Privileged to Kill (8 page)

12

I had lied to Estelle Reyes-Guzman and she probably knew it. I didn’t have “a couple of things to take care of,” as I had said in the hospital parking lot. If I had anything at all to do, I sure as hell didn’t have a clue what it was. What was worse, I didn’t have the gumption to find out.

There was probably a “to-do” list that was a hundred items long in someone’s head, but not in mine.

Normally a short nap worked wonders…that was standard operating procedure for keeping my insomnia under control, and I had become adept over the decades at snatching a quick nap whenever the spirit moved me. But even the dark, cool invitation of the bedroom seemed pointless.

I walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. On automatic pilot, my hand was about a foot away from the cupboard where I kept the coffee filters when I stopped.

“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud, finally giving voice to my frustration. I stood at the sink with my hands resting on the cool porcelain edge, letting things ebb and flow. Even the idea of coffee, the lifeblood of my existence, was nauseating.

The kitchen window faced north and I gazed out through the six-inch square of dirty glass that hadn’t yet been covered by the energetic Virginia creeper vine outside.

If I removed the vine and then a couple hundred cottonwood trees, junipers, elms, poplars, and hollyhocks, I would be able to look across the depth of my five acres and see a vehicle if it drove by on Escondido Lane. Another two hundred yards beyond that were the trailer park, Manny Orosco’s truck, and finally the interstate.

The telephone rang and I ignored it. Instead, I walked across the kitchen to the pantry and unlocked the back door. Years before, I had had visions of a wonderful brick veranda outside that door. If I had designed it just right, I could have bricked right around the massive trunk of the nearest cottonwood, including it in the terrace. My youngest daughter had named the huge, sprawling tree “Carlos Cottonwood” for reasons known only to her. Underneath that tree, and on the north side of the house, the area was cool any time of year.

Visions were about as far as I had ever gotten. I stood by the door and looked at the jungle. The Virginia creeper’s trunk began on the east side of the house, and the vine had covered thirty feet of adobe wall before taking on the kitchen window on the north side. Encouraged by the cool shade, the vine had created a thick, green mat that was just beginning to brown off with the crisp fall nights.

I turned and looked at the cottonwood. It was an unkempt tree by nature, but the benign neglect contributed by my bachelor residency on the property had resulted in a creation that looked like something out of a British fantasy book.

The tree soared upward, its limbs spreading across the compass, crotches choked with nests whose tenants had come and gone, among them squirrels, ravens, perhaps even children. Who the hell knew. Dead limbs littered the ground and hung perilously from the living canopy, ready to rain down with the slightest breeze.

“Carlos Cottonwood,” I said and thrust my hands in my pockets. Beyond a passing glance out the window to check the weather, I hadn’t looked at the tree for a decade. Its massive root system was probably a hairsbreadth from plugging my sewer system for keeps.

I turned and looked at the kitchen window again. If the glass ever broke, the vine would find a way inside. They’d discover me one day, choked to death in bed by Virginia creeper.

As if the day held no other urgency, I wandered around the house to the garage, pushed up the door, and slid past all the junk that threatened to landslide down and crush both me and the late-model Chevy Blazer parked there. Deep in the bowels of the garage, in the bottom of a plastic bucket that was home to three sprinkler heads and a half bag of plant food, I found a set of nippers, yellow plastic handles and all.

I had never seen their jaws sprung open. I had no recollection of ever buying them, but knew of their existence in the same vague way that I knew there was a box of wide-mouth canning lids on top of the paint cabinet and a small package of gas lantern mantles in one of the tool boxes.

I went back outside, opening and closing the nippers as if trying to train them before the big event.

Before beginning on the vine, I cleared away the worst of the cottonwood detritus against the back of the house. It all made a neat pile about the size of a bathtub. It would have taken about a thousand of those piles to make a dent around the property.

With access to the back wall, I gently worked on the creeper. I didn’t want to make it angry, of course, but I was determined to have a window and maybe even an outside veranda light. There was no bulb in the fixture, but that was a problem easily solved. I left an artistic sweep of vine over the light and let the tendrils drape over the window frame, cascading down on the other side to touch the ground.

With the vine disciplined and the spiderwebs swept away, I had an old-fashioned four-pane window whose glass was intact under the thick crust of time. A sponge and plastic pan were just a few steps away in the pantry and I was eager to see glass.

The grime came away in great streaks, but I worked methodically, changing the water when it threatened to coagulate. By the time I had polished the glass to crystal with several editions of the
Posadas Register
, I could see that the wooden sill and window frame had peeled until there was only a trace of the original blue paint remaining.

