Privileged to Kill (9 page)

14

And they did wait, apparently. The telephone may have continued ringing during my entire shower. I had no idea. When the roar of the water subsided, the damn thing was still ringing—or ringing again. With a heartfelt sigh, I gave in and padded over to the nightstand beside my bed.

I snatched up the receiver. “What?”

“Hello, sir.” Estelle’s soft voice carried no reproach or urgency. “I was just making sure you hadn’t fallen asleep on us.”

I laughed. “Not likely, sweetheart. Sorry I barked at you. I figured it was probably the sheriff. I just stepped out of the shower, and as soon as I stop dripping all over my expensive rugs and get dressed, I’ll be over. I wouldn’t miss fried chili-chicken for the world.”

“Baked chicken,” she said. “No chili.”

I groaned in mock distress. “But that’s the next thing to health food.”

“See you shortly,” Estelle said.

“I’ll be over in about fifteen minutes.” I hung up, wondering why she’d bothered to call to remind me. To the best of my recollection, in all my sixty-four-plus years I had never forgotten a meal. Skipped a few thousand, certainly, when things got hectic. But never forgotten.

I dressed in my most comfortable civilian uniform—brown boots, khaki trousers, and checkered flannel shirt—and then took my time backing the Blazer out of the garage. I’d owned it for less than two months and hadn’t yet put the obligatory scratch on it that would then allow me to treat it like the truck it was.

The Guzmans lived on South Twelfth Street, a street name that made Posadas sound like more than the sleepy village it was. I headed for their place by my usual direct route, under the interstate on Grande, then north to the intersection with Bustos Avenue by Pershing Park.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, or thinking about. Maybe it was the cloud bank off in the southwest, hanging low over the San Cristobal mountains, promising the first fall storm. Maybe I was wondering what Wesley Crocker had found in his exploration of Bennett’s Road north of town. Maybe I was still stewing about Maria Ibarra. Who the hell knew.

Whatever it was that preoccupied my mind, it was a good thing that our postmistress, Carla Champlin, was looking where
she
was going. My shiny new Blazer, with 206 miles on the odometer, sailed right through the stoplight at Grande and Bustos. I realized the light was red only after I’d passed underneath it, commanding the intersection like I owned the road. The spinster Champlin, bless her heart, saw me coming, and had time to stand on the brakes for all her spindly legs were worth.

Her eastbound station wagon screamed to a halt in a cloud of blue rubber smoke, skewed slightly sideways as she wrenched the steering wheel to the left. Her vehicle’s bumper missed bashing the Blazer’s left rear quarter-panel by inches. I didn’t even have time to wave a greeting. As if no one were on the street but me, I continued through the intersection and turned westbound on Bustos.

When my heart started beating again and I stopped swearing, I glanced in my rearview mirror. Her car was pulling away, none the worse for wear except for the flat spots on her tires. It was twilight, and perhaps in the failing light she hadn’t recognized me. I knew that was wishful thinking, since she’d had a broadside view of my startled face. Besides that, Carla Champlin never missed anything. I would get the full withering treatment next time I snuck in the post office.

I took a deep breath and muttered a curse-studded prayer of thanksgiving that Posadas was tiny, it was dinner hour, the football game was out of town, and that every other grace had resulted in there being only Carla Champlin and me on the street at that moment.

Estelle Reyes-Guzman opened the door before my finger could touch the doorbell. She took one look at my face and her eyes narrowed. As she stepped aside to let me in, her head cocked a little sideways. Her radar was working overtime, and as usual, it was dead accurate.

“What happened?” she asked, not sounding worried, but rather conversational, as if I were inspecting the sole of my boots after walking past the dog run. Before I could answer, the Guzman’s two-year-old son catapulted into the room, saw me, and stopped short.

