The opportunities for someone to slip in, murder Jim Sisson, and then slip out again, all unseen, were legion. The backhoe was the stumbling block. Jim Sisson wouldn’t have crouched patiently while the killer fumbled with the machine’s control levers. Whoever had killed the plumber would have had to immobilize him first, and a stout whack on the head would have done the trick-not that we’d find evidence of that, since the massive tire and rim had done a complete job of erasing any trace of a previous head wound.
The killer had to be someone who recognized the opportunity for a cover-up when it presented itself, coupled with a basic working knowledge of how to operate a backhoe. If we had a list of suspects, those two key factors would shorten it considerably.
What bothered me was that Jim and Grace Sisson had been at each other’s throats all day-enough that neighbors had called in an official referee on three separate occasions to mediate. Why they were arguing no one seemed to know, and the Sissons never went public, even to the deputy.
I found it hard to believe that everyone suddenly, as the dusk of evening fell after a day from hell, returned to knitting or reading or the tube, conveniently unconscious of the comings and goings of their day-long adversary. Any compilation of crime statistics that I had ever bothered to read said that most homicides in the home were the handiwork of people well known to the victim. Family members led the list.
It didn’t make sense that after a day of fascinating violence between husband and wife, someone else would slide in and whack Jim Sisson because of an unpaid bill or a copper pipe joint that still leaked.
I tossed the pencil down, crumpled up my doodled creation, and threw it toward the trash can. The shot missed, but I felt better. Knowing what I wanted to do prompted me out of my chair. In the outer office, life had come to a standstill. Ernie Wheeler sat in front of the dispatch console with his hands clasped in his lap, staring at the big chrome-plated microphone in front of him, trying to will it to squawk.
“Where’s Linda?” I asked, and Ernie started. “Sorry,” I added.
“I guess I was daydreaming,” Wheeler said. “Linda went home, I think. She was downstairs for a while, but I think she left. You want me to call her in here?”
I waved a hand. “That’s all right. I’ll swing by.”
Sure enough, Linda’s Honda was parked at the curb on Third Street. I pulled 310 in behind it and left it idling when I got out. The front door of the house was open, ready to let in any cool breeze that the storm to the west might care to generate. I stopped in front of the screen door, noticing the long tear in the screen where something had snagged it-probably the handlebars of the Harley when Tom Pasquale wheeled the motorcycle inside.
Voices next door prompted me to turn my head, and I saw a kid about ten years old standing on the neighbor’s front step, eyeing me with interest. Someone inside the house said something in rapid-fire Spanish, and the kid lifted a hand to me in greeting before ducking back inside.
“Knock, knock,” I called through the screen, and rapped on the frame at the same time, the thin aluminum rattling against the jamb.
“Just a second!” Linda’s voice floated out from somewhere inside. In a moment, she appeared, towel in hand, short black hair wild. “I smelled like basement,” she said. “Come on in, sir.”
“You spend much more time down in that darkroom, you’ll turn into a mushroom,” I said as I opened the screen door gently. The flimsy thing flexed on its hinges. Linda gave her hair a final drubbing with the towel and then ran her fingers through it to restore order. She was barefoot, wearing jeans and a T-shirt with “Property of the University of New Mexico Athletic Department” across the chest.
The little house was uncomfortably warm. With lousy insulation and cinder block construction, it was one of those places that would be cooled off nicely just about the time the sun rose…and by noon would be sweltering again.
I glanced into the tiny living room, and my first impression was of a welter of magazines on every flat surface. Beside one ratty chair was a pile of books, with one of them spread-eagled open across the arm of the chair.
“It’s a mess,” Linda said when she saw my glance.
If I had to clean a house, it would be in far worse shape, but I didn’t comment. “I stopped by to ask you if you can break away for a bit to make a quick run to Las Cruces.”
Linda stopped messing with her hair and looked at me, towel poised. “Cruces? Sure. When?”
“Right now. I want to talk with Grace Sisson, and it’d help if you went along.”
She nodded. “Let me change real quick.”
“What you’re wearing is fine, if you’ve got a pair of shoes to go with it.”
Linda grinned, the smile a little lopsided but fetching nevertheless. “I’ve got shoes. But I’d rather put on something a little more,…” she pulled at her T-shirt, “a little more something than this. It’ll only take a minute.”
She disappeared into the back of the house, and I wandered into the living room. The book on the arm of the chair was Fulton’s A History of Forensic Science, and being flopped over the furniture wasn’t helping the old volume’s spine any. I picked it up and saw that whoever was reading it was about to embark on chapter 7, a discussion of Daguerre’s photography. A sample of his work, the familiar “mug shot” that was used for the first time as evidence in an 1843 trial, stared off the page. The suspect looked as if he had been forced to hold his breath for about a minute too long.
“Interesting stuff,” I said when I heard Linda enter the room behind me.
“Tom’s forcing himself to read that,” she replied, and I glanced up at her. She had kept the jeans but donned a plain white blouse and a pair of running shoes.
“Forcing himself?” There was a mailer card from a magazine on the table, and I used it as a bookmark, closing the old volume carefully.
“Well,” Linda said with a smile, “that’s not how he’d describe it, but I get the impression that reading wasn’t one of his strong suits in school. He works pretty hard at it.”
“A little at a time,” I said, and placed the book on the table. “You ready to go?”
She nodded, and we went back out into the blast furnace of the afternoon. The storm hadn’t made much progress across the prairie and was still parked twenty miles west of the village. The sun peeked out beside one thunderhead, washing the cloud fringes in light.
Interstate 10 put the sun to our backs as we headed toward Las Cruces, and for the first five minutes or so we rode in comfortable silence-comfortable for me, anyway. As we flashed by a sign that promised DEMING, 12, she asked, “Have you heard anything from Estelle?”
“I keep meaning to call her,” I said. “The house is off the market, whatever that means.”
That was the prompting Linda needed, and for the next hour or so she chatted about this and that, a sort of bubbling overflow of information, most of which either I didn’t hear or didn’t require a response beyond an interested grunt.
As we started down the long hill west of Las Cruces, she asked, after spending five minutes talking about her mother’s keen desire to run her daughter’s life, “Do you think Tom is involved in anything?”
We were in the process of passing an oil tank truck at the moment, and I didn’t answer until we’d pushed through the rig’s bow wave and drifted back into the right lane.
“What do you mean by that?” I replied, knowing damn well exactly what she meant.
“He told me about the letters you received.”
I looked at her sharply. “When was this?”
“The letters, you mean?”
“No…When did he tell you?”
“This afternoon. In fact, it was just a few minutes before you came over.”
“He didn’t waste any time,” I said, more to myself than to Linda Real.