The City of Rocks

by Don Travis

  “Not yet. Close, but not yet. I’ll find her, but I need my precious to give me a few more clutches of eggs, another couple of generations from different drakes.”

  “And that makes her worth a quarter of a million dollars?”

  “Every dime of it.”

  “May I take a look at the insurance policy? I can get a copy from the company, but it will save time if I can look at yours.”

  “Sure. Let’s go to the office.”

  As we walked back to the house, I thought over the past few minutes. Bert was pretty straightforward. His mother, on the other hand, puzzled me. I felt as if I’d just met two different women. The bluff, forceful Mud Hen who’d demanded I find her duck and the duck farmer who’d shown me her gaggle and explained the down business fit the mental image I’d built of the woman from what I’d heard about her. Yet, in the middle of the interview, Millicent turned nervous… almost hesitant. What was going on?

  Once we were seated again, Millicent handed over the policy on Quacky Quack II—and that’s exactly how the damned thing read. It solved the mystery of how to identify one specific duck among many by citing a serial number branded into the duck’s bill. The policy was so watered down, about the only events covered were disappearance by theft or death by vandalism or malice. One clause excluded natural death. Fishy—or more appropriately, foul. On the face of it, the policy was worthless unless a human hand committed mischief.

  At my request, Millicent called in Luis Rael and his wife, Maria—the housekeeper and cook—for interviews. Both were plump and rosy-cheeked, courteous but shy. They had worked on the ranch since legally emigrating from Palomas in 1999. Both claimed to know nothing about the theft of the duck. Luis confirmed the details of the discovery of the crime the night Poopsie had put up such a fuss. I learned they had a son named Paco who apparently lived on both sides of the border. On occasion he helped out with the spring and fall gatherings—which is what I’d always called roundups. He was expected to show up at the ranch sometime this afternoon.

  Luis took me back to the duck pen, where I tried to ignore all the quacking while I snapped several photographs, including one of the coop that had held the stolen property. Then he drove me around the ranch in a pickup so I could take pictures of various points of entry and exit. While he had no proof, Luis believed Liver Lips had been the thief, probably to get back at the señora for firing him.

  “Why did she fire him?” I asked.

  “Couldn’t count on him. Show up one day. Gone the next. Wasn’t much of a wrangler. Liked to cook, but Maria, she’s our cook.” Luis gave me a shy look out of the corner of his eyes. “Liked to smoke funny cigarettes too.”

  About that time, Del called on my cell to say the insurance company had reluctantly agreed I could remain on the premises overnight. He made it sound as if he’d had to do a selling job to get their okay.

  THE FOOD was good and the conversation noisy at the table that evening. If we ate Lazy M stock, the ranch raised prime cattle. Maria also served potatoes and string beans with a chili side for everything.

  Millicent, looking more handsome than pretty in a plain white muslin skirt and a blouse adorned by a heavy Navajo squash blossom necklace and matching turquoise-and-silver earrings, dominated the room. She seemed less nervous than when I’d interviewed her earlier, but she constantly fiddled with something—the silverware, the stem of her glass, a napkin, the big square-cut diamond on her finger. Yet she met my eyes frankly, and her body language was open. I decided she was one of those human dynamos who couldn’t sit still.

  Bert would be equally at home chowing down from the back end of a chuck wagon out on the range or gracing the State Dining Room at the White House. On occasion he vied with Millicent for dominance of the small group.

  The Lazy M sat a democratic table; the help ate with the masters and liberally voiced their own opinions. Maria kept popping up to serve another course or refresh some depleted platter.

  The Raels’ son, Paco, had shown up as expected just before everyone sat down at the table. My impression was that this was nothing more than a social visit.

  In his mid- to late twenties, Paco was olive-skinned and sleek. Small framed, he stood around five eight. Quiet, he glanced away every time I looked at him, which, of course, caused me to look at him more. An evident bond of friendship existed between him and Bert, one likely forged on the anvil of shared work, whiskey, brawls, and the pursuit of willing women.

