Short Straw (17 page)

“Good morning,” she said as he walked into the kitchen.

“You really don’t have to cook all our meals,” he said.

“I’ve got to earn my keep somehow.”

“I guess I’m going to have to take you out this evening to keep you from cooking again.”

“Don’t you like my cooking?”

“It’s wonderful, but I don’t like making you work.”

They sat down and ate a big breakfast, then Eagle got out the Range Rover and drove them through Tesuque and down Tano Road.

“This route isn’t as easy as it used to be,” he said as he first followed a four-lane highway, then turned onto a dirt road. “They closed the entrance to Tano Road in some sort of weird traffic rerouting, so it’ll take you a little longer to get home than it once did.”

“I don’t mind the drive,” she said.

He turned onto Tano Norte. “This road used to be called County Road 85, or something like that, but the writer who built your house and Stanley Marcus, of Neiman’s fame, who lived right there”—he pointed out a house as they passed—“got together and had the name of the road changed and the houses numbered.”

They drove on down Tano Norte until they came to the house, where Susannah’s real estate agent was waiting for them. The walk-through went well, and Susannah made notes for minor repairs and changes she wanted done.

“I’ll recommend somebody to take care of all that,” Eagle said.

The walk-through completed, they drove to Eagle’s office, where his associate had the paperwork arranged on the conference table in his suite. The seller’s lawyer showed up, the papers were signed and money changed hands.

“Congratulations,” Eagle said, “you’re a Santa Fe home owner.”

V
ITTORIO WOKE UP LATER
than he had intended, had some breakfast and got dressed. He could see the Toyota in the ferry parking lot across the street, and he kept an eye on it as he dressed. His intention had been simply to go and get into the car when Cupie and Barbara did, but then he had a strange thought: Could the two of them have been in cahoots? He dismissed the idea as implausible, but he resolved to be more cautious.

He asked the hotel to provide a rental car, to be dropped off in Tijuana, and when Cupie arrived at the Toyota with their bags he was waiting across the street in a red Chevrolet.

C
UPIE OPENED THE TRUNK
and set his and Barbara’s luggage inside, then he stopped. Vittorio’s luggage had been there; now it was gone. He checked the lock on the Toyota; it was undisturbed; the trunk had not been broken into. He closed the trunk and looked carefully around him. What was going on here? The coast guard had reported not finding Vittorio’s body. This was creepy.

V
ITTORIO DUCKED AND WAITED
for Cupie to drive away, then he followed. Cupie stopped at a side entrance to a hotel, and Barbara ran from the building and dived into the rear seat of the Toyota. Cupie was still being careful. Good.

Vittorio followed at a distance as the Toyota made its way out of town, north toward Tijuana. He wasn’t sure just how he was going to handle this yet, but what he really wanted was to kidnap her himself and sell her to a pimp in Tijuana. Maybe life as a sex slave in a Mexican whorehouse would be good for her.

B
OB MARTINEZ SAT IN
his car with a detective, across the street from the Santa Fe County Corrections Center, and watched the day’s crop of released inmates leave the building.

“You know any of these guys, Pedro?” he asked the detective. “I’m looking for a man who might do a contract killing.”

Pedro Alvarez watched the men through small binoculars. “I know three of them,” he said. “One is a burglar, one is a car thief and the third is what you might call a jack-of-all-trades.”

“What’s the jack’s name?”

“Harold Fuentes,” Pedro replied, as he watched Fuentes get into a pickup truck with a woman. “He’s your best bet.”

“Then let’s follow him.”

“What do you expect to learn by doing that? I could just brace the guy.”

“We don’t have enough to charge him with anything yet. Let’s just see where he goes and what he does.”

Pedro started the car and followed the pickup at a distance.

“You know where he lives?” Martinez asked.

“Off Agua Fría, in a little adobe,” Pedro replied.

Martinez watched as Fuentes passed Agua Fría without turning. “Harold appears to be going somewhere else,” he said.

Fuentes passed the road to the interstate without turning. “There’s nothing out here but a water-treatment plant and the airport,” Pedro said.

“Let’s see which one he chooses,” Martinez replied.

Fuentes turned left toward the airport.

“You know who lives out here?” Pedro said.

“Yeah, Joe Big Bear, or at least he did before Ed Eagle so kindly blew him away for us.”

