Dead Weight

by Steven F Havill

  “Explain the door to me, for instance,” I said.

  Torrez nodded. “The cooler door is closed. The broken bottles are behind it. So how does the beer spill so far across the aisle if the door is closed, with only a little bullet hole through it?”

  “Unless Carter grabbed it when he fell,” Mears said. “Maybe pulled it open some, then the door closes after he tumbles away.”

  “Could be,” Torres said. “Could be.” He was gazing at the floor, and held up both hands as if he were blocking traffic. “Stay put,” he said, and brushed past me, staying close to the racks.

  “Christ, Sam,” I muttered, “what the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

  In a few moments, Torrez returned with his flashlight. The evening sunshine was still bright outside, streaming in through the advertisement-plastered store windows. The specialty stock, piled high in pyramids at the end of each row, bounced and shadowed the slanting sunlight so that most of the cavernous store, especially the rear portion where we were standing with its high fluorescent lights turned off, was gloomy.

  “Just a thought,” Torrez said. “The killer didn’t run out the front door, unless he had Carter’s keys…and he’s not likely to spend time fumbling there and risk being seen. And we found the back door ajar. That’s what makes sense to me. You’ve got to really give that door a good hard push to make sure it latches securely. So if whoever it was goes out the back way after tussling with Carter, he either goes down this same aisle, maybe even having to step over the body, or goes up front, cuts across, and then down another aisle.”

  “We don’t know if there was a struggle or not,” I said. “And we don’t know how Sam was standing when he was shot.”

  “No, but we’ve got a trajectory in the cooler there, from door to bottle. That’s a start.”

  “We’ve got to take this one step at a time now,” I said, apprehensive that the undersheriff was just eagerly charging ahead without any clear notion of what he was looking for. “We need to call Perrone over here,” I said to Mears. Trying to reach conclusions without even preliminary findings from the medical examiner always made me nervous.

  Sam’s corpse hadn’t been touched yet. I looked down at him, wondering if his keys were in his pocket, wondering if he’d had a weapon when he came down the stairs to confront the killer, wondering who the hell had pulled the trigger, wondering all kinds of things in a confusing blizzard of questions.

  Moving methodically, Bob Torrez crouched down, snapped on the flashlight, and laid it on the polished tile floor. “Some things we don’t want to have slip away,” he mused. “I don’t think we want to wait on this one.” The beam shot down the aisle toward the back wall, a parabola of white light harsh on the white-and-gray-flecked tile. He rolled the flashlight slowly across the tile, using just the tip of his index finger.

  None of us were breathing. I bent down with my hands on my knees as the light stopped, and even I could see what had to be shoe prints.

  “Bingo,” Torrez whispered. “Somebody got careless.”

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” I said.

  “We need Linda here with the camera,” he said to Mears. “And Perrone, and the whole crew. But stay off the radio. Use the phone.”

  Mears backpedaled down the aisle, following Torrez’s example by keeping his steps immediately beside the shelving…an awkward and difficult place for anyone to walk and the least likely place for us to plant our size twelves on important evidence.

  I knelt down while Torrez held the light motionless. “See ’em?”

  “I see something,” I said. “I’d hate to be the one to have to swear what they are.”

  He reached out his left hand toward the ghostly patterns. “Not much,” he said, “but something.” With his index finger, he traced the print’s outline in the air just above it. “It looks like whoever it was just sort of grazed the puddle here, enough to leave about a quarter of a print, a slice lengthwise from toe to heel. If we’re lucky, we can even measure a size.”

  “What’s it look like to you?”

  “It ain’t very big. Teenager, woman, small man.”

  “You think it’ll show up in a photo?”

  “If it can be done, Linda can do it,” Torrez said. “If we can bounce the light just right, I don’t see why not. If we can see them clearly with the flashlight, there’s no reason the film shouldn’t be able to see ’em, too.”

