment. “We do a bit of everything. Missing persons, accident investigation, some security work. We also do a fair amount of white-collar business—asset searches and personnel background—but Rita handles most of that. Our rates vary with the type of job we do, but I think it’s fair to say that we charge a reasonable fee. If you worked with us, you might not get rich, but you wouldn’t starve to death.”

  I nodded.

  “We also do a certain amount of divorce work,” he said. “Do you have a problem with divorce work?”

  “Not an insurmountable problem.”

  He nodded and looked at me as though I’d disappointed him in a way he had almost been expecting to be disappointed. “But you’re less than enthusiastic about it.”

  I shrugged again. “People can get intense.”

  He nodded again. “And we do some collecting. Have you done any collecting?”

  “Some.”

  Another smile. “But you’re less than enthusiastic about it.”

  “For the same reason.”

  Another nod. “The gentleman on the telephone was a man n
amed Jack Cronin. He owes the agency five hundred dollars. His daughter ran away and he hired us to find her. We found her. She was down in Albuquerque, mainlining heroin and working twelve hours a day on Central Avenue. I pried her away from her pimp and brought her back. She ran away again, and Mr. Cronin has decided that this has negated his debt to us.”

  “Not very sporting of him,” I said.

  “No, not at all. How would you feel about giving Mr. Cronin a visit? Asking him if he’d reconsider?”

  I smiled. “Is this a test?”

  He smiled back. “I suppose you could see it that way.”

  “What kind of work does Mr. Cronin do?”

  He sat back and a flicker of interest passed over his handsome face. “He’s a building contractor,” he said.

  “He works out of an office?”

  “Out of his home.”

  “He’s there now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does his wife work?”

  “As a housewife.”

  “What kind of a neighborhood do they live in?”

  “A new development off Zia Road.”

  “Middle class? Upper class?”

  “Middle. With a pretension or two. Do you know where Zia is?”

  “I can find it,” I said. “I’ll need a van.”

  “A what?”

  “A white van. Doesn’t matter what year, so long as it runs.”

  “A white van,” he repeated.

  “Gray’s okay, but I’d prefer white.”

  He smiled again. “I can arrange one for you in fifteen minutes.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What’s my legal status?”

  “Your Connecticut license isn’t valid here. You’re a civilian. Simply someone I’ve asked to collect a debt.”

  I nodded. “One more thing.”

  “What?”

  “What was it that Cronin wanted you to tell the ‘associate’ you sent out there?”

  “That he’d better bring along an army.” Once again he smiled that easy smile.

  I gave him one of mine. “A contractor, you said. He’s worked construction?”