Privileged to Kill

7

Sergeant Robert Torrez pulled his patrol car in beside mine just as I shoved the gear lever into “park.” His face didn’t show any excitement, and he methodically gathered his paperwork before uncoiling his large frame from the front seat.

The air was the crisp of predawn with the sun just beginning to highlight the tops of the San Cristobal mountains to the west. If Orion had ever been in the sky, it was long gone then. It would have been a nice morning to sit on the back steps, enjoying a cup of fresh brewed coffee and a cigarette. Out of habit, my fingers began to grope in my shirt pocket and settled for a perfunctory pat of the pocket flap.

Torrez held up a manila folder.

“Archer let me borrow his guidance department’s file on the girl.”

I stopped short and frowned. “She’s local then. How come none of us knew her? And who are her parents? Has someone contacted them yet?”

Torrez held open the back door of the old red adobe building that had housed the sheriff’s department since the structure was built in 1934, and then followed Estelle and me inside. “You’ll get a pretty good idea about that when you look at the file, sir.”

“Who’s talking with her parents?” I repeated. “Did you assign someone to that?”

Torrez took a deep breath. “Eddie Mitchell said he’d work on it.”

“Work on it?” I frowned again. “Let’s see this thing.”

And at 5:15 A.M., the paperwork that had accumulated to mark a brief life was spread out on my desk.

I tipped my head back so I could see the small typing. “Maria Ibarra,” I read. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“She was fifteen,” Estelle murmured, reading over my shoulder.

“And looked twelve,” I said, reading the short biographical information form quickly. “Did Eddie find this guy?” I tapped the space for “parent/guardian” that listed the name Miguel Orosco. “I know a Manny Orosco, but he sure as hell doesn’t have a Las Cruces address…or a kid.”

“We haven’t found him yet,” Torrez said.

I frowned. “Did he check this?” Orosco had listed a Las Cruces address for residence, but it was a post office box number-no street address.

“He’s working on it, sir,” Torrez said.

“There’s not much here,” I said. “The school just lets them walk through the front door like that? Where was she living? In a culvert somewhere?”

Estelle Reyes-Guzman took a deep breath. “A public school isn’t a high security place, sir.” She indicated the handwritten addendum for “shot records” at the bottom of the form where someone had printed “REF/Paddock.” “Dawn Paddock might know about her.”

“She might.” Dawn Paddock had been the school nurse for eighteen years. When my youngest son had busted his ankle playing basketball in gym class, she’d told him to lie down on a cot outside her office for half an hour to see if the ankle felt any better. My hopes for information from her didn’t soar. But it was something.

The rest of the information added very little to the picture. A copy of her schedule showed that Maria Ibarra had been taking all the standard eighth-grade academic courses, along with art and Spanish II as electives. “Do eighth-graders take second-year language courses?” I asked, and Estelle shrugged.

“If she didn’t speak much English, they might have put her in a second-year Spanish class as a way of helping her. Especially if she was an accelerated student. Glen Archer would know.”

I picked up a form labeled Parent/School Cooperative Checklist. The lines for student and parent signatures were blank, as were the twelve items.

“‘I expect my child to act respectfully and be treated with respect,’” I read, and tossed the paper back on the desk. “Cute.” The home language survey form was also blank. “And this is all that Archer had?”

Torrez nodded. “Apparently the girl was new in the district.”

“Apparently very new,” Estelle said with considerable acid.

“Well, she had to have been living with somebody,” I said. I gathered the papers and handed the file to Torrez. “Keep after it, Robert. Talk with the nurse, the counselor, whoever. Get ’em out of bed.”

Estelle was already moving toward the door, and I followed her out into the hall and up the stairs toward Wesley Crocker’s cell.

Crocker wasn’t asleep. I’m sure his interior clock had told him half an hour before that it was time to be up and pushing that bicycle into another bright New Mexico day.

The jail cell was far from bright. Crocker lay on his back, contemplating the ceiling, one arm hooked behind his head.

When he saw us, he sat up quickly and swung his feet to the floor.

“Well, good morning to you, sir…and to you, miss.” He turned slightly and patted the heavy brown blanket just above the hem where the legend POSADAS COUNTY CORRECTIONS had been stenciled in black ink. “I’ve certainly slept on worse.”

I unlocked the cell and motioned him out. “We’d like to talk with you again, Mr. Crocker.” He rose to his feet and I indicated the conference room down the hallway. I didn’t bother with the handcuffs and Wesley Crocker didn’t offer his wrists.

He took the same chair he’d used before and folded his hands on the oak table, expectant.

“Mr. Crocker, you understand that you haven’t been formally charged with any crime?” He nodded and I flipped through the pages of my small pocket notebook. “When we last talked, you said a couple things that puzzled me.”

His eyebrows met over his nose but he didn’t say anything.

I gazed at him for a long moment until one of his hands fidgeted on the tabletop. “Mr. Crocker, why did you lie to us about what you did last night?”

His eyebrows knit even further, and his head tilted a fraction. “Sir?”

“You told us that yesterday evening you were out there on the football field by the goalposts, enjoying the stars. Under the glare of two sodium vapor lights. That’s hard to do.” He started to say something, and I interrupted. “And you mentioned the constellation Orion-how you had a grandstand view of it. At this time of year, it isn’t visible in the western sky until just before dawn.” I sounded as if I knew exactly what I was talking about. Wesley Crocker looked down at the table.

Estelle and I waited while Crocker mulled things over. Finally he held up his hands and said, “It was a stupid thing to say, sir.”

I waited.

