Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  Maines’s eyes came up to my face.

  “That also means that she saw Richard holding that gun on me,” I went on, “and she didn’t report it. Now, maybe that’s not DNA or fingerprints, but it proves to me that she’s no law-abiding citizen.”

  Maines reached into his shirt pocket and got out his notebook. He flipped back through a couple of pages, looking grim.

  “Where did she say she was on Thursday night?” I asked him.

  He recited, “In and out at the hotel, then in bed, asleep.”

  “She told Mike earlier in the evening that she had something to do that night, and that she’d see him the next day.”

  “It’s not against the law to lie to your boyfriend.”

  I sat back in the pew to think.

  “That’s only half of what I wanted to talk to you about, anyway,” Maines added before I could get started again. He paused and looked toward the altar to make sure that we were alone.

  “Alex Méndez isn’t DEA,” he said when he came back around. “He’s CIA. They’re using the drug thing as cover for tracking some Bolivian from an old international case they been trying to close since the ’60s.”

  I swallowed the thrill that jumped up into my throat. “What case?”

  The sheriff gave an irritated shrug. “That’s all my guy would tell me. You know how the feds are.”

  Well, that was that. Talk about making a mess. I hadn’t known the half of it.

  “Do you think they’re involved in Teresa’s death?” I asked Maines.

  He laid his arm along the back of the pew. “I doubt it. They usually clean up after themselves pretty damned thoroughly. No body. No clues. No nothing.”

  I let the brain play with this for a second, then shoved it onto the back shelf and asked Maines, “Did you have forensics check Teresa’s office? That would at least tell you whether Tova’s ever been up there or not.”

  “No cause to check it, at the time.”

  I leaned forward again and gestured at the folder still lying on the pew in front of me. “You’ve got cause now.”

  “Judge wouldn’t give me a warrant to get that,” he said, waving at it. “He sure ain’t gonna give me one for what you’re talking about.”

  Frustration pushed me up out of my seat and down the aisle. After I’d done a couple of laps back and forth, I found myself thinking about Hector’s shirt and the mid-crime trip to Teresa’s for the second hand.

  “How about between Tova’s suite and the bar?” I said. “Did you check for a blood trail?”

  “It was raining,” Maines pointed out.

  “Not inside the hotel.”

  Maines went dour again, but before he could protest, I said, “You could check the public areas—the lobby and the corridors—without a warrant. If you find something, surely that opens a door the judge can’t shut.”

  Maines’s crystalline eyes focused on me thoughtfully. “You ever thought about going into law enforcement?”

  I frowned at him. “Don’t be insulting.”

  The big wood door at the back of the church creaked open and a stout elderly woman came in, dipping her hand in the bowl of holy water and crossing herself. Maines stood and touched the brim of his hat as she passed us.

  “Listen,” I said, stopping him outside before he got into his car, “if Tova confesses, does she have to tell you all the details?”

  He paused with one foot inside the car. “Why?”

  “Just curious.”

  I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he played ball. “I’d certainly expect it. The law will go easier on her.”

  He waited for my answer, his eyes blank in the dark behind his spectacles.

  “You’d better make tracks,” I said.

  II

  The courthouse clock showed two fifteen when I got back to the square. It hadn’t felt that long. The lights were off in the bar, and the front door was locked. I let myself in and went upstairs. Hector wasn’t there.

  It was just as well. I didn’t think I had the mental energy left to cope with telling him about Tova. I scribbled a note apologizing for my extended dinner break and saying I’d call him in the morning.

  III

  The phone rang around ten. I was still in bed, but I answered it.

  “Got some things to discuss with you,” Silvia said.

  “Your friend Olmos, I hope.”

  She made a spluttering, shushing noise. “Cállate, you idiot!”

  “Hey, you’re the one who wanted to talk.”

  “Just get over here. Damn.” The line went dead.

