Wall of Glass (9 page)

“Chavez,” he said. “Carla Chavez. Biddle lived with her. On Fremont Street. Two thirty-one.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“A pain in the neck.”

“But nothing helpful.”

“No. She says she doesn't know anything about Biddle. They'd been living together for two years and she doesn't know anything about the guy.”

“You have anything on her?”

“She was working the night he got killed. Plenty of witnesses. And she's clean. No record. Her brother's got one. Benito. Works for Norman Montoya, up in Las Mujeres. But we don't have any connection between Biddle and the brother.”

“Montoya's a fence.”

“No one's ever been able to prove it.”

“He's also coke, I hear.”

“No one's ever proved that either.”

“Was Biddle selling coke?”

“We don't think so.”

“But it's possible.”

“Shit, anything is possible. As far as I know, Biddle got iced by creatures from Venus. Listen, Josh, talk to Chavez if you want, but stay away from Stacey Killebrew. I don't want to be prying you up from the sidewalk.”

“A tender sentiment, Hector, and I appreciate it.”

“You're good, Josh, but I don't think you're that good. Killebrew would as soon pound your face in as look at you.”

“I'll try to bear that in mind.”

I
N THE MORNING
, I drove downtown to the police station, signed the first statement I'd made, about Biddle's visit to the office, and then dictated another, about the shooting incident last night. Hector pointed out that I was making more statements lately than a politician.

Afterward, I drove out to Allwood's on Cerillos Road and picked up a new pane of glass for the window. Fitting it in occupied most of the morning, and I didn't get back to work till after twelve.

Fremont Street lies to the west of St. Francis Drive, in what local Anglos, with a certain smug complacency, once referred to as the
barrio.
Until fairly recently the area was entirely Hispanic; but now, with land prices inflated everywhere else in town, those same Anglos are beginning to move in. Two-story adobe haciendas with clerestory windows and solar heat collectors are sprouting up next door to tiny, carefully tended frame cottages. Jaguars and BMW's prowl down the narrow streets, coolly ignoring the Chevy lowriders and the Ford pickups that slumber along the sides.

Carla Chavez's house was neither a hacienda nor a cottage. Even in its better days, three or four decades ago, it would have barely qualified as a hovel. A small, square, featureless building, it sat on a small, square lot surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence. Two small, square windows, one on either side of the front door, stared blankly out at the street. The brown paint that was supposed to make the walls resemble adobe had flaked off in large irregular patches, revealing the gray cinderblock beneath. There were more cinderblocks to the left, these holding up a red '58 Chevy, missing all four tires and blotched with primer. To the right of the house an ancient refrigerator lay on its back, its door yawning open. The yard was brown dirt, still sodden from the meltwater, and bare, as though not even weeds would grow here.

The latch on the gate was ajar, and looked as if it had been for years. I pushed through the gate and walked up through the mud to the front door. There was no doorbell. I knocked. Ever resourceful.

After a moment, the door opened.

She surprised me. Probably I had expected someone whose disrepair would match that of the house and grounds, someone slovenly and unkempt, a slattern. She was in her mid-twenties, and she was short, maybe five foot three. Her black hair, thick and shiny, fell to her shoulders. She wore light metallic blue eye shadow, jet black mascara, lipstick the color of arterial blood. It was more make-up, especially in broad daylight, than anyone needed, and she needed none at all. Her lush young body, flared-hipped and firm-breasted, was encased in spray-on jeans and a red Danskin top so tight that one deep breath would've given her thread poisoning. In a few years, unless she took care of herself, that opulence of body would fill out, thicken, and she'd become a fleshy parody of herself. But right now, young and sensual and ripe, she was stunning.

The dark brown eyes moved up and down, taking me in. The striking face was vacant, an empty sullen mask. “Yeah?”

“Carla Chavez?”

“Yeah?”

“Joshua Croft. I'd like to talk to you about Frank Biddle.”

