Jack Lauerson glanced at the clock again, held up a finger, and walked quickly back to his desk. He shuffled through half a dozen Post-it notes that had accumulated, frowning at one of them, and then nodded. “Never turn down a free meal,” he said. His waistline looked as if his idea of lunch was half a tuna sandwich on whole wheat with ice tea as a chaser. What a trio of extremes we made.
As we walked out of the office, Lauerson held the door for Estelle. “How are the plans for the new clinic coming along?”
“Always a few kinks,” she said. “But fine. I think.”
He laughed. “Bill, wait ’til you see what that place does to property values in that part of town. Your neighbors will be delighted with you.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
The number of meals that I’d eaten at the Don Juan de Oñate over the decades was enough to earn me plenty of frequent eater perks…admittedly along with an impressive waistline. The choice seemed simple enough to me. Did I want to be able to tie my shoes without grunting with the effort, or did I want to be able to sigh with something close to ecstasy when I took the first mouthful?
Besides, this was important. Estelle Reyes-Guzman had suggested lunch, and that in itself was an occasion that demanded nurturing. How she kept going on her caloric intake was a mystery to me. In my world, salads and herbal tea were only of use to pass the time until the main course arrived. Second, I was sure that assessor Jack Lauerson knew a good deal more than he would casually offer in an office where a dozen ears might overhear. Third, what better tribute to George Payton could there be? I wasn’t one to mope around in a church, surrounded by teary people in black, nor one to pick at one of the five meat loaves out in the kitchen brought by sympathetic neighbors.
I led the way toward my customary booth in the back of the restaurant. JanaLynn Torrez appeared with a cheerful smile of greeting and three tall glasses of ice water with lemon. She was pretty enough that when she walked by, more than one customer had missed his mouth with a loaded fork, but she’d never married…not that at the ripe old age of thirty-one all options were lost.
JanaLynn knew that this was the time to hone appetites, not wallow in regrets. She raised a pretty black eyebrow at Jack Lauerson. I guessed that the Don Juan wasn’t a customary haunt for him. The best thing in my day was a bountiful lunch followed by a nap, but maybe that didn’t fit the assessor’s work schedule. I could see him pulling a pathetic little brown bag of dry sandwich out of his desk drawer come noon, his work pace never slackening. Maybe on occasion, for a real treat, he bartered sandwich halves with Kevin Zeigler.
“What are you going to have, Mr. Lauerson? I already know what this guy wants.” She leaned against me, bumping me with her hip.
“What’s good?” he asked, confirming my suspicions.
“Well, a menu might help.” JanaLynn stepped over to one of the server islands, pulled a menu out of the rack, and handed it to Jack. “I get so used to folks knowing what they want that I sometimes forget.” She grinned down at me.
Lauerson frowned at the vast selection. He looked skeptical, as if he were about to skate on really thin ice. “I’ll try a couple of the beef enchiladas, I guess.”
“Red or green?”
Our official state question prompted a cautious pause. “Is the green really hot?”
JanaLynn made a face to defuse his anxieties. “It’s not bad. Not like yesterday, when it melted out the bottom of one of the stainless steel pans.” She reached out a hand and made contact with Jack’s left shoulder. “I’m kidding. It’s really good.”
“I’ll try that, then.”
“Smothered?”
“Sure. Why not.”
“Comin’ right up.” She gathered the menu, slipped it under her arm, and held up both hands to demonstrate the size of a football. I nodded, feeling no pangs of remorse at being so predictable. “How about you?” she said to Estelle. When the undersheriff ordered a chicken taco salad, it surprised the hell out of me. It’s a great dish, with lots of savory roast chicken, fresh beans and other wonderful secrets in a large taco shell bowl. Add the quacamole, salsa, and sour cream, and it’s a decent snack. I knew that Estelle was thinking overtime, and some actual food was going to help fuel the process.
Jack Lauerson watched JanaLynn’s retreating figure. “You always order the same thing?” he asked me.
“Of course not. I had the enchiladas once. In the spring of 1982, I think.”
He laughed, still watching as JanaLynn reached up to clip the ticket on the kitchen’s Lazy Fernando. I said nothing to interrupt the assessor’s day dreams. After two previous tries at matrimony, Lauerson was enjoying bachelorhood again…or not.
“Isn’t she related to the sheriff somehow?” he asked after a moment.
“JanaLynn is Robert’s youngest sister,” I said. “One of many sisters, in fact.”
He turned back toward the kitchen, but JanaLynn had disappeared. “She’s attractive,” he said.
“Indeed she is,” I agreed, and watched as Lauerson pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, glanced at it, and then switched it off, a brave, relaxed thing for a government bureaucrat to do.
“So…” He leaned back, hooking one arm over the back of the booth, and sighed with obvious contentment, enjoying the break in scenery from filing cabinets, light green walls, and patrons whose standard expression was a frown. “Losing old friends is tough.”
I nodded. “Especially when you reach the age that you no longer buy green bananas. All us geezers sit around making bets about who’s going next. Not a real healthy outlook.”
“Mr. Payton was how old?”
“Seventy-seven,” I replied. “And not a particularly hale or hearty seventy-seven, either. He’d been living on a third of a heart for a long time.”
“Maggie’s going to have her hands full,” he said. The familiarity in his tone, the way he tossed Maggie Payton Borman’s name into the conversation, surprised me a bit.
“The properties, you mean?” Estelle asked.
He nodded and pulled his arm down. “Of course, that’s what she does for a living, so she’s used to it. Didn’t she get married or something here not long ago?” I heard a wistful note in his tone, although the steady, unexciting assessor didn’t seem to be the type-A Maggie Borman’s type…then again, neither did her current husband.
“She married Phil Borman,” I said, wondering how someone like the county assessor, in the hub of activity in such a small community, wouldn’t know that.
“That’s right,” he said. “He’s a Realtor too.” He straightened up, pulling back from the table to make room for JanaLynn as she arrived with two enormous platters.
“Be careful,” she said. “They’re really hot.” With her hands now free, she pointed her right hand pistol-like at me. “You’d like coffee with cream. How about you, Mr. Lauerson?”
“Ah, I guess the water’s fine.”
“You got it. I’ll be right back with your salad,” she said to Estelle, and in a handful of seconds, she was.
The next several minutes were spent in silent bliss…at least for me. I noticed that Jack Lauerson had to spend as much time dabbing at his leaking nose and perspiring forehead as he did eating.
“I should eat here more often,” he said. “This is really good.”
Estelle Reyes-Guzman had been delicately sorting through her salad, ushering various green things to one side so she could pick out the chunks of perfect chicken. She paused with one properly loaded piece on her fork. “Have you talked recently with Kevin about the county building property?”
“You mean about George’s piece? You know, Kevin and I cross paths a dozen times most days.” The assessor’s office made sure that money flowed in to the county coffers, and Zeigler spent it. “But now we have something of an issue, don’t we,” Lauerson added.