Dead Weight

Chapter Thirty

Kenny Carter’s Jeep left the interstate and headed up Posadas’ Grande Avenue. I half-expected to see the kid turn on MacArthur, aiming for his sweetheart’s, but apparently the love of his life-if we were right about the kids-wasn’t the first thing on his mind. The Jeep pulled up into the parking lot of the Family SuperMarket. We drove by just in time to see the Jeep swing around back, into the alley.

“You want to give them some time?” Bob Torrez asked.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “What I want is some answers.”

Torrez parked the patrol car on the north side of the store, next to Sam Carter’s black Explorer.

As the automatic doors swung open to greet us, Taffy Hines looked up from register one, black marker in hand. She had what looked like a proof of the weekly full-page grocery ad spread out on the conveyor. A weekday midmorning obviously wasn’t hustle time for shoppers.

With a slight smile, she pointed over her shoulder with the marker. “His Nibs is in the office,” she said. “I assume that’s who you want to see, unless you’re here to actually buy something.” She grinned good-naturedly.

“Thanks,” I said. “We need to see Sam.” I stepped close to her and paused. “I’m sorry if you’re getting sucked into this mess.”

Taffy straightened up, marker poised. “Sheriff,” she said, voice even and low, “I could really care less. You just do what you have to do.”

“I appreciate that,” I said, reaching out to touch her lightly on the forearm. If he bothered to look, Sam Carter could see us through his mirrored observation window, so I didn’t bother with subtlety, didn’t bother trying to make the visit look as if we’d just dropped by to pass the time of day or to check bargains on cookies.

As I opened the swinging door with the EMPLOYEES ONLY sign, Kenny Carter was coming down the back stairs from the office. He saw Torrez and me and stopped on the bottom step. His shoulders sagged just a touch, and he leaned against the wall.

“How you doin’, Kenny,” I said. He straightened up and glanced toward the exit door at the rear of the building. “Nobody’s going to bother your Jeep, son. Can we talk for a minute or two?”

Sam Carter emerged from the office door and stood on the narrow landing at the top of the steps.

“What have you got to tell me?” he said.

I shrugged. “I think it’s time we had a little chat, Sam.” I stepped forward toward the stairs, giving Kenny the choice of blocking my path, trying to bolt past me, or retreating uphill. The stairs were too narrow for both of us. He retreated, and Torrez and I trudged up the stairway behind him.

“Come on in,” Carter muttered. “I’ve got a lot of things I need to be doing, so I hope this won’t take too long.”

He sat down in his chair by the idling computer and waved a hand toward a single straight-backed chair over by the bookcase. The row of catalogs and binders threatened to explode off the shelf, and I pulled the chair out so I wouldn’t be caught in the avalanche.

Kenny stood by the corner of his father’s desk, trying his best to look unflustered. He wasn’t very good at it. He toyed with a can of soda that I guessed he’d brought up from the Jeep, took a perfunctory sip or two, and then set the can on the narrow windowsill. Maybe it was Bob Torrez’s towering presence that made Kenny nervous. If he wanted to bolt out the door, he’d have to go through the undersheriff, and that clearly wasn’t going to work.

“Let’s just cut right to it, Sam.” I shifted on the chair, trying to avoid the crack in the wooden seat.

“I’d welcome that,” he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it.

“Kenny here knows the Sisson family, and he had contact with them recently.”

“Now how do we know that?” Carter snapped.

I sighed. “Sam, I think now is the time to stop playing the games, all right? We’re not all blind and deaf. We talk to people. We know that Jennifer Sisson is pregnant, and we know that particular situation has to be partly responsible for some of the hell that family has been through recently.”

Carter started to shift in his chair, and I leaned forward, watching his face closely.

“And it’s no secret that Kenny here has been keeping company with the young lady,” I added, turning to Kenny. “Am I right?”

He bit his lip and took a bit too long to nod agreement, as if he needed the time to calculate his odds. He was a pretty good-looking kid, lanky and tough, with a bit more height and weight than his father and some of his mother’s darker complexion.

“So then. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put it together.” I leaned back, regarding Kenny. “More than one person assumes that you’re the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child. What do you say?”

