Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) (25 page)

“Just relax, Martin,” said Lasko as we got back to town. “She’s either OK or she ain’t. We find out when we get there.”

“What were you doing out there on the roadblock, anyway? I thought this wasn’t your case anymore.”

“Martin,” he growled affectionately, “get real. I hear this shit on the radio coming down, wild horses ain’t gonna keep me away.”

We pulled up in the hotel drive right behind a big black limo. A uniformed cop came over to Lasko’s window and nodded hello. “It’s OK,” the cop said. “She’s in there alone, and we’ve got men posted in the halls, too. But Watson just radioed and said—”

Lasko shushed him and nodded at me to go on up alone. “Thanks,” I said. “She doesn’t have any reason to trust anyone else. Just give me a minute.”

The bell captain and the desk clerks turned white as I padded into the lobby. I showed them my key and told them to send up some more towels.

&&&

The hall was quiet as I got off the elevator. Most of the rooms had do not disturb signs hung on the doors. I was shaking from head to toe. The cops stationed by the exits squinted their eyes hard upon seeing me, then spoke discreetly into walkie-talkies and eventually let me pass.

She didn’t answer my knock. As I put the key in the door and let myself in I heard water running. The bathroom door was partially shut and there were two suitcases parked at the foot of the bed, two airline tickets by the telephone.

The water stopped and she called out. Her voice was vibrant, just a bit tremulous and sweet with bathroom reverb. She said, “Bingo, is that you?”

I didn’t say a word, just listened to a big bass drum of a heart.
Thunk, thunk
. She called out again, those red artificial nails appearing on the edge of the door as it slowly swung open and she leaned out, her back turned toward me, wet and naked, the mellow dark color of her skin uninterrupted by tan lines.

“Daddy, is that you?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

After I answered, she spun around quickly, reeling as if she’d been struck. She turned and stood knock-kneed, her hands trying to shield the large
V
of glistening pubic hair at her crotch, then ducked back into the bathroom and slammed the door.

I knocked on it hard and told her to come out.

The lock finally clicked, and the knob turned in my hand. I stepped back to let her pass. As she went by I breathed in her fragrant, wet smell. It saddened me. Her hair clung to her head, no longer a spiky crown. The robe had been thrown on hastily, drooping off one shoulder, the dark button of one nipple peeking out like the eye of a pet that had misbehaved. She plopped on the corner of the bed, sighing. The robe fell open further and she didn’t bother to fix it.

Now I could see the catlike aspect of her face as a familial feature. Mexican royalty, or, at least, South Texas Mexican royalty. She rubbed her nose and let her hand fall in her lap, a balled-up fist, the red nails protruding like hard little daggers.

“I see you made it,” she said. “Chicken dick.”

There was a small rumble of clomping feet, and soon the room was crowded with uniforms. Lasko was trying to wedge his way through the throng, saying, “Hold on, hold on just a minute here.”

An eager young officer stopped at the foot of the bed, gun drawn, handcuffs dangling. He looked down at the wet girl, then at the muddy, bloody bass player I saw in the mirror and said, “Which one of you is B. Q. Torres?”

“She is,” said a voice. I turned around. It was Detective Watson, elbowing a couple of his men out of the way. He gave me an astringent smirk, whipped out his own handcuffs, and fastened them on her thin wrists. “You,” he told her, “are under arrest for attempted murder.”

She rolled her eyes, smirking. “Who says I did that?” Watson grinned from ear to ear, looking back at me over his shoulder. “You’ll find out later. Could be several people, though. Could be me, ’cause I think you did. Could be Roberto Villareal, for one. Or it could be Retha Thomas. She’s starting to come around.”

&&&

It turned out that parts of an Absolut bottle were embedded in my shoulder, a tooth was broken, and my leg needed stitches. Those things got me an escorted trip to Brackenridge Hospital, where I was sponged off, jabbed with needles, stitched, swabbed, probed, and bandaged. It took a few hours. Next to the Saturday night drug overdoses, car wreck and shooting victims, I was a low priority. A black officer kept an eye on me, even through the most embarrassing probes and sponges.

