Statute of Limitations

by Steven F Havill

  Estelle turned onto her stomach and buried her face into the heart of her pillow, leaving both ears above the surface.

  “You wake?” She could feel the butterfly of her youngest son’s breath on her arm.

  “Yes,” she said without moving.

  “Do we get to go see Padrino today?”

  “Maybe, hijo.” She turned her head and was eye-to-eye with the four-year-old. “Would you like to do that?”

  He nodded. “Papá said somebody hit him on the head,” he said soberly.

  “That’s right. Somebody did.”

  “Why did they do that?”

  “I don’t know, hijo.”

  “Are you going to catch ’em?”

  “If I can get out of bed.”

  “Okay.” At least there was no doubt in his mind, Estelle thought. Carlos grabbed the blanket and backed away, pulling it half off the bed. She reached down and yanked it back, and a tug-of-war ensued that ended up with Carlos on the floor, wrapped in the blanket like a mummy. Estelle picked him up and dumped him on the bed and piled the pillows on top of him.

  In response to the shrieks and giggles from Carlos, the volume of music out in the living room increased, reached a crescendo, then abruptly ceased.

  “Ay,” Estelle said to the squirming mummy. “Reinforcements.” By the time the war was finished five minutes later, both boys lay trussed on the bed like cocoons. One foot, already plenty large for a six-year-old, stuck out unprotected, and Estelle sat down on the bed, grabbed Francisco’s ankle, and played spider on the bottom of his foot, holding him firmly against his laughing convulsions.

  After a moment she stopped, and helped the two of them out of the wadded bedding without ever releasing her grasp on her eldest son’s ankle.

  “You’re too strong, Mamá,” Francisco gasped. He tried to pry her fingers loose.

  “Way too strong for you, mi corazón. What were you playing?”

  “Tía gave it to me yesterday for Christmas,” he said. “It’s by Bach.” He exaggerated the guttural ch of the composer’s name. “He’s a grump.”

  Christmas. What was that? “A grump?”

  “Un gruñón,” Carlos chirped.

  Estelle looked over at the little boy in surprise. “Where did you hear that funny word?”

  “Tía said he was.”

  “Ah. Tía said. Bach the gruñón.”

  “You want to hear?” Francisco asked.

  “Of course I want to hear. Then I have to get dressed.”

  She wrapped herself in a white terry-cloth robe and followed the two out to the living room. Teresa Reyes already had taken up court in her large rocker, and she held a small mug of coffee in both hands, looking expectant. Sofía Tournál looked up from the kitchen sink as Estelle appeared.

  “Finally, you get some rest,” she said. She held up a peach, impaled on a small paring knife. “These are no good this time of year, but we’ll make do. You have time for some breakfast?”

  “Sure. First I promised to listen to el gruñón.”

  “Ah, that.” Sofía waved the knife toward the living room. “Hijo!” she called, and somehow Francisco knew exactly which hijo was under orders. He slipped from the piano bench and trotted to the kitchen.

  Sofía held up a bent index finger. “Give them time to talk,” she said, and then fluttered her fingers together in the universal sign of people jabbering. “Están parloteando, mi hombre. Let them have their say. Let’s see how well you can do it now.”

  Francisco nodded and made a face as he returned to the piano. Apparently this was serious, since Carlos didn’t slide onto the piano bench with him, but instead took up a post on the sofa nearest his grandmother. Francisco sat for a moment, regarding the piano keys, and Estelle leaned against the right arm of her mother’s chair.

  “Six hours of this,” Teresa grumbled. “You’re lucky you have something to do outside the house.” She wasn’t altogether successful at keeping the pride out of her voice.

  What followed, even to Estelle’s untrained ear, seemed to be a conversation between two or three people—at times it was impossible to tell how many. One hand took a melody, then handed it off to the other, and even though Francisco started out precisely and almost methodically, before long he lost it in a burst of giggles, driving the invention into manic parloteando, a musical jabbering that made no sense.

