Dead Weight

Chapter Eleven

Grace Sisson had wasted no time. The night her husband had been killed, she’d taken the three youngest children-twelve-year-old Todd, fourteen-year-old Melissa, and fifteen-year-old Jennifer-to her parents’ house in Las Cruces. The older children had flown the nest years before, deciding that Posadas wasn’t the answer to their every dream.

With the family gone, we had the place to ourselves. Still, I didn’t want any legal complications. While Linda Real developed the film from her earlier sessions, I woke up Judge Lester Hobart, explained what I wanted to do, and walked out of his kitchen fifteen minutes later with a court order.

We could have impounded the machines and moved them all over to one of the county barns, but that seemed like a waste of time and money. Besides, I didn’t want just an approximation of the episode that had ended with Jim Sisson’s death.

Driving back on Bustos, I saw Frank Dayan unlocking the front door of the Register, and I swung over to the curb. He had a breakfast burrito in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, juggling his keys like a pro. It’d been more than an hour since we’d been the Don Juan’s first customers, and the idea of a snack was appealing.

I buzzed down the window as he stepped to the curb. “If you’ve got time, drop by the Sissons’,” I said.

“You mean right now?”

“Yep. Might be interesting.”

“Well, neither Mary Ann nor Pam is here yet.” Pam Gardiner was the reporter who’d taken Linda Real’s place at the Register, a blubbery, much too cheerful person who apparently thought that most of the news would come to her if she sat on her butt long enough. Why Dayan put up with her lassitude I didn’t know. Maybe he was working too hard to notice. Mary Ann Weaver, the wife of county commissioner Frank Weaver, had run the front desk of the Register for fifteen years.

“They’ve both got keys, don’t they?” I grinned. “Come on.” I reached over and opened the door.

“What the hell,” Frank said, and got in. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Of course not.”

He laughed and sipped the coffee, grimacing. “Want some?”

“No, thanks. I’ll take that burrito, though.”

He hesitated and then actually extended the thing toward me. “Sure. Here.”

I waved him off. “This is going to be a nasty one, Frank.”

“You mean Sisson…”

I nodded.

He took a bite of the burrito. It smelled wonderful. “You know, Pam can cover this better than I can,” he said between chews. “She’s the reporter.”

“It’s an election year,” I said. “Humor me.”

***

Howard Bishop pulled himself up into the seat of the backhoe with practiced ease. The machine cranked a couple of times and fired, belched a cloud of black smoke, and then settled into a clattering idle.

Torrez stood by one back tire, resting a forearm on it like a neighbor chatting over the fence. “I want to attach the chain over on the side, away from the original marks,” he said to Bishop. “Swing the bucket to the left some, and I’ll hook it up.”

Bishop lowered the bucket and extended the arm so that the bucket’s teeth hung over the left side of the tire, taking the heavy logging chain with it. Torrez threaded the free end of the chain through the wheel and around the tire near where it was supported by a short chunk of two-by-four, then hooked one of the links.

“You sure?” I asked, and Torrez nodded. I held out a hand. “That’s not secure,” I said. The chain hook had a scant hold on the link.

“I know, sir. That’s what I want.”

He turned to Bishop and gave him a thumbs-up, and the backhoe’s boom lifted until the slack was out of the chain. It slipped a little on the rubber, and then the tire eased off the ground as the backhoe took the weight.

“Nothing to it,” Bob said.

“How high do you want it?” Bishop shouted.

“About a foot or two off the ground,” Torrez replied. “There’d be no reason for Sisson to lift it higher than that.” I glanced across at Linda Real. The red light on the video camera’s snout was on. “And right over this spot,” Torrez added, and he picked up a shovel that had been leaning against the building and touched the spot on the concrete where the tire had first impacted, close to the shop wall.

When he was satisfied, he nodded at Bishop. “Perfect,” he said. The tire hung suspended about eighteen inches above the concrete apron. It drifted around in a lazy circle, stopping when the chain links tightened up. Then it started to drift back.

“Now what?” Frank Dayan asked.

“Now we drop it,” Torrez said. “You guys back off some.”

