Dead Weight

by Steven F Havill

“I’m overwhelmed with all the power I seem to have,” I said.

  He scoffed with amusement. “You’re a cop. Not a politician. But besides the schools, the other wings of the county government, and the hospital, your department is one of the largest employers in the county. That’s just for starters.” He ticked off on his fingers. “Sheriff sales. Civil work. Bids to important vendors. You can make other politicians look good or bad, your choice. On and on and on. Even the little stuff. You can talk to any service club any time you want as a guest speaker, beating your own drum.”

  “That’s something that’s appealing, all right,” I scoffed.

  “Not to you, maybe, but it’s all part of the package for someone who’s interested. It’s enough to make a regular citizen hesitate before going out on a limb against the county sheriff. There’s probably some fear of retribution, a little bit of paranoia that if they try to stand alone without official support they’re going to get squashed. It’s just easier to have someone else fight the battle for you. Being a whistle-blower is a lonely business. But an election.” He rapped the dashboard again for emphasis. “That changes the whole formula.”

  “How so?”

  “Hey, spread a little gossip, spread a little rumor, and pretty soon what happens? The rumor starts to take on a life of its own.”

  “And so I gather you think these moronic letters are the first stage in some kind of organized attempt to discredit us, discredit Bob, discredit the department, so someone else can win. A little nasty publicity just as the campaign gets under way.”

  “That’s a good guess. Either side stands to gain.”

  “Why pick Tom Pasquale? He’s just a kid.”

  “Assuming he’s innocent? He’s a good target, is why. He might have ruffled somebody’s feathers sometime in the past. There might be a grudge there. If I remember my own newspaper’s files, Pasquale has had his share of scrapes, and just enough heroics that when the story breaks in the newspapers, readers will say, ‘Oh yeah, him…’”

  “When the story breaks?”

  Dayan waved a hand. “A figure of speech. Carter and Gray received letters. They’re both Democrats. That leaves three to go. Tobe Ulibarri and Frank Weaver are Republicans. Janelle Waters is a Democrat. Care to bet who’s going to contact you next?”

  “So why are you betting on the Democrats? Why am I going to hear from Janelle Waters…not that she’s such a bad dish to hear from, mind you.”

  Waters topped the list of Posadas’s eligible singles. Her husband had been building a prosperous dental practice when cancer killed him at age thirty-eight. For reasons unknown to anyone but her, she had elected to remain in Posadas.

  “Sheriff Martin Holman was a Republican, and an active one. You served as undersheriff for a long time before he took office and then nearly eight years as undersheriff for Holman afterward. Your department is a reflection of what he and you built as a team. Bob Torrez is a popular part of that. Hell, he’s related to half the Hispanic population of the county.”

  “And if the Republicans jump on us, it’ll look like they’re turning on their own ‘team,’ as you put it. If they jump on Torrez, it’ll make them look vindictive, even though he was never a registered Republican anyway.”

  “Something like that. All I’m saying is that to me, it explains why the one side is so quick to attack and the other side is holding back a little bit.”

  “So who’s attacked? Neither Gray nor Carter wrote the note. They just apprised me of it.”

  “And lost no time, either.”

  “Why should they? If I was them, I’d give me the damn thing, too. And speaking of all that, you didn’t lose any time, either, Frank.”

  “True enough. I hope that my motives are different, though.”

  I turned 310 onto the broad shoulder in front of the Moore Mercantile hulk and snapped on the spotlight.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “We just check,” I said. “See that old stone building back there? It used to be a party spot. Sometimes folks from south of the border stop there, too. You never know.” I looked over at him as I snapped off the spotlight. “We just check. That’s what we do. We look a lot.”

  We pulled back out on the road and headed south.

  “Tell me about Jim Sisson,” Frank said.

  “What’s there to tell? You’ve heard the basics already. He was working on a big old front loader and had one of the back tires held up by a chain from another tractor. The chain slipped and the wheel and tire crushed him against the wall of his shop. That’s it.” I glanced over at Dayan. “As the papers are fond of saying, ‘he is survived by his widow, Grace, and six children.’”

