“You mean our client.”
“Our client. I see. Okay, you got me-what do you need me to do?”
“The murder was in the barrio. Tracey wants me to go over there and hang out and find out everything I can, basically redo and expand the police investigation. I just got their report. As you can imagine, it’s pretty flimsy. Those yahoos couldn’t find a hippopotamus in an ant farm.
“Anyway, I figured I would stick out like a sore thumb but you wouldn’t.”
“You mean there’s a difference between me and you other than the fact that I’m much better-looking?”
“Yeah, you’ve been out in the sun a lot more than me. Whaddya think? It’ll probably take a couple of weeks.”
“I’m not working in the fields.” It was Dick’s turn to laugh. Talking to Joaquin was good for him, the only time he laughed anymore.
“You can’t work in the fields, Joaquin. You’re too old. Nobody would hire you. Just find the local hooch joint and hang around. Get to know the people in the neighborhood. We need to find more witnesses.”
“Are you telling me how to be a detective?”
“Nothing more than I did for the last twenty years.”
Four days later, a Monday, Joaquin and his boat arrived in Bass Creek. He rented an efficiency at the Skyline Motel for two weeks. If anybody inquired, Joaquin was a retired truck driver in town for a couple of weeks of fishing. And he intended to fish. He hadn’t been on this side of the big lake in a long time.
Joaquin spent his first evening hanging out in the barrio, getting the vibe. He’d already studied the police report and written down the names of streets and witnesses. His first stop was the convenience store where Rudy worked. Benny Dragone was behind the counter. Joaquin picked up some Red Man chewing tobacco, some Cokes and a bag of chips.
“What’s biting these days?” he asked Benny.
“Not much of a fisherman myself, sorry,” Benny said as he rang up the items.
Joaquin plowed ahead. “Any decent place around here I can park my butt for a couple of drinks?”
Benny didn’t even look up. “Rosa’s is two blocks down. It ain’t much, a beer and wine joint.”
“That’ll do. Ain’t lookin’ for nothin’ fancy. Much obliged.” Joaquin walked out, intending to head next for Mercer Street and the scene of the crime. He’d wanted to pick the grocer’s brain a little more, but Benny hadn’t exactly been a scintillating conversationalist and had even seemed a little wary of Joaquin. He decided to play it safe and turned instead for the motel-just in case Benny was watching.
Benny was. He followed Joaquin’s progress from the window, saw him walk the two blocks to the Skyline. Saw the boat outside on the trailer. Only then did he relax. He didn’t know why, but he was distrustful of just about everybody these days.
That night Joaquin took a short walk that ended at Rosa’s. Benny wasn’t lying; it wasn’t much-a hole in the wall with a few stools at the bar, a dartboard and some tables in the back. Bob Marley was playing on the jukebox. Joaquin pulled up one of the stools and ordered a cerveza from the middle-aged woman behind the bar, who seemed about as chatty as Benny. He drank quietly for a half hour or so until the bar started to fill up. Rosa seemed to pick up when the crowd did.
“Another cerveza?” she asked him.
“Sure.” Some of the patrons who had just come in eyed him suspiciously. Joaquin knew it was time to get his story out. He struck up a conversation with the man sitting next to him, a fisherman himself of sorts.
“I catch frogs,” Geraldo Martine told him after a couple of beers. “Sell them to the big restaurants. They’re what you call a delicacy.” Some way to make a living, Joaquin was about to say, but he knew Geraldo would take it as an insult so he kept it to himself.
“So how do you catch them?”
“Gotta go out in the dark, along shore. You can hear ’em and even see their eyes. They glow, you know.” Joaquin didn’t know. He also didn’t know if Geraldo was making it up as he went or not. He just nodded, trying to appear as interested as possible. “Then you shine your flashlight right into their eyes. It freezes ’em. And you stab ’em with a long pole. You gotta be quick and you gotta be fast.”
Joaquin nodded again. “I’d love to see you do that sometime.”
“Be at the boat dock at four in the mornin’, any mornin’, and I’ll take you out.”
“I just might take you up on that,” Joaquin assured him, then he nonchalantly unloaded his story about being retired and coming to Bass Creek to fish. After that, he paid for his two beers and left. He knew Geraldo would tell the others.
It seemed safe now, so Joaquin took a detour down Mercer Street on his way home. He walked by Pilar Rodriguez’s house-whose lawn Rudy had fertilized with the contents of his stomach a few weeks before. The house was dark. He proceeded farther down the street to Lucy Ochoa’s trailer, which was also dark and looked abandoned. Joaquin knew it was going to stay that way for a long time. He walked on to Ray Castro’s place, hoping he might find him and Jose Guerrero sitting on the stoop drinking a beer. There were lights on inside but nobody outside he could casually chat with. He stood there for a moment, looking back in the direction of the abandoned trailer. He couldn’t actually see it because it was set back, but the path to it was less than a hundred yards away. After reading the police investigation, Joaquin had become convinced that the key to breaking this case was somewhere in the mix between Ray Castro, Jose Guerrero and the mysterious Geronimo guy the two of them had mentioned. He could smell it from the report itself: These guys weren’t telling the truth. And why did this Geronimo suddenly disappear? If he could find a connection between Lucy Ochoa and Ray, Jose or Geronimo, that would be a good start. He then had to make up those hundred yards and put one of them in the trailer the night of Lucy’s murder.
He decided to fish only in the morning. In the late afternoon he’d take a walk, maybe meet some of the neighbors, strike up a chat about Lucy-who her friends were, that sort of thing. He didn’t plan on re-interviewing Ray or Jose or Pilar until he had picked up as much information as he could. Of course, if he ran into them during his sauntering, he’d try to steer the conversation in the right direction.
At four o’clock the next morning he was standing at the boat ramp waiting for Geraldo, who didn’t show up until almost five. He’d taken Geraldo for a talker. Maybe, just maybe, out on the lake in the early morning hours, he might learn something about the characters he was pursuing. Geraldo didn’t notice him at first; he was busy setting his small boat in the water. Joaquin came up behind him.
“Told you I’d take you up on your invitation,” he said almost in a whisper. Geraldo, who was in his own little world, almost jumped out of his shoes.
“Jesus, you scared me,” he said with no look of recognition in his eyes. Joaquin picked up on it right away.
“I’m Joaquin. We met at Rosa’s last night. You invited me to come out on the boat with you.”
Geraldo hesitated for a moment, wondering if he was going to end up as a distant memory washed up on shore if he took this guy out with him. Then a very dim light went off in his brain and his suspicions ebbed.
“Oh yeah, I remember now,” he replied. “Let me just get my pole and my flashlight and we’ll head out. Sorry I’m late.”
“No problem.”
They set out on Geraldo’s rowboat, which was fitted with a fifteen-horsepower motor. It took about twenty minutes to reach the lake. Geraldo made a quick left turn and cut the motor, pulling it out of the water. He then set his oars and began to row in towards shore.
“The motor scares ’em,” he whispered. “Gotta be real quiet.” They were the first words he’d spoken since they left the dock. Close to shore, Geraldo pulled in the oars and let the boat drift. His left hand grabbed his flashlight, his right a long pole with a pointed end like a spear. He looked in at the shoreline with an intensity that surprised Joaquin.