Skull Duggery (10 page)

Julie was considerably more animated. “Really?” she said, grinning. “Oh, it’ll be great to see him. I was afraid we might miss him.”

“And I have better news for you than that,” Annie told her. “Jamie’s coming down with him. The knee’s doing better than expected, so he’s flying down to Mexico City in the morning and he’ll drive down with Tony. He’s raring to get back to work.”

At this news Julie really lit up. “Jamie’ll be here tomorrow? I can leave the bookkeeping to him? I don’t have to do that horrible stack of accounts payable, and bank reconciliations, and God knows what else? I’ve been scared to death to touch them, I don’t know anything about QuickBooks or-”

“Fear no longer,” said Annie. “You’re off the hook. Leave all that stuff for the man. Jamie thrives on it. Hey, look who’s here. Greetings, jefe.”

Chief Sandoval, who had just entered, was approaching them somewhat tentatively. After a round of greetings and an introduction to Julie, he stood there looking undecided.

“Have a seat,” Carl said, pulling out a chair for him. “Gideon was just telling us about your mummy.”

Sandoval remained standing, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “Well, that’s what I came about. I e-mailed my report-also your report, Gideon-to the police in Oaxaca, and they want me to come in to speak with them.” A despairing sigh. “I have to go tomorrow morning to the offices of the-I don’t know how to say it in English-the Procuraduria de Justicia -”

“It’s like the state attorney general,” Annie contributed, and to Gideon: “The police here report to them.”

“Yes, attorney general,” said Sandoval. I am to meet with Sergeant Nava. I remember him from before, from the little girl. Not such an easy man to get along with.” He turned a pleading, apologetic look on Gideon. “I was wondering if… I was wondering…” He paused encouragingly, as if wanting Gideon to finish the sentence for him. “Wondering if…”

“Yes?” Gideon was at a total loss. “Wondering if?”

“Wondering if…”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Annie burst out, “he’s wondering if you would go with him.”

“To talk to the police?”

“Yes.” Sandoval launched into an excited flood of words: “I’m afraid if he asks me things, how will I answer? I know about traffic accidents, about people who drink too much mezcal and get in fights. What do I know of bones, of wounds? What if they want to know more? What if they want to know how-”

“Sure,” Gideon said, “I’ll go with you.”

“ Thank you!” Sandoval, practically going limp with relief, sagged into the chair that Carl had pulled out for him.

“Have yourself a michelada, Chief,” Annie said. “You look like you could use one. Stay for dinner, why don’t you?”

“But already I come here three times this week. I don’t like-”

“Oh, break a rule for once, it’ll do you good. Come on, we’d like to have you.”

Sandoval grinned and relaxed a little more. “Well, okay, maybe this one time.” After a swallow, he looked curiously at Julie and wagged his finger at her. “Hey, wait a minute, I know you. Didn’t I used to see you…”

Julie smiled. “You have a good memory, Chief. You used to see me right here. I was Julie Tendler then, Carl’s niece, just a teenager helping out for the summer.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember.” He smiled fondly at her. “And I was Memo Sandoval, Dorotea’s dumb big brother, still thinking I had to be a weaver, only I stunk at it.”

“Well, I’m sure you’re a good police chief.”

“From what I’ve seen, he is,” said Gideon gallantly.

Sandoval responded with a modest shrug and changed the subject. On his way in, he had passed the women’s group on the terrace. “You know, maybe it would be better for me to join your guests outside?”

“Well, now, I don’t know that I’d-” began Carl.

But Sandoval was already heading for the terrace. “Tonio, he likes that I do this. The ladies especially, always they are impressed to know the chief of police. To meet me,” he said complacently, “makes them feel protected. I answer the questions.”

“You wouldn’t think so to look at him,” Annie said, watching him go, “but our timid little chief has quite an eye for the ladies. He does seem to get along with them too.”

“I don’t know about these particular ladies, though,” Julie said, seeing the women turn as one toward the lone, innocently approaching male. “Hm, I wonder why the phrase ‘lamb to the lions’ leaps to mind.”

Gideon concurred. “They’ll eat him alive.”

Twenty minutes later, as they were starting on their dinners, the chief was back, shell-shocked and staring.

