The Wolf Path

by Judith Van GIeson

  “Has the medical examiner established the time of death yet?” I asked Ohweiler.

  “As a matter of fact he has, ma’am,” he replied. “Midafternoon.”

  “Midafternoon? Are you sure? That’s almost twelve hours before the truck went off the embankment.”

  “That’s what the report says, ma’am.”

  It’s hard to pinpoint the exact time of death, I knew, although an approximate time could be established by body temperature and the degree (or lack) of rigor mortis.

  While I pondered this change of events, they moved on to my room, the guest room. I followed. I was staying over again, but I hadn’t brought my bag in yet so we didn’t have to argue about whether or not they could look through it. Not that I had anything to hide; it was the principle. There was nothing in the room but an empty chest of drawers, an empty bedside table, an empty bed, bare walls, bare floor. It had the look of a nun’s cell. They poked through the adjacent bathroom—empty except for one pink towel—and I thought about what had gone on in this bed. Not much, when I’d been there. One night had been filled with Juan’s wolf howls and cries (Juan wasn’t the kind of guy you could ignore, even in the middle of the night—especially in the middle of the night). I hadn’t had any dreams that I’d want to remember. Given an ordinary situation, would a nun’s room produce more erotic dreams or less? More, I figured. People who are having sex don’t have to dream about it.

  Having come up empty here, the law marched on to the living room, where the missing paintings were striking by their absence and Frida by her barbed-wire-eyebrowed presence. It’s hard not to notice Frida Kahlo. Her eyes found you the minute you entered the room, but what were they saying? Te acuso? Whatever you throw at me, I can take it? Tree of hope, keep firm.

  Sheriff Ohweiler broke a sweat as he crossed the ballroom-sized floor, but not because he was dancing. He lumbered over to Frida and lifted his Ray-Bans. “Jeez,” he said. “What the hell’s the matter with her?”

  “She was impaled by a stake,” I said. “In a bus accident.”

  “Whew.” He took out his handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his chin and then took Frida off the wall and looked behind her. For drugs? A weapon? Frida’s eyes were her weapon, that and her paintbrush. I was glad Jayne wasn’t here to see him take the painting down. I’d seen Juan in action, Jayne in distress; once of each was enough for me.

  “That painting is worth more than your house,” I said. “I’d be careful of it if I were you.”

  “Yeah?” Ohweiler hung Frida back on her nail. “Ain’t the kind of thing I’d want in my house.”

  One man’s artwork goes in another man’s garbage bag. People trash priceless treasures and never even know (or care) that they’re doing it. I wondered what Ohweiler had on his wall. A tiger on velvet? Elk horns? A mountain lion’s head?

  He went next to the second most expensive thing in the room, the conquistador credenza. Paying no attention to the quality of the wood or the beauty of the carving, he opened it up. The shelves were stacked with manila legal folders. He flicked quickly through them—what he was looking for wasn’t on paper—put the folders back, closed the credenza. Next he went over to the people-sized fireplace, stuck a poker up the chimney, knocked loose some soot. Then he picked up the cushions on the cowboy sofa, felt for lumps, put them back.

  There wasn’t anything else in the room to search so he went out to the hallway, looked through the closets. Nothing there but running shoes and horse gear. He moved on to the kitchen. Juan, still obeying his lawyer, had taken a cup of coffee and gone out to the portal. Ohweiler went through the refrigerator probably looking for ice cream and cake. He opened a covered pot full of puffy white corn in red chile sauce. ‘‘What’s that?” he asked.

  “Posole,” said I.

  “Ugh. How can people eat that stuff?” He picked up a loaf of whole grain bread, examined the vegetable bin: lettuce, carrots, jícama. “Rabbit food,” he said.

  By the look of Ohweiler he didn’t consider it food unless it had sugar and fat in it. “There’s some sugar in the cupboard,” I offered.

