Leaning Land (8 page)

“Did you know him very well?”

“Not as well as I know some of the other folks around here. He wasn’t around home that much. I know his wife, Sharon, a lot better.” His cheeks suddenly darkened with a blush. “I mean, she comes in the store to do shopping and mail letters, you know. So we have a chance to talk some. Rubin was always off somewhere with his trucking business, so I didn’t know him so well.” He added, “Seemed like a nice fella, though. Always friendly.”

“You’ve lived here long?” Wager glanced across the dimly lit store. The aisles were narrow and flanked by a little of everything, ranging from canned and dried foodstuffs to hardware and beauty items. A chiller near the entry held soda pop and beer, another just beyond the cash register and fronted with sliding glass doors showed dairy goods, ice cream, popsicles, a small variety of frozen dinners, bags of frozen vegetables, wrapped packages of meat and fish and poultry. There were no shopping carts—they wouldn’t fit through the cramped aisles—but a short stack of plastic tote baskets sat beside the check-out counter. That was a small space cleared between displays of candy and tobacco, most of which was the chewing kind.

“About three years now. Came from California about three years ago when I bought the store. Love it here—it’s peaceful, you know?”

“Ever hear of anyone who might want Del Ponte dead?”

“Oh, no. Maybe some of his relatives over on the reservation could tell you something.” A tilt of his head in another direction. “But I never heard anything like that.”

“Have you ever heard of the Constitutional Posse?”

Herrera’s eyes widened momentarily and he blinked. “Just that some folks belong. I don’t. I don’t really know much about it. I can’t tell you much about it.”

“Is Mrs. Del Ponte home now?”

“Sure—she’s … I mean, she’s usually home … . Got her two kids and only one’s in school, you know, and so she has to stay home.”

Wager asked a few more questions about local people Del Ponte might know and where they lived. Egnarville was different from Denver and far more spread out. But the network of a victim’s friends and acquaintances, relatives and enemies, was familiar; and despite the empty sky, the distant glimmer of snowy peaks, the wind that made the only sound, Wager was beginning to feel at home.

Sharon Del Ponte had one of those faces that seemed to be dried down to basics: small, triangular eyes, thin nose, full lips. She wasn’t what Wager would call pretty, but she wasn’t exactly plain or ugly, either. She might have been better-looking when she was in her teens—probably when she married Del Ponte—but there was enough left which, with the bushy red hair that made her face seem even more doll-like, could cause some men to look twice.

“I heard he was telling people he worked as an informer. We didn’t talk about it though.” Her full lips pressed together a bit. “Somebody told the newspaper he was. It was in the newspaper with the story about him being found.” She sat in a turned-wood rocking chair placed to look through the picture window at the swing set in the sandy front yard. There, a child climbed alone up the small slide, carefully slid down, and then turned to climb again: he or she did it over and over, deliberately, learning early what life was all about. “I don’t think they should’ve put that in there.”

The house was a prefab, the “wide load” kind you saw being trucked in halves down the highway on flatbed trailers, to be set up on a cinder-block foundation somewhere. Early American. That was what the wooden chairs and table, the red-and-white checkered curtains and wall paneling were called, Wager remembered. Early American, maple stain. Framed pictures of mountains and lakes hung here and there on the dark walls, and children’s toys had been dropped and not yet picked up. The urgent knock of a dog scratching a flea bite bumped against the closed front door.

“He never spoke to you about anything he might have found out? About anyone who might have been interested in or afraid of what he was doing?”

“No. If he knew something like that, he never told me.”

“Did he ever mention the Constitutional Posse?”

“No!”

“Do you know anybody who belongs to it?”

She chewed at her lip. “Some around here probably do—it’s mostly the big ranch owners and the ones who go along with them. Not Rubin—he didn’t have any reason to join up with them.”

Wager nodded. “Any idea what he was doing over in Squaw Canyon without his truck?”

A frown pulled her pale red eyebrows together. “I don’t know. I have wondered some about that. But you ought to talk to his brother over on the reservation—Luther. Rubin was always going over there to see him.”

