Rode Hard, Put Away Dead

by Sinclair Browning

  The whole thing was like a crazy quilt of mixed patterns. None of it made much sense. But all my suspects had a common denominator. Money. If Abby'd been poor, the whole thing would probably have been a lot easier to sort out. The trouble with being rich, it seems to me, is that someone always wants you dead. Even if they like you, they might like your money better.

  My head was spinning by the time I arrived home and I was in no mood for Cori Elena, who came bounding out of the bunkhouse the minute she heard the truck in the drive. I'd just shut down Priscilla when she ran up.

  “Trade, I've got to talk to you.” She was dressed in her short cutoff fringed Levi's and a halter top. Barefoot, she danced on the hot soil, hopping from one foot to the other. “Por favor, it's importante.”

  “Okay, let's go inside before your feet get cremated.”

  I followed her racing form back to the bunkhouse, grateful for the evaporated air that hit me in the face when I walked in. Her hot Mexican music was blaring, and to her credit she turned it down to a low murmur.

  “Cerveza ? ” she asked, holding up a bottle of Dos Equis beer.

  While it sounded good, I wasn't eager to prolong my time with Cori Elena any longer than I needed to so I shook my head. “What's up?”

  She finished off the bottle she'd been working on, wiped her mouth and said, “Guess who was killed yesterday in Magdalena?”

  “Carmen Orduño's husband?” I made a wild guess.

  “Tonta! Rafael Félix!”

  It didn't take me long to figure out that this was indeed very good news. Félix was the guy who had been in some kind of questionable business with Lázaro Orantez, Cori Elena's husband. The reputed drug lord who had accused her of taking off with some of his money.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. With Félix out of the picture Martín would be staying at the Vaca Grande. There'd be no need for him to pack up his things and head off with Cori Elena for California.

  “God, that's great news,” I said, feeling slightly guilty that I could revel in someone's death. How selfish was I? Still, it meant that Martín and Quinta, two people I really cared about, were no longer under any threat. Besides, all indications were that Rafael Félix had been a scumbag. “Maybe I will have that beer.”

  She withdrew one from the refrigerator and handed it to me. I popped the cap and drank. Dos Equis wasn't as good in my book as Corona, but it still tasted good. I held the cold bottle against my face. “What happened?”

  “There was a shooting in one of the bars and Félix was killed.”

  “How'd you find out?”

  “A friend of mine down there called me.” She popped the cap on a fresh beer. “It was a drug thing.”

  Her admission had not gone unnoticed by me. Supposedly no one but her father knew where she was, yet not only had Carmen Orduño showed up at the Vaca Grande, but now she had just admitted that she'd also given her phone number to another friend in Magdalena. I'd never thought of Cori Elena as particularly stupid, cunning was more like it, but how could she be so blithe with her whereabouts when someone as ruthless as Félix was after her?

  My anger with her was somewhat diluted by my euphoria that Martín would not be leaving, so I cut her some slack and said nothing about her slip. “That means you won't be leaving then.”

  She smiled and the little mole at the corner of her mouth winked at me. “I called Martín over at Prego's, they're working on the truck, and told him. Still, I think a trip to Hollywood would be nice, so maybe we'll go for a couple of days anyway.” She caught herself. “I mean if that's okay with you.”

  “Whatever.” I was pretty sure that Hollywood was not on Martín's list of Top Ten Places he'd want to visit, but a short hop over to California for a few days wouldn't hurt a thing. I was just so damned relieved that Félix wasn't going to be around to blow all of our heads off.

  “That's great news.” I walked over to the counter and placed my half-empty bottle of beer down. “Now you can all live happily ever after here on the Vaca Grande,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment for having to include her in the equation.

  “Seguro,” she said with a lack of enthusiasm that echoed my own.

  When I finally got inside the house there were a couple of messages waiting for me. The first was from María López Zepeda.

  “Trade, the lie detector test is scheduled for tomorrow morning. I'm still against it, but J.B. won't back off. I'll let you know.”

