Private L.A. (Private 6)

AFTER CHECKING IN, Justine and Cruz left the Hotel Francis in the city’s Zona Central. The temperature hovered in the low eighties. The breeze smelled of simmering chicken, probably a mole, Justine thought. In the distance, she could hear music playing. Brass horns.

“We should make contact with the local police,” Cruz said. “See if any reports were made regarding the Harlows.”

“Why not go right to the horse’s mouth?” Justine replied. She’d changed into a light summer shift, blue and conservative, covering her knees.

“And whose mouth would that be?” Cruz asked.

Justine fished in her pocketbook, found her iPhone, opened the notes app, said, “Leona Casa Madre, the blogger who made the claim on her site.”

“She never saw them personally, right?” Cruz said.

“No, but she claimed to have interviewed two people who saw them.”

“Drunk.”

“That’s what she wrote,” Justine said.

“No, I meant her, the blogger,” Cruz said. “I looked her up as well. Two years ago, she got fired from La Prensa in Mexico City when her love of tequila overcame her ability to perform her job as one of the newspaper’s court reporters. So she’s hardly an unimpeachable source. We really should go to—”

“No,” Justine said, standing her ground. “I have a gut feeling about this. I mean, if she can lead us to the people who actually saw the Harlows, it doesn’t matter what her past is.”

Cruz hesitated, then said, “Jack said you lead. I follow.”

“I like that,” Justine said.

“Figured you would. You have an address for her?”

“As a matter of fact,” Justine replied.

A short cab ride later, they pulled up in front of an apartment building on the Rio Panuco, east of González Gallo Park. “Number eight,” Justine said when Cruz went to the security phone by a locked steel front gate.

He buzzed, got nothing. He buzzed again. Nothing. A woman pushing two children in a stroller came to the gate. She opened it, looked at them suspiciously, spoke to Cruz in blisteringly fast Spanish.

Cruz smiled, flashed his Private badge, and replied. Justine got most of it. The woman had asked who they were looking for, and Cruz had given her the blogger’s name, which the woman obviously recognized because her head lagged to one side in a gesture of What are you going to do?

“Leona always sleeps in late, two, three in the afternoon, then up all night, that one, writing her book, she says,” the woman said. “She’s up there. Just pound on her door. She’ll hear you eventually. Maybe she’ll even answer.”

Chapter 32

THEY FOUND NUMBER eight on the second floor on the other side of a surprisingly well-tended garden where flowers were still blooming. Somewhere a cat was meowing, long and loud, as if in heat.

Cruz knocked on the oak door. “Señora Casa Madre?” he called. “Leona?”

After a minute of no response, Justine said, “I think the lady said pounding was in order.”

Cruz shrugged, pounded with his fist, and they waited another minute. “That should have woken the dead,” he said in frustration. “Maybe there’s a back door. Or a window or something.”

Justine was about to agree when something told her to try the doorknob. It twisted. She heard a click. The door sagged on its hinges and swung slightly inward. She pushed it open with her fingers, calling, “Señora?”

The cat was louder now and Justine realized it was inside the blogger’s apartment. She took a step into the doorway, finding a room dimly lit by the sun sneaking through the slats of closed blinds to reveal slices of a pack rat’s nest. The apartment smelled of cat urine, rotting food, and the hint of things fouler.

Newspapers, magazines, and books were stacked on every inch of every piece of furniture save a simple, largely bare wooden desk, which displayed the greatest sense of order in the place. The cat meowed again, louder this time.

“Leona?” Cruz called.

Justine pointed beyond a kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly in months. Dishes were stacked in the sink. There had to have been at least ten empty bottles of tequila, rotgut stuff, sitting amid other trash on the counters. The garbage reeked so badly she stopped breathing through her nose.

It was the lair of an alcoholic, one well down the road in the disease, far beyond caring about personal hygiene. Justine had been in these kinds of hovels before as part of interventions by concerned relatives. She’d never had the heart to explain to them that this sort of existence pointed to little or no hope.