  He went to the cupboard, looked through the boxes on the shelves, but he didn’t find a high-powered rifle, a motorcycle helmet or anything to eat either. He was coming up empty all around. An empty hand for him was a fuller hand for me, but you wouldn’t really expect that anyone who would go to the trouble to run Bartel’s truck and body off the road nearly twelve hours after he was killed would be careless enough to leave the weapon lying around the house either.

  “If they’d known you were coming, they might have put out some cookies and milk,” I said.

  “Um,” replied Ohweiler.

  This being an old adobe there was no basement or attic. “We’ll check the barns next,” he said. He cut across the portal where Juan sat cradling his coffee and for the moment anyway keeping his mouth shut. I stuck to Ohweiler and the deputy like an annoying fly, following them into the horsy-smelling stable. Sunlight filtered through the dust and illuminated hay and horse gear but no horses; they were all outside. This was one place on the property where a motorcycle could be hidden, but it wasn’t here. Another place was Juan’s van, but I’d already looked and knew it wasn’t there either.

  “Did your witness see a motorcycle at the crime scene?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. The witness was going sixty-five miles an hour. There’s a rest area right near the crime scene and we figure the motorcycle was parked there.” His officious politeness was getting on my nerves and being called ma’am made me feel like I was 110.

  Ohweiler found no high-powered rifle here either and we left. Just as we stepped into the bright afternoon light Jayne rode up. Coming upon people suddenly on horseback makes an impression, as Cortés and the conquerors knew well. Horseback makes a person more than ten feet tall. The conquistadors heightened the effect by wearing metal helmets and armor that glinted in the sun. Jayne relied on Clairol. She was in riding gear: blue jeans, denim shirt, cowboy boots, but she resembled Lady Godiva with her long blond hair billowing behind her. The sun at her back gave her a golden aura, airbrushed away her wrinkles and made her for the moment movie-star perfect. The sun on the law officers made them one skinny man and one fat one who wore shabby uniforms and earned twenty-five thou—or less—a year.

  I hadn’t seen a horse yet that could stand still and hers danced around, snorted and cast a long-legged jittery shadow. Jayne’s nostrils widened when she saw Ohweiler and the deputy step out of the barn. She had a pistol in her holster and a riding whip in her hand, which she tapped against the horse’s shoulder. Ohweiler’s hand moved involuntarily toward his holster. “What are you doing on my property?” she said.

  “We have a search warrant,” Ohweiler replied. He had the legal authority but her display was a lot more imposing than his dumpy pose. His hand moved away from the holster.

  “It’s legal; I saw the warrant,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Well, get it over with and get the hell out of here,” Jayne snapped, prancing her horse around toward the barn, turning into the light which cross-examined her and found a human being, not a female centaur, one who legally owned her property but was losing the improvements on it. One who dyed her hair and had age lines in her face. One who, even with a lawyer around, couldn’t keep pudgy law enforcement with a search warrant away. It’s better not to challenge pudgy gray men. They like to bring down the beautiful and the mighty. That’s the efficient way democracy works. We destroy those we envy through the courts and the press. It used to take a revolution.

  Ohweiler, however, remained cowed. “Yes, ma’am, we’re leaving right now,” he said.

  12

  I’D HAVE A chance to depose Bob Bartel’s supervisor if Juan was indicted, but why wait till then? I had an uneasiness about this case that made me want to get it resolved, at least in my own mind. My excuse for talking to Boyd was that Sirius was still being held in captiv
ity in the zoo and I wanted to get him out. In the morning I called the USFWS office and asked if Boyd was in. “No ma’am, he sure isn’t,” a secretary answered, “but he’ll be back in about a half an hour. He could see you then.”

  “How do I get there?” I asked.

  “Where are you coming from?”

  “Roaring Falls Ranch.”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Come on down the hill, get on I-10 west, get off at the Pomona Road exit, turn right, then go about a quarter of a mile and you’ll see a bunch of government-looking buildings on the right. Turn in there, go south to the north-south facing building, then you go to the bottom of the U and turn right. Now the building you want’s facing east, next to the chain-link fence, but what you want to do is you want to go to the north side of the building and come in the middle door, but you have to park your car on the west side because only people that work here can park in front of the building. Got it?”

