Dead Weight pc-8

by Steven F Havill

  “Ask what?”

  “Two nights ago, down on 56. You were parked up on the mesa? You’d already received one or two of those letters?”

  “Yes.”

  “You thought there was something to them, sir?”

  “I didn’t know what to think.” I reached out and gave him a paternal pat on the arm. “And when that happens, I go out and park in the dark somewhere, roll down the windows, and let great thoughts come to me.” I didn’t know if that answer satisfied him or not, but he nodded and settled the summer-weight uniform hat firmly on his head, the broad brim two fingers above the bridge of his nose.

  “Keep your eyes and ears open,” I said as he headed toward the door of my office.

  “Yes, sir,” he replied, and touched the brim of his hat. He opened the door, and at the same time a muffled drumroll of summer thunder murmured off to the west.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The late afternoon storm, carrying the first promise of precipitation in more than a month, hung dark and broody over the western half of the county. I followed Deputy Pasquale outside, and we stood for a moment on the back steps of the Public Safety Building. The San Cristobal Mountains were obscured by long fingers of rain that curtained from ragged, torn scud clouds, while thunderheads built enormous billowing ranges whose tops anvilled out into wisps of ice.

  A rich, prolonged rumble, like something from the gut of a colossal horse who’d eaten moldy hay, rolled across the prairie.

  “The crazies are going to be out,” Pasquale said. He hefted his briefcase. “A change in the weather is all the excuse they need.” He grinned at me, the sort of expression that you paste on when you don’t want others to know how rotten the world makes you feel. In no mood for small talk, the deputy turned and started down the steps.

  “Don’t worry about the letters,” I said as he set off across the parking lot toward the gas pumps where 303, one of the department Broncos, was parked.

  “That’s going to be hard, sir,” Pasquale said over his shoulder.

  “Yes, it is,” I muttered, and went back inside.

  It was going to be a good evening to worry about a whole list of things. The lightning show out on the prairie might torch a grass fire. The resulting smoke could drift across the four lanes of the interstate, sending folks who didn’t understand the function of the brake pedal into a colossal domino game of twisted metal. The rain might hang up there, never touching the ground, taunting us. And that was just the weather.

  As I walked back into my office, I added to the worry list. Our resident heroic protector of the public trust might crawl out from under his rock and send another cute note to someone-this time, since there hadn’t been any public reaction that I’d heard, to a blabbermouth who would get the job done.

  And, most important, almost twenty-four hours had passed since a tractor tire served as a blunt instrument to crush Jim Sisson to death. We were no closer to knowing what had happened in that backyard.

  I knew that the deputies were scouring MacArthur Avenue for any tidbit and that gradually Undersheriff Robert Torrez would put together a profile of what the neighborhood had looked like on Tuesday night.

  My worry was that we probably knew that profile already. I had that nasty gut feeling that no one was going to jump out of the woodwork and say, Now let me tell you what I saw. I saw a 1989 yellow Mercury parked in front of the Sisson home, New Mexico license XYZ. I recognized one of the men who got out of it. He walked around behind the Sisson home, sure enough just about nine o’clock. I heard a heated argument, some machinery running, and then I saw him come running out a few minutes later and speed off.

  The longer I sat behind my desk staring at the blotter, the more skeptical I became. After a moment, I pulled a piece of paper out of the top right-hand drawer, picked up a pencil, and doodled a crude map. I was a rotten artist, but the map helped me focus my worries.

  To the best of our knowledge, four people had been inside the Sisson home that Tuesday evening-Mom and three teenagers-while Daddy vented his frustration on a deflated front-loader tire out back.

  Yes, the family inside the house could all have been absorbed with telephone gossip, video games, or raiding the fridge-whatever passed for evening activity in the Sisson household when Mom and Dad weren’t throwing things at each other. They might have been so absorbed that they didn’t hear an argument outside. Or they might have been arguing among themselves, that continuous nitpicking that scrubbed the nerve endings raw.

  Outside, the gentle pulsing idle of the diesel backhoe could have blanketed any but the most strident sounds. Someone might have come in the driveway unbeknownst to the folks inside the house. Even if they heard the crunch of tires on the driveway gravel, they might not have cared one way or the other who the visitor was. Or the killer might have parked out at the curb, or down the street, or in the Burger Heaven parking lot, or in the back alley and sauntered through the back gate.

  The opportunities for someone to slip in, murder Jim Sisson, and then slip out again, all unseen, were legion. The backhoe was the stumbling block. Jim Sisson wouldn’t have crouched patiently while the killer fumbled with the machine’s control levers. Whoever had killed the plumber would have had to immobilize him first, and a stout whack on the head would have done the trick-not that we’d find evidence of that, since the massive tire and rim had done a complete job of erasing any trace of a previous head wound.

  The killer had to be someone who recognized the opportunity for a cover-up when it presented itself, coupled with a basic working knowledge of how to operate a backhoe. If we had a list of suspects, those two key factors would shorten it considerably.

  What bothered me was that Jim and Grace Sisson had been at each other’s throats all day-enough that neighbors had called in an official referee on three separate occasions to mediate. Why they were arguing no one seemed to know, and the Sissons never went public, even to the deputy.

