Over the years I’d seen circumstances far more suspicious or even bizarre surrounding what turned out to be an innocent accident. Hell, one icy January several years before, we’d spent two days looking for the car that had smacked old Efren Padilla while he was walking along the county road in front of his ramshackle place south of town.
He’d been found by another motorist, bleeding profusely, his scalp all but torn off the right side of his head. His right arm was snapped in two places. For a few hours the emergency room doctor at Posadas General had had his hands full trying to keep Efren alive.
We’d been so pissed that someone would run down an old drunk that we’d damn near torn the county apart looking for a vehicle with fresh damage to the front end.
And then, after about fifty hours, Efren had regained consciousness and embarrassed the hell out of all of us.
He had decided in the dark of night, he told us, that he wanted to have a talk with his horse. He had stumbled from the house nearly blind drunk and made his way to the little barn and corral. The horse hadn’t shared his enthusiasm for nighttime conversation and had kicked old Efren in the side of the head. The iron horseshoe had laid open the old man’s scalp from eyebrow to crown.
Efren had fallen, yelling like a madman. His cries had spooked the horse and a thousand pounds of animal danced sideways, planting first one hoof and then another on Efren’s arm. The bone snapped like a dry twig.
Efren told us that after that he didn’t remember much. He could vaguely recall stumbling back toward the house. Where he had actually stumbled was in the opposite direction. He collapsed on the shoulder of the highway, leaving it to the rest of us to assume the worst.
In all likelihood, it had been even simpler for Anna Hocking. We’d found no hint of burglary, no hint of argument, no trace of a struggle. It had to be simple.
She’d decided to check out the basement for whatever reason, stubbed an old toe on a torn fragment of linoleum, and pitched forward into blackness. That simple. The unlatched window no doubt had been unlatched since summer.
I slowed the county car for the first of several cattle guards and gritted my teeth as the wheels jounced across. I glanced to my right at the first of what would be dozens of For Sale signs that Stuart Torkelson Realty had posted in the overgrazed pasture to the north.
“Live in Rural Beauty” the signs promised. I grinned. Arid beauty, maybe. No electricity. No plumbing. No driveways. No nada. Torker had proven over the years he could sell anything to almost anybody. This patch of desert was going to challenge even his skills.
Maybe he knew something about the potential of Martinez’s Tube that none of the rest of us did. Carlsbad Caverns they weren’t, but maybe Torkelson had vision. Maybe folks from back east really would flock to clamber down inside 600 feet of cold, dank, black rock.
But my mind wasn’t concerned with real estate investments. Instead, it continued to play the Hocking tape. There had to be a simple reason why Deputy Bob Torrez’s bootprints had been obliterated from Mrs. Hocking’s cellar floor. Maybe she’d decided to sell the place and had cleaned it up—or had it cleaned up—before the realtor visited. Or maybe the circumstances just weren’t right for obvious prints. Maybe the dirt of the cellar floor was as hard as only hundred-year old dirt could be, impervious to scuff marks and imprints.
I hit the second cattle guard too fast and the front end of the Ford bottomed out with a crash. I swore and slowed to a crawl. The dust from the road filtered into the car, a sweet musty smell, and I turned on the air conditioner.
Two more cattle guards and a blue sea of For Sale signs paraded by before I reached the turnoff to Reuben Fuentes’s ranch. His driveway made the gravel county road seem like an interstate. The wheelbase of the patrol car was too wide for the ruts and the Ford jounced and scraped as I followed the lane toward a jutting brow of limestone.
For more than forty years, old man Fuentes had lived hard-scrabble on this property. He’d probably enjoyed every minute of it. Or so he’d always said. His wife, Rosa, had never professed any love for the dry, piñon- and juniper-studded land. She’d finally given up and died on Reuben’s eightieth birthday.
Even Estelle Reyes-Guzman had given up trying to convince the old man to move into the twentieth century. The small stone house came into view as I wound the county car through a dense grove of juniper and crashed across a dry wash.
