“Don’t make Padrino laugh too much, hijo. He’s got a sore head.”
He beamed, and she crunched him one more time before letting him slide to the floor. She had just time to slip on her suit jacket before Carlos catapulted into the room for his hug, and he felt tiny and fragile to her in comparison to the robust six-year-old.
“Thanks, Sofía,” she said on her way to the front door, and then she detoured to her mother, who was back in the rocker. “Are you going with them to the hospital?” she asked.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Teresa said. “Hospitals…” She let it go with a wave of her hand in front of her nose, fending off the odors. “That makes you look fat,” she said, nodding at the vest. “But I’m glad you wear it.”
“It’s easy to forget,” Estelle said. “Eddie gave me a hard time.”
“As well he should,” Teresa said. “You just be careful and take your time with this nasty thing you’re working on. Con paciencia, se gana el cielo, you know.”
“I know, Mamá.” With patience, you can reach the sky. As she went outside to her car, she wondered what Janet Tripp’s killer was thinking. And she wondered what the man who had clubbed Bill Gastner was thinking. She turned the ignition key, and as if she somehow shared in the jolt of voltage, realized that it made sense to her that the two attackers were one and the same.
Chapter Twenty-four
She listened to the telephone’s pulse as she drove. After eight rings, she was about to disconnect when Mike Sisneros answered.
“Yes.” His voice was flat and mechanical, and Estelle, at once relieved that he had answered, now had the mental image of him wrapped around a bottle, his face unshaven, with dark bags under his eyes. No one would have blamed him.
“Mike, this is Estelle. Can we talk?”
“Sure.” Again, no emotion, no rise.
“Have you had breakfast?”
This time there was a moment’s hesitation. “No, I guess I haven’t.”
“How about if I pick you up?”
“Okay. If that’s what you want to do.”
“Give me five minutes.”
“Okay.”
Estelle switched off the phone. If not wrapped around a bottle, Sisneros sounded as if he’d been zapped with one too many sedatives, uncomfortable with any decision more complicated than “yes” or “no.”
The apartment complex, a homely brick box divided into three apartments downstairs and two above, fronted on Third Street, across from the high school’s athletic field. Through his front window, Sisneros could watch high-school football games from the comfort of his easy chair. The rear of the building was separated by an alley from Posadas Lumber and Hardware on Grande.
Estelle parked in the empty spot reserved for the deputy’s Mustang that had been stranded in Lordsburg when Mike was picked up by Eddie Mitchell. As she got out of the car, she heard a door above and looked up to see Sisneros putting his keys back in his pocket. He came down the outside stairway with a methodical rhythm that bobbed his head with each step. He wore fashionably faded blue jeans and a stolen from the university of new mexico athletic department T-shirt that was two sizes too large and not tucked in. Even though it was barely fifty degrees outside, he wore no jacket. The T-shirt did nothing to hide the holstered automatic on his belt.
“Ma’am,” he said with a nod.
“Did you get any sleep?” she asked.
“Nope.”
She reached out and touched his arm, nodding toward the Crown Victoria. “I wish I knew some way to make this easier,” she said.
“Can’t think of a way,” he said, and settled into the seat. He swung the door shut too gently, like a man with a migraine who was afraid that his head would shatter. He tried again. “At least I’m still ridin’ in the front.” He glanced at Estelle to see if she’d caught his reference to the fenced-in back seat. “This is so…” He ran out of words. She guessed that he had been up all night…at least he smelled as if he had been.
“Can you eat something?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
Don Juan?”
“Sure. Anything.”
The restaurant was less than a dozen blocks away, and by the time they had reached the Don Juan’s parking lot, Mike Sisneros had slumped even farther, shoulder against the door, head resting on his right hand, gazing off at nothing.
JanaLynn Torrez, one of the sheriff’s innumerable cousins, greeted them inside the restaurant, managing to conceal most of her surprise at seeing Estelle without her customary restaurant companion, Bill Gastner.
