Holy Guacamole! (25 page)

“How old are your children, Mr. Finnegan?” Carolyn asked, ever the polite conversationalist. Pretty soon she’d have him discussing the weather.

“That’s touching, Mar-cus,” I cut in, “and we got no designs on screwing up your happy family. Just answer a few questions, and you can go home and finish your beer.”

“Shit.” He looked at his hand and realized that the can wasn’t in it.

“Our questions have to do with Mr. Ignatenko and his whereabouts last Saturday night and Sunday morning,” said Carolyn. “Did you see him that night?”

Marcus gave her a
duh
look and said he saw his boss every night. “I work an eight-to-four shift. That’s when we’re open, so that’s when we’re there, me an’ Boris, the girls, waitresses, bartenders. Everyone.”

“Right, but was Boris there the whole time?” I asked.

“Where else would he be?” Marcus looked confused. “It’s his place.”

“Answering a question with a question is not helpful to us, Mr. Finnegan,” said Carolyn sternly.

“Right. Maybe we should go back to your house,” I put in. “Your wife might have heard you say—”

Marcus belched. “He was there, okay? In his office. On the floor if there was any trouble, not that I ain’t up to takin’ care of anything them guys can dish out.”

“Would you have known if Mr. Ignatenko chose to leave the building for, say, an hour or more?” Carolyn inquired.

Damn. The woman had a notebook out.

“Yeah. Sure. I stick my head in every half hour to report. Unless he’s got company.”

“What company?” I asked. “What company did he have that particular night?”

“Well, he called Carmen in about two, and they was going at it—you know what I mean. She come back in when we closed, so I guess they had another—uh—” He glanced at Carolyn. “Meetin’.”

“Who else?” I asked.

“Just them two. Boris don’t usually go for threesomes.”

I noticed that Carolyn was embarrassed at talk of threesomes, but if she wanted to investigate scumbags, what did she expect? Those other murders she said she’d looked into—they must have been classier than this one. “Anyone but Carmen go in to see him when Carmen wasn’t in there for their
meeting?
”

Marcus scratched his bald head, puzzling over the question. “Manny. Manny come in around midnight.”

“Who’s Manny?”

“He does hits, an’—like that. Muscle. You know? Only he don’t necessarily use his fists like me, not that I don’t use a bat if I gotta. But I just work in the club. Manny works outside. Like a freelancer.”

Now, Manny was of interest to me. If he came in at midnight before Vladik was killed, maybe Boris
had
hired a hit. “How long was he there? Did Boris give him a job?”

“How the hell would I know? Boris don’t tell me about his business with Manny. I just work inside, like I said.”

“How—long—was—Manny—in—there?”

Marcus shifted uncomfortably on his rock, evidently catching on that I was getting pissed with the lack of information. “Fifteen minutes?”

I kept staring at him.

“Whyn’t you ask Manny. He went in right after I did my twelve o’clock check with Boris, an’ he was gone by twelve-thirty.”

“Fine, I’ll ask Manny. Where do I find him? What’s his last name?”

Marcus scratched his head again. Many more questions and he’d have a scab there. “Diaz? I heard he got a place over a pool hall downtown, but I ain’t never been there. Listen, can I go back now? The kids an’ me is gonna watch
1001 Dalmatians.
It’s on cable. They’ll be pissed off if I ain’t there when it starts.”

I let Marcus go, and when he was out of earshot, Carolyn said, “Poor man. I think he’s retarded.”

“Or maybe that’s what he wants us to think.” I watched Marcus shamble down the street. Looked like he couldn’t hurt anyone unless he fell on them, but I knew he had fast fists and a mean temper.

“You’re thinking that Mr. Ignatenko hired a hit man to kill Vladik, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Smothering someone with a pillow isn’t your usual hired-hit weapon of choice. More like a weapon of opportunity.”

“I think we should investigate this Manny,” said Carolyn, as if that idea wasn’t obvious.

“Did I say we weren’t?”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic about it,” she retorted as we walked the half block between the arroyo and the car.

“Ever been in a pool hall?” I asked, feeling kinda mean.

“Yes, I have. In San Francisco. I helped question a tattooed criminal named Arana. It was a life-enhancing experience.”

“Now who’s being sarcastic?” I asked as she started the car.

