Less Than a Moment

by Steven F Havill

  “That sounds like something Mr. Robert would do, all right.” Linda glanced back over her shoulder at her husband.

  “And all this time, what did his buddy say? Rolando?”

  “Nothing. Well, a couple of times, he’d say, ‘Quentin, just shut up.’ Good advice that Quentin didn’t take.” He looked hard at Estelle. “You’re thinking Quentin had a hand in the shooting at the newspaper office? I mean, when he was yelling at us, he was pretty well sauced. I figured after he sobered up and had a chance to think…”

  “Ah, think,” Linda interjected.

  “We don’t know yet. It’s clear that Glenn Archer’s Navigator was used in the incident, almost certainly without the superintendent’s knowledge. At least let’s hope it was without his knowledge. That’s why we put it in impound…so Lieutenant Mears can head up a really thorough investigation.”

  “You’re bringing Quentin in for questioning?”

  “Not yet. We have no more reason to suspect him of this shooting than any of our other resident punks.”

  “Except for his latest arrest winding up in the newspaper. He couldn’t take it out on us, so maybe trashing the newspaper building was next best.”

  “That may be what the sheriff thinks,” Estelle mused. “The Register includes every infraction and violation in their column. It’s equal opportunity publicity, whether people like it or not.”

  “Somebody didn’t like something,” Pasquale said.

  “Or just impulse. You know how it is with kids.”

  “For sure I do.”

  “Having been one himself once upon a time,” Linda observed.

  “Although at nineteen,” Estelle said, “Quentin Torrez isn’t exactly a kid anymore. The Don Juan doesn’t sell anything stronger than iced tea, so they’re off the hook for illegal sales. Did you find anything in the truck?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “So partying somewhere else, then.”

  “He said they were on the way to drop Maddy off at home. He didn’t say from where. He’d just say, ‘I plead the fifth.’ They thought that was clever as hell.”

  “Eddie seemed to suggest that maybe the arrest was made at the Broken Spur, or some other watering hole. That you were lying in wait.”

  “Uh, no. He’s about thirty miles off in that wild-­hare guess. Quentin was drinkin’ at his girlfriend’s house, then maybe some more at the Don Juan, is what makes sense to me. Are you going to talk to Quentin?”

  “Yes. The sheriff suggested that I do. And Maddy. And Rolando, for that matter.”

  “Yeah, well,” and Pasquale laughed. “The sheriff would be just as happy to whup his nephew upside the head as talk to him. Not too many warm fuzzies between those two.”

  “But there’s no reason to suspect that Quentin had anything to do with the newspaper assault. Other than the tiff, if there was one, over the arrest publicity. There’s no reason to be turning the young man’s world upside down. Unless.”

  “Unless,” Pasquale nodded.

  The computer’s printer pushed out an image, and Linda slipped the print into a labeled glassine envelope and added it to the pile.

  “Twenty-­five,” she announced with satisfaction. She tapped the pile into order. “Cap wanted these. She’s working up the schematic for the shooting site.”

  Captain Jackie Taber’s fine art skills would make sense of all the measurements, and with added computer graphics it would be the next best thing to having a video of the episode from start to finish. It was a start, Estelle knew, but nothing in the evidence pile hinted about whose finger had been on the trigger.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Hey.” Sheriff Robert Torrez rapped a knuckle on the roof of Estelle’s car as she pulled the Charger to a halt by the department fuel island. He waited until she’d shut down and ducked out of the car. “Got a minute?”

  “Of course.”

  “When you’re caught up here, stop by my office. Got something to show you.” Nothing in his tone revealed excitement, confusion, or anxiety. “And we got somebody to talk to.” He walked off without waiting for a reply.

  In a few minutes, with the gas tank filled and her log sheet caught up, she parked in the reserved spot and went inside. She skirted dispatch and continued down the hall to the sheriff’s office, a small room that made it easy to imagine the stark, metallic and concrete, uninviting offices of the lower-­echelon military. Even the sheriff’s desk was a metallic gray cast-­off. Gray filing cabinets, two metal folding chairs, and a map rack served as his decorations, along with a huge, laminated county map compliments of the assessor, similar to the one in Estelle’s office.

