Disturbed Ground (11 page)

To keep control of her emotions, Judy kept it brief. "A man is missing," she said simply.

While Judy Moise was busy with her calls, Dorothea Puente was busy with arrangements of her own. She rushed downstairs and found John Sharp, the loyal tenant for whom she'd bought a special chair
when he'd moved into her boardinghouse after having had back surgery
.
She told him the police were coming to ask about Bert, and she implored him to tell them a specific story
.
"I'll make it worth your while," she promised.

When Officer Richard Ewing arrived at the Volunteers of America office at 10:30, Judy and Beth told him all they could about Bert Montoya's disappearance, Dorothea Puente's dance of broken promises, and the morning's weird phone calls. The earnest, good-looking officer filled out a report and promised to go by the house at 1426 F Street to investigate. Before he left, Judy urged him to be sure to talk to John Sharp. "He's a tenant there and he's reliable," she said. "He’ll be a good source of information for you."

Mrs. Puente was composed and prepared when officer Ewing appeared at her door. She graciously invited the policeman inside, offered to show him around the house, and stuck to her story
.
Those social workers were just overreacting to Bert Montoya's trip to Utah, she said.

Officer Ewing found nothing amiss during his routine check of the Puente residence. The upstairs was quiet, as was the downstairs— which, Mrs. Puente hastened to point out, was separate from her own quarters.

When they encountered tall, skinny Mr. Sharp, the officer prodded him with questions, and Sharp mouthed his dull, reassuring answers. Detail for detail, he substantiated Puente's story that she'd gone down to Mexico for a couple of days, then had returned with Bert on Saturday. On Sunday, he said, Bert had gone away. "Yes," John Sharp told Ewing, "I saw Bert moving out. He and this other fellow were loading his things into a red pickup truck."

Satisfied, the officer and the landlady went back upstairs.

But once they'd gone, John Sharp scribbled a note on the back of an envelope: "She wants me to lie to you."

When Ewing came back downstairs, Sharp shoved the note into his hand. Thinking quickly, Ewing stepped into Sharp's room and turned up the television so they couldn't be heard. Sharp told him that they had to meet secretly so they could talk, and the two agreed to rendezvous outside on the corner of Sixteenth and E streets.

That afternoon, after Judy and Beth returned from the Social Security Administration, where  they'd reported  Dorothea Puente  and
asked that Bert Montoya's payments be stopped, Judy got a message from the VOA office on Bannon Street: "John Sharp is here and he wants to speak to you."

At Bannon Street, they found John Sharp looking agitated. He knew that Judy had specifically suggested that the cops seek him out, so he'd come to talk. Now he and she were bonded by their shared suspicions of Dorothea Puente.

Earnestness etched across his face, Sharp related the information he'd shared with Ewing after slipping him the note. There was something strange going on, he was saying, and he wasn't just talking about Bert. He was talking about another fellow, Ben Fink, who had suddenly disappeared last spring. He was talking about holes in the yard that Dorothea had ex-cons dig for her—several of them—holes that were empty one day and mysteriously covered over the next. And he was talking about a bad odor that came from a room upstairs and then settled over the house like a pestilence. He was talking about having worked in a mortuary back in Kansas City, and how he'd recognized that awful smell as the stink of death.

As Sharp's story poured out, the grim notion of homicide loomed like ugly weather. Judy shuddered. It seemed unreal. How could John Sharp believe that the little old women who had doted on Bert like a mother could be capable of murder?

Sharp went on, the deep creases in his face working to hold back an avalanche of emotion. He said he knew that ten or twelve Social Security checks arrived at the house every month—for people who weren't even living there.

If John Sharp had been a chronic drunk or a "mental," maybe Judy could have disregarded his words, but the concern in his voice rang true. A damp chill passed over her as she understood for the first time that Bert might be dead.

Shaken by John Sharp's suspicions, Judy and Beth reported this new information directly to their boss, Leo MacFarland. They felt that, given the seriousness of Sharp's allegations, they ought to make sure the cops were giving the case their utmost attention.

MacFarland listened but was reluctant to interfere. "I think we ought to just let the police do their job," he said. Bringing their meeting to a close, he casually added, "It's been an interesting day, I'd say, with this on top of the break-in."

"What break-in?" Judy asked.

"Didn't anyone tell you? Someone broke into the office last night."

"Oh no! Did they take anything?"

"No, oddly enough, it doesn't seem that anything was stolen. But whoever it was ate something out of the refrigerator, used the phones, and left murder notes all around."

"Murder notes?" This was too much. The room was spinning.

Judy began asking questions, but MacFarland insisted there was nothing more to know. He dismissed Judy and Beth, saying, "There's no cause to worry; the police were already looking into it."

