Out of Season

CHAPTER THIRTY

Martin Holman had never hinted to me that he was the least bit interested in branching out on his own into criminal investigation. He’d never hinted to me that one of his passionate goals was to lead an important investigation-or any investigation, for that matter. I had considered ourselves lucky if we kept him from ruining evidence on those rare occasions when he had shown up at a crime scene. Thankfully, that hadn’t happened too often.

His turf, his expertise, had been administration-dealing with county government, other agencies, the forward march of technology, grant-writing, budget concerns-and especially the press. Over the past decade, Posadas had suffered its share of high-profile cases, the sort that attract big-city television cameras. Each time, Martin Holman had been an effective buffer. He was the elected official who represented the department when we needed an official “face.” Now I knew that I had only a matter of hours before providing that “face” was going to be my own personal headache-unless I could pawn the duty off on someone else.

With Martin Holman, my status had been simple, and perfectly suited to my liking. As undersheriff, I had been given supervisory status over all of the deputies and their law-enforcement activities. I had little or no interest in civil work, and so I had delegated the department’s civil matters to Sergeant Howard Bishop. The pace of civil work suited him just fine.

When it came to criminal investigations, Martin Holman had learned long ago to adopt a hands-off policy. He hadn’t interfered with my work, or attempted to supervise me-that being a losing battle anyway. It had taken him several years to accept Estelle Reyes-Guzman as more than just a pretty face.

He had sometimes offered suggestions and ideas-not all of them bad, either. On a few occasions-thankfully, very few-he had spent some time by himself in a marked patrol unit cruising the county, and those times always made me nervous. Gayle Sedillos had standing orders to call me whenever Martin Holman suffered an attack of lawmanitis and took it upon himself to go patrolling.

How Martin Holman had been elected to the county’s top law-enforcement position three times running was one of those political marvels that happened routinely in the southwest. But at least he had been no speedtrap-loving redneck, and if any county could win the “Be Kind to Tourists” award, it should have been Posadas-if only more tourists had chosen to stop.

Thus it was with considerable surprise that toward the back of the second file drawer from the top in the unit to the right of his desk, I stumbled upon a file division whose ear was clearly marked in the sheriff’s neat, almost architectural block printing. “Pending cases.”

“What pending cases?” I said and pulled out the entire section. We all had our own active files, kept separate from the main department collection until the cases were resolved one way or another. With some careful thought, I probably could have listed the important cases that each one of the deputies was working on at any given moment. We didn’t hide work, and we didn’t keep our favorites to ourselves.

But, judging by the contents of the folder, it appeared that Martin Holman had been doing exactly that.

Estelle looked over my shoulder and lifted up the corners of the manila folders. “He’s got three separate files here,” she mused. I handed the bundle to her and she opened the first file, turned, and spread it out on the desk. “Well, now.” She pressed the covers of the folder open flat against the desk and leaned on them while she looked at the pages inside, as if the covers were controlled by heavy springs, ready to snap the thing closed.

“So what is it?”

“A complaint filed against County Commissioner Sam Carter by one of his employees.”

“You’re kidding. Which one?”

“Taffy Hines.”

“You’re kidding again. Taffy?” An image of the stout, middle-aged cashier flashed through my mind. I could picture her where I’d seen her just hours before, bent over the inventory books at the register of Sam Carter’s supermarket.

Estelle nodded and held up a tape cassette in one hand and a deposition in the other. “Alleging telephone solicitation. She says here that she recorded Carter on three separate occasions. She calls them ‘obscene telephone calls soliciting sexual favors.’”

“What’s the date?”

“April nineteen is when she made the signed statement to the sheriff.”

I groaned. “I don’t want to hear it. I don’t know why it surprises me when I find out things like that.” I held out my hand. “Let me see that damn file.” I took the folder and scanned the deposition. “And Sam Carter, of all people. He’s got to be as old as I am. What a jerk. Why didn’t he just proposition her in the store when no one was around to listen?”

“I can see why the sheriff had this filed away in here,” Estelle said without trying to answer my question.

“Sure. With Carter being a county legislator, I’m not surprised that Martin was procrastinating.” I looked at the tape cassette, then dropped it back in the folder in disgust. “Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe if I ignore this, it will go away.”

“I’m sure,” Estelle said. She reached out for the folder. “Let me talk to Taffy and then to Mr. Carter.”

I shook my head. “With less than a week to go before you pack it in, I don’t think you want to get involved in a mess like this.”

Estelle almost smiled. “I think Taffy will drop the complaint, and I think Sam Carter won’t ever call her again,” she said.

I looked closely at her, then grinned. “Can I be there when you talk with Carter? I’m beginning to understand why he was concerned that you might be appointed sheriff.” She laughed and I gestured at the folders. “What’s the other stuff? I’m not sure I want to know.”

Estelle turned the second folder right side up and opened it. She frowned and read for several seconds. “It’s paperwork from Sheriff Burkhalter requesting an evaluation on Eddie Mitchell.”

“I’ll make sure Burkhalter gets something. Someday. What’s the third?”

Estelle opened the last folder, glanced at the cover page, and grinned.

