by Don Travis
“Fine, but I suggest you advise Anthony Alfano of events as soon as possible.”
“Why?” Plainer asked.
“Because it’s the prudent thing to do,” I said.
His flat blue eyes signaled he’d decided not to pursue the matter. “He’s your client. You do as you see fit.”
Lonzo spoke up. “I’d like to go over things again to see if either of you can recall anything new.”
And go over them he did. With our statements side-by-side on the table in front of him, he reviewed everything line by line, asking additional questions as he went. The man was no slacker. His quiet, friendly demeanor masked a keen intelligence. He showed particular interest in the car crash in the Rio Grande Gorge.
When he brought up the bullet holes in the car, I caught Aggie’s start of surprise. I hated to spring it on him like that, but I’d had no option but to tell Plainer about it since either he or Lonzo Joe would doubtless talk to Lucinda Schwartz and wonder why I withheld the information.
At length, Lonzo straightened up in his chair and told us we were free to go, but asked us to let him know when we decided to leave the area.
IT WAS dark when we headed for the rental car in the BLM parking lot. Aggie held his tongue, but I could see he was seething inside. He let go as soon as we were in the car.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the bullet holes?”
“Because I didn’t have the lay of the land at the time I found out about them. I’d just met you, remember? You were getting over the trauma of believing your brother had died in the gorge, and I didn’t want to raise your fears again. If I’d found anything significant about those holes, I would have told you.”
“Does Papa know?”
“No. And I’m not going to tell him either. Not until we know more.”
Aggie sighed heavily. “All right.”
“Are we okay?” We were going to be joined at the hip for the immediate future, and things would be stressful enough without bad blood between us.
“Is there anything else you’re hiding?”
I shook my head. “I don’t hold out on the law, and you heard my statement. There’s nothing else.”
“Yeah, we’re okay.”
The words were right, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction behind them. Even so, it was the best I could hope for at the moment.
“What happens next?” he asked.
“They’ll put out a bulletin on Lando, and we’ll be marginalized. Lonzo may decide to keep us in the loop or not. He seems like a decent guy. Thank God, Plainer’s not in charge of the investigation. Dix might be good for some information. At least she might give us the results of the OMI’s autopsy when it’s available. In the meantime, we try to find where the Porsche was abandoned. Right now let’s go back to the motel. We haven’t eaten anything since breakfast except some power bars.”
“I couldn’t keep anything down,” Aggie replied, running a hand over his stomach.
“Then get some sleep.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“Take something. You need to keep up your strength.”
When we got back to the motel, we spoke to Alfano over the speakerphone on my cell, laying out the whole thing in minute detail, except for the bullet holes in the Porsche. He remained gruff but calm. The calculating business mind at work, probably. Once all of his questions were out of the way, there wasn’t much else to say, so we closed the conversation.
I looked at Aggie’s drawn, haggard features. “Sure you don’t want something to eat?” He shook his head. “Get some rest. We need to start moving early in the morning.”
After Aggie returned to his room, I sat on the bed to make two calls. First I dialed Artie Hartshorn in Santa Fe—at home again, which would endear me further—and asked him to tackle Harvey Schwartz and get him to loosen Joe Cruz’s muzzle.
The second call was to the Taos Police Department. While the dispatcher ran down Delfino for me, I made a quick trip to the all-night service station nearby and picked up a desiccated, prefabricated ham and cheese sandwich. When he called back a few minutes later, Delfino heard me out, grunted a couple of times in appropriate places, and agreed to contact the Cruz family to see if he could develop any more information on the theft of the Porsche.
Then I took a long, soaking shower, put on my robe, and plugged in my charging unit. The cell phone battery was getting low, and I wanted this conversation to be long and slow. Paul answered our home phone.
“Hi, guy.” My exhaustion melted like magic at the sound of his voice.
“I was beginning to think you forgot all about me.”
