“That’s what he said. Once he told me he likes to go out on top of the mesa behind Consolidated. It’s quite a view from up there.”
“He took a gun with him?”
“His old twenty-two rifle.”
“And you’re not worried?”
“Of course I’m worried, Sheriff. He’s the only brother I’ve got. And I love him a lot. But you can’t put a teenager in a cage. Scott’s not self-destructive-just confused.” She blinked rapidly and cleared her throat. “And you can’t believe how much it hurts to talk like this. But I have faith in Scott. I really do. Other than that, about all you can do is love ’em and make ’em really believe there’s something worthwhile to come home to. And when they do come home, there better be someone to talk to who’ll just listen and not make them believe they’re being judged.”
I looked at Amy Salinger for a long minute, and she returned the gaze evenly. “Then he’s a lucky kid,” I said.
“Thanks. But I think it’s just common sense.”
I nodded agreement with that. “What’s he driving? I really need to talk to him.”
“A 1974 Bronco. Blue over rusty white. It’s got four of those big chrome lights on the roof and a power winch in front that doesn’t have a cable. You can’t miss it.”
“Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“If he comes home and we haven’t talked, would you ask him to call me?” I pulled a card from my wallet and handed it to her. “It doesn’t matter what time. If I’m not home, have him call the office number. They’ll find me.”
“I’ll tell him, Sheriff. But in some ways, he’s a stubborn kid. He’ll mull things around in his head and then finally decide what he’s going to do. Try and force something on him and he’ll just clam up.”
“I know. But I got to give it a try. It’s been two weeks or better since the accident. He’s had time to think. I really believe he’s got some answers we badly need.”
Amy Salinger said she’d do what she could, and I believed her. I backed out of the driveway as she headed back toward her garden. I knew the odds of finding Scott Salinger up on the mesa were slim, but I was stubborn, too.
***
To reach the mesa top, I drove up County 43 past the mine and the turn off to the lake. The pavement almost immediately gave way to gravel, then to rough and rutted government surplus caliche-hard as concrete when it was dry and slick as silicon syrup when wet. I half-expected to meet Scott’s Bronco on the way down. One of us would have to take the ditch, and it wasn’t going to be me. The county car straddled ruts most of the time, but once in a while crunched down hard enough to make me wince.
The road wound up the mesa face and finally came out on top. I couldn’t see anything through the pinon and juniper, but when the road reached a triple fork, I stayed left, knowing I was heading toward the rim. Another hundred yards on I passed a derelict refrigerator, ten miles from the nearest 110-volt outlet. I always wondered what strange soul would go to all the trouble to cart such a thing out there when the county landfill was only a mile from town. A quarter mile farther on, an old mattress and the backseat of a van rotted slowly into the dirt. At least I could figure out what they had been used for.
After another ten minutes, I could see only emptiness through the trees and knew I was making progress toward the edge. And some of the tire tracks in the dust looked fresh. The road skirted a thick grove of mixed pinon and juniper and ended in a wide spot liberally littered with beer cans, a disposable diaper or two, and two bright-yellow oil cans. Parked under a fat juniper was Scott Salinger’s Bronco.
I switched off the car and got out. The keys weren’t in the Bronco, and it was locked. I felt a little better. I walked slowly and carefully through the timber…not because I was stalking anyone, but because I didn’t want to fall on my face. I broke out of the trees and involuntarily slowed, struck by the view. The mesa rim was a wonderful place. The rocks were jumbled into scores of the best benches nature could provide. You could look out and see hundreds of square miles-old and new mines, two villages besides Posadas, a score of human enterprises, and endless works of nature. I stood still and scanned the rim. After a minute I saw Scott Salinger.
He was lying stretched out on a large flat rock, using another as a pillow. If he had the rifle, it was hidden behind him. I walked across toward him, and when I was a hundred feet away he decided to notice. He turned his head just enough to see who was intruding. I was well aware of the effect uniforms had on people, especially youngsters, and was glad then that I had changed into casual clothes. As I walked toward him, I thrust my hands deep in my pockets, hoping the effect was that of a harmless old man out for a simple daily constitutional, and that the meeting was entirely by chance.
