A heavy pounding shook the front door. I put down the beer and jogged back toward the front of the house.
“You in there! Open up!”
I held my breath. No one but Treadwell knew I was here.
“Now!” the man’s voice demanded. “I’m serious. I’ve got a gun!”
Panicked, I searched around me for a weapon. An empty pizza box wasn’t going to do the job.
I tiptoed to the front door and sidled along the wall to the window. The hammering continued. I squatted down and, lifting the barest inch of dusty curtain, peeked above the sill.
Faded jeans and a worn leather belt with a tarnished silver buckle. A white T-shirt with the Tucson Fire Department logo over the left breast. And above that, the scowling face of my brother Martin.
“Jesus, Martin,” I said, opening the door, “you scared the shit out of me.”
“Jessie? What are you doing here?”
“Do you really have a gun? If you do, I’m not letting you in here, no matter what.”
“I was supposed to pick up Bonita’s stuff. When I saw the lights on…”
“And you were ready to do what? Shoot the squatter?”
“Naw, I didn’t really—”
“Damn good thing.” I turned away, leaving the door open for him. “Probably shoot your own fucking foot off.”
“I just didn’t expect—”
“I know.” I sank into the ugly yellow chair.
Martin hadn’t aged at all. Clear blue eyes, an almost-handlebar mustache, and the barest hint of crow’s feet around his eyes from squinting at the summer sun.
“So, how’ve you been?” he said, dismissing the two-year absence and all his unreturned messages. He moved a carton of books off a dining room chair and took a seat.
“Okay. I’m probably leaving tomorrow, so if you need to take anything…” Monday would be the comp day I’d been promised. I had to be back in Phoenix by Tuesday evening for my shift.
“No, no, that’s okay. It can wait. You just surprised me, that’s all.” He looked everywhere in the room except at me.
I hadn’t seen Martin since the trial; there was no simple way to ease back into the banter and comfort we’d had before that time.
“I saw Paula on TV,” I started.
“Yeah.” He inspected Bonita’s worn carpeting. “Great way to get your name on national television.”
His ex-wife had taken up with an incarcerated bank robber through a church penpal program, and had helped him bust out of jail. She’d been featured prominently on an America’s Most Wanted program last fall. That made two of Martin’s family members making the news.
“It was a good picture of her.” It wasn’t a question but it sure could have won in the Dumb Comments category.
He looked up with the grin I remembered from his elementary school photos. “Not bad for a mug shot.”
I thought about my own mug shot. Mouth held firm but straight. Eyes alight with the certitude of the righteous.
We waited while the embarrassment, the questions, the denials, and the pain settled at ankle level, like scuffed dust. After a few moments, Martin tried to start three sentences, but ultimately chose none of them, as seemingly unsure of my status in the family as my mother was. I was going to have to do this on my own.
“I’m not here about family stuff. It’s for my job.” I explained about HandsOn and the disappearance of the man in the Cadillac. “So I won’t be here long. I won’t bother anybody.”
He nodded and rubbed his palms together. Washing the taint of me away? Dismissing my story as another lie? My mother’s barbs must have found a place to snag. I didn’t wait to find out.
“Do you want me to follow you in Bonita’s car? I’ll help you carry stuff…” I grabbed a box from the pile against the wall.
He jumped up as well. “Don’t bother. I’ll come back next week sometime.”
He left without saying good-bye. Without touching me. As if I were a stranger he’d passed on the street. And maybe I was.
I left the house at seven the next morning, in search of a massive breakfast to make up for having drunk my dinner the night before. The pancakes had just arrived when my cell phone went off.
“Jessie? You still in town?” It was Treadwell. This couldn’t be good.
“I’m at the Denny’s on Speedway.”
“Order me some eggs. Over easy.” I glared at the phone like it had just farted.
He beat the eggs to the table by seconds, huffing into the seat opposite me with a scrape of keys and handcuffs against the laminated tabletop as the waitress plunked the plate down in front of him.
“Tell me more about this HandsOn program.”
“I thought you said there wasn’t any crime here.”
“We’ve still got a car thief to find.” He let the egg bleed across the plate and dunked a triangle of toast into the yolk.
I pushed my pancakes aside and looked around to signal a waitress for more coffee. No luck. There was a gaggle of them near the kitchen, but none looked my way.
“It combines three technologies—built-in sensors that give you diagnostics about the car’s performance, the GPS system that gives you location and directions, and a really strong satellite phone with HandsOn advisors available at the other end.”