  “It was an accident?”

  I hesitated only a fraction of a second, but that was long enough to tell Frank Dayan what he wanted to know. There was no point in being coy.

  “Don’t know,” I muttered, thinking back to the photos Linda Real had taken.

  “I saw the yellow ribbon across the Sissons’ driveway, with the undersheriff’s truck parked there.”

  “Yes.”

  “If it were a simple accident, I don’t see much point in protecting the scene by having the undersheriff sit there all night.”

  I fell silent for a moment, not bothering to tell Dayan that I didn’t have a clue about why my undersheriff was spending the night keeping two silent machines company when his young wife would have been a hell of a lot more cuddly. I said, “If I had any choice about what you print, I’d request that you said something vague like ‘investigation is continuing.’”

  “Fair enough. If something breaks, will you give either me or Pam a call?”

  “Of course.”

  “How’s Linda doing, by the way?”

  “Linda is a treasure, Frank. Stealing her away from you folks was the best thing we ever did.”

  “And you’re not forgiven yet, either, let me tell you.”

  We swept past the Broken Spur Saloon and in another couple of seconds passed the spot where the shooting of Linda Real and Deputy Paul Encinos had taken place two years before. As we started up the long, winding route through Regal Pass, I said, “After what she’s been through, she deserves some happiness. She seems content now, and she’s very good at what she does. And why she’s so happy, only she knows.”

  Frank Dayan nodded, but I didn’t add that the source of much of Linda Real’s contentment was the human target of some creep with too much free time. That made me angry enough, but what was worse was the other side of the coin. If Tom Pasquale was a crooked cop, was Linda Real in on the scam, too?

  “Shit,” I said aloud, forgetting in the recoil from the thought that I had a passenger.

  “What?” Frank Dayan asked.

  “Nothing. I was just telling myself stories. It’s an occupational hazard.” I looked at the clock. “Let’s circle through Regal, then head back and get some breakfast.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Let me give you a tour,” Undersheriff Robert Torrez said. The five of us stood near the back of Sisson’s tractor—Torrez, Sgt. Howard Bishop, Tom Pasquale, Linda Real, and myself. The hubbub of the night before was long gone.

  Two cameras hung around Linda’s neck, and a heavy camera bag with a plethora of gadgets rested on the gravel at her feet. Her right hand was poised on one of the cameras, index finger on the button as if she were covering an action sport.

  “Jim is working right here, at the left rear hub. He wraps the chain from the backhoe’s bucket around the wheel, so that when he takes off the lug nuts the wheel is supported. The front loader is jacked up, with all kinds of shit under the back axle for safety.” Torrez looked at me and shook his head. “So far, so good. He’s got the wheel and tire off, suspended from the chain. He wants to swing it around to the left, so that it’s on the shop’s concrete apron, and then lay it down flat.”

  He reached out and grabbed the chain that hung from the backhoe’s bucket. “When we arrived, the bucket that was doing the li
fting, this one, was right where you see it now. And that’s where it was when he was working. Then the tire was hanging right here, right above the apron. He figures there’s no sense in taking it into the shop. He’s going to break the tire loose right here, using the backhoe.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said.

  “The tire’s flat,” Torrez continued. He thumped the rubber with his boot. “It doesn’t look flat, because it’s so stiff, but it is. In order to have it repaired, or put a new one on, he’s got to break it off the rim. Most of the small shops around here can’t do that. It’s easier just to use the backhoe and break it that way. Push down on the tire, right beside the rim, with a couple of teeth. It’ll pop it back from the rim.”

  “Otherwise you end up pounding on it forever with a sledgehammer,” Bishop said. He was a big, florid-faced man, almost as tall as the six-foot four-inch Torrez, but with a gut that threatened to pop the buttons on his shirt. He squatted down beside the tire. “And there aren’t any tooth marks along the rim, so he hadn’t gotten that far yet.”

