Finnegan's Week (36 page)

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I'm a detective with the U.S. Navy. I'm just trying to find out if he's in jail, or in the hospital or something.”

The woman said, “You gave another name. What was that name?”

“Durazo,” Bobbie said. “Abel Durazo.”

“One moment please,” the woman said.

When she came back on the line she said, “Do you have a pencil? I have another number for you to call.”

Bobbie was excited. Maybe they
were
in jail, and maybe it had to do with being caught selling two thousand pairs of shoes! When she rang the other number she was given over to a man who spoke nearly unaccented English. “This is Rojas,” he said. “Who do you wish to learn about?”

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I'm a detective with the U.S. Navy at North Island. And also I wanna know about Abel Durazo. Are they in jail, or what?”

Rojas said, “I am with the state judicial police. Do you know Mister Durazo very well?”

“No,” Bobbie said. “I'm investigating his
possible
involvement in a large theft of navy shoes.”

The Mexican cop said, “We have a murder victim in our morgue with the name of Abel Durazo on his California driver's license and on his
pasaporte
.”

“Good god!” Bobbie said. “How about Shelby Pate?”

“No, but
another
man was murdered. A man named Porfirio Velásquez Saavedra, better known to us as Juan Soltero.”

“Is he a receiver of stolen property, by any chance?”

“Yes, and other things. It appears that they killed each other. Durazo was stabbed, and then must have got off one shot before he died. A derringer pistol was found beside him.”

“Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of U.S. Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

After she hung up she dialed Fin's number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell's number and got
another
machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

After spending three hours on Mission Beach, most of it under a beach umbrella, Fin and Nell decided to go to his apartment to shower and change for dinner.

“And to do
what?
” Nell asked, after he made the suggestion.

“Ride the roller coaster,” Fin said.

“I haven't ridden a roller coaster in twenty years,” she said.

“I ride it every once in awhile. It's very nostalgic for me. When I was a kid my sisters used to take me for rides with their boyfriends. I sat between them usually. The boyfriends hated my guts.”

They were lying under the umbrella when he'd asked her. He thought she had a terrific body, for a woman of a certain age. She thought he had pretty good buns, but ought to work on his tummy.

Late that afternoon, after eating a hot dog and a hamburger, Fin Finnegan and Nell Salter rode the Mission Beach vintage roller coaster, raising their hands in the air and screaming as they sped down the dips, losing themselves for a while in lovely memories of their lost youth.

When Shelby arrived home he found some of his clothes in the driveway. Some were in the street and some were on the little patch of grass in front of the house. He parked the Harley, jumped off and ran to the front door, discovering that his key no longer fit the lock.

He started banging on the door, yelling, “Bitch! You better open this fucker or it's goin
down
!”

His next-door neighbor, the tweaker who'd interrupted him when he'd been trying to landscape the neighborhood, opened his window and yelled, “Hey, dude! Your old lady said to tell you she went home to her momma!”

“She changed the fuckin lock!” Shelby hollered.

The tweaker said, “She told me you ain't got nothin in the house no more. She threw everything out. By the time she told me, there was people from down the street stealin
everything
. I got some a your stuff in my garage. You kin come get it.”

Shelby ran to the tweaker's garage and jerked it open. His camouflage jacket was there, and his extra helmet. He ran inside his own garage and pulled things down from the shelf: every box, every tool, every auto part. The boots were
gone
!

He ran back outside and said to the neighbor, “My boots! I had some
boots
in the garage!”

“Didn't see no boots,” the tweaker said. “I saved your shirts and some jeans and I got a bag full a your sox. Them greasers from down the block, they got your boots, I guess.”

The ox just gaped. Finally he said, “You shouldn't
never
steal somebody's shoes.”

“That's cold, dude,” the tweaker agreed.

Shelby said, “Some Mexicans got the firin squad for takin a man's shoes.”

“What firin squad?”

“They got shot.”

The tweaker said, “Dude, you shouldn't be doin that crystal so early in the morning. You ain't talkin sense.”

“You shouldn't
never
steal somebody's shoes,” Shelby Pate informed his neighbor. “It's the worst mistake you can ever make.”

Bobbie Ann Doggett was beside herself with excitement. She thought about calling up the assistant director of security at North Island, but she knew he'd say what Fin would say: “It'll all keep till tomorrow. Till you're on duty and can work in a proper investigative environment.”

What
could
she do now anyway? Nobody was going anywhere. Abel Durazo was on ice, and so was his Tijuana contact, Soltero. Shelby Pate might also be lying in a Tijuana alley with a knife in his ample gut.

Jules Temple would be coming to his place of business tomorrow as usual, none the wiser as far as his employees' fate was concerned. And how was she going to tie Jules Temple into all this? She
wasn't
. Not unless Pate was still alive and willing to talk about it.

So far, everyone who'd come in contact with those navy shoes had ended up dead. Her boss would probably tell her that if she recovered the shoes, the navy ought to send them immediately to Saddam Hussein.

Bobbie sat and tried to read a magazine, cooling her heels until three o'clock. Then she rang up Fin and Nell once again. Bobbie was going bughouse.

After she hung up, she got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and strapped on her shoulder holster, concealing it under her most comfortable cardigan. Then she grabbed her purse and map book and headed for the house of Shelby Pate in National City.

She drove her Hyundai slowly through the ethnically mixed, working-class residential neighborhood, a district with lots of homeboy spider-script sprayed on all the walls. His house was easy to spot. It was the only one with the front door kicked off the hinges. The small yard was littered with articles of clothing, and a Harley hog sat menacingly in the driveway, aimed at the street.

A fleeting memory occurred to Bobbie. The director of security had once warned her that women in police work frequently take great risks because they don't want to call for backup from the men until they're sure they need it. But by then, it's often too late. He'd warned that many female cops had been needlessly injured and even killed, for fear of seeming to be the damsel in distress.

