by Ted Clifton
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Pacheco. But the sheriff’s not here. We haven’t seen him since yesterday.” She sounded concerned. Ray wondered whether that meant Trujillo had disappeared.
“Who’s in charge?”
“I guess it would be Sergeant Hoover.”
“Is he here?”
“Yes.”
Ray struggled with dwindling patience. “Could you see if he’d meet with us?” She seemed only to react, not taking even ordinary initiative.
“Oh, sure.” That seemed like a good idea to her. She picked up the phone, tried a number, and waited. For practically a minute. Then she hung up. “Guess he’s not in his office. Let me call dispatch and see if they can find him.”
Ray nodded and smiled, pressing his lips together. He listened while she spoke to dispatch. She hung up the phone.
“He’s on his lunch break,” she reported brightly. “They’ll call and see when he’ll be back. You can wait if you’d like.”
Ray bit his lip. “We’ll come back later.”
They left the building.
“Something doesn’t smell right.” Tyee made his bad-odor face.
“Wasn’t expecting this. One day Trujillo’s a bad guy, the next day a good guy, and now he’s a gone guy. I can’t imagine why he’d disappear unless he’s guilty of something.” Ray sighed.
“I guess we should consider the possibility of foul play. We’ve already had two murders in this town.”
Ray looked at Tyee. “You’re right. I should’ve thought of that, but I guess I’m worried that Trujillo’s dirty, so my first assumption was that he took off. It could be something else. We’ll give him a little time.” Ray paused. “Let’s go get lunch. After that we can drop in and see Vickie Grimes.”
Tyee grinned. “Maybe she’ll be out by the pool again.”
“Maybe I should leave you in the truck.”
Mrs. Grimes pouted at them. “You do know my name’s not Vickie, right?”
Ray exchanged glances with Tyee. “Not sure what you mean, Mrs. Grimes. You told us your name was Vickie.”
“Yeah,” she sneered. “That’s the old bastard’s way of irritating everyone, all the fuckin’ time. See, his first wife’s name was Vickie. So, along came wife number two, and the old fart decided he’d call her Vickie, too. He said that made it easier to remember her name. Now it’s my turn as wife number three, and I get the same goddamned name. Vickie. I hate it. My name is Joyce Sanders. Or I guess, technically, Joyce Grimes.” She huffed. “One of these days, someone’s going to kill that old fool.”
So much for matrimonial bliss. “Well, o-okay,” Ray stammered. “Is this a good time for us to talk?”
“Sure, I don’t know where he is, but if he comes back while you’re here, all hell will break lose.”
Ray had decided that there were no easy conversations to be had in Farmington. “I want to ask about your relationship with Sheriff Trujillo.”
In a flash her demeanor changed from offhand to a look that could kill. “What kind of goddamned question is that? What the hell do you mean?” Her voiced grew louder. She leaned forward, as if ready to pounce.
Ray retreated into official reserve. “I’m sorry, ma’am, if that question feels inappropriate to you. But we’re investigating a murder. That’s a serious matter. We’ve been told you had an affair with Trujillo. Is that true or not?”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Please answer my question.”
“Yeah, well,” she straightened up, as if to project nonchalance, “it wasn’t an affair, it was just a fling, some fun. My dear husband was having affairs with half the damn female population in town. What? I’m supposed to be pure or something?” She went back to a pout.
Tyee leaned in to get her attention. “We’ve been told you and Trujillo looked for buried money here. Is that true?”
“Jeez, what nonsense. Okay, one night we got shit-faced drunk. Grimes was off in Santa Fe or some place. Thad and I got to partying a little—it’s just so damn boring here. So, after we got too drunk to do anything else, if you know what I mean, we decided we’d go look for the millions the old fart supposedly buried here. Thad dug a pretty big hole out back, and I guess one of those asshole guards saw us.” She stopped and seemed to be thinking. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. Why don’t you just fuck off? I want you out of here, right now.” She stood, shot hot glares at Ray and Tyee, and left.
