Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  “I didn’t even think about the repercussions of turning her down, it was so ludicrous,” Hector said, sounding weary. “When I got home, she was up here waiting for me—she’d done her over-the-roof thing, and said she wanted to apologize.”

  “Did she bring the hand with her?”

  Hector shook his head. “We had a couple of glasses of wine and talked for a while.” He closed his eyes. “Everything after that is gone.”

  My ears felt like a million tiny insects were nibbling at them. “You mean from the bottle that was on the counter when I came by on Friday?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “It was doped,” I told him, amazed that he didn’t know. Why was Maines telling me shit that he wasn’t even giving the lawyers?

  Hector’s face snapped open like a searchlight had hit it. I watched him run through it, stunned, and then he balked like a horse refusing a jump. “No way. Teresa would never do a thing like that to me.”

  I couldn’t help an exasperated snort. “Hector, she’d just tried to blackmail you into having sex with her.”

  “Come on,” he said, doubt shading his expression. “You can’t date-rape a guy.”

  “Why not?”

  His face flushed. “Because I’d have to be conscious to—you know.”

  His embarrassment made me smile, in spite of what we might be talking about. “You’ve never had a wet dream?”

  He paused at that, then tried, “If that’s what she was up to, why’d she drug the whole bottle? She was drinking it, too.”

  “They put a dye in that stuff now,” I said. “If she’d just done your glass, you’d have noticed the color difference. She was a big enough woman to ingest a little bit and still be functional, and she had the advantage of knowing it was there. You’d be out before you realized she wasn’t keeping up with you. That’s why they found it in her system.”

  Hector sat back on the sofa and stared at me. I gave us both a little time with it. It’s a hell of a thing to have to comprehend. After a long silence, he looked over at the chakana, lying on the coffee table next to his cigarettes.

  “When’s the last time you remember having that on?” I asked him.

  “Thursday night, when you looked at it back in the office,” he said. “I noticed it missing Friday, after I got home from the gym.”

  “Jesse claims he found it around five in the morning,” I said, half to myself. “I mean, he could be—” Another bomb exploded behind my eyeballs. I held my breath, not believing what I was thinking, then let it out and looked over at Hector. “Are any of your clothes missing?”

  “My clothes?” he repeated, looking baffled. “Why?”

  “Just look, will you?” I didn’t want to put words to my idea until it proved itself worthy of the effort.

  Hector heaved himself off the sofa and went into the bathroom. I wrapped myself in the bedsheet and followed him. He pawed through the hamper, paused, then went over to the chest of drawers and dug through it. “The shirt I was wearing that night. I don’t see it anywhere.”

  I dropped down onto the toilet seat, closing my eyes while I thought out loud: “The chakana must have gotten tangled up in it when Teresa undressed you.” When I opened my eyes, Hector was leaning on the sink, looking a little sick. I went on quickly, “Richard came down here and got your shirt to cover up with before he went over to get the other malqui, so that nobody would see the blood on his clothes if he were spotted.”

  “I thought Richard was in the clear,” Hector said.

  “Only because he didn’t have time to give Teresa the roofies,” I said. “Since she gave them to herself, that’s off the table now.” The brain was racing ahead, trying to keep up with itself. “You were lying with your head toward the window when I came by on Friday morning, so if Teresa was on top of you—” Hector turned his head, closing his eyes. I hurried to finish. “—she’d have had her back to the door. You were more or less unconscious, and she was—busy. Richard could have grabbed the knife from your kitchen, if he was quiet, without either of you clocking him.”

  “What would be the point?” Hector said. “If he wanted to hang this thing on me, killing her down here would have sealed the deal way faster than doing it on the roof. I couldn’t remember what happened, and she’d be lying there with my DNA all over her and my kitchen knife in her chest. It’d be a slam dunk.”

  The brain screeched to a halt. “You’re right.”

