“Now what?” Frank Dayan asked.
“Now we drop it,” Torrez said. “You guys back off some.”
I stood near the rear wheel of the backhoe, and Dayan joined me. Torrez walked over to his pickup and rummaged in the back, finally returning with a six-foot length of one-inch galvanized pipe and a three-pound hammer. “This’ll work,” he said.
He walked altogether too close to the tire, stopped, and looked over at Linda. “You all set?”
“World’s Strangest Videos, take one,” she said.
Torrez grinned and lifted the steel pipe as if it were a toothpick. He rested one end against the tip of the chain’s hook where it had a tenuous grip on the link. He struck the other end of the bar with the hammer, and it drove the tip of the hook out of the link with the first tap.
With a brief rapppp of sliding chain, the tire thumped to the concrete like a wet pillow, with just as much bounce. When he struck the bar, Bob Torrez was two paces from the tire, and even as it hit the concrete, he stepped forward and put a steadying hand on the tread. After a second or two, he took his hand away. The tire stood motionless, a fat bulge at the bottom.
“Don’t turn it off yet,” he said to Linda, and then looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “So much for it bouncing into the building.”
Resting a hand on the top of the tire, he walked around on the other side. With a gentle nudge, the tire fell over, striking the side of the building with a crash. And there it leaned, refusing to slide down.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
Torrez walked to one side and aimed a hearty kick at the tire. It thumped and refused to move.
“There’s just no way,” he said. Then he turned to Howard Bishop and beckoned. Bishop extended the boom, curling the bucket as he did so. Torrez pointed to the spot on the tire, and Bishop lowered the bucket until its back gently touched the rubber.
“Nail it!” the undersheriff shouted, and Bishop slammed the lever full forward.
The tire skidded down the wall, its bottom simultaneously kicking out on the concrete slab. When it thumped flat, I shivered, imagining Jim Sisson’s final moments with that weight on top of him. Bishop kept the hydraulic force applied, and the backhoe lifted itself in the air, the outriggers clearing the ground by a foot.
Torrez held up a hand, and Bishop stopped, the machine frozen, bucket crushing the tire, outriggers up in the air. Bishop reduced the throttle as Torrez walked around and approached us.
“Now,” he said to Bishop, “how do you jog it sideways?”
“It’s easy to do,” the sergeant replied. “If the operator gets excited, he can do it by accident. The sideways movement of the arm is on the same lever as down thrust.” He pointed at the left of the two long central control levers.
“Do it,” Torrez said. “Just drop her down. Try and make the same kind of marks.”
“Move a little,” Bishop said, and waited while we stepped away from the backhoe. Then he jammed the lever to the left and pulled back at the same time. The bucket jerked left; the tractor bucked right and dropped like a giant yellow stone, its outriggers crashing back in the gravel.
The tire had scrubbed a couple of inches to the left.
“And that’s what I think happened,” Torrez said. The tractor idled down and then died as Bishop pulled the manual throttle lever back.
“The tire clearly didn’t drop and kill him,” he said.
“Nope,” Torrez agreed. “It had help.”
Frank Dayan shook his head in wonder. “Wow. That’s amazing.”
I reached out a hand and put it on his shoulder. “And now you know that if you just print ‘investigation is continuing’ you’ll be telling the absolute truth.”
“But what you’re saying here is that Jim Sisson was murdered,” Dayan replied. “You’re saying that someone deliberately crushed him to death. And then made it look like an accident.”
“It appears that way.”
“That means whoever it was would have had to clout him on the head or something first…overpower him in some way. He wouldn’t just lie still, waiting to be crushed.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Maybe the autopsy will show something. But if it was something as simple as a blow to the back of the head, that’s not going to show up. Not with his skull crushed the way it was.”
“Give me a photo. At least give me that much,” he pleaded. “It’s not often I get to scoop the big-city dailies.”
“On one condition,” I said. “On one condition, we’ll fix you right up.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t use the word homicide yet.”
“Done deal,” Dayan said. “And my paper doesn’t come out until Friday morning, anyway. Maybe things will have changed by then.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Dayan bent down, looking at the tire marks on the concrete. “Do you suppose whoever did this figured you’d never look closely?”
“Maybe,” I said. “And we can hope that’s not the only mistake they made.”
Chapter Twelve
Jim Sisson’s death hadn’t attracted much press, to Frank Dayan’s relief. His major competition, the Deming newspaper, stumbled across the incident in the course of their routine morning phone call to check the blotter.
The story didn’t make the front page. The episode was tucked under several obits more local to Deming than Posadas. If it had been a hot news week, we wouldn’t have made it at all.
The headline was artfully evasive across two columns:
Posadas Contractor Dies Following Shop Incident
Most of the grim details were there, with the exception of any speculation about how the “incident” might have happened.
The fundamental conundrum-how a five-and-a-half-foot man managed to be crushed under a fifty-four-inch-tall tire and wheel assembly-was not mentioned, other than the cover-all expression that “investigation is continuing into the incident that claimed the life of James L. Sisson.”
Apparently the use of the word incident rather than accident hadn’t been lost on Posadas Chief of Police Eduardo D. Martinez, who waddled into the Public Safety Building with a copy of the Deming paper under his arm. He appeared in the door of my office shortly after 3:00, brow furrowed and mouth working either a wad of chewing tobacco or a rehearsal of what he wanted to say.
The chief was fifty-six, with about the same dimensions in the torso as a fifty-five-gallon oil drum. His large, square face, with dark eyebrows, wide, heavy-lipped mouth that winked gold, and enough chin for three people, would have made him perfect casting as the Mexican bartender in one of those grade-D spaghetti westerns.
I liked Eduardo, even though I’d never been sure just what purpose his tiny department served-especially since he made no effort to grab his share of the law enforcement turf. But state law was clear: Incorporated villages had to have a police department. A decade before, back when the copper mines were open and fat paychecks flowed directly from payroll office to bank to saloons, the police department had kept busy.
But that was before Eduardo’s tenure as chief-back when he was still earning a living driving a road grader for the village street department. Now Chief Martinez and two part-time patrolmen kept themselves busy making sure that we had one of the best patrolled fifteen-mile-an-hour school zones in the state. Eduardo’s philosophy seemed to be that if the kids could cross the street safely, what else mattered?
Chief Martinez was so adept at staying backstage that I sometimes forgot that he was there. If he took offense at that, he never let it show.
He ducked his head and smiled ruefully. “You busy?”
“No, no,” I said quickly and got up, motioning toward one of the leather-backed chairs. “Come on in. Pull up a seat and rest the bones.”
He did so and unfolded the newspaper. “This is sure something, eh?” he said, his soft voice carrying that wonderfully musical border cadence.