The Devil May Care (20 page)

He told me to get out, and he kept telling me in a loud, screeching voice until a couple of nurses and an orderly appeared. So I left.

*   *   *

I returned to the elevator, stepped inside the car, hit the button for the first floor, and stood facing out. I saw her just as the doors closed—an attractive young woman with long black hair. I hit the
OPEN DOOR
button, but it was too late, so I pressed the button for the third floor and the elevator stopped. I got out of the car, found the staircase, and climbed it to the fourth floor. No one noticed me as I walked quickly back down the corridor to Nunez's room. I stopped outside the door and listened.

“That fucking McKenzie,” Nunez said.

God, that's getting old,
my inner voice said.

“What does he know?” a woman's voice asked.

“He don't know nuthin'.”

“He must know something or he wouldn't have come here.”

“Look, you going to give me a ride home? I've been waiting all day. You gonna give me a ride?”

“McKenzie could ruin everything.”

“Fuck 'im.”

“This is your fault, Arnaldo.”

“My fault? I didn't do nothing.”

“You and your little friends. You're so stupid.”

“I am your brother. You do not talk to me that way.”

“
Estúpido.
Mary Pat is good to me. She is a friend. She gave me a job; said she'd make me an assistant manager as soon as I finish a college course that she's paying for. There was no reason for what you did. I would have told you if he showed up again. It was just a matter of time.”

“Got tired of waiting.”

“What if Mary Pat finds out?”

I walked into the hospital room.

“Good question,” I said. “What if Mary Pat does find out?”

Maria spun to face me. Her mouth hung open, and her beautiful eyes exploded with a fearful light.

“
Buenas noches,
Maria,” I said.

I had knocked her off balance by my abrupt appearance, yet her equilibrium quickly returned.

“It is too early for
noches,
” she said. “It is still afternoon.”

“Buenas tardes,”
I said.

“Buenas tardes.”

“At the risk of sounding racist, you got a lot of 'splainin' t' do.”

Maria turned toward her brother. He was standing now, a crutch under each arm.

“Tell him nothing,” he said.

“In a minute your brother is going to start screaming for me to get out of here,” I said. “This time I won't leave until the police arrive.”

“Say nothing.”

“Maria?”

She was standing between her brother and me, turning her head back and forth as if she were at a tennis match.

“I'm not here to jam you up,” I told her. “You or your brother. I like Mary Pat, and I don't want her to be upset any more than she already is.”

“Maria,” Nunez said. She turned her head to look at him. “We do not talk about our business.”

“I don't care about your business.” Maria's head turned again. “I don't care about the fire. I care only about Navarre.”

“This is a family matter, Maria.” Her head turned once more.
“La familia.”

“No, it's not. Someone else is after Navarre, too. Someone who hurt friends of mine in an attempt to find him. Who killed friends of mine. Who might hurt or kill Mary Pat. Or even you.” Maria pivoted so that she was facing me. “Help me. Please.”

“You do not say anything. Maria.” She spun to face her brother. “You know the rules.”

“Please,” I said again. “I just need to know why you're looking for Navarre.”

Maria looked me directly in the eye.

“He is not Navarre,” she said.

“Maria,” her brother said. “Do not say anything more.”

“Who is he?” I asked. “Maria, who is he?”

She put her hands over her ears and shouted.

“Stop it. Stop it, both of you.”

“Maria,” I said.

“McKenzie, it is not for me to say. You must speak to my brother.” I glanced at Nunez. She shook her head. “My brother Cesar. It is for him to say.”

FOURTEEN

The face of Cesar Nunez bore all the marks of a trouble-prone life. Despite that—and the tattoos that peeked out from around the collar of his white T-shirt and up and down his arms—he had the forlorn expression of a businessman who fought all the way to the top only to discover it hadn't been worth the effort. He yawned at me, and I wondered what kind of hours he kept and whether he had any choice in the matter. Probably not.

Since both Maria and Arnaldo refused to provide any more information to me, I decided to go to the top.

