New River Blues (13 page)

Zack hit the pavement with one foot, whirled helplessly left with his arms out, and slammed into the car going by him in the next lane. That car slowed, all the vehicles behind it stopped, and most of the traffic in the nearest lanes got stopped within a couple of car-lengths.

Zack was lying on the pavement by then, dazed and bleeding from scrapes all over his body. He could see his van far ahead, speeding toward the next intersection. Barely able to hold his head up, he watched Nino maneuver into the outside lane and turn right. The little shit was probably headed back downtown, Zack thought. Then the world got distant and blurry for a few minutes, and the next thing he knew he was being helped into a squad by the patrolman somebody had called.

They sat there for some time while the patrolman offered him water and then a ride to an emergency room. He took the water and refused the hospital, asking instead for a ride to his shop so he could get his other vehicle.

‘I can do that,' the officer said, ‘but don't you want to file a complaint against your passenger first?' He was watching his new victim curiously by now, so on the spot Zack invented a troubled nephew who needed help, not blame.

‘I fired him today because he's no good on the job, but I certainly don't want to give my brother any more trouble than he's got already.' Stiffening up fast and still a little dazed, Zack was nevertheless clear on one point – the last thing he needed to do right now was fill out any damn police reports.

He persuaded the patrolman to give him a lift back to his shop so he could get his car.

‘What about your van, though?' the officer said. ‘Don't you want to report it stolen?'

‘Nah,' Zack said. ‘He'll go to one of his relatives and I know 'em all. I'll just drive around till I find it.'

‘Well,' the officer said, ‘if you're sure.'

‘He can't seem to grow up,' Zack said. ‘By now he's probably crying to his mama about his mean old uncle.' He shrugged and said, ‘Families.'

‘Yeah,' the patrolman said, ‘ain't they the worst?'

Alone in her workspace, Sarah surveyed her littered desk and thought longingly,
Back in the day, I'd have stayed right here until midnight and cleaned up this mess.
She still sometimes yearned for the flat-out concentration of those first two kinetic years in Homicide, when her zeal to be the best female detective in the history of TPD kept her at her desk through many late nights. Secretly, she still believed she might have nailed the title if there'd been one.

‘And all that cost you,' Andy Burke had pointed out near the end of that blurry work spasm, ‘was our marriage.'

‘Oh, right, and you jumping the bones of every waitress you could catch had nothing to do with it,' she'd yelled back, hurling a plate and two phone books at his head. Her aim and the strength of her pitching arm improved so much during that last disastrous year of marriage that on the final morning of white-hot rage she was able to heave most of his clothes and his Waterpik out the door before he got her stopped. Wherever the balance of blame lay between Andy's carousing and her drudgery, adding Homeric battles to the mix had made their home life too toxic to tolerate.

But now her divorce was yesterday's news, and the new priorities in her life demanded she get home for dinner if it was humanly possible. So she plunged headlong into the multitasking mode by which a Tucson homicide detective enabled a family life. Tobin called it ‘Fun with both hands.'

Wearing her headset so she could talk on the phone while she sorted paper, she worked through several clusters of phone tag before she dug down to a memo in Menendez' handwriting, ‘One of the servers at the party was a girl named Felicity – actress at Grand Street theater,' and the number. She dialed and listened to the phone ring many times before somebody with a young androgynous voice picked it up and said, breathlessly, ‘Grand Street Theater.'

Guessing that a theater group would be informal, Sarah took a chance and just asked for Felicity. The hurried person at the other end of the line shouted, without hesitation, into some echoing space, ‘Anybody seen Felicity?' A distant answer floated back, filtered through the heavy breathing of the person on the phone. When the remote yelling stopped, the person on the phone said confidently, ‘She's due to rehearse the next scene, so she'll be here soon.'

Sarah left her number, privately betting she'd leave it many more times before she got an answer. But five minutes later when she answered her ringing phone, ‘Burke,' she heard a voice like a velvet mitten say, ‘This is Felicity.'
I'm a kind, cultivated person
, the voice suggested,
and when you know me better you'll like me even more.