While they were putting on the finishing touches, Lasko came back and pulled up a chair, dismissing my sentinel. After they’d read Barbra Quiero Torres her rights and told her that her beloved daddy was dead, he said, she confessed.

“She was also pretty relieved that Retha is gonna be OK,” said Lasko. “The two gals were pretty dang close, but this hot stud deejay by the name of Bone came between them. He was living with Retha, but he snuck over to Barbra’s apartment one night for a quick one and Retha found out.”

“Whoa,” I interrupted. “Barbra told me
she
was going with a deejay, and
Retha
used to have a boyfriend named Bone.” Lasko shook his head. “There’s only one deejay involved in

this case, and his name is Bone. He says he was living with Retha when he cheated on her with Barbra. The gals had a big falling out over it. Retha knew all about Barbra’s daddy’s troubles back here, and heard about the rumors going around about Vick, how it was that he ‘helped out’ guys when they needed it. After she got here, she got to the bottom of those rumors. Turns out that Vick has paid the emergency room bills for fourteen broken digits, six or seven broken arms, and five broken legs over the last ten years. And ten years is as far back as we’ve had time to check, so likely there’s a lot more.”

I hung my head as a new wave of nausea swept over me. “Nice guy . . . end of an era ...” I groaned, which caused the nurse to ask me if it was something she’d done. I shook my head and looked up at Lasko. “So Retha came out here to get even with Barbra for the boyfriend thing by blackmailing Bingo?”

He shrugged. “Partially, I guess. And she was trying to impress the IMF guy by volunteering to come out and check things out. When she got the goods on both Vick and Bingo, she thought she could parlay it into a job. She asked both Vick and Bingo for jobs, but they just tried to buy her off with a few hundred bucks. And you can guess that the IMF guy didn’t have any further use for her, either.”

“And Barbra followed her out here once she got wind of things?” I said.

“Uh-huh. She claims she wasn’t trying to kill her, she just got mad and flew into the proverbial rage. Said she was sick of people trying to put the bite on her dad, especially when it’s her ex-best friend.”

“What does Retha say?”

“Nothing. She’s opened her eyes and mumbled something. She recognizes her parents, and seems to understand that she’s in a hospital. The doctors think she’ll come out of it without too much damage, but it’s real likely that she won’t remember what happened. Retroactive amnesia, they call it.”

The nurse stepped back to admire her handiwork, handed me some forms, and ducked out. Lasko gave me a grocery bag with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, both a few sizes too big. I put them on and checked out at the ER desk, paying the bill with the band’s American Express card.

&&&

Retha was sleeping. The doctor said he thought she was going to be all right, but it would take time. Her eyes were still rimmed with black and yellow, her head sporting a turban of gauze. But she was no longer in limbo. Soon she wouldn’t need to be hooked up to all the tubes and machines that were plugged into her. Lasko and the doctor led me out to the hall once again.

“Her parents are asleep,” said the doctor. “First sleep they’ve had in a week, and nobody, but nobody is going to disturb them.”

An aide came padding up and said something about an emergency. The doctor shook my hand and trotted down the hall. Lasko put an arm around me and told me that Monday morning I’d have to have an interview with the DA, but not to worry about it right now. First things first—Ladonna was in the waiting room.

I went in there and we clung together like two sandburs. And we stayed that way as Lasko drove us to her place. We stayed that way for the better part of the day, and we stayed that way all night too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Monday morning the DA wanted me to look at two mug shots. At least one of the faces in the photos belonged to one of the two cowboys I’d given the $20,000 to in the parking lot of Rosie’s Roadhouse, which is what I told the DA. Afterwards, he put the photos back in a folder, asked me to wait, and left the room. Fifteen minutes passed. A black female assistant came in looking like she’d been up all night with a sick child. She asked a lot of questions and took a lot of notes. Before she left, she made sure that she had a number where they could get in touch with me.

Lasko came in and plopped down in a chair, put his feet up, and got comfortable. “We got us a whole new case this morning,” he said.

I was prepared for the worst. “Barbra’s confession is inadmissible?”

