Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 3, March 1990

Repo Joe by Elana Lore

Basically, the only thing I like about Standley is his signature on my paychecks. I wasn’t overjoyed about having to see his runty little cigar-chomping face every day, but my leg hurt like hell where the bullet had gone through it, and even the painkillers didn’t help much, so I’d been working in the office since I had come back. I was so tired of it I didn’t care about the pain any more. I needed some action.

Standley could tell I was unhappy. He had been slinking around nervously all morning. I had just decided to go tell him I wanted to roll again when the phone rang. I saw him slip out the side door as I picked up the receiver.

“Hey, welcome back, cholito. How’s the leg?” It was Alicia from the dealership down the street.

“Aw, shoot, Miss Scarlett, ’tweren’t nuthin’. Just a scratch.”

“Be serious.”

“I am. It’s still attached to the rest of me.” I took a sip of my coffee. “Want to see my scar?”

“Not if it’s where I think it is.”

“Too bad. It’s the chance of a lifetime. So, what’s up?”

Alicia sighed on the other end of the phone. “I’ve got some heat for you. A Corliss GT — loaded.”

“Yeah?” I said.

I could hear her shuffling papers. “Guy did a Playhouse 90 on us.”

“Sounds like somebody’s under the bus.”

“Yeah — me, if we don’t get the car back. It’s my heat.”

“Okay, I’m on it. Personally.”

“Thanks. By the way, seeing as how you’re disabled, I sent the lot guy over with the keys. Is he there yet?”

I looked out the plate glass windows. The street was deserted, except for a couple of palm trees swaying in the breezes and a tall black man walking purposefully toward the door, eyeballing the scenery like he was new in town. “Does he look like Dobbin, only a few shades darker?”

“Yeah. His name’s Bowie.”

“He’s on his way. What’s the scoop on the Corliss?”

“The usual Sunday night credit bandit, I guess.” I never understood why, but car dealerships are open Sunday evenings, after TRW closes, and they actually sell cars without a credit check if the buyer looks okay. I can’t complain — it gives us extra business.

“Somebody got by you? Pobrecita.”

“Yeah. He looked okay, and he was dressed nice. He said he had his own business, and his car got stolen last week. He gave me a check for a grand, but Marcy at the bank says he’s down to spare change.”

“Did you talk to him about bringing the car back?”

“Yeah, yesterday. He said his secretary screwed up the accounts, and he was going to fix it. I called again this morning. His business phone’s been disconnected and his home phone doesn’t answer.”

“Give me the listings.”

She read off a business address and phone number in Del Mar, and a home one in Peñasquitos. I entered them in my computer.

“The business number checks out, but the residential’s listed as a C. Hendricks in University City.”

“That little liar.”

“It’s probably his girlfriend. Only women living alone list themselves under their initial.”

“I’ll remember that.”

While we had been talking, Bowie had arrived and stood towering over me. He was about six feet, fighter’s build, dark-skinned. He was wearing a pair of faded, grease-stained jeans over heavy work boots. It looked as if he’d been doing some kind of heavy construction lately.

“So, you want me to pull the car?”

“Yeah. Even if he does make good on the check, I can’t get him financed.”

“Okay.”

“Gotta go now, crip. Bowie still there?”

“Yeah.”

“He sounds like he needs some extra cash, so keep him in mind if you’re short-handed, okay?”

“Your wish is my command.”

I hung up and turned to face Bowie, grimacing as I caught my leg on the corner of the desk. I rose a little bit and stuck out my hand. “Jose Camacho, better known as Joe Cho. You Bowie?”

“Yeah. Bowie Randall. Don’t get up, man,” he said. “I heard you took a bullet. I just brought you some keys.”

His voice was soft and deep, with some kind of accent I couldn’t place.

“Thanks. Alicia told me you were looking for some action. You done repo before?”

“Nah. You need a whole lot of experience?”

It was just a question, nothing behind it, so I shrugged and let it pass.

“Can you get bonded?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

“I’ll see what we can do when Standley needs some help.”

“Thanks.”

All the teams were out rolling, which meant there wasn’t anybody to relieve me at lunchtime. I ordered a pizza that arrived almost cold, ate half, and wrapped the rest to take home for dinner.

I worked the phones pretty hard until Standley came back, which wasn’t until almost three, but I didn’t get any leads on the Corliss bandit. His name was John Schroeder, which didn’t ring any bells with me. We got some guys we visit two or three times a year. Standley tried to slime his way past me into his office, but I blocked him.

“You ever heard of giving a guy a lunch break?” I snarled at him.

“I thought Mick...”

“You thought nothing. If this is the way you’re gonna treat me, I’m going back out on the street.”

Standley looked around nervously, but the office was empty.

“Fine. You do that,” he said weakly.

“Starting tomorrow,” I said.

“Sure, Joe. Whatever you want. I’ll get someone else to work the desk.”

I smiled as I walked back to my desk, and hoped Standley couldn’t see my reflection in the plate glass window.

The usual routine when we’re rolling is I pick up Dobbin at the bus stop around the corner from his ma’s house at seven — he doesn’t have a car — and we meet the Creeper at this doughnut shop down by Balboa Park. I don’t know where he lives; sometimes I think maybe he hangs out in the park at night.

We eat and grab some coffee to take with us, then we prowl around the airport parking lots for a while, and head into the shop about eight thirty to see if there’s any new heat.

Standley doesn’t like the three of us together so much — he thinks if we had three cars out we could pull more — but we’ve been proving him wrong for so long he hardly mentions it any more, except when business is slow.

