wouldn’t work with a woman like Carrasco. It didn’t mean she didn’t appreciate charm and good looks. It just meant she didn’t run with charming and good-looking men and she wasn’t going to buy into it. She knew what she was and who she was. Her style was men like Blade, who had a little rougher edge. He would start; they would keep the charm in reserve.
Blade smiled. “Mrs. Carrasco, I’m Art Christensen and this is Tom Lean. We’re the detectives from Fresno who talked to you on the phone. Thanks for agreeing to talk to us.” He waited to see if there would be any response. Carrasco looked at Christensen through narrowed, unblinking eyes, sizing up the two men in front of her. Blade had seen the look before. For her, they were her natural enemy and any alliance would be uneasy and temporary. He cleared his throat and nodded slightly, a demonstration that he understood what she was thinking. “By the way, we wanted you to know that we’ve been talking to the authorities in Sacramento, and your boy, Raul, is doing fine. He was lucky; he dropped the gun when the sheriff’s deputies got there. Whoever gave him that .45 should have thought about how dangerous it was to give a gun like that to a kid. Even men with experience can easily shoot themselves by accident with a .45.” He waited. He had scratched the scab a little bit, by reminding her that Allen had taken advantage of her boy. Her mouth opened slightly, showing teeth that were surprisingly white. And then she spoke in a voice that reflected its share of border bars and border men, a voice raised loudly enough to be heard and used to being listened to.
“Clarence Ray Allen is a son of a bitch. He shouldn’t have given no gun to a kid. He shouldn’t have left him there like he did.” She moved her heavy body forward in the chair. “Let’s get to it. I only got nine months left before I get out but if it’s the last fucking thing I do in my life, I’m going to get a piece of him.” Blade nodded, waiting for her to keep talking, wanting to give her a feeling of some control.
“If those cops in Sacramento haven’t told him nothin’ about me, then it’s cool. I got lawyers. I know what it’s all about. I know about circumstantial stuff and I don’t want any of that circumstantial shit. He knows where my kids are. I want you guys to take him down good.”
Carrasco had enough experience with the system to know that if Allen didn’t know there was an insider talking, it would be easier to get solid evidence on him. Lean pushed the tape recorder forward so Carrasco could see it. “Mrs. Carrasco, we’d like to record this.” He didn’t ask it as a question. When you shove a tape recorder in front of most people, it scares them. If you ask their permission, they may say no and that leads to a whole lot of other problems. If they don’t say anything, then you’re okay. You don’t ask for permission. You just assume you have it and they may not think about asking if they can refuse. You want to avoid confrontation. Carrasco knew the drill. She eyed the recorder.
“Whatever. Just call me Mom. Most people in here call me Mom.”
Lean squirmed, so Blade replied, “Okay, but we have to type up the report, so how about if I just call you Barbara. I’m too old to be calling you Mom.”
Carrasco sniffed. “Okay. Whatever you want. So, like I was sayin’, Clarence Ray Allen ain’t nothin’ to play around with. But if you want me to be buddy-buddy with him to get what I want, honey, then I’ll do it, ’cause like I say, nobody messes with my kid. What I got to say is things been told to me. Somethin’ about me—people like to tell me things they don’t tell nobody else. I don’t talk. Never have, not once. But this is different. Nobody’ll blame me for talkin’ about a man that hurt my kid.”
Blade leaned back in his chair. She was talking. You don’t interrupt. Just keep them talking. First rule.
“Clarence Ray Allen carries around a big roll. I seen as much as $12,000 at a time he’s laid out. Drives a ’76 Lincoln Continental and he runs a henhouse security agency out of a little town outside Fresno—Sanger. That business doesn’t pump out this kind of money. We been in some shit together along the line but nothin’ that turns out the kind of money he throws around. He told me you guys almost got him last year with a shotgun in the back of his car. If you’d a’ waited, he was gonna take down a lumber business. He told me you boys got too eager.”
Blade gave a slight smile. “We had some young officers out there.”
“Yeah, jumped the gun. Anyway, he likes to brag a lot. Like I said, people tell me things. I never say the wrong thing, honey. I’m smuggling aliens, okay. I do something where I believe I’m okay. Ain’t got the guts to go in and put a gun to somebody and say give me your money. So I’ll do it the sneaky way, ’cause I ain’t got that much guts. I don’t make that much money from those poor suckers. See, I’m a sucker too, ’cause them fools come over, they got a wife and ten kids in Mexico and then when I get them over, they ain’t got no money. I mean it costs me money to bring ’em but I say, shit, what are you gonna do?”
Blade nodded sympathetically. “What are you gonna do?”
Barbara looked at him out of the side of her eyes, weighing whether he was with her or jerking her chain. She decided he understood. “So, that old bastard, Clarence, called me after the robbery in Sacramento went sour. I asked him what did you have my kid up there for? And he says well it ain’t important what Clarence Allen says ’cause it don’t mean shit. You don’t want to fuck with him. So I just kept my mouth shut. Now I’m talking to you guys. Been messin’ with your guys for years. Now I’ll work with you two—this time I guess.”
Carrasco slumped slightly in her chair. “What he done, he got my boy there. Now my boy, he ain’t mine, but he’s mine. He belongs to me. I raised him, loved him, since he was eight years old. I’m all he’s got. I picked him up in a street in Tijuana and raised him ’cause he didn’t have nobody. When I got sent here, I told him that Clarence would help him. Just stay at his place until Mama gets out of jail and then we’ll be a family again—it will all be okay. So he goes there. I tell Allen that he’ll help with the horses. You seen his place?”
Blade shook his head. It wasn’t the right time to tell her Allen was in jail for the robbery. She might decide that was enough and she could deal with Allen another way, the way personal grievances are handled by people inside prisons where justice is much more abrupt and very final. “Not yet.”
Carrasco nodded slowly, her mouth drawn down into a knowing line. “Well, he’s got himself a stable and a big pool out there and everything. He said he’d take my boy and take care of him ’til I got out. He knew I was good for it. Look, I never had nothin’. I don’t expect nothin’. My kids, they sent me twenty dollars on my birthday. Allen told him he could help me. He’s a con artist, baby. He can sucker you. Like he had these men working for him and suckered them, you know, burglaries and everything. Used his men to knock over places they was supposed to be guardin’. So he tells my boy that I need money to get home on when I get out and the kid believes it. I would’a got the money together; probably be ridin’ my ass on the rails or the bus, but Clarence, he tells the kid he can get money to help me and maybe buy me somethin’ for Christmas. He’s put a story on my kid and then he put a gun in his hands and said walk in that store. I talked to my boy before Allen took him to that store. I asked him what he was doin’ and he said he was gonna buy some stuff for me for Christmas. So when the Sacramento police called, I knew what went down. Plenty of older dudes on the street. You don’t have to put no gun in a kid’s hand.”
Blade stepped in. “So Barbara, what happened with Clarence Allen and this Lee Furrow?”
Carrasco stopped. She had a story and she was going to tell it her way. They needed her but she needed something, too. She hadn’t had any visitors since she’d been inside, so talking to people from the outside, even cops, was entertainment. “Hurtin’ my kid. Look, that’s where Clarence made his mistake ’cause otherwise I’d never be talking to
