Cool in Tucson (6 page)

“It’s the same thing,” Gloria said.  “Somebody just figured out what was in the  Super-Glue, so we can leave those stupid little tubes for the hobby train set.”  She plugged in the plate and stood by, watching it bubble.

While they waited, Sarah speed-dialed the fingerprint lab and listened to five rings before a deep voice boomed, “Ganz.” 

Sarah said, “Oh, Bud, good, I’m glad you’re working today.” 

“You are, huh?  I’m not, I’d rather be shooting pool.  Who is this?”

“Oh, sorry, Sarah Burke.  I was just thinking—”

“Thinking?  On the police force?  What’re you, some kind of a trouble-maker?”  He laughed and then coughed explosively, hurting her ear.  When he could talk again he yelled, “You were thinking about asking for a favor, weren’t you?  Huh?”

“Bud, are you too busy to talk?” 

“Hell, no,” he said, subsiding into a normal tone of voice, “It’s been kind of a slow day for laughs around here, so I’m giving you a bad time.  Whaddya want, Sweetheart?”

“I’ve got a body with no ID on it except a couple of nice big tats, look like they might be jailhouse specials.  I thought if you could run his prints against AZAFIS
¾
”

“I might get a match and you could start to look very smart, huh?  You want this miracle today or yesterday?”

“Well, I could have them up there in a few minutes, if—”

“And you think I’m so easy you can just run up here and pinch my butt and I’ll put your stuff right at the head of the queue, do you?”

“I didn’t mean—”

The terrible laughing and coughing rattled her eardrums again.  Bud Ganz really needed to quit smoking.  But when he recovered he said, “Sure, bring them up whenever they’re ready, Sarah, I’m just ragging on you.”

“Gloria’s going to bring them.  In just a few minutes.” 

“That big tall girl from the lab?  Tell her to call me when she checks them in, I’ll find a stepladder and we’ll make love.”

“I’ll tell her that and I’m sure she’ll be looking forward to it.”

“Uh-huh.  No matter how much you stroke me, Snookums, I might not be able to  get to your prints till tomorrow.  But I guess he’ll still be dead tomorrow, won’t he?”

Must be the new mantra.

 
“All
right
,” Sarah said, folding up the phone.  She repeated Ganz’s instructions to Gloria, who shook her head and said, “So bad,” absent-mindedly, intent on the view through the little window in the tent. 

When Sarah couldn’t stand the suspense any longer she said, “You got something?”

“I think so,” Gloria said as the bell rang on her timer.  “One good one, coming up on the inside of the right leg, see?”

“Oh?”  Sarah looked.  “Oh.  Oh, my.”  She watched Gloria peel off the tent, thinking this one print could make all the difference if…they looked at it together.  Sarah realized she was holding her breath.  “Couldn’t hardly be the victim’s print, could it?  On the inside of the leg like that?”

“Well, we’ll check that first, but no, not likely.  Looks like one quick touch from a pickpocket, on that little smooth place with no hair.”

“Now when you take this to Ganz,” Sarah said, “be sure he knows we think this one print might be the killer’s.”

“Gotcha.  Hey, wouldn’t it be estupendo if we matched this up with some thug in the system?  Whee, I could call my mother and tell her I solved a murder case all by myself.  No, maybe I won’t.” Gloria drew herself up and launched into an imitation of her mother saying indignantly, “Girl, you get back here to L.A. this minute!”  She rolled her eyes up.  “Mama wants me to go to beauty school and learn how to paste on those acrylic fingernails.”

“Well, the smell is different,” Sarah said.

“But no better.  And the conversations are even worse.”  She was frowning over the body.   “Anything else I see here is less than a partial, Sarah— just fragments.  But this one’s a winner, I think—looks like it might be an index finger.”  She got out her camera and took a picture, dusted it with magnetic powder and took another picture before she lifted it onto a strip of gummed paper.  

“Okay, let’s bag him up,” Sarah said, pulling on gloves again.  When the victim was zipped inside the bag she signed the department sealing tape and spread it carefully over the pull tab.  From now until the autopsy, nobody could get access to this body without leaving a record.  “I’ll stop at Gilligan’s office and tell him he can put his body away.”

“Fine.  You know, Sarah,” Gloria said, pressing the last fingerprint into her spiral book and noting the location, “this guy….”

“The dead guy?  What?”

Gloria brooded.  “He’s not your average John Doe, is he?  Looks like…I don’t know…somebody.”

“I thought so too.  Seems like we should be getting some inquiries.”

“If he belonged to me I’d sure be asking by now.  Hoo!  Hunky dude like this in a park all alone?  Why?”

“I guess I don’t think much about the
why
.”

“You don’t?  Motive doesn’t matter any more?”

“Well…it does to a jury.  But to tell you the truth, the reasons people give for killing somebody usually don’t make any sense.”

“People don’t know why they kill other people?”

“I think by definition killing’s an irrational act.”

“Oh, now, hold on, I know
some
people—you take my Uncle Budge—”

“But you haven’t killed him yet, have you?  Because all your constraints are in place and working.”

 “And besides I don’t have to see him any more.  If I did—”

“Uncle Budge would be toast, huh?”  Sarah hung her purse and briefcase on her shoulders, smiling.  “We all
say
that.  ‘One of these days I’m going to strangle her with my bare hands.’ My mother says that about my sister almost every week.  But very few of us do it.”  

