Joseph Wambaugh - Finnegan's week

After the line went dead, Bobbie immediately called the Tijuana Police and talked to four different people to whom she gave the names of Abel Durazo and Shelby Pate. She got an English-speaking woman on the line, who said, “Who are you inquiring about?”

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I’m a detective with the U.S. Navy. I’m just trying to find out if he’s in jail, or in the hospital or something.”

The woman said, “You gave another name. What was that name?”

“Durazo,” Bobbie said. “Abel Durazo.”

“One moment please,” the woman said.

When she came back on the line she said, “Do you have a pencil? I have another number for you to call.”

Bobbie was excited. Maybe they were in jail, and maybe it had to do with being caught selling two thousand pairs of shoes! When she rang the other number she was given over to a man who spoke nearly unaccented English. “This is Rojas,” he said. “Who do you wish to learn about?”

“Shelby Pate,” Bobbie said. “I’m a detective with the U.S. Navy at North Island. And also I wanna know about Abel Durazo. Are they in jail, or what?”

Rojas said, “I am with the state judicial police. Do you know Mister Durazo very well?”

“No,” Bobbie said. “I’m investigating his possible involvement in a large theft of navy shoes.”

The Mexican cop said, “We have a murder victim in our morgue with the name of Abel Durazo on his California driver’s license and on his pasaporte .”

“Good god!” Bobbie said. “How about Shelby Pate?”

“No, but another man was murdered. A man named Porfirio Velásquez Saavedra, better known to us as Juan Soltero.”

“Is he a receiver of stolen property, by any chance?”

“Yes, and other things. It appears that they killed each other. Durazo was stabbed, and then must have got off one shot before he died. A derringer pistol was found beside him.”

“Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of U.S. Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

After spending three hours on Mission Beach, most of it under a beach umbrella, Fin and Nell decided to go to his apartment to shower and change for dinner.

“And to do what? ” Nell asked, after he made the suggestion.

“Ride the roller coaster,” Fin said.

“I haven’t ridden a roller coaster in twenty years,” she said.

“I ride it every once in awhile. It’s very nostalgic for me. When I was a kid my sisters used to take me for rides with their boyfriends. I sat between them usually. The boyfriends hated my guts.”

They were lying under the umbrella when he’d asked her. He thought she had a terrific body, for a woman of a certain age. She thought he had pretty good buns, but ought to work on his tummy.

Late that afternoon, after eating a hot dog and a hamburger, Fin Finnegan and Nell Salter rode the Mission Beach vintage roller coaster, raising their hands in the air and screaming as they sped down the dips, losing themselves for a while in lovely memories of their lost youth.

When Shelby arrived home he found some of his clothes in the driveway. Some were in the street and some were on the little patch of grass in front of the house. He parked the Harley, jumped off and ran to the front door, discovering that his key no longer fit the lock.

He started banging on the door, yelling, “Bitch! You better open this fucker or it’s goin down !”

His next-door neighbor, the tweaker who’d interrupted him when he’d been trying to landscape the neighborhood, opened his window and yelled, “Hey, dude! Your old lady said to tell you she went home to her momma!”

“She changed the fuckin lock!” Shelby hollered.

The tweaker said, “She told me you ain’t got nothin in the house no more. She threw everything out. By the time she told me, there was people from down the street stealin everything . I got some a your stuff in my garage. You kin come get it.”

Shelby ran to the tweaker’s garage and jerked it open. His camouflage jacket was there, and his extra helmet. He ran inside his own garage and pulled things down from the shelf: every box, every tool, every auto part. The boots were gone !

He ran back outside and said to the neighbor, “My boots! I had some boots in the garage!”

“Didn’t see no boots,” the tweaker said. “I saved your shirts and some jeans and I got a bag full a your sox. Them greasers from down the block, they got your boots, I guess.”

The ox just gaped. Finally he said, “You shouldn’t never steal somebody’s shoes.”

“That’s cold, dude,” the tweaker agreed.

Shelby said, “Some Mexicans got the firin squad for takin a man’s shoes.”

“What firin squad?”

“They got shot.”

The tweaker said, “Dude, you shouldn’t be doin that crystal so early in the morning. You ain’t talkin sense.”

“You shouldn’t never steal somebody’s shoes,” Shelby Pate informed his neighbor. “It’s the worst mistake you can ever make.”

Bobbie Ann Doggett was beside herself with excitement. She thought about calling up the assistant director of security at North Island, but she knew he’d say what Fin would say: “It’ll all keep till tomorrow. Till you’re on duty and can work in a proper investigative environment.”

What could she do now anyway? Nobody was going anywhere. Abel Durazo was on ice, and so was his Tijuana contact, Soltero. Shelby Pate might also be lying in a Tijuana alley with a knife in his ample gut.

Jules Temple would be coming to his place of business tomorrow as usual, none the wiser as far as his employees’ fate was concerned. And how was she going to tie Jules Temple into all this? She wasn’t . Not unless Pate was still alive and willing to talk about it.

So far, everyone who’d come in contact with those navy shoes had ended up dead. Her boss would probably tell her that if she recovered the shoes, the navy ought to send them immediately to Saddam Hussein.

Bobbie sat and tried to read a magazine, cooling her heels until three o’clock. Then she rang up Fin and Nell once again. Bobbie was going bughouse.

After she hung up, she got dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and strapped on her shoulder holster, concealing it under her most comfortable cardigan. Then she grabbed her purse and map book and headed for the house of Shelby Pate in National City.

She drove her Hyundai slowly through the ethnically mixed, working-class residential neighborhood, a district with lots of homeboy spider-script sprayed on all the walls. His house was easy to spot. It was the only one with the front door kicked off the hinges. The small yard was littered with articles of clothing, and a Harley hog sat menacingly in the driveway, aimed at the street.

A fleeting memory occurred to Bobbie. The director of security had once warned her that women in police work frequently take great risks because they don’t want to call for backup from the men until they’re sure they need it. But by then, it’s often too late. He’d warned that many female cops had been needlessly injured and even killed, for fear of seeming to be the damsel in distress.

He’d finished reading the paper, but found that he couldn’t concentrate on the Sunday talking-head shows blathering about Tuesday’s election as though everyone wasn’t already certain that George Bush was history. Jules had never cared anything about politics. He sat, channel grazing, when the phone rang.