She walked alongside the curb, her eyes scanning the asphalt, looking for something, anything, maybe a cigarette butt or a piece of luck. Thompson stood with me, kicking at the ground with one foot. I couldn’t take my eyes off Rachel. I saw her stop and look down and bite her lip for a moment. I walked over.
Glimmering like a cache of diamonds against the curb was a pile of shattered safety glass. She toed her shoe through the glass stones.
The trailer park’s manager was already about three shots into the day when we opened the door and stepped into the cramped space advertised outside as an office. It was clear the place was also the man’s home. He was sitting in a green corduroy La-Z-Boy chair with the feet extension up. Its sides were scarred by cat scratches but it was still the nicest piece of furniture he had. Other than the television. That was a new-looking Panasonic with a built-in VCR. He was watching a home-shopping show and it took him a long time to pull his eyes off the tube to have a look at us. The device being sold sliced and chopped vegetables without all the mess and setup time of a food processor.
“You the manager?” Rachel asked.
“That should be obvious, shouldn’t it, Officer?”
A wise guy, I thought. He was about sixty and he wore green fatigues and a white sleeveless T-shirt with burn holes on the chest through which a crop of gray chest hair protruded. He was balding and had a drinker’s red face. He was white, the only white person I had seen so far in the park.
“It’s Agent,” she said, showing him the inside of her badge wallet.
“FBI? What’s the G care about a little car break-in? See, I read a lot. I know you people call yourselves the G. I like that.”
Rachel looked at me and Thompson and then back at the man. I felt the small tingling of anxiousness.
“How do you know about the car break-in?” Rachel asked.
“I seen you out there. I got eyes. You was lookin’ at the glass. I swept it up into a pile. Street cleaners only come ’round here maybe once a month. More in the summer when it’s dusty out.”
“No. I mean, how did you even know there was a car burglary?”
“ ’Cause I sleep back there in the back room. I heard ’em break the window. I saw them messing about inside that car.”
“When was this?”
“Let’s see, that’d be Thursday last. I was wondering when the guy’d report it. But I didn’t think no FBI agent would be coming out. How ’bout you two, you with the G, too?”
“Never mind that, Mr.—what is your name, sir?”
“Adkins.”
“Okay, Mr. Adkins, do you know whose car got broken into?”
“Nope, never saw him. I just heard the window and saw the kids.”
“What about a plate?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t call the police?”
“Don’t have no phone. I could see Thibedoux’s over to lot three but it was the middle of the night and I knew those cops wouldn’t come running on a car rob’ry. Not here. They got too much to do.”
“So you never at any point saw the owner of the car and he never knocked on the door to see if maybe you heard the break-in or saw anybody?”
“That’s right.”
“What about the kids who broke in?” Thompson asked, robbing Rachel of the payoff question. “You know them, Mr. Atkins?”
“Adkins. With a D, no T, Mr. G.”
Adkins laughed at his command of the alphabet.
“Mr. Adkins,” Thompson said, correcting himself. “Well, do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Know who the kids were.”
“No, I don’t know who they were.”
His eyes strayed past us to the television. On the program they were now selling a glove with small rubber bristles on the palm for grooming pets.
“I know what else you could use that for,” Adkins said. He made a masturbation motion with his hand and winked and smiled at Thompson. “That’s what they’re really selling that for, you know.”
Rachel stepped over to the TV and turned it off. Adkins didn’t protest. She straightened up and looked at him.
“We’re investigating the murder of a police officer. We’d like your attention. We have reason to believe the car you saw burglarized belonged to a suspect. We are not interested in prosecuting the boys who broke into the car, but we need to speak to them. You were lying just then, Mr. Adkins. I saw it in your eyes. The boys came from this park.”
“No, I—”
“Let me finish. Yes, you were lying to us. But we’re going to give you another chance. You can tell us the truth now or we’ll go back and get more agents and police and we’ll go through this dump you call a trailer park like an army laying siege. You think we’ll find any stolen property in those tin cans? You think we might run across some people wanted on warrant? How about some illegals? What about safety code violations? We passed one back there, I saw the extension cord going out the door into the shed. They’ve got somebody living in there, don’t they? And I bet you and your employer charge extra for that. Or maybe just you do. What’s your employer going to say when he finds out? What’s he going to say when the receivables go down because the people who are supposed to be paying you rent cannot because they’ve been deported or they’re in lock-up on warrant holds for not paying child support? What about you, Mr. Ad-kins? You want me to run the serial number off that television on the computer?”
“The TV’s mine. Bought it fair and square. Know what you are, FBI lady? Fucking Bitch Investigator.”
Rachel ignored the comment, though I thought Thompson turned away to hide a smile.
“Fair and square from who?”
“Never mind. It was those Tyrell brothers, okay? They’re the ones what robbed that car. Now if they come in here and beat the shit outta me, I’m suing you. Got that?”