“I already talk to the cops.” A lot of Hispanics in town speak English with a lilt, as though it were Spanish. Usually it gave color and music to the language. In Carla Chavez's case, however, it sounded simply petulant.

“I know,” I said. “But I saw Frank the day he died. I thought we might be able to help each other.”

“Yeah? How?”

“I don't know yet. Suppose we talk.”

She pursed her lips together. At last she said, “You're not a cop.”

“No. Private investigator.”

She nodded. “Like ‘Rockford Files.'”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly.”

She nodded again. “Okay, come in. But not for long. I gotta go to work soon.”

I wiped my feet on the mat and followed her in, shutting the door behind me. The living room was tiny and most of the furniture was cheap—a burgundy recliner chair, its naugahyde arms spotted with cigarette burns; a sway-backed second-hand sofa, cream colored; an end table and a matching coffee table, each of whose oak veneer, paper thin, was beginning to peel back at the edges. A black portable stereo cassette player sat on the end table; a bean-bag ashtray lay on the coffee table beside a package of Marlboros and a red Bic lighter. The only thing there that cost more than fifty dollars was the television, a big color console that was set against the wall opposite the couch.

Lying atop the television was a battered leather Bible, and hanging on the wall above it was a large wooden crucifix with a nickel-plated Jesus. I suspected that Frank Biddle hadn't had anything to do with either the Bible or the cross.

I suspected that he hadn't had anything to do with the house at all. He had lived here, stayed here, but the place was more hers than his. It was a young woman's replica of her family home, and she clearly spent time and energy keeping it up. No dust lay anywhere, and although the threadbare brown wall-to-wall carpeting showed trails of wear, it was spotless.

On the television screen, a man swathed in bandages, lying in a hospital bed, was telling a woman dressed in an evening gown that she'd be better off without him. For no real reason that I could see, she was disagreeing.

Carla Chavez nodded to the TV. “‘Days of our Lives.' You ever watch it?”

I shook my head. “I'm usually working.”

“That's Mickie, the guy in the bed. He got hit by a truck. He just got married again to Maggie, that's Maggie there, but he hasn't told her yet that he's the father of Marcella's baby.”

I think she was explaining all this just so she could postpone turning the thing off and missing something wonderful. I said nothing. She looked back at me and then, with obvious reluctance, reached out and pushed the button. The picture folded in upon itself and the screen went black. She turned to me again. “You wanna drink?”

“No thanks. Just talk. May I sit down?”

“Yeah, sure, go ahead.”

I sat in the recliner; she sat on the sofa. She leaned forward, picked up the pack of cigarettes from the coffee table, slid one out, and lit it with the Bic. She sat back and inhaled the smoke up from her mouth into her nose, two thin streamers, then blew it out in a pale blue billowing cone. Very sophisticated. I wondered then if she were a good deal younger than she looked. “So,” she said, “what you wanna talk about?”

“I'm working for the company that insured a diamond necklace that was stolen last year.”

“Yeah,” she said, “I know all about the necklace from the cops. They were buggin' us about it last year.” With her thumb and fourth finger, she plucked a flake of invisible and—filtered cigarettes being what they are—probably nonexistent tobacco from her lower lip. “Frank din't steal no necklace, man. We were in Amarillo, Texas, a thousand miles away.”

“Did the police tell you that Frank came to my office last Friday and offered to sell it back to the insurance company?”

“How could he sell it, man? I tole you, he din't have it.”

“Did they tell you that he came to see me?”

“Yeah, sure, they tole me. But Frank din't have no necklace.”

“You didn't wonder why Frank would offer to sell something he didn't have?”

She laughed. “No, man. Frank was always cooking up some scam. Frank was good at scams.”

There was something in her voice, but I couldn't tell whether it was bitterness or admiration. Maybe she couldn't either.

I asked her, “What kind of scam do you think Frank had in mind?”

“How do I know, man?” She sucked in the cigarette and put her head back to exhale, staring at me, eyes narrowed, over the plume of smoke. “You said you were gonna help me. So how you gonna help me?”