“Only for about ten minutes at a time. Gets in the way of my sleuthing sometimes.”
He snorted. “Yeah, I’ll bet.”
“You keeping busy?”
“Between work and school, what do you think?”
“Not getting in any line dancing with some cute little cowgirl at the C&W?”
The C&W Palace was a big barn—no, that’s an understatement, a massive barn—where cowboys and would-be cowboys boot-stomped until the early hours of the morning. Paul was a good dancer and looked sexy as hell in the tight denims, colored T-shirts, and leather half vests he habitually wore with snakeskin boots and a curled-brim Stetson. As easy as we both were with our sexual identity, neither of us frequented gay bars. Since dancing together in a straight place like the C&W would get us tossed out on our ear, Paul indulged his passion by escorting one of several coeds from school. That caused some heartburn until I figured he simply saw them as acceptable dancing partners.
“Saturday night they had a good band,” he said, “and I enjoyed myself. Would have sooner spent it with you.”
“That’s the risk you run hooking up with a PI. Fortunately I don’t work out of town often.”
“So long as I’ve got this beat-up ex-cop who can put up with me, I’ll handle his eccentricities okay. Which reminds me, are you behaving yourself?”
“Yeah, but temptation reared its ugly head the other day.”
“How’s that?”
So I told him about Jazz but downplayed the kid’s spectacular looks—didn’t hide them, just didn’t dwell on what a stunner he was. When I finished, there was a decided pause.
“So you took him back to your motel room to question him?”
“True. We needed privacy to question him.”
“We?”
“Aggie Alfano. I told you about him, remember?”
“I remember.” He paused. “Hurry up and come home, Vince. Please.” Since the rest of the world called me by my initials, he’d settled on Vince as his pet name.
“As fast as I can, but the San Juan County Sheriff’s got a good man on the job here. I need to lend him a hand, if I can.”
“The sheriff?” Worry edged his voice.
I started to explain, but he cut me off.
“You aren’t in any trouble with them, are you? The law, I mean.”
“No. In fact, they might help me find the Alfano kid. Get me home sooner.”
“Then go, San Juan County,” he said.
When I finally hung up, I missed him more than before. It shouldn’t work that way, but it did—at least for me. I went to bed, trying to ignore the empty feeling in my chest. That didn’t work, so I pretended I was a teenager again and masturbated.
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Chapter 14
THE NEXT morning I learned Artie Hartshorn ran into a brick wall with Harvey Schwartz, the attorney for the Cruz family, but Delfino fared a little better. The Taos cop had approached Mateo Cruz as a shaman instead of a policeman. The dead boys’ father either had Indian blood in his veins or considered a Taos medicine man a worthy curandero. Even so, all Delfino could contribute was that the two Cruz boys had intended to look up a young lady by the name of Maria Martinez on their excursion to Farmington. As a matter of fact, she was the reason for the trip.
“That doesn’t help us fin
d where the Porsche was stolen,” Aggie said as we roared out of the Trail’s End parking lot later.
“No, it doesn’t. Let’s see if Dix Lee can narrow things down a little.”
Dix was out on a call. While we waited for her, Lonzo Joe walked out of the crime lab and moseyed over to say hello.
“Sorry about your brother’s friend, Aggie. Any news of him… your brother?”
“No. We talked to my father last night and confirmed there hasn’t been a ransom demand. He’s heard nothing. But we’re hopeful.”
“What are you guys up to, anyway?”
“Thought Dix might help us find where Lando’s Porsche was stolen.”
“If you learn anything, you let me know, okay?” He glanced up, looking past us. “Here’s Dix now.”
Dixie Lee walked like a woman in sensible shoes—her uniform oxfords—but she looked totally feminine as she slid behind her desk and did that unconscious blond tress-curling thing with the forefinger of her left hand. “Thought I might see you boys again.”
“Can’t keep away. Lonzo wants us to stay in town for the moment, so might as well have the pleasure of some good company.”
