Chapter Eleven
By late Saturday morning, the ogler gallery had reached some conclusions all by themselves, and most had retreated to their homes to leave us in peace. Whether the spectators’ theories about what had happened were right or wrong, even the most hard-core gossips had learned a few things.
Yes, Sosimo Baca was dead. The heart attack scenario was the path of least resistance. After all, the old drunk had been through a lot in the past hours, beginning with consumption of about a gallon of hard cider, and then progressing through the death of his son and the arrival of his estranged wife who snatched the two remaining children. In less than a day, fortune had taken Sosimo from bleary-eyed contentment to some seriously twanged heartstrings.
No, we weren’t going to let all of Regal gawk at the corpse or let friends and relatives into the house to rummage for souvenirs. No, we weren’t going to hold a question and answer session out front.
In addition, a stout southwest wind gradually built, driving the bite of chilly November air. Without a circulating hot coffee vendor, folks who hadn’t dressed for the occasion quickly wearied of leaning against cold trucks, waiting for us to attend them. A heart attack wasn’t that interesting, after all—even an incident as odd as this one appeared to be.
While Linda Real, Tom Mears, and Tom Pasquale worked to photograph and lift every square inch of the interior with special concentration on the Bacas’ kitchen, Sergeant Howard Bishop, Scott Gutierrez, and a pair of state troopers scoured the back and side yards of the tiny house. That alone accounted for some of the spectators lingering beyond their welcome, since it’s unusual when a heart attack attracts so much law enforcement attention. That added interesting fuel to the gossip fires.
Eventually the coroner, Dr. Alan Perrone, allowed the EMTs to remove Sosimo Baca’s corpse. Perrone’s examination at the scene was just enough to establish that someone hadn’t driven a blade under the victim’s ribs, or popped a .22 in Sosimo’s ear. “I would guess that it was his heart,” Perrone said quietly, and left. We agreed with him. Sure enough, Sosimo Baca’s heart had stopped. Exactly when and how was a puzzle.
Undersheriff Robert Torrez and I tackled the seemingly endless job of sorting out who had actually been in the house, and when and why they’d been there.
We didn’t know who had been the last person to see Sosimo Baca alive, so we started on the other end—we knew who had been the first to see him dead. Little Mandy Lucero had walked into the middle of things, took one look at the victim, and ran screaming home to her mother. Mandy adamantly maintained that she hadn’t touched anything in the house other than the front and back doorknobs. She remembered that both were closed when she arrived. An honest little kid, Mandy didn’t remember if she’d closed either when she ran out.
Mrs. Lucero hadn’t simply taken her distraught daughter’s word and then called the police. She’d hustled over to Baca’s herself to make sure, adding her own shoe and fingerprints to the mix. And then she’d telephoned who to her was the logical choice…the formidable Clorinda Baca.
The hamlet politics of Mrs. Lucero’s choice were simple enough—and perfectly natural. If she had hot news, she didn’t call the newspaper. She called a favorite neighbor…and in this case, the closest relative of the deceased.
The police were the outsiders, those folks who clomp around for a while and then vanish, leaving the village to sort out the forced changes in social hierarchy. Mrs. Lucero hadn’t given her actions a second thought. After all the smoke cleared, she would have to live in the same village with Clorinda—not with us.
Ms. Clorinda Baca, a solidly built, square-shouldered woman in her late sixties, sat on one end of the old couch in her late brother’s living room. She wore khaki trousers and a blue denim workshirt, with a paisley bandanna forcing order on a full head of wiry, salt-and-pepper hair. It was a uniform that would serve equally well for a day spent pulling ragweed or baking apple pies.
She had deflated a bit from her earlier moments of brassy panic, and now sagged pale and trembly-lipped against a couple of pillows. She hugged one of them under her left arm, fingers fussing with one frayed corner.
I shifted forward in the single overstuffed chair in the opposite corner of the tiny room, just a couple of strides away. For a moment, the two of us were alone. The undersheriff had gone outside with Mandy Lucero and her mother, and I could hear his quiet voice beyond the closed door.
