Convenient Disposal

Chapter Twenty-six

“Has the feature started yet?” Dr. Francis Guzman settled on to the sofa beside Estelle. The VCR counter showed one hour and seventeen minutes into the meeting, and the sound was turned down to a murmur. He studied the screen intently, watching County Manager Kevin Zeigler methodically making a point about the leaky, one-year-old hospital roof and a possible repair strategy that didn’t involve suing the contractor.

“Crowley pays attention,” Estelle said. “He catches everyone who speaks, and doesn’t waste tape on anything else.”

“Fascinating,” Francis mumbled. “If it’s deadly boring the first time around, the tape must be just spellbinding.” He squirmed down into the cushions, resting his head against Estelle’s arm.

Estelle pushed the remote’s Pause button, and the county manager froze in place, pencil poised, eyes leveled at the commission. “It’s strange to see him,” she said. “One minute he’s here, the next minute he’s gone.”

“Huh,” Francis said noncommittally as the tape continued. “What makes you think that Zeigler’s disappearance has anything at all to do with the meeting?”

“Absolutely nothing, querido,” Estelle said. “And that’s how frustrating all of this is.”

“Then…,” he said, and let it hang.

“Because we have nothing else. There has to be something, somewhere-some little key.”

“Maybe he was just robbed. Maybe he went out for a noontime run or bike ride, got mugged and then dumped in a ditch somewhere.”

“That’s as possible as any of this,” Estelle said. “Except when I saw him right at noon yesterday, he said he had several errands to do. He didn’t say anything about exercising in the middle of the day.”

“And he probably wouldn’t, now that I think about it,” Francis said. “At least not on a meeting day. His habit was to run early in the morning.”

Estelle touched Pause again and turned, having to duck her head to look her husband full in the face. “How long has he been doing that, Doctor?”

“I would guess most of his adult life,” Francis said. “He’s a hell of an athlete, you know.” He lifted a hand and pointed at the frozen figure on the screen. “He keeps his cool right along with a BP that’s down in the basement. His pulse rate might rise to fifty on a bad day. That’s where that endurance comes from.” Out of idle curiosity, Francis lifted the legal pad on Estelle’s lap and scanned the notes. “You don’t think it was something from his personal life?”

“Not that I’ve been able to discover. I had a long talk again today with William Page. There was plenty of opportunity to bring up problems, a lot of time for slips.”

“Maybe Kevin was having an affair with somebody else. That’s always a good one. What, about ninety percent of homicides are committed by family members against family members?”

“Too many,” Estelle said. She sighed. “The problem is trying to determine what sort of casual contacts a person makes during the day that are going to be where the trouble starts. I mean, who can predict that sort of thing? His roommate’s not much help with that. Page is only in town a couple of days a week. Sometimes not even that.”

“You think there’s something there? I mean, with those two?”

“What do you mean, something? ”

“I don’t know. Triangles, rejection, two-timing…all those old tried-and-true ways to wreck a life. Not to mention that they’ve made it a little more of a challenge anyway. Besides, with Page up in Socorro most of the week, there’s both opportunity and temptation.”

“I suppose. If there is, though, we haven’t found a thing. Except maybe a crush on the boy next door.”

“Well, there you go,” Francis said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Page wasn’t even in this part of the world yesterday noon, was he?”

“No. I talked to him in his Socorro office. If this is something he orchestrated from afar, then he’s doing an Academy Award job of playing the worried spouse. And he doesn’t strike me as your basic ‘hire a hit man’ type.”

“But that’s been done before,” Francis said.

“Oh, si.” She pushed the Play button. “I don’t know, querido.”

They watched in silence for a while, and eventually Estelle became aware that Francis’ breathing was deeply rhythmic and that his head weighed a ton. She glanced down, loath to move and wake him. Instead, she circled an arm around his shoulders and snuggled deeper herself, resting her head back against the cushion.

The tape plodded on, and each time the camera swung back to take in the commissioners’ dais, she could see the back of Robert Torrez’s head, a few rows ahead of the camera. Sitting one row ahead of him and one seat to the right was Eddie Mitchell. Once in a while, Torrez would lean forward and say something that the camera couldn’t pick up, and Mitchell would respond, occasionally glancing back toward the camera when he turned.

At 10:45 AM, the commissioners had called a brief recess, and everyone that the camera could see before the recess returned when the meeting reconvened. Twenty minutes later, the camera’s mike caught the thud of the commission chamber doors. The camera didn’t move, catching every word of Commissioner Barney Tinneman’s impassioned plea that the county should sue Colstrup Brothers Construction of El Paso for the shoddy roof job.

At one point, he pounded the dais in frustration. “I mean, if a contractor tore off the roof of your own home, and then replaced it with one that cost what this job did, and then it leaked, why in hell would you beg and plead for the job to be done right?” He leaned back in his chair, then surged forward again. “Kevin, what was the date of the final inspection? When we supposedly said the job was finished and approved?”

The camera swiveled deftly to catch Zeigler’s answer, and while the county manager explained the July 10 date and what it actually meant, Estelle saw that a new face had joined the meeting, this time sitting one row in front of Zeigler’s special microphone-equipped desk…perhaps explaining the thud of the chamber’s door. Ralph Johnson, the Highway Department’s supervisor, had taken a seat beside Don Fulkerson, manager of the landfill. Johnson didn’t look like he wanted to be present anymore than did the other department heads in the room, each one of them trying to time their arrival just seconds before the commission might have questions on their personal agenda item. Fulkerson appeared to be dozing.

For another hour, the commission worked its way down the agenda, and as the various department heads said their piece, most then left the meeting. Estelle imagined that they all walked faster toward the exit than they had entered. Ralph Johnson answered a half dozen simple questions, including a brief tussle over bid specifications with Tinneman, who appeared ready to argue about everything, given the chance. When the camera swiveled to watch and hear Johnson speak, Estelle could see Zeigler on the far left, and the full sweep of the commission chambers, with Commissioner Barry Swartz just visible on the right margin of the picture.

