Bag Limit

by Steven F Havill

  I didn’t, but nodded agreement anyway, figuring I’d find out soon enough.

  “I asked her to meet us at the MVD office at three this afternoon.”

  “That’ll work,” I said. “Do you mind if I bring Estelle along? If she’s here by then, that is?”

  He grinned, started to say one thing, and then changed his mind. “No, I don’t mind.”

  “That’s if she wants to,” I said. “She may be pooped from the trip. But I have a resident kid-sitter with my grandson being here, so Estelle could break away for a little while.”

  “Sure, if she wants to.”

  “I talked to Betty Contreras, by the way. She was being a good witness, telling us what we wanted to hear.”

  Torrez frowned. “Sir?” he said, looking sideways at me.

  “She admits that she isn’t sure that it was Scott Gutierrez who drove by at eight on Saturday morning. She isn’t sure who it was. In fact, she has no idea at all. She mentioned Scott’s name to me because she’d seen him drive by the night before. His name just came to mind. She didn’t mention him to Tony, like she told me she had.” I shrugged. “She’s embarrassed, needless to say.”

  “Well, duh,” Torrez said with a straight face, sounding more like my grandson than the undersheriff. “What time did she see Scott Friday night, did she say?”

  “About eight forty-five or so.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean squat,” he said. He turned to his truck, rested a hand on the hood, and kicked the left front tire pensively. “See you at three?”

  “You got it,” I said. “And by the way, Judge Hobart asked me this. Are you planning on announcing who you’re going to name as undersheriff before Tuesday? Not that it’s any of my business—or his. But voters might like to know.”

  Hand still on the truck, he twisted and looked at me, one eyebrow cocked. “You want the job?”

  “Oh, sure.” I laughed.

  He returned his scrutiny to the front tire, looking down at the gnarly tread, idly digging at one of the huge cleats with the toe of his boot. “It’s not something that I want to rush into,” he said. I couldn’t remember an occasion when Robert Torrez had rushed into anything. “Did you hear who Leona Spears asked?”

  “No. But then again, I’m not on her ‘tell first’ list, either.”

  “Eddie Mitchell called me from Bernalillo County. She gave him a buzz.”

  “She has more brains than I thought,” I said. Mitchell had left Posadas the previous spring, and I knew he’d already passed his lieutenant’s exam in Bernalillo. “He’d do a fine job.”

  “Yes, he would. I was thinking the same thing.” He sighed and straightened up, pushing away from the truck. “It’s a long four months until January, too. We’ll see what happens.”

  “Let me know what I can do,” I said.

  “I will. Right now, I’m just going to Uncle Sosimo’s place. Sit and think. There’s got to be something. There’s a couple other things I want to check out, too, while I’m down that way.”

  I patted the faded fender of the Chevy. “We’re short of vehicles?”

  He grinned. “Nah. It’s that time of year.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. The scoped .308 rested in its back window rack, ready to train its sights on a trophy desert mule deer. “You be careful,” I said, and stepped back from the truck. I knew the cloud of fumes that would issue from it the moment he hit the starter. “Happy hunting.”

  “We’ll see,” he said, and I knew from his expression that he wasn’t talking about mule deer.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I had never been a hunter. Or a golfer. Or messed with model railroads or patiently fitted stained glass. I didn’t have the patience of a fisherman. At odd moments, I sat down with a book that had something to do with military history, but even then, the collection that overflowed my living-room shelves held many more volumes than I had actually completed…or ever would.

  The nearest I came to a consuming hobby was consuming at the Don Juan—and my thoughtful grandson had made sure that wouldn’t be necessary for several hours.

  Two o’clock on that Sunday afternoon seemed weeks away instead of hours, and that was only if the damn airlines were on time. Mercifully, Buddy and Tadd returned shortly before noon. “Do you think they’ll already have eaten?” Tadd asked even before he set the three heavy plastic bags on the kitchen counter. I grinned. The kid was a true Gastner in everything but appearance—and that part was just as well.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “No matter what they do, the two youngsters will be starving. And I’ve never known Francis to turn down a meal, either.” I paused and glanced at the slow-moving clock. “And then there’s me.” That brought a wide grin from my grandson. “I’ve got a meeting at three, by the way.”

