“Yes, sir.”
I nodded. “Good man.”
Together we walked up the narrow sidewalk between the displays of various cacti. Carter’s house didn’t try to look Southwestern, didn’t try to complement the cacti. The place would have looked at home on a side street in Columbus, Ohio. The white clapboard siding was evidently vinyl, and the finish was trying hard not to turn to powder under the blast furnace of the New Mexico sun.
I touched the doorbell but didn’t hear anything and after a couple of seconds rapped on the door frame. In a moment the door opened and MaryBeth Carter peered out. She recognized me and smiled. “Well,” she said. “Good morning. You gents are up bright and early.” She turned on the porch light to give a boost to the slow dawn.
“Early, anyway,” I said.
Sam Carter’s wife was short and plump, the perfect picture of someone’s favorite aunt or even grandmother. She wore a fluffy robe cinched tightly around her middle, with a pair of equally fluffy slippers. But my attention was drawn to her eyeglasses, a spectacularly awful design with molded curlicues and flowers in the outer corners where the bows joined the frames. They would have looked wonderful at a pet show back in 1956.
“We need to chat with Sam, MaryBeth,” I said. “We’ll just be a minute, if he’s home.”
“I think he just stepped into the shower,” she said.
“We’ll wait out here,” I replied.
“Oh, don’t be silly. Come on in.”
“This is fine, ma’am,” I said. “If you’d just tell him we’re here.”
She turned away, and I said quietly to Tom, “Have you ever been able to climb leisurely out of a shower when someone’s waiting at the door?”
Pasquale grinned, no doubt thinking that, hell, it might be fun to piss off the chairman of the county commission as long as it was the old sheriff’s neck that was on the block, not his.
In due course, Sam Carter appeared, hair wet and curling away from the bald spot that he took pains to cover. He wore a white terry-cloth robe, was barefoot, and had a towel in hand. He draped the towel around his neck as he swung open the door.
“Christ, what’s going on?” he asked. “Is the town burning down or what?”
“Nothing like that,” I said. “I had a couple of questions that I’d like to shoot your way, and from the way the day’s shaping up, I thought this might be my best chance.”
“Christ, it’s five-thirty in the morning, for God’s sakes.” His tone softened a bit. “And questions about what?” he asked. If he’d had the chance to do it all over again, he might have taken pains to make his tone a little less guarded.
I moved closer to the light and opened the folder. “These letters still puzzle me, Sam.”
“Letters?” He shot a glance sideways at Tom Pasquale but then concentrated his frown at me.
“Yes. Your copy of the letter about Deputy Pasquale, here, and the similar ones received by Dr. Gray, Leona Spears, Frank Dayan, and I assume other folks we haven’t heard from yet.”
“What about it? What did you find out?”
“Well, for one thing, we’re going to get back a pretty comprehensive fingerprint analysis from the state crime lab. They’re awfully good at what they do.” I smiled helpfully. “That ought to come sometime today. If we’re lucky, someone might have been just a tad careless.”
“All right. But I’m sure you didn’t come over here at five-thirty to tell me that.”
“No, actually, I didn’t.” I leafed through the letters as if I were reading them, which in that dim light would have been a real trick. “You told me earlier that you received yours in the mail, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that in itself is interesting, since of the folks who have brought this letter to my attention, you’re the only one whose copy was mailed.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, Sam. But you also told me that you didn’t show the letter to anyone at the time. I think the expression you used, if I remember correctly, was something like, ‘If this got out, it’d be a real mess,’ or words to that effect. Do you remember saying that?”
“Well, I guess so. I don’t remember everything I say in the course of a busy day.”
“Few of us do, I suppose,” I said. “But in this case, you made a considerable effort to find me and talk with me in private, as I recall.”
Carter lifted the towel and dabbed at his left ear and again shot a glance at the silent figure of Thomas Pasquale. “What’s your point?” Carter asked, and he didn’t bother trying to soften the question.
