“As best I can,” Nell said. “There’s a remote possibility I might come up with something. Somebody else may’ve been contaminated.”
“This is very interesting!” Jules said. “I’ve never been part of an investigation before. Please let me know what’s going on and if I can help you in any way, you only have to call.”
Jules Temple hung up the phone without telling Nell Salter that Detective Bobbie Ann Doggett had questioned his haulers about a separate crime entirely! Jules didn’t know why, but his instinct told him he should not put Bobbie Ann Doggett and Nell Salter together. He sensed that it’d be better for him if the two investigators pursued separate criminal inquiries, and never crossed paths. For the first time, Jules Temple seriously considered the possibility that his employees might be responsible for the theft at North Island.
CHAPTER 14
San Diego’s Old Town-wildly popular with the city’s vital tourist industry-was never one of Fin’s favorite haunts, even though a lot of cops frequented an Old Town restaurant that served pretty fair carnitas, homemade tortillas, and decent margaritas, all of which tended to attract happy-hour working women.
There wasn’t much left in Old Town of the Spanish period when Father Junípero Serra and the soldiers of the Presidio brought the Gospel to the local Kumeyaay whether the Indians liked it or not. There was some evidence that they didn’t, in that the peace-loving Kumeyaay destroyed the friars’ original mission.
The early nineteenth century brought the Mexican period and with it large adobes, including some impressive haciendas with whitewashed walls, tile roofs, patios and fountains. One of those old haciendas, actually built for a rich Peruvian, had been transformed into a restaurant with courtyard dining, and it packed in the tourists. But most of the surrounding shops sold items that could be purchased more cheaply in Tijuana.
A grassy square in the middle of Old Town Plaza was the best part of the whole shebang, as far as Fin was concerned. It was there in the pedestrian area where he’d strolled with ex-wife number two and made the disastrous mistake of proposing marriage, after guzzling five margaritas. He’d never enjoyed margaritas since.
Huerta’s Pottery Shed was larger than the other shops, in that the pots required large display space. Alberto Huerta, the second-generation owner of the shop, sold glazed pottery for cookware and serving, and decorative pottery for plants and flowers, specializing in cactus pots with watering ports. Some of his pottery was designed in the shape of chickens, pigs, sheep, and of course, bulls.
Nell Salter was late, so Fin decided to go it alone and get it over with. He figured that any acquaintance of the late thief José Palmera wasn’t about to confess and beg for leniency.
Alberto Huerta was surprised that afternoon when a rather slight man in a herringbone sport coat entered his shop and showed him a badge.
“You took delivery of a truckload of pots a couple of days ago,” Fin said to the shop owner.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Alberto Huerta didn’t look like somebody who’d know dick about a hot van and a cold thief, but since it was a bogus investigation anyway, Fin said, “The driver got killed in an accident after he left you.”
“He did? My god!”
“Did you know him well?”
“He told me his name was Pepe Palmera. I never saw him before, but we’ve done business with Rubén for years. That’s who makes the pots in Tijuana, Rubén Ochoa.”
“The paperwork indicated that the driver was the owner of the pottery business.”
“They do that down there,” Alberto Huerta explained. “They make up all kinds of paperwork to get past U.S. Customs and deliver their loads up here. It’s a hard life down there so they learn to cut through the U.S. red tape. That driver didn’t own a single pot, I promise you.”
“That was a special van,” Fin said. “It was loaded with drums of toxic waste when it got stolen last Friday. I’ve got a colleague who wants to know where the thieves dumped the waste.”
“I can’t help you with that,” the shopkeeper said. “A stolen truck? You might try Rubén Ochoa in Tijuana. Maybe he can help you.” Then he added, “Toxic waste? Those people have enough to worry about without us giving them our poison. Let me get Rubén’s address and phone number for you. I don’t think he’d knowingly do business with a truck thief.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well …” Alberto Huerta shrugged apologetically. “They’re poor people, aren’t they?”
He went into the back room and when he returned he gave Fin a piece of paper with the pottery maker’s Tijuana address and phone number on it.
“Here’s my card,” Fin said. “If you hear anything that I should know, gimme a call.”
Alberto Huerta nodded, anxious to help the customer standing in the doorway. She was a tall woman in a red cable-knit turtleneck. She had shapely legs revealed to advantage in a long skirt with a front slit. Alberto Huerta liked the way her hair had that I-just-got-out-of-bed look. She looked boldly at everyone in the shop. And her nose, it was slightly bent, obviously having been broken. On a fine-looking woman, the broken nose was strangely exciting, the shopkeeper thought.
After Fin spotted Nell, his thoughts were instantly similar to Alberto Huerta’s-about the long legs, and the go-to-hell hairdo-but especially about the nose. In 1984, when acting jobs were more plentiful, he’d done a local TV commercial with a model whose nose had been broken in a jet-ski accident. Her agent had tried to persuade her to leave it as is but she got it fixed, after which her modeling career went nowhere. Fin told her to rebreak it.
“Yo, Nell!” Fin said, and her firm handshake gave him goose bumps.
“Sorry I was late,” Nell said, as they walked toward his car after a quick briefing.
She’d offered to drive, but he wanted her to see his Vette. “He didn’t seem to know diddly,” Fin said. “I bet your toxic goop got dumped in T.J.”
“Nothing unusual in that,” Nell said. “The next generation in that town’s gonna be Ninja Turtles.”
“This is mine,” he said, when they got to the Vette. He unlocked the door on her side and offered his hand as she settled into the leather seat.
Decent manners, Nell thought. And he was kinda cute, but pretty small for a cop. This actor was not the leading-man type, a second banana, maybe. The guy that doesn’t get the girl, hard as he tries. Still, he had soft gray eyes and didn’t have a macho cop mustache, thank god.
She hadn’t found a man worth sleeping with in seven months, not since St. Patrick’s Day after a boozy party for D.A. investigators. Then, after five dates with the guy, she’d found out that the lying bastard was married.
When Fin fired up the Vette he revved the engine to let her feel the power. Then he said, “Now that all the hard police work’s done, do you really want a beer or shall I take you someplace nice?”
“To that German saloon,” she said. “You made it sound slightly better than an emergency call to a shrink.”
“I was kinda lying about the beer,” Fin confessed. “Actually their suds is the kinda stuff they use in Germany to kill potato bugs with. Lemme take you somewhere else.”
“Speaking of bugs,” Nell said, “I think we’re gonna get a lab report from the medical examiner saying that Palmera had been exposed to an organophosphate.”
“What’s that?”
“In this case an insecticide called Guthion. That’s what they were hauling when the truck got ripped off.”
“Poetry in that,” Fin said. “The thief steals poison and it poisons him.”
“I just wanna know if it got somebody else. And where the hell is it, that’s what I wanna know.”
He took the Garnet turnoff to Pacific Beach, saying, “You’ve held up real well in the years since I last saw you.”