  When a couple of cowhands came in from the range and plopped down into vacant chairs, the tenor of the table changed. Excellent fare became simply grub as the hungry men shoveled it down to the obvious embarrassment of absolutely no one. As soon as the two were finished, they headed out the door with big helpings of peach cobbler in hand.

  After the group around the table broke up, I managed to get a hasty interview with Paco Rael and the cowhands in the bunkhouse, where I interrupted a poker game. Away from the big house—or perhaps because his parents weren’t present—Paco was more direct. He seemed comfortable in the bunkhouse. He spoke easily about his work on the Lazy M but grew less clear about what he did on the Mexican side of the border.

  The cowhands gave me their version of the night of the duck theft, punching it up with some of Mud’s colorful language. One of them claimed he learned a new cuss word that night. I didn’t pick up anything new but earned an invitation to join them at the card table. I didn’t think the client would approve of that, so I declined.

  LATER, IN the privacy of my bedroom on the second floor, I crawled between the crisp bedcovers and mulled over whether a duck could really be worth a fortune because it produced ducklings that gave the finest down known to mankind. Ranchers bred cattle and horses to accomplish certain ends, so was it unreasonable to believe the laws of biology allowed the same sort of fiddling in a duck’s gene pool? I didn’t know, but I’d check it out.

  Somehow the whole thing didn’t seem to hang together. Something was wrong with the picture. While I investigated a murder up in the Bisti Badlands country of northwestern New Mexico last year, the sheriff’s detective in charge kept getting diverted by a dogfighting ring. Could there be duck-fighting rings? I sat up in bed. No, but they had duck races. I’d seen posters advertising the Great American Duck Race in Deming, coming up later this month.

  That made more sense. Maybe Quacky was a champion waddler. Or did ducks swim their races? At any rate, Millicent struck me as the kind of gal who wouldn’t hesitate to back her favorite with a high-stakes bet. Was Quacky well on her way to winning the web-foot equivalent of the Triple Crown before she disappeared?

  Had I covered all the bases? Hazel was checking the appropriate records—police, DMV, credit, Dun & Bradstreet—anything to flesh out a picture on the people I’d run into. I was especially interested in any “known associates” on Liver Lips Martinson’s sheet.

  I had collected a lot of taped interviews, so I’d need to overnight them to Hazel for transcribing when I reached Deming tomorrow. Sometimes when she got the words on paper, something jumped out that went over Charlie’s or my head at the time of the interview. On more than one occasion, Hazel picked up something from a transcription that we’d missed.

  Tired of thinking about a stolen duck, I dialed my home phone. No answer. I decided against trying Paul’s cell. Line dancing at the C&W, I suspected, so he wouldn’t hear the ring over all the noise. I opted to leave a message on my home voice mail telling him how much I missed him and his various parts… enumerating some of those sexy parts in graphic detail.

  I snapped off the light and tried to sleep. But escape from this crazy world of heavily insured ducks with pretentious names, a large woman who owned a big ranch and doted on a tiny dog, and a “ducknapper” with a name like Liver Lips—who was dead and probably murdered—was slow in coming.

  Chapter 6

  BY THE time I crawled out of bed around six, everyone else had already eaten. Maria kept a full-sized breakfast warm and waiting for me, s
o I felt obligated to devour every delicious crumb. As I polished off the last buttermilk biscuit, Bert stuck his head into the breakfast nook.

  “I’m headed out to check on things. You want to ride along?”

  “Thanks, but I’d better get on the road. Your mom might not take kindly to me sightseeing instead of searching for her duck. You don’t seem too torn up by the bird’s disappearance.”

  “Not as much as Mud. I run the beef end of the business. The ducks are hers.”

  “So that makes it her problem.”

  “Yeah. Don’t get me wrong. I feel bad for her, but I don’t have time to fret over it. Too bad you’re in your car. I could get you back to Deming in nothing flat.” He touched the brim of his hat in a farewell gesture and left.