With my pocketknife, I poked the wood. It was sound enough. It was still early in the day and plenty warm. Another opportunity might not present itself, and I shrugged. I still had blue paint from the last time the house trim had been painted.

I walked through the kitchen, pausing long enough to pour a pot of water into the coffeemaker and spoon grounds into the filter basket. By the time I had found, opened, and stirred the paint—a color labeled “Alhambra” by some imaginative engineer—and found a serviceable brush buried under my timing light and dwell meter, the coffee was finished.

With a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the brush in the other, I daubed at the window casing and sill, stopping periodically to critique my progress. The critique was not always good. When my brush touched the glass for the third time, I set down the coffee cup and dug my glasses out of my pocket, then spent some more irritation trying to decide which panel of the bifocals would work best.

By the time I finished a quarter of the window, I had decided that a person could spend a lifetime painting a house. My old adobe, plastered as it was with genuine, hundred-year-old brown mud, saved me that trouble, but it still had an acre of window and door trim. The trick was not to look too closely at the other windows as I walked around the building.

With the window half done, I made another pot of coffee and brought out one of my folding chairs. I sat under the cottonwood and looked at the house, deciding that I liked what I saw.

The second half of the window was tedious. The light was bad, my neck cricked, and the paint was thick and uncooperative on the brush. But I persisted and avoided painting the glass blue.

With six inches of the center mullion to go, I heard footsteps in the house. My hand froze, the brush poised just above the wood, a bead of paint ready to run.

“Sir?”

“I’m out back,” I shouted when I recognized Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s voice.

She appeared in the doorway but didn’t open it. Instead she stood quietly, regarding me. Her eyebrows pulled together in the beginnings of a frown.

“I made fresh coffee,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen with the brush.

“No thanks.” She pushed the door open and stepped out. Her deep brown eyes traveled first to the paintbrush, then to the can of paint, and then to the window. She was taking long enough to critique the work.

“What do you think?” I asked.

She looked back at me, and one eyebrow lifted a bit. “Why are you doing that, sir?”

I chuckled. “Because it needed doing. I got tired of not being able to see out the window.” I gestured with the brush at the vine. “It wasn’t hard. Kind of relaxing, actually.” I bent over and laid the brush across the top of the paint can. “What’s up?”

Estelle took a deep breath and reached out with one hand toward my sleeve. “You got some blue paint on your revolver.” I lifted my arm up and peered down at the gun, not an easy task considering my girth. I frowned. It was the first time all day that I was conscious of being in uniform.

I pulled the flannel paint rag I’d been using out of my back pocket and wiped the drip off the walnut grips and then daubed at another fleck near the buckle of the Sam Browne belt. “I can’t believe I did this without changing my clothes,” I muttered.

“I tried to call you earlier,” Estelle said.

“Yeah, I know. I heard it.”

“Five times.”

“You need to let it ring more than five times, sweetheart.”

“No…I mean I tried calling five times. Once not long after I dropped you off, and then around noon, and then afterward. I figured you were asleep.”

I stared at her blankly. “What do you mean ‘once around noon’? What time is it?” I said, and looked at my watch. The hands made no sense, stuck at five after four. The sweep second hand swept methodically around the face.

“It’s after four.”

“What time did you drop me off?”

“About ten…maybe ten-thirty, sir.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, sir.”

I backed up and sat down slowly in the lawn chair, my heart hammering in my ears. Estelle looked back at the window. She stepped up close and examined the glass. “Nice job.” She turned and looked at me. “Are you going to do all the trim?”

My hand groped at my shirt pocket, a tick left over from half a century of smoking. “Estelle…” I started and then stopped.

“Do you want me to come back later, sir?”

I shook my head with irritation. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” I got to my feet and waved a hand at the window. “It just seemed important at the time. I don’t know why.”

“Sometimes you need a break.”

I snorted and toed the paint can with my black boot. “I must be quite a sight.”

Diplomatic as always, Estelle didn’t respond to that.

“So…what did you find out?” I asked. I pulled a second folding chair out of the pantry and snapped it open for Estelle. She settled into it with a grateful sigh.

“Wesley Crocker left.”

“What do you mean, he left?”

“Sheriff Holman suggested to him that maybe he didn’t need to stick around the office after all. That maybe he could find himself somewhere else to stay. That’s what Bob Torrez told me earlier today.” Her mouth twitched slightly. “That’s one of the times I tried to call you, sir. The sheriff told Bob that we didn’t need to turn the place into a roach motel.”

“For God’s sakes, what an idiot,” I snapped. “Where’s Crocker, then?”

“He told Bob that he wanted to ride north of town a ways and investigate an old trail. He said you’d know.”