After all,
my inner voice told me,
if you want someone to break the rules, go see the people who actually make the rules, because they do it all the time.

Unfortunately, visiting hours for the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater had already expired by the time I left Chaska late Friday afternoon. My first chance to see Cesar was at eight fifteen Saturday morning in the prison's noncontact visiting room. So that's where I was, sitting on a stool attached to the wall that resembled a toilet seat. Cesar was sitting on a molded chair inside a tiled room the size of a closet. A brick wall, iron bars, and reinforced glass separated the two of us.

I picked up the black telephone receiver so I could speak to him, yet he did not pick up his. Instead, he merely gazed at me through half-closed eyes, his expression as vague as the dark side of the moon.

I returned the receiver to the cradle and found my cell phone. I called up the photograph of Navarre that Riley had sent me and pressed the phone to the glass. Cesar glanced at it and yawned some more. I called up the photo of an angry-looking Arnaldo, the one where he was wearing a 937 Mexican Mafia T-shirt, and pressed that against the glass. Cesar took one look at it and snatched his telephone receiver off the wall. I quickly grabbed mine.

“Where did that come from?” he asked.

“I took it in the parking lot of a restaurant that your brother and his Mexican Mafia friends set on fire Wednesday night.”

“Nine-Thirty-Seven don't exist no more. It's gone.”

“Arnaldo seems to be reviving it. Both he and Maria.”

I used the names of Cesar's brother and sister on purpose to see what kind of reaction it would provoke. Yet Cesar gave me nothing but a blank stare. I recalled the photograph of Navarre and pressed it against the glass again.

“He calls himself Juan Carlos Navarre,” I said. “Who is he really?”

“You a cop?”

“No, I'm not.”

“Who are you then?”

“My name is McKenzie. Look, you're not the only one searching for Navarre. There are a couple of others, too. One of them raped and murdered a friend of mine to get information. That's who I want.”

“I don't care about you or your friend.”

“You do care about Navarre. Help me find him.”

Cesar leaned back and prepared to hang up his phone. I rapped on the glass with my receiver.

“You dumb jerk,” I shouted.

Cesar brought the receiver up to his mouth as if he wanted to give me a few choice words before hanging up. I beat him to it.

“Hey, asshole. Do you want Arnaldo to join you in here? He's looking at an arson rap. Maybe you can share a cell with him. And Maria? Pretty girl. Why don't you just punch her ticket to the women's prison in Shakopee as an accomplice? We'll see how long she stays pretty. You fucked up your life; you want them to fuck up theirs?” I found Arnaldo's pic again and showed it to Cesar. “He's wearing a fucking gang sign on a T-shirt. How long do you think he's going to last before the cops grab him up?”

Cesar stared at the photograph of his little brother.

“Arnaldo is trying hard to find Navarre—for you. Only he and his crew haven't got the smarts for it. I do. Give me something to work with. Once I find Navarre your people can do whatever you want with him. I don't care. He means nothing to me.”

“You give him up?”

“In a heartbeat,” I said, wondering at the same time if it was true.

Cesar stared at the pic of his brother some more and leaned forward. He whispered into the receiver.

“Jax Abana.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Traidor.”

“
Traidor?
Traitor? Did you say traitor?”

Cesar hung up the phone without answering, left the visiting room, and made his way back to his prison cell.

*   *   *

I called Bobby Dunston from the prison parking lot.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“It's nine o'clock,” he told me. “At nine thirty I'm leaving the house. I'm taking Shelby and the girls to TCF Stadium to watch the alma mater play Ohio State.”

“The Gophers are going to get crushed.”

“You are the most negative person I know, McKenzie. How do you even get through the day?”

“I need a favor.”

“So you said. I'm saying if I can't do it in the next thirty minutes, it's not going to get done.”

“Can you reach out to someone for me?”

“Who?”

“Anyone involved with the Nine-Thirty-Seven Mexican Mafia thing that's still around.”