  “You’re kidding,” Buddy said in wonder. “No, I guess you’re not.” He thumped a heavy wrapped cut of meat onto the counter. “We’ll get you fed in time for that.” He turned with his hands on his hips. “Come Tuesday night, is it like somebody suddenly throws a big light switch? Do you suddenly get your life back? The phone stops ringing, all that sort of thing?”

  “I fervently hope so,” I said. “In theory, the sheriff-elect takes office in January. But I told Robert that when he wins the day after tomorrow, he gets the keys to the executive washroom right then and there. Tuesday night. That’s it. It’s his.”

  Buddy laughed. “And what if what’s-her-face wins?”

  “Leona Spears? She’s not going to.”

  “Famous last words.”

  “They would be, too. If she won, I’d be intensely unhappy, because I’d have to rethink the whole thing. I’m not sure I’d toss the keys to her. I might have to wait until the last second on January twentieth, and in the meantime, hope for an earthquake or something of the sort.”

  “We’re going to eat at exactly two-thirty,” Tadd said, not one to be easily derailed from his mission with talk of politics. “If the Guzmans’ plane is late, that’s tough.”

  “He has spoken,” Buddy said. I watched his son poke at the fresh leg of lamb as if seeking out a weak spot.

  “You’re not going to have time to cook that whole thing between now and two-thirty,” I said, but I should have known better.

  Tadd picked up a package of eight stainless-steel skewers. “Lamb ka bobs,” he said, beaming.

  “Christ, you bought those, too?”

  “No. You had ’em inside the grill,” Tadd said. “The package had never been opened. Neat-o.”

  “Neat-o,” I said. “I didn’t know I had ’em. Anything else you need?”

  “Just a really good knife,” Tadd said. “So I can hack this thing up.” He patted the leg of lamb affectionately.

  I turned and pulled open a drawer, viewing the helter-skelter of implements lying at rest. “Define ‘really good,’” I said.

  “Something that won’t snap halfway through a cut and shear off his thumb,” my son said, and I detected a note of parental concern. Apparently it was one thing to have a teacher tell you that your son was a culinary arts genius, and another thing entirely to turn over to the kid all the edged weapons without a single apprehensive pang.

  Tadd chose a big old heavy thing that had been his great-grandmother’s, then settled in with the knife and the sharpening steel to bring the edge up to his specifications.

  Buddy and I retired to the living room, with nothing to do but talk and watch the clock…and perhaps keep one ear cocked toward the kitchen in case a sudden gasp from the chef alerted us to a missing digit.

  At 12:30 the phone rang, and for the next twenty minutes I talked with my eldest daughter, Camille. More accurately, I listened to the high-powered recitation of life in Flint, Michigan.

  Somewhere in midparagraph, I realized that she had asked me a question.

  “Pardon?” I asked.

  “I said, have you heard from Kerri and Joel?”

  “Ah, no. But then it’s early. Probably tomorro
w. Or maybe even Tuesday,” I said. My youngest daughter Kerri would find a working phone only with difficulty in the Peruvian village where she lived—less than ten miles from where her mother had been born and raised.

  My oldest son Joel and I didn’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, and it wasn’t just because as president and CEO of BetaComp International, he was on the other end of the income spectrum from Kerri. It’d been nearly two years since I’d last heard the sound of his voice…and even on that occasion, his secretary had put me on hold for ten minutes. Hopefully, Joel Gastner was finding happiness peddling whatever computer component it was that BetaComp manufactured.

  “Big doings planned for Tuesday night?” Camille asked.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “What”—she laughed—“no victory burrito at the Don Juan?”

  “Nope. They’re closed all day Tuesday, the bastards. But we’ve got the last laugh. Tadd’s here, and he’s cooking up a storm. You want to talk to him while he’s still got all his fingers?”