  This was going to be interesting. If Silvia and Alex knew that Hector was their Bolivian, they wouldn’t be bothering me. I doubted that I could hold the dam alone for long, though. With Teresa’s case coming to a head, his true origins were eventually going to get out.

  I had a leisurely breakfast and bath before I obeyed the summons, not wanting anybody to get into the habit of ordering me around before noon. When I pulled up at the botanica, Silvia was sitting out on the porch in her rusty chair, as before. The big yellow dog greeted me with the same tongue-flapping enthusiasm.

  “The sheriff searched the hotel this morning,” Silvia said as I stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

  “Yeah?” I said, peering through the screen into the house. “Where’s your keeper?”

  “He’s been reassigned.”

  I stepped up onto the porch and parked myself in the other chair. The dog clacked over and dropped onto the board floor in front of the screen door with a satisfied snuffle.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “First things first,” Silvia replied. “What’s Maines after?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Come on,” she growled.

  I gave her as little as possible. “Tova Bradshaw.”

  She formed a silent whistle and looked out across the street, toward a vinyl-clad double-wide bleaching slowly in the heat.

  “That’d be just about perfect,” she murmured. “He’ll never work in the county again, if he locks her up. Is it gonna stick?”

  I shrugged.

  She had something folded into the lap of her dress, some herb or other, which she was tearing away from its dry stems. Her hands continued this work as she asked, “Anything you can do to make sure it does?”

  “Oh, probably,” I said.

  She looked over at me.

  “Is it the feds or the Kings that don’t want him to get the police chief’s job?” I asked her.

  “Same thing,” she said. “What’s good for them is good for us, and vice versa.” She didn’t say anything else, so I prompted, “What about Olmos?”

  She came forward in the chair, resting her elbows on the arms and peering hard at me with those little black eyes. “I’ve known Nick for almost twenty years, since before he joined the service. He hooked me up down here. It’s part of his job to make recommendations to the feds for people he thinks will be useful in certain situations.”

  The back of my neck twitched. “You’re saying he ‘recommended’ me for this?”

  “The Brotherhood connection was just too good to pass up,” she said. “Mama needed somebody fast to replace Alex, and they figured Torres would eat you up with a spoon.”

  Something about that made the radar jumpy. I gave it a minute, but it was back a ways and I couldn’t get to it, so I stuck to the subject at hand. “Did they tell Teresa to get me the job at the bar?”

  Silvia gave me a sharp look. “You had to work somewhere.”

  I paused to consider whether getting confirmation on Olmos’s identity was worth pushing her. I decided it wasn’t.

  “All right,” I said. “So what’d you get me over here for?”

  “That hand y’all found behind the bar,” she said, keeping her eyes on the herbs in her lap. “What’d it look like?”

  Making myself sound puzzled, I said, “Why?”

  Silvia’s shrug was fairly convincing. “Mig
ht be somebody trying to move onto Torres’s turf. Was it a man’s hand?”

  “Search me. Teresa was going to send it off to the lab, but who knows if she got around to it before she was killed?”

  Silvia got up, shoveling the mound of plant matter in her lap into a ceramic bowl on the small table next to her. She dusted off the front of her dress and said, “Find out.”

  I smiled, managing to make it look perplexed rather than triumphant. “Surely you guys can do that without my help.”

  She gave me an annoyed look. “Just do it, all right?”

  “You and Olmos are working off the books, aren’t you?” I said. “Otherwise, you’d be able to find all this out through official channels. How’d you get Alex out of the way?”

  “Listen,” Silvia barked, “I can put you in the graveyard just like that. So do what I tell you.”

  That’s the kind of thing that makes me stubborn on principle—but in this case, pretending to obey would get me closer to what I wanted.

  “You’re the boss,” I said, getting up.

  IV

  I found Hector half horizontal in front of his TV, in a pair of cut-offs and an elderly T-shirt. The GPS unit was still cinched around his ankle. I went over and sat down in the side chair. Hector clicked off the TV.

