Burning Midnight (15 page)

“What—” she said, as I reached the porch, and put a hand to her throat, choking herself off. She had circles under her eyes, frown lines bracketing her nostrils all the way to the corners of her mouth. She was still pretty and plump, but she'd aged five years since I'd seen her last.

An interior door closed with a bang.

Jerry said, “I warned him I'd take that door off the hinges next time.”

“He's home,” she said. “Let's not drive him away again.”

I jerked my chin toward the living room. Jerry held his ground for an instant, but his wife's hand on his arm made him step far enough aside for me to squeeze through the door. They were a couple that communicated with touches and gestures.

“So you're Walker.” He stood with his back to Jesus, moving the liquid around inside his glass. It was clear, with a couple of tired ice cubes floating on top, rounded at the edges like soap. I smelled pure grain alcohol. They say vodka has no smell, but why should they be right about anything? “I thought you'd have a cauliflower ear at least.”

“Don't be rude, Jerry. Can we offer you a drink?”

“Maybe later.” I sat down and waved toward the other seats. “Make yourselves at home.”

He opened his mouth again, but sat without having his leash tugged. Chata took a place next to him on the sofa, not close enough to lean against him, and rubbed her upper left arm with her right hand, just to be doing something. I doubted she knew she was doing even that. She stopped when I told her all that had happened, repeating some things she already knew, and what I'd gotten from her brother. The muscles in Jerry's jaws stood out like dumbbells. He looked down into his glass, then took a deep swallow.

I took the lighter out of my pocket and stood it on the coffee table. “That's evidence. The lawyer's going to want it.”

“Lawyer?” she said.

“Ernesto needs to talk to someone who can't be made to report what he said to the police. I stopped questioning him because I can be made to, theoretically; private investigators can't claim client privilege under the law.”

Her eyebrows went up; she'd heard the
theoretically.
“And realistically?”

“Realistically, the cops have tried before and I've been a disappointment to them, but that means jail time. I'm no good to anybody inside. With an attorney in the picture I can refer them to him, and that lets me off the hook.”

“Theoretically,” Jerry said.

“Theoretically. Math is the only exact science.”

“Does disappointing the police mean disappointing my father as well?”

“That's the tough part. He's the client.”

Chata said, “But if you tell him what you won't tell the police, and he
is
the police—what?”

“I'll have to dance on the head of that pin when I come to it. Meanwhile, the lawyer will probably insist that Ernesto turn himself in.”

“To jail?” Horror clouded her eyes. They were identical to her brother's.

“It's not like prison. Michigan law says jail inmates get a cell of their own, and he'll be booked as a material witness. That means he won't be treated as a common criminal and he'll have protection twenty-four-seven.”

“Is he in danger?” she asked.

“He won't see seventeen if he spends one more day on the street.”

“So you say.” Jerry drained his glass. Ice crunched between his powerful jaws.

“We can always take the chance I'm wrong.” I was fed up with him. He came from mulish stock, but his father knew reason when he heard it, even if he didn't follow up. I was ready to take sides in their fight.

She rose. She looked taller now. Some people call that character. There is probably a better word for it in Spanish. “I'll talk to him.”

“To his door, probably. Do just as good as if he wasn't on the other side.” Jerry swallowed ice.

She went upstairs. He got up. “Let's have that drink.”

I stood and followed him into a small clean kitchen with a butcher-block island holding up a bottle of Smirnoff and a bowl of ice. Vodka's not my favorite by a long shot, but I helped myself to a glass and filled it with cubes and splashed clear liquid over it.

He did the same. The ice was still cracking from the shock when he took a gulp, then replaced what he'd drunk. “I didn't sign on for this,” he said. “I expected kids—our kids—the terrible twos, teenage rebellion. I figured I could condition myself as I went along. I wasn't ready to deal with all the worst all at once.”

I drank. The stuff made my tongue tingle.

He said, “I know what you're thinking.”

“Bet you don't.”

