Holy Guacamole! (21 page)

“That’s very kind of you,” I replied, “but I’m afraid I don’t have a head for more than one tequila drink, and we had dinner at Martino’s.”

“Sure, Martino’s. Good place. Me, I like the
sesos.
”

“I’m sorry. I don’t speak Spanish.”

“Sesos. Brains.
Muy sabroso
. You oughta try ’em. And hey, I’m an American citizen. You don’t have to speak Spanish to me. So you like my singing, huh?”

“Very much,” I replied. He was leaning my way again. “Excellent tonal quality, and you have a good range.”

“Nah. I ain’t got a ranch. But my yard’s pretty big. Over near the golf course. Big yard. Maybe you want to come see it.”

Did I? I looked toward Luz, and she replied for me. “Say, that would be great. Now that I’m not a cop anymore, I can associate with whoever I want.”

“They kick you out? Catch you takin’ the
mordida?
” He grinned, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together suggestively.

“Nothing so sexy,” she replied. “Medical retirement.” She picked her cane up from beside the chair and displayed it.

“Got shot, huh? It happens. I been shot myself.”

I’d decided that I didn’t want to go to his house, so I didn’t wait for Luz to bring up the subject of our quest. I did it myself. “I think you may know a friend of mine, Mr. Barrientos. Another opera lover,” I said. Luz frowned. Barrientos denied knowing any opera lovers, although he said that he’d like to get to know
me
better. I tried to simper, but I’m afraid it wasn’t very successful. “Your name sounds so familiar,” I murmured.

“Well, I got a reputation.” He nodded, looking tough and proud of it. “But I don’ know that a lady like you would have heard about me.”

“No,” I insisted. “I’m sure Vladik Gubenko mentioned your name.”

“Who?” He looked puzzled, but I assumed that he was acting.

“Aren’t you connected with gambling?”

“Well, I lay a bet now and then. An’ I know where to put my money too. You don’t see Palomino—that’s what my friends call me—Palomino—you don’t see me making or taking sucker bets.”

I nodded admiringly. “I know that’s so. Vladik said you were too lucky for him, and he owed you money.”

“Yeah? What kinda name’s that? Va-dik? He got a big one?”

“Debt you mean? Well, forty thousand dollars sounds big to me.”

My new friend Palomino roared with laughter. “No, chica, a big dick. Well, I guess that ain’t no conversation for a nice lady, huh? Sorry. But I don’t know nobody with a name like that.”

“He’s Russian,” I persisted. “The artistic director of Opera at the Pass.”

“Don’t know him. Sorry. Hey, there’s someone waving at me. I’ll get back to you ladies.”

“Well, you really screwed that up,” said Luz angrily. “You should have let me handle the questioning.”

“He doesn’t know Vladik. He doesn’t even seem to know that Vladik’s dead.”

“Right. Or he’s not gonna admit to knowing a dead guy, especially if he killed him. Now we’ll have to go out to his house and wait for him. Could be half the night. If you hadn’t screwed up, we could have gone with him and got on with it.”

“Got on with what?” I asked, bemused. She’d done it again—
he killed him
. Two male pronouns with only one instead of two antecedents. Should I mention it to her?

Stake Out

W
ell that’s what
I
get for tearning up with an amateur,
I thought as we drove toward Campestre, where everyone said Barrientos lived. Luck was with us when we got to the guard station. I ordered Smack down out of sight and told the guard that we had been invited by Mr. Barrientos to visit him at home. The guard and I leered at each other knowingly, and he opened the gate, even told us how to get there. Of course, the two of us were speaking Spanish, so the directions passed right over Carolyn’s head. We found the place, a big, sprawling adobe house with a three-car garage and a lawn, for Christ’s sake. No wonder Juarez was running out of water.

I found us a good stakeout spot under a tree with a straight line of sight to the house. “Why don’t we park in the driveway?” Carolyn asked.

