Dead Weight

by Steven F Havill

  I buzzed down the window as he stepped to the curb. “If you’ve got time, drop by the Sissons’,” I said.

  “You mean right now?”

  “Yep. Might be interesting.”

  “Well, neither Mary Ann nor Pam is here yet.” Pam Gardiner was the reporter who’d taken Linda Real’s place at the Register, a blubbery, much too cheerful person who apparently thought that most of the news would come to her if she sat on her butt long enough. Why Dayan put up with her lassitude I didn’t know. Maybe he was working too hard to notice. Mary Ann Weaver, the wife of county commissioner Frank Weaver, had run the front desk of the Register for fifteen years.

  “They’ve both got keys, don’t they?” I grinned. “Come on.” I reached over and opened the door.

  “What the hell,” Frank said, and got in. “You’re going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Of course not.”

  He laughed and sipped the coffee, grimacing. “Want some?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll take that burrito, though.”

  He hesitated and then actually extended the thing toward me. “Sure. Here.”

  I waved him off. “This is going to be a nasty one, Frank.”

  “You mean Sisson…”

  I nodded.

  He took a bite of the burrito. It smelled wonderful. “You know, Pam can cover this better than I can,” he said between chews. “She’s the reporter.”

  “It’s an election year,” I said. “Humor me.”

  ***

  Howard Bishop pulled himself up into the seat of the backhoe with practiced ease. The machine cranked a couple of times and fired, belched a cloud of black smoke, and then settled into a clattering idle.

  Torrez stood by one back tire, resting a forearm on it like a neighbor chatting over the fence. “I want to attach the chain over on the side, away from the original marks,” he said to Bishop. “Swing the bucket to the left some, and I’ll hook it up.”

  Bishop lowered the bucket and extended the arm so that the bucket’s teeth hung over the left side of the tire, taking the heavy logging chain with it. Torrez threaded the free end of the chain through the wheel and around the tire near where it was supported by a short chunk of two-by-four, then hooked one of the links.

  “You sure?” I asked, and Torrez nodded. I held out a hand. “That’s not secure,” I said. The chain hook had a scant hold on the link.

  “I know, sir. That’s what I want.”

  He turned to Bishop and gave him a thumbs-up, and the backhoe’s boom lifted until the slack was out of the chain. It slipped a little on the rubber, and then the tire eased off the ground as the backhoe took the weight.

  “Nothing to it,” Bob said.

  “How high do you want it?” Bishop shouted.

  “About a foot or two off the ground,” Torrez replied. “There’d be no reason for Sisson to lift it higher than that.” I glanced across at Linda Real. The red light on the video camera’s snout was on. “And right over this spot,” Torrez added, and he picked up a shovel that had been leaning against the building and touched the spot on the concrete where the tire had first impacted, close to the shop wall.

  When he was satisfied, he nodded at Bishop. “Perfect,” he said. The tire hung suspended about eighteen inches above the concrete apron. It drifted around in a lazy circle, stopping when the chain links tightened up. Then it started to drift back.

  “Now what?” Frank Dayan asked.

  “Now we drop it,” Torrez said. “You guys back off some.”

  I stood near the rear wheel of the backhoe, and Dayan joined me. Torrez walked over to his pickup and rummaged in the back, finally returning with a six-foot length of one-inch galvanized pipe and a three-pound hammer. “This’ll work,” he said.

  He walked altogether too close to the tire, stopped, and looked over at Linda. “You all set?”

  “World’s Strangest Videos, take one,” she said.

  Torrez grinned and lifted the steel pipe as if it were a toothpick. He rested one end against the tip of the chain’s hook where it had a tenuous grip on the link. He struck the other end of the bar with the hammer, and it drove the tip of the hook out of the link with the first tap.

  With a brief rapppp of sliding chain, the tire thumped to the concrete like a wet pillow, with just as much bounce. When he struck the bar, Bob Torrez was two paces from the tire, and even as it hit the concrete, he stepped forward and put a steadying hand on the tread. After a second or two, he took his hand away. The tire stood motionless, a fat bulge at the bottom.

  “Don’t turn it off yet,” he said to Linda, and then looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “So much for it bouncing into the building.”

  Resting a hand on the top of the tire, he walked around on the other side. With a gentle nudge, the tire fell over, striking the side of the building with a crash. And there it leaned, refusing to slide down.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  Torrez walked to one side and aimed a hearty kick at the tire. It thumped and refused to move.

  “There’s just no way,” he said. Then he turned to Howard Bishop and beckoned. Bishop extended the boom, curling the bucket as he did so. Torrez pointed to the spot on the tire, and Bishop lowered the bucket until its back gently touched the rubber.

  “Nail it!” the undersheriff shouted, and Bishop slammed the lever full forward.

  The tire skidded down the wall, its bottom simultaneously kicking out on the concrete slab. When it thumped flat, I shivered, imagining Jim Sisson’s final moments with that weight on top of him. Bishop kept the hydraulic force applied, and the backhoe lifted itself in the air, the outriggers clearing the ground by a foot.

  Torrez held up a hand, and Bishop stopped, the machine frozen, bucket crushing the tire, outriggers up in the air. Bishop reduced the throttle as Torrez walked around and approached us.