The way we work when we’re on the road is I handle the car phone and the wheels, Dobbin hotwires when we have to and acts as a general menace to society, and the Creeper keeps the heat sheet. He doesn’t really need to look at it much — he’s got a photographic memory for license plate numbers, which always makes me think he must have done time.

We had a couple of new cars on our sheet, so we did the usual home and office check to see if the people were stupid enough to leave the car lying around. These two weren’t. It looked like I was going to have to call them and ask them nicely to bring the cars back. Sometimes, when you do that, they get nervous about where they stashed it and move it, and all you gotta do is follow them.

Mostly that doesn’t work. And once you let them know you’re after them, they really go underground. Not to mention that sometimes they get pissed off at you for stealing their wheels back and take it out on you, which is why Dobbin has a couple of fake teeth and I have a bullet hole that might have been a sex change operation if the guy had had better aim.

I explained to Dobbin and the Creeper about Alicia’s Corliss bandit, and we took 805 up to University City to see if Schroeder had hidden the car at his girlfriend’s house. The address was a nice bunch of condos nestled in the side of a hill just below the shopping center. We did a couple of rounds in the parking lot, watching kids stumble out and head in little packs for school, dragging lunch boxes behind them, but the car wasn’t there.

I decided to call and see if I could flush somebody out of the roost. We pulled into a vacant parking space right outside the Hendricks unit, where I could see into the downstairs windows. I dialed the number, deciding at the last minute to do my L. A. Law act.

“Is this Miss Hendricks?” I asked.

“Mmmm. Who’s this?” she mumbled.

“This is Victor Sifuentes. John Schroeder said I could get in touch with him through you.”

She was more awake now. I liked it when they thought they recognized the name, but weren’t sure where they had heard it before.

“John?” she said, surprised. “He isn’t here.”

“Please have him call my office. He has the number.”

As I hung up the phone, I heard her say something else, but I didn’t catch it. Dobbin was staring blankly at the phone, while the Creeper was checking out the cars in the parking lot. We waited for some signs of life but nothing happened, so we decided to go back to our heat sheet.

We got lucky fast. The Creeper I.D.’d a Toyota we’d been carrying for almost a week in a grocery store parking lot. Dobbin hotwired it and took it in.

Then, about ten minutes later, we found an XZ convertible parked out in front of the guy’s house. He must have gotten careless, I guess. We’d been looking for that car for a while. I called the police dispatch number and gave them the details while the Creeper dug around in his bag for the master key. You can’t be too careful with the Creeper. He’s been busted for grand theft auto on a two mile trip back to the lot. He’s just got that kind of face.

That left me alone for a while. I wanted to check out Schroeder’s office anyway, so I radioed in that Dobbin and the Creeper were on their way back and I’d pick them up in an hour.

Del Mar’s not that far north on 805, and it’s a pretty stretch of highway. Right past the turnoff was a long, low row of high-tech offices — the kind with tinted windows that look like giant sunglasses. The landscapes had left colorful rows of pansies and dianthus behind to assure visitors they were still inside the boundaries of civilization, even though the area was ringed with scrub grass and the rocky debris of some ancient volcanic uprising.

The parking lot looked freshly poured and painted, and most of the cars parked there were fairly new. It was a very upwardly mobile kind of place. I pulled into a spot marked RESERVED, JOHN SCHROEDER, and turned off the engine.

The door in front of me said SCHROEDER ENGINEERING. Very fancy. I got out and knocked on it, then tried the handle. It was open.

It was dark in the office, and after the bright light outside, I couldn’t see. I fumbled for the light switch but couldn’t find it. I heard the sound of something heavy hitting the floor, and footsteps, and then something hit me hard and I went down on my bum leg. I tried to stifle a scream, but couldn’t. I felt a breeze as the door slammed. Whoever had hit me was gone.

I lay there for a couple of minutes, doing the Lamaze breathing that the nurse at the hospital had assured me would ease the pain, and when my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I saw that Schroeder’s office had been trashed. The file drawers had been emptied and rooted through, the desk was littered with papers — even the coffeepot had been torn apart.

I decided to look around. The office was long and narrow, with a formal executive office set up beyond the secretarial alcove, and beyond that, what looked like some kind of studio. The formal office area was decorated in some kind of light wood, with pastel carpet and walls. There was less damage here — lamps broken and pictures tom off the walls. It looked like Schroeder hadn’t used the area much except for decoration, and whoever had just left had figured that out.

The studio was where the noise had come from. It was apparently where Schroeder worked. It had a drafting table, plastic storage containers against the walls, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Drafting paper was wadded up in little balls all over the floor and the storage containers had been emptied of their supplies. The only thing that hadn’t been touched was a six-pack of Vernor’s ginger ale that was sitting on the kitchen counter. The guy at least had some sense.

I got a clean glass out of the kitchen cabinet, some ice out of the refrigerator, and opened a soda. I love the stuff.

I rooted around through the papers a little bit until I finished my drink, but all I found were some weird drawings that looked like they were for electrical stuff.

I heard a door slam and walked cautiously to the service entrance to the studio. Next door, a UPS truck was backing up. The driver nodded in my direction when he saw me. As the truck rolled down the delivery drive, I saw the glint of blue metal beyond it. This is too easy, I thought.

I propped the back door open with a stapler so I wouldn’t get locked out and went to investigate. The info on the receipt of sale in the front window matched what Alicia had given me on the telephone. I got the Creeper on the radio, told him I’d found the Corliss and was bringing it in. He said he’d hitch a ride up with one of the other units, bring my car in, then meet me at the impound lot.

The car still smelled new, the stereo was top of the line, and aside from the ache in my leg when I shifted gears, I was in heaven. I eased into traffic and popped the clutch into overdrive. A guy could get used to this, I thought to myself.

