The Big Gamble

by Michael McGarrity

  “Something like that.”

  She caved, lost her poise, buried her head in her hands. Kerney stayed back and let her cry. She forced herself to straighten up, composed her face, and spread her arms wide, as if to embrace the hilltop house, the views of the mountains in the distance, her reinvented, respectable life.

  “If I hadn’t done what I did, I would have none of this,” Pearson said. “Can you understand that?”

  Kerney nodded.

  “How can you possibly protect me?”

  “When the time comes, I’ll ask the DA to have you appear before a grand jury. Your testimony will be sealed and never made public.”

  Kerney knew he might be making a false promise, and while he didn’t want to cause Pearson any pain, getting to Norvell was much more important than preserving the woman’s secret.

  “It’s your call,” he said.

  Pearson’s slight nod of agreement gave Kerney no sense of satisfaction. She had the look of a small animal about to be eaten by a predator.

  “Come inside the house,” she said.

  It took an hour for Pearson to tell her story. Part confession, part rationalization, it spanned the years just before Norvell’s return to New Mexico and his election to his first term in office. Pearson had been the number-one girl in Norvell’s Denver stable; the most expensive, the most in demand, the one with the most repeat customers.

  She had made money, spent money, gotten high, lived the good life: designer clothes, weeks at luxury resorts with wealthy men, extravagant gifts, world travel. She explained what it had meant to a girl from a dysfunctional family who’d felt worthless and stupid.

  She told him how watching Norvell’s older girls get dumped as they lost their bloom made her realize she had to do something with her life before it was too late. How coming to Santa Fe on working weekends to be with clients, she found a place where she thought it would be possible to turn things around.

  Kerney didn’t interrupt. He heard her out as she talked about breaking away from Norvell, moving to Santa Fe, going into therapy, apprenticing with a clothing designer, opening her business, meeting her future husband, starting a family. Finally, she stopped, exhausted by the outpouring. But her eyes looked clearer, less troubled.

  Kerney decided not to press too much for specifics. That would come later in an in-depth interview. He brought up Adam Tully and Luis Rojas and got confirmation that both were Norvell’s partners. He learned that Rojas lived in El Paso. She had no knowledge of Cassie Bedlow, Gene Barrett, or Leo Silva.

  “We’ll need to meet again,” he said. “You can pick the time and place, but it must be soon.”

  “How did you find me?” Pearson asked.

  “Luck,” Kerney replied.

  “Here at the house is best, in the mornings after eight. My husband goes to work and drops the children off at preschool on his way.”

  “Tomorrow, then,” Kerney said. “I think we can wrap things up in one session.”

  Pearson’s eyes bored into Kerney with the hardness of a con who’d been trumped. “You suckered me with this bullshit about the grand jury, didn’t you?”

  “Not necessarily,” Kerney replied. “I’ll try to work something out on your behalf.”

  She snorted in disbelief. The sound stripped away the last shred of her sophisticated veneer. “Yeah, right. Son of a bitch. Have you got a cigarette?”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “If you change your mind about tomorrow, our deal is off.”

  “No kidding,” Pearson said.

  Outside, the glare of sunlight bounced off the roofs of the houses in the valley below, washed out the roughness of the mountains beyond, and pulled most of the color from the sky. Kerney drove away from Helen Pearson thinking that the siren call of Santa Fe had always drawn searchers, dreamers, nonconformists, and oddballs looking to transform their lives. Why not a hooker? Considering everything, Pearson had done a damn good job of it.

  His cell phone rang. At Kerney’s request, the fiscal officer who kept the records of legislators’ travel and per diem reimbursement payments had searched Senator Norvell’s old files. Norvell had attended a three-day meeting of a joint-house finance committee in Santa Fe that coincided with the date Anna Marie Montoya had disappeared.

