Final Payment

by Steven F Havill

  “About that. And I would think that they’d remember someone filling multiple cans.”

  “And it don’t have to be gas stations,” Jim Bergin offered. “Any rancher that has a storage tank. Probably another half a dozen outfits in town have tanks.”

  “It still ain’t that many,” Torrez said. “Let me get someone started on that.”

  “Eddie’s still out at the airstrip?”

  “Far as I know. Him and Jackie. I’m going to leave her out there, get the rest combin’ the area for gas sales.”

  Estelle shook her head slowly. “Ay,” she whispered. “If this is the plane…”

  “Then it’s somebody local,” Torrez finished the thought.

  “Or somebody who knows the community as well as a local.” She reached out a hand to Bergin, taking him by the left shoulder. “How many pilots do you know in Posadas who fly well enough to do something like this?”

  “Oh, shit,” Bergin said. “You mean steal an airplane and bring it back? Just about anybody with a pilot’s license, Estelle. Now, if they’re flyin’ at night, that’s different. And if they’re dodgin’ border security, that’s something else again. I don’t know anybody who’d be crazy enough to do that.”

  “Well, taking the plane is the least of it.” She drew him several steps farther away from Jerry Turner’s hearing. “Jim, we think that this plane was used to fly in from somewhere—maybe Mexico, maybe not—with at least four people.” She released Bergin’s shoulder and held up four fingers, then bent one down. “One was the pilot. The other three were murdered. Shot to death.”

  Bergin looked at her in silence.

  “The sheriff found the bodies out at the west end of the gas company’s airstrip, off County Road Fourteen.”

  “Jesus,” Bergin murmured.

  “We don’t know who they are, but we think they may be from Mexico, maybe somewhere else south of the border.”

  “You’re tellin’ me that somebody took this airplane, flew down south, picked up passengers, brought ’em back into the country, then killed ’em?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then returned the airplane. Just parked it back in the hangar and walked away.”

  “That’s the possibility we’re looking at, Jim.”

  “Well, I wondered why all the fuss. I don’t guess you’d have the whole department out lookin’ for a stolen car—or airplane. Least of all a borrowed one. Unless there was something else goin’ on.”

  “There is. Three homicide victims. Maybe a family. We don’t know.”

  Bergin held up a hand. “I don’t need to know no more,” he said. “Does Turner know any of this?”

  “No. He’s going to need to know, though. I want to borrow the plane. With you flying it.”

  Bergin cocked his head incredulously. “Now what? What are we talkin’ about here?”

  “I’m going to repeat my original question: how many pilots do you know of around here who fly well enough to pull this off? For the sake of argument, let’s say, fly deep into Mexico, pick up passengers, fly back, and land at the airstrip—all, I’m going to guess, at night. Daytime is too risky. He lands, shoots the three, then piles back into the plane, and returns to Posadas. Again, at night. If you’re not here, he’s going to be able to slip in without anyone noticing.”

  “Sure he is. And I’m not here all the time, either.”

  “Just so.”

  “Who could do that? Well, I could. Jerry, there. He could. He wouldn’t, but he could. There’s maybe half a dozen at most.”

  “In Posadas.”

  “Here in town. Now, you include Deming and a few other towns, there’s more. But if what you’re sayin’ happened the way you think it did, that’s…well, I don’t know.” Bergin groped for words. “That’s something kind of different.”

  “Yes, it is. Very, very different. That’s why I want the ride.”

  “That’s not one of your better ideas, Madame Undersheriff,” he said.

  She regarded Jerry Turner’s Cessna 206 critically, trying to push commonsense agreement with the airport manager out of her mind. “There’s nothing that says this isn’t the plane that landed out on the gas company’s strip, Jim,” she said. “The wheelbase measurement is consistent.”

  “Hell, that could change,” Bergin said. “Loaded heavy, your tire track is going to be one thing, empty and it’s going to be somethin’ else. I don’t see how you can measure that close.”

