Holman shook his head and looked out the window. Crocker’s bike was on the opposite side of the building, or the sheriff would have been watching his every move.
“I wonder where a guy like that goes. I mean, where he’s going. And why. Why the hell doesn’t he just get a job somewhere? He reminds me of all those bums you see on the street corners in the city-like up in Albuquerque. ‘Will work for food.’ And you know they probably never intend to do an honest day’s work in their lives.”
“Probably not.”
“And you’re not curious about where he’s headed? Who he is? Why he’s just tramping around?”
“No. It’s his life. There’s no law that says he has to stay in one spot and build a nest.”
“Build a nest, shit.” Holman looked across what little we could see of the dining room from the alcove. “Maybe I should just go out and ask him.”
“Spare the man, Martin. He can’t vote in this county anyway.”
Holman knew I was joking but he still managed to look hurt.
“You’ll probably never hear from him again,” he said. “And you’ll never know. I still say he’s probably pushing around eighty pounds of heroin.”
I saw Shari Chino come around the corner. “No doubt he sells a little now and then to finance new bicycle tires. Hell, why not.” I grinned as Shari set a platter down in front of me. “As long as the chili is hot, that’s all that matters. Thanks, sweetheart.”
As the aroma rose to clear out my sinuses, all thoughts of Wesley Crocker vanished from my mind. Martin Holman poked tentatively at his dark, generic fried chicken, then looked wistfully across the table at my masterpiece. “Maybe I should have had that,” he said, always willing to admit his shortcomings.
“Yes, you should have,” I said around a mouthful of green chili enchilada.
“The heartburn would keep me awake all night,” the sheriff said, and he started to pick some of the hard, grease-embalmed skin from a chicken wing.
“It’s worth it.” I knew insomnia would keep me awake most of the night anyway. And that was why, eight hours later when the telephone rang at two in the morning, I was sitting at the kitchen table of my old adobe house on the south side of Posadas, burping the aftertaste of my rich chili dinner and drinking coffee. I picked up the receiver, expecting to hear the voice of the sheriff’s department night dispatcher.
“Sheriff, now I hope you believe me when I tell you I wouldn’t be calling at an hour like this if it wasn’t important.”
I recognized Wesley Crocker’s quiet, polite voice.
3
I glanced at the clock over the stove and jotted down the time on the telephone pad just as he added, “This here is Wesley Crocker. You might remember that you gave me a lift into town earlier.”
At that hour, there was no point in chitchat. He wasn’t calling to thank me again for dinner.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Crocker?”
“I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I briefly wondered why people who called in the middle of the night bothered to say that. “What can I do for you?”
“Well…” And he stopped talking. I could hear a voice in the background, and then Crocker said, “Yes, sir,” obviously not to me. I waited. The unmistakable crackle of a two-way radio came next, and I knew where Crocker was before he spoke.
“Sir,” he said, “I’m in kind of some trouble here. I didn’t know who else to call.” He murmured something apologetic that I didn’t catch, then added, “I still have your card, thank the Lord.”
“Where are you, Mr. Crocker?”
“I’m…I’m down at the village lockup.” Again I heard a voice in the background and Crocker said to someone else, “Yes, sir. Here.”
“Bill?”
“Yes.” I would have recognized Sheriff Martin Holman’s voice in the middle of a deep sleep. “What’s going on, Marty?”
“I didn’t know he was going to call you right off the bat or I would have beaten him to it,” Holman said. “We’ve got a real mess down here at the village P.D. I already called Estelle Reyes-Guzman and some of the others. But it sure would help if you’d come on over.”
I took a deep breath, knowing it did no good to get testy with Holman’s oblique nature.
“Sheriff,” I said, measuring my words as if I were talking to a four-year-old instead of a reasonably intelligent former used-car salesman, “what happened?”
“Well, the village got a report of a possible person down. Over under the high school bleachers. Looks like it’s a twelve- or thirteen-year-old kid.”
“Dead?”
“Yes. Tom Pasquale’s first guess is that it was assault.”
I managed not to groan. Tom Pasquale had worked his way up from hopeful volunteer to paid part-timer for the village department, adding his overly enthusiastic weight to the village’s two-man squad.
The young officer’s application for employment with the county had taken up residency in my filing cabinet more than a year before. I was sure there was a carbon copy at the state police personnel office as well.
Pasquale spent a good deal of his time trying to impress whoever would pay attention. He would have been better served by going to the police academy in his spare time…but he wasn’t going to attend on our buck.
“And he arrested Wesley Crocker?”
“Well, it seems logical to me,” Holman said. “Officer Pasquale said the man was camping near the bleachers, apparently. Are you coming down?”
“I’ll be right there. Who is the victim, do we know?”
“Not yet. They haven’t moved the body yet. They’re waiting on Estelle. She was going to pick up Francis at the hospital and head over.”
“All right. I’ll see you in a few minutes. Who’s standing by at the scene? Is someone protecting that?” I had visions of huge Pasquale boot prints squashing evidence into unrecognizable pancakes.
“Bob Torrez said he’d take care of it until you or Estelle got there. Chief Martinez is there with him.”
“Good. I’ll be right there.” I hung up, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. Before the night was over, we’d know who the victim was, if Estelle Reyes-Guzman and the deputies had to knock on every door in town. That would be half of the puzzle.
I left the quiet darkness of my old adobe wondering how long it would take to find out who Wesley Crocker really was.
***
I drove 310 out of Escondido Lane and turned onto South Grande Avenue. Grande split the village in half from north to south. The only thing grand about it was its name.
The streets of Posadas were deserted. Even traffic on the interstate was sparse with winter still too far away for the snowbirds to be heading for Arizona or Mexico and too late in the fall for family vacations…just the consistent, dull flow of trucks.
I turned on the radio and was greeted with silence. Holding the coffee cup and steering wheel in one hand and keying the mike with the other, I said, “Three-oh-eight, three-ten.”
The response from Sergeant Robert Torrez was immediate. “Three-oh-eight.”
“Three-oh-eight, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Ten-four.” Torrez sounded half asleep, but he would sound that way in the middle of a train wreck. “You might want to park in front of the school, in the bus loop.”
I acknowledged with two clicks of the transmit button and then slowed down as I continued north through the intersection with MacArthur. The high school was the dark hulk off to the left, on its own island, surrounded on all sides by the families who supported the place.
As I turned onto Piñon, I buzzed down the window, listening to the night sounds of the village. Piñon jogged to Sylvester and then I turned the patrol car onto Olympic, the narrow macadam service road that skirted the football field and track. Someone shot a flashlight beam at me, but I didn’t stop the car. Instead, I continued on, circling the grounds by turning left on Pershing and away from the field.
The semicircular driveway in front of the high school was aglare with three sodium vapor lights, and I idled the patrol car into the driveway, aiming to park behind Torrez’s unit and the chief’s blue Pontiac.