  Kerney now had motive and opportunity, but he needed more. He decided a trip to Lincoln County would be worthwhile. That was where Montoya’s body had been found and where Norvell and his buddy, Adam Tully, had grown up. The connection between the two was too strong to dismiss.

  He checked the time. The architect was waiting for him at the building site with a survey crew, and Sara was standing by at Fort Leavenworth for his call. This was the day the site for the house would be spotted and staked. It was the last chance before the contractor broke ground to make sure everything was as it should be. He would talk Sara through it as the survey crew and the architect laid out the footprint for the house.

  He wondered if Sara would reinvent herself once the baby came and the house was finished. Could she give up her career and be satisfied with the role of wife and mother? It was all still undecided.

  He called the architect, said he was on the way, and pressed the accelerator.

  There had been something not quite right about Clayton’s meeting with Detective Brewer. After a few worthless hours of trying to get a handle on Harry Staggs, Clayton ate a quick meal at a family-style diner and tried to sort it out. For starters, Brewer hadn’t shown any interest in Clayton’s investigation, hadn’t asked any questions about what a deputy sheriff from Lincoln County was doing down in El Paso seeking information about local prostitutes.

  Was that because he simply didn’t care, or because he already knew about it? If he knew, how did he know? Had the El Paso police captain who’d given Rojas a clean bill of health passed the word to the troops about him nosing around?

  Brewer had held on to the paperwork, showing Clayton none of it, instead reading little excerpts. Was there something he didn’t want Clayton to see? Clayton doubted that offense reports of solicitation for the purposes of engaging in prostitution held much in the way of sensitive or confidential information a brother officer would be reluctant to share. Or maybe they did.

  Clayton had two bits of information, the names and photographs of the prostitutes. He looked at the women’s pictures. Both were young and very attractive. Not what Clayton considered to be typical street-walkers, although he’d only actually met one: Sparkle, the hooker who’d fingered Ulibarri in Albuquerque.

  He decided to spend some time visiting the best El Paso had to offer in the way of expensive hotels. There were only a few, if the yellow pages were anything to go by. Maybe he could find out if Brewer had been holding something back.

  After three stops with no results, he made his way downtown, which had one nice hotel near the plaza. The area looked like an urban redevelopment project that had gone down the tubes when the money ran out. Around the spruced-up plaza were old commercial and retail buildings in need of attention. One, which had obviously been a flagship department store, sat empty. Two public works buildings, a public library, and an art museum were nearby. Behind the plaza several Victorian homes sat forlornly on a small hill surrounded by vacant lots. There was no life to the place, few people, and Clayton didn’t see many customers inside an eatery steps away from the hotel.

  Modern in design, the hotel towered over the district in startling contrast to the bleak, shabby-looking street that cut a straight line to the Rio Grande and the Mexican border.

  Inside, the lobby was empty. At the reception desk, Clayton asked for the hotel security chief, and was soon greeted by a slender man in a suit and tie who introduced himself as Bob Rigby.

  “Yeah, I know these two,” Rigby said as he looked at the photos of Victoria and Sandy, the two hookers.

  “Have you seen them lately?”

  “Yeah, a couple of weeks ago they were here in the restaurant d
ining with two of our guests. Then they went up to their rooms.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  Rigby nodded. “I’m sure. Those two are in the hotel three, maybe four times a month, sometimes more. I know why they’re here, but I’m not a cop. Whatever guests do in their rooms doesn’t matter to me, as long as they don’t cause a commotion, trash the place, skip out on their bill, or steal the towels.”

  “What about the cops?” Clayton asked.

  “They don’t care either, unless they get a complaint. We try to avoid that, if possible.”

  “Bad for business, I suppose,” Clayton said, wondering what else Detective Brewer might have lied about. He handed Rigby the rest of the photographs of the women he’d collected at the motor vehicle office.

  “All of them have been here at one time or another,” Rigby said. “All of them are working girls.”

  “Including this one?” Clayton asked, pointing to Deborah Shea’s photo.