  “So where’d you get off to last night?”

  “Maines wanted to talk to me,” I said, feeling suddenly nervous.

  Hector’s face went quizzical. “Kind of late, wasn’t it?”

  “Tova is Milestone’s sole investor,” I said, ripping the Band-Aid off as fast as I could. “She was funding Richard and Jesse’s whole scam.”

  Hector went still, looking at me with motionless eyes for almost a full minute. Then he asked quietly, “What are you saying?”

  “Teresa found out about it somehow,” I said. “She got a copy of the incorporation documents from the county clerk’s office a couple of days before she was killed.”

  Hector’s eyes started going vague. I didn’t want him fading out on me, so I reached over and took one of his hands. He yanked away from me, jumping off the sofa, and went to the window. His breathing rasped noisily against the glass, then he turned to me with an agonized face and said, “Money? That’s what she died for?”

  No.

  I almost turned to see who had spoken before I realized that I was only hearing the word in my head. Perplexed, I waited, and the voice came again:

  She saw them.

  I closed my eyes, shutting everything but the brain out. Saw who? Saw what?

  She saw them both.

  I opened my eyes. Hector was leaning on the windowsill, watching me.

  “Marie Hooks took Richard’s car over to Teresa’s on Wednesday night, to retrieve some booze she’d stashed in the basement when she used to work for them,” I said, following the brain as it groped along, then reminded me of Tova’s urgent visitor at the hotel during my visit to buy the truck. “Marie saw the malquis, and it freaked her out. She went to Tova the next day, for legal advice about what she should do.”

  Hector crossed his arms, his eyes folding down and away from me. It didn’t matter. At this point, I was just telling the story out loud to hear how it sounded.

  “When Tova stopped into the bar that night, she went over to talk to Richard and Jesse, and Richard must have said something that made her realize Marie might not just be babbling. She palmed his keys so that she could go over to Teresa’s and have a look in the basement for herself.”

  Hector had grown more attentive now, and he came back over to the sofa, reaching for his cigarettes. I kept talking.

  “Before she was able to get over there, we found the hand behind the bar. So she came back here to ask you about it, and walked in on Teresa assaulting you.”

  Hector’s lighter flame froze. He reached up and took the cigarette out of his mouth, snapping the lighter closed.

  “It was a perfect storm,” I said, watching it take shape in my head. “She thought that leaving the hand with Teresa’s body would incriminate Richard and put you in the clear. She had no idea the hands had anything to do with you.”

  Hector came around the coffee table and sat down on the sofa with a grunt. “I might buy Marie Hooks overlooking the logic we talked about before, but not Tova,” he said. “She’s, like, the female reincarnation of Machiavelli.”

  “She didn’t care whether the cops believed Richard had done it or not,” I said. “All she wanted to do was make sure they knew it wasn’t you. She had no idea that leaving that hand with Teresa’s body would have the exact opposite effect.”

  Hector sat looking at his unlit cigarette, pushing his chin out. I gave him a minute, then said, “So. Why does the CIA want you?”

  He flinched forward on the sofa, his eyes going black.

  “Escobar is working with them, and they’re looking for you,” I said. “You in particular. And they’ve been doing it for years. Why?”

  Hector had gone so motionless that I paused to make sure he was breathing before going back to work on him. “Is it because you can identify him as one of the guys who killed your family?”

  My question dropped into an opaque silence that stretched into minutes. Finally, Hector leaned forward, put his cigarette back in the flat yellow box, and got up.

  V

  I followed him down through the bar and out onto the square, where he made for the hotel. When we got to Tova’s suite, she and Maines were standing in the hall outside with another man, short and round in a dark brown suit. Suit extended a hand toward Hector as we approached, and Hector shook it, saying warily, “What’s going on?”

  The skinny forensics kid came to the door of the suite with an impossibly small pair of ladies’ athletic shoes. He held the soles toward Maines and said, “These are positive for blood.”