  “May we can’t—but it’s close enough to suggest a match.”

  “Look,” Bergin said, and his fingers groped for a cigarette. It was half out of the pack before he remembered that he was standing near an aircraft hangar, in close proximity to a full load of volatile fuel. He thrust it back and patted his pocket closed. “I don’t think anybody ought to be flying this airplane until we have a chance to really go over it, nose to tail. If she’s got auto fuel mixed in with avgas…and I realize that ain’t no big thing. But just the same…”

  “Whoever used it didn’t have any qualms,” Estelle said. “Would he necessarily know the difference?”

  Bergin laughed dryly. “Yes, he’d know. And we ain’t him. Havin’ a few of those qualms keeps us alive. Not to mention that it’s the middle of the goddamn night, with a short unlighted airstrip that has a fence at either end. Besides, what’s the difference? Maybe this is the plane…maybe it is. So what? What’s flyin’ it out there in the dark going to tell you?”

  “I don’t know what it’s going to tell me,” Estelle said. “It’s just helpful. What I know is that it’s a link we need to explore—the sooner the better.”

  “Helpful,” Bergin repeated. “Seems like it could at least wait till light.”

  She nodded, not knowing how to explain what she felt. “It could. But they landed at night. I’d bet on it.” In her mind’s eye, she could see the Cessna sinking downward, with the apprehensive eyes of the passengers glued to the windows, staring out into the inky blackness of the desert. The landing lights would cut a swath, making the desert seem all the more ominous. The plane had touched down solidly, no bounces, no swerving—a perfectly executed landing followed by a long, straight rollout. And then the drift to the right, slowing more, swinging hard left perhaps with a burst of power—and then the first sign of a miscalculation, so out of place with the rest of the command performance.

  “We can’t jump to easy answers,” Estelle said. “We’re so far out of the loop it’s pathetic, Jim. We don’t even know for sure where the three victims are from—most likely someplace south of the border, but we’re not sure. We haven’t found any paperwork, no personal belongings. The plane could have flown five hours south, and that would have put it pretty deep in Mexico, but where the passengers were actually picked up might just be a staging area.” She shrugged. “If I can put myself in the same situation, it might tell me something about the pilot. About the way he thinks.”

  “You think the pilot is the killer?”

  “I don’t know. He would almost certainly be involved somehow. He would have to know. And if the pilot did the shooting himself, that means the plane had to be parked for a few minutes untended while he got out to do his business. Right now we have no way to tell if that’s what happened. If the victims had any personal belongings, those stayed in the plane—we didn’t find anything scattered in the desert. I’m hoping you can help me with that.”

  “Huh,” Bergin grunted. “And parked is parked, Estelle. When he stopped to let out passengers, he was parked. Whether for thirty seconds or five minutes don’t matter much.” He looked at the floor thoughtfully. “This airplane don’t have any seeps. No oil puddle from bein’ parked. So you can’t tell from that.” He heaved a sigh. “Tell you what. You want to fly out that way, let’s take my plane.”

  “There’s no point in that.”

  Bergin almost smiled. “I was afraid you’d say that.” He fumbled with his cigarettes again and laughed. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these things.” H
e sighed. “Okay, tell you what. If Turner says it’s okay, fine. You got to give me a couple hours to check this bird over real good. Maybe even drain out the gas, if that’s in question. I don’t want any surprises.”

  “Done. I’ll talk with Jerry.”

  The big man turned a shade more pale as Estelle recited a short version of events to him. As she described the victims and how they were found, she saw his shoulders slump and his weight sag onto the fender of the BMW.

  “Why would someone do something like that?” he asked finally. He looked quickly first at Bob Torrez and then at Estelle. “I hope to heaven you folks don’t think I had something to do with all this.”

  “Someone used your airplane, sir. That’s what we think. If we can have your cooperation, we’d appreciate it. We’ll fill it up when we’re finished.”

  “With avgas,” Turner said, trying to smile.

  “You bet.”

