Nine Days: A Mystery Page 22

  “I don’t like the results now. How much worse does it get?”

  “That file has got to be somewhere,” Maines said, pinning the blotter to the desk with a rigid index finger. “It’s none of the places it should be. If you don’t have it, and those west-side yahoos don’t have it, and Richard doesn’t have it, where is it?”

  I noticed that he wasn’t pausing endlessly between questions and answers anymore. His face, too, had grown more animated, showing actual expression for the first time since I’d met him. It was making the back of my stomach itch.

  “Why do you care?” I asked, genuinely curious. “You’ve got your case against Hector all sewn up. You’ve done your job. Take a day off.”

  “Physical objects don’t just disappear,” Maines said. “Somebody’s trying to hide that thing. There’s got to be a reason.”

  “You can have your very own copy, you know,” I told him. “All you need is a warrant.”

  Maines’s eyes fluttered away from me. “Judge won’t give me one.”

  I was surprised to hear him admit it, until I remembered his earlier bouts of loose lips. I felt my attention swerve away and congeal around the memory, making my stomach hurt in a completely new way. “Richard can’t make that happen for you?”

  Maines twitched in the creaky chair like something had bit him. “You think I’d be stuck covering seven hundred square miles of territory with just myself and a couple of deputies if I had that kind of pull?”

  Baffled, I said, “So why have you been trying so hard to shove me under the bus all this time?”

  “I been making lemonade,” he drawled, one of the level corners of his mouth lifting a hairsbreadth.

  When I realized what he was saying, I had to get up out of the chair and put enough distance between us that I wouldn’t reach across the desk and punch him in the face. Once the urge had faded, I turned back and said, “If you tell me that you’re in on this thing with Alex and Silvia, I swear to God I will go postal on your ass.”

  His fractional smile evaporated. “What thing?”

  “Alex is a federal agent of some kind—DEA, if I had to guess—and Silvia’s his local. They’re working the drug route up through here from Mexico, and are trying to rope me into working with them. Not very nicely, I might add.”

  I left Olmos/Escobar out of it for now. Maybe if I made Maines mad enough, he’d run the whole bunch off before they could finish whatever they’d started.

  The sheriff absorbed what I’d said with his usual impassivity, gazing through me for a few long minutes before sitting up and grabbing his pencil. He made a couple of notes, then said, “The chief know about this?”

  I shrugged. He lifted one of his long hands to his forehead and drew it across. After a while he muttered, “Lots of gopher holes to step in there, all right.”

  He sighed and took off his hat, revealing a thicket of strawberry curls so at odds with his personality that I almost laughed. He leaned forward and watched his hand drop the hat on the blotter, saying, “You know that thing about most homicides being solved within the first forty-eight hours? It’s because the obvious person usually turns out to be your killer. If not, you go on to the next obvious candidate. And so on. Until you find your guy. It rarely takes more than a couple of days. Because most murders aren’t planned, and the ones that are planned—well.” He turned over one hand. “How much practice does the average person get?”

  He looked almost human without the hat. I couldn’t tell if that’s what was tweaking my radar or not, so I just asked, “What’s your point?”

  Maines looked up. Light fell through his glasses into his eyes, showing them sharp and transparent in his colorless face. “I think the complexity of this crime is a kind of evidence. Your garden-variety criminal—somebody like Torres—he doesn’t want to fool with logistics like limited-access rooftops and drugging his victims. He just wants to get in, get the job done, and get out.”

  “Nobody drugged her,” I said. “She drugged herself.”

  Maines’s sandy eyebrows appeared above his glasses. “Say again?”

  “She’s the one who put the roofies in that bottle of wine,” I said. The sheriff made a skeptical noise, but I kept talking. “She made up the whole affair with Hector to piss Richard off. Hector went along for the fun of it, but then Teresa decided that she wanted the real thing. Hector turned her down, so she took matters into her own hands.”

  Maines was still looking doubtful, but he was paying attention without interrupting me now.

