In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries) Read online

  "Frontera?" She flipped her hair over her shoulder, a disdainful gesture. "Never heard of that place."

  "I understand you got pretty close to your cellmate, Nelda Ruiz, when you were at Frontera," Harry said. "When was the last time you talked to her?"

  "I told you already, I don't know what you're talking about." She seemed awfully huffy.

  The date started to speak, but Harry stopped him with a glance. "You want to excuse us, pal?"

  The date seemed happy to be excused, but Lisa grabbed him by the belt before he could get away. All she did was glance at her watch, and the man handed her a string of tickets. She looked at the tickets, then up at the date, and he gave her three more before he went away, taking his drink can with him.

  She stuffed the tickets into her little sequined evening bag. All pouty, she shouldered Harry. "You screwed me out of a good tip."

  "Lisa," Harry chuckled. "I just screwed you out of your job. But before you leave this place tonight, you're going to tell me what I want to know about your bunkmate Nelda Ruiz or I'm going to screw your ass into jail."

  "On what charge?" She had a whole lot of attitude.

  "Violation of parole; you haven't registered your current address with your parole officer. And if I take you in and the matron finds any evidence of a certain testosterone-rich joy juice in your underwear or behind your teeth, I'll book you for lewd behavior in a public place, too."

  Uncowed, Lisa muttered, "Chingate."

  "I would if I could," Harry laughed. "But I'm not that well built. Now, if you cooperate a little, I'll forget where I found you, and you can finish your shift and cash in your tickets. Just don't be here next time I drop by."

  I said, "Where can we find Nelda Ruiz?"

  Lisa looked directly at me for the first time. Her question was a challenge. "Who are you?"

  "My name is Maggie MacGowen. I want to talk to Nelda."

  She evaluated me through narrowed eyes. "I know you. You're the lady on the TV, aren't you? I saw you."

  "Yes," I said. "I work in television."

  "You make a lot of money from the TV?"

  "Not as much as people seem to think."

  "I hear if you know something about somebody famous, or you have a picture of somebody famous, you can get big money for it."

  "I don't buy information," I said.

  She put up her hand between us, the hand wall. "That's fine with me, 'cuz I got nothing to sell. And I haven't seen Nelda, neither, because talking to her would violate my parole."

  "I thought I made myself clear," Harry said.

  "Yeah, yeah." She waved him off. "You take me in, I'm out tomorrow and you still don't have what you came for."

  In the old days, this is where the cop would have slapped her face, the bitch slap. Since Harry was adhering to the kinder, gentler school of policing, at least in public, I considered doing the deed for him. Instead I leaned in close to her and pulled the Bacardi out from under the cushion. I opened the bottle and offered it to her. First she glanced toward the security man, saw he was talking to the snack counter clerk. Then she looked at Harry, her shield if security should become interested, and gave herself a big shot of dark rum.

  "Harry has to play by the book," I said, holding up her mug shot with the black eye. "I don't."

  She froze with the bottle halfway back to her lips for her second drag when she realized it was herself in the picture.

  "You don't look so good all beat up," I said. "Hard to get paying dates when your face is trashed."

  "You threatening me?" Unsure of herself finally, she turned to Harry. "She threatening me?" Harry just shrugged.

  I put my hand in my jacket pocket and came up with a twenty. I held it out to her. "Twenty bucks buys forty minutes of your time. How long do you think it'll take you to tell us what you know about Nelda?"

  Lisa took another long swallow of rum, let it do its work while she considered her options, I thought. Then she snatched the twenty and made it disappear.

  "Nelda is probably working out of the bus station."

  "Soliciting?" I asked.

  "She ain't no whore. That ain't her thing. Miss Nelda picks up people who come downtown looking to score some crack or some bud. She takes them out into the neighborhood and makes the buy for the customer. It's good money 'cuz she gets paid on both ends: The customer gives her a cut of the score, the dealer gives her a kickback."

  "Do you send her customers?" I asked.

  She squirmed a little, but she didn't say no.

  "How do you get in touch with her?" I asked.