“Clorinda, I’m sorry about your brother,” I said.
She nodded absently, picking at the pillow. When she spoke, each word came slowly with careful enunciation, as if she were afraid I might misunderstand. “Sheriff, he was not… a bad …man.”
“I know he wasn’t, Clorinda,” I replied. “But there are some things we have to know. We need to move quickly, and I think maybe you can be of some help. You’ve been through a lot, but I want you to focus now…all right?” She either didn’t hear me, or didn’t care what I had said. Instead she smoothed the tassel on the pillow and repeated herself.
“Sosimo was not a bad man, Sheriff. I want you to know that.” Her implication was clear. We were not to think that her brother had suffered a heart attack as some sort of divine retribution for his actions, whatever they might have been. Clorinda and God were evidently in agreement about that.
“Clorinda, my first concern right now is the two girls. Tell me what you told the undersheriff earlier.”
“What did I tell him?” Her brow furrowed with either true confusion or a hell of a good act. I didn’t answer. “Now what happened,” she added, and clutched the pillow a little tighter, glaring at the floor as if the old carpet held the answers. “Their mother came and picked them up.”
“What time was that?”
“Maybe it was seven. Seven-thirty, maybe.”
“And you were here at the time? Here in this house?” She nodded, closed her eyes, and pressed her lips tightly together. “Clorinda, who called Josie? Who told her about Matt?”
“Lucinda did that,” the woman said, and I wasn’t able to tell from the tone of her voice just what she thought.
“Lucinda is the oldest daughter, right?”
“Yes. Thirteen, and such a good girl.”
“I’m sure they’ll both be all right,” I said. “We’ve got someone over in Lordsburg right now, making sure.”
“That Josie,” Clorinda said, but didn’t elaborate.
“And it was the oldest daughter who called you earlier this morning? To break the news? That was Lucinda?”
She looked heavenward. “When the telephone rang this morning, por Dios, I knew it was something awful. Lucinda told me that Father Anselmo and Bobby were at the house, and that Matthew had been killed. ” Clorinda heaved a great sigh. “And she said that her father was drunk, and she didn’t know what to do. And that I should come over right away.”
“And so you did.”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
She shook her head. “It was still dark, you know. Pitch-dark. The middle of the night, sometime.”
“And so when you arrived, the undersheriff and Father Anselmo were here, along with your brother and the two girls. That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t bring anyone with you?”
“No. Who would I bring?”
I ignored the question, remembering that part of the joy of really good gossip was controlling the exclusivity of it. “Did the undersheriff explain to you what had happened?”
“Of course he did,” Clorinda snapped. “Bobby said that Matthew had been taken away because of something he did earlier in the night. Something about a car wreck. And then he said that somehow the boy broke loose or something, and got in the way of a truck.” Her eyes misted and her jaw muscles clenched. “That was just a matter of time, you know. Before something terrible happened. Como padre, como hijo.”
I nodded as if I understood completely. “Did Sosimo fight with his wife Josie?”<
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“What do you mean, fight?”
“Just that. Did the two of them get along? I understand that Josie walked out a couple of years ago.”
“So, they don’t fight,” Clorinda snapped. “She’s gone.”
“Did they fight before that?”
“I suppose so. Well, no, they didn’t. Sosimo didn’t fight with anybody. He just went his way, and figured that things would work out, you know. Josie was always after him to quit his drinking, to find some work, to do this, to do that.” She shrugged. “Sosimo, he just kind of liked to take things real easy, you know.”
Clorinda dabbed her left eye. “Josie was real…how do you call it…” Clorinda sat up straight and made a flourish with her hand, like a flamenco dancer. “She was so proud, you know.” She settled back against the sofa cushions. “I don’t know why she stayed as long as she did, if you want my honest opinion.”
“Who knows why folks do what they do,” I said. “So Lucinda, the oldest daughter, called Lordsburg to tell her mother about Matt’s death. Do you remember about what time that might have been?”
Clorinda’s brow furrowed again. “Sometime, I guess.”