“Because we need to find out if there’s anyone in the house, and if there isn’t, we don’t want to look too eager when he gets home. I told her to keep the motor running, and I took out a gadget I had for opening other people’s garage doors and began trying different wavelengths. Of course she wanted to know what I was doing, but just about then one of his garage doors zipped up. The space inside was empty, and it looked like the middle space was too. While Carolyn gaped, I closed the one door and kept trying frequencies until I got the middle door open. I’d been right. I noted the two frequencies, figuring he’d put his car in one of the spots. There was a monster pickup in the far one, a big black number with dark tinted windows, a chrome roll bar, and spotlights. The steel looked heavy enough that you wouldn’t be able to shoot through it, which was a nice feature if you were a drug dealer. Since no one came out to check the garage doors going up and down, I figured the house was empty, but I didn’t count on it.

Of course, I’d rather Barrientos came home and let us in himself. Then we wouldn’t have to mess with security alarms, but if that didn’t work, then we’d drive right into his garage after he was asleep, kick the door in if I couldn’t open it with picks, and drag him out to the car. Whatever worked. When she asked again what we were doing, I told her we were on a stakeout and to keep her eyes open for lights and movement in the house.

“A stakeout?” She actually sounded intrigued. Didn’t take much to entertain the woman. Nothing in the world more frigging boring than a stakeout, but she didn’t know that.

“You want to go to sleep, feel free. We could be here a while.”

“What? And miss my first stakeout?” she exclaimed indignantly. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Okay. So what are these murder investigations you’ve been involved in?” Might as well do something to pass the time, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be subjected to any more history lessons. I wished now that I’d had her use the john before we left the mariachi place. She wasn’t going to want to pee behind someone’s bush if she needed to go before he got home.

“Well, a friend of mine went missing in New Orleans, and the police wouldn’t do a thing.”

Her voice sounded kind of weepy. Must have been a good friend.

“So I found the murderer myself.”

“No shit?” I didn’t believe a word of it.

“And a colleague of Jason’s was murdered in New York. We solved that one together. And my mother-in-law was accused of murdering someone in San Francisco, and again the police weren’t helpful, so a private detective and I saw to her exoneration. And then there was the corpse I found in a Barcelona art exhibit—”

“Jesus, you seem to run into a lot of corpses. Maybe I better take you home before you get me killed.”

“I’m driving,” she pointed out. “Are we doing something dangerous? Besides visiting Juarez?”

“It depends. Just follow my lead.”

“Your knee seems to be feeling better tonight,” she remarked. “I noticed that you didn’t seem to limp at all.”

“Yeah, I figure it was the tequila.”

There was silence for a while, and then she said, “Your condo is very nice, and all on one floor. That must be a blessing.”

She was obviously one of these people who feel obligated to keep the conversation going. So all right. I’d entertain her and maybe set her mind at rest about my ability to take care of us if the situation got sticky. “Well, the house that I got in my divorce settlement and still owned when I had to retire was two-story and a real pain in the ass for someone in a wheelchair, which I was after a while. That was before I started taking the expensive meds and got better.”

“Does the police medical insurance pay for them?” she asked. “Our medication insurance at the university has co-pays up to eighty dollars for three months for some prescriptions, or so a friend told us. Neither Jason nor I have had to use it for any long-term treatments.”

“Eighty for three months would look good to me,” I said bitterly. “I got insurance, but it doesn’t cover the eighteen thousand they charge every year. I had to mortgage my house to pay for the first couple of years, so I could get mobile enough to earn some money.”

“I didn’t realize you had a job.”

“I don’t. I do a little bounty hunting now and then. For instance, the first time I heard about a guy with a big reward on his head, the scuzzball was over here in Juarez. Bounty hunters don’t like to come over here. They don’t want to end up in jail. But I figured I didn’t have anything to lose, and I knew where he went to visit a lady friend—without body guards—so I came on over, caught the two of them fucking—you’re wincing, right? Well, what they were doing couldn’t be called making love, if you know what I mean.”

I gathered that she didn’t and still objected to my choice of words, which made it damn hard to tell the woman a story. “Anyway, I made the guy tie up the woman. Then, I stuck the pistol up his nose—”

“Are you carrying a gun tonight?” she asked. “We could go to jail if you are. I’ve read in the newspaper that the Mexican authorities don’t allow people to transport guns across the border. They throw visitors right in prison if there are weapons in the car, even if the people just forgot—”

“I’m not carrying,” I interrupted. “I was more desperate in those days. Say, do you want me to finish this story?” She did. “So I made him shoot himself full of his own product.” I had to laugh just thinking about it. The guy was a dealer who was smart enough not to use, so the heroin he’d brought for his true love was enough to send him right into the nodding-off stage.