  What did he mean by that? Did he have a secret trail through Mexico that cut the trip in half? When I heard a racket outside, I understood. The small helicopter pad located well away from Millicent’s duck pens had escaped my notice until I glanced out the window and watched him warm up the machine, an old Bell chopper with a molded plastic bubbletop called a fish bowl and an open tube-work tail boom. It reminded me of the whirlybirds on the TV program M*A*S*H. Within minutes, Bert cleared the ground and clattered off to the west.

  “Horses still have their places.” Millicent’s deep voice took me by surprise. I hadn’t heard her approach. “But that threshing machine sure comes in handy. It chases brush cattle out of the chaparral better’n any cutting horse. I just wish it wasn’t so damned noisy. It upsets my ducks.”

  She shook her head as her gaze followed her son’s rapidly disappearing machine. “It’s a shame. In the old days, labor was easy to come by. My granddaddy hired Mexican cowboys—vaqueros, they called themselves—but ever since they passed the Immigration and Control Act back in ’86, it’s illegal to hire undocumented workers. Bert’s mechanized the place as much as he can to overcome that problem. That blessed chopper’s part of it.”

  “Everything cuts both ways, doesn’t it?” I said. “One part of the population considers something a solution while another classifies it as a problem. I assume they’ve built the big fence we’ve all heard about along your border.”

  That brought a grimace. “Down around Columbus and east to El Paso, yeah. Over along the Arizona-Mexico border, they’re building like crazy. Around here, no. Not even the electronic kind. You know what that does?”

  “My guess is it sends the illegals your way.” Was that what those two men in the Columbus cantina had meant about Mud being involved in across-the-border doings?

  “Like driving them into a cattle chute. Flushing them through a spillway.” She started as if waking from a trance. “Anyway, it’s caused some problems.”

  I thanked Millicent for her hospitality and apologized for eating and running. I needed to get instructions from Del and then presumably start back over Martinson’s trail.

  “That’s all right, BJ. You go find my Quacky, hear?”

  TALKING ON a phone while driving is illegal in parts of New Mexico unless you have a hands-free phone. Rather than trying to keep up with where it was and wasn’t legal, I always used a mounted cellular phone while driving. On the way back to Deming, I punched my speed dial and contacted Del Dahlman at home. He spent thirty seconds grumbling about the early hour and then promised to contact Hank Grass, the GSR vice president, and learn all he could about Millicent’s financials.

  It was pretty clear GSR stood in jeopardy. Someone had stolen the insured property, one of the few events that put the company at risk under the terms of the policy. Two things might negate their liability: recover the duck or prove Millicent Muldren had a hand in her disappearance. Of course, before they paid, someone would have to examine a gaggle of identical white ducks on the Lazy M to look for a particular serial number branded into one of the bills. In any case, Grass should be motivated to cough up some details to Del.

  I next called Det. Manny Montoya. When the dispatcher finally ran him down, he confirmed that Martinson’s crash had been caused by a side collision with another vehicle. It wasn’t clear yet whether it had been deliberate or accidental, but the other car fleeing the scene was a criminal act regardless of intent.

  An analysis of the paint found on Martinson’s wrecked pickup had them on the lookout for a black 1996 Pontiac Firebird with damage to the passenger’s side. I was a bit dubious they could pin down the exact year from a paint sample, but his lab boys knew more about that kind of thing than I did.

  My first stop when I hit the city limits was the Deming-Luna County Chamber of Commerce on West Pine. The converted residence had an old train caboose sitting alongside it to remind tourists of the town’s long railroad history. I introduced myself to a helpful gray-haired lady with a name tag reading Mabel who gushed an exuberant welcome.

  “The Great American Duck Race? Oh yes. We’re famous for that nationwide. Worldwide, I imagine. This will be the twenty-eighth annual race. But you’re too early. It doesn’t start until August the twenty-first. That’s a Thursday, and it runs through the weekend, ending Sunday afternoon with the racing finals.”

  “Explain how that works.”

  “Well, there are two types of races: a dry track and a water track. Each is run—” She tittered. “—or swum on an eight-lane, fifteen-foot track. So they run those until all the entrants have competed, and the winners of the dry track and the wet track are advanced to the quarterfinals, and so on until the championships on Sunday afternoon. It’s not too late to make a reservation at one of the local inns. I’d be happy to call around for you.”

