Dead Weight

Chapter Thirty-one

I thought we’d made some progress with our fishing. For one thing, my large gut’s feeling was that Kenny Carter was lying. He was just too goddamn earnest and believable to be believed. And Bob Torrez agreed.

But since neither Jennifer Sisson nor her mother was protesting Kenny’s suspected paternity up and down the street, the kid had good reason to stonewall us until we could sledgehammer some holes in his defenses. The trouble was, I didn’t have a clue about how we might do that.

If he was lying about fathering Jennifer’s child, then there was a good chance some connection existed between him and Jim Sisson that Kenny didn’t want us sniffing into, and that idea intrigued me.

All of this seemed a profitable avenue to explore, if we could find a way, especially since we didn’t appear to have any others.

Bob Torrez dropped me off at the office, remarking that after a quick errand or two, he wanted to head south toward the little village of Regal and “check my freezer.” I knew what that meant. We all had our worry sites-I suppose my personal favorite was the booth at the Don Juan de Onate Restaurant. Robert, the unrelenting hunter, liked to cruise the boonies, watching the game animals that he would hunt come fall. I could imagine that as he sat on some knoll with binoculars glued to his eyes watching the phantoms of antelope or elk in the distance, the problems of the day might sift into some perspective.

As I walked into the office, I toyed with my own important decision-lunch or a nap. I checked my mailbox and found the ubiquitous Post-it note, this time telling me that Judge Lester Hobart had called. His office was no more than a hundred yards from mine, over in the new east wing of the Public Safety Building. But with the good judge’s gout, a walk of even a few yards was torture for him. I crumpled up the note, wondering if the judge had received his own version of the Pasquale letter, and went to return the call.

Violet Davies, the court administrator, answered the phone.

“Violet,” I said, “this is Gastner. What’s new in your life?” I could picture her pretty face framed with all the tight blond curls, breaking into the easy, bright smile that made nasty court appearances just a touch more pleasant for so many people.

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” she giggled. “Ah, well…” She let that thought drift off.

“Just one of those days?” I could hear a voice or two in the background. Her office was sort of like a nurses’ station in the hospital, open to the hallway that led to the courtroom’s back door, the judge’s chambers, and the other county offices beyond, but partially corralled by a low counter where she met the public.

“Well, we’ve had company most of the morning. Really interesting company. You got the judge’s note?”

“Yes.”

“He’d like to meet you for lunch, if that’s possible.”

“Sure enough possible. Will you join us?”

She laughed. “No, thanks. I’ll keep Carla company.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Her voice dropped a bit. “Carla Champlin’s been sitting out in the hall all morning. She said she’s going to sit there until the judge signs a court order evicting one of her tenants.”

“Lucky you,” I said. “She bent my ear a day or so ago, but I guess that didn’t do any good. Did you tell her to bring a pillow? My guess is that it’s going to be a long wait.”

“Oh, sure,” Violet said. “You come over and tell her that.”

“Nope. Did the judge say where he wanted to escape to?”

“He asked that you meet him at the country club at twelve-thirty, if that’s going to be possible for you.”

“I can do that,” I said, and groaned inwardly.

“He said it was his treat,” Violet added, and I grinned. After nearly thirty years, the judge knew my habits, even if he didn’t share my enthusiasm for Mexican food.

“Well, tell His Honor to sneak out the back door. I’m on my way.”

“I’ll do that,” she said. “And so will he.”

I could picture Carla Champlin, ramrod straight, jaw thrust out pugnaciously, sitting on the blond oak bench under the display of Western paintings by various county artists. Maybe after a few more hours her bony butt would hurt enough that she’d go away. Or maybe she’d overheard Violet and even at that moment was planning to join the judge and me for lunch.

I suppose I was a touch annoyed with Carla, too. I’d told her that I would talk to Pasquale, and I had. She wasn’t allowing much time for success before badgering someone else. But if she wanted to sit in the courthouse hallway, that was her call. She could talk to the potted plants. I’d rather have a conversation with a good green chili burrito.

The Posadas Country Club was less than two years old, and despite the grand implications of its name, it was no more than a nine-hole patch of irrigated sand, rattlesnakes, and Bermuda grass. The club sported a restaurant-Vic’s Place-in what long ago had been one of the county’s maintenance barns. Renovated and painted with a jazzy new hung ceiling, the clubhouse and restaurant still smelled vaguely of old hydraulic fluid and rubber.

Shortly after its grand opening, I’d eaten the worst chicken salad of my life at Vic’s Place-cold, slimy, and reptilian. I was no golfer, so it wasn’t hard to avoid a repeat of that culinary adventure. As far as I could tell, the quality of the restaurant matched that of the rest of the club.