“
Padrino
is here!” Francis Jr. bellowed and charged toward me. How the genes of two such reserved and quiet parents had produced this tiny human windbag, even Gregor Mendel wouldn’t be able to figure out. A lusty roar was the kid’s idea of a whisper. I cringed from the attack, not because I didn’t like the child, but because I was feeling a little frail around the edges. Estelle gracefully intercepted him and locked him in a bear hug.

“Yes,
kid
, he’s here,” Estelle said, nuzzling his ear and using my nickname for Francis Jr. The two-year-old squirmed and cackled, but Estelle held him fast. She looked at me, eyes still assessing. “You look pale, sir.”

I tossed my baseball cap on their sofa, and like a small two-legged retriever the kid twisted out of his mother’s grip and tore after the cap, seized it, and pulled it down on his head to the bridge of his nose.

“I ran the red light at Grande and Bustos,” I said and shrugged. Estelle looked puzzled, and I held up my hands. “That’s it. I ran the light.”

“No one else…”

I shook my head. “Carla Champlin was coming the other way. She managed to miss me. I’m sure I scared the zip code out of her, though.” I grinned sheepishly. “If she had scratched my truck, I’d have had to shoot her.”

Estelle’s smile was only the faintest of twitches at the corners of her mouth. Her dark eyes weren’t amused.

“Hey,” I said, “it happens now and then.”

“Let’s eat,” she said, and beckoned me toward the dining room.

“Where’s the good doctor?” I asked, following her with the blinded two-year-old stumbling at my heels, both hands clutching the bill of my cap.

“He had to run down to the hospital for a few minutes. Cassie Madrid is scheduled for surgery in the morning, and there was some question about her prep meds.” Estelle glanced at me. “He said it would only take a minute. You know how that goes.” She disappeared into the kitchen.

Before I had a chance to comment on Cassie Madrid’s pending cesarean section that would produce child number ten, I heard a car in the driveway. In a moment, Dr. Francis Guzman hustled into the house. In one smooth motion he scooped up his son, tucked him under one arm, and then extended a hand to me. His grip was firm and he was in no hurry to let go.

“Bill, how’s it going?” He pumped the hand another time for good measure, just enough pressure that he didn’t set off my arthritis.

“I’m hungry,” I said. “And this was a nice idea.”

“How’s Cassie?” Estelle asked.

Francis dismissed that story with a wave of a hand. “Nurse can’t read,” he said. He put his hand on top of the kid’s head as if he were about to unscrew the top of a wide-mouthed jar of mayonnaise. “Do you want this creature in his high chair, or feeding out of the dog dish in the kitchen?” he asked as Estelle reappeared with a load of serving bowls and platters balanced on her arm like a professional waitress.

“High chair, next to you.”

Francis Guzman looked eyeball to eyeball with the youngster, both big and little brows furrowed in mock ferocious combat. “But that way he’ll get his food all over me instead of Bill.” The kid screeched and tried to grab my sleeve.

“That’s the general idea,” I said.

Francis laughed. We settled in at the table and Francis said grace in Spanish while his left hand clamped his son motionless in the high chair. I don’t think that the hand was necessary. As soon as he heard his father start to speak, the kid closed his eyes and froze. The truce lasted as long as the prayer. Then Estelle dolloped the makings of an artistic mess on the kid’s unbreakable plate and let him have at it.

“So, how’s the painting going?” Francis said. He grinned at me and when he saw the expression on my face he added, “Estelle was telling me that’s how you were working out your frustrations.”

“Maybe that’s what it was, I don’t know,” I said. I looked at my plate and realized that, despite my best intentions, I wasn’t the least bit hungry. I toyed with the food and then spent four times as long as necessary preparing my iced tea with sugar and lemon juice. While Estelle and Francis chatted about this and that and periodically played referee between the kid and his food, I found my mind wandering.

I had enjoyed probably half a thousand meals at this table over the years, and the Guzman home was an adult version of a safe haven for me when I got too disgruntled at the world and the people in it. But that night, it was as if my mind were somewhere else, trying to pick its way through a fog.

