Convenient Disposal (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-six

“Has the feature started yet?” Dr. Francis Guzman settled on to the sofa beside Estelle. The VCR counter showed one hour and seventeen minutes into the meeting, and the sound was turned down to a murmur. He studied the screen intently, watching County Manager Kevin Zeigler methodically making a point about the leaky, one-year-old hospital roof and a possible repair strategy that didn’t involve suing the contractor.

“Crowley pays attention,” Estelle said. “He catches everyone who speaks, and doesn’t waste tape on anything else.”

“Fascinating,” Francis mumbled. “If it’s deadly boring the first time around, the tape must be just spellbinding.” He squirmed down into the cushions, resting his head against Estelle’s arm.

Estelle pushed the remote’s Pause button, and the county manager froze in place, pencil poised, eyes leveled at the commission. “It’s strange to see him,” she said. “One minute he’s here, the next minute he’s gone.”

“Huh,” Francis said noncommittally as the tape continued. “What makes you think that Zeigler’s disappearance has anything at all to do with the meeting?”

“Absolutely nothing,
querido
,” Estelle said. “And that’s how frustrating all of this is.”

“Then…,” he said, and let it hang.

“Because we have nothing else. There has to be something, somewhere—some little key.”

“Maybe he was just robbed. Maybe he went out for a noontime run or bike ride, got mugged and then dumped in a ditch somewhere.”

“That’s as possible as any of this,” Estelle said. “Except when I saw him right at noon yesterday, he said he had several errands to do. He didn’t say anything about exercising in the middle of the day.”

“And he probably wouldn’t, now that I think about it,” Francis said. “At least not on a meeting day. His habit was to run early in the morning.”

Estelle touched Pause again and turned, having to duck her head to look her husband full in the face. “How long has he been doing that, Doctor?”

“I would guess most of his adult life,” Francis said. “He’s a hell of an athlete, you know.” He lifted a hand and pointed at the frozen figure on the screen. “He keeps his cool right along with a BP that’s down in the basement. His pulse rate might rise to fifty on a bad day. That’s where that endurance comes from.” Out of idle curiosity, Francis lifted the legal pad on Estelle’s lap and scanned the notes. “You don’t think it was something from his personal life?”

“Not that I’ve been able to discover. I had a long talk again today with William Page. There was plenty of opportunity to bring up problems, a lot of time for slips.”

“Maybe Kevin was having an affair with somebody else. That’s always a good one. What, about ninety percent of homicides are committed by family members against family members?”

“Too many,” Estelle said. She sighed. “The problem is trying to determine what sort of casual contacts a person makes during the day that are going to be where the trouble starts. I mean, who can predict that sort of thing? His roommate’s not much help with that. Page is only in town a couple of days a week. Sometimes not even that.”

“You think there’s something there? I mean, with those two?”

“What do you mean,
something
? ”

“I don’t know. Triangles, rejection, two-timing…all those old tried-and-true ways to wreck a life. Not to mention that they’ve made it a little more of a challenge anyway. Besides, with Page up in Socorro most of the week, there’s both opportunity and temptation.”

“I suppose. If there is, though, we haven’t found a thing. Except maybe a crush on the boy next door.”

“Well, there you go,” Francis said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Page wasn’t even in this part of the world yesterday noon, was he?”

“No. I talked to him in his Socorro office. If this is something he orchestrated from afar, then he’s doing an Academy Award job of playing the worried spouse. And he doesn’t strike me as your basic ‘hire a hit man’ type.”

“But that’s been done before,” Francis said.

“Oh,
sí
.” She pushed the Play button. “I don’t know,
querido
.”

They watched in silence for a while, and eventually Estelle became aware that Francis’ breathing was deeply rhythmic and that his head weighed a ton. She glanced down, loath to move and wake him. Instead, she circled an arm around his shoulders and snuggled deeper herself, resting her head back against the cushion.

The tape plodded on, and each time the camera swung back to take in the commissioners’ dais, she could see the back of Robert Torrez’s head, a few rows ahead of the camera. Sitting one row ahead of him and one seat to the right was Eddie Mitchell. Once in a while, Torrez would lean forward and say something that the camera couldn’t pick up, and Mitchell would respond, occasionally glancing back toward the camera when he turned.

