“Thanks, sir, but that won’t be necessary. I’ve got a cousin who said he’s got a place he’d rent us. Maybe for a few bucks less than what I’m paying now, too.”
“Then go for it. Tonight. All right? And I’m serious. Not in the morning, not tomorrow afternoon. This very evening.”
Tom looked like he wanted to say something else but swallowed and settled for, “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” I turned to get into the car. “That’s one thing out of the way.” I stopped abruptly and glared at the young deputy. “Linda used the word fiancee. Is that right?”
He ducked his head and actually blushed. “We hadn’t told anybody yet.”
“Secrets around here seem to be department policy,” I said wryly. “Well, congratulations. You take good care of her.” He stammered something in return, but I didn’t hear it. I slid into 310, wincing as the hot vinyl seat scorched my backside.
Chapter Thirty-five
Time hung heavily that afternoon. I was too tired to sleep, too confused to relax, too hot and sweaty to socialize.
My musty adobe house on Guadalupe Terrace was just the burrow I needed, and I headed there after leaving Tom Pasquale standing on the hot sidewalk in front of the Sissons’.
Even without an air conditioner, the temperature differential was enough to prompt a groan of relief when I stepped inside and shut the heavy carved door behind me. After a shower and change of clothes, I settled in the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, and then sat, staring into the swirls of steam coming out of my cup.
I hadn’t taken a sip, and I have no idea how long I sat there, mesmerized, trying to think about absolutely nothing. I must have succeeded, because the phone’s first ring practically sent me into orbit.
I answered a little more gruffly than I meant to, and a moment’s silence on the other end prompted me to repeat myself. Finally a small voice said, “Bill?”
“Yes?”
“This is Carla. Carla Champlin.”
I took a deep breath and moved my right hand away from the coffee cup so I wouldn’t spill it-just in case there were more surprises.
“How are you doing?” I said, trying not to sound as if I was talking to someone who’d just stuck a shotgun in my face.
“I…well, I…better,” she said, and then some of the old brusque postmistress efficiency came back into her voice. “The dispatcher said that you’d be home, and I just called to tell you that I’m really terribly sorry about what happened this afternoon,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“Well, no, it isn’t. It most certainly isn’t.”
“These things happen,” I said.
She hesitated, then said, “I’m just awfully glad that it was you in the RV, not someone else.”
Of course if I’d had a coronary and dropped dead on her mobile carpeting, she wouldn’t have been so glad, but I didn’t say that. “Carla, let’s just forget it happened, all right? I haven’t given it a second thought. You shouldn’t, either.”
“I just hate being an old fool, that’s all,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what that young couple must think. Or Judge Hobart, either, for that matter. Honestly. I don’t know what came over me.”
I didn’t see any bombshells on the horizon, so I risked taking a sip of coffee. “Tom and Linda will be out of the house this evening. They’ve found another place, and just between you and me, I bet they’ll take a little better care of it. I think you taught them a good lesson.”
“Um, well,” she said, not ready to be placated, “none of it was necessary. Especially with all of you people being as busy as you are right now.”
“Carla,” I said, not needing to be reminded that I should have been busy just then, “I appreciate your thoughts. We all do. Just give me a buzz if you need anything.”
She sounded a little miffed that she was being cut off and took the offensive. “All right then,” she said and hung up.
I chuckled and put the phone down and immediately thought about Grace Sisson. If Carla Champlin, a half-crackers old lady with steel rebar for a backbone, could apologize for being ridiculous, perhaps we could expect a miracle from Grace, too. I contemplated making a casual, only half-official visit with the woman and her daughter but then rejected that idea as unlikely to produce anything except another vitriolic eruption.
Bob Torrez’s strategy was probably sound. Let the woman stew overnight without knowing what the deputies had found in the backyard and then put the pressure on in the morning-perhaps after someone other than myself had had a sleepless night.
I refilled my coffee, shut off the machine, and left the house, heading for Bucky Randall’s construction site just north of the Posadas Inn on Grande Avenue. He’d been Jim Sisson’s last customer, and although any connection between that job and Jim’s murder was pretty dubious, it was worth the shot. At least one of the deputies had already touched bases with Bucky, but another perspective wouldn’t hurt. Normally people didn’t kill each other over flat tires or some other construction glitch, but it was a crazy world.
I had heard various rumors about what kind of motel-restaurant combination was going in at the Randall location, from steak house to seafood joint to saloon. At the moment, the property was flat and dusty with a touch of white alkali frosting the soil, not a tree or shrub or cactus in sight.
Machinery-presumably Jim Sisson’s big new front loader-had taken a chunk out of a small dune, leveling it away from the highway. Various ditches mapped the property as the contractors piped and wired.
Several vehicles were gathered around one corner where a crew worked with a transit, shooting across to an array of plumbing near the access hole for the village water meter. I stopped 310 beside one of the trucks, a red Dodge with a T.C. RANDALL CONSTRUCTION, LORDSBURG, NM logo on the cab.
I swung open the door and started to pull myself out just as one of the young men near the transit headed my way. At the same time, my cell phone chirped, and I slid back into the seat, both feet outside the car.
I found the phone and flipped it open. “Gastner,” I said, and glanced at my watch. It was ten minutes before six-the construction crews were on overtime.
“Sir, this is Ernie Wheeler. Mrs. Sisson just called and said she needs to see you. She said it’s an emergency.”
I swung my feet inside the car, shook my head at the young construction foreman, and said into the phone, “Is Torrez still over there?”
“Yes, sir. But she insists that she talk to you.”
“I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”
“I’ll tell her, sir. She’s still on the line.”
Without explaining to the puzzled contractor, I backed clear of the trucks, then headed north on Grande toward MacArthur. By the time I’d reached the Sisson address, I’d run every scenario I could imagine through my head, right down to the pipe dream where Grace Sisson stretched out both wrists toward me, ready for the handcuffs, and said, “Take me. I did it.”
Torrez’s patrol car was still in the driveway, parked behind the Blazer that Howard Bishop favored. The Sissons’ Suburban was parked at the curb, and I pulled in behind it. I slid the cellular phone into one pocket, then snapped open my briefcase and rummaged for the tiny microcassette recorder. The gadget was smaller than a pack of cigarettes. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d used the recorder even after Estelle Reyes-Guzman had convinced me of its value. The tapes were so dinky that my fat fingers fumbled them all over the place, and the control buttons were worse.
I squinted at the thing and saw that it was loaded. I pushed the record button and dropped the recorder, into my shirt pocket.
Bob Torrez and the deputies were still out back, and I wondered if Grace Sisson had mentioned a word to them. The undersheriff appeared before I reached the steps to the front door, and I stopped.
“She asked me where you were,” he said. “I suggested she call Dispatch if it wasn’t something I could help her with.”