I stuck a piece of chewing gum in my mouth and opened the ashtray to ditch the wrapper. Something inside rattled. I felt around, got a grip on it, and pulled it out. It was some kind of little plastic gizmo with wires in it — probably a piece of the car’s electrical system that the installers at the dealership had forgotten to hook up. I put it in my pocket to turn in at the lot.

I couldn’t wait to show Alicia, so I decided to pull into the dealership on the way to our impound lot. She was standing on the stairs by the front door, going over some kind of list with Bowie. I honked the horn and they came over.

“Hey, fast work,” Alicia said. “Where was it?”

“In the parking lot behind his office. Piece of cake.”

“Did Schroeder give you any trouble?” Alicia asked.

“He wasn’t there.” I was about to explain what had happened, but Bowie stopped me.

“Gimme the keys for a minute, Joe,” he said. He had a puzzled look on his face.

“Sure.” I handed them over. “Is something wrong?”

“There’s something sticking out of the trunk.”

Alicia walked back and peered down. “It looks like a suit jacket. Maybe it’s Schroeder’s dry cleaning,” she joked.

Bowie turned the key in the lock and the trunk sprang open. He jumped back and turned his head away from the sight.

Inside, squeezed around so his face was practically between his knees, was the body of a man. Alicia turned pale and was starting to gag. One of the salesmen was walking over, smiling, to see what was going on.

“Could you shut that thing, Bowie?” Alicia asked.

I was starting to feel a little green around the gills, too. Bowie slammed the lid.

“I guess we ought to call the cops,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” Alicia said. “Maybe we should move the car around back.”

Bowie glanced at me and held up the keys. “No, go ahead,” I said. We were on his turf.

The cops who arrived first were uniforms. I watched from inside the employee lounge as Alicia walked them to the back lot and explained what had happened. The cops opened the trunk, made faces, and shut it again.

I hobbled out to join them. One of the cops had gone back to his unit to radio for intelligent life, while the other was looking at Alicia as if he’d been stranded on a desert island since puberty. Alicia was starting to look irritated. She saw me approach and rolled her eyes.

“This is Joe Camacho,” she said. “He pulled the car.”

The officer was young, blond, tanned, fit — a beach bunny, maybe, or a male model, but not my idea of a cop. His gold nametag reflected the sunlight, wavering. I stared at his shirt for a while, finally made out the name: Warner.

I gave him my name and address, and Standley’s, as a sort of reference. Then I went and sat down in the shack where Bowie does business, on the three-and-a-half-legged Formica castoff that passed for his guest chair.

The two cops were back over by the car, guarding it, I guess, until they were relieved. Bowie had his feet propped up on his desk, going over invoices and watching the action outside.

“So, what do you think?” he asked, tilting his head toward the Corliss.

“I think it probably wasn’t a suicide,” I said. “Why?”

“I dunno. You see a white guy come in here, dressed nice, looks like he’s probably got a house in the ’burbs, coupla kids, swimming pool in the back yard. He gets himself killed and stuffed into the trunk of a car. What did he do? Get caught cheatin’ on his wife? Forget to pay his taxes? No, man. What we got here is some high-class drama.”

Two cars pulled up outside — the reinforcements. We got up to investigate and were put through the twenty-questions routine again by a plainclothes-man while a guy dusted the car for prints and a tiny girl who couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds took photos of the guy in the trunk.

A few minutes later a wagon from the coroner’s office arrived, and a few minutes after that, a news truck from one of the networks.

The plainclothes cop who talked to us was a cholo named Miggy Hernandez I used to deal with on the phone back when he was in auto theft. He was an okay guy.

He herded us back into Bowie’s shack when he saw the news truck and asked us not to talk to anyone but him. He slipped a leather card case out of his pocket and handed each of us a card with his San Diego P.D. number on it.

As he was leaving, one of the guys from the coroner’s office walked up and said, “He’s been pronounced. You want us to take him so you can dust the trunk?”

Hernandez looked around. The fingerprint guy and the tiny photographer seemed to be done. “Yeah. Get him out of here before the cameras are set up, if you can. Any I.D. on him?”

“Driver’s license in his wallet. Says his name was John Schroeder. The photo pretty much matches.”

“Anything interesting?”

“His pockets were rifled, but nothing was taken, looks like. Money’s still there.”

“I’ll send Robbie down to the morgue when he’s done here to see if he can lift any prints off the stuff. How soon can you have the report?”

The guy from the coroner’s office glanced over at the news truck, then back to Hernandez. Bowie and I were pretending to be real busy doing paperwork in the shack. “We’ll put a priority on it.”

Hernandez and his partner watched the loading of the body, then talked to the reporters. Meanwhile, I got the Creeper on the phone and told him what was going down. He said he’d cover for me for the rest of the day. Alicia showed up a few minutes later, called the general manager and told him she and Bowie were splitting due to general shock and trauma, and to avoid giving the dealership any bad publicity by accidentally talking to the reporters milling around. He went for it. The three of us drove down to a little Mexican restaurant to have a couple of beers. It ended up being an all-evening thing, with dinner and then a trip out to Mission Bay for ice cream and a walk on the beach.

We talked about everything except the dead guy, and as the evening progressed, I decided I liked Bowie. He was quiet, but he had a good sense of humor. It wasn’t until I got home to my apartment about midnight and got into bed that what he had said earlier about Schroeder started rolling around in my head. What could a white-bread kind of guy like Schroeder have done to get offed like that?

Thursday, Bowie and I had our names in the paper. Standley kept me and the guys out on the road most of the day, I guess to cut down on the rehash with the other teams, which was fine by me. I’d had a little too much excitement in my life lately.

