Kenny Carter’s Jeep left the interstate and headed up Posadas’ Grande Avenue. I half-expected to see the kid turn on MacArthur, aiming for his sweetheart’s, but apparently the love of his life—if we were right about the kids—wasn’t the first thing on his mind. The Jeep pulled up into the parking lot of the Family SuperMarket. We drove by just in time to see the Jeep swing around back, into the alley.
“You want to give them some time?” Bob Torrez asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said. “What I want is some answers.”
Torrez parked the patrol car on the north side of the store, next to Sam Carter’s black Explorer.
As the automatic doors swung open to greet us, Taffy Hines looked up from register one, black marker in hand. She had what looked like a proof of the weekly full-page grocery ad spread out on the conveyor. A weekday midmorning obviously wasn’t hustle time for shoppers.
With a slight smile, she pointed over her shoulder with the marker. “His Nibs is in the office,” she said. “I assume that’s who you want to see, unless you’re here to actually buy something.” She grinned good-naturedly.
“Thanks,” I said. “We need to see Sam.” I stepped close to her and paused. “I’m sorry if you’re getting sucked into this mess.”
Taffy straightened up, marker poised. “Sheriff,” she said, voice even and low, “I could really care less. You just do what you have to do.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, reaching out to touch her lightly on the forearm. If he bothered to look, Sam Carter could see us through his mirrored observation window, so I didn’t bother with subtlety, didn’t bother trying to make the visit look as if we’d just dropped by to pass the time of day or to check bargains on cookies.
As I opened the swinging door with the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
sign, Kenny Carter was coming down the back stairs from the office. He saw Torrez and me and stopped on the bottom step. His shoulders sagged just a touch, and he leaned against the wall.
“How you doin’, Kenny,” I said. He straightened up and glanced toward the exit door at the rear of the building. “Nobody’s going to bother your Jeep, son. Can we talk for a minute or two?”
Sam Carter emerged from the office door and stood on the narrow landing at the top of the steps.
“What have you got to tell me?” he said.
I shrugged. “I think it’s time we had a little chat, Sam.” I stepped forward toward the stairs, giving Kenny the choice of blocking my path, trying to bolt past me, or retreating uphill. The stairs were too narrow for both of us. He retreated, and Torrez and I trudged up the stairway behind him.
“Come on in,” Carter muttered. “I’ve got a lot of things I need to be doing, so I hope this won’t take too long.”
He sat down in his chair by the idling computer and waved a hand toward a single straight-backed chair over by the bookcase. The row of catalogs and binders threatened to explode off the shelf, and I pulled the chair out so I wouldn’t be caught in the avalanche.
Kenny stood by the corner of his father’s desk, trying his best to look unflustered. He wasn’t very good at it. He toyed with a can of soda that I guessed he’d brought up from the Jeep, took a perfunctory sip or two, and then set the can on the narrow windowsill. Maybe it was Bob Torrez’s towering presence that made Kenny nervous. If he wanted to bolt out the door, he’d have to go through the undersheriff, and that clearly wasn’t going to work.
“Let’s just cut right to it, Sam.” I shifted on the chair, trying to avoid the crack in the wooden seat.
“I’d welcome that,” he said, and I knew he didn’t mean it.
“Kenny here knows the Sisson family, and he had contact with them recently.”
“Now how do we know that?” Carter snapped.
I sighed. “Sam, I think now is the time to stop playing the games, all right? We’re not all blind and deaf. We talk to people. We know that Jennifer Sisson is pregnant, and we know that particular situation has to be partly responsible for some of the hell that family has been through recently.”
Carter started to shift in his chair, and I leaned forward, watching his face closely.
“And it’s no secret that Kenny here has been keeping company with the young lady,” I added, turning to Kenny. “Am I right?”
He bit his lip and took a bit too long to nod agreement, as if he needed the time to calculate his odds. He was a pretty good-looking kid, lanky and tough, with a bit more height and weight than his father and some of his mother’s darker complexion.
“So then. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put it together.” I leaned back, regarding Kenny. “More than one person assumes that you’re the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child. What do you say?”
“Now who says she’s pregnant?” Sam Carter barked, the first to be about two steps behind.
