Los Alamos (7 page)

The road was no better than the day before, however, and he lurched and bounced, afraid for his new tires, all the way to the outskirts of Santa Fe. He drove around the cathedral, lost in the unfamiliar streets, until he found the police station in a large adobe building that resembled a Western movie jail. Inside, however, everything was up-to-date and all business.

“You can call me Doc,” Holliday said. “Everyone does, sooner or later, and I’ve got no time for the suspense. Now if you’re going to start by dumping all over us and telling us how top secret and important you all are, you can save your breath, ‘cause I’ve heard it all before. I don’t suppose you’ve come to tell me just who our John Doe is.”

“His name is—was—Karl Bruner.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. First time a liaison man ever told me anything. Usually the way we liaise around here is kind of one-way—you don’t tell me anything and I get to like it. A German?”

“By birth. American citizen. Army. Also a cop.”

Holliday stared at him. “You don’t say. What kind of cop?”

“Security officer.”

Holliday continued staring at him, as if he needed time to take this in. Finally he said, “Do I keep going, or is this where you cut me off with all the classified horse-shit?”

“I’m new. They usually give you a hard time?”

“They don’t tell me much.”

“They don’t tell me much either. Maybe there’s not much to tell. But that’s who he was. And now that you know, you’ll have to forget it again. Officially, he’s still a John Doe. Now you know most of what I know. What’s important to me is what you know.”

“You’re not trying to flatter me by any chance, are you?”

“Would it work?”

Holliday grinned. “Never fails. I don’t suppose while you’re in the mood you’d like to tell me what you boys are doing up there?”

“Doc.”

“Well, a try. Actually, I don’t give a good goddamn. The only reason anybody wants to know is you won’t tell him. You got explosions going off up there at five o’clock in the morning you can hear clear across the valley, but nobody’s supposed to hear them. The smart money says it’s rockets, some kind of new V-2. I just hope you don’t aim them over here. One goes off and there’d be a hell of a time explaining that away.”

“At the moment all we’ve got is a body.”

“Yeah. If he was security, are you telling me the army’s taking this over? Just put my feet up and have a cup of coffee and politely butt out. You want some, by the way?” he said, nodding toward the hot plate behind him. “It’s cowboy coffee, just boiled in the pot and tastes like shit, but since we’re such great friends—”

“I’m okay, thanks. You still have a case. To tell you the truth, nobody thinks it’s connected to the Hill anyway, so you might have the only case.”

“But without a name, rank, and serial number.”

“Let’s go over what you do have. Who found the body?”

“Mexican woman. Just about had a heart attack and been gibbering ever since. None of it means a thing, or maybe my Spanish isn’t what it used to be. Priest says she’s practically living in the church now to get over the shock. Nothing there. She found him in the morning, but he’d obviously been out all night.”

“How obviously?”

“Rigor. Plus he got rained on a lot. Coroner estimates time of death anywhere the evening before and won’t budge on getting more detailed. I tried. I’ve been assuming he was killed sometime after eleven—earlier than that and you figure someone would have seen something. After that, it gets pretty quiet here, even on the Alameda.”

“State of the body consistent with that time?”

“Coroner says so. You’ve seen his report, haven’t you?”

“Not very specific, is it?”

“Well, let’s just say Ritter’s a careful kind of guy. You can’t hold him to much.”

“Let’s just say he’s incompetent. What’s your guess?”

“Figure midnight, one o’clock at the outside.”

“No witnesses, no signs of struggle, nothing that tells us anything?”

“Right. Rain did a good job on the site. Some broken branches on the bushes, but that could be from falling down. From the looks of it, though, I’d say he was dragged in.”

“Why?”

“There wouldn’t have been room for two of them there where we found him. You know, if they’d been together. So I have to assume he was put there. We did find footprints, partial ones anyway.”

“That’s interesting.”

“No it isn’t. No special marks, just a standard workboot. All the Mexicans around here wear them.”

“Just the Mexicans?”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Anybody. Any working man.”

Connolly frowned. “Hmm. Does that seem right to you?”

“They’ve got dicks too.”