I didn’t get home until around seven. The minute I walked in the door I knew something was wrong — someone had been there while I was out. Nothing seemed out of place, but I could smell garlicky body odor and maybe cheap cigar hanging in the apartment.

I checked around but nothing was missing, which made me think right away that this was somehow connected to Schroeder. I didn’t know how or why, but whoever had been tossing Schroeder’s office when I had walked in now thought I had what he’d been looking for.

I opened a beer and turned on the Padres game to help me think. Should I call Miggy Hernandez? Nah. He’d probably think I was nuts or, worse, some kind of wimp. There was only one thing I could do. I showered, changed, and went back out.

“Who is it?” The voice sounded a little scared.

“It’s Joe Camacho. I’m the guy who found John Schroeder’s body in the car.” Apparently she knew he was dead. She didn’t seem surprised. I like people who keep up on current events.

“What do you want?”

“Schroeder’s office was tossed when I went there yesterday to look for the car, and today, someone broke into my apartment. Schroeder listed this address on his credit app for the car, and I was hoping you could tell me what’s going on.”

I heard the latch click and. the door opened the length of the chain.

“Let’s see some I.D.”

Her hands trembled as she took my driver’s license and Standley’s I.D. card.

A moment later the door shut, then opened wide. C. Hendricks was a tall blonde with the deep brown eyes of a frightened doe. She ushered me into a kitchen that was larger than I expected and motioned me to a bar stool at the center island. She offered me a soda, and while she was pouring it, she said, “He listed my address? Why?”

“Beats me.” I shrugged as she handed me the glass and sat down. “Were you his girlfriend?”

“No. His secretary — up until Monday. He told me he was leaving town for a while and wouldn’t need me any more.” Something seemed to be bothering her. Finally, she said, “What really happened to John?”

“I don’t know much. I just brought the car in; the body was in the trunk. The cops were talking about a bullet wound, but I don’t know where he was shot.”

“Oh.”

“What did he actually do up there in that office? I couldn’t tell.”

“I don’t really know. He was supposed to be a toy designer, but I never saw him do anything.”

“I saw drawings in his studio.”

“Yeah. There’s a two-month-old coffee stain on the top one. That’s how I caught on that he wasn’t actually working.”

“How did he spend his time?”

“He was out a lot. When he was there, he was mostly on the phone.”

“With who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t speak Spanish. Most of the guys who called seemed to be Mexican.”

“He spoke Spanish?”

“Yeah. I started thinking he was maybe smuggling drugs or something. And then, when his car got stolen, he got really scared. I had just about decided to start looking for another job when he told me he was going away. I was getting really nervous about all the weird stuff that was going on.”

“Did he say where he was planning on going?”

“No.”

“How about the guys he talked to on the phone — do you remember any of their names?”

“One. A guy named Enrique Moreno. He and John were back and forth on the phone a lot lately.”

“You wouldn’t happen to remember his phone number, would you?”

“No. But it was long distance. I dialed it a couple of times for John. It would be on his phone bills at the office.”

She hesitated for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and a key in her hand. “Here. This is John’s home address and the key to the office. I never gave it back to him.” She paused and looked me in the eye. “Whatever happens, I don’t want to be involved, okay?”

I nodded, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to.

I decided to check out Schroeder’s house. I thought about ’loiding the lock to see what was inside, but there was an unmarked police car parked down by the street corner, which changed my mind for me. I wondered how Miggy was doing on the case, and tried to remember what I’d told him about Schroeder. Even if I hadn’t mentioned C. Hendricks to him, surely he would have picked up on the phone number on the credit app and checked it out. Maybe not — she hadn’t mentioned the police being there to question her. I decided to ask Alicia to call Miggy in the morning and tell him. She could do it tactfully.

The sunglass windows of Schroeder’s building looked droopy and wavy in the light from the street lamp. The parking lot was deserted. I was starting to have some doubts. Had Miggy and his friends been here and decided there wasn’t anything useful? Was I barking up the wrong tree?

I was in and out in a couple of minutes with no problem. The only thing different about the office was that there was fingerprint dust all over the place, which restored my faith in the San Diego Police Department. The phone bills had been in the mess of papers near the file cabinet in the front office. It didn’t take a genius to find them.

By midnight, I had a list of four numbers that Schroeder had called frequently. One was a toll number in San Diego that was hooked to a squeaky-voiced kid’s answering machine, complete with Star Trek music in the background. The kid said his name was Don Gervase. The second was a long-distance number that gave commodities quotes. Gold and silver were down; platinum was up. The third was an exchange that I recognized as being in Tijuana. The sexy female voice that answered on the recording said in both Spanish and English that La Marqueta was closed for the day and would open promptly at nine the next morning. The fourth number was answered by a gravelly-voiced man whose accent sounded more Puerto Rican than Mexican. I didn’t recognize the exchange, but I knew the number was somewhere on the Baja Peninsula.

The next morning, early, I persuaded Alicia to use her contacts at the phone company to find out who the Puerto Rican voice belonged to. Then I called Bowie and asked him if he wanted to take a little trip across the border to Tijuana. He said he’d see if he could switch shifts with the evening guy and call me back. While I waited, I ate some really disgusting bran cereal and decided I’d go back to churritos and doughnuts and the hell with being healthy.

Alicia confirmed what I suspected — the number belonged to Enrique Moreno, and the exchange was a Rosarita one.

Once Bowie gave me the okay, I called in sick, then met Bowie at Dobbin’s bus stop so I could give him the car. Dobbin looked nervous driving off by himself in my wheels, and I felt like I was sending a kid off to his first day of school. I don’t know how he and the Creeper managed while I was in the hospital.