  "She calls me on my cell to tell me where she'll be, gives me a password for customers, tells me where she'll leave my cut." Lisa frowned. "But I haven't heard from her for maybe a week."

  "What's she driving?" Harry asked.

  "Her? Drive?" Lisa laughed, as if the notion that Nelda would use her own car was naive. "They take a taxi from the bus station."

  "A taxi?" I glanced at Harry for confirmation.

  "It's smart," he said. "If anything doesn't look right, she can get away clean."

  He took Lisa's mug shot from me and slipped it back into his pocket. "Where is Nelda's candy store? Where does she take her pigeons?"

  "What, you think she'd tell me?"

  "I do."

  She tried to shake him off. "Most times, some yard down by the bus station."

  "I'll check it out, Lisa." Harry rose. "But if I find out you're lying to me, you know I can find you."

  "Yeah, yeah," she said, followed by a great big, sad sigh.

  When we came out of the elevator downstairs, Lisa's boyfriend was already trying to fall in love with a different girl.

  • • •

  Back in Harry's car, we made another circuit through empty lots, scattering people off the streets. I yawned and asked him if he got bored, or if he found a quiet place to take a nap from time to time. He said no to both questions. I knew this could never have been my job.

  At the corner of Sixth and Wall, a block past the Greyhound bus terminal, with his spotlight Harry scattered a little gathering of flowers of the night, five or six not-very-young women, all of them wearing the uniform of their trade: well-stretched spandex and crippling high heels. These women who worked the transient crowd were hardly Pretty Woman material: dirty hair and soiled clothing stretched too tight over slack bodies. Some were fat and some were skeletal, none of them had been anywhere near lovely for a long time. A far cry from the women working Club Las Palmas, this neighborhood defined the low end of the love-for-hire trade.

  "Strawberries," Harry said. "Look at their teeth, that's how you tell. They work for drug money. Smoking crack and meth fries their gums and their teeth go to hell. Later, just to cheer you up, I'll drive you over and show you the real babes. The most gorgeous hookers in the division."

  Harry cruised along beside a chunky blond woman, separating her from the others. She wore tight, midcalf-length sunflower-print leggings and a tiny pink halter top. After one glance to see if we were potential clients, she kept her eyes straight ahead.

  Harry rolled down my window, and called out to her.

  "Hey, Wanda." He steered with his left hand as he leaned over me to talk to the woman. "When'd you get out?"

  "Out of where, sir?" She wouldn't turn her head toward him. "Sir, I do not know what you're talking about. Sir."

  I thought Harry was having too much fun. "Just taking an evening stroll, Wanda?"

  "Yes, sir, I am. Getting me some fresh air."

  He stopped, and she stopped about even with the headlights so that all we could see was her dimpled backside and her midriff roll.

  "C'mere, Wanda. Talk to me."

  She hesitated, but she backed up a few steps and bent down to put her face at window level. She had no front teeth on either top or bottom, and her skin was hard, as if it had been left outside to dry like beef jerky. More than anything, she looked used-up.

  "Who's your dealer?" Harry asked.

 
"No sir," she said, shaking her head. "I'm clean."

  Harry's sleeve brushed my chin as he extended a mug shot of Nelda Ruiz towards her. He said, "You see her tonight?"

  "I'm sorry, sir, but I do not believe I have any knowledge of the lady."

  "Nelda Ruiz." He flipped one of his cards out of his breast pocket and handed it to her. "If you see this woman, you call me. And if you do, next time you get picked up, have the arresting officer call me. I'll stand up for you."

  She was still leaning over, waiting for Harry to say or do something, when Harry rolled up the window and pulled away.

  "Cons," he said, head turned away to the left to check for oncoming traffic. "You can always tell a con by the way they talk. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You hear her? That's how they have to be in the joint. Totally servile."

  "You called her by name," I said. "Do you know this woman?"

  "Sure I know her." He laughed. "And her mother, too. I just never met her before."

  "So her name's not Wanda?"

  "Now it is. Just ask her."

  I rolled my window back down a few inches to let in some fresh air. The fetid smell of the woman filled the car. "She needs a bath and a toothbrush."