“Scott, how are you doin’?” I said casually.
“Amy must have told you I was here.” He sat up and watched my progress across the rocks.
“Yup, she did.” I started to lower myself to a rock, and hesitated. “Do you mind?”
“Pull up a chair,” he said, and managed a smile. I felt better.
“She seems like a wonderful gal,” I said.
“She is.”
“She’s a little worried about you. So are a lot of people. I talked with Coach Tatman today.”
“Yeah. Well.” Salinger looked out into the distance. A slight breeze ruffled his hair and he ran a hand through it self-consciously. The family resemblance was striking.
“What happened? With football, I mean.” I asked that and the boy shot me a glance as if to ask what business it was of mine, but then thought better of it. He returned his gaze to the distance and locked it there.
“It just got so it wasn’t fun anymore. That’s all. I was having a good time playing with some of the little kids. Watching ’em try to throw cracks me up.” He grinned and curled his hands as if he were spastic. “The coaches aren’t supposed to spend more than about an hour with us each day. With the varsity team, I mean…some state rule like that. But push, push, push. You’d think we were going for the Rose Bowl or something.”
“You don’t think it’s pretty important?”
“No. Not compared to other things.”
“Like?”
He was a long time in answering, and obviously knew why I had bothered tackling the mesa. “Like that undercover cop getting killed. Like Mr. Fernandez getting killed.” There was a tremor then in his voice, and he turned his head further so I couldn’t see his face. “Like Tom Hardy. Ricky. Isabel. All the rest.” He twisted and looked at me then, under control. “No. It’s not important.”
“Life goes on, Scott.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I lighted a cigarette and the breeze took the smoke back away from the rim. “I guess it’s not such an original thought. But it’s true.”
“Yeah.”
“Where did the cocaine come from?”
Scott let out a breath that was the beginning of a weak chuckle. “I saw you coming across the rocks there, and knew that’s what you wanted to ask me.”
“Well? Here I am.”
“Where do you get the idea that I know?”
“That first interview. When I used the tape recorder. I listened to that quite a few times. So did Detective Reyes.”
Scott Salinger grinned at the mention of Estelle Reyes. “You know what she said to me a day or so ago?”
“I have no idea. She didn’t tell me she’d talked to you.”
“I was downtown. She was walking out of the bank. She stopped and stuck out her hand, like she wanted to shake, you know? I was kinda embarrassed, but what the hell. So I shook hands and she wouldn’t let go right away. She hung on for a minute, and put her other hand up here, on the side of my face. Then she said, ‘I wish I knew what was going on inside that skull of yours.’”
I laughed. “That sounds like Estelle. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘So do I.’”
“Fair enough.”
&n
bsp; “She’s something else. She didn’t say anything more than that. Just kinda smiled and let me go. I was embarrassed as hell.” He glanced at me. “She knows my sister. Went to school with her.” I nodded and remained silent. He reached out and stripped a grass stalk bare and chewed on the end of it. After a minute he said, “I think the cocaine belonged to Jenny Barrie.”
“What makes you think so?”
Salinger shrugged. “You hear talk. And once, I think it was a couple weeks before the end of school, Tommy was talking to me and asked me if I thought coke was as bad as everybody was telling us it was.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I didn’t care, one way or another. I told him he was stupid if he was messing with it.”
“What’d he say to that?”
Salinger frowned. “I don’t remember. I think he just kind of shrugged it off. But he was going with Jenny Barrie, and she was a space case. She always was, even in grade school. Tommy said once that her old man smoked pot. I thought that was kinda funny.”
“Funny how?”
He glanced at me and his eyes drifted to my cigarette. “Somehow I just never think of older folks smoking joints. There he is, fretting over his income tax, or oiling his lawn mower, or building one of those model airplanes his shop sells, and he’s sucking in for all he’s worth.” Salinger pressed thumb and index finger against tightly pursed lips and sucked the imaginary joint until his eyes bugged. He let out a hard breath and chuckled bitterly. “Funny.”
