“Ah, this is Joseph Morales, officer,” Tortensen said. “He had A17 . . . their table . . . last night.”
Maricón, Salvador thought—clinically, he wasn’t bothered by them. There had been one he knew who was an artist with a Javelin launcher. He could put a rocket right through a firing slit, which has a good dirty joke in it somewhere.
“Pleased to meet you,” Morales said to the policemen with transparent dishonesty, but he was at least trying to hide it. “How can I help you?”
The restaurant manager started to speak, and Salvador held up a hand. “We’re interested in a party of two at one of your tables last night.”
He held up his notepad with Tarnowski’s face.
The waiter laughed—it was almost a giggle. “Oh, them. Yes, I remember them well. They ordered—well, Ms. Brézé ordered—”
He rattled off a list of things, most of which Salvador had never heard of. He held up a hand.
“What did that come to?”
“With the wines? About . . . twenty-five hundred.”
The manager was working his desktop, and nodded confirmation. Cesar gave a smothered sound that had probably started as an agonized grunt, passed through indignation, and was finally suppressed with a tightening of the mouth.
“Tip?”
“Very generous. Seven hundred.”
Outside, Cesar shook his head. “Seven hundred for the tip? And you went there?”
“I was starting to get worried about Julia, wanted to show her I thought about something besides my job. Didn’t work. Three weeks later, she told me I was just as far away living here as I had been when they deployed me to Kandahar.”
“Ai!”
“Yeah, sweet, eh? What’s the next stop?”
“I’ll try and see if anyone around saw the van that Adrian Brézé and Mystery Man in Leather were using after they left the burn site.”
Salvador laughed. “And I’ll get back and catch up on my paperwork. Don’t you wish this were a TV show?”
“So we could just work one case at a time? Sí, the thought has crossed my mind.”
III
“OKAY,” CESAR SAID TWO WEEKS LATER. “GUESS WHAT? SOMETHING FUNNY on the Brézé case.”
“Tell me something funny. I could use it.”
Salvador sipped at a cup of sour coffee and looked out the window at a struggling piñon pine with sap dripping from its limbs; they were having another beetle infestation, which happened every decade or two. Firewood would be cheap soon; he could take his pickup out on weekends and get a load for the labor of cutting it up and hauling it away.
The prospect was a lot more fun than the case he was working on now. Man beats up woman, woman calls cops, woman presses charges, woman changes mind, couple sues cops. Tell me again why I’m not selling insurance?
“The funny thing is the analysis on the DNA from the puke I found in the Dumpster behind Whole Foods,” Cesar said.
“Ain’t a policeman’s life fun? Digging in Dumpsters for puke?”
“Sí, jefe. Nice clean white-collar job, just what my mother had in mind for her prospective kid when she waded across the river to get me born on U.S. soil. Anyway, there’s blood in the puke.”
“I remember you telling me that. The attendant says it was Adrian Brézé’s puke, right?”
“Right, he saw him puking out the rear of that van, thought he was drunk. I’m pretty sure that Brézé paid him something to forget about it—he sweated pretty hard before he talked, and I had to do the kidnapping-and-arson dance. He saw the blood in it too.”
“So he’s got an ulcer. Even rich people get them. How does this help us?”