| |
––––––––
A few minutes past four o’clock on a bitter Sunday evening and outside, the day had prematurely aged into night. Detective Temeke lay on his couch, feet resting on a weight bench, smoking a cigarette. He stared through the window at the sunset, now a pale streak on the horizon. On a clear night, he could see as far as the computer factory on 528 and the smoke stack that spilled into a gray sky. But not tonight.
A snow-heralding wind prowled along the driveway, blowing the last of the winter leaves into the neighbor’s yard. The forecast had issued a storm warning, alerting drivers of the possible closedown of I-40 and I-25 in the event of severe blizzards. Fortunately, Temeke didn’t use either. It was up Alameda all the way to Ellison, provided his car didn’t trace another counter turn in the ice before Northwest Area Command.
He was glad he didn’t have to drive downtown to those cracked pavements, dirty sidewalks and old fashioned slot boxes for parking. Where old newspapers got caught up in dirt devils, gyrated down the middle of Lomas and snaked onto Fourth Street. The old folk who read them peered between the net curtains of their derelict houses, living proof that not all of Albuquerque had been transformed by gentrification.
The good news was, he would be reviewing cold cases starting tomorrow and reporting directly to his brother-in-law, Luis Alvarez. At least he had the autonomy of pursuing his own cases without the usual red tape. But if he was honest, leaving Homicide was like being catapulted into space with only thirty minutes of oxygen. He’d felt the dread then. He felt it now.
Put the old bugger in a closet and lock the door ‒ wasn’t that the whisper on the streets?
His partner, Malin, told him he needed a support group, told him he couldn’t be in law enforcement if he was going to drink and smoke. Especially in the office. What kind of example was that?
He’d kicked the booze all right. Well... almost. Bought a cat, an outcast British Blue he’d picked up at the pound. He and Dodger were two of a kind.
Cocking his head sideways, he listened to the crackle of flames in the fireplace and the soft chime of Dodger’s identity disk. It was the rattling he couldn’t work out until his cell phone skidded sideways between the ashtray and a potted cactus. The cat bounced off the couch in a fit of rage, got as far as the fireplace before collapsing in an exhausted heap.
Temeke grabbed the phone, fingers fumbled with the buttons.
“Got a moment?” a voice muttered.
It was Captain Fowler, treacherously smooth with hot lava bubbling beneath the surface. In a word, he was a sod.
“Your commander wants you in at nine o’clock if you still want a job. Got a cold case he wants to discuss.”
Temeke consulted the view outside his window. It was pitch black out there, temperatures in the low twenties. “When you say cold, how cold?”
“Delgado. 2007.” Temeke had to press the phone closer to his ear to catch what Fowler was saying. “Mrs. Delgado called this afternoon. Said her younger daughter didn’t come home last night. Found a note in the pocket of a pair of jeans when she was doing the laundry. After what happened to Alice a few years back, she wanted us to take a look.”
“Any idea what it said?” Temeke studied the glowing end of his cigarette.
“She didn’t say. Wanted to talk to you.”
It didn’t surprise Temeke that Mrs. Delgado wouldn’t talk to an insensitive git like Fowler, but she must have given him a reason. “And she asked for me because...?”
“Read your name in the newspaper. The Oliver case.”
That was the trouble with being a well-known detective in the Duke City Police Department. Everyone wanted a big part of your life. The time-off part. “Girl’s name?”
“Lily Delgado. Nineteen, five-seven, a hundred and twenty-five pounds. Missing? Maybe not after inheriting a crap load of money.”
“Tell Hackett I’ll be in at eight.”
Temeke hung up and mashed the remains of the cigarette in the cactus pot, pressing it deep into the soil.
It had been a week of reports, car thefts and drunks. Old files, new files, cases-that-got-under-your-skin files. A box of black three-ring binders that had found their way onto Unit Commander Hackett’s desk over two weeks ago had now found their way onto Temeke’s.
He remembered the Delgado case even down the photograph of a young woman on the front page of the newspaper. A redhead, a suicide, an aggressive investigation. The medical report confirmed an overdose of amphetamines and alcohol ‒ if he remembered correctly ‒ but it was possible they had missed something.
He poked another cigarette between his lips and dragged a match along the top of the coffee table, blew a smoke ring and watched it drift toward the cactus, separating between two spiny shoots. The house was spartanly furnished, cold, uninviting, nothing like it was when Serena had been there. Dumbbells on the hearth where a brass coal scuttle once stood and eleven bottles of amber ale piled in a pyramid on the mantelshelf. Letters still lay on the kitchen table, untouched, unopened since the day they arrived from her attorney and that was over a week ago.
He almost laughed, but not as much as he did when she told him she was leaving. A striking woman in a red dress, standing by the front door with a mound of suitcases she expected him to carry. It was lucky he managed to squeeze them all into her car on the first trip, he couldn’t have handled it if she had come back for the rest. He’d lost the love of his life.
Reluctantly, he picked up the phone and called Malin Santiago. She was the only partner he had ever had who could put up with a bawdy, cynical, chain-smoking Brit like him and somehow infuse some hope into his bald skull.
“Marl,” he said, imagining the apologetic smile, her half-hearted condolences. She knew about the divorce papers he refused to sign and the house he refused to sell. “Fowler just called. Looks they’re reopening the Delgado case.”
“He told me this afternoon. Said the girl’s tall, skinny. Nice looking.”
“It takes a horny old sod to notice.” Temeke could hear the sound of dripping water on the other end of the line and the echo in her voice. “So, where would you go, Marl, if you were tall, skinny, nice looking?”
“LA. Where all the models go.”
“Most of them end up bussing tables for a living.”
“Someone with a large handout wouldn’t be working in a restaurant, sir. If this girl’s a looker, she’ll have an agent and might already be the new face of Rogue’s Bazaar. She had an older sister.”
“Alice. Committed suicide at school on her nineteenth birthday.”
“Any family background, sir? Reporting officer?”
“Alan Delgado, Albuquerque’s top racing driver, was killed on NAPA Speedway in 2006. Public refused to believe it was an accident, refused to believe their star was dead. Apparently one teenager, who was sitting in the Turn 1 grandstands claimed he saw the two drivers in an altercation half an hour before the race. The surviving driver denied any such disagreement.”
“So no foul play?”
“None that I can see. It was one of Jack Reynolds’ old cases, only Jack’s dead and there’s no one else to ask.”
Temeke knew the police had monitored every murmur, every move, every breath for months after that terrible day and still couldn’t come up with a reason other than depression. They'd gotten hints over the years, carefully planted lies that made you itch under the skin. But nothing solid you could hang your coat on.
“We’ll go and see Mrs. Delgado tomorrow and it wouldn’t hurt to call a few modeling agencies either. And it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the tub, Marl, before you turn into a bloody raisin.”
Hanging up, he ground the cigarette in the ashtray and stood up to stretch. He noticed the motion sensor lamps flick on and off in the neighbor’s yard and saw Fats Riley sauntering down the driveway toward his mailbox. His dog did a fine impression of an air raid siren as it sprinted after a drift of junk mail. It was the same every night.
Temeke felt an unusual urge to see Alice Delgado’s picture again, to study those eyes, read what was in them. He imagined that lowered chin, faraway gaze, strands of Titian-colored hair playing around her jaw. Not smiling, yet she was strangely haunting, beautiful come to think of it.
She reminded him of someone.
