Cool Cache (3 page)

Gatan handed Helen her card. “Call me when you locate the cousin. I’ll handle the rest.”

As we got out of the patrol car, dozens of camera flashes lit up the alley. A crowd was gathered outside the yellow tape, people drawn by curiosity, boredom, or maybe just a sense of the macabre.

The rain had stopped but the street was still wet, so I offered Helen a ride to her car. As soon as she slid into the passenger seat of my Boxster, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed a number. I could hear the blare of the busy signal from where I sat. I backed out of the parking space and waited while a patrol officer lifted the crime-scene tape and motioned the crowd to step away from the alley.

By the time we got to Helen’s car, which was parked on the street a couple of blocks away, her breathing had become shallow. I asked if she was okay.

“I will be as soon as I know Lupe’s kids are safe.”

“Is that her cousin you’re trying to call?”

She closed her phone with an audible snap. “I’m trying to reach Roberto, but the line is still busy. I can’t leave him alone with those children.”

A feeling of dread settled in my chest. “Helen, what’s going on?”

“Lupe was having problems with Roberto. He was running with a bad crowd, experimenting with drugs. His dad tried to straighten him out, but he wouldn’t listen. Other people tried to help, too—school counselors, her parish priest. I told her I’d pay for a psychologist, but her husband was against it. He didn’t want people to know he couldn’t control his own son.”

“Why didn’t you tell O’Brien?”

“Because I didn’t want to cause more problems for the family.”

Helen got out of the car and slammed the door.

I lowered the passenger-side window. “What are you going to do?”

“Drive to East L.A. and talk to Roberto.”

“Helen, that’s insane. You have no idea what kind of mess you’re walking into.”

She glared at me. “And Lupe’s children? What about them? Their lives are a little messy right now, too.”

“They don’t even know their mom is dead. Are you going to tell them?”

“I’ll have to.”

“Why are you doing this? Lupe’s not even your employee.”

“I don’t want to do it. I have to because there’s no one else.”

I hoped Helen’s compulsion to meddle in other people’s lives wouldn’t become a problem, but if rescuing Lupe Ortiz’s children was her latest cause, trying to talk her out of it was futile. There was only one thing I could do to save her from herself.

“Get in the car,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

Chapter 3

There were many reasons why a trip to see Roberto Ortiz could turn into disaster. It was late at night. The streets were slick with rain. The freeway would be a mess. And East L.A. could be a dangerous place. At the moment, telling a troubled teen that his mother had just been murdered seemed like the least of my problems.

Locals call East Los Angeles East Los or ELA. Once home to Russians, Jews, and Japanese immigrants, the area is now ninety percent Latino and the largest Mexican-American community in the United States. It’s larger than Manhattan. Larger than Washington, D.C. One million people. Hundreds of colorful outdoor murals. Graffiti.
Discotecas. Farmacias.
Pastry shops. Hardworking people. ELA also has young mothers in short skirts carrying babies that already know how to hold a gun, and young men with no work and few alternatives, selling weapons from the trunk of a car. There are good neighborhoods in East L.A. Lupe Ortiz and her family didn’t live in one of them.

The house was a downtrodden bungalow that looked like a child’s crude drawing—a square box with a slanted roof and a front door flanked by two small windows. A few blocks away, a police helicopter swept a spotlight over the neighborhood, searching for something or someone I didn’t want to know about.

Cars and pickups lined the street, so I parked in the driveway behind an older-model Toyota. Gang graffiti marred the surface of a three-foot cinderblock wall that barricaded the neighbor’s yard from the outside world. A man stood on the porch, struggling to restrain a pit bull that was lunging at us with bared teeth. The barking triggered a response from canines up and down the block until it sounded like the doggie version of Tchaikovsky’s
1812 Overture
.

“I hope that collar doesn’t break,” Helen said.

I wanted to allay her fears, but it was all I could do to keep my own in check. “We’re here now. We might as well go to the door.”

