“I’ll make sure Burkhalter gets something. Someday. What’s the third?”
Estelle opened the last folder, glanced at the cover page, and grinned.
“What?”
“You don’t want to know, sir.”
“Yes, I do. What is it?”
Estelle smiled up at me and handed me the folder so I could read it for myself. “It’s a list of people he wanted to be sure to invite to your retirement party, sir. It looks like he was still in the process of adding to it. Probably when he remembered a name, he’d add it to the list.”
“A party?”
“September thirtieth at the Don Juan de Onate, in the Conquistador Room. Seven P.M.”
“He never told me about that. Let me see this thing.”
“Of course he didn’t, sir. Evidently it was supposed to be a surprise.” I caught the wistful note in her voice and glanced up at her.
“There’re a lot of people here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Including you and Francis.” She nodded and I closed the folder. “You were going to come all the way down from Minnesota?” She nodded again and I added, “That would be silly.” The telephone on the desk buzzed and blinked, and with a sigh, I dropped the three folders on the desk.
I picked up the phone and slumped down in Holman’s chair. “Gastner.”
“George Payton on line one, sir,” Gayle Sedillos said, and the phone clicked.
“Thanks,” I said and punched the button. “George? This is Bill. What’s up?”
“Hey there,” George Payton said. We’d been friends for two decades, and we were both at that stage where we figured the other would die first. “I’ve got company.”
“I know you do,” I said.
“This is sure a sorry, sorry business,” he said and coughed. “How come you didn’t come over with these two feds?”
I chuckled. “Estelle and I are sorting through the wreckage of Martin Holman’s office paperwork, George. I couldn’t break away.”
“Sorry, sorry thing. But Eddie’s all right.”
“Yes, he is,” I said, assuming he was referring to Sergeant Mitchell. “What can I do for you?”
“Look…” He hesitated. “The law says that I have to make all the federal paperwork involving firearm sales available to law enforcement if so asked, correct?”
“That’s correct, George.”
“There’s nothing on the yellow forty-forty seventy-three form that asks why a customer is purchasing a firearm. Did you know that?”
“I guess I knew that.” I heard some conversation in the background and could picture Agent Walter Hocker standing there patiently, arms folded over his chest.
“If a bona fide law-enforcement officer asks me what my knowledge is of a customer’s purpose in purchasing any weapon-or any product at all, for that matter, even a goddam chain saw-am I required to tell him?”
“If there’s evidence of a crime, and if what you know is germane, and if it’s not self-incriminating, then yes-either now or later, and later, it may be in front of a Grand Jury,” I said. “But understand that we’ve got a significant criminal offense here. We need all the help we can get.”
“What’s the offense?”
“Evidence indicates that Martin Holman was murdered.”
Dead silence followed. “Nobody told me that,” Payton said finally. “Johnny Boyd did that?”
“We don’t know who did it.”
“I thought Martin was killed in a plane crash.”
“He was.”
“Then you’re not making sense.”
“George, we’ve known each other for a long time, isn’t that true?”
“Sure enough, we have.”
“Will you trust me on this one, then?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure.”
Payton chuckled dryly. “Sure I do. So you want me to tell these gents anything they want to know?”
“That’s just about it. And by the way, while I’m talking to you…did Johnny Boyd ever actually tell you why he bought all that hardware?”
“Well, of course he did.”
“Then tell the agents, George. It’s as simple as this: what Johnny Boyd did with his various weapons purchases, and I mean all the details, may well end up as the stuff of a Grand Jury session. Whether he’s innocent or not.”
“Sorry, sorry state of affairs.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more. By the way, do you have any South Korean two-twenty-three ammo in stock?”
“Sure.”
“The agents are going to ask you that. Do me a favor and give them a few samples, will you?”
“I can do that. What, did someone shoot Holman, or what?”
“Someone shot the plane and the pilot, George.”
“Good God.”
“Yep. Just tell the feds what they need to know. And keep it confidential for the time being, all right?”
Payton agreed, and I hung up. “I don’t know why he felt the need to call me,” I said.
“Because you’re an old, trusted friend, sir,” Estelle replied. “Remember Johnny Boyd saying to have Judge Hobart sign the warrant? Same thing.”
I sighed. “I suppose.” I looked up at her. “Can I go to Michigan with you?”
“Minnesota, sir. And that’d be neat.”
I grinned, picked up the three file folders again and handed them to Estelle. “That’d be neat,” I repeated. “And this shit is not neat. A complaint of solicitation by one of the county fathers, a threat to hire away one of my dwindling supply of best officers, and a goddam party that Marty Holman will never get to attend.” I relaxed back in Holman’s chair and watched Estelle shuffle the files into order. A deep weariness was finally beginning to catch up with me. I rested my head back against the chair.
“I’d like to know what the actual trajectory of that bullet was,” Estelle said, and she sounded as if she were talking just to try to keep me awake. “What the path was through the airframe. And then, if we can coax Charlotte Finnegan to focus a little, she might remember just where the plane was when she heard the backfiring. That might give us a closer idea of where the shot came from.”
“Within a county or two,” I said. “Buscema will be down at the hangar, I imagine.”
“Unless he took time out to eat or sleep.”
I looked at Estelle in mock surprise. “Now who does that?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
We refueled hurriedly at the Don Juan, and I could have lingered over the wonderful green-chili burritos and fresh coffee for the rest of the evening. But I was anxious to find out what Vincent Buscema had determined as he sifted his pile of junk, and Estelle needed to stop by her home on Twelfth Street for a moment to reassure her family that she hadn’t abandoned them.
I waited in the Bronco. Her husband’s Isuzu Trooper was parked in the driveway, and ten minutes later when she came back out, she wasn’t smiling.
“Francis finished the autopsy,” she said as she closed the car door. “At least all that they could do here.” She looked across at me, and I could see that there was something else.
“And?”
“Nothing beyond the gunshot wound that would contribute to the crash. There’s still quite a bit of lab follow-up that they want to do. But that’s going to take several days.”
That answer didn’t explain the expression on her face, so I repeated, “And?”
“And Martin Holman had multiple myeloma.”
I heard and understood perfectly well what Estelle had said, but my reaction was to say, “He what?”
“Multiple myeloma. It’s a bone cancer.”
“I know what it is,” I said, mystified. “Francis told you that?” She nodded. “At what stage was it?”
“If he’d felt ill enough to be seeing a physician, it wasn’t anyone in town, sir. It was a surprise to both Alan Perrone and Francis.”
“How did they discover that? It’s not a cancer that you’d see, like a big tumor or something, is it?”
“Francis said that the protein levels in the blood test tipped off Alan. They had done a preliminary screening in the lab here at the hospital. And then they did a series of X rays of bone samples, and I suppose that confirmed whatever it is that they look for.”