Connolly looked up, surprised at the sharpness of it. “Okay, let’s get down to it. I read about the pants. Any evidence of anal penetration?”

“No.”

“Semen?”

“No.”

“What about the park? Is it one of the meeting places?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must. You’re chief of police.”

“Well, you know, this is a quiet town. I’m not saying we’re Dogpatch—we know what it is. You go up to Taos, where all the artists are, or down to Albuquerque, and I guess you’d find plenty of what you’re looking for. We’ve got a few antique dealers and sandalmakers—well, one look, you can see they’re covered in fairy dust, but they don’t bother anybody. We’ve never had this kind of trouble. Honest to God, I don’t even know where to look.”

“You mean you haven’t checked the bars or anywhere someone’s likely to have heard something?”

“Well, I’ll make you a deal. You find out where they are and I’ll check them out for you.”

“I’ll make you a deal. You get your men to talk to their snitches and get
them
to tell you where people go at night. Then check it out and talk to people nice so they talk back to you and see what you can see. You do that and I’ll forget you haven’t even got around to basic police work. You’re putting it out this guy was homosexual and then you turn around and say you haven’t got any here. Who do you think killed him, then?”

Holliday stared at him, offended. “You tell me. What I’m telling you is we’ve got no problem in that park. Take it or leave it.”

“All right,” Connolly said, “let’s leave it for now. But check about the bars, will you?”

“I’ll do that. Now suppose we both get down off our high horses and look at what we do have.”

“Such as?”

“Such as another case down in Albuquerque just three weeks ago.”

“Same MO?”

“Close enough. Parking lot behind one of those bars I guess you’re talking about. Another guy caught with his pants down. Stabbed this time. They found him behind his car.”

“Who was he?”

“Local businessman. Ran some laundries down there, which is a good business since the war got going. Seems he met somebody in the bar and they went outside to have themselves a conversation. Must have been about money, since he didn’t have any left in his wallet when they found him.”

“All this according to—?”

“The bartender. He’s the one found him.”

“Any idea who?”

“No. Boys there think it was a Mexican, on account of the knife, but they always think it’s a Mexican, so you probably can’t count on that.”

“They get a description from the bartender?”

“Yeah, I’ll get you the file on it. I’d say it was a little on the vague side, though. Medium height, medium build, medium nothing. ‘Course, his memory isn’t the best. He doesn’t remember anyone else being there. I guess they don’t have any regulars. They sure haven’t had any since—nobody’s been near the place.”

“He might have to close it.”

“The police had that idea too.”

“What about the victim—any signs of sexual activity?”

“Plenty. At least this one got his money’s worth.”

Connolly frowned and got up to pour some coffee, pacing and looking up at the ceiling as he talked, as if he were thinking aloud.

“Okay, so what do we have here? Let’s reconstruct.”

“Shit.”

“Well, let’s try it. A guy goes into a bar, meets another guy, and they go out to the parking lot to get friendly. Either because they took a shine to each other or because one of them’s paying. Now what do they do?”

“For Christ’s sake, Connolly.”

“No, follow me for a minute. What do we think happened? What’s the lab report?”

“You mean the semen? Everywhere. In his mouth, some on his face.”

“But nothing behind?”

“No.”

“So they got to know each other real well. Then one stabs the other and takes his money. So we have to assume it’s not a lover’s quarrel, not with the money gone. How old was the victim, by the way?”

“Forty-one.”

“Right. How old did the bartender say the other one was?”

Holliday turned over a folder cover and glanced at a sheet. “Twenty something. Not under drinking age, of course. He wouldn’t allow that. Not him. I don’t think you can go by any of this,” he said, closing the folder with disgust.

“No. But not middle-aged, either. Clothes?”

“Jeans. Blue shirt. Like I said, anybody.”

“Even a working man. Bar cater to that?”

“I don’t know. From the sound of it, I’d say it was a fairly democratic place. I don’t think they care about your job.”

“Okay, so let’s take this same guy—you assume it’s the same guy, don’t you?—let’s take him and put him in our case. What do you think happened?”