“Then I strapped him into my car and told the agent at customs he was a boyfriend who was drunk. Since I’d declared American and didn’t have an accent, Immigration took my word for it, and I hauled my prisoner off to the feds. The reward paid for the new condo and a lot of meds.”

All and all, Carolyn thought that was pretty neat and wanted to hear more bounty-hunter stories. Since I only had one more, which I didn’t want to talk about because it had gotten pretty messy, I told her about busting whores and johns in the downtown area when I was a beat cop and later working the stash-house detail. That one got her all upset. She thought maybe she’d need to keep her eyes open for stash houses in her neighborhood. I assured her that she should. So that’s the way it went.

Next she said, “I didn’t realize you’d been married.”

“Yeah. Right out of college. Big wedding, white dress, the whole enchilada. My parents were pretty pissed off when we got divorced. Dad had to come back from a prospecting trip in Mexico to catch the wedding, they spent a fortune to give away their number-two daughter, and then the bridegroom gave her back. I’m not saying Francisco was a bad guy. He wasn’t. Probably the nicest banker you ever met.”

“You married a
banker?
” Carolyn exclaimed.

I was kind of insulted at how surprised she was. “Right. He graduated in business from the university here, then went on to the Wharton School of Business for his master’s, which is a big deal, fancy Ivy League university. Then he came home and married me. Is that so hard to believe? I told you he was a good guy. We loved each other, and he didn’t even mind a wife on the job, but he wanted kids in the worst way. Frankly, I wasn’t crazy about the idea, but I wanted him to be happy, so we tried. When normal screwing around didn’t do it, we both went to doctors. He was fine. I was going need all that hormone stuff and getting it on at just the right time, maybe some test-tube deal. That was where I drew the line. I told him he’d better get an annulment because I wasn’t going for the hormone stuff. No way. Imagine me on the streets chasing some criminal type and all of a sudden I’m having PMS to end all PMS. So we split. The Church gave us an annulment. The state gave us a divorce. It was too bad, but that’s the way it had to be.”

“And you never remarried?” Carolyn asked, sounding kind of sad.

“No reason to. Frank did. After we split, he moved to L.A. Came back about ten years later to take a job as VP of a bank here and married some nice little Maid-of-Cotton type. I hear they have some kids, so maybe he’s happy. I hope so.”

She sat silent for a while. Then she said, “His name isn’t Escobar, is it?”

I was surprised. “Yeah, Francisco Escobar. You know him?”

“He’s on the opera board.”

I had to laugh. “Poor Frank. The new wife must have dragged him into that.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Carolyn answered. “She strikes me as sort of snobbish. They have two girls and a baby boy. He’s evidently crazy about them and goes to all the school productions the girls are in.”

“Better them than me,” I said, glancing at my watch. Thank the Holy Virgin, Carolyn hadn’t asked to pee. Smack was snoring happily in the back seat, minding her own business, when Carolyn changed the subject and asked why I’d given my dog such a strange name. Maybe she thought I smacked the dog around. Anyway I told her it was slang for heroin, Smack heard her name and woke up, sticking her nose in my ear, and Barrientos pulled into his driveway in a red sports car that he’d screwed up with a lot of fancy detailing.

Guy was as dumb as ever. You’d think with a record like his and a reward on his head in the States, he’d want to make a stab at anonymity. No way. Asshole had that skunk streak and a loud, expensive car. Piss for brains. No question. “Quit it, Smack,” I told the dog. I like her, I trust her, but I’m not crazy about dog drool in my ear.

“Let’s go.” I wanted the three of us to get to him before he pulled into the garage or went into the house. Hadn’t seemed to be anyone there. I’d got out once and walked the perimeter. No lights. No TV. No noise. If there’d been bodyguards, even after all the garage-door racket, we’d have been up shit creek. And nobody followed him home, thank the Lord. My luck was holding. “Call out to him,” I told her. “Tell him we’re accepting his invitation.”