The Old Blue Line: A Joanna Brady Novella (Joanna Brady Mysteries) (7 page)

“It was on the noon news,” she said. “They’re saying you murdered your ex-wife. I didn’t even know you had an ex-wife.”

“That’s because it’s not something I like to discuss. And my attorney—Harold here,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder toward the guest room, “says I’m not to talk about it now with anyone.”

“Mum’s the word, then,” she said, giving me a second fierce hug. “All I can say about Mr. Meeks is bless his heart.”

She left then. I went into the bedroom and showered. I needed to scrub the feel of that holding cell off my skin and out of my soul. No need to rub it out of my hair.

When I came back out to the living room, Charles Rickover had let himself in and made himself at home on the chintz sofa. He had somehow managed to talk his way around Matty and come upstairs with a cup of freshly brewed coffee in hand. Maybe I did need to keep my apartment door locked.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought you were going to Vegas.”

“Did,” he replied. “Flew there and back, chop-chop. You ever hear of the Wright brothers?”

“So what’s up?”

“Katherine Melcher’s husband—her most recent husband—is in the clear, at least as far as doing the deed himself. He was out of the country on business. I’ve got airline records, car rental receipts, and passport control stamps coming and going. He could have hired someone to do it, I suppose, but as far as I can tell, Katherine had landed herself a fat cat and was determined to hang onto this one. According to him, after ditching the drugs, she became really serious about working her program. That’s when she changed her name from Faith to Katherine—when the two of them married. It was part of a joint effort on their part to put her past in the past. By the way, my reading on Melcher is that he really is heartbroken.”

“The woman would have dumped him sooner or later, and cleaned him out, too, in the process,” I said. “Knowing Faith the way I do, up close and personal, I suspect her husband probably just dodged a bullet.”

“Speaking of husbands,” Charles said. “I also checked on your old pal Rick Austin.”

“What about him? Where’s he?”

“Deceased. Katherine—she was still Faith back then—married him shortly after she left you. That was followed by a time when they both did a serious amount of coke. She ended up in rehab, cleaned up her act, and left him high and dry. Austin blew his brains out after she left.”

Karma’s a bitch. Much as I thought Rick deserved everything he got, I couldn’t help having a moment of sympathy for the guy. After all, there but for the love of Grandma Hudson would go I.

“By the way,” Charles said, “I managed to lay hands on the vic’s telephone records.”

“How did you do that?”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Harold can subpoena them later if he needs to, but it’s always better to know what they’re going to say before you do that. I’ve got the dates and times for all the calls that were placed from the pay phone downstairs. I’ve also got a record of the call to her cell phone that was placed from the swimming pool pay phone at the Talisman at 2:05
A.M.
.

“Katherine took the call. It lasted for over three minutes. Twenty minutes later she is seen on surveillance tapes leaving her building. That’s the last record I’ve been able to find of her, although I’ve got someone in Vegas looking at the surveillance tapes of all the hotels along the Strip. Talk about looking for a needle in the haystack, but we have a little better idea of what we’re looking for now. It’ll turn up. As for the Talisman? What a dog of a hotel! They may have surveillance cameras hanging on ceilings all over the place, but that’s just for show. The problem is, not one of them works.”

“In other words, the surveillance tape that might have caught the killer and exonerated me doesn’t exist?”

Charles nodded. “That’s the way it looks. So, are you ready to take a ride?”

I wasn’t so sure. My most recent experience with being given a ride hadn’t turned out very well.

“Where to?”

“I want to show you something.”

“Can’t you just tell me?”

“Showing’s better than telling. Come on.”

Not particularly happy about it, I headed for the stairs. Out in the parking lot I was surprised to discover that Charles’s ride was a fire-engine-red Corvette. Not brand new, but new enough to make a statement. The man may have hit bottom years earlier, when Tim O’Malley’s daughter had walked out on him for another woman, but that had most likely been the beginning of a long upward path for which Pop O’Malley was most likely largely responsible. I wondered what Tim would think if I called him by that handle, too. Somehow I suspected that he wouldn’t mind.