Nailed to a stout pinon tree in the front yard was a No Traspessing sign, its misspelling bleached with age.
I doubted if Reuben had had a trespasser, no matter how it was spelled, in thirty years, barring the occasional deer hunter who strayed off course. One of the popular Posadas County rumors had the old man’s notches counting six men killed over the years. I knew of two.
When he was thirty-seven years old and living in the little Mexican village of Tres Santos with his sister, he’d been caught up in a dispute with three other men over ownership of half a dozen bag-of-bones cattle.
Somehow—the years had bleached those facts too—the dispute turned nasty. Reuben had been quicker and luckier. One of the men had pulled a little .32 topbreak revolver and Reuben had grabbed it away from him. The first little pellet had hit Simon Vasquez right between the eyes. Simon’s brother Juan and a cousin sprinted for their lives toward their wagon. Reuben jerked the trigger until the gun was empty.
All but one of those four shots buried themselves harmlessly in the Mexican sand. The third slug raked along the top of the wagon seat and then buried itself in Juan’s left kidney.
When Estelle’s mother—Reuben’s niece—told me what she knew of the episode, she maintained that Juan Vasquez lived for almost a week.
That was enough time for every member of the Vasquez family, and they were legion, to gather weapons and set out after Reuben. Reuben was no fool. He decided that United States citizenship was just the ticket.
It was altogether possible, though, that after all those years he still kept one rheumy eye cocked toward the timber, waiting for the Vasquez boys to show up.
The versions of that story had flourished, of course, growing and vitalizing over the years. Reuben had kept the old .32 revolver. That weapon or some other had been at his side for half a century, until he was too old to remember how the holster was supposed to fit on his belt. Over the years, he’d acquired guns of one kind or another by the dozens.
Local color, the Posadas Chamber of Commerce nervously called him. He was that, unshaven, unwashed, with his felt hat pulled low over his eyes, and more often than not mumbling to himself in Mexican.
But he’d never shot anyone else as far as I knew. Five or six years before, he’d said he’d come damn close when a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses took him on as a project. It was his driveway rather than his artillery that had discouraged them in the end.
Reuben Fuentes’s cabin was twenty-four feet on a side. The flat roof was traditional rock and dirt on logs and latillas. When it leaked badly in strategic spots, he’d made repairs with black plastic weighted down with discarded tires.
I parked near the remains of a ’48 GMC pickup truck and got out of the county car. An archaeologist was going to have a lark when he excavated Reuben’s front yard in a thousand years. Nothing had gone to the county landfill. When he’d somehow accidentally punched a hole in his washbasin in 1952, he hadn’t thrown it away. He took an ice pick and punched a couple dozen more holes. He’d used the thing as a bean colander until the rust flakes showed up in his stew. Then the blue porcelain had been flung outside to rest with everything else…the old shoes, the busted axe handle, the myriad tin cans, the GMC and four of its cousins, the other washbasins from other decades.
The place was quiet. Reuben’s ’73 Ford Bronco was parked beside the cabin, nestled between an old school bus and what had probably been a chicken coop. I made my way to the door, ready for the chorus of barks from Reuben’s three mutts.
I hesitated, listening. The hasp wasn’t closed where Reuben normally hung his pa
dlock but the slab-wood door was pulled tightly shut. I knocked and waited.
“Reuben!” I called. Whatever ailments the old man suffered, deafness hadn’t been one of them. I rapped again. “Reuben! It’s Bill Gastner.” I turned and surveyed the yard and surrounding trees. The dogs would have greeted me if they’d seen or heard me. I stepped away from the cabin and walked along the cluttered two-track that led past the Bronco.
The vehicle’s hood was warm, but not more than the hot sun would bake it. I took a deep breath, wishing I had something other than the aroma from fragrant juniper needles for refreshment. I set off down the two-track toward the pastures.
Fifty yards beyond the cabin I reached the first barbed wire fence and stopped. To my left, the fence gate was open. I squinted into the sun. Ahead of me was a thousand acres of rough country where Reuben had once pastured his cattle. As far as I knew, he didn’t own a single steer anymore.
