Red Man Down (17 page)

The clouds were darker than before and it was breezing up. The ‘possible rain’ forecast was looking better every minute. In fact, was that a sprinkle? A few grudging drops darkened the asphalt as she thump-clicked her way to the car.

And her mangled toe joint was responding to the abrupt drop in air pressure by hurting enough to send little twinges through the pain meds. She got into the driver’s seat, drank the rest of the water left in the bottle she’d brought along and looked at her watch. Quarter to five. She dug out her cell phone and dialed.

‘Leo,’ she said when he answered the phone, ‘I’m just leaving Pima County. I can’t make it back in time to do anything useful. Check me out, will you?’

‘Sure, kid. Why wouldn’t I be glad to risk my retirement by involving myself in corruption for a colleague as swell as you?’

‘That’s the spirit. If you get written up I’ll speak at your defense.’

‘Go away, Sarah.’

She drove home alternately wincing at the pain in her foot and crowing approval as the sprinkle grew into a steady rain. That was one thing about living in Tucson: sometimes just watching rainwater sluice down your windshield could put a fresh gloss on a hard-fought day.

F
unny how fast you establish a routine, Sarah thought Friday morning, as she opened the door to Tia Louisa’s housekeeping crew.

Sarah and her mother had agreed, when they moved in together, to pool money for a cleaning service, since Sarah’s time off was always conditional and Aggie’s stroke had bought her the Home Free pass from heavy housework. They’d established Friday as their day to take care of the house, so while the crew cleaned, Will caught a nap after his all-night shift, and Sarah dealt with the blizzard of laundry that cleaning created. Aggie, meanwhile, perched in a quiet spot, usually the patio, and made the week’s lists of needed supplies. After Will got up, the crew would clean the master bedroom last and then vacuum their way down the hall and out of the house.

This week Aggie said, ‘Why don’t you let the laundry wait a few days? No use carrying sheets around on your sore foot.’ But Sarah, after a few experimental steps, found that her toe joint seemed to be settling back into its accustomed groove and she could walk a few steps pretty comfortably now on two matching sandals. She set a stool by the folding table, kept the machines whirring and got the cleaning crew to ferry linens back and forth while she washed and folded.

Brain-dead labor needing little mental effort, her mind grew restless and soon wandered off on its own. When Tia Louisa brought the second load of sheets and took away the first stacks of folded towels, Sarah asked her to fetch a tablet and ballpoint from the drawer in the kitchen. Soon she had an almost perfect split going: the lizard brain to fold sheets and towels, the sentient portions to ponder the questions that had begun to cluster around Frank Martin’s suicide.

She emerged from this perfect circle once to find herself staring at the control panel on the washer while Tia Louisa asked her, looking a little worried, ‘Whatsa matter? You forget how to run the machine?’

Sarah explained that she had been thinking about something else. Louisa nodded, plainly suspecting that her employer had gone a little lame in more than her foot. But when Sarah limped back to the table and added another note on the bottom line of her growing list, she was wearing a small, satisfied smile.

By Monday morning, Sarah’s foot had given up the Northern Lights display and settled back to all-over ocher. It was still tender to the touch, though, so none of her shoes would work. Snow had fallen in downtown Tucson Saturday night and quickly melted Sunday morning, but the wind off the mountain had fangs and claws. She put on a pair of her thickest wool hiking socks and the Big Ugly Sandals, and stumped off to work.

She had an idea she wanted to peddle to her fellow detectives, and had made up her mind not to waste any more time thinking about her stupid foot. So as soon as she’d checked her email and answered the essentials, she sought out Cifuentes first in the clustered workstations. He was already bivouacked in his cubicle, almost buried in paper, and raised a cautionary hand as she entered.

‘Careful, careful! Don’t make a breeze.’ He laid staplers, scotch tape and scissors across any mounds not already secured. ‘There. I’m reading case histories, remember? If I tip over a pile and lose my place I’ll kill myself.’

‘How’s it going?’

‘Autopsy reports are filled with long, technical words. Leo loaned me this.’ He held up a dictionary of medical terms.

‘Yeah, I have one too. It helps, but I think they add new words every few months.’

‘
Exactamente
. Thank God for Google. What do you need?’

‘Have you ever found any mention in all those records of the original of Frank Martin’s farewell note?’ He blinked at her. ‘The one you copied and frequently carry in your shirt pocket so you can read it to your admiring teammates. Where’s that?’

