“Kidnapping.” I grated. I already knew that.
“Right! But if that’s true, then the girls didn’t run away at all. So it isn’t a question of figuring out why the girls ran away while they were alone. The question is, how did the kidnapper know they were going to be alone? How did he know they were going to be somewhere that he could get at them without being seen? For that matter, how did he know he could get them to come with him? And how did he know their addresses? How did he know how many parents they had?”
I said, “Research?” Feeling like an idiot.
“Now you’re getting it. Tell me, Brew. If you wanted to research nine different girls in six different schools, and find out the answers to all these questions, where would you go?”
That was it. Finally I understood. “The school board. The files.” She was right, I could feel it. The bastard we were looking for got his information from those files. It was the only answer that made sense.
Maybe he was even on the board.
PART THREE
Thursday Night/Friday
11
Of course, it all rested on the assumption that the girls were being kidnapped. I had no problem with that. But it had one crucial flaw.
There didn’t seem to be any payoff. No ransom demands. And in any case, half the families involved couldn’t have scraped up a self-respecting ransom to save their souls.
Which brought me back to drugs. Some pusher in town was hot for new business. A very particular kind of new business.
Some pusher old Manolo had never heard of.
There must’ve been a hell of a lot of money in it to make it worth a possible kidnapping rap. Or a hell of a lot of hate. The kind of hate that makes serial killers.
I didn’t say anything to Ginny about that. Instead I said, “That’s going to be a big job. How many people are on the school board these days? Twenty?”
She said, “Fifteen.”
“And then there are all those secretaries. And on top of that, some people from the individual schools may have access to the general files. You’re talking about thirty suspects.” Or more. “Where do we start?”
“By whittling down the list.”
I said, “Oh.” Heavy on the sarcasm. The sense that we were finally getting somewhere made me feel a little better about Alathea, but it didn’t do much for my opinion of myself. “That shouldn’t be too hard. We’ll just call people up and ask them how they feel about stuffing dope down thirteen-year-old girls.”
“So we’ll have to work at it,” she said evenly. “Where did you get the idea it was supposed to be easy?” When I didn’t answer, she went on, “There’s a lot we can do, but to save time we’ll start with the obvious, the full-time people: Stretto, Scurvey, Greenling, and the secretaries.”
I couldn’t argue with her, so I asked, “What about Acton?”
“I’ll check on him tonight. Find out if he was lying about the commissioner. If he was telling the truth, we’ll have to assume he’s in the clear—and Stretto, too, for that matter. Until we know more, anyway.”
I couldn’t argue with that either. If Stretto was involved, he wouldn’t have called the commissioner. As for Acton—If he was dealing drugs, we’d put him in a real bind. As long as the commissioner knew about those notes, Acton couldn’t risk destroying them. If the commissioner knew. After chewing it around for a minute, I asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“Get some sleep,” she said promptly. “At this point, there’s nothing more we can do until morning. Get a cab and come to the office tomorrow early. By then I’ll have something set up.”
After that, it was too late to argue. I didn’t have anything else to offer. It was her case now. When she hung up, I went to bed.
And I went right to sleep. Being sober makes you more tired than you’d expect. But I spent the whole night dreaming about amber, and the next morning I was up with the birds. My face ached as if I’d been grinding my teeth for hours. Nevertheless I ignored it, ignored the feeling of stupidity that filled my chest, ignored the dry wish for alcohol in my mouth. Someday I’d have to find a way to feel proud of being sober, but right then I wasn’t up to it. By eight A.M. I was out on Cuevero Road looking for a cab.
Which was not a good time of day for cabs, but I finally found one. Then it wasn’t long until I was riding up the elevator of the Murchison Building to Ginny’s office.
She was there already. When I went into her back room, I found her on the phone. I dropped into a chair. Whoever she was talking to, it didn’t take her long. A couple of minutes later, we had an appointment with somebody or other for nine thirty.
“That was Dr. Sandoval,” she said. “Camilla Sandoval, pediatrician. How long has it been since you voted?”
I shrugged. How can you answer a question like that?
“Well, you probably don’t know she represents your district on the board of education. This is her fifth term—she’s very popular. One of the part-time members.” She looked at me sharply, as if she expected me to be surprised. “Your friend Encino speaks highly of her.”
If she wanted a reaction out of me, she was going to be disappointed. We errand boys try to keep our opinions to ourselves. Especially when we’re ashamed of our own bitterness. I got out my pocketknife and pretended to clean my fingernails, letting her hang for a moment before I asked, “What else did he have to say?”
She frowned, but she didn’t look serious about it. I wasn’t fooling her any. “Not much about Dr. Sandoval. But he told me a little something about Acton and the commissioner. Apparently Acton was giving it to you straight. Encino wasn’t there, but when the commissioner personally goes to see a lieutenant instead of sending for him, and chews him out in front of half the duty room, word gets around pretty fast. Stretto called the commissioner, all right. We can count on it.”