  I found it hard to believe that everyone suddenly, as the dusk of evening fell after a day from hell, returned to knitting or reading or the tube, conveniently unconscious of the comings and goings of their day-long adversary. Any compilation of crime statistics that I had ever bothered to read said that most homicides in the home were the handiwork of people well known to the victim. Family members led the list.

  It didn’t make sense that after a day of fascinating violence between husband and wife, someone else would slide in and whack Jim Sisson because of an unpaid bill or a copper pipe joint that still leaked.

  I tossed the pencil down, crumpled up my doodled creation, and threw it toward the trash can. The shot missed, but I felt better. Knowing what I wanted to do prompted me out of my chair. In the outer office, life had come to a standstill. Ernie Wheeler sat in front of the dispatch console with his hands clasped in his lap, staring at the big chrome-plated microphone in front of him, trying to will it to squawk.

  “Where’s Linda?” I asked, and Ernie started. “Sorry,” I added.

  “I guess I was daydreaming,” Wheeler said. “Linda went home, I think. She was downstairs for a while, but I think she left. You want me to call her in here?”

  I waved a hand. “That’s all right. I’ll swing by.”

  Sure enough, Linda’s Honda was parked at the curb on Third Street. I pulled 310 in behind it and left it idling when I got out. The front door of the house was open, ready to let in any cool breeze that the storm to the west might care to generate. I stopped in front of the screen door, noticing the long tear in the screen where something had snagged it-probably the handlebars of the Harley when Tom Pasquale wheeled the motorcycle inside.

  Voices next door prompted me to turn my head, and I saw a kid about ten years old standing on the neighbor’s front step, eyeing me with interest. Someone inside the house said something in rapid-fire Spanish, and the kid lifted a hand to me in greeting before ducking back inside.

  “Knock, knock,” I called through the screen, and rapped on the frame at the s
ame time, the thin aluminum rattling against the jamb.

  “Just a second!” Linda’s voice floated out from somewhere inside. In a moment, she appeared, towel in hand, short black hair wild. “I smelled like basement,” she said. “Come on in, sir.”

  “You spend much more time down in that darkroom, you’ll turn into a mushroom,” I said as I opened the screen door gently. The flimsy thing flexed on its hinges. Linda gave her hair a final drubbing with the towel and then ran her fingers through it to restore order. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with “Property of the University of New Mexico Athletic Department” across the chest.

  The little house was uncomfortably warm. With lousy insulation and cinder block construction, it was one of those places that would be cooled off nicely just about the time the sun rose…and by noon would be sweltering again.

  I glanced into the tiny living room, and my first impression was of a welter of magazines on every flat surface. Beside one ratty chair was a pile of books, with one of them spread-eagled open across the arm of the chair.

  “It’s a mess,” Linda said when she saw my glance.

  If I had to clean a house, it would be in far worse shape, but I didn’t comment. “I stopped by to ask you if you can break away for a bit to make a quick run to Las Cruces.”

  Linda stopped messing with her hair and looked at me, towel poised. “Cruces? Sure. When?”

  “Right now. I want to talk with Grace Sisson, and it’d help if you went along.”

  She nodded. “Let me change real quick.”

  “What you’re wearing is fine, if you’ve got a pair of shoes to go with it.”

  Linda grinned, the smile a little lopsided but fetching nevertheless. “I’ve got shoes. But I’d rather put on something a little more,…” she pulled at her T-shirt, “a little more something than this. It’ll only take a minute.”

  She disappeared into the back of the house, and I wandered into the living room. The book on the arm of the chair was Fulton’s A History of Forensic Science, and being flopped over the furniture wasn’t helping the old volume’s spine any. I picked it up and saw that whoever was reading it was about to embark on chapter 7, a discussion of Daguerre’s photography. A sample of his work, the familiar “mug shot” that was used for the first time as evidence in an 1843 trial, stared off the page. The suspect looked as if he had been forced to hold his breath for about a minute too long.

  “Interesting stuff,” I said when I heard Linda enter the room behind me.

  “Tom’s forcing himself to read that,” she replied, and I glanced up at her. She had kept the jeans but donned a plain white blouse and a pair of running shoes.

  “Forcing himself?” There was a mailer card from a magazine on the table, and I used it as a bookmark, closing the old volume carefully.

  “Well,” Linda said with a smile, “that’s not how he’d describe it, but I get the impression that reading wasn’t one of his strong suits in school. He works pretty hard at it.”

  “A little at a time,” I said, and placed the book on the table. “You ready to go?”

  She nodded, and we went back out into the blast furnace of the afternoon. The storm hadn’t made much progress across the prairie and was still parked twenty miles west of the village. The sun peeked out beside one thunderhead, washing the cloud fringes in light.

  Interstate 10 put the sun to our backs as we headed toward Las Cruces, and for the first five minutes or so we rode in comfortable silence-comfortable for me, anyway. As we flashed by a sign that promised DEMING, 12, she asked, “Have you heard anything from Estelle?”

  “I keep meaning to call her,” I said. “The house is off the market, whatever that means.”