“Everyone's still around, McKenzie. You're the only one who quit.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Like you haven't heard that before,
my inner voice said.

“There's a detective in West St. Paul that worked the case,” Bobby told me. “He's the guy I spoke to Thursday morning—the one who gave me the intel I passed on to you.”

“Can you ask him to meet with me?”

“I can ask, but he'll want to know what the meeting's about.”

“Tell him the confidential informant that burned the Nine-Thirty-Seven to the ground is back in town.”

*   *   *

“Jax Abana,” the detective said. “Now that's a name I haven't heard in a good long time.”

“Seven years,” I said.

“Closer to eight.”

I met Ted Ihns for an early lunch at Boca Chica Restaurante on Cesar Chavez Street in an area we call District del Sol on St. Paul's west side—which was not to be confused with the City of West St. Paul a mile down the road, where Ihns worked as a police detective. West St. Paul, in fact, was actually located due south of downtown St. Paul. It got its name because it happened to be on the west side of the Mississippi River. Don't ask me why they didn't call it something else, I only live here.

Boca Chica might have been the oldest Mexican restaurant in the Twin Cities. It was also one of the finest. Ihns ordered Mole Poblano con Pollo—chicken served on a bed of Spanish rice with a chile ancho and Mexican chocolate sauce poured over the top—and I had Pescado ala Boca Chica, a broiled walleye fillet smothered with the owner's renowned poblano sauce. The meals were so good that neither of us spoke until we were nearly finished eating.

“Where did you hear the name?” Ihns asked.

“Cesar Nunez.”

“He does have reason to remember it. How's he look, Cesar?”

“Like he wishes he were somewhere else.”

“Ain't gonna get out of the jug for quite a while yet.”

“Because of Jax Abana?”

“Exactly because of Abana.”

“He was a traitor, then.”

“Oh, yes. Indeed he was. He served up the Nine-Thirty-Seven on a platter, gave us everything. We thought, at first, that he was putting us on. He had no reason to turn, no reason to make a deal. We had nothing on Abana. All I knew, all I heard was that he was an up-and-comer in the gang. I could have ID'd most of the Nine-Thirty-Seven by sight back then. Not him.”

“Just came forward like a good little citizen, did he?”

“Yeah, right. Turned out that Abana was the gang's CFO. Eighteen and right out of high school and he was handling all of the Nine-Thirty-Seven's finances.”

“So why did he turn?”

“For the money. Why else?”

“Did you pay him?”

“Of course not. What happened, Abana gave us the drugs, the guns, the prostitutes, the gamblers, an annotated list of all the Nine-Thirty-Seven's customers, and, of course, all the leaders. What he didn't give us was two hundred and sixty-seven thousand dollars in cash, pretty much the Nine-Thirty-Seven's entire treasury. He neglected to share that with us. We wouldn't have even known it existed except Nunez and some others accused us of stealing it. We didn't steal it, by the way.”

“Never thought you did.”

“Others aren't so sure. I blame TV. Have you ever seen a cop show where half the force wasn't dirty?”

“
Barney Miller
?”

“I mean in the last forty years.”

Nothing came to mind.

“What happened to Abana?” I asked.

Ihns brought his closed fingers to his mouth, blew on them, and let his fingers fly open.

“Poof,” he said.

“Poof?”

“Gone, baby, gone. Disappeared with all that cash. Which explained a lot.”

“Explain it to me.”

“Abana was happy to give us information on the Nine-Thirty-Seven, yet he refused to go on the record. He refused to testify. We told him we could put him in Witsec, give him a new identity, give him protection if he took the stand. He wouldn't even consider it. The feds pushed hard, too. I didn't know why he was so adamant until I heard about the money. If he had entered the Witness Security Program, he would have had to give it up.”

“Did you look for him?”

“No, why would I?”

“To get the money back,” I said.

“Yeah, well, it was a small price to pay to take so many assholes off the street at one time, you know?”

“It was a good bust.”