I was damned if I was going to hike the countryside looking for the old man. He was probably sitting in the shade of a piñon somewhere, smoking his pipe, pulling on a whiskey bottle, and watching me.
I turned and started to walk back to the cabin. I hadn’t taken ten steps when I saw him, one hand outstretched to rest against the rough stones of the cabin wall. He waited in the shade as I approached.
“Good morning, Reuben,” I said. Almost in slow motion, he released his grip on the wall of the house. I wasn’t sure that he recognized me. He turned his head slightly and I pushed my Stetson back on my head so the brim didn’t shadow my face.
“Señor,” he said. “¿Cuando va a venir Estelita?”
I relaxed a little. That was his standard question on those dozen or so occasions each year when I spoke with him. His grandniece had spent considerable time with Reuben, especially after Rosa’s death. The old man had been one of Estelle’s major worries when she’d accepted a job with a sheriff’s department up in the northern part of the state. It had been her mother who had finally convinced her to leave Posadas…and convinced her that the old man would do just fine without her. And he had.
I smiled at him. “La semana próxima,” I said, exhausting most of my abilities to speak Mexican. Estelle was not coming that next week. Reuben had forgotten that we were driving south for the christening of Estelle’s first child.
The old man muttered something I didn’t catch and waved a hand as he turned to go back inside. As he turned, I saw that he was still wearing the revolver. And it wasn’t a little .32 topbreak, either. I could see enough of it to recognize the heavy Colt Single Action.
He shuffled to the door and pushed it open. The bottom edge scraped along an arc worn in the wooden floor. The door hadn’t fit properly when he’d hung it and hadn’t improved with time.
Inside, the little cabin was the deep cool that only stone houses offer. That was the extent of the amenities. The place stank—a rich, permeating, choking potpourri of odors that would take a week to categorize and isolate. The dogs were no doubt responsible for much of it. Judging by the thick tapestry of pet hair that clung to every fabric surface, the animals owned the place.
I took another step farther inside as Reuben shuffled toward the ancient round-top refrigerator. The cabin was dimly lit, its clutter mercifully hidden by shadows. Dominating the far wall was a massive stone fireplace whose mantel had been hewn from an alligator bark juniper log sixteen inches in diameter that Reuben had pulled down off the hill behind the cabin with a team of horses in 1945.
Reuben scrabbled around inside the nightmare that was his refrigerator and found two brown bottles of beer. He set one by the sink and handed the other to me. I twisted off the top and extended the bottle to him, then reached past him to take the other. I wondered how long it had been since he’d been able to manage a twist top.
“Where are the dogs?” I asked. He frowned and took a long drink of the beer.
“You want to sit down?” His voice was soft and gentle, the Mexican lilt heavy.
“I can’t stay that long, Reuben.” I turned and looked around the room as my eyes adjusted to the dim light. “Usually the dogs are on top of me,” I said.
“Someone poisoned them.” He said it so simply and quietly that at first I wasn’t sure that I’d heard right. But he didn’t repeat himself. Instead he leaned against the sink and tipped the beer bottle. His hand, the dark brown skin tight against the bones and tendons, was steady.
“Poisoned them? When? What are you talking about?”
He waved a hand. “Three, four days. Maybe Saturday.”
“That’s last week,” I said. “You found them dead?”
“Yes.” He regarded me steadily over the beer bottle.
“Where did this happen? Right here at the house?”
Reuben shook his head. “One crawled to the truck. I find her there, half under it. The other two I find later, down in the field near the road.”
“You’re sure they were poisoned?”
Reuben nodded. I waited for a moment, hoping he would continue, but he remained silent.
“I wish you had called us, Reuben.” He lifted one eyebrow and said nothing. After a week, the trail would be as stone cold as his dogs. “Where are the dogs now?”
“Enterrados.” Buried. He waved vaguely in the direction of the pasture behind the trees, down toward the county road.