  “Hell of a time to turn agreeable,” Hector grumbled. I looked up at him and he pushed himself off the sink, giving my hair a friendly rumple on the way out.

  My scalp was feeling overheated and greasy. I turned on the shower and got in, giving up on trying to see the logic in what Hector and I had just figured out. The brain was cranking busily around on it; I’d know soon enough.

  While I lathered, rinsed, and repeated, the sequence of events started to take shape. First: opportunity. Whoever killed Teresa couldn’t have planned it ahead of time, because she had no regular schedule for going across the roof to Hector’s. They must have seized the moment. That meant they were on the square, or somewhere in the vicinity, a good hour after the bar had closed. That ruled out a lot of people.

  Second, who wanted to kill her? Richard and Jesse were the only possibilities I knew of, and as Hector had just pointed out, they wouldn’t have done it on the roof. I could guess at motives for the rest of the population until I was blue in the face, so I left off and moved to the nuts and bolts.

  The bar would have been locked, meaning the killer had gotten on the roof some other way. Maybe Teresa had left the alley door at the café unlocked, and they followed her. Killer climbs up, goes across and down; sees what Teresa is up to, grabs the knife … I closed my eyes, visualizing myself standing there. Why do I go back up to the roof? I’ve got a perfect opportunity to kill Teresa and make it look like Hector did it.

  As I got out of the shower and into a towel, it occurred to me that maybe the killer hadn’t wanted it to look like Hector did it. But then why not wait over at the café building and kill her there? Close the roof hatch, and nobody would ever know she’d even been at Hector’s. Well, except for the DNA. But that could have been explained away by their “affair.” Still, the difference between Hector’s roof and inside his apartment felt critical.

  I found a comb on top of the medicine cabinet, and as I reached up to get it, caught sight of some new muscle definition in my arm, which made me smile. I flexed it a little, and it hit me: Teresa was big enough that even an average-sized man would have balked at attacking her without some kind of advantage. If the killer was a small man, or a woman, there was no way they would be able to just sink a knife into her without getting a hell of a fight in return. That’s why the roof. They’d gone up there to wait because they’d seen the two-by-four on their way in, and realized that they could whack Teresa as she came up out of the attic hatch, then stab her while she was down.

  I dressed and went back up front, where Hector was on the sofa, smoking and looking out the window.

  “Somebody small,” I said, “with a reason to kill her. Who fits that description?”

  He made an impatient gesture. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  I started to tell him that I was leaving the malquis out of it for the time being, but the brain had caught up. I dropped into the side chair. “Marie Hooks. She saw the malquis in Teresa’s basement on Wednesday night, so she knew that Richard was hiding them down there. She didn’t know why. She just thought that if she left the remaining one with Teresa’s body, it would implicate him in her death.”

  Hector boggled at me, then said, “OK, I’ll admit that when Teresa let her go, she was pissed, but Jesus, not pissed enough to kill her. Even if she was, leaving the malqui doesn’t make sense—she’d have to expect the cops to believe that Richard was, like, carrying it around in his pocket or something, and it just fell out by accident without him noticing. It’s absurd.”

  “Not to an alcoholi
c,” I said. “That’s how they think. Come on, you must have listened to plenty of drunks over the bar—you know what I’m talking about.” I felt Hector’s certainty starting to yield, and leaned forward. “Marie was here that night, late—I saw her. She was lit up and bitching about Teresa ruining her life. Connie couldn’t give her a ride, so maybe she hung around the square, saw Teresa coming across the roof to your place, and decided to come up here and give her a talking-to. Instead, she catches her date-raping you. Hell, I might have tried to kill her, too.”

  “That doesn’t track with what you just said about going up to the roof to wait,” Hector said.

  “She’d probably sobered up a little by then,” I mused. “It was at least an hour since the bar had closed. She saw her opportunity to get rid of both of them in one go—kill Teresa and frame Richard for it.”

