Nine Days: A Mystery Page 11

  “The chief was a big woman. Not easy to move in the best of circumstances. Even for him.”

  “So—what?” I guffawed, turning my palms up. “He was going to wait for her to mummify? Let the buzzards eat her? Turn her into a rooftop planter?”

  The sheriff kept his eyes on my face, silent.

  My logic was biting into his certainty. I kept talking. “If he was waiting for some future opportunity to move the body, why’d he go up there while I was with him?”

  Maines’s jaw moved, and he looked away. He let the air settle for a second, then said, “What were the two of you doing, just before?”

  I started to tell him it was none of his damned business, but then I saw the snare lying there, waiting. “Look, he’s either an evil genius or an idiot,” I said. “He can’t be both.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Maines answered, something light touching his pale face.

  The son of a bitch was enjoying himself. It wasn’t the standard cop enjoyment of being the designated authority figure; there was something else—a sense that I was entertaining him somehow. Maybe he had a sadistic streak. A lot of them do.

  “Are we done?” I asked, getting up.

  “No,” he said.

  It was polite, but there was no way I was sitting back down. I folded my arms and waited for him to get on with it.

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to Silvia Molina yet,” he said. “I don’t want to go over there until I’ve gotten hold of the Marshal’s office. I’m not sure how safe you are to be running around loose.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised.

  He paused, then said, “I want to put you in protective custody until I get this thing sorted out.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “You are seriously confused if you think I’m going to willingly let anybody lock me up after what I did to avoid it.”

  Maines had sat back in the low banker’s chair and was examining me again. “That doesn’t make any sense.” His voice was mild and toneless, as usual, but had a note of curiosity in it.

  “Then it ought to feel right at home between your ears,” I said, and left.

  V

  As I stopped at the truck to get out my keys, I heard my name and looked up to see Tova Bradshaw motioning to me from the front door of the hotel.

  “What on earth happened last night?” she asked as I walked over. “No one will tell us anything except that Teresa was killed.”

  “You haven’t talked to Hector?”

  “He hasn’t been home.”

  My stomach blipped. “I thought he stayed here last night.”

  Tova shook her head. A couple of Harleys roared by on Main. She made a face and said, “Come inside for a few minutes, will you?”

  I nodded and followed her into the lobby. Instead of going to her office, though, she turned at the main corridor and pressed the elevator call button. The purple-haired clerk watched us, curious.

  “Hector and I found her on his roof,” I said once we were inside the elevator car and rising. “She’d been stabbed.”

  Tova covered her mouth, then asked in a hushed, incredulous voice, “What was she doing on his roof?”

  I shrugged.

  “How was Hector when you left him?”

  “Better than when we first found her,” I admitted. She looked away from me, her composure hardening back into place, and I added, “Connie told me about his PTSD.”

  Her eyes came back at me, but she didn’t say anything. The elevator opened, and I followed her down a thickly carpeted corridor to a suite at the back of the building, on the street side. This consisted of a tall sitting room with a queen-size bed hidden in a damask-draped nook, a small kitchenette opposite, and an open door showing a white bathroom with a big walk-in closet.Connie was sitting on one of the twin velour sofas in front of an arch-top window, smoking a cigarette. She looked like she hadn’t gotten much sleep. “Julia,” she said, sitting up. “Are you OK?”

  “She was stabbed on Hector’s roof,” Tova said to her.

  “I’m fine,” I replied to Connie’s question.

  Tova balked, looking annoyed, then went on. “Julia doesn’t know where Hector is, either.”

  Connie leaned forward for the ashtray, sighing. “For God’s sake, Tova, would you let it go?”

  “He needs to be around people at a time like this,” her sister snapped back at her.

  “No, you would need to be around people at a time like this,” Connie returned, her voice brittle with enforced calm. “He needs to be by himself.”

  “Because you keep filling his head with all that politically correct nonsense about ‘psychocultural differences’! If you’d—”

  “The sheriff thinks Hector killed her,” I cut in before they could get up to warp speed.

  Two pairs of eyes jumped toward my face. Tova made an impatient motion and said, “That’s absurd. Hector’s no more capable of killing someone than I am.”

  “Everyone’s capable under the right circumstances,” I said.

  “Oh, please,” Tova said, rolling her eyes and turning to hunt for something on the kitchenette counter. “You’re as bad as she is.”

  Connie said something under her breath that I couldn’t hear and got up. “I need some air.”

  Tova had found a cell phone and was punching angrily at the buttons, muttering, “John Maines is going to rue the day he decided to visit his incompetence on one of my relatives.”

  I got up, too. The only thing I hate worse than having a telephone conversation is listening to someone else’s.

  In the corridor, as we walked to the elevators, Connie told me, “She’s got every lawyer in the state on speed dial. Dad’s contact list was almost as valuable as the money he left.”

  I pressed the elevator call button, looking pointedly around the opulent hallway. “It must have been quite a pile.”

  “Oh, it was,” she said, then corrected herself. “Is. A couple of million, from what I’ve heard.”

  “From what you’ve heard?”