  “There will be a sign on the door, won’t there?”

  “I think so. Now you have a nice day.”

  “You bet,” I said.

  Pomona Road was a piece of cake, but it took another thirty minutes to find the north-south building, then the building with the north-facing door with no parking for visitors, and I asked directions twice along the way. The government complex was as confusing as the government mind. The FWS office, once I found it, was in a squat cinder-block building that faced either north or south or east or west. Unless the sun was rising or setting I couldn’t tell. It had an institutional green interior, gray metal desks and maps all over the walls.

  “You didn’t have any trouble finding us, did you?” the secretary asked. She was about as old as Anna and about as interested in her job, although not as interested in her appearance. Her hair was unmoussed, unstyled, her makeup absent. It was a country look and she had a country name to go with it—Lynette. I saw it on the nameplate on her desk.

  “I think I made a wrong turn at the top of the U.”

  “I know. Sometimes I have a hard time finding the place myself. Frank’s talking on the phone. He’ll be with you in a minute.” She turned back to her computer and clicked the keys.

  I studied the USGS maps on the wall. I’d like to be in a profession where I could hang maps on the wall, although I could do without the metal furniture, the institutional green paint, the cinder blocks and forty years to retirement. All I had on my wall was a UNM law degree. Maps are my favorite form of reading and art. I like looking at the dotted lines that lead to out-of-the-way places and time warps, the red lines that mark the lonesome highways, the high-speed interstates. I like the mountains, the valleys, the blue veins of rivers, the yellow squares of Indian reservations, the green of national forests. I like to think there’s all that land out there uninhabited by humans. I was staring at a map of the Soledads trying to get a falcon’s fix on them and looking for El Puerto when Lynette told me Boyd had gotten off the phone and pointed the way to his office.

  I was expecting a cautious public official. What else would one be when everything they say can be used against them and often is? But that’s not the same as being a wary crook or a lawyer. The difference is bureaucrats don’t have the right to remain silent. They have to listen to public comment and respond to it, although that doesn’t mean they have to say anything. Mealy-mouthed evasion goes with the territory and the longer bureaucrats stay in their jobs, the better they get.

  When I saw Frank Boyd I knew I’d be dowsing for water in the desert. His hairline was receding at the same rate as his chin and they had achieved a kind of balance. From straight on he was all nose, eyeglasses and frown. In profile he looked like a Mayan glyph. He was gray, weary, in his late fifties, I’d say, looking longingly at the retirement road, which meant he probably hadn’t said anything worth hearing for thirty years, maybe even had forgotten how. The best I could do was keep him talking and hope that something of interest would bubble out. He was having an allergy attack, it being the season when antihistamines are—for some—the drug of choice. There’s pollen even in the desert. A box of Kleenex sat on Boyd’s desk. His eyes were red and runny and he sniffed when he wasn’t sneezing. He wore a white shirt and tie and his overall pallor gave him the look of a man who would prefer to leave the air conditioner on and keep the outdoors out there. His job was to administer the wild, but he could do that by radio from his desk while his field biologists went out and did the studies, took the risks.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked. The Kleenex he pulled from the box fluttered like a white bird in his hand.

  “I’m Neil Hamel, Juan Sololobo’s lawyer.”

  He blew his nose into the Kleenex and crushed it. “Juan Sololobo,” he repeated. That name might be a swear word in Soledad, but Frank Boyd said it like he was saying maybe.

  “I’m sorry about Bob Bartel’s death,” I said. “I spent some time with him and thought he was an exceptional human being.”

  “Had it all right here,” Boyd tapped his forehead. “One of my best people. We care in Soledad. We’re all upset by what happened and it’s gonna be real hard on Erin and the kids.” He threw a Kleenex at the trash basket, reached for another. “What kind of a man would kill Bob Bartel anyway?”

