Before She Dies pc-4

by Steven F Havill

  “Hey, Bill,” he said. “Kind of past your curfew, isn’t it?” He grinned at Holman, who looked uncomfortable. “Sheriff, how you doin’?”

  “Nick,” I said, “we’re in a bind. Can you spare us a little of your time?”

  “Sure.” He held open the storm door and beckoned. “Come on in. Marty, are you tired of playin’ cops and robbers yet? You want a real job?” Martin Holman may have sold used cars at one time in his varied career, but he’d never voiced the slightest inclination to return to the lot. I knew his purchase order for election year campaign posters and cards had already gone to the printer. And when he stepped through the door, Holman squared his shoulders a bit and looked like a proper sheriff-trim build with broad shoulders, a little gray just beginning to creep into his neatly clipped sideburns. I always felt like an old worn-out basset hound standing next to him.

  Nick Chavez closed the door and frowned. “I heard what happened yesterday. It’s hard to imagine who would do such an awful thing. How’s the young lady?”

  Thanks to the efficient media, the entire world had heard one version or another of the shooting. I didn’t answer Nick’s question, but instead gestured toward the formal living room, untouched by humans except for regular dusting. “Can we talk in here, Nick?”

  “Sure. Sure. Let me get you something to drink. Coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” I shook my head.

  “How about you, sheriff?”

  Holman nodded. “That would be just right. Black.”

  I sat on the edge of a flowered sofa while Holman prowled the room, examining Mrs. Chavez’s collection of porcelain figurines. She tended toward gnomes, elves, and other small, ugly caricatures. Holman picked up a casting of a leprechaun examining a rabbit’s injured paw and turned the figurine this way and that. He set it down carefully and picked up a business card that someone had placed on the mantel.

  “Florie Gallegos for Assessor,” he read. “She’s been in office a hundred years.” After carefully replacing the card, he added, “You know that Estelle is going to run against me.” He said it as a statement, with just a hint of self-pity mixed with accusation creeping into his voice.

  “She told me yesterday. We didn’t have a chance to discuss it.”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea?” He thrust his hands in his trouser pockets and leaned against the fireplace mantel.

  I took a long time to answer and finally settled for, “No.”

  Holman’s eyebrows shot up and he started to say something. But Nick Chavez returned, carrying two mugs of steaming, fresh coffee. He set one down carefully on the small end table near my elbow.

  “You say you don’t want any, but you really do,” he said. He handed Holman’s mug to the sheriff. “Spill any of that on the carpet and my wife will cut your heart out,” he grinned, then turned serious. “Now, what can I help you gentlemen with?”

  I looked at Nick Chavez’s open, expectant face, round and friendly like one of the porcelain figurines. He settled his short, chubby body onto a chair that looked like something out of Wuthering Heights and clasped his hands between his knees.

  “We’re chasing shadows, Nick,” I said.

  “I don’t follow.”

  I hesitated, then said, “This is just between us.”

  He nodded vigorously. “Sure, sure.”

  “We have reason to suspect that the deputy was shot after he stopped to assist a motorist. Maybe shot by that motorist, maybe by a third party.”

  “Ay,” Nick said softly.

  “We also have reason to think that one of the vehicles involved was both brand-new and disabled somehow.” I saw Nick’s eyes narrow a little. “Svenson Motors in Albuquerque reported a Chevy Suburban stolen sometime Saturday night. There is some circumstantial evidence that points to that as the vehicle involved. Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  I shrugged. “As I said, it’s circumstantial. Pretty thin. But it’s our only lead. That’s it. Period.”

  Nick pursed his lips, then said, “A stolen Suburban is going to be hard to find, Bill. If he’s got some hours head start, he’s in Mexico by now, that’s for sure. Are you working with the Federales?”

  “Yes. But they won’t turn up anything.”

  Nick shrugged his sympathy for our frustrations with Mexican law enforcement. “What can I do for you, then?”

