“Here’s a bruise, here’s the second, and here’s a third,” Linda said. “One, two, three, in an arc that we could extend from top right shoulder down to lower left flank.”
I blinked and straightened up, grimacing at the kinks in my back. I took off my glasses, pulled a lens-cleaning tissue from the box by the enlarger, and polished them. Tom and Linda waited for me to mull whatever it was that didn’t click.
“There’s no way that we can predict with one hundred percent certainty how that tire struck him,” I said finally. “But he had to have been crouching down when that tire hit him…maybe groping for a bolt or something-some tool maybe. That tire’s big, but it’s not like it’s off one of those giant earthmovers or something.”
“But there’s a clear match between how the tire is resting on Mr. Sisson in this photo,” she pulled the first enlargement out of the pile and put it beside the photo of the corpse, “and the two upper bruises here and here.”
“True.”
“In this photo, the tire isn’t in contact with his body at this point, where the lower, third bruise is.”
“Also true.” I didn’t add that there could be several explanations for that, because I couldn’t think of a single one. “Anything else?”
Linda shook her head. “Bob’s out there now. I guess Mrs. Sisson went to Las Cruces with the kids to stay with some relatives. He wasn’t too happy about that, but…” She shrugged. “He said he was going to hang around until light. He wants me back out there then.”
“All right. Get some rest before that.” I looked at the photos again and frowned. “It doesn’t quite add up, does it?” I said.
As I turned to go, Tom Pasquale asked, “Did you want to talk to me about something, sir?”
I stopped short and frowned. “If I did, I’m damned if I remember what it was. Couldn’t have been too important.” I grinned at both of them. “You guys keep after this.”
I had no doubt that Undersheriff Robert Torrez was sitting over at the Sissons’, deep in thought, the same thing bothering him that now bothered me. Somehow, a heavy tire had fallen on Jim Sisson, crushed him to death, and then been jerked sideways.
Maybe Sisson’s death throes had been enough to do that, even with a two-thousand-pound, fifty-four-inch-diameter, nineteen-inch-wide tractor tire on top of him. If there had been a spark of life in him, it had been crushed out during the hour that he’d been pinned before his wife finally stuck her head out the back door to see when he was going to shut off the damn machine and come to bed.
Chapter Eight
For an hour I poked here and there without particular rhyme or reason. The events of the evening jumbled in my mind, and I couldn’t see a well-defined path of action. I didn’t want to end up stumbling all over Undersheriff Robert Torrez’s trail, getting in his way, slowing him down. I idled 310 east on a deserted Bustos Avenue shortly after 4:00 a.m., not breaking fifteen miles an hour.
A mechanic at the Ford garage had replaced some part deep in the car’s guts, and it was almost eager. Still, fifteen miles an hour was just fine, a perfect match for my mood.
By habit, I drove with the windows open and the two-way radio turned low, listening to and smelling the night. In the past, that had always accomplished one of two things: It either cleared my mind or made me drowsy enough that I could go home and grab an hour’s sleep. This time I couldn’t even make myself hungry.
Turning south at the intersection with MacArthur, I cruised past the Sissons’ driveway. Bob Torrez’s old pickup truck squatted in the driveway, well back from the street. He’d been using that oil-burning, huge-engined heap since earlier in the day, his idea of an unmarked car.
Farther south on MacArthur, I passed the neighborhood where the undersheriff lived with his wife, Gayle. It was a scattering of squat, old adobe houses that sat helter-skelter with a spiderweb of dirt streets. The oldest neighborhood in the village, it had once been called La Placita and nestled right up to the banks of Posadas Creek. The creek became a dry arroyo, mines opened, Posadas bloomed, and MacArthur sliced through La Placita’s vitals and killed it.
A couple dozen families lived in that part of town, and Bob Torrez was related in one way or another to most of them.
As I drove past, I caught a glimpse of 308, his county car, parked under the big elm tree in his front yard.
Reaching Grande, I turned north and a few minutes later completed the short loop by crossing Bustos. Salazar and Sons Funeral Home loomed, the lights in the manicured front yard washing up the white marble facade. The place was garish and prosperous. A black Cadillac hearse was parked under the wrought-iron portico, no doubt waiting to be polished and prepped in anticipation of Jim Sisson’s last ride.
The lights were on at 221 Third Street. The streetlight half a block away cast vague shadows, but even in the poor light I could see that Carla Champlin would disapprove. While she lived in a manicured terrarium, this place was as desolate as the day it was built thirty years before as low-rent housing for copper miners. She may have been right-perhaps at one time the tiny yard had bloomed as a showplace, with a putting-green lawn. I couldn’t remember.
The front yard was dirt, basically a parking lot. A single scraggly, thirsting elm managed a few green leaves in the postage-stamp backyard. If the house was more than eight hundred square feet I would be surprised-not much larger than my kitchen and living room combined.
Linda Real’s Honda station wagon was parked in the narrow driveway, and pulled in beside it was Deputy Pasquale’s old Jeep Wrangler.
“Huh,” I said aloud.
Beyond the casual arm-on-shoulder I’d seen in the darkroom, there had been few other hints that indicated any particular relationship between Linda and Tom-although they had known each other back when he was still flipping cars as a part-timer for the village PD and she was a reporter for the Posadas Register. It was as a reporter that she’d been riding with one of our deputies when he’d stopped a suspect vehicle. A shotgun blast had killed the deputy and another had mangled Linda.
Her convalescence from long, complicated corrective surgery after the shooting had taken her out of Posadas, to live with her mother in Las Cruces.
Earlier in the spring, I’d hired Linda, despite her left eye blindness and left ear deafness. She could work wonders with a camera, was bright and quick, and had the potential to be the best dispatcher we had, next to Gayle Torrez.
In her complaint, Carla Champlin hadn’t mentioned that 221 Third Street was no longer bachelor’s quarters. I remembered her remark about the happily married McClaines and their one child and wondered if that had been a left-field way of voicing her disapproval of Linda and Tom’s cohabitation, if that’s, in fact, what was going on.
Parked to the right of the front door was a large motorcycle. I almost snapped on the spotlight but thought better of it. It was a Harley, but how new I couldn’t tell.
“Huh,” I said again. I hadn’t known that Pasquale fancied motorcycles-and didn’t know that he could afford a big, expensive road bike. If he was still making payments on the Jeep, that, coupled with his rent, would leave him just about enough from his meager county paycheck for one meal a week. No wonder he was prompt at the doughnut box when some kind soul brought them into the office.
I chuckled at myself. I was making the same kinds of assumptions for which I chided the deputies. The motorcycle might even belong to Linda. Who knew. Maybe she’d taken up black leather and small cigars during her off-hours. Tom might have inherited the Jeep from a rich uncle who had bought it to go hunting and then promptly dropped dead from a heart attack.
I idled 310 out of the neighborhood, leaving the kids to some short moments of peace and quiet.
Back on Bustos, I drove west. As I approached the Don Juan de Onate Restaurant, still two hours from opening, my stomach twinged with conditioned reflex. Turning southbound, I slowed as I approached 410 South 12th, a neat brick-and-stucco place on a double lot. I felt a silly twinge of loss when I noticed that the “for sale” sign was missing. Somehow, as long as that sign had been up, the last connection hadn’t been cut. Estelle Reyes-Guzman and her family had moved to the land of snow and lutefisk, but as long as they still owned 410 South 12th it seemed to me that there was a chance that Minnesota winters and summertime mosquitoes might chase them back to Posadas, where their home awaited.