“You’re going to tell us that she’s not?” Bob Torrez said quietly.
Sam jerked around as if he’d been touched with a cattle prod, and he glared at Torrez.
“Well…”
“And it really doesn’t matter who told us, does it?”
“Of course it matters,” Carter exploded. “Jesus, you can’t just go around spreading rumors like that, getting people all worked up.”
“Yes, she’s pregnant,” Kenny Carter said before his father had a chance to take another breath. “So what.”
“Listen, Son—” Sam started, but Bob cut him off.
“The fact that Jennifer is or isn’t pregnant doesn’t matter, Kenny. At least not to us. At least not yet. What matters is that we find the person who killed James Sisson.”
“What, and you think that my son knows something about that? Don’t be ridiculous. And for one thing, nobody’s even proved it to be murder yet. It’s just all theory on your part. Lots of publicity.”
Torrez pushed himself away from the door and walked to the desk. His head was a scant inch below the ceiling fixture. “Earlier this morning, Kenny, we drove to your job site south of Deming, as you well know. When Mrs. LaCrosse called out there and tipped you off, you ran back here as fast as your little Jeep could go, short of getting a second traffic ticket.” He stopped and grinned at the expression on Kenny Carter’s face.
“Yeah,” Torrez added, “it’s a small world. But for starters, let’s establish some relationships. Jennifer Sisson is pregnant—everyone seems to agree on that. Are you the father?”
“Now listen,” Sam Carter said, but Torrez held up a hand.
“No, I’m not,” Kenny said from between clenched teeth. “I don’t know who knocked her up, but it wasn’t me.”
“All right.” Torrez nodded pleasantly. “Fair enough. How do you know it wasn’t you?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” Sam said, and he managed to find a small clear area in the landfill that was his desk so that he could slap the desktop with the flat of his hand. “What the hell does it matter, anyway? Whether the boy is or isn’t?” A vein pulsed on the side of his neck, and he was red enough to have spent the whole day out in the sun. “Hell, Kenny, tell ’em the truth, if that’s what they want to hear.”
“I told them the truth.”
“And on Tuesday night, did you have occasion to go over to the Sissons’ place?” I asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t go over and talk to Jim Sisson?”
“No.”
“Did you know whether or not Jim knew that his daughter was pregnant?”
“I wouldn’t know. But I don’t see how he couldn’t know.”
“Did you know what Jim’s reaction to that news might be?”
“How could I know that? If I was him, I’d be pissed. She’s only fifteen, or something. What do you expect?”
“Would he blame you, do you think?”
“Yes. And that’s what a couple of the guys told me. Jennifer was telling her friends that it was me. Like she was proud of getting knocked up, or something. But I don’t know for sure. I haven’t talked to him in a while. If he was all mad at me, that’s the last place I wanted to go.”
“Were you on friendly-enough terms with him before?”
“I guess.”
“You guess,” I said. “When was the last time you talked with Jim Sisson?”
He frowned. For once Sam Carter kept his mouth shut. He gazed at his son, face flushed with anger.
“Last week, maybe.”
“That recently?”
“Something like that. Jennifer and me had an argument and broke up. At least we hadn’t talked in a while. I was figuring that maybe we could get back together, you know? I mean…you know. I like her. I’d see her out on the street, but she wasn’t about to talk to me. I saw Jim comin’ out of the auto parts place one day last week, when I was goin’ in. I think it was Saturday, maybe. He was like, ‘I haven’t seen you around in a while,’ and I said, ‘No, I think Jenny’s mad at me for something,’ and he was all, ‘Well, that’s how women are,’ and then he asked me where I was workin’, and I told him LaCrosse’s, and he said that was good. And that was it.”
“So he knew that you’d been going out with Jennifer?” I asked.
“Sure, he knew.”
“And that was the last time you saw him alive? Last Saturday?”
Kenny Carter nodded.
Torrez rested his hands on his utility belt. “And at that time did you know that Jennifer was pregnant?”
“Nope. And I don’t think Mr. Sisson did, either. If he had, he wouldn’t have been all calm and everything.”
“When did you hear that she was pregnant?”
“A friend of mine that talked to a friend of hers called me and told me.”
“When was that?”