She laughed. “Can it, Vinson. I checked. You’re a three-dollar bill, and he’s married.”
“True. I’m found out.”
“Turned out is more like it, but from what I hear, you’ve never been in the closet. So what is it you really want?”
“Have either of you heard the results of the autopsy?”
“I don’t think it’s finished yet,” Lonzo said, “but the doc thinks the guy was strangled.”
“How?”
“With a belt, rope, sash—something like that.”
“Any guess as to when?”
“Somewhere around two weeks.”
I thought for a second. “I can account for the two men’s movements up through Monday the thirteenth. They were at Salmon Ruins that day. Lando and Dana got in a hassle over Jazz or something that evening, but before their spat they were talking about going to Bisti. My guess is they went the fourteenth or fifteenth. And Dana never left there.”
Dix consulted her desk calendar. “So on a Tuesday or Wednesday, huh?”
“My best guess.”
“If they were going to Bisti together, that makes it look bad for the Alfano kid.” She cast an eye toward Aggie.
“Yeah, that makes him a logical suspect,” I acknowledged. “Neither of us believe he killed Dana, but it would look that way to some.”
Dix tipped her head in Lonzo’s direction. “Like to the San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, for instance. He put out a bulletin on the kid.”
“And that’s good,” I said. “We need to find Lando to make sure he’s safe, and I think you can help.” I told the two of them about the Cruz brothers hitching out here to visit Maria Martinez.
Dix snorted. “You don’t happen to know which of the hundred or so Maria Martinezes in the county, do you?”
“No, but I suspect she lives south of town. Probably somewhere in the vicinity of the Sidewinder.”
“That doesn’t help much.”
“The car was supposedly parked on a dirt or gravel road in a rural area near the city limits.” I consulted my notes. “There was a big cottonwood and a row of what was probably honeysuckle draped over a fence.”
“This is where three rivers come together. There are cottonwoods all along the riverbeds.”
“Yeah, I hear you. There was a white horse in a pasture across the road from the honeysuckle. The source said it was a stallion, but I’m not too sure of that part.”
“All I can do is point you in a likely direction,” Dix said. “But I don’t see how finding where the car was abandoned helps you.”
“Maybe it won’t, but it’s better than sitting around waiting.”
“Right,” Dix said. “Okay, you take the highway south to the Sidewinder. Just before you reach the bar, the country turns rural. The landscape opens up on the west side of the highway, so chances are the road you’re looking for is somewhere to the left. East of the highway has a good bit of tree cover. Not the real big ones like down on the riverbanks, but at least they’re trees.”
She turned to Lonzo. “What’s the name of that Martinez kid on the south side that’s always giving us trouble? You remember, the one you had a couple of run-ins with while you were still with FPD. Phillip, Peter… one of those saints.”
“Oh, yeah. Pete Martinez. The one they call Petey.”
“He have a sister named Maria?”
Lonzo chuckled. “If there are girls in the family, odds are one of them’s named Maria. And I know for a fact there’s girls in that family.”
“They have any connection to Taos?” I asked.
“Yeah, moved here from Taos. The area, anyway. One of those little towns nearby.”
“El Segundo, maybe?”
“That’s it. El Segundo.”
I turned to Aggie. “We found our Maria.” I looked at Lonzo Joe. “You have a problem with us poking around a little?”
“Be my guest,” he said.
THE MATTHEW Martinez home was clapboard with fresh white paint, well-kept grounds, and what appeared to be brand-new asbestos shingles on a pitched roof. The house was an old-fashioned double shotgun structure with a covered walkway between the two halves. That presented a problem in figuring out which of the two front doors was for receiving guests. Reasoning that people gravitate to the kitchen, I opted for the one cluttered with bikes and trikes.
I suspected the kid who answered our knock was Petey. Lonzo had said the guy didn’t have a serious rap sheet—yet. Some fights, a couple of shoplifting complaints that weren’t pursued, and a drunk and disorderly. Just enough trouble to bring him to the department’s attention.
