Red Man Down(77)
‘Back in the trunk,’ Delaney said. ‘The kid’s been good about remembering that.’
‘OK if I check it out again?’
‘Sure. Anybody else?’
‘I want to talk to a couple of people at the jail,’ Sarah said. ‘Maybe Joey, you know … said something.’
‘Good. Why don’t you do that? Now, here’s what I want. Ray, just for the hell of it, go back to that block on Speedway where we found Joey. Must be four or five bars on that block, plus a couple of antique shops, good places to move some used merch, right? Stroll around there today, talk to the folks, take along the picture, see if anybody remembers Joey. Watch their eyes if they say yes, and see how many lies they tell right after that.
‘And Oscar, pick up the tool kit we keep in Lost and Found and go back to the impound yard. Pull the Toyota out into an open spot and tear that sucker apart. Joey didn’t get much time to enjoy that last pile of money, so most of it’s gotta be someplace. See if you can find it in the car. Maybe, come to think of it, you ought to have some help with that.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Jason said quickly. ‘I’m cool with Toyotas, put myself through Pima College selling used ones.’
‘Good enough. Go for it.’
You’d think he gave them a week off with pay, Sarah thought, watching Jason and Oscar charge off the second floor with their eyes alight.
Sarah phoned the jail, found Greta in the admitting section and got her to agree to a short interview in one hour’s time, perhaps with coffee if things broke just right. She cleared her desk and stopped by Ollie’s workspace on her way out.
‘What are you looking for on the laptop?’ she asked him. ‘Is Tracy helping you?’
‘Tracy’s gone back to high school, where he probably does not enjoy perfect rapport with his teachers. He’s going to be working here a few Saturdays this winter, he said, but not many because the college hunt is getting serious. So before he left I got him to show me a couple of those conjuring tricks he was using to pull stuff out of the laptop. I don’t have specific goals, I just want to nose around in there and see if I can act enough like a teenager to find something. It’d be cool if I got some idea about what the late Angela Lacey was finding out about just before she got so rudely interrupted.’
‘What a good idea,’ Sarah said, in a voice so full of fake admiration Ollie stopped checking his email and gave her his equally fake Alfred E. Neuman grin.
‘I can put my toe in my ear, too,’ he said. ‘What do you want, Sarah?’
She told him about Marjorie Springer’s remark about Angela’s ‘research.’
‘She asked me that day, “You think maybe she found something?” But then, you know, there was so much else to do … I never got back to that. Would you take a look for a folder conveniently labeled, oh, I don’t know, “Angela’s Deadly Research”?’ She smiled at him.
‘Sure. Happy to – making a note, “Angela’s Deadly …” There! Now will you go away and leave me alone for a long time? Because I’m not very good at this yet, and I don’t want you listening when I have to call a high-school boy and ask for advice.’
The freeway was full of drivers behaving as though they had just received word that this was the last Monday of the year for getting work done. Wide awake and feeling her jaws throb, Sarah pulled off on Silverlake a few minutes later and parked to the right of the jail. She took her time walking in across the brick pavers – the weather had returned to Resort Special, and the sun on her back felt like a cure for traffic and other forms of stress.
Greta Wahl apparently felt the same way – she walked out to the desk to greet Sarah, said they’d better skip coffee today and suggested they sit outside, ‘I like to get out of this air-conditioning once or twice a shift if I can.’ A compact, tightly organized woman with no outstanding features, she somehow exuded confidence and authority so completely that, in the potentially chaotic surroundings of the admitting section, her presence alone was sufficient to calm the room.
She’d read the report of Joey’s death. ‘I have to say I’m not surprised. His temper was out of control. But I’m glad you called me – you reminded me of something I meant to tell you.’ She tapped her upper lip a couple of times, thinking.
‘It was two days, I think, before his mother bailed him out. Joey had been brought up into the front section to make a phone call. You know the arrangement? They can have all the phone calls they want, but they all have to be collect calls, there aren’t any coin boxes on the phones here. We don’t have to monitor calls, in fact we’re not allowed to – that’s supposed to be the advantage of this pod construction: they’re never in direct contact with the outside so they don’t have to be monitored for visits and phone calls.