“How was everything?” he said.
“Awful, as usual,” I replied. “The chile was green, the sopaipillas were full of hot air…all that sort of thing.”
“Good, good,” he said, and favored the two wide-eyed children with a vast, perfectly capped grin. “Those kids are sure growing up, eh?”
“Kids do that,” I said. “And by the way, what’s with the sign on the door? How can you do that to me?” I nudged my empty plate. “What’s life without a green chile burrito, especially tomorrow?”
“How’s it feel, eh?” Fernando said. “You finally going to do it?”
“I have no choice.” I grinned. “And it’s a good time, Fernando. Robert will do a fine job.”
“I’m sure he will. So what are you going to do with yourself? All this time on your hands.”
“I don’t need to worry about that until tomorrow,” I said.
Fernando grinned. “I hear that you’re going to take over Cliff Larson’s job.”
“This is indeed a small town,” I said. “I’m going to help Cliff out for a few weeks. That’s all. It’s a favor.”
He regarded me through narrowed eyes, and then swung his gaze to Estelle. “What do you think about this guy?”
“El resolvera su problema aunque le lleve toda la noche,” she said.
Fernando Aragon laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. “This guy,” he said, and if possible his accent thickened for the occasion. “At six o’clock in the morning, he’s at the door, wanting dinner.”
“That’s because you don’t open at five,” I said. “When ordinary people eat.”
“That’s okay,” Fernando said. “When you stop coming in, that’s when we sell the place. To hell with it.” He smiled widely again. “People today don’t appreciate what it takes.” To Estelle he said, “El esta en ayunas de manana?”
She shrugged and said in English, “I think so.”
“You think so what?” I asked.
“We’re painting the kitchen ceiling tomorrow,” Fernando said. “That’s our excuse for closing. I told her that if you’re starving to death, drop by and knock on the back door. I’ll fix you something.”
“Paint chips and all,” I said. “Thanks, anyway. I can survive a day.”
He patted me on the shoulder again, and nodded around the table at each one of us in turn. “Take your time. I have to go back in the kitchen and mix paint, but if there’s anything else you want, just ask Janalynn.” He held up a hand in salute. “Hasta…hasta cuando.”
“Thanks, Fernando. Give my regards to your lovely wife.” I watched him saunter back to the kitchen, sliding the coffee decanter back in place with one smooth, practiced motion without breaking stride.
I turned to Tadd. “So tell me what they actually said, Tadd.”
He grinned at Estelle, who raised one eyebrow in that characteristic expression that said she was waiting for someone to dig a deep enough hole.
“She said that you’d figure out what you wanted to do if it took you all night.”
“Uh-huh. And he said?”
“Uh…that he’d see us whenever.” He shrugged. “Hasta cuando means sort of like that. See you whenever.”
“I see.” I studied him through my bifocals for a minute. “You’re pretty good in that language, son.”
“Yes, he is,” Estelle said, and took a deep breath. “Well…they probably want some peace and quiet around here. What’s on your docket for the rest of the afternoon?”
“I need to run by the hospital for a few minutes,” I said. “When Scott Gutierrez comes out of it, I want to make sure he knows that he’s not going to have to wade through this mess all by himself.”
“If you see Francis, would you tell him that we were going to go over to the Twelfth Street house for a bit?” She looked at Buddy. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Tadd might,” my son said. “I’ve got a few things I need to do. If you’d drop me at the house, that would be fine.”
“Let’s play it by ear for dinner, then,” I said.
“I was thinking of green-chile cheeseburgers on the grill,” Tadd said instantly, and Francisco’s eyes bugged with delight.
“Arg,” I said. “More food.”
Janalynn Torrez waited by the front register, and I expected to see her start digging for the ticket. “It’s on the house today,” she said with a smile.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“We hope you enjoyed it.”