“We won’t have the full blood run-up back for another forty-eight hours or so, but I think it’s interesting,” Francis said, and with a start I realized that I had drifted back into hearing range.

“Sir?” Estelle prompted.

“What’s interesting?” I asked. “Sorry. I was wandering.”

“Francis was saying that the preliminary autopsy showed Maria Ibarra had virtually nothing in her stomach other than the equivalent of about a quarter slice of pizza.”

“Really?”

She nodded, and I was aware that Francis was gazing at me, his dark eyes doing their quiet doctor-patient number.

“She was famished then,” I said. “She went after the food too fast.” I grinned. “Great dinner table conversation.”

But with some relief, I focused on Maria’s last meal as I laid my fork across my plate, most of the food untouched. With my elbows on either side of the plate and my chin resting on laced fingers, I squinted at Estelle.

“Maria Ibarra couldn’t have afforded half a slice of pizza, let alone anything else. So she was with someone who picked up the tab,” I said. “We know that much.” I pushed myself away from the table and leaned back in the chair. “If she was with kids, what are the odds that it was packaged pizza? The kind you buy in the grocery store?”

“Zero,” Estelle said. “That time of night? Kids cruising the village? They’re not going to go home and eat microwave pizza.”

“Maybe not.”

“And not pizza with fresh jalapeños,” Francis said.

I turned and grinned at him. “This is getting even better, this conversation. But it gives us a place to start. How many places in Posadas sell fresh pizza? Two?”

“Three, if you count Portillo’s Handy-Way.”

“And that’s just miked packaged stuff,” I said. “It shouldn’t be hard to track down who sold the pizza…and if we have any luck at all, the counter help will remember who came in and who didn’t. It’s not that big a town.”

“If you can get people to talk,” Francis said.

“At the moment, that doesn’t matter,” I replied. “Remember what it’s like to be a teenager? If we find a single kid who remembers seeing Maria last night, even just one, that kid will remember who Maria was with. And a teenager with an adult? That, they’ll really remember.”

I reached out and stabbed the piece of chicken that I’d been pushing around my plate while my mind was off in the blue. The chicken was tender and spicy, and when that piece was gone I went searching for another. It looked like the others had finished their dinner, so I had some catching up to do. Both Francis and Estelle seemed perfectly willing to keep me company.

15

While the others waited, I finished a dinner fit for a condemned man, and then spent time over coffee, hashing out a battle plan with Estelle. Francis Guzman even spent the better part of ten minutes with us before adjourning to the living room to play with his son. That ten minutes was something of a record for him.

The battle plan should have been simple enough. My brain was clear, the paths of action seemed limited to a handful. The first order of business was to find out who had kept Maria Ibarra company the evening of her death.

What I hoped, of course, was that we’d visit Jan’s Pizza Parlor on Bustos and Second, or maybe the Pizza World over on North Fifth, and find out that Maria had been seen with person X, and then we’d go arrest the son of a bitch for failure to report a death. That’s not what happened.

The Guzmans’ nanny, Irma Sedillos, she of the chililess baked chicken recipe, showed up at the house around eight that evening for the night shift. The kid seemed perfectly attuned to his parents’ bizarre life, accepting their sudden comings and goings with complete aplomb. He obviously loved Irma and accepted her as a third parent—probably because she was noisier than he was.

“I can’t watch,” Estelle muttered as she closed the door on the kitchen. Neither could Francis. The good doctor had locked himself in his study, nose deep in a stack of medical journals. Irma and the kid were about to do the dishes. I didn’t bother to ask what kind of team the two of them would make. Irma had to be capable of some magic, though, since the two of them had done dishes many times before and the Guzmans didn’t yet eat off paper plates.