  "Hasn't got many teeth left to brush."

  Harry made a sharp right turn at the corner, dropped down to Seventh where a patrol unit had a man against the wall. Harry pulled up behind them and we got out.

  "What do you have?" Harry asked the arresting officer, a very buff woman rookie. Her partner, who was her training officer, stood to the side, right hand on the butt of his service revolver as he evaluated how she handled herself.

  "D and D. Too much to drink, got in a fight with his buddy."

  "Where's the buddy?"

  She nodded toward her car where I could see the profile of a man in the backseat. "They're pretty steamed."

  "Anyone hurt?"

  "No. They both got in their shots, but they're both way too drunk to inflict much damage."

  Harry walked over to the car and had a conversation with the man inside. He came back grinning. "Buddy's crying. Take them in, let them sleep it off in lockup."

  "Okay." The woman officer handcuffed her charge and using the chain between the cuffs like a handle, she guided him into the backseat of her car next to his friend. I heard her say, "You two behave. And don't throw up in my car or you'll have to clean it up."

  Before we left them, Harry asked both officers to keep an eye out for taxis leaving the bus station with a dark-haired woman in the front passenger seat. He showed them Nelda's mug shot.

  As he eased away from the curb, Harry said, "I like that rookie. Has a lot of confidence about her. You might even say she has attitude. That's what a female street cop needs to survive out here, a salty attitude."

  We were at the edge of an industrial zone. Harry drove down the side streets: Cyclone fences around salvage and storage yards, the walls of blocky warehouses--all of them dark for the weekend--were the backdrop for what looked like a low-rent Scout camp. Against the fences and windowless walls, street people had erected shelters for the night.

  By one-thirty, when we turned down Kohler Street, the sidewalks were solid with the assemblage of junk the homeless use for building materials. Harry drove slowly with his headlights out. The fence around one particular salvage yard seemed to be a gathering place, a club al fresco, as it were. As we approached, the denizens of the block scurried out of the open to slip into their shelters, out of sight.

  Harry turned on his spotlight and aimed the beam through the fence. A dog barked somewhere inside, but all I could see were dark mounds that looked like the carcasses of broken machinery.

  "Dealers hang out inside these fenced-in yards, a different location every night," Harry said, following the beam of his spot. "They sell through the fence. Anyone goes after them or tries to rip them off, they just disappear into the junk."

  "You'd think the property owners would put up lights."

  "Waste of money." Harry shrugged. "The crackheads would only knock them out. For the good citizens camped out here on the sidewalk, it's like living next door to the candy store. Anything they want, they just go to the fence and order it. If they go back into their hovels to smoke or shoot up, we can't go in after them unless we see the buy go down or we get a warrant; court says 'expectation of privacy.' "

  I turned on the camera again and aimed it at the fenced yard, hoping to see something there. The shadows in my monitor were ghostlike; were there human forms inside, or were the apparent movements only tricks of the light?

  Harry turned off the spot and accelerated toward the corner. Before he turned the corner, he took a last glance over his shoulder at the street.

  "You notice how many people were hanging out right where that Dumpster is? I think we've found where the candy store is tonight. Or one of them." He had a eureka grin on his face. "Pretty handy to the bus station.

  "The guy behind the fence can be a fairly big player and pretty well connected," he said. "Takes a big stake, or a backer, to buy enough stuff to stock a store. Lot of volume passes through that fence in a night, lot of money to be made if the dealer doesn't smoke up his profits."

  "Shall we stake it out and hope that Nelda shows up?"

  He shook his head. "Don't worry, we'll get her. Right now, though, we're going to go find the gorgeous hookers I promised you."

  He turned down Ceres Street. The area was in transition from residential to commercial use. Small, old apartment houses sat among newer commercial buildings. At the far corner, the bottom floor of an old, narrow, two-story, yellow stucco tenement building was the Club Caribe, a beer and wine bar. Reggae music poured from the open front door. Above the bar, bright red and turquoise curtains billowed from open apartment windows. The place was seedy, but in a tropical way. Exotic. The people hanging around outside were a mixture, white, black, Asian, Hispanic.