“Booth in the back?” JanaLynn said brightly. She looked from Estelle to Mike, doing a creditable job of pretending that nothing was wrong that green chile couldn’t fix. The Posadas grapevine was amazingly efficient at spreading information, correct or otherwise. JanaLynn would have heard about the murder of Janet Tripp, perhaps even the head-bashing of Bill Gastner, one of her favorite patrons. If she was eager to ask questions, she showed great self-control.
She led them to Gastner’s booth. “How’s this?” A hand reached out and brushed Mike’s shoulder-just a light touch that carried a world of sympathy with it.
“Perfect,” Estelle said. Tucked toward the rear of the restaurant, the booth had a fine view of the parking lot, and was blocked from the rest of the dining area by one of the serving stations.
“I heard Bobby was coming home this morning,” JanaLynn said. It was always safe to stick with family.
“We hope so,” Estelle said. “Now the trick will be getting him to behave himself.”
“Gayle will see to that,” JanaLynn said. “Either that or his mother.” She smiled sweetly. “Menus?”
“Please.”
“Oh,” she said almost as an afterthought, and her expression grew sympathetically serious. “I heard Bill is going to be all right?”
“Oh, sure,” Estelle said. “He’s got a hard head.”
“Oh, boy, does he,” JanaLynn agreed. “I hope you find out who the burglar was and hang him by his heels in Pershing Park.” She left without a word or question about Janet Tripp, or an expression of condolence to Mike. Her touch had said it all.
As soon as JanaLynn was out of earshot, Estelle pushed her napkin and silverware to one side. “Mike, I realize that Eddie talked with you at considerable length yesterday, and then he and I had a go later. I know some of this is going to be repetitive for you.”
“I know the drill,” he said.
Estelle traced the patterns in the plastic tablecloth for a moment, considering how best to begin. JanaLynn arrived with menus, giving her another couple of minutes.
“I guess just coffee,” Mike said, and JanaLynn frowned.
“That stuff will burn a hole in your stomach if you don’t have something to eat,” she said. Estelle glanced up at that, hearing a little more than just polite waitress in JanaLynn’s tone. If Mike Sisneros caught the message of compassion, he gave no indication. “How about a nice omelet?”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Okay. That’s fine.”
“Green chile? Bacon? What would you like?”
“Just whatever,” he said.
JanaLynn nodded with satisfaction and turned to Estelle. “How about you?”
“I guess a green chile breakfast burrito.”
Surprise flickered briefly on JanaLynn’s pretty face. “Tea with that?”
“Please.”
“So,” Estelle said when they were once more alone, “let me just tell you what I think, Mike.” She regarded him thoughtfully, looking for some sign of interest. He had changed out of the clothes she’d seen the night before, when Mitchell had brought him home from his mother and stepfather’s Christmas dinner. Why he’d bothered, she couldn’t guess. He hadn’t forgotten the gun, though.
Sisneros didn’t respond, but sat quietly with his hands down on the seat of the booth, as if he needed the two props to hold himself up. Maybe he did, Estelle thought.
“I think the same person who k
illed Janet also attacked Bill Gastner.”
His eyelids flickered. “How do you figure that?”
“It’s just a guess, at this point. Look,” she said, and slid one hand across toward him, palm up. “What happened to Janet tells me that there’s someone out there who set out to see her dead…I don’t buy that it was a robbery. If it was a robbery, the killer wouldn’t have moved the body. He would have just left her there, slumped in the car.”
Mike turned and gazed out the window. “Why’d he take her?” he asked, voice no more than a whisper.
“I don’t know, Mike. Maybe he… I don’t know. We could speculate all day, and not know for sure.”
“Mitchell said she wasn’t assaulted,” the deputy said.
“No. She wasn’t.”