Kenny Carter shrugged. “I don’t know. A day or so before her dad—”
“Maybe Sunday then? Maybe Saturday? It was after you saw Jim coming out of the store?”
“Yeah…it was after that.”
Torrez shook his head slowly. “Kenny, if we drove over to the Sissons’ right now and asked Jennifer who the father of her child was, what do you think she’d say?”
The kid’s expression was bleak. “I don’t know what she’d say,” he said. “I just know it wasn’t me. And I don’t know why she’d blame me, neither.”
“Give me a reason to believe that,” I said.
He looked at me for a long time, longer than most kids his age bother to think about anything. “Jennifer and me…well, the last time we…were together was early June. Like about the fifth or so. I remember ’cause I started with LaCrosse the next day, and Jennifer was sore ’cause I was going to be workin’ out of town.”
“And that’s the better part of seven weeks ago,” I said.
Kenny almost smiled. “And knowin’ Jenny, the second she knew she was pregnant, she’d blab it to her friends. That’s the way she is. Got to have something to talk about. Nothin’ much embarrasses her. And I know she wouldn’t wait for no two months to go by before she said something.”
“Maybe she wasn’t sure at the time,” I said.
Kenny glanced at me sideways. “Yeah,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.
“But she never actually called you, is that right?” Torrez asked.
“Nope. I ain’t talked to her in probably three weeks.”
I pushed myself to my feet. “Interesting,” I said, and reached across the desk to the windowsill. I picked up Kenny Carter’s soda can by the bottom rim. “Mind?”
He shook his head.
“Kenny, I want you to understand the serious nature of all this,” I said, and held up the can. “You can cooperate with us or not, just as you see fit. But a simple DNA test can establish whether or not you’re the father of that child. That way, we know that we have the story straight.” I didn’t bother to tell the kid that a DNA test was neither simple nor even a remote possibility.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “I don’t know what an empty can of Coke is going to tell you, but I ain’t lying.”
“So that’s where we stand at the moment,” I said, nodding. “You want to tell us why you took off when you heard we were driving out?”
Kenny shot a quick glance over at his father, then at me. “I don’t know. I guess I just panicked, is all.”
“Just because we wanted to talk to you is cause to panic?”
“Well, I figured it was something serious, with you driving all the way down to Deming to see me.”
I turned and said to Sam, “Anything else you want to tell us, Sam?”
He got to his feet, careful not to kick the overloaded trash can.
“The sooner this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game is over, the happier I’ll be. I still say it was an accident that killed Jim Sisson, nothing else.”
“Maybe so, Sam, maybe so.”
Bob Torrez hadn’t finished, though. He reached across the desk and picked a cigarette butt out of the ashtray, holding it by the crushed, burned end. “You mind?”
“There’s fresh ones you could buy down by the registers,” Sam Carter said.
“No thanks. But as long as we’re running DNA tests on lip cells, we might as well cover all the bases.” Sam’s eyes narrowed, and any goodwill he might have harbored for Robert Torrez vanished. And he didn’t rise to the bait.
I smiled. “Thanks for your time.”
I took my time heading down the stairs, trying to keep the damn treads in focus around the bifocals. Out at the car, Bob Torrez dug a couple of plastic bags out of his briefcase and sacked the can in one and the cigarette butt in the other.
“Sam was pissed,” he said.
“Sure enough,” I replied. “If it turns out that the kid’s lying, he’s going to be more than pissed. Why the butt?”
I damn near fell into the passenger seat, always surprised when my insomnia-driven body decided it was time to poop out. Torrez stowed the two evidence bags carefully in his briefcase and snapped the lid shut.
“I guess I did that just to tweak Sam a little more, give him something else to think about,” he said. “Ah, I probably shouldn’t have.” He grimaced. “It’s the idea of the thing, see. If I was to mention to someone that we were running a paternity test on Sam Carter, well…”
I grinned at Bob and he shrugged and added, “Imagine the political miles that kind of rumor is worth. I wouldn’t do it, of course, but Sam doesn’t know that. A little worry is good for him.”
“I never thought of you as devious before, Robert,” I said.
“Me, neither.”
I thought we’d made some progress with our fishing. For one thing, my large gut’s feeling was that Kenny Carter was lying. He was just too goddamn earnest and believable to be believed. And Bob Torrez agreed.
