My oldest daughter Camille was fond of referring to the undersheriff as my “fifth kid.” Camille was only half-joking when she said that, and it was said with as much affection as if it were genetically true. In fact, I’d first met Estelle when she was twelve years old. A particularly interesting escapade with her great-uncle Reuben had taken me south of the border to the tiny village of Tres Santos, where the tiny, dark, sober child lived with Teresa Reyes, Reuben’s niece. A fierce guardian, Teresa had arranged for Estelle to come to the United States a few years later to finish her high-school education. The child had lived with Reuben, which must have been a colorful experience.
I parked, locked the truck, and climbed out, taking time to survey the neighborhood and the gawkers before turning my attention to matters at hand. As I trudged up the sidewalk, I found myself thinking that Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t changed much over the years-dark olive complexion, raven hair cropped a little closer now with the added hint of steel gray here and there, full eyebrows that knit over the bridge of her nose when she was thinking hard. Her fine features reminded me of the Aztecs, not that I knew anything about that tribe beyond the fanciful paintings of their heart-rending ceremonies that I’d seen in the National Geographic.
And who knew. Estelle’s stepmother, Teresa Reyes, had adopted the two year-old child from the local convent in Tres Santos. No records existed of who Estelle’s parents might have been. Perhaps they had descended from a long line of Aztec heart surgeons. And keeping up the tradition, Estelle had married Dr. Francis Guzman, who’d tinkered with a heart or two in his time.
The undersheriff caught my elbow and escorted me to the front step. “I’m glad you could come over, sir,” she said soberly. Sometime decades before, she had settled on “sir” as the appropriate all-purpose name for me, alternating that with padrino after I had agreed to be godfather to her two urchins. I could count on one hand the number of times that she’d called me “Bill,” or “Mr. Gastner,” or “Sheriff.”
“Has Alan been here?” I asked
“Not yet.”
I shook my head, muttered an expletive, and said, “I’m not ready for this.” Estelle gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Who found him?”
“His son-in-law,” Estelle replied. I knew Phil Borman only casually, enough to greet him by name on the street.
I nodded in the direction of the Cadillac. “Maggie knows, then.”
“She’s inside.”
“You know,” I said, “George and I were all set to have lunch together today. I talked to him just…” and I looked at my watch. “An hour ago, or a little more. Right when I got tangled up with the Torrances.”
“Gayle told me,” the undersheriff said. “Did George call you earlier?”
“No. He might have tried,” I replied, remembering the ringing phone. “I called him to tell him I’d be late, and he wasn’t in the mood to wait. He said that he didn’t feel all that hot.”
“Ah,” Estelle said, without explanation about what she was thinking. But I was used to that. I took another deep breath to fortify myself for the meeting with Maggie Payton Borman, George’s daughter and only child-and one of those type AAA personalities who always made me feel tired. Now in her forties, Maggie hadn’t lost any of her spunk. She ran the Posadas Realty with her new husband, Phil. I knew they enjoyed an enviable track record of convincing potential home or business buyers that the village of Posadas was poised to grow like kudzu, rather than being the dried-out desert runt that it really was.
Linda Real, the Sheriff’s Department photographer, met us at the door. An inch shorter than Estelle and tending toward chubby, Linda’s passion, besides Deputy Thomas Pasquale, with whom she lived, was shooting enough hard film and using enough digital bits and bytes that stock prices rose every time Posadas County reported a serious incident.
She greeted me with an affectionate half hug, the huge digital camera that hung around her neck banging against my belly. “Hi, Sheriff,” she said, one of about half the county who had kept the title attached to me as an honorarium. She lowered her voice to a whisper as she said to Estelle, “I’m finished until Dr. Perrone gets here. You want me to stick around?”
“Yes,” Estelle nodded. I didn’t know how many pictures anyone really needed of a heart attack victim, but I’d learn long ago not to question Estelle’s judgment.
I looked beyond Linda into the house. George Payton had lived simply in this little two bedroom, cinder-block bungalow. In the past decades, I’d been inside dozens of times. With my eyes closed, I could draw the floor plan-in part because nothing was out of the ordinary. The ambiance was neo-utilitarian. I knew that, when I looked inside, I’d see only one thing that would remind me of George’s wife, Clara-a bright, cheerful woman. Her hand-me-down, battered upright piano would still be sitting against the east wall, a bright orange vase filled with a bouquet of plastic flowers on top.
Clara had died on daughter Maggie’s eighteenth birthday. With his wife gone and Maggie headed off to college, George had sold their fancy home behind Pershing Park and pulled into himself, making do in this tiny, 950-square-foot place. He’d brought the piano and flower vase with him, even though he didn’t know middle-C from Adam and never replaced the dusty, fading flowers.
The old man had always lived simply, but with a fondness for anything related to the firearms industry. His Sportsmen’s Emporium had been a fixture in Posadas for almost forty years. He had an amazing inventory of stuff packed into that store, both new and historic, mass market or unique. That’s where I’d first met him, and over the years we’d become good friends.
Wearying of the day-to-day grind and the bureaucracy of the Treasury Department’s paperwork, George sold the business when the millennium turned. The young man who bought it streamlined the operation, cleared out a lot of the old junk, ran inventory control through a nifty new computer system, raised prices to current levels, lost two-thirds of his customers, and went out of business within the year.
An enormous cartridge collection hung on the south living room wall, its heavy walnut frame thick with dust. Each cartridge, from the tiny Kolibri cartridges designed to dispatch rabid houseflies to gargantuan shells developed to batter elephants, was labeled and mounted on a painted background depicting Cat Mesa, the mesa north of Posadas. It was an impressive collection and probably worth some money to the right buyer. Posters advertising firearms ringed the room, with paintings reminiscent of Russell or Remington painted on sheet metal-except these were all period originals, not stamped replicas.
Maggie Payton Borman was standing beside the piano, gazing out the window at the tiny side yard that grew an abundant collection of goat-heads and tumbleweeds. There wasn’t much of a view, just the neighbor’s unkempt car-port and a tarp-covered boat on a small trailer with flat tires. The neighbors hadn’t lived there for more than a year, and the boat hadn’t been in the water for twice that.
I doubt that Maggie saw any of it. Her mind was elsewhere. Off to her left, a yellow sheriff’s ribbon stretched across the narrow doorway into the kitchen, the bright color a jarring intrusion on this dismal scene.
Maggie turned, saw me, and held out both arms. We met in the center of the room and she held me hard enough to make me flinch. She hung on for a long time, not saying a word. Eventually she drew back and looked me straight in the eye without saying a word.
“Maggie,” I said, “what can I say.” She squeezed my shoulder. A good-looking woman, tending to be stocky like her father and with the same honest, open face, Maggie was the kind of person who bustled. She bustled to arrange things, to control things, to take charge of things, even when she didn’t have to. Now, she had been hauled up short, with nothing to bustle about. She had nothing to do but stay out of the way. She couldn’t even go into the kitchen to fix us a sandwich.