Fire Sale

40 An Acid Touch

The lights were on in the church when I pulled up to the corner of Ninety-second and Houston. I went up the shallow step to the front door to see what was going on. Thursday night Bible study, six-thirty to eight, November topic, the book of Isaiah. It was just after six-thirty now, so the pastor was hard at it.

Directly across the street from the church was a vacant lot where a handful of cars and trucks were parked at skewed angles-including a Dodge with big speakers in the back and a license plate begi

I had called Morrell from the car to let him know I would be a little late, just a little. He had sighed, the exaggerated sigh of a lover who is always being stood up, and said if I wasn’t home by eight he and Don would eat without me.

The exchange sent me into Cocodrilo in a bristly mood. I let the door bang shut behind me, like Clint Eastwood, and put on my Clint Eastwood face: I own this bar, don’t mess with me. There were maybe fifteen people inside, but it was a small place, and dark, just a narrow room with a high counter and a couple of rickety tables jammed against the wall, so it was hard to survey the crowd.

The television over the bar was tuned to a soccer match, Mexico versus some small Caribbean island. A few men were watching, but most were talking or arguing in a mixture of Spanish and English.

Cocodrilo seemed to be a young man’s bar, although there were a few older faces-I recognized one of the men from this afternoon’s construction site. And it was definitely a man’s bar: when I walked in, conversation died down as they eyed me. A trio near the door thought they’d try a smart remark, but my expression sent them back to their beer with a surly remark in Spanish-whose meaning I could certainly guess, even though it hadn’t been in my high school text.

I finally spotted Diego, my center Sancia’s boyfriend, in a small knot at the far end of the room. The man next to him had his back to me, which made him easy to recognize-he had the thick, dark hair and camouflage jacket I’d trailed through the warehouse a couple of hours earlier.

I pushed my way past the trio at the door and tapped him on the shoulder. “Freddy! And Diego. What a wonderful coincidence. We’re going to talk, Freddy.”

When he turned, I saw Rose was right: he did have sort of pretty-boy good looks in his high cheekbones and full lips, but she was also right-indolence and drugs were eating away at them.

Freddy looked at me blankly, but Diego said, “The coach, man, she’s the basketball coach.”

Freddy stared at me in dawning alarm, then shoved me hard enough to send me reeling. He barged down the narrow length of the room to the front door, knocking over a bottle of beer as he went.

I righted myself and took off after him. No one tried to stop me, but no one moved out of my way, either, so Freddy was out on the street before I caught up with him. I put on a burst of speed, forgetting my sore thighs, my swollen hands, my shoulder. He was crossing the vacant lot to Diego’s truck when I launched myself at him. I knocked him to the ground and fell heavily on top of him.

I heard applause and looked up to see three of the men from the bar, including the guy from the jobsite, laughing and clapping.

“Hey, missus, you go see Lovie Smith, you play for the Bears!”

“What this chavo done to you? Leave you with baby and no money? He got two babies already and no money for them!”

“She’s not the kind, not the kind, Geraldo, mind your mouth.”

Freddy shoved me aside and scrambled to his feet. I grabbed his right ankle. When he started to kick at me, an audience member moved in and pi

The rest of the men trickled out of the bar and stood in a half circle around us, except for Diego, who moved uncertainly halfway between Freddy and the truck.

I got to my feet and pulled on my mittens. “Freddy Pacheco, you and I are long overdue for this talk.”

“You a cop, missus?” the man holding his arms asked.

“Nope. I’m the basketball coach down at Bertha Palmer. Julia was a good student and a good ballplayer until this chavo banda ruined her life.”

A murmur in Spanish rippled through the trio. El coche. Yes, but a detective, too, only private, not police; Celine, his sobrina, she was crazy about el coche. Sobrina, my tired brain fished in my high school Spanish. Niece. Celine, my gangbanger, was this man’s niece; she was crazy about me? Maybe I was misunderstanding him, but the notion cheered me no end.

“So what you want to know from this piece of garbage, missus?”

“The soap dish Julia gave you for Christmas last year, Freddy.”

“I don’t know what you talking about.” He was looking at the ground, which made it hard to understand his whining.

“Don’t lie, Freddy. I sent the dish to a forensics lab. You know what DNA is, don’t you? They can find DNA even on a soap dish that’s been through a fire. Isn’t that wonderful?”

He balked some more, but after more prodding and a few threats, both from me and the men, admitted that he’d given it to Diego, who’d given it to Sancia Valdéz. “What Julia think I want with a girly present like that?”

“And Sancia was mad when she learned that Diego hadn’t bought it for her. Secondhand goods, Sancia called it, and she didn’t want it, so she gave it back to Julia. Isn’t that right, Diego?”

Diego backed away from me in alarm, but another of the men caught his arm and dragged him back to the group, with a guttural command.

“So, Freddy,” I picked up my narrative in a bright, schoolteacher voice, “recently you changed your mind. And you went to the Dorrado place and took it back from Julia. Why did you do that?”

There wasn’t much light on the street, just what little was spilling out of the bar, and the one streetlamp across the road in front of the church, but I think Freddy was giving me a calculating look, as if to decide how big a story he could get me to swallow.

“I was sorry I treated her mean, man, she tried to do something nice for me, I shouldn’t have been so mean to her.”

“Yeah, Freddy, I believe in the Easter bu

“I don’t know. Maybe someone stole it from me.”

“Yes, a three-dollar soap dish, that’s worth breaking and entering for, isn’t it? Here’s the problem.” I turned to the men from the bar, who were listening to me as closely as if I were telling their fortunes. “That soap dish was used to start the fire at Fly the Flag. Frank Zamar died in that fire, so the person who set it is guilty of murder. And it looks like that person was Freddy, here, maybe with Bron Czernin’s help, maybe with Diego’s.”

Shocked comments in Spanish rippled through the group. Had this gamberro and his cousin killed Frank Zamar? Destroyed the plant?

“Why, Freddy? Why you do this?” Celine’s uncle slapped him.

“I didn’t do nothing. I don’t know what she talking about!”

“How that soap dish start the fire?” one of the men asked.

I pulled the crude drawing of the frog from my pocket again. They crowded around to study it in the dim light.

“I don’t know who made this drawing-maybe Bron Czernin, maybe Freddy. But here’s how it worked.”

Pointing at the drawing, I explained my theory, about the nitric acid and the wires, and there was another buzz of talk. I caught Andrés’s name, and Diego, and “carro,” which at first I heard as the Italian “caro,” darling: Diego was some-body’s darling? No, the pastor had done something to Diego’s darling, no, to his-not his wagon, his truck, that’s what it was.