I explained what was up to Bowie while he drove south. There wasn’t very much traffic, so we crossed the border fast. The main tourist drag was already crowded, but we didn’t have much trouble finding a parking space. I bought myself a bottle of Kahlua and some tequila añejo with a worm in it for Bowie. He thought I was kidding about the worm. He’d find out soon enough. I taught Bowie how to haggle for stuff, and he got a pretty good deal on a donkey piñata for Dobbin. I also bought the Creeper a thick blanket, just in case he really does sleep in the park.

By then it was almost lunchtime, and we decided to go out to La Marqueta and see if we could hustle up some information. It was out past the airport, near Otay, in a cluster of long, low adobe buildings. There were a couple of dusty stores and a faded building with a crooked, hand-painted sign that said ROSA’S CANTINA — CERVEZA. The parking lots were full of old beaters with blue Mexican license plates.

We parked outside Rosa’s and went in to have lunch. It was still early, and the place was nearly empty. Rosa herself was there. She was short and stout, with high, flat cheekbones and orange-clay skin. She was a talker — actually, a complainer — and it didn’t take long for me to find out that La Marqueta was a maquiladora that made electronic parts for Anglo companies, and that Enrique Moreno, who ran the place, was a slick Nuyorican with fancy clothes who didn’t pay his workers well enough for all the money he was making. Bowie sort of nodded in the right places and pretended he was following what was going on. I’d never asked him if he spoke any Spanish.

It turned out he does, a little. He told me Nuyorican wasn’t an insult — it was just what Puerto Rican New Yorkers called themselves. And I explained to him that a maquiladora was a factory where Anglo companies got parts made at cheap Mexican wages with no union hassles.

“You think there’s something fishy going on at the maquiladora?” Bowie asked as I gave him directions to the Otay crossing.

“Probably not,” I said. “Customs is really tough on those shops. But it’s got to have some connection to what’s going on.”

As usual, I had trouble at the border. I know customs has to be careful, but I always end up feeling like I’m crossing illegally, which is why I don’t go to Tijuana much any more. I showed my driver’s license and Standley’s I.D., and finally they let me through.

When we were back on the highway, Bowie smiled and said, “That was a really interesting experience, man.”

“You like Mexico?”

“Nah. I like the way they let a brother in, no problem, but you they hassle.”

“Yeah? Let’s try crossing the Alabama border sometime and see what happens.”

Bowie chuckled.

Neither one of us had any particular plans for the afternoon, so we decided to get some carry-out food and eat in Balboa Park. We watched a pickup game some teenage boys were having on the lawn and talked about what we had come up with so far.

When I told Bowie about how Schroeder’s office had been torn up, he pointed out to me that if they had trashed the coffeepot, they were probably looking for something small. I hadn’t thought of that before. But that was as far as we got.

I don’t understand Dobbin or the Creeper. They got it into their heads that I was really sick, so they both showed up in the car and the four of us ended up going back to my place to have a few beers. They stayed until about midnight, and after they left, I realized how much I had had to drink that day and how much weird food I had eaten. I got the cleaning bucket out from under the sink and put it by the bed, then prayed that I would live until morning before I fell on the mattress.

It was my worst nightmare — the kind that could make you use birth control forever. When I woke up, a sweaty, wheezy, overweight asthmatic kid with thick black glasses held together by masking tape was standing over me, peering at me through milky blue eyes.

I stared at him for a moment through narrowed eyes that were trying to focus.

“I said I want my toy back,” the kid said.

“Ay, Dios. Why me?” I said, staring at the ceiling. “I don’t have any toys. Since you let yourself into my apartment, you can probably tell I don’t have any kids, either. What I do have is a terrible hangover, so go away.”

The fat kid crossed his arms and looked at me stubbornly. “No.”

“At least go blow your nose, then,” I said. “Your wheezing is giving me a headache.”

He looked around. “In the bathroom,” I said. “And it would be better if I didn’t have to hear you do it.”

I tried to sit up. The fat kid came back out, sounding a lot less noisy, and said, “It really stinks in here. You smell like a brewery.”

“And you are going to be dead soon if you keep bothering me,” I said.

He peered at me for a minute. “I know how to make coffee,” he said finally.

I had my doubts, but I was a desperate man.

“I tell you what. You make coffee and I’ll take a shower.”

“Okay.”

When I got out of the shower, a steaming cup of coffee was sitting on the bathroom sink. He hadn’t lied. It was better than the stuff I make. I drank it while I dressed and went out to the kitchen to get another cup.

The kid was sitting on the living room floor with pieces of my television set scattered around him.

“What in God’s name are you doing to my TV?” I shouted.

“Fixing it. It’s a compulsion of mine. I couldn’t get Channel 2, and the cartoons are about to come on.”

I sighed and got another cup of coffee. This was the kind of kid even a mother would probably leave in the desert, or at least send out to play on the freeway. He was making me loco. Then I thought, well, if he can make coffee, maybe he can fix TV’s.

“I’m finished,” he called out. “See?”

I looked. The picture was terrific. “How about the others?”

He flipped through with the remote button. They were all clearer.

“Want me to rig you into cable?” he said.

“Isn’t that slightly illegal?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sort of. I just wanted to see if you thought I could do it.”

“Okay. I believe you. Now, who are you, and what makes you think I have your toy?”

“My name is Don Gervase. Have you ever heard of me?”

“No. Should I have?” I remembered his voice from the answering machine.

“I created the Gervase Greeks.”

“What are they?”

“Toys — computerized simulations of war games.”

