Nine Days: A Mystery Page 4

  “Is he a licensed mechanic?”

  One corner of her coral mouth slipped upward. “No, but ask anyone in town what Hector Guerra knows about the internal combustion engine, and you’ll get the same answer.”

  I twitched at the name, and she paused, giving me a quizzical look.

  “I just took a job over at the bar,” I said, unable to stop the doubtful once-over I was giving her. If this peaches-and-cream ice princess was related to the swarthy hunk who’d interviewed me, something had gone very wrong in the gene pool.

  Her smile spread to the other corner. “Dad adopted Hector when I was three and Connie when I was nine.”

  There was a note of pride in her voice, and for a second I wondered if I’d been too quick to mark her down in the “entitled rich girl” column.

  “My father was a softhearted man,” she said. “After my mother died, he went a bit insane and started bringing home the children he found on the streets while working cases south of the border.” The prideful note turned sardonic. “Fortunately, he passed away before it got out of hand.”

  It was only almost funny; I could feel some real resentment behind it. Tova seemed to notice, and changed the subject, going on the offensive again. “I’m happy to sell the truck to you if you can meet my price, but I must warn you that Hector may not be entirely happy about you purchasing it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s been angling to buy it himself, but he can’t afford to pay what I’m asking.”

  I started to join in on the joke, then realized that she was serious. I hesitated, wondering if I were unwittingly getting involved in some sort of family feud.

  She snugged herself up against the edge of the desk, folding her delicate hands over the folder. “Would you want to finance, or pay the full amount in cash?”

  “Maybe you’d better let me look at those records before we start talking money,” I said, keeping my face neutral.

  She leaned back in her oversize Naugahyde chair, sliding the folder toward me. “Of course.”

  Her white phone buzzed as I flipped the folder open. She picked up the receiver and said, “What is it, Kathleen?” She listened, then made a face. “It can’t be so dire that a few minutes will make any difference. Ask her to wait, please.” I’d seen enough to know that the truck was worth what she was asking. “OK if I write you a personal check?”

  She pursed her lips, studying me briefly, then said, “I wouldn’t normally, but Hector’s instincts about people are preternaturally accurate. He wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t trustworthy.”

  I ducked my head so she wouldn’t see me trying not to laugh. When I came back up with my checkbook, composed, she was watching me. She might trust her brother’s instincts, but she didn’t trust her own.

  IX

  The feds hadn’t let me drive myself anywhere during the trial, and having wheels again took me back to the old life. Day trips to the national forest, cruising Baker Street on Friday nights, aimless runs to the coast when Joe was busy with clients and wanted me out of the house. A low wave of sick agony roiled in my gut as I remembered. I took a slow breath, refusing to sink down into thinking about the past. He was gone. There was nothing I could do about it.

  Silvia Molina crawled back up into my head as I turned the corner at the church. It occurred to me that she could have been on her way home from somewhere on the other side of the Amazon’s place, and had just pulled over to pluck her eyebrows or something. That didn’t explain her stop at the graveyard to look me over, but half an explanation was better than none.

  I drove past my driveway turnoff and kept going. After a couple of miles, the road sloped into a grove of trees, and the air began to smell of standing water. It was cooler down here, but the houses, half hidden in clumps of overgrown understory and sedentary farm equipment, were little more than dilapidated shacks anchoring worthless strips of floodplain. Rusted wire fences woven with spindly weeds ran around some of them, enclosing ragged-looking livestock.

  None of it qualified as an obvious destination, but I knew that curanderas often paid house calls. Silvia might have been visiting a patient. Short of stopping to knock on doors, though, I had no way to find out for sure. Frustrated by not being able to put the issue definitively to bed, I looped back through the neighborhood to head home.

  As I came to a four-way stop, one of three boys staked out on the corner raised a hand and stepped onto the asphalt. His face went deadpan when I pulled up. “Where you get this ride, lady?” he demanded with that soft, slightly belligerent cadence typical of the gangsta class.

  He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and he was small for his age, dressed in a red tank top and a too-big black gimme cap set high and angled on his head to ensure that it was understood as a fashion statement. There was a red crown tattoo on the swell of his left shoulder, just like the one I’d spotted on Alex Méndez.

  “Expecting Tova?” I said.

  He pointed his brown chin at me. “You know her?”

  “Sure,” I said, stringing him along. “How am I gonna be driving her truck if I don’t know her?”

  “Maybe you boosted it.”

  The two other boys had crowded in behind him where he’d stopped on the other side of the road. They stood listening, watching me with guarded eyes and pulling at their low-hanging pants. They were ten or eleven years old, tops; flying colors but without visible art.

  “Maybe I did,” I admitted. “If I’m stupid enough to clip a ringer like this, I’m probably stupid enough to drive it around town.”

  The point man lifted his chin higher, sucking his cheeks in. He reminded me a little of my cousin Joachim, who’d worked as a lookout for La Eme, one of the gangs trying to tear Bakersfield in half the year I hit town. I’d been fascinated and calmed by the simple, predictable rules of gang life—loyalty, revenge, and profit—the uncomplicated hierarchy, the clear link between action and consequence. Unfortunately, no matter how dark I dyed my hair or how much eyeliner I wore, nobody ever bought me as a cholita. I’d had to be satisfied on the fringes. Not that I’m complaining. Sometimes Edge City is a better learning experience than living downtown.