“Did you ever get caught doing something when you were a kid and you were so eager to get off the hook that you said too much?” The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes crinkled, but I wasn’t in the mood to share childhood humor. “Well, that’s about what happened, and it wasn’t just the smartest thing I ever did, I can see that.”

“Explain.”

He shrugged. “There ain’t nothing much more to it. I was campin’ right where I said I was, trying’ to decide if I was going to be able to get any sleep with all the glare from the field lights. That’s all. When you folks talked to me, I just padded the story a little. Kind of…you know, to make it sound maybe a little better. I shouldn’t have done that.”

I sat back in the chair and folded my arms across my chest. “Did you know what the officer was looking for when he arrived?”

“No, sir.”

“You had no idea that there was someone under the bleachers?”

“No, sir. I sure didn’t.”

“When you heard the kids in the cars earlier, did you see any of them get out of the cars? Anything like that?”

“No, sir. It was too dark, too far away. My eyes aren’t just what they should be anymore.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

“No, sir. Well, now, wait a minute. One of the cars was quiet, and one was a little louder, if you know what I mean. It might have been a diesel, maybe.”

“Car or truck? Pickup?”

He shrugged helplessly. “I couldn’t say. It was just dark forms and taillights.”

“They didn’t have their headlights turned on?” Wesley Crocker shook his head. “And how long was it from the time the two vehicles drove away to the time the police officer arrived?”

Crocker frowned. “Well, like I say, one of ’em left first, then the other after a few minutes. And I’d say that it was fifteen minutes after that when the police car showed up. Maybe twenty at the most.”

“And that’s it.”

“Yes, sir.” Crocker didn’t bother tacking on the I’m telling the truth…why don’t you believe me? that kids do when they’re lying through their teeth.

Estelle Reyes-Guzman tapped the eraser of her pencil on the table thoughtfully.

“Mr. Crocker, who are you?”

“Ma’am?” Crocker said uneasily.

“Who are you?” Her black eyes held Crocker without blinking. “An officer is working up a background check, but save us some time.”

“Well, I…I been around a bit. Like I said, the good Lord has seen to bless me with my health, and there’s a lot of this country I still want to see.”

“Do you work?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. I mean, not at any one thing for any length of time.”

“Why not?”

He frowned at that, and spent a handful of minutes sifting possible answers. He settled for a shrug. “It’s not my way, I guess. Now and then, maybe, for a little while. And then it always seems more important to me to be movin’ on.”

“When was the last time you worked for someone?”

“For pay?”

“For whatever.”

Crocker glanced at me as if maybe I was going to help and then turned back to Estelle. He leaned forward so that he rested his chest on his hands. “I stopped for a few days…it was three days…at Thomas Lawton’s place east of Button, Utah. Lawton’s Wagon Works, is what he calls it. He makes all kinds of wagons. Repairs old ones. That sort of thing.”

“What did you do for him?”

“He was building a new corral. He said his tractor was broke down and so he couldn’t use the posthole digger. I dug holes.” Crocker smiled and held up his right hand, pointing to the remains of what might have been a blister under his ring finger joint.

“For three days?”

“Well, we did a lot of talking, ma’am. He knows about all there is to know about old wagons, and I had lots of questions. It’s fascinating.”

“When was the last time you talked with your sister?”

A flicker of regret stabbed across his rough features. “I told you about her? I know I gave her name to that young officer.”

“You told us you had a sister in Anaheim.”

He nodded. “I don’t call her much. Me and her don’t see eye to eye on most things. I tell her that yes, maybe someday I’d like to settle in one spot, maybe have my own post office box number.” He grinned. “That always makes her mad. You talk to her and you’ll see what I mean.” He traced the grain of the table with a stubby fingernail. “I like to keep a journal of things. Places I’ve been, folks I’ve met. I write down just about everything and then I send it all to her. I’ve asked her to keep my records for me. Someday, maybe, I’d kind of like to see them all together.” He smiled again. “See what all those years and all those miles look like in one place.”

“So she has this diary of yours?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. At least I asked her to keep it. She said she would. You can read that and see just exactly where I’ve been, and who I’ve seen over the years.” The silence returned, and after a moment Crocker added, “And that’s why it’s so stupid, that fib I told you. You want to know about me, you just read that journal.”

“We’ll do that.”

“I gave that young police officer my sister’s name and address.”

I nodded.

“Do you have any police record, Mr. Crocker?” Estelle asked. It wouldn’t take long for the National Crime Information Center to spit out whatever it had on Wesley Crocker, but it was always interesting to hear a person’s own version of scrapes with the law.

“No, ma’am. Never.”

“If we ask you to stay available for a few days, do you have somewhere to stay? Other than the park or the football field?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Mr. Crocker,” I said, “you understand that you may be an important witness to events that happened last night?” He nodded. “The county will pay for a room at the MotorCourt Inn over by the interstate interchange. We’d like you to stay there.”

Crocker waved a hand. “No need to spend that kind of money. My little room down the hall here is just fine.” He grinned. “You might leave the door ajar. That would make it a bit more homey.”

“We really can’t do that,” I started to say, thinking of the myriad reasons why the sheriff’s department couldn’t become a civilian R. V. park. Estelle stood up.

“Call it protective custody,” she said. “It might be better if he stays here. We don’t know who else saw him at the football field.”

Wesley Crocker looked skeptical. “Oh, now, there isn’t anyone who’d care much about me,” he said.

“You have too much faith in your fellow man,” I muttered.

“Yes, sir. But I don’t mean to be any trouble.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“You’re thinking of assigning Pasquale to him?” Estelle said, but it was one of those rare occasions when she hadn’t read my mind correctly.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got other plans for Officer Pasquale.”