He nodded and kept eating. When I didn’t continue, he patted his lips with a paper napkin and said, “What else? Like, what do the sensors do?”
“They can tell whether you’re in a crash and how bad it is. Whether you need an oil change. Why your ‘check engine’ light is on…” I made a rolling wave with my hand to indicate the thousand other things the system could read.
“Can it tell where you’ve been?”
“Not unless you’ve asked the GPS to give you directions someplace. That’d still be in the system.”
“No, we checked.”
“Some rental cars have that tracking equipment installed,” I added, “so they can tell if you’ve taken the car across state lines or into Mexico.”
He shook his head. That wasn’t what he was interested in.
“It should be able to tell you how fast the car was going when it was hit and whether he slammed the brakes on. Would that help?”
Treadwell returned to his eggs. “Not a lot. We can pretty much estimate the combined speed based on the damage to the car’s rear end. And we found some blue paint embedded in the Caddy’s bumper. It’s a color Ford uses, so we already know we’re looking for a blue Ford with significant front-end damage.”
I stripped the lid off a thimble of half and half, added it to the cold coffee in my cup, and took a sip, thinking back to the three voices I’d heard.
“There is one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It can tell you if anybody else was in the car with him.”
Treadwell sat up so fast you’d think the caffeine had reached his system, not mine.
“Weight distribution. It can tell you if there was somebody else in the car, where they were sitting, and whether they had their seat belt on.”
He pursed his lips. “Well, at least we’d know whether we were looking for one car thief or two.”
The money he left on the table didn’t even cover the tip.
When I got back to Bonita’s house I decided that the sisterly thing to do would be to clean the place up well enough that Bonita could get her cleaning deposit back. And if there wasn’t any deposit to be reclaimed, at least I’d have the benefit of a clean bathtub tonight.
I poked around under the sink and opened likely boxes until I found sponges, paper towels, and a couple of all-purpose cleaning products.
I sure hoped this Felicia from the bar didn’t drive a blue Ford. Maybe it belonged to Emily Markson or her ever-so-attentive lawyer-neighbor, Paul Willard. But that didn’t make much sense if Markson’s car had been stolen from the airport parking lot.
There might be a way to get part of the answer.
I stopped at Walgreens on my way to the South Tucson City Hall and bought a stiff, canvas arm sling and some dark lavender eye shadow, then rubbed dime-sized eye shadow dots around my throat like a necklace of finger bruises and added another smear under my left eye. Emily Markson’s bruises hadn’t looked much different, but hers would be tougher to get rid of.
The South Tucson City Hall still had the pale, flaky remains of a painted mural clinging to the side wall: a starlit night, an Indian chief, and what looked like a giant headless lizard. I stuck my left arm through the canvas sling and crossed the parking lot.
Three clerks were available at the counter. I chose the young, round-faced woman on the left, the one with her eyes on the countertop and a despondent slump to her shoulders.
“Can you help me, please?” The clerk glanced up, her eyes widening when she spotted the eggplant shadows on my neck. My right hand cradled my canvas-covered left elbow.
“I’m trying to find out the name of the person who owns the bar called Juanito’s.”
She turned to a rack of plastic shelves on her right, plucked paperwork from the third tier, and directed her reply to the counter-top. “Fill in this form and you can come back tomorrow for the information. It’s a ten-dollar fee for duplication and it’s twenty dollars if you need it notarized.”
I let my eyes well with tears. “I don’t have ten dollars. And I don’t need a copy anyway. Just a name.”
She raised her eyes again, as if checking the shadow of a new bruise seen in her own mirror. “What is it, honey?”
“I can’t make him pay until I know his name.” I tried unsuccessfully to move my bandaged arm; a broken-winged mourning dove who had somehow found her way indoors.
The woman looked right and left, then leaned toward me. “He hurt you like this and you don’t even know his name?”
“It was…he said…I thought he was going to be nice.”
I didn’t need to see her reaction. Her voice already said that she understood the intentional humiliation of a casual encounter, and the gut punch of misplaced trust.
She only hesitated a moment. “Tell me what you know, and I’ll look it up right now.”
I gave her the address of the bar.
“Juan Villalobos,” she said, coming back from her computer search. “There are two mailing addresses: the one you gave me and this one on Silverlake.” She shoved a scrap of paper across the counter.
I nodded gratefully and tucked the note into the sling. “Thank you.”
“And honey?” the woman said, placing her hand over mine on the counter. “Please tell me you’ll go to the police. He can’t get away with this.”