Dead Man's Rules (10 page)

“Someone asking for me?”

Cere stepped forward, held out her hand and introduced herself. “I’d like to look at your old files. I’m doing a story on the death of Marco Gonzales.”

The woman drew straight up and stared hard at Cere. “Marco…” Her voice was breathless.

“I told her it’s stupid,” the cook said.

Cere ignored the interruption. “I’m certain your files would have stories about his death.”

The woman’s face grew hard as brown granite. “
Our
files don’t go back that far. See, Marco burned down the old newspaper office the night he died.”

****

Rafe circled the Palladium in his patrol vehicle, bumping along the rough open country. The old building looked as forlorn and lonely as the first day he’d seen the stranger lurking beside it. Today he saw no sign of Diaz or his black Escalade.

He parked in the back and climbed out. A blast of hot summer air hit his face as he closed the door to the air-conditioned cab. He stood for a moment, listening. The only sounds were leaves rustling in the distance and turtle doves cooing far overhead. Walking around the building, he stopped to examine the gravel parking lot for tire tracks. A pair of wide marks probably came from the Escalade. As he neared the edge of the old parking lot where the gravel ended and the soft earth of the prairie began, he picked out a line of small footprints. Someone in heels. He shook his head. Crazy Cere Medina. The small bulky footprints that stepped partially over hers were probably made by her cousin.

Reaching the back of the building, he hopped up the steps and cursed. The biscuits and gravy nearly boiled into his throat. Flecks of faded green paint dotted the weathered gray wooden planks by the back door. He yanked open the screen door. The metal latch on the back door had been broken and clumsily repaired. He removed the broken latch and pushed open the door. Sure enough, as he stepped inside he could see where the dust on the floor had been displaced by someone pushing the door wide open. He squinted into the gloomy room after the brightness outside, but he didn’t need to see the footprints of cowboy boots in the dust to know Diaz had gotten into the building.

Anger rushed through him. Naldo had lied to him.
Why?
One thing was for certain, Diaz was still around.

Who was that guy?

And what was he really doing in Rio Rojo?

He was going find him and question him if he had to spend all day looking for that arrogant SOB. And one way or another he was going to get some straight answers out of old Naldo.

For the next eight hours he drove from one end of the county to the other, keeping a watch out for the black SUV. He made three trips to the Palladium, only to find it deserted every time. Perhaps Diaz had found what he wanted when he got inside and was really gone. No, he had a feeling the man was still lurking somewhere. When he finally came back to town in the late afternoon, he stopped at the Matador, prepared to grill Naldo.

The dining room was nearly empty and Josie was putting out water glasses and silverware for the dinner crowd. Frank, the owner, was sweeping out the dining room.

“He left early,” he replied to Rafe’s impatient questioning.

His pulse quickened. “Alone?”

“Yeah, sure. He said he had to meet someone.”

Oh, hell, what if he’d spent all day looking for Diaz and the guy had been sitting in town all day?

As Rafe yanked open the door to his Jeep, his police radio crackled to life.

“Sheriff… there’s… uh… trouble over at old Naldo’s house… someone says he’s dead and …there’s blood all over.”

Chapter Ten

Murder.

It made him sick. Not that Rafe had never smelled the coppery stench of death. Not that he hadn’t seen his share of corpses during his years in the LAPD. Four of those years had been in homicide. This was different. Those bodies belonged to strangers. He knew Naldo. And this was Rio Rojo. Things like this didn’t happen in his hometown.

“You’re thinking he was shot?” he asked Police Chief BJ Foster, trying to ease around the man’s bulky frame to get a full look. Rafe could make out well-worn slippers, a length of bloody denim and a dark crimson stain on the floor.

BJ threw up his hands. “Don’t really know nothin’ yet. Looks like it could be gunshot. Let the doc tell us.”

“I know the difference between a gunshot and knife wound.”

“Well, you ain’t in LA now, so just hold your horses. This is city jurisdiction, so it’s not really your concern. It doesn’t look like an accident. Could be he shot himself.”

Rafe glanced around the tiny, neat kitchen. “I don’t see a weapon, so I don’t think he did it himself, unless one of your officers picked it up by mistake.”

