“You want your father punished, don’t you?”
“For what he’s done to my mother. But that’s my job- mine and a good lawyer’s. The other thing … no. You want him for that, you go get him on your own. You and the fuckin INS.”
He shoved along the wall toward the door. I didn’t try to stop him. When he got there he stopped and half-turned and said, “I meant what I said about staying away from my mother. She’s had enough crap. You bother her again, you’ll be damn sorry.”
And then he was gone.
* * * *
He’s still sick with the flu.
The memory fragment came to me just after I exited the alley onto Howard, on my way to where the car was parked. I’d been walking fast because of the rain; now I walked even faster, remembering.
On Tuesday Coleman Lujack had told Eberhardt and me that Rafael hadn’t called in to explain his absence. Today, the tight-lipped office worker had claimed Vega still hadn’t called in. But yesterday, Teresa Melendez had told me on the phone that Vega was “still sick with the flu.” And now she was off the job too.
Some young Latina with big tits, Paco had said.
Teresa Melendez?
* * * *
Chapter 12
The male voice on the line said, “Containers, Inc. Good afternoon.” You can never be sure about voices on the telephone but it sounded like the tight-lipped guy I’d dealt with earlier.
“Containers, Inc.,” I repeated, roughening my own voice, making it a little deeper. “Some kind of business outfit, are you?”
“… Yes?”
“Teresa Melendez work there?”
“Yes, she does, but she’s not here today.”
“You know where I can reach her?”
“I suppose at her home. Who’s this, please?”
“Officer Walter Keene, San Francisco Police. Badge number seven-three-nine-nine-two.”
“The police?”
“That’s right. Mind telling me if Ms. Melendez is married?”
“Married? I don’t understand …”
“We’re holding a man who claims to be her husband. Assault and battery, drunk and disorderly. He busted up a bar in the Mission. He can’t hardly talk, he’s so sozzled; all we could get out of him is he’s married to this Teresa Melendez. He had your telephone number on a piece of paper in his pocket.”
“Oh,” the guy said. “Well, it might be her ex-husband. Is his name Arturo?”
“That’s it. She divorced him, huh?”
“Last year.”
“Well, he thinks he’s still married and he keeps yelling for her. What’s her address and telephone number?”
There was a silence.
“Hello?” I said. I didn’t have to work at sounding annoyed. “You there?”
“Yes. I’m not sure I ought to give out that information….”
“This is the police department, for Christ’s sake. What’s your name, mister?”
That convinced him; citizens don’t like angry-sounding cops to have their names. He cleared his throat and said meekly, “If you’ll hold the line just a minute …”
“Hurry it up, all right?”
He went away. The phone booth smelled of somebody’s cheap cigar; I opened the door all the way. This was a dark, Western-style neighborhood tavern on Geneva, not far off Mission, that wasn’t doing much business at four o’clock on a rainy workday afternoon. Half a dozen customers hunched like sullen vultures over the bar and the jukebox was silent. I’d come in here to make the call because car phones sound like just what they are-they don’t filter out traffic noises- and everybody knows police vehicles aren’t equipped with cellular phones. If you’re going to run a bluff, you’d better run a good one.
It was a minute or so before the guy came back on. “Officer Keene?” I grunted, and he said, “Sorry to be so long. Teresa Melendez lives at eight-oh-six Atlanta Street in Daly City. Her telephone number …” and he went on to give me that.
“Got it,” I said. “Thanks.”
“Glad to be of help, officer.”
He was a good citizen, he was.
* * * *
In the car I called Harry Fletcher at the Department of Motor Vehicles and asked him to run Teresa Melendez’s name through the computer, let me know what kind of car she drove and its license number. I could have called Harry in the first place, after I’d determined that she wasn’t listed in the San Francisco phone book (which includes Daly City) under either Teresa or T. Melendez; but for all I knew there were fifty Teresa Melendezes living in the Bay Area. Even if there were only two or three, it would have taken too much time to sift out the right one.
I asked Harry to get me the same information on Rafael Vega’s vehicle. If Vega was shacked up with Teresa Melendez, his car would be somewhere in the vicinity of her home; and if I spotted it, then I’d know for sure without having to knock on her door blind.
* * * *
It was Four Forty when I turned off Industrial Way into the parking lot at Containers, Inc. Dusk was already settling, like thick soot drifting down through gray water, and the outside lights-widely spaced sodium-vapor arcs on metal poles-were on. When it got to be full dark, the arcs would put a greenish tinge on the night and create pockets of deep shadow where the light didn’t quite reach.
I drove slowly past the parked cars. I had no idea what kind Coleman Lujack drove, but whatever it was, it figured to be expensive. There was only one expensive model slotted among the compacts and junkers-a new Chrysler Imperial- and that was his, all right. It had a personalized license plate that readCOLE L.
I backed into a space near it, midway between two of the sodium-vapor lights. From there I could watch the office entrance, but I was in shadows and at enough of an off angle so that the staff inside couldn’t see me from their desks. I maneuvered myself into a comfortable position and settled down to wait.
After ten minutes the mobile phone interrupted the monotonous beat of the rain. Harry Fletcher. Teresa Melendez, he said, drove a five-year-old Honda Civic, license number 1BTQ 176; the vehicle registered to Rafael Vega was a Buick Skylark, vintage 1987, license number 1MXX 989. My memory isn’t what it once was, so I wrote all of that down in my notebook.
A little after five, people began to file out of both the office and the factory. None of them was Coleman Lujack. I spied the tight-lipped guy but he didn’t notice me; his transportation was on the opposite side of the lot. I got glances from a couple of the workers who passed near my car, but they weren’t interested enough to ask me what I was doing there. Hard rain and long workdays dampen curiosity as well as spirits.
The lot was mostly empty by five thirty-just Coleman’s Imperial and three other cars. It was cold in my clunker by then, with the wind and dampness seeping in through cracks around the wired-shut passenger door, and I was cramped and getting hungry and running out of patience. Come on, Coleman, I thought. Shag ass. Don’t you have a hot toddy or something to go home to?
If he did he wasn’t in a hurry to get it. It was almost six before he finally showed. He was wrapped in a gray trench coat and carrying an umbrella that he left furled as he crossed the lot; the rain had let up into a fine mist. He was one of those people who look straight ahead when they walk, as if they’re peering down the length of a piece of three-inch pipe, so he didn’t see me until he was at the door of his Chrysler and I was already out of my car. Then he came to stiff attention and stared as I approached him, his head making little involuntary bobbing movements, like a bird watching an oncoming cat.
“What are you doing here?” he said. He sounded nervous and put out, with an undercurrent of something that might have been fear.
“Waiting for you.”
“Why? We don’t have anything to discuss. If we had I would have seen you earlier.”
“There are some questions I want to ask you.”