  “I don’t want to go, if that’s all right. For one thing, I’d have to put the seats back in.”

  “That’s fine, sir. We won’t be gone long.”

  She checked her watch. “Midnight straight up?” she asked Bergin.

  “That’ll work. It’s crazy, but it’ll work.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Sheriff Torrez agreed to meet airport manager Jim Bergin and Estelle out at the gas company’s airstrip. “Somebody’s got to be there when you two crash through that barbed-wire fence,” he said. With the sheriff coordinating the search of local gas stations and fuel dumps, Estelle took a moment to prepare a brief statement for the media. Word of the triple homicide would certainly leak out, and the city papers and television stations would be calling, if they hadn’t already.

  Each police agency would have its own spin on events, and she couldn’t count on the Border Patrol or the State Police or the INS to suggest that reporters call the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department for information. Some of them would anyway, and she didn’t want Gayle Torrez, who would be taking over from dispatcher Brent Sutherland at six the next morning, to be blindsided.

  Without doubt, Frank Dayan, publisher of the Posadas Register, would be calling, searching for some angle to put his small weekly newspaper ahead of the metro media.

  The cyclo-cross bike race, in its first year and just hours away, didn’t offer much news value—certainly not enough for metro news teams to travel to Posadas, wherever that was, to shoot footage of a crowd of spandex-clad people pedaling laboriously up Cat Mesa. But throw in a multiple homicide on the same turf, and the attraction would escalate.

  The media interest would be sparked until everyone made the easy assumption that the three dead people were just another unhappy statistic—Mexicans whose drug deal in the desert had gone wrong, or migrants who had been ill-prepared for a long trek in the wilderness. That would lead to more sidebar stories in the Sunday papers about the growing problem of the border drug trade, or of illegals running afoul of border vigilante groups, or the push to finish the transcontinental border fence, or to a dozen other takes on the “border problem.”

  At ten minutes after eleven on that Saturday night, Estelle pulled into the driveway of her home on South 12th Street, parking beside her husband’s SUV. The front porch light was on, and a single light glowed through the living room curtain. Her mother was a fitful sleeper, and often chose her rocking chair in the living room, in company with her friendly books, rather than tossing and turning in bed.

  Estelle let herself in and stopped abruptly. Her mother wasn’t in her chair, but Estelle could see her older son’s tousled little head peeking out from behind the music rack of the piano. Their eyes met for just a fraction of a second, and then he ducked down, hunching his shoulders.

  “You’re up late, hijo,” she said as she crossed the living room. The dark circles under his eyes hinted that he hadn’t just popped out of bed. She dropped her jacket on the sofa, then crossed to the piano. “May I?” she asked, and slipped onto the bench beside him. She circled his thin, bony shoulders in a hug. His hair smelled vaguely musty, reminding her of an old man’s. Her right hand stroked his forehead, pushing the flop of curly black hair out of his eyes. He didn’t look up at her, but she felt him lean against her.

  “You got called out,” Francisco whispered.

  “Yes. A bad time, querido. But I heard you play. I’m so proud of you.”

  He nodded and fell silent, looking down at his hands. His fingers rested on the piano keys as they might on an unresponsive tabletop. After a minute, his right index finger reached out tentatively and touched the face of the black C-sharp key just above middle C. His fingers were long and strong, and she saw that his muscles had already taken on definition resulting from hours of unrelenting exercise.

  Estelle waited, sensing that the little boy was wrestling with something far beyond his seven-year-old capabilities to articulate. Perhaps, after the intense excitement of the recital, his first time in front of an audience other than family, the adrenaline rush hadn’t subsided yet.

  “Are you going out again?” he asked.

  “I have to, for a little bit.”

  “Right away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are we going up on the mesa to watch Tommy race tomorrow?”

  “I hope so.” She felt his shoulders rise with a little sigh of resignation. “You know I can’t promise, mi corazón. But Daddy will take you up if he can. Or Nana Irma. Or Padrino.”