“Well, of course we enjoyed it,” I said, flustered. “Thank you very much.” I slipped a twenty out of my wallet and put it in her hand. “That’s for putting up with all the mess, Jana.”
She blushed. “Thank you, sir.”
“Hasta cuando,” I said.
Tadd was holding the door for me. “That’s pretty good, Grandpa.”
“It’s just that natural Gastner ear for language,” I said. Estelle heard me, but made no comment.
***
I exchanged the aromas of the Don Juan for the sterile bouquet of disinfectant at Posadas General Hospital, where instead of black velvet renditions of the conquistadors, the artwork consisted of light green walls and the reflections in the polished floor tile of the Danish-style furniture.
Anne Murchison Shalley looked up from the nurse’s station, saw me, and beckoned. I’d known Anne since she was in grade school. Her mother, Helen Murchison, had been head nurse for years at Posadas General, and knew my insides better than I did. While I had often described Helen as an old battle-ax, Anne was a delight for the eye.
“Sir, Dr. Perrone said that if you came in, I should tell you that Scott Gutierrez would be able to speak with you for just a few minutes.”
“Just a few is all it will take,” I said.
“He’s going to be in a lot of pain,” she added, and her sympathy was genuine.
“Where’s he at?”
“Intensive care recovery,” she said. “You can’t miss it.”
She knew how often I’d been there myself. I turned the corner at Radiology and saw Sergeant Howard Bishop down the hall, leaning against the wall with one hand, deep in concentration. He looked up as I approached.
“All the docs just left a few minutes ago,” he said. “Is Francis Guzman working back here again? I saw him with Perrone.”
I shook my head. “No. Golfing buddies. They’re just visiting. They’re staying over at the house.”
“Estelle, too?”
“Yep. Her too.” I thought Bishop’s expression was a touch wistful. “Is he conscious yet?” The facility had glass partitions, but the sliding curtain had been drawn around Gutierrez’s bed.
“I heard one of the nurses talking to him a bit ago, so I guess he is. I haven’t been in. Bobby said to post a watch in the hall, so here I am.”
“Long day, huh.” I didn’t wait for his reply, but stepped past and pushed the door open. I didn’t recognize the nurse at the ICU desk, but she apparently knew who I was. She nodded and remained seated, caught up in paperwork.
I stepped around the curtain and looked at Scott Gutierrez. His head was bandaged down to the tip of his nose, and he had enough lines and hoses plugged into his system to support a fair-sized village.
He raised his right hand a few inches off the sheet, as if he could sense who had invaded his domain by the change in air pressure.
“Scott, it’s Bill Gastner,” I said.
“Hi,” he replied.
“Can you talk with me for a few minutes?”
After shifting a tiny bit on the bed as if winding up for the effort to speak, he said, “Yes.” He sounded almost normal, like a person with plugged sinuses. He was lucky he still had sinuses. He reached up and touched the bandages lightly. “This is not going to be good, is it?” He spoke slowly, trying his best to make each word come out right with a minimum of movement.
“You’re going to be fine,” I said, unable to think of anything more creative than the standard line. I didn’t know-and Sco
tt probably didn’t, either-if his vision had been saved or not. “Connie is doing all right, too, Scott. She was banged up pretty badly, but she’s going to be all right.”
“I couldn’t catch her,” Gutierrez said. “I remember that. I couldn’t catch her.” He took a deep breath, very slowly. “I remember the look on her face.”
“She’s going to be fine.”
“Walsh?” It wasn’t “Dad,” or “my stepfather,” or anything else that might be tinged with affection.
“He’s dead, Scott.”
He lifted his hand again, then let it drop on his stomach. “How?”
“Heart attack. We found him just a few feet from where the shots were fired.”
“He shot twice,” Gutierrez said. “Really fast. I heard the snap of the first one. Right over my head.”
“Then what happened?”
“Before we could move, he shot a second time. The bullet hit the rock.” He stopped and seemed to be marking time, his index finger tapping the sheets. “I thought that it hit Connie. She kinda jumped. She lost her balance. I couldn’t grab her.”