“Had the undersheriff already left?”
“Oh, yes. He didn’t stay too long,” and the tone of her voice made it clear that perhaps Robert should have.
“Father Anselmo was still here?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “We…the father and me…we were pouring the coffee into Sosimo, trying to sober him up some more. The girls were crying. Por Dios, such a time. It was Father Anselmo who said that Josie should be notified and Lucinda, right away she was on the phone to her mother.”
“And Josie came right over from Lordsburg?”
“She must have come straight over. It wasn’t very long, you know.” She looked up quickly as the door behind me opened. The undersheriff closed it behind him and walked over to the sofa. Clorinda moved over and patted the cushion beside her.
“You sit here, sobrino.” Torrez did so, and Clorinda reached out and patted the back of his hand.
“Clorinda, did you call anyone? Did you ask anyone to come over?” I asked.
She glanced at Robert, but nothing in his expression gave her a clue about how she should answer. She drew her hand away from his and latched on to the pillow corner again. “I called Mary, because Raymond would want to know. They don’t see each other much, but he’d want to know, just the same.”
“That would be Mary Baca?” I asked.
She nodded, and Robert said quietly, “Raymond Baca is Sosimo’s younger brother. Mary is his wife.”
“Did they both come over?”
“No. Raymond said he had to open the store. But Mary, she came on over.”
I glanced at Robert, whose Uncle Raymond was manager of the Posadas Town and Country Hardware, as ambitious and commerce-oriented as his late brother had been soggy.
“Just her?” I asked.
“She brought Sabrina along, too.”
“Sabrina Torrez,” Robert added. “Mary’s sister.”
I didn’t bother to ask if Sabrina was related to him in any way but by marriage. It wasn’t genealogy we were after just then. “Clorinda, this is important,” I said, and leaned forward, pointing a gentle finger her way. “The undersheriff left you all ‘sometime.’ Before dawn, let’s say. Lucinda, the oldest daughter, called her mother shortly after that, and Josie Baca arrived from Lordsburg about seven-thirty or so. Fair enough?” She nodded.
“Now,” I continued, “Josie left, taking her two daughters back to Lordsburg with her. When did Father Anselmo leave?”
That really made her forehead pucker. “Maybe sometime after that,” she said, and I sighed.
“So there was a time when it was just family, right? Just you, your sisters-in-law, and Sosimo? Right?” She hesitated and I added, “The girls are gone, Robert here is gone, Father Anselmo is gone.”
“Yes.”
“And what time would that be?”
Clorinda did a good job of looking helpless. “I just don’t know for sure, you know.” I glanced at her wrist, the one partly buried in the comfort of the pillow. Sure enough, there was no watch there, and no pale stripe.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Sosimo wanted to go to town and get his truck. And I told him he was crazy, just to leave it be for a while. I knew what was going to happen if he did that. I told him he should get himself cleaned up so we could all go in and”—she stopped suddenly, with a little twist of anguish—“the boy’s lying in that hospital somewhere, or they got to do an autopsy, I suppose. If Josie’s not going to handle it, then it’s up to us, you know. Up to Sosimo. That’s what I told him. We didn’t need him to go off and jump in the bottle again. Somebody’s got to take care of the arrangements.”
“And Sosimo didn’t want to do that?”
“He did.” Clorinda nodded. “But he wanted to be able to drive himself. But we knew what would happen. He’d find his way into Posadas, and that would be that. He’d go off and get drunk again.” She shook her head vehemently. “Not just when we’ve got the poor boy’s funeral to think about. We just didn’t need that.”
“Did Sosimo ask you to take him?”
“Yes. And we all said no. That we’d find a way to get that damned old truck back for him. Sosimo, he wasn’t in any condition to drive.”
“But he went anyway?”
“Yes. He just walked out. He said he’d find a ride.”
“And so the only ones here, in this house, were you, your sister-in-law Mary Baca, and her sister, Sabrina Torrez.” I saw a ghost of a grin slip across the undersheriff’s face.