“There's a reward,” I said, “a finder's fee being offered for the necklace. If you can provide information, any kind of information, that helps me locate the thing, I'll see to it that you get some of the money.”

“Yeah?” Dubious. “How much, man? Five bucks?”

“That depends on the information.”

“Yeah, well, I don't have no information. And Frank din't have no necklace.”

“Do you know Stacey Killebrew?”

“Yeah, I know him. He's a pig.” She leaned forward to stab the cigarette out in the ashtray.

“He was a friend of Frank's,” I said.

“No, man, not for a long time.”

“Since when?”

“Since we got back from Amarillo.”

“And that was when, November?”

“Yeah.”

“Why'd you leave Amarillo?”

“Thing weren't workin' out.” Her eyes narrowed. “What difference does it make?”

“Just curious.”

“Yeah, well, curiosity, man.” She nodded. “You know what it did to the cat.”

“In a private detective, it's considered a plus.”

She leaned forward and slipped another cigarette from the pack. Holding the lighter poised before it, she said, “How much they payin' you, that insurance company?”

“Nothing unless I find the necklace.”

She lit the cigarette, sat back. “Rockford gets a hundred bucks a day.”

“Rockford retired. Why weren't Frank and Killebrew getting along?”

“How do I know? Frank din't talk business with me.”

“What kind of business was Frank involved in since he came back from Amarillo?”

“This and that. Odd jobs. Cars. He fixed cars for people. He was good at cars.” She narrowed her eyes. “Shouldn't you be payin' me some money for all this?”

“For all what? So far you haven't told me anything.”

“I got bills to pay, man, it's not gonna be easy now I'm on my own.”

“Where do you work?”

“At the Donut House. My tips are okay. The truck drivers like me, but the tips, they don't cover everything.”

“Maybe I can help. Tell me about Frank and Kille brew.”

She shrugged. “Nothin' to tell. They used to hang out, go hunting and stuff. Then Frank got pissed at him.”

“Why?”

“How do I know? Stacey, he called here one time, just after we got back, and Frank tole him if he ever come around again he'd break in his head.”

“Killebrew's a pretty big guy for Frank to be talking to him like that.”

“And he's crazy, man. Mean. Evil-mean. I seen him beat up on people, nearly kill 'em, just 'cause he don't like the way they look. But Frank wasn't afraid of nothin', man. Someone lean on him, he get a baseball bat and come back and break their knees. He was short, you know? But strong. And he wasn't afraid of nothin'.”

As good an epitaph as any, probably. “Did Frank have a gun?”

“A rifle. Like I say, sometimes he went out hunting deer.”

“No pistol.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Did Frank have any close friends beside Killebrew?”

“No. Not anyone close, you know? Acquaintances, like, he had a lot of acquaintances. Everybody liked Frank a lot.”

“Did your brother Benito like him a lot?”

She frowned. “Why you asking?”

I shrugged. “Curiosity.”

“Me and Benito, we don't get along too good. Benito only saw Frank one time, maybe two.”

“Did Frank do coke, Carla?”

She nodded. “I knew that was why you were askin'. No, never.
Never.
I don't have no drugs in my house. I tole him, that's the one thing I don't put up with.”

“Frank never dealt coke?”

“I tole you, no. I don't allow it.”

“Okay. What about these acquaintances of his. Do you know any of them? Know their names?”

“No, man. How'm I gonna know? They were guys. You know. Guys who hung out at the bars. Guys Frank knew.”

“Which bars?”

She shrugged. “He liked the Lone Star. Everybody knew him there.”

“The country-western place north of town?”

“Yeah.”

“What about other women? Was he seeing any?”

She frowned. “What's he need other women for? He had
me.
He take care of me; I take care of him.”

Involuntarily, I glanced around the tiny room, took in the shabby second-hand furniture. I kept to myself my opinion of Frank's abilities as a provider.

But it must have shown on my face, because suddenly her mouth turned down in a frown and she said, “This was only temporary. We were only staying here until Frank made his score, and then we were off. We were history, man.”

“Off to where?”