No fence barred us from entering Lupe Ortiz’s yard. We made our way up the sidewalk through a lawn that was dead except for tufts of grass that reminded me of hair plugs on the pate of a desperate man. Paint was peeling from the wood siding of the house. The doorframe was hollowed out in places, probably from termites. The windows were covered in blue floral bedsheets that would make Martha Stewart proud.

I knocked on the front door and waited. A faint rustling sound could be heard from inside the house. A moment later, the bedsheet on the window to my left parted, revealing the face of a girl of around eight. I waved to her. She waved back.

“Angelica,” Helen said through the glass. “I’m looking for Roberto. Is he home?”

The girl stared at us for a moment and then stepped away from the window. The curtain drifted shut. We waited, but nobody came to the door.

“Try calling the number again,” I said to Helen.

She dialed and listened. “Still busy.”

I knocked, louder this time. A short time later, the door jerked open and an unpleasant chemical odor drifted onto the porch. A young man of about sixteen stood in front of us. I assumed he was Lupe’s son Roberto. Small bumps covered his face. They looked like a crop of mini Botz dots that had gone on a rampage. Heavy, arching eyebrows accented his broad face. A metal stud pierced the skin just below his lower lip. He had on an oversized white T-shirt and a pair of jeans that were so large they would have fallen off if he hadn’t been holding on to his crotch.

Behind him were three young children—the girl I’d seen in the window and two younger boys, age three and four, I guessed. They were all huddled in front of a television set.

“Roberto?” she said. “I’m Helen Taggart. Your mother cleans my chocolate store. I’m sure she’s talked about me.”

Roberto raked his nails over the blemishes on his face. His gaze flitted from me to Helen and back again, as if our presence had made him hyperalert. His lips were dry and cracked. He moistened them before speaking.

“I know who you are,” he said. “What do you want?”

Helen reached out as if she was going to embrace him. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. Your mother’s dead. The police asked me to identify the body. It was awful. I drove all the way over here to see if I could help.”

I grabbed her arm before she blurted out any of the gory details.

Roberto seemed repelled by Helen as much as by the news of his mother’s death, but the two younger boys didn’t even look away from the TV. Angelica did. Her dark eyes burned with anger as she stared at Helen and me.

Pain etched Helen’s face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” “Listen, Roberto,” I said. “It’s important for you to contact your father right away and tell him to come home. In the meantime, you need to find an adult relative who can stay at the house.”

He lifted his chin and looked down his nose at us in a gesture of defiance. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

Helen broke free of my grasp. “The police said—”

I interrupted her. “Of course you don’t. But you might have to leave the house, and your brothers and sister will need someone to watch out for them. What about your cousin? Would you like me to call her?”

He didn’t answer for some time. Perhaps it was shock or just machismo that allowed him to stand in the doorway without shedding a tear.

“I don’t need your help.”

I felt the music before I heard it, that loud, thrumming base that reverberates in your chest like thunder. I turned toward the street and saw an older-model American sedan with tinted windows, maybe an Oldsmobile, cruising down the street. It slowed to a roll as it neared us. The neighbor pulled his pit bull into the house, and the barking grew muffled. The rear window of the sedan rolled down. Rap music pounded into the night.

Roberto’s eyes narrowed. The last image I saw was the glow of the television screen and three wide-eyed children scurrying for cover as the door slammed shut. A moment later, the lights in the Ortiz house went out.

In my mind’s eye I saw tomorrow morning’s newspaper headline. NOSY BUSINESSWOMAN MOWED DOWN IN DRIVE-BY SHOOTING. Next to the article would be that old high school picture of me with the perm that looked like a mushroom cloud over the Nevada desert. People would come to my funeral. People I didn’t know. Just to see if my hair really looked that bad. I couldn’t let that happen.

“Get in the car,” I whispered.

“We can’t leave without the children,” Helen said.

“Get in the car,” I said, louder this time.

Helen seemed to sense the urgent tone in my voice, because she followed me down the sidewalk toward the Boxster. Once we were both inside the car, I locked the doors—for all the good that would do. You didn’t need a PhD to know that bullets penetrated glass.