  “Tova doesn’t want me and Hector to know exactly how much. Dad never got around to legally adopting us, so Tova got everything when he died. She gave me the Ranch and Hector the bar and called it even.” As we got on the elevator, she caught a look at my face and cracked, “Not that I’m bitter or anything.”

  Her self-deprecating tone made me laugh.

  She gave me a smiling, questioning look and said, “You seem to be coping OK.”

  “I didn’t know Teresa that well,” I told her, feeling as though I’d been saying it constantly.

  She gave a shaky sigh as we started to drop toward the lobby. “I didn’t either, but it still just feels—unreal. I can’t imagine how it must be hitting Hector.”

  I nodded and said, “I wonder where he is.”

  “Enchanted Rock, probably. That’s been his retreat of choice lately. It’s usually pretty deserted this time of year.” Connie paused to sigh again, then added, almost apologetically, “Tova means well—she just doesn’t understand that Hector’s social persona was already pretty fully formed when he came to us. He’s never going to do things the way she was always taught is the right way.”

  “Do you remember anything from before you came to the States?” I asked her, curious.

  “Oh, no. I wasn’t even a year old.” Connie paused, then mused, “I’m not sure why Tova and I are so different.”

  The elevator dinged open, and we stepped out into the wide corridor. Kathleen got Connie’s attention as we passed the desk, and Connie said she’d see me later.

  I stopped on the sidewalk in front of the theater to fish out my keys and heard a low crunching noise to the right. A couple of guys were walking over the top of a full roll-off in front of the salon, mashing down a mound of charred construction debris in preparation for hauling it away. Charlie was watching them from the sidewalk, drinking a take-out coffee.

  “How’s the cleanup going?” I asked as I walked up, smiling at her outfit of
yellow satin capri pants, pink ballet flats, and off-the-shoulder black blouse.

  “Faster than I expected,” she replied. “I didn’t expect to see you out and about today.”

  Having to explain my lack of visible grief on Teresa’s behalf was getting old, but I went ahead and trotted out the standard disclaimer.

  Charlie waited a decent interval, then said, “I warned that idiot sheriff that Richard Hallstedt was dangerous, but he wouldn’t take me seriously.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at her, and she said, “Why did Teresa ask you to come down here?”

  She obviously had a theory, so I just shrugged.

  “She needed help,” Charlie said. “Help that she couldn’t ask any of us for.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Richard. He was abusing her.”

  “Oh, come on,” I scoffed. “She could have broken him in half.”

  One of the workmen came around the Dumpster, and Charlie stepped back, lowering her voice. “Last April, right after Richard proposed this downtown development thing, I saw him slap her, right out there on the courthouse lawn, and she just took it. Didn’t say a word, just turned and walked off.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call one slap a pattern.”

  “How many times does a man have to hit a woman for it to matter?” she shot back. “A dozen? A hundred?”

  “They’re in the middle of a divorce,” I reminded her. “I’m guessing their marriage wasn’t all rose petals and candle-lit baths.”

  Charlie made an exasperated motion with her coffee cup. “Yeah, I guess. Still.”

  “Want to give me the grand tour?” I said, leaning toward the building.

  “Sure, if you’re up for it.”

  I took a look around the square before we went in, then remembered I didn’t have to worry about Teresa catching me anymore. Something started to flutter under my breastbone at the thought, but Charlie and I were coming to the top of the stairs, and the lack of anything between us and the big sky overhead was getting all my attention.

  “They couldn’t save any of the roof framing?” I said, stepping out onto the scorched wood floor.

  “It was all down,” Charlie said. “The rafters, the ceiling, everything.”

  I walked toward the rear, examining the limestone walls. They were black with soot, and some of the mortar had crumbled out of the joints near the top, where the char was darkest. The smell of burned timber was still strong, even with the roof gone.

  “It was all just storage up here,” Charlie was saying. “I thought about making it into an apartment, like Hector’s place, but never could afford to do it.” She rolled her eyes at the sky. “Thank God. I really would be screwed if this had been my living quarters.”

  I was looking at the top of the wall where the joists had sat. There were still some remnants of the wood bearing plate, but most of it had burned away. “Not much of an arsonist,” I said.

  Charlie quirked at me, and I said, “It looks like the fire started on the roof.”

  She nodded. “The fire marshal said that they found accelerant up there.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense, if whoever torched the place wanted it to burn to the ground.”

  “You know, I thought the same thing,” she said, her pointy face animating. “Why go to the trouble to climb all the way up there, when they could have just broken the back window, thrown in some gasoline, and lit a match?”

  I got that weird sense of heavy things sliding together between my ears again, like cargo shifting across the deck of a rolling ship. I held still, waiting, and after a second the brain sent up a flare.

  “Did you say the development project started up last April?” I asked. Charlie nodded, and I said, “Mel told me this downtown crime wave has been going on for about a year.”

  “Yeah, something like that,” she said, looking puzzled. “Why?”

  “I saw an article in the newspaper that said Richard proposed the development project in response to increased crime on the square. But if it kicked off last April, and the crime wave didn’t start until November, that doesn’t add up.”

  Charlie frowned, then shook it off. “I must be remembering the dates wrong.”

