“We think it’s loose,” I said. “Whatever it is that we’re looking for. We might save ourselves a little time and effort by not undoing all your good work.”
“Hijole,” Fernando muttered under his breath. “You choose a bad day, you know. They pick up on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So you got a lot to look through before they come around this morning.”
“Right. But it would have been tossed in sometime since Thursday noon,” I said.
The restaurant owner sighed with resignation. “Well…you want help?”
“No. You have far better things to do,” I said. “We’re fine, Fernando.”
“You still think something happened to Mr. Payton?” I was impressed that he’d made the connection without prompting.
Other than death? I amended, but I kept the thought to myself. “Yes.”
He nodded. “Coffee’s on whenever you need some,” he said, and reached out to pat my arm as he walked past. He went back inside the restaurant, careful not to let the screen door slam behind him.
For another half hour, we waded our way through a day and a half in the life of the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant. I knew from her determined expression that Estelle had conjured up her own scenario for what had happened on Thursday. I hadn’t, but maybe that was because I wanted us to find some innocent reason for George Payton’s death, not food or wine spiked with lethal chemicals.
A similar scene was in progress at several other sites around the village-in the alleys that served George’s small home on 1228 Ridgemont, in the Borman’s neighborhood, even behind Guy Trombley’s pharmacy. They found exactly what we did…lots of garbage, none of it incriminating. No deadly little bottle with the DeMur Industries label, no plastic spoon, no ah-stick used to mix the brew.
It’s always nice to hope for a simple resolution, but when a criminal doesn’t want to be caught-when he doesn’t send rude notes to the cops taunting them, when he doesn’t leave behind incriminating, obvious clues, when he has no intention of striking a second time, or most simple of all, when there are no witnesses-crimes often remain unsolved, something most taxpayers don’t want to hear.
In another hour, we’d finished behind the restaurant. All our digging and sorting had produced nothing.
The two dumpsters behind the county building on Bustos featured an entirely different ambiance, including an interesting mix of bagged governmental detritus, rather than old lettuce and platter scrapings. Somebody spent a lot of time feeding paper shredders. Even though I’d been caught in the middle of county bureaucracy for a fair span of time, I’d never actually appreciated the amount of just plain stuff that pooped out the back of the county office buildings every day, headed for the landfill.
By the time we finished there, the sun was painfully harsh on the metal surfaces. I hadn’t had breakfast yet, and none of the young eager beavers around me showed any signs of weakening. I had privately reached the conclusion that of all the interesting wild chases I’d been on with the undersheriff-and most of them had paid off in one way or another-this one took top honors as being the most useless. That in itself was depressing, since I wanted answers about George Payton’s death as much as anyone.
At least Estelle, Tom, and Linda were perfecting their technique. The dumpster was eased over, the lids folded back out of the way, and then the trash was eased only as far forward as necessary to examine all the way to the bottom of the container.
About finished with the second dumpster behind the county building, Tom Pasquale straightened up, holding what appeared to be a perfectly good deep throat document stapler. As he turned it this way and that, the sun winked off the metallic inventory sticker on the bottom. “From the assessor’s office,” the deputy said. He clicked it several times, pulled open the back, and checked the innards. “Anybody want it?”
“Jack Lauerson might,” I said, and Tom handed the gadget to me. “It must have slipped off one of the desks somehow and landed in the trash.” The bags went back in the dumpster and I watched the trio clean up before tipping the last container back into place.
I looked at my watch. “Look, I need to eat,” I said. “Watching all you bears cleaning out the dumpsters is making me hungry. Breakfast is on me.” Linda Real wrinkled her nose, looking at her gloved hands.
“Yuck,” she said. “Shower sounds better.”
“That too,” I agreed, although as a bona fide sidewalk supervisor, I’d done nothing to work up a sweat or attract aroma. “What’s the deal now?” I asked Estelle, even though I knew perfectly well what the deal was. Her dogged determination wouldn’t be appeased by a token effort, one that left any dumpsters unturned.
“It’s 8:55,” she said. “There are a couple places I’d like to check before we wrap it up.” She pulled a folded paper out of her pocket and consulted it. “I didn’t assign the dumpster out on County Road 19 just beyond the Hocking place.”
“You know,” I reflected, “if the killer is driving around with a little bag of trash tossed behind his car seat, we’re wasting a lot of time.”
“Yes, sir,” Estelle agreed. “And that’s just as much a possibility as tossing the trash in one of these.” She nodded at the dumpsters. “But in a few minutes, the trucks are going to collect all this, and the only chance to search goes out the window.” She started to say something else, but her phone chirped.
“Reyes-Guzman,” she said, and then glanced at me as she listened. “Good morning, sir.” Silence followed for a moment, and then she asked, “What time was that, sir?” A lengthy dissertation followed, and Estelle closed her eyes-whether out of frustration or fatigue I couldn’t tell. “And you’re absolutely sure, sir?” she asked at last. Apparently the caller was. “We’ll be over in about five minutes, then,” she said. “Thank you, sir. I appreciate this.” Something in her tone said that she didn’t. Snapping the phone closed, she looked askance at me.
“Unbelievable,” she said.
“Go ahead…I’m gullible.”
The undersheriff laughed, but without much humor. “The histamine diphosphate is back on the shelf.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Despite Trombley’s astounding discovery, Estelle Reyes-Guzman was not ready to abandon her dumpster project altogether. I understood her persistence, unproductive as the search had been. Trombley may have made yet another mistake, or the contents of the original bottle could have been transferred into another-all sorts of bizarre scenarios were possible. Tom and Linda were sent out to the county to continue the checks, and other teams, all reporting nothing but garbage, continued from one site to another.
Linda made a face at me when I mentioned that I sure wished that I could be with them every dumpster of the way. But sacrifices have to be made. Estelle asked me to ride along with her the few blocks to Trombley’s pharmacy to check the pharmacist’s discovery. One block into the trip, Estelle held up both hands, ignoring the steering wheel.
“Why?” she said. I hoped that it was a rhetorical question, since I didn’t have any inkling why.
“We may well be dealing with a quirk of human nature here,” I said, sounding more judicious than I actually felt. “Guy Trombley isn’t going to relish admitting that someone could just waltz into the drug store and swipe drugs off the shelf. It’s just like Fernando Aragon and his chile. You think he’s going to admit using canned ingredients? And Victor Sanchez doesn’t want his customers thinking that he talks with he cops. Silly ego is what it all is, sweetheart. And when both this case and Patrick’s come to trial, these guys can all keep each other company on the witness stand.
“There’s that,” Estelle agreed. “You often talk about forks in the road during an investigation.”
“We’re at one,” I said, not sure which of several forks she might be referring to.