Ditch Rider (7 page)

“Put her in the Girls' School for two years.”

“She comes from a broken home? Right? Absent father? Mother works all the time or takes drugs? Fatherless, godless, jobless and hopeless.”

“Something like that.”

“The Girls' School will seem like summer camp.”

“That's a possibility.”

“I could go for consecutive two-year terms and hold her over until she is twenty-one.”

“You won't get away with it.”

“Let's say she was an accessory. Cade's her boyfriend and she's covering for him. She's crazy about the guy and she wants to save his neck. I can put him away for life, but she'll only get two years. So she pleads guilty for him.”

It was one scenario.

“If she gives him up I'll deal,” Saia said.

“What are you offering? A trip to Europe? A new car? A father? A new life?”

“I would if I could.”

Avoiding the Girls' School didn't seem to be any bargaining chip with my client. “I'll run it by her, Anthony, but I don't think she'll go for it. She says she acted alone.”

He leaned back in his chair. “I find that hard to believe.”

He wasn't the only one.

“Where's the weapon?” he asked.

“She says she threw it in the ditch.”

“Can she show us where?”

“
I'll ask her.”

“Don't ask her, tell her.”

“When it comes to teenagers, nobody tells them nothing, don't you know that yet?”

“It won't be like that when I have a family.”

“Don't count on it.”

“I'll have the bullet analyzed to see if it was the one that killed Padilla.”

“It's in your hands,” I said.

He flipped a pencil up on its tip and began poking the point into the pile of papers on his desk. “There is one more thing. Cade's lawyer called and arranged to bring him in for questioning.” He laughed. “Maybe I'll end up with two guilty pleas.”

“Not likely,” I said.

******

DNA analysis of the bullet would take time. Dredging the ditch could be done quickly, but more easily with Cheyanne's cooperation. The APD could have searched the ditch without her. They could have followed the Chapuzar Lateral from the crime scene to Mirador Road, but they wanted Cheyanne to go to the scene with them to show them how and where she had shot Juan Padilla and to pinpoint the spot where she'd dumped the gun.

I stopped by the trailer the following morning and found Cheyanne, Sonia and Leo sitting around the table having a cup of coffee before they went to bed or to work or stayed home all day and watched the tube. Tabatoe was curled up in Cheyanne's lap. On the wall an orange tiger paced across a black velvet background. I looked out through the kitchen window and saw pigeons lined up like targets on the telephone line. I told Cheyanne that I'd given the bullet to Saia.

“Will he believe me now?” she asked. Her eyes were wide.

I glanced at Leo. I wasn't sure this case should be discussed in front of anyone but Sonia and Cheyanne. “It's all right,” Sonia said. “Leo's in on what's happening.”

“Is it all right with you?” I asked Cheyanne.

She studied her chipped fingernails. “I guess.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“It's an all right,” she said.

I took that as a sign to continue. “If you were with Ron Cade and he shot Padilla, you could be charged with being an accessory. Saia will cut a deal if you tell him Ron Cade was the shooter.”

Leo put his elbows on the table. He was wearing an undershirt and I could see the black curly hair on his chest, the chain on his right forearm and the Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on his left bicep. “What
kind
of deal are they willing to cut?” he asked.

“Very little or no time at all in the Girls' School, I'd say. Saia has a vendetta against Cade, plus Cade is too old to be treated as a juvenile. Saia would prefer to prosecute him.”

Cheyanne stared at the crumbs on the Formica table and said nothing.

“Listen up,” Leo ordered.

She raised her head and flipped her hair over her shoulder. Tabatoe leapt off her lap. “Ron Cade didn't do it, I did. Got it?”

“Don't get smart with me,” Leo snapped.

“You're not my father.”

Sonia's cigarette was burning in the ashtray and the smoke was rising like a warning signal from a fire. “Knock it off, you two,” she said.

Leo shut his mouth, but he tightened his grip on his coffee mug until the virgin on his muscle shivered. Had he gotten those muscles from lifting the ladder? I wondered. From emptying the water out of evaporative coolers? Or was it from pumping iron?