  “After we get some photos, we’re going to do just what he did. If the wheel is suspended here, it makes sense that it was touching the ground, or close to it. If it’s hanging right here, he’s getting ready to lay it down.”

  “Why didn’t he, then?” I said. “Why get off the tractor?”

  “Maybe he needed to spin it around,” Tom said. “If it’s hanging from the chain, it might rotate some. He gets off to manhandle it around so that when he does lay it down, it goes the way he wants it to.”

  “Christ,” I muttered. “This sounds like a two-man job, at least. What the hell was he doing out here all by himself?”

  “Because he was royally pissed at his wife, is one reason. He spent the whole day being pissed. I talked to Bucky Randall for a few minutes last night. That was Jim’s last job. Randall said one of the reasons this machine ended up in the shop is that Jim jammed it backward into a bunch of rebar and speared the tire. His mood wasn’t the best. But this is actually pretty simple,” Torrez said. “I mean, lifting it up is no trick, and then swing it over. Maybe the tire nudged the lip of the concrete and turned some. If it starts to swing, to pendulum, then it’s just easier to hop off and turn it by hand, then take a step and pull the lever to set it down. He wouldn’t even need to be on the tractor to do that. It’s careless, but operators do it all the time.”

  “So he’s standing somehow between the suspended tire and the building. There’s enough space there to lay the tire down. But it drops off the chain and he can’t get out of the way? That doesn’t make sense to me. That tire’s not going to bounce like some crazy beach ball.”

  “No, sir, it’s not,” Torrez said. “And that’s what’s been bothering me all night.”

  “He’d have had to lift it up a bunch for that to happen.”

  “And if the backhoe’s boom is where he last put it, that wasn’t the case. And there’d be no reason to lift it more than an inch or two…just enough to clear the concrete lip.”

  “All right,” I said. “He lifts the wheel and tire. And then, he gets off the tractor.” I held up my hands to mark an imaginary spot in the air. “The tire is hanging from the chain right about here.” I turned and looked at the wall of the shop. An outline of Sisson’s body had been marked on the concrete, behind where I stood. “He’s got about six feet of space between the tire and the shop wall.” I took a step back so that my boot was about where Sisson’s had ended up. “If that tire comes off the chain, it’ll drop, what, maybe a couple inches at most?”

  “At most,” Bishop said. “And it isn’t going to bounce.”

  “So how’s it going to catch me?” I asked. “Break my legs, maybe, knock me down. But how’s it going to land on top of me?”

  “It’s not,” Bob Torrez replied. “This can’t be where the backhoe’s boom was when the wheel dropped. It’s that simple.” He knelt down and pointed at a faint black rubber scuff mark on the concrete. “If you measure from this mark to the top one on the shop wall, you get a distance that’s equal to the height of the tire.”

  “It hit that wall with more impact than just leaning over,” I said.

  “Indeed it did. Enough to scuff rubber and dent the siding. And then it slid down on top of Jim Sisson.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and Torrez nodded.

  “I don’t think so, either. For one thing, look at this.” He stepped to the big tire. “We moved this tire up and over to the left just enough to remove Jim’s body. If you look right here, you can see the imprints of the chain where it went around the tire.”

  I peered closely. The imprints were just faint, dark marks, with interruptions that corresponded to the end of each link. “Will this show up in a photo?”

  “It should, sir,” Linda said. She knelt beside me. “I took a whole bunch just a few minutes ago. With this morning light coming in at a strong angle, I think it’ll work.”

  “You took plenty, to be sure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I heard the clank of chain and looked up as Bob Torrez stretched out a section and laid it beside the marks. The match didn’t take any imagination.

  Linda said, “I took a series like that, for comparison.”

  “Good. So what else?”

  Bob leaned over, moving the chain so that it crumpled into a tight S, just above the bright yellow rim, two feet from the first set of marks.

  “The chain struck the rubber here, too,” he said. “If you look closely, you’ll see that it actually scuffed the surface of the tire.”

  “Not with these eyes I can’t,” I said. “What are you telling me?”

