Seventeen

Abel called from the room with the televisions showing what the security cameras were seeing.

“That’s them coming in now. Junior and Star. She’s as nasty as he says.”

Benny Silva looked up from the documents his lawyer had sent over. Don’t tell me I don’t know garbage. I’m seeing it right here. This lawyer was already including “Nine Million Dollar Verdict!” in his TV ads and he wasn’t the one doing the hard work.

Benny went from his office and looked at the black and white image showing a trashed Jaguar, hood paint gone, plastic for one of the rear windows, pulling past the last gate, parking in the visitor slot. An unattractive, hell, an ugly young woman was driving. The sun sparkled on metal in her face when she got out of the car. Junior stood up from the passenger seat and winked at the camera.

She needs to wash her hair, Benny thought, cover those bony shoulders.

“Bring them around the back. I got the runner from my lawyer in the office, waiting for me to sign papers.”

Benny returned to his desk and signed an affidavit to answer another motion in the new trial drama. The runner acted as a notary and Benny gave him a Silva Enterprises ball cap. He waited to see his car pass through the gates onto the street. Then Benny opened the door that led to the windowless room in the center of his cinder-block building.

Up close the young woman looked a little sick. Her color was off. Benny checked her arms. He’d seen this before, his own daughter killing herself. Sure enough, those were needle tracks, very old ones, on the inside of her elbow. His daughter switched at the end to sticking herself between toes. She got tired of Benny always grabbing her arm and turning the inside to the light. With this girl’s color, he didn’t need to tell her to take off her shoes to know she was still using the heroin.

Junior, already his father’s height but minus fifty pounds, said, “Uncle Benny, this is my friend, Star.”

“I like your name,” Benny said. “There’s that.”

Star dragged fingers through her hair, each nail painted a different color. The black nails made him think she’d hit herself with a hammer.

“Joon said you might have a job I can do, pay me in cash. Hook me into something big.”

“Losing Cassandra spooked her,” Junior said.

“You already got work that pays in cash. Sit.” Benny nodded at a straight-backed chair, the one the Indian who lost a foot had been in. He pushed it closer to the girl as Rigo entered the room.

Star looked at Rigo, then Benny, then back at Rigo.

“We’re twins,” Benny said. “Except for Rigo’s distinguishing features.”

“I never saw old-man twins.” Now she was looking only at Benny. “I don’t have any job that pays cash.”

“Junior, what were you telling me?”

The boy stepped up. Benny could see he was proud to be part of this. Like his father, eager to learn, get his hands on things.

“Star runs girls. She’d stop beatings, chase away bullies, then turn the girls out. Called them the Jags, each getting a crappy tattoo of a Jaguar car on their hip. Cassandra Baca was one. She was doing a judge and a rich lawyer. Lady judge, lady lawyer. That’s how Star could buy her own Jag.”

“What did Cassandra tell you about the judge?”

Star stared at Junior. “You brought me here saying there was a job.”

“There is a job,” Benny said. “Look at me. We’ve got a machine out back that needs attention.”

“I don’t know shit about machines. That wasn’t the kind of thing I thought this was about. I heard about you, you know. I want in.”

“You can jump right in. Rigo and Abel will show you. Junior, you can learn, too. This machine, it’s the key to this business. Star, I’m ready to feed you right into the heart of the operation if you’re up to it. Sit down a while. Consider this your job interview.”

Star scratched the back of a hand, letters there Benny couldn’t read. She looked behind her and settled her narrow butt on the chair. She pinned her hands in her armpits and bent one leg along the side of the chair, toe pressed into the floor. Benny didn’t like her heavy black boots with the two-inch waffle soles.

“She said they were weird, but they paid a lot of money. This last time, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back.”

Benny stepped close to the chair, directly in front of her. The tip of his SAS comfort shoe touched her black boot.

“What last time?”

“A couple nights ago, right before she, you know. It was on TV.”

“She went with the judge and lawyer again?”

“And the lady who picked her up at Pizza Hut. The one who called me.”

Benny waved for a chair for himself. Abel brought one and Benny sat next to Star.

“That’s something I never quite figured out, how Cassandra got with this judge. You knew the lady who took her?”

“She worked for the lawyer that did my brother’s case.”

“He shot a kid at a party,” Junior said.

“She was the investigator. My brother, he was in jail, said to give her all the guns to give to his lawyer. She wanted to know if I knew any girls liked being with women, or wouldn’t mind, what they were paying. That’s how I hooked her up with Cassandra. I told her about the kind of money she could make and she said she didn’t care.”

Benny patted the knob of her knee. The girl could stand to eat a few combo plates. “Did you send this investigator any other girls?”

“No, only Cassandra. She was my best. She was okay, too. Nice. She kept herself pretty.”

“This investigator. Was she tall, long arms and legs, a neck like Audrey Hepburn?”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Like a model.”

“Oh, yeah, ’cept she’s old.”

“Abel and Rigo, show Star how that machine works. I’m done here.”

