Chapter 22
In the morning, I wiped the sleep from my eyes. Thursday. I scooped up my phone, turned it on, and noticed two missed calls. I fished Joseph Custer’s business card out of my shirt pocket. The numbers matched. He must have called when I was hiking. I had turned off my phone to save the battery and forgot to turn it back on after Jake dropped me at my car. I had to talk to Joseph today. I couldn’t let this potential contact slip away.
I also wanted to try again to talk with Cortina Perez, though now I was wondering if that was necessary at all. I knew that the man I’d found on Monarch Trail was dead. If what Jake Monroe said could be believed, I felt sure that the guy’s body was hauled back into the valley by his pursuers. He did not then come back out to rejoin Cortina. He was probably buried in there to preserve the secret the valley held. Yet I still wanted to talk to her, to close the loop, to expose Enid Powell for the liar that he was. Based on what the Sheriff said, the Deputy had received a note from Cortina expressing relief that her lost and injured Hispanic boyfriend had returned. I doubted the truth of any of it.
My encounter with Jake opened a new question. Were bounty hunters involved in this at all? Now I wasn’t so sure. Yet the coincidence of the body snatchers showing up right after my 9-1-1 call left me with the conclusion that those who took the call were involved in this: Ranger Pine, Enid Powell, or maybe both. And certainly there still had to be payoffs, perhaps not from bounty hunters, but from whoever occupied Spring Valley.
Regardless, yesterday I found the fence, the fortress in the forest. There was something much bigger than a tree-planting operation in the valley. No wonder I never saw a crew leave the National Forest when I sat for hours outside the entrance. There was no crew to see. So Ranger Pine was covering up something, something big. He had lied to me. Too bad lying to a civilian is not a crime. If I only had a badge.
Going back to Ranger Pine to probe about the chain-link fence seemed like a bad idea. He had already lied and given me a stern warning to not be in that area. I didn’t care about his warning, not in the least. But before confronting him, I needed more information. At least then I would be in a better position to deflect whatever new lies he might tell me.
I could go to the Sheriff. He wasn’t lying to me, at least not that I could determine. He simply wasn’t interested in what I had to say. This was all over, as far as he was concerned. Nothing happened. Sharing what I had with him would be pointless, so I was still on my own.
I left my room to find Cortina. Her cart was parked outside the storage room door. An arm occasionally poked out through the doorway and plopped supplies on the cart. But it wasn’t Cortina. In her place was another woman. She was taller, scrawny, and had an older-looking sun-wrinkled face surrounded by tangled salt-and-pepper hair.
And she was angry. She cursed, slamming stacks of towels onto the cart and dumping little individually packaged bars of soap into a box, spilling several onto the concrete walkway. She ignored them and stomped off, pushing the cart up over them, crushing them to smears on the sidewalk. They would leave bubbly streaks in the next rain. She puffed on a cigarette that had a long tendril of ash clinging to its lighted tip. If she was having a bad day this early, I did not want to be around for her mood at the end of her shift.
I stopped in the office, hoping there might be some coffee. The pot was empty and cold, as it had been every day I’d been here.
“Good morning,” I said to the clerk behind the desk.
“Yeah, yeah,” he growled. He was also in a foul mood.
“A bad day already?” I asked.
“You could say that. The maid didn’t show up yesterday, and she ain’t here today. The bitch. Leaves me hanging with a motel full of guests.”
“You mean Cortina?” I asked.
“You know where she is?” he snapped accusingly.
“No, no, not at all,” I said defensively. “I just happened to speak to her the other day and remembered the name. I see you already have a replacement.”
“Her?” he said with a sneer. “She’s no replacement. My wife arranged this little deal. That’s my no-good sister-in-law. She’s out there doing this only cuz she wants me to fix her piece-a-crap car. Terrible cleaner. Her own house is a pigsty. I’m gonna have a hard time finding someone as good as Cortina.”
“Does she live near here?” I probed.
“Cortina? Near here? Hell, yes. Lived in a utility room in the back. Too small to rent out, but she was fine with it. Free room. That was half of her pay. It was a great deal for me.”
“Did she have any family or a boyfriend? Maybe they know where she is.”
“Why do you care so much about her? Got a thing for Hispanic maids?” he asked lewdly.
“No. It’s just that I talked to her, and she seemed like a nice lady.” That was a long stretch on the extent of our relationship, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, I can tell you, she was the best maid I ever had here. Was here over 2 years. Always kept the rooms real nice. Clean and tidy.”