  “If I had to make a guess, I’d say that the chain was driven into the tire with a lot of force. And so was the reddish dirt.”

  “Reddish dirt?”

  I bent over, shifting so that I wasn’t blocking the wash of morning sunlight. The tire was clean, but even I could see the loose dirt on that section of the tire, some caught in the crevice between rim and tire, some ground into the rubber.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “Did you get this?”

  Linda nodded. “I’ve got a good close-up lens,” she replied.

  “I bagged a good sample,” Torrez said. “And I’ll bet a month’s pay that it matches the dirt on the back side of that backhoe’s bucket.”

  I turned and looked at the machine, its bucket poised seven feet above the concrete slab. The teeth were polished from the constant abrasion of the digging process, but soil clung here and there to the rest of it, the sort of thing I would expect after a session of digging beside someone’s leaking water line.

  “You got all that?” I said to Linda.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you haven’t moved the machine any?” I asked Robert Torrez.

  “No. Nothing’s been moved.”

  “What are you thinking, then?”

  Torrez took a deep breath. “I think that after the tire was lying down—”

  “On top of Sisson?”

  “Yes, sir. After it was lying down, the operator, whoever it was, curled the bucket like this,” and he curled his hand back toward the underside of his forearm, “and then set it down on the tire. The chain was still attached at the bucket, and a handful of links were caught between the bucket and the tire when he pushed down…” Torrez hesitated. “He pushed down hard enough to lift the backhoe off the ground.”

  Torrez walked back to the machine and beckoned. “Look here.” The hydraulic outriggers of Sisson’s backhoe were lowered into the gravel.

  “Why would he bother to put the outriggers down just for a job like this?” I asked.

  “Always,” Bishop said. “The weight of that backhoe arm makes those big tires bounce like crazy. The stabilizers lock you in place. If the tractor bounces against the weight, then whatever you’re swinging starts to bounce and pendulum, too.”

  “All right. So the outriggers are down, just like they’re supposed to be.” />
  Torrez knelt and touched the gravel with his index finger. “And you can see how they’ve dragged sideways in the gravel? I measured that gouge as almost six inches long.”

  Linda anticipated my glance and nodded.

  “The machine moved?”

  “There’s only one way to do that,” Bishop said. “You put down force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t go down, the machine lifts itself up. Sideways force on the boom, and if the bucket can’t move sideways, the machine does.”

  I squinted at Torrez. “I looked at all the photos that Linda has so far. The sideways scuffing of the tire mark?” I pointed over at the concrete apron. “That’s a hell of a photo. I wouldn’t see that scuff unless it was pointed out to me.”

  Torrez nodded. “The tire moved sideways. Not a whole lot, but a bit. Several inches.”

  “And when it did,” I said, “there was a tremendous downward force on it.”

  “About as much as this machine weighs,” Bishop said. “Old Jim might have survived the tire dropping on him, but not with the weight of a backhoe on top of it. That machine weighs about five tons. Crushed him like an insect.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Grace Sisson had wasted no time. The night her husband had been killed, she’d taken the three youngest children—twelve-year-old Todd, fourteen-year-old Melissa, and fifteen-year-old Jennifer—to her parents’ house in Las Cruces. The older children had flown the nest years before, deciding that Posadas wasn’t the answer to their every dream.

  With the family gone, we had the place to ourselves. Still, I didn’t want any legal complications. While Linda Real developed the film from her earlier sessions, I woke up Judge Lester Hobart, explained what I wanted to do, and walked out of his kitchen fifteen minutes later with a court order.

  We could have impounded the machines and moved them all over to one of the county barns, but that seemed like a waste of time and money. Besides, I didn’t want just an approximation of the episode that had ended with Jim Sisson’s death.

  Driving back on Bustos, I saw Frank Dayan unlocking the front door of the Register, and I swung over to the curb. He had a breakfast burrito in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other, juggling his keys like a pro. It’d been more than an hour since we’d been the Don Juan’s first customers, and the idea of a snack was appealing.