Scavengers pc-10

by Steven F Havill

  “Would you tell him I’ll call him right back? Just have him leave the number where he’s at. I’ll be about five minutes.”

  Irma nodded and retreated inside.

  Estelle bent down, wrapped her left arm around her mother’s shoulders and with her right hand on the older woman’s elbow, lifted her out of the car and to her feet.

  “You’re pretty strong, hija,” Teresa said. “You always surprise me.”

  Estelle got the walker out of the back seat and handed it to her mother. “Do you want the chair?”

  “No, this is fine,” Teresa said. She settled some of her weight tentatively on the aluminum walker as if afraid it might collapse. “It might take me a while.”

  “We have all day, Mamá. ”

  Teresa flashed a smile, her strong teeth good for another eighty years. “Wouldn’t that be nice,” she said. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” She looked toward the front door, fixing that in her mind as the destination, and then navigated around the car door so that Estelle could close it.

  Five-year-old Francisco appeared in the doorway. “Where did you go?” he said to his grandmother.

  Teresa stopped and rested both hands on the walker handle. “Andando a la caza de pinacates, hijo.”

  Francisco’s black eyebrows knit together as his forehead puckered in a frown. “No you weren’t,” he said cautiously and looked around at Irma for confirmation. Surely Abuela had not been out hunting the first stinkbugs of the season without telling him.

  “Here’s one right here,” Teresa said, and moved the walker delicately. Sure enough, one of the comical black beetles had decided that the heat bouncing off the concrete of the sidewalk and the house’s foundation had moved spring ahead of the actual calendar. He was posed by the sidewalk, tail up in the air. “He walked all this way, just like me.”

  Francisco ducked his head, giggled, and bolted back into the house. “Abuela ’s back!” they heard him shout to Carlos, but the younger boy was not so easily dislodged from whatever engrossed him at the moment.

  “Hijos,” Teresa Reyes said as if that proved the thesis of some earlier conversation.

  With her mother inside and tucked in her favorite chair with the oxygen tubes looped around her head like a high-tech necklace, Estelle paused for a moment in the middle of the small living room to slow the whirlwind that was her elder son. She clamped him in a bearhug as she said to Irma, “Did Naranjo leave his number?”

  “He’s still holding,” Irma replied, and then lowered her voice. “He sounds like a movie star or something.”

  Estelle laughed and aimed Francisco toward Irma. “He doesn’t need to hear that,” she said, and went to the phone in the kitchen. During her various dealings with the Mexican policeman over the years, it had always been abundantly clear that Naranjo remained a bachelor at heart, despite his long and apparently happy marriage. His prowl had extended for decades.

  “Capitán, buenos días. Lo siento la tardanza,” she said in Spanish.

  “Ah,” Naranjo said. “It’s good to hear from you, Señora Guzman.” His English was flawless and elegantly accented, as if he were trying to imitate Ricardo Montalban. “My office told me that you called, and I knew it must be important.” He chuckled. “Or at least, I hoped it would be. How is your mother, by the way?”

  “She’s fine. Just tired. I just brought her home.”

  “A remarkable woman. I hope you will give her my very best wishes.”

  “I’ll do that,” Estelle said, at the same time wondering when her mother and Tomás Naranjo had crossed paths. In his early fifties and having served in the Judiciales for nearly thirty years, Naranjo had become something of an institution in his district. “I was hoping that I could ask your assistance with a case we’re working at the moment.”

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  “We have two homicide victims whom I believe are Mexican nationals, captain. They were apparently working up here for a month, cutting firewood on a large ranch near the community of Mule Creek, up in Grant County.”

  “With all the appropriate papers, of course,” Naranjo interjected.

  “Oh, of course. Actually, we really don’t know. When we found the bodies, there was no identification…no wallets, no cards, no nothing.”

  “And no money, I’m sure.”

  “Certainly not that.”

  “Shot?”