  Nice cars and hopped-up pickup trucks lined both sides of the street. The club and the apartments above it seemed to be an oasis of gaiety in a desert of squalor. Well-dressed men hung out on the sidewalk with women who were so flamboyantly beautiful they could have been refugees from a Las Vegas floorshow.

  Every woman was tall and slender, snaky-hipped and graceful. They still wore hooker high heels, but their clothes were fabulous, like high-budget-film versions of streetwalker apparel.

  Harry pulled up to the curb and honked. A tall creature wearing a tight purple Chinese silk sheath toddled over, swinging her shoulders to make her breasts sway. It wasn't until she leaned into Harry's open window that I caught on.

  Harry cupped his hands over his own breasts. "Where'd you buy those?"

  "Tijuana." Sounded like Ti-hwhana, the J rolled at the back of the throat. The he-she's baritone voice and five-o'clock shadow gave him away.

  "How much?"

  "Two thousand, but worth it." The beauty pointed to my chest. "You want a referral? I'll give you a card."

  "Lovely, but no thanks," I said.

  "How about down there?" Harry asked, pointing to his own lap. "You still have all your goods."

  "Good God yes, honey." Our friend reared back and laughed. "I wouldn't let no man with a knife touch my little Petey. Uh-uh. Why you ask me such a personal question? You want to see it?"

  "I'll take your word for it," Harry said.

  "Speaking of down there." The beauty gestured for Harry to lean in closer. "There's all kinds of implants you can get. You want a nice set of big cojones, they run you about a thousand, fifteen-hundred, but, my, they are pretty. Feel good, too, like real."

  "Thanks for the information." Harry blushed, looked at me, shrugged, and began to pull away from the curb. "See you."

  "Bye-bye, Officer, honey." Playfully, tottering on his ridiculously high heels, the man ran after us for a yard or two, blowing kisses. "Come back, now. I'll be looking for you."

  "Thanks, Harry," I said, laughing, as we drove away. "As I said earlier, you do take me to the nicest place
s."

  "Thought you'd enjoy that," he said.

  "I'd kill to have that guy's thighs."

  "He's a Barbie doll. Everything he has is made of plastic." Harry shook his head. "You'd be surprised how many hetero guys, at least guys who like to believe they're hetero, come down here. Like they think that when they have their hands on a set of silicon boobs, it makes shoving their six inches into a whore's poop chute somehow not gay sex."

  • • •

  After a while, we stopped by the station to stretch, use the rest room and get hot coffee. While we were there Harry set up a strategy with a couple of his patrol units for tracking Nelda. I suggested staking out the bus station, but he said a good stakeout would take too long to arrange. If Nelda spotted a tail she would jackrabbit and we'd have to start all over again.

  The plan was to watch any taxi that turned down Kohler Street. The fare would be given time to make a buy before anyone closed in.

  While Harry worked out the details, I took advantage of the break to walk down the hall to the ladies' room. When I came back out, there was a tall, well-built man, late-forties, waiting for me. He wore civilian clothes, an open-neck shirt and Dockers, but, because of his posture and attitude, I knew he was on the job, or had been.

  "You're MacGowen," he informed me.

  "Guilty," I said.

  "You think you're going to go out there tonight and find Jesus Ramon?" He was sarcastic, dismissive. A hard-ass.

  "Might take me till morning," I said, looking him square in the face. "I didn't get your name."

  "Washington," he said. "Eldon Washington."

  "Interesting." I looked him up, I looked him down. If he didn't have eight inches and ninety pounds on me I would have spun him around and checked his backside, too. Here was Eldon Washington who busted Nelda the day Jesus disappeared. Someone I wanted to talk to. I wondered who had called him.

  I said, "I heard you retired."

  "I put in my twenty-five," he said, as if that gave him some sort of credential to have major attitude. "Doing investigation work for the district attorney now."

  "At this time of night?"

  "I do what I need to do, when I need to do it."

  "Actually," I said, "I'm not looking for Jesus, but for an old friend of yours, Nelda Ruiz."