  “Now,” he said to Bishop, “how do you jog it sideways?”

  “It’s easy to do,” the sergeant replied. “If the operator gets excited, he can do it by accident. The sideways movement of the arm is on the same lever as down thrust.” He pointed at the left of the two long central control levers.

  “Do it,” Torrez said. “Just drop her down. Try and make the same kind of marks.”

  “Move a little,” Bishop said, and waited while we stepped away from the backhoe. Then he jammed the lever to the left and pulled back at the same time. The bucket jerked left; the tractor bucked right and dropped like a giant yellow stone, its outriggers crashing back in the gravel.

  The tire had scrubbed a couple of inches to the left.

  “And that’s what I think happened,” Torrez said. The tractor idled down and then died as Bishop pulled the manual throttle lever back.

  “The tire clearly didn’t drop and kill him,” he said.

  “Nope,” Torrez agreed. “It had help.”

  Frank Dayan shook his head in wonder. “Wow. That’s amazing.”

  I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. “And now you know that if you just print ‘investigation is continuing’ you’ll be telling the absolute truth.”

  “But what you’re saying here is that Jim Sisson was murdered,” Dayan replied. “You’re saying that someone deliberately crushed him to death. And then made it look like an accident.”

  “It appears that way.”

  “That means whoever it was would have had to clout him on the head or something first…overpower him in some way. He wouldn’t just lie still, waiting to be crushed.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Maybe the autopsy will show something. But if it was something as simple as a blow to the back of the head, that’s not going to show up. Not with his skull crushed the way it was.”

  “Give me a photo. At least give me that much,” he pleaded. “It’s not often I get to scoop the big-city dailies.”

  “On one condition,” I said. “On one condition, we’ll fix you right up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don�
��t use the word homicide yet.”

  “Done deal,” Dayan said. “And my paper doesn’t come out until Friday morning, anyway. Maybe things will have changed by then.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Dayan bent down, looking at the tire marks on the concrete. “Do you suppose whoever did this figured you’d never look closely?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “And we can hope that’s not the only mistake they made.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Jim Sisson’s death hadn’t attracted much press, to Frank Dayan’s relief. His major competition, the Deming newspaper, stumbled across the incident in the course of their routine morning phone call to check the blotter.

  The story didn’t make the front page. The episode was tucked under several obits more local to Deming than Posadas. If it had been a hot news week, we wouldn’t have made it at all.

  The headline was artfully evasive across two columns:

  Posadas Contractor Dies Following Shop Incident

  Most of the grim details were there, with the exception of any speculation about how the “incident” might have happened.

  The fundamental conundrum—how a five-and-a-half-foot man managed to be crushed under a fifty-four-inch-tall tire and wheel assembly—was not mentioned, other than the cover-all expression that “investigation is continuing into the incident that claimed the life of James L. Sisson.”

  Apparently the use of the word incident rather than accident hadn’t been lost on Posadas Chief of Police Eduardo D. Martinez, who waddled into the Public Safety Building with a copy of the Deming paper under his arm. He appeared in the door of my office shortly after 3:00, brow furrowed and mouth working either a wad of chewing tobacco or a rehearsal of what he wanted to say.

  The chief was fifty-six, with about the same dimensions in the torso as a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. His large, square face, with dark eyebrows, wide, heavy-lipped mouth that winked gold, and enough chin for three people, would have made him perfect casting as the Mexican bartender in one of those grade-D spaghetti westerns.

  I liked Eduardo, even though I’d never been sure just what purpose his tiny department served—especially since he made no effort to grab his share of the law enforcement turf. But state law was clear: Incorporated villages had to have a police department. A decade before, back when the copper mines were open and fat paychecks flowed directly from payroll office to bank to saloons, the police department had kept busy.

  But that was before Eduardo’s tenure as chief—back when he was still earning a living driving a road grader for the village street department. Now Chief Martinez and two part-time patrolmen kept themselves busy making sure that we had one of the best patrolled fifteen-mile-an-hour school zones in the state. Eduardo’s philosophy seemed to be that if the kids could cross the street safely, what else mattered?

  Chief Martinez was so adept at staying backstage that I sometimes forgot that he was there. If he took offense at that, he never let it show.

  He ducked his head and smiled ruefully. “You busy?”

  “No, no,” I said quickly and got up, motioning toward one of the leather-backed chairs. “Come on in. Pull up a seat and rest the bones.”

  He did so and unfolded the newspaper. “This is sure something, eh?” he said, his soft voice carrying that wonderfully musical border cadence.

  “Just about the goddamnedest thing I ever saw.”

  “You know,” he said, looking up at me, “when Bobby answered that call, it was the third time yesterday.” He frowned and tried again. “Three times he went out to that place.”

  “Out to the Sissons’, you mean?”

  “Yes.” The chief nodded vigorously. “You know, there have been days when I went out there myself, three, four times.”

  “They put on quite a show from time to time, that’s for sure.”

  He frowned again and scooted his chair forward. “What do you think happened?”