  I remained kneeling, gazing at the prints—or at least at the spot where Bob Torrez said they were. “Shit,” I said, and shook my head. It was more than just a comment on the current state of affairs, particularly those that included the dead Sam Carter. Torrez caught the inflection and looked sharply at me.

  “What?”

  I took a deep breath and then pushed myself to my feet. “It was no casual robbery. Not shooting him in the back of the head like that. And unless Sam’s lying right on top of it, I don’t see a weapon, either. Nothing left behind.”

  Torrez looked sideways at me. He held out a thumb. “Kenny Carter is home, under surveillance. Sam’s wife could have done it, but she’s bowling. I already verified that with a phone call after we stopped by there and saw Kenny. Grace Sisson is home, and has been ever since she came back from Las Cruces. Jennifer was locked in a motel room, waiting for her sugar daddy, here.” He gazed down at the corpse and then back at me. “So who does that leave?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wish to hell I did.” I looked down the aisle. “Tell you what. You don’t need me here. While you’re working this, I’m going to go back upstairs and turn that office upside down. I gave it a once-over, but now…” I hesitated. “And don’t forget to have Gayle, or someone else who’s good at that sort of thing, break the news to MaryBeth Carter.” I turned to go, then stopped. “And make sure you give our brilliant assistant DA a call. He should be in on this. If you don’t, you’ll be on his shit list for life. And he’s too stupid to have as an enemy.”

  I looked down at the remains of Sam Carter. As bad as I felt about not being able to save Sam Carter from his own foolishness, some ideas were beginning to coalesce in my mind that were making me feel a whole lot worse.

  Chapter Forty

  I sat down in Sam Carter’s chair and looked out across the sea of papers on his desk. If there was some kind of order there, it escaped me. The Mexican brass trash can under the left desk wing was packed to the brim, just as it had been when Torrez and I had visited not too many hours before. If possible, more stuff had been piled on top until it looked like some crazy artist’s mixed-media bouquet.

  The computer near my elbow was the same model as those in the county building, and I pushed the corner key, rewarded by the symphony of start-up chimes. Sam Carter might have been working after-hours, but it hadn’t been on the computer—unless when he’d been interrupted he’d taken time to shut down the system first.

  While I waited for all the bells and whistles to do their thing, I opened one desk drawer at a time. Guessing what might have been out of place was impossible, since nothing appeared to be in any particular place. Sam Carter had been a fan of landfill filing—the most recent junk on top.

  In the right-hand drawer, hidden under a pile of old-fashioned receipt books, was a small nickel-plated pistol, one of those cheap imported things that are supposed to make you feel safe until you actually have to use them. With the tip of my pen I lifted it out by the trigger guard. The clip was missing, and it hadn’t been fired. I put it back.

  Turning to the computer, I looked at the list of the most recent files that had been accessed and clicked on the top of the list. After a few seconds a letter to QuadState Distributors appeared on the screen blistering them about dairy product expiration dates—perhaps a subject near and dear to Sam Carter’s heart. An irate milk distributor might have shot Sam Carter, but it seemed unlikely.

  I heard voices downstairs as the party got under way. If they needed anything from me, the undersheriff knew where I was.

&
nbsp; The bulk of the files were spreadsheet types of things, either inventory or ordering files or pay and time sheets—endless rows of numbers. What correspondence there was appeared to be Sam Carter taking various people to task—usually errant distributors but also a series of letters to his insurance company about their subpar performance when he had asked for a new section of ceiling damaged by a leaking sprinkler pipe.

  I ducked out of the files and sat back, thinking. In the lower right-hand corner, the little trash-can icon bulged, and I grinned. It looked just like the real trash can under the desk. A click of the mouse brought up the trash file—unemptied for a significant number of bits, or bites, or whatever counted for trash to a computer.

  I didn’t know much about computers, but Estelle Reyes-Guzman had once shown me that the trash can could be emptied, just like its real-life counterpart. That and the off-on switch accounted for at least half of what I knew about the electronic world.