  Maines did his chin-drop nod and murmured, “Bag ’em up.”

  “I want those processed in San Antonio,” Suit said. He was maybe thirty, with a peaches-and-cream complexion below a head of earnest dark curls.

  “OK with me,” Maines said. “They’re usually faster than Houston anyway.”

  Tova hadn’t reacted to our appearance or the kid’s comment. She stood observing with her arms crossed, a little distance apart, one white finger tapping a rhythm against her elbow.

  “The whole thing’s ludicrous,” Suit said. He turned his bright brown eyes on Maines. “Naturally, we’ll cooperate with the investigation, but it’s clear that someone screwed up pretty royally somewhere.”

  Hector was watching Tova, who now smiled her closed-lipped smile and told him quietly, “I knew what they were up to.”

  “Tova,” Suit warned, but she ignored him.

  “I had complete right of refusal for all buyers,” she went on, looking at Hector. “I wasn’t going to let them sell us out. If I hadn’t invested, someone less scrupulous would have.”

  Hector’s eyes wandered uncertainly through the suite door at the kid, who was logging the bagged shoes on a clipboard.

  “The killer could have tracked blood into the street,” Suit said as if addressing a jury. “Anyone might have stepped in it.”

  I heard a woman’s voice call to the kid from the inside of the suite, and he got up and disappeared from view.

  Suit kept on at Maines, “You can’t make an arrest on this—it’s completely circumstantial.”

  Maines’s eyes moved behind his glasses. Nothing else did.

  “Got positive for blood here as well, Sheriff,” the kid said, coming back into the doorway with a dark blue man’s button-up shirt. “It’s been washed, but there’s still reactive proteins.”

  I recognized it as part of what Hector had been wearing on Thursday night. He put one hand on the papered corridor wall, steadying himself, and looked over at Tova.

  Her face had frozen. She stood staring at the shirt for a long minute, then said in a firm, cool voice, “I have no idea how that got there.”

  “You put it on after you killed the
chief,” Maines drawled. “To cover up the bloodstains on your own clothes. In case somebody saw you coming back over here.”

  Suit went wild. “You can’t prove any of this! It’s all conjecture!”

  Maines continued gazing at Tova. “If you’ll come voluntarily, I won’t cuff you.”

  She fixed her chilled blue eyes on his pale face, then dropped her arms called into the suite, “May I have my purse, please?”

  The kid handed it out, and Hector said quickly, “I’m coming with you.”

  Maines did his one-stroke nod, and Tova strode off down the hall with the three men trailing behind her.

  VI

  On my way back to the truck, I reflected that Hector’s mission was probably to somehow keep Tova quiet about the malquis. If the CIA was really after him, I understood why, but the whole thing felt oddly off balance. Hector seemed to care about those relics more than he cared about his own life. Why not just bury the damned things out in a field somewhere far away? Why keep them so close if they were so dangerous? Was it just a cultural thing I’d never understand, or something else?

  It was working my attention so hard I nearly ran over Neffa, coming down the sidewalk from the direction of the bar.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “I just seen Tova Bradshaw heading to the courthouse with the sheriff and her lawyer. Was that Hector with them?”

  I nodded and noticed that she was holding a book, which she fidgeted nervously with.

  “He ain’t in trouble, is he?” she asked, her squint tighter than ever.

  “No,” I said. Not any more than he had been before, anyway.

  She saw me looking at the book in her hand and made an awkward teenage gesture with it. “I been meaning to give this back to him.”

  “I can take it, if you like,” I said. “I’m going back up to the apartment to pick up my stuff.”

  She seemed puzzled by this, but handed the book over. I noticed the title as I took it: Metaphor and Ritual in Pre-Columbian Culture.

  “We were doing the conquistadors in history class,” she explained. “I was talking about it to Hector one day, and he give me that. It’s pretty interesting.”