“Then why take her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe just to gain some time, Mike. There was a good chance that her body wouldn’t have been discovered for days. Maybe he didn’t want to take the time, or the chance, to actually bury her somewhere. If he’d done that, we might still not know where she was.” She saw Mike’s eyes narrow. “It didn’t turn out that way, anyway. Who could predict a kid riding his Christmas bike up the Escudero.”
“One more interruption,” JanaLynn said tactfully from several paces away. She placed a mug and carafe of coffee in front of Mike, and a pot and teacup by Estelle’s place. “The food will be out in a minute.”
“Thanks, Jana,” Estelle said, and the waitress ducked away. “Look, Mike,” she continued, “the shooting isn’t something that stemmed from a confrontation at the ATM. You stand there with a fistful of money, and you’re a prime target for a snatch and run. Janet wasn’t a big girl, she wasn’t some ninja, she wasn’t armed in any way. A teenager could have menaced her out of that money. It doesn’t make any sense to me that someone would sneak up behind her and execute her.” She paused for a minute. “I’m sorry, Mike, but that’s what happened.”
His dark eyes held hers, watchful and alert. “Why take the money at all, then?”
“It’s there, it’s easy, and maybe he figured it would lead us off in the wrong direction. Mike, we’re not looking for a simple thief. We’re looking for a killer. And that’s what got me to thinking. Whoever hit Bill Gastner didn’t confront him, like someone with a grudge. There were no words exchanged. No threats. Bill had no warning, never saw it coming. Just one very hard blow from the back, and if the weapon hadn’t struck the door jamb at the same time, that would have been it. It would have done the job.”
“If it was the same person, why didn’t he just use the gun?” Mike’s speech cadence had picked up a notch as his mind engaged.
“If he had, that would have connected the two, for sure. No doubt. And who knows? Maybe the killer did plan to use the gun. Maybe he crouched in the dark on that patio, gun in hand. Maybe he had second thoughts. Maybe he had time to think about the noise out in that quiet neighborhood. Maybe he tripped over the piece of rebar while he waited, and that changed his mind. Maybe it was one of those bright ideas at the last minute.”
One eyebrow twitched, but Mike remained silent.
“But see,” Estelle persisted, “it was the same sort of simple attack. One blow, and that was it. We both know that if they’d met face to face, he would have had to use the gun. Bill’s a tough old guy, even pretty quick on his feet when he’s not thinking about it. The killer didn’t hang around to argue, to gloat, or for that matter, to ransack Bill’s house. The keys were right there. He could have gone inside with no problem. But he didn’t. One blow, and he’s gone.”
“Someone local, then,” Mike said. “It wasn’t just someone down off the interstate who saw an opportunity and robbed Janet. He’d have no reason to wander around town until he stumbled on Gastner coming home.”
“That’s exactly right,” Estelle said. “It’s someone local, and it’s someone who doesn’t want to be caught. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Jana Lynn arrived with the food, but didn’t linger. The burrito, thoughtfully reduced in size from the dish that would have brought a grin of anticipation to Bill Gastner’s face, rested fragrant and daunting in front of Estelle. She had ordered it only to encourage Mike Sisneros to eat, and now the idea of trying to work her way through its ten thousand calories cramped her stomach. The omelet parked in front of Mike Sisneros could have nourished a small army.
“Tell me about her,” Estelle said as she started to unwrap one end of the burrito, exposing the filling without having to eat the thick tortilla or the blanket of cheese that held it all together. The request prompted silence. “Mike, look,” Estelle said. “You’re a good police officer. You know what we’re up against. We have a victim. We have precious little forensic evidence. We have no one who has stepped forward and presented himself as a suspect. There’s a missing gun in the picture. The gun belonged to the victim’s fiancé. Do you want to quote me some statistics about domestic violence?”
“I’m the most likely person to have killed her,” the deputy said dully. “That’s what the statistics say.”
“That’s right. That’s what they say.”
“Captain Mitchell didn’t arrest me last night, and here I am, trying to stuff my face this morning. The undersheriff hasn’t arrested me either, so I guess I’m off the hook, huh?” He almost managed a tired smile. “For a while, anyway.”