  The file names didn’t mean much, except for one titled “commissioner: you.” I selected it, and in an instant the pathetic little note aimed at smearing Tom Pasquale’s name—and the Sherriff’s Department’s reputation—appeared on the screen.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said, and sat back.

  Sam had let the computer program name the document for him but then had trashed the file, covering his tracks. Except he’d forgotten to take out the garbage, leaving it to ripen in its little electronic trash bag.

  While I waited for the printer to warm up, I retraced my tracks and pulled up the letter of reprimand Sam had written to the distributors. “Sure enough,” I muttered, and sent that, the trash file, and the trash index to the printer.

  I heard steps behind me, and Tom Mears appeared in the door. “Sir, they’re going to remove the body now.”

  “All right. Any other wounds?”

  “No, sir. Just the one in the back of the head.”

  “How about a cut on the finger?”

  “The undersheriff asked Perrone to check on that first thing,” Mears said.

  “And no weapon?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute. Is Linda here yet?”

  “Yes, sir. She and Bob are doing some measurements. Did you find anything up here?”

  The printer started its whine, and I nodded. “I think so. Give me a minute.”

  I sat silently, watching the pages ooze out of the little laser printer. I wanted the souvenirs for Tom Pasquale’s benefit as much as anything else. Now that I’d found the original home of the smear letters, Tom was going to feel a lot better. And when he compared the phrase “in five instances that we have documented” that appeared in his note with the phrase “in several instances that we have documented” that graced the letter to the dairy products distributor, he would feel confident that not only had the letters come from Sam’s computer, but Sam himself had written them.

  My hunch was that Taffy Hines was correct: Sam Carter had been too proud of his little libel scam not to show the draft to Taffy and then had let his tendency to be a slob trip up any effort he might have made to cover his tracks. He had miscalculated in thinking that folks would be more interested in the rumor itself, rather than wondering where the note might have originated.

  I turned off the printer. They’d be bundling Sam’s corpse up, and nothing I’d found pointed to his killer. Maybe he had interrupted a two-bit money snatch…That was the simplest scenario.

  Even as I was pushing myself out of Sam’s comfortable chair, I heard steps coming up to the office. Don Jaramillo appeared, face flushed. Behind him were Tom Pasquale and Frank Dayan.

  “My God,” Jaramillo said, “what kind of mess is this?”

  “Are you talking about the office here, or downstairs, or the world in general, Counselor?” I asked, and cocked my head in Dayan’s direction. “And who called you? And better yet, who the hell let you in the door?”

  “I told him that if he walked right behind me, he could come as far as here,” Deputy Pasquale said.

  “If you want me out, I’ll go,” Dayan said. “I happened to see all the cars and lights and came on down. But I’ll stay out of the way. I’m holding my front page. It’s really Sam Carter?”

  “What’s left of him, yes,” I said. “Sam’s got you on a deadline. He would have liked that.”

  “So what the hell happened?” the assistant district attorney asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Beyond what’s obvious.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “You haven’t been in the store yet?”

  “Well, yes, I was in the store. Torrez is busy mucking around trying to establish the trajectory of the bullet that broke the beer bottles.”

  “Mucking around?” I looked at Jaramillo, trying to keep the expression on my face pleasant.

  “Well…”

  I stepped up close to Jaramillo and lowered my voice. “I think in a murder investigation it’s interesting to know where the bullet might have come from and where it went, don’t you?”

  “Well, of course.” His eyes darted around the office, and then he lit on a new topic. “The money bag didn’t contain any cash…just checks and stuff. So it looks like robbery. We have no way of knowing how much they got unless Carter had the deposit slip already filled out.”

  “Did you check for that?”

  Jaramillo frowned as if the thought of him actually doing some of the fieldwork was a foreign idea. Perhaps that was just as well for us. “No,” he said. “I think Tom Mears was working that angle.”

  “That’s good,” I said, wanting to add, “Now you just stay out of the way.”

