“You think there’s something there? I mean, with those two?”
“What do you mean, something? ”
“I don’t know. Triangles, rejection, two-timing…all those old tried-and-true ways to wreck a life. Not to mention that they’ve made it a little more of a challenge anyway. Besides, with Page up in Socorro most of the week, there’s both opportunity and temptation.”
“I suppose. If there is, though, we haven’t found a thing. Except maybe a crush on the boy next door.”
“Well, there you go,” Francis said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Page wasn’t even in this part of the world yesterday noon, was he?”
“No. I talked to him in his Socorro office. If this is something he orchestrated from afar, then he’s doing an Academy Award job of playing the worried spouse. And he doesn’t strike me as your basic ‘hire a hit man’ type.”
“But that’s been done before,” Francis said.
“Oh, si.” She pushed the Play button. “I don’t know, querido.”
They watched in silence for a while, and eventually Estelle became aware that Francis’ breathing was deeply rhythmic and that his head weighed a ton. She glanced down, loath to move and wake him. Instead, she circled an arm around his shoulders and snuggled deeper herself, resting her head back against the cushion.
The tape plodded on, and each time the camera swung back to take in the commissioners’ dais, she could see the back of Robert Torrez’s head, a few rows ahead of the camera. Sitting one row ahead of him and one seat to the right was Eddie Mitchell. Once in a while, Torrez would lean forward and say something that the camera couldn’t pick up, and Mitchell would respond, occasionally glancing back toward the camera when he turned.
At 10:45 AM, the commissioners had called a brief recess, and everyone that the camera could see before the recess returned when the meeting reconvened. Twenty minutes later, the camera’s mike caught the thud of the commission chamber doors. The camera didn’t move, catching every word of Commissioner Barney Tinneman’s impassioned plea that the county should sue Colstrup Brothers Construction of El Paso for the shoddy roof job.
At one point, he pounded the dais in frustration. “I mean, if a contractor tore off the roof of your own home, and then replaced it with one that cost what this job did, and then it leaked, why in hell would you beg and plead for the job to be done right?” He leaned back in his chair, then surged forward again. “Kevin, what was the date of the final inspection? When we supposedly said the job was finished and approved?”
The camera swiveled deftly to catch Zeigler’s answer, and while the county manager explained the July 10 date and what it actually meant, Estelle saw that a new face had joined the meeting, this time sitting one row in front of Zeigler’s special microphone-equipped desk…perhaps explaining the thud of the chamber’s door. Ralph Johnson, the Highway Department’s supervisor, had taken a seat beside Don Fulkerson, manager of the landfill. Johnson didn’t look like he wanted to be present anymore than did the other department heads in the room, each one of them trying to time their arrival just seconds before the commission might have questions on their personal agenda item. Fulkerson appeared to be dozing.
For another hour, the commission worked its way down the agenda, and as the various department heads said their piece, most then left the meeting. Estelle imagined that they all walked faster toward the exit than they had entered. Ralph Johnson answered a half dozen simple questions, including a brief tussle over bid specifications with Tinneman, who appeared ready to argue about everything, given the chance. When the camera swiveled to watch and hear Johnson speak, Estelle could see Zeigler on the far left, and the full sweep of the commission chambers, with Commissioner Barry Swartz just visible on the right margin of the picture.
Regardless of what was going on with the commission, or what questions they may have had for the various people who took the mike or for the county manager, Kevin Zeigler remained the focus of an almost constant procession of people who entered the chambers to speak with him, bending down for a confidential confab while Zeigler covered the mike with his left hand. Almost invariably, when Crowley’s camera swung to cover a speaker, there was Zeigler in the rear of the hall at his desk, talking with someone.
Most of the time, he appeared in good humor, a quick smile his standard greeting for people who needed to whisper in his ear.
At 11:30, the commission launched into its discussion of providing police services for the village. Village Chief Eddie Mitchell walked stolidly to the microphone in the back of the hall, immediately beside Crowley’s camera. The chief fielded questions for twenty-five minutes.
When the meeting adjourned for lunch, Crowley kept the camera focused on the commissioners, recording their small tete-a-tetes for posterity. At one point, Tinneman pulled County Clerk Stacey Roybal to one side, his brow stormy. He bent close to Roybal, who was a full head shorter than he was, and it was obvious that Milton Crowley, all the way in the back of the hall, wanted to know what they were talking about, since he zoomed in as close as the camera’s lens would allow. The camera didn’t waver.
As Tinneman finished, he glanced toward the back, said something else, and gathered his sports jacket off the back of his chair. The camera went dead as Dr. Arnold Gray, the last commissioner to leave the hall, grinned into the lens and said loudly, “Come on, Milt, it’s time for lunch. Turn that thing off.” The camera winked to snow.
Before the tape had a chance to start the afternoon session, Estelle pushed the Pause button. Francis shifted and lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck.
“Why don’t you go to bed, querido,” Estelle whispered.
Francis pushed himself upright with a groan. “I fell asleep.” He regarded the static on the television screen. “That didn’t have much of a plot.”
“They broke for lunch.”
“Are you going to break for bed?” He glanced at his watch.
“I need to see a few more minutes,” Estelle said.
“The whole afternoon session is a hell of a lot more than a few minutes,” Francis said, and clamped a hand on her knee. “Sofia’s coming tomorrow. It’d be nice if you weren’t in a coma from exhaustion. Plus we’re going to try to have a nice dinner Friday night with Padrino, and on Saturday, we’re supposed to go to Las Cruces.” He grinned and yawned. “I forget what for.”
“You win,” Estelle said. She pressed the Off button and the television snapped to black.
“Did you ever mention to Francisco that you saw him at school?”
Estelle shook her head. “He’s got his secret, I’ve got mine.”
Francis chuckled gently. “That sounds like something tu mama would say, one of her many little dichos.”
“I’m sure she has several that cover it, oso.” She frowned, and he reached out with his thumb, stroking the wrinkles over the bridge of her nose.
“What’s the matter?”
She sighed and dropped her legal pad on the floor beside the sofa, then settled back into the cushions again.
“I’ve had one of those ‘what if’ days, oso. ” He looked quizzical. “Roy and Ivana Hurtado find out that their little darling, their little A-plus, principal’s-list daughter, is carrying around a six-inch hat pin for a weapon. And yesterday, or whenever it was, Melody Mears greets me on the tarmac at the school, and I look at her inseam, too. What do you think Tom and Deb Mears would say if their daughter pulled a Deena? And it goes downhill from there.”
“None of it’s your fault, querida.”
“I know that,” she said impatiently. “Carmen is lying in a coma up in Albuquerque, and there’s no telling what that’s doing to her parents. And then when I come home and tell her about Francisco, my mother says to me”-and she switched to a fair imitation of her mother’s stately, formal Spanish-“‘Are you just now noticing that he has music in his heart?’”