Dead Weight

Chapter Nine

Dayan reached into his pocket and pulled out a white envelope. From it he removed the now familiar piece of white typing paper, folded neatly in thirds, just like the other two.

“This came to my office today. Plain envelope, just my name typed on it.” He held it up as if I could read it in the darkness. I glanced his way, trying to work out in my mind how much I could trust him. “I gather you’re familiar with the contents?” he asked.

“‘Commissioner, you need to know that Tom Pasquale is a slimeball and is hitting up on nationals and tourists and God only knows who else, blah, blah, blah.’ Is that the gist of it?”

“Yes.” He folded the note, slipped it in the envelope, and extended it toward me. I took it and snapped it under the clip on my log. It lay there, on top of the junk pile, if Dayan wanted it back. “Except it was addressed to me, not a commissioner. You’re saying that they all got one, too?”

“No.” I paused as I cleared the intersection beyond the interstate and turned onto 56, heading toward Regal. “Sam Carter made a point of telling me that he got one. So did Arnold Gray. I haven’t heard from the others yet.”

“But you probably will.”

“No doubt.”

“Did you talk to the deputy yet?”

“No.”

Dayan paused. He reached out and beat a short tattoo on the dashboard with his index fingers. Maybe it helped him think.

“I guess it’s not anyone’s business but yours how you handle it, but are you going to talk to him?”

“When the time comes…if it comes. The first thing that has to happen is that we move beyond the anonymous note stage. If someone wants to come forward with the ‘documentation’ that the note promises and is willing to sign a formal complaint, then it’ll be a different ball game. But a sleazy unsigned note, sent to all the right people? I don’t think so.”

I knew it sounded as if I’d dismissed the contents of the note from my mind, continuing on as if it had never been delivered. If Frank Dayan thought that, it was fine with me. I trusted him as much as I trusted anyone associated with the media, but he didn’t have to know the nagging little seeds of doubt that damn note had planted in my mind. In that respect, the writer had been successful.

“So you tell me, Frank. What are you going to do? Are you going to run a story about it in the Register?”

His reply was snappy. “Come on, Sheriff. We don’t print rumors. We don’t print letters to the editor unless they’re signed and we can verify them. We don’t even print ‘name withheld’ letters when they ask. No guts, no signature, no letter. It’s that simple. And this kind of personal attack, even if it was signed? I don’t think so.”

“Commendable,” I said.

“I don’t think the letter would have been written if it weren’t an election year.”

“Oh? Not for me, it isn’t an election year.”

Dayan turned as much sideways as his seat belt would allow and rested his left arm along the back of the seat. He laced his fingers through the grillwork of the security screen that separated the backseat area from the front.

“Bob Torrez made a lot of people angry when he filed as an independent, Sheriff.”

“Whoopee.”

Dayan laughed. “I know, I know. You don’t care. You were appointed when Sheriff Holman got killed last spring and agreed to serve until after the election. And the first thing you did was appoint Bob as undersheriff.”

“All that’s public record,” I said, shrugging. “So what?”

“If Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t moved out of town, you’d probably have appointed her, right?”

I looked over at Dayan, amused. “I did appoint her, Frank. I appointed her for the last week that she was here. If that gave the county fathers conniptions, so much the better. And then she and her family moved, as you said. Torrez was the next logical choice.”

“Sure he was. And then he files as an independent for the election, with probably as good a chance of winning as anyone, including Mike Rhodes, Sam Carter’s brother-in-law, who just happens to be the only Republican candidate, and Leona Spears, who was unopposed in the Democratic primary, even though she doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell.”

“And all of this means…”

“You’re about as political as the amount of snow we get in the summertime, Sheriff.”

“Thank you,” I laughed. “I try to lead a clean life.”

“Have you wondered yet why you didn’t receive a letter?”

“The thought crossed my mind. But what good would it do to write to me? If there was some grand scheme to fleece the public, wouldn’t I be just as suspect as my deputies? Hell, if it were true, I’d just cover it all up, wouldn’t I? That’s how things are done these days in what little of the political world I ever hear about.”

“You know what I think?”

“What do you think.”

“I think it’s someone who knows you pretty well. They know that trying to get a rise, a reaction, out of you is probably a waste of time. Whoever it is knows that they can’t smear you personally. You’ve been around too long. Too many people know you, know what kind of a hardheaded old…” He paused, groping for just the right tone of insult that wouldn’t leave him stranded by the side of the road.

“Son of a bitch,” I prompted. “I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess,” I chuckled. “But I think you’re blowing it out of proportion, Frank. If someone’s got valid information on a crooked deputy, then why doesn’t he just come forward and spill the beans? Go to the district attorney’s office, or the attorney general. Sign a deposition. What’s the point in all this anonymous shit?”

“The county sheriff can be a powerful position, Bill.”

“I’m overwhelmed with all the power I seem to have,” I said.

He scoffed with amusement. “You’re a cop. Not a politician. But besides the schools, the other wings of the county government, and the hospital, your department is one of the largest employers in the county. That’s just for starters.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Sheriff sales. Civil work. Bids to important vendors. You can make other politicians look good or bad, your choice. On and on and on. Even the little stuff. You can talk to any service club any time you want as a guest speaker, beating your own drum.”

“That’s something that’s appealing, all right,” I scoffed.

