Before She Dies

Chapter 31

Nick Chavez painted on his glad salesman’s face and ushered me across the showroom floor. We had to skirt a new addition-a brand-new Blazer. Nick patted it affectionately on the hood and at the same time hooked his arm through mine as if we were the oldest of buddies.

“Have I got a deal for you, Bill,” he said. “Come on in here and let me show you some figures.” One of the other salesmen looked up from his desk and grinned at me-much the same grin a hungry cat might give his still-kicking dinner.

“I don’t think I have time for this,” I said without much conviction. Nick was smiling his best salesman’s smile from the nose down. His eyes gave him away. I followed him into his office like a docile, committed customer, and he closed the door behind me.

“Sit, sit,” he said, and beckoned me toward his own swivel chair behind the desk. I started to move toward one of the others, and he motioned with considerable impatience. I shrugged and took his chair, commanding a nice view of the showroom, the other salesmen’s desks, and the parking lot outside.

Nick sat down in the customer’s chair, his back to the world. He ran a hand through his hair, keeping his eyes closed. One hand closed around a pencil, and the point hovered over a salesman’s work sheet. He looked for all the world like a salesman who had negotiated all night, and was now at the point of splitting his commission with the customer just to nail down the sale.

“I’m really pissed, Bill.” He opened his eyes, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.

I leaned forward and rested my hands on the desk like a helpful father confessor. “What’s the problem, Nick.”

He was one of those people who talked with his eyes closed, as if he were reading a script etched on the inside of his eyelids. “Look, I don’t know why I checked. After you and me talked yesterday, or whenever the hell it was, I got to thinkin’, you know. And the thing that bothered me the most was…ah, to hell with that.”

I leaned back, unsure of where this interesting flow of disconnected thoughts was leading him.

“Look at this.” He pulled a bound pad of forms out of a folder and slid it across the desk toward me. “Temporaries.”

“I see that,” I said. Anyone who purchased a vehicle in New Mexico had seen them-approximately half the size of a standard sheet of typing paper, the temporary permit was filled out by the dealer and taped in the back window of the vehicle until plates could be issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles.

“Now look here,” Nick said, and leaned forward. He kept his voice low and pointed with the pencil. “Each one of them has a serial number. See that?”

“Yes.”

“Consecutive, the whole pad. We buy the pad, and issue the temporaries one at a time.”

I nodded.

“So, the numbers should match, right?”

“Should match what?” I asked.

Nick frowned with impatience. “If we sell ten cars in a week-and wouldn’t it be goddamned nice if we did that-then we should use ten of these.”

“All right.”

“So we’re missing some.”

“Someone took some, you mean?”

Nick shrugged. “Maybe.”

“I don’t understand the ‘maybe.’ It seems a pretty simple inventory problem.”

Nick ducked his head. “Sure. That’s what’s so goddamned embarrassing. And that’s one of the things that’s got me so pissed. I mean, we aren’t required to keep some kind of careful record of these things, you know. I mean, I don’t know anyone who does. We stick one copy in the back window, stick the back copy in the file, and that’s it. Who the hell’s going to spend all day long checking those kinds of goddamned things.” His voice had risen, and he suddenly checked himself. He continued in a near-whisper.

“And I guess that’s kind of dumb, when you consider that these things are the equivalent of a free license plate for thirty days,” he said.

“So you think that you’re missing some temps, and you don’t know for sure how many. That’s it?”

Nick nodded. He turned and reached into the folder again. “The past two months I can account for. Why? Because it’s been slow, and just by chance we’ve been workin’ off this one pad. And I used the first one. I remember havin’ to go get it out of the file.” He slid a piece of paper across and I tilted my head so my bifocals could focus on the neat rows of numbers. “That number there on my list corresponds to this number on the temp.” He tapped the printed number on the first permit of the pad.

“All right,” I said.

“Now, from here, count backward,” and his pencil moved up his handwritten list. “If we sold sixteen cars since this pad was new, which we did, then the first number of the pad would be this one.” He circled the top number of the list.

“And it doesn’t come out,” I said.

“Right. It don’t come out. And for another thing, look here.” He leaned across and with his pencil eraser drove through what little was left of the pad, rapidly lifting each permit in turn. He stopped and pointed. “See that number?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Check this out.” He turned to the next permit. “What do you see?”

“They skipped a number.”

Nick nodded. “I mean, who’s gonna notice, huh?”

“You did.”

“Only ’cause you got me thinkin’.” He sat back with one hand resting on the folder. “And that ain’t all.” He pulled out a second pad of permits. “Brand-new pack.” He tossed them in front of me. “Twenty-five temps there, with copies. Check it out, about a third of the way through the pad.”

“And there are supposed to be twenty-five here?”

“Twenty-five. That’s what we pay for, and that’s what shows in the number series.”

I rifled the pad, watching the serial numbers tick by. “There’s one,” I said, as the digit 4, the last digit in the long state number, was followed by a number ending in a 6. I looked up at Nick. “How many missing from this pack?”

“Two.”

I looked at the neat bundle and frowned. “So two missing here, and one or two from the other pack.”

“That’s right. And these goddamned things are registered with the DMV when you buy ’em. I mean, the serial numbers are recorded by the state against my dealer number.”

“I can buy one of these myself, can’t I?”