At 10:45
AM
, the commissioners had called a brief recess, and everyone that the camera could see before the recess returned when the meeting reconvened. Twenty minutes later, the camera’s mike caught the thud of the commission chamber doors. The camera didn’t move, catching every word of Commissioner Barney Tinneman’s impassioned plea that the county should sue Colstrup Brothers Construction of El Paso for the shoddy roof job.

At one point, he pounded the dais in frustration. “I mean, if a contractor tore off the roof of your own home, and then replaced it with one that cost what this job did, and then it
leaked
, why in hell would you beg and plead for the job to be done right?” He leaned back in his chair, then surged forward again. “Kevin, what was the date of the final inspection? When we supposedly said the job was finished and approved?”

The camera swiveled deftly to catch Zeigler’s answer, and while the county manager explained the July 10 date and what it
actually
meant, Estelle saw that a new face had joined the meeting, this time sitting one row in front of Zeigler’s special microphone-equipped desk…perhaps explaining the thud of the chamber’s door. Ralph Johnson, the Highway Department’s supervisor, had taken a seat beside Don Fulkerson, manager of the landfill. Johnson didn’t look like he wanted to be present anymore than did the other department heads in the room, each one of them trying to time their arrival just seconds before the commission might have questions on their personal agenda item. Fulkerson appeared to be dozing.

For another hour, the commission worked its way down the agenda, and as the various department heads said their piece, most then left the meeting. Estelle imagined that they all walked faster toward the exit than they had entered. Ralph Johnson answered a half dozen simple questions, including a brief tussle over bid specifications with Tinneman, who appeared ready to argue about everything, given the chance. When the camera swiveled to watch and hear Johnson speak, Estelle could see Zeigler on the far left, and the full sweep of the commission chambers, with Commissioner Barry Swartz just visible on the right margin of the picture.

Regardless of what was going on with the commission, or what questions they may have had for the various people who took the mike or for the county manager, Kevin Zeigler remained the focus of an almost constant procession of people who entered the chambers to speak with him, bending down for a confidential confab while Zeigler covered the mike with his left hand. Almost invariably, when Crowley’s camera swung to cover a speaker, there was Zeigler in the rear of the hall at his desk, talking with someone.

Most of the time, he appeared in good humor, a quick smile his standard greeting for people who needed to whisper in his ear.

At 11:30, the commission launched into its discussion of providing police services for the village. Village Chief Eddie Mitchell walked stolidly to the microphone in the back of the hall, immediately beside Crowley’s camera. The chief fielded questions for twenty-five minutes.

When the meeting adjourned for lunch, Crowley kept the camera focused on the commissioners, recording their small tête-à-têtes for posterity. At one point, Tinneman pulled County Clerk Stacey Roybal to one side, his brow stormy. He bent close to Roybal, who was a full head shorter than he was, and it was obvious that Milton Crowley, all the way in the back of the hall, wanted to know what they were talking about, since he zoomed in as close as the camera’s lens would allow. The camera didn’t waver.

As Tinneman finished, he glanced toward the back, said something else, and gathered his sports jacket off the back of his chair. The camera went dead as Dr. Arnold Gray, the last commissioner to leave the hall, grinned into the lens and said loudly, “Come on, Milt, it’s time for lunch. Turn that thing off.” The camera winked to snow.

Before the tape had a chance to start the afternoon session, Estelle pushed the Pause button. Francis shifted and lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck.

“Why don’t you go to bed,
querido
,” Estelle whispered.

Francis pushed himself upright with a groan. “I fell asleep.” He regarded the static on the television screen. “That didn’t have much of a plot.”

“They broke for lunch.”

“Are you going to break for bed?” He glanced at his watch.

“I need to see a few more minutes,” Estelle said.

“The whole afternoon session is a hell of a lot more than a few minutes,” Francis said, and clamped a hand on her knee. “Sofía’s coming tomorrow. It’d be nice if you weren’t in a coma from exhaustion. Plus we’re going to try to have a nice dinner Friday night with
Padrino
, and on Saturday, we’re supposed to go to Las Cruces.” He grinned and yawned. “I forget what for.”