“My point, Sam, is that you specifically told me that you didn’t show the letter to anyone else.”
“And I didn’t,” he said, then retreated a bit and tacked on, “not that I recall, anyway.”
“Do you recall showing the letter to Taffy Hines?”
“Taffy Hines?”
“Yes.”
His pause was just a shade too long, a pause of calculation rather than simple recollection. “I…I might have, now that you mention it.”
“So, despite your concern, the first person you showed the letter to was not me, but your head cashier. A woman who spends her day talking with half the town.”
“Now wait a minute,” Carter flared, and he grabbed the ends of his robe belt and jerked them tight. “I did show it to her, yes I remember that now. But I told her to keep quiet about it until I talked to you. Did she tell you that, too, the town blabbermouth?”
“Yes, she told me that. She also told me that her first reaction was to think that you’d written it.”
“Now wait a minute,” he blustered, and he took a step toward me, which by coincidence happened to be a step away from Tom Pasquale.
Before Sam could splutter out anything else, I said, “I didn’t come here to upset you, or make waves. What I really need is the envelope, Sam. I understand that Taffy often opens the mail for the store, but that she doesn’t remember seeing anything that might be a match. Since there might be prints on the envelope, it’s important. Or a postmark. Any number of things.”
“I don’t think I still have the envelope,” Carter said. “And now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely certain it came in the mail. With the mail, maybe. I’m just not sure.”
“Why wouldn’t you keep it?” I asked. “Something as important as that? Wouldn’t you be curious about the return address, if there was one, or the postmark?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t save it. I guess I should have. I…I didn’t think. And you didn’t ask me for it.” He stopped abruptly.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “You said you’d look for it, as I recall.”
“And I didn’t,” Carter said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only been a couple of days. Is there a possibility that it’s still in the trash can in your office?”
He shook his head without hesitation. “No, no. That’s emptied as a matter of course every day.”
“When’s the Dumpster pickup? That’s not until this afternoon, is it? This is Thursday?” I turned to Pasquale. “We can put a couple of deputies on that this morning. Turn the damn thing upside down. If the letter’s there, it’ll turn up.”
“I just don’t understand,” Carter snapped. “Hines holds a king-sized grudge against me, and I can understand why she’d say just about anything, but you sound as if you think I wrote the damn note, too. Is that what you both think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “What I’m doing is trying my best to clear up the discrepancies.”
“Let me tell you what’s most likely, Sheriff. And I don’t say this out of spite. I just don’t trust the woman—”
“What woman is that? Taffy?”
“No. Leona Spears. This is just the sort of thing that Leona Spears is good at. You see all the letters to the editors that she writes? God’s sakes, the woman has an answer for everything. This is just the sort of thing that Miss Spears would
do.” He spit out the Miss as if the one word included everything anyone needed to know about Leona Spears’s private life and predilections.
I smiled. “Maybe so, Sam. Maybe so. Whoever wrote the letter to Miss Spears agrees with you, that’s for sure.”
He didn’t ask what I meant but nodded vigorously. “Well, you just check it out,” he said testily. He glanced at his wrist where a watch should have been and settled for rubbing the spot with the towel.
“We won’t take any more of your time, Sam. I just wanted to check and get some clarification, that’s all. We’ll get the print analysis today and, with any luck, the analysis of the paper and the machine that did the printing. Maybe something will show up.”
Sam Carter’s reaction didn’t tell me if he thought that was a good idea or a world-class waste of time.
We made our way back to the vehicles, and I turned to Pasquale. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s a lying son of a bitch.”
“Well, maybe.”
“I think it’s interesting that he never bothered to ask me if I did what that letter says I did.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “That’s because in an election year, what actually happened isn’t too important to folks like Sam Carter. Give him a little time, and best of all maybe an audience, and you’d be surprised how tough Sam Carter can be.”