“Do either of you own a thirty-eight?” I asked Sonia and Leo.

“I didn't get it from them,” Cheyanne said.

“Who did you get it from?”

“I can't tell you.”

“I don't keep guns anymore,” said Leo.

“I never kept guns,” said Sonia. “Coffee?” she asked me.

“No thanks. Saia is threatening to ask for consecutive two-year terms and to hold you over until you are twenty-one, Cheyanne. It will go better for you if you cooperate.”

“I already said I did it. What else do they want?”

“Saia wants you to show the APD where you threw the weapon.”

“In the ditch, I said.”

“They want to know where in the ditch.”

“Do I have to?” She wrapped a curl around her finger and tugged at her hair.

“DNA testing may prove that bullet killed Juan. It won't prove that you're the one who fired it. The gun could help if your prints are on it.”

“But if we go to the ditch everybody will see me,” she moaned.

“Do it,” barked Leo.

“All right, all right.”

8

W
HEN THE TIME
came to search the ditch the police swarmed all over the Chapuzar Lateral and the neighboring fields like mosquitoes after a hard rain. They'd searched the area before, but their search hadn't been nearly as thorough or precise. A ditch rider made the job easier by stopping the flow further north and letting the relevant part of the ditch network drain out. Instead of brown muddy water in the Chapuzar Lateral there was thick, brown mud. It resembled the ruts that pass for rivers in this part of the country.

Cheyanne prepared for the search by pumping up the volume of her hair and putting on her largest t-shirt. Sonia took the afternoon off from work. The Morans, the investigating officers and I began at the strip mall. There were two officers: a tall, rangy guy with intense blue eyes named Jim Donaldson and Sandra Jessup, a plump woman with fine brown hair. She had blue eyes, too, but hers had a twinkle in them. His had long distance.

Cheyanne pointed out where Juan had fallen, approximately where she had stood when she shot him, and the place where she had found the bullet. She insisted that the gun had gone off accidentally but wouldn't say where she got it or who else was there. She said she'd been talking to Juan before the shooting happened, but she wouldn't say what they'd been talking about.

After we'd examined the crime scene we walked down Ladera toward the ditch, turning onto the access road at the corner where people dump their mattress springs and worn-out refrigerators. Donaldson and Jessup walked with Cheyanne, Sonia and me. A third officer named Tony Mares followed inside the ditch, which had to be like walking through a bled dry vein. The ground was wet, and it was slow going for him as the mud sucked at his boots. Rotting apples clustered at the first culvert we came to. They were covered with buzzing flies that were turning iridescent in the sun. I smelled the apples long before I saw them. It was the smell of a changing season. The air was already showing some of the coolness of fall, when the sun no longer pounds you into the pavement.

Cheyanne was way nervous. Her eyes darted from the ditch to the fields to the houses and back again. Her hands tugged at the hem of her t-shirt. She walked quickly. The detectives let her go at her own pace. Maybe they thought she knew where she was headed, but I wasn't so sure. Sonia followed behind us puffing on a cigarette. After we passed the culvert and crossed the first street, Detective Donaldson gave Detective Jessup a sideways glance. I knew what they were thinking. Wouldn't Cheyanne have tossed the gun as soon as she got to the ditch? Why wait?

Detective
Mares wrestled with the mud and fell behind. The drained ditch resembled an archaeological dig loaded with the relics of late-twentieth-century Rio Grande valley civilization—beer cans, the tiny liquor bottles known as miniatures, running shoes, sandals, a cowboy boot, the pale white skeleton of a long-dead bird, a sprinkling of condoms, a doll, a rifle, a rusty semiautomatic pistol. Every time Mares came across something of interest he stopped and examined it. He lifted the semiautomatic carefully and dropped it in an evidence bag.