I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the pleasure that strangling the sheriff would give me. “So he’s on the loose. What else? What’s the rest of the bad news? I hope Manny Orosco is still in custody, or did the sheriff send him somewhere, too?”

Estelle took a deep breath and held it as she regarded me. “Orosco’s dead.”

“Of what?” Somehow I wasn’t surprised, but the news irritated me even more. Drunks seemed perfectly capable of hanging around for years, until everyone was thoroughly tired of them. The day that they might have been of some concrete use, they crapped out.

“Well, sir, that’s the interesting thing.” She leaned forward in her chair and clasped her hands together. “When we went through the truck, we bagged as evidence the liquor bottle that was lying near the head of his cot.”

“The rotgut sherry,” I said.

Estelle nodded. “There was no other evidence of liquor bottles near the bed. Up in one of the cabinets, I found a half bottle of that cheap fruit brandy, and a new bottle of peppermint schnapps. Unopened.”

“Even Manny might have thought twice about drinking that stuff,” I said.

“I don’t think so, sir. Anyway, Francis told me this afternoon that preliminary blood tests showed a blood-alcohol level that was right off the charts. Over point three-five. That’s enough to be toxic in anyone, sir.”

I frowned. “How do you get that kind of blood reading from part of a bottle of cheap sherry, Estelle?” I could see by the look on her face that she hadn’t told me everything. The light of the chase was in her eyes, and I took a deep breath, determined to keep up with her this time.

“You don’t, sir. The chem lab at the hospital helped me out. The sherry tested out at a hundred and sixty proof.”

“That’s eighty percent alcohol. That’s not possible, unless someone spiked the sherry.”

“That’s exactly what happened. There was enough sherry for a little flavor. The rest was pure grain alcohol. The stuff that kids like to buy to spike punch when they want a real nuclear buzz.”

“Half a bottle of that would kill a person,” I said.

“That’s exactly what it did, sir.”

13

Estelle watched me rinse out the coffeemaker and waited patiently while I dumped the filter, added a new one, and spooned in the grounds. I felt as if I hadn’t had a decent cup all day, even though my blood had to be half caffeine. My stomach was growling that it was close to dinnertime. Still, dinner would have to wait.

“Now, let’s see what you’ve got,” I said, and joined Estelle at the kitchen table. “And the first thing I want to know is what killed the girl. What’s Francis say?”

“She choked to death, sir.”

“Choked?” I turned and looked at Estelle. Then I raised my hands as if I were strangling someone. “You mean
choked
, as in strangled?”

“No, sir. It appears that she choked to death on a piece of pepperoni pizza.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, sir.” Her face was sober. “And if that’s the case, then it looks like she choked to death somewhere, and then was just dumped.”

I stared at the detective and slowly shook my head. “No. There’s got to be something else. If she were alone when it happened, she wouldn’t have ended up under the bleachers. And who the hell would just dump someone who choked? Jesus.”

“That’s a good question. We don’t know the circumstances yet.”

“Yet. All right. What else have you found?”

“We have a list of every student who was in a class with Maria Ibarra,” she said, and slid a piece of paper with neatly typed columns across to me. I sat down and scanned the names.

“This won’t tell us much,” I said. “But it’s something. Do we know yet who she was friendly with?”

“The short list,” Estelle said, and pulled another piece of paper out of her briefcase. “I talked with the counselor again this afternoon, and each one of Maria’s teachers. These names are students who have been seen with her outside of class.”

“Not a particularly long list.”

“No, sir. Six names.”

“Have you talked with any of them?”

“Not yet. I was going to start on that this evening, with the ones who didn’t go to the game.”

I nodded. “If any. Fair enough. Let me give you a hand. After we eat something.”

Estelle smiled. “And we have a list of students who were absent from school today”—she handed me the list of eighteen names—“and absent yesterday.”

The names were just a blurred collection of words to me, and I laid the list on the table. “That helps us only if the person or persons that Maria was with when she died were students…and only if that student is in one of Maria’s classes…and only if that student chose to be absent from school.”

“A lot of if’s,” Estelle said. “We don’t know if any of them are close.” She sighed. “And you know, the way she was living, with Orosco and all…there’s no way of telling who she was associating with.” She looked up at me. “We don’t even know for sure if the vehicles that Wesley Crocker saw behind the school were driven by…or occupied by…students. And we don’t know if there is actually any relationship between those vehicles and Maria’s death.”

I shook my head and got up. Enough coffee had run into the decanter that I could slide it out and put my cup underneath the drizzle while I poured it full. “You sure?” I said, and waved the decanter at Estelle. She shook her head.

“What
do
we know?” I asked, and sat back down at the table. “Other than that Manny Orosco didn’t kill the girl.”