  There was what sounded like a collect call from the jail, which could only be J.B. I was sorry to have missed that one, since there was no way I could call him back. I suspected that he was also calling to tell me about his test.

  The third call was from Curly at the feed store.

  “Sorry to bother you, but there was a woman in here a while ago that said your north tank's got a problem. Thought you'd want to know.”

  Shit. We have a lot of recreational horseback riders on the state land I lease for grazing. Occasionally one of them notices some cows out, or a cut fence or a broken water pipe and calls Martín or myself. Apparently the rider who had noticed the north tank problem hadn't known us.

  With Martín at Prego's there was nothing for me to do but go fix it myself. Since I was on a roll with the beer I grabbed a Corona and headed out the door.

  Mrs. Fierce and Blue wanted to come with me, but I turned them down. There wasn't much shade at the north tanks and they'd be cooler if they stayed home.

  My trip took me twenty-five minutes over deserted back dusty roads. I was expecting to find my Brahmas restless with thirst and was surprised to find a mud slick and puddles of water on one side of the tank as the water gushed out several small holes. The few cows that were in the area were bedded down, looking quite content. While I hated to see the water wasted, I was happy in knowing that my cows hadn't been cut off. The weather was brutal enough on them without their being dehydrated.

  It didn't take a hydrologist to figure out the problem. Three small holes were peppered right above the bottom rim of the tank and it was from these that the water seeped out. Judging from their size, I guessed them to be from a .22. Probably some bored target shooter who'd decided over the weekend to take a shot at the tank. It was one of our fairly common problems, as near to civilization as the ranch was. Still, it beat the hell out of someone target-practicing on cows, which they've also done.

  While Martín would eventually have to come out and weld the tank, I had a couple of options this afternoon. There was some J-B Weld in the truck box, and I could patch it with that. I didn't feel like mixing the stuff together and turning the water off for it to set, so I opted for the easy out.

  Grabbing my buck knife from the cab of the truck, I cut a thin branch from one of the mesquite trees. Whittling this down to a small stub, I pushed it into the hole and plugged it. I repeated the procedure two more times and presto! The tank was temporarily fixed. As it filled with water, the mesquite would swell and further plug the holes. There would probably be some slight leakage, but the whole thing should hold until we could get the welding equipment up here.

  I drove out past a huge saguaro. While I'd been by this particular specimen almost all my life, the light from the late afternoon sun gave it a strange halo. I stopped the truck, jumped out and studied the cactus. It was crowned with a ring of bursting carmine fruit.

  The saguaro made me think of the Michael Chiago painting in María's office, and that led me to thinking about Stella Ahil's saguaro harvesting camp.

  I don't know where the epiphany came from, but I couldn't shake the feeling that none of it was coincidental. That, somehow, all of it was related to Abigail Van Thiessen's drowning in a murky stock tank in the Baboquivaris.

  37

  IT WAS GETTING DARK AND I HAD JUST PULLED ONTO THE LANE from the back road when I spotted Prego's beat-up yellow Land Rover coming out of the Vaca Grande. We stopped in the middle of the road for a neighborly chat.

  “Hey, Trade, it's been a while. I left some fish for you
with Martín.”

  “Thanks, Prego. Guess they were biting, huh?”

  He spread his hands a couple of feet apart and then slowly inched them back together and grinned. “It'll break up the monotony of all that beef you eat.”

  “How's the truck coming along?” While there probably wasn't any real rush on it now that Rafael Félix was dead, being down one truck on the ranch could become a serious handicap.

  “We'll get 'er done, but I'm swamped this week since I took off fishing. I told Martín we could work on it tomorrow night.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” I said. “Take care.”

  At the ranch I fed the horses and chickens. As I scattered scratch at the pond for the ducks, I heard a clucking sound from the brush and a proud mallard hen trailing seven little yellow balls of fluff emerged. It was Baby Duck Time again. After admiring the ducklings and congratulating the mallard, I fed Mrs. Fierce and Blue and then let Petunia in the back porch where she squealed and grunted in an effort to encourage me to fill her bowl with pig chow. From her prodding, it didn't sound as though she thought I was moving fast enough.

