Dead Weight

Chapter Thirty-four

I spent a couple of minutes following the RV as Carla Champlin trundled it home. She drove it reasonably straight and true, signaling and stopping at all the right places. Pausing 310 at the curb in front of her house, I watched her wedge the big machine back into its place in the grape arbor. She glanced my way as she darted inside the house, and I waved a hand. She didn’t acknowledge.

But that was OK. I didn’t have time just then for tea and crumpets, or whatever she might serve, even if she had showed signs of wanting to continue her conversation with me. Maybe a little conversation was just what she needed. Maybe Carla Champlin had started her long slide downhill toward the loony bin, and this was the one day that fate had given her to teeter on the edge. She could be hauled back to the world of the reasonable or pushed on over. But I didn’t feel that I had time to stand on the edge with her just then. She was going to have to depend on her own sense of balance.

Instead, I drove directly to the Public Safety Building and discovered I was just about the last one at the party. In the few moments that I’d been following Carla Champlin, Gayle had taken up Dispatch again, and when she saw me she motioned toward the basement door.

“They’re all down there, sir,” she said.

The “they” were far too many large people for the small space outside the darkroom. On the utility table photographic enlargements were lined up in neat rows, and as I walked down the stairs Linda Real was bending over one of the prints, guiding one of those little photo gadgets used to check the focus of a print. The aroma of chemicals from the darkroom was strong enough to make my eyes burn.

At her elbow on one side was Tom Pasquale, with Bob Torrez on the other. Both were trying their best not to knock heads on the spiderweb of plumbing and electrical pipes.

Howard Bishop sat at the end of the table, his considerable bulk balanced on an absurdly small stool.

The only fan was the exhaust unit in the darkroom behind them, and with so many large individuals so long from a shower on a hot day, I was surprised Linda hadn’t keeled over from the rich locker-room effluvia.

“We’ve got a nice conference room upstairs,” I said by way of greeting. But they were too excited to bother with amenities. “What have you got?” I asked, and Linda glanced up from the lens.

“Sir, Sergeant Bishop lifted a neat set of latents from the cabin frame on the backhoe,” she said. “I had just finished processing the initial prints when we got called over to Judge Hobart’s.” She swept a hand to include the dozen or so prints. “They’re pretty clear.”

Bob Torrez braced both hands on the table and scanned the photos. The dusted fingerprints, little more than dark ghosts against the lighter steel, showed clearly enough in one of the photos that I could actually see them, with the tractor’s sunshade in the background blanking out the bright sky.

“It looks like somebody grabbed real low on the frame and hit a sharp spur on the weld joint,” he said. “And then the blood smeared on the metal, maybe when he was getting off.”

“He’s going to grab it in the same place each time?” I asked.

“If it’s a habit,” Bishop said without shifting the position of his chin on his hands. “It wouldn’t start bleedin’ fast enough to smear like that the instant he cut it gettin’ on.”

“Huh,” I said, and pondered the picture. It didn’t mean much to me. “Good enough,” I said. “But I guess I need to see it for real. Anything on the blood type yet?”

“Mears is at the hospital now,” Torrez replied.

“Then let’s ride out and take a look at this thing. Maybe whoever left this,” I tapped the photo, “got careless and dribbled somewhere else.”

“I’ve been over that machine ten times,” Bishop said, and heaved himself to his feet. “Course, we found this on about round nine, so another good look wouldn’t hurt.”

“Who’s out there now?” I asked.

“Taber’s taking the afternoon,” Torrez said, and I grimaced. Jackie Taber normally worked midnight to eight. Like everyone else, her eight-hour workday had gone extinct.

The hot, windless afternoon air was a relief after the basement. The machinery in Jim Sisson’s backyard rested silently, circled by a yellow ribbon. Deputy Taber had parked in the Sissons’ driveway, well back so that she could watch the back and front at the same time.

If Grace Sisson and her daughter objected to the surveillance, they hadn’t told us. Neither had been outside since returning home, at least that we knew of. And friends weren’t exactly standing in line to visit. Maybe the neighborhood assumed the Sissons were still at Grace’s parents’ place in Las Cruces.

I walked up to the backhoe, and Linda Real pointed at the steel frame just above the outriggers. Originally, the backhoe had sported a nifty enclosed cab. Over time, it had shed various parts, with most of the glass or Plexiglas or whatever it was going first. The remaining cage had plenty of sharp spots that an operator would avoid out of habit.