After a third cup of coffee, I worked up enough gumption to move out of my chair. We decided to hit Jan’s Pizza Parlor first, for no good reason other than that it was the more popular of the two nightspots. With an out-of-town game, business would be slow. There was no reason for this game to be any different from other contests. The cavalcade of cars and trucks that traditionally followed the Posadas Jaguars’ game bus out of town would have been long and vocal. The ruckus in the local eateries would start about midnight, when everyone returned.

I drove the Blazer home to its garage with Estelle following in the patrol car. Even as I swung the heavy door down, I could hear a siren far in the distance. Estelle swung 310 into my driveway and I hustled over to the patrol car.

She started to step out. “Do you want to drive, sir?”

“Go ahead,” I said, and slid my bulk into the passenger side, simultaneously reaching for the radio’s volume knob. The damn thing was turned so low it was an unintelligible mumble and I frowned at Estelle. “Wonderful gadgets, these radios,” I said.

“It’s a pedestrian accident at the corner of Pershing and Bustos,” Estelle said. “Bob Torrez is coming in, but he’s about twelve miles west. The ambulance is already en route.”

“Where’s the P.D.?” I asked, but the radio answered my question.

“Posadas, P.D. will be ten-ninety-seven.” I could hear the excitement in Officer Thomas Pasquale’s voice, and his radio was picking up enough background noise that I could hear the wail of his patrol car’s engine as he flogged it down one of the village’s quiet streets.

“Ten-four, P.D.,” our dispatcher said, calm as ice. He didn’t ask Tom Pasquale where he was, or why he was predicting that he would arrive at the scene before he actually did. Ernie Wheeler took life as it came. Instead he added, “P.D., did you copy three-oh-eight?”

“Ten-four. I’m on North Twelfth. E.T.A. about a minute,” Pasquale said, and I wished that he would leave the damn radio alone and put both hands on the steering wheel.

I keyed the mike and told Posadas dispatch that we were responding as well. The ambulance had a block and a half to travel from the hospital to the reported accident site. If Officer Tom Pasquale was on North Twelfth, he had approximately half a mile to cover. We were three quarters of a mile south.

We flew through the same intersection where I’d run the red light earlier in the evening and immediately saw, one block west, the ambulance parked at the south curb of Bustos, near the sidewalk at the intersection of Bustos and Pershing. Two other vehicles were parked nearby, and a small crowd had gathered. Tom Pasquale’s village patrol car was nowhere in sight.

“Swing around and block eastbound,” I said needlessly. Estelle was already in the process, neatly shielding the accident scene from incoming traffic—including Officer Pasquale, if he ever showed up.

Several people were clustered around a figure lying at the base of a utility pole, but they didn’t seem to be paying much attention to the patient. Instead, they were all looking off to the west, and one of them was pointing.

We pulled to a halt and beyond the crowd, fifty feet farther east and well across the intersection of Pershing, close to the curb, was what had once been a bicycle, crushed to junk. The street was strewn with debris. The light was not good, and I wouldn’t have immediately recognized the bicycle even if it hadn’t been reduced to scrap.

As I got out, one of the well-wishers shouted, “I think you got another accident down there!” He gestured toward the west. “We heard a hellacious crash, and the siren stopped.”

“Christ,” I said, and Estelle ducked back into the car to call dispatch. She’d take care of the radio, and Bob Torrez would be inbound in minutes. I turned my attention to the figure on the sidewalk.

Wesley Crocker grinned sheepishly as I knelt down. I had to brace one hand on the utility pole to steady myself.

He wasn’t bleeding from every orifice, no bones jutted grotesquely through torn clothing, and his limbs hadn’t been twisted or smashed into obscene angles. Still, even I could see that he was pale and shaky, despite his attempt at good cheer.

“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

I moved to one side so that the ambulance attendant could work his magic. Crocker tried to push himself upright and grimaced, and Miller Martinez, the EMT, placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Stay put, sir. Let us do all the work.”

Crocker turned his head so he could see me. “I fell off my bike, good sir.”

