Natural Causes (33 page)

"What about Dover?" I said.

"He died of natural causes, following a fall in
the bathroom. That's the way it's going to stay."

I sighed. "Maybe so."

"Frank would appreciate a call, Harry. He feels
rotten about this. He really did want to clear everything up."

"I'll call him," I said. "I guess I'll
fly back to Cincinnati tonight."

"You want me to pick you up?"

"No, I left my car at the airport."

"I'm sorry about this, Harry," Jack said.
"You must think we're real shits."

"No, I don't," I said. "Maybe he did
die accidentally. I found a document at his house here in Las Cruces.
Could be he came out here to work on it, after all."

Jack laughed. "You don't really believe that, do
you?"

"No," I said.

"What was the document about?"

"A man running from his past, who disguises
himself as something he's not, then gets blackmailed for it."

Moon didn't say anything for a moment. "That
sounds familiar. Must have been one of our old story lines."

"Probably," I said.

"I'll see you when you get back, Harry,"
Jack said and hung up.

I packed my overnighter and called the El Paso
airport. There was a plane leaving for Cincinnati at four-thirty that
afternoon. I booked the flight. It would take me about an hour to
drive down to El Paso, the ticket agent told me. That gave me five
and a half hours to kill. Checkout time at the hotel was two. I
decided to wait until then to check out, in case I wanted to come
back to the room to make a call or eat lunch. I left the overnighter
in the luggage rack by the door and walked down to the lobby. It was
funny but I didn't feel angry or disappointed about being taken off
the case. I think I felt relieved.

I decided to do a little sightseeing-like any
tourist. It was a very warm day. The sky was white hot overhead and
pale blue above the mountain ranges. The desert was drenched in
sunlight. I drove out on the desert for a while, then worked my way
southwest to Mesilla. I stopped at the old town square again and took
a closer look at the church and the shops. I ended up in the curio
store at the end of the promenade--the stone building where the
Gadsden purchase had been signed and where Billy the Kid had been
jailed. The woman with the weathered face and the grudge against
Santa Fe was waiting on a Mexican boy when I stepped through the
door. The boy was about twenty-two and he wanted a silver belt buckle
so badly that he could taste it. The woman took the one he wanted out
of the glass case and he fondled it lovingly. He was a tall, skinny
kid in a plaid shirt and blue jeans. His black hair was cropped so
short in back that he looked like a Marine in boot camp. When he
handed the buckle to the woman, she dropped it back in the display
case and gave him a disgusted look. The kid looked embarrassed and
walked out. As he passed by me, I noticed that he had a teardrop
tattoo on his eye, like Ramirez.

"Goddamn Mexican trash," the woman said
when the kid had gone. "Coming in here and wastin' my time. The
only way he's gonna get seventy bucks is to steal it. And both he and
I know it."

"Why do you say that?"

She pulled at the flesh beneath her eye. "Didn't
you see it?"

"The tattoo?"

"Yeah. It's their macho mark. You can only wear
that if you've done hard time. That's what they say, anyway."

"You know a man named Jorge Ramirez?"

She nodded. "I know Jorge."

"He's got that kind of tattoo."

"He did time," the woman said. "But he
straightened himself out. He's one of your decent mexicans. It's that
wetback riff-raff I can't abide."

"What did Ramirez do time for?" I asked
her.

"I don't remember. It's been a while. Like I
said, he straightened himself out. Got married, went to work, had
kids."

"Did you know Quentin Dover?"

"Hell, yes," she said. "I knew
Quentin. Sorry he's dead."

"Ramirez worked for him, didn't he?"

"He not only worked for him, he worshipped him.
Dover was good to Ramirez. Good to a lot of Mexican families around
here. He had a thing for the so-called disadvantaged."

"You didn't approve?" I said.

"Never said that," the woman said sharply.
"He was just like a lot of Easterners who come out here and
don't know what it's all about, that's all. He would have grown out
of it, after a time. You gotta do for yourself first, mister. That's
my motto. You can't depend on other people to do for you. They'll let
you down every time."

"You think Dover depended too much on Ramirez?"

"I think he didn't depend enough on himself,"
she said.

She was the kind of woman who gave the frontier
spirit a bad name. But she was honest in her own, bigoted fashion and
what she'd said about Ramirez interested me. But not enough to do any
more detecting. I was done with Quentin Dover. He'd been picked over
enough, God knew, in life and in death. And I'd liked Ramirez enough
not to want to know whether he'd been involved in Dover's final folly
or in some folly of his own. I was just a tourist now.

I drove back to the hotel at one-thirty and went up
to my room to get my luggage. The message light on the phone was
blinking, so I picked up the receiver and dialed the desk. Sy
Goldblum had called at twelve-thirty. He'd left a number where he
could be reached and an urgent message that I return the call. I
almost didn't do it. I almost tore the phone number up and walked
down to the desk and checked out. What I didn't know wasn't going to
hurt me-or anyone else. And I didn't want to hurt anybody, least of
all Quentin Dover. Connie would have been proud.

I made the call anyway.

Goldblum sounded very excited. That in itself almost
made me hang up the phone.

"My friend in Texas tells me there is no Gene
Clark in El Paso," Wattle said. "Thought you'd like to
know."

"I already knew," I said.

"Now here comes the interesting part."

"Don't tell me," I almost said.
"That license number you gave me? Ran it
through DMV this morning and guess what? The registration comes up
Jerry Ruiz."

"Shit," I said.

"Why shit? Christ, man, we're really onto
something!"