  Hector smoked in silence for a while, thinking. Finally he said, “It answers a lot of questions, I’ll give you that, but even if you’re right, I’m still in the same fix. If the feds hear about the malquis—which they will, if anybody but me goes to trial—I’m cooked.”

  I moved over to the coffee table, where I could watch his face. “Look, tell me the truth,” I said. “I was married to the mob for eleven years. I can forgive a lot, and maybe I can help.”

  “If I could, I would,” Hector replied. “It’s just not safe.”

  “Why isn’t it safe?”

  He made a frustrated gesture with his head, pressing his lips together, and the guard went up in his dark eyes. He kept quiet. I was suddenly furious.

  “Last chance,” I said, keeping my voice low and even. “You can tell me voluntarily, or let me make a mess.”

  I watched him calculate his odds and pick the wrong horse. It was too bad, but at least I wouldn’t have to be careful anymore.

  IV

  I stopped downstairs to call Mike on the bar phone. “Have you been back out to Richard’s yet?”

  “This morning,” he said. “I doubt he’ll so much as mention Hector’s name for the rest of his life.”

  “Did you by any chance talk to Marie while you were out there?”

  “Marie? No. Why?”

  “She might be mixed up in Teresa’s death.”

  “Look, don’t fuck with this. Everything is settled.”

  “Did Richard give you somebody to take the fall?”

  “No,” Mike said, “we don’t need that. Richard will pull Maines off the case, Tova’s lawyers will take care of Hector, and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “Except he’ll go to jail.”

  “Not for long,” Mike said, “and as we’ve discussed at length, it’s the lesser of many evils.”

  I couldn’t agree, but Mike wasn’t the person I had to convince.

  V

  Richard’s huge house looked deserted, except for a large bald man standing to one side of the front door. He was wearing an athletic-cut blue sharkskin suit, and flexed impassively as I pulled into the porte cochere and got out.

  “Is the boss at home?”

  His laconic gaze moved over my face. “Who’s calling?”

  I told him, and he put out a long arm and rang the bell. Marie opened the door. When she saw me, her thin lips twisted with aversion.

  “She’s on the list,” the bodyguard rumbled at her.

  Marie didn’t like it, but she stepped back and let me in. I gave her a gander as I passed. She looked sober.

  Richard was sitting on one of the sofas in the enormous living room. His face was badly bruised, but the caked blood was gone, and both his eyes, blackened, were open now. As I came in, he picked up a checkbook from the side table. Marie made a derisive noise and headed for a swinging door in the wall behind him, but I stopped her with a question. “Did you ever decide where you were on Thursday night?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you,” she said, stopping behind the sofa.

  I looked at Richard. He made a placating gesture over his shoulder, and she huffed but stayed put. “You know where I was. You saw me.”

  “After that,” I said.

  “I went home.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember palming his keys?” I said, pointing my eyes at Richard.

  His head came around at her faster than I’d have said was possible with his injuries.

  Marie’s expression turned hateful. Her hands started to shake. “You’re crazy!” she said, crossing her arms. “I don’t know nothing about no keys.”

  “You run the household here. You know that Richard’s keeping some stuff in Teresa’s basement. You found out exactly what when you went over there on Wednesday night to look for a bottle you’d stashed down there.”

  Richard returned, painfully, to looking at me. It was hard to tell what his eyes were saying.

  Marie tugged at the hem of her apron and squared her narrow shoulders. “So what? It’s none of my business. He’s a doctor.”

  “So you knew right where to go, when you needed something to implicate him, after you killed Teresa.”

  She widened her eyes at me, then started to laugh. Richard glared over his shoulder and she shut up, but kept grinning.

  “Go do the patio,” he said. His words were slurry around some wiring in his mouth, and his voice sounded raspy.

  Marie gave him a scornful look and pushed out of the room.

  Richard opened the checkbook, clearing his throat. “Before we go any further, I’d like to express my gratitude for the actions that you and Mr. Hayes undertook on my behalf.”