The Hit Man’s Ex

W
e found the
pool hall, but there was no Manny Diaz in an apartment above it. The proprietor downstairs and, evidently, the owner of the building said Manny had moved in with his wife and three children several months ago. He gave us an address in the Lower Valley. We found that too, although I feared for my car’s suspension on the pot-holed and, ultimately, unpaved road.

“Cold front coming in,” Luz remarked as we opened an iron gate and walked up to the door. She was right; the temperature had dropped perceptibly, and sunshine was intermittent rather than continuous, as I’d come to expect during 99 percent of the daylight hours. Mr. Diaz’s house was painted a deep blue green and had bars on every window and door. No doubt hit men needed extra security. I could hear the sound of children’s voices behind the house and had to wonder how much danger they were in because of their father’s profession.

“We’re looking for Manny Diaz,” Luz said to the woman who answered the door and peered at us suspiciously from between the intervening bars.

“What for?” she replied.

“Business,” Luz answered.

“Need someone to take out your old man?” asked the wife cynically.

“Exactly. My friend here wants to hire your husband.”

I was horrified, not only to be identified as a woman who wanted her husband killed, but at the wife’s easy admission of her husband’s business. Didn’t she realize that we might be the police? Luz
had
been the police.

“Well, you’re out of luck. Manny took off for Mexico Monday. Thought the cops was after him. And I’ll tell you, if he figures he’s coming back here when the heat’s off, he’s wrong. I’ll kick his ass right off the doorstep. I don’t need his customers and the cops showing up at my door. I got kids, an’ only one of ’em’s Manny’s. An’ he ain’t my husband. I never married him in church or nothin’. I’m too smart for that. I’m takin’ a computer course at the community college, an’ I got my eye on a new man. Me an’ my kids will do just fine without that pendejo.”

There was that word again. “Tell me, Mrs.—ah—” If she wasn’t Mrs. Diaz, what was her name?

“Tell you what? You want the name of some other pendejo to kill off your old man, you gonna hafta ask someone else. I’m out of the hits-for-hire business.”

“No, I wanted to ask what
pendejo
means. My Spanish is minimal, but I keep hearing that word.”

“It means
stupid prick
.
Pendejo
means
stupid prick
. Spanish or English, don’t matter. That’s what it means, and that’s what Manny was, a stupid prick.”

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“Probably you old man is too.”

“Not at all,” I protested, forgetting that I was supposed to be a customer in search of a hit man.

“Okay, if we’re through with the language lesson,” said Luz, “I got a question for you. Manny had a talk with Boris Ignatenko Saturday night. You know what that was about?”

“Sure,” said the non-wife. “Boris wanted to hire him.”

“And did Manny accept?”

“Hell, yes. Offer him five hundred, he’d shoot me an’ the kids. He is one real mean bastard.”

“So who did he kill?” Luz asked.

“He didn’t kill no one. There was a guy makin’ book and sellin’ dope at Brazen Babes. Which wouldn’t make no difference to Boris. I know Boris. I used to dance there before I had the third kid, Manny Junior. But the guy wasn’t kickin’ back Boris’s share of the profits. So Manny beat the crap out of him. It was a lesson. Know what I mean? Don’t fuck with Boris. That was the message.”

“Was this Saturday night or Sunday morning early that Manny earned his five hundred?” Luz asked.

I was too bemused to join in the questioning.

“Nah, Manny caught him comin’ out of the can in some bar on Texas Sunday night, dragged him into an alley, an’ broke all his ribs an’ whatever. Guy recognized Manny and swore he’d set the cops on him, so Manny left him there, hopin’ he’d die. Then he thought about it all night. Woke up the damn kids about three times bitching about his bad luck the guy had made him and Boris didn’t want the guy killed. So he took off Monday morning. Good riddance, I say.”

“You’re sure it was Sunday night?” Luz asked.

“What do you care, anyway? You act like a cop, but
she
don’t look like no cop.” Manny’s ex pointed at me. “Since when are cops helpin’ gringo women hire hits. Some new battered-wife protection deal? If it is, gimme your card. I had a few guys beat me up. Manny included.”

“I’m not a cop,” said Luz.

“And I don’t want my husband murdered,” I added. What if Jason ever heard about this? I glared at Luz.

“So you’re both liars. You want any more information, go find Manny. He’s probably shacked up with some
puta
in Ciudad Chihuahua.”

“Do you think she was misleading us?” I asked shortly thereafter as I started the car.