  “Yes. Large caliber, no casings left behind, no bullets or bullet fragments. One victim was buried, the other apparently was able to break away. His body was discovered a thousand yards west. Out on the prairie.”

  “I see.”

  “At any rate, some witnesses have placed the two men here in Posadas County earlier this winter-when they were on the way to their job. They stopped at the saloon in Maria.”

  “La Taberna Azul.”

  “That’s correct. And they were seen by several people.”

  “What is it that I can help you with?”

  “First of all, did you have a chance to see the photos that we faxed to your office yesterday?”

  “No, as a matter of fact. But then, I haven’t been in my office for most of the week, so that is not surprising.” He made a sound as if he were trying to hum a tune. “Did you address them directly to me?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well,” Naranjo said. “That’s the problem then. I wasn’t in the office, and no one else looked at them. I’m sure that they’re lying on my desk at this very moment.”

  “I see.”

  “But the message I received was that you would be in Tres Santos this afternoon? Is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. My mother would like to visit her home for a little while, and we thought that today would be good.”

  “May I meet you there?”

  “I was hoping that you could. I’ll bring copies of the photos with me. If you could be of assistance in identifying the two men, that would be a great help.”

  “Most certainly. We will do everything that we can.” He cleared his throat. “Did you have a particular time in mind?”

  “Would two o’clock be convenient?”

  “I will make it so,” Naranjo said. “And perhaps afterward, there is a small place in Asunción we might visit for dinner. It is a short drive, after all. I would enjoy the opportunity to visit with your mother once again.”

  “We’ll have to see,” Estelle said. “My mother tires easily. Even the short drive from here to Tres Santos is going to be a major undertaking for her.”

  “I understand completely. I must confess, I had-what do you call them-ulterior motives. We are currently investigating a nasty little incident at Asunción. I was going to lay it out for you, so to speak…to see what you have to say.”

  “I’d be interested,” Estelle said, her pulse quickening.

  “Then I think it will be a profitable afternoon,” Naranjo said. “I will plan to arrive at your mother’s house at two. Is that settled?”

  “Thank you, sir. You know where it is?”

  “Indeed I do. Until then.”

  Estelle hung up the phone, turned, and took two steps toward the living room. She could hear the two boys in earnest conversation with their grandmother, and then the shrill ringing of the telephone stopped her in her tracks. Even as she lifted the receiver out of the cradle, she could hear the radio traffic in the background.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  According to the story that Paulita Saenz recounted, she never would have looked south that morning had the sink in the women’s bathroom not clogged. Paulita had run enough water to soak a sponge, and then saw the ugly puddle of soap scum, hair, and who knows what else as the sink refused to drain.

  Unscrewing the big plastic lock rings of the sink trap was a simple job requiring no special tools and no particular knowledge of sophisticated plumbing. Paulita knew the trap, long neglected, was choked. With a sigh, she slid a pan under the trap, grunted loose the lock rings above and below the trap, and grimaced at th
e smell of the trapped, stagnant water as it cascaded into the pan. Long tendrils of hair nearly held the plumbing together, but eventually, Paulita managed to pull out the offending plug, her face screwed up in a puckered eeewww of disgust. She dug at the curtains of residue that hung from the now-exposed sink drain stub and wiped the elbow joints clean.

  Reassembly took seconds, and she had closed her eyes and grunted with a dry rag wrapped around the lock rings, snugging them so they wouldn’t leak. With a sigh, she had pushed herself up off the floor, holding a pan containing a quart of bluish-brown water and a large, ugly, fragrant glob of caca asquerosa. The logical place to dispose of the cargo was out the side door that led to the courtyard between house and saloon.

  From there, Paulita turned right, unlatching the garden gate. As the rough, weathered board gate swung open, Paulita was treated to a view south, the early morning sun lancing across the desert. She paused, bowl of watery gunk in hand, riveted by what she saw. Then she dropped the bowl, ran inside and called the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department.