  His index finger tickled the front of the C-sharp again. “Did you hear Melody play?”

  “Yes, I did.” She didn’t release her hug. “And I thought it was nice that she asked you to turn pages for her. Have you ever played that piece?”

  “No. But it’s easy. And it’s boring.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t think so.”

  “Pitney is mad at me,” he said after a minute. “She wouldn’t talk to me after the recital.”

  “Why ever not?” But already part of the scenario was obvious to her. Her seven-year-old son, adorable in so many ways, had wandered into the unpredictable turf between two older females.

  “’Cause I turned pages for Melody.”

  “Why would that make her mad at you?”

  “’Cause. She said I should play Pachelbel,” and he pronounced it patchy-bell, “to show Melody how it should go.”

  “You mean instead of your own piece?”

  “Yes. But I don’t like that old stairway song.”

  “Stairway song?”

  He sighed. “You know. Up and down. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da,” and he continued, the fingers of his right hand once more over the keys, marching down and then back up, soundlessly touching each one, following the opening motif of Pachelbel’s Canon.

  “Pitney wanted you to play Melody’s piece, instead of your own? Instead of the Mozart?”

  He nodded. “But that’s mean, isn’t it, Mamá?”

  “More than mean,” Estelle said. “Why would Pitney want you to do that?” She could imagine perfectly well why, but wanted to hear her son’s version.

  “’Cause. She doesn’t like Melody, Mamá.”

  “I see,” she said. “But you like Melody, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  Oh my, Estelle thought. He’s seven, and the women are fighting over him already.

  “You know that what Pitney asked you to do was wrong, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But she wouldn’t talk to me when Melody finished playing.”

  “Maybe that’s not important, mi corazón. When people ask you to do things, you must always think about it. You must think about what they ask of you. And you know, Melody has always been kind to you, Francisco. I’ve seen her at school, and she always asks about you. She’s so proud of you. She doesn’t try to make you do things that you shouldn’t.”

  Her son drew his hands off the keyboard, curling them under his chin in that characteristic gesture of delight.

  “She’s a clown,” he said, but his tone welled with kindness rather than
insult. “She played well, don’t you think?”

  “She played beautifully. You all did. Does Daddy know you’re still up?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You should go to bed. Tomorrow’s a big day.”

  He nodded and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been working on a story,” he said.

  A musical story, she knew, and wondered what images he was seeing in his head. If they had returned home from the concert by 8:30, Francisco had been at the keyboard for several hours. “You’ve been here since you came home from the recital?”

  “I didn’t make any noise,” he said, and a note of childlike conspiracy entered his tone. “Just like this.” With left hand curled under his chin, his right hand spidering over the keys, and after a moment his left hand joined the music, the touches on the keyboard as soft as a kitten’s tread, so soft that the piano’s mechanisms never moved under the strings.

  “Start over,” Estelle said. She reached across and with thumb and index finger twisted an imaginary knob on her son’s left temple. “Turn up the volume so I can hear.”

  “Abuela is still asleep,” he said.

  “I bet not,” Estelle said. “She can hear ants crossing the sidewalk. And anyway, she’d like to hear, too.”

  He took a breath, and once more the right hand started, this time touching three notes in succession, lingering on the last. “That’s her name,” he said, and played the three notes again. “Me-lo-dy.”

  “I hear that it is. Should I hear the rest, or will you save it for her?”

  That thought obviously hadn’t occurred to Francisco. His fingers hesitated, and he looked around at his mother for the first time. “Should I do that?”

  “It’s up to you, mi corazón.”

  “I want you to hear it.”

  “All right.”

  Estelle found herself wishing that she could somehow tune in to the pictures that paraded through her son’s mind as he played, but that remained his private world. The music was simple, the two hands talking to each other as he’d learned to do by playing the Grump, el Gruñón, as he called J.S. Bach. But the music went beyond that, and Estelle wondered if her son heard the difference between his soundless hours of practicing and what now swelled from the huge piano, lyrical and rich.