Fuentes drove past the big junkyard, then turned into a road alongside it.

“Bingo,” Pedro said.

“Stop here, and let’s see what he does,” Martinez ordered.

Pedro pulled over and looked through his binoculars. “He’s trying to get into Big Bear’s trailer,” he said. “The woman is keeping watch. He’s fiddling with the lock.” He watched as Fuentes gave up on the lock, returned to the pickup for a tire iron, then jimmied the door. The woman followed him inside.

“Now we’ve got a charge,” Martinez said. “Let’s go get him.”

Pedro drove down the road and turned into the trailer’s driveway, then coasted to a stop. “Are you carrying?” he said to the D.A.

“You bet,” Martinez said, producing a Walther. 380. “Let’s go.”

The two men got out of the car and walked to the trailer, its door ajar. They peeked inside and saw Fuentes and the woman ransacking the place.

“Here!” the woman cried, opening the undersink cabinet. “He’s got a safe.”

They watched as Fuentes knelt in front of the safe, took hold of it and tried to lift it. “It’s bolted down,” he said, taking the tire iron to the plywood floor.

Martinez signaled Pedro to wait, and the two men watched through the door until Fuentes had the safe free of the floor. “Now,” he said, stepping back and letting the detective precede him.

Pedro pushed open the door, held out his gun and yelled, “Freeze, police!”

Fuentes was lifting the safe from under the sink, and he dropped it as if it were red hot and turned around. “What?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“You’re under arrest for burglary, both of you,” Pedro said.

“What are you talking about? My wife and me live here.”

“Come on, Harold, this is Joe Big Bear’s trailer.”

“I rented it from him the day before yesterday,” Fuentes protested. “I’ve got the agreement in my truck.”

“You talked to Joe the day before yesterday?”

“Sure, I did. He came to see me in jail.”

“Is that when you hired him to kill Ed Eagle?”

“Now, wait a minute Detective Alvarez,” Harold said. “Maybe I better explain this a little better.”

“Okay, Harold,” Pedro said, producing handcuffs. “Let’s go down to the station, and you can explain it to me and the D.A.”

Thirty-eight

E
AGLE AND SUSANNAH HAD LUNCH AT THE TESUQUE
Market, sitting on the front porch. The weather was gorgeous, as it usually was in Santa Fe.

“I’m kind of drowsy,” Susannah said. “Maybe I’d better have a cup of coffee.”

“No, you should have a nap. What you have is a mild case of altitude sickness; you have to remember that we’re at seven thousand feet of elevation here, and it takes at least twenty-four hours to get over it. Let’s go back to the house, and you can stretch out for a while.”

They drove back up the mountain, and on the front doorstep Eagle picked up a Federal Express envelope with a shipping label showing that it had been sent from Mexico. He put Susannah to bed, then went into his study, sat down and opened the envelope with a real sense of satisfaction. Inside were six blank sheets of paper. Furious, he called Vittorio’s cell phone, but all he got was voice mail. He tried Cupie’s, too, and the same thing happened. What the hell was going on down there? Then he noticed the light on his answering machine was flashing. He pressed the message button.

“Ed, it’s Cupie,” a voice said. “I’ve got some bad news: Vittorio is dead. We were on a ferry across the Gulf of California yesterday, and he disappeared from the upper deck. The coast guard has conducted a thorough search, and they haven’t been able to find him. Vittorio couldn’t swim, it seems. Apparently, he borrowed my cell phone, so that’s gone, too. I won’t be able to get another one until I get back to the states. I’m calling from a hotel in La Paz, but Barbara and I are leaving for Tijuana right now. I’ll call you again when we’re across the border.”

Eagle was stunned. Vittorio dead? Cupie and Barbara on their way to Tijuana? She was coming back to the States? The phone rang, and he picked it up. “Hello?”

“Ed, it’s Bob Martinez. We’ve arrested the man we believe called you from the Santa Fe jail. You might want to come down to the police station and hear what he has to say about the attempt on your life.”

“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” Eagle said. He hung up and looked in on Susannah, who was sound asleep, then he got into the Range Rover and started for town.

C
UPIE DROVE ALONG
at a steady sixty miles an hour, glancing regularly in his rearview mirror. For a long time he saw nothing that worried him, then he did. He drove faster, then slower. “Barbara?”