Every house on the street seemed to be dark now. I watched the taillights of the sedan grow smaller as it continued down the block. When the car was out of sight, I turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway.

Helen pressed her forehead to the window, staring into the darkness. “I failed Lupe. They’ll take the children away now.”

I didn’t answer right away because I was focused on navigating us out of the neighborhood and back to the freeway.

“You did what you could,” I said. “The police will take care of the rest.”

That was easy enough to say, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Lupe Ortiz’s death was only the beginning of Helen’s problems—and mine. The next challenge was convincing Detective O’Brien to release Helen’s recipe books, but I had a feeling he wasn’t going to let them go without a fight.

Chapter 4

By the time we got back to Nectar, Lupe’s body had been taken to the morgue. Detective Gatan promised to arrange for the Ortizes’ cousin to stay with the family until the father could be located. I’d been right about O’Brien. He wasn’t going to let the recipes go without a fight, but it wasn’t with Helen or me. It was with his partner. After a heated discussion between the two, Detective Gatan escorted Helen into the store to get her recipe books, plus several boxes of business records she’d need while Nectar remained closed.

There wasn’t room for everything in Helen’s car because the trunk was filled with the collectible display from the retail store, so she asked me to take the cocoa tins, the heart box, and the spouted chocolate pot home for a day or two until she could free up some space at her condo. Of course I agreed.

It was past two a.m. by the time I pulled the Boxster into the driveway of my beach cottage just north of Malibu. There were no lights on at my neighbor’s house. Mr. and Mrs. Domanski had likely been lulled into slumber hours ago by multiple martinis and years of marital ennui.

Cold November sea air seeped into my lungs as I got out of the car. In the distance I heard the surf slam the shore, sizzle, and withdraw to renew the cycle. I pulled my coat tight around my neck and walked toward the house, watching the moon spotlight the water with a milky yellow glow. The only other light I saw was from a house in the middle of a wide arc of beach that sloped gently into the Pacific Ocean.

I made my way through the sand toward my deck, pausing for a moment to admire my house. It wasn’t much to look at, just a small brown rectangle I’d inherited from a grandmother I’d never known, but I loved the place more than anywhere I’d ever lived.

Unlike Lupe Ortiz’s neighborhood, mine felt quiet and safe. I trudged up the wooden steps leading to the side door and tried to imagine what it would be like for her children in the days ahead. My father had died before I was born, which had left a void in my life, but I’d never had to mourn a parent who’d been loved and lost the way Lupe’s kids would have to do now.

I heard barking from inside the house—my West Highland terrier. Muldoon had a good voice, but he’d never make it to Carnegie Hall. He was too handsome to be talented, too. That just wouldn’t be fair. The pup had leading-man good looks—broad shoulders, bedroom eyes, and a melancholy expression that melted hearts.

The door swung open and Muldoon charged out to greet me. I threw him a couple of air kisses and stepped over the threshold, nearly tripping over his yellow cashmere sweater. It was just one of many gifts from Mrs. Domanski, whom Muldoon had come to view as a generous but eccentric aunt.

I paused near the small alcove that functioned as my home office and flipped on the lights in the living room and on the deck. By the time I’d laid my coat on my grandmother’s steamer trunk, Muldoon was staring at his empty food dish. The expression on his face read
Uh . . . excuse me. Empty!

I negotiated my way around my apartment-sized kitchen to the refrigerator where I kept Muldoon’s food. I moved his dish to the round rooster rug on the kitchen floor and filled it to the top from a sack of low-fat kibble, waiting for him to dig in. He studied the cuisine for a moment, flicking his tongue at the pellets. Several shot out of the bowl like skeet off the back of a cruise ship. He plopped his butt on the floor and began to whimper. I hated to see the little guy unhappy, so I caved in and nuked a frozen panini that was big enough for two.

While Muldoon was eating, I changed into a sweatsuit and checked for messages on the answering machine located on the kitchen counter. No one had called. I went to my office and booted up the computer to check my e-mail. Nothing. I was beginning to feel like the Maytag repairman.