“I wonder what would pop my cork?”  Gloria straightened up from the table and rubbed her back with a little groan.  “Rage, I guess.  Sex, of course.  What else do people kill for?”

“Oh, in Tucson, these days,” Sarah said, “we usually just look for the drugs.”    

CHAPTER FIVE

Rudy Ortiz woke before dawn Tuesday, as he did most days.  He lay still a few minutes listening to his wife’s gentle snoring, thinking about the day ahead of him.  When his plans were complete he got up and dressed silently in the half-light, down to his socks.  He carried his boots out through the kitchen and into the garage, where he sat on the cement step to put them on.  The garage door lifted discreetly on silicon rollers and the motor on his Buick Century, always kept in perfect tune, purred quietly to life.  He backed into Thirty-Second Street at sunrise without even waking the neighbor’s dog. 

His wife kept plenty of food in the house and would have fixed his breakfast if he asked.  But it had been some time since they wanted to talk to each other first thing in the morning.  Besides she usually had the house full of grandkids and down-and-out nephews and nieces, and rather than risk waking any of them and hearing what they had to say he got in his car and drove around aimlessly, smoking and looking at the weather.  When he got hungry he drove to the WhataBurger on Sixth Avenue, ordered a taquito with cheese and sausage at the drive-in window, and ate alone with the radio tuned to KZLZ, the Spanish-language station.  His Spanish was sketchy so he got only the vaguest notion of the news, which suited him fine.

Any other day but Tuesday he would have driven randomly, then, from one to another of his businesses, arriving at a different time each day so his managers never knew when to expect him.  Keeping his employees a little on edge was a feature of his management style.  He would walk in without greeting anyone and stand or sit somewhere, in a spot that was inconspicuous until he chose to occupy it.  While he was there, all his employees watched it covertly.  He always wore a Black Stetson and dark sunglasses, so it was impossible to tell where he was looking as he slowly scanned the room.  Sometimes he left after a few minutes without saying a word.  Other days, he might start a conversation with a customer or one of his employees that would last an hour and include a stroll around the store. 

If anything displeased him he took the manager aside, described the problem and told him how to fix it.  It was a short conversation because there was never any discussion.  He was polite and quiet but had a reputation for widely spaced violent rages during which somebody usually got hurt.  You never knew what might set him off, which was, of course, the point.

But this was Tuesday so he went to the tire store as soon as it opened, at eight o’clock. It was the oldest of all his properties, a shabby place crowded with new and used tires stacked on wheeled platforms.  Many hand-lettered signs, in English and Spanish, advertised bargains.  There was one hoist in a greasy work bay at the side of the building where the tires were changed.  On the counter that faced the door, an ancient mechanical cash register covered with scrollwork had a bell that rang when the drawer was opened.  Rudy liked the cheerful sound of it.  He kept it and all the other vintage tools in the place in good repair, but did nothing to upgrade the building.  For his purposes, it was perfect just as it was. 

Tilly Stubbs was waiting for him, sitting behind the wheel of his Escalade in the small side parking lot. Rudy walked past him without a word and went into the store.  As usual Tilly followed him to the tiny office at the back, where Rudy sat down behind the scarred oak desk.  Tilly closed the door, found the armless chrome kitchen chair that was always there somewhere, moved it to the wall behind Rudy, and sat on it, facing the door.  They would stay in that crowded space, smelling petroleum products and sweat, most of the morning, counting money and watching the people who brought it.

Rudy supplied his dealers on short credit.  They sold cocaine in both powder and crack form, some heroin and a little marijuana as a convenience to customers.  Fronting the money like that, Rudy took a higher risk than the suppliers who insisted on cash on delivery, so he charged a higher price.  He was the supplier of choice for poor young men getting started.  Rudy’s risk was manageable because he had lived in this neighborhood all his life and had watched most of his dealers grow up.  Besides, he had a reputation as a bad man to get on the wrong side of.  He kept his pushers on a very short leash, made them pay in full within a week. 

He changed the locations of both his supply depot and payment office frequently, and switched pick-up and payment times on short notice.  But they all paid him on a mid-week morning at one of his businesses, at a precise time and place assigned by Rudy when they picked up the product.  Weekly payoffs avoided confusion, he said, but the morning meetings served another purpose for him.  His drug salesmen, normally night creatures, had to get up early one day a week and face him in a brightly lighted office, close to the clatter of a busy kitchen, or the hiss of a pneumatic lift or the punishing clamor of tools dropped on cement.  

Rudy watched them open the door to his office, kept his eyes on them as they walked or sidled or staggered to his desk.  He judged how easily or painfully they sat down on the hard straight chair, listened to their voices and noticed whether their hands shook.  From these signals he could judge accurately when they began to use their own product, how fast their use escalated and how much alcohol they were pouring in alongside the other poison.  He had seen many men go to hell in the drug business.  By now he could judge accurately when to start looking for a replacement pusher.

He assigned his morning payoff times in the order of his dealers’ importance: the newest men had the earliest appointments.  As they built up a client base and brought in more money, they worked up to slightly later times.  It was one of those small favors he doled out sparingly, to keep people hopeful but wary.