Fire and Ice (18 page)

“What?” Joanna asked again. Then she remembered the previous day’s difficulty with Jaime’s nephew. “Is this about Luis?”

Jaime nodded. “I went to the high school late yesterday afternoon and spoke to the principal.”

“Debra Highsmith isn’t one of my favorites,” Joanna said.

“Mine, either,” Jaime said. “But she came through this time. The office keeps a comprehensive list of all the padlocks on the lockers—a list of who has which locker and what the combination is. The students and the parents sign a contract at the beginning of the year. If the lock on any given locker isn’t on the official list or on the right locker, the administration has the right to cut it off.”

“You’re saying you went through Luis’s locker?” Joanna asked.

Jaime nodded bleakly, and Joanna’s heart sank. She knew a lot of bad stuff had a way of turning up in high school lockers these days, everything from illicit drugs to illicit weapons.

“I take it you found something?”

“It’s a letter,” Jaime said. “A letter Luis wrote to his father in prison, asking if he knew where his mother was.”

“That’s hardly surprising,” Joanna said. “In fact, under the circumstances, I’d be surprised if he didn’t try to find her. Luis could have had lots worse things in his locker.”

“The letter hadn’t been opened until I opened it,” Jaime continued. “Someone at the prison had sent the envelope back to Luis with the word
D-E-C-E-A-S-E-D
written across the address in big red letters.”

Joanna was appalled. “Luis’s father is dead and that’s how the poor kid found out about it?”

Jaime nodded. “Whoever crossed out the address had no idea who Luis was. The return address is to a PO box in Bisbee—a PO box Luis rented in his mother’s name and without my knowledge, by the way. He evidently forged his mother’s name to make it work, and he was using the address to try to find her—to find Marcella. I guess he didn’t want Delcia and me to know what he was up to.”

“How long ago did the letter come?”

“A month ago,” Jaime said. “Which is about the time things started going downhill with him at school. Before that he had been doing fine. After this came, he fell apart.”

“And when did his father die?” Joanna asked. “Were you able to find that out?”

“I called California first thing this morning and spoke to the warden’s office,” Jaime said. “Marco Andrade died the last week in October. On October 31. Someone shanked him in the shower. According to the corrections officer I spoke to, they have no idea who’s responsible. It was a medium security facility with more drug dealers than anything else.”

“Why wasn’t Luis notified?” Joanna asked.

“That’s what I wanted to know as well,” Jaime said. “Marcella is listed on Marco’s prison records as his next of kin, but the address he gave was her old one. When she and Luis moved down here from Tucson, she didn’t tell anyone where she was going and she didn’t leave a forwarding address, either.”

“Because she didn’t want to be found,” Joanna added.

Jaime nodded. “Because she and Marco had evidently ripped off money from one of their fellow drug dealers or maybe from one of their drug suppliers. I don’t know which. At any rate, according to the warden’s office, they did attempt to notify the family about Marco’s death.”

“But they didn’t try very hard,” Joanna added.

“Exactly,” Jaime agreed. “But if whoever did this was able to get to Marco inside the walls of the prison, what if they decide to come after Luis? Any bad guy who gets a look at Marcella’s missing persons report will know everything he needs to know. If she was reported missing from here, this is the logical place to find her son. Bisbee’s a small town. If somebody comes here looking for Luis, they won’t have much trouble finding him.”

“In hopes he might still have the missing money,” Joanna said.

Jaime nodded again.

“Did you tell the warden’s office that Luis is your nephew?”

“I didn’t even mention Luis,” Jaime replied.

“I seem to remember your telling me about one of Marco’s drug-dealing pals in particular…” Joanna began.

“That’s right,” Jaime said. “His name is Juan Francisco Castro. His street name is Paco. He used to live in Tucson and was a minor player for the Cervantes gang out of Cananea. Supposedly he’s the one Marco and Marcella ripped off.”

“Where’s Paco now?” Joanna asked.

“He seems to have disappeared. I have some pals inside Tucson PD, and I’ve made some discreet inquiries. No one seems to have any idea where Paco is at the moment. For all I know, he could be dead or he may have gone back to Mexico.”

“Is there a chance he landed in the same prison where Marco died?” Joanna asked.

Jaime shook his head. “Nope. I already asked. That would have been too easy.” For several long moments they sat in silence. Finally Jaime continued. “So what do I do about Luis?” he asked glumly. “How do I handle this?”

“We,” Joanna said, emphasizing the pronoun. “We handle it by protecting him. We do everything in our power to protect him, including, if necessary, sending him to live someplace else until we find out who was responsible for his father’s death.”

If need be, we’ll send your whole family somewhere else, Joanna thought.