I stood near the rear wheel of the backhoe, and Dayan joined me. Torrez walked over to his pickup and rummaged in the back, finally returning with a six-foot length of one-inch galvanized pipe and a three-pound hammer. “This’ll work,” he said.

He walked altogether too close to the tire, stopped, and looked over at Linda. “You all set?”

“World’s Strangest Videos, take one,” she said.

Torrez grinned and lifted the steel pipe as if it were a toothpick. He rested one end against the tip of the chain’s hook where it had a tenuous grip on the link. He struck the other end of the bar with the hammer, and it drove the tip of the hook out of the link with the first tap.

With a brief rapppp of sliding chain, the tire thumped to the concrete like a wet pillow, with just as much bounce. When he struck the bar, Bob Torrez was two paces from the tire, and even as it hit the concrete, he stepped forward and put a steadying hand on the tread. After a second or two, he took his hand away. The tire stood motionless, a fat bulge at the bottom.

“Don’t turn it off yet,” he said to Linda, and then looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “So much for it bouncing into the building.”

Resting a hand on the top of the tire, he walked around on the other side. With a gentle nudge, the tire fell over, striking the side of the building with a crash. And there it leaned, refusing to slide down.

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

Torrez walked to one side and aimed a hearty kick at the tire. It thumped and refused to move.

“There’s just no way,” he said. Then he turned to Howard Bishop and beckoned. Bishop extended the boom, curling the bucket as he did so. Torrez pointed to the spot on the tire, and Bishop lowered the bucket until its back gently touched the rubber.

“Nail it!” the undersheriff shouted, and Bishop slammed the lever full forward.

The tire skidded down the wall, its bottom simultaneously kicking out on the concrete slab. When it thumped flat, I shivered, imagining Jim Sisson’s final moments with that weight on top of him. Bishop kept the hydraulic force applied, and the backhoe lifted itself in the air, the outriggers clearing the ground by a foot.

Torrez held up a hand, and Bishop stopped, the machine frozen, bucket crushing the tire, outriggers up in the air. Bishop reduced the throttle as Torrez walked around and approached us.

“Now,” he said to Bishop, “how do you jog it sideways?”

“It’s easy to do,” the sergeant replied. “If the operator gets excited, he can do it by accident. The sideways movement of the arm is on the same lever as down thrust.” He pointed at the left of the two long central control levers.

“Do it,” Torrez said. “Just drop her down. Try and make the same kind of marks.”

“Move a little,” Bishop said, and waited while we stepped away from the backhoe. Then he jammed the lever to the left and pulled back at the same time. The bucket jerked left; the tractor bucked right and dropped like a giant yellow stone, its outriggers crashing back in the gravel.

The tire had scrubbed a couple of inches to the left.

“And that’s what I think happened,” Torrez said. The tractor idled down and then died as Bishop pulled the manual throttle lever back.

“The tire clearly didn’t drop and kill him,” he said.

“Nope,” Torrez agreed. “It had help.”

Frank Dayan shook his head in wonder. “Wow. That’s amazing.”

I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. “And now you know that if you just print ‘investigation is continuing’ you’ll be telling the absolute truth.”

“But what you’re saying here is that Jim Sisson was murdered,” Dayan replied. “You’re saying that someone deliberately crushed him to death. And then made it look like an accident.”

“It appears that way.”

“That means whoever it was would have had to clout him on the head or something first…overpower him in some way. He wouldn’t just lie still, waiting to be crushed.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Maybe the autopsy will show something. But if it was something as simple as a blow to the back of the head, that’s not going to show up. Not with his skull crushed the way it was.”

“Give me a photo. At least give me that much,” he pleaded. “It’s not often I get to scoop the big-city dailies.”

“On one condition,” I said. “On one condition, we’ll fix you right up.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t use the word homicide yet.”

“Done deal,” Dayan said. “And my paper doesn’t come out until Friday morning, anyway. Maybe things will have changed by then.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Dayan bent down, looking at the tire marks on the concrete. “Do you suppose whoever did this figured you’d never look closely?”

“Maybe,” I said. “And we can hope that’s not the only mistake they made.”