Dead Weight

Chapter Eight

For an hour I poked here and there without particular rhyme or reason. The events of the evening jumbled in my mind, and I couldn’t see a well-defined path of action. I didn’t want to end up stumbling all over Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s trail, getting in his way, slowing him down. I idled 310 east on a deserted Bustos Avenue shortly after 4:00 a.m., not breaking fifteen miles an hour.

A mechanic at the Ford garage had replaced some part deep in the car’s guts, and it was almost eager. Still, fifteen miles an hour was just fine, a perfect match for my mood.

By habit, I drove with the windows open and the two-way radio turned low, listening to and smelling the night. In the past, that had always accomplished one of two things: It either cleared my mind or made me drowsy enough that I could go home and grab an hour’s sleep. This time I couldn’t even make myself hungry.

Turning south at the intersection with MacArthur, I cruised past the Sissons’ driveway. Bob Torrez’s old pickup truck squatted in the driveway, well back from the street. He’d been using that oil-burning, huge-engined heap since earlier in the day, his idea of an unmarked car.

Farther south on MacArthur, I passed the neighborhood where the undersheriff lived with his wife, Gayle. It was a scattering of squat, old adobe houses that sat helter-skelter with a spiderweb of dirt streets. The oldest neighborhood in the village, it had once been called La Placita and nestled right up to the banks of Posadas Creek. The creek became a dry arroyo, mines opened, Posadas bloomed, and MacArthur sliced through La Placita’s vitals and killed it.

A couple dozen families lived in that part of town, and Bob Torrez was related in one way or another to most of them.

As I drove past, I caught a glimpse of 308, his county car, parked under the big elm tree in his front yard.

Reaching Grande, I turned north and a few minutes later completed the short loop by crossing Bustos. Salazar and Sons Funeral Home loomed, the lights in the manicured front yard washing up the white marble facade. The place was garish and prosperous. A black Cadillac hearse was parked under the wrought-iron portico, no doubt waiting to be polished and prepped in anticipation of Jim Sisson’s last ride.

The lights were on at 221 Third Street. The streetlight half a block away cast vague shadows, but even in the poor light I could see that Carla Champlin would disapprove. While she lived in a manicured terrarium, this place was as desolate as the day it was built thirty years before as low-rent housing for copper miners. She may have been right-perhaps at one time the tiny yard had bloomed as a showplace, with a putting-green lawn. I couldn’t remember.

The front yard was dirt, basically a parking lot. A single scraggly, thirsting elm managed a few green leaves in the postage-stamp backyard. If the house was more than eight hundred square feet I would be surprised-not much larger than my kitchen and living room combined.

Linda Real’s Honda station wagon was parked in the narrow driveway, and pulled in beside it was Deputy Pasquale’s old Jeep Wrangler.

“Huh,” I said aloud.

Beyond the casual arm-on-shoulder I’d seen in the darkroom, there had been few other hints that indicated any particular relationship between Linda and Tom-although they had known each other back when he was still flipping cars as a part-timer for the village PD and she was a reporter for the Posadas Register. It was as a reporter that she’d been riding with one of our deputies when he’d stopped a suspect vehicle. A shotgun blast had killed the deputy and another had mangled Linda.

Her convalescence from long, complicated corrective surgery after the shooting had taken her out of Posadas, to live with her mother in Las Cruces.

Earlier in the spring, I’d hired Linda, despite her left eye blindness and left ear deafness. She could work wonders with a camera, was bright and quick, and had the potential to be the best dispatcher we had, next to Gayle Torrez.

In her complaint, Carla Champlin hadn’t mentioned that 221 Third Street was no longer bachelor’s quarters. I remembered her remark about the happily married McClaines and their one child and wondered if that had been a left-field way of voicing her disapproval of Linda and Tom’s cohabitation, if that’s, in fact, what was going on.

Parked to the right of the front door was a large motorcycle. I almost snapped on the spotlight but thought better of it. It was a Harley, but how new I couldn’t tell.

“Huh,” I said again. I hadn’t known that Pasquale fancied motorcycles-and didn’t know that he could afford a big, expensive road bike. If he was still making payments on the Jeep, that, coupled with his rent, would leave him just about enough from his meager county paycheck for one meal a week. No wonder he was prompt at the doughnut box when some kind soul brought them into the office.