“What?” she said from the backseat.

“You sure there’s nothing you want to tell me about that might cause the Mexican police to be interested in you?”

“Cupie, I already told you, there’s nothing. Now leave me alone.”

“Reason I ask is, there’s a red car following us, keeping well back. When I speed up, he speeds up; when I slow down, he slows down.”

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“My sentiments exactly. Now, maybe if you told me what’s going on here, it might help me figure out what to do.”

“I’ll tell you what to do,” she said. “You give me my gun back, and get ready to use yours.”

E
AGLE WAS LED
to a small room separated from an interrogation room by a one-way mirror. Martinez and a detective were waiting for him.

“You know Detective Pedro Alvarez?” Martinez asked.

“We’ve met in court, I believe,” Eagle said, shaking the man’s hand.

“The gentleman handcuffed to the table in the next room is Harold Fuentes,” Martinez said. “He’s a small-time offender who imagines himself capable of bigger things. He was released from the county jail this morning and, with his wife, went directly to Joe Big Bear’s trailer, broke in and started ransacking it. Pedro and I followed him and watched as he forcibly removed a safe that was bolted to the floor. We arrested him on a burglary charge, and we’ve got somebody working on the safe right now, to see what he was stealing.”

“Have you questioned him at all?” Eagle asked.

“Not yet.”

The door opened, and a uniformed officer walked in carrying a basket containing a substantial sum of cash. “Here we are, Mr. Martinez,” the officer said. “The safe had over thirty-six thousand dollars in it and a copy of a receipt from Western Union, showing that a Pepe Oso Grande received a wire transfer of twenty-five thousand dollars the day before yesterday.”

“Spanish for Joe Big Bear,” Alvarez said.

“The money was wired from a bank in Mazatlán, Mexico,” the officer said. “There was no name listed in the space for the sender.”

“Thank you,” Martinez said. The man set down the basket and left.

“My wife is in Mexico,” Eagle said.

“Pedro,” Martinez said, “I think it’s time for you to wring out Mr. Fuentes for us. We’ll watch.”

Alvarez got up and left the room, and a moment later, appeared on the other side of the glass. Martinez turned up the volume on a speaker.

“I’ve read you your rights,” Alvarez said. “Do you understand them?”

“Sure,” Fuentes replied.

“Sign this,” Alvarez said, placing a sheet of paper before him. Fuentes signed.

“Well, Harold,” Alvarez said, “it’s more than simple burglary, now; it’s grand theft. There was thirty-six thousand dollars in that safe.”

Fuentes didn’t looked surprised. “That money belongs to me,” he said. “I didn’t steal nothing.”

“So, the day before yesterday you were in Mexico, instead of in jail?”

“Huh?”

“Twenty-five thousand dollars of that money was wired from a bank in Mexico on that day. How’d you manage that, Harold?”

“It was the woman wired it, then,” Harold said. “The other twelve thousand, five hundred was mine, what I gave Joe Big Bear.”

“Let’s start at the beginning of all this, Harold, and while you’re telling me the story, don’t leave out the part about the woman.”

“Okay, a couple of weeks ago, right before I got arrested and sent to jail, I’m sitting at a traffic light on Paseo de Peralta, and this woman in a big SUV pulls up next to me and waves. She says, ‘Follow me; there’s money in it for you,’ and drives off. I’m curious, so I follow her. We go up Canyon Road, and we make a few turns and she parks, waves me over, gets out of her car and gets into my truck. She says she’s heard that I’m a man who can get things done, and she has a job for me. Am I interested?

“I say, maybe, and she says she wants somebody killed. I ask who, and she says her lawyer, name of Ed Eagle. I heard of him, and I ask why she wants him dead. She says, none of my business, and she says how much? I say fifty grand, and we bargain some. We settle on twenty-five grand, all of it up front, because after that moment, we won’t meet again.”

“Wait a minute, Harold,” Alvarez said. “You’re telling me she gave you twenty-five grand up front? What’s to keep you from just walking away with the money and doing nothing?”

“That’s what I figured to do,” Fuentes said, “but after she counts out the cash from her pocketbook, she says there’s another guy who’s going to be watching me, and if the job doesn’t get done, he’s going to kill me.”

“And you believed her?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“Did she tell you her name?”