  ***

  Deputy Jackie Taber, off-duty when dispatch went on the air to locate an officer, had been methodically scouring the prairie around the grave site north of Maria, hoping to find a deformed bullet or another shell casing that might have hidden under a chamisa or cholla-something that had been missed in earlier searches. Sgt. Howard Bishop had just turned into the airport parking lot northwest of Posadas. Taber took the call, her Bronco airborne as often as not as she hurtled down the power line access road. She beat the undersheriff to the taberna by eight minutes.

  “Stay here,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, and Paulita Saenz stepped onto the flagstones of her patio and stood with her arms crossed, hugging herself like a small child waiting for a bus. Estelle followed Jackie Taber’s boot prints where the deputy had walked the hundred yards from the back of the Taberna Azul to the border fence, four strands of barbed wire that had seen better days. Stepping directly on the deputy’s prints, Estelle approached until she stood immediately behind Taber.

  “No sign of anything?”

  “Nothing,” Jackie said, and lowered the binoculars. She offered them to Estelle, who shook her head. “This is a good bet where they crossed,” she added. “Lots of boot prints, and you can see the scuffing in the dirt where they climbed over…or through.”

  The border security separating New Mexico and Texas from old Mexico ran the gamut from nothing-where the Rio Grande provided a natural barrier of sorts-to impressive chain link with barbed wire topping in urban centers. Out in the country, however, where tourists didn’t need to be reminded which part of the desert belonged to whom, an aging barbed wire fence frequently served the purpose. At one time, a narrow dirt lane had been bladed along the border fence from one side of New Mexico to the other, but the lane served little purpose: no one drove east-west. It was north-south that interested most folks.

  At formal ports of entry, the fence was bolstered by imposing block houses that protected American and Mexican customs officials from sunstroke. At the smaller crossings, like Columbus to Palomas or Regál to Tres Santos, traffic inched through a single lane, lined up for inspection.

  The tiny village of Maria had never been lucky enough to warrant a crossing of its own. For one thing, the state highway that passed through Maria headed out of the village east toward Las Cruces, roughly paralleling the border rather than crossing it. In the other direction, State 61 veered north to Posadas.

  Columbus, New Mexico, was matched on the Mexican side by Palomas, and westward, at the other end of the rumpled San Cristóbals, folks in Regál could see the lights of Tres Santos if they stood on the hill behind the water tank. Maria had no such sister village across the border.

  The nearest pocket of population, Asunción, was tucked in a wonderfully shady little canyon some sixteen miles south of the border. Roads from Asunción led still farther south to Janos, east to Juarez, and even west to Agua Prieta. But south of Maria in Posadas County and the stretch of barbed wire that marked the border, the Chihuahuan desert stretched rumpled and desolate, marked only occasionally by a rough lane or two-track.

  “Did you contact Mexican authorities?” Estelle asked.

  “I did, but there’s a problem.” Jackie turned and nodded toward the saloon, and Paulita Saenz. “She saw a car, but doesn’t know what kind it is-not the year, not even the make. She thinks it was an older model station wagon. And at the distance, she didn’t recognize the two men who were with Eurelio.”

  “Could it have been the Madrid brothers?”

  “She just couldn’t tell. Apparently she didn’t have on her distance glasses,” Jackie said. “She was busy with the plumbing.” She shrugged. “I talked with a Mexican officer named Bernardo. Luis Bernardo? He’s a corporal in Asunción. Anyway, I told him that we’d be interested in anything he could do for us. I gave him a description of Eurelio.”

  “It’s a place to start,” Estelle said. She turned and regarded the saloon.

  Had there been a window in the back storage room of the Taberna Azul, Paulita Saenz could have peered out and seen the sun glinting off the barbed wire border fence. But a window would have been an attractive nuisance. The back, southern-facing wall of the saloon was solid, secure adobe from ground to vigas.