“But what do I tell him?” Jaime insisted.

“You tell him exactly what you told me,” Joanna replied. “That you’re afraid whoever killed his father might come looking for him next.”

“There’s a problem with that.”

“What problem?”

“I wouldn’t have known Marco was dead if I hadn’t broken into Luis’s locker. How’s he ever going to trust me again when he finds out about that? He probably already knows, because there was a new lock on his locker when he got to school this morning.”

“Look,” Joanna said, “you broke into his locker because you love him. Tell him you knew something was bothering him and you were trying to find out what it was.”

“I suppose I could lie to him,” Jaime said. “What if I told him I found out about Marco through work?”

Joanna stood up. She came around the desk and sat down next to Jaime. “Don’t do that,” she urged, placing a hand on his knee. “A lie takes constant maintenance. One thing leads to another until it screws up your life. You know that. It’s what you do in interview rooms—you catch crooks in the little lies so you can nail them on the big ones.

“Considering the kinds of stunts your sister pulled over the years, don’t you think your nephew has been lied to enough? Even if Marco was a bad father, he was still Luis’s father. Tell him the truth about how you found out and then be there for him when he needs you to be. It takes time to grieve. That poor kid has been doing it all on his own. No wonder he’s been a problem at school.”

Jaime Carbajal thought about that for a moment. Finally he nodded. “You’re right, boss,” he said softly. “Luis Andrade has been lied to long enough.”

I CAUGHT UP WITH MEL IN FEDERAL WAY IN TIME TO BUY HER
lunch at Marie Callender’s. She had spent the morning at Denny’s talking to the people who worked there, and she was sick of it. She wanted to eat somewhere else.

“So what did you find out?” I asked over steaming potato soup with a side of corn bread.

Mel shook her head. “It’s one of those places with enough employee turnover that there’s zero corporate memory. Well, maybe not quite zero. One of the cooks thought he maybe remembered someone named Marina, but he wasn’t sure. They evidently had the manager from hell for a while and everyone who could walk away did so. In that regard, Marina was no different from anyone else. She left without telling anyone and without bothering to pick up her final paycheck. That was sent in the mail.”

“To Silver Pines?”

“That’s the address they had,” Mel told me. “That’s the only address they had.”

“Was it ever cashed?” I asked.

“Nope. It came back.”

“But no one bothered to mention that she had disappeared.”

“No one from work. What did you find out?”

“I went to see an old buddy of mine from Seattle PD.” I was going to let it go at that, but then I remembered that Mel and I are married now. And that bit about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a good idea if you want to stay that way. “Al Lindstrom and I used to be partners,” I added. “He used to work with Tom Wojeck, too. Big Al claims Tom Wojeck left under a cloud. And that he has AIDS—has had for years.”

“Big Al,” Mel mused, latching on to the part of what I’d said that I would have preferred her to skip. “How big is he?”

“Not that big,” I told her. “There were two Als in his class at the academy. He came out Big Al, the other one came out Little Al.”

“What happened to Little Al?”

“He quit right after graduation. Went to work for State Farm or Farmers selling car insurance.”

“But the Big Al part stuck?” Mel asked.

“Pretty much,” I said.

As far as the partnership deal was concerned, I thought I had gotten off relatively easy. What I failed to understand is that God has a sense of humor about these things, and He was about to show me an ex-partner problem that was a whole lot more complicated than Big Al Lindstrom.

“Anyway,” I continued, “from what Big Al told me, Tom Wojeck had a dark side that caused him to leave Seattle PD in a hell of a hurry. They were about to launch an Internal Affairs
investigation. Then he was diagnosed with AIDS before I.A. got around to him.”

Looking thoughtful, Mel said, “And Tom Wojeck just happens to be the same guy who cleaned out Marina’s apartment where there might have been some stray drug-dealing money.”

Sometimes Mel’s uncanny ability to put things together makes me feel like she’s reading my mind, but don’t get me wrong. I love it when she does that.

“Yes, ma’am,” I told her. “Want to do a ride-along and go see him?”

“What do you think?” she returned.

So back we went to Black Diamond. This time I drove. When we cleared the trees on the driveway to Mama Rose’s house, I wondered at first if we had somehow made a wrong turn.

The night before, the house with all its lit windows had been our main focus. In the daylight it was even more impressive. It was a sprawling two-story home with a standing-seam steel roof in a gleaming copper color—a choice that made sense in a house that was in the middle of nowhere with forest all around. The outside walls were covered with neat gray siding. The many windows were trimmed out in impeccable white, and an expansive veranda covered the entire front of the house. What hadn’t been apparent on our previous visit was that this was clearly a work in progress.