I raised my eyebrows — very carefully. “I’m impressed.”

“Yeah?”

“You must be pretty smart.”

He blushed. “I’m supposed to be some kind of boy genius. Too bad I can’t convince my mother. She won’t even let me drive.” His shoulders slumped.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh. You still have baby fat. You need to exercise.”

“Yeah, I know. But the asthma slows me down.”

“Maybe if you make enough money with your toys, you can buy your own car.”

“I made twelve million last year. She won’t let me touch it until I’m twenty-one.”

“Your mother sounds like a tough broad.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what is this missing toy of yours that you think I have?”

“Last year I designed this game, see? It’s called the Trojan Horse. It was the top seller at Christmas, so the manufacturer wanted me to design another one that was even harder. You know, like, more complicated. I finished the prototype last week, but before I could send it off to the manufacturer, it was stolen from my safe by this guy named John Schroeder.”

“How do you know he stole it?”

“A guy I met at a science fiction convention last year told me about him. He hangs around guys like me, then goes off with their stuff. See, I had this problem with the Trojan Horse. Right after Christmas, another company ripped off the design and made knockoffs a lot cheaper, so I lost money I could have made. I didn’t worry when Schroeder started hanging around and calling me up and stuff because I had put this self-destruct device on the prototype, and I had a camera rigged up in my safe. I have really good photos of him taking it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I’m already in trouble with my mom. I didn’t want her to know it got stolen. She’d think I’m irresponsible, and then she’d never let me do anything.”

“Oh. What made you think that I had it?”

“I talked to Cynthia Hendricks. She told me your apartment had been broken into. It made sense that if Schroeder’s office was ransacked and he was killed there, it was by somebody who was looking for the chip. But if your place was broken into right after the piece in the paper about how his body was found, then whoever did it hadn’t found the chip and thought you had it.”

“That’s pretty good reasoning. How did you get to know Cynthia Hendricks?”

He looked uncomfortable. “She was always nice to me. I liked talking to her. When I found the office phone disconnected, I decided to call her at home. You know — see if she was all right.”

I sensed there was more to it than that, but I didn’t want to embarrass the kid.

“Anyway,” he said, “I have to deliver the chip to my manufacturer by Tuesday, even if Schroeder already opened it and destroyed the coding. That part I can do over again.”

“What was the coding part of it?”

“It was this light-sensitive... oh, forget it. You wouldn’t understand.”

“I get it. The minute you expose the insides to light, they don’t work any more.”

“Yeah.”

“Who was it who stole the Trojan Horse thing?”

“Anderson Toys. They’re in L.A.”

“Did they steal it from your house?”

“No. They just bought one and opened it up. Once it’s on the market, everybody rips you off.”

I was starting to get a sick feeling in my stomach. I stood up and took my wallet out of my back pocket. “Hey, kid, I need some time to think.” I handed him a twenty. “Could you run down the street to McDonald’s and get a bunch of Big Breakfasts or something?”

He looked suspicious. “I guess so.”

“How did you get in here?”

“My mom’s old VISA card. You need a better lock on that door.”

“Yeah.”

I lay down on the couch after he left and tried to piece everything together. Schroeder steals this toy design from the kid — Don. Maybe a buyer like Anderson sends him after it. What next? Schroeder gets greedy, decides to sell it to someone else, too, and tries to copy it. But suddenly he doesn’t have anything to sell, so he what? Maybe he cleans out his accounts and decides to leave town? That sounded good to me.

But what next? I thought about it for a while, and managed to put myself to sleep in the process. The next thing I knew, the kid was standing over me with a big white bag in his hand, shaking me awake.

“You snore,” he said.

“Only when I’m about to beat someone to death with my bare hands.”

“You have a weird sense of humor.”

While we ate, I explained what I had come up with.

“So, what you’re saying is that if I hadn’t booby-trapped Helen of Troy — that’s the name of the toy — Schroeder wouldn’t be dead.”

“Probably not, but you shouldn’t feel guilty about it. You didn’t ask him to steal your toy. Helen of Troy? Does this thing have a lot of sex in it?”

The fat kid blushed. “Not exactly.”

“So what does this toy look like?”

“It doesn’t look like a toy. It’s just the electronic components. The manufacturer is going to package it.” He reached into his pocket and took out a Polaroid snapshot. “That’s what it looks like.”

I slumped in my chair. “Ay, Dios.”

“What?”

“I’ve had your toy all along — I just didn’t realize it.”

“Where is it?”

“At the dry cleaner’s, probably.” It was all rushing back to me now — the little electronic part I had found in Schroeder’s car ashtray and forgotten to return at the lot in the excitement of discovering Schroeder’s body in the trunk; the dirt on my jacket from my trip to the linoleum floor of Schroeder’s outer office; the hasty trip to the cleaners on my way to work Thursday.

I fumbled for the car keys while Don Gervase looked on, worried. “Dry cleaning solution will destroy everything,” he said. “How long have your clothes been there?”

“Two days,” I said. “Don’t worry. Mr. Lee always cleans out my pockets.”

The kid turned kind of pale. “Have you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I got kind of a sick feeling again. This wouldn’t be a good time for Mr. Lee to decide to take a vacation and leave some acne-faced gum chewer in charge of the place.

The kid moved faster than I thought he could and slammed the door as I pulled from the curb. We had to sit around and wait for twenty minutes until the cleaners opened. Mr. Lee is an elderly Chinese man who doesn’t speak English very well, and has a hearing problem as well, so we had to repeat ourselves a couple of times before he understood what the fuss was about. He gave me my jacket back all right. I felt for the little toy, but it wasn’t there.