  Juan or Quinta had left some fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden on the porch table and I grabbed these and headed inside the house. In the kitchen I sliced a clove of garlic and ran it around a wooden salad bowl and then rummaged through the refrigerator. I finally came up with some old microwaved baked potatoes and a hardboiled egg, which I peeled and cut in pieces, along with the fresh cucumbers and tomatoes. I tossed the vegetables with lettuce, a few black olives and a can of tuna, and then doused the whole thing with vinegar and oil. My ersatz salad Niçoise along with a glass of cold Chardonnay made a pleasant enough dinner.

  I was halfway through the salad when the telephone rang.

  “Trade? It's Em. There's a new fly in your ointment.”

  I set the wineglass down on the Mexican tile counter and clutched the headset to my ear.

  “What kind of fly?”

  “The analysis is in on those bottles of booze the detectives picked up at the camp site.”

  “Let me guess. They'd been messed with,” I said, remembering the Baileys and the Jack Daniel's that J.B. said they'd had late that night.

  “That's the fly. They hadn't. The Baileys had.”

  “You're saying that the J.D. was all right? That there wasn't anything in it?”

  “Just sour mash whiskey. Not a trace of drugs. The Baileys was something else. They found traces of triazolam in it, trade name Halcion.”

  “The sleeping pill?”

  “Yep. It's a pretty sure bet that Abby was drugged before the ketamine ever went in her body.”

  “So it wasn't actually in the booze?”

  “Not the ketamine, just the triazolam. They've got a fresh puncture wound too. The speculation here now is that's how the ketamine was administered.”

  “Thanks, Em. You've given me a lot to think about,” I said before hanging up.

  It made sense. Someone had drugged Abby to the point where she wouldn't fight a hypodermic, or someone messing with her in the middle of the night. Once the ketamine hit her system she'd have been in a zombielike state, unable to resist anything, including her fatal trek to the pond.

  The rub, of course, was that J.B. had told me that he'd also been out of it. If that was the case, why hadn't drugs been found in his Jack Daniel's? And if he wasn't drugged, why hadn't he noticed his wife being carried off?

  Since only the Baileys had been doctored, it had to have been done by someone who knew J.B. and Abby very well. Well enough to know that he wouldn't touch the Baileys and that she would.

  Gloria Covarrubias immediately came to mind. She'd been the one to pack all of the food, as well as the whiskey. All of that had been confiscated by the police after Abby's death was reported, so there was no way to switch bottles. Unless the killer had exchanged the doctored bottle of Jack Daniel's with a clean one that night, either before or after killing Abby.

  I picked up the phone and called Emily Rose back.

  “I know it's stupid, but those bottles were dusted for prints, right?”

  “As far as I know, but that's not our job.”

  “I know, I just thought maybe you might have heard something.”

  “More importantly is what I haven't heard. And what I haven't heard is that anyone else's fingerprints have shown up anywhere. They're not looking too far beyond J.B. Calendar.”

  Discouraged, I still needed to check out implications of Abby's having Lou Gehrig's disease. I placed a quick call to Charley Bell asking him if he could dig up some information for me.

  “Sure thing, Ellis, we're heading into my time of day,” he assured me.

  After hanging up, I let Petunia out of the back porch and took my glass of wine to the pond and settled into one of the Adirondack chairs. The hot night air settled on me like a cloak. Now that the sun was down, the cicadas had ceased their singing. A lone coyote who sounded like he was somewhere down along the Cañada del Oro wash sang a sprightly solo as I stared at the still water of the pond.

  What in the hell was going on? The thought had crossed my mind more than once that J.B. had killed Abby and had hired me to make things look good. But was he really that stupid? Stupid enough to not doctor his own bottle of booze if he really had killed her? Even a crazed bull rider could surely figure out the implications if his dead wife's whiskey was loaded with sedatives and his was not. And even with the worst-ever hangover, wouldn't a jury have trouble believing he'd actually slept through her abduction?

