Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  I thought for a minute. “Do you keep a log of court orders?”

  She gave me the eye. “Yeah? …”

  “Can I take a look at that?”

  She started to resist, but then got up and brought over a green-bound ledger. She set it on the counter in front of me and resumed her seat at the computer.

  I flipped through until I found the current entries, then went back a few pages and found what I hoped might be there: T. Hallstedt had obtained a copy of the incorporation instruments for Milestone Properties on October 27, by order of the Honorable Melrose J. Smith. She’d had Milestone’s records for less than a week before she’d been killed.

  VII

  My first impulse was to drive straight back to Azula and wave it in Maines’s face, but I wanted to synchronize with Hector first. Naturally, it had occurred to me that he was keeping his argument with Teresa quiet because he’d killed her, but every time the thought crossed my mind, every cell in my body rebelled. It just wasn’t possible. Maines, shackled to mere logic, would never get that. He’d never understand that what matters when figuring people out isn’t looking at them, it’s looking at yourself. If you’ve been tuned right by life—if you’ve had to depend on successfully identifying someone else’s half conscious preferences and repressed motives to survive—listening to your own reactions will tell you what the person in front of you is really made of.

  The thought suddenly turned around and bit me. While I was mostly sure that Hector wasn’t a killer, he still tied my stomach in knots, and not entirely in a good way. It was that weird stillness of his, the way he went vicious in an instant. I’d told myself it was a PTSD thing, but what if I were just making excuses for his behavior because he blew my skirt up?

  The turnoff to Enchanted Rock put me on another two-lane road with no shoulder. A mile or so in, a patch of pink appeared in the dirty brown landscape off to my left, growing gradually larger until it dipped out of sight when I turned onto a gravel drive at the direction of yet another sign. This stopped at a small guardhouse with a gate, on which was hung a sign that said PARK CLOSED FOR REPAIRS UNTIL DECEMBER 1.

  Remembering Connie’s remark about Hector’s liking to have the place to himself, I pulled up and shut the motor off. There was a deserted parking area about fifty yards beyond the gate, but a gravel path, wide enough to drive a motorcycle on, led farther into the park. I walked along it until I came out from under the trees, and got a close-up of the pink bulb I’d seen on the way in. It was huge, curving up from the ground like a giant egg pushing through the earth’s crust. I wouldn’t have called it “enchanted,” exactly, but it was pretty impressive.

  The park map tacked to the guardhouse wall showed that the trail went all the way around the monadnock’s base, with several camping areas along it. The sun was starting to go down, turning the white light yellow. Even at my fastest clip, I’d never make the loop before it got dark. I decided instead to climb up top and see what I could see from there.

  The low slope was relatively easy to navigate, but it took longer than I expected. The sunset was well under way as I walked around the rock’s crown without seeing any signs of life along the trail below. I sat down to enjoy the evening and think about how to proceed. No point in wasting the light show.

  That peculiar reverse vertigo that I’d felt coming out of the bus station on my first night in town hit me again. I lay back on the scurfy granite, looking up into the sky, which had gone a deep indigo blue. I floated up into it, swimming through the air back toward town. People were out, some of them on the rooftops of the buildings, looking up at me. Teresa was among them, her dead eyes a cold white beam that dragged at me, sucking me back toward the earth. I woke up just before I crashed down on top of her.

  VIII

  It’s weird how the atmosphere of some dreams lingers over into your waking time as if they were real occurrences. I couldn’t shake off the sensation of having descended into a place very far away, with languages and rituals that I didn’t understand; Azula but not Azula, like some hallucinated parallel universe. That alien strangeness rode shotgun with me all the way back to the apartment.

  It was almost seven, but I called the police station to see if Maines was there. Scherer advised that he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow morning. I thought about asking for his home number but decided to give fate a chance. Maybe I’d run into Hector somewhere before the next day.