  “See what happens?” Sofía said matter-of-factly. “No wonder the composer is so gruñón when he hears you play like that. You make him tumble end for end in his grave.”

  Each successive attempt dissolved into a musical intersection whose traffic light was out of order, but Estelle enjoyed it nevertheless.

  “He’s not ready to be an old man,” Teresa observed dryly after Francisco abandoned Bach’s original time signature and ventured off on his own.

  “That may be a good thing,” Estelle said.

  “Come and eat something,” Sofía called, and Estelle couldn’t help noticing that her aunt had waited for an auspicious moment when it was clear Francisco was having trouble searching for something else to slaughter. The concert stopped as abruptly as it began.

  “I’m impressed,” Estelle said as she settled at the kitchen table. She looked at Francisco. “Tell me what you hear when you play that piece by the gruñón, hijo.”

  The little boy craned his neck, looking out the window behind Estelle. He pointed outside. “When the jays come,” he said. “They all fly in and argue about the seeds. Nobody listens. They all just jabber, jabber, jabber.”

  Estelle laughed. “Bird feeder music. I wonder if Bach fed the birds.”

  “No,” Francisco said without hesitation. “They didn’t have birds like that back then.”

  “Por Dios,” Sofía said. “Where he gets these ideas.” She placed a large bowl of honeyed fruit on the table, along with a platter of English muffins. Teresa tottered to the table after a trip to the coffee pot.

  Estelle turned to Carlos, who was already industriously buttering one of the muffin halves. “And what do you hear?”

  He shrugged. “I like the other one better,” he said, and before Estelle had a chance to ask which other one, he added, “Can we go see Padrino now?”

  “I can’t this morning,” Estelle said. “Bobby is coming home today, too. I need to talk with him.”

  “He’s a gruñón too,” Francisco observed. “A scary gruñón.”

  “That may be, hijo. And maybe he has reason to be, no? It was a scary day yesterday.”

  “Do you want me to take the boys by the hospital?” Sofía asked.

  Estelle was about to refuse the offer, but thought better of it. Things put off had a nasty tendency to turn into regrets. The gouge in Padrino’s door jamb came to mind, the gouge that had absorbed just enough of the blow that the old man’s eighth or ninth life had been spared. “If you would, I think that would be wonderful,” she said. “He’ll bitch and complain, but he’ll appreciate the visit, tía.”

  “You come, too,” Carlos said.

  “I can’t right away, mi corazón. I talked to Padrino just before I came home last night, and he understands.”

  She ate so little that she earned disapproving looks from both her mother and aunt.

  “Take something with you,” Sofía said.

  “No. I can’t.” Both boys were within reach, and she took Carlos’s left hand and Francisco’s right, bringing them together until she could cover both hands with hers. “I need to go. When you two are with Padrino, you be careful, you understand? He doesn’t feel well. Don’t make it harder for him.”

  “Somebody hit him,” Carlos said, as if maybe his older brother hadn’t heard the previous conversation. Estelle didn’t add to the remark, but just sat quietly for a moment, then released their hands with a final sque
eze and excused herself from the table.

  She showered quickly, brushed her short hair just enough to restore some semblance of order, and then dressed in one of her tan pants suits. She was in the process of putting her Kevlar vest on over her blouse when she realized that Francisco was standing in the doorway.

  “What’s that?” he asked, although Estelle was certain that he already knew.

  “My vest,” she said. “It fools the bad guys, hijo.”

  “Does Bobby wear one of those?”

  “Sure he does.” She didn’t bother to tell the boy that Bobby hadn’t been wearing a steel ass-protector when the .223 rifle bullet had drilled him through the rump, making hash of a pound or two of muscle and mixing it with chips of hip bone.

  “Does Padrino?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Not on his head, though, huh.”

  “Nope. Not on his head.”

  “You know those helmet thingies that knights wear?” Francisco stretched his hand far up, emulating the plume on top of the helmet.