  “Part of their fake affair thing was that Teresa would sneak over to Hector’s across the roof from the café building from time to time—probably making sure that somebody on the square saw her, so that they’d gossip about it later. On Thursday night, she used that route to get into Hector’s apartment, cajole him into sharing a bottle of wine she’d doped, and then have her way with him while he was passed out. That’s why you found his semen in her body.”

  Maines’s expression went horrified, then his face split open and emitted a long staccato laugh, revealing a set of big, round-edged teeth. He looked like a gawky high school kid who’d just gotten the punch line of a dirty joke. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I think I’ve ever heard.”

  “What’s so ridiculous about it?”

  He gazed around the room, his merriment subsiding. “I wouldn’t know where to start. If you knew her at all, you’d laugh, too. It’s just not something she’d do.”

  My eyes jumped to his bare left hand, and he leaned forward to put his hat back on. “I know sex can be a powerful motivator. But you might as well tell me she was from another planet. That gal was straight. To the bone.”

  “I was, too,” I said, “until life made me different.”

  That bought me a disgusted look. “After what it cost you, you can joke about that?”

  I was getting tired of matching wits with the poorly armed. “Look, you tell me how that stuff got into her.”

  “Guerra doped the bottle.” He shrugged. “Raped her. Then took her up to the roof and killed her.”

  “Again—,” I began wearily, but Maines cut me off.

  “I don’t explain things,” he said. “My job is to deliver the most plausible suspect to the legal system. That’s what I’ve done. You want to get creative with the whys, talk to the lawyers.”

  The strawberry-curled kid companionably complaining about his job had disappeared. We were back to Mr. Hard-ass.

  “You’re such a fucking fraud,” I said, getting up to leave. I heard the chair creak and turned back to make sure he wasn’t coming after me. “You wish you didn’t care, but you’re just as hooked on getting to the bottom of this thing as I am. Why else are you chasing this Milestone file around?”

  The sheriff was sitting forward against the desk, watching me narrowly with his ropy forearms lying on the blotter. He didn’t answer my question.

  VII

  Coming around the courthouse, I saw Tova going into the hotel. I wasn’t exactly eager to answer her summons, but it was something to be gotten out of the way, so I steeled myself and followed her. She’d already gone up to her suite when I came into the lobby, so I rode the elevator up and knocked.

  She answered the door with a sheaf of papers in one hand and stepped back, beckoning me in. “I put in roughly four hours getting everything together for the closing on the Ranch,” she said, sitting down on one of the velour sofas. “Since you neglected to give Connie any earnest money against the possibility of your backing out of the deal, I’m forced to ask that you compensate me for that time.”

  “Forced, huh?” I went around the sofa facing her, getting out my checkbook. As I did so, my eyes flicked over at the big arched window, which perfectly framed the second floor of the café building. The western sun was blazing against the side street wall, turning the window glass solid gold; at night, with no curtains to interrupt her view into the lighted interior, Tova had a front-row seat to any doings on the second floor.


  I brought my eyes back around into the suite, measuring the angles. The main room was about twenty feet long; the bathroom and closet would add another ten. This was probably the only room in the hotel that could see what it did.

  “Something wrong?” she asked, noticing that I hadn’t sat down.

  I finished my circuit around the sofa and joined her. “Just admiring your view.”

  She jumped up and went to the kitchenette, getting a can of soda out of the small refrigerator. She popped the top with nervous fingers, pouring about half out into a juice glass and adding some ice. I had the feeling she wished it were something stronger.

  “Five hundred should cover it,” she said, leaning against the edge of the counter. Her voice was cool, but I could smell fear coming off her.

  “You saw Teresa going up to the roof on Thursday night, didn’t you?”

  “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind getting the hell out of my apartment,” she snapped, going over to the door and yanking it open.

  I put my checkbook back in my wallet and got up. As I passed her, I saw a droplet of sweat streak down her left temple.