  The baby Gs lost interest and turned to saunter back toward their shop. I pulled away, savoring the knowledge that the prim and proper Tova Bradshaw was a known quantity to the other end of the stick. I wondered what she was into. She was no crackhead or junkie. Weed or downers, probably. That would take the edge off the prim and proper when it got too sharp.

  Back in town, I hooked a right at the courthouse, turning east. This took me through another neighborhood, more prosperous than the one I’d just visited but still pretty damned rustic. At a stop sign, my eye caught on a hand-painted wooden sign hanging from a mailbox a few houses down from the intersection: BOTÁNICA MOLINA.

  I idled there, not completely sure why I wanted to drive down and go in. It reminded me of that weird fear you sometimes get up on something high, that you’ll throw yourself off just to see what it feels like. The French have a word for the feeling, but I couldn’t remember it.

  Rationalizing that the chances of a geriatric Latina being connected to the Aryan Brotherhood were minimal, I made the turn and pulled up in front of the botanica. It was a small blue house with a pyramid-shaped metal roof and a corner porch. The painted white fence enclosed a minuscule patch of yard that had been manicured to within an inch of its life. A big yellow dog loped toward me as I approached the gate.

  “He won’ hurt you,” I heard from the direction of the porch. I had to squint to see Silvia creaking up out of a rusty metal chair. The sunlight was so bright that it made the shade of the porch practically black in comparison.

  “Come in, please,” she said in her low, cordial voice.

  The dog followed me up the narrow walk with his nose at my heels. Silvia pulled open the screen door and held it for me.

  The front room was about the size of a king-size bed, with a small wood table in the center.
The walls on either side were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves crowded with votive candles, bottles, tins, and pasteboard boxes of all sizes, shapes, and colors, many with handwritten labels attached. It was dim and cool inside, with a faint smell of burnt matches. Through an arched opening in the back wall I could see a television and a chintz sofa in a larger room.

  Silvia sat down at the table, drawing a deck of oversize cards toward her. She indicated the chair opposite, and I took it.

  “¿Hablas español?” she asked, turning up one of the cards and laying it in the center of the table.

  I nodded, and she laid out another card. I watched her, keeping quiet, until she’d constructed a large cross pattern with a vertical row of four cards running up the right side. She studied this arrangement, then flashed her bright little eyes at me and asked, in Spanish, “Do you have trouble sleeping?”

  “Oh, you’re going to warm me up first?” I said. “OK, yeah. Yeah, I’ve got terrible insomnia. I haven’t slept in weeks.”

  She blew her breath out through her nose and shoved the cards back into a pile, looking disgusted. “There is a vibration around you,” she tried next, lifting her hands, palms outward, toward me. She’d switched to English now. “Something dark. A sense of danger and loss.”

  “You’re not very good at this,” I told her.

  “Then what are you doing here?” she asked quickly.

  “Trying to find out why you’ve been following me around town.”

  I saw her consider denying it, then discard the idea in favor of something else. She got up, crooking a finger at me, and shuffled through the archway toward the back of the house. I wasn’t getting anything scary off her, so I followed.

  She was waiting for me in her dated but spotless kitchen, where she opened an unpainted board door and stepped down into a small chamber with a dirt floor. It was constructed of concrete block, with one high window and an old iron laundry sink. In the middle of the room, a body lay on a long table, covered with a white sheet.

  Silvia went to the table and folded the sheet down, revealing the head and shoulders of an elderly Hispanic woman. The corpse was dressed in a freshly pressed high-necked blouse, her dead face skillfully painted with makeup.

  “She looks good, don’ she?” Silvia asked me, pride in her voice.

  “Was she a friend of yours?”

  “Anybody who can’t afford to get buried right is a friend of mine,” she said with a small, virtuous smile.

  “OK,” I said slowly, rotating my hand at her.

  She passed a hand over the body. “My work takes me places ordinary people don’ go, hearing things ordinary people don’ hear.”

  Her peering black eyes checked my reaction, and I felt a little tickle around the bottom of my esophagus. I considered several responses, but didn’t like any of them. Better to take the path of least resistance and just wait the story out of her.

  That bought us five minutes of silent staring at each other, after which she emitted a small puff of breath and hiked up the concrete stairs into the kitchen. I followed her back to the front room, where she went over to one of the tall shelves and took down a pasteboard box and a small envelope. She shook out a quantity of dark yellow powder from the box into the envelope and made a note on the front with a pencil, then handed the envelope to me.

  The label said WIDOW’S TEA.

  My eyes jumped to her face. She gave me a solemn look and then her face creased into a wide grin. The glitter in her tiny black eyes was sure now.

  “How much?” I heard myself say.

  She motioned toward a stone plate on a stand next to the door, feigning surprise. “Whatever you wish.”

