“Or some such,” I said. “You think they just packed her in the back of a truck under a load of watermelons and told the driver to dump her off when he got to the Posadas overpass?”
“Remember last year?”
“Yes, I do remember last year. I remember it very well.” And anyone would have who’d smelled the stench when the young state police officer and I had pried the back door open on a van that he’d stopped just across from the motel on the east edge of town. I’d been sitting in the motel’s café at the time, drinking iced tea. I saw the stop and knew damn well what was coming, even if the rookie trooper didn’t.
By the time the van was unloaded, there had been nineteen confused, sweating, frightened aliens lined up on the shoulder of the interstate awaiting the friendly escort of the U.S. Border Patrol. Three more inside the van awaited the coroner, because heatstroke had killed them deader than desert sand.
Estelle turned onto the street in front of Posadas General, and as she guided the car into a slot in staff parking, I saw Sheriff Martin Holman’s brown Buick parked in one of the doctors’ spots.
I turned in the seat and rested a hand on the dashboard. “Tell you what,” I said, and then stopped. With one eyebrow cocked, Estelle waited for me to finish the thought. “Why don’t you drop me off at home.”
“Sir?”
“At home. There are a couple of things I’d like to take care of, and sure as hell Manny Orosco is going to wait. Even if your husband pumps him dry, he’s not going to be coherent for quite a while.” I looked across at the Buick. “And I don’t feel like talking to Marty right now. I’m not ready to answer stupid questions.” I turned and grinned at Estelle. “I feel too stupid myself at the moment.”
She pulled the patrol car in reverse without a word, and in five minutes we turned onto Guadalupe Terrace.
My five acres were overgrown with gigantic cottonwoods and brush, shielding my sprawling adobe house from neighbors and noise. I had always thought of the place as a perfect hideaway for an old insomniac like myself. I did my best thinking either there or in a patrol car, and this time the patrol car wasn’t working.
Estelle stopped the car in my driveway. “Is there anything in particular you want me to do beyond…?”
“Beyond what you’re already going to do? No. I’ll get in touch with you after lunch. By then Francis should have something definite for us about what killed the girl. Maybe we can ream some sense out of all this.” Estelle didn’t argue with me and she didn’t pry. I got out and she backed the patrol car out of the driveway. I couldn’t help noticing that she waited until I’d stepped through the front door before driving away.
I closed the heavy, carved wooden door behind me and let the silence and coolness seep in. Diving back in the burrow was all I could manage at the moment. I couldn’t remember ever being so angry that I couldn’t think straight.
I took off my Stetson, closed my eyes, and rubbed a hand on the stubby bristle of gray hair on the top of my head. Against one foyer wall, its legs resting on elegant Mexican tile, was an old hand-carved wooden bench that had been made years before by Estelle’s great-uncle. Folded neatly on one end was an inexpensive Zapotec rug. I used the rug as a place to sit when I pulled on my boots by the door and from time to time in the winter as a seat cover in my Blazer.
As I tossed my hat on the bench beside it, I reflected that the rug was about twice as big as Maria Ibarra’s sleeping pad.
12
I had lied to Estelle Reyes-Guzman and she probably knew it. I didn’t have “a couple of things to take care of,” as I had said in the hospital parking lot. If I had anything at all to do, I sure as hell didn’t have a clue what it was. What was worse, I didn’t have the gumption to find out.
There was probably a “to-do” list that was a hundred items long in someone’s head, but not in mine.
Normally a short nap worked wonders…that was standard operating procedure for keeping my insomnia under control, and I had become adept over the decades at snatching a quick nap whenever the spirit moved me. But even the dark, cool invitation of the bedroom seemed pointless.
I walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. On automatic pilot, my hand was about a foot away from the cupboard where I kept the coffee filters when I stopped.
“Jesus Christ,” I said aloud, finally giving voice to my frustration. I stood at the sink with my hands resting on the cool porcelain edge, letting things ebb and flow. Even the idea of coffee, the lifeblood of my existence, was nauseating.
The kitchen window faced north and I gazed out through the six-inch square of dirty glass that hadn’t yet been covered by the energetic Virginia creeper vine outside.
If I removed the vine and then a couple hundred cottonwood trees, junipers, elms, poplars, and hollyhocks, I would be able to look across the depth of my five acres and see a vehicle if it drove by on Escondido Lane. Another two hundred yards beyond that were the trailer park, Manny Orosco’s truck, and finally the interstate.
The telephone rang and I ignored it. Instead, I walked across the kitchen to the pantry and unlocked the back door. Years before, I had had visions of a wonderful brick veranda outside that door. If I had designed it just right, I could have bricked right around the massive trunk of the nearest cottonwood, including it in the terrace. My youngest daughter had named the huge, sprawling tree “Carlos Cottonwood” for reasons known only to her. Underneath that tree, and on the north side of the house, the area was cool any time of year.
Visions were about as far as I had ever gotten. I stood by the door and looked at the jungle. The Virginia creeper’s trunk began on the east side of the house, and the vine had covered thirty feet of adobe wall before taking on the kitchen window on the north side. Encouraged by the cool shade, the vine had created a thick, green mat that was just beginning to brown off with the crisp fall nights.
I turned and looked at the cottonwood. It was an unkempt tree by nature, but the benign neglect contributed by my bachelor residency on the property had resulted in a creation that looked like something out of a British fantasy book.
The tree soared upward, its limbs spreading across the compass, crotches choked with nests whose tenants had come and gone, among them squirrels, ravens, perhaps even children. Who the hell knew. Dead limbs littered the ground and hung perilously from the living canopy, ready to rain down with the slightest breeze.
“Carlos Cottonwood,” I said and thrust my hands in my pockets. Beyond a passing glance out the window to check the weather, I hadn’t looked at the tree for a decade. Its massive root system was probably a hairsbreadth from plugging my sewer system for keeps.
I turned and looked at the kitchen window again. If the glass ever broke, the vine would find a way inside. They’d discover me one day, choked to death in bed by Virginia creeper.
As if the day held no other urgency, I wandered around the house to the garage, pushed up the door, and slid past all the junk that threatened to landslide down and crush both me and the late-model Chevy Blazer parked there. Deep in the bowels of the garage, in the bottom of a plastic bucket that was home to three sprinkler heads and a half bag of plant food, I found a set of nippers, yellow plastic handles and all.
I had never seen their jaws sprung open. I had no recollection of ever buying them, but knew of their existence in the same vague way that I knew there was a box of wide-mouth canning lids on top of the paint cabinet and a small package of gas lantern mantles in one of the tool boxes.
I went back outside, opening and closing the nippers as if trying to train them before the big event.
Before beginning on the vine, I cleared away the worst of the cottonwood detritus against the back of the house. It all made a neat pile about the size of a bathtub. It would have taken about a thousand of those piles to make a dent around the property.