Pedro refused to come to mind, and Estelle shook her head.
“No matter.” Teresa waggled her fingers. “He was a natural guitarrista. I knew it. He had these marvelous, nimble fingers, and when someone would play, you could see the look on his face. Anyway, I told his father, and Luis had this old guitar.” She shook her head in disgust. “It was like having a big chunk of cottonwood with strings nailed on. Imposible. I told Luis he should take this old thing out and burn it, and he told me that I was being ridiculous, that a guitar was a guitar. You know what happened?”
“No.”
“I told Father Tomas about it. I told him what I thought, and about Pedro. The good Father thought about it and then said he’d see what he could do. Before you know it, Pedro had himself a decent guitar. I don’t know where Father got it. But he gave Pedro lessons, and before you know it…” She shrugged elegantly.
“And now he plays concerts all across Europe,” Estelle said soberly, knowing what was coming.
“No, he doesn’t. Luis drank too much one night and drove into the Rio Plegado, which happened to be flooding at the time. He drowned the whole family, including little Pedro with his little guitarist’s fingers.” She pursed her lips as Estelle tried to avoid bursting out laughing, a combination of fatigue and her mother’s version of a moral tale.
“That’s a terrible story, Mama,” she said, groaning.
“It’s true, though. Most of it. The only good thing is that Luis drowned, too. Otherwise I think the whole town would have taken turns shooting him. Yo tambien.”
“I promise, Mama. We won’t buy a cheap piano.”
“Who are you going to find to give lessons?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well, you’re a detective. I’m sure you can find somebody. You know who I think would be good?”
“Who?”
“Isabel Sedillos. If she’ll do it.”
“Gayle Torrez’s grandmother?”
“Yes. If she’ll do it. I don’t know. But she plays every week in church, you know. I see what she does with some of the little ones in the choir. It wouldn’t hurt-” She bit the sentence off when she saw the glacial calm settle over her daughter’s face.
“I’ll talk to Gayle,” Estelle said.
“I think you should. That’s a good idea.” She nodded at the video. “You’re going to watch that now?”
“It’s probably about six hours long, Mama. I’ll wait until everyone’s gone to bed.”
“That’s what you should do, too.”
“In a little bit.”
“Six hours is not a little bit,” Teresa said. “And when are you going to buy this piano?”
“Saturday, I think. I’m going to ask Sofia to go along with us. She plays so beautifully.”
“She doesn’t just play, hija. She is a concert pianist.”
Estelle nodded. “I thought she could help Francisco find the right one. Will you go with us?”
Teresa immediately grimaced and waved a hand. “No, no. I don’t go to that place. I’ll stay home. Are you going to take Carlos?”
“Sure.”
“That’s good.”
“And what do you know about him?” Estelle almost asked, but before she could, her mother took a hold of her walker and pulled herself to her feet.
“And this nasty thing you’re working on,” Teresa said. “What about it?”
“It’s nasty,” Estelle said wearily. “I’m hoping this will help.” She nodded at the tape.
“What makes you think you’ll be able to go off to Las Cruces all day Saturday, then?”
“I’m just going to, that’s all.”
Teresa nodded with satisfaction. “You can do anything you make up your mind to do, hija. This is a good thing you’re doing for Francisco. It’s too easy, you know.”
“What’s too easy?”
“Ojos que no ven, corazon que no siente,” Teresa said, a pontifical forefinger, crooked with arthritis, raised in the air. “You put them out of sight long enough, pretty soon they’re out of your heart, too.”
“Mama, they’re in my heart and mind all the time. That’s why I do what I do. I think about you, about Francis, about the boys all the time.”
“Well, that’s good,” Teresa said. “But you just remember that being safe and well fed isn’t enough.” For a moment, it looked as if Teresa wanted to say something else, but she didn’t. She began her slow shuffle across the living room, heading toward her room in the back of the house. “I’m going to start on a nap while there’s some peace and quiet.”
“Close your door so they don’t wake you when they come home.”
Teresa shook her head. “No. That’s the best sound to hear, you know.” She blew a kiss toward her daughter. Estelle sat quietly for a few minutes, gazing at the blank spine of the videotape.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Has the feature started yet?” Dr. Francis Guzman settled on to the sofa beside Estelle. The VCR counter showed one hour and seventeen minutes into the meeting, and the sound was turned down to a murmur. He studied the screen intently, watching County Manager Kevin Zeigler methodically making a point about the leaky, one-year-old hospital roof and a possible repair strategy that didn’t involve suing the contractor.
“Crowley pays attention,” Estelle said. “He catches everyone who speaks, and doesn’t waste tape on anything else.”
“Fascinating,” Francis mumbled. “If it’s deadly boring the first time around, the tape must be just spellbinding.” He squirmed down into the cushions, resting his head against Estelle’s arm.
Estelle pushed the remote’s Pause button, and the county manager froze in place, pencil poised, eyes leveled at the commission. “It’s strange to see him,” she said. “One minute he’s here, the next minute he’s gone.”
“Huh,” Francis said noncommittally as the tape continued. “What makes you think that Zeigler’s disappearance has anything at all to do with the meeting?”
“Absolutely nothing, querido,” Estelle said. “And that’s how frustrating all of this is.”
“Then…,” he said, and let it hang.
“Because we have nothing else. There has to be something, somewhere-some little key.”
“Maybe he was just robbed. Maybe he went out for a noontime run or bike ride, got mugged and then dumped in a ditch somewhere.”
“That’s as possible as any of this,” Estelle said. “Except when I saw him right at noon yesterday, he said he had several errands to do. He didn’t say anything about exercising in the middle of the day.”
“And he probably wouldn’t, now that I think about it,” Francis said. “At least not on a meeting day. His habit was to run early in the morning.”
Estelle touched Pause again and turned, having to duck her head to look her husband full in the face. “How long has he been doing that, Doctor?”
“I would guess most of his adult life,” Francis said. “He’s a hell of an athlete, you know.” He lifted a hand and pointed at the frozen figure on the screen. “He keeps his cool right along with a BP that’s down in the basement. His pulse rate might rise to fifty on a bad day. That’s where that endurance comes from.” Out of idle curiosity, Francis lifted the legal pad on Estelle’s lap and scanned the notes. “You don’t think it was something from his personal life?”
“Not that I’ve been able to discover. I had a long talk again today with William Page. There was plenty of opportunity to bring up problems, a lot of time for slips.”
“Maybe Kevin was having an affair with somebody else. That’s always a good one. What, about ninety percent of homicides are committed by family members against family members?”
“Too many,” Estelle said. She sighed. “The problem is trying to determine what sort of casual contacts a person makes during the day that are going to be where the trouble starts. I mean, who can predict that sort of thing? His roommate’s not much help with that. Page is only in town a couple of days a week. Sometimes not even that.”