‘This is Detective Sarah Burke at the Tucson Police Department. I'm calling because I understand you were part of the catering crew that served the Henderson party Sunday, and I need to ask you a few questions.'

‘Questions? I don't really . . . what did you say your name is? I'm sorry, there's a lot of noise in here.'

‘Detective Sarah Burke, of the Tucson Police Department.' She spoke louder and slower. ‘I need to ask you about a party in El Encanto Estates, where two people were murdered sometime Sunday night.'

‘I'm an actress, Ms Burko, I work here at the Grand Street Theater.'

‘Burke.
Detective
Burke. You also sometimes serve parties, as a caterer, right? And you were on the crew at the Henderson house Sunday night.'

‘Oh, ah . . . Henderson. I have worked there a couple of times, yes.'

‘Including Sunday night?'

‘Let's see, was that when . . . it was mostly in the afternoon, as I remember it. Cake and ice cream, a birthday party – for a daughter named, um, Patricia I think.'

The kind of thumps and crashes that in scripts are called ‘noises off' had begun behind her. Felicity shouted, away from the phone, ‘Oh, God, what did you do?' Into the phone she said, ‘Could we talk about this later, please? I've got a mess on my hands here.'

There was one last crash and then a humming silence coming over her dead phone. Sarah listened for a moment before acknowledging to herself that this young woman had hung up on her. She said aloud, to her empty cubicle, ‘What the hell?'

I'll catch her tomorrow, she decided, looking at her watch. She called her own house and asked her mother, ‘Everything under control?'

‘Pretty much.' At her house, the clattering noises meant Aggie Decker was unloading the dishwasher. ‘Hold on a second.' The noise level changed, a door closed, and when Aggie spoke again a bird was singing nearby. ‘Denny's got her nose out of joint about something, do you know what it is?'

‘No. She was fine this morning. Did you just go outside?'

‘Yeah, I'm on the back step. Denny came in from school looking like a storm in the desert, but when I asked her what was wrong she said, “Nothing.” Changed her clothes and started on a big pile of homework, hasn't said a word to me since.'

‘Huh. Better than having a tantrum, I guess. I'll see what I can do tonight. But you know Denny, she marches to her own drummer. Anything else?'

‘Will Dietz just parked his car at the curb. Were you expecting him for dinner?'

‘More or less.'
As much as I ever know what to expect from him.
‘Have you got enough food or shall I—'

‘We're fine. You on skej?'

‘Yes, I'm just heading out. Do we need milk?'

‘Tomorrow,' Aggie said, ‘but I'll bring it with me when I come.'

‘OK. Anything else?'

‘No, we're good, just come on home.'

She punched END and stacked the last of tomorrow morning's work in the In basket, with the highest-priority stuff on top. One last check of her email, four more answers banged out in the semi-literate patois that was replacing decent English on electronic devices worldwide, ‘c u 4 lunch thurs . . .' She shut the machine down, locked her desk, and grabbed her jacket in one fluid move, and trotted for the elevator.

Mount Lemmon turned purple and then slate as she zigzagged north-east on traffic-clogged streets. She swiveled her head to ease the tense muscles of her head and shoulders.
Relax
 . . . but the thought came unbidden:
God, there's still dinner to get on the table and then dishes and help with homework, and after that whatever the hell is bothering Denny.
She had taken in her ten-year-old niece at the beginning of October, when her sister Janine took a powder. And in the same month, Will Dietz had landed in her life, tentative as a butterfly but with no apparent inclination to migrate further. He seemed to have two equally intense desires – to stay as close to her as she'd allow, and not to talk about his intentions, if any.

Not that Sarah was pressing him for declarations. Who had time to make big decisions? Just crowding her everyday life into her limited means felt like all she could possibly handle right now.