“Now who says she’s pregnant?” Sam Carter barked, the first to be about two steps behind.

“You’re going to tell us that she’s not?” Bob Torrez said quietly.

Sam jerked around as if he’d been touched with a cattle prod, and he glared at Torrez.

“Well…”

“And it really doesn’t matter who told us, does it?”

“Of course it matters,” Carter exploded. “Jesus, you can’t just go around spreading rumors like that, getting people all worked up.”

“Yes, she’s pregnant,” Kenny Carter said before his father had a chance to take another breath. “So what.”

“Listen, Son-” Sam started, but Bob cut him off.

“The fact that Jennifer is or isn’t pregnant doesn’t matter, Kenny. At least not to us. At least not yet. What matters is that we find the person who killed James Sisson.”

“What, and you think that my son knows something about that? Don’t be ridiculous. And for one thing, nobody’s even proved it to be murder yet. It’s just all theory on your part. Lots of publicity.”

Torrez pushed himself away from the door and walked to the desk. His head was a scant inch below the ceiling fixture. “Earlier this morning, Kenny, we drove to your job site south of Deming, as you well know. When Mrs. LaCrosse called out there and tipped you off, you ran back here as fast as your little Jeep could go, short of getting a second traffic ticket.” He stopped and grinned at the expression on Kenny Carter’s face.

“Yeah,” Torrez added, “it’s a small world. But for starters, let’s establish some relationships. Jennifer Sisson is pregnant-everyone seems to agree on that. Are you the father?”

“Now listen,” Sam Carter said, but Torrez held up a hand.

“No, I’m not,” Kenny said from between clenched teeth. “I don’t know who knocked her up, but it wasn’t me.”

“All right.” Torrez nodded pleasantly. “Fair enough. How do you know it wasn’t you?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” Sam said, and he managed to find a small clear area in the landfill that was his desk so that he could slap the desktop with the flat of his hand. “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Whether the boy is or isn’t?” A vein pulsed on the side of his neck, and he was red enough to have spent the whole day out in the sun. “Hell, Kenny, tell ’em the truth, if that’s what they want to hear.”

“I told them the truth.”

“And on Tuesday night, did you have occasion to go over to the Sissons’ place?” I asked.

“No.”

“You didn’t go over and talk to Jim Sisson?”

“No.”

“Did you know whether or not Jim knew that his daughter was pregnant?”

“I wouldn’t know. But I don’t see how he couldn’t know.”

“Did you know what Jim’s reaction to that news might be?”

“How could I know that? If I was him, I’d be pissed. She’s only fifteen, or something. What do you expect?”

“Would he blame you, do you think?”

“Yes. And that’s what a couple of the guys told me. Jennifer was telling her friends that it was me. Like she was proud of getting knocked up, or something. But I don’t know for sure. I haven’t talked to him in a while. If he was all mad at me, that’s the last place I wanted to go.”

“Were you on friendly-enough terms with him before?”

“I guess.”

“You guess,” I said. “When was the last time you talked with Jim Sisson?”

He frowned. For once Sam Carter kept his mouth shut. He gazed at his son, face flushed with anger.

“Last week, maybe.”

“That recently?”

“Something like that. Jennifer and me had an argument and broke up. At least we hadn’t talked in a while. I was figuring that maybe we could get back together, you know? I mean…you know. I like her. I’d see her out on the street, but she wasn’t about to talk to me. I saw Jim comin’ out of the auto parts place one day last week, when I was goin’ in. I think it was Saturday, maybe. He was like, ‘I haven’t seen you around in a while,’ and I said, ‘No, I think Jenny’s mad at me for something,’ and he was all, ‘Well, that’s how women are,’ and then he asked me where I was workin’, and I told him LaCrosse’s, and he said that was good. And that was it.”

“So he knew that you’d been going out with Jennifer?” I asked.

“Sure, he knew.”

“And that was the last time you saw him alive? Last Saturday?”

Kenny Carter nodded.

Torrez rested his hands on his utility belt. “And at that time did you know that Jennifer was pregnant?”

“Nope. And I don’t think Mr. Sisson did, either. If he had, he wouldn’t have been all calm and everything.”