“Ah! One moment,” Mr. Lee said and walked to the back of the shop. He came back with a little paper lunch bag in his hand. “Shame, shame, Mr. Cho. You not clean out pockets again.”

I opened the bag. Inside was about a dollar in change, a couple of phone messages from Standley’s, and the kid’s toy. We both heaved a sigh of relief. Mr. Lee must have thought we were nuts the way we carried on about the stuff in the paper bag, but he was polite, as always.

When we got back in the car, I said, “I have to take you home before your mom comes after me with a baseball bat or, worse, has me up on kidnapping charges.”

He shoved his glasses back up on his nose. “She’d probably rather have a date with you if she saw you, so don’t worry about the kidnapping charges.” I shuddered to think of what a date with his mother would be like, so I went on. “But first, we have to take a little trip down to police headquarters.”

“Why?”

“Because there are a bunch of guys trying to figure out who murdered Schroeder, and why, and we have some answers.”

The kid slumped down in his seat. “I’m going to get in a lot of trouble if my mom finds out.”

“She doesn’t have to. Here’s how we can work it. You got your toy back. You talk to the police, I deliver you to the corner nearest your house, and you fix up Helen by Tuesday. All we’ve got to do is make the cops look good.”

“How?”

“By giving them all the credit for figuring out this stuff.”

Miggy Hernandez was at his desk, looking tired and depressed. He didn’t seem too pleased to see us. I asked him in Spanish if he had time for a cup of coffee somewhere private and maybe a big lead on the Schroeder case, and he brightened up considerably.

“You got it.”

We went to a little cafe a couple of blocks away that was full of ferns and empty of cops. The kid seemed pleased that we let him have coffee. I was starting to think his mother needed a good talking to by someone. Maybe Hernandez. He was married, last I heard, so he wouldn’t have to worry about the fat kid fixing him up with his mom.

“You’re the kid who designed the Trojan Horse?” Hernandez said when Don Gervase finished telling his story. “My kids love that thing. I thought you were older.”

Yep. Hernandez was a done deal on the talk with the mother.

“Are you sure you don’t want some publicity — you know, about helping the police solve this case? Maybe your mother would take you more seriously,” I said innocently.

The kid shoved his glasses back up his nose and looked at me suspiciously.

“We can work something out,” Hernandez said expansively.

I decided to nail him a little tighter. I went on about how restrictive the fat kid’s mother was until finally Hernandez said, “Okay, I’ll fix it with the mother. Don’t worry about it.”

“Good,” I said. “He’s an okay kid, once you get used to him. Now, if you two don’t need me any more, I’m going to go take some aspirin and sleep off the rest of this hangover.”

“Take a shower while you’re at it,” Hernandez said. “You smell like a brewery.”

I glared at him and the kid as I left.

The next few days I felt really jumpy, like I should be doing something, but I didn’t know what. On Sunday I drove down to the beach and took a long walk, trying to get it out of my system, but all I ended up with was sore leg muscles. My doctor had told me to exercise the leg the bullet had gone through, but I didn’t think he meant for me to do a whole week’s worth of walking in one afternoon. I didn’t have to see him again until Thursday, so I tried to patch up the damage with a hot bath when I got home. It helped some, but I was still stiff when I went in to work on Monday morning.

Even Dobbin and the Creeper noticed that I was edgy, but they didn’t say anything. The Creeper just sort of took over, giving me directions to places he wanted to check out, and Dobbin worked faster than usual to give us extra time on the road. I was really grateful — we would have gone back to Standley’s empty-handed if it had been up to me.

Monday night I had a dream that Enrique Moreno had found out where Alicia lived and was stalking her to see if she had the chip. When I woke up, sweating, I realized that I didn’t know what Moreno looked like.

The tension of not knowing what was going on, and not being able to do anything, was wearing on me. First thing Tuesday morning, when we rolled into Standley’s for the new heat sheet, I picked up the phone and called Alicia.

She could tell something was wrong and set up a dinner for us and Bowie at the same place we’d gone to before. She said it might help to talk it out.

It only got worse. All day I had the urge to call Miggy, the fat kid, even Cynthia Hendricks, but I managed to talk myself out of it. Miggy knew what he was doing — if he needed my help, he’d call me.

When I got to the restaurant about seven, Alicia and Bowie were already there. They had ordered a pitcher of beer and a bowl of tostados, and the waitress brought me a frosted glass when I sat down.

“Your leg still bothering you?” Bowie asked.

“I went for a little walk,” I explained. I was limping pretty badly after sitting in the car all day. “I think I overdid it.”

Alicia was in a good mood. She told me about this old guy who had come into the dealership right before she’d left and tried to pay cash for a car. He’d taken a huge wad of bills out of his pocket and started peeling them off, and nobody knew what to do. She’d finally had the cashier call the bank and check the serial numbers, just to make sure the money wasn’t stolen. He’d turned out to be a harmless old guy who didn’t trust banks. He didn’t drive too well, either. Bowie said he’d had to close his eyes when the guy took the car off the lot, for fear he was going to total the inventory on the way out.

There was always something weird happening at that dealership, and I started to relax as they told the story. We got another pitcher of beer and some more tostados, and I told them what had happened over the weekend on the Schroeder case, leaving out the part about my dream so I wouldn’t worry Alicia.

We were just about to order dinner when Miggy Hernandez strolled in the door and came over to our table. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“How’d you ever find me here?” I asked.

“It’s my job,” he said with a small smile. “You can’t escape from the long arm of the law.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

Bowie reached out and pulled another chair up to the table for him. “We’re just about to order. Want to stay for dinner?”