“Madre de Dios,” he mumbled as he sat down with his tray. “Those ladies.”

Mercifully, the others refrained from pursuing the subject.

The offices of the Procuraduria General de Justicia were located well south of downtown Oaxaca, out near the airport, in a once-palatial nineteenth-century building that had gone sadly to seed. There were still touches of elegance to be seen on the outside-ornate grillwork on the upper-story windows, the remnants of fine stucco-work here and there, panels of veined marble, a pair of fountains flanking the grand stone entrance stairway, a row of elaborately wrought metal benches-but all was run-down and tatty. The stucco was flaking, the rusted fountains no longer flowed, and the benches had been painted so many times, and were so in need of yet another coat, that they were a mottled black and white, impossible to tell whether the black had chipped away to reveal the white or vice-versa. In some places-the arms, or the ornamental rosette that topped their backs, the successive layers of paint were worn all the way down to bare, gray metal. On one rosette Gideon was able to make out a single brave word in bold relief: Libertad.

The building itself, coated in two equally repellent shades of green, was also seriously in need of a new paint job (in different colors, one would hope). Only the neat line of flowering shrubs along the foundation showed signs of loving, or at least painstaking, care.

All this Gideon had to take in on the fly as he and the heavily perspiring Sandoval walked rapidly-trotted, in the smaller Sandoval’s case-over the brick-paved front plaza and up the two flights of wide, curving stone steps to the entrance. From Sandoval’s point of view, the day had gotten off to a disastrous start. He had allowed what he thought was more than ample time for the drive from Teotitlan, but he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had had a terrible time finding the place. Thus, instead of being fifteen minutes early for his two o’clock appointment, they were ten minutes late. They would have been only five minutes late had matters not been made worse when, having no convincing credentials to produce, he had been denied entrance to the official-business parking lot and had had to park on a side street two blocks away. As a result, Chief Sandoval, who had been a nervous wreck to begin with, was practically a moving puddle by the time they got there.

Once through the entrance they found themselves in a plain lobby that smelled of disinfectant, unadorned except for much-thumbed sheaves of official-looking documents hanging on cords from the walls. People moved in and out of corridors radiating from the lobby, the bureaucrats and civil servants (confident, decisive, focused) easily distinguishable from the ordinary citizens (apprehensive, uncertain, demoralized).

On one wall was a building directory, from which Gideon read aloud: “ ‘Director de la Policia Ministerial, planta sotano.’ Basement.”

“Dungeon,” Sandoval amended in a strained voice.

At the bottom of the stairwell they were blocked by a hulking giant with an imposing black mustache. He was at least a couple of inches taller than Gideon’s six-two, and a whole lot wider, dressed in black military fatigues and combat boots, with the blunt, squarish black handle of what appeared to be a 9-mm Beretta sticking out of his belt.

He looked them offensively up and down. “You’re in the wrong place,” he said dismissively in Spanish. “This is police headquarters.” With a jerk of his chin he gestured for them to get the hell back upstairs.

Sandoval instantly began babbling away with a stammering, apologetic explanation for their presence that got nowhere until Gideon interrupted.

“We have an appointment with Sergeant Nava,” he said in Spanish.

Until now, the cop had fixed his attention mostly on Sandoval. Now he turned it on Gideon and came a step closer; two steps. Whatever he’d had for breakfast, it had been heavily doused with cumin and garlic. “You’re not Mexican.”

“No. American.”

“American.” Disdainful, skeptical. “What’s your business here in Oaxaca?”

Gideon was quickly learning why the Oaxaca police, and to a lesser extent the police of Mexico, had the reputation they did. And it wasn’t simply the man’s size and attitude that intimidated, it was that gun stuffed so thuggishly into his belt. Was that meant to be intimidating (which it was)? What, could they not afford holsters?

“I’ve already told you why we’re here,” he said sharply, answering discourtesy with discourtesy. “Now where can we find Sergeant Nava, please?”

The cop narrowed his eyes, glared at him and opened his mouth to speak, at which point Sandoval started in again, grinning and wheedling and talking twice as fast as before. “Officer… sir… I’m the, the chief of police, you see-from, from Teotitlan del Valle? I have… there was… Sergeant Nava, he said to… he knows me, he told me-”

He was cut off by a weary bellow from down the hall. “Donardo, for Christ’s sake, will you put an end to that goddamn racket and bring them back here?” Gideon’s Spanish wasn’t up to getting every word, but following the gist was easy enough.

