A Discount for Death

Chapter Twenty-one

The revolver lay on Sheriff Robert Torrez’s desk, still enshrouded in plastic. Sgt. Tom Mears sat in the sheriff’s swivel chair, head on one fist, writing with a pencil on a yellow legal pad. He reminded Estelle of a kid taking a boring test.

As she walked into the small office, Mears looked up with an economy of movement. The pencil stopped, his eyes shifted, but that was it.

“Long night?” Estelle asked. Mears was one of the “denizens of the night,” as Dr. Francis Guzman called them…the deputies who rarely worked day shifts.

“Very,” he said. “As if we needed something else, last night was National Domestic Dispute Night.” He flashed a tired smile, still not moving his head from its leaning post. “You should see Pasquale negotiate a dispute between a fifteen-year-old pot-head girl and her great aunt, who happens to be the fastest cane in the West.”

“Cane?”

“Cane. One of those old, gnarled things made out of briar or whatever.” He dropped the pencil and leaned back in the chair, both hands on the sheriff’s desk. “She about fractured the kid’s skull with it before we got there.” He held up index and thumb an eighth of an inch apart. “She came that close to being zapped with the Tazer.”

“That might have gotten her attention.”

“Yup. Then the kid tried to run auntie down with a pickup truck that she didn’t know how to drive, and hit the neighbor’s tree instead. Pasquale took the call, and auntie damn near ended up fracturing his thumb when he tried to take the cane away from her.”

“It’s in the drinking water, I think. Who are they, by the way?”

“You don’t want to know.”

Estelle looked quizzically at him.

“Esmirelda Vasquez? Does that ring a bell?”

“Bobby’s aunt.”

“Yup. Esmirelda of the cane. And niece Paula. Some such as that.” He waved a hand in weary dismissal. “I can’t keep track. As Bobby likes to say, ‘just arrest ’em all.’ ”

“Is that where he is now?”

Mears shook his head and glanced over at the wall clock. “No. He and Chief Mitchell are doing something. I don’t know what. He said you’d want to look at this.” He nudged the revolver with the eraser of his pencil. “I looked at the case and receipt you found in George’s desk at the house.”

“Yes. What did you find out?”

“For one thing, we’re reasonably sure that it’s the murder weapon. There’s blood and tissue on the muzzle.”

“Match?”

“It’s O positive, the same as the victim’s. We’ll be waiting on a DNA profile from the lab. End of the week, if we’re lucky.”

“What about the bullet in the wall? Bobby thought it was consistent.”

Mears nodded. “That’s the easy part. No doubt there. One shot, and that was it.” He opened the left-hand top drawer of the sheriff’s desk and drew out a large manila envelope. From it he extracted a smaller plastic pouch and handed it to Estelle. The weight of the single revolver slug nestled in her hand. The brass half jacket was pealed back, but still in place around the lead core. She could see the white traces of Sheetrock imbedded in the lead.

“Ay.”

“Is right. But look here.” He slid the yellow pad he’d been using across the desk toward Estelle. “This is what I think is interesting.” He reached across with the pencil. “The bullet’s path is about like this, Estelle. We really can’t tell exactly how he was sitting in his chair…all we know is that the bullet passed through his head from left to right, angling from front to back a little. It hit the edge of the bookcase behind him at enough of an angle that it glanced off and into the wall.” He drew a lightly dotted line from the drawing of a figure in a chair.

“Two things,” he continued, and his pencil paused in midair as he looked up at Estelle. His head still rested on his hand. “For one thing, there’s blood and bone fragments along the top of the chair back.” He pushed himself up and twisted, resting a hand on top of the sheriff’s swivel chair. “Right here. And the residue extends down the backside a little bit.” He ran his hand over the top of the chair, out of sight.

Estelle straightened up. “He would have had to be leaning backward, then, as if he was resting his head against the chair back.”

Mears nodded, and he relaxed in the sheriff’s chair, his own head against the leather padding. “His office chair doesn’t have a real high back,” he said, reaching around with his right hand. “The top of it catches you right at the base of the skull if you’re average height. If Enriquez’s head was resting against the back of the chair, and the bullet exited above his ear, it’s likely that there’d be blood and tissue on the top and back of the chair.” He rocked forward and closed his eyes. “That’s one thing.” He propped his head on his hand again, opened his eyes, and regarded Estelle. “We’re kinda eager to see Perrone’s preliminary. The sheriff said that Enriquez had what appeared to be a powder burn on his left forearm, just ahead of his elbow.” He reached over and patted his own arm.

“How would that happen?”

“I don’t know.”

Estelle frowned. “But it wouldn’t happen if he were holding the gun himself, in his left hand.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Mears said. “And I think the sheriff told you that the gun didn’t have a single print on it. Not one. That’s not possible unless George used gloves, which he didn’t. There are prints on the cartridges, and every one that I can read worth a damn belongs to George.”

“So he loaded it.”

“But didn’t fire it,” Mears said. “The other interesting thing is that there is what appears to be a little hair and some tissue along the side of the barrel, just about where the legend is printed. That’s an odd place for blow-back debris.”

“How is Linda coming with the photos?”

“I know she printed about a jillion. She’s got ’em downstairs.” He glanced at the clock again. “She finally went home about three-thirty.” He grinned and closed one eye conspiratorially. “When she was sure that Tom was going to make it away from Bobby’s aunt in one piece.”

Estelle’s brows furrowed as she looked at the silent revolver, and she slowly sank back against the edge of the desk. “Huh,” she said after a minute, and shook her head. “Georgie, Georgie.” She looked up at Mears, who waited patiently, arms crossed over his chest. “Connie Enriquez has no idea about this, Tom. As far as she knew, her husband didn’t own a single gun. At least she didn’t think that he kept it in the house. She was surprised to see the gun case.”

“I bet she was. And by the way, the only prints on that case belong to George. The case was nicely cleaned and polished. Very thoughtful of him.”

Estelle took a deep breath. “How did Kenderman’s arraignment go?”

“Judge Hobart wasn’t in an understanding mood either,” Mears said with a laugh. “You know how the old man likes being bothered off-hours. Perry’s cooling his heals in the lockup.”

“Bond?”

“Fifty thousand. Ten percent up.”

“Perry’s not going to find five thousand any quicker than he’d find fifty,” Estelle said. “It’ll give him time to think.”

She gazed at the heavy revolver and shook her head. “Now we find out the why, Tom. Perry Kenderman is simple.”

“I’ll agree with that,” Mears said, and grinned.

“That’s not what I meant. I understand him. He was infatuated with Colette and the two kids, and got cross-wise with his brother, who evidently had a weak spot for the girl himself. George Enriquez, though…I just find it hard to believe that a guy like him could do anything dark enough that someone would want to kill him.”

“There’s the other side of that, Estelle.”

“Yes, there is. Maybe it’s not what he did, necessarily, but what he knew. That’s a good place to start.”