“Well, I guess that interview’s over.” Tyee watched her walk away—a very male thing to do. “Good guys zero. Bad guys—and gals—a perfect score.”
They walked toward the car. “Let’s head back and see if Sergeant Hoover’s available.”
“At this rate,” Tyee observed, “we might as well just hide out and wait for whatever explosion is going to happen. We aren’t making much progress.” He was tired of being in the truck.
“I’m not so sure. We have Trujillo missing, and that’s going to tell us something once we find out what happened to him. We have Vickie—and of course, by that I mean Joyce—telling us that she was having an affair, and that they did look for money buried at the house, and that it was witnessed by guards. Which reminds me, we need to talk to those guards. The treasure hunt sounded like a drunken lark, not a serious search. That’s good information.”
“But we’re still basically in the dark about what happened to Martin.”
Ray nodded. “Yep. You’re right, there.”
At the station the young receptionist handed Ray a note, while explaining, “He just now called and said it was very important that you contact him.”
The message was from the city attorney, Mark White. It said he had important information regarding Martin. “Okay, thanks. Has the Sergeant returned?”
She smiled apologetically. “He did come back, but then there was a disturbance at one of the downtown restaurants. One customer hit another. He went out to handle that. Said to tell you he’d be back in an hour or so.”
Ray handed Tyee the note and they headed back out to the truck. “Get the feeling the sergeant is avoiding us?”
“We are no longer popular.”
They had been to the city offices before when they met with the mayor. It was a short trip and a much shorter wait this time. Mark White came out almost immediately.
“Welcome, please come in.” White was tall and slender, young looking with clear blue eyes and prematurely graying hair. He looked like an attorney—or at least, the public’s image of one.
Ray began to summarize an introduction regarding their authority in state matters as arranged by the governor.
White waved him off. “No intro needed. I’ve heard all about you two. I wanted to talk to you the first day you were here, but it seemed a lot was going on. I thought it best to wait until you had some time to look into our little nightmare.”
Ray raised an eyebrow. “The ‘nightmare’ being?”
“Lewis Grimes.” White paused to peer at his guests for emphasis. “If we were in Chicago, I’d likely say he was one of our biggest gangsters. Here in Farmington, he’s our only gangster.”
“That’s a pretty bold statement for a city attorney. Do you have evidence to support it?”
White softened with a chuckle. “Well, no. Not really. At one time, I was working with Sheriff Jackson, and I think we’d uncovered a trove of evidence that Grimes was stealing gasoline tax money. But then,” he inhaled, “the sheriff kind of went off the deep end. And before you knew it, he was gone and so was the evidence. I don’t know if he took it with him or hid it somewhere. Trujillo wouldn’t let me search the sheriff’s office without a warrant. I got one and then had two state troopers drop in to make the search. They found nothing. About all I accomplished was to piss off Trujillo.”
Ray’s eyes were still wide. “Sheriff Jackson had proof that Grimes stole tax money?”
White nodded significantly. “Yep. Saw the documents myself. It was only one month’s worth of detail. Still, the amount of
tax money he was lying about was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, just for that one month. If he’d been doing that for years, like we suspected, it had to be millions.”
Tyee popped in. “Why didn’t you turn that over to the state, or the feds?”
“The only person who knows that for sure would be Sheriff Jackson—who, of course, is dead. He’d contacted me about the documents and brought them here for me to see. He wanted to know what to do with them. Of course, I told him he should contact the state and federal taxing authorities, and arrest Grimes while he was at it.” White took a breath. “He said he’d do that once he was sure his contact was safe. But then, within a few days, he was off on some kind of weird military operation. If I hadn’t seen those docs, I would’ve assumed that Jackson was completely nuts and none of it was true. But I saw detailed records showing that Grimes was moving money all over the place and falsely reporting gallons sold on the reservation at a ridiculous volume.”
Ray asked White the obvious question, “You said he wanted to make sure his contact was safe. Do you know who that contact was?”