“Politicians,” I muttered, mostly to myself. They know how to talk to each other. If I’d gone to the commissioner with those notes myself, I would’ve gotten in trouble for “obstructing an official investigation.” Paul M. Stretto makes one phone call, and all of a sudden the air’s full of shit. “So scratch the chairman of the board. Put Acton on the back burner. What’s next?”
Ginny frowned again. This time she meant it. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and everything we do takes time. I can’t find Ted, so I bit the bullet and hired some help. I called fat-ass Smithsonian.”
All things considered, that probably shouldn’t have surprised me. We had between ten and thirty suspects lined up, and every passing day put Alathea in that much more trouble. But Ginny is an independent cuss, and she doesn’t like farming out work to other agencies. And of all the private investigators I know, Lawrence Smithsonian is the one she actively hates. He isn’t all that fat, but he as sure as hell looks fat, probably because his fees are overweight. And on top of that, his way of condescending to Ginny sends her blood pressure through the roof. Hiring his help probably cost her a pound of flesh. I had to stare at her for a while before I recovered enough to ask, “Why him?”
“Because he knows money.” She was practically spitting. “He can learn more about the personal finances of our suspects in one morning than we could in a week. He’ll start with the full-time board members and the secretaries, try to find out if any of them are getting rich in private, or living over their heads, or gambling with money they haven’t earned, or rolling too high on the stock market. Anything. He has half the bank presidents in this town in his back pocket. I think he blackmails them.”
After a minute I said, “Lona can’t pay you.”
“I know that.” She wasn’t thinking about money. She was still steaming about Smithsonian.
“I can’t either.”
That made her look at me. “Who asked you?”
I got up, went over to her. Cupped her head with both my hands and kissed her on the mouth.
She didn’t kiss me back. She just sat there and took it. When I stopped, she looked at me like
the barrel of a gun and said, “The next time you do that, you better mean it.”
Well, I meant it all right. My shoulders were trembling, and my pulse beat in my head so loud that I could hardly hear her. But that wasn’t what she was getting at. What she had in mind was something even more serious than the way I felt about her. We’d been through it before. She wanted me to quit drinking. Completely. Forever.
That was something I couldn’t do. I wasn’t worth it.
I went back to my chair and sat down, trying to hold myself so that she couldn’t see me shake. When I thought I could control my voice, I asked, “When is he going to call back?”
“When he finds something. Or this afternoon. Whichever comes first.”
“And in the meantime?”
“We’ll go talk to Dr. Sandoval. Then we’ll go back to the school board and see what we can run down this time.” Her composure was too perfect. I’d confused her and probably hurt her—which was something I had definitely not meant to do. While she got herself ready to leave, I spent a few minutes trying to think of a new way to curse myself.
She was still holding up her wall of businesslike professionalism as we rode the elevator down to the garage and took the Olds out into the morning glare. But after that she unbent enough to tell me what her plans were. They sounded reasonable, and if they worked, we could probably cross half the people off our list today. I let it go at that. I’d already pushed my luck too far with her.
The office of Dr. Camilla Sandoval was on the opposite side of the old part of town from where I lived. It was in a squat dull-red adobe structure that looked like it moonlighted as a bordello. Already the waiting room was full of mothers with babies in various stages of stupor or hysteria. Most of them were either Chicano or Indian, and all together they gave a pretty good capsule summary of what life was like in the old part of Puerta del Sol. After half an hour in that room, Ginny and I’d seen every degree of squalor, sickness, flamboyance, passivity, color, resentment, joy, hunger, love, and rage. A real education, if you can stand to hear babies squall. And see mothers hit them.
When Ginny told the nurse we had an appointment for 9:30, she just shrugged and gestured at all the people ahead of us. It looked like it was going to be a long wait, and I didn’t see any way around it. In this part of the world, the Anglos have spent the past hundred fifty years or so barging in line ahead of Chicanos and Indians, and I didn’t want to add to the resentment in those faces. But in situations like this Ginny has a thicker skin than I do. She stood it for that first half hour. Then she dug some paper and a pen out of her purse, wrote a long note, and gave it to the nurse. Her way of presenting it didn’t leave the nurse much choice. Three minutes later, Dr. Sandoval called us in to see her.
She was a chunky little woman, too small to be a football player and too big to be a fireplug. If she was married, she didn’t advertise it by wearing a ring. In fact, she didn’t wear any jewelry at all. Her manner was tough, but it was a particular kind of tough, the kind that can look pain straight in the face and make it hurt less without being hurt herself. Or without showing it, anyway. By the time she asked Ginny and me to have a seat in the square cubicle she used for an office, I liked her.
She sat down behind her desk and studied us for a second. Then she picked up Ginny’s note and slapped it with the back of her hand. “Nine junky whores,” she said, “thirteen or younger. Seven of them dead. What do you want from me? Do you think they were my patients?”
“Dr. Sandoval”—Ginny matched her tone evenly—“we’re private investigators.” She flipped the photocopy of her license onto the desk. “We’ve been hired to find the two girls who are still alive. I don’t think you know anything about them. That’s why we want to talk to you. We want to ask you some questions about the people you work with on the board of education.”
