“Before I get sidetracked, I need to talk with Emilio Contreras for just a minute. He’s up at the church.” I nodded toward the driveway.
“Drivin’s faster than walkin’.”
La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora had been built on a knoll just east of the highway, positioned so that its buttressed, windowless back wall faced Mexico. A perfectly painted sign beside the entrance steps, dark blue letters against a white background, read simply:
La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora
1826
The graveled parking lot was empty. Larson let the pickup roll right up to the wide front steps. “It don’t look like anybody’s here.”
“His wife says that Emilio walks down from the house,” I said. “Every day.”
Without comment on what he must have regarded as Emilio Contreras’ daily monumental waste of energy, Larson switched off the truck. “Wetback hotel,” he said, and coughed a laugh. “I’ll wait for you.”
“You’re welcome to come in,” I said. “I’m not going in for confession or anything.”
The livestock inspector laughed again. “I don’t think so.” He reached down and turned up the volume on the police radio. “I’ll keep track of your boys for you.”
“I’ll be just a minute,” I said, and got out of the truck. The carved wooden door of the church faced north and swung on enormous iron strap hinges, with a simple thumb latch for security. I pushed it open and went inside.
Little had changed since the first finishing coat of whitewash had been slathered on the walls in 1826. Light poured in through five tall, narrow windows on each side. The ripples in the colored glass and the dark patina on the leading would make an antiques dealer’s pulse pound.
Emilio Contreras was working near the third window on the west side, and he didn’t look up as I approached.
“Hello,” he said as I came up to him. A small scraper and a patch of sandpaper rested on the wide sill. He held a pint can of paint in one hand, and what looked like an artist’s brush in the other. With his mouth held just so, he was running a bead of white paint down the lower mullion, the loaded brush bristles following the seam between glass and wood with precision.
I watched in silence until he finished the stroke and lifted the brush.
“If I tried that, you’d have a white window,” I said. “How are you doing, Emilio?” Resting against the nearest pew was his cane-one of those modern aluminum things with four feet spread wide, a sort of one-handed mini-walker.
“I’m doing okay,” he said, sounding surprised. “How about you?”
“I’ve been better,” I said, and he shot me a quick glance as he straightened away from the window. I’d once heard that Emilio was twenty years older than his wife. I knew Betty was pushing sixty, but in the shadows of the church, I wouldn’t have guessed that Emilio was much older than that. Barely five feet tall and slight, he moved with a dancer’s grace unless the maneuver required use of his left leg.
“I need to ask you about this morning, Emilio. I’m particularly interested in the hour between seven and eight-what you might have seen or heard.”
“You mean over at Sosimo’s?” He pointed with the handle of the small brush. “What a shame, eh.”
“Yes.”
He regarded the window for a long time, can of paint in one hand, brush in the other. “I walked over here at seven,” he said judiciously, and turned to look at me. “And there were a lot of people over there, even then. That’s unusual.” He grinned. “Sosimo doesn’t get up so early.” He set the open can of paint carefully on the windowsill, and rested the brush across the top.
“But you didn’t go over?”
“No, I didn’t go over. Clorinda was there.” He flashed a quick smile. “Her big old barge was parked out front. The last thing I needed was to be corralled by that woman.” He shuffled to the pew and lowered himself to the seat, stretching his leg out with a grunt. “She always wants me to fix something or other.” He frowned suddenly. “We heard about the boy. That was too bad, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was. When you walked over here this morning, was there any traffic?”
“No, not then. Maybe later, when Sosimo was walking up the hill.” He gestured toward Regal Pass to the north.
“You saw him walking then? What time was that?”
“Maybe seven-thirty, maybe quarter to eight.” He indicated the plastic two-and-a-half-gallon water container on the floor, and the coffee can. “I went outside to clean this brush. It gets loaded, you know, and the paint starts to dry. That makes it hard. So I went outside to clean it and take a breather.” He grinned again. “I like to see the village waking up. And Sosimo, he’s walking up the road.”
“You’re positive that it was him?”
“Oh, sure.” He didn’t explain why, at two hundred yards or better, in oblique morning light shaded by the mountain’s bulk, he could recognize Sosimo Baca from the back.
“And he just walked up the hill?”
“As far as I know. I came back in here. I got work to do.”
“You mentioned traffic. Was it just the usual border traffic on the road, or someone specific that you recognized?”
He nodded. “The usual,” he said. I turned and surveyed the small church, and found myself idly wondering who from the next generation was going to lavish the attention on its wood, plaster, and glass. “Emilio, I’m thinking that this morning somebody was over at Baca’s place, alone with Sosimo sometime between seven-thirty and eight. It looks like he died right around then. Mandy Lucero says it was about eight or maybe a little after when she found him.”
“It’s a shame that Mandy had to walk in on something like that,” the old man said. He narrowed his eyes and frowned. “And maybe it’s a blessing that she didn’t walk into that house a few minutes earlier, if what you say is true.”
“For sure. If you happen to remember anything, give me a call, will you?”
He nodded, and picked up the brush, politely waiting for me to stop interfering with his drying latex.
The women needed to cook and bake in preparation for the funerals. Emilio needed to paint and spruce up La Iglesia de Nuestra Senora. I walked out of the church with the feeling that everyone in Regal was ready to close the book on Sosimo Baca and his son. The daughters were out of sight and out of mind, and a good meal and some organized wailing would take care of the last vestiges of that branch of the Baca family.
Cliff Larson saw the expression on my face when I walked out, and he grinned through a fresh plume of smoke. “Didn’t see a thing, did he?”
I sighed and settled into the truck. The door, slightly buckled just behind the hinges, closed with a groan. “No. He didn’t see anything.”
“I coulda told you that before you went in there.”
I laughed. “You gotta cover all the bases, Cliff. Actually, there was something. Emilio did say that he saw Sosimo Baca walking up the hill, toward the pass. That’s what the three women said-that he set off toward town. Emilio saw him too. That’s something, at least.”
“So he started to feel bad, and turned around and walked back home. No mystery there.”
“Nope. No mystery there.”
Cliff frowned. “What’s the problem, then?”
I didn’t want to launch into a dissertation about a refrigerator, or Bob Torrez’s reservations, or just my own sense that we were missing something, so I shrugged and let it go by saying, “I don’t know what the problem is, Cliff. Intuition, I guess.”
“Well,” he said, starting the truck and pulling it into gear, “that’ll screw you up every time.” He glanced at his watch. “Let’s give you something else to think about. Bobby can handle this end of the county. Hell, he’s related to half of ’em.”
“And I don’t know if that’s part of the problem or not,” I said.
Chapter Fifteen
The livestock inspector kept his truck in third gear for two cigarettes’ worth, all the way up through Regal Pass. Other than a grunt or two about the weather and what kind of winter it was going to be, Cliff didn’t say much. It was as if his concentration helped the truck manage the grade. He was mentally fussing with something, I could see that. He tongued the cigarette from one corner of his mouth to the other, but I didn’t prompt him. He’d get around to whatever was nagging him.