Wager asked a dozen or so other questions, but they were the same thing in different words and received similar responses. When you didn’t know exactly what you wanted, when you were going by hunch and guesswork, you tried repeating the same thing in two or three different ways. It was one of the basic techniques of interviewing witnesses that Wager had learned over the years. More than once, early in his career, he had found himself unnecessarily delayed until a witness—on a third or fourth interview—brought out something vital that hadn’t been mentioned earlier because, “You didn’t ask me about it that way!” The worst kind were those witnesses who, being helpful, limited their answers strictly to what the detective asked. But Mrs. Del Ponte didn’t seem helpful as much as reluctant—her answers were terse and they all came back to the same point: she knew very little about her husband’s job or even about his life away from Egnarville.

“Did you or your husband know Larry Kershaw, Buck Holtzer, or Walter Lawrence?”

“No … Walter Lawrence, maybe. Ain’t he the Indian they found dead on the reservation a while ago?”

“Yes, ma’am. The other two are the slain federal employees. Your husband would have been asking about them.”

“Oh.” Then, “No. I didn’t know them. Rubin probably knew Walter Lawrence—everybody on the reservation knows each other. They’re all some kind of kin, mostly.” She shook her head again. “I didn’t know him.”

“Do you like living here, Mrs. Del Ponte?”

That question surprised her and drew her eyes from the cheery yellow-and-red plastic swing set dwarfed by the expanse of sagebrush and horizon. “Like it? Well, I reckon. It’s where I’ve lived all my life.”

“You have family nearby?”

“My uncle and his wife, but I don’t see much of them. Most of my family’s up near Fruita—in Mesa County. It used to be like this: real pretty and nobody around. It’s grown a lot up there, though.” She added, looking at a future Wager couldn’t see, “Jesse says it’s going to grow like that around here, too. I don’t think I’ll like that.”

“Who says?”

“Jesse. Herrera. Owns the store.”

“You talk to him a lot?”

She shrugged. “When I go over to the store. The post office is there, too.” She added, and her tone of voice told Wager to make of it what he would, that she didn’t have anything to hide. “Around here, anybody you see you talk to. It’s not like some places.”

“Do you intend to stay here now?”

“Well, it’s paid for—” Which was either as far down the road as she had thought or as far as she was willing to let Wager see. He wasn’t sure which.

“Does Jesse Herrera live around here, too?”

“Yes.” She wagged a hand over her shoulder. “Over there near the store. Why?”

“Is he married?”

“What’s that mean?”

“Just trying to understand your husband’s life, Mrs. Del Ponte. Maybe something will help explain his death.”

“Well, you understand this, Detective Whatever Your Name Is: there ain’t nothing between me and Jesse Herrera—nothing at all! We’re friends and that’s it!”

B.J. Haydn told another story. His house was about a mile down a dirt section road on a quarter acre of lushly irrigated greenness. It was fenced off from the expanse of open range with its greasewood and sagebrush by an electrified wire.

“Hell, a man runs around and leaves his woman alone all the time, he’s got to expect somebody’ll sniff around when he ain’t there.”

The unshaven, wiry man in dark blue overalls grunted as he wrenched tight a hose connection on the pneumatic line of his drilling rig. Wager stood in the shade of the metal Butler building and pushed the wet, insistent nose of Haydn’s dog away from his crotch. The dual-axle pickup truck parked between the weathered frame house and the tin building had HAYDN DRILLING SERVICE on the door in sun-worn letters.

“Is Herrera married?”

“Sure. What difference’s that make? So’s she. Or was.”

“Did Del Ponte think there was anything between his wife and Herrera?”

“Hell, I don’t know. If he did, he didn’t say anything to me. And I wasn’t about to tell him. Little place like this, you mind your own business, know what I mean?”

“You were his friend, I understand.”

“Well, yeah, I suppose. I hired him and his truck sometimes when I needed extra wheels on a job. And we’re neighbors. Hell, around here, it’s hard not to be a neighbor.”

“Did you know he was working for the FBI as an informant?”

Haydn grinned and scratched an oil-grimed knuckle at his earlobe. “Yeah, I read something about that. They even had something in the newspaper about it. Damn waste of the taxpayers’ money, but that’s nothing new.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about what he was looking for or if he might have discovered something about the deaths of two federal agents?”

