I pocket the Post-it with Grace Gimble’s address and phone number and apologize to Susan and Margaret for a hasty departure.
“There’s nothing else you want to ask?” says Margaret.
“Not right now. I’ll call Susan if I have more questions. Next time we can do it over lunch. My treat.”
Margaret is not sure what to do with this, whether to say no now or later. She doesn’t say anything. I tell Susan I’ll call her, and I’m out the door.
Without more information, I am forced to make decisions based on assumptions. Whoever hired the lawyer to spring Espinoza also coughed up his bail. This is a chunk of change. Unless she won the lottery, it wasn’t his wife. Whoever it is wants him out for a reason. And since they dealt directly with the man himself, it had to be someone Espinoza either met or had seen previously. Espinoza may know a hundred people that fit this bill, but the only one I know is the man in the felt hat, the man Joyce told me goes by the name Hector Saldado.
There’s a little vibration against my leg. It’s coming from the pocket of my suit coat lying on the seat next to me. It’s my cell phone ringing. I fish it out.
“Hello.”
“Can you hear me?” It’s Harry.
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
“I got ahold of the lawyer, this guy Winston.”
“Yes.”
“Says he never met Espinoza before he saw him in court, at the bail hearing. Catch this. The guy’s been admitted to practice for only four months. Says he was retained by phone, a male voice. This person identified himself as Espinoza’s brother. A check for the retainer came by courier a few hours later, along with a substitution of counsel already signed by Espinoza. The kid says he set the hearing. He called it a cakewalk. I got the sense it may have been his first time in court.”
“Why?”
“He thought he was doing his client a favor with a million-dollar bail. Apparently he caught the deputy U.S. attorney, the one assigned to bail hearings that day, off guard. The prosecutor asked the court for a quarter million, then looked at the file and realized what he was dealing with. He immediately jumped it to a million, figuring like you that Espinoza couldn’t raise it. The kid tried to knock it down, but the court said no. Espinoza told the kid on the way back to his cell not to worry about it. It wasn’t gonna be a problem. The lawyer says he knows about the bond. He says somebody else must have arranged it.”
My worst fears. “Did you talk to the bondsman?”
“He’s out of the office.”
I’m still hoping that maybe he’s watching his investment, keeping an eye on Espinoza.
“Where are you headed?” asks Harry.
“South on I-5,” I tell him.
“Are you coming back to the office?”
“No. Listen, what time do you have?”
“It’s about eleven-twenty,” says Harry.
“If I don’t call you in one hour, do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Call the police in San Diego and give them this address.” I give the address to Harry, so he can write it down and read it back to me.
“What’s going on?” he says.
“Just do it.”
“You want me to have ’em send a squad car?”
“More than one,” I tell him. “But give me one hour.”
“You got it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I pull up to the curb under the shade of an old elm tree half a block up and across the street from the old house with its cut-up flats and sagging front porch.
The large two-story wooden frame house at 408 appears larger and more run-down in daylight. I also notice something that wasn’t there on my last visit, an older model SUV parked in front. The body is boxy and beat-up, primed, but unpainted. Parked on the short gravel drive on the other side of the stairs, its front bumper is into the bushes against the house with the large, aggressive tread of the rear tires sitting halfway onto the sidewalk.
What catches my attention most, however, is the car’s back window. It’s covered by a piece of wrinkled black plastic, taped and wrapped around the window frame. This vehicle fits to a tee the Chevy Blazer that Espinoza described on my visit with him at the lockup.
I sit and watch for a few minutes. Signs of life in one of the houses, the one at 408. The front door opens, the screen door pushing out.
Tall and slender, carrying a suitcase in each hand, I recognize the build. It’s the Mexican I’d seen that night, the one Espinoza had described, but without the hat this time. If the name on the mailbox is real, and Joyce’s information is accurate, this is Hector Saldado, who makes calls daily on his cell phone to the area around Cancun.
Saldado carries the suitcases down the stairs to the back of the beat-up Blazer, where he swings the rack with the spare tire out of the way and lifts the hinged rear door with the plastic-covered window. As he tosses the suitcases inside, another figure comes shooting out the door. Running barefoot, half naked, carrying a child in her arms, she makes it to the top step when Saldado turns and sees her.
She tries to get past him on the stairs, but he reaches out and grabs her by one arm, almost ripping the child out of her hands.
She tries to pull free, and he swings her around so the baby is nearly propelled from her arms by the centrifugal force.
The Mexican is powerful, wiry. With his hands gripping her upper arms from behind he lifts her, the child still sheltered in her arms, off her feet. Quickly he has her back up the stairs, inside the door, and beyond the shadows, where he stops, turns, and looks, making sure no one has seen him. I slide off to one side behind the wheel. Then he disappears.
The entire episode took less than twenty seconds. Anybody watching would consider it overly aggressive for any husband to treat his wife in this way. Some might call the cops, though I wouldn’t want my own life to hang on that slender thread. What she is doing here I don’t know, but Robin Watkins, Espinoza’s child-wife, is in serious trouble.
I grab my cell phone and dial nine-one-one. The operator comes on.
“I want to report domestic violence.”
“Is this an emergency?”
“It is.”
“Is the act occurring at this time?”
“Yes.” I give her the address, my name, and cell number.
“We will dispatch a car.”
“How long?”
“It may take a few minutes,” she says.
“How many minutes?”
“I can’t give you an estimate. We don’t have any officers in the area at the moment. As soon as a unit is available.”
I hang up, take a deep breath, and step out of the car. From the backseat I grab my old attache case, Samsonite, hard-sided and heavy. I close the car door and step back to the trunk. Inside, under the spare, I find the