  I could have told him that women were on the planet, too, and just as capable of killing as any man, but I didn’t. I knew what kind of a person would kill Bob Bartel, a person whose interests were threatened, a person who had access to a high-powered rifle, a person whose finger might have already been on the trigger, but as I didn’t know which person yet, I replied, “I don’t know.

  “My client wants to know what will happen to his wolf,” I continued. “I’d like to get the charges against him of not securing a vicious animal dismissed because it has been established that the Upward Bound kids cut the chain and set the wolf free. If the charges are dismissed, will you release Siri?” That was a tough question for a bureaucrat because it required a yes or no. The answer I figured would be no but I was interested to see how Boyd would phrase it.

  “We haven’t quite passed the threshold of coming to a decision about that.”

  “Can you tell me when you will?”

  He squirmed and equivocated until he passed a short, rounded word, painful to him as a kidney stone. “No.”

  “What grounds do you have for holding the animal?” I knew the answer to that, too, or I thought I did, but I wanted to hear Boyd say it.

  “Three calves have been killed on the Phillips ranch. If an animal kills cattle in Soledad County we put it away. We can’t release that wolf until we know what’s been killing those cattle.”

  “Three? I thought there were only two.”

  “Don Phillips came across a third Thursday morning and Bob went out there to check it out. That was the last time I saw him. He radioed in from the ranch and said he’d seen the kill. It was a few days old—old enough for your wolf to have killed it before he went to the zoo. He said he still couldn’t say what was doing it, but he’d bring the corpse in for further examination. “

  “Did he come back?”

  “No.”

  “Was the corpse in the truck?”

  “No. I presume it fell out when the truck went off the road.”

  “Wasn’t that unusual for him not to come back to the office?”

  “Bob was a field biologist. He said he was picking up some signal with his Yagi antennas that he wanted to check out, then he was going to White Sands and he’d see me tomorrow.” Between the allergies and the death of Bob Bartel, Boyd’s defenses were slipping.

  “Some signal?” It was a trickle and I pounced but too quickly. Boyd darted away.

  “Something like that. I think that’s what he said.”

  “Could that signal have been a mountain lion that the FWS had collared?”

  “Could. Could also have been a bird the FWS collared.”

  “Norman Alexander, who’s a retired FWS biologist, said…”

  “Who said Norman Alexander
retired?”

  “He did.”

  “That’s his version.” I should have known everybody in Soledad County would know everything there was to know about everybody else.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.” I should also have known they weren’t going to tell me. “What did Alexander say?”

  “That activity-monitored collars can tell you within hours if an animal has died.”

  “Could.”

  “Could they also tell you if an animal was being pursued?”

  “Might, if you had an experienced operator.”

  “Bartel was pretty experienced, wasn’t he?”

  “One of our best.” Boyd sneezed, reached for another Kleenex.

  “Maybe Bartel picked up Buddy Ohles tracking another FWS-collared mountain lion. Bartel told me he’d had trouble with Buddy and mountain lions before,” I said.

  “Buddy’s got his job to do, we got ours.”

  “It hasn’t been proven that a wolf killed those calves. It could have been a mountain lion.”

  “It’s possible, but they’re known to prefer sheep.”

  “Maybe Bartel came upon Buddy tracking that lion and Buddy panicked and shot him. As Bartel said, you never know what a man’s going to do when he’s got a weapon in his hand.”

  “Buddy’s a local boy.” Juan Sololobo was not.

  “He’s pretty hotheaded.”

  “He wouldn’t kill anybody. Your client’s got a temper and he’s got a record, too.”

  “Did Bob tell you Juan Sololobo threatened him?”

  Boyd looked longingly at his watch. We were entering into a new realm of inquiry that made him uncomfortable. “That case is under investigation. It’s really not my job to be talking about it. As for your original question, there’s nothing I can do about your client’s wolf. You know, we’re taking care of that wolf because our department has the expertise in caring for it, but when it comes to cattle kills you really ought to talk to Agriculture. That’s their department.”