The wind usually blew so hard that I guessed it was possible to tee off from the first launch pad and whack the ball all the way across nine holes to the parking lot of Posadas High School on South Pershing Street.

But golfers were ecstatic to have a spot closer than Deming to play, and they took the snakes, goat heads, and wind in stride. When Vic’s Place had somehow managed to find a brand-new liquor license, the restaurant with the awful chicken salad had become a sort of watering hole for “who’s who” in Posadas-or for who wanted to be who. It was an out-of-the-way spot for Judge Hobart to feed his gout.

I drove down Grande to Country Club Road and turned right past a short block of apartments and then the sprawl of Posadas High School. What had once been a gently rolling short-grass prairie was now a nine-holer, watered just enough that the grass on the putting greens remained an alkali-bleached, sickly ochre.

I parked beside the judge’s white minivan and noticed the assistant district attorney’s Corvette nestled off in the corner in the shade of a single valiant elm tree.

Inside Vic’s Place, the air conditioning was cranked to maximum. As my eyes adjusted, I could see Judge Hobart across the dining room, seated with Don Jaramillo under the display of historic golf clubs.

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I said.

With a glass in one hand, the judge waved at the chair beside Jaramillo.

“Seat yourself,” the judge said, and reached out a hand. I shook, and felt joints older and more arthritic than my own. I braced myself for Jaramillo’s knuckle-duster, but he was surprisingly gentle this time. Maybe he knew he was in the company of duffers.

One of Vic’s waitresses, a young gal whom I didn’t recognize, appeared at my elbow with a mug of coffee. While she was setting the cup on the table, I shifted my bifocals so I could see her name tag.

“Mr. Palacek said you’d want coffee,” she said brightly. “Do you use cream?”

“Everything, thanks, Tamara,” I said. The judge and the ADA watched as I emptied two packets of cream and two of sugar into the coffee.

“I remembered that you drank coffee black,” the judge said after the waitress had left.

“I do. This isn’t coffee.” And it wasn’t. Even with the additives, it tasted like a quarter-teaspoon of instant coffee dissolved in dishwater. I took a sip, grimaced, and pushed it aside.

“I ordered the chicken salad, and Don here is having the halibut.”

He pushed a menu across toward me. The print was so fuzzy that even with my bifocals I couldn’t read the grim details.

“They don’t have enchiladas,” the judge added helpfully. “But the whiskey sours aren’t bad.”

The waitress appeared at my elbow and I looked up into her sober face. “I guess I’d like a ham and cheese, hold the cheese,” I said. She nodded and turned away, laboriously writing something far more complete than the word ham on the ticket.

“Bob tells me that you and he talked to the Carters,” Don Jaramillo said. He was a pudgy man, with a good set of jowls forming despite not yet having reached his fortieth birthday. His shirt looked as if he’d slept in it, tucked carelessly into jeans-the Jaramillo uniform when not in court. I somehow always expected him to blurt out, “I’m not really a lawyer, really, I’m not.” He eyed me sideways, which was pretty direct for him.

“We did that.” I nodded.

Bob Torrez had dropped me off at my office not many moments ago, but he hadn’t mentioned that the assistant district attorney had been one of his “errands.”

“What’s he have to say?” Jaramillo asked.

“Who?”

“Sam. Sam Carter.”

“Oh, I thought you said you just talked to Bob. I figured he’d tell you.”

“Well, no,” Jaramillo fussed. “We just crossed paths, so to speak. We didn’t have time…”

I put his floundering out of its misery. “Kenny Carter says he had no conversation with Jim Sisson beyond a chance encounter-a friendly encounter, he claims-last Saturday, three days before Sisson’s death.”

“And the chairman of the county commission? What’s he got to say for himself?” Judge Hobart asked.

“Sam blustered, as always. My guess is that he doesn’t know what his son’s doing most of the time. Par for that course.”

“Bob says that he thinks Kenny Carter is the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child,” Jaramillo said.

“So do I.”

Judge Hobart frowned. “She’s a tad young, isn’t she?”

“Sure.”

“But the boy denies it?”

“That’s correct, Judge. Sincerely denies it, too. With a good, level, unblinking gaze,” I said. “In the best ‘I am offended you should think such a thing’ tradition.”

Jaramillo leaned forward and glanced across the empty dining room. Apparently other folks shared my opinion of the food. He lowered his voice. “The undersheriff thinks it might be profitable to order a paternity test. That’s why he stopped by a bit ago, to see what I thought.”

Judge Hobart toyed with his whiskey sour but didn’t take a sip. I watched him thinking and was surprised how much he’d aged in the past year or so. The New Mexico sun had reduced the skin of his cheeks to a blotched parchment, with a particularly nasty patch in front of his right ear. His hand drifted up toward the blemish, then hesitated at the last instant, leaving it alone.