“When did you hear that she was pregnant?”

“A friend of mine that talked to a friend of hers called me and told me.”

“When was that?”

Kenny Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. A day or so before her dad-”

“Maybe Sunday then? Maybe Saturday? It was after you saw Jim coming out of the store?”

“Yeah…it was after that.”

Torrez shook his head slowly. “Kenny, if we drove over to the Sissons’ right now and asked Jennifer who the father of her child was, what do you think she’d say?”

The kid’s expression was bleak. “I don’t know what she’d say,” he said. “I just know it wasn’t me. And I don’t know why she’d blame me, neither.”

“Give me a reason to believe that,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time, longer than most kids his age bother to think about anything. “Jennifer and me…well, the last time we…were together was early June. Like about the fifth or so. I remember ’cause I started with LaCrosse the next day, and Jennifer was sore ’cause I was going to be workin’ out of town.”

“And that’s the better part of seven weeks ago,” I said.

Kenny almost smiled. “And knowin’ Jenny, the second she knew she was pregnant, she’d blab it to her friends. That’s the way she is. Got to have something to talk about. Nothin’ much embarrasses her. And I know she wouldn’t wait for no two months to go by before she said something.”

“Maybe she wasn’t sure at the time,” I said.

Kenny glanced at me sideways. “Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.

“But she never actually called you, is that right?” Torrez asked.

“Nope. I ain’t talked to her in probably three weeks.”

I pushed myself to my feet. “Interesting,” I said, and reached across the desk to the windowsill. I picked up Kenny Carter’s soda can by the bottom rim. “Mind?”

He shook his head.

“Kenny, I want you to understand the serious nature of all this,” I said, and held up the can. “You can cooperate with us or not, just as you see fit. But a simple DNA test can establish whether or not you’re the father of that child. That way, we know that we have the story straight.” I didn’t bother to tell the kid that a DNA test was neither simple nor even a remote possibility.

“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “I don’t know what an empty can of Coke is going to tell you, but I ain’t lying.”

“So that’s where we stand at the moment,” I said, nodding. “You want to tell us why you took off when you heard we were driving out?”

Kenny shot a quick glance over at his father, then at me. “I don’t know. I guess I just panicked, is all.”

“Just because we wanted to talk to you is cause to panic?”

“Well, I figured it was something serious, with you driving all the way down to Deming to see me.”

I turned and said to Sam, “Anything else you want to tell us, Sam?”

He got to his feet, careful not to kick the overloaded trash can.

“The sooner this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game is over, the happier I’ll be. I still say it was an accident that killed Jim Sisson, nothing else.”

“Maybe so, Sam, maybe so.”

Bob Torrez hadn’t finished, though. He reached across the desk and picked a cigarette butt out of the ashtray, holding it by the crushed, burned end. “You mind?”

“There’s fresh ones you could buy down by the registers,” Sam Carter said.

“No thanks. But as long as we’re running DNA tests on lip cells, we might as well cover all the bases.” Sam’s eyes narrowed, and any goodwill he might have harbored for Robert Torrez vanished. And he didn’t rise to the bait.

I smiled. “Thanks for your time.”

I took my time heading down the stairs, trying to keep the damn treads in focus around the bifocals. Out at the car, Bob Torrez dug a couple of plastic bags out of his briefcase and sacked the can in one and the cigarette butt in the other.

“Sam was pissed,” he said.

“Sure enough,” I replied. “If it turns out that the kid’s lying, he’s going to be more than pissed. Why the butt?”

I damn near fell into the passenger seat, always surprised when my insomnia-driven body decided it was time to poop out. Torrez stowed the two evidence bags carefully in his briefcase and snapped the lid shut.

“I guess I did that just to tweak Sam a little more, give him something else to think about,” he said. “Ah, I probably shouldn’t have.” He grimaced. “It’s the idea of the thing, see. If I was to mention to someone that we were running a paternity test on Sam Carter, well…”

I grinned at Bob and he shrugged and added, “Imagine the political miles that kind of rumor is worth. I wouldn’t do it, of course, but Sam doesn’t know that. A little worry is good for him.”

“I never thought of you as devious before, Robert,” I said.

“Me, neither.”