ones.
“Considering the kinds of stunts your sister pulled over the years, don’t you think your nephew has been lied to enough? Even if Marco was a bad father, he was still Luis’s father. Tell him the truth about how you found out and then be there for him when he needs you to be. It takes time to grieve. That poor kid has been doing it all on his own. No wonder he’s been a problem at school.”
Jaime Carbajal thought about that for a moment. Finally he nodded. “You’re right, boss,” he said softly. “Luis Andrade has been lied to long enough.”
CHAPTER 11
I caught up with Mel in federal way in time to buy her lunch at Marie Callender’s. She had spent the morning at Denny’s talking to the people who worked there, and she was sick of it. She wanted to eat somewhere else.
“So what did you find out?” I asked over steaming potato soup with a side of corn bread.
Mel shook her head. “It’s one of those places with enough employee turnover that there’s zero corporate memory. Well, maybe not quite zero. One of the cooks thought he maybe remembered someone named Marina, but he wasn’t sure. They evidently had the manager from hell for a while and everyone who could walk away did so. In that regard, Marina was no different from anyone else. She left without telling anyone and without bothering to pick up her final paycheck. That was sent in the mail.”
“To Silver Pines?”
“That’s the address they had,” Mel told me. “That’s the only address they had.”
“Was it ever cashed?” I asked.
“Nope. It came back.”
“But no one bothered to mention that she had disappeared.”
“No one from work. What did you find out?”
“I went to see an old buddy of mine from Seattle PD.” I was going to let it go at that, but then I remembered that Mel and I are married now. And that bit about “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is a good idea if you want to stay that way. “Al Lindstrom and I used to be partners,” I added. “He used to work with Tom Wojeck, too. Big Al claims Tom Wojeck left under a cloud. And that he has AIDS-has had for years.”
“Big Al,” Mel mused, latching on to the part of what I’d said that I would have preferred her to skip. “How big is he?”
“Not that big,” I told her. “There were two Als in his class at the academy. He came out Big Al, the other one came out Little Al.”
“What happened to Little Al?”
“He quit right after graduation. Went to work for State Farm or Farmers selling car insurance.”
“But the Big Al part stuck?” Mel asked.
“Pretty much,” I said.
As far as the partnership deal was concerned, I thought I had gotten off relatively easy. What I failed to understand is that God has a sense of humor about these things, and He was about to show me an ex-partner problem that was a whole lot more complicated than Big Al Lindstrom.
“Anyway,” I continued, “from what Big Al told me, Tom Wojeck had a dark side that caused him to leave Seattle PD in a hell of a hurry. They were about to launch an Internal Affairs investigation. Then he was diagnosed with AIDS before I.A. got around to him.”
Looking thoughtful, Mel said, “And Tom Wojeck just happens to be the same guy who cleaned out Marina’s apartment where there might have been some stray drug-dealing money.”
Sometimes Mel’s uncanny ability to put things together makes me feel like she’s reading my mind, but don’t get me wrong. I love it when she does that.
“Yes, ma’am,” I told her. “Want to do a ride-along and go see him?”
“What do you think?” she returned.
So back we went to Black Diamond. This time I drove. When we cleared the trees on the driveway to Mama Rose’s house, I wondered at first if we had somehow made a wrong turn.
The night before, the house with all its lit windows had been our main focus. In the daylight it was even more impressive. It was a sprawling two-story home with a standing-seam steel roof in a gleaming copper color-a choice that made sense in a house that was in the middle of nowhere with forest all around. The outside walls were covered with neat gray siding. The many windows were trimmed out in impeccable white, and an expansive veranda covered the entire front of the house. What hadn’t been apparent on our previous visit was that this was clearly a work in progress.
Last night we had been the only visible vehicle. This time, however, when we broke through the trees it looked as though we had landed in a subdivision-in-progress. The place teemed with machinery, trucks, and workers. A dump truck was unloading an avalanche of man-sized boulders. A jigsaw puzzle of white PVC pipes was laid out in a complicated pattern indicating that a comprehensive irrigation system was being installed. There were workers everywhere. A whole group of them was laying down a flagstone walkway that led from the edge of the veranda down to where another group of workers was installing a metal trellis over a big water feature of some kind. That, too, was under construction.
Tom Wojeck, wearing muddied work boots and denim coveralls, seemed to be overseeing much of the action. He left a huddle of workmen and came over to where Mel and I were climbing out of the car.
“Patrol cars seemed to have come up in the world since I quit the force,” he said, casting an approving glance in the direction of my S550 Mercedes, which, except for the color, was very much like the one in Tommy and Mama Rose’s garage.
“It’s mine,” I said. “They let us use our own rides these days. I bought it used and got a great deal on it.”
Mel doesn’t have a lot of patience with boy/car small talk. She likes driving fast cars fast; she doesn’t like standing around discussing them.
“What’s all this?” she asked, waving toward the beehive of activity.
Wojeck shrugged. “If Mama Rose wants a rose garden, we build a rose garden. Like that old song ‘Whatever Rosie wants; Rosie gets.’ I designed it myself, with a little help from a landscape architect. We’ve got a hundred and eighty varieties of roses that should be arriving in the course of the next week or so. That’s why we’re doing a full-court construction press right now.”
“That’s a lot of roses,” I said. “Who’s going to take care of them?”
“We have a full-time gardener who’ll be doing that,” Tom said. “And you’ll notice that we’ve regraded the entire area so the walkway is wheelchair accessible coming and going.”
He was clearly proud of his project, and I couldn’t blame him for that, but we weren’t here as building inspectors. “So which is worse?” I asked. “AIDS or MS?”
Tom gave me a sharp look. “So you know about that?”
I nodded. “I talked to Big Al. And to Molly.”
“I suppose Molly is still pissed at me?” he asked.
“That’s a reasonable assumption.”
“She was good friends with Abbie, my ex. Did you know we were neighbors at one time? Big Al and I used to carpool to work.”
I hadn’t known that, but it stood to reason.
“I didn’t give it to her, thank God,” he went on. “We’d been fighting a lot, which isn’t exactly conducive to rolling in the hay. As soon as I got the diagnosis, I moved out. She took the kids and moved to Spokane, where she ended up marrying another cop. I would have thought she’d have learned her lesson after marrying me, but her second husband is more of a team player than I ever was. I believe he’s moved up to being an assistant chief.”
“Was Mama Rose one of your girls?” Mel asked.
“She wasn’t,” Tom said. “We met at a support group, several months after Abbie and I split. We were the only heterosexuals in the group, so we sort of bonded. At the time, we were both down on our luck. Rosie wasn’t