Nick Chavez nodded. “Sure, one at a time.”

“And when I do, the DMV takes down all the transfer information.”

“Right.”

“I remember. I once gave one of my sons an old truck that didn’t have a plate, and we had to go through the whole rigmarole. Why else would someone steal one?”

“Hell, I don’t know. So they could drive a vehicle on the highway without goin’ through the DMV, I guess. You tell me.” He paused to take a breath. “You’d stop a vehicle on the highway if it didn’t have no license plate, right?”

“Sure.”

“What about if it had one of these?”

I held up my hands. “Not unless there was a traffic violation of some sort, or some other reason to be suspicious.”

“Right.”

“Nick, who has access to these temps?”

He snorted and thumped his fist on the arm of his chair. “Every goddamned person in the building, one way or another. I mean, they aren’t kept in a vault or anything. Shit, most of the time, they’re lying right here.” He tossed the pad of permits across to the narrow bookcase that rested against the wall beside his desk.

“And your office isn’t locked?”

He made a snort of derision that I took as a “no.”

“You know, you were tellin’ me that the deputies stopped a late-model pickup truck. And your gal, there, the one who got all mucked up…”

“Linda Real.”

“Yeah. She recalls seeing a temporary in the back window. Now, is that permit going to be mine? When you and your posse haul somebody’s ass in for that shooting, is the whole world going to come down on me? God, that pisses me off.”

I ducked his questions, since he knew the answers as well as I did. “Who buys these things for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who actually goes over to the DMV office and picks up the new permits. The new pack. Or packs. Whatever.”

“Well, hell, whoever is free. Me, Rusty, Manny, Carlos. Becky goes down sometimes. You know. Whoever. It’s not like going to Fort Knox or anything. It’s just another one of those goddamned errands. Paper, paper, paper. Remember when you could just give a man his money and walk off with the car?”

I laughed gently. “Now they just walk off with the car.”

“Shit. That ain’t funny.”

“We’ll look into it, Nick. I don’t know what to tell you, unless we get lucky.” I removed a page from the legal pad and jotted down the missing numbers. “If these show up somewhere, we’ve got a starting point. We’ll get ’em on NCIC.”

“Do you want me to kind of snoop around here? See what I can find out? I mean hell,” and he leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper, “I ain’t got that many employees. I ought to be able to turn something.”

I held up a hand. “Not yet. Don’t do anything.” I had a mental picture of Nick pulling a tremendous magnifying glass out of his coat pocket as he sifted through his building. “Don’t talk to anyone about this at all.” This time, I lowered my own voice. “And I mean no one, Nick. Let us try and fit it all together.” I stood up and folded the piece of paper with the temp numbers. “And by the way, in the small world department, remember the Weatherfords?”

“How could anyone forget. I thought those noisy kids of theirs were going to camp out in my showroom.”

“They got as far as Weatherford, Oklahoma.”

“The first day? That ain’t bad.”

“No. To Weatherford, period. Their new Suburban was stolen right out of the motel parking lot.”

I don’t know what reaction I expected from Nick Chavez, but it wasn’t the one I got. He froze in his seat, and then his eyes narrowed ever so slowly. He leaned one elbow on the edge of the desk and cupped his jaw in his hand with his fingers covering his mouth. I suppose it was one of those gestures with which a psychiatrist would have a heyday.

“What?” I asked.

“You know,” he said through his fingers, “I saw that Suburban.”

My pulse kicked up ten notches, booting my already impressive blood pressure skyward. “When?”

“Goddamn, I saw it.” He lowered his hands and sat up straight. “I thought I was crazy, and didn’t think much about it earlier. But goddamn it, I saw it.”

“When?”

“I was coming to work, and I saw it go through the intersection of Grande and MacArthur. I was startled, see, ’cause this one was absolutely identical to the one the Weatherfords bought here. I mean absolutely. It even had the goddamned temporary tag in the back window, because I looked in my rearview mirror and saw it. And I remember thinkin’ to myself, ‘I thought they left, but maybe not.’ Maybe they decided to stay another day. Except she wasn’t drivin’ it.”

“Who was?”

“Beats me. I didn’t get enough of a look.”

“What time, Nick?”

He closed his eyes. “I got here at five minutes before eight. I looked, ’cause I needed to talk to the service manager, and he always walks through the door at eight sharp, like he’s some kind of digital freak. So, subtract from there. MacArthur up to here is about a minute and a half, give or take. So, seven minutes before eight, maybe.”

I did some mental calculations. If the thieves had taken the Suburban at midnight, eight hours averaging fifty miles an hour would see four hundred miles-and that wouldn’t see them to Posadas. But if they took the lightly traveled back roads, like Route 70 across the Texas panhandle, they could average much faster with ease. It was possible.

“You really think it could have been their truck?”

Nick shrugged. “How many can there be with a paint job like that in this area?”

“Why…” and I stopped. I had planned to ask why the car thieves would bother bringing the unit back to Posadas, but the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to tumble together.

“Nick,” I said, rising from his comfortable seat, “you’re going to be here all day?”

“Sure.”

“Keep this conversation to yourself, all right?”

“Goddamn right.”

“If this works out the way I think it will, I’ll buy that,” and I pointed at the Blazer on the showroom floor.