  That was the prompting Linda needed, and for the next hour or so she chatted about this and that, a sort of bubbling overflow of information, most of which either I didn’t hear or didn’t require a response beyond an interested grunt.

  As we started down the long hill west of Las Cruces, she asked, after spending five minutes talking about her mother’s keen desire to run her daughter’s life, “Do you think Tom is involved in anything?”

  We were in the process of passing an oil tank truck at the moment, and I didn’t answer until we’d pushed through the rig’s bow wave and drifted back into the right lane.

  “What do you mean by that?” I replied, knowing damn well exactly what she meant.

  “He told me about the letters you received.”

  I looked at her sharply. “When was this?”

  “The letters, you mean?”

  “No…When did he tell you?”

  “This afternoon. In fact, it was just a few minutes before you came over.”

  “He didn’t waste any time,” I said, more to myself than to Linda Real.

  “He said that he didn’t want me finding out from someone else,” she said.

  I took a deep breath and sighed. “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t figure it out. The son of a bitch who’s writing the notes obviously thinks that he’ll accomplish something-damned if I know what.”

  “Tom said that you hadn’t actually gotten one directly.”

  “That’s right. Two county commissioners and a newspaper publisher passed them along.” I glanced over at her again. “I’m trusting you in this, Linda,” I said.

  “Sir?”

  “You need to understand that whoever is writing those damned notes has a reason. It’s not just a joke. You’re an intelligent young woman, and you can figure out the possibilities just as well as I can. There’s the possibility that the note writer was fed what he believes to be reliable information. That means someone else is in on it, too. Or there’s the possibility that whoever is sending those notes just wants to make life hard for the department during an election year and picked Tom as an easy target. I’m sure you can add to the list of creative possibilities.”

  Linda gazed out the passenger side window in silence for a moment, then turned back and regarded me. “What makes you think that Tom isn’t involved, sir?”

  “I don’t remember saying that I thought that.”

  “I guess I’m hoping,” she said. “Tom got that impression from what you said to him.”

  “Well, then he’s right. For two reasons. First is intuition, which I freely admit in my case isn’t much to go on. But, for instance, my intuition tells me that I can trust you.” I shrugged and smiled at Linda. “I’ve known you for a while, through some trying circumstances. I’ve watched you work, as the saying goes. The same is true for Thomas Pasquale.” I chuckled at a sudden memory, and Linda looked puzzled.

  “I’m sure he told you of his most famous stunt, when he flipped his village patrol car in the middle of the Twelfth Street intersection with Bustos. Before an audience, so to speak. What I remember most about that incident is that he never tried to make an excuse. He never tried to make the accident appear to be anything other than what it was-a young hot-rodder going altogether too fast in the wrong place.”

  I slowed 310 as we started the endless ramp that took us from Interstate 10 to Interstate 25 northbound. “It’s little things like that. They tend to collect over the years.”

  “You said there were two reasons, sir.”

  “The second is simpler. If Thomas Pasquale actually was putting the arm on traffic stops for some quick cash and an honest citizen found out about it and had proof, I find it hard to believe that the logical response would be to write little anonymous notes to politicians. The logical thing would be to give me a call. Or the district attorney. Or Judge Hobart. Or even the state police or the attorney general.”

  “Maybe they’ve already done that and we just don’t know about it. Or maybe they haven’t because they’re just afraid of repercussions.”

  “Maybe. But you don’t think so, and neither do I.”

  “I’m glad of that, sir.”

  We shot north, passing a large water tank with the history of the Southwest painted on it, and then dived down Exi
t 1. “I’m sure you are. And for the time being, I’m going to ask that you keep all this to yourselves. I don’t want you discussing those notes, or any possibilities about them, with anyone else.” I glanced at her to make sure she was listening. “Not even with anyone in the department.” I grinned. “Except the officer in question, of course. Not that it’s any of my business, but I wasn’t aware until today that you two were living together.”

  “We’re sort of pooling our resources a little bit,” Linda said. A light flush crept up the side of her neck.

  “Well, as I said, it’s none of my business. But you’ve got my best wishes. And you should know that Tom is going to need some help with all this before it’s over.”

  She nodded. “He was pretty down earlier today.”

  “And it’s going to get worse,” I said. “As a born pessimist, I think I can pretty much guarantee that.”

  At the first stop sign, I pulled a small note out of my pocket that included the directions the Las Cruces PD had given me and handed it to Linda. “Navigate,” I said. “I can’t read the damn thing.”

  At ten minutes after six, we pulled into the driveway of 2121 Vista del Campo.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I shut the engine off and sat quietly for a moment. A block west, a large moving van was pulled into a driveway across the street, its tractor wedged sideways against the curb, out of traffic. Nearly hidden behind the truck, a Las Cruces police patrol car was parked facing us.

  Vista del Campo curved gracefully away from the main feeder street and the heavy stone wall that ran as far as the eye could see, undulating over what had once been the open valley. The housing project was surrounded by walls, like a vast, spreading fortress.

  From the backyard of 2121, Grace Sisson’s parents had a marvelous view of the interstate, and if they craned their necks, they could see the spread of development east of the interstate as well.