She knew Will Dietz was the man she should have been looking for if she'd believed he existed. But by the time he popped up on her radar screen she was dealing with a pothead sister and a badly spooked niece. He had put aside his convalescence from recent life-threatening injuries, though, to help her out during the disappearing-Janine crisis. Then he had taken to turning up at her door, often unannounced but timed so she'd know he researched her schedule. Meantime he'd charmed her hard-edged mother off her feet by making himself useful around the house. What could you do with a man like that but take him in and feed him extra helpings?

As for the other unsettled factor in her life, she was fiercely proud that Denice Lynch, a bright, tough kid who was nobody's fool, wanted to stay with her in preference to other relatives. But she was flying blind a lot of the time. There'd been no trace of Janine since she disappeared leaving only an enigmatic note. Forced to make decisions whether the system said they could or not, Sarah and her mother had switched Denny's school to one closer to Sarah, cleaned up Janine's rental house, and turned in the keys. Sarah told Denny, ‘I'm trying to get appointed your legal guardian, but I'd like to find your mother first so we don't have to sue her in court, you understand?'

Denny dipped her head in the quick little nod that was becoming her default response to the shame of abandonment. Sarah wanted to make their relationship official and see that look go away, but she was hoping to do it without paying a lawyer, because she needed all her take-home pay.

Finding the hours and money for child care in the same month she made space and time for a still-convalescing man often felt like a bigger mountain than she could possibly climb. She understood now why single mothers occasionally wore the panicked expressions of horses running from burning stables.

Aggie had promised, when Janine took off, to help care for Denny. And she had been as good as her word, giving up some of the fun and games in her retirement community to come across town and cover the hours after school. She did most of the cooking and laundry while she was there. Dietz was picking up a lot of the slack too, doing grocery runs and garbage and repair jobs. A sure-fire way to lose a new boyfriend, Sarah thought, but once, when she started to protest, he wagged his screwdriver at her and said, ‘Sarah, this is strictly business. Stay out of it.' He went back to resetting the hinge on a kitchen cupboard. ‘Aggie traded me a mending job on my blue sweater for a fix on this door.'

Aggie made no secret of her opinion that Will Dietz walked on water. ‘Anything is possible now,' she told Denny one day, ignoring Sarah who was standing right there. ‘My daughter the cop has even landed a decent boyfriend.'

All she got back from her granddaughter was the look Sarah had begun to think of as the Denny Special, a smile so cool and polite it curdled milk. Denny Lynch had seen enough boyfriends come and go in her mother's turbulent household to convince her that the whole demographic ought to be driven off a cliff. Never exactly rude to Will Dietz, she treated him with stiff courtesy that carried its own indictment, and went out of her way to avoid being alone with him.

Dietz wasn't offended, or even surprised. ‘Denny's been jerked around,' he said, when Sarah ventured an apology, ‘give her time.' He and Sarah were alone that afternoon for once, in his Spartan casita on the east side, wrapped tightly around each other after one of their rare hours of love-making. Dietz's nondescript face settled into ironic folds beneath the diagonal scar that put a second part in his hair. ‘The child can't possibly resist my charm forever.'

‘Probably not,' Sarah nuzzled his neck. ‘Although much of your charm is known only to a lucky few.' She caressed some of his hidden charm and Dietz chuckled low in his throat.

Inconvenient as their present living arrangements were, Denny's dubious nature wasn't all that kept Sarah from talking about moving in with Dietz. Her own house was too small to accommodate another tenant, and all Dietz had told her about his situation was, ‘I'm too poor to seek help for my low self-esteem.' Even allowing for his quirky sense of humor, she could see that the thrift-shop decor in his apartment matched what she knew about him, that he'd had an accident-prone career in law enforcement and a divorce that dragged on for years.

‘Will and I,' she told Aggie, ‘have everything in common – unfortunately.' It was true, they were classic law-enforcement train wrecks. The crazy hours and emotional stress of their jobs put so much pressure on personal lives that the divorce rate in the department was an ongoing source of embarrassment. Not to mention the disastrously low survival stats during the first five years after retirement. Even a cockeyed optimist might suggest they take it slow.