  The feds had prepped me for the possibility of blackmail, and I knew the protocol. I took a bill out of my wallet, laid it on the plate, and got the hell out of there.

  X

  The directory on the first floor of the courthouse told me that the police department was in the basement, which I’d have found funny if I hadn’t been busy freaking out. I had to go back outside and down the wide limestone steps, walk around the building on a narrow concrete sidewalk, and down a sloped ramp to a single glass door at the rear.

  Inside, the low room was sectioned off into nine cubes of space by a tic-tac-toe board of rough stone arches edged with red brick. In the quadrant immediately left of the door, a skinny brunette sat at a metal desk with an antiquated two-way radio console behind it. Her name patch said SCHERER.

  “Is the chief in?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “What’s the problem?”

  I looked over at the clock hanging above a battered wood bench against the stone wall. It was three thirty. “What time do you expect her?”

  “I don’t, really,” Scherer said with a hint of smile. I lifted my eyebrows, and she explained, “She does night shift, and she usually rolls out from home. She’s in and out.”

  “How is anybody supposed to get hold of her?”

  Scherer pointed at a phone next to the bench, and I remembered the Amazon giving me her card the previous night. I dug it out of my wallet and punched in the green-scribbled number on the back. The Amazon answered on the second ring with a short “Yeah?”

  “Hey, it’s Julia. I need to talk to you. It’s about Etta. I ran into somebody who knows her.” That was the WITSEC code drop to convey that my cover had been blown.

  “This isn’t a secure line,” the Amazon warned, her voice going tense. “Keeping that in mind, what happened?”

  “I went by to see Silvia Molina, the curandera?”

  A burst of breath on the other end of the line cut me off. “What’d you do that for?”

  I glanced over at Scherer, who’d gone back to reading the magazine on the blotter in front of her. Maybe twelve feet separated us. I lowered my voice and said into the phone, “She followed me downtown from your house.”

  “What do you mean, followed you?”

  “What do you mean, what do I mean?” I hissed. “She was parked down the street when I left, and when I got to the church, she fucking stopped and watched me.”

  A uniform came in, and I paused to let him get out of hearing range before going on. “I went over there to see what the deal was, after my interview, and she tried to touch me.”

  “What, for money?”

  “Yeah.”

  Another breath; then her voice came again, exasperated now. “That’s not a cover bust. A cover bust is when somebody shoots at you, OK?”

  “She knows I’m a widow,” I said.

  “She’s a professional fortune-teller, Julia. She cold-reads people for a living.”

  “I had all my tells beaten out of me by the feds,” I insisted. “There is no way in hell that I gave her that.”

  “Listen to me,” the Amazon said, a brittle calmness coming into her voice. “If the Brotherhood knew where you were, you’d be ducking bullets, not talking to me on the phone.”

  “I know that. But if there’s a leak somewhere, it’s only a matter of time before it drips on the wrong people.”

  The Amazon’s voice relaxed down another notch. “Look, I’ll go talk to Silvia when I get back to town in a couple of hours, but trust me on this: you’re OK. OK?”

  She hung up without saying anything else, and I put the phone down, feeling stupid.

  I closed my eyes to get a grip and run over everything I could remember about my brief interaction with the curandera. Maybe her knowing smirk at the fire had been a test of possible new meat for her fortune-telling business, and she was just turning up the heat with this following thing. My luggage in the backseat of the Amazon’s car would have told her where I was staying, and she could have heard about my job interview on the small-town airwaves. It didn’t explain the Widow’s Tea, though.

  “Everything all right?” Scherer asked. I opened my eyes and nodded, and she asked, “Are you the family friend from Boston?”

  I couldn’t help a wry smile, and her look went from professional to curi
ous.

  “I heard you took a job with Hector,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, getting up. “Teresa put in a good word for me.”

  Scherer hesitated, skeptical; then her face creased into disbelief. “Really?”

  “What, is the place haunted or something?”

  The cop giggled, and I realized that she was younger than she looked. “No, no. It’s just—”

  She shrugged, running her eyes down to my feet and then back up. Maybe I didn’t look sufficiently bartender-like, or she was one of those people who thought that people who don’t fit into the “normal” range on those height/weight charts should all take a walk in heavy traffic. I thought about pushing the question, but decided it probably wouldn’t be worth it. Cops always get more out of you than you get out of them, and I was already as far into information debt to law enforcement as I cared to go.

  XI

  It was too early to show up at the bar, and I needed some time to settle down anyway, so I drove around until I found a grocery store. I bought some staples, including a box of loose oolong tea and a filter pot, and then headed back to the apartment.

  On reflection, I decided it was probably a good thing that the rest of my stuff—including my full wardrobe—hadn’t arrived yet. I know a couple of things about men now that I didn’t when I was younger, and one of them is that you probably don’t want one you have to dress up for to catch. I don’t dislike dressing up, but having it expected of you gets old fast.

  I put some tea on to brew and took a cool bath, then went online to see if Silvia Molina could have stumbled across my true marital status there. The judge had blacked the press out of the trial, but they’d been absolutely relentless everywhere his else. Maybe some juror had signed a tell-all book deal and was spilling his guts.