  Incongruously, the only nonutilitarian decoration was a large framed photo of Gayle Sedillos Torrez and the couple’s young son, Gabe—­a carefully posed portrait taken by the department photographer, Linda Pasquale. The portrait had played to the beautiful Gayle’s strongest features—­vibrant black hair so long that it flowed over her shoulders and disappeared down her back, the shadows of her elegant cheekbones in high relief, and most startling of all, the bottomless wells of her dark brown eyes drinking in the innocent face of her three year-­old son as he snuggled on her lap.

  The photo, mounted professionally with a satin black frame and dark gray matting, stood beside one of the teddy bears from the same batch that rode in most of the department’s patrol units. One of the bear’s paws rested lightly on the edge of the picture frame as if standing guard. No one else would have expected such a subtle display of whimsy from Robert Torrez, but Estelle was quietly amused at the various mellow spots that surfaced in the man’s character now and then.

  “I was thinkin’ to find Quentin and talk with him,” Torrez said by way of greeting. “You want to come along?”

  Estelle settled into one of the metal chairs. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  The sheriff opened a folder near his left elbow and drew out a plastic evidence bag. “From Archer’s truck.” He handed it to Estelle without further explanation.

  Holding the bag so she could stretch it out against the light, Estelle could see a couple of heavy, black hairs.

  “Five of ’em in there. All from around the driver’s seat headrest.”

  “Without bothering with a microscope or a lab opinion, we can eliminate some names. Glenn Archer has what’s left of a short buzz cut, now a nice uniform gray. His wife has a pixie cut, dyed blond.”

  “And my nephew’s is black.” Torrez paused. “So is his girlfriend’s.”

  “Maddy?”

  “Yup.”

  Estelle laid the evidence bag on Torrez’s desk and leaned forward so she could rest both elbows on the desk edge, resting her chin in her hands. She dropped her voice. “Lots of people have black hair in this part of the world, Bobby.”

  “Yup.”

  “But?”

  “Shooter with black hair, shootin’ from the driver’s seat.”

  Both of them fell silent. “On the basis of black hair you want to go after your nephew? That puts him in a club with about half the people we arrest…including you and me, my friend. Or go after him because he shot off his mouth when he was half-­lit after his arrest? That’s standard, too. They’re always right, we’re always wrong.”

  She shrugged. “No one saw him in the area. No one saw him drive by in that lowrider Chevy truck of his, and no one has reported seeing him take Glenn Archer’s fancy new rig. No one ran NAA tests to see if he fired a gun recently, although considering your nephew’s habits, he’d flunk that test just about any day of the week. As far as we know, he doesn’t have a personal grudge against the Register or the folks who work there.

  “So…” She straightened up a little and spread her hands out. “What do we have? Not much. We can tie things up for weeks with a DNA analysis of the hairs found…maybe.”

  “How’s it going to
hurt to talk to the kid?”

  Estelle looked at the sheriff for a long moment. “Your relationship with that particular nephew isn’t the best, Bobby. To harass him without probable cause isn’t going to help that relationship any.”

  “I ain’t worried about that.”

  “But if he’s innocent, you should be. We need to be on firm footing.”

  “Christ, now you sound like my mother.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  Torrez huffed something that might have been a laugh. “You going along when we talk to Quentin might stop some of the tongues from waggin’.”

  “What, from thinking you’re likely to cut your nephew some slack? What they’re more apt to think—­and not that it matters what anybody thinks, Bobby—­is that you’re apt to be a whole lot tougher on Quentin than you might be otherwise.”

  “We got two people shot. It ain’t no time to cut anybody no slack.” He looked hard at her. “So you should go. Yeah, we don’t got a whole truckload of evidence. Not yet, we don’t. So the thing to do is stir the pot a little. And if the kid don’t like it, tough shit.”

  “I’ll ride out with you, sure.”