  I sipped the coffee. He was right. The coffee was just what I needed. “How do you steal a locked vehicle without breaking anything?” Nick Chavez grinned and settled back in the chair. “You’ve got to protect your own inventory, Nick. You’re as much of an expert as anyone around.”

  “The easiest way is to steal the key.” He made a little twisting motion with his right hand. “But other than that? We take the keys in at night. On some of the high-profile vehicles…like the Blazers and Suburbans…we use a steering wheel bar-lock. But I tell you…” He leaned forward. “Nothing works too good if someone really wants the vehicle. See, first of all, we all used to use window lockboxes. Everybody did. But the damn kids would break them and take the keys. So now, they pop a window and they’re inside.”

  “What about the steering wheel bar-lock?” Holman asked.

  Chavez shrugged. “I heard that sometimes they spray the lock mechanism with Freon and then tap it hard with a hammer. Just shatters. I’m not sure about that. But the easiest way is just to cut a little chunk out of the steering wheel rim.”

  “It’s that easy to do?” I asked.

  “Sure. They have to make the steering wheel kind of soft, you know. The metal, I mean. So it bends and deforms in a wreck and doesn’t cut the driver into little pieces. Thieves know that, and with a good pair of wide-jawed bolt cutters…snip, snip.”

  “But if they break into the truck by shattering a window, that would leave some glass on the ground.”

  Nick shook his head. “Not necessarily. Hold a towel over it and rap it inward. Maybe one of the smaller back windows. You can do it pretty clean.” He grinned slightly. “Or you can slip the door lock other ways, I guess. You know, as fast as they come up with antitheft systems, there’s some smart thief out there who spends all day long figuring ways to beat the system. Count on it.”

  “And you can hot-wire these new ignitions? What about all the interlocks, and cutoffs, and what not?”

  “Like I said, as fast as the engineers design something, there’s a solution. And it’s a big market down south, let me tell you.”

  “Maybe with NAFTA, it’ll dry up,” Holman said.

  “Sure,” Nick said, and grinned.

  “When’s the last time you had a truck stolen from your lot?”

  Nick puffed out his cheeks in thought. “Eight years ago. We keep the inventory down, though.”

  “Nothing since then?”

  “No. You remember that time. When the Alvaro kid took the Z-28 and went joyriding all night before he blew up the engine?”

  “What have you been hearing from other dealers?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of theft, especially in the bigger cities. But not from dealers. It’s too risky. The lots are well lit now and some of them even have security all night.”

  I looked down at the dark coffee and swirled the cup gently, watching the patterns. Nick Chavez sat and waited. “Nick,” I said, “the deputy’s last call to dispatch was from the general area of your dealership.” I set the cup down and retrieved a small notebook from my breast pocket. After thumbing a few pages I found the entry I wanted. “He radioed dispatch at fifty-three minutes after ten from your dealership.”

  “What was going on?” Nick asked. “No one called me.”

  “Someone apparently called the police and complained that kids were driving around behind the dealership. Maybe parking in some dark corner, doing who knows what. Deputy Encinos noted in his patrol log that he responded and made no contact. Six minutes later he noted in that same log that he was ten-eight…that he was in service and available.
”

  “And then…”

  “And then he drove about ten or eleven miles west on State Highway Fifty-six and was killed.”

  Chavez looked at the floor, his hands clasped tightly with the index fingers steepled together. “Do you have much trouble down at the lot, Nick?” Holman asked, and Nick looked up at Holman as if he had just seen the sheriff for the first time.

  “No,” he said. “None. I guess we’ve been lucky. The other place,” he said, referring to D’Anzo Auto Plaza, “they had more trouble…but they’re closed now, so we’re the only game in town. We’ve been lucky, I guess.”

  “Isn’t the shop area fenced off in back?” I asked. “There’s nowhere anyone can go, other than just skirting the building, right?”

  Chavez nodded. “The main service building is fenced, yes.” He stood up quickly. “You fellas got time?”

  “To…”

  “Let’s take a run down there. Right now.”

