After Estelle took hair samples from the bedding, she bagged the quilt and blanket. The material wasn’t fresh from the cleaners, but it was tolerable.
“She’d have to curl up like a cocker spaniel to fit on that bedding,” I muttered, but Estelle looked almost relieved.
“At least she wasn’t sharing the cot with the drunk,” she said. “Better to curl up in any corner than to put up with that.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said, realizing as I said it that Maria was long past caring.
Where the girl had attended to the other of life’s functions that most of us performed with some privacy was another question to which there were no obvious answers.
Hung from the aluminum frame of the driver’s-side window were changes of clothing, kid-sized. The two wire clothes hangers seemed like an unexpected luxury. None of the clothing was freshly laundered, but it would pass casual inspection. “She favored blue,” I said and unhooked the hangers and handed two blouses to Estelle. “What’s the label say?”
Estelle ruffled the collar and cocked her head. “One is from Price World, and that could be anywhere in the Southwest.” She opened the other collar. “This one was made in Mexico. What about the slacks?” I unhooked the single pair of dark blue slacks from the window track and handed them to Estelle. “Mexican,” she said after a glance.
“And that’s it,” I said. Estelle handed the sacked collection to me to hold and then bent over and retrieved a small plastic bag that had been shoved down beside the driver’s seat. She opened it and scanned the contents.
“Not quite all. There are maybe three pairs of socks and a change or two of underwear here.”
I added that to the collection while Estelle contorted herself downward in the door well so she could see under the driver’s seat. “Here we are,” she said with interest, and then added, “huh.”
“Do you want another evidence bag?”
“Yes.” After a minute she turned slightly to one side so she could swing her arm free. I held out the clean evidence bag and into it she dropped a chunk of fried cherry pie, the kind sold in any convenience store anywhere in the country. The wrapper was neatly folded over the open end.
“I don’t know of a teenager alive who only eats half of something like that and stashes the rest for later,” I said.
“Maybe she didn’t know for sure when her next meal was coming,” Estelle said quietly. “And maybe no one told her she could get a free lunch at school.”
“The only food Orosco believed in was alcohol,” I said.
She nodded and pointed at the piece of pie with her lips, like an Indian. “The date on the wrapper is current. Maybe somebody will remember her buying it.” She shifted position and grunted. “This was her private spot.” She handed me a twenty-four-count bottle of aspirin with less than a dozen tablets remaining.
“Pie and aspirin?” I said.
“Ah, there’s some more stuff here.” And one by one, the contents of Maria Ibarra’s stash went into the evidence bag. One nail file, nearly new. Half a card of bobby pins. One small tube of toothpaste, hardly squeezed. That made sense, since we didn’t find a toothbrush. A plastic cup showed traces in the bottom of what might have been cola. The price bar-code label was still on the underside.
“I think that’s it, sir,” Estelle said, and she took another minute to probe under the broken seat’s springs with her flashlight. I leaned back against the bulkhead and shook my head.
“A talented little girl,” I said.
“Sir?”
“To survive like this, even for a couple weeks. What kept her from just running?”
“Nowhere to run to.” Estelle pushed herself upright and looked askance at me. I made no effort to move, and she held out a hand for the bag. “Are you all right, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. I stepped past her, down to the sliding door. “Just disgusted. Hell, this is not much more than a good shout from my place across the way.” I waved a hand toward the south. “I’ve got more room in my smallest closet than there was in this kid’s master bedroom.”
She reached out a hand and touched me on the arm, one of those feather-light grace notes that Estelle used instead of speech. “I’ll get my camera,” she said, and she walked back toward the patrol car. I grunted and followed, head down.
“I’ll sit in the car and try to get my thoughts together while you finish up,” I said. But, by the time Estelle had made Kodak happy with her last roll of film, I hadn’t made much progress adding anything up.
Deputy Eddie Mitchell arrived less than a minute after we called him, and he and I strung a yellow crime scene ribbon around the pathetic truck and the immediate grounds. When we were ready to leave, Estelle started toward the passenger side of the patrol car. I waved her away. I didn’t want to drive. That would mean I would have to pay attention to the world. I plopped down on the passenger seat and gazed out the windshield.
We drove out of the mobile home park, and my eyes shifted to the right-side rearview mirror. By tipping my head a bit, I could see the tangle of trees behind us and glimpse a faint hint of yellow here and there.
“Sir?”
I realized with a start that Estelle had been talking to me. She turned the patrol car onto Grande Avenue and we headed toward downtown Posadas.
“Do you have any ideas?” she said again and I pulled myself out of whatever reverie I’d been in.
“No.” I knew that I sounded curt, but that was it. I had nothing. “I’ve got lots of questions, that’s all.”
“It should be simple enough finding out how the girl came to be linked up with Orosco. Maybe he really is her uncle. When he dries out a little, we’ll get some answers.”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said, and Estelle shot a quick glance at me.
“No, I’m serious, sir,” she said. “There’s a possibility that her family in Mexico just sent her up to live with him, maybe assuming that he was well-off or some such.”
“Or some such,” I said. “You think they just packed her in the back of a truck under a load of watermelons and told the driver to dump her off when he got to the Posadas overpass?”
