With access to the back wall, I gently worked on the creeper. I didn’t want to make it angry, of course, but I was determined to have a window and maybe even an outside veranda light. There was no bulb in the fixture, but that was a problem easily solved. I left an artistic sweep of vine over the light and let the tendrils drape over the window frame, cascading down on the other side to touch the ground.
With the vine disciplined and the spiderwebs swept away, I had an old-fashioned four-pane window whose glass was intact under the thick crust of time. A sponge and plastic pan were just a few steps away in the pantry and I was eager to see glass.
The grime came away in great streaks, but I worked methodically, changing the water when it threatened to coagulate. By the time I had polished the glass to crystal with several editions of the Posadas Register, I could see that the wooden sill and window frame had peeled until there was only a trace of the original blue paint remaining.
With my pocketknife, I poked the wood. It was sound enough. It was still early in the day and plenty warm. Another opportunity might not present itself, and I shrugged. I still had blue paint from the last time the house trim had been painted.
I walked through the kitchen, pausing long enough to pour a pot of water into the coffeemaker and spoon grounds into the filter basket. By the time I had found, opened, and stirred the paint-a color labeled “Alhambra” by some imaginative engineer-and found a serviceable brush buried under my timing light and dwell meter, the coffee was finished.
With a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the brush in the other, I daubed at the window casing and sill, stopping periodically to critique my progress. The critique was not always good. When my brush touched the glass for the third time, I set down the coffee cup and dug my glasses out of my pocket, then spent some more irritation trying to decide which panel of the bifocals would work best.
By the time I finished a quarter of the window, I had decided that a person could spend a lifetime painting a house. My old adobe, plastered as it was with genuine, hundred-year-old brown mud, saved me that trouble, but it still had an acre of window and door trim. The trick was not to look too closely at the other windows as I walked around the building.
With the window half done, I made another pot of coffee and brought out one of my folding chairs. I sat under the cottonwood and looked at the house, deciding that I liked what I saw.
The second half of the window was tedious. The light was bad, my neck cricked, and the paint was thick and uncooperative on the brush. But I persisted and avoided painting the glass blue.
With six inches of the center mullion to go, I heard footsteps in the house. My hand froze, the brush poised just above the wood, a bead of paint ready to run.
“Sir?”
“I’m out back,” I shouted when I recognized Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s voice.
She appeared in the doorway but didn’t open it. Instead she stood quietly, regarding me. Her eyebrows pulled together in the beginnings of a frown.
“I made fresh coffee,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen with the brush.
“No thanks.” She pushed the door open and stepped out. Her deep brown eyes traveled first to the paintbrush, then to the can of paint, and then to the window. She was taking long enough to critique the work.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She looked back at me, and one eyebrow lifted a bit. “Why are you doing that, sir?”
I chuckled. “Because it needed doing. I got tired of not being able to see out the window.” I gestured with the brush at the vine. “It wasn’t hard. Kind of relaxing, actually.” I bent over and laid the brush across the top of the paint can. “What’s up?”
Estelle took a deep breath and reached out with one hand toward my sleeve. “You got some blue paint on your revolver.” I lifted my arm up and peered down at the gun, not an easy task considering my girth. I frowned. It was the first time all day that I was conscious of being in uniform.
I pulled the flannel paint rag I’d been using out of my back pocket and wiped the drip off the walnut grips and then daubed at another fleck near the buckle of the Sam Browne belt. “I can’t believe I did this without changing my clothes,” I muttered.
“I tried to call you earlier,” Estelle said.
“Yeah, I know. I heard it.”
“Five times.”
“You need to let it ring more than five times, sweetheart.”
“No…I mean I tried calling five times. Once not long after I dropped you off, and then around noon, and then afterward. I figured you were asleep.”
I stared at her blankly. “What do you mean ‘once around noon’? What time is it?” I said, and looked at my watch. The hands made no sense, stuck at five after four. The sweep second hand swept methodically around the face.
“It’s after four.”
“What time did you drop me off?”
“About ten…maybe ten-thirty, sir.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, sir.”
I backed up and sat down slowly in the lawn chair, my heart hammering in my ears. Estelle looked back at the window. She stepped up close and examined the glass. “Nice job.” She turned and looked at me. “Are you going to do all the trim?”
My hand groped at my shirt pocket, a tick left over from half a century of smoking. “Estelle…” I started and then stopped.
“Do you want me to come back later, sir?”
I shook my head with irritation. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” I got to my feet and waved a hand at the window. “It just seemed important at the time. I don’t know why.”
“Sometimes you need a break.”
I snorted and toed the paint can with my black boot. “I must be quite a sight.”
Diplomatic as always, Estelle didn’t respond to that.
“So…what did you find out?” I asked. I pulled a second folding chair out of the pantry and snapped it open for Estelle. She settled into it with a grateful sigh.
“Wesley Crocker left.”
“What do you mean, he left?”
“Sheriff Holman suggested to him that maybe he didn’t need to stick around the office after all. That maybe he could find himself somewhere else to stay. That’s what Bob Torrez told me earlier today.” Her mouth twitched slightly. “That’s one of the times I tried to call you, sir. The sheriff told Bob that we didn’t need to turn the place into a roach motel.”
“For God’s sakes, what an idiot,” I snapped. “Where’s Crocker, then?”
“He told Bob that he wanted to ride north of town a ways and investigate an old trail. He said you’d know.”
I closed my eyes, trying to imagine the pleasure that strangling the sheriff would give me. “So he’s on the loose. What else? What’s the rest of the bad news? I hope Manny Orosco is still in custody, or did the sheriff send him somewhere, too?”
Estelle took a deep breath and held it as she regarded me. “Orosco’s dead.”
“Of what?” Somehow I wasn’t surprised, but the news irritated me even more. Drunks seemed perfectly capable of hanging around for years, until everyone was thoroughly tired of them. The day that they might have been of some concrete use, they crapped out.
“Well, sir, that’s the interesting thing.” She leaned forward in her chair and clasped her hands together. “When we went through the truck, we bagged as evidence the liquor bottle that was lying near the head of his cot.”
“The rotgut sherry,” I said.
Estelle nodded. “There was no other evidence of liquor bottles near the bed. Up in one of the cabinets, I found a half bottle of that cheap fruit brandy, and a new bottle of peppermint schnapps. Unopened.”
“Even Manny might have thought twice about drinking that stuff,” I said.
“I don’t think so, sir. Anyway, Francis told me this afternoon that preliminary blood tests showed a blood-alcohol level that was right off the charts. Over point three-five. That’s enough to be toxic in anyone, sir.”