But since neither Jennifer Sisson nor her mother was protesting Kenny’s suspected paternity up and down the street, the kid had good reason to stonewall us until we could sledgehammer some holes in his defenses. The trouble was, I didn’t have a clue about how we might do that.
If he was lying about fathering Jennifer’s child, then there was a good chance some connection existed between him and Jim Sisson that Kenny didn’t want us sniffing into, and that idea intrigued me.
All of this seemed a profitable avenue to explore, if we could find a way, especially since we didn’t appear to have any others.
Bob Torrez dropped me off at the office, remarking that after a quick errand or two, he wanted to head south toward the little village of Regal and “check my freezer.” I knew what that meant. We all had our worry sites—I suppose my personal favorite was the booth at the Don Juan de Oñate Restaurant. Robert, the unrelenting hunter, liked to cruise the boonies, watching the game animals that he would hunt come fall. I could imagine that as he sat on some knoll with binoculars glued to his eyes watching the phantoms of antelope or elk in the distance, the problems of the day might sift into some perspective.
As I walked into the office, I toyed with my own important decision—lunch or a nap. I checked my mailbox and found the ubiquitous Post-it note, this time telling me that Judge Lester Hobart had called. His office was no more than a hundred yards from mine, over in the new east wing of the Public Safety Building. But with the good judge’s gout, a walk of even a few yards was torture for him. I crumpled up the note, wondering if the judge had received his own version of the Pasquale letter, and went to return the call.
Violet Davies, the court administrator, answered the phone.
“Violet,” I said, “this is Gastner. What’s new in your life?” I could picture her pretty face framed with all the tight blond curls, breaking into the easy, bright smile that made nasty court appearances just a touch more pleasant for so many people.
“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” she giggled. “Ah, well…” She let that thought drift off.
“Just one of those days?” I could hear a voice or two in the background. Her office was sort of like a nurses’ station in the hospital, open to the hallway that led to the courtroom’s back door, the judge’s chambers, and the other county offices beyond, but partially corralled by a low counter where she met the public.
“Well, we’ve had company most of the morning. Really interesting company. You got the judge’s note?”
“Yes.”
“He’d like to meet you for lunch, if that’s possible.”
“Sure enough possible. Will you join us?”
She laughed. “No, thanks. I’ll keep Carla company.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Her voice dropped a bit. “Carla Champlin’s been sitting out in the hall all morning. She said she’s going to sit there until the judge signs a court order evicting one of her tenants.”
“Lucky you,” I said. “She bent my ear a day or so ago, but I guess that didn’t do any good. Did you tell her to bring a pillow? My guess is that it’s going to be a long wait.”
“Oh, sure,” Violet said. “You come over and tell her that.”
“Nope. Did the judge say where he wanted to escape to?”
“He asked that you meet him at the country club at twelve-thirty, if that’s going to be possible for you.”
“I can do that,” I said, and groaned inwardly.
“He said it was his treat,” Violet added, and I grinned. After nearly thirty years, the judge knew my habits, even if he didn’t share my enthusiasm for Mexican food.
“Well, tell His Honor to sneak out the back door. I’m on my way.”
“I’ll do that,” she said. “And so will he.”
I could picture Carla Champlin, ramrod straight, jaw thrust out pugnaciously, sitting on the blond oak bench under the display of Western paintings by various county artists. Maybe after a few more hours her bony butt would hurt enough that she’d go away. Or maybe she’d overheard Violet and even at that moment was planning to join the judge and me for lunch.
I suppose I was a touch annoyed with Carla, too. I’d told her that I would talk to Pasquale, and I had. She wasn’t allowing much time for success before badgering someone else. But if she wanted to sit in the courthouse hallway, that was her call. She could talk to the potted plants. I’d rather have a conversation with a good green chili burrito.
The Posadas Country Club was less than two years old, and despite the grand implications of its name, it was no more than a nine-hole patch of irrigated sand, rattlesnakes, and Bermuda grass. The club sported a restaurant—Vic’s Place—in what long ago had been one of the county’s maintenance barns. Renovated and painted with a jazzy new hung ceiling, the clubhouse and restaurant still smelled vaguely of old hydraulic fluid and rubber.
