I switched off the car and got out. The keys weren’t in the Bronco, and it was locked. I felt a little better. I walked slowly and carefully through the timber…not because I was stalking anyone, but because I didn’t want to fall on my face. I broke out of the trees and involuntarily slowed, struck by the view. The mesa rim was a wonderful place. The rocks were jumbled into scores of the best benches nature could provide. You could look out and see hundreds of square miles-old and new mines, two villages besides Posadas, a score of human enterprises, and endless works of nature. I stood still and scanned the rim. After a minute I saw Scott Salinger.
He was lying stretched out on a large flat rock, using another as a pillow. If he had the rifle, it was hidden behind him. I walked across toward him, and when I was a hundred feet away he decided to notice. He turned his head just enough to see who was intruding. I was well aware of the effect uniforms had on people, especially youngsters, and was glad then that I had changed into casual clothes. As I walked toward him, I thrust my hands deep in my pockets, hoping the effect was that of a harmless old man out for a simple daily constitutional, and that the meeting was entirely by chance.
“Scott, how are you doin’?” I said casually.
“Amy must have told you I was here.” He sat up and watched my progress across the rocks.
“Yup, she did.” I started to lower myself to a rock, and hesitated. “Do you mind?”
“Pull up a chair,” he said, and managed a smile. I felt better.
“She seems like a wonderful gal,” I said.
“She is.”
“She’s a little worried about you. So are a lot of people. I talked with Coach Tatman today.”
“Yeah. Well.” Salinger looked out into the distance. A slight breeze ruffled his hair and he ran a hand through it self-consciously. The family resemblance was striking.
“What happened? With football, I mean.” I asked that and the boy shot me a glance as if to ask what business it was of mine, but then thought better of it. He returned his gaze to the distance and locked it there.
“It just got so it wasn’t fun anymore. That’s all. I was having a good time playing with some of the little kids. Watching ’em try to throw cracks me up.” He grinned and curled his hands as if he were spastic. “The coaches aren’t supposed to spend more than about an hour with us each day. With the varsity team, I mean…some state rule like that. But push, push, push. You’d think we were going for the Rose Bowl or something.”
“You don’t think it’s pretty important?”
“No. Not compared to other things.”
“Like?”
He was a long time in answering, and obviously knew why I had bothered tackling the mesa. “Like that undercover cop getting killed. Like Mr. Fernandez getting killed.” There was a tremor then in his voice, and he turned his head further so I couldn’t see his face. “Like Tom Hardy. Ricky. Isabel. All the rest.” He twisted and looked at me then, under control. “No. It’s not important.”
“Life goes on, Scott.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I lighted a cigarette and the breeze took the smoke back away from the rim. “I guess it’s not such an original thought. But it’s true.”
“Yeah.”
“Where did the cocaine come from?”
Scott let out a breath that was the beginning of a weak chuckle. “I saw you coming across the rocks there, and knew that’s what you wanted to ask me.”
“Well? Here I am.”
“Where do you get the idea that I know?”
“That first interview. When I used the tape recorder. I listened to that quite a few times. So did Detective Reyes.”
Scott Salinger grinned at the mention of Estelle Reyes. “You know what she said to me a day or so ago?”
“I have no idea. She didn’t tell me she’d talked to you.”
“I was downtown. She was walking out of the bank. She stopped and stuck out her hand, like she wanted to shake, you know? I was kinda embarrassed, but what the hell. So I shook hands and she wouldn’t let go right away. She hung on for a minute, and put her other hand up here, on the side of my face. Then she said, ‘I wish I knew what was going on inside that skull of yours.’”
I laughed. “That sounds like Estelle. What did you say?”
“I said, ‘So do I.’”
“Fair enough.”
“She’s something else. She didn’t say anything more than that. Just kinda smiled and let me go. I was embarrassed as hell.” He glanced at me. “She knows my sister. Went to school with her.” I nodded and remained silent. He reached out and stripped a grass stalk bare and chewed on the end of it. After a minute he said, “I think the cocaine belonged to Jenny Barrie.”
“What makes you think so?”
Salinger shrugged. “You hear talk. And once, I think it was a couple weeks before the end of school, Tommy was talking to me and asked me if I thought coke was as bad as everybody was telling us it was.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said I didn’t care, one way or another. I told him he was stupid if he was messing with it.”
“What’d he say to that?”
Salinger frowned. “I don’t remember. I think he just kind of shrugged it off. But he was going with Jenny Barrie, and she was a space case. She always was, even in grade school. Tommy said once that her old man smoked pot. I thought that was kinda funny.”
“Funny how?”
He glanced at me and his eyes drifted to my cigarette. “Somehow I just never think of older folks smoking joints. There he is, fretting over his income tax, or oiling his lawn mower, or building one of those model airplanes his shop sells, and he’s sucking in for all he’s worth.” Salinger pressed thumb and index finger against tightly pursed lips and sucked the imaginary joint until his eyes bugged. He let out a hard breath and chuckled bitterly. “Funny.”
“Do you have any direct evidence that the kilo of cocaine was Jenny’s?”
He shook his head. “No. But I know Tommy wouldn’t be able to afford even a down payment, even if he was into that shit. He couldn’t even afford a dime bag. And Isi Gabaldon was so straight she squeaked. The only reason she was in the car is because Hank Montano was. And Ricky only did what his friends told him to do. No, it was her. Count on it.”
I took another long shot, now that Scott was talking. “Did you know Darlene Sprague?”
“Sure.”
“What about her?”
Scott picked at the grass stem. “We all had ideas about who slipped her that shit. And you know the semester after she died? Last year? I had a creative-writing class. Space case was in it, too.”
“Space case?”
“Barrie. She spent the whole time writing those damn sappy poems. Always the same thing. Death, guilt, suicide.” He made a horrible, twisted face that would have looked about right on a corpse. “We always had to read our stuff in class, you know. And hers. Wow.” He pitched a small pebble down the rocks. “It got so bad that whenever she read something in class, me and a bunch of others would pretend like we were playing violins.” He looked over at me and grinned. “Pretty bad dudes, huh?”
“Well…” I said dubiously.
“We got on her case pretty hard. But it always seemed that she enjoyed it in sort of a screwball way. I got the notion that she just enjoyed being miserable and tragic.”
“Miserable and tragic.”
“Yeah. It got really bad one day, though. The vice-principal came to the door to talk to Mrs. Rosenthal about something, and this one kid, maybe you know him-Terry Semple?”
“I know the family. His dad’s a rancher.”
“Right. Well, Jenny’d just finished reading some damn thing, all full of oh-ah, pain and agony. Just real first-class shit, you know. I didn’t think anybody was really listening, ’cause she was wearing one of those sweatshirts that’s got all the cutouts in it?” Salinger grinned. “And absolutely nothing on under it. That was kinda neat. Anyway, old Semple, he leans across that dumb little circle we had to sit in and says when Jenny finished reading, ‘If you knew you were going to feel so damn guilty and broke up, what’d you deal in that shit for?’”