  Just sitting around the house with this stuff on my mind was out of the question, so I threw some workout clothes into my gym bag and went to see if the place Mike had told me about was open late. It was: the only one of the old brick factory buildings facing the railroad tracks with lights on. A big overhead door stood open on the loading dock, through which I saw several boxing rings set up inside. I parked on the gravel, got my bag out of the truck bed, and went up the concrete steps.

  The place was huge inside, maybe half the size of a football field, with exposed steel beams and columns holding up the distant ceiling. A faint odor of creosote and sawdust still hovered in the air. The weight pile was against the back wall, directly in front of me, spread out on a large rubber mat. There was a squat rack, two benches with uprights, and a bar and plates collection fit for an Olympic squad.

  A plastic sign bragging OFFICE was tacked to a hollow-core door on my right. I opened it and went in, and found myself in somebody’s living room. The somebody was sitting on the sofa, watching television.

  “Sorry,” I said, giving the door sign the hairy eyeball.

  “No problem,” he said, getting up. “What can I do for you?” He was close to sixty, with a big black pompadour and mustache, and a military bearing that made him look a little bit like Stalin. A fighter’s physique with forty years on top of it.

  “I’d like to use your weights,” I said.

  He picked up the remote on the coffee table and clicked off the television. “You wanna join the boxing club?” he asked doubtfully.

  “I’ll join, if that’s how you’re set up, but I’m not a fighter.”

  He was looking me over, trying not to appear skeptical. “It’s nothing but guys here. I don’t got no sauna or nothing.”

  “All I need is a lock on the bathroom door,” I told him.

  He pushed his lips forward, making the mustache bristle, then said, “How about ten bucks a month?”

  I got out my checkbook, not looking the gift horse in the mouth. “You make money at those rates?”

  “I ain’t in this to make money,” he replied. “I’m trying to keep these boys outta trouble so I don’t gotta call the cops on ’em later.”

  “That seems a little fatalistic,” I remarked, tearing off my check.

  He made a dimissive gesture at me. “Ah, you women never get it. When that testosterone hits, it makes you crazy. You been playing with teddy bears and Legos for ten, fifteen years, then alla the sudden you just want to tear shit up. At least here, they can channel it into something that won’t land ’em in jail.”

  That took me back to California, sitting on my aunt’s back steps, watching Joachim and a couple of his homeys blowing up tree stumps with some black powder they’d run across while robbing a sporting goods store. I don’t understand it any better now than I did then, but it had never occurred to me that there might be more at work than just sheer stupidity.

  Lifting in the vast warehouse felt a little public after the minuscule weight room at the Pacific Street gym, but after some warm-ups, I forgot anyone else was there. I did the full monty—dead lifts, squats, presses, and curls—and was resting on the bench when one of the fighters from the center ring came my way and stopped at the edge of the mat, taking off his headgear. It was Mike Hayes.

  “What the hell did you tell the cops?” he snarled at me in a low voice.

  I was too stoned on endorphins to answer right away, so I just looked at him and waited for the rest of it.

  “Maines is on the warpath for Hector,” he said, still puffing a little from his
own workout. “It ain’t bad enough, one of his oldest friends killed like that, now he’s gotta deal with the law thinking he did it?”

  “Hey, Maines came up with that all by himself,” I said, getting up to unload the preacher bar. “I didn’t help him get there.”

  “What did you tell him?” Mike insisted. His scattergun energy was all aimed at me now, and the sensation wasn’t pleasant.

  “Do you get a lot of results with that approach?” I asked him. “Because all it’s doing over here is pissing me off.”

  He looked away, clenching his jaw. “What is your problem? It’s a simple question. Just answer it.”

  I took the plates off the bar and carried them to the rack, muttering mildly, “Fuck you.”

  Instead of being gone when I turned around to come back, he was still standing there—only he was smirking now. “You know how I pick out glass heads? They’re the ones that get all mouthy and hard when you lean on ’em.”

  “I guess we’re both a couple of lightweights, then.”