  “Maybe we should have those, too,” Estelle said. She watched her son’s eyes stray downward to the stubby .45 automatic in its black holster at the small of her back, and to the handcuffs beside that. An eyebrow flickered, but he didn’t say anything.

  “When you come home for lunch,” he said, with implications far more refined and pointed than his years should have allowed, “I’ll play that piece just the way old gruñón says, okay?”

  She picked him up in a fierce hug. “Promise?”

  He nodded, knocking the knuckles of his left hand against her vest.

  “I love you, hijo. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know that,” Francisco said with a grimace. He seemed fascinated by the hard edge of the vest, and as she held him, Estelle realized how heavy and solid he was. She boosted him up and held him even more fiercely.

  “Don’t make Padrino laugh too much, hijo. He’s got a sore head.”

  He beamed, and she crunched him one more time before letting him slide to the floor. She had just time to slip on her suit jacket before Carlos catapulted into the room for his hug, and he felt tiny and fragile to her in comparison to the robust six-year-old.

  “Thanks, Sofía,” she said on her way to the front door, and then she detoured to her mother, who was back in the rocker. “Are you going with them to the hospital?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Teresa said. “Hospitals...” She let it go with a wave of her hand in front of her nose, fending off the odors. “That makes you look fat,” she said, nodding at the vest. “But I’m glad you wear it.”

  “It’s easy to forget,” Estelle said. “Eddie gave me a hard time.”

  “As well he should,” Teresa said. “You just be careful and take your time with this nasty thing you’re working on. Con paciencia, se gana el cielo, you know.”

  “I know, Mamá.” With patience, you can reach the sky. As she went outside to her car, she wondered what Janet Tripp’s killer was thinking. And she wondered what the man who had clubbed Bill Gastner was thinking. She turned the ignition key, and as if she somehow shared in the jolt of voltage, realized that it made sense to her that the two attackers were one and the same.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  She listened to the telephone’s pulse as she drove. After eight rings, she was about to disconnect when Mike Sisneros answered.

  “Yes.” His voice was flat and mechanical, and Estelle, at once relieved that he had answered, now had the mental image of him wrapped around a bottle, his face unshaven, with dark bags under his eyes. No one would have blamed him.

  “Mike, this is Estelle. Can we talk?”

  “Sure.” Again, no emotion, no rise.

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  This time there was a moment’s hesitation. “No, I guess I haven’t.”

  “How about if I pick you up?”

  “Okay. If that’s what you want to do.”

  “Give me five minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Estelle switched off the phone. If not wrapped around a bottle, Sisneros sounded as if he’d been zapped with one too many sedatives, uncomfortable with any decision more complicated than “yes” or “no.”

  The apartment complex, a homely brick box divided into three apartments downstairs and two above, fronted on Third Street, across from the high school’s athletic field. Through his front window, Sisneros could watch high-school football games from the comfort of his easy chair. The rear of the building was separated by an alley from Posadas Lumber and Hardware on Grande.

  Estelle parked in the empty spot reserved for the deputy’s Mustang that had been stranded in Lordsburg when Mike was picked up by Eddie Mitchell. As she got out of the car, she heard a door above and looked up to see Sisneros putting his keys back in his pocket. He came down the outside stairway with a methodical rhythm that bobbed his head with each step. He wore fashionably faded blue jeans and a stolen from the university of new mexico athletic department T-shirt that was two sizes too large and not tucked in. Even though it was barely fifty degrees outside, he wore no jacket. The T-shirt did nothing to hide the holstered automatic on his belt.

  “Ma’am,” he said with a nod.

  “Did you get any sleep?” she asked.

  “Nope.”

  She reached out and touched his arm, nodding toward the Crown Victoria. “I wish I knew some way to make this easier,” she said.