“You win,” Estelle said. She pressed the Off button and the television snapped to black.

“Did you ever mention to Francisco that you saw him at school?”

Estelle shook her head. “He’s got his secret, I’ve got mine.”

Francis chuckled gently. “That sounds like something
tu mamá
would say, one of her many little
dichos
.”

“I’m sure she has several that cover it,
oso
.”
She frowned, and he reached out with his thumb, stroking the wrinkles over the bridge of her nose.

“What’s the matter?”

She sighed and dropped her legal pad on the floor beside the sofa, then settled back into the cushions again.

“I’ve had one
of those ‘what if’ days,
oso
. ” He looked quizzical. “Roy and Ivana Hurtado find out that their little darling, their little A-plus, principal’s-list daughter, is carrying around a six-inch hat pin for a weapon. And yesterday, or whenever it was, Melody Mears greets me on the tarmac at the school, and I look at
her
inseam, too. What do you think Tom and Deb Mears would say if their daughter pulled a Deena? And it goes downhill from there.”

“None of it’s your fault,
querida
.”

“I know that,” she said impatiently. “Carmen is lying in a coma up in Albuquerque, and there’s no telling what that’s doing to
her
parents. And then when I come home and tell her about Francisco, my mother says to me”—and she switched to a fair imitation of her mother’s stately, formal Spanish—“‘Are you just now noticing that he has music in his heart?’”

She looked searchingly into her husband’s eyes. “
Oso
, did you know that he’s musical?”

“No. It doesn’t surprise me, but no—I didn’t know.”

“We’ve lived in the same house with him for six years,” Estelle said. “How could we not know?” Francis didn’t reply. Estelle was sure the answer was obvious to both of them. “What if Francisco or Carlos had some enormous talent, and we ignored it?”

“I don’t think that they’re
ignored, querida
. Sometimes we get busy and maybe we don’t spend the time that we should. But we don’t
ignore
them.”

“Does something like that eventually come out anyway, eventually? Despite numb parents?”

“Something like what?”

“The music that’s in his heart.”

“I don’t know,
mi corazón
. I suppose so.”

Estelle stretched her arms all the way over her head, then brought down her hands to cover her face, realizing exactly what her mother had meant.

“What if Teresa Reyes hadn’t taken in that little urchin way back when?”

“Estelle…
what if, what if
.”

“I’m serious. I was four years old when she adopted me. If she hadn’t done that, if I’d stayed a scruffy little
huérfana
, watched over by the good sisters of the Iglesia de Tres Santos…what would I be now?”

“You might be
La Presidente de México
. Who knows.”

“
That’s
a sobering thought.”

“Hey,” Francis said with sudden inspiration. “Maybe you would have become a nun yourself and worked your way up to Mother Superior. Or married one of those good-looking Diaz boys right there in Tres Santos and had fourteen children to worry about.”

“Ay. What a choice you give me.” She pushed herself upright and slipped her arm around her husband’s waist. “Promise me something,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Help me keep the Saturday promise I made to Francisco.”

Francis looked skeptical. “You know how things are,
querida
. If something comes up, he’ll have to understand. That’s just the way things go.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t want them to go that way this time.”

“Just do your best,” he said. “Your mother always says that, I know.”

“She also says that being safe and well fed isn’t enough.”

“Whatever that means.”

“That’s the trouble,
querida
. I know exactly what she means. And she’s right, too.”

Chapter Twenty-seven

The German shepherd four doors south sniffed something on the still night air that tickled his attention, and he settled into a rhythmic two-three-two barking. Estelle lay in bed, curled inside the arc of her husband’s body, listening. She could feel his even breathing against her left shoulder. Since his earliest days as a medical student, Francis Guzman had been able to grab deep, comfortable sleep whenever the opportunity arose, whether on a hard couch, an empty hospital bed, or even the floor of the staff lounge.

She knew that Francis would sleep until the alarm, the telephone, or one of his children blasted him awake.

Estelle shifted her head just enough to be able to see the digital clock on the dresser across the room. The neighbor’s dog stopped barking at 1:26
AM
For another five minutes, she listened to the sounds of the house and her sleeping family.