That was confusing enough to short-circuit some of Dr. Sandoval’s hostility. She didn’t exactly retreat, but she eased back a bit. “I don’t understand.”
“I know it’s complicated,” Ginny said, “and I can’t tell you much without violating the confidence of my clients. But I can tell you this: We have reason to believe these girls were kidnapped. And we suspect the kidnapper has some sort of connection with the school board. We’d like you to give us background information about a few of the people who work there.”
Now that the first surprise was over, Dr. Sandoval had started to fume. “This is insane. Do you understand what you’re saying? Perhaps you don’t know what the school board does. It exists to help children, to provide them with an education. Not all the members are idealists, of course, but they believe in education. We all believe in children. What you suggest is inconceivable.”
Ginny didn’t falter. “Criminals come in all disguises, Dr. Sandoval.”
“I repeat. It is inconceivable.”
“Then you believe Paul Stretto is pure as the driven snow?”
The doctor hesitated. Not a long hesitation, but a hesitation nonetheless. When it was over, she answered the question with a question. “If you’re right,” she asked, “why aren’t the police involved in this?”
“They are,” Ginny drawled. “It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if you have cops on your doorstep before the day’s over. The only difference is, they’re trying to catch a pusher. We’re trying to find two little girls.”
“I see.” She scanned both of us, and after a minute she looked like she really did see. “I have patients waiting. Please be as quick as you can.”
Ginny’s gaze didn’t shift an inch. “Paul Stretto?”
“Mr. Stretto is a politician. I doubt that he has so much as glanced at a textbook since fifth grade. He is on his way to an exalted career as a public servant.” Her mouth twisted sourly around the words. “I can’t believe that he would risk his future by involving himself in kidnapping.”
“Maybe he has friends who just ask him for information.”
“How would I know that?”
“Have you heard any rumors?”
“The rumor,” Dr. Sandoval said, “is that Paul Stretto wants to be president. Of the United States.”
“All right,” Ginny said, “How about Astin Greenling?”
“That man is the salt of the earth.” No hesitation at all. “His life has been very unhappy, but he burns himself out every day struggling to provide the children of this city with a decent education. Every year when the levies are voted down, the budget cuts always come out of curriculum. He’ll have heart failure some day if he doesn’t stop trying to raise the quality of education with less money every year.”
“You say unhappy? In what way?”
“His wife has leukemia.” Dr. Sandoval’s tone made it clear that she didn’t intend to say anything more about Astin Greenling’s unhappy life.
Ginny nodded. She was thinking the same thing I was. Treating leukemia costs money. Reams of money. But she didn’t make any comment. Money was Smithsonian’s job. Instead she went on down the list. “What can you tell us about Martha Scurvey?”
The doctor frowned, took a moment to decide on an answer. Then she said, “I don’t like her personally. But since she was elected budget vice-chairman last year, our accounting procedures have started to climb out of the Dark Ages. And she seems to have a talent for procurement: She gets lower prices for our supplies. I have to respect that. It takes a little pressure off Astin.”
“How long has she served on the board?”
“Just a year.” Dr. Sandoval was sardonic. “For some reason, most people don’t seem to know that the full-time members of the board of education are elected by the city at large. As far as I know, she’s never been elected for anything before.”
I sighed to myself and mentally crossed Martha Scurvey off the list. She hadn’t been on the board when the first four girls disappeared. But Ginny went right on, not wasting the doctor’s time. “And Julian Kirke?”
“He isn’t an elected officer. We hired him. The board decided to ge
t into this business of computerizing the files—which, incidentally, I’ve resisted every step of the way. It’s expensive, and I think the money should be spent on the children. But quality education doesn’t have as much prestige as computers. Machines have more dignity than human beings.”
I liked her more and more all the time.
“But that’s beside the point,” she went on. “When I was outvoted, the board looked for someone who could handle the nuts and bolts of this grand system. They found Julian. He’s a data-management expert, and had a good job with NCR, but they didn’t promote him fast enough to keep him. I think he is a petty tyrant, but that doesn’t prevent him from doing a good job. The fact is, in his hands the whole project has been less expensive than I thought it would be.”
“How long ago did you hire him?”
“Two and a half, maybe three years.”
“All right, Doctor,” Ginny said briskly. “Just a couple more questions. How much do you know about the secretaries who work under Mr. Kirke?”
“Very little. That’s his department. I’m not involved with it. It’s my impression that he’s pretty hard on them. For that matter, he’s barely civil to me. But they do good work.” She sighed. “Our correspondence looks professional now. Finally.”
I wanted to think about that for a while. I didn’t know whether Kirke was a perfectionist or just a cantankerous sonofabitch. But it was going to have to wait. Ginny was asking, “How many people have access to those files?”
“In theory, everybody in the school system. They aren’t intended to be secret. They’re supposed to help the schools run better. But the process hasn’t reached that point yet. In practice, the files are primarily accessible to the full-time people. When the rest of us want information, we ask Julian or one of the secretaries.”