Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [78]
A sailor with a bag of chips came up to the counter. I stepped back and waited until Vic had completed the transaction before I asked, “Do you know Marty Salazar?”
His eyes narrowed, hard little points of light flashing in their depths. “Yeah.”
“He ever come in here?”
“He tried, I’d cut his cojones off, and he knows it. Salazar keeps his distance.”
“What about the men who hang around in the parking lot? Would they deal with him?”
“If they get hungry enough—and most of ’em do. Why?”
“Somebody’s been following me, probably since the morning I came in here. If one of the men told Salazar about me—”
Vic shook his head. “Don’t make no sense. I warned ’em about you after you left. Nobody could’ve followed you. And like I said, Salazar don’t hang around … Ah, shit!”
“What?”
“That goddamn Pete!”
“Pete who works for my brother?”
“Yeah.” Vic’s expression soured. “Pete’s my cousin’s kid, and he’s okay, but he’s one of these guys who, you know, plays the angles. He does things for Salazar—I don’t even wanna know what. I bet he’s the one put him onto you.”
“You mean after John asked him to find out what you knew about the Anglo who came in here?”
“Uh-huh. Pete came around with his picture—same picture you showed me—and I told him what’d gone down. Then I gave Ana Orozco a call, and Pete took down her address to pass on to you. He probably peddled the info to Salazar.”
“But why would he think Salazar’d be interested in me—or in what I was investigating?”
Vic shrugged. “Salazar’s interested in everything that goes on in the South Bay. And he pays good.”
So it probably had been one of Salazar’s people watching me later that afternoon as I sat in the Scout outside Luis Abrego’s building. Which meant Salazar had been more or less prepared for the questions I’d asked him that night. Those were Salazar’s people outside my father’s house, too. The man in the Padres cap whom I’d lost in the maze of Huston’s department store? And what about right now?
I frowned and glanced through the barred window at the parking lot. Vic noticed my discomfort and muttered, “I’d like to bust Pete’s face!”
“We’ll let my brother take care of him,” I said. “In the meantime, can I ask a favor of you?”
“I figure I owe you one. What d’you need?”
“A ride to the Avis rental car office downtown.”
“No problema. And I know how to do it so if anybody’s watching, they’ll never suspect a thing. I’ll just have my stock boy take you out of here like a sack of potatoes in my delivery van.”
I wasn’t sure I cared for the comparison, but I went along without complaint.
* * *
While I was waiting for my latest rental car to be brought around, I called Ron Chan’s number from a pay phone in the office. No answer. Next I dropped more coins in the slot and punched out the number I’d found earlier in the directory. Professor Emeritus Harold Haslett of U.C. San Diego wasn’t at his Point Loma residence, but a pleasant-voiced woman who said she was his housekeeper told me I could find him down at the harbor. When I asked where, she replied vaguely, “Oh, anywhere near the G Street Mole.” G Street Mole is what old-timers call the area that’s been renamed Tuna Harbor, and as I hung up I wondered why Professor Haslett—a friend of Melvin Hunt, whom I’d met at the buffet supper he and my mother had given on Christmas Eve—was spending his Saturday in what was basically a tourist trap.
My transportation, a perky white Toyota Tercel that I rented with a cash deposit, arrived just then. After I got in and familiarized myself with it, I set off to follow the lead that had seemed so promising the night before.
San Diego Bay once harbored the nation’s largest tuna fleet, as well as many other types of commercial fishing vessels. I can remember going to the piers as a child to see my uncle Ed, whose frequent gifts of the daily catch helped to make the McCone food budget more manageable. Back