“Not to you, maybe, but it’s all part of the package for someone who’s interested. It’s enough to make a regular citizen hesitate before going out on a limb against the county sheriff. There’s probably some fear of retribution, a little bit of paranoia that if they try to stand alone without official support they’re going to get squashed. It’s just easier to have someone else fight the battle for you. Being a whistle- blower is a lonely business. But an election.” He rapped the dashboard again for emphasis. “That changes the whole formula.”

“How so?”

“Hey, spread a little gossip, spread a little rumor, and pretty soon what happens? The rumor starts to take on a life of its own.”

“And so I gather you think these moronic letters are the first stage in some kind of organized attempt to discredit us, discredit Bob, discredit the department, so someone else can win. A little nasty publicity just as the campaign gets under way.”

“That’s a good guess. Either side stands to gain.”

“Why pick Tom Pasquale? He’s just a kid.”

“Assuming he’s innocent? He’s a good target, is why. He might have ruffled somebody’s feathers sometime in the past. There might be a grudge there. If I remember my own newspaper’s files, Pasquale has had his share of scrapes, and just enough heroics that when the story breaks in the newspapers, readers will say, ‘Oh yeah, him…’”

“When the story breaks?”

Dayan waved a hand. “A figure of speech. Carter and Gray received letters. They’re both Democrats. That leaves three to go. Tobe Ulibarri and Frank Weaver are Republicans. Janelle Waters is a Democrat. Care to bet who’s going to contact you next?”

“So why are you betting on the Democrats? Why am I going to hear from Janelle Waters…not that she’s such a bad dish to hear from, mind you.”

Waters topped the list of Posadas’s eligible singles. Her husband had been building a prosperous dental practice when cancer killed him at age thirty-eight. For reasons unknown to anyone but her, she had elected to remain in Posadas.

“Sheriff Martin Holman was a Republican, and an active one. You served as undersheriff for a long time before he took office and then nearly eight years as undersheriff for Holman afterward. Your department is a reflection of what he and you built as a team. Bob Torrez is a popular part of that. Hell, he’s related to half the Hispanic population of the county.”

“And if the Republicans jump on us, it’ll look like they’re turning on their own ‘team,’ as you put it. If they jump on Torrez, it’ll make them look vindictive, even though he was never a registered Republican anyway.”

“Something like that. All I’m saying is that to me, it explains why the one side is so quick to attack and the other side is holding back a little bit.”

“So who’s attacked? Neither Gray nor Carter wrote the note. They just apprised me of it.”

“And lost no time, either.”

“Why should they? If I was them, I’d give me the damn thing, too. And speaking of all that, you didn’t lose any time, either, Frank.”

“True enough. I hope that my motives are different, though.”

I turned 310 onto the broad shoulder in front of the Moore Mercantile hulk and snapped on the spotlight.

“What are you looking for?”

“We just check,” I said. “See that old stone building back there? It used to be a party spot. Sometimes folks from south of the border stop there, too. You never know.” I looked over at him as I snapped off the spotlight. “We just check. That’s what we do. We look a lot.”

We pulled back out on the road and headed south.

“Tell me about Jim Sisson,” Frank said.

“What’s there to tell? You’ve heard the basics already. He was working on a big old front loader and had one of the back tires held up by a chain from another tractor. The chain slipped and the wheel and tire crushed him against the wall of his shop. That’s it.” I glanced over at Dayan. “As the papers are fond of saying, ‘he is survived by his widow, Grace, and six children.’”

“It was an accident?”

I hesitated only a fraction of a second, but that was long enough to tell Frank Dayan what he wanted to know. There was no point in being coy.

“Don’t know,” I muttered, thinking back to the photos Linda Real had taken.

“I saw the yellow ribbon across the Sissons’ driveway, with the undersheriff’s truck parked there.”

“Yes.”

“If it were a simple accident, I don’t see much point in protecting the scene by having the undersheriff sit there all night.”

I fell silent for a moment, not bothering to tell Dayan that I didn’t have a clue about why my undersheriff was spending the night keeping two silent machines company when his young wife would have been a hell of a lot more cuddly. I said, “If I had any choice about what you print, I’d request that you said something vague like ‘investigation is continuing.’”

“Fair enough. If something breaks, will you give either me or Pam a call?”

“Of course.”

“How’s Linda doing, by the way?”

“Linda is a treasure, Frank. Stealing her away from you folks was the best thing we ever did.”

“And you’re not forgiven yet, either, let me tell you.”

We swept past the Broken Spur Saloon and in another couple of seconds passed the spot where the shooting of Linda Real and Deputy Paul Encinos had taken place two years before. As we started up the long, winding route through Regal Pass, I said, “After what she’s been through, she deserves some happiness. She seems content now, and she’s very good at what she does. And why she’s so happy, only she knows.”

Frank Dayan nodded, but I didn’t add that the source of much of Linda Real’s contentment was the human target of some creep with too much free time. That made me angry enough, but what was worse was the other side of the coin. If Tom Pasquale was a crooked cop, was Linda Real in on the scam, too?

“Shit,” I said aloud, forgetting in the recoil from the thought that I had a passenger.

“What?” Frank Dayan asked.

“Nothing. I was just telling myself stories. It’s an occupational hazard.” I looked at the clock. “Let’s circle through Regal, then head back and get some breakfast.”