Cool in Tucson (4 page)

“The tattoos look right.  And the fingers.”

“So, what, you’re looking to ID him off a record?”  The doctor had pulled off his gloves and was looking around for the trash. 

“Yes.  Here,” She held up a bag and he dropped the gloves in.  “And you know, if he hasn’t been out here more than three hours—” she looked around and said “Gloria?”

“Yeah?”

“You got your fuming gear along?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I’d like to do that, too.  This body was stripped of all ID, money, wallet—somebody had to touch him.  We might lift a print before we put him in the cooler.  How about it?” Sarah asked the doctor.  “You can delay storage for an hour, can’t you?”

“Oh, yeah, once I get him inside out of this heat, one more hour…but what’s your hurry?  He’ll still be dead tomorrow.”  

 “He will, but fuming works better if we do it before he’s cold.”

 “Ah.  Okay, if you want to.  Seems kind of overzealous, to me, for a John Doe in a park.” 

“Ah, well, a little zeal,” Sarah imitated his hand-rocking motion, “I can hide that in the paperwork.” 

Greenberg rolled his eyes to the sky and muttered, “Oy vey, a comedian.”  

 “Oh, damn,” Ibarra said, “here’s the wagon and I haven’t diagrammed the crime scene.”

“Do it now,” Sarah said.  “You got a tape on you?  Gloria, come and help us.”  She called out the distances she wanted and the other two did the measuring, from the body to the trees, to the bike path, to the railing—Ibarra taking a gleeful pleasure in watching Gloria Jackson out on the far end of the tape, running around. 

“Damn,” he said, his gold tooth flashing in the sunlight, “just like an antelope, ain’t she?”  Even Jimmy Ibarra, whose devotion to his wife was legendary, could not resist the pleasure of watching Gloria Jackson run. 

He called out the last of the numbers as a county driver parked and got his rear doors open.  Sarah closed her long notebook and stuck it in the back of her pants, gloved up again and helped the driver get the body onto the gurney.  Watching it slide into place in the transport vehicle, she told Jimmy, “Okay, Gloria and I have to follow the body.  You be okay here alone with the rest of the site work?”

“I have a choice?”

“No.”  They exchanged jaded smiles.  “Listen, when you’re taking ground samples?  Don’t just get dirt from under the body, take some from out at the edges of the circle, will you?  Always a chance the killer shed something.”

“So?”

“So Delaney tells me we’ve got a forensic geologist at the University now that we can use if we don’t get any other leads to the killer.  He can analyze dirt and pebbles, tell us if any of it came from someplace else.”

“Oh, my.  Way cool.”

“Uh-huh.  And this case is going to need all the cool we can scare up before it’s ready to go to court, wouldn’t you say?”

“About as close to
nada
as I’ve ever seen,” Ibarra said.

“Right.  So…first I’m going to try to expedite his prints, see if we can get an ID.”  She watched as another Department vehicle turned into the lot.  “Oh, hey, here comes Cunningham.  I forgot—”

“Go ahead,” Ibarra said, “
I’ll
take care of
her
.”  He did a Groucho Marx thing with his eyebrows.  He wouldn’t really make any moves on the new public information officer, but she was young and attractive and he was a Tucson cop with a Hispanic name; he had to show some
cojones.

“Good.  Tell her a John Doe for now, but say we hope to have an ID by tomorrow.  Try to make us sound like we know what’s going on.”

“Uh-
huh
.  The old knowledgeable ploy, that could work.”

Sarah pulled her car into line behind Gloria and the county van.  Waiting for the break in traffic that would let them all onto First Avenue, she glanced at the clock on the dashboard and thought, as she usually did now on school mornings,
Hope Denny’s getting off to school okay. 
In her mind, she reached out and gave her favorite niece a little pat
.  You get a good breakfast, Babe?   

Denny had stayed with her for a couple of months last fall, while they got her clothes ready, got her registered and started in school.  The rest of the family thought she should stay in the country till…they didn’t say till when.  But Sarah argued that Denny’s best shot at a successful year was to get started in her own school, get to know her teachers and have that much going for her when her mother got out of detox. 

Janine came out of the hospital radiant with hope and saying, “I can’t wait to get my baby back.”  So Sarah helped her find a rental and reluctantly took Denny back to her mother.  She didn’t see she had any alternative, but letting the child go set up a jangling conflict in her mind that ate at her nerves.  She’d always been fond of Janine’s child, but now that they’d been alone together for several weeks she felt responsible for her in a new way.  Besides, they were friends, understood each other, got along.  And she knew Janine’s resolve was fragile. 

A little girl wanted her mother, of course.  Everybody knew that.  But what if Janine…every day now, underneath her unease about Delaney and her job, Sarah’s worries about Denny ran like a slow-moving dark river. 

CHAPTER THREE

When the alarm rang, Denny shut the noise off quickly and lay still a minute, thinking about the day ahead.  She had clean clothes ready and some money stashed, so she figured she had a fair shot at making this Tuesday an OK day.

OK days didn’t just happen; they took planning, hard work, and attention to details.  Well, and some lying and stealing.

She was ten years old, so she had to take the days as they came along.  Grown-ups ran the world, and they didn’t run it to suit kids.  But they didn’t always have as much control as they thought, either, so if you kept your eyes open you could do yourself some good around the edges.  She was beginning to be quite proud of the ways she had learned to do some good for herself.     