“What’s the job pay?” Star dragged her heavy black boots to the front of the chair and pushed to her feet. Her hands dug into pockets coming through tears in her jeans, not after anything. Just another place to put them. “Can I start today?”

“You can start right now. Give Junior your keys. He’ll move your car around back while you learn the ropes.”

“You didn’t say what it pays.”

“We’ll see if you’re up to the job first. You finished our interview. Now’s the on-the-job training part, where you show the valuable contribution you can make to Silva Enterprises.”

Rigo and Abel led her to the door, each taking an arm, bone under skin with that bad color that made him think of ashtrays.

Junior said to his uncle, “How come you never gave me that job? I need to get my own car.”

“This kind of job … ” Benny moved the chairs from the middle of the room to a wall. He was thinking about how to put this when the phone started ringing. “Look, you want work that can take you places in life. This one, it goes nowhere. Move that car and catch up with your dad and grandpa. You’ll see. Go ahead. I’ve got a call.”

He picked up the phone. The call had come to his direct number, bypassing the number in the Dex for E. Benny Silva Enterprises, Waste Disposal, Recycling, and Sanitation Services. He was thinking who might have this number when he recognized the lawyer’s voice saying she wanted to meet him.

“Come by my office,” he said, remembering how she moved in the movies.

“Not a chance.” A laugh in her voice the same time she was being serious, showing she was sure about things and enjoying herself, all of it, even the danger. Telling him, too, she knew some things about him and his office. Abel had said he thought he saw her circling the block with Frank Pacheco, someone they’d done business with off and on.

“I’ll come to your office again,” he said.

“I want people around. And I don’t want anybody who knows me seeing us together.”

“Something you want to keep between us. Tell me where.”

“Moriarty.”

“That’s a drive.”

“La Cantina de los Romeros.”

“The state senator’s restaurant? He’s there, I’ll introduce you.”

“Maybe not. Down the street. Jenny’s Truck Stop, I think it’s called. It’s got a big rig painted on the wall. Meet me at the café inside. I’m leaving now.”

“You don’t want people recognizing you, meet me at Juanita’s on Airport Road. It’s full of mojados don’t know me neither. I don’t like to drive so much at night. That’s a long way, down and back.”

“Divide the distance by nine million dollars. That’s what you’ll be making per mile.”

“We’ve got an Abominable Snowman,” Elaine Salas said to Lewis. She sized up Aragon. “What do we call you? A bunny with shoulders?”

Salas was in her own hooded white clean suit. She led them to the sheet of plywood from the dumpster site, now on saw horses inside the evidence room. Spotlights showed it in a pool of harsh white light. With the tip of a surgical knife, Elaine Salas touched a spot circled and marked “#1.”

“I found the first tissue here,” she said. Six other circles, with matching numbers, spanned the wood. “Tiny scrapings of skin snagged against the grain. I think we can confidently say how Cassandra Baca got those abrasions and splinters on her backside.”

She pushed the knife into an unmarked spot on the board and flaked off a piece of wood.

“Plywood’s made from particle and fiberboard. I doubt it will have any distinctive signature. But there’s glue, waxes, and resins mixed with the fibers. That we can definitely identify with an electron microscope. We find it on the splinters in Cassandra Baca, and a DNA match with the skin on the board, we slide into home plate.”

“On to the next question,” Lewis said. “Why put her on a board?”

“The Abominable Snowman speaks,” Aragon said.

“Why not just heave her into the dumpster?” Lewis tugged at the clean suit where it climbed his chest to pinch his Adam’s apple. “It’s a lot harder to raise a body on the board, keep it balanced, until you can tip it over the side.”

“No splinters in her scalp, right?” Aragon rubbed the back of her own head through the clean suit’s hood. “She had the Whole Foods shopping bag on her head when she slid down the board.”

Salas wrote numbers on masking tape and stuck them on little packets with wood chips inside. “She went in head first or the bag would have come off. Nate Moss said there was a uniform angle of penetration to the splinters. That should answer it.”

“We should get the drag dummy from the Academy,” Lewis said. “Load it to Cassandra Baca’s weight, get another board like this. See how it might have been done.”

Aragon said, “Elaine, can you rig that for us? Something close to a dead body with arms and legs flopping around. A dead weight, as difficult to handle as the real thing.”

“Balancing and lifting a body on a board,” Lewis said. “We’re talking pallbearers. We don’t need an experiment to know one person couldn’t do it.”

“What if they didn’t lift her from the ground, but were already higher, closer to the edge of the dumpster? They had her in the back of a pickup. That got the most votes last time we kicked this around.”

Lewis said, “You see that a lot. Guys not wanting to scratch their truck. You cut a plywood sheet to fit. A cheap bedliner.”

“But she slid off the board, in one direction,” Salas said. “She didn’t get those abrasions and splinters from rolling around. I would think it requires more force, sudden movement, for wood splinters to penetrate the skin.”

Aragon held an edge of the board with white gloves, trying hard to imagine it with a body, raised level, carried to the edge of the dumpster, the end with the feet lifted so high Cassandra Baca slid off head first.

And not seeing it.