“She’s going to be all right, Scott.”
“She went right over backward.”
“He shot again, though. Do you remember that?”
“Oh, yeah. I remember that.” He fell silent again and I watched as he lifted his right hand as if in slow-motion. He carefully ran his finger under the edge of the bandage on his right cheekbone. “Uh,” he said and took another deep breath.
“Do you want me to ask the nurse to get you something?”
“No.” He lowered his hand to the automatic morphine dispenser’s plunger that was clipped to the bed rail. He didn’t press the button. “I could see…see that he was trying to line up again, and I dove off to one side.”
“Did you try to shoot back?”
“No.” His left hand lifted an inch off the sheets. “I didn’t even think about that. Can you believe it? I didn’t even remember I had a damn rifle in my hands. And then it felt like somebody hit me in the nose with a baseball bat. I couldn’t see, I didn’t know what the hell…” He pulled his right hand away from the morphine dispenser.
“Do you remember dropping your rifle?”
“No. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember much else, except I couldn’t see where to go.”
I reached out and touched the back of his hand, just a couple of fingers, just enough to make contact. “Why did he do it, Scott?”
“Because Connie was going to quit.”
“Quit what?”
“She was making fake licenses for him.”
“Driver’s licenses, you mean?”
“Yes. Like the one Matt Baca had.”
“He told you this?”
“No. Connie did. She told me last week what she’d done. That she’d run one once in a while for Walsh. He paid her eight hundred bucks. He lines ’em up down south, in Acuna. They come up here when she’s working by herself. She’d help ’em with the test, whatever they needed.”
“Fake addresses?”
“Yes. And especially commercial tickets. You’d be surprised…” He stopped suddenly. His right hand moved halfway to his face and stopped. “Jesus,” he breathed. “You’d be surprised how many truckers down in South Texas live in Posadas, New Mexico.” He made a little snuffling sound as if the laugh had been stopped short, followed by a groan of pain.
“I don’t understand about Matt.”
“She made him a fake license.”
“For eight hundred bucks? You’re kidding.”
“No. No money. She was hot to trot as far as he was concerned. For a little while, anyway. Then she got nervous, and realized that Matt was going to really screw things up if he wasn’t careful.”
“And she told you this when?”
“Last week. She was scared, sir. Walsh had a good thing going. An easy place to get the right paperwork.”
“Why did he do it?”
“Money for one thing. For another, it was easier to sell ’em a car if they’re citizens. A lot of ’em wanted it registered in this country.”
“Banks fall for that?”
“No. It was used cars and trucks. He carried the papers. Right at the dealership.”
“So Connie panicked and told you about all of this?”
“Right. I thought maybe I could just nose around, you know, and straighten things out. I guess I thought wrong.”
I felt a presence behind me and heard the curtain. I turned to see the nurse hovering. “Give us just a few more minutes, all right?” She retreated after closing the curtain. Scott took another deep, careful breath. “Walsh was coming up here to go hunting. He’s done that for a long time. This time, though, he probably figured to calm Connie down. Tell her she had nothing to worry about. And then the thing with Matt happened. She flipped out when she heard about it. And then Matt’s father on top of it.”
“Were you involved in that?”
“Yes. I saw Sosimo walkin’ on the road. I thought maybe I could go in and get the license back. I didn’t count on old…old Sosimo having a thing about the U.S. Border Patrol.”
“You mean he didn’t let you in?”
“Oh, he accepted the ride, and he let me in the house. I had to promise to drive him into Posadas so he could get his old truck. But when I asked him if I could look for Matt’s license, he went ballistic. We struggled a little, but it was mostly me just trying to calm him down. He lost his balance and broke the window in the back door, and then he popped. That was it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I thought there might still be a chance to find that license. If I had that, then there was no evidence for you guys against Connie. But you told me you’d found it, so…” His right hand moved slightly in lieu of a shrug. “But she heard what had happened down in Regal, and went off the deep end.”