“Yes, Sergeant,” Donardo muttered with a roll of his eyes. Giving them a silent look that made it clear they had made no friend of him and would be wise not to cross his path again, he turned and led them down a linoleum-floored corridor bordered by a string of ramshackle office cubicles constructed from shoulder-high, building-grade plywood partitions that had been nailed together and covered over in watered-down white paint, the many knotholes, patches, and joints still plainly visible.

Sergeant Nava’s cubicle was no different from the ones they had glimpsed on their way: a cramped enclosure with an old metal desk and chair, a computer, a file cabinet, two unmatched metal chairs for visitors, and papers and files scattered over every available surface. There was nothing in it that wasn’t utilitarian in the extreme; not a photograph, not a coffee cup, not an ashtray. The Sergeant himself was cut in the Donardo mode, thickly built, blackly mustached, wearing black fatigues with the gun tucked into his belt. He was, however, marginally more polite than his subordinate-not polite enough to smile or say hello or get out of his chair, but enough to indicate with a wave of his fingers that they should take chairs as well, into which they squeezed, Gideon with some difficulty. With the back of the chair shoved right up against the wall to make some Space, his knees were still pressed against the desk.

Wordlessly, Nava watched them sandwich themselves in. Then, with a tired sigh, he leaned back-he had more room than they did-and addressed Sandoval.

“So. You again. This time a mummy.”

Sandoval giggled. “Yes, Sergeant, I’m afraid it’s me again. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but I knew that the proper action, in a matter such as this, was to inform you at once, so after Dr. Bustamente kindly-”

“This happy little village of yours-it’s getting to be quite a dangerous place, isn’t it? As bad as Mexico City.”

“Well, this didn’t happen in the village, Sergeant. Neither did the other one, the little girl. They were both found-”

Nava silenced him with a brusque motion of his hand. “All right, just tell me about it. And speak more slowly, for God’s sake. I already have a headache.” He jerked up the cuff of his shirt, grasped the face of his watch between thumb and forefinger, and studied it, sending a clear message: I am a busy man. My time is extremely valuable. I will allot a little of it to you, but be quick about it.

Still, he listened to what Sandoval had to say, or at least he allowed Sandoval to talk without interrupting him, other than the occasional finger-waving “Yes, yes,” to hurry him along-for almost five minutes. But he made it no secret that his mind was elsewhere. He asked no questions and jotted down only a couple of brief notes.

Obviously, he wasn’t much interested in the case, for which Gideon couldn’t blame him: a drifter, his body subjected to the depredations of the desert for half a year before anybody found it, with no apparent clues as to who had killed him or why-there wasn’t much the policia were going to be able to do about it, or, frankly, much impetus for them to try. Nava was doing pretty much what an American police Sergeant would do in his place: going through the motions for the record. But most American sergeants, or so Gideon hoped, would have done it a little more courteously.

Sandoval too was quick to spot the lack of interest, and it cheered him up perceptibly. His thoughts flowed across his mobile face as clearly as if he’d spoken them: maybe this wasn’t going to be as bad as he’d feared, maybe they’d just tell him to go ahead and bury the body and they’d get around to it when they could sometime, maybe Nava had been thumbing abstractedly through the thin folder that Sandoval had supplied, and his first question, interrupting Sandoval in mid-sentence, was directed at Gideon. He held up the report on Garcia’s body.

“You’re Professor Oliver? You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“It’s in English.”

“Yes.”

“But obviously you speak Spanish.”

“Speak, yes-a little. But I don’t write it well enough for a police report. I assumed you’d have somebody here who could translate. I’ll be glad to help.”

“Mm.” Nava’s lips, barely visible under his mustache, were pursed. Sandoval held his tongue, only too happy to have the sergeant’s attention directed at Gideon and not at him. However, when Nava spoke again it was to Sandoval. With a jerk of his head at Gideon, he said, “If you think we are paying for his report, you’re mistaken. It was authorized without my permission. God knows we spent enough on your last case. Unless you have a budget for it, he will have to go without his fee.”