Last night we had been the only visible vehicle. This time, however, when we broke through the trees it looked as though we had landed in a subdivision-in-progress. The place teemed with machinery, trucks, and workers. A dump truck was unloading an avalanche of man-sized boulders. A jigsaw puzzle of white PVC pipes was laid out in a complicated pattern indicating that a comprehensive irrigation system was being installed. There were workers everywhere. A whole group of them was laying down a
flagstone walkway that led from the edge of the veranda down to where another group of workers was installing a metal trellis over a big water feature of some kind. That, too, was under construction.

Tom Wojeck, wearing muddied work boots and denim coveralls, seemed to be overseeing much of the action. He left a huddle of workmen and came over to where Mel and I were climbing out of the car.

“Patrol cars seemed to have come up in the world since I quit the force,” he said, casting an approving glance in the direction of my S550 Mercedes, which, except for the color, was very much like the one in Tommy and Mama Rose’s garage.

“It’s mine,” I said. “They let us use our own rides these days. I bought it used and got a great deal on it.”

Mel doesn’t have a lot of patience with boy/car small talk. She likes driving fast cars fast; she doesn’t like standing around discussing them.

“What’s all this?” she asked, waving toward the beehive of activity.

Wojeck shrugged. “If Mama Rose wants a rose garden, we build a rose garden. Like that old song ‘Whatever Rosie wants; Rosie gets.’ I designed it myself, with a little help from a landscape architect. We’ve got a hundred and eighty varieties of roses that should be arriving in the course of the next week or so. That’s why we’re doing a full-court construction press right now.”

“That’s a lot of roses,” I said. “Who’s going to take care of them?”

“We have a full-time gardener who’ll be doing that,” Tom said. “And you’ll notice that we’ve regraded the entire area so the walkway is wheelchair accessible coming and going.”

He was clearly proud of his project, and I couldn’t blame him
for that, but we weren’t here as building inspectors. “So which is worse?” I asked. “AIDS or MS?”

Tom gave me a sharp look. “So you know about that?”

I nodded. “I talked to Big Al. And to Molly.”

“I suppose Molly is still pissed at me?” he asked.

“That’s a reasonable assumption.”

“She was good friends with Abbie, my ex. Did you know we were neighbors at one time? Big Al and I used to carpool to work.”

I hadn’t known that, but it stood to reason.

“I didn’t give it to her, thank God,” he went on. “We’d been fighting a lot, which isn’t exactly conducive to rolling in the hay. As soon as I got the diagnosis, I moved out. She took the kids and moved to Spokane, where she ended up marrying another cop. I would have thought she’d have learned her lesson after marrying me, but her second husband is more of a team player than I ever was. I believe he’s moved up to being an assistant chief.”

“Was Mama Rose one of your girls?” Mel asked.

“She wasn’t,” Tom said. “We met at a support group, several months after Abbie and I split. We were the only heterosexuals in the group, so we sort of bonded. At the time, we were both down on our luck. Rosie wasn’t doing very well, and neither was I. It was looking like we were both going to be short-timers, but that’s when Mama Rose won her Powerball prize. That changed everything—for both of us. It turns out there are things money can buy. We found doctors who got us into clinical trials. And here we are.”

“You’re married?” Mel asked.

Tom shook his head. “No point,” he said. “We’re registered domestic partners. Her AIDS strain is different from mine. If I happened to give mine to her or if she gave hers to me, it could be
fatal. Actually, long-term, with all the medications we take, it’s probably fatal anyway. If the disease doesn’t get us, side effects will. If she dies first, I’m set for life. If I die first, the folks from the AIDS Partnership will dance on my grave.”

“Why’s that?” Mel asked.

“Because a big chunk of whatever I don’t get will go to them. Overnight, they’ll turn into the city’s eight-hundred-pound charitable gorilla. But somehow I don’t think you came all this way to ask about Rosie’s and my health or the state of our domestic tranquillity.”

“We had a few more questions about Marina Aguirre,” I said.

Just then one of the French doors opened, and Mama Rose wheeled her walker out onto the veranda. It was a chilly spring day, with temperatures still in the fifties. She was wrapped in a heavy-duty sweater over a maroon-and-gray Cougar sweatshirt. It made me wonder what connections a former prostitute and her best boy might have with Washington State University.

“What’s going on?” she called down to us.

“We’re just asking a few more questions,” Mel told her.

“Well, come inside to ask them,” Mama Rose ordered. “I’ve asked the cook to make more coffee. It’s cold out, Tom. If you just stand around talking, you’ll end up with pneumonia.”