  Rigby nodded. “But I haven’t seen her in quite a while.”

  “Do you know who these women work for?”

  “That, I don’t know.”

  Pumped by what he’d learned, Clayton left Rigby and drove past Rojas’s house. In daylight it was even more impressive, probably a million-dollar property, which for El Paso was about as pricey as it got.

  He cruised the neighborhood, trying to think of his next move. He still needed to locate Deborah Shea, but he wanted to do it without tipping off Rojas. All the houses—there weren’t very many along the paved street—looked down on El Paso over a wide stretch of open desert. At both ends of the road, signs of a private security company were posted, citing twenty-four-hour armed patrol.

  That gave Clayton an idea. A security patrol vehicle had passed him when he’d been on his way to talk to Rojas. Maybe someone at the company could shed some light on who came and went at the residence. Maybe they even had a record of who lived on the property with Rojas.

  After finding an address in the phone book at the closest convenience store, consulting his map, and getting lost again, he finally reached the business, which had a small suite of offices in a building across from an adult bookstore.

  The owner inspected Clayton’s credentials, said that he was an ex-deputy sheriff himself, talked a little cop stuff, and pulled the file on Rojas.

  “We’ve never had any problems at the Rojas place,” he said.

  Aside from Rojas, two residents were listed: a personal assistant and a live-in housekeeper. Clayton wrote down the names. An attached frequent-visitor list carried the names of what looked to be Rojas’s friends and business associates. Shea’s name was included, along with a description and license plate number of the car she drove.

  “Do your people check on unfamiliar vehicles traveling through the neighborhood?” Clayton asked.

  “All the time,” the man replied. “It’s policy.”

  “Can I look through your patrol logs?”

  “How far back do you want to go?” the man replied.

  “A week will do it.”

  The man pulled the logs and let Clayton use his office, a small, tidy space next to a room where a uniformed security officer manned a radio. He sucked in his breath and whistled when he saw the entry for Harry Staggs’s car and license plate number. Then he checked the date, sat back in the chair, and smiled at the ceiling.

  Staggs had been with Rojas just hours before Clayton had arrived to be fed a line of bullshit by Rojas and Shea.

  A small copying machine stood on a rolling cart next to a file cabinet. Clayton checked with the owner for permission, and made a copy of the log and the frequent-visitor list, mulling over his next step. It was too soon to confront Rojas. He decided to stake him out instead. Maybe Deborah Shea would show, or someone else equally interesting.

  He thought about the lay of the land in front of Rojas’s house. There wasn’t much that provided concealment, but he could make do. On the rez he’d stalked poachers through open fields, caught trespassers in vast meadows, and busted out-of-season hunters above the timberline. He had everything he needed in his unit to stay warm and comfortable when night came and it got cold.

  The prospect of the surveillance pleased Clayton far more than the thought of spending the night in an El Paso motel. He checked the wall clock. There were two hours left before dusk. If he hurried, there was enough time to locate a place to conceal his unit at the bottom of the hill below Rojas’s house, hike up it, and pick a spot to hunker down.

  The architect and the survey crew left just before sunset. Kerney stayed on at the building site watching touches of color fringe the few stray clouds, shadows deepen in the canyon, and the mountains fade into gray ghostly shapes. He stood behind the stakes that defined the placement of what would one day be his living room, imagining the house completed—the ceiling overhead, the plastered adobe walls, the tiled floor, the picture window looking beyond the portal to the canyon and the mountains. All of it on twelve hundred and eighty acres of ranch land just a few miles off a highway, yet far enough away to be private and secluded.

  The night was quiet. Hills a mile or so to the east blocked any traffic noise, and the air was still. He thought about his parents, now long dead, who had lost their ranch. He thought about Sara, who’d left her family’s ranch in Montana to attend West Point. He thought about his best friend, Dale Jennings, who’d never done anything but ranch, and vowed that he wouldn’t trade one day of it to live any other way.

