Accustomed to the Dark (15 page)

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 clear 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.”

He studied the picture some more, finally nodded. “Maybe, yeah. Could be. Could be her.” He turned back to the machine, fiddled with the mouse. The photograph disappeared, replaced by the tabular screen. He jerked the mouse and the lines went whizzing down the screen. The screen stopped. He clicked the mouse. The screen showed another series of thumbnails. None of these were a picture of a woman.

“Damn,” said Mr. Niederman. “Wait. We'll get there.”

The tabular screen showed again. Mr. Niederman clicked his mouse.

Four small photos showed on the screen. A man, a woman, a silver-gray Lincoln Towncar, the car's Texas license plate. The photograph of the woman was about the same size as the photo on a driver's license, and it was a photograph of Sylvia Miller.

Mr. Niederman turned to me and grinned. “Good, huh?”

“Very good,” I told him.

PART THREE

17

I
NTERSTATE
70
HEADS
directly east into the plains from Denver until it reaches Strasburg, where it dips toward the south for a while before it levels out at Limon and heads east again, aiming straight at Kansas. The land around me was flat and mostly empty. Some of it was open range, a few gaunt and solemn cattle grazing in the sparse scrub grass. Some of it was farmland, acres and acres of winter wheat coming up pale and thin. Now and then, off in the distance, a tiny complex of farm buildings huddled against a lonely clump of elms. Now and then, a faraway copse of cottonwoods clung to a thin ribbon of stream. Now and then, every twenty or thirty miles, signaled by the silhouette of a water tower against the blank blue sky, a small town clung to the thin ribbon of highway.

It seemed bleak and desolate to me and I wondered how they did it. How those people, whoever they were, lived out here in those isolated farmhouses, those isolated towns, surviving over the years at the mercy of the weather and the water and the finance companies.

Maybe they had MTV.

“
You're being snide, Joshua,” Rita told me
.

“
I honestly don't know how they do it,” I said. “I'd go crazy in a week
.”

She smiled. We were on the patio again. The sunlight was winking off the gold cross at her slender neck, sliding along the black of her hair and the blue silk of her blouse. “Perhaps that indicates that you've some fundamental flaw. Some problem with confronting yourself
.”

“
Maybe. I've got plenty of flaws, fundamental and otherwise. But I don't even like driving through a place like this
.”

“
Why do it, then? Why drive to Texas?
”

“
Those pictures of Mr. Niederman's. He got a good shot of Sylvia Miller, and a good shot of the license plate of the car she was in. It's registered to a Thomas Thorogood of Carlton, Texas. Carlton is a few miles west of Wichita Falls. This is the best way for me to get there
.”

“
But why drive? Why not take an airplane?
”

“
I keep my mobility. Maybe, somewhere along the line, I'll have to turn around and head back to Santa Fe
.”

We didn't discuss why I might have to do that
.

“
Why do you think Sylvia was in Denver with Thorogood?” she asked me
.

“
I think that Carillo, who's apparently some kind of lieutenant to Lucero, was arranging for the flow of funds into Sylvia's account
.”

“
And why was Thorogood there?
”

“
I don't know. Maybe he had business with Carillo and it was convenient for him to pick up Sylvia along the way
.”

“
And why would he drive all the way from Texas?
”

“
Maybe he was transporting drugs
.”

She smiled. “That's fairly thin, isn't it?
”

“
Maybe. We'll see
.”

“
And you really think that Lucero will be taking Martinez and Miller to Carlton?
”

“
It's the only lead I've got,” I said
.

“
It's not much of one
.”

“
Following it is the only thing I can do right now
.”

“
You can give it to the police
.”

“
Then I wouldn't have anything to do. And they had their chance. The Denver cop who came by Mr. Niederman's. If he'd looked through all the pictures in that computer, he'd have seen the picture of Sylvia Miller
.”

She smiled again. “It wouldn't have meant anything to him. You know that. No one knew about Sylvia Miller until yesterday. When was that picture taken?
”

“
Two months ago. But he'd still have seen the picture of the car with the Texas license plate. He could've checked it out with Texas Motor Vehicles, just like I did, and found Thorogood
.”