‘The one Frank wrote? I told you – I never had that.’

‘What did you copy?’

‘Um … I’m trying to think. Wasn’t it in all the newspaper stories when he shot himself?’

‘I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking … never mind. No, God, don’t get up, you’ll start an avalanche. I’ll ask Leo.’

She walked around the connecting half-wall to his desk, where he was already looking up over half-glasses, saying, ‘Ask Leo what?’ He was pretty well walled in by stacks of paper himself. All the top pieces were warm, copies he had just made of newspaper stories from the months after Frank Martin’s death.

‘Have you found any mention yet of Frank Martin’s suicide note?’

‘Mention, are you kidding? It’s quoted verbatim in about a dozen places. All the reporters got their rocks off repeating it. Talk about juicy – right out of Edgar Allen Poe.’

‘Well, do any of them say where it was? Who found it?’

‘Uhh … let’s see, do they?’ He loosened his tie, stuck a judicious forefinger in a stack, read a sentence and thumbed down through a few pages. ‘Here we go … “The note he left …” That’s no help.’ He tried another stack. ‘Here’s from the day he was charged. ‘The message he sent his nephew, Tucson police sergeant—’ He looked up. ‘Ed made Sergeant?’

‘While he was a trainer, sure. He lost his rank after the first reprimand.’

‘Ah, yeah. OK, the message he sent blah blah, and then the quote again, “I didn’t take the money but I won’t” blah blah.Doesn’t say how it was sent. Or where.’ He squinted at her. ‘Who cares? You do, obviously, but why?’ His squint turned into a scowl. ‘You’re looking all games-afootish, Sherlock. What’s the— Oh.’ His forehead smoothed out, and he made a small motion in his chair, like nesting. ‘All of a sudden I think I see why.’

‘Yeah. We’ve been looking for a letter, on paper, in Frank Martin’s handwriting—’

‘So we could all nod wisely and say, “Well, it’s right here in his handwriting, and it proves he felt so guilty he offed himself—”’

‘But if the message was an email …’ They stared at each other, breathing shallowly, thinking about the possibilities.
Anyone can send an email.
Finally Sarah said, ‘This can’t be the first time anybody ever brought up the question, can it? Remind me … how long ago did he shoot himself?’

‘Uh … in March, it’ll be three years.’

‘I was just coming aboard in Homicide. Newly escaped from Auto Theft.’

He gave her his avuncular smile. ‘You mean you didn’t love all those meaningful conversations about VINs? For shame.’ He thought. ‘I was here. Dietz was here then, wasn’t he?’

‘For a few months, before he transferred to Narcotics. Yes. Oscar was still in Auto Theft, Jason was out on Patrol. Ray followed me on board, from Child Abuse. Who’s that leave? Ollie. He came in three months after me.’

‘So it’s you and me – well, and Delaney.’

‘And I don’t remember us ever talking about the note. Why not?’

Leo raised his eyebrows and shrugged as high as he dared with so much paper around. ‘Well, you know, it wasn’t our case, at first. And “at first” lasted a long time – the embezzlement thing simmered along for most of the winter in fraud division, while the bank inspectors came in and pawed through records for weeks. Finally they arrested Frank Martin, of all people.’

‘That’s exactly how we all said it, wasn’t it? Like that was his full name, Frank Martin Of All People.’

‘Yes. The media people had fun with quotes like that for a week or so. Meantime, Martin was out on bail but also out of a job … what happened next?’

‘I’m trying to remember,’ Sarah said. ‘Seems to me we had some big case we were working on, multiple shootings …’

‘That’s right! That miserable drug war that erupted between the, what did we call them?’

‘The Snakes and the Worms. God, talk about police arrogance.’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Leo said. ‘We didn’t feel we were superior to them. We felt they were inferior to everybody else on earth.’

‘I guess that’s right. How did they get those names, though?’

‘One side was a gang called the South Side Serpents. Mostly cousins, and they had those disgusting tattoos, snakes crawling all over them, remember? The other side was just a bunch of street thugs that aspired to be as rotten as the Serpents, so we ended up calling them the Worms, and pretty soon the Serpents became Snakes because it was easier to say.’

‘And even if they were mostly kids they were all full-blown outlaws, weren’t they?’

‘Every molecule of every person on both sides,’ Leo pronounced solemnly, ‘deserved heartfelt contempt, right down to their hair follicles and toenails.’