“Good idea,” Hernandez said. “I’m glad you two are here, too. I came to tell Cho we arrested Enrique Moreno this morning.” He winked at Alicia. “Cho gets real upset when things aren’t wrapped up neat. One of these days, maybe I’ll tell you some stories from the old days, back when I was in auto theft.”

We ordered, and when the waitress left, Alicia said, “So, what happened?”

Hernandez chuckled. “I’d like to tell you we did some real heavy duty detective work, but it didn’t go down that way. Our computer did most of the work. John Schroeder turned out to be an industrial spy. He’d been working the San Diego — L.A. area for about four years and had decided it was time to move on — too many people in the business knew him. He’d been establishing a new identity as John Sheridan in New York for about six months, which is why his bank accounts here came up empty. He was transferring money to his new accounts back east. But he had made this deal with Moreno to steal a computer chip for a toy.”

“I told them about the fat kid just before you got here,” I interrupted.

“Good,” Hernandez said. “That makes it easier. Anyway, the fat kid’s chip was supposed to be his last job before he moved on. But he got greedy. He decided to duplicate it and sell it to a couple of other guys he’d done business with before, only when he opened the chip, he destroyed it. He realized he was going to have to leave town sooner than he’d thought.”

“Did Moreno find out about the other guys Schroeder had sold the chip to?” Alicia asked.

Hernandez shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt it. Those guys don’t talk to each other. The way we figured it, Moreno was on a tight production deadline. He had to get the chip in a hurry to get the toys done for the Christmas sales season, so he was bugging Schroeder to deliver, and Schroeder was probably putting him off. Moreno not only owns La Marqueta, the maquiladora, but he’s a principal in Anderson Toys in L.A., so he was also involved in the Trojan Horse knockoff last year. It was a big coup for him to get the chip and to have his factory be the one to produce it. He would have made millions. I talked to a friend of mine on the force down there and found out that his factory was all geared up to produce something but they couldn’t show my friend anything it was based on. They even had their promo pieces done.

“Moreno isn’t talking, but I think he panicked when he found out Schroeder’s phone had been disconnected and went up to his office to confront him.”

“Why didn’t Schroeder just give him the chip, even though it didn’t work?” Bowie asked. “It would have bought him some time.”

“Who knows?” Hernandez said. “I think Schroeder figured Moreno needed him alive until he had the chip, so he tried to put him off again. Moreno was probably thinking that Schroeder didn’t plan on delivering the chip at all, so why not ice him, ditch the body somewhere it wouldn’t be found for a while, and search Schroeder’s home and office at his leisure.”

“It never made sense to me,” Alicia said, “that Schroeder would disconnect his phone. A-dead giveaway that he was planning on splitting.”

“I have this sister-in-law who doesn’t believe in making long distance phone calls,” Hernandez said. “She says they cost too much. She doesn’t save money any other way, but you can’t convince her to use the phone. It was probably some idiosyncrasy like that. He didn’t think it through.”

“Like the old guy who doesn’t believe in using banks,” I added.

We ate quietly, thinking about what Hernandez had told us. When we were about done, I said, “When was Schroeder killed?”

“The morning you found the body. Probably early. I would say before nine, when people arrived for work, since nobody heard the altercation or the shot. And Moreno had had time to tear up the office before you arrived.”

“So he was the one who knocked me down when I got there?” I asked.

“Yeah. It would seem so,” Hernandez said.

“I guess I was lucky. He must have still had the gun on him. He could just as easily have shot me.”

Hernandez shrugged. “He didn’t have any reason to. He must have known you couldn’t see him, coming in from the bright sunlight like that, so it was a safe bet not to make things any worse by attracting attention as he left.”

“How does the car fit in?” Alicia asked. “Was the old one really stolen?”

“I don’t know,” Hernandez said. “Moreno didn’t have any reason to steal it — he wasn’t suspicious yet — and Schroeder had no reason to switch cars, unless there was something else going on that we don’t know about. The old car hasn’t turned up yet. Aside from the inconvenience of not having wheels for a couple of days, it worked out okay for Schroeder. Getting a new car wasn’t a bad idea. Moreno wouldn’t recognize it, for one thing, and second, it would be a freebie. He’d be long gone by the time you figured out you’d been scammed and sent someone to repo the car. All he’d have to do once he got to New York was buy a junked Corliss, change over the VIN numbers, and register the new car under the serial number of the junker. Nobody’d be the wiser. It happens all the time.”

“But we decided to pull the car two days after he bought it,” Alicia said.

“Yeah. I think he was planning on being gone by then, but it didn’t work out that way,” Hernandez said. “He made a big deposit Tuesday afternoon to his New York account, so it looks like he stuck around to pick up some money from one of his other customers. That and not having a car for a few days slowed down his plans to leave town.”

“What’s going to happen to Moreno now?” Alicia asked.

“We found the gun he killed Schroeder with,” Hernandez smiled. “He’s a done deal for hard time.”

“You seem pretty confident of that,” I said.

Hernandez smiled mischievously. “Last I heard, he was having a hard time finding a lawyer willing to take the case.

Nobody wants a loser.”

We talked for a while longer, then walked to our cars together. I felt a lot better now, and on the way home, I thought about Alicia. Maybe I could go on to Plan B now — a date with her without Bowie as a chaperone. I decided I’d call her tomorrow and see if she’d go for it.

When I got home, the phone was ringing. I went through the list of people who could possibly be calling me at this time of night, and almost decided not to answer it. On the off chance that it might be Alicia, I picked up the receiver and heard a wheezy voice on the other end of the line. It was no doubt Hernandez’ revenge.

“My mom says I can drive now,” the fat kid said. He sounded excited. “Will you teach me?”