Somewhere out in the county, Deputy Jackie Taber was working her regular shift, cruising the back roads, poking into dark corners, leaving the high-speed drone of the interstate to the State Police. Jackie had been sent home earlier in the day to grab a few hours of sleep.

Now, never grumbling about frustration or fatigue, she would plod patiently on, looking and listening. If Estelle turned on the scanner, she knew that she would hear Jackie on the air once in a while, perhaps firing a license number to Dispatcher Brent Sutherland for an NCIC check, something to do to keep them both awake.

The telephone hadn’t rung since early evening, when she’d talked briefly with Sheriff Robert Torrez. The minutes and hours ticked away with the only progress being Carmen Acosta’s slow healing, three hundred miles north. The medical staff still would not hazard a guess about how long it might be before Carmen could remember the incident at all. The grim odds were that the blow to the back of her skull had smashed all remnants of the episode from her mind.

Moving the sheet and blanket as little as possible, Estelle slipped out of bed. Her eyes now accustomed to the dark, she crossed to the chair, slipped into her nightgown and robe, closed the bedroom door behind her, and padded out to the living room.

In a moment, the sharp image of Dr. Arnold Gray was calling the county meeting back into session. Estelle plugged in a set of earphones and settled into the rocking chair beside the sofa.

She saw herself enter and take a seat near Mitchell and Torrez. The commission immediately resumed its discussion of providing services to the village, and more than once, one or another of the commissioners would ask about Kevin Zeigler’s absence. As if to punctuate the problem, Milton Crowley would swivel the camera each time the county manager’s name was mentioned, and even once touched the zoom lens to zero in on Zeigler’s empty chair, as if to say, “Aha, see? This is your government in action.”

Tinneman made a wisecrack about Zeigler’s power lunch, and then Sheriff Torrez rose from his seat and strolled back to the microphone. For the next few minutes, discussion continued, with Torrez answering questions using just enough volume that the commissioners could hear if they paid rapt attention.

Estelle found herself pressing the headphones against her left ear to hear the sheriff. Eventually, their questions for Torrez wound down, and the undersheriff took her place at the small podium.

As she walked to the podium, the camera swung to follow her. Because she had been standing so close to its lens, what the video picked up behind Estelle was fuzzy. Clearly, though, Zeigler’s desk was still empty.

Estelle pressed the remote Pause, and then rummaged through her briefcase to find the agenda for the meeting. Item 17 was open for discussion at that moment. Several less weighty items were scheduled to follow, taking the meeting to its projected five
PM
adjournment.

Scanning down the list of action items, Estelle could see that a presentation to the commission by a representative of Baynes, Taylor, and O’Brien of Albuquerque was scheduled to present final paperwork for a bonding issue. Dedication of a portion of a little two-track on the western side of the county as a county road joined a host of other similar items—the sort of day-to-day workings of local government that some folks found fascinating, others found stultifyingly boring, and a few, like Milton Crowley, claimed were cloaks for governmental conspiracy.

Item 28, headed Discussion Items, included such blockbusters as sharing a road grader with the tiny unincorporated village of Newton, a hamlet that lay outside the northern Posadas County limits by about a hundred yards; communication from
The Country Patriot
, which Estelle knew to be Milton Crowley’s newsletter; the preliminary report from the county manager about the feasibility of hiring a private contractor for solid-waste and landfill services; and an entry simply titled Resolution of Litigation. The meeting would conclude with an executive session for Personnel Matters and Pending Litigation.

Estelle wasn’t surprised by either the personnel session or mention of litigation—that was standard procedure for the county. Employees were hired, evaluated, fired. The county sued and was sued on a regular basis, whether over something as simple as determination of an old fence line, violation of a vendor contract, or failure to pay back taxes. The constant flow of civil paperwork kept Sergeant Howard Bishop busy.

Setting the county meeting back into motion, Estelle listened to herself respond to questions until the tape reached the point where Commissioner Tinneman petulantly repeated that he wanted to talk with the county manager. At that point, it appeared that Crowley wasn’t sure whom he wanted to capture on tape. The camera actually wavered a bit with indecision. He swung it hard to the left and recorded Estelle as she left the commission chambers, then panned back to where Zeigler should have been.