“It was different between John and me. He tried that tough-love crap right off the bat. That's a last resort. At least I made an effort to understand Nesto. I even thought I was making progress, but kids are good at pretending to know what you're talking about.”

“Actually, I was thinking that whoever invented vodka didn't like drinking and didn't want anyone else to like it either. But I think you're right about kids. Lunatics are the same way. They can imitate sane behavior and fool a trained psychiatrist.”

“I wouldn't go that far. He isn't a lunatic.”

“I'm wrong, probably. I never had a kid.”

Chata came back downstairs and found us standing there. “He wants a Mexican lawyer.”

“My God.” Jerry drank.

She stiffened. “What's that mean?”

I intervened; a mistake, of course. “I know some lawyers who can probably recommend one. Good ones come in all packages.”

He barreled on, right over me. “I didn't mean anything. It's just that when you think of hiring a lawyer, ‘Mexican' isn't the first adjective that comes to mind.”

“As opposed to hiring a bricklayer.”

“I'll use your phone if it's okay,” I said. “My cell's dead.”

I don't know if they heard me. I took myself out of the crossfire and picked up the telephone in the living room. While I was waiting for someone to answer, Jesus smiled sympathetically at me from above the gas fireplace. He had blood in His eyes from His thorn hat.

*   *   *

The lawyer's name was Rafael Buho.
Búho
in English is owl. Poets say owls are wise; ornithologists say they're swift and ruthless predators. The two things aren't mutually exclusive. I figure the family had been founded by a lawyer.

He was a small, soft, alert man with caramel-colored skin, fine graying hair smoothed back from his small face, and eyes that showed white around the irises under brows raised perpetually, so that he seemed surprised by everything he heard. That made him bulletproof in a courtroom; a poker face doesn't mean one that has no expression, just an expression that never changes. You could tell him you'd cut up your sister and mailed her to every zip code or that you'd forgotten to separate your darks from your whites at the laundromat and he'd look just as shocked by the one as by the other. He wore a tiny black moustache shaped like a carpenter's square set at an angle and a powder-blue suit that would photograph white under a strong light. His red-and-white polka-dot bow tie looked like a clip-on, but when you studied it closely you saw it was perfectly tied, all the edges even. An attorney who pays that much attention to the only purely ornamental man's garment is a comfort to his clients.

He could pass for the concierge in a one-star hotel in San Diego, but his hands were a dead giveaway: soft, paraffin-treated, with nails pared round and as white as cane sugar. I wouldn't trust him at blackjack. But the law is a different game. My source, a former federal judge, now a consultant to one of the biggest firms in Detroit—a lawyer who represented lawyers—had told me that Buho could reduce a thirty-year sergeant in Major Crimes to a blubbering penitent on the stand. I disliked him on sight, and as a rule I was prepared to like Mexicans. He was too studiedly humble, which is colossal arrogance of a kind. But I wouldn't place my life in the hands of a lawyer I liked.

He bowed to Chata in the living room, gripping a moleskin briefcase in both hands at his chest like a shield, and asked if there was a place where he could speak with the boy in private.

“I'm his guardian. Anything you have to say to him you can say to me.”

“No,
Señora
. I have my oath.” His tone was firmer than his actions.

“It's true,” I said, when she looked at me. “Unless Nesto says you can sit in.”

“He's asked me not to. I thought perhaps his lawyer—”

“Your pardon,
Señora
. Mr. Walker is my client.”

“That's so he can tell me what Nesto tells him. It lets me claim privilege.
Señor
Buho confirmed it when I talked to him on the phone.”

“Then you can insist I take part,” she said.

“You think he'll say in front of you what he'd say to his mouthpiece?”

“I do not like this term.” Buho looked bemused. He might have been calling me all kinds of a
puerco
inside.

“Then you can tell me afterwards,” she said.

“I can. I probably won't.”

“But you'll tell John!”

“I don't know that yet. I already said that.”