Shortly after its grand opening, I’d eaten the worst chicken salad of my life at Vic’s Place—cold, slimy, and reptilian. I was no golfer, so it wasn’t hard to avoid a repeat of that culinary adventure. As far as I could tell, the quality of the restaurant matched that of the rest of the club.
The wind usually blew so hard that I guessed it was possible to tee off from the first launch pad and whack the ball all the way across nine holes to the parking lot of Posadas High School on South Pershing Street.
But golfers were ecstatic to have a spot closer than Deming to play, and they took the snakes, goat heads, and wind in stride. When Vic’s Place had somehow managed to find a brand-new liquor license, the restaurant with the awful chicken salad had become a sort of watering hole for “who’s who” in Posadas—or for who wanted to be who. It was an out-of-the-way spot for Judge Hobart to feed his gout.
I drove down Grande to Country Club Road and turned right past a short block of apartments and then the sprawl of Posadas High School. What had once been a gently rolling short-grass prairie was now a nine-holer, watered just enough that the grass on the putting greens remained an alkali-bleached, sickly ochre.
I parked beside the judge’s white minivan and noticed the assistant district attorney’s Corvette nestled off in the corner in the shade of a single valiant elm tree.
Inside Vic’s Place, the air conditioning was cranked to maximum. As my eyes adjusted, I could see Judge Hobart across the dining room, seated with Don Jaramillo under the display of historic golf clubs.
“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I said.
With a glass in one hand, the judge waved at the chair beside Jaramillo.
“Seat yourself,” the judge said, and reached out a hand. I shook, and felt joints older and more arthritic than my own. I braced myself for Jaramillo’s knuckle-duster, but he was surprisingly gentle this time. Maybe he knew he was in the company of duffers.
One of Vic’s waitresses, a young gal whom I didn’t recognize, appeared at my elbow with a mug of coffee. While she was setting the cup on the table, I shifted my bifocals so I could see her name tag.
“Mr. Palacek said you’d want coffee,” she said brightly. “Do you use cream?”
“Everything, thanks, Tamara,” I said. The judge and the ADA watched as I emptied two packets of cream and two of sugar into the coffee.
“I remembered that you drank coffee black,” the judge said after the waitress had left.
“I do. This isn’t coffee.” And it wasn’t. Even with the additives, it tasted like a quarter-teaspoon of instant coffee dissolved in dishwater. I took a sip, grimaced, and pushed it aside.
“I ordered the chicken salad, and Don here is having the halibut.”
He pushed a menu across toward me. The print was so fuzzy that even with my bifocals I couldn’t read the grim details.
“They don’t have enchiladas,” the judge added helpfully. “But the whiskey sours aren’t bad.”
The waitress appeared at my elbow and I looked up into her sober face. “I guess I’d like a ham and cheese, hold the cheese,” I said. She nodded and turned away, laboriously writing something far more complete than the word
ham
on the ticket.
“Bob tells me that you and he talked to the Carters,” Don Jaramillo said. He was a pudgy man, with a good set of jowls forming despite not yet having reached his fortieth birthday. His shirt looked as if he’d slept in it, tucked carelessly into jeans—the Jaramillo uniform when not in court. I somehow always expected him to blurt out, “I’m not really a lawyer, really, I’m not.” He eyed me sideways, which was pretty direct for him.
“We did that.” I nodded.
Bob Torrez had dropped me off at my office not many moments ago, but he hadn’t mentioned that the assistant district attorney had been one of his “errands.”
“What’s he have to say?” Jaramillo asked.
“Who?”
“Sam. Sam Carter.”
“Oh, I thought you said you just talked to Bob. I figured he’d tell you.”
“Well, no,” Jaramillo fussed. “We just crossed paths, so to speak. We didn’t have time…”
I put his floundering out of its misery. “Kenny Carter says he had no conversation with Jim Sisson beyond a chance encounter—a friendly encounter, he claims—last Saturday, three days before Sisson’s death.”
“And the chairman of the county commission? What’s he got to say for himself?” Judge Hobart asked.
“Sam blustered, as always. My guess is that he doesn’t know what his son’s doing most of the time. Par for that course.”