I knew that cleanliness. In contrast, the office was trashed. This guy did not have any of the traits that he seemed to so admire in her. While the area on my side of the counter was clean, by the hand of Cortina, no doubt, everything on his side was in disarray. Paper and pamphlets were strewn about at random. Huge wispy clumps of dust lingered along the baseboards, and the linoleum floor was grimy and scuffed. There were dirty smudges high up on the inner office door where he had probably placed his hand thousands of times to open and close it, rather than using the doorknob. And the counter top had a layer of well-entrenched dust. There was a clear line of demarcation between where Cortina cleaned and where this guy’s chaotic turf started. I supposed he just did not want anyone messing with his stuff, so Cortina didn’t clean behind the counter.
A No Smoking sign was tacked to the wall. But he had an ashtray on the counter that overflowed with cigarette butts and burned residue. The air was filled with a stale foul bluish haze.
His personal appearance was no better. Unkempt hair, black stubble on his face that was several days in the making, wide gaps between smoke-yellowed teeth, and a shirt that had been fastened such that there were two unused button holes near his chin but only one available button to close the gap. It gave him an off-kilter appearance, like he was leaning sideways a few degrees. To complete the picture, one tail of his shirt protruded from the waistband of his trousers. Yet, he said he had a wife, so somewhere in the world he found someone who would keep him regardless.
“Cortina never caused no trouble,” he continued, thankfully unaware of my thoughts. “Just worked here every morning, then over at the convenience store next door every afternoon and evening. Sent most of her money to her family back in Mexico. If she had a boyfriend, I never saw him. Hell, with the hours she worked, she didn’t have time for no boyfriend.”
I had been to that convenience store a couple of times, but had not seen her there. Now that I thought about it, the store had seemed unusually clean, not like most such establishments that were often a bit seedy looking. Likely the hand of Cortina Perez.
“So, she just left without a word? Packed up her stuff and left?” I asked, already suspecting that his answer would confirm those points.
“Yup, not a word. All her stuff is gone. And that old junk car of hers. That won’t get her far. Shit. I’ve got to find someone. Can’t put up with all the crap from my sister-in-law.” He continued grumbling, pounded his fist on the door behind him to push it open, and disappeared into the small office, slamming the door shut.
I didn’t know Cortina, in spite of what I might have implied to the clerk or tried to imagine. In the few days I’d been here, she was always on the job early in the morning. His comments suggested she was a hard-working dependable employee: works two jobs, ends money home to her family, has no time for a social life. The disappearing act
seemed out of character. As if I really knew anything about her character. Maybe she was so overwhelmed with joy at the supposed return of her boyfriend that they had just packed up and left town. Conveniently left just when I wanted to talk to her and meet this dead-now-undead boyfriend.
The desk clerk mentioned that she also worked next door. I wondered when they noticed her disappear. I walked over to ask.
Just inside the door was a bank of coffee urns with a selection of roasts. I poured a cup of regular coffee and strolled up to the register. “Good morning,” I said.
The cashier looked weary, his face pale and drawn, dark circles under his eyes, and hair a bit unkempt. He just nodded with a tight smile, which seemed to be all the emotion he could muster. “Anything else?” he asked.
“I was hoping to talk with Cortina Perez. Is she around?”
He eyed me a bit suspiciously, hesitated, and then answered. “She only works afternoons and nights. Why do you want to see her?”
“Oh, nothing in particular. I met her at the motel and heard she also worked over here. Just wanted to say hi if she was around.” I knew it sounded weak, but that’s what I had to offer.
“Well, I’d like to talk to her, too.” Color returned to his face, which was flushing with suppressed anger. “She didn’t show up for work yesterday, so I guess you could say she doesn’t work here anymore. I would like her to come around so I can officially fire her ass for leaving me without a cashier yesterday. I had to work an 18-hour shift because she didn’t show. And I’ll have to be here all day today too. If you see her, tell her….” He closed his lips tight and didn’t say anything further. But he got still redder in the face, his cheeks puffing like a chipmunk hoarding food. He seemed on the verge of bursting into an uncontrolled tirade.
“Sorry I brought it up,” I said. I paid him for the coffee and left. He was still glaring at me as I walked by the front window of his store on my way back to the motel.