“Five minutes alone with him might be the answer,” Pasquale muttered.
“I don’t think so, Thomas. Just be patient.” That was easily said, of course. But I knew perfectly well that patience wasn’t young Thomas Pasquale’s strong suit.
Chapter Twenty-six
The state’s regional crime lab in Las Cruces was efficient and dedicated, but they couldn’t create what didn’t exist.
On the original letters, the fingerprints were easy to match. The addressee’s prints were clear in each case, and in one instance where I’d been careless with Dr. Gray’s copy, one of my own thumbs had left a record. Sam Carter’s letter bore several prints, both his and an unidentified second party’s.
Taffy Hines had been true to her word. She stopped by the Sheriff’s Department on her way to work and allowed Brent Sutherland to lift a set of prints. He managed the task in the sort of self-conscious, clumsy way that rookies do until they’ve processed about a hundred sets. I looked at the card when he’d finished, pretended that I could see all the little swirls, gigs, and arches, and nodded approval.
Deputy Mears was our resident fingerprint expert, and he’d do a formal comparison when he came in at 4:00. But my eyes were good enough to convince me that the unidentified prints were Taffy’s. That made perfect sense and supported her contention that she’d handled the letter when it was offered to her by Sam Carter.
Other than that, nothing. Whoever had sent the letters, or dropped them off, had been careful…very careful. And that in itself answered some questions. Whoever had sent the sorry little notes had been just as concerned that he or she not be caught as with having the notes read by all the right people.
Even before the morning sun had a chance to heat up the garbage and flies in the alley behind Carter’s Family SuperMarket, Deputies Richard Johnson and Sutherland, who claimed to have nothing better to do once Gayle Sedillos took day dispatch, were sifting methodically through the dumpster, looking for a plain, white number-10 envelope.
I was willing to bet a month’s pay that no postmarked envelope existed. What was the point, I reasoned, in hand-delivering all but Sam Carter’s copy, trusting only that one to the postal service? All of the notes had arrived at their destinations in plain white envelopes, unsealed, unstamped, unpostmarked. I had no reason to suspect that Sam’s would be different.
The garbage excavation was probably a massive waste of time, considering the other drains on our resources at that moment. But I had my reasons. Bob Torrez was heading the investigation into the death of Jim Sisson, and when he needed me to do something specific for him, he’d say so.
Much of my interest in the Pasquale notes, I cheerfully admitted, was ego. I wasn’t about to let someone smear a department of which I was justifiably proud during the final months of my tenure—and I wasn’t about to let someone ruin the career of a young man who’d done nothing wrong, beyond having his name come to mind.
If we found the plain envelope, with no evidence of its having been mailed, I knew damn well what Sam Carter would say:
“Sorry, boys. My mistake. I guess it wasn’t mailed, after all. But it came into my office with the mail, heh, heh, so I guess that’s what I meant.”
And if we found nothing at all? “Well, gosh, boys, I know it was there. You must have just missed it.” At least the three of us provided some comic relief for folks driving to work who glanced toward the rear of the supermarket and saw me standing beside the dumpster, directing the efforts of the two dump rats inside.
We were lucky—or rather the deputies were lucky, since they were the ones who climbed inside to smell the roses. The dumpsters held primarily commercial waste—crushed boxes and the like, with a few little soggy, smelly, rotting surprises.
By 9:15, we’d—they’d—reached the bottom of all three units. Sam Carter had the grace not to come outside to say, “Well, you must have just missed it.”
Brent was exploring one last corner when the undersheriff’s patrol car idled to a stop beside mine. Bob Torrez got out, a slow grin spreading across his face. “Now, this is interesting,” he said, and I shrugged.
“You never know where your next meal comes from, Robert,” I said.
“Oh, yes, I do,” he said, and he didn’t have to elaborate. I knew that Gayle Torrez could manufacture her own brand of magic in the kitchen, and I was surprised that the undersheriff’s waistline hadn’t started to spread after even a short period of marital bliss.