“You’re going to make me do this, aren’t you? I think they met somewhere, maybe one of those bars I don’t know about that you think the town’s full of. Maybe just sitting in the plaza. Anyway, they meet and go down to the park and do whatever they do in the bushes. Then one smashes the other on the head, pulls him further into the bushes, takes his wallet, and gets away.”

“So what’s wrong with this?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“I don’t know either, but there’s something. Let’s take our boy from Albuquerque—let’s say he’s young, let’s say he’s still in jeans and workboots, and let’s say he lets guys give him blow jobs. Probably for money. In Albuquerque something goes wrong. Maybe the guy won’t pay, or maybe our boy’s ashamed or—So he meets Bruner, or Bruner meets him, and they strike a deal. But why should Bruner pay? He’s young too. Good-looking.”

“There’s nothing in that. Why do guys go to hookers?”

“Okay. So let’s say he likes the convenience. Or even just likes the idea. They go to the park. They have sex, but before they even finish our guy kills Bruner, takes his money, keys, everything, steals his car. Is this the same guy? Why not finish? Who stops in the middle of a blow job?”

Holliday followed Connolly around the room as if he were watching a court performance, caught up in the story. “Well, I sure as hell never did. From a woman, I mean. Unless I was going to—”

“Move on to something else. Right. But they never did.”

“They didn’t in Albuquerque either, remember?”

“Yes, but our guy’d already finished. Maybe the other one was still hoping. So why stop this time? There’s something we’re not getting here. Why take everything? You just have to get rid of the wallet somewhere else. Why even bother?”

“Maybe he’s not real bright.”

“And the car. That’s just looking for trouble. It’s not so easy to lose a car.”

“Well, that’s where I disagree with you. Everybody wants a car these days—when’s the last time you saw one for sale? So we put a trace on the license, which it won’t have anymore, and check out the used lots and the black market—yeah, we do have that—but I’ll bet it’s already gone. You just drive down the road to Mexico and first thing you know you’ve got money in your pocket and keep the change. Hell, they don’t care down there. If it’s got wheels, you can grab yourself a stack of pesos.”

“But he didn’t do it before and he was in a goddamn
parking
lot.”

Holliday was quiet. “Well, maybe it’s like you say,” he said finally. “But you know what that means?”

Connolly nodded. “Somebody else did it.”

“And where does that leave us? We got a victim we don’t know anything about and a killer we know even less. No victim, no suspect. Fact is, the Albuquerque case is
all
we’ve got. Without that, we might as well hang it up.”

Connolly leaned on the back of the chair. “But it doesn’t fit.”

“And here I was having all this fun, just like a big-city detective.” Holliday grinned at Connolly. “You spend your life handing out parking tickets and then you get a real live murder and the next thing you know you’re up a creek without a paddle. Guy says nothing fits. Might as well go take a vacation. But it’s got to fit somehow. Look, we’re making this too hard. It could have happened just the way we said it did in the first place, couldn’t it?” He looked up calmly. “Couldn’t it?”

Connolly shrugged. “I guess so.”

“In fact, you might even say there’s no reason—no real reason, anyway—to think it didn’t happen that way. So he took the car. So what? Maybe he needed a way home. We don’t know where they met. Maybe your man drove him all the way from Albuquerque and he didn’t want to hitch back. You might even say it’s
likely
that it happened the way we said.”

Connolly nodded. “But I can’t picture it.”

“Oh. Is that some of that professional police work you were telling me about earlier? The kind we don’t do?”

Connolly smiled. “All right. But I can’t. Why the pants?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why would he have his pants down? Why would he need to?”

“Maybe they were taking turns.”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t sound like your parking-lot guy.”

“Maybe he was playing with himself. It’s possible.”

Connolly nodded. “Okay. Then why don’t I believe it? Why can’t I picture Bruner doing that?”

“Maybe you need to be—you know, to imagine it.”

“I’m not, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I wasn’t,” Holliday said firmly, then grinned. “Might have come in handy, though, all things considered. We’re flying blind here.”

“Okay, let’s go with your story. What else?”

“You want to tell me about his car?”

“ ’Forty-two Buick. Probably in great condition—he loved the car, apparently. Liked to go for drives. I’ll get you all the numbers. Any point in sending the info across the border, in case you’re right about that?”