With directions from Adkins we arrived at a trailer four units in from the main entrance. Word had spread that the law was in the park. There were more people on stoops and sitting on the outdoor couches. When we got to Number 14, the Tyrell brothers were waiting for us.
They were sitting on an old glider beneath a blue canvas awning extending from the side of a double-wide trailer. Next to the door of the trailer were a washer and dryer set beneath a blue canvas cover to keep the rain off. The two brothers were teenagers, maybe a year apart and of mixed race, black and white. Rachel stepped to the edge of the shade provided by the awning. Thompson took a spot about five feet to her left.
“Guys,” Rachel said and got no response. “Your mother home?”
“Nah, she not, Officer,” the older one said.
He looked at the brother with slow eyes. The brother started rocking the glider back and forth with his leg.
“You know,” Rachel said, “we know you’re smart. We don’t want any trouble with you. Don’t want to give you any trouble. We promised Mr. Adkins that when we went in there to ask where your trailer was.”
“Adkins, shit,” the younger one said.
“We’re here about the car that was parked out on the road last week.”
“Didn’t see it.”
“No, we didn’t see it.”
Rachel walked over close to the older one and bent down to talk directly into his ear.
“Come on now,” she said softly. “This is one of those times your mother told you about. Think now. Use your head. Remember what she told you. You don’t want trouble for her or for yourselves. You want us to go away and leave you alone. And there’s only one way we’re going to do that.”
When Rachel walked into the squad room at the field office, she carried the plastic bag like a trophy. She set it down on Matuzak’s desk and a handful of agents gathered around to look. Backus came in and looked down at it as if he were looking at the Holy Grail. Then he looked up at Rachel with excitement plain in his eyes.
“Grayson checked with the PD,” he said. “No record of any break-in reported at that spot. Not on that day, not on t
hat week. You’d think a legal citizen who gets his car broken into would make a report.”
Rachel nodded.
“You’d think.”
Backus nodded to Matuzak, who picked the evidence bag up off the table.
“You know what to do?”
“Yes.”
“Bring us back some luck. We need it.”
What the bag contained was a car stereo stolen from a late-model Ford Mustang, white or yellow depending on which of the Tyrell brothers had better eyesight in the dark.
It was all we got from them but the feeling, the hope, was that it was enough. Rachel and Thompson had interviewed them separately and then switched sides and interviewed them again, but the radio was all the Tyrell brothers could give. They said they never saw the driver who left the Mustang at the curb in front of Sunshine Acres and they took nothing but the stereo in a quick smash-and-grab. They never bothered to open the trunk. They never looked at the plate to see if the car was even registered in Arizona.
While Rachel spent the rest of the afternoon doing paperwork and preparing an addendum on the car to be transmitted to all field offices, Matuzak fed the serial number of the stereo to the Automotive ID unit at Washington, D.C., headquarters, then gave the stereo itself to a lab tech for processing. Thompson had taken prints of the Tyrell brothers for elimination purposes.
The lab got no usable prints off the stereo other than those left by the Tyrells. But the serial number was not a dead end. It came back to a 1994 pale yellow Mustang registered to Hertz Corporation. Matuzak and Mize then headed to Sky Harbor International to continue tracing the car.
The mood of the agents in the field office was upbeat. Rachel had delivered. There was no guarantee that the Mustang had been driven by the Poet. But the time of its being parked outside Sunshine Acres matched the time period in which Orsulak had been killed. And there was the fact that the break-in by the brothers had never been reported to the police. It added up to a viable lead and, more so, it gave them a little more knowledge about how the Poet operated. It was an important gain. They felt like I felt. That the Poet was an enigma, a phantom somewhere out there in the darkness. Coming up with a lead like the car stereo seemed to make the possibility of catching him more believable. We were closer and we were coming.
For most of the afternoon I stayed out of the way and simply watched Rachel work. I was fascinated by her skill, amazed at how she had come up with the stereo and how she had talked to Adkins and the Tyrells. At one point in the office she noticed my gaze and asked what I was doing.
“Nothing, just watching.”
“You like watching me?”
“You are good at what you do. It’s always interesting to watch somebody like that.”
“Thank you. I just got lucky.”
“I have a feeling you get lucky a lot.”
“I think in this business you make your own luck.”
At the end of the day, after Backus had picked up and read a copy of the alert she had transmitted, I watched his eyes narrow into two black marbles.
“I wonder if that choice of car was intentional?” he asked. “A pale yellow Mustang.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
I saw Rachel nodding. She knew the answer.
“The Bible,” Backus said. “Behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death.”
“And Hell followed with him,” Rachel finished.
We made love again Sunday night and she seemed even more giving and needing of the intimacy. In the end, if either of us was holding back, it was me. While I wanted nothing more in the world at that moment than to surrender to the feelings I had for her, a low whisper in the back of my mind found just enough volume to question her motives. Perhaps it was a testament to my own precarious self-confidence, but I couldn’t help but listen to the voice when it suggested that perhaps her aim was just as much to hurt her ex-husband as to please me and herself. The thought made me feel guilty and insincere.