It was important not to expect too much, so you didn’t get disappointed.  She knew better now than to look for really ring-a-ding days like the first half of last year, when Mom was just back from rehab and had a good job doing accounting in an office.  Mom was a whiz at her job, she said so every day.  She kept saying other things like, “Knowledge is power,” and “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives.”  Denny thought that was all pretty obvious but she wasn’t going to argue as long as Mom stayed sober and happy and there was food in the house. 

All last fall until almost Christmas, they’d had spiffed-up extra-credit days together.  That’s how it felt, like they were turning in days to some invisible school counselor, showing off clean clothes and brushed hair and good grades in social studies, so they could get to the head of whatever class Mom was enrolled in.  They’d start with cheery Leave-It-To-Beaver breakfasts, Denny with a dishtowel over the front of her clean school clothes and Mom making her face beautiful for work.  As Denny walked away toward the school bus stop, Mom would be waving from the doorway of their house.   Smiling back through the bus window, Denny knew she could count on a good dinner and help with homework later if she needed it.

Something about Christmas made Mom moody and sad, though, and in January she started keeping beer in the refrigerator again.  By the end of February she was calling in sick about one day a week, and when the company announced layoffs at the end of March she was one of the first to be let go.  She got unemployment for a while, so although they ate a lot of beans and macaroni they had a roof over their heads, as Mom said, while she looked for something new.  She would make Denny laugh after school, describing the appointments she went to, imitating the really stupid people who luckily  hadn’t offered her a job. 

She told Denny not to worry.  Everybody knew she was a whiz at anything to do on a computer.  But everybody wasn’t calling.  In fact nobody called about anything, and the longer she stayed home the less housework she seemed to get done. 

By May they began to have some really bad days, when there was hardly anything in the house to eat, Mom was sleeping like a stone when she left for school, and Denny couldn’t find any clean socks or lunch money. 

Sometimes the house was empty when Denny got home, and Mom came in late and made a lot of noise getting into bed.  When Denny was hungry she woke up easily and had trouble going back to sleep, so the bad day was followed by a rotten night and a worse tomorrow.

In June Mom had to borrow money from Aunt Sarah to pay the rent.

“Janine, now, don’t start this,” Aunt Sarah said, “I’m just getting back on my feet myself after the divorce.”

“Well, Jesus, Sarah, I’m not doing it for the fun of it,” Mom said.” I got laid off, remember?  I mean I’m doing my best, I’ve got applications in all over town and I’m living in a duplex on Lurlene Street, for God’s sake.  A block from Kolb Road where half the traffic in Tucson goes by every day.”

Kolb Road
seemed to feature in all their fights now.  Mom had seemed grateful while Aunt Sarah was helping her get settled in a place she could afford.  But since she lost her job and couldn’t afford much of anything, she brooded about the fact that Sarah’s house was in a nicer neighborhood than hers.  Their brother Howard had the family ranch and Grandma had moved to a new development with a swimming pool in a suburb west of town.  “But Denny and I drew the slum.  If this block gets any noisier we’ll have to wear ear-plugs, is this really what you want for your niece?”

 “What I really want for my niece,” Aunt Sarah said, “is a mother who can get her ass in gear and find another
job
.  And clean up this house, for God’s sake!”  They yelled at each other like that for a while and then cried and hugged and made up and Aunt Sarah gave Mom some money.  That was about standard for how it went between them when Mom was off the wagon and trying to hide it.  She picked more fights with Aunt Sarah then because she was trying to keep her on the defensive. 

Aunt Sarah was edgy lately too, probably because she could see her sister was in trouble again and dreaded talking to their parents about it.  Denny had a bigger worry than that:  if her mother went to rehab, she’d probably get sent out to the ranch to live with Uncle Howard and Aunt Jane like the last time.  The ranch was okay and Uncle Howard tried to be nice, but Aunt Jane and the two girls hated her guts and wanted her
gone
.  So when the fights started between Aunt Sarah and her mother, Denny stayed out of sight till the hugging started.  Lately she even skipped the hugging part if she could manage it.

The next day after the rent-money fight, Mom got a Mondays-only job in a second-hand clothing store called “Twice Is Nice,” that said its merchandise was “gently used.”  Just a fun gig till the world got serious again, Mom said.  Then she found a waitress job in a bar on Speedway, Friday and Saturday nights only, so she took that too.  After that she countered any criticism of her housekeeping by saying, “Okay,
you
try being a single mother with two jobs.” 

At least she made good tips at the bar, she told Denny, so they’d be fine till she could find a real job.  She told many funny stories to illustrate how unreal her present jobs were.  Without knowing how to say it, exactly, Denny saw that her mother was using humor as a shield, to fend off questions about her drinking.  One of her lines was, “Go easy on me, I’m still in recovery from rehab.”  

Besides tips, though, the other thing Mom made at the bar was a lot of new boyfriends.  They called on the phone and came home with her sometimes, bringing plenty of beer and sometimes pot.  More and more afternoons now she got that hazy look, the little smile and the “hmm?” that meant you could forget about supper unless you fixed your own. 

Summer was like drifting in a risky swamp, long hours of nothing and then scary times with loud music and new boyfriends in the house.  Mom stayed in bed a lot on her days off, but Denny got her to drive to the library once a week or so.  It took a lot of nagging but was worth it, because with enough books she could stay in her room almost forever and pretend the boyfriends weren’t there.