“Do you have any direct evidence that the kilo of cocaine was Jenny’s?”
He shook his head. “No. But I know Tommy wouldn’t be able to afford even a down payment, even if he was into that shit. He couldn’t even afford a dime bag. And Isi Gabaldon was so straight she squeaked. The only reason she was in the car is because Hank Montano was. And Ricky only did what his friends told him to do. No, it was her. Count on it.”
I took another long shot, now that Scott was talking. “Did you know Darlene Sprague?”
“Sure.”
“What about her?”
Scott picked at the grass stem. “We all had ideas about who slipped her that shit. And you know the semester after she died? Last year? I had a creative-writing class. Space case was in it, too.”
“Space case?”
“Barrie. She spent the whole time writing those damn sappy poems. Always the same thing. Death, guilt, suicide.” He made a horrible, twisted face that would have looked about right on a corpse. “We always had to read our stuff in class, you know. And hers. Wow.” He pitched a small pebble down the rocks. “It got so bad that whenever she read something in class, me and a bunch of others would pretend like we were playing violins.” He looked over at me and grinned. “Pretty bad dudes, huh?”
“Well…” I said dubiously.
“We got on her case pretty hard. But it always seemed that she enjoyed it in sort of a screwball way. I got the notion that she just enjoyed being miserable and tragic.”
“Miserable and tragic.”
“Yeah. It got really bad one day, though. The vice-principal came to the door to talk to Mrs. Rosenthal about something, and this one kid, maybe you know him-Terry Semple?”
“I know the family. His dad’s a rancher.”
“Right. Well, Jenny’d just finished reading some damn thing, all full of oh-ah, pain and agony. Just real first-class shit, you know. I didn’t think anybody was really listening, ’cause she was wearing one of those sweatshirts that’s got all the cutouts in it?” Salinger grinned. “And absolutely nothing on under it. That was kinda neat. Anyway, old Semple, he leans across that dumb little circle we had to sit in and says when Jenny finished reading, ‘If you knew you were going to feel so damn guilty and broke up, what’d you deal in that shit for?’”
“Ouch.”
“Jenny just looked him right in the eye and said, ‘Fuck you.’ He turned about eight shades of red, because he didn’t know what to say to that. Then Mrs. Rosenthal came back and we were all acting real normal, like nothing happened. The rest of us about split a gut.”
“And you didn’t have much use for the Barrie girl, did you?”
Salinger hesitated, then said, “Unless you were in her pants, I don’t think there was all that much about her to like.” He looked soberly at me. “I mean, she didn’t deserve to get killed like she did, and I don’t mean to be bad-mouthing her. But…” he looked away for a minute, thinking hard. “I just thought she was a fake, that’s all. I didn’t know her that good, and I never had anything to do with her, until Tommy took up with her.” He still gazed off into space. “She really had him hooked. And now they’re all dead, so maybe it doesn’t matter. But hell. One more year, and then I’m gone.”
Abruptly changing the subject, he pointed off toward Posadas. “I sure like country like this. You sit here long enough, and it seems like you can feel the earth turning. I think I can see the curve in the horizon, and then I can feel the movement. You ever felt like that?”
I didn’t say anything, pretty sure he wasn’t expecting an answer. “I do,” he said. “Every time I come up here. It’s just back down in town that things are all screwed up.”
“That’s where the people are.”
“That’s for sure,” Salinger said with a short laugh.
“Scott, I’ve bothered you long enough, but will you do me a favor? If you think of anything else that we should know, will you call? Now that you kinda have things sorted out? Will you do that? I’d appreciate that. We don’t have any concrete leads, and the last thing I want to see is any more people hurt. We could use the help.”