  I stood in the corridor for a few minutes after the door had finished slamming, then walked down and rang for the elevator. I rode to the lobby and went to the front desk, where Kathleen was slouched, tapping on her laptop.

  “Were you working on Thursday night?” I asked her.

  She gave me an uncertain look. “The night Chief Hallstedt was killed, you mean? Yeah.”

  “What time do you get off?”

  “I don’t. I mean, I do an eight-to-eight shift, eight at night to eight in the morning.”

  “Did you see anybody leave here around three a.m.?”

  Her eyebrows shot toward the ceiling. “Like who?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to lead the witness, and she said, “Not that I can remember. I bunked down for a nap around two—slept for about an hour—but the elevator will usually wake me up if somebody comes down.” She gestured toward the hall next to the desk. “Sometimes people use the fire stairs. It’s not the fastest elevator in the world.”

  I glanced down the hall, remembering the steel exit door out into the alley. The fire-stair door would have the same kind of hardware, a metal push bar that retracts flush bolts at the top and bottom of the door leaf. Noisy.

  “You didn’t hear anybody going out that way?” I asked Kathleen.

  She screwed up her face, thinking, then shook her head. “Honestly, I can’t remember. This week has been kind of a nightmare.”

  Fucking Maines. If he hadn’t been so quick to decide that Hector was his killer, he’d have been out questioning people when their memories were fresh.

  As I turned to go, the brain burped an idea at me, and I pointed at the old phone booth. “Does that thing work?”

  “Sure,” she said, sounding relieved at the apparently innocuous question. “Dial nine for an outside line.”

  I shut the booth’s folding door and dialed my own number, keeping the receiver to my ear until a hotel customer came in. When Kathleen got up to meet him at the desk, I stepped quietly out of the phone box and ducked down the corridor.

  The door to Tova’s office was unlocked.

  It was past sundown, and the fading light coming through the French doors wasn’t doing much for my eyesight, but I didn’t want to turn the lights on, lest a sliver of light give me away. I went over to the desk and flipped quickly through the stack of papers and folders sitting on its corner, without finding anything interesting. Then I tried the filing cabinet. Still nothing.

  I started to move away, then turned back and pulled it open again, parting the hanging files to look below them. Sure enough, at the very back of the bottom drawer, the face of a manila folder gleamed up at me. I pushed the hanging files farther apart and saw MILESTONE PROPERTIES handwritten in green ink on the tab.

  I couldn’t suppress a grin. As I reached in to take it out, though, I hesitated. If I took it with me, I’d never be able to prove that it had been here, but if I left it, Tova might try to get rid of it. Especially after what I’d just said upstairs.

  As I crouched there, trying to decide, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor. I grabbed the folder, jumped toward the French doors, and slid out, plastering myself up against the exterior wall. The office door opened, throwing a rectangle of light onto the pale carpet. I heard a faint fumbling at the French doors. A pair of small white hands was closing the flush bolts. I was locked out.

  I heard the filing cabinet open, and did a quick, desperate survey of the courtyard. There was an exit-only gate on the alley side, and I was standing on a rubber welcome mat. I lifted one corner and slid the folder underneath, then sidled silently to the gate and out.

  VIII

  Hector was behind the bar with a book, as usual, when I came in.

  “I need to make a quick phone call,” I told him, barely slowing down. “OK if I do it from the office?”

  He didn’t say no, so I kept walking.

  “I found that Milestone folder in Tova’s office,” I told Maines when he answered. “I stuck it under the mat in the courtyard. Public domain. If you get over to the hotel right now, you might find it before she does.”

  “Where are you?” Maines asked.

  I told him I was at the bar. He hung up without saying anything else.

  Hector was leaning on the serving top when I went back up front, talking to an older guy whom I recognized as Mel’s drinking buddy from Thursday night.

  “What are you doing here?” Hector asked as I came through the flip-top.

  “Reporting for work,” I said, nodding hello to the older man.

