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He nodded and went back to writing. “Everybody has tattoos now.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe.” No smile. This passed for raucous Mike Peralta humor. I didn’t laugh.
“We shouldn’t take this case.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” I prowled around the small room, absently slid out a file drawer, closed it. “He paid in cash.”
Peralta opened the envelope and counted. He peeled off five grand and held it out to me. The bills looked as if they had come out of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving that morning. I made no move to retrieve them. Someday soon I would need to set up an accounting and tax system in the computer if we were actually going to have a PI business.
Peralta gently tapped the Ben Franklins. “Paying clients are nice.”
“Cash,” I persisted. “Who pays in cash? A criminal.”
“That’s why you’re going to run a background check.”
This was a man who until recently had bossed around hundreds of deputies and civilian employees. Now only I was available. I made no move to pick up the phone. “He says his last name is Smith. Smith? Right.”
“Some people are actually named Smith.” He left my share of the retainer on his desk and slid the envelope containing the remainder into his suit-coat pocket.
“And his sister has a different last name?”
“Families are complicated nowadays. Lindsey and Robin had different last names.”
Bile started up my windpipe. Lindsey and Robin. I wanted to curse him. I bit my tongue, literally. It worked. I gained deeper knowledge about the provenance of a clichéd expression. And I said nothing.
Peralta, typically, bulled ahead. “How is Lindsey?”
“Fine.” How the hell should I know? She’s only my wife, a continent away physically and even further in the geography of the heart.
“When did you talk to her last?”
I told him I called her on Sunday. I called her every Sunday, timing it so I would catch her around noon in D.C.
“She’ll get tired of Washington and Homeland Security,” he said. “It’s a temporary gig, right?”
“I guess.”
It was a temporary position that seemed to have no end.
“When she’s ready to come home, we could use her here.”
I said nothing. Yes, she was the best at cyber crimes. That was the job she did for Peralta when he was sheriff. But the last place my wife wanted to be was back in Phoenix.
I started coughing again. Three wildfires were burning in the forests north and northeast of the city. The previous year had been the worst wildfire season on record and we were off to an ambitious start now. It was the new normal. Yesterday the smoke had combined with the usual smog to obscure the mountains. Somebody flying into Sky Harbor would never know why this was called the Valley of the Sun. The gunk was sending people with asthma to emergency rooms and making me cough. Quite an irony for a place that once claimed clean, dry air that had made it a haven for people with lung ailments.
But that was the least of the reasons why Lindsey didn’t want to be here.
Sitting back down, I said again, “We shouldn’t take this case.”
Peralta’s obsidian eyes darkened further. “Why?”
“Felix the Cat in his fifteen-hundred-dollar suit, paying you in hundred-dollar bills. He’s hiding something. Maybe Zisman had a mistress or not. Maybe Felix is using us for some vendetta against Zisman. The guy’s pretty clean from what I remember. He actually came back home to Arizona after making it big and has tried to help out poor kids. Now here’s some dude in an expensive suit who wants us to play morals police.”
“He only asked us to investigate a suspicious death,” he said. “Remember, Felix bridled when you implied Grace was involved with this Zisman.”
