“So you didn’t notice folks coming and going next door?”
“No, I’m sorry. Once, I heard what I thought was someone walking by. Sosimo, I think. He kind of mumbles to himself when he walks. I remember being a little surprised that it was him, but I was in the middle of something, and before I could get to the front door, he’d walked on by. I wasn’t about to shout after him and disturb the whole neighborhood.”
“At that time, did you happen to glance out the window? Look next door?”
She nodded. “Clorinda’s big old Mercury was there.”
“You didn’t hear her leave?”
“No, but she would have driven out the other way. Her house is just down around the corner, there. Just a stone’s throw from the Sisneroses’ place.”
“About a two-minute walk,” I said.
Betty Contreras laughed. “Clorinda Baca does not walk, Bill.”
“And from then until the parade started, nothing special that you remember?”
“No. One of the federal units went by about the time I finally got around to feeding the cat, but they cruise through here all the time, night and day.”
“Border Patrol, you mean? What time was that?”
She nodded. “I think so. Probably about eight. I just glanced up and saw the white and green. I didn’t see who it was. Scott Gutierrez said that it was probably him.”
I took a deep breath, my stomach acutely aware of the time of day and the aromas from Betty Contreras’ kitchen. “If you should happen to think of anything else, you’ll give me a buzz?”
“Certainly.” She frowned as she rose from the chair, and looked sideways at me. “You think that there’s something going on? More than a heart attack or something? When Elva called me, that’s what she said it looked like.”
“We’re not sure, Betty. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, anytime there’s an unattended death, we tread kind of carefully until we know the answers. Emilio is down at the church, though?”
“Oh, he’ll be there most of the day. He’ll want to make sure that everything is just so. Weddings and funerals-they’re important shindigs in a place like this. The whole town gets out.”
“They sure do.”
She reached out and touched my arm. “And are you ready for the big day?”
I laughed. “As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess. For a while there, I thought things were going to stay nice and quiet. And then all hell breaks loose down here.” The moment I said it, I was acutely aware of the various painted eyes around the room, watching me with disapproval.
Chapter Fourteen
Betty Contreras wasn’t the only resident of Regal with food for funerals on her mind. As I walked down the narrow lane that skirted first one home and then another, various aromas wafted out to greet me. It was going to be a hell of a feed.
In another two hundred yards, the lane curved around an old adobe whose back wall bulged out to leave a gaping cavern under the eaves. A hole in the roofing had allowed the infrequent rainwater to reach the earthen bricks. The windows were gone, with just a few cross sticks remaining, broken askew by swiftly pitched rocks and bleached gray by the weather. Gravity had started the war, but the old house was tough.
I had wandered through Regal for the first time nearly thirty years before, and the house was vacant then, too. Sometime in the next decade, the back wall would crumble, leaving the guts of the place yawning open and vulnerable. Gradually, with the remaining walls dissolving and tumbling bit by bit, the structure would settle into a collection of rusted roofing metal, corroded nails, and the last of the adobe nothing more than a pile of clay and gravel.
Sosimo Baca had been no genius of home maintenance. But any living presence, no matter how neglectful, helped a house survive the seasons. With Sosimo and his son gone and the two remaining children wafted off to Lordsburg, the process of collapse had started. I wondered how long it would be before the first rock whistled through one of the windows at what eventually would be known as “the old Baca place.”
I couldn’t picture Josie Baca and her new boyfriend returning to Regal. The property would be tied up in probate court for so long that by the time Josie was free to sell it, no one would want the place. Maybe in fifteen or twenty years, one of the Baca girls would convince her husband to bring in a bulldozer to level the lot. Then the process could start all over again.
I ambled along with my hands thrust deep in my pockets, ruminating about stuff like that…an old man walking through an old village in the heart of November with a hard breeze at his back. It was positively poetic. Enough to make me want to seek out a gnarled old walking stick and take up pipe smoking.
A few steps on the hard, impersonal asphalt highway that led toward the church’s driveway and, farther on, the international border crossing were enough to break the mood. The wind was chilly, and I quickened my step. I’d managed about fifty yards along the left shoulder when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. It slowed even as I turned around.
Cliff Larson stopped his Ford and regarded me with a raised eyebrow. “Headin’ for Mexico?” He glanced in the rearview mirror and without bothering to pull off the highway popped the gear lever into neutral. At the same time, he dug out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. I walked across the oncoming lane and rested a hand on the top of the truck.
“My morning constitutional,” I said.
“Oh, sure.” He grinned and looked off into the distance, his face a weather-beaten mass of lines and wrinkles. Larson was one of those men who had never known the burden of a single ounce of extra fat. He was as rail thin now, at fifty-seven, as he’d been at sixteen. How his system managed, I didn’t know. It wasn’t from hard work. Lifting the cigarette was about the extent of any exercise I’d ever seen Cliff Larson do.
I had always thought that Cliff took a quiet, private delight in sounding like an uneducated hayseed, despite the bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry and a master’s in range management from the state university in Las Cruces. He’d made more than one impressive arrest by simply sounding stupid at the right time and place, digesting information that others assumed was just passing in one big ear and out the other.
He inhaled deeply and coughed out a blue stream of smoke. “So…has Bobby about figured out which one of his relatives did what to who?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It looks like Sosimo had a heart attack.”
Larson looked askance at me. “Quite the party of cops for just a heart attack.”
“Well, there are a few things that don’t quite add up. We want to be sure.”
“Such as?” He shifted his gaze to the wing mirror and we watched a large white and blue RV approach. “Suppose I ought to get out of the road,” he said.
“You’re all right,” I said, and watched the vehicle roll past in the passing lane, two sets of eyes staring at us. “For one thing, there are signs of a struggle in the kitchen.”
“That happens sometimes. He mighta kinda thrashed around some. They do that now and again.”
“Uh-huh, they do. But not quite like that. And I’d think that maybe he’d thrash his way toward the telephone, or maybe a neighbor’s. The glass in the back door was broken outward, then that door was opened, and the screen door broken. Somebody or something hit it so hard it was torn off a hinge.”
“Huh.”
“Of course, the door was in such rotten shape it wouldn’t have taken much.”
“No blood?”
“No. But Torrez is being careful. We might get lucky and turn a good set of prints, or some tissue, or something like that.”
“Is this tied in some way with last night? With the kid that got himself killed.?”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t know. We’ve got some gray areas there, too. Some things that don’t add up.”
“Well, let’s us do some addin’, Sheriff, if you’ve got the time. Come around and climb in.”