  Kerney understood Dale’s feelings. There was a pride that came from being a steward of the land, a satisfaction that came from hard physical work outside in the natural world, and a richness of spirit that came from the beauty that surrounded you.

  Once, the idea that he could ever have anything close to this land had only been a dream, totally out of reach. Now it was coming true.

  It wasn’t a big spread and would never be economically self-sustaining. Maybe he could break even with it. If not, it was his, free and clear, with enough money left over from his inheritance after all the bills were paid to provide a comfortable life for his family and pass it on to his son, and maybe someday a daughter.

  Kerney cracked a smile in the darkness. The land was beautiful but the native grasses were hardly sufficient for raising livestock. Still, he wanted to put some animals on it, and had decided to raise horses, primarily for pleasure, selling a few every now and then. Perhaps, when he retired, he’d get into breeding, but there was a lot he had to learn. Modern ranching had become a science, and he was way behind the curve on what he needed to know.

  Did he have any horses? Yeah, one. A mustang named Soldier he’d bought at auction and turned into a good cutting horse. Dale was keeping Soldier on his ranch until the time came for Kerney to claim him. That time was coming fast.

  Sara had been bugging him to give the ranch a name. Today on the phone, after he’d talked her through the final house siting, she’d teased him about it. Everything he’d suggested she dismissed as insipid. He had orders to come up with something good, perhaps even creative.

  What did he have? Right now, he owned two sections of land and a horse.

  That was it: The One Horse Ranch.

  He made his way down the rocky dirt road thinking he really did need to rebuild it. He would call around to see if he could scour up a grader soon.

  Chapter 11

  The telephone call from Wendell and Hannah caught Kerney by surprise. Hannah recited the letters of the alphabet she’d learned along with her numbers, which she rattled off into the double digits. As the pièce de résistance she informed Kerney that she could write out her name. Kerney said he was amazed and that Hannah was a very, very smart girl.

  “I know,” Hannah said, handing the phone off to Wendell.

  Wendell described the picture he’d drawn for Kerney and asked if it would be all right to have his mother mail it to him. Kerney said that he would love to have it. He would keep it in his office at police headquarters.
r />   “I’m gonna be a policeman, just like you and my dad,” Wendell said.

  The pleasure in the children’s voices made Kerney realize that no matter what stood between him and Clayton, to Hannah and Wendell he was their grandfather, and they seemed to like it. He wondered where the idea for the phone call had come from. He didn’t think Clayton was behind it, so that left Grace, or Clayton’s mother. He settled on Grace as the instigator.

  Grace came on the line and Kerney asked about Clayton.

  “He would have called himself,” she said, “but he’s out of town.”

  “Give him my best, and tell him I’ll be coming down there soon.”

  “Stop by the house while you’re here,” Grace said. “Wendell and Hannah would love to see you.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kerney said. “Thank you for calling, Grace. It made my day.”

  “From the smiles on your grandchildren’s faces, I’d say the feeling was mutual.”

  The phone rang immediately after Kerney disconnected. He picked up to find Sara on the line.

  “Sara, I just . . .”

  “Don’t talk, Kerney, listen. I’m pissed at you and this whole situation. I think you just want me only for sex, or for carrying your child, or for occasional companionship when I can fly in on one of your rare free weekends.”

  Kerney’s cheerfulness evaporated. “What are you talking about?”

  “I should have been there today for the house siting, not hearing about it on the other end of a phone call. I should have been there because it’s supposed to be our house. I don’t think you give a damn about me. You’ve just got this fantasy going about a wife, a family, and a ranch, not necessarily in that order.”

  “That’s crazy. I thought you said you couldn’t get away between now and graduation.”

  “Of course I can’t get away,” Sara snapped. “That’s not what I’m talking about. You could have waited. What’s one month? Shit! I hate to curse. Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I shouldn’t have had to. It should have been clear in your mind that it was something we needed to do together.”