Bag Limit (11 page)
Betty Contreras wasn’t the only resident of Regal with food for funerals on her mind. As I walked down the narrow lane that skirted first one home and then another, various aromas wafted out to greet me. It was going to be a hell of a feed.
In another two hundred yards, the lane curved around an old adobe whose back wall bulged out to leave a gaping cavern under the eaves. A hole in the roofing had allowed the infrequent rainwater to reach the earthen bricks. The windows were gone, with just a few cross sticks remaining, broken askew by swiftly pitched rocks and bleached gray by the weather. Gravity had started the war, but the old house was tough.
I had wandered through Regal for the first time nearly thirty years before, and the house was vacant then, too. Sometime in the next decade, the back wall would crumble, leaving the guts of the place yawning open and vulnerable. Gradually, with the remaining walls dissolving and tumbling bit by bit, the structure would settle into a collection of rusted roofing metal, corroded nails, and the last of the adobe nothing more than a pile of clay and gravel.
Sosimo Baca had been no genius of home maintenance. But any living presence, no matter how neglectful, helped a house survive the seasons. With Sosimo and his son gone and the two remaining children wafted off to Lordsburg, the process of collapse had started. I wondered how long it would be before the first rock whistled through one of the windows at what eventually would be known as “the old Baca place.”
I couldn’t picture Josie Baca and her new boyfriend returning to Regal. The property would be tied up in probate court for so long that by the time Josie was free to sell it, no one would want the place. Maybe in fifteen or twenty years, one of the Baca girls would convince her husband to bring in a bulldozer to level the lot. Then the process could start all over again.
I ambled along with my hands thrust deep in my pockets, ruminating about stuff like that…an old man walking through an old village in the heart of November with a hard breeze at his back. It was positively poetic. Enough to make me want to seek out a gnarled old walking stick and take up pipe smoking.
A few steps on the hard, impersonal asphalt highway that led toward the church’s driveway and, farther on, the international border crossing were enough to break the mood. The wind was chilly, and I quickened my step. I’d managed about fifty yards along the left shoulder when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. It slowed even as I turned around.
Cliff Larson stopped his Ford and regarded me with a raised eyebrow. “Headin’ for Mexico?” He glanced in the rearview mirror and without bothering to pull off the highway popped the gear lever into neutral. At the same time, he dug out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. I walked across the oncoming lane and rested a hand on the top of the truck.
“My morning constitutional,” I said.
“Oh, sure.” He grinned and looked off into the distance, his face a weather-beaten mass of lines and wrinkles. Larson was one of those men who had never known the burden of a single ounce of extra fat. He was as rail thin now, at fifty-seven, as he’d been at sixteen. How his system managed, I didn’t know. It wasn’t from hard work. Lifting the cigarette was about the extent of any exercise I’d ever seen Cliff Larson do.
I had always thought that Cliff took a quiet, private delight in sounding like an uneducated hayseed, despite the bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry and a master’s in range management from the state university in Las Cruces. He’d made more than one impressive arrest by simply sounding stupid at the right time and place, digesting information that others assumed was just passing in one big ear and out the other.
He inhaled deeply and coughed out a blue stream of smoke. “So…has Bobby about figured out which one of his relatives did what to who?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It looks like Sosimo had a heart attack.”
Larson looked askance at me. “Quite the party of cops for just a heart attack.”
“Well, there are a few things that don’t quite add up. We want to be sure.”
“Such as?” He shifted his gaze to the wing mirror and we watched a large white and blue RV approach. “Suppose I ought to get out of the road,” he said.
“You’re all right,” I said, and watched the vehicle roll past in the passing lane, two sets of eyes staring at us. “For one thing, there are signs of a struggle in the kitchen.”
“That happens sometimes. He mighta kinda thrashed around some. They do that now and again.”
“Uh-huh, they do. But not quite like that. And I’d think that maybe he’d thrash his way toward the telephone, or maybe a neighbor’s. The glass in the back door was broken outward, then that door was opened, and the screen door broken. Somebody or something hit it so hard it was torn off a hinge.”
“Huh.”
“Of course, the door was in such rotten shape it wouldn’t have taken much.”
“No blood?”
“No. But Torrez is being careful. We might get lucky and turn a good set of prints, or some tissue, or something like that.”
“Is this tied in some way with last night? With the kid that got himself killed.?”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. We’ve got some gray areas there, too. Some things that don’t add up.”
“Well, let’s us do some addin’, Sheriff, if you’ve got the time. Come around and climb in.”
“Before I get sidetracked, I need to talk with Emilio Contreras for just a minute. He’s up at the church.” I nodded toward the driveway.
“Drivin’s faster than walkin’.”