When we held each other afterward, she whispered that this time she was going to stay until dawn.
31
The phone pulled me out of a sound sleep. I looked around the strange confines of the room, getting my bearings, and my eyes fell on Rachel’s.
“You better get it,” she said calmly. “It’s your room.”
She didn’t seem to have nearly the same difficulty I had coming awake. In fact, for a moment I had the feeling she had already been awake and was watching me when the phone rang. I lifted the receiver on what I guessed was the ninth or tenth ring. At the same time I saw that the clock on the bed table said it was seven-fifteen.
“Yes?”
“Put Walling on the line.”
I froze. There was something reminiscent about the voice but I didn’t place it in my jumbled mind. Then a thought occurred to me that Rachel shouldn’t be in my room.
“You got the wrong room. She’s in—”
“Don’t fuck with me, reporter. Put her on.”
I covered the phone with my hand and turned to Rachel.
“It’s Thorson. He says he knows you’re there—here.”
“Give it to me,” she said angrily and jerked the phone out of my hand.
“What do you want?”
There was a period of silence. He must’ve said two or three sentences to her.
“Where did it come from?”
More silence.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked, the anger back in her voice. “Go ahead and tell him, if that’s what you want. If you want him to know. It says as much about you as me. I’m sure he’d like to know that you’re some kind of Peeping Tom.”
She handed me the phone and I hung it up. She pulled a pillow over her face and moaned. I pulled it off her face.
“What is it?”
“I’ve got bad news for you, Jack.”
“What?”
“In this morning’s edition of the Los Angeles Times there was a story about the Poet. I’m sorry. I’ve got to bring you into the FO for a meeting with Bob.”
I was silent for a moment, confused.
“How’d they . . .”
“We don’t know. That’s what we’re going to talk about.”
“How much did they have, did he say?”
“No. But apparently it was enough.”
“I knew I should have written this yesterday. Damn it! Once it was clear that this guy knew about you people, there was no reason not to write it.”
“You made a deal and stuck to it. You had to, Jack. Look, let’s wait on this until we get to the office and talk about what they had.”
“I’ve got to call my editor.”
“You can do that later. Bob’s apparently already in and waiting for us. I guess he doesn’t sleep.”
The phone rang again. She jerked the phone out of the cradle.
“What is it?” she said in a voice painted with annoyance. Then in a softer tone, she said, “Hold on.”
She smiled sheepishly and handed me the phone. She then lightly kissed me on the cheek, whispered that she was going to her room to get ready and started to get dressed. I put the phone to my ear.
“Hello?”
“It’s Greg Glenn. Who was that?”
“Uh, that was an FBI agent. We’ve got a meeting. I guess you’ve heard about the L.A. Times.”
“You’re damn right I have.”
The sinking sensation in my chest was growing. Glenn went on.
“They’ve got a story on the killer in the paper. Our killer, Jack. They’re calling him the Poet. You told me we had the exclusive on this and we were protected.”
“We were.”
It was all I could manage to say. As Rachel finished throwing her clothes on she watched me with sympathetic eyes.
“Not anymore. You’ve got to come back this morning and write ours for tomorrow. Whatever you’ve got. And you better have more than they’ve got. We could’ve had this in the paper, Jack, but you convinced me. Now we’re p
laying catch-up on our own story, goddamnit.”
“All right!” I said sharply just to shut him up.
“And I hope I don’t find that you’ve extended your stay in Phoenix just because you found some babe to bang down there.”
“Fuck you, Greg. Do you have the story there or not?”
“Of course I do. It’s a great story. A great read. But it’s in the wrong paper!”
“Just read it to me. No, wait a minute. I gotta go to this meeting. Have somebody in the library—”
“Don’t you listen, Jack? You aren’t going to any meeting. I want you on the next plane back here to write this for tomorrow.”
I watched Rachel blow a kiss at me and then go out the door.
“I understand. You’ll have it for tomorrow. But I can write it here and ship it.”
“No. This is a hands-on story. I want to work this one right here with you.”
“Let me go to this meeting and call you back.”
“Why?”
“There’s a new development,” I lied. “I don’t know what it is and I have to go and find out. Let me go and I’ll call you. Meantime, have the library take the Times story off their wire and ship it to my basket. I’ll call it up here. I gotta go.”
I hung up before he could protest. I quickly got dressed and headed out the door with my computer bag. I was in a daze. I didn’t know how this could have happened. But a thought was pushing through.
Thorson.
We each grabbed two cups to go from a hospitality stand in the lobby and then headed to the federal building. She had packed all her things again. I had forgotten.
We didn’t talk until we had finished our first cups. I imagined we had completely different dilemmas and different thoughts going through our mind.