“Give it up, honey. He's as much a brick wall as my old man.” It was the first thing Jerry had said since the lawyer had arrived. He sat on the sofa with his knees spread and his glass cradled in both hands between his thighs. His eyes were out of focus and he missed half his consonants.

“He's my brother! You talk as if I haven't any rights.”

Buho bowed again. “You grasp the situation very well, madam.” He seemed to be able to turn the Antonio Banderas accent off and on. A smart lawyer has more skins than an onion.

She called off the assault. “His room's the first door on the left, top of the stairs.” She sounded as tired as she looked.

“Thank you. I should like to speak with Mr. Walker first, in private also.”

She didn't even react to that except with a tiny nod that might have been her chin quivering. Buho and I went into the kitchen. No door separated it from the living room, so we kept our voices low. I told him everything I'd learned, went over with him the questions I wanted answered, and let him examine the lighter. He hefted it on his palm, turned it upside down to read
ZIPPO
engraved on the bottom, ran his thumb over the raised enamel design on the side. For good measure he flipped it open and spun the wheel, getting a spark but no flame, snapped it shut.

“The fluid, it evaporates even when you don't use it. You think it is the same lighter from the video?”

“That's one of the questions I want you to ask Nesto.”

“Is a complicated affair, no?”

“Is a complicated affair, yes. And stop talking like the Cisco Kid. You were born in Santa Fe, so was your father and grandfather, and you went to Harvard. I like to know all about a man before I do business with him.”

He smiled, showing a row of teeth so white and even you couldn't see the divisions between at first. I didn't count this as a genuine expression any more than the eternal surprise. “Okay, fella,” he said. “I'll go up and see the kid.”

 

FIFTEEN

He was alone with Nesto forty-five minutes. It would work out to ten minutes of solid questions and answers and a half-hour of art. That left five minutes of silence; but silence is an art also.

I spent the time watching television with Jerry and Chata. The program happened to be a National Geographic special about interesting aquatic fauna. I doubt when it wrapped up that any of us could repeat anything we'd learned about life at the bottom of the wine-dark sea, except that it bore a disturbing resemblance to Mexicantown. Jerry had finished drinking and sat glassy-eyed and silent. I pegged him as an amateur with beginner's luck; a dedicated alcoholic would have slid under the coffee table ten minutes into the androgynous world of the seahorse. I nursed my second vodka, the fastest-acting and sneakiest of distilled poisons. It made hail-fellows-well-met of axe murderers and horny Vikings of Baptist lay readers.

Buho and I reconvened, alone with our hosts' permission, at a glass-topped table on a poker chip–size deck in the backyard. A pair of coach lamps mounted on either side of the glass doorwall coaxed a number of tough tiny moths into self-immolation. They were doomed anyway, because outside those auras of intense heat, sitting there was like picnicking on the Aleutians. I turned up my collar against the frigid breezes that whipped around the corners of the house, but Buho was plainly suffering in the cold. His nose was cherry-colored and he shivered visibly, without a word of complaint.

“That's one scared
muchacho,
” he opened. “He's all right, I think.”

“In general, or in sworn testimony?”

“In general. He's no killer. He's a pretty good liar, but aren't they all at that age.”

“Youth isn't for wimps. So much for philosophy. Give me something I can use.”

He opened a cigarette case made of black silk stretched over a frame, aluminum or bamboo, and offered me something brown with a gold tip. I don't know where they get them; probably through the mail from some reservation so they don't have to pay state taxes. I shook my head and stuck a Winston between my lips. “I like my poison slow.”

He shrugged—an elegant gesture in his culture, insolence personified in mine—and lit us both up off a butane lighter that shot a blue flame two inches high, endangering his toy moustache. His brand smelled like autumn—downwind of a city incinerator. “He's telling the truth about Zorborón. Luis Guerrara put him up to returning that lighter. It belonged to
El Tigre
originally, according to The Brother. Lighters, they are always being misplaced, yes?”

“
Sí
. You're forgetting our conversation. Save the pidgin English for the tourists.”