He gave me the same patient, searching look that his sister had. “All right. I’m sure that stuff was Jenny Barrie’s. But I have no idea where she might have gotten it. Not that much. I can’t believe her family had anything to do with it. Hell, Mr. Barrie is a jerk, but nothing like that.”
I stood up somewhat shakily, careful to stay well away from the jumbled edge. Scott picked up the short Ruger.22 that had been lying beside him. “I’ll walk back with you. I got to get home for supper anyway.”
We reached the vehicles and he stopped short. “I don’t believe you drove that up here.”
I patted 310’s front fender. “Wanna drag?”
He laughed. “From here to the pavement, sure.”
“No dice. In fact, let me go first,” I said. “That way, if I break an axle, I won’t have to walk back to town.”
I carefully turned the heavy Ford around and idled and bumped out the path through the trees. Scott Salinger’s Bronco stayed a respectful hundred yards behind me all the way. I hit the pavement feeling pretty sure that the kid would be all right. But I had been wrong before. I wasn’t quite ready for a ground swell of confidence. I knew I’d feel better when I had somebody behind bars. But at least now I had some ideas.
Chapter 16
The telephone rang five times before my sleep-fogged brain bothered to interpret the noise. Even then, it was slow to issue orders to move. We had gotten back from Hewitt’s funeral at midnight, and even Sheriff Holman had been bone-tired. I had been almost comatose, and driven the last fifty miles by instinct.
I had no idea what time it was, only that the telephone sounded like a fire alarm exploding directly in my ear. Had it been noon already, I wouldn’t have known. My bedroom would have made a good photographer’s darkroom. Some years before, I had installed a really heavy pair of shutters on the window, with the logic that a cop who has to sleep at odd hours should be able to do so in comfortable darkness.
I groped for the nightstand, realized I was on the wrong side of the bed and groaned as the ringing persisted.
“Ga-” I coughed and then managed a squawky, “Gastner.”
“Sheriff, sorry to bother you.”
“Um,” I murmured, more interested in drifting back to sleep than listening.
The voice said something about being Roger Downs, and a lonely, alert synapse somewhere deep in my
brain fired promptly. “Are you awake, sir?” Downs persisted.
“What’s up, Roger?” I replied, finally close enough to the surface to remember that Downs was one of our own part-timers, a student at the community college thirty miles away, who found time to study between midnight and eight.
“Sir, Sheriff Holman said to call you. We’ve got a ten-sixty-five, and he says you’d want to know.”
“Umph.” I tried to sound as noncommittal as possible, because I couldn’t remember what a 10–65 was, and found myself wondering what kind of eager beaver would use the cryptic 10-code on the telephone. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll be down shortly.” I hung up the phone without waiting for a response and promptly fell asleep.
“Sir, are you awake?” It was Downs again, and for the life of me I didn’t know how the telephone receiver got up against my ear.
That was, finally, all the disturbance my aching brain needed. I snapped fully and completely awake. Through a narrow crack in the shutter I could see a sliver of white light as wide as a pencil lead that meant the sun was trying to burn off the paint. “What the hell time is it, Roger?”
“Eight-fifteen, sir.”
“Jesus H. Christ. What’s the problem?” I could only vaguely remember the first call.
“We’ve got a missing-person report in, sir. Sheriff Holman said you would want to know.”
“You bet. Who is it?”
“A kid by the name of Scott Salinger, sir.”
For a minute, I couldn’t think of anything to say. Roger Downs finally said into the silence, “Sir?”
“Give me fifteen,” I replied, already moving to hang up the phone. “And I’m awake this time. Thanks for the re-call, Roger.”
Thirteen minutes later, cotton-mouthed and unshaven, I pulled 310 into the small sheriff’s department parking lot. Amy Salinger’s Nova sat two spaces down from my reserved space. I hustled inside.
Amy Salinger was standing with our regular dispatcher, Gayle Sedillos, near the big wall map of Posadas County. They were in earnest conversation, with Gayle pointing out something on the map north of town. I saw no one else in the office. Apparently Roger Downs had already gone home.
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