  To Dayan, I said, “You know about as much as we do, Frank. The deputies arrived after-hours to discuss certain other matters with Sam Carter and discovered his body down in the store, lying on the floor by one of the beer coolers. He’d been shot once in the back of the head. Money is apparently missing from the bank bag. Whether Sam was carrying the bag or not, we don’t know. It would appear that the shooting happened very close to closing time. Deputies will be interviewing the store employees to determine who might have been the last one to see Sam alive.”

  Dayan had a small recorder in his hand. “Any other leads? Suspects, that sort of thing?”

  I exaggerated my enunciation, eyes locked on the recorder: “In-ves-ti-ga-tion is con-tin-u-ing, Frank. Period, thirty.”

  Dayan hesitated. “And what was going on down at the motel a little bit ago? Was that a related incident? Someone said that every cop car in the county was there.”

  “That would be about three units,” I said. “No big convention. We had a tip that a minor who had been reported missing might be holed up there. She was. End of story.”

  “Who was it?”

  I grinned at Dayan and motioned him back out of the doorway so I could pass. “You know I’m not going to tell you that, Frank. The key word is minor.”

  “And was, is, there any relationship between that incident and this shooting here?”

  I stopped on the top step. “Frank, I’ll make you this promise. I’ll let you know the minute we have something significant. All right?” He was smart enough to notice that I’d ignored his last question and in so doing had supplied an answer of sorts. “The big scoop.” I thumped the railing for emphasis. “What’s your absolute deadline?”

  “I’ll hold,” he said with a shrug. “The big morning dailies aren’t going to get anything this late, so I’ve got some time.”

  I nodded. “Fair enough.” I glanced at my watch. “Hunt me down around midnight. That gives us five hours. I think we’ll have something by then.”

  “Now what direction are we going with this?” Jaramillo asked, and he pulled a slender fancy leather memo book from his suit coat pocket.

  “Give us until midnight,” I said again.

  Annoyance flashed across Jaramillo’s pudgy face. Midnight would also give me plenty of time to find Daniel Schroeder, the district attorney. H
is office was in Deming, and I considered it a cruel twist of fate that most of the time we had to deal with his assistant rather than him.

  “None of this can be published yet,” Jaramillo said to Dayan. “This is an ongoing investigation.”

  “Indeed,” I said as I let them go past me on the stairs. I started down after them, saying, “And the sheriff just gave a statement to the press. Use your own judgment, Frank.”

  Tom Pasquale closed the office door, and I turned and handed him the printer pages. As Dayan and Jaramillo continued on out of earshot, I said quietly, “You might read those and see if you see any similarities.” He took the papers, and before he had a chance to read more than a couple words I added, “Both were on Carter’s computer. He could have taken the file on a disk to any printer, I suppose, but I doubt that he was smart enough to do that.” I reached out and punched Pasquale lightly on the arm. “Did you get more than two lamps and a bookcase moved?”

  He grinned, more with relief at seeing the documents than at the question.

  “No, sir. But we’ll get to it.”

  “Other things take precedence right now, Thomas. I’m sure Carla Champlin will understand.” I pointed at the documents. “Don’t lose those. Put ’em in your briefcase. When you get a moment, start a file. I’ll write a formal deposition about where I obtained them…all that sort of thing. As soon as he gets breathing space, I’ll get Tony Abeyta to come up and make a copy of that computer’s hard drive, just to be double sure. I would think he can do that. If he can’t some computer guru can tell him how. Just in case at some later date someone wants to make an issue out of all this.”

  “Yes, sir.” He folded the papers and glanced at the doorway leading to the crime scene. “It’s all too bad, though.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Any ideas about who might have done this?”

  “Yes,” I said. Frank Dayan was headed out the back door, stepping carefully around Howard Bishop and Tony Abeyta, who were working prints. Don Jaramillo followed, apparently preferring the fresh air outside to the smell of spilled beer and blood.