I thought of that broken-down ranch, the man, the
woman, and their kids and felt sick at heart. If I told Wattle where
I'd spotted that plate, he'd have cops swarming all over the Ramirez
ranch in a matter of hours. And if the cops knew about Ruiz, the gang
that killed Maria wouldn't be far behind. There'd be more dead
bodies--more dead kids. And for what? Because Ramirez did a favor for
a man he'd loved and admired. "Who have you told about this?"

"Nobody yet. I've been waiting for you to call
back to find out where you spotted the tags."

"I want you to do me a favor, Sy. I want you to
forget about the plates."

"Forget about them," he said with a laugh.
"You're kidding."

"I'm not kidding," I said. "Forget I
mentioned them."

"I can't do that, Harry," he said in a
tough voice. "This ain't the sort of thing you can pass by.
Somebody's got to look into it."

"I'll look into it. I give you my word."

"It ain't enough. This is murder, man."

"Look, you don't know that. I don't either. The
Ruiz kid hasn't been directly related to the Sanchez girl's death."

But it wasn't the Ruiz kid I was thinking of.

"I can't forget it, man. Understand?"

"Two thousand," I said. "I'm sure I
can get it for you, Sy. By tomorrow."

"Make it five," he said.

"I'll make it five."

He didn't say anything for a moment. "I don't
understand this, man."

"I don't either," I said. "Is it a
deal?"

"I'll have to think about it," he said, and
hung up.
 

39

I called the El Paso airport and canceled my
reservation for the flight to Cincinnati. Then I called Frank
Glendora at the United American building.

"We've got a serious problem," I said.

"I'm really sorry about this whole thing,
Harry," he said unhappily. "Connie's just being
intransigent."

"That's not the problem."

"Well, what, then?"

I explained the situation to him. "Dover's
overseer, Jorge Ramirez, is apparently harboring a fugitive--a kid
named Jerry Ruiz. Ruiz is the boy who helped Dover get out of the
Belle Vista on Friday night. He's probably also the one who picked
him up at the airport on Sunday morning. The point is, Ruiz was
heavily involved in Dover's scheme. And now it looks like Ramirez was
involved, too."

"But we don't know what that scheme was, do we?"
Glendora said innocently.

I was getting a little sick of that innocence. "At
this point, I can make a pretty good guess. You must know that,
Frank. Jack has to have told you."

"He told me some things," Glendora said.

"Frank, this isn't the time to kid around. Ruiz
is connected to a killing. He may be marked for killing himself."

"I fail to see how that involves us."

"You do? Then let me make this as plain as I
can. The Sanchez girl and her son were tortured to death. Cut and
burned, Frank. Gangland style. They were made examples of, because
they'd gotten involved in a drug deal that didn't go down right. You
hear what I'm saying?"

"Yes," he said. "I hear you."

"It was Dover's deal, Frank. I'd bet on it now.
I don't know the details, but they're bound to come out. Sy Goldblum
at LAPD knows that and he also knows that I know where Ruiz is. He
knows I'm withholding evidence in a capital crime, too. Now we can
buy him off maybe. But I wouldn't count on him staying bought and
it's going to cost you a great deal of money."

"How much?"

"Five thousand, at least. It'll probably be more
by tonight, once Sy has had some time to think about how serious this
thing is. And something has to be done about Ruiz, Frank."

"What?" he said.

"I don't know. I won't know until I find out how
deeply involved he was in Quentin's scheme and what that scheme
actually was. If Quentin screwed with the wrong people, he could have
sentenced everyone else who was connected to him to death. Maybe we
can make it right again--for a price. But we have to know who to deal
with."

"You're asking me to put you back on the case,"
he said.

I laughed. "You think I'm looking forward to
this? I was just as ready to call it quits as you were. Quentin has
that effect on me."

"Then why not ... I mean could we just ..."

"We could," I said. "But if it ever
comes out that we did, you'd have the biggest scandal on your hands
in the company's history. If I could make Ruiz's car, so can a state
trooper. Goldblum already ran the license through California DMV, so
somebody at DMV knows about it, too. And if the cops know about it,
you can bet the thugs who killed Maria Sanchez know about it."

"God's teeth," Glendora said.

"There's something else," I said. "If
I'm right about this thing, Ramirez, Ruiz, the Sanchez girl--they
wouldn't have been involved if it weren't for Dover. Ramirez, in
particular. I don't want to see anybody else get killed or busted, if
I can prevent it. Not for Quentin's sake. And if I'm right and we
don't follow up on this, I've got the feeling that there's going to
be more death. Maybe United can live with that, but I can't."

Glendora took a deep breath. "Neither can I,"
he said. "Do what you have to do, Harry. I'll back you up on it.
I'll go out to L.A. tonight to talk to Goldblum and to be available
in case you need me."

"Good," I said.

"You may be costing me my job, old boy. You and
Quentin."

"You shouldn't have cared about him," I
said.

"I couldn't help it,"
Glendora said.

***

I didn't start thinking about what I'd bitten into
until after I'd gone out to the car. Then everything began to seem
very complicated. I hadn't wanted Ramirez to be involved in the case.
But he was, and he had a criminal record, and he was harboring a boy
who was either running away from a murder or involved in it himself.
I couldn't wish that kind of trouble away, like Ramirez had said
Dover was trying to do. I couldn't go out to that ranch armed with
good intentions.

I drove the Mustang back to the town square and
parked behind the low row of buildings fronting the south side of the
promenade. There was a gun shop on that side of the mall. I'd seen it
on Monday when I'd been waiting for Ramirez and again, that morning,
when I'd browsed in the curio shop. I walked up one of the alleys to
the sidewalk and went into the store.

"What have you got in .45 caliber?" I said
to the stringy Mexican man behind the counter.