  Hector stared at me for a few long seconds, then said, “Herb, this is Julia Kalas, my new bartender.”

  “Kalas?” Herb’s opalescent blue eyes brightened. “Mistä olet kotoisin?”

  “Um,” I replied.

  “Ah, nobody teaches their kids anymore,” he complained. “I knew some Kalases back home in Kainuu. Maybe you’re related?”

  “I might be,” I said, then, knowing I shouldn’t: “Any of your Kalases named Timo?”

  Herb thought about it, his eyes wrinkling. “Maybe. I’d have to ask my nieces.”

  Hector said deftly to me, “It’s pretty slow. You could take the night off, if you want.”

  A pair of shadowed figures were crossing the square from the courthouse, moving toward the hotel. One of them wore a cowboy hat and had a high stoop.

  “Trying to get out of paying me?” I said to Hector.

  He shook his head, giving up, and lifted his chin at Herb’s glass. “You want a refill?”

  Herb pushed the glass forward with one finger. Hector took it down the bar and dumped it in one of the bus trays, setting up a fresh glass for the new round.

  “What part of Finland?” Herb asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I lied, sorry I’d brought it up now. “He and my mom met in the States, back in the ’60s.”

  He gave me a shrewd look. “She wasn’t Finnish.” His faded blue eyes were merry, like he was doing a magic trick. “If I hadda guess, I’d say”—he scrutinized me—“Mexican.”

  I relaxed at the incorrect guess and went back to watching the square. “Not bad. What gave me away?”

  “That cultural anthropology degree still comes in handy sometimes,” Herb chuckled, hooking his thumbs under his overall straps.

  I kept him going, asking pointless questions and giving inaccurate answers, while I did a fair imitation of being at work and kept my eyes peeled for Maines or his wingman. By eleven thirty, I was about ready to jump out of my skin, and nearly did it when the bar phone rang. The place was almost empty, and Hector had gone back to the office for something, so I grabbed it.

  It was Maines. “Meet me at the church in fifteen minutes,” he said, and hung up without waiting for me to answer.

  I buzzed the office and told Hector I was going out for a break, then hit the sidewalk.

  I
X

  I found Maines sitting in the second pew from the back, gazing meditatively toward the altar.

  “You’re supposed to take that off in here,” I said, glaring at his tan-hatted head.

  He turned and laid his arm along the pew back, lifting that mouth-corner of his. The hat stayed where it was. As I sidled into the pew behind, I spotted a manila folder lying on the seat next to him. He picked it up, opened it, and handed it to me. The page I was looking at listed Milestone’s investors, and there was only one name.

  Tova Bradshaw.

  THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8

  I

  I stared at the page for a minute, then sat down.

  “She was underwriting the whole damned operation,” Maines said.

  I closed the folder and handed it back to him. “I didn’t see anybody leaving the hotel in handcuffs.”

  The sheriff tossed the folder back onto the pew seat. “I can’t make an arrest on this. It’s her money. She can spend it any legal way she damned pleases.”

  “If Jesse and Richard are colluding on this development thing, it’s not legal.”

  “She could easily say she doesn’t know anything about that. Assuming I ever find anything to prove it.”

  I tried again. “Why was she trying to hide that file, if she didn’t want people finding out?”

  “Tova Bradshaw cares about her reputation more than any human being ever should,” he said. “If she were seen to be making money off the backs of her neighbors, she’d never live it down.”

  “That gives her motive,” I insisted.

  “Not if anybody with a warrant could get a copy of this,” Maines said, gesturing at the file.

  “Anybody can’t,” I reminded him. “She must have called in some of the favors she inherited from her father to make it difficult.”

  Maines made a face at the folder, not answering.

  “Tova’s got a direct view into the second floor of the café building from her suite at the hotel,” I said, leaning forward to rest my arms on the back of his pew. “That file was in the desk when Richard dragged me out of there on Saturday night, and it was nowhere to be found when I got back to town a couple of hours later. She went up there and got it after we left.”