  The west wall of the taberna once had sported a window with a beautiful, deep sill. The view of the San Cristóbal mountains had been breathtaking when the dawn washed them in rose and purple. Three break-ins through that window had prompted Monroy Saenz to block up the window and plaster it over to match the rest of the wall. On the inside of the patched wall, he’d painted a window with shutters thrown open to reveal a colorful garden beyond, complete with a vineyard and improbably huge purple grapes glistening in latex splendor. It was a cheerful, secure view that never changed, the grapes hanging forever ripe.

  Estelle could remember, during a visit to the taberna with her great-uncle when she’d sat quietly, waiting for Reuben to finish his business. She had watched the grapes, trying to imagine the movement of the leaves in the breeze.

  The single front window of the saloon, protected by a heavy wrought-iron grill, looked out on the front parking lot, State 61, and across the way, Wally Madrid’s gas station.

  The Taberna Azul was a comfortable fortress. It was a place to sit in quiet darkness while the New Mexico sun baked the world outside, or the wind scoured it, or ambitious people blew themselves up trying to make a profit from it.

  “She said her son went willingly, though…at least at the beginning,” Estelle said.

  “Until the very last, apparently,” Jackie replied. “Then it turned into a tussle.”

  Estelle nodded. “Let me talk to her again.”

  Paulita Saenz was weeping and trying to hide the fact by wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. She turned back toward the patio as Estelle approached, and the undersheriff heard a loud, heartfelt sigh from Paulita.

  “Paulita, it’s one thing if Eurelio just jumped the fence and took off with friends-he probably does that all the time. That’s not what happened this morning?”

  The woman wiped her eyes again with her sleeve and shook her head. She turned and tried to meet Estelle’s gaze, but couldn’t. “I saw them go over the fence,” she said. “Their car was parked just beyond, on the Mexican side, on that little cow path there.”

  “I understand that. But what did you see, exactly? I really need to know.”

  “Eurelio was walking ahead of them, and they were all talking. I could see their hands moving, you know? I guess they must have come across and walked to the back of the house to find my son. I was busy in the taberna. I didn’t hear them. I didn’t see them.”

  And maybe it’s just as well that you didn’t, Estelle thought. “And then what happened?”

  “I saw them hop the fence. And then they went to the car, and then I could hear their voices. Eurelio opened the passenger door in front and just as he turned to get in, one of the men
hit him in the back of the head. I saw him do that.” Paulita’s voice quavered.

  “With his fist, or did he have something in his hand?”

  “I couldn’t tell for sure.” Paulita held out her right hand, palm spread with her fingers pointing up. She patted the heel of her hand. “It looked like this.” And she punched sharply forward with her hand. “That’s what I think. Eurelio, he turned then, and they struggled. Then he went down inside the car.”

  “Did your son fall?”

  “I couldn’t tell if he fell, or what,” Paulita said.

  “But it looked to you that he’d changed his mind about getting in the car?”

  She nodded. “And the one man slammed the door on him. Then one of them got in to drive and the other got in the back.”

  “And you never saw any weapons?”

  Paulita shook her head.

  “Did they ever look back and see you?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “And show me again what direction they went.” Paulita pointed toward the southwest. “Toward Asunción, then?”

  “Maybe. Maybe anywhere.”

  “It was a four-door sedan?”

  “It was one of those huge old station wagons,” Paulita said. “The kind with the roof rack on top.”

  “Deputy Taber said that you didn’t see what model it was.”

  “Well, I remembered some. That’s what it was. Just about the same color as the dust.”

  “Sort of a yellowish tan?”

  “That’s right. And big.”

  “And a station wagon.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you ever have a chance to see the front of the car?”

  “Yes, I saw the front. It was parked sort of angled toward the fence, you know. Yes, I could see the front.”

  “Would you recognize the front of it if we showed you a picture?”

  “I think I might,” Paulita said. “I remember the hood, you know. It was really long. A big old boat. The front fenders were really sharp. Creased on the top. They looked like cheeks.”