“Under there, sir,” she said, and I cranked my neck around so I could see under one of the braces. The smear was a light brown against the machine’s yellow paint.

Reaching out my hand as if to grab the bar, I said, “So he grabs hold to pull himself up. He cuts himself on the weld somehow.”

“There’s a spur there, if you look close,” Bishop said. “Linda got a good photo of it.”

“I’ll take your word,” I said. “So he grabs here, cuts himself, and then on the way down grabs again and leaves blood.” I shrugged. “Possible. If he got on this side, he’s got a cut on his left hand somewhere.” I held my hand near the bar. “If he grabbed it in the usual fashion, it would nick him right about between the first and second knuckle. If he got on the other side, he’d grab the bar with his right hand.”

“But he wouldn’t leave blood here if he got on the other side,” Torrez said.

I turned to Bishop. “You were on and off this machine a number of times yourself,” I said.

He stepped up close and reached out a hand. “And my prints are right about here,” he said. “I kinda reach on over a ways.”

“Or it could be Jim’s blood,” Torrez said. “I asked Alan Perrone to double-check for minor injuries that would be consistent with this. But that’s going to be a tough call.”

“Impossible,” I said. “What about on the operating levers themselves?” I peered close at the black rubber handles. “Anything there?”

“No,” Bishop said. “We’d expect a pretty good collection there, too. We dusted before I touched them, so at the very least we should have Jim Sisson’s and maybe the killer’s. But they’re clean.”

“Wiped, then. Very clever. Just the sort of thing a person committing suicide would do.”

Bishop actually came close to laughing. “They always slip up somewheres, if you look close enough,” he observed. “Whoever bled on this thing didn’t take the time to wear gloves.”

“If the levers hadn’t been wiped clean, the most logical guess would be that the blood is Sisson’s himself,” I said. “Maybe. So look, we’ll get a blood type, and that’s a start. We’ve got some good prints off the bar, and that’s another plus. Maybe the blood’s enough for a DNA match, if it comes to that. What I want you to do now is go over these machines, this entire area, for the ten-dozenth time. Slow, careful, methodical…every square inch of the machines, the tire, the wheel, hell, even the shop itself. I want to make sure that we looked at everything, too many times.”

I turned to Bob Torrez. “And before we get busy, I need to ask you something.” I pointed at Tom Pasquale. “And you stay close. I need to talk to you in just a minute.”

Pasquale hadn’t said a word in the darkroom, and he’d been a shadow while we discussed the machine. When I spoke to him, he nodded as if he’d been waiting for the ax to fall.

Torrez accompanied me back to the front curb where 310 was parked. “I talked to Judge Hobart and Don Jaramillo at lunch today,” I said.

“Jaramillo’s not being much help with any of this,” Torrez said. “I’d expect him to be doggin’ every step of this investigation, but he’s been staying about as far away as he can get.”

“I can think of all sorts of reasons for that,” I said, “but that’s not what interests me just now. He’s just an assistant DA with politics on his mind, and nobody’s going to be very popular with this case, no matter what happens. We can cut around him if we have to, go straight to Schroeder. But what did surprise me is that he mentioned something about asking for a court order to run a DNA test on Jennifer Sisson’s unborn child.”

Torrez frowned and leaned toward me as if he hadn’t heard right. “On the kid? The fetus, you mean?”

“That’s what he said.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Torrez said. “I know I said that to Sam, back there in his office, but that was just to jerk his chain a little bit…make him nervous.”

“I understand that. And I knew that’s what you were doing,” I said. “But did you bring up the idea to him? To Jaramillo?” Torrez’s eyebrow cocked at me in surprise, but he didn’t reply. “Don Jaramillo told Judge Hobart and me that you had suggested to him a paternity test on Jennifer Sisson might not be such a bad idea.”

“Jaramillo’s a liar,” Torrez said matter-of-factly. “As simple as that. I never suggested that to him. Like I said, you were there and heard what I said to Sam Carter. That’s it. I haven’t mentioned the idea to anyone else.” He looked hard at me. “I don’t think we’re going to go around sticking needles in the bellies of teenage girls. If Jaramillo thinks Hobart’s going to go for that, he’s more of a jerk than I think he is. And unless he came up with the idea himself, there’s only one place he could have gotten it-and that’s from Carter himself.”

