I raised an eyebrow, impressed at Holman’s dramatic speech.
I stood up and retrieved my hat. “Well, all this shit is perfectly timed, I’ll tell you that.” My fingers groped for a cigarette and settled for patting my breast pocket.
“Why don’t you join us for breakfast?” Holman asked. I shook my head.
“Maybe later.” I left the two young politicos to their designs and hustled my way to Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s dark corner down the hall. The door was closed and locked. Irritated, I stalked to my own office and opened the door.
Estelle was seated in one of the chairs in front of my desk, notepad on her lap. Seated in the other chair, looking pale and scared, was Karl Woodruff.
Chapter 18
“Morning,” I said shortly. I didn’t tack on a “good,” since Karl’s face told me it was anything but that. I read equal parts embarrassment, apprehension, and resentment in his expression. Estelle rose quickly from her chair and beckoned me back toward the door.
“Will you excuse us for just a moment?” she said to Woodruff. Estelle and I stepped out into the hall and she closed my office door behind us. At first she spoke so softly I couldn’t hear her.
“I can’t read lips, Estelle,” I said. “And how come you didn’t wake me up?”
“Sir, it was pure chance. I decided to run the fingerprints on the wrench for a match, so I just started with the most recent prints we had on file. From this weekend.”
“Well, that makes sense.” I looked suddenly at my office door as if I could see right through the old dingy mahogany. I could see Karl Woodruff sitting in that room, alone, his pulse hammering away in his ears. “Not him,” I said.
“One of the prints on the wrench belongs to Tammy Woodruff.”
“To Tammy?”
Estelle nodded. “A perfect match, sir. No mistake. I sent the wrench to Santa Fe early this morning for backup analysis, but I’m right. There’s no mistaking that print.”
Estelle held up her right index finger. With her left index, she drew a corkscrew line from the corner of the nail down across the pad, ending at the joint line. “Tammy has a scar across the pad of her finger. Friday night when we booked her, she told me she sliced her finger last year, when the top of a wine bottle that she was trying to open broke.”
“Tammy Woodruff,” I mused. “What the hell was she doing out there.”
“Changing a tire?” Estelle offered.
“Why did you call Karl in? Tammy’s the one we should be talking to, Estelle. She’s no minor.”
“I thought maybe her father might know where she is.”
“You checked?”
Estelle nodded. “She’s not at her apartment, sir.”
“Shit,” I muttered, and added, “Let’s go see what he has to say.”
Karl Woodruff watched us reenter the office; his eyes tracked my face as I closed the door. Estelle sat down and once more picked up her notebook, this time sliding her pencil into the spiral binding as if to announce that we were off the record. She then folded her hands on her lap.
The casualness of that little motion was not lost on Karl Woodruff, and he took a deep breath and tried to relax back in the hard chair.
“Sir, I asked Mr. Woodruff to join us for a few minutes this morning,” Estelle said to me. I glanced at my watch. Woodruff’s RxRite pharmacy would open in six minutes. “Is this a bad time, Karl? Do you have someone covering for you, or…”
He shook his head quickly. He leaned forward, taking most of his weight on his elbows, pushing against the arms of the chair. His hands were balled into his gut as if he were about to toss his breakfast burritos. “No, it’s fine,” he managed. He was a spare man anyway, one of those folks whose nervous system hangs on the outside. He’d make a lousy poker player.
“You want a cup of coffee or something?”
“No, thanks.”
I sat down behind the desk, behaving for all the world as if I knew what the hell was going on, as if I had orchestrated this reduction of a confident, successful merchant and chairman of the Republican party into a nervous wreck. Estelle pulled the pencil out of the notebook binding again.
“Sir, I asked Mr. Woodruff to come down because of the information we’ve received that places his daughter Tammy at or near the scene of the homicide Sunday night.”
Woodruff blanched. Homicide was one of those grim words that was a real attention grabber. I leaned forward and propped my chin on one hand. Woodruff was terrified, which was to our benefit, since if he knew anything at all he’d tell us-in a great rush of words that would try to wash away the grime of that single pronouncement.
Tammy Woodruff was twenty-three years old. She didn’t need daddy’s permission for anything, as she’d proven the previous Friday night at the Broken Spur Saloon with Sergeant Torrez. And we sure as hell didn’t need daddy’s permission to arrest her attractive young butt if she’d gotten tangled in something far dirtier than public drunkenness.
But for all her majority, nothing could erase her from her father’s mind as a little kid-a little kid winning 4-H ribbons at the fair, a little kid screaming out her first cheer, a little kid…all those sentimental things had to be swimming in Karl Woodruff’s mind just then. I felt sorry for him. I had four “little” kids of my own.
Estelle bent slightly and retrieved the lug wrench from her briefcase, which had been leaning against her chair. She held it out toward Karl Woodruff.
“Mr. Woodruff, this is part of a lug wrench from a General Motors product-a newer model truck of some sort. It’s the sort of wrench that we discovered in the grass just a few feet in front of where the deputy’s patrol car was found parked Sunday night. We have reason to believe that the deputy stopped that night, perhaps to assist someone.” She held up the wrench and turned it. Karl Woodruff’s eyes followed it.
“I don’t…”
“Mr. Woodruff, your daughter’s fingerprints were found on the wrench.”
“On that?”
“On the lug wrench that we found near the scene of the shooting. Yes, sir.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor do we, sir.” Estelle said it so quietly I almost didn’t hear her. And then she let the moment of silence hang.
“Her fingerprints?”
“Yes, sir.”
He pushed against the arms of the chair, rising up an inch or two. “I don’t understand. How does that wrench…” He stopped abruptly, cocked his head, and frowned. “What did Tammy tell you? I mean, she must have a simple explanation for all this. Just because she handled a wrench doesn’t mean…I mean, she could have touched it at any time. It doesn’t mean she had anything to do with that…with what happened out there.”
“Indeed not, sir. But it’s a connection we need to track down. I was hoping you could tell us where she is, sir. So we could ask her a couple of questions.”
Woodruff looked relieved, as if he had the right answer. “Well, I assume she’s at her apartment, detective.” He tried for a grin and managed a lopsided grimace. “She’s not an early riser.”
“She’s not at her apartment, sir.”
“She’s not?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, a friend’s then. She frequently stays with a friend.” Woodruff shifted in his chair, uncomfortable having to admit that his healthy, wild-hair daughter didn’t live the life of a nun. “But wait, now.” Woodruff looked at me as he tried to rise to the offensive. “I don’t understand any of this. Why would Tammy’s fingerprints be on that…that wrench in the first place? She doesn’t even drive a Chevrolet, or whatever you said it’s from. Hell, you know what she drives.” He chuckled weakly. “Doesn’t drive it too well, sometimes, either.”