“Remember last year?”
“Yes, I do remember last year. I remember it very well.” And anyone would have who’d smelled the stench when the young state police officer and I had pried the back door open on a van that he’d stopped just across from the motel on the east edge of town. I’d been sitting in the motel’s café at the time, drinking iced tea. I saw the stop and knew damn well what was coming, even if the rookie trooper didn’t.
By the time the van was unloaded, there had been nineteen confused, sweating, frightened aliens lined up on the shoulder of the interstate awaiting the friendly escort of the U.S. Border Patrol. Three more inside the van awaited the coroner, because heatstroke had killed them deader than desert sand.
Estelle turned onto the street in front of Posadas General, and as she guided the car into a slot in staff parking, I saw Sheriff Martin Holman’s brown Buick parked in one of the doctors’ spots.
I turned in the seat and rested a hand on the dashboard. “Tell you what,” I said, and then stopped. With one eyebrow cocked, Estelle waited for me to finish the thought. “Why don’t you drop me off at home.”
“Sir?”
“At home. There are a couple of things I’d like to take care of, and sure as hell Manny Orosco is going to wait. Even if your husband pumps him dry, he’s not going to be coherent for quite a while.” I looked across at the Buick. “And I don’t feel like talking to Marty right now. I’m not ready to answer stupid questions.” I turned and grinned at Estelle. “I feel too stupid myself at the moment.”
She pulled the patrol car in reverse without a word, and in five minutes we turned onto Guadalupe Terrace.
My five acres were overgrown with gigantic cottonwoods and brush, shielding my sprawling adobe house from neighbors and noise. I had always thought of
the place as a perfect hideaway for an old insomniac like myself. I did my best thinking either there or in a patrol car, and this time the patrol car wasn’t working.
Estelle stopped the car in my driveway. “Is there anything in particular you want me to do beyond…?”
“Beyond what you’re already going to do? No. I’ll get in touch with you after lunch. By then Francis should have something definite for us about what killed the girl. Maybe we can ream some sense out of all this.” Estelle didn’t argue with me and she didn’t pry. I got out and she backed the patrol car out of the driveway. I couldn’t help noticing that she waited until I’d stepped through the front door before driving away.
I closed the heavy, carved wooden door behind me and let the silence and coolness seep in. Diving back in the burrow was all I could manage at the moment. I couldn’t remember ever being so angry that I couldn’t think straight.
I took off my Stetson, closed my eyes, and rubbed a hand on the stubby bristle of gray hair on the top of my head. Against one foyer wall, its legs resting on elegant Mexican tile, was an old hand-carved wooden bench that had been made years before by Estelle’s great-uncle. Folded neatly on one end was an inexpensive Zapotec rug. I used the rug as a place to sit when I pulled on my boots by the door and from time to time in the winter as a seat cover in my Blazer.
As I tossed my hat on the bench beside it, I reflected that the rug was about twice as big as Maria Ibarra’s sleeping pad.
12
I had lied to Estelle Reyes-Guzman and she probably knew it. I didn’t have “a couple of things to take care of,” as I had said in the hospital parking lot. If I had anything at all to do, I sure as hell didn’t have a clue what it was. What was worse, I didn’t have the gumption to find out.
There was probably a “to-do” list that was a hundred items long in someone’s head, but not in mine.
Normally a short nap worked wonders…that was standard operating procedure for keeping my insomnia under control, and I had become adept over the decades at snatching a quick nap whenever the spirit moved me. But even the dark, cool invitation of the bedroom seemed pointless.
I walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. On automatic pilot, my hand was about a foot away from the cupboard where I kept the coffee filters when I stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud, finally giving voice to my frustration. I stood at the sink with my hands resting on the cool porcelain edge, letting things ebb and flow. Even the idea of coffee, the lifeblood of my existence, was nauseating.
The kitchen window faced north and I gazed out through the six-inch square of dirty glass that hadn’t yet been covered by the energetic Virginia creeper vine outside.
If I removed the vine and then a couple hundred cottonwood trees, junipers, elms, poplars, and hollyhocks, I would be able to look across the depth of my five acres and see a vehicle if it drove by on Escondido Lane. Another two hundred yards beyond that were the trailer park, Manny Orosco’s truck, and finally the interstate.
The telephone rang and I ignored it. Instead, I walked across the kitchen to the pantry and unlocked the back door. Years before, I had had visions of a wonderful brick veranda outside that door. If I had designed it just right, I could have bricked right around the massive trunk of the nearest cottonwood, including it in the terrace. My youngest daughter had named the huge, sprawling tree “Carlos Cottonwood” for reasons known only to her. Underneath that tree, and on the north side of the house, the area was cool any time of year.
Visions were about as far as I had ever gotten. I stood by the door and looked at the jungle. The Virginia creeper’s trunk began on the east side of the house, and the vine had covered thirty feet of adobe wall before taking on the kitchen window on the north side. Encouraged by the cool shade, the vine had created a thick, green mat that was just beginning to brown off with the crisp fall nights.