  He didn’t care much for that, but he couldn’t argue with it. He started unwinding his hand wraps. “Hope the sheriff’s life insurance is paid up.”

  He wasn’t looking at my face, so I said, “You might not want to go around saying shit like that out loud.”

  Mike’s head came up, eyes sharp.

  “Has Hector always had that fire-bomb temper?” I asked him.

  “Of course,” Mike said. “It’s what made him so great in the ring. He had this”—Mike searched for the word—“fury that would come over him at the bell. It was like watching some kinda natural disaster in progress—horrible and beautiful at the same time.”

  “What does he do with that fury now that he’s retired?”

  “Takes it out on me, mostly.” Mike grinned, refusing to be goaded. I shrugged it off, turning back to my cleanup, and heard him add, “He ain’t violent, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “That drunk he threw out Thursday night might disagree.”

  Our eyes met, and I saw the humor drain from his.

  I started talking before he could. “He and Teresa fought a lot, didn’t they?”

  “They always did. If he was gonna kill her in a fit of rage, he’d have done it twenty years ago.”

  “Maybe it took twenty years to light the fuse.”

  Mike sighed again, turning to head for the showers. “Lady, I wish you’d figure out whose side you’re fucking on.”

  Mine, I thought, watching him disappear.

  IX

  I swung by the bar again on my way home and saw that there was a light on upstairs now. I parked quickly and went in. The door to the apartment was standing open, but there was nobody inside. I listened for a minute, then went over to the mouth of the hall and called “Hector?” back toward the bathroom. There was no answer.

  Getting a chance to search the living quarters of somebody who’s exercising my radar doesn’t happen all that often, so I took it without asking questions. I’d locked the bar behind me, so if Hector came in from wherever he’d gone, I’d hear him in time to desist before he came upstairs. The half curtains across the bay window were drawn, so I didn’t feel exposed as I went over to the desk.

  The pencil drawer held the usual pencil-drawer stuff—feral paper clips and rubber bands, even some pencils. I looked through more of the same in the side drawer, then moved on to the files below. Bank statements, the building title, medical records—none of these told me anything I didn’t already know, except that Hector’s cholesterol was a little high and that he hadn’t been kidding about being broke.

  Toward the back I found an unlabeled folder with a couple of photos in it. One was a full-sheet promo shot of a young fighter in a pair of satin boxing trunks, posed in about-to-kick-your-ass mode. It took me a minute to realize that the boxer was Hector. His hair was cropped short and the fringe falling over his forehead, as well as the thousand-yard stare in his dark eyes, made him look like a different person. The second photo was a snapshot of this same curiously different Hector at maybe sixteen, with a big, sixtyish blond man and two little girls, which I took to be a family photo with Connie, Tova, and her father. They were all smiling except for Connie, who was holding Hector’s hand and looking at the camera with the gravity that only children of that age can muster.

  My radar was simmering, and after a pause I saw what it was pointing at: everything in the desk, except the two photographs, was recent and impersonal. No old letters, clippings, or memorabilia; none of the banal minutiae that congeal around a life in progress. It reminded me of my apartment at Teresa’s.

  It occurred to me that Hector might also be in protection, but that didn’t track with his independently verified history in Azula, and I doubted that the feds would send two clients to the same pin-dot tiny Texas town. Maybe he purposely avoided keeping anything that reminded him of his past, because of whatever had happened to him, but surely that didn’t preclude more recent keepsakes. If anything, those would have served to replace the old memories.

  More curious than ever now, I booted up the computer, where I found the same lack of history. Even his Internet bookmarks were nondescript. His e-mail folders were all empty, and I didn’t have the know-how to recover stuff he might have thrown out. Even if I did, though, I was willing to bet I wouldn’t find anything informative. I knew what living anonymously looked like. The question was why Hector Guerra was doing it.

