J. Jance - Fire and Ice

Mel seemed to regard my intervention as unwarranted. She turned her blue eyes on me and gave me a glacial stare that would have brought a lesser man to his knees. Then she turned back to the clerk. Between us, Mel and I had finally managed to get the woman’s attention. She stood up and took a long careful look at Mel’s badge. Then, blanching visibly, she flopped back down into her chair.

“It says homicide,” the clerk managed. “Does that mean someone’s dead?”

Homicide usually means murder, so it was clear the woman wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.

“Yes,” Mel said. “Someone is dead, and it’s our job to investigate it. Now what about last fall? Were you working here then or not?”

Instead of answering, the woman reached for the phone and began to dial. “I’m not allowed to talk to anyone without talking to Mama first,” she said.

Mel pushed down the button on the desk-based phone and ended the call before anyone could pick up. “It seems to me you could answer a few questions without having to consult with your mother,” she said.

“I have no idea who was working the desk back then because I wasn’t here,” the clerk said pointedly. “And Mama Rose Brotsky is definitely not my mother,” she added. “She’s my boss. She’s the owner. And she most especially doesn’t like anyone from here talking to cops.”

For some reason that name, Mama Rose Brotsky, rang a bell, but right then, standing in front of the counter of that grim little office, I couldn’t make the connection.

“What’s Ms. Brotsky’s number?” I asked. Passing my own ID across the counter, I stepped into the middle of the melee, notebook in hand. “And where can we find her?” I added.

“She lives somewhere over by Black Diamond,” the clerk said. “Her number’s unlisted. I’m not allowed to give it out.”

Mel reached across the counter, picked up the telephone receiver, and punched the redial button. A moment later she read off a number while I copied it down. “That’s the right one, isn’t it?” Mel asked. “Mama Rose’s number?”

Nodding, the clerk glared at Mel. “Yes, it is,” she said. “But she isn’t going to like it if you call.”

“Too bad,” Mel returned. “If you happen to talk to her in the next little while, you might pass along our names and let her know we’ll be dropping by, if not later today, then certainly tomorrow.”

There was, of course, no “if” about that phone call being made. Mel and I both knew that the clerk would be dialing Mama Rose’s number the moment our backs were turned. And by the time we showed up at her place, she’d probably have an attorney or two in attendance. I had a suspicion that despite the fact that Silver Pines looked squeaky clean, some of the residents maybe weren’t exactly upstanding citizens, and that probably meant Mama Rose wasn’t one, either. Birds of a feather and all that jazz.

“Does the name Marina Aguirre ring a bell?” I asked.

“No,” the clerk said. “Should it? Is that the person who’s dead?”

“When did you move in?”

“January,” she answered.

“And your name?”

“Donita,” she answered. “Donita Mack, but I don’t have any warrants. I swear.”

I hadn’t asked about warrants. In my experience, people who spontaneously swear they don’t have them usually do. But Donita Mack wasn’t our problem. Marina Aguirre was, and since she had disappeared in early November, if she really was our victim, Donita’s arrival in January was two months too late for our purposes.

Looking across the counter, I noticed for the first time that something was missing. The only pieces of electronic equipment in the office were the telephone and the droning television set. There was no computer in attendance. Zero. None.

I had already estimated that the trailer park contained a hundred or so mobile homes. At probably a low-ball rental figure of seven hundred and fifty to a thousand dollars a month, that meant someone was collecting a whole lot of money-close to a hundred thousand a month. It also meant that Donita Mack wasn’t the one doing the collecting.

“What’s your job here exactly?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I answer the phone and sign for packages. I let repairmen in and out of mobiles. When there are vacancies, I show people what’s available and give them the application forms. It doesn’t pay much, but I don’t have to type and that’s a good thing because I don’t know how.”

“How much does it pay?” I asked.

“Some,” she said. “But Mama Rose takes it off my rent. I’m not the only one. She does the same thing for some of the other girls as well. That way the office is covered around the clock.”

“Is she the one who collects the rent?” I asked.

Donita nodded. “Cash only. Twice a month, on the first and the fifteenth. Some people only pay for two weeks at a time. Mama Rose’s driver brings her down and waits while people bring her their envelopes.”

Cash only? Mel and I exchanged glances as both of us arrived at a similar conclusion. That meant a great deal of cash, and it opened the door to a lot of other things as well, none of them good.

“Tell me about her driver,” I suggested.

“Maybe he’s more than a driver,” Donita allowed.

“So you’re saying the driver is actually her bodyguard?” Mel asked.

Donita nodded again. “That and maybe her boyfriend. I don’t think they’re married, but he carries a gun, and he acts like he knows how to use it. I think he used to be a cop,” she added, “but I don’t know where.”

I didn’t ask how she knew that. In the wild, crooks recognize cops. Cops recognize crooks. It’s part of the natural order of things-a variation on a theme of survival of the fittest.

“Does the driver have a name?” Mel asked.

Donita shrugged. “Tommy something or other. I don’t think I’ve ever heard his last name, and I don’t pay that much attention to him. After all, I’ve only seen him a few times when they’ve come by to pick up the rent.”

“How many residents live here?”Mel asked.

“One hundred and ten,” Donita answered.

“Are all the units occupied?”

“Yes. Like I said before. No vacancy.”

“How do you keep track of that many people?”

Donita reached in a drawer and pulled out a clipboard. On it was a computer-generated printout several pages long, with names and unit numbers. Once again my distant-reading skills gave me a distinct advantage. From the far side of the counter I could read the printout plain as day. Every name was followed by two numbers. The one on the left, running in consecutive order, was evidently the unit number. The second number was far more random. It didn’t take long to guess that one would turn out to be an abbreviated form of the tenant’s arrival date. One was 20305. Another was 20406.

The computer printout told us something else as well. Mama Rose might be dealing in cash, but somewhere there was a computer that was keeping careful records of all moneys coming in and going out. Once we talked to the person behind the computer, we’d be able to find out exactly when Marina had moved in and when she had disappeared. We’d also be able to track down some of her near neighbors to see if they had seen anything out of the ordinary-any loud arguments or stray people coming and going at odd hours.

“Anything else you can think of?” I asked Mel.

When she shook her head, Donita looked enormously relieved.

“We’d better head out then,” I suggested. “It’s starting to get dark, and I don’t know my way around Black Diamond very well.” This was not entirely true on two counts. For one thing, I had spent some time in Black Diamond years earlier. For another, the GPS navigation system knows its way around, regardless of whether it happens to be day or night.