  On the other hand, if he had been drugged, it was a pretty slick trick for the real killer to swap the bottles of Jack Daniel's to further implicate J.B.

  Gloria, if she was the killer, could not possibly have acted alone. Almost as wide as she was tall, she didn't look fit enough to walk the distance from the camp site to the stock pond. Even if she had been able to do all the rest of it, there was no way that she could have carried Abby, even taking time to rest along the way.

  No, if Gloria Covarrubias was involved, as I was beginning to suspect she was, she had to have had an accomplice. But who? While her husband, José, was the logical choice, how did that explain the extra deposits and why Gloria opened up her own separate account? Was she hiding that extra money from her husband?

  If the deposits were in fact related to Abby's murder, then the field of possibilities narrowed to those who had an extra $28,000 to throw around. J.B. could have easily taken that out of the million that Abby had given him. Peter would also have had no trouble coughing up the money. Lateef Wise's church looked like it could survive a twenty-thousand-plus hit, and hadn't Charley Bell told me that Laurette's father was a doctor in St. Martin? Maybe she dipped into a trust fund somewhere.

  While Jackie Doo Dahs didn't look like she had two nickels to rub together, I still couldn't discount her. Love and greed were powerful motivators. Besides, J.B. had admitted that he'd been giving her money. I guess the question now was, how much? Calendar had married her twice, so would it have been unreasonable for her to think that if she had Abby out of the way he would take her to the altar again?

  But I had a new twist. The Lou Gehrig's. Dr. Mullon had known about Abby's disease and he had died a tragic death. Was that related? And what did the Lou Gehrig's have to do with Abby's murder?

  I felt a cold nose on the palm of my hand. Mrs. Fierce had joined me.

  “So what do you think, old girl. Who's our villain?”

  Her response was to lick my fingers.

  I leaned back and studied the night for answers.

  The only thing I saw was the constellation Libra, high in the evening sky.

  Somehow, seeing the scales made me think that I would eventually sort it all out.

  38

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE STAGE STOP OFFICE THE NEXT MORN-ing the flag was up on the old mailbox. Charley had left me a fat envelopeful of information on Lou Gehrig's disease. Now that I had a computer, I suppose I could have tried to fi
nd the stuff myself. But I also knew that I was never going to be very adept on the damned thing and that I'd find a lot of dead ends on the Information Superhighway. As far as I was concerned, Charley and I were a team, and I wasn't going to steal his job.

  As I read through Charley's notes I learned a little bit more about the disease. The bottom line was a loss of muscle control that would eventually lead to paralysis. If you had Lou Gehrig's, the nerve cells controlling muscle movements would die, and you'd eventually waste away. Your arms, legs, torso, throat, tongue and finally breathing muscles would progressively weaken until you were totally dependent on life-saving machines. Among others, the disease had recently taken another famous baseball player, Catfish Hunter.

  No wonder Abby was on Prozac.

  I was studying this new information when the phone rang. It was María López Zepeda with bad news.

  “He flunked,” she said.

  “Shit.”

  “Right. But that doesn't mean he's guilty.”

  “Well, I'd feel better about things if he'd aced it.”

  “I tried to tell him this could happen, but he was so insistent. He just knew he'd pass.” Although María was trying to keep the accusation out of her voice, she wasn't doing a very good job of it.

  “Do you think he did it?”

  “I don't think in those terms,” she said. “My job is to see that he gets the best possible defense I can give him. Period.”

  “Mine isn't.” My job wasn't that cut-and-dried. There was nothing tying me to J.B. Calendar other than our signed contract. Part of my deal was that I could cut and run at any time. While I've never had a client before that I knew was guilty of that which he or she was hiring me to investigate, supporting a murderer was another thing altogether.

  “Just because he flunked the test doesn't mean he's guilty,” Maria repeated, trying to assuage the doubt she heard in my voice. “A lot of things affect these tests—the subject's anxiety, physical or mental problems, their personal discomfort. Sometimes they're excessively interrogated before the test.”