“I can see that,” I said. “You must have been doing ninety miles an hour.” He grinned and then sighed as the two EMTs lifted him onto the gurney and strapped him in. “Did you see who hit you?”

He shook his head. “I surely didn’t. I never heard a thing.” He grinned. “I wasn’t paying all that much attention, either, I confess.”

I glanced over my shoulder, and then back at the bicycle. “Whoever it was came up behind you?”

“Yes, sir.”

I stood at the back door of the ambulance, and the EMT gave me a few more seconds.

“Did you see the vehicle?”

“No, sir.”

“Not even after it hit you?”

“Especially not then,” Wesley Crocker said, and managed a chuckle. “I was headed ass over teakettle.”

“Were you on your bike?”

“No. I was pushing it. I guess that’s what saved me. The bike was on the street side of me. I don’t think I would have been hurt much at all if I’d managed to miss that utility pole. That thing’s on the hard side, sir.”

“We need to go, Sheriff,” Miller said, and I nodded.

“Once more, though. Wesley, the vehicle came from the west, is that right? It came down Bustos from the west?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And it continued on down Bustos, or did it turn on Pershing here?”

“I couldn’t swear either way, sir, but if I was to guess, I’d say it went on down the main drag, there.”

I nodded. “We’ll catch up with you at the hospital. Don’t worry about any of your stuff.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about any of that, sir. I just don’t think I need to bother the folks at the hospital for a few bruises.”

“Sir…” I turned as Estelle touched my arm.

“What’s going on?”

“It looks like Tom Pasquale flipped his vehicle down the street. Right at the intersection of Twelfth and Bustos.”

“Oh, for God’s sakes.”

“Ernie Wheeler said the manager of the Don Juan just called. The patrol car is on its top right in the middle of the intersection. Chief Martinez just arrived, and Torrez will be there in a minute.”

“Is Pasquale hurt?”

“Apparently not, sir.”

“Then let’s get busy here. Let the chief call his own tow truck.”

I suppose I should have felt more solicitous, but I wasn’t in the mood. We cleared away oglers, and Eddie Mitchell arrived to help secure the area so we could see what the hell we had. Then I sent him out to look for a vehicle with a freshly crumpled fender.

We didn’t have much. The first clear tire scuff mark showed on the curb about thirty feet west of the corner of Bustos and Pershing. Whoever had been driving the vehicle let it climb the curb on the south side of Bustos, then ran along it for just a few feet, gathering up the bicycle and flinging Wesley Crocker against the utility pole.

The bike had gotten snarled up with the vehicle, which finally spat it out across the intersection.

I played my flashlight over the remains of the bicycle. “After all those miles, some jerk does this,” I muttered.

Estelle Reyes-Guzman unlimbered her camera. She knelt down and pointed with the tip of her pencil. “Lots of flat black paint on the bicycle, sir.”

“Yep,” I said. “Whoever did this is going to show some battle scars. Any other paint souvenirs that you can see?”

She played the light this way and that. “Lots of black. Some bright metal scrapes. We can go over it better down at the shop, with some decent light.” She handed me a small plastic object. “And we have this.”

It was the plastic trumpet portion of a deer whistler, those little gadgets that folks stick on their cars and trucks to warn deer out of their path. The thing was broken off at the base.

“Maybe,” I said. “Or from some other vehicle. Bag it.”

Fifteen minutes later, the street was clear and we were as finished as we would ever be.

I leaned against 310, my arms folded over my belly. “We still don’t know if it was intentional or not,” I said.

Estelle shrugged. “It could have been someone who just wasn’t paying attention. They panicked and ran.”

“Could have been,” I said.

“Do you want to drive down the street?” She indicated westward, and I remembered Tom Pasquale.

“I’m not sure I want to see it,” I said, then added, “and sure as hell, Pasquale doesn’t want to see me.” I looked at Estelle and grinned. “Let’s go see.”