“What about the steering wheel bar-lock?” Holman asked.
Chavez shrugged. “I heard that sometimes they spray the lock mechanism with Freon and then tap it hard with a hammer. Just shatters. I’m not sure about that. But the easiest way is just to cut a little chunk out of the steering wheel rim.”
“It’s that easy to do?” I asked.
“Sure. They have to make the steering wheel kind of soft, you know. The metal, I mean. So it bends and deforms in a wreck and doesn’t cut the driver into little pieces. Thieves know that, and with a good pair of wide-jawed bolt cutters…snip, snip.”
“But if they break into the truck by shattering a window, that would leave some glass on the ground.”
Nick shook his head. “Not necessarily. Hold a towel over it and rap it inward. Maybe one of the smaller back windows. You can do it pretty clean.” He grinned slightly. “Or you can slip the door lock other ways, I guess. You know, as fast as they come up with antitheft systems, there’s some smart thief out there who spends all day long figuring ways to beat the system. Count on it.”
“And you can hot-wire these new ignitions? What about all the interlocks, and cutoffs, and what not?”
“Like I said, as fast as the engineers design something, there’s a solution. And it’s a big market down south, let me tell you.”
“Maybe with NAFTA, it’ll dry up,” Holman said.
“Sure,” Nick said, and grinned.
“When’s the last time you had a truck stolen from your lot?”
Nick puffed out his cheeks in thought. “Eight years ago. We keep the inventory down, though.”
“Nothing since then?”
“No. You remember that time. When the Alvaro kid took the Z-28 and went joyriding all night before he blew up the engine?”
“What have you been hearing from other dealers?”
He shrugged. “Nothing out of the ordinary. There’s a lot of theft, especially in the bigger cities. But not from dealers. It’s too risky. The lots are well lit now and some of them even have security all night.”
I looked down at the dark coffee and swirled the cup gently, watching the patterns. Nick Chavez sat and waited. “Nick,” I said, “the deputy’s last call to dispatch was from the general area of your dealership.” I set the cup down and retrieved a small notebook from my breast pocket. After thumbing a few pages I found the entry I wanted. “He radioed dispatch at fifty-three minutes after ten from your dealership.”
“What was going on?” Nick asked. “No one called me.”
“Someone apparently called the police and complained that kids were driving around behind the dealership. Maybe parking in some dark corner, doing who knows what. Deputy Encinos noted in his patrol log that he responded and made no contact. Six minutes later he noted in that same log that he was ten-eight…that he was in service and available.”
“And then…”
“And then he drove about ten or eleven miles west on State Highway Fifty-six and was killed.”
Chavez looked at the floor, his hands clasped tightly with the index fingers steepled together. “Do you have much trouble down at the lot, Nick?” Holman asked, and Nick looked up at Holman as if he had just seen the sheriff for the first time.
“No,” he said. “None. I guess we’ve been lucky. The other place,” he said, referring to D’Anzo Auto Plaza, “they had more trouble…but they’re closed now, so we’re the only game in town. We’ve been lucky, I guess.”
“Isn’t the shop area fenced off in back?” I asked. “There’s nowhere anyone can go, other than just skirting the building, right?”
Chavez nodded. “The main service building is fenced, yes.” He stood up quickly. “You fellas got time?”
“To…”
“Let’s take a run down there. Right now.”
“Nick,” I said, “don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that there is any connection between the stop the deputy made at your place and what happened afterward. We’re just trying to reconstruct what happened that night.”
The dealer nodded vigorously, and held up one index finger close to his face, like a schoolteacher savoring a moment of explanation. “You never know,” he said. “Now you got me curious.”
“About what?” Holman asked.
Chavez walked to the foyer and lifted a Posadas Jaguars wind-breaker off the hook. He shrugged it on. “You said that the deputy responded to the call from your dispatcher at ten-fifty-three, right?”
“That’s right.” I knew Nick’s next question before he asked it, a nagging little gap in events that had been eating away at me all afternoon. “And six minutes later, he’s clear.”
Nick Chavez nodded. “So what is he doing for six minutes, Bill?”
Chapter 15
If kids wanted a dismal place to party, the narrow space behind the Chavez Chevrolet-Oldsmobile back fence was certainly it. Between the chain-link and the ragged edges of Arroyo Cerdo were fifty feet of sand, goat-heads, creosote bush and bunch-grass…mixed with debris and junk that the wind had brought in, or that Chavez’s mechanics had tossed over the fence from time to time.
Inside the eight-foot, barbed wire topped fence a row of vehicles waited for repairs that would probably never be made, or waited to surrender vital parts so some other junker could waddle a few more miles. As we walked along the fence, I noticed that several of the stripped vehicles were newer models than my own Blazer.
“Now this inner gate is locked all the time,” Nick said. He fumbled with a large set of keys.
I surveyed the eight-foot-high chain-link fence. “The person who called in the complaint from across the street wouldn’t be able to see back here. The building is in the way. She just said that there was vehicle traffic.”
“Kids,” Chavez said, as if that covered all the sins of the world. “They can pull in off the street, sneak around here, and be out of sight.” He pointed at the tire tracks outside the fence.
He opened the gate and motioned for the sheriff and I to follow. “The service manager opens this each morning,” he said. “That way the four back service bay doors can be opened and we can drive vehicles straight through, out and around.” He made a circular motion with his hands.
I grunted and turned slowly, surveying the yard. “Nothing,” I said to myself.
“Pardon?”
“I said, ‘nothing.’ There’s nothing here that tells me a damn thing.”
“I wish we knew who the deputy talked with,” Holman said. “That would answer a lot of questions.”
“It might,” I replied dubiously. “We have no connections, Martin. None. We can assume either way-that what Deputy Encinos did here had something to do with the later shooting, or that there is no relationship.” I shrugged. “You take your choice. Nothing either way.”
“Who called in the complaint?” Nick asked.
“Across the street. The Burger Heaven’s night manager. She called to say that she saw kids driving around behind this building.”
“Then all they could do is park outside the service yard fence,” Nick said. “They’re not going to climb over the barbed wire.”
“Who talked to the manager?” Holman asked.
“Tom Mears. He said that she couldn’t identify what kind of vehicle was involved. She was busy, the light was bad, it’s a hundred yards distant…”
“But she took time out to make the call to police,” Holman said. I looked at him with mild surprise. Given another four-year term, he might turn out to be as cynical as the rest of us. There was hope yet.
We dropped Nick Chavez back at his house after extracting the standard promise that if anything cropped up he’d give us a call. I wasn’t optimistic. Unable to let go, I drove back to the car dealership and pulled into the lot.
“Now,” I said, looking at my watch. “It’s ten-fifty-three. I’ve just checked out the lot, found nothing, and called the PD to inform them.”
“All right,” Holman said. “What do we do for six minutes?”