  “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. I assume there are prizes for the winners?”

  “Oh yes. Each winner gets a prize of ten dollars. Since it costs only five dollars to rent a racing duck, the entrant has a chance of doubling his money. The final winners split whatever’s left in the pot. Sometimes that’s as much as $700 or so.”

  There went my prime theory up in smoke. “That’s not exactly on a par with a steeplechase, is it?”

  “Oh no. It’s purely a social event. Tourists come from all over to enjoy the occasion. The people who put it on just hope to break even. If they do make a few dollars over and above their costs, it goes to charity.”

  “Is it necessary to rent a duck, or can someone enter his own?” Perhaps I could salvage something from this train wreck.

  “Heavens no. There’s a woman who breeds and raises ducks specifically for the Great American Duck Race organization.”

  “A woman in Hidalgo County?”

  Mabel wrinkled her powdered nose. “She’s local.”

  “I see. There must be some side betting going on. Otherwise the only people profiting are the local restaurants, innkeepers, and merchants.”

  She smiled broadly. “You’ve put your finger squarely on the mark. The duck races are a promotion for the City of Deming and Luna County. As I say, it’s purely social for the general public. Of course, I’m sure there’s a certain amount of friendly wagering. Among friends, you know.”

  “No one handicaps the races?”

  “Good gracious, no. Not ours.”

  My ears perked up. “There are other races?”

  “Oh yes. I’d guess there must be two or three hundred of them throughout the United States. Some of them could be more… uh, sports oriented, I suppose.”

  I left laden with brochures extolling the virtues of the area—heavy emphasis on the railroad history and rock hound potential—plus the names of a couple of those other duck races. As I examined the old railroad car outside, my phone rang. Del with instructions to locate the missing duck or find out the perpetrator behind the theft. Easy enough for him to say.

  “What did you learn about Muldren’s financials?” I asked.

  “Because of the size of the coverage, the insurance company requires annual financial statements. The principal asset is the ranch. They own around a hundred thousand acres, but they lease another fifty thousand or so from private owne
rs and the government. And then, of course, there’s the inventory of livestock and ducks. They have over 200 ducks, Vince.”

  “I know. I’ve met them all. Personally. They swarm over a big duck pen like white ants.”

  “What keeps them from flying away?”

  “They don’t have flight feathers. They can get off the ground, but they can’t sustain flight.”

  “Oh. Well, the ranch makes money… generally. Like all such ventures, it depends on outside circumstances—weather, outbreaks of disease, beef prices, and the like. When the son, Albert, became foreman, things started to look better. He’s kept things profitable. Marginally so at times, but profitable nonetheless. Even the damned ducks usually make money. Apparently the M Lazy M is known for its ducks. They sell the eggs, the ducks, the down. They’ve got a fine reputation for the down and foie gras their birds produce.”

  “No sign of financial distress?”

  “Not really, but last year was an exception. They reported a loss because of some extraordinary expenses. Had to replace a lot of fencing. Quite a bit of fencing, actually. And their rustling losses were unusually high.”

  “Why?”

  “Grass didn’t know. Fencing is a continuing expense. Despite the size of the pastures—some of them are as big as twenty sections—there’s a lot of wire strung around the ranch. The livestock losses were attributed to hard economic times. Plus they’re on the border, and Grass guesses some M Lazy M beef ends up in Mexico.”

  There wasn’t much else Del could tell me, but he had unleashed me on the world of ducks and duck racers, duck down, and duck pâté de foie gras to make mischief as I saw fit.

  I made calls to the Hidalgo County Cattle Growers’ Association, the New Mexico Cattlegrowers, the Better Business Bureau, and the Attorney General’s office in Santa Fe, hoping to add to my store of knowledge about the Muldren operation. Mud Hen—a name widely used among her peers in the beef industry—had a reputation for tough dealing. While she was willing to push the envelope, nobody openly claimed she was crooked or even unethical. Nonetheless, I got the feeling everyone kept an eye on the pocketbook when she was involved.