Regardless of what was going on with the commission, or what questions they may have had for the various people who took the mike or for the county manager, Kevin Zeigler remained the focus of an almost constant procession of people who entered the chambers to speak with him, bending down for a confidential confab while Zeigler covered the mike with his left hand. Almost invariably, when Crowley’s camera swung to cover a speaker, there was Zeigler in the rear of the hall at his desk, talking with someone.

Most of the time, he appeared in good humor, a quick smile his standard greeting for people who needed to whisper in his ear.

At 11:30, the commission launched into its discussion of providing police services for the village. Village Chief Eddie Mitchell walked stolidly to the microphone in the back of the hall, immediately beside Crowley’s camera. The chief fielded questions for twenty-five minutes.

When the meeting adjourned for lunch, Crowley kept the camera focused on the commissioners, recording their small tete-a-tetes for posterity. At one point, Tinneman pulled County Clerk Stacey Roybal to one side, his brow stormy. He bent close to Roybal, who was a full head shorter than he was, and it was obvious that Milton Crowley, all the way in the back of the hall, wanted to know what they were talking about, since he zoomed in as close as the camera’s lens would allow. The camera didn’t waver.

As Tinneman finished, he glanced toward the back, said something else, and gathered his sports jacket off the back of his chair. The camera went dead as Dr. Arnold Gray, the last commissioner to leave the hall, grinned into the lens and said loudly, “Come on, Milt, it’s time for lunch. Turn that thing off.” The camera winked to snow.

Before the tape had a chance to start the afternoon session, Estelle pushed the Pause button. Francis shifted and lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck.

“Why don’t you go to bed, querido,” Estelle whispered.

Francis pushed himself upright with a groan. “I fell asleep.” He regarded the static on the television screen. “That didn’t have much of a plot.”

“They broke for lunch.”

“Are you going to break for bed?” He glanced at his watch.

“I need to see a few more minutes,” Estelle said.

“The whole afternoon session is a hell of a lot more than a few minutes,” Francis said, and clamped a hand on her knee. “Sofia’s coming tomorrow. It’d be nice if you weren’t in a coma from exhaustion. Plus we’re going to try to have a nice dinner Friday night with Padrino, and on Saturday, we’re supposed to go to Las Cruces.” He grinned and yawned. “I forget what for.”

“You win,” Estelle said. She pressed the Off button and the television snapped to black.

“Did you ever mention to Francisco that you saw him at school?”

Estelle shook her head. “He’s got his secret, I’ve got mine.”

Francis chuckled gently. “That sounds like something tu mama would say, one of her many little dichos.”

“I’m sure she has several that cover it, oso.” She frowned, and he reached out with his thumb, stroking the wrinkles over the bridge of her nose.

“What’s the matter?”

She sighed and dropped her legal pad on the floor beside the sofa, then settled back into the cushions again.

“I’ve had one of those ‘what if’ days, oso. ” He looked quizzical. “Roy and Ivana Hurtado find out that their little darling, their little A-plus, principal’s-list daughter, is carrying around a six-inch hat pin for a weapon. And yesterday, or whenever it was, Melody Mears greets me on the tarmac at the school, and I look at her inseam, too. What do you think Tom and Deb Mears would say if their daughter pulled a Deena? And it goes downhill from there.”

“None of it’s your fault, querida.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “Carmen is lying in a coma up in Albuquerque, and there’s no telling what that’s doing to her parents. And then when I come home and tell her about Francisco, my mother says to me”-and she switched to a fair imitation of her mother’s stately, formal Spanish-“‘Are you just now noticing that he has music in his heart?’”

She looked searchingly into her husband’s eyes. “Oso, did you know that he’s musical?”

“No. It doesn’t surprise me, but no-I didn’t know.”

“We’ve lived in the same house with him for six years,” Estelle said. “How could we not know?” Francis didn’t reply. Estelle was sure the answer was obvious to both of them. “What if Francisco or Carlos had some enormous talent, and we ignored it?”

“I don’t think that they’re ignored, querida. Sometimes we get busy and maybe we don’t spend the time that we should. But we don’t ignore them.”

“Does something like that eventually come out anyway, eventually? Despite numb parents?”

“Something like what?”

“The music that’s in his heart.”

“I don’t know, mi corazon. I suppose so.”

Estelle stretched her arms all the way over her head, then brought down her hands to cover her face, realizing exactly what her mother had meant.

“What if Teresa Reyes hadn’t taken in that little urchin way back when?”

“Estelle…what if, what if.”

“I’m serious. I was four years old when she adopted me. If she hadn’t done that, if I’d stayed a scruffy little huerfana, watched over by the good sisters of the Iglesia de Tres Santos…what would I be now?”

“You might be La Presidente de Mexico. Who knows.”

“That’s a sobering thought.”

“Hey,” Francis said with sudden inspiration. “Maybe you would have become a nun yourself and worked your way up to Mother Superior. Or married one of those good-looking Diaz boys right there in Tres Santos and had fourteen children to worry about.”

“Ay. What a choice you give me.” She pushed herself upright and slipped her arm around her husband’s waist. “Promise me something,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Help me keep the Saturday promise I made to Francisco.”

Francis looked skeptical. “You know how things are, querida. If something comes up, he’ll have to understand. That’s just the way things go.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want them to go that way this time.”

“Just do your best,” he said. “Your mother always says that, I know.”

“She also says that being safe and well fed isn’t enough.”

“Whatever that means.”

“That’s the trouble, querida. I know exactly what she means. And she’s right, too.”