  The sheriff opened the folder again, laid the evidence envelope containing the hair sample inside, and drew out a single sheet that he passed across the desk. “Not a lot there.” Estelle glanced down the inventory of evidence found in Superintendent Glenn Archer’s Navigator.

  “Every one,” she mused, reading the note that listed twenty-­five empty twenty-two caliber shell casings. “Now why didn’t they scrounge those up, rather than leaving them behind?”

  “Dumb shits.”

  “But your nephew isn’t dumb, Robert.”

  “No, he ain’t, but he ain’t got the common sense God gave a toad, neither.”

  “Middle of the night like that, maybe they just didn’t think about the casings. They got in a hurry…afraid to keep the Navigator too long for their harebrained stunt, afraid to linger around the school, afraid that Archer might come out and see his truck gone and call the cops. Or maybe they thought that there wasn’t much we could do with twenty-­two casings. They’re small, hard to hang onto, and won’t provide much surface for prints.”

  She scanned on down the miserably brief list. “A few strands of black hair from the headrest. Some gravel on the floor mat that matches what’s in the school’s parking lot, and could just as easily have been tracked into the vehicle by its owner. But…” She stopped and looked across at the sheriff. “…no latents other than Glenn and his wife.”

  “Gloves,” Torrez said. “Maybe smart enough to do that.”

  She handed the inventory list back. “We don’t have much.”

  “Nope.”

  “Quentin would be at work now.”

  “He ain’t. He was workin’ at Leland’s Auto Repair. That didn’t last long before he was shit-­canned.”

  “He was fired?”

  “Yep. Got mouthy with a customer.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Same day Pasquale arrested him for DUI. Celebratin’, I guess. He mouthed off to this guy, then he mouthed off to Pasquale and anyone else who would listen. He’s what we got, and we need to follow it along a little.”

  As they walked outside, the sheriff gestured toward his truck, parked in a far corner of the department parking lot. “Let’s take mine,” Torrez said, and Estelle groaned a little at that suggestion. Torrez actually smiled. “Hey, it’s a good truck. I coulda been driving the one your son sold me.” The thought of riding through town in the convertible troop carrier—­a whim purchase by Francisco that turned into a whim gift for the sheriff—­made her groan again.

  His aging Chevrolet was what he referred to as his “undercover unit,” even though anyone in Posadas County who’d been the least bit awake knew that the 1970 three-­quarter ton was his. A combination of primer gray, flat black, and traces of the original Forest Service green offered a certain panache.

  Estelle climbed up on the running board and then inside. Slung under the heater controls was a police radio, the microphone hung from the lip of the coin-­choked ashtray. An archaeologist would have had a good time sorting through the various levels of litter on the floor, the dashboard, and on and under the seat. An Ithaca pump shotgun nestled in the rear window gun rack.

  “Your side don’t have one,” Torrez said when he saw Estelle searching for the seat belt.

  The big V-­8 fired up promptly, a waft of oil fumes making their way through the firewall. Estelle reached for the window crank, and saw only a serrated stub projecting from the door. “Your side don’t work.” Torrez smiled again. “Makes for better security. And we ain’t goin’ that far.”

  “That far” was a small, older mobile home on North McArthur just before the intersection with County Road 19. One of three rental units, the trailer slumped among the surrounding tumbleweeds that were packed tightly enough to provide trailer skirting of sorts.

  “He moved out of his mom’s place about a year ago.” Torrez maneuvered his truck into the narrow driveway. “Turned eighteen and moves out.” The sheriff’s sister, Quentin’s mother Mariana, was the second youngest of the vast Torrez brood, earning something of a family reputation by having Quentin when she was only fifteen. Tight-­lipped for a teenager, Mariana had never revealed who the father might be—­and had never married, either him or anyone else.

  The door of the trailer opened, and Quentin appeared, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his middle. “I just stepped out of the shower.” He pushed a thatch of wet, black hair off his forehead. The family gene pool was evident—­broad through the shoulders like his Uncle Robert, still trim at the waist, and at six feet three in his bare feet, just an inch shy of his uncle. Fate had not cared that Quentin Torrez was movie star handsome, articulate, and intelligent. His life had not been an easy one, despite the head start his good looks had given him. Estelle knew that the boy had a quick temper, and loved a good fight almost as much as he loved the various controlled substances with which he had experimented.