  “Nick,” I said, “don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that there is any connection between the stop the deputy made at your place and what happened afterward. We’re just trying to reconstruct what happened that night.”

  The dealer nodded vigorously, and held up one index finger close to his face, like a schoolteacher savoring a moment of explanation. “You never know,” he said. “Now you got me curious.”

  “About what?” Holman asked.

  Chavez walked to the foyer and lifted a Posadas Jaguars wind-breaker off the hook. He shrugged it on. “You said that the deputy responded to the call from your dispatcher at ten-fifty-three, right?”

  “That’s right.” I knew Nick’s next question before he asked it, a nagging little gap in events that had been eating away at me all afternoon. “And six minutes later, he’s clear.”

  Nick Chavez nodded. “So what is he doing for six minutes, Bill?”

  Chapter 15

  If kids wanted a dismal place to party, the narrow space behind the Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile back fence was certainly it. Between the chain-link and the ragged edges of Arroyo Cerdo were fifty feet of sand, goat-heads, creosote bush and bunch-grass…mixed with debris and junk that the wind had brought in, or that Chavez’s mechanics had tossed over the fence from time to time.

  Inside the eight-foot, barbed wire topped fence a row of vehicles waited for repairs that would probably never be made, or waited to surrender vital parts so some other junker could waddle a few more miles. As we walked along the fence, I noticed that several of the stripped vehicles were newer models than my own Blazer.

  “Now this inner gate is locked all the time,” Nick said. He fumbled with a large set of keys.

  I surveyed the eight-foot-high chain-link fence. “The person who called in the complaint from across the street wouldn’t be able to see back here. The building is in the way. She just said that there was vehicle traffic.”

  “Kids,” Chavez said, as if that covered all the sins of the world. “They can pull in off the street, sneak around here, and be out of sight.” He pointed at the tire tracks outside the fence.

  He opened the gate and motioned for the sheriff and I to follow. “The service manager opens this each morning,” he said. “That way the four back service bay doors can be opened and we can drive vehicles straight through, out and around.” He made a circular motion with his hands.

  I grunted and turned slowly, surveying the yard. “Nothing,” I said to myself.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said, ‘nothing.’ There’s nothing here that tells me a damn thing.”

  “I wish we knew who the deputy talked with,” Holman said. “That would answer a lot of questions.”

  “It might,” I replied dubiously. “We have no connections, Martin. None. We can assume either way-that what Deputy Encinos did here had something to do with the later shooting, or that there is no relationship.” I shrugged. “You take your choice. Nothing either way.”

  “Who called in the complaint?” Nick asked.

  “Across the street. The Burger Heaven’s night manager. She called to say that she saw kids driving around behind this building.”

  “Then all they could do is park outside the service yard fence,” Nick said. “They’re not going to climb over the barbed wire.”

  “Who talked to the manager?” Holman asked.

  “Tom Mears. He said that she couldn’t identify what kind of vehicle was involved. She was busy, the light was bad, it’s a hundred yards distant…”

  “But she took time out to make the call to police,” Holman said. I looked at him with mild surprise. Given another four-year term, he might turn out to be as cynical as the rest of us. There was hope yet.

  We dropped Nick Chavez back at his house after extracting the standard promise that if anything cropped up he’d give us a call. I wasn’t optimistic. Unable to let go, I drove back to the car dealership and pulled into the lot.

  “Now,” I said, looking at my watch. “It’s ten-fifty-three. I’ve just checked out the lot, found nothing, and called the PD to inform them.”

  “All right,” Holman said. “What do we do for six minutes?”

  “Suppose we just sit here. Suppose the deputy and Linda Real were just talking. About what, we don’t know. But they’re sitting in the dealer’s lot, watching what little traffic there is, and chatting. They finish their conversation, and Encinos calls ten-eight.”

  “So they drive twelve miles west on State Fifty-six.”

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  “Why not?”

