I didn’t want to appear too eager. “Do you want any food? I could get you a plate of something.” I pushed the remains of my burrito to the edge of the table.
A bit of warmth crept over her face. “I’m not hungry.”
I waited, but I couldn’t hold out long. “What did you find?”
Nancy sighed. “Look, I don’t want to scare you. It could be nothing.”
My pulse jumped. “What is it?”
She glanced at my hands, inches away from her own on the table, and her fingers twitched. “The place—it’s a gym now…It used to belong to a guy named Francis Clery. Frank Clery. It was a pawnshop for a while, but I guess they sold it after he went to jail.”
“He went to jail? For what?”
“Pretty recently. Aggravated assault against a household member, one of the DV laws. He hit his wife across the face with a gun, cracked her eye socket. She’s fine, but he’s doing eight months. That’s a third-degree felony.” She blew out a breath. “Assuming she doesn’t lose her nerve. It’s hard to make DV cases stick.”
I frowned. “I don’t…” I caught her eye and added quickly, “I mean, that’s awful. But what does it have to do with Leslie?”
Nancy laced her fingers together, gripping until the knuckles turned white. “We…keep track of this guy. Not officially. There’s been no cause to arrest him, and I think everyone thought he’d go down for tax evasion, but you live for moments of stupidity like this. She ran to the neighbors’ house and called us. We’d gotten complaints before about disturbances, but she’d always sworn he never hit her. This time, we took care of it before he could get to her. Had an officer on the corner already, got him booked for the assault practically as soon as she hung up.” She shook her head.
“You guys keep someone on the corner at all times because he beats his wife?” I said, thinking it through. “Or…you keep a guy on the corner because…”
Nancy’s dark eyes met mine. “Because people hire him to kill other people sometimes.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. “How do you know?” I said at last.
“We don’t.” She shrugged. “If we knew for sure, he’d be in jail for that instead of for assault. But there are guys you hear things about, even if you never have enough to arrest them. Look, maybe Leslie just went to the pawnshop.”
“But you don’t think so, do you.” I watched as Nancy cast her eyes down. “Why not?”
Nancy spoke to the table. “If it was just the address, sure. But you gave me his phone number. That’s not the store’s phone. That’s a personal cell. Maybe he bought it just to talk with customers. But why give them another avenue to bother him at all hours of the day and night?”
“Some businesses do that,” I said absently. “If he’s posting online and wants people to be able to text in offers.”
“That’s true,” Nancy replied. She pressed her lips together, then said measuredly, “He doesn’t post online.”
“You guys track that too?”
“Like I said, we figured he’d go down for taxes. His business doesn’t make enough for him to drive a ’67 Camaro. He had it restored and repainted within the last year.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What’s that, twenty grand?”
“More. No pawnshop in Corrales is moving enough to throw that much money away on a single car. He takes in people’s grandma’s jewelry, guns, art pieces from Santa Fe where the frame is worth more than the canvas. There’s no way.”
“Maybe he’s a drug dealer.”
She tapped her fingers on the table. “The thing is, if you’re pulling down enough to move out of your mom’s basement and start restoring classic cars, I’m probably going to hear about it. It’s a hazard of the trade when your customers regularly get pulled over with your merchandise in their car.”
“But, I mean, how can it be profitable? There aren’t that many murders per year, right? It’s Albuquerque, it’s not, you know, Los Cabos.”
Nancy shook her head. “We get lectured on it every fucking month at the station. Violent crime here is more than twice what it is on average in the rest of the country. Most of it’s opioids. People assaulting one another because of drug money. I’m not surprised you don’t think it’s dangerous here, though. It’s not really dangerous for you.”
I looked up. “Because I’m white?”
Nancy lifted her shoulder. “And you don’t do drugs. Your biggest risk is what happened to Jennifer Clery.”
I pressed the name into my mind. “His wife.”
“Yeah.” She slid her hand across the table to cover mine, then withdrew it just as quickly. She’d remembered we were in public.
“Then Leslie has to be even safer. You should see their house. They have a lawn in the backyard, a real lawn, with real grass. And she doesn’t do drugs. Dave—her husband—he smokes a joint from time to time, and he hides it from her—that’s how much of a teetotaler she is.”
“What else do you know about Dave? Is he an angry person?”
I let my hands fall into my lap and glanced down. “Dave would never. He loves her.” But my mind was going a mile a minute. Had Leslie found out about the money to Elaine Campbell? Had she confronted him and—?
The lines around Nancy’s mouth deepened. “If you listen to those guys when they get arrested, that’s why they do it. Because they love their wives.”
“No way,” I said. “He’s got this big family, older sisters, loves his mom. They have a baby—he loves the baby.”
“How about Leslie?” Nancy asked. “I don’t mean to be—you know. But while you were gone, did she have a big support system like that? Or did he isolate her?”
I fell silent.
“If he controls the finances, it can be very difficult to leave. Some women say they feel like there’s no way out.”
We gazed at each other for a few moments.
“I have to know,” I breathed at last. “Because when I think about it, I want to say Leslie doesn’t have it in her. But I can’t say that. Because I know she does.”
“If it makes you feel better…” Nancy trailed off, then swallowed and started again. “Most people do. When they feel trapped, most people do have it in them.”
She was so beautiful, even under the fluorescent lights. Her body was marked by strong, clean lines connecting one element to the next. It made her appear more sharply present than everyone else in the room, the way the cowboys looked in old Westerns. I couldn’t imagine her killing anybody, although I knew she’d been in the army.