“Does your brother own his packing equipment?” Marquez asked.
“He leases.”
Water dripped through holes in the corrugated roofing twenty feet over their heads, and they dodged that and worked their way around old wooden fruit boxes. Raburn unlocked two tall wooden doors, swung them open. He hit a light switch, and they were looking at two long wooden tables, dirt floor, stainless-steel sinks, stainless-steel pans, a hose, freezers, always a freezer, but not the pots and seines for producing caviar that Marquez was looking for. He opened a freezer and found sturgeon fillets wrapped in white butcher paper. On the end of one of the tables was a scale.
Shauf worked her way around the room with the camcorder. She was the one designated for recording all evidence. If it went to trial she’d be the one called. That was their practice, have one officer designated to avoid having several pinned down by the same trial.
When they finished, Marquez drove Raburn back to the houseboat and dropped him near his pickup. The rain had stopped, though heavy droplets still fell from high in the eucalyptus branches and struck like pebbles on top of the truck cab.
“I’m supposed to buy a sturgeon in the morning,” Raburn said.
“I’ll ride with you to pick it up.”
“You don’t believe me about Nick, do you? You think I’m bullshitting you.”
“I’m hoping you’re not bullshitting us. I’m putting faith in you.”
They had set up surveillance on Ludovna’s house this afternoon. Cairo was there now.
“We’ll meet tomorrow,” Marquez said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Driving away, he returned a call from Cairo, and he’d worked enough years with Cairo to know the differences in his voice. There was a way Cairo’s voice got both quiet and intense.
“Ludovna just got here, and it looks like he’s leaving again. There’s a woman with him, Lieutenant. He pulled up in a midnight-blue Cadillac that looks black in this light. It could be Anna’s airport car. From across a parking lot in the fog it would look black. It’s late-model, maybe last year’s. He’s pulling out now. What do you think?”
“Stay with him. I’m on my way.”
8
Ludovna came down the street with his date, right hand resting high on her ass before slipping down and up under her skirt long enough to feel the slide of nylon on both legs. His arm was around her shoulders as they went into a restaurant, and Marquez waited until they were at a table in the corner and he could see a waiter opening a bottle of wine.
“You’re good to go,” he told Cairo, and Cairo slid onto his back at the curb and shimmied under the front of Ludovna’s Cadillac. He attached a GPS unit to the engine block, taking his time with the battery pack. He was still under the Cadillac when the waiter returned to pour more wine.
The rain started again as Ludovna and the woman stood up from dinner. When they walked outside Ludovna draped his coat over her narrow shoulders, and rain soaked through his shirt and blew against his face, but he didn’t seem to care or be worried about that or anything else. He held the woman near his chest and sheltered her body as they walked to his car. He was half bald, the remaining black hair slick in the rain, his eyes checking the sidewalk ahead, checking his car, cars passing on the street, checking everything.
Marquez watched them pull away in the Cadillac, an Escalade, an ‘04, last year’s model. He drove toward his Land Park house but stopped at a bar on the way.
“The night is young,” Marquez radioed.
Cairo had run the Cadillac plates and gotten the name Sandy Michaels and a Ventura address for the owner. The digital clock on Marquez’s dash moved toward midnight. He could see the Cadillac under a light in the parking lot and thought about Raburn’s story of Ludovna and the treble hook. Shauf drove up, and he watched her get out and walk up to his truck. She got in on the passenger side, and they talked in darkness.
“My friend Cheryl in administration called me today,” she said. “She told me a story about Bell that might explain why he’s been all over us.”
“Must be a good story to call you on a Sunday.”
From her tone it didn’t sound like it was going to be a happy story, at least not for Bell. Marquez glanced over at her. He’d probably sat through more surveillances with Shauf than with anyone else in his years with the SOU. It was still less than a year since her sister had died of cancer, and, though she seemed like she was doing better, there was still a quiet to her that filled the cab at times.
“This happened the day before Thanksgiving,” she said. “A kid showed up with a pizza delivery for Bell at headquarters. You know how Chief Baird doesn’t like anything brought in, so Bell’s pretty snippy about it when they tell him his pizza has arrived. He’s got to stop what he’s doing, writing a memo to God or whatever it was, and leave his office and tell the pizza kid he made a mistake. So he comes down the corridor and tells this kid he didn’t order any pizza, and what’s more would never order pizza to headquarters. But the kid checks the name again and hands Bell the tag. Pizza is from Bell’s wife. She called it in and sent it there, or so the kid insists.”
“Bell’s wife sent him a pizza?”
“Right, and that’s what Bell can’t figure out. He doesn’t even like pizza.”
Shauf’s face turned in the darkness. She was getting to the punch line, and the streetlights reflected her smile. But in her face he saw her anger at Bell.
“The pizza kid has one of those candy-cane striped shirts and a hat. I wish I could describe him like Cheryl did, but anyway he’s a pimply-faced college kid, and Bell asks, ‘What kind of pizza?’ The kid goes, ‘This kind,’ and opens up the box. He’s a process server, not a pizza guy, and he’s got divorce papers from Bell’s wife. He hands them to Bell and says, ‘Enjoy your lunch.’”
Marquez felt bad for Bell as he listened to the rest. Bell had stood there reading, making no attempt to hide what it was about, and according to Shauf’s friend he didn’t move for twenty minutes.
“Hard story,” Marquez said.
“Well, don’t forget all those times he went somewhere with his wife and then chewed our asses for working through the weekend and wasting overtime dollars.”
Marquez remembered Bell coming in Monday morning after a weekend in Aspen or LA, having gone to some party at the Getty Museum, remembered one Monday morning in particular when Bell had flown back early from LA. With his wife, Bell did things that were complete fantasies for Marquez and Shauf on their salaries. More than a few times Marquez had walked out of Bell’s office angry, but he’d never begrudged Bell his lifestyle and forgave him his need to talk about it. He read it as Bell’s desire to look like something he wasn’t, but the truth was, Bell’s wife made the money. No one working for Fish and Game made any more than just enough to get by. The Bells lived in a big house in Sacramento with a wide lawn and a huge garden that went two lots deep in the back. Among the roses were a circular brick pavilion and a koi pond lit with underwater lights that threw soft colors into the water.
Working in a bureaucracy where the pay scale is low, you tended to hear rumors of who’s having more fun. The Bells entertained quite a lot, and those parties were, or so the rumor went, often thrown to further Bell’s career. For several years Bell worked out every day at lunch, and it always seemed like he was readying himself for some anticipated promotion. He got his hair cut at a beauty parlor, and the manicures were a running joke among wardens. He kept his skin tanned and his uniforms well pressed. In many ways he was the antithesis of a game warden, but not at a summer cocktail party where he could regale a group with tales heard from the SOU or wardens in the field and almost make it sound like he’d been there before he’d been promoted. At those parties where his tan skin and athletic pose suggested a man accustomed to the outdoors, he portrayed the image of an officer on the rise, a man who had it all.