He'd finished reading the paper, but found that he couldn't concentrate on the Sunday talking-head shows blathering about Tuesday's election as though everyone wasn't already certain that George Bush was history. Jules had never cared anything about politics. He sat, channel grazing, when the phone rang.

“Hello,” he said, thinking it might be Lou Ross with details about the New York trip.

“It's Shelby Pate, Mister Temple,” the voice said.

Jules was astonished. He caught his breath and said, “Yes?”

“I gotta talk to you today.”

“How'd you get my number?”

“Abel got it for me,” Shelby said, “a few days ago.”

“How'd he get it?”

“From Mary,” Shelby said. “He was fuckin her.”

“I see,” Jules said. “What do you wanna talk about?”

“Money,” Shelby said.

“I see,” Jules said.

“Want me to explain?”

“I don't want you to explain on the telephone,” Jules said. “I'll meet you somewhere.”

“Where?”

“At my office.”

“Be there at one,” Shelby said.

“I simply can't,” Jules said. “I can be there by five-thirty. That's the best I can do.”

“Okay,” Shelby said. “Five-thirty.”

“Will Durazo be with you?” Jules asked.

“He had an accident in T.J.,” Shelby said. “He ain't never gonna be with me again.”

When Jules hung up, he was paralyzed with rage. His heart was pounding. His mouth was very dry but at least his hands didn't shake. He was pleased that his hands didn't shake. He'd always been able to control stress to a remarkable degree, hadn't he? He was pleased that his mind had worked so quickly under fire. He'd told that pig to meet him at five-thirty because he knew instinctively that he'd be better off after dark. Whatever happened, it should happen after dark.

Jules hadn't clearly formulated a plan yet, but Shelby Pate was forcing him. He wasn't exactly making it up as he went along. He already had ideas, but they weren't crystallized. Abel Durazo
wasn't
coming back? That was
great
news. There was only Pate.

Jules looked at his watch. There was plenty of time to go to Green Earth and make preparations. Hazardous waste could be stored for a long time if he did it properly, and he certainly knew how to do that in order to sidestep government regulations. There was a stack of drums containing diesel fuel, and some containing etching acid that he'd been holding until he had a sufficient load. He'd put Shelby Pate into one of those drums.

Then it would be a matter of borrowing a boat from someone at the club. Maybe a runabout on a trailer. He could haul it to the yard and dolly the drum onto the boat; then he could launch the boat and dump the drum a mile offshore. He could do it as soon as Monday, or wait till the weekend. That might be best, doing it on the weekend. Then he could stay out and do some fishing just to
prove
something to himself: that Jules Temple did not panic. That Jules Temple was once again in control of his own destiny.

But he quickly dismissed that plan. The more mundane but less dangerous way would be to dump Pate's body in the vicinity of a bikers' bar like Hogs Wild, and let it be found. Let the police think he'd died as he'd lived, at the hands of some other lowlife scum.

C
HAPTER
26

“I
t's possible that I've been running away from my three sisters all my life,” Fin said to her.

He was sitting on the sofa eating his second bowl of butter brickle ice cream. His bachelor apartment, a block from the sand in south Mission Beach, had been thoroughly cleaned and tidied up by Fin on the chance that he'd be successful in persuading Nell to come home.

She was seated at the kitchen table finishing her second bowl.

“Why would you spend your life running away? Are they so awful?”

“Actually, all three're smarter than me. And each managed to have a happy marriage to guys that weren't millionaires or senile or comatose. The youngest one's recently widowed and she got herself a good job, recession and all. They have nice kids and they're successful in life. Me, I'm a failed actor, a failed cop, and the world's worst marriage prospect.”

“So're you saying you always marry women who
aren't
like your sisters?”

“Actually, I came to that conclusion just after I met you.”

“Whaddaya mean by that?”

“You remind me of my sisters.”

“I thought they kicked ass and took names.”

“They did. It didn't work, but they kept trying.”

“Did it ever occur to you that you waste a lotta time on self-pity?”

“That's exactly what my sister says.”

“Which one?”

“All three.”

“Are you a junkie that can't stop?”

“Probably,” he said, “unless I finally get involved with somebody who's like my sisters.”

“I thought your first wife, the good sergeant, kicked your butt from time to time.”

“Yeah, but she did it for her own amusement. My sisters did it to make me a better person.”

Nell got up and went to the refrigerator for more ice cream. “The hell with calories,” she said.

“With that bod, you can afford a few calories.”

“Looks like I'm doing it again,” she said.

“What?”

“Getting involved with a Peter Pan policeman. Your favorite song is ‘Someone to Watch Over Me,' right?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“A woman my age would kinda like it the other way around, even in these modern times.”

“Hillary Clinton wouldn't think so. Who're you voting for on Tuesday?”

“Since you got me all mixed up I'll probably vote for Perot.”

“I'd rather not talk politics.”

Nell sat down next to him on the sofa, and said, “I'll bet your sisters spoil you rotten. Want some of my ice cream?”

“Does this mean we're …
involved?
”

She didn't answer, but she put down the bowl and scooted closer.

“The thing that drove me wild was your broken nose,” he said. “It's
so
sexy.”

“My most masculine feature,” she said.

“I
told
you I was probably gay …”

“Except for the sex part,” she said. “Right?”

“Riiiiiiight,” said Fin Finnegan.

Jules was tired, but quite satisfied with his day's work. He felt he looked cool and collected in gabardine slacks and an oversized cotton shirt with a yachting crest on the pocket. He wore the shirt for the freedom of movement he'd need during the action he'd planned. Instead of tasseled loafers, he wore boat shoes, for traction on the greasy asphalt in the truck yard.