“With all that, you decided to go hunting anyway.”
“Sir, it’s the truth. We figured that we’d get out of town, just the three of us, and work it out. We’d just explain to Walsh. We didn’t have to involve any of the authorities. I told Connie…” He stopped and raised his hand to his head. “Jesus, this hurts,” he whispered. “I told Connie that I’d just lay the cards out on the table. The license deal was over. He’d stop pushing Connie about it, and I wouldn’t go to the authorities.”
“He didn’t go for that?”
“He would have. It was Connie who couldn’t handle Matt’s death, and then the old man’s dying on top of that. It’s just something that she couldn’t handle. It was obvious to me. It would have been obvious to Walsh.”
“So he thought a hunting accident was going to work?”
“Stupider things have been done, sir. He must have seen the two of us arguing, and took a chance. I think he wanted to hit her, but it worked out even better than he planned. He knew he didn’t hit Connie, so now he could say that she fell. He’d nail me, and that’s it. Self-defense.”
“But you never fired.”
“No. He could have climbed up to where we were, and fired my rifle a couple of times. He could have done that.”
“Had his heart been in it,” I said. I stood silently for a while, looking down at the young man. “Scott,” I said finally, “somebody’s going to ask this. It might as well be me.” The silence lingered for another few seconds.
“Walsh said that he saw you push Connie off the rocks. That he heard you two arguing. He saw you push her, and he then yelled at you. We know you didn’t fire your rifle. But what about Walsh’s claim that you pushed your sister?
Scott Gutierrez remained silent.
“How would you answer that, Scott? If Dan Schroeder puts those questions to you?”
He lifted his right hand, making a pistol out of his thumb and index finger. “I didn’t push my sister off that rock, sir. If everyone thinks I did, then I wish this had been a couple of inches farther back.” He put his index finger to his skull just above the ear a
nd dropped his thumb. When I didn’t respond immediately, Gutierrez stretched out his right hand toward me. I took it, and his grip was surprisingly strong.
“You haven’t talked to Connie yet, have you?”
“No. I haven’t. She’s in Las Cruces. It’s going to be a while.”
“Oh, Christ,” he murmured.
I gave his hand another squeeze. “You hang in there, Scott. Give us a chance to work this thing through.”
“I guess I don’t have much choice, do I?”
Chapter Fifty-one
“Do you believe him?” Undersheriff Robert Torrez waited by my front doorstep while I thought through my answer. There were too many angles still to be explored, but my intuition had made up its mind.
I’d had all afternoon and evening to think about Scott Gutierrez, his sister Connie French, and their stepfather, James Walsh. I knew what my gut feelings were, but I didn’t want to bulldoze over the soon-to-be-sheriff’s investigation. He had his men placed where he wanted them, and he’d proceed with his investigation at his own speed.
He didn’t need me barking at his heels for the next few hours. If he was good enough to lead the charge up through the rocks without knowing if a high-powered rifle was trained his way, then he could manage the wrap-up, too.
In fact, all Robert Torrez really needed from me was to make sure that I voted the next day.
The undersheriff had driven to my home on Guadalupe late that evening. I hadn’t crossed paths with him all Monday afternoon. I didn’t want to leave messages for him at dispatch, interrupting his day just so that I could tell him, “Hey, I think this,” or “Listen, I think that.”
Even if I were completely wrong, even if I were hoodwinked by sincere-sounding answers from behind the convenient mask of Scott Gutierrez’s bandages, neither he nor his sister were going anywhere. Deputy Jackie Taber was keeping Connie French company in Las Cruces, along with assistance from the Las Cruces Police Department. At four that afternoon, Deputy Tony Abeyta had relieved Howard Bishop outside the Posadas ICU. It had been at that point that I stopped hovering and went home.
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