A slender, five-foot-seven male with wide, bare shoulders thrusting out of a white, sleeveless undershirt stared at us from behind a closed screen door. He had a lean, dark, sulky appearance and was probably around seventeen.
“Yeah?”
“Is Maria home?” I asked.
“Who wants to know?”
“Me, for one.” I threw a thumb over my shoulder. “And him for another. Now stop screwing around and answer the question.” I pulled the screen door open, startling him. Manners weren’t going to get us anywhere with someone nursing an attitude. Brass might not either, but it was worth a try.
The kid’s eyes went flat, and I spoke quickly. “Look, you can let us talk to her about a visit she had from some Taos friends a few weeks back, or we can put in a call for Sergeant Dix Lee down at FPD and she can do the asking. I only have questions for Maria, but Dix and County Sheriff’s Detective Lonzo Joe might have some for somebody named Petey.”
Stubbornness and hostility wrestled with self-preservation on his smooth brown features. Self-preservation won. “The Cruz brothers?” I nodded, and he shouted back into the house. “Maria, coupla cops wanna talk to you about your boyfriend.”
“Just to keep things straight,” I said, “we aren’t cops. I’m a private investigator working for this man’s family. We’re looking for his missing brother.”
“Don’t know nothing about no brother.”
“No, but Martin Cruz did. He died in the missing man’s car.”
Thick black eyebrows shot up. “Marty’s dead?”
“He and his brother Jaime went over the side of the Taos Gorge in a car. Joe managed to get out before it took flight.”
“No shit! Jaime too?” He yelled for Maria again. “Was it that bitchin’ orange Porsche?”
I nodded and dug an elbow into Aggie’s side as he started to say something.
“Man, that was some ride. Told him it was trouble. Guess it was. The Big Trouble.” The kid crossed himself quickly.
A female version of Petey appeared behind him. The effect was startling, like two identical heads on one body. Same black hair, full but not long. Similar jeans and white cotton shirt, except she filled hers out differently when she elbo
wed her brother aside. Twins.
“What is it?” she asked. “Who are you?”
“Hey, sis, Marty’s dead. Muerto. Jaime too.”
“What are you talking about?”
Aggie and I didn’t exist for those two at the moment. Brother and sister conducted their own conversation. “Drove off a cliff and ended up in the Rio Grande.”
“In that car? I told you that was bad business. I warned you to leave it alone.”
“Excuse me, miss,” I interrupted. “That’s what we want to talk to you about. That car belonged to this man’s missing brother. We need to know where and how it was found.”
The girl grimaced and indicated her brother. “Ask him.”
“It was just there, man. Sitting right out there on Halmstead Road. Been there two days.”
“Can you show us where? It’s important.”
“Sure, I guess so.”
Taking me by surprise, he barged through the door, shot down the drive, and turned east on the road running in front of his place. Petey Martinez was hyper; he walked with everything he had, reminding me of a lizard scurrying over rocks.
A quarter-mile walk brought us to a setting almost exactly as described by Lucinda Schwartz. Heavy tendrils of honeysuckle—you could still catch the scent—almost obscured a wire fence. Overhead, the branches of an old cottonwood in a decades-long process of dying threw a thin shadow across a convenient turnout that was probably used by local kids as a make-out spot. A pasture opened up on the other side of the road. In the distance a white horse stood over a water trough watching us carefully.
Petey Martinez stopped and turned. “Right here. It was parked right here.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“I dunno. At least a couple of days. When Marty and his brother showed up out of the blue, I took them to see it. They didn’t leave until the next day, so that was at least two days.”
“You didn’t notice it before that?”
“Well, yeah. I seen it parked here. How else would I know to show Cruz?”
“No, I mean did you see someone drive it in. Did you see a stranger on the road—afoot or in a car?”