As Charles and I headed down Highway 60 and turned onto the 101, I was dying to ask where we were going, but I stifled. Both highways were clotted with late afternoon traffic. Inching along in the HOV lane, we drove across the near north end of the city—not the real north end because the city has now expanded northward far beyond where those traditional boundaries used to lay. On the far side of Scottsdale and still on the 101, we turned south, exiting toward downtown Scottsdale on East Chaparral, just north of Camelback. Charles turned left onto Scottsdale Road, drove past Goldwater, and pulled into a parking garage at Fashion Square. Instead of parking in a space on one of the lower levels, he drove all the way up to the roof and pulled into a spot at the far edge of the lot, looking north.

“What do you see?” he asked.

I looked at the mid-rise across the street. It obviously housed high-end condos. The spacious balconies were filled with plants in wildly colorful pots and furnished with equally high-end deck chairs and tables. The grounds around the base of the building were meticulously landscaped with towering palms, a carpet of lush green grass, and flower beds thick with recently planted petunias. Clearly this was a building where the residents weren’t the least bit concerned about the high cost of water in the Valley of the Sun.

“It’s a building,” I said grumpily, annoyed at being forced to play a guessing game. “Condos for the rich and famous.”

“Rich and infamous maybe,” Charles replied with a sly grin. “Who do you suppose lives here?”

“I have no idea.”

“Your cleaning lady,” he said. “Marina Ochoa. That’s not the name she goes by here. Folks in the condo complex know her as Maria Fuentes, but believe me, this is where the woman known to you as Marina Ochoa lives. By the way, she doesn’t have any kids. None at all.”

I’m sure my jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”

“Wish I was,” Charles answered. “I got the license of her work car from the surveillance tapes at your security agency. That’s an old Buick, and she doesn’t park it here. She’s got a sweet little SLK that she drives back and forth between Scottsdale and Peoria. The Buick is what she drives when she comes to see you. She keeps it parked, complete with her vacuum cleaner and tray of cleaning supplies stowed in the trunk, in a garage over in Peoria just a few blocks from the Roundhouse.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How could she possibly afford to live here?”

“I’m sure her boyfriend pays the freight. Does the name Jeffrey Jones sound familiar?”

My jaw dropped again. Or maybe still. “She’s hooked up with the hotel developer, the one who’s trying to buy me out?”

“That’s right. One and the same. I believe that’s what Jones and Ochoa have been after this whole time—they’ve been trying to get the goods on you for months now. Jones must have finally realized that he wouldn’t be able to convince you to sell at what he wanted to pay, so he sent Marina to you along with her hard luck story in order to gain access to your private life. One or the other of them came up with the brilliant idea that if you were in jail facing homicide charges with the possibility of a long prison sentence, you might be more inclined to be reasonable.”

“But I thought . . .”

“I know what you thought,” Charles said. “You believed Marina’s sob story about being an illegal immigrant and about her working her poor little fingers to the bone in order to support her poor fatherless children. Guess again. Her parents immigrated from Mexico long before she was born. She’s a U.S. citizen with an honors degree in history and English from ASU. She went on to get an MBA from Thunderbird over in Glendale. That’s where she and Jeffrey hooked up. He divorced his first wife—his starter wife—shortly thereafter.”

“But she worked for me for months,” I objected.

“True,” Charles agreed, “and they must have been looking to make a huge score, considering she was willing to do that much hard physical labor just to have unlimited access to your private life. Believe me, the Maria Fuentes who lives here has a cleaning lady of her own. The really good news for us is that before she and Jeffrey became a couple, Maria spent several years working in the securities field. That means her fingerprints are on file. I’m hoping the criminalists dusting your file folders for prints will not only find hers, but they’ll find them where we need them.”

“Finding her prints won’t mean anything,” I objected. “She cleans my apartment. Her fingerprints are bound to be there.”

“In your apartment maybe, but not on the file folders containing your private documents. I can’t imagine you expected her to dust the file with your divorce decree in it on a regular basis.”

“But what if she wore gloves?” I objected, thinking about the gloves Charles put on his hands before touching my computer keyboard.