“So it appears. But you’re a good cop, Mike.”
“That’s what you said.”
“So you tell me where we should start.” She pushed her plate to one side. “Mike, I don’t know anything about Janet. Let’s start that way. I haven’t met her half a dozen times in the last six months. I know she worked at A amp; H. Doing what, I don’t know. And I sure don’t know why anyone would want to kill her.”
He shook his head slowly, the omelet growing cold after the initial explorations. “I went to school with her,” he said, and Estelle could see that he wasn’t seeing the designs his fork drew in the omelet’s crusty surface. “Well, sort of. She was a year behind me. I didn’t hang out with her or anything. She was one of those kids that…well, that nobody really notices. She had her friends, I had mine. She went to work for the welding shop right out of high school. I know that, ’cause my father’s a welder and taught me how, and we used to buy supplies and stuff like that over there. I’d see her once in a while.”
“When did you start going out with her?”
He heaved a sigh. “Remember that nasty fire over at the Popes’ place a couple of years ago?”
“Of course.”
“She was one of the ones who helped round up some of the horses and donkeys that got loose after that. She lives in that trailer park right there when you turn off from Grande to Escondido? I mean, she did. Anyway, she broke her ankle that night. Stepped crooked or something, walking back home along the road. I was the responding officer to that.”
“Ah.” A damsel in distress does it every time, Estelle thought.
“We got to talking, and it just kinda grew from there. At first, she didn’t seem too excited to have anything to do with a cop, but she came around.” A ghost of a smile touched his face.
“She was never married before?”
“No. Kinda took our time, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t call thirty-one over the hill, Mike.”
“I’m thirty-two. She’s a year younger.”
She grinned. “Well, then. That’s over the hill. I speak from painful experience. She has family?” The night before, Mike Sisneros had been vague about Janet Tripp’s relatives.
“She has one sister.” Sisneros frowned at the table. “She lives over in Kansas. I know Janet has her address and number in her little book. But they don’t talk much.”
“Parents?”
“I…well, her mom died ten years ago or so. They were divorced. I know that. Her dad just walked out on ’em one day a long time ago. Left ’em high and dry. Janet doesn�
��t like to talk about it. So we don’t. I mean we didn’t.”
“Sometimes this is a hard time of year for folks with family problems,” Estelle said.
“Yep. That’s what the textbooks say.” He glanced up and shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Why didn’t she go with you to Lordsburg on Christmas Day? Wasn’t she planning to originally?”
“Maybe. Yeah. I guess she was. But I know that sometimes she’s a little uncomfortable around my mom. It’s one of those things-she has to kind of work up to it, you know? My mom is…well, she’s bossy. And she doesn’t like it much that I’m living with a white girl. And not married to boot. Mom is the Catholic of all Catholics when it comes to things like that.”
“A white girl?”
“What can I say. To Mom, there’s Indian, and there’s white, and never the twain.”
“She’s Hopi?”
“Zuni.”
“And your dad?”
“My stepdad is Zuni. My dad-dad is just plain old Mexican. That’s white as far as Mom is concerned.” He grinned but his eyes didn’t go along. “Maybe that’s where all the problems start, huh? A psychologist would have a ball.”
“So Janet decided not to go over to Lordsburg at the last minute?”
“Yep.” He worked the fork into the omelet until the utensil could stand upright by itself. “That was something that we were going to have to work out.”
“Your mom, you mean?”
“Yep.” He gave the fork a twist and withdrew it and put it down on the tablecloth. “I don’t see it,” he whispered. “Who’d want to do…”
“Who had access to your apartment, Mike?”
“Access?”
“I’m talking about the missing gun. People don’t just lose guns, Mike. And I’m not suggesting that your gun was used as the murder weapon, either. But it’s a loose end. Do you see? We have a weapon missing that’s similar to what might have been used in a homicide.”
“Janet had a key for the apartment. She was living with me.”
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