  I glanced at my watch. “The deputy’s shift ends at midnight. It’s already eleven. So to give himself time to finish up paperwork and so forth, he’s only got a few minutes. It’s been an interesting shift. He assisted at the Weatherford crash on the interstate, and he may want to talk with Mears about that report. He’s had two domestic dispute calls, and the odds are good that a third one might come in before the night’s over. So it makes sense, both from timing and need, that he’d tend to stay central-that he’d stick close to town for the last few minutes of his shift.”

  “But instead, he headed west.”

  “Right,” I said, and pulled 312 into gear. “He heads west. It’s just about eleven, dead up. Driving at moderate speed will bring him twelve miles out on State Fifty-six in fifteen to twenty minutes.”

  “Maybe he wanted to stop at the Broken Spur for something.” Holman’s face brightened. “Or maybe Linda did. Remember, she’d been there just the night or two before. With Torrez.”

  “Then why did they drive beyond the saloon, Martin?”

  “I don’t know.” He slumped in the passenger seat and watched the night slide by. “Maybe a patron left there drunk, and the deputy decided to follow him.”

  “Follow a drunk? Not for three miles before he pulls him over. Maybe a thousand yards.”

  “Maybe he was just trying to make sure he got home all right.”

  “Martin, if one of your deputies does that and I find out about it, he can go earn a living flipping burgers. The only place they’d better be escorting drunk drivers is into the backseat of the patrol car.”

  Holman shot a quick glance at me. “It was just a thought.”

  “Watch the highway and the right-of-way for junk,” I said. “Remember? If the theory is that something ruined a tire, then that’s what you should be looking for.”

  “Testy, testy,” Holman grinned. He straightened up a little and watched the roadway. After a minute, he said, “Why is it I always feel like I work for you?”

  I looked over at him in surprise. “Sorry, Martin. I’m tired, that’s all. And old habits die hard.”

  Holman shrugged. “Well, in a way, I suppose I do work for you. I’m elected, you’re not.” He lowered his window an inch and inhaled deeply, holding the air in like someone smoking a joint. He finally let out the air with a monumental sigh. For a moment, I thought that he was going to start rattling on again about the election, but instead he sai
d, “It’s not going to tell us much, even if we do find something.”

  “Anything at all is a piece of the puzzle,” I assured him. “Have you ever tried one of those two-thousand-piece jigsaws, where all the pieces are shaped almost alike? The box top shows a big picture of some Swiss castle or some such? One piece at a time. And if you’re missing one piece, it’s all just that much harder.”

  Holman snorted with disgust. “My daughter talked me into helping her with one of those. It was a picture of a field of horses.” He looked across at me. “About two-hundred damn pieces of blank blue sky, Bill. It took forever, and even then she figured it out just by trial and error.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do here.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “Oh yes. It is the same thing, Martin.”

  We reached the Broken Spur Saloon. The parking lot was full, the patrons no doubt taking advantage of having a good story to kick about. I slowed 310 and pulled off the highway. I switched on the spotlight, swiveled it, and played the light across license plates as we idled along the shoulder of the highway. A westbound truck laid on the air horn and passed us so fast the car rocked in its wake.

  “Jesus,” Holman murmured.

  And just beyond the parking lot, as I was pulling back out onto the highway, the sheriff found his missing puzzle piece.

  “Stop,” he barked, and I did so, the patrol car half on and half off the pavement. “Turn the light around this way.” The fender of the patrol car blocked the beam and I backed up. “What’s all that stuff?”

  I craned my neck, pulling myself up against the steering wheel. “The remains of an old sign base, maybe.”

  Holman was out of the car before I finished the sentence. My guess was correct. Hidden in the bunchgrass just far enough off the highway’s shoulder that the mowers wouldn’t hit it in summer was a concrete slab two feet square and a foot thick or more. The sign base rested skewed, sunken into the ground where ants undermined it and occasional careless drivers coming out of the saloon’s parking lot clipped it. One corner of the concrete had spalled and crumbled to pebbles.