“I don’t think it’s worth the paper it’s written on,” he said. “We don’t have a shred of evidence to support it. Roberto, who I’ll lay odds will never dance
conjunto
again, says it’s bullshit. So does her mother, who flew in from LA with a hotshot lawyer last night. So does one blood-smudged partial print we got from the dresser and the blood that was under Retha’s fingernails, neither of which match Barbra’s.”

“Whose do they match?”

“The man who did it, Bingo. Her dad.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty dang sure. The first thing we showed ole Roberto after he come out of surgery yesterday was his spare blue lame suit, all covered with Retha’s blood. It was found stuffed in a minnow bucket down by the boat dock. Plus we got the cowboys that you just ID’d one of. They’ve worked for Bingo for almost ten years. Mostly down on his ranch near Beeville, but he used to fly them up here for special chores.

“Anyway, these folks are real talkative. Including the ex- Mrs. Torres, who is a damn good-looking six-foot blonde by the name of Cassandra Whitestone. What we know now is this: Bingo slipped out from surveillance Sunday night wearing Roberto’s blue lame suit, went to La Quinta, and waited for Retha.”

“So he’s the one who flew into the proverbial rage,” I said.

He nodded grimly. “I doubt he knew exactly what he was gonna do when he went there. Probably figured to negotiate, because if he wanted to kill her, he’d have gotten someone else to do it.”

“I just can’t believe
anybody,
even Bingo, would stick around town as long as he did,” I said, “waiting to see if Retha would either die or come to and say what happened. And then extort money from Vick. Twice.”

“Aren’t you the one heard him say he was entitled to the hundred grand since he paid for the records that earned Vick the money, only he couldn’t step up and say so? That would’ve led the feds straight to the Danny Cortez alter ego. But that ain’t the whole story. When we ran Danny Cortez through the FBI computer, we found a whole slew of things he was wanted for, and most of them wasn’t nice.”

“Would Vick know enough about those activities to testify about them?”

Lasko nodded. “You bet. And Bingo wouldn’t like that, and not just because they used to be
business
partners.”

“You mean Bingo and Vick ...”

“They were pals, Martin. Why do you suppose Cassandra left Bingo back when the kid was just a tyke? She didn’t like the class of people her husband was hanging around with. I’m not saying Bingo was a pervert, too, but he
knew.
And as the years went by and he flew in higher circles, he got used to the idea of looking down on it, pretending that he came from a different kind of stock. Maybe he even managed to forget the whole thing.”

“But Retha reminded him,” I said.

“Uh-huh. And Bingo flew into a rage when she threw that in his face on top of everything else.”

“You think Barbra knows?”

“I don’t think it would matter to her. She seems to think her dad hung the moon. I don’t think she’s too fond of her mom. She came out here to help Bingo. First Retha was in the way, then you.”

“So what’ll happen to her?”

“Who knows? We might have a case of obstructing justice and accessory to attempted murder if we can show she aided her dad in the attempted murder cover-up. We still have to sort out the extortion thing with Vick. Hell, we don’t know for sure that she
didn’t
meet up with Bingo to wait for Retha. I don’t know. Roberto says that Bingo came back just before dawn. Alone.”

“But you’ve got Barbra’s confession.”

“She denies it now. Her lawyer says it’s no good. Hell, he’s half right. Retha’s gonna live, and all of our evidence points to Bingo, and none of it points to Barbra. The lawyer’s getting her sprung right now.”

Lasko swung his boots off the table and looked down at his hands in his lap. Slowly, like a cloud breaking up under a summer breeze, a smile broke out on his tired face. Not a broad smile, but one that showed more than a glint of mischief.

“You look like a guy who just remembered he got laid last night,” I said.

“Well,” he drawled as he toyed with his notepad, “it’s that born-again hardass, Watson.”

“Son of a Texas Ranger.”

“He’s whimpering like a whupped pup. He was so proud of getting that confession. He personally transcribed and photocopied it, everything but tie it up with a little pink ribbon. Meanwhile I was on the horn to LA tracking down her mom and the dark past of Danny Cortez. And it was a couple of my boys that found that suit in that minnow bucket.”