“And what do you think?” the judge said finally to Jaramillo.

“Well,” he shrugged, “I don’t know. I guess I’m of mixed minds about it, without some rock hard evidence to back it up.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped. “Last time I looked, Hitler and his gang were dead. I don’t think any court in the state is going to let us run around sticking needles in the bellies of pregnant women to suck out DNA samples. And if we had rock hard evidence, it’d be doubly pointless.”

“Well-” Jaramillo started, but I interrupted him.

“Forget it, Don. Unless Jennifer requests the test herself, with the mother’s written consent, forget it. I’m surprised that Torrez brought it up.”

Judge Hobart almost smiled and gestured toward the waitress, arriving with our food. My ham sandwich was recognizable, a slice of ham on white bread with eight potato chips on the side. Jaramillo looked with something akin to alarm at the thing that was touted to be a fish fillet, floating in a sea of yellow curdled sauce. The judge’s chicken salad looked exactly as I had remembered it.

“What if Kenny Carter is lying, though?” Jaramillo said, tapping the lump of fish tentatively with his fork. “If he knocked up Jennifer, then there’s every reason to think that Jim Sisson would go ballistic when he found out. If the two of them had a confrontation-”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said flatly. “If we can’t solve this thing some way short of the sort of intrusive procedure that I understand amniocentesis to be, then forget it. Jim’s ghost can come back from the grave someday and whisper who did it in our ear. And this is the goddamned worst chunk of ham I’ve ever tasted.” I looked at Jaramillo. “And if that stuff doesn’t kill you, I’ll be surprised.”

“It’s not that bad,” Jaramillo said lamely.

“Jennifer Sisson and the food aside,” Judge Hobart said around a mouthful of chicken salad that clung to his dentures like wallpaper paste, “Bill, we need to decide what to do about Carla Champlin.”

“I’m not sure there’s a whole lot to do, Judge. Except maybe find someone who can make her understand what her legal options are. If she wants Tom Pasquale evicted, then I suppose there’s a process she can follow, isn’t there?”

“Well of course there is,” he said testily. “Damn woman won’t, though.” He put down his fork. “Look-all she needs to do is go see her goddamn lawyer, whoever that is, and have him look over the rental agreement. If there’s something in the lease that Pasquale has screwed up, then she can ask that the lease be canceled, in an appropriate manner. But Jesus, she can’t just go yowling around the neighborhood, changing locks willy-nilly, and yelling threats.”

“You heard about the locks, eh?” I asked.

“Course I heard about it. And I heard about the open bedroom window, and about the kid changing the oil on his goddamn motorcycle in the back bedroom, and on, and on, and on.” He jabbed at the salad. “Christ, she spent nearly the whole morning camped out on the hallway bench in the county building, yammering.” Hobart glanced up at me and grinned. “I should have sent her on over to your office.”

“Thanks. I already talked to her. Apparently it didn’t do any good.”

“Hell, why should you be any different? You know, I always used to wonder about her, just a little. Back when she was running the post office. Licked one too many stamps.”

“I’ll try to talk with her again,” I said. “I don’t promise much.”

“Better still, why don’t you just tell that young deputy to move the hell out and save us all a headache. Before she shoots him or does something equally nuts.”

I swallowed the last of the ham and tongued the slab of white bread paste off the roof of my mouth. “I’m not sure I want to arbitrate housing disputes for my deputies, Judge. They’re all consenting adults, perfectly capable of running their own lives.”

Hobart laughed, a barking rasp that threatened to spray chicken salad across the table. “Don’t be so modest. You’re their goddamn father confessor, and you know it.” He frowned at Jaramillo. “Torrez asked you what you thought about the paternity thing?”

“Yeah, well,” Jaramillo said, “I think Bill’s probably right. We’d be apt to get ourselves in a royal mess, one way or another.”

“Us being in a mess wasn’t what I was worried about,” I said, and looked at the sludge in the bottom of my cup. “And let me talk with Carla again, Judge, and see what I can do.” I pushed myself away from the table and stood up. “No promises.” I glanced at my watch. “I really need to be on the road, gents. Thanks for the company.”

“Bill…” Judge Hobart said, and then finished the thought with just a nod, as if he was sure I could read his mind.

“We’ll keep you posted,” I said to Jaramillo, and tossed a couple bucks on the table for Tamara, who thoughtfully hadn’t tried to inflict any more of the awful coffee on me.

Outside in the sunshine, I looked at my watch again. The Don Juan wouldn’t be crowded, and a fast burrito would settle my writhing stomach. I managed to drive within a hundred feet of the restaurant’s parking lot on Twelfth Street before the telephone rang.