“Crooks like these are arrogant,” Charles said. “It won’t ever have occurred to them that we’re this smart. She’s probably been snooping through your computer the whole time she’s been working for you, looking for something they could use to bring you to heel. Then two things happened. First they found out that Faith Dixon had turned into Katherine Melcher who was living in Las Vegas. Then you decided to go to Vegas for that writing convention. What’s it called again?”

“Bouchercon.”

“Yes, Bouchercon. At that point they must have thought they hit the jackpot because it all seemed to fall into place. At some point along the way your sweet little Marina made a copy of your car keys—the trunk key anyway. I checked the tapes. The week of October fifteenth, the week Katy Melcher died, Marina cleaned your apartment on Thursday rather than Friday. I’m pretty sure she and Jeffrey drove to Vegas together the next day to scope out the situation. I’m sure they used the old Twelfth Step ruse to lure Katy out of the house at that hour of the morning. According to Katy’s widower, she took late night calls from addicts trying to kick their drug and alcohol habits.”

That was way more than I could get my head around. The idea of Faith or Katy or whoever she was going out on a late night mission of mercy and being murdered for it seemed utterly unlikely.

“What about the threatening phone calls?” I asked.

“They came on days when Marina Ochoa would have been working for you. They must have figured that would make your situation a slam dunk. Threatening calls come from the victim’s ex before she’s murdered? What could be better?”

“What about the e-mail from Deeny?” I asked.

“That’s apparently legit,” Charles said. “Because of the phone calls, Katy Melcher really was worried that you were coming after her.”

“In other words, Marina and Jeffrey expected that the local cops would focus on me to the exclusion of anyone else.”

“Exactly,” Charles Rickover agreed. “It might have gone just that way had it not been for Pop. Without him, you would have been a goner. Had you decided to forgo a public defender in favor of hiring your own defense attorney, you would have been forced to sell the Roundhouse to the first available buyer just to cover legal fees. You’d be amazed to know how much a top flight homicide defense team costs these days.”

Evening was settling in. Across the street, lights switched on in various units as people came home from work or whatever it was they did during the day.

“So what happens now?”

“The two cops from Las Vegas . . .” he paused.

“Detectives Jamison and Shandrow,” I supplied.

“They may be a bit slow on the uptake, but they’re not stupid. Bright and early tomorrow morning, I expect Harold will point them in the right direction. It may take a few weeks to straighten all this up, but sooner or later your name will be cleared, as though nothing ever happened, and Jeffrey and Maria Fuentes will be up in Vegas facing first degree murder charges—both murder and conspiracy to commit. They’re the ones who are goners now.”

Rickover reached down, turned the ignition, and the Corvette rumbled to life.

“Where to?” he asked. “Back home?”

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop off in Sun City on the way. I need to see Tim O’Malley and tell him thank-you.”

“Great,” Charles said. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

When Tim let us into his house that night, I shook his hand and said, “Thank you, Pop. It was the first time I ever called him that—the first but not the last.

“How on earth did you find all those guys?” I asked. “Harold, Roger, Matt, and even old Charlie here.”

Charles Rickover and I had been through enough together that I thought my calling him Charlie was . . . well . . . long overdue.

Tim and Charlie both grinned. “You’ve heard of how cops used to be called the Thin Blue Line?” Tim asked.

I nodded.

“Our little group calls itself the Old Blue Line,” Tim said. “Some of us are thinner than we ought to be and others are wider, but when one or the other of us has a problem and runs up the flag, we all come on the double.”

“Thank you,” I said again. “More than you know.”

Pop served us iced tea and apologized that he’d already eaten his TV dinner and didn’t have any food to offer. I said I knew a place where we could find some grub if we needed it.

Later, as we were leaving, Pop gripped my hand with both of his. “Aggie would be so happy about this,” he said, “so very happy.”

And I knew it to be true. Grandma Agatha Hudson would have been pleased as punch.

I took Charlie back to the Roundhouse and treated both of us to the biggest and best steaks we had in the kitchen. When I came upstairs, much later, there was no sound from the guest room and no sign of a light under the door, either. I tiptoed past, hoping not to disturb Harold Meeks. He had worked his tail off for me that day, and he deserved a good night’s sleep.