  “Can’t think of a way,” he said, and settled into the seat. He swung the door shut too gently, like a man with a migraine who was afraid that his head would shatter. He tried again. “At least I’m still ridin’ in the front.” He glanced at Estelle to see if she’d caught his reference to the fenced-in back seat. “This is so...” He ran out of words. She guessed that he had been up all night...at least he smelled as if he had been.

  “Can you eat something?”

  He shrugged. “I guess.”

  Don Juan?”

  “Sure. Anything.”

  The restaurant was less than a dozen blocks away, and by the time they had reached the Don Juan’s parking lot, Mike Sisneros had slumped even farther, shoulder against the door, head resting on his right hand, gazing off at nothing.

  JanaLynn Torrez, one of the sheriff’s innumerable cousins, greeted them inside the restaurant, managing to conceal most of her surprise at seeing Estelle without her customary restaurant companion, Bill Gastner.

  “Booth in the back?” JanaLynn said brightly. She looked from Estelle to Mike, doing a creditable job of pretending that nothing was wrong that green chile couldn’t fix. The Posadas grapevine was amazingly efficient at spreading information, correct or otherwise. JanaLynn would have heard about the murder of Janet Tripp, perhaps even the head-bashing of Bill Gastner, one of her favorite patrons. If she was eager to ask questions, she showed great self-control.

  She led them to Gastner’s booth. “How’s this?” A hand reached out and brushed Mike’s shoulder—just a light touch that carried a world of sympathy with it.

  “Perfect,” Estelle said. Tucked toward the rear of the restaurant, the booth had a fine view of the parking lot, and was blocked from the rest of the dining area by one of the serving stations.

  “I heard Bobby was coming home this morning,” JanaLynn said. It was always safe to stick with family.

  “We hope so,” Estelle said. “Now the trick will be getting him to behave himself.”

  “Gayle will see to that,” JanaLynn said. “Either that or his mother.” She smiled sweetly. “Menus?”

  “Please.”

  “Oh,” she said almost as an afterthought, and her expression grew sympathetically serious. “I heard Bill is going to be all right?”

  “Oh, sure,” Estelle said. “He’s got
a hard head.”

  “Oh, boy, does he,” JanaLynn agreed. “I hope you find out who the burglar was and hang him by his heels in Pershing Park.” She left without a word or question about Janet Tripp, or an expression of condolence to Mike. Her touch had said it all.

  As soon as JanaLynn was out of earshot, Estelle pushed her napkin and silverware to one side. “Mike, I realize that Eddie talked with you at considerable length yesterday, and then he and I had a go later. I know some of this is going to be repetitive for you.”

  “I know the drill,” he said.

  Estelle traced the patterns in the plastic tablecloth for a moment, considering how best to begin. JanaLynn arrived with menus, giving her another couple of minutes.

  “I guess just coffee,” Mike said, and JanaLynn frowned.

  “That stuff will burn a hole in your stomach if you don’t have something to eat,” she said. Estelle glanced up at that, hearing a little more than just polite waitress in JanaLynn’s tone. If Mike Sisneros caught the message of compassion, he gave no indication. “How about a nice omelet?”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “Okay. That’s fine.”

  “Green chile? Bacon? What would you like?”

  “Just whatever,” he said.

  JanaLynn nodded with satisfaction and turned to Estelle. “How about you?”

  “I guess a green chile breakfast burrito.”

  Surprise flickered briefly on JanaLynn’s pretty face. “Tea with that?”

  “Please.”

  “So,” Estelle said when they were once more alone, “let me just tell you what I think, Mike.” She regarded him thoughtfully, looking for some sign of interest. He had changed out of the clothes she’d seen the night before, when Mitchell had brought him home from his mother and stepfather’s Christmas dinner. Why he’d bothered, she couldn’t guess. He hadn’t forgotten the gun, though.

  Sisneros didn’t respond, but sat quietly with his hands down on the seat of the booth, as if he needed the two props to hold himself up. Maybe he did, Estelle thought.

  “I think the same person who killed Janet also attacked Bill Gastner.”