La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora had been built on a knoll just east of the highway, positioned so that its buttressed, windowless back wall faced Mexico. A perfectly painted sign beside the entrance steps, dark blue letters against a white background, read simply:
La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora
1826
The graveled parking lot was empty. Larson let the pickup roll right up to the wide front steps. “It don’t look like anybody’s here.”
“His wife says that Emilio walks down from the house,” I said. “Every day.”
Without comment on what he must have regarded as Emilio Contreras’ daily monumental waste of energy, Larson switched off the truck. “Wetback hotel,” he said, and coughed a laugh. “I’ll wait for you.”
“You’re welcome to come in,” I said. “I’m not going in for confession or anything.”
The livestock inspector laughed again. “I don’t think so.” He reached down and turned up the volume on the police radio. “I’ll keep track of your boys for you.”
“I’ll be just a minute,” I said, and got out of the truck. The carved wooden door of the church faced north and swung on enormous iron strap hinges, with a simple thumb latch for security. I pushed it open and went inside.
Little had changed since the first finishing coat of whitewash had been slathered on the walls in 1826. Light poured in through five tall, narrow windows on each side. The ripples in the colored glass and the dark patina on the leading would make an antiques dealer’s pulse pound.
Emilio Contreras was working near the third window on the west side, and he didn’t look up as I approached.
“Hello,” he said as I came up to him. A small scraper and a patch of sandpaper rested on the wide sill. He held a pint can of paint in one hand, and what looked like an artist’s brush in the other. With his mouth held just so, he was running a bead of white paint down the lower mullion, the loaded brush bristles following the seam between glass and wood with precision.
I watched in silence until he finished the stroke and lifted the brush.
“If I tried that, you’d have a white window,” I said. “How are you doing, Emilio?” Resting against the nearest pew was his cane—one of those modern aluminum things with four feet spread wide, a sort of one-handed mini-walker.
“I’m doing okay,” he said, sounding surprised. “How about you?”
“I’ve been better,” I said, and he shot me a quick glance as he straightened away from the window. I’d once heard that Emilio was twenty years older than his wife. I knew Betty was pushing sixty, but in the shadows of the church, I wouldn’t have guessed that Emilio was much older than that. Barely five feet tall and slight, he moved with a dancer’s grace unless the maneuver required use of his left leg.
“I need to ask you about this morning, Emilio. I’m particularly interested in the hour between seven and eight—what you might have seen or heard.”
“You mean over at Sosimo’s?” He pointed with the handle of the small brush. “What a shame, eh.”
“Yes.”
He regarded the window for a long time, can of paint in one hand, brush in the other. “I walked over here at seven,” he said judiciously, and turned to look at me. “And there were a lot of people over there, even then. That’s unusual.” He grinned. “Sosimo doesn’t get up so early.” He set the open can of paint carefully on the windowsill, and rested the brush across the top.
“But you didn’t go over?”
“No, I didn’t go over. Clorinda was there.” He flashed a quick smile. “Her big old barge was parked out front. The last thing I needed was to be corralled by that woman.” He shuffled to the pew and lowered himself to the seat, stretching his leg out with a grunt. “She always wants me to fix something or other.” He frowned suddenly. “We heard about the boy. That was too bad, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. When you walked over here this morning, was there any traffic?”
“No, not then. Maybe later, when Sosimo was walking up the hill.” He gestured toward Regal Pass to the north.
“You saw him walking then? What time was that?”
“Maybe seven-thirty, maybe quarter to eight.” He indicated the plastic two-and-a-half-gallon water container on the floor, and the coffee can. “I went outside to clean this brush. It gets loaded, you know, and the paint starts to dry. That makes it hard. So I went outside to clean it and take a breather.” He grinned again. “I like to see the village waking up. And Sosimo, he’s walking up the road.”
“You’re positive that it was him?”
“Oh, sure.” He didn’t explain why, at two hundred yards or better, in oblique morning light shaded by the mountain’s bulk, he could recognize Sosimo Baca from the back.
“And he just walked up the hill?”
“As far as I know. I came back in here. I got work to do.”
“You mentioned traffic. Was it just the usual border traffic on the road, or someone specific that you recognized?”
He nodded. “The usual,” he said. I turned and surveyed the small church, and found myself idly wondering who from the next generation was going to lavish the attention on its wood, plaster, and glass. “Emilio, I’m thinking that this morning somebody was over at Baca’s place, alone with Sosimo sometime between seven-thirty and eight. It looks like he died right around then. Mandy Lucero says it was about eight or maybe a little after when she found him.”
“It’s a shame that Mandy had to walk in on something like that,” the old man said. He narrowed his eyes and frowned. “And maybe it’s a blessing that she didn’t walk into that house a few minutes earlier, if what you say is true.”
