Joe Gores - Glass Tiger

Waiting for them to arrive, he put the name Janet Amore out on CLETS and the National Crime Index, e-mailed the DMVs of all fifty states, Googled her, all without any results at all. No credit history, no driver’s license in that name. As if she didn’t exist. He planned to go interview the sister, Edie Melendez, but by her name she was probably a stupid beaner without a thought in her head.

First he would take his ally, Marlena Werfel, out to lunch. A modest meal at a fancy place with a reputation, like Spago’s in Beverly Hills, would impress her. She could maybe even see a star or two and dine out on the experience for years.

He didn’t mention business until they were on dessert and coffee. It turned out she had something worth a $125 lunch for him. Potentially, something big.

He started out, ‘I spoke with Houghton. If Thorne went to see him, the doctor is stone walling. Patient confidentiality and all that. He’s doing the same thing on this Janet Amore. Is there anything you can think of that might help me find her?’

She started to shake her head, then paused. Her eyes widened, she exclaimed triumpantly, ‘The locker!’

‘What locker?’ he almost snapped.

‘That nurse I told you was a troublemaker was seen sneaking something into one of the hospital lockers and giving the key to Amore. The nurse who saw her mentioned it to me. None of my business, of course. But then Amore sneaked out in the middle of the night and had to leave everything behind. I just bet whatever it was is still in that locker.’

If Amore had left something behind — clothing, letters, photos, personal belongings — it was sure to give Hatfield some sort of clue to who she was and where she might have gone, and why Thorne was looking for her.

‘Let’s go take a look at that locker, Marlena.’

But when they opened the locker with a master key, it was empty. Hatfield’s always volatile temper was bubbling up.

‘You mean someone just took it? How could they do that without the key?’

‘Amore must have given the key to someone,’ said Werfel. ‘They could have sneaked in, opened the locker, and emptied it.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘But my troublemaker will be on shift tonight. She’ll know who took it, and why. I’ll get it out of her.’

‘You sure it wasn’t Amore herself?’ demanded Hatfield.

‘If she’d been around, I would have known about it. I’ll have the answer by morning.’

Probably it was the sister, Edie Melendez, who had taken it. If it was, she would have an address on Amore. And she would be easy to break down, her being a beaner with a green card that was probably bogus. Hatfield wouldn’t wait for morning.

Dusk was approaching when he fought his way through the rush-hour exodus from LA to Grace Avenue in Carson. No one was home. A half-hour later a yard man’s beat-up old truck pulled into the driveway and a handsome Latino with liquid eyes and black hair in a ’50s pompadour got out. Obviously the hoosban. Hatfield intercepted him between truck and house.

‘We want to talk with your wife, Melendez. Right now.’

The man turned quickly, warily, retreating to the safety of the racial barrier. He whined, ‘Wha’ you want with her, man?’

Hatfield flopped his credentials open before Melendez’s startled eyes. ‘Special Agent Terrill Hatfield, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now start talking.’

The change was remarkable. The diffidence was gone. ‘Day after your other man was here, I come home, Edie, she gone. Nobody cook me no meals, nobody wash my clo’es. Took off with all the dinero in the house.’ He stepped close. He reeked of beer. ‘You gotta get her back for me, man!’

‘This other agent? He have a name?’

‘She never even tell me he was here.’ He jerked a thumb at the house next door. ‘Neighbor, he tell me after she gone. A gringo, he say, with black hair. Thass all he know.’

Thorne. Looking for Amore in all the wrong places.

‘We actually want your wife’s sister,’ said Hatfield. ‘Janet Amore. We know she’s been staying here with you and we know she had her sister pick up a package at the hospital after she was discharged.’

‘Package? I don’ know nothin’ ’bout no package.’

But the resistance had disappeared at mention of Amore.

‘She was here, si, but she gone,’ he said eagerly. ‘Is always trouble, tha’ one. She’s nothin’ but a puta, man. Look for her where the whores walk the streets. She got beat up cause she did bad things. Of that I am sure.’

A whore. ‘Gone where?’

‘Doan know, doan care. Maybe Edie, she know. But Edie, she gone too.’ His belligerence returned. Obviously his green card was in order. ‘She lef’ cause of FBI, now wha’ the FBI gonna do to get her back for me?’

‘We’re not going to do anything,’ said Hatfield. He handed Melendez a card. ‘But if your wife gets in touch with you, or her sister does, you call this number, pronto. Or you’ll be back in Mexico so fast your fucking huaraches will be smoking.’

There were twelve of them waiting for the bus at Groveland, an old goldrush town in the Sierra foothills on the way to Yosemite National Park. It was their first river raft trip, and they were charged up. The bus pulled up. They filed aboard. The driver stood in the front, counting noses.

‘It’s about a fifteen-twenty minute ride to Casa Loma,’ he said. ‘Then five miles of really bad road to the Put-In Spot on the Tuolemne River. I’m glad to see you’re wearing warm clothes. This early in May, the river is still pretty darn cold.’

A slender woman with streaked blond hair and smile lines at the sides of her mouth gestured at the equally slender fifteen-year-old boy beside her.

‘Can Jimmy sit up front behind you?’

The boy looked embarrassed. The bus driver chuckled.

‘Sure can. He’ll like that ride down the hill. By the way, in case any of you are worried, the rafts almost never get tipped over. Even if one of ’em got holed by a sharp rock, there’s no life-threatening danger. But just to be on the safe side, AQUA River Tours furnishes wet suits, life jackets and helmets to all our clients.’

He didn’t add that anyone going into the river would get bruised and scraped, maybe get a cracked rib or two, because that’s not what the clients were paying to hear. Instead, he fired up the bus. Snorting diesel fumes, it lurched forward.

At just eleven a.m., they were at the water’s edge, where four guides were holding three rubber rafts in place against the steep earth bank. The clients crawled enthusiastically to their places, and were pushed out into the swirling current.

Thorne had driven hard well into the night, had checked into the Groveland Hotel, an 1849 adobe wedded to a 1914 Queen Anne Victorian. Two story, white with red-brown trim, with pillars all the way around. While he was checking out in the morning, he asked where the post office was. The clerk, a middle-aged man with silvery hair, faraway blue eyes, and turtle-wrinkles in his thin neck, smelled faintly of mothballs.

He nodded with little jerks of his head. ‘Street behind the hotel, up the hill. Along there a ways.’

Groveland had a population of 1,500, which doubled on the weekends during the summer months. The AAA Tour Book said the town’s main recreational activity was white-water rafting on the Tuolemne River a few miles distant.

Thorne found the post office easily, an ugly modern brown building with what looked like a corrugated iron roof and inset doorways and a somehow incongruous blue mailbox at the foot of the gleaming concrete front steps. Inside, behind the counter, was a round, rosy-faced woman in a blue uniform with a nametag, ROSIE, pinned to the front of her shirt.