Driving home, reflecting on the roller-coaster events of the day, Judy worried that there could be some connection between the break-in, Dorothea Puente, and "Miguel Obregon." Nothing had been taken…. Could Puente and her friend have been looking for something? Could the murder notes have been aimed at Judy? Did Dorothea think she knew too much? The landlady didn't seem dangerous, but what if she'd somehow learned Judy's address?

Spooked, Judy rushed home and called her daughter, who had recently moved to her own apartment. When Britt finally answered, Judy related the wildly spiraling events of the day, saying she no longer felt safe at home. Britt told her to pack her things, and Judy went to stay with her daughter.

That same night, John Sharp was also wrestling with fears of what Dorothea Puente might do if she realized he was cooperating with the police. He listened to the house creak and pondered his options. Before retiring to bed, he adopted a precautionary measure of his own, wedging a chair tightly against his door.

CHAPTER 10

The revelations of November 7 profoundly affected Judy Moise. By her own admission, she became "kind of obsessed" with the shifting identities of the landlady on F Street. "Who is this Dorothea Puente?" she wondered aloud. "Now that I know who she's
not,
I have to find out who she is."

But Dorothea Montalvo Puente had confounded far more accomplished sleuths in the past, and wasn't about to stop.

Meanwhile, Judy's zeal for learning the truth about Puente and what had happened to Bert wasn't going to endear her to her co-workers. When Judy shared her rising fears with her partner, she was scoffed at.

"What do you mean?" Beth chided. "You're really being paranoid."

"I'm just going to call the police to find out what's happening," Judy explained.

Beth quietly insisted that they should follow their boss's instructions and "let the police do their job."

"You don't realize the import of this," Judy protested. “I think it's big! I think it's a very dangerous situation."

But Beth was incredulous: "I can't believe you think that way."

"I can't believe you don't."

Clearly, Judy wasn't going to get much support from her partner, but it seemed understandable: Judy felt personally endangered in a way that Beth did not. So, while Beth was concerned about following the boss's orders, Judy felt that something was so seriously wrong, and she just couldn't let it go. She had to do something.

With tension rising, the longtime partners set off in different directions, working independently.

Judy went to the Social Security Administration, where she hoped to stop the numerous checks that John Sharp had said were going to Dorothea Puente's residence. Instead, she heard that sad old song of a huge bureaucracy overloaded with cases: With so many checks being processed, there was no way to zero in on exactly which checks were going to whom. And Judy Moise was about to hear a similar tune from the police.

Back at the office, she called Officer Ewing, who told her the case had been transferred to Detective John Cabrera, Missing Persons and Homicide. Before ringing off, Ewing offered ominously, "It's probably even worse than you thought."

Feeling a queasy urgency, Judy phoned Detective Cabrera. At first he seemed well informed, volunteering that the police had "been watching the [Puente] house for a year." He implied that Judy's fears were no news to them, and they had things under control. But when she asked for a case number, Cabrera admitted they "didn't have one yet," and when she asked if he'd been out to the house, he told her he had not.

Some investigation, she thought.

In the end, Cabrera tried to reassure her that they were doing all they could, but she had to understand that they had several thousand cases to investigate….

On Tuesday, November 8, George Bush was elected President of the United States. Meanwhile, as far as Judy could tell, the police were doing nothing about finding Bert Montoya or investigating Dorothea Puente.

By Wednesday it was conventional wisdom around the office that Judy had gone off the deep end over her missing client. At one point, her boss openly laughed at her, calling her suspicions of homicide "absurd."

Still, she couldn't stop worrying. She placed repeated calls to Detective Cabrera to find out how and if the investigation was progressing, but he was always out. When he didn't call back, she called his superior, Sergeant Jim Jorgensen, and was even threatening to call Congressman Matsui if something wasn't done. Whether as a result of her pushiness or not, Detective Cabrera finally returned her calls on Thursday and asked her to come to police headquarters the next morning.

By now Judy was particularly anxious to come in because she'd just received a disturbing letter, posted from Reno, Nevada. It read:

Mrs. Moise,

As I told you on the phone Alvaro
,
"Bert" as you know him Jose as we in the family call him. Until he was told he was going to have to move again after the holidays and he did not want. He liked Dorothea and she took care of him like a "mom." As you know she has had difficulty with the law which she also told us about. What Jose did not tell you was he had called here at our home for the last 3 ½ years. When we get settled we will send you photos and will let him call you about Thanksgiving if he wants to.

Yours truly,

Michel Miguel Obregon

P.S. As you know Jose does not write English. I will also be writing to Mrs. Puente. Also he has been wanting to go to Costa Rica for the Navidad period.