  I walked to the front of the building and scanned the vacant properties on the square. None of them looked like they’d been touched since the businesses closed. All the vandalism I’d heard about had been on occupied buildings, the ones that Milestone didn’t own yet. It was too definite a correlation to be a coincidence.

  I took a breath, trying to pop the bubble of suspicion I felt rising. Even if I was right, and Jesse had created the crime wave to soften up the owners of properties he wanted to buy, so what? It’s a long run from petty vandalism to murder, and I couldn’t see where killing Teresa would advance Milestone’s agenda any.

  “Has anyone approached you recently to try and buy this place?” I asked Charlie.

  “I wish,” she snorted. “Richard keeps telling me I should sell out, but he’s not allowed to buy it, so I don’t know why he keeps going on about it. It’s probably not worth much now.”

  Now it started to tighten up. Jesse was paying Richard to make sure the bond package passed. That’s why they were always in each other’s pockets. Considering how much money I suspected was involved, I could easily see the two of them offing Teresa, if she’d gotten wind.

  I noticed that Charlie was gazing at my head. “You know, if you want, we could barter some salon services.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said hedgingly, starting for the stairs. “I’ll get back to you in a day or two.”

  It wasn’t entirely a dodge; I was remembering an office renovation I’d done for a small company in Bakersfield. They’d neglected to pay me, and to file the mechanic’s lien, I’d had to get copies of the company’s incorporation instruments, which hadn’t been difficult to obtain. Surely something similar existed for Milestone, and I wanted to lay my hands on it as soon as I could figure out how.

  VI

  The directory in the courthouse didn’t list a county clerk’s office, so I stepped into the nearest door and asked the receptionist sitting there where it was.

  “Johnson City, forty miles north,” she told me. “Went up there when they moved the county seat.”

  My eyes flicked involuntarily around at the building I was standing in, and she laughed one of those big, raucous laughs that most women try to suppress. “You ain’t from around here, are ya?”

  I couldn’t help grinning back at her. She was mid-fifties, frankly dyed blond, with lots of makeup, but there was something rough and Western about her that her grooming didn’t touch.

  “We’re the only county in Texas with two historic courthouses,” she told me. “Ya think we’d have more money.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  She waved a French manicure at the past. “Oh, some political thing, way back. There’s a plaque up there if you really wanna know.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and ducked out.

  I got into the truck and drove north, passing into a forest of new-looking subdivisions after about half an hour. The houses were bloated and ugly, set too close together in the vastness of the surrounding landscape, and I found myself wondering if this was Richard’s neighborhood. It struck me as ironic that someone who publicly championed revitalizing a small town’s business district might be part of the lifestyle that was killing it to begin with.

  That kept me busy until I hit open road again, at which point I couldn’t hide anymore from the question of what the hell I thought I was doing. I tried “righting a wrong that was about to be perpetrated on an innocent man,” but the notion didn’t offer to shake my paw. After chewing around for a while, I finally got down to the bone: publicly hoisting the idiot Maines on his own petard was too good to pass up. Law enforcement loves to play ethical watchdog, as if they’re the only people in the world with honor. It gives me a pain.

  A brown and white road sign reading ENCHANTED ROCK ST
ATE NATURAL AREA flashed by, pointing down a turnoff toward the west. Maybe I’d go out there on my way home and see if Hector would explain to me why we weren’t telling anybody about his argument with Teresa on Thursday night. That sharp flutter of sensation jabbed up under my ribs again. It wasn’t jealousy or scorn or any of the other familiar emotions I was used to feeling about other people’s lives; it was something meeker and less noisy. I couldn’t identify it.

  Houses were starting to appear alongside the highway again now, and I passed a sign welcoming me to the Johnson City limits. Just beyond this came a wider stretch of road that had been cutesied up to within an inch of its life with corny-looking restaurants and antique stores. Another sign pointed discreetly off this main drag to the HISTORIC CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT.

  This turned out to be a square very much like the one in Azula—only here the buildings surrounding the nicely restored courthouse all seemed to house operating businesses. I parked at the low curb in front of what appeared to be a pool hall and crossed the dusty street. The building directory at the top of the courthouse stairs advised me that the clerk’s office was to the right, through a pair of pine doors with a transom at the top. Inside, modern modular office furniture the color of dried puke divided a big room into cubicles, with a small counter at the front. The gray top of a grandmotherly head showed just above it.

  “Melp you?” the woman asked, keeping her eyes on her computer screen. She was stringy and dry-looking, like a harvested stalk of corn.

  “Yes, I’d like to see some incorporation instruments.”

  “What’s the name?”

  I told her, and spelled it, as requested. She tapped it into the computer and said, “They’re sealed.”

  “Sealed?” I repeated, both irritated and gratified. Irritated because my telephone phobia had cost me the drive; gratified because the sealed records meant Milestone had something to hide.

  “It’s a private corporation. They don’t gotta make their company information public if they don’t want to.”

  “What if I suspect they’re doing something illegal?” I asked.

  “Get yourself a lawyer,” she advised, seeming slightly more interested. “You gotta have a court order to look at these.”