Luz shrugged. “Hard to tell. Probably not. He must have had a car, and I didn’t see one in the yard. But then he could have gone straight out of Brazen Babes Saturday night, walked into Gubenko’s house, and taken him out. Be nice if we had a witness. For sure, we gotta go see Boris tonight.”

“For sure, I’ve got to go home and get some sleep,” I said wearily. “What time do you want me to pick you up? Definitely not before ten.”

“What we need,” said Luz, who didn’t seem to care about my state of sleep deprivation, “is a new suspect, or someone to break Boris’s alibi.” I drove, and she grumbled to herself. “You notice anything in the paper about some guy beat up in an alley downtown?”

I didn’t remember. There were so many stories of violence in the paper and on TV then; it wasn’t likely I would. In Africa and the Middle East people were killing each other off by the thousands. A few broken bones in an El Paso alley wouldn’t be a big story. Which is a sad comment on our time. We’re becoming desensitized. I wondered about people in the Middle Ages. Those had certainly been violent times. But, with no newspapers and TV, they wouldn’t have known what was happening forty miles away, and by the time they realized what was happening in their own areas, they were either dead or running for their lives. Medieval people probably didn’t live long enough to become desensitized.

“Hey, you’re not asleep at the wheel, are you?” Luz asked.

“No, I was comparing violence and the public perception of it in our time to what it must have been in the Middle Ages.”

“Terrific. That’s going to be a big help in finding out who killed the Russian opera guy. Not that I miss him. He was a real noisy SOB. Say, maybe those two students of his killed him. With one on either side of the pillow, that would work.”

“They were taking their clothes off in public when it happened,” I replied. “They worked until four. Didn’t you hear what Marcus said?”

“If you believe what Marcus said. Or any of these upright citizens we’ve been talking to.”

“They are a distasteful lot, aren’t they?” We were quiet for a moment, thinking about the people we’d interviewed just lately. “Since we’re in the Lower Valley, we could visit one of the missions. That might be uplifting,” I suggested.

“You’re kidding, right? Uplifting? The Spaniards and their priests just about killed off the Indians—took their land, turned them into slaves, made ’em wear clothes in hot weather, worked ’em to death or killed them with smallpox, cut off their hands when they rebelled. You didn’t know that with all your history reading? Now we want to put up the world’s biggest statue of Don Juan de Onate and his horse. Figure that out.”

I sighed. “I do know about Spanish treatment of the Indians, but
you
evidently don’t know that Onate was born in Mexico—Zacatecas. His father was a Spaniard, but his mother was a direct descendant of Montezuma. What could be more Mexican? As for violence, both the sides were violent. The Aztecs ate their victims after cutting their hearts out.”

“Okay. Truce. But I don’t want to visit a mission.”

“Fine,” I agreed. “Let’s go back to El Paso and get some sleep.”

There was silence for a mile or so as I bumped over the unpaved road, and then the pot-holed road, toward I-10. “By the way, did you know that Ysleta used to be the county seat?” I couldn’t help asking. We were passing a sign directing us to the Ysleta Mission. “The people from El Paso hired Mexicans to cross the river and vote, so El Paso won the county seat by fraud.”

“Right. Ysleta was where the Mexican Americans lived. They got screwed by the Anglos. Again.”

“Why, Luz,” I exclaimed. “You’re an activist.”

“Nah,” she said. “Just a woman short on sleep and long on bum knees. That smelly goop of your husband’s isn’t half as good at killing pain as my hot-chile salve, and don’t, for Christ’s sake, start telling me about the Aztecs and chile.”

I grinned at her. “They did have some interesting uses for it in the old days, but I’ll save that information for later.”

Luz groaned and closed her eyes.

Boris Loses It

O
f course she
didn’t show up on time. I had to call her and roust her out of bed.
How much sleep can one woman need?
I wondered as I waited. She was probably showering, dressing, and eating. By the time we got to Brazen Babes, Ignatenko would have picked his Friday night lay, and we’d be locked out until he came up for air. It wasn’t that I thought he’d killed Vladik. His alibi seemed pretty solid. I just wanted to know why he sent us after Salvador Barrientos, who’d ended up in jail. Maybe that was just what Boris wanted. Maybe Vladik and Barrientos wouldn’t cut him in on the border smuggling route, so he got even. Like he got even with the poor slob who had been taking bets and selling dope at Brazen Babes without giving Boris his cut. Nice guy.