“For sure. If you happen to remember anything, give me a call, will you?”
He nodded, and picked up the brush, politely waiting for me to stop interfering with his drying latex.
The women needed to cook and bake in preparation for the funerals. Emilio needed to paint and spruce up La Iglesia de Nuestra Señora. I walked out of the church with the feeling that everyone in Regal was ready to close the book on Sosimo Baca and his son. The daughters were out of sight and out of mind, and a good meal and some organized wailing would take care of the last vestiges of that branch of the Baca family.
Cliff Larson saw the expression on my face when I walked out, and he grinned through a fresh plume of smoke. “Didn’t see a thing, did he?”
I sighed and settled into the truck. The door, slightly buckled just behind the hinges, closed with a groan. “No. He didn’t see anything.”
“I coulda told you that before you went in there.”
I laughed. “You gotta cover all the bases, Cliff. Actually, there was something. Emilio did say that he saw Sosimo Baca walking up the hill, toward the pass. That’s what the three women said—that he set off toward town. Emilio saw him too. That’s something, at least.”
“So he started to feel bad, and turned around and walked back home. No mystery there.”
“Nope. No mystery there.”
Cliff frowned. “What’s the problem, then?”
I didn’t want to launch into a dissertation about a refrigerator, or Bob Torrez’s reservations, or just my own sense that we were missing something, so I shrugged and let it go by saying, “I don’t know what the problem is, Cliff. Intuition, I guess.”
“Well,” he said, starting the truck and pulling it into gear, “that’ll screw you up every time.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s give you something else to think about. Bobby can handle this end of the county. Hell, he’s related to half of ’em.”
“And I don’t know if that’s part of the problem or not,” I said.
The livestock inspector kept his truck in third gear for two cigarettes’ worth, all the way up through Regal Pass. Other than a grunt or two about the weather and what kind of winter it was going to be, Cliff didn’t say much. It was as if his concentration helped the truck manage the grade. He was mentally fussing with something, I could see that. He tongued the cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other, but I didn’t prompt him. He’d get around to whatever was nagging him.
We crested the pass and the northern two-thirds of Posadas County stretched out before us. The wind during the past several days had kept the prairie stirred up just enough that the murky air on the eastern horizon reduced the Posadas skyline to a black smudge twenty miles away.
“The whole problem is,” Cliff Larson said suddenly as we started down through the east slope esses toward the Broken Spur Saloon, “there ain’t a whole lot to go on. You know how these things are. A few tracks, things like that.” He grinned at me, his slate-gray eyes just about disappearing behind the wrinkles. “You want a snack of something before we head on over to Newton?”
“Coffee, maybe,” I said. “Where exactly is the holding pen that Waddell was using? Are you talking about that complex of corrals south of Newton, on Johnny Boyd’s property?”
“That’s the one.”
“We don’t need to drive all the way out there, do we?” I glanced at my watch. “I don’t know as I have the time. This is a bad day.”
“I’d really appreciate it,” Larson replied doggedly, and the way he said it told me that he had something on his mind that he didn’t feel like turning loose just then. “Let’s get a cup of coffee first, though.” He shrugged his shoulders as if a chill was whistling through the truck. “Damn, I get cold awful easy nowadays. Old age ain’t what it’s cracked up to be, is it.”
I shifted on the uncomfortable seat. “How and when did Waddell find out that his cattle were missing?”
“Well, see, Miles told me that he was up in Albuquerque for the day. He come home Thursday late, and he drives out to feed the stock, and everything is just dandy. Everybody is accounted for. He goes out again Friday mornin’ just to check things out, and damn if a handful of ’em ain’t missin’. See,” and he smiled, “he says he was sure they was all there the night before.” Cliff hesitated while he braked for a sweeping corner that could safely have been negotiated five times faster than our current rate. “So sometime between eight-thirty Thursday, and about seven in the mornin’ on Friday. That’s the window we got to look at.” He snapped ashes in the general direction of the ashtray.
“So what have you gathered so far?” I asked. “Cast of the tire tracks? Photos, I suppose. Anything else?”
“I took some pictures. I’m not sure just how great they’re going to be, but I took ’em. A cast would help, for sure. I was hopin’ that maybe you could help with some of that.”
“Of course we can. I can have Linda Real out there sometime this afternoon for photos. That’s easy. Tom Mears does the best job of plaster-casting tire prints. We can spring him free for a few minutes.”