“Any luck?” Bob added.
“No.”
“Do you think Sam Carter is lying?”
“Yes.”
“Any ideas why?”
“Other than the obvious political ones, no. Except it might just be in his nature. I think he’s embarrassed that he got caught being indiscreet.”
Torrez leaned against the front fender of his car and folded his arms across his chest. “Speaking of being indiscreet, I’ve got a couple of things that I need to run by you, when you have a chance.”
I grinned at him and stepped away from the dumpster, trying without success to avoid the greasy chocolate puddle strategically placed in front of it. I swore and stamped some of the muck off my shoes.
“What did you find out?”
He turned and reached inside the car for one of his black vinyl notepads. “First of all, I swung by Vicente Garcia’s, just on the off-chance that he might talk to me, and on the off-chance that the Sissons had some other insurance with State Mutual besides their auto policies.”
“Why shouldn’t Garcia talk to you?” I chuckled. “He’s your cousin.”
“Well, but professional ethics, you know. Vicente did ask me if I was going to get a court order if he didn’t answer my questions, and I told him that either I would or the district attorney would. I told him I’d go get one right then, if it’d make him feel better. I guess that was good enough for him. Besides, it turns out it might be in his company’s best interests.”
“Let me guess,” I said, half-turned to watch Brent Sutherland vault out of the dumpster. “There’s some life insurance.”
“Yep. State Mutual holds the Sissons’ auto, home, business, and life. The whole package.”
“How much life insurance?”
“Not all that big a deal. One hundred thousand is the limit on either spouse.” He flipped open the notebook and scanned his figures. “No double indemnity or anything fancy like that.”
“But still a nice, round figure,” I said. “How old is the policy?”
“They took it out eight years ago.”
I frowned. “Huh. Nothing recent, then.”
“No, sir. They took
it out four years after their youngest kid was born. Vicente Garcia said that the kid needed some expensive corrective orthopedic surgery on one leg, and Jim and Grace took out the policy then, in case something should happen to one or both of them. The kid’s needs would be provided for, no matter what.”
“Smart planning,” I said. “If either of them dies, the surviving spouse gets a hundred grand. They had health insurance?”
“Yes, but not with State Mutual. It’s that HMO that the chamber of commerce sponsors.”
“Makes sense. So they were well insured, from A to Z. Someone knew how to plan. Grace and the kids are provided for…at least for the near future. A hundred thousand is no fortune, but it’ll stretch quite a ways, if you do it carefully.”
“Right. Unless there’s a crime involved. Vicente said his company is holding off until we’re finished with our investigation. If it’s murder, then Grace’s only recourse is a civil action against the killer’s estate.”
I nodded. “Interesting. What else?”
Before he could answer, Sutherland and Johnson appeared at my elbow after heaving the last of the boxes back into the dumpsters. I held up my hands helplessly. “Thanks, gentlemen. Sorry it didn’t pay off.”
With exquisite timing, the solid back door of the supermarket opened as the two deputies were driving off in Johnson’s patrol car. Sam Carter raised a finger in salute and minced around the puddles toward Torrez and me.
“So,” he said, “nothing?” He managed to sound disappointed.
“Nothing, Sam. But, as I said before, no big deal. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
“Well, if it turns up…” he said, and let the thought drift off.
“Robert, how are you?” He stretched out his hand, and Torrez gave it a brief, polite pump, letting a nod suffice as an answer.
“Is Kenny still living at home?” the undersheriff asked, and the question was such an abrupt change of subject that for a few heartbeats Sam Carter went blank.
“Kenneth?”
“Yes. Your son.”
The grocer’s mental gears meshed and he nodded. “Oh, yeah. Well…I should say most of the time. When there’s laundry for his mother to do, and when he gets hungry.” Carter smiled lamely. “You know how they are. Why? I mean, why do you ask?”
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