  “Sure, but put Buddy on first,” Camille said. “I need to talk to him before I forget what I wanted.”

  “Buddy,” I said, and held the phone out to him. “It’s Camille. She wants to talk to you.”

  “Of course she does,” my son said, and took the phone into a quiet corner of the living room.

  “Anything I can do?” I asked Tadd, bending over his shoulder as he labored.

  He shook his head. “Just havin’ fun,” he said.

  “Well, I’m glad you are. Tell your dad when he gets off the phone that I’m out back. I’m going to get some air.”

  The kitchen door opened without a pry bar, and I brushed aside a couple vines that had spent all summer trying to come inside the house. As I stepped outside into the cool air, I saw that the back door of the garage was ajar. The grill had been hauled outside to sit in the sunshine, lid open to allow the spiders a chance to escape before Tadd touched off the gas.

  The dry cottonwood leaves crackled overhead and underfoot. There had been no ripping wind whistling around the house to do my raking for me, and the leaves made a nice, deep blanket over the patio bricks. With hands thrust in my pockets, I ambled out away from the house.

  The first cottonwood stood less than thirty feet from the back door. Fully four feet in diameter, its trunk bulged in a series of nodules and carbuncles as if the very weight of the tree was compressing the lower wood. The tree shed limbs regularly, some of them crashing onto the roof of the house. I craned my neck and looked up. The limb that hung thirty feet over the kitchen was gunmetal-gray and without a stitch of bark. At its base, it was more than a foot in diameter.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” Buddy asked. He let the screen door close gently in deference to the rusted hinges.

  “That limb.” I pointed. “It’s drawing a bead on the kitchen.”

  “That’ll be exciting,” he said, glancing up. “Camille’s telling Tadd how to make an instant marinade for the lamb,” he added. “Anything is possible, apparently.”

  “Your son is amazing, Buddy.” I touched his shoulder. “Take a walk with me?”

  “Sure.” The two of us strolled out into the wilderness of my backyard. A trail of sorts took us through the grove of cottonwoods. Far enough away from the house that roots couldn’t reach the waterlines, the vegetation became a hodgepodge of whatever could survive—grasses mixed with New Mexico locust, elm, cholla, creosote bush, three or four species of acacia, and stunted juniper.

  “This makes a nice buffer for your place,” Buddy said. “Gives you some privacy.”

  “I guess it does,” I said, and stopped at a small grove of twisted oaks, none more than twenty feet tall.

  “I remember when those were just sprouting,” Buddy said. “Me and Billy Spaulding used to shoot the tips off with our BB guns.”

  “The two Wild Bills,” I said. “Whatever became of him, anyway?”

  “Don’t know,” Buddy said. “We graduated and that was that.”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. It was too easy to slip into a quagmire of reminiscence. The last thing I wanted to do was spend three maudlin days letting the past take over my life.

  “Do you have any objections if I sell this land?” I said suddenly.

  Buddy looked surprised and followed me through a thick grove of elm saplings. “Why would I mind?”

  “I just thought I’d ask, is all. No sentimental attachments?”

  Buddy laughed. “Attachments? No. Other than that this is where you live. If you move somewhere else, that’s fine.” He chuckled again. “You can run, but you can’t hide, Dad.”

  I didn’t tell him that was the second time in forty-eight hours I’d been told that—the first time by a pretty bartender at the Broken Spur. I stopped within view of Escondido Lane, the village street that circled the back of my five acres. Just beyond was the embankment that rose up to the interstate. The earth along Escondido was still freshly torn up after the village had put in a new water line to service the neighborhood to the east of me.

  “This property is probably pretty well situated for some business,” I said. “I sure as hell don’t need it all.”

  “If you don’t mind someone moving in close by,” Buddy said. “But hell, you don’t need the money. Just keep it. As long as you’re living here. Why worry about it?”

  “I’m not worried. Just thinking, is all.” I flashed a smile at him. “Scheming.”