I chuckled at myself. I was making the same kinds of assumptions for which I chided the deputies. The motorcycle might even belong to Linda. Who knew. Maybe she’d taken up black leather and small cigars during her off-hours. Tom might have inherited the Jeep from a rich uncle who had bought it to go hunting and then promptly dropped dead from a heart attack.

I idled 310 out of the neighborhood, leaving the kids to some short moments of peace and quiet.

Back on Bustos, I drove west. As I approached the Don Juan de Onate Restaurant, still two hours from opening, my stomach twinged with conditioned reflex. Turning southbound, I slowed as I approached 410 South 12th, a neat brick-and-stucco place on a double lot. I felt a silly twinge of loss when I noticed that the “for sale” sign was missing. Somehow, as long as that sign had been up, the last connection hadn’t been cut. Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her family had moved to the land of snow and lutefisk, but as long as they still owned 410 South 12th it seemed to me that there was a chance that Minnesota winters and summertime mosquitoes might chase them back to Posadas, where their home awaited.

A block south the pavement turned to dirt, and my car rumbled along toward the T intersection with State 17, the old highway that paralleled the interstate. Though it was once a major arterial across the country and even across the southern part of the state, only ranchers used it now, to reach their irrigation ditches on those rare occasions when there was enough water to bother.

“Three ten, Posadas.”

The voice was so faint I almost didn’t hear it over the crunching gravel. I turned up the volume and keyed the mike.

“Posadas, three ten.”

“Three ten, ten-thirty-nine.”

“I’m wandering,” I said without keying the mike. “I’m without status.” I pushed the button and said, “Three ten is ten-eight.”

“Ten-four, three ten. Can you…”

There was a pause, and I could picture young Sutherland leaning forward, looking at the worn copy of the ten code taped to the cabinet beside the radio. Normal conversations over the new cell phone units, despite their limitations and other drawbacks, made the old-fashioned ten-code system seem pretty silly.

“…ten-nineteen.”

“Ten-four,” I said. “ETA about six minutes.”

I reached a wide spot at Kenny Gallegos’s driveway and turned around, and in less than five minutes I pulled into the parking lot of the Public Safety Building. Frank Dayan, the publisher of the Register, stood by the back door, smoking.

I glanced at the dashboard clock. Four twenty-six a.m. If Frank wanted to talk to me without interruptions, he’d picked a good time.

I swung around to the curb and stopped, leaving the engine idling. Frank crushed out his cigarette and took his time putting the butt in the trash can by the door. Dressed in his usual khaki trousers and short-sleeved sport shirt, he thrust his hands in his pockets and ambled out to my car. This was not the ballistic Frank Dayan that I knew, rushing from merchant to merchant, pushing those column inches of advertising space for every penny he could squeeze.

“This meeting of Insomniacs Anonymous is hereby called to order,” I said, and he grinned, looking Irish as hell, more like a Frankie O’Rourke than a Dayan. He leaned both hands against the car door and regarded me with what I took for melancholy. “What’s up? You about ready for breakfast?”

He freed one hand and looked at his watch.

“You’ve got time,” I chided. “Don’t give me this ‘I’m busy’ nonsense. The world’s asleep.” I nodded toward the passenger side. “Get in.”

He did so, settling into the seat with a sigh. He regarded the stack of radios and other junk with interest. “I’ve never ridden with any of you folks before,” he said.

“Well, then,” I replied. “Let’s lift your level of boredom to new levels. Put on your seat belt.”

He struggled trying to find the buckle under all the crap in the middle of the seat but finally managed.

I jotted the time and Dayan’s presence in my log, clicked the mike, and said, “Three ten is ten eight.” Before Sutherland had completed half of his canned response, I had turned the volume down to a murmur.

“So,” I said, heading 310 out of the parking lot. “Is there anywhere in particular you wanted to go, or are you just cruising?”

Dayan shrugged. “I just wanted to chat with you about a couple of things, if you’re not too busy. Maybe get an update on the Sisson deal.”

No one asks for an update on anything at 4:26 in the morning, and I laughed. I was willing to bet what he wanted, and so I said, “Oh…busy. As you can see, I am awesomely busy, Frank. Tell you what. I was going down toward Regal for a bit. Maybe bust some illegals.” I glanced around toward the backseat, as if someone might be back there listening. “Maybe put the screws on some of them for a quick buck. Know what I mean?”

Frank Dayan’s reaction was just as I had expected. His jaw dropped a fraction and his head jerked. Before he could answer, I added, “You got a note, too, eh?”

My stomach churned again, and not from early-morning hunger, when he didn’t say, “What note?”