I took a deep breath and shook my head. “Any ideas who might have done it?”
His nod was almost imperceptible.
“Who?”
“You want another?” He indicated the beer bottle in my hand. I had yet to take a drink.
“No, thanks. Who did it, Reuben?”
He shrugged that universal Mexican shrug that meant about a thousand different things, from “I don’t know” to “the world is ending tomorrow.”
I tried one more time. “You know that if we can prove who did it, we can put them in jail. We can do that.” I saw a trace of amusement in the old man’s eyes. He didn’t believe me and neither did I. We could go out to where he’d buried them, dig them up, take tissue samples, and have the lab tell us three weeks later that, sure enough, the dogs had been poisoned. But without a witness, the case would fall flat.
I changed tracks, hoping that he’d drift back to the subject of the dogs on his own.
“The ladies at the post office were a little upset this morning. Your revolver made them nervous.”
“¿ Porque?” His voice was the lightest of whispers.
“Maybe because you dropped it? They said you did.” He nodded and said nothing. I mentally sent out a distress call to Estelle Reyes-Guzman. English was as awkward for Reuben as Mexican was for me. Our conversation was never going to slip into that easy gait where men speak their hearts. “Would you do me a favor and not wear it into public buildings, Reuben? Maybe even leave it at home? ¿ A casa?”
He shrugged again and set his beer bottle down near the sink. I did the same. “If you need anything, will you call me?” I realized how stupid that sounded the instant I said it, but Reuben Fuentes had the good grace not to say, “I would call you, Señor, if I had a telephone.”
I stepped toward the doorway. The sunlight was harsh after the cool shadows of the house. “Can I stop by every couple days to check on you?”
He shrugged. “Si quiere.” He held onto the doorjamb as I stepped away from the cabin. “You know,” he said, “it took me almost two hours to bury those dogs.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish you’d let me help.”
“The soil is pretty hard. Lots of rocks. They could have helped, but they didn’t.”
“Who could have helped?”
“Hijos.”
“What kids?”
“On the road, you know. They were on the—” he stopped and pantomimed holding onto handlebars.
“Motorcycles? Motorbikes?”
“Si. The two of them. They saw me digging. They could have helped.”
Reuben was living in the wrong century. If he expected two
youngsters out from town on a lark to stop, hop a barbed wire fence, and offer manual labor, he was more senile than I thought… especially if they recognized him. Even saying “Good morning” to an old, smelly, gun-toting legend like Reuben Fuentes was the stuff of which Truth or Dare games were made.
“You didn’t recognize them?”
He shook his head and waved a hand again.
“Do you think it was kids who killed the dogs? Maybe on a dare? Something like that?”
He shook his head immediately, reinforcing my impression that he had a culprit already in his shaky sights.
“I really wish you’d let us help you, Reuben.”
“You tell Estelita to come visit,” he said, and I knew our conversation was over.
I thanked him for the beer and settled into the seat of the patrol car, cussing myself for being such a gutless wonder. I should have pushed him into a chair and struggled my way through his language and mine until he understood that we could help him find the son of a bitch who killed his pets. All he had to do was tell us what he knew.
And then I realized, as I turned around and headed the patrol car out the two-track, that he understood me perfectly well. I was the one who didn’t understand. Reuben Fuentes didn’t want my help.
7
The lane from Reuben Fuentes’s cabin to the county road was six-tenths of a mile. During the long minutes it took me to negotiate that distance without ripping out the oil pan of 310, my county car, I tried to formulate a short list of people who might have killed the old man’s dogs.
Reuben’s only neighbor, Herb Torrance, lived in the ranch headquarters four miles down the county road. His cattle roamed the countryside, maybe even grazed on property leased from Reuben. I didn’t know for sure. But all three of the little dogs banded together wouldn’t amount to much more than a fly strike on Herb’s Brangus cattle.
I ruled out a casual passerby as the culprit, and that conclusion didn’t require much brilliance.
Twice Buried Page 4