  “Well, scheme away, Dad. Put in a helipad while you’re at it, and I can scoot over for a visit now and then, when things get slow.”

  He meant it as a joke, but mention of helicopters crystallized an image in my mind so powerfully that Buddy frowned at the expression on my face. A comic-book panel would have had a huge yellow lightbulb hovering over my head.

  “What?” he asked.

  “The hospital doesn’t have room for a helipad,” I said. “They have to drive out to the airport, and that’s a long way.”

  “You’re thinking here instead?”

  “Why not? With five acres, there’s enough room for a clinic, parking, helipad…whatever the hell we want. We’re three minutes from the hospital.”

  This time, the look of enlightenment spread over my son’s face. “Ah,” he said. “That’s ambitious. I didn’t know that Francis was serious about relocating back here.”

  I took a deep breath, surprised that I had been so transparent. “I don’t know if he is or not, Buddy. If he is, then maybe some readily available land is just the ticket.”

  “You think he has the financing to set up his own clinic?”

  “He can get it,” I said.

  My son regarded me with amusement. “No ulterior motives here, though.”

  “Of course not.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  The telephone rang at 2:20. My immediate reaction when the phone’s bell tingled my pulse was that Estelle Reyes-Guzman was calling to report that their flight had been snowed in somewhere in downtown Minnesota, or that they hadn’t been able to find a rental car in El Paso.

  Tadd managed to manipulate the phone on the kitchen counter without breaking stride with whatever it was that he was doing…a process that appeared to involve a lot of loose flour.

  “Gastner residence. This is Tadd Gastner speaking,” he said, and tucked the phone under his chin as he concentrated with both hands on kneading a long roll of dough. “Sure,” he said, and listened again. “No, he’s right here. Hang on.”

  A lift of the chin and he dropped the phone and caught it deftly with a small explosion of flour. He extended it toward me. “Mr. Dayan would like to talk with you, Grandpa,” he said.

  I took the receiver gently and dusted it off. “Frank,” I said into the phone, “I was about to call you.”

  “I thought we had a moratorium against weekend crimes,” Dayan said.

  “Don’t I wish,” I replied. Dayan’s Posadas Register hit the newsstands and the Post Office on Thursday afternoon. A major
event happening close to the weekend made him easy prey for the big-city dailies whose circulation reached Posadas—should we have an event that piqued their curiosity.

  “I tried to reach you yesterday afternoon, but you were busy, I guess. Pam was going to track you down too, but I didn’t hear if she managed or not.”

  “No, she didn’t.” Pam Gardiner did most of the editing and reporting for the Register, but she was no ball of fire. I was certainly no judge of journalism, but it appeared that her favorite kind of news was the carefully prepared public relations release that she could paste into the newspaper without a second thought.

  “Someone was telling me that it’s Undersheriff Torrez’s nephew who was killed Friday night in that truck-pedestrian accident, and his uncle who died Saturday morning. Is that right?”

  “Almost. Matthew Baca was killed Friday night. He was one of Torrez’s cousins, not a nephew.”

  “The other was his uncle, though?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And you’re investigating the uncle’s death as a possible homicide? Did I hear that right?”

  “That’s also correct. Your grapevine is pretty good.”

  “Well, it’s Dan Schroeder, and he should know,” Dayan said with a short laugh. “How did the old man die, do you know?”

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Not shot or stabbed, though? Anything like that?”

  “No. It doesn’t appear that way. It looks like there might have been some kind of tussle that precipitated Sosimo’s death.”

  “Got a name yet?”

  “For whom?”

  “For whomever Mr. Baca was fighting with.”

  “I didn’t say they were fighting, Frank. I said some kind of tussle. We don’t actually know what the hell they were doing, if there was a they. Dancing, maybe. And no, we don’t have a name.”

  “Huh,” Dayan said, hesitating.

  “That’s the way I feel,” I said. “A great big ‘Huh.’”

  “Is the undersheriff heading things up?”