“After Sosimo walked out, we all went home,” Clorinda Baca added, and she forced the pillow down into the corner of the sofa, looking as if she was planning to get up.
“It’s really important to know what time that was,” I said.
“Well, I just don’t know,” Clorinda said flatly.
“Who called you to tell you that your brother was dead, Clorinda?”
“Elva Lucero,” she said promptly, and her tone made it unnecessary for her to add, “as well she should have.”
“And you came over here again, saw your brother’s body, and called your nephew, at his home.” I pointed at Torrez, and Clorinda nodded.
“That’s what I did,” she said.
“And you’re not sure what time that was?”
“No,” she snapped. “I’m not.”
“Maybe it’ll come to you,” I said gently. “Clorinda, you saw your brother every day, I’m sure. Off and on, anyway. Was he having trouble with anybody? Arguing with anybody that you know of?”
“My brother didn’t have trouble with a living soul,” Clorinda Baca said quickly. She pushed herself off the sofa and stood with her arms folded across her chest. “Not a soul. He was a drunk, but he was a good man, Sheriff.” She pointed at the small notebook in my left hand. “You write down that I said that. He was a good man.”
I slipped the notebook into my shirt pocket. Having made herself abundantly clear, Clorinda Baca left the house. I glanced over at Robert Torrez. “What time did she call you?”
“I was on the phone with her at eight fifty-seven. I pulled in here at twenty after nine.”
“Between about seven-thirty and the time the neighbor kid walked in here, we don’t know what the hell happened, do we?”
“No, sir. We don’t.”
“Your aunt doesn’t think her brother crossed swords with anyone in the world. If you’re right, your uncle sure as hell had trouble with somebody,” I said.
“Yep,” he said philosophically. “And if I’m right, that means Clorinda is wrong…that just doesn’t happen much in this family.”
Chapter Twelve
Fifteen minutes. Maybe half an hour. Maybe an hour. The unaccounted for minutes in the Baca household formed their own little black hole. In the predawn hours, the undersheriff had come and gone, as had Father Anselmo. Josie
Baca had arrived in Regal and picked up her two children. There hadn’t been much of an argument—at least no objection that Sosimo had voiced, no chair-throwing shouting match.
Shortly after his wife’s departure with the two little girls, Sosimo Baca had found himself left alone with his sister and her small brigade of moral support—all of whom knew exactly what direction his life should take at that very moment—three women who knew what was good for him.
It didn’t surprise me that Sosimo had decided then and there that of all the things in this world that he needed most, his old battered truck headed the list—no doubt along with a nip or three. And so he had left the little adobe in Regal…sometime that morning, most likely before eight o’clock.
Without the children or the father to fuss over, Clorinda Baca and her two sisters-in-law had left the house about the same time…whenever that was. And an indeterminate time later, little Mandy Lucero, innocent of all the upheaval in the Baca household, had arrived for a day of play with the Baca girls. What she found instead was an empty house—and Sosimo’s corpse in the backyard.
Another hour spent with Mary Baca and Sabrina Torrez failed to produce anything useful. We talked to them separately, we talked to them together. The black hole of time during which Sosimo Baca had returned home to die in his own backyard remained inviolate.
“The aunties,” I muttered as I watched the women leave. “We need to find someone who looked at a goddamn clock this morning, Robert. Nobody knows when they did a damn thing.”
The undersheriff stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the small living room. For a moment, the house was silent. The deputies had finished out in the kitchen, but I wasn’t optimistic that the prints they’d lifted would shed much light.
“Illegals, you think?” I asked, knowing full well that would be the most lame scenario. Mexican nationals streamed across the border at night in an unchecked flow. It wasn’t hard to find a place to hop the fence out of sight of the Border Patrol agents. I knew folks who routinely—and illegally—crossed into the United States on a daily basis to work, their own version of a commute. We knew that illegals frequently took their rest inside La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora, the small Catholic mission on the knoll at the east end of Regal. The place was never locked, and the handful of wooden pews served as a peaceful resting spot.
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