We passed behind the Kid's shop with the flying red horse sign, the Renewal Spa and Beauty Salon, the Armijo wood yard, La Cienega gated community and the Texas Trailer Ranch and came to a place where the weeds on the bank were taller than Cheyanne. Beside us was an empty field. It was the same place I'd found her struggling with Ron Cade. What had been dark and shadowy at night was dry and empty during the day.

Cheyanne stopped here and stared at the fields trembling like a flower in the wind.

“Is this the place?” Detective Jessup asked.

Cheyanne shook her head and kept on walking. We went on like this until we were only one block away from Mirador. By now school had let out. The police kept everybody away from the ditch, but from this location we could see the kids walking home from school. A couple of guys stopped, looked at us, then shuffled on down the road. They wore long black t's and wide pants, the shape that said gang. Danny rode by on his bike. Patricia leaned against a tree and watched us until a cop made her move on.

Cheyanne jumped off the ditch bank into a field where there was a barrier of Siberian elms between her and Mirador Road. “This is the place. This is where I threw it,” she said.

Detective Mares, who had caught up to us, said, “I thought you said you threw it in the ditch.”

Cheyanne shook her head. “I was wrong,” she whispered. “It went in here. Can I go home now?”

But the APD wasn't ready to let her go. The police made her cover the field with them, inch by inch, but too much time had gone by, too many animals and people had moved through here. If the gun had ever been in this field, it was long gone.

The police continued their search, but after an hour they let Cheyanne, Sonia and I go. I walked them as far as my courtyard, where Patricia stood waiting.

“Everybody could see you, Cheyanne,” she said.

“I know,” Cheyanne moaned.

“What did you tell them?”

“Cheyanne shouldn't be discussing this case with anybody, and that includes you,” I said to Patricia.

“But I'm her friend.” Patricia poked the ground with her foot and kicked up some dust.

“You can talk about it when it's settled,” I said.

“
Okay,” mumbled Cheyanne. She was about as down as a thirteen-year-old can get, which is way down.

Patricia tried to cheer her up. “That cop that was talking to me? Do you know his name?” she asked.

“No,” said Cheyanne.

“He's fine.”

“He's a cop.”

“I'll see you later,” Patricia said. “I gotta catch the bus and go home.” She headed west toward Fourth Street.

After she left Sonia asked me the question that had been on her mind. “Are they going to arrest Cheyanne now?”

“Without the gun? I doubt it,” I said. I'd ended up in the awkward position of trying to get a client into jail. “I don't think they'll do anything before they talk to Ron Cade and get the DNA back on the bullet.”

“What's gonna happen to her, then? Everyone will know she's been talking to the police now.”

“The timing of the search was not good,” I agreed.

“She's like a piece of cheese for a rat, and there are plenty of rats in this town.”

“Keep an eye on her. Keep her at home,” I advised.

“And you, you listen to your mother, Cheyanne.”

“Okay,” she mumbled.

Cheyanne and Sonia headed home. I could see Leo's truck in the yard and I watched him open the door and let them in.

******

It was the night the garbage goes out, and after dinner I went around the house emptying wastepaper baskets into a black plastic bag.

“You want me to do that?” the Kid asked when I took the bag outside to load it into the garbage can, but he was buried in the sofa with a Tecate in his hand, so I said I'd do it myself.

I dumped the bag in the pail, closed the lid and lugged the garbage down the driveway, setting off my neighbor's motion detector light, which illuminated Danny standing at the end of the driveway holding the handlebars of his bike. The light cast a long shadow behind him and turned his tires into monster truck wheels.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Helping seemed more important to him than it had to the Kid, so I let him.

Danny
leaned his bike against the fence and walked toward me. The pail was about as tall as he was, but he took the handle and held up his end while we carried it down the driveway and parked it beside the road. Under the street lamp I could see that he was wearing his hair slicked up and back in a modified DA.

“New hairdo?” I asked him.

“Kinda.”

“What do you call it?”

“The greaseball,” he said.

“How do you get it to stay back like that?”

“Grease.” He sat on the seat of his bike and put one foot on the ground for balance. The raised letters on his Goosebumps t-shirt shimmered beneath the street lamp.