“We don’t even know that for sure, sir. He might have been with her last night, panicked when she choked to death, dumped the body, and drained the bottle of sherry after he returned home. Remember, we didn’t find him until almost midmorning today.”

“That’s unlikely. In the first place, Manny didn’t have a car. How would he have transported the body?” Estelle raised an eyebrow. “And I’m not sure he would have been strong enough to carry the girl’s corpse anywhere. I don’t think he would have thought clearly enough to even come up with the scheme. And finally, I don’t think he would have bothered mixing grain alcohol, or whatever it was, with sherry. Not only wouldn’t have bothered…he couldn’t have afforded it.”

“Probably not,” Estelle said. Her voice was neutral and I looked sharply at her.

“What are you thinking?” She shifted in her chair and grimaced a little, an expression I took to mean discomfort. “Can I get you something?”

“No, no. I’m fine, sir. It’s just that I can’t imagine anyone cold enough to watch a little girl die and then just dump the body.”

“What did Francis say about the bloody finger? The torn nail? Anything there?”

“His first guess is that it might be consistent with the victim flailing around as she was choking.”

“
Might
be…” I said. “No other tissue under her nails?”

“No, sir.” Estelle frowned. “And there weren’t any traces of drugs or alcohol in her system, so that didn’t contribute. And there wasn’t any sign of a struggle, other than the torn fingernail.”

Estelle pulled a small evidence bag out of the briefcase and handed it to me. I held it at arm’s length, trying to bring the contents into focus. “Whose hair?” I said, taking an educated guess.

“Bob Torrez found it under the bleachers, sir. There were about eight strands caught in one of the steel angle supports, right where it bolts into one of the girder stiffeners.”

“Head height?”

She nodded. “Right where someone would crack their head if they weren’t paying attention.”

“And we don’t know when this nifty little sample was left there, do we?”

“No, sir. We don’t know if it is connected in any way.”

“Lab?”

“Yes, sir. Part of that sample, and a suitcase of other items. I sent Tony Abeyta to Santa Fe with everything we’ve got. Jim Bergin flew him up. Maria’s clothing, the hair sample, the sherry, the tissue and fluid samples from the hospital that Francis gathered.” She smiled. “Hair samples from Orosco, Crocker, and Pasquale.”

“Tom Pasquale? Why him?” And then I held up a hand. “Don’t bother. I know why him. Anything else?”

“That’s about it. I thought I’d do the interviews with Maria’s friends this evening. That way, if any kind of pattern develops, we’ll be right on it.”

I nodded. “One other thing…we don’t know yet how Maria got into the country, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“We need to find her Mexican connection somehow.”

“Eddie Mitchell is working on that. I know that he was planning to meet with Tomas Naranjo of the
Federales
down at the crossing in Regal this afternoon. He took a set of Maria’s prints, and a photograph.” She pushed herself away from the table and began gathering her papers. Her motions showed signs of fatigue. “We didn’t find anything in Orosco’s truck that would give us a lead. No letters from Mexico, no photographs. Nothing.” She shrugged. “Maybe Naranjo can help.”

“And are you going to get some rest?”

“Sure.”

I stood up and wagged a mock-stern finger at her. “What about dinner? You want to go someplace and grab a bite?”

“Irma baked a chicken for dinner. She told me at noon that if Francis and I didn’t sit down for a dinner together tonight, she wasn’t going to vote for me.” She shrugged. “So I’m blackmailed. Come join us.” She snapped her briefcase shut.

I grimaced and shook my head. “The way I look and probably smell, I don’t think so. And it sounds like you guys need a quiet family dinner.”

“Take a few minutes to clean off the worst of the paint,” Estelle said. She reached out a hand and squeezed my arm. “And you are a member of the family,
padrino
.” She glanced at her watch. “We’ll look for you about six-thirty.”

“One chicken isn’t going to be enough anyway,” I said, but Estelle was already out of the kitchen and headed toward the front door.

“Six-thirty, sir. Don’t disappoint the kid.”

I grinned at her reference to her son as the front door thumped closed behind her and the house sank back into its characteristic deep silence. This time, though, the place seemed a little more light and friendly. I turned off the coffeemaker and headed for the shower.

Just as I turned on the water, the phone rang. It was probably Martin Holman, worried about Estelle’s hiring Jim Bergin, the airport manager, to fly charter. The county was strapped for funds, but she was right. We were also strapped for time, and we couldn’t fax clothing and hair samples.

I hesitated, then stepped into the shower. What the hell, I thought. Life was too short. A baked chicken dinner with the Guzmans sounded wonderful. Anybody else could wait.