  I checked the bottoms and backs of the desk drawers and the hidden surfaces of the desk carcass. Then I went over and took a look at the bookshelf next to the bed. The top shelf was mostly political texts whose authors I didn’t recognize. Lower down was mixed Latin American fiction—Borges, Pablo Neruda, Isabel Allende, and others—a few English-language classics, some prosaic things like a Chilton’s for the truck and an Audubon bird guide, and a smattering of pre-Columbian history. I didn’t want to take the time to go through them all, but I fanned a couple at random just to see if anything fell out from between the pages. No luck.

  Nothing under the sheets, the mattress, or the bed frame; same for the sofa and chairs. The kitchen cabinets held only groceries and dishes, no wads of money or classified documents. In the bathroom I frisked the dresser, then started going through the pockets of the hanging clothes. About halfway down the rod, my knuckles raked across a smooth spot in the rough stone behind them. It was a wall safe, empty, with the door closed but unlocked. Since it wasn’t contemporary with the building, I theorized that Hector had installed it when he inherited the place, which meant that he had something he wanted to keep inside it. I wondered if the recent burglars had gotten to it. Breaking a safe isn’t something you just walk into a place and do—if that’s what had happened, they had come prepared. That meant they knew ahead of time what was in the safe and that they wanted it.

  When I backed out of the clothes, Luigi was sitting in the bathroom doorway, watching me. He looked suspicious.

  “Any idea what was in there?” I asked him.

  The cat did a slow blink—the feline equivalent of a shrug, I guess. He didn’t say anything.

  The rest of the bathroom was unremarkable. Luigi escorted me back to the kitchen and showed me where the cat food was. I duly filled his bowl and stepped out onto the landing, shutting the door behind me.

  A couple of Harleys were going by on Main, and it took me a second to realize that the reason they sounded so loud was that the noise was raining down from overhead. I peered up into the darkness. After a minute for my eyes to adjust, I saw that the roof hatch was open.

  My radar flashed alarm, but the brain cut in to assure me that the forensics people had probably just forgotten to close it. I climbed up to do it, but halfway there my morbid curiosity got the better of me, sending me out onto the roof.

  The floodlights from the courthouse filtered over, almost bright enough to read by. A pale stain marked where Teresa’s body had lain in its shallow pool. The scupper was clear, and I wondered if the f
orensics squad had collected all the water and trash to take back to the lab. What a job.

  Not sure exactly why I’d come up in the first place, I turned to go back downstairs, and caught sight of a bright spot to the south. The hatch at the café building, two roofs over, was also open, its rim illuminated from within.

  I froze, trying to remember if those lights had been on when I drove up. Then the brain reminded me of Hector’s burglary again, and I sidled over to the parapet along the alley to look down. No car waiting in the dark with the motor running and the lights off. I watched and listened for a while; the light coming from the rear window of the café building didn’t flicker, and nothing stirred but the occasional rumble of a passing vehicle and a lonely dog on night duty off in the distance. Unless somebody was over there taking a nap, I was up here alone.

  My pulse had slowed down a little, and the brain started to percolate. If Milestone owned the café building, Richard or Jesse could have stashed the cadaver hand there, then picked his moment on Wednesday night to run down the block, go upstairs, cross over to Hector’s roof, and throw it off. By the time Benny and Teresa arrived, he’d have been back down on the street, innocently mingling with the bar patrons. Granted, it didn’t prove anything, but the fact that Richard and Jesse might have had a second access point to the roof where Teresa died was at least interesting.

  I stepped over to the parapet to check out the two intervening building roofs. They were a story lower than the bar, but there was an old iron service ladder running down to them about halfway along the parapet. The café building showed maybe six feet of wall above its adjoining roof—it would be easy enough to hop down from there, cross over the flat roofs between, and take the ladder up here. I couldn’t tell from this distance, though, whether it would be possible to climb back up the café building wall. I made use of the service ladder and went to find out.

  Up close, the wall proved to be rough-cut stone with plenty of voids in the old mortar. I took a shot at climbing it, and found it almost as easy as walking over had been.