She nodded, and Robert said quietly, “Raymond Baca is Sosimo’s younger brother. Mary is his wife.”
“Did they both come over?”
“No. Raymond said he had to open the store. But Mary, she came on over.”
I glanced at Robert, whose Uncle Raymond was manager of the Posadas Town and Country Hardware, as ambitious and commerce-oriented as his late brother had been soggy.
“Just her?” I asked.
“She brought Sabrina along, too.”
“Sabrina Torrez,” Robert added. “Mary’s sister.”
I didn’t bother to ask if Sabrina was related to him in any way but by marriage. It wasn’t genealogy we were after just then. “Clorinda, this is important,” I said, and leaned forward, pointing a gentle finger her way. “The undersheriff left you all ‘sometime.’ Before dawn, let’s say. Lucinda, the oldest daughter, called her mother shortly after that, and Josie Baca arrived from Lordsburg about seven-thirty or so. Fair enough?” She nodded.
“Now,” I continued, “Josie left, taking her two daughters back to Lordsburg with her. When did Father Anselmo leave?”
That really made her forehead pucker. “Maybe sometime after that,” she said, and I sighed.
“So there was a time when it was just family, right? Just you, your sisters-in-law, and Sosimo? Right?” She hesitated and I added, “The girls are gone, Robert here is gone, Father Anselmo is gone.”
“Yes.”
“And what time would that be?”
Clorinda did a good job of looking helpless. “I just don’t know for sure, you know.” I glanced at her wrist, the one partly buried in the comfort of the pillow. Sure enough, there was no watch there, and no pale stripe.
“What happened then?” I asked.
“Sosimo wanted to go to town and get his truck. And I told him he was crazy, just to leave it be for a while. I knew what was going to happen if he did that. I told him he should get himself cleaned up so we could all go in and”-she stopped suddenly, with a little twist of anguish-“the boy’s lying in that hospital somewhere, or they got to do an autopsy, I suppose. If Josie’s not going to handle it, then it’s up to us, you know. Up to Sosimo. That’s what I told him. We didn’t need him to go off and jump in the bottle again. Somebody’s got to take care of the arrangements.”
“And Sosimo didn’t want to do that?”
“He did.” Clorinda nodded. “But he wanted to be able to drive himself. But we knew what would happen. He’d find his way into Posadas, and that would be that. He’d go off and get drunk again.” She shook her head vehemently. “Not just when we’ve got the poor boy’s funeral to think about. We just didn’t need that.”
“Did Sosimo ask you to take him?”
“Yes. And we all said no. That we’d find a way to get that damned old truck back for him. Sosimo, he wasn’t in any condition to drive.”
“But he went anyway?”
“Yes. He just walked out. He said he’d find a ride.”
“And so the only ones here, in this house, were you, your sister-in-law Mary Baca, and her sister, Sabrina Torrez.” I saw a ghost of a grin slip across the undersheriff’s face.
“After Sosimo walked out, we all went home,” Clorinda Baca added, and she forced the pillow down into the corner of the sofa, looking as if she was planning to get up.
“It’s really important to know what time that was,” I said.
“Well, I just don’t know,” Clorinda said flatly.
“Who called you to tell you that your brother was dead, Clorinda?”
“Elva Lucero,” she said promptly, and her tone made it unnecessary for her to add, “as well she should have.”
“And you came over here again, saw your brother’s body, and called your nephew, at his home.” I pointed at Torrez, and Clorinda nodded.
“That’s what I did,” she said.
“And you’re not sure what time that was?”
“No,” she snapped. “I’m not.”
“Maybe it’ll come to you,” I said gently. “Clorinda, you saw your brother every day, I’m sure. Off and on, anyway. Was he having trouble with anybody? Arguing with anybody that you know of?”
“My brother didn’t have trouble with a living soul,” Clorinda Baca said quickly. She pushed herself off the sofa and stood with her arms folded across her chest. “Not a soul. He was a drunk, but he was a good man, Sheriff.” She pointed at the small notebook in my left hand. “You write down that I said that. He was a good man.”
I slipped the notebook into my shirt pocket. Having made herself abundantly clear, Clorinda Baca left the house. I glanced over at Robert Torrez. “What time did she call you?”
“I was on the phone with her at eight fifty-seven. I pulled in here at twenty after nine.”
“Between about seven-thirty and the time the neighbor kid walked in here, we don’t know what the hell happened, do we?”
“No, sir. We don’t.”
“Your aunt doesn’t think her brother crossed swords with anyone in the world. If you’re right, your uncle sure as hell had trouble with somebody,” I said.
“Yep,” he said philosophically. “And if I’m right, that means Clorinda is wrong…that just doesn’t happen much in this family.”
Chapter Twelve
Fifteen minutes. Maybe half an hour. Maybe an hour. The unaccounted for minutes in the Baca household formed their own little black hole. In the predawn hours, the undersheriff had come and gone, as had Father Anselmo. Josie Baca had arrived in Regal and picked up her two children. There hadn’t been much of an argument-at least no objection that Sosimo had voiced, no chair-throwing shouting match.
Shortly after his wife’s departure with the two little girls, Sosimo Baca had found himself left alone with his sister and her small brigade of moral support-all of whom knew exactly what direction his life should take at that very moment-three women who knew what was good for him.
It didn’t surprise me that Sosimo had decided then and there that of all the things in this world that he needed most, his old battered truck headed the list-no doubt along with a nip or three. And so he had left the little adobe in Regal…sometime that morning, most likely before eight o’clock.
Without the children or the father to fuss over, Clorinda Baca and her two sisters-in-law had left the house about the same time…whenever that was. And an indeterminate time later, little Mandy Lucero, innocent of all the upheaval in the Baca household, had arrived for a day of play with the Baca girls. What she found instead was an empty house-and Sosimo’s corpse in the backyard.
Another hour spent with Mary Baca and Sabrina Torrez failed to produce anything useful. We talked to them separately, we talked to them together. The black hole of time during which Sosimo Baca had returned home to die in his own backyard remained inviolate.
“The aunties,” I muttered as I watched the women leave. “We need to find someone who looked at a goddamn clock this morning, Robert. Nobody knows when they did a damn thing.”
The undersheriff stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the small living room. For a moment, the house was silent. The deputies had finished out in the kitchen, but I wasn’t optimistic that the prints they’d lifted would shed much light.
“Illegals, you think?” I asked, knowing full well that would be the most lame scenario. Mexican nationals streamed across the border at night in an unchecked flow. It wasn’t hard to find a place to hop the fence out of sight of the Border Patrol agents. I knew folks who routinely-and illegally-crossed into the United States on a daily basis to work, their own version of a commute. We knew that illegals frequently took their rest inside La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora, the small Catholic mission on the knoll at the east end of Regal. The place was never locked, and the handful of wooden pews served as a peaceful resting spot.
“No, sir, not illegals,” Torrez replied. “It makes no sense that someone is going to hop the wire, and then walk all the way over here, through all the barking dogs, to pick on about the least promising place in Regal. And last night-early this morning-there wasn’t even a car parked in the yard. Nothing to steal, if that’s what someone had in mind.”