Dulci Corona’s sharp voice could be heard on the tape, and in a moment, the camera’s view returned to the podium. After a few minutes, it filmed Estelle’s return as she walked down the aisle and sat beside Mitchell. In a flurry of activity, the final vote was pushed through. The camera caught Tinneman’s discomfiture, then captured Estelle leaning toward Chief Mitchell for a final comment before she rose to leave and the commission moved on to other matters.

With a quick stab at the remote, Estelle stopped the tape and ran it in reverse, watching Dr. Gray’s gavel spring up from the desk and herself waddle backward to her seat. She kept rewinding until she reached the point where she had left the chamber to inquire about the missing Zeigler, then replayed the tape.

When Crowley panned the camera to the left to catch her exit on tape—and what was so important that he would film that particular moment?—the rear of the chambers was also visible, all the way across the spotty audience to Kevin Zeigler’s desk and microphone. A number of people hadn’t returned from lunch, including Commissioner Tina Archuleta and
Posadas Register
editor Pam Gardiner. The seat where Don Fulkerson had been sitting, directly in front of Zeigler’s desk, was also empty. Predictably, several new faces had joined the audience as well, including an elderly couple at the far side of the chambers. The husband stood his walker in the outside aisle.

Estelle ran the tape forward again. Fifteen minutes after the session resumed, Tina Archuleta returned, grimacing with apology as she took her seat. The others ignored her, except for a pleasant nod of recognition from the commission chairman. Crowley filmed her arrival from the moment the door opened, panning as she walked down through the audience.

The meeting plodded onward through two breaks, and as if concerned that his high-density tape would run out too soon, Crowley became more conservative with his recording, cutting off the video during discussion that he considered to be of no consequence. Estelle wondered how he decided, since not a great percentage of what he taped appeared to be much higher on the consequence scale.

At 4:02
PM
by the video camera’s timer, Crowley panned left once more, as the old man with the walker stood to briefly address the commission about the condition of
his
undedicated two-track that had once been a county road but no longer was and should have been. In the row behind him and close to the aisle, Don Fulkerson had returned, but Ralph Johnson had left, leaving Fulkerson to doze alone.

Estelle glanced at the agenda. The discussion item concerning the contracted services was looming on the agenda’s horizon, and Fulkerson had timed it well. Estelle sat forward a little in the rocker and frowned at the screen, but the light in the back of the commission chambers was uncertain, turning individual audience members into shadows.

With Zeigler absent, the commission dropped several agenda items and adjourned early to executive session. The camera panned across the audience, many now standing and milling toward the exits, apparently deciding not to remain and wait for the commission to return from session. The noise level rose as people took the opportunity for chatter and the exchange of gossip tidbits. As she watched their images—some smiling, some sleepy, some bludgeoned numb with boredom—Estelle wondered if someone in those chambers knew exactly where Kevin Zeigler was.

The camera must have been its own form of intimidation, since not one of the audience stopped to talk with Milton Crowley. Maybe sometime in the past, they too had read the sign on his fence, and didn’t care to trespass on his personal space.

Far in the back of the house a toilet flushed, its noise muffled by Estelle’s earphones. Estelle looked at her watch. She had another hour before Francisco would appear, bright-faced and with mouth in gear.

The tape went blank, then flickered and sprang into life as the commissioners filed back into the hall after the executive session. Dr. Gray pushed them through what little business remained, and at 5:03 by the video timer, he rapped his gavel to end the meeting.

Crowley continued to videotape, the camera intruding into the various private conversations that took place in the natural course of a meeting’s end. Finally, the tape ended.

Estelle sat back in the rocker, tapping the remote on her thigh after pressing Rewind. She had seen nothing to pique her interest, other than Zeigler’s absence. The huge, numbing possibility loomed clearly.
What if…what if
? she thought. What if she was stumbling blindly down the wrong road entirely? What if Kevin Zeigler’s disappearance had nothing whatsoever to do with his work as county manager? Estelle realized with growing frustration that she could say the same thing about every other avenue, too.

For nearly an hour, she sat in the rocking chair, doodling on the legal pad. In half an hour, she’d blackened in enough semicircles to represent a fair-sized pile of discarded tires, with a little one standing at the top.