BJ’s blue eyes flashed with anger. “My officers didn’t touch nothing. We’re all wearing gloves and bein’ real careful about where we step. Now you’re welcome to hang around, if you insist, but this is
my
case.”

He stifled a reply, pleased that BJ didn’t try to force him out. The two were constantly mixed up in cross-jurisdictional disputes. But he had been to more crime scenes than BJ would ever see in his life. And the man wasn’t handling it well. BJ’s normally ruddy face carried an unnatural pallor.

The chief hitched up his pants and turned away, blocking Rafe’s view. The kitchen was too small to maneuver around and two young officers bent over the corpse. He surveyed the kitchen. Its orderly state stood in stark contrast to the chaos on the floor. Boxes of cereal and rice stood arranged in a line by height on the counter. A frayed dish towel was neatly draped over a towel rack. Everything had been painted white, from the cabinets to the wooden table and chairs. Everything was spotless. Rafe’s mother said Naldo kept his house so clean you could eat off the floor. That made the blood on the floor more obscene.

Rafe ran his finger over a jagged scar at the edge of his cheek. A queasiness edged into his stomach. “Want me to take pictures? I have a camera in the pickup.”

“My boys can do it.”

BJ moved, and Rafe got what he really wanted. He managed to lean over and get a look at the body. Naldo’s frail form lay crumpled beside the table, the front of a brown plaid shirt soaked with blood. Rafe couldn’t see the wound, but he had seen enough. Even if he had found a gun on the floor, he knew this was no suicide.

Murder.

In Rio Rojo.

Rafe pulled his gaze away and as he did, the flip top of the beige plastic wastebasket caught his eye. With everything else so clean, a reddish brown smudge screamed for attention. Taking a pen from his pocket, he used it to tip the lid. A gun barrel poked through potato peelings.

“BJ, you might want to check this.”

BJ whirled toward him. “What the hell you doing?”

“I just noticed this. Looks like the killer tossed the gun in here.”

“Killer?” One of the officers jerked up from looking under the table. “No one said anything about a killer. He musta shot himself. Look at all this blood.”

Rafe struggled to keep from sounding sarcastic. “Then he threw the gun in the waste basket? Suicide victims don’t usually have time to hide their weapons.”

The officer shot him a startled look. “Maybe the kid who found him put it there. He said he never came inside, but maybe he lied.”

“Why?”

BJ started to reach inside the waste basket, but Rafe caught his hand.

“You ever heard of fingerprints? That gun is evidence. You should call the state crime lab. We’re not equipped to handle this sort of thing.”

The chief pulled back like he’d had his hand slapped while digging in the cookie jar. “Don’t pull crap with me, just ’cause you spent time in the city. We’ll deal with this ourselves. You can leave.”

Rafe considered arguing, but he looked from BJ to the young officers who appeared ready to vomit on the clean floor. Before long one of them would suggest the same thing and BJ would agree. They were all on edge. Arguing could only make things worse.

Without replying he turned and walked back through the shabby house, saddened by the old man’s death. He stopped in the tiny, cramped living room, recalling the past. As a boy, when he’d helped shovel snow, they sat in this room drinking hot chocolate. Naldo would regale him with stories about the pawn shop his father once owned and point out leftover treasures. German cuckoo clocks brought back by returning WWII soldiers, silver bowls and candle sticks, various ceramic artifacts and sculptures had ended up in their possession when borrowers couldn’t pay off pawn tickets.

The interior hadn’t changed much. Worn, overstuffed furniture was jammed together, giving the room a claustrophobic feel. Even in dim light, the linoleum floor gleamed, and the wooden tables and stained glass lamps looked freshly dusted. Rafe smiled at the one tribute to modern culture. An entertainment center holding a state-of-the-art flat screen television occupied much of one wall.

The glass of an antique curio cabinet shimmered from a narrow hallway, catching Rafe’s attention. The door hung open. Like the smudge on the wastebasket, that wasn’t like Naldo.

Rafe glanced toward the kitchen. BJ was arguing with his officers as they looked into the trash can. Careful not to disturb anything, Rafe crossed to the cabinet and peered inside. An array of small silver and gold trinkets glittered in the light, but he knew something was missing. The bottom shelf once held a black lacquer box with a white horse painted on the lid.