“No. Nothing like that. No reason to.”

“Have you heard of the Constitutional Posse?”

“Sure. Everybody around here has. Half the ranchers in the county belong or have relatives in it. Why? You think they had something to do with Rubin’s death?”

“I don’t know. Did he ever mention them to you?”

“Naw. What for? They’re not like the goddamn KKK—they don’t go around burning crosses and lynching people. That what you think?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” said Wager. “What kind of work did Rubin do for you?”

“Transport—drove his truck or mine to the site, depending.”

“You do a lot of well drilling around here?”

“Here, Montezuma County, Montrose County. The reservation. Sometimes over in Utah, depending. Business’s been good. Promises to get better—more people coming in all the time. How long the water’ll last is another question—that and the water rights on the subterranean flow. That’s what’ll make or break the future of La Sal and every other county around here: how much water and who owns it.”

“Can you think of any reason at all why someone might want Del Ponte dead?”

“No.”

Neither could Pete Stein, who Wager found under the shaft of an irrigation rig and wearing rubber boots coated up to their shins with gluey mud. The long aluminum tube ran like an axle through the centers of a dozen spoked wheels spaced fifty feet apart and which stood about twice as tall as Stein. The farthest wheel, tiny and fragile-looking across the wind-rippled grass whose green was so dark it almost hurt the eyes, was anchored near a well pump or a hose connection. The water from that source built up pressure in the long shaft, its jets pulsed feathers of water from rotating sprinkler heads, and the turning sprinkler heads levered the wheels in wide circles around the pivot. It was the same principle as a crawling lawn sprinkler, and like that device, occasionally broke down.

“No reason at all why anybody might kill him that I know of.” Stein had a big chin made bigger by a wad of tobacco in his cheek and by the strain he put on a nut that held against the torque of his wrench. “Sombitch set here half a day running water before I saw it.” He pointed to a six-inch-wide track of dredged mud where the frozen walker wheel had been dragged across the soaked earth by the effort of the other wheels.

“This your hay crop?”

The brown-haired man glanced at Wager and nodded. “Get it grown, get it baled, get it stacked, get through the winter.” He spat a long brown stream. “And then get started again.” He grunted with satisfaction as the nut finally yielded a fraction. “There—you sombitch!”

“How well did you know Rubin Del Ponte?”

“Well enough, I reckon. Hired him off and on—he was a pretty good worker, if he did talk your ears off.”

“What did he do for you?”

“Field work—moving irrigation pipe—general farm work when he wasn’t trucking. Anything he could to scrape in a few dollars cash.”

“Would that include being an informer for the feds?”

Another long squirt of brown spit. “What I hear, yeah, I guess it did.” Stein glanced at Wager again. “Was it you he was working for?”

“I’m not federal. I’m state.”

A wordless nod.

“Did he seem worried or afraid of anything before he was killed?”

“He definitely was killed? That what they saying now?”

Wager corrected himself. “Maybe killed. We don’t know for sure.”

“Then maybe you don’t want to go around saying he was.”

“Why?”

The man rattled in his large toolbox for a tube of something and squeezed a blob into the opened axle plate. “If it ain’t true, you don’t want to say it. That’s all.”

“Did he seem afraid or worried before he died?”

“Quiet. He was quiet. Like he was thinking something over real good.”

“Any idea what that was?”

“No. I didn’t ask and he didn’t say. At least he wasn’t talking a hundred words to the minute.”

“How long before his death was this?”

“Week, maybe. I hired him to move some steers for me, and we worked almost a full day loading and trucking.” He added, “I gave him a full day’s pay for his time, anyway.”

“Did he say anything at all unusual? Anything that at the time struck you as odd?”

“Didn’t say much. That’s what was odd. Usually he had all sorts of crap to talk about—who he was working for next, what job he’d just finished, who he’d run across over in the canyons. I didn’t much care, but he liked to talk about it.”

“Did he say anything about his wife?”

Stein paused in his work to swing his arm and loosen a stiff shoulder. The flannel of his shirt was dark with water dripping from the pipe. “What’s that mean?”

“I heard Mrs. Del Ponte might have played around.”