  Marie appeared beyond the plate glass windows with a bucket and broom. I sat down on the sofa opposite Richard. “You can write me a check if it’ll make you feel better, but I won’t cash it.” He lifted the pen and raised his head. A glimmer of hostility passed across his ruined face. “You can’t buy her out of this,” I told him.

  His swollen, purple-ringed eyes flickered from side to side; then he raised and dropped his shoulders and replaced the checkbook on the side table. He cleared his throat again and said, “Perhaps you’d be so good as to specify why you think I can’t.”

  “Because there isn’t enough money on the planet.”

  Richard regarded me silently with a disparaging smirk. Then he said, “I realize that people like you enjoy fraternizing with your social inferiors in an attempt to appear egalitarian, but you fail to understand that not everyone shares that predilection.”

  The statement didn’t appear to be related to anything I’d just said, so I kept quiet. He seemed disappointed, but went on, “Azula is dying. Ten years ago, it was a pretty little town—quiet, law-abiding, a place people felt safe and enjoyed living in. Now, it’s overrun with immigrants, white trash, hippies—” He waved toward the ersatz Sherwood Forest outside as if it were to blame, which—ironically—it partially was. “Some years ago, I determined to put my considerable resources to work in an effort to reverse that trend.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said, leaning forward. “You’re a reformer.”

  I didn’t try to make the word sound anything but contemptuous, and his face reddened behind the bruises. “Naturally, you wouldn’t understand. You haven’t worked hard all your life to make a decent living for your family, only to see it all stripped away.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “I haven’t clung to the antiquated ideal of having two-point-five kids and a plastic house in the suburbs. Maybe you could explain how that makes me your ‘social inferior.’”

  Richard saw that he was getting into an unproductive area, and swerved back to his original point: “What I’m attempting to convey to you, Ms. Kalas, is that I occupy a respected position in this little town. You may find it difficult to make your accusations stick to someone associated with a person of my standing.” He smiled, exposing the metal in his mouth. “Especially without any concrete evidence.”

  I glanced out at the patio, where Marie’s alcohol-shriveled form was laboring. “How long do you think sh
e can hold out?”

  Richard didn’t answer me. I got up and left.

  VI

  I spent the drive home compiling a list of possible reasons for Richard to protect Marie. A love affair seemed out of the question, but I’ve seen stranger couples. Or maybe she knew something, from working for him, that Richard couldn’t afford to let get out.

  There was a tan county cruiser leaning off the driveway at Teresa’s when I drove in and parked. As I got out, the big deputy who’d brought me home the night Hector and I found Teresa’s body ambled over to meet me at the foot of the back steps. “Sheriff wants to see you,” he said.

  I wanted to pursue the Maria Hooks angle, but I know better than to argue with enforcers who can break me in half. I followed him to the car, wondering how much Maines knew about the whole mess.

  The sheriff was vertical and conscious when we got to the sty. He pointed his eyes at the side chair and said, “Have a seat.”

  I pulled it around and parked myself side-on to the desk, facing the office door. Maines had his notebook open in front of him, which he continued to look at for a couple of minutes in silence. Then he breathed deeply, closed it, and creaked back in his chair.

  “Did you find that Milestone file out there?”

  I kept my expression neutral. “Out where?”

  He lowered his chin and looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “I’m givin’ you self-defense on Floyd Garnier. Push me, I’ll make you prove it.”

  My stomach jumped, and I couldn’t help a mirthless grin. Richard hadn’t talked to him. I wondered if Mike knew.

  Maines continued to look at me without comment for another minute, then asked, “Did Torres say anything about Milestone at all?”

  “Who’s Torres?”

  The sheriff examined the ceiling, then returned his pale gaze to my face, saying, “You want to make life hard for me? You just go right ahead on and do it. I guaran-damn-tee you won’t like the results.”