Privileged to Kill

19

The Posadas telephone directory told us that Teresa Davila lived at 100 Escondido Lane. She was listed under Teresa…not Bobby and Teresa Davila, or whatever her once-upon-a-time husband’s name was. The address was painted on the gate of the Ranchero Mobile Home Park.

As the tires of 310 crunched on driveway gravel, I scanned the rows of trailers. One or two of the twenty-four units had lights burning in the windows. Otherwise the park was dark, with a single sodium vapor light near the entrance. To the north and well above the level of the park, traffic droned by on the interstate, a constant infusion of noise.

A single light burned in the first trailer, where Taylor Boyd had his office.

“I’ll go in, sir,” Estelle said, and parked in front of Boyd’s trailer.

I watched her walk over to the porch and go up the steps two at a time, nimble as a teenager. About the fourth time she pressed the bell, I saw a light go on in the back. A moment later, the front door opened and a wash of light flooded out. Boyd’s T-shirt was stretched over a belly bigger than mine, and his boxer shorts somehow defied gravity.

He looked out at our car, frowned, and then squinted at the identification that Estelle held up. Finally he stepped out on the small porch and pointed toward the far end of the park. “About three trailers down,” I heard him say. Estelle didn’t buy the “about” and said something to which Boyd replied, “That’s right, the blue-and-white one.”

He said something else that I couldn’t hear even with Estelle’s window down.

He went back inside and before Estelle had reached 310, the light in the back of his trailer switched off.

“The blue-and-white one,” I said.

“Right. In slot three. But he doesn’t think they’re home.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said. Sure enough, the blue-and-white mobile home in the third slot was dark. There was a porch light fixture, but no bulb. Estelle cranked the spotlight around and illuminated a sorry hulk of a car that was parked next to the trailer, both back tires flat.

“My turn,” I said. I didn’t take the steps two at a time. In the harsh light from the spot, I watched where I planted each foot. There were only three steps up to the door, and I was glad of it. I rapped on the door, feeling the light-gauge metal bend under my knuckle. Estelle turned off the spotlight so my eyes would have a few minutes to adjust.

No one answered my knock, so I pressed the doorbell. I was surprised to hear it chime bright and cheerful inside. Just after my finger pressed the bell for the second time, I heard a light thud from inside the trailer, and then a voice.

I turned to look at Estelle and nodded.

If I had been Teresa Davila, I’m not sure that I would have opened my door at that hour to a fat stranger on my front porch. But she did and looked up at me with unfocused eyes heavy from sleep. Not counting about a hundred pounds, I immediately saw the family resemblance. Vanessa Davila was a young, heavyweight version of her mother.

I stepped back away from the screen door so she could see past me to the patrol car.

“Mrs. Davila?”

“What you want?” Her voice was flat and featureless.

“Mrs. Davila, I’m with the sheriff’s department. Is your daughter home?”

“What?” She said it as if I were speaking Dutch or Greek.

“Your daughter? Vanessa?”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing is wrong with her, ma’am. We just need to talk with her. Is she home?”

“No, she’s not home yet.”

“Do you know where we can find her?”

“What do you want?” This time a touch of late-night crankies tinged her voice.

“We need to talk with her.”

“You want to talk with Vanessa, you come back in the day time.” She started to close the door.

I heard the door of the patrol car open and saw Mrs. Davila’s eyes dart down to focus on Estelle as she approached.

“Who is this?”

“This is Detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman, Mrs. Davila.”

“Is she the one who needs to talk to Vanessa?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Estelle stopped with one hand on the thin aluminum railing and her left foot on the first step.

“Señora Davila,” she said, and her voice was soft and musical. “¿Vanessa…no esta aqui?” She made it sound as if it were really too bad we were missing the girl.

Mrs. Davila answered in a flood of rapid-fire, slurred Spanish that was far beyond my limited vocabulary. Estelle grimaced and then shrugged.

“Tal vez-” she started to say, and the woman interrupted her.

“Mas tarde, anoche,” she said. “O quizas manana, no se.” She glanced at me, then back at Estelle. “¿Esta la joven en un aprieto?”

Estelle smiled and shook her head. “No, I don’t think she’s in trouble,” she said in English, and Mrs. Davila’s hand crept up toward her throat, clasping the collar of her nightgown. “But we need to talk to her.”

“Is it about that little girl…”

Estelle nodded. “Yes, señora. We think that Vanessa might have seen her sometime yesterday.”

Mrs. Davila nodded vigorously. “They plan to go to the game tonight. But now, I don’t know…” Her voice drifted off in that delightful habit where the speaker expects the other person to supply the necessary details. But we didn’t know details, in any language.

“She went to the game anyway?” I asked, not bothering to add, “Even though her best friend just choked to death?” I didn’t say it for two reasons: Mrs. Davila didn’t need to hear it, and we didn’t know yet what the relationship had been between Maria Ibarra and Vanessa Davila.

“That’s what she said,” Estelle answered, and then to Mrs. Davila, “¿Es posible fue con varias amigas?”

The woman didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, whether her daughter had gone to the game alone or with a mob, and it was apparent that she really didn’t care…or if she did, she was so far from being able to do anything about it that she had given up long ago. We left it at that, and we didn’t promise to return…although I had a feeling Mrs. Davila would be seeing much more of us before it was over.

I settled back in the car and looked at Estelle. “I think it’s interesting that the girl comes and goes as she pleases, when she pleases. Mama didn’t seem the least bit uneasy about not knowing when the kid was coming home.”

“Oh, she’s uneasy, all right,” Estelle said, and swung the car around.

“She is?”

“Sure. But what can she say? What can she do? If she says anything to her daughter, she’d probably be beaten even worse.”

“Whoa,” I said, puzzled. “Beaten worse than how?”

Estelle shot a quick glance my way, and when she accelerated out onto Escondido, the back tires chirped. “You didn’t notice the bruises?” she asked.

I frowned. “No. I couldn’t see her well enough.”

“Especially around her left eye. A nice shiner.”

I hadn’t noticed that, and I began to wonder what else I wasn’t seeing. For a couple of blocks I just sat, staring out the side window at nothing. “Christ,” I said finally. “Remember when it used to be simple? Somebody would rob a store, and we’d chase ’em. Remember that? Or they’d have too much to drink and crash into a tree? Nice simple stuff like that.”

“It hasn’t been like that for a long time, sir.”

“A very long time. Too long.” I shook my head. “A horse, gun, and badge, just like Crocker said.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Do you want to go back to the office now?”

“Sure. Why not.” What I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. I picked up the microphone and rapped it against the dashboard, beating out a soft cadence of frustration. “So you think the girl beats her own mother?”

“Nothing would surprise me, sir. That’s the simplest explanation.”

“And the most depressing. What other explanations have we got, other than that maybe the mother makes a habit of walking into doorjambs?”

“A boyfriend, maybe.”

“At her age?”

“Sir…” Estelle said in the tone that she reserved for the times when my Stone Age heritage was showing. “Sir, boyfriends are possible at any age. But bet on the girl.”

“She’s big enough,” I said.

“Yes, she is. And Mrs. Davila doesn’t look like she’s capable of putting up much resistance.”

I keyed the mike. “PCS, 310 is ten-eight, ten-nineteen.”

Ernie Wheeler acknowledged, and I wondered if Sheriff Martin Holman was still standing behind him, waiting. It wasn’t like Holman to stay up during the night shift unless he absolutely had to. He preferred to meet the public refreshed and well rested, like any good salesman. I didn’t have any news to make him sleep any easier.