With that she turned around and tottered back into the house. I was surprised Tom didn’t object to that summary summons—at least he didn’t voice an objection aloud to her. I suppose if you’re already walking around with AIDS, coming down with pneumonia isn’t a good idea. I could see that Mama Rose’s calling Tom inside was a lot like Mel telling me to take my Aleve. Only more so.

“I don’t want to discuss this in front of her,” Tom said urgently. “Ask me now and then get the hell out of here before you make things worse.”

“I take it Marina is a sore spot?” Mel asked.

Tom nodded. “But not the way you think. I never touched her. Rosie loved that girl; thought she walked on water. I think she saw a lot of herself in Marina, and she really wanted her to succeed in getting out of the life. I’ve never told her what really happened.”

“And what was that?”

“Look,” he said impatiently. “I never would have done it if I hadn’t thought Rosie’s life was in danger. She means the world to me, understand?”

“What happened?” I insisted.

“Some guy showed up out here—right here in the yard. A tough guy—a Hispanic tough guy. I don’t know how he found us but he did. He said Marina had ripped off a friend of his. He said he knew Marina had taken off again, but he thought she might have left the money in her trailer at Silver Pines or else with us.”

“When was this?” Mel asked. She was already taking notes.

“Sometime in early November,” Tom said. “I know it was before her rent was due. The guy knew Marina lived at Silver Pines, but he didn’t know which unit. He wanted me to go into her place and look for it.”

“Did you?” I asked.

“Yes, I did. I checked it out.”

“Why?”

“Because he made it pretty clear that if I didn’t, something bad would happen to me or to Rosie.”

“Did you find anything?” I asked.

“Yes, I did,” he answered shamefacedly. “It was there in the freezer compartment of her fridge—several Ziploc bags filled with cash. Not a very original hiding place, if you ask me.”

“How much was there?” Mel asked.

“I didn’t count it all. It looked to be fifty thou or so. Maybe more.
Tell me this. Where does a girl who’s waiting tables at Denny’s come up with that much moolah? I figured she was either dealing drugs or else she stole it, both of which are against Mama Rose’s rules. So I gathered it up, hauled it out of the house in a brown paper bag and gave it back to the guy who came looking for it.”

“Are you kidding?” Mel asked. “You gave away that much money just like that—because some asshole claimed it belonged to a friend of his?”

“It had to,” Tom said. “Who else’s would it have been, and how would they have known about it? Besides, in the larger scheme of things, it wasn’t that much money. Choosing between giving it back and protecting Mama Rose or calling in the long arm of the law wasn’t a big contest.”

I couldn’t help wondering if Tom was telling us the truth or if he was conning us. His cell phone rang just then. “I’m coming,” he said without bothering with a hello. “I’ll be right there.” Then, after a pause, he added, “It’ll just be the two of us. They won’t be staying.”

“And you didn’t tell Mama Rose about any of this because…?” I asked when he ended the call.

“Because Marina was supposed to be one of Mama Rose’s rising stars. She had a job and a boyfriend. The boyfriend was legitimate, as far as I can tell. I don’t think he had anything to do with the drug money. I was planning on finding a way to bring it out in the open the next time we went to collect Marina’s rent, but it turned out there never was a next time. The guy who came here was right. Marina had already taken off for good. She must have realized the bad guys were closing in on her. She bailed in such a hurry that she left the money behind.”

Mel stood with her pen poised over the paper. “Any idea about the ID of the crook who threatened you?”

Tom shook his head. “No idea. I did some checking at the time. Like I said, we’re not too popular with the city administration in town, but out here in the boonies, Mama Rose is something of a folk hero. When the guy came back to pick up the money…”

“He came here?” I asked.

“Yes. I already told you. He knew where we live. But when I handed off the money, I made a mental note of the vehicle license. You know how it goes. Once a cop, always a cop. You’re trained to remember those kinds of details, and that training never goes away. But then, just to be sure, as he was leaving, I went one step beyond that and managed to take a photo of his license plate. Later I checked with one of our local deputies. The vehicle turned out to be stolen—no surprise there. What was left of it wound up in a chop shop down in Tacoma a few days later.”

“So you don’t know who the guy was,” Mel said again.

“No, I don’t. And I’ve got to go now. Otherwise Rosie is going to start asking questions.”

My impression was that he was playing it straight, so I gave him one of my cards. “If you think of anything else, call us.”

“Right,” he said. “I will.”

He walked away, heading inside for his coffee. Mel and I got back into the Mercedes. Mel looked unhappy.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I think he was gaming us,” she told me. “I think he’s the kind of guy who could look you straight in the eye and lie through his teeth.”

Which only goes to show that we’re not always on the same wavelength.