‘Remember the baby-killer? He said, “Sure I killed his baby – he took my dope.”’

‘My phone kept ringing,’ Leo remembered. ‘Friends and neighbors saying, “We’ll all be murdered in our beds if you don’t lock every one of these animals up, yadda yadda, what’s the world coming to …” like it was my job to know
that.
’

‘So when the quiet little comptroller killed himself after skimming a load of cash, it didn’t make much of an impression, did it? On us, I mean. We all said, ho hum, what else is new? We had bigger fish to fry.’

‘Yeah, teenage drug lords – sexy stuff.’ Leo looked thoughtful. ‘Still, though, Martin’s wasn’t a natural death, so there
was
an autopsy and somebody
was
assigned to that. Who?’ He looked at his stacks. ‘I haven’t come to that part of the story. Stick your head around there and ask Oscar who attended that autopsy.’

Oscar said, without looking up, ‘Funny name, Eisenstaat. You need the spelling?’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘I knew him.’

‘I heard him,’ Leo said when she turned back. He shook his head, looking tired. ‘Shit. If Harry got the case we’ll probably never know how the note got delivered.’

They sat quiet a moment, remembering the frustration of that last year with Eisenstaat. Sarah had heard the acronym LOP, for Live On Payday, before she came to Homicide, but had learned its full implications working around Eisenstaat, while he did as close as possible to nothing, in that last year before he retired.

‘We better be a little careful how we talk about this with Delaney,’ Leo said. ‘Harry was a major embarrassment for him.’

‘Oh? I didn’t know … In what way?’

‘He should have got him out of the department a year before he went. But Delaney came in as the fresh boss, and Harry was the classic passive-aggressive obstructionist; he used his long tenure to fake Delaney out of putting his foot down, at first. Then, after a few months, it was so close to Harry’s retirement that it seemed awkward to make him change jobs so Delaney let it go. But it taught him a lesson; he’s been a real hard-ass about not accepting anything but best efforts ever since. I think that’s why he’s so hard on …’ his voice dropped and he inclined his head toward Oscar’s workspace, ‘… you know who over there.’

Damn. I wish I’d known that.

A few minutes later, Delaney walked out of his office and into the cluster of desks where his detectives were rolling up sleeves and peering at computer screens. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine that’s probably going to take the whole damn morning,’ he said, ‘and maybe suck up the whole rest of the week. So before it starts, let’s have a quick huddle in my office.’

They all pulled chairs around his desk, settled their piles of notes and looked at him with impatient faces that said,
Yeah
,
what?
The second floor of 270 South Stone, on Monday morning, was no place to stand on ceremony.

‘OK,’ Delaney said, ‘who’s got any results?’

‘Let me go first,’ Jason said. ‘I’ll be quick.’

‘Go,’ Delaney said.

‘It worked just the way you said it would,’ Jason said, flashing his evil-wolf smile. ‘Except I didn’t have to take three turns at being a meathead. After the first bunch of merry-makers cleared out of the bar, the bartender came over to my table, gave me a friendly smile and said his name was Dewey. I said how glad I was to know him and he said, “I feel the same way, and maybe if you tell me right now what you want, I might not call my goon squad to break your face.”’

‘Why didn’t you call for backup?’

‘Didn’t have to. I started to tell him who I was and what I wanted, but he pointed to my pocket recorder. Soon as I turned it off, he said, “I’ll tell you what I know but I can’t go on the record. And I won’t testify. The boys I work for would kill me before I ever got to court.” So he did.’

‘Fair enough,’ Delaney said. ‘What’s his story?’

‘Damn near nothing. He did watch the whole thing as it happened, of course. I mean, second-floor window across the street? All he lacked was a Sky box and champagne. He told me the guy took so long getting his little piece of wire, he figured him for a decoy. Thought maybe a bunch of vets were playing a game they’d learned in Iraq, going to stream out of one of these empty buildings and blow away however many cops showed up. But no, the thief just tried to do the job by himself and got capped.

‘Then I grilled ol’ Dewey about the buying and selling, said all those bad-cop things you told me to say. He just laughed at me and said, “You kidding? This ain’t no amateur hour you walked into here, Officer, no offense. We’re not going to get caught dealing with two-bit punks like that bozo, can’t even shoot straight enough to get his man when he had the jump on him.” He said, “I never saw that screw-up before that day, and I hope you’ll do me a favor and never ask me to talk about him again.”’