“What?”

“You don’t want to know, sir.”

“Yes, I do. What is it?”

Estelle smiled up at me and handed me the folder so I could read it for myself. “It’s a list of people he wanted to be sure to invite to your retirement party, sir. It looks like he was still in the process of adding to it. Probably when he remembered a name, he’d add it to the list.”

“A party?”

“September thirtieth at the Don Juan de Onate, in the Conquistador Room. Seven P.M.”

“He never told me about that. Let me see this thing.”

“Of course he didn’t, sir. Evidently it was supposed to be a surprise.” I caught the wistful note in her voice and glanced up at her.

“There’re a lot of people here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Including you and Francis.” She nodded and I closed the folder. “You were going to come all the way down from Minnesota?” She nodded again and I added, “That would be silly.” The telephone on the desk buzzed and blinked, and with a sigh, I dropped the three folders on the desk.

I picked up the phone and slumped down in Holman’s chair. “Gastner.”

“George Payton on line one, sir,” Gayle Sedillos said, and the phone clicked.

“Thanks,” I said and punched the button. “George? This is Bill. What’s up?”

“Hey there,” George Payton said. We’d been friends for two decades, and we were both at that stage where we figured the other would die first. “I’ve got company.”

“I know you do,” I said.

“This is sure a sorry, sorry business,” he said and coughed. “How come you didn’t come over with these two feds?”

I chuckled. “Estelle and I are sorting through the wreckage of Martin Holman’s office paperwork, George. I couldn’t break away.”

“Sorry, sorry thing. But Eddie’s all right.”

“Yes, he is,” I said, assuming he was referring to Sergeant Mitchell. “What can I do for you?”

“Look…” He hesitated. “The law says that I have to make all the federal paperwork involving firearm sales available to law enforcement if so asked, correct?”

“That’s correct, George.”

“There’s nothing on the yellow forty-forty seventy-three form that asks why a customer is purchasing a firearm. Did you know that?”

“I guess I knew that.” I heard some conversation in the background and could picture Agent Walter Hocker standing there patiently, arms folded over his chest.

“If a bona fide law-enforcement officer asks me what my knowledge is of a customer’s purpose in purchasing any weapon-or any product at all, for that matter, even a goddam chain saw-am I required to tell him?”

“If there’s evidence of a crime, and if what you know is germane, and if it’s not self-incriminating, then yes-either now or later, and later, it may be in front of a Grand Jury,” I said. “But understand that we’ve got a significant criminal offense here. We need all the help we can get.”

“What’s the offense?”

“Evidence indicates that Martin Holman was murdered.”

Dead silence followed. “Nobody told me that,” Payton said finally. “Johnny Boyd did that?”

“We don’t know who did it.”

“I thought Martin was killed in a plane crash.”

“He was.”

“Then you’re not making sense.”

“George, we’ve known each other for a long time, isn’t that true?”

“Sure enough, we have.”

“Will you trust me on this one, then?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure.”

Payton chuckled dryly. “Sure I do. So you want me to tell these gents anything they want to know?”

“That’s just about it. And by the way, while I’m talking to you…did Johnny Boyd ever actually tell you why he bought all that hardware?”

“Well, of course he did.”

“Then tell the agents, George. It’s as simple as this: what Johnny Boyd did with his various weapons purchases, and I mean all the details, may well end up as the stuff of a Grand Jury session. Whether he’s innocent or not.”

“Sorry, sorry state of affairs.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more. By the way, do you have any South Korean two-twenty-three ammo in stock?”

“Sure.”

“The agents are going to ask you that. Do me a favor and give them a few samples, will you?”

“I can do that. What, did someone shoot Holman, or what?”

“Someone shot the plane and the pilot, George.”

“Good God.”

“Yep. Just tell the feds what they need to know. And keep it confidential for the time being, all right?”

Payton agreed, and I hung up. “I don’t know why he felt the need to call me,” I said.

“Because you’re an old, trusted friend, sir,” Estelle replied. “Remember Johnny Boyd saying to have Judge Hobart sign the warrant? Same thing.”

I sighed. “I suppose.” I looked up at her. “Can I go to Michigan with you?”

“Minnesota, sir. And that’d be neat.”

I grinned, picked up the three file folders again and handed them to Estelle. “That’d be neat,” I repeated. “And this shit is not neat. A complaint of solicitation by one of the county fathers, a threat to hire away one of my dwindling supply of best officers, and a goddam party that Marty Holman will never get to attend.” I relaxed back in Holman’s chair and watched Estelle shuffle the files into order. A deep weariness was finally beginning to catch up with me. I rested my head back against the chair.

“I’d like to know what the actual trajectory of that bullet was,” Estelle said, and she sounded as if she were talking just to try to keep me awake. “What the path was through the airframe. And then, if we can coax Charlotte Finnegan to focus a little, she might remember just where the plane was when she heard the backfiring. That might give us a closer idea of where the shot came from.”

“Within a county or two,” I said. “Buscema will be down at the hangar, I imagine.”

“Unless he took time out to eat or sleep.”

I looked at Estelle in mock surprise. “Now who does that?”