Cliff Larson’s face crumpled up as he grimaced. I didn’t know what he was thinking about, but I supposed he had his reasons for being so reticent. Evidently my suggestions weren’t the kind of help he was seeking. The truck slowed as we approached the Broken Spur Saloon. I waited patiently while he swung in, thumping down off the rough shoulder and crossing the gravel. He squared the truck away in the saloon parking lot and the engine sighed to a stop. I sighed too.
“Let’s get us some coffee,” Larson said, as if all the answers to the world’s problems would be solved that way.
As we walked toward the front door of the Broken Spur Saloon, I saw Victor Sanchez’s pickup truck parked around the side, and another vehicle I didn’t recognize. I didn’t see Christine Prescott’s car. Larson held the door open for me and we went inside.
“How about right over here,” Larson said, and led the way toward a dark booth on the opposite side of the room from the bar. We slid in, and before my hat settled beside me on the vinyl seat, Victor Sanchez appeared at the table.
“Hello, Victor. Just coffee, please,” I said, and without response or even indication that he had heard, Sanchez shifted his gaze to Cliff Larson.
“The same.”
Sanchez spun on his heel and left, hospitality overflowing. He had his reasons not to like us much.
“So, what’s the ‘something else’?” I asked. Larson turned sideways and stretched his lanky frame, letting a boot hang off the end of the bench.
“I got to go to Illinois here pretty quick.”
“What’s in Illinois?”
Cliff took a deep breath. He patted his pocket, and pulled out the remains of the cigarette pack. It was flat. He crumpled it and tossed it in the ashtray, and pulled a fresh one out of the side pocket of his jeans—already pre-crumpled. “Well, my ma’s not doin’ too good. Had a stroke last week, and Dad, he can’t manage. He tried.” Larson peeled the foil off and rapped the first butt out of the pack. “Nah, he can’t do it. So I need to run me on back there for a while.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your folks, Cliff. I didn’t know you were from Illinois.”
“Yep. Hell of a good place to be from.” He grinned lamely. “And it looks like I’m headed back that way, too. Ain’t none too happy about that.”
“That’s why you called earlier? Whenever it was?”
He nodded and sat back while Sanchez placed the two cups of coffee on the table between us. “Nothing else, Victor,” I said pleasantly. “Thanks for asking.” I grinned at him, and that just made matters worse. If I’d been a young sprout, he’d probably have tossed me out on my ear. As it was, his upper lip just twitched a bit.
After he’d left, Cliff Larson leaned forward. “Here’s what I’m thinkin’. Come election, you’re gonna hang it up, right?”
“Sure enough. November eighth. That’s twelve-oh-one
AM
this coming Wednesday.”
“Going traveling?”
I frowned. “No, I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Not going to spend two weeks at each one of the kids’? What, you got four of ’em. That eats up eight weeks, right?”
“I don’t think so. If they want to come here to visit, I’ve got plenty of room.” I knew damn well what he was getting at, so I said with a grin, “Get to the point, Cliff.”
“I want you to fill in for me.”
I laughed. “Not in this lifetime.”
“Now you think on it for a minute.”
“It won’t take even that long, Cliff. Why would I want to do that, anyway? The New Mexico Livestock Board can hire its own inspectors. Get some young buck fresh out of school at Las Cruces. They don’t need me. And on the other side of the same coin, I can’t imagine that they’d
want
me, either.”
Cliff Larson took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “You think on that for a minute,” he repeated.
“I already did.”
“Here’s the problem,” he said, ignoring my response. “I’m flyin’ out the later part of next week. There ain’t no time to bring somebody new in and train ’em from the ground up. But I could get together with you and show you the ropes.”
“I wouldn’t know what the hell to do, either.”
“Sure you would. And it’s the kind of work you’d like, Bill. Most of the time, it’s outdoors. Drive around, talk with people. Check brand scabs, lip tattoos, paperwork. It’s no big deal. Write a few permits, collect fees, turn ’em in. It’s who you know, most of the time—and hell, you know this county and the folks in it every bit as good as me.”
“About the last thing I’d want to do is jump from one job right into another,” I said.
“Why the hell not?” Larson laughed. “What the hell else you going to do? Sit around and read until your arteries crust over?”
“That sounds sort of pleasant.”
“Shit. You know that ain’t true. You want to be out smellin’ the sage and breathin’ that good air.” He dragged deeply on the cigarette.
I didn’t respond to his pastoral image, and Cliff shook his head with impatience. “You ain’t ready to park it,” he said. “Anyways, it might not be for too long. Soon as I can square things away back home, I’ll be back. Hell, it might only be for a week or two. You never know.”
“Right. That’s how these things start,” I said. “I know how it works.” Draining the last of the not very inspired coffee, I set the cup down and added, “Do we still need to drive to Newton?”
“Yep, we do,” Larson said. “There’s a few things you need to see.”