“Bob says that he thinks Kenny Carter is the father of Jennifer Sisson’s child,” Jaramillo said.
“So do I.”
Judge Hobart frowned. “She’s a tad young, isn’t she?”
“Sure.”
“But the boy denies it?”
“That’s correct, Judge. Sincerely denies it, too. With a good, level, unblinking gaze,” I said. “In the best
‘I am offended you should think such a thing’
tradition
.
”
Jaramillo leaned forward and glanced across the empty dining room. Apparently other folks shared my opinion of the food. He lowered his voice. “The undersheriff thinks it might be profitable to order a paternity test. That’s why he stopped by a bit ago, to see what I thought.”
Judge Hobart toyed with his whiskey sour but didn’t take a sip. I watched him thinking and was surprised how much he’d aged in the past year or so. The New Mexico sun had reduced the skin of his cheeks to a blotched parchment, with a particularly nasty patch in front of his right ear. His hand drifted up toward the blemish, then hesitated at the last instant, leaving it alone.
“And what do you think?” the judge said finally to Jaramillo.
“Well,” he shrugged, “I don’t know. I guess I’m of mixed minds about it, without some rock hard evidence to back it up.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped. “Last time I looked, Hitler and his gang were dead. I don’t think any court in the state is going to let us run around sticking needles in the bellies of pregnant women to suck out DNA samples. And if we had rock hard evidence, it’d be doubly pointless.”
“Well—” Jaramillo started, but I interrupted him.
“Forget it, Don. Unless Jennifer requests the test herself, with the mother’s written consent, forget it. I’m surprised that Torrez brought it up.”
Judge Hobart almost smiled and gestured toward the waitress, arriving with our food. My ham sandwich was recognizable, a slice of ham on white bread with eight potato chips on the side. Jaramillo looked with something akin to alarm at the thing that was touted to be a fish fillet, floating in a sea of yellow curdled sauce. The judge’s chicken salad looked exactly as I had remembered it.
“What if Kenny Carter is lying, though?” Jaramillo said, tapping the lump of fish tentatively with his fork. “If he knocked up Jennifer, then there’s every reason to think that Jim Sisson would go ballistic when he found out. If the two of them had a confrontation—”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said flatly. “If we can’t solve this thing some way short of the sort of intrusive procedure that I understand amniocentesis to be, then forget it. Jim’s ghost can come back from the grave someday and whisper who did it in our ear. And this is the goddamned worst chunk of ham I’ve ever tasted.” I looked at Jaramillo. “And if that stuff doesn’t kill you, I’ll be surprised.”
“It’s not that bad,” Jaramillo said lamely.
“Jennifer Sisson and the food aside,” Judge Hobart said around a mouthful of chicken salad that clung to his dentures like wallpaper paste, “Bill, we need to decide what to do about Carla Champlin.”
“I’m not sure there’s a whole lot
to
do, Judge. Except maybe find someone who can make her understand what her legal options are. If she wants Tom Pasquale evicted, then I suppose there’s a process she can follow, isn’t there?”
“Well of course there is,” he said testily. “Damn woman won’t, though.” He put down his fork. “Look—all she needs to do is go see her goddamn lawyer, whoever that is, and have him look over the rental agreement. If there’s something in the lease that Pasquale has screwed up, then she can ask that the lease be canceled, in an appropriate manner. But Jesus, she can’t just go yowling around the neighborhood, changing locks willy-nilly, and yelling threats.”
“You heard about the locks, eh?” I asked.
“Course I heard about it. And I heard about the open bedroom window, and about the kid changing the oil on his goddamn motorcycle in the back bedroom, and on, and on, and on.” He jabbed at the salad. “Christ, she spent nearly the whole morning camped out on the hallway bench in the county building, yammering.” Hobart glanced up at me and grinned. “I should have sent her on over to your office.”
“Thanks. I already talked to her. Apparently it didn’t do any good.”
“Hell, why should you be any different? You know, I always used to wonder about her, just a little. Back when she was running the post office. Licked one too many stamps.”
“I’ll try to talk with her again,” I said. “I don’t promise much.”
“Better still, why don’t you just tell that young deputy to move the hell out and save us all a headache. Before she shoots him or does something equally nuts.”