As a boy he had watched Naldo take out the box and fish an envelope full of dollar bills from it. The old man would hand two crisp dollar bills to Rafe and then carefully replace the envelope in the box and put it back into the cabinet. Nothing else in the neat room appeared to have been touched. Was robbery the motive for Naldo’s death? Someone could have known about the money box, or perhaps Naldo had told them, never realizing it was the last thing he would ever say.

Another thought hit him and his stomach turned upside down.

The coins!

Naldo had kept a small brown leather pouch that he swore contained gold coins dating back to the late 1800’s. The worn pouch had also been in that box. He’d often told Rafe about them, providing a different story about how he’d acquired them every time. He showed him one once. It had been the color of gold, but whether or not it was real, young Rafe had no idea.

“What the hell are you doing? Get out of there!” BJ had entered from the kitchen. He pointed toward the outer door.

Rafe didn’t move. “You might want to check this. His money box is missing.”

“Money box?” BJ’s brows shot up.

“He used to keep a black wooden box with money and coins in this cabinet. It’s gone.”

“Don’t you start with the crazy rumor about that old man’s coins.”

Behind him, Officer Joe Hernandez laughed and jerked a thumb at the television set. “He probably sold them for that. Thing must have cost him thousands. Last time I priced sets like that they were running ten times more than his pay as a janitor.”

BJ nodded and squared off the entryway to the hall. “Hell, Tafoya, you’re getting on my nerves. Maybe I ought to arrest you. You seem to know a hell of a lot. Just happened to find the gun, just happened to notice a box is missing. Just happen to know money might be in it.” His face bloomed red.

Rafe drew a deep breath and held back an angry response. He could understand BJ’s frustration. He motioned toward the cabinet. “The door was open. When I was a kid and did odd jobs for him, he paid with money from that box. He said it held his valuables.”

“How do you know he still kept it there?”

Rafe grimaced and turned away. BJ was right. He hadn’t been around lately and maybe he was jumping to faulty conclusions. Perhaps Hernandez was correct about the big TV.

No.
Something didn’t feel right here. And until they could figure out the truth, better safe than sorry.

“BJ, you know as well as I do that robbery was probably the motive. Everyone claimed he had money hidden in the house or buried in the back yard.”

A frightening thought hit him as he considered Naldo’s bragging about his money. Had the old man foolishly made those claims to Diaz?
Where the hell was he?
Had he paid a final, deadly visit to Naldo before leaving town?

BJ seemed to weigh Rafe’s words before walking over to close the cabinet door. “I know all that.”

“Dammit, BJ, don’t touch anything!”

The police chief grew so red he appeared ready to explode. “This is my case. Let me do my job. Now get the hell out of here!”

Rafe started to mention Diaz, but given BJ’s anger, he turned and stomped out without further protest. He’d talk to him later, once he calmed down.

Stepping outside into a soft evening breeze, Rafe paused, inhaling fresh air like a thirsty man gulping down water after crossing a desert. Small knots of people stood outside the low brick fence that ringed the front of Naldo’s house. In nearby yards, neighbors spoke in low voices, anxious eyes on the house. He examined the well-kept front lawn with its ceramic donkey and cart and cement birdbath on one side and a Virgin Mary in a bathtub on the other side of a brick walkway. Plastic sunflowers bordering the bricks seemed comical against the back drop of death. Naldo’s Chevy pickup was parked in the gravel drive, and a couple of men lounged against it.

“Did someone kill him?” A voice came out of the darkness as Rafe approached the men near the truck.

Denial was useless. Young Robby Padilla, who found the body and called his office instead of BJ’s, had probably already spread the word. The teenager was outside the house talking to anyone who came by when Rafe arrived. His curt order to one of BJ’s officers to isolate the boy set the tension level with the police chief before they ever entered the house.

Rafe’s queasy stomach still felt like it was inside. “Afraid so. You guys better get out of the yard if you’re going to hang around. We don’t know who might have touched his truck. They may want to fingerprint it.”

The men jerked away as though the vehicle was hot. They retreated to congregate along the edge of the brick wall that separated the yard from a broken city sidewalk.