  “Yeah, well, go get dressed,” Torrez replied.

  “Madame Undersheriff, how are you doing?” Quentin’s smile was bright, white, and just a little seductive, Estelle thought, his gaze drifting down her figure all the way to her shoes. Without waiting for an answer, he added, “Just give me a minute.”

  He went back inside without inviting them in, not bothering to wait until he was completely out of sight before whipping off the towel. In less than two minutes he returned, wearing old sneakers without socks, veteran jeans, and a T-­shirt with a clever three-­dimensional rendering of a snarling pit bull, the graphics making the animal appear as if he were vaulting out of Quentin’s body.

  Estelle’s dealing with Quentin Torrez had been infrequent, and she noted that the nineteen-­year-­old was growing into a bruiser. Still, he wasn’t a dullard. Even drunk, he’d had the self-­control not to take on Sergeant Pasquale.

  “You guys want some coffee or something? I can make some.”

  “Nope.”

  “I mean, it’s no trouble.”

  “Nope.” Sheriff Torrez reached out and tweaked the pit bull’s nose. “Cute.”

  “Yeah.” Quentin took a half step back and smoothed the pinched fabric against his chest. “Maddy gave it to me. Kinda gross, but I like it. You oughta get a little one for Gabe.”

  “Don’t think so,” the sheriff said. “Look, do you still got that twenty-­two rifle you used to have? That Ruger bunny buster I gave you?”

  Estelle looked sharply at the sheriff. This was the first mention of what was on his mind—­fueling the suspicion that placed his nephew at the newspaper shooting.

  Quentin slid his hands into his back pockets. “’Course I got it.” He nodded toward the house. “It’s in the house now, thanks to you guys takin’
my truck.”

  “Get it for me.”

  “What, you lose your own?”

  Torrez balled his right fist and with no wind-­up jabbed the young man square in the pit bull with the flat of his knuckles, his hand instantly recoiling back and his index finger becoming an aggressive pointer inches from Quentin’s nose.

  “Hey.” Quentin managed an engaging smile at the same time. “Don’t be doing that, now.” He rubbed the spot on his chest.

  “I want to see that gun.” He took Quentin by the arm, but the young man resisted, still smiling. “Sure. And speakin’ of that, when am I going to get my wheels back? I mean, what do they expect me to do, ride my bike to work?”

  “I heard you ain’t workin.’ That the garage fired your sorry ass.”

  For a long moment, Quentin regarded his uncle, jaw muscles working as he considered his choices. Then he glanced at Estelle and his eyebrows knit together as if to ask, “Is this guy with you?”

  He thrust his hands back in his hip pockets. Estelle suspected that the young man, faced by his angry, intimidating uncle, was making more of an effort to rein himself in than he would with anyone else. He turned a little bit and smiled first at Estelle and then at his uncle. “What is it you two actually want with me?”

  “I want to look at that twenty-­two, is what I want.”

  “I got a right to have it, as you well know, since you’re the one who gave it to me. I mean it’s just a damn twenty-­two.”

  “Didn’t say you couldn’t have it. What were you doin’ Friday night?” Torrez snapped.

  Quentin looked puzzled as he turned back. “You mean just yesterday?”

  “Yup.”

  The young man turned again to look toward his trailer. “Couple beers, stayed in and watched television. Had a fight with my girl, but she won’t stay mad at me long.” He grinned with self-­confidence.

  Sheriff Torrez regarded his nephew for a long moment. “You going to invite us in?”

  Quentin started to nod, started to say something, but thought better of it. He made no move toward the small three-­step stoop. “Are you asking as my Uncle Bobby, or as Sheriff Torrez? ’Cause if it’s as the sheriff, you can come in when you got a warrant.” Light dawned behind his dark eyes. “You’re thinking I had something to do with that shooting at the newspaper office on Friday?”