  I leaned back in my chair and regarded Martinez with interest. The chief was adept at staying out of the way—he had never been the sort to weasel his way into an investigation that another agency was conducting, for limelight or any other reason. In fact, this was the first time that he’d ever taken the initiative to come to my office and ask to be brought up to speed.

  The manila folder that included the set of photographs rested at my elbow, and I flopped it open. “Take a look,” I said. “Tell me what you think.” Like any of us, the chief enjoyed a little deference now and then, and instead of just handing him the folder, I selected several photos, reached across, and spread them out on my desk, facing him.

  He leaned forward with his hands tightly clasped between his knees, as if afraid that touching the prints might smear the images.

  “Linda shot this one before the tire was moved,” I said. “And these were taken at the hospital.”

  Martinez grimaced. “Hm,” he said, and blinked.

  “Here’s our problem,” I continued. “See the way he’s scrunched up against the wall? There just isn’t very much space there. About four feet or so. And that’s how tall the tire is, give or take.”

  “I don’t get it,” Martinez said.

  “Me, neither. We picked up that tire with a chain, just the way Jim Sisson might have. We can’t be sure, of course, but the chain marks on the tire,” and I tapped another photo, “indicate that Sisson—or someone—lifted the tire with a chain that in turn was looped around the bucket teeth of a backhoe. From what we could pry out of Grace, old Jim was working alone out back. And that tire is flat, so it’s logical to assume that’s what Jim was doing.”

  “And the chain just slipped off?”

  “So it would appear. We tried the same thing. Hoisted it up, knocked the chain loose, and let the tire drop. It hit the ground and stopped dead. No bounce. Bob stepped up to it and balanced it in place with one hand.”

  Martinez chewed his lip in thought. “He would have to be kneeling down or sitting or something to be caught like that.”

  “When we tipped the tire over, it just leaned against the wall. It didn’t slide down. Not until we forced it with the bucket. And that explains the chain marks, there.” I indicated one of the photos.

  I leaned back and folded my hands over my stomach. “Bob went out there on three separate occasions yesterday. He never was able to determine what Jim and Grace were arguing about, but apparently it was a doozie. The first call came when a neighbor who happened to be walking by heard a screaming match and the sound of shattering glass. From what we can gather, a large mirror in the living room was the target of a flying object.” I grinned. “And that was the first call. Right after lunch, they went at it again, apparently when Jim returned from a job he was doing at Bucky Randall’s place. The third time was early in the evening, just before dark.”

  “When Jim came home again,” the chief said.

  “Probably. The interesting thing is that the Sissons wouldn’t tell Bob what the argument was about. Grace still won’t. She took the kids down to Las Cruces, and the city PD there confirms that all four of them are staying with her parents. The city cops are keeping an eye on her for us until we sound the all clear.”

  Reaching across the desk, I pulled the photo of the tire hanging from the chain. “We have a video of our little test, Chief. You might want to look at that, too. You asked me what I think happened, and I’m sure of this much: That tire didn’t just drop off the chain and crush Jim Sisson to death. It had help.”

  For a long time Chief Martinez looked at the photo as if the still picture might come to life for him.

  “Marjorie always gave them troubles,” he said, and glanced up at me. “The oldest daughter.”

  “The blond bombshell,” I said. “I remember an episode or two that involved her. But she’s off in college somewhere.”

  “Over in California,” the chief said. “But they had three at home, still.”

  “Todd, Melissa, and Jennifer,” I offered.

  “And when people a
rgue,” he said, “you can bet that it’s about money or their kids. And if I had to bet, I’d find out a little more about that girl.”

  “Jennifer, you mean? Or Melissa?”

  He nodded. “Jennifer. I see her around town, you know. All the time. Her tail…wag, wag, wag.” He fluttered his hand back and forth but didn’t crack a smile.

  “And maybe the argument between Jim and Grace didn’t have a damn thing to do with Jim Sisson’s death,” I said. “There’s always that. He might have been working back there, and someone came in without Grace hearing, without one of the kids looking outside and seeing who it was. We just don’t know. They all say that they didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything.”

  Eduardo Martinez settled back in the chair and folded his hands in his lap. “What did Tomas tell you?” he asked, and I didn’t make the connection. Eduardo saw my puzzled expression and quickly added, “Deputy Pasquale.”

  “What do you mean, what did he tell me? What should he have told me?” Even before the question was out, I could feel my blood pressure starting to rise.

  “A couple days ago—maybe it was Monday, I’m not sure—his unit was parked at Portillo’s and he was talking to a group of kids. I stopped there just to pick up some things, you know. It was kinda late.”

  Portillo’s Handy-Way, the convenience store a dusty field and one street east of the high school, was a popular hangout for youngsters—or at least the store’s parking lot was. From there they could watch traffic cruising up and down Grande, an excitement that I somehow failed to appreciate.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said. “When Pasquale worked for you, Portillo’s was one of his favorite haunts, if I remember correctly.”

  “Yes, it was. And one of the kids he was talking to the other night was Jennifer Sisson. I happened to notice her. The long blond hair, you know.”

  “Huh,” I muttered, then took a deep breath. “Well, I’m sure that if she’d told him anything of significance, he would have mentioned it to me.”