“That was the conclusion I’d reached,” I said. “If Carter thinks you’re actually going to do a test, he might well start to panic, afraid of what would happen if it ever leaked out…and all it takes is one blabby nurse or lab tech.”

Torrez hitched up his gun belt, his face twisted with annoyance. “Maybe I’m wrong, but knowing exactly who’s the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child doesn’t tell me who pushed the levers on that backhoe over there.”

“It might give a suggestion of who might want to,” I said.

“Not even that. If Kenny Carter is the father, why should he want to kill his future father-in-law?”

“Self-defense springs to mind, Roberto.”

“That murder wasn’t self-defense, sir,” he said. “You don’t drop a tire on someone in self-defense and then squash it flat with a backhoe in self-defense. It’s a murder carried out by someone who thought he was goddamn clever, is what it is.”

“What do you want to do, then?”

Torrez gazed off down the street. “I want a few answers from the lab first,” he said. “And then I think it’s time we haul Grace Sisson into custody and put her under the lights. The one thing I’m sure of is that she knows a hell of a lot more than she’s letting on. She’s good. She sits still and watches us watching her. That all by itself makes me nervous. If she wanted to find out who killed her husband, she’d be cooperating with us. Or at least going through the motions.”

He turned and nodded at the house. “I’d like to give her one more night to think about it. Tomorrow morning, we’ll pick her up.”

“And we have nothing to hold her on,” I reminded him. “One phone call, and at the most one quick preliminary hearing, and she walks. You’ll be lucky to hold her for an hour.”

“Sure. But she doesn’t have to know that. She doesn’t know what we’ve found in that backyard. Or not found.”

I shook my head in frustration. “I don’t know. Go with the prints off the bar first and the blood sample. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Deputy Pasquale appeared in the driveway, and I beckoned him over.

“Keep me posted,” I said to Torrez, and watched him amble off, head down, deep in thought. I leaned on the fender of the car and crossed my arms.

Tom Pasquale stopped two paces away. “Sir?”

“Thomas,” I said, “did Linda get a chance to talk with you?”

“Just a little. She said that Miss Champlin pulled a gun on you.”

“Well, strictly speaking, I suppose that’s true. It turned out to be an old unloaded shotgun, more of a stage prop than anything else. But for a few seconds there, it was a magic moment.” I grinned. “I need to ask you to do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

I held up a hand, interrupting myself. “And first, I know just as goddamn well as you do that none of this is any of my business. But chalk it up to me being a little worried about an old friend, OK? Here’s what I’d like. I’d like you and Linda to take the rest of the afternoon off, starting five minutes ago, and get yourselves moved out of that place on Third Street. Can you do that?”

He hesitated. “Well, sure, I guess, but-”

I shook my head. “At this point, it has nothing to do with right or wrong, or tenant rights, landlord rights, leases, ruts in the yard, motorcycle oil on the floor, or any other goddamn thing, Thomas. It has to do with you doing me a favor.”

“Well, I don’t see, then-”

I cut him off again. “I want you out of Carla Champlin’s way, Thomas. And not for your sake, either. For hers.”

“Is she nuts or what?”

“Well, some of both, probably. Or headed that way. I want to defuse this thing, today. And tomorrow, I’m going to ask that one of the home health workers from Social Services stop by and chat with her. In the meantime, let’s get you and Linda out of the line of fire, all right? I told her that you two can camp out in one of the guest rooms at my place, if you need to.”

“Thanks, sir, but that won’t be necessary. I’ve got a cousin who said he’s got a place he’d rent us. Maybe for a few bucks less than what I’m paying now, too.”

“Then go for it. Tonight. All right? And I’m serious. Not in the morning, not tomorrow afternoon. This very evening.”

Tom looked like he wanted to say something else but swallowed and settled for, “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” I turned to get into the car. “That’s one thing out of the way.” I stopped abruptly and glared at the young deputy. “Linda used the word fiancee. Is that right?”

He ducked his head and actually blushed. “We hadn’t told anybody yet.”

“Secrets around here seem to be department policy,” I said wryly. “Well, congratulations. You take good care of her.” He stammered something in return, but I didn’t hear it. I slid into 310, wincing as the hot vinyl seat scorched my backside.