I turned and looked at the cottonwood. It was an unkempt tree by nature, but the benign neglect contributed by my bachelor residency on the property had resulted in a creation that looked like something out of a British fantasy book.
The tree soared upward, its limbs spreading across the compass, crotches choked with nests whose tenants had come and gone, among them squirrels, ravens, perhaps even children. Who the hell knew. Dead limbs littered the ground and hung perilously from the living canopy, ready to rain down with the slightest breeze.
“Carlos Cottonwood,” I said and thrust my hands in my pockets. Beyond a passing glance out the window to check the weather, I hadn’t looked at the tree for a decade. Its massive root system was probably a hairsbreadth from plugging my sewer system for keeps.
I turned and looked at the kitchen window again. If the glass ever broke, the vine would find a way inside. They’d discover me one day, choked to death in bed by Virginia creeper.
As if the day held no other urgency, I wandered around the house to the garage, pushed up the door, and slid past all the junk that threatened to landslide down and crush both me and the late-model Chevy Blazer parked there. Deep in the bowels of the garage, in the bottom of a plastic bucket that was home to three sprinkler heads and a half bag of plant food, I found a set of nippers, yellow plastic handles and all.
I had never seen their jaws sprung open. I had no recollection of ever buying them, but knew of their existence in the same vague way that I knew there was a box of wide-mouth canning lids on top of the paint cabinet and a small package of gas lantern mantles in one of the tool boxes.
I went back outside, opening and closing the nippers as if trying to train them before the big event.
Before beginning on the vine, I cleared away the worst of the cottonwood detritus against the back of the house. It all made a neat pile about the size of a bathtub. It would have taken about a thousand of those piles to make a dent around the property.
With access to the back wall, I gently worked on the creeper. I didn’t want to make it angry, of course, but I was determined to have a window and maybe even an outside veranda light. There was no bulb in the fixture, but that was a problem easily solved. I left an artistic sweep of vine over the light and let the tendrils drape over the window frame, cascading down on the other side to touch the ground.
With the vine disciplined and the spiderwebs swept away, I had an old-fashioned four-pane window whose glass was intact under the thick crust of time. A sponge and plastic pan were just a few steps away in the pantry and I was eager to see glass.
The grime came away in great streaks, but I worked methodically, changing the water when it threatened to coagulate. By the time I had polished the glass to crystal with several editions of the Posadas Register, I could see that the wooden sill and window frame had peeled until there was only a trace of the original blue paint remaining.
With my pocketknife, I poked the wood. It was sound enough. It was still early in the day and plenty warm. Another opportunity might not present itself, and I shrugged. I still had blue paint from the last time the house trim had been painted.
I walked through the kitchen, pausing long enough to pour a pot of water into the coffeemaker and spoon grounds into the filter basket. By the time I had found, opened, and stirred the paint—a color labeled “Alhambra” by some imaginative engineer—and found a serviceable brush buried under my timing light and dwell meter, the coffee was finished.
With a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the brush in the other, I daubed at the window casing and sill, stopping periodically to critique my progress. The critique was not always good. When my brush touched the glass for the third time, I set down the coffee cup and dug my glasses out of my pocket, then spent some more irritation trying to decide which panel of the bifocals would work best.
By the time I finished a quarter of the window, I had decided that a person could spend a lifetime painting a house. My old adobe, plastered as it was with genuine, hundred-year-old brown mud, saved me that trouble, but it still had an acre of window and d
oor trim. The trick was not to look too closely at the other windows as I walked around the building.
With the window half done, I made another pot of coffee and brought out one of my folding chairs. I sat under the cottonwood and looked at the house, deciding that I liked what I saw.
The second half of the window was tedious. The light was bad, my neck cricked, and the paint was thick and uncooperative on the brush. But I persisted and avoided painting the glass blue.
With six inches of the center mullion to go, I heard footsteps in the house. My hand froze, the brush poised just above the wood, a bead of paint ready to run.
“Sir?”
“I’m out back,” I shouted when I recognized Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s voice.
She appeared in the doorway but didn’t open it. Instead she stood quietly, regarding me. Her eyebrows pulled together in the beginnings of a frown.
“I made fresh coffee,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen with the brush.
“No thanks.” She pushed the door open and stepped out. Her deep brown eyes traveled first to the paintbrush, then to the can of paint, and then to the window. She was taking long enough to critique the work.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She looked back at me, and one eyebrow lifted a bit. “Why are you doing that, sir?”
I chuckled. “Because it needed doing. I got tired of not being able to see out the window.” I gestured with the brush at the vine. “It wasn’t hard. Kind of relaxing, actually.” I bent over and laid the brush across the top of the paint can. “What’s up?”
Estelle took a deep breath and reached out with one hand toward my sleeve. “You got some blue paint on your revolver.” I lifted my arm up and peered down at the gun, not an easy task considering my girth. I frowned. It was the first time all day that I was conscious of being in uniform.
I pulled the flannel paint rag I’d been using out of my back pocket and wiped the drip off the walnut grips and then daubed at another fleck near the buckle of the Sam Browne belt. “I can’t believe I did this without changing my clothes,” I muttered.
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