Iron tables stood out under the cottonwoods, vacant this time of year; the flower beds were sere and brown as well. A glassed-in box near the entrance covered the original well that had supplied water to the complex. He glanced at the menu posted beside the door; they weren’t open for lunch yet.
“Ever eaten here?” he asked.
“Twenty-five for a ham sandwich?” Cesar said, peering at the prices. “You loco?”
“I had dinner here once. An anniversary, the last one before Julia divorced me. The food was actually pretty damn good.”
“Jesus, if lunch is like this, what’s dinner for two cost?”
“About the price of a trip to Paris.” Salvador grinned and read the small print: “And the ham sandwich has green chile aioli, ciabatta, aged Wisconsin Gouda—”
“It’s still twenty-five dollars for a fucking ham sandwich. Okay, a ham and cheese. I don’t care if the butter was made from the Virgin’s milk.”
“Can I help you?” a young woman in a bow-tie outfit said, opening the door. “Lunch doesn’t start seating until—”
They flashed their badges. “The manager, please.”
That brought quick action: “I’m Mr. Tortensen—”
After the introductions, the manager showed them through to his office, though Salvador felt as if half the contents of his wallet had vanished just stepping over the threshold of the front door into the pale Taos-style interior. Even the office was stylish. The man was worried, brown-haired, in his thirties, lean to the point of emaciation, and licking his lips.
“What can I do for you, officers?” he said.
Salvador leaned back in the chair. He knew he could be intimidating to some. People who’d led sheltered lives particularly. He didn’t have to do anything in particular, even if they were people who’d consciously think of him as something they’d scrape off their shoe on a hot day.
“You had two guests at dinner yesterday,” he said. “From a little after five thirty to seven thirty. Ellen Tarnowski and Adrienne Brézé. I’d like some details.”
The man started very slightly, and then his mouth firmed. “I’m afraid our clients’ confidentiality is—”
Cesar cut in smoothly: “Ms. Tarnowski’s house burned down last night, and there’s suspicion of arson. Her car was found and towed from a parking spot not too far from here. We have independent confirmation that she was here last night, and she’s a missing person with this as her last known location.”
Salvador nodded. “So we’d really appreciate your cooperation in this arson and possible kidnapping investigation.”
The manager started; short of shouting terrorism it was about the best possible way of getting his attention.
“Let me make a few calls,” he said, pulling out his phone.
Cesar worked on his notepad. Salvador crossed his arms on his chest and enjoyed watching the manager sweat as he tried to get back to his routine. People came in to talk to Mr. Tortensen about purchasing and things that probably made perfect sense. At last, a harassed-looking man in his early twenties came in; he was slimly handsome, but looked as if he really wasn’t used to waking up this early. Which, with a night-shift job like waiting tables, he might not be.
“Ah, this is Joseph Morales, officer,” Tortensen said. “He had A17 . . . their table . . . last night.”
Maricón, Salvador thought—clinically, he wasn’t bothered by them. There had been one he knew who was an artist with a Javelin launcher. He could put a rocket right through a firing slit, which has a good dirty joke in it somewhere.
“Pleased to meet you,” Morales said to the policemen with transparent dishonesty, but he was at least trying to hide it. “How can I help you?”
The restaurant manager started to speak, and Salvador held up a hand. “We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”
He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.
The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them. Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”
He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.
“What did that come to?”
“With the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”
The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.
“Tip?”
“Very generous. Seven hundred.”
Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip? And you went there?”
“I was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later, she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”
“Ai!”
“Yeah, sweet, eh? What’s the next stop?”
“I’ll try and see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”
Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”
“So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind.”
III
“OKAY,” CESAR SAID TWO WEEKS LATER. “GUESS WHAT? SOMETHING FUNNY on the Brézé case.”
“Tell me something funny. I could use it.”
Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, which happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.
The prospect was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now. Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sues cops. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance?
“The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.
“Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”
“Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on U.S. soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”
“I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”
“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it too.”
“So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”
Cesar scratched his mustache, and Salvador consciously stopped himself from doing likewise.
“I’m not sure it does,” he said. “But it’s funny. Because the DNA from the puke is not the same as the DNA from the blood. In fact, the DNA from the blood is on the Red Cross list. One of their donors, a Shirley Whitworth, donated it at that place just off Rodeo and Camino Carlos Rey. It seems to have gone missing from their system. They clammed up about it pretty tight. We’ll have to work on that.”