This disappearing act did not make sense. Cortina, by these accounts, had been a dependable employee. She apparently needed the money for her family back home. Her supposed boyfriend did not appear to have a lot going for him. His clothing and appearance did not fit with the neat and tidy Cortina. He did not seem to be in a position to support himself, let alone the two of them and her family back in Mexico. Why would she run off with him? Then there was his being dead, a significant factor in disbelieving any connection between him and her. There was no way he was or had been Cortina’s beau. If I could put any stock in Jake Monroe’s story, the Hispanic guy had been a prisoner who escaped from the valley.
Cortina’s unexplained disappearance really bothered me. It was just too convenient. I wanted to talk to her, and now she was gone. The Sheriff said that Enid got a note from her saying her injured boyfriend was back. Yeah, right. There might well be a note, but Cortina didn’t write it. If anyone wrote it, Enid did.
So did he scare off Cortina, force her to run away? What leverage would he have used? Perhaps she was an illegal immigrant, and he threatened to report her.
I needed information. I scrolled through the contact list in my phone. When I got to my old partner’s name, I punched the call option. He answered after the third ring.
“Garvey.”
“Hey, Ed. Hope it’s OK to talk now about the stuff you’re looking into.”
I then realized that jumping right to business was probably inappropriate, particularly since I was asking him again for favors. Rather, I should have at least started with some cordial conversation, some measure of civility. So I added, “How’s your day so far?” It was really lame.
His stilted robotic response revealed that he had noticed the lack of proper order in my salutation. “My day is fine so far.” Then he lightened up. “But I don’t think I’m going to make your day.”
“What do you mean?” I asked with concern.
“Well, on your bounty hunter, there’s nothing out there. No bodies turned in for a reward. I think you might be chasing ghosts, buddy.”
I felt badly. Not about him not finding any useful information, but that none of it mattered anymore. I no longer cared about bounty hunters because that had been a misdirection of my own creation. So I had wasted Ed’s time. But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that.
“That’s fine, Ed. Thanks for looking.”
“Are you bull shitting me?” Ed blurted.
“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound confused and insulted.
“When you asked for this stuff two days ago, you made it sound so urgent. Now you’re fine when I didn’t find anything. Did you already know this was a dead end?”
Why did he always have to be so insightful? I admired that in him. But now it worked against me.
I mustered my best argument in response. “No, it’s not a dead end. It’s still a good lead I’m following. If it takes a little longer to develop, that’s OK since I also have other directions to go. I can focus on those for now.”
I hoped he bought it, though his long silence suggested he wasn’t convinced. Surely my using him as a resource had not burned through all the trust we had built over the years, but it was probably taking a toll.
“Ed?”
The silence continued for a few more moments before he finally spoke.
“And I suppose you want help on those other directions?” he probed calmly.
A wave of relief rolled over me. He was still going to assist me. “That would be great if you could.”
After a long pause, one that was long enough to convey his annoyance with me, he asked, “What have you got today?”
“Got a name of someone perhaps you can track down. Hispanic woman, maybe thirty years old. Name is Cortina Perez. She was working as a maid at a motel and as a clerk at a convenience store here in Willow Run, then just disappeared. I’m curious if she is here legally, and if there is any paper trail on address, where she might have gone, say like credit card use, car, family, anything you can find.”
“Checking up on an old girl friend you scared away?” he asked with irritation. “Or is this one you’re planning to stalk?”
“Nothing like that, Ed. It’s just that she might be connected to the dead man, and now she has mysteriously vanished. Packed up and left town without a word.” I chose to ignore the note that Enid reported finding since I was convinced those words did not come from Cortina.
“OK, Liberty.” I was glad to hear him use my nickname. He used it when things were good between us. When he wasn’t using it, as had been the case in much of our recent phone conversations, it meant he was somehow displeased with me. I couldn’t really blame him. Now, though, it seemed we were getting back on firmer footing.
“Thanks, Ed.”
“If I find your Cortina, would you put in a good word for me? Maybe I’ll want a shot at her.”
“Samantha’s gonna be jealous,” I warned.
“I can fantasize, can’t I?” Ed lightly defended himself. Then his tone became more serious again. “Are you writing your novel yet? I seem to recall that was your new chosen profession.”
“I’m working on it.” I thought glumly that I hadn’t really even started yet.
“If you say so,” was his unconvinced reply. “Anyway, I’ll see what I can find. It might take a couple of days. It doesn’t sound like that will delay publication of your novel,” he mocked.
“Not likely.”
“But seriously, Nathan. Remember you don’t carry a badge now. Watch where you step.”
“I will. Thanks, Ed.”