White nodded sadly. “Councilman Martin. The dead councilman Martin. According to Jackson, it was Martin who contacted him and told him what was going on. He was the source for the documents.”
Tyee frowned. “We’ve been told Martin was a friend of Grimes; that they’d go out drinking together. Do you think Martin was involved in the tax scheme?”
“I don’t think so, although I’m beginning to question everything I think I know. Martin was a long-time resident and for years a real straight shooter. It was the drinking and woman-chasing that led to his downfall. It might sound odd, but he might drink and womanize with Grimes, but I don’t believe he would’ve stolen a dime.”
Ray took his turn. “How did he get those records?”
“My guess would be that Barbara Jackson gave them to him.”
Tyee sat back, looking surprised. “Barbara Jackson—the sheriff’s ex-wife who he confessed to killing?”
“Yep. Shakespearean, isn’t it?” White rubbed his head like he had a headache. “She had a rather public affair with Grimes. I think she did it to try to hurt Jake, and sort of went nuts herself. Then Grimes announced in a bar one night that he was tired of her. Now, here’s where the documents come in. She had connections in Grimes’s office because of her political work. I think she managed to get access and stole them. But here’s the thing: she wanted to nail Grimes, but I’d bet that she was terrified of Jake. I don’t believe she wanted anyone to see a straight connection between herself and the documents. So I think, she started an affair with Martin, mostly to get him to do her bidding, part of which was to give the evidence to Jackson so she could get revenge against Grimes.”
“Shit.” was Ray’s comment.
White nodded wearily. “Yep, big piles.”
Tyee tilted his head skeptically. “Do you think Trujillo knows about any of this?”
“At one time I would have said yes, but today I’m not sure. No question, he’s been in the middle of a lot of things related to this, like his affair with Vickie. But did he commit a crime or know about it? I don’t have any idea.”
Ray eyed Tyee. “If we go see Grimes, you won’t cause any trouble, will you?” He didn’t need his partner locked up in a Farmington jail for strangling the town’s leading citizen.
“If by ‘trouble’ you mean killing him, no, I won’t. But I’m not going to be friendly.” Tyee grinned while daydreaming about throttling the old fart.
“I don’t like that grin.”
Tyee got down to business. “What do you think he might know?”
“Everything centers around him, his affairs, and his questionable business practices. He was asshole buddies with the dead councilman, and he had an affair with the deceased, Barbara Jackson. It just seems reasonable to ask him more questions.”
Tyee grunted. “So that means you have no idea what he might know.”
“Something like that. And I’m not sure how to find the evidence White saw. I guess our best approach with Grimes is to annoy him enough to see if he’ll accidently tell us something important. My instincts tell me he’s involved in everything.”
They once again drove to the out-of-place mansion. The guards were back.
Tyee got out to approach the one who kept the gate.
“No reason to knock,” the guard told him. “They’re all out.”
Tyee noticed how friendly he seemed. “Know when they might be back?”
“Nah,” he scoffed, “they don’t tell us shit. The wife left early this morning. And Mr. Grimes, I think, went to his office downtown, but not sure. He left about an hour ago.”
“Thanks.” Tyee got back into the truck to report, “They’re both out. Nobody for us to annoy.”
“Oh, I’m sure we can find someone to irritate. Let’s try the sergeant again.”
“Hey, I wasn’t avoiding you. I’ve got my duties I have to take care of. It’s not like crime takes a break just because you guys are in town.” Hoover smiled, perhaps to lend the impression he was just a good cop doing his job.
“Yeah, sure. I understand. Do you know where Trujillo is?”
“No,” he shook his head as if mystified. “He just up and left. Told me he’d be gone a day or two, but he’d be back. Told me to handle shit the best I could, and away he went.” The sergeant shrugged.
“The city attorney told us he secured a warrant and searched these offices some time back. Were you here for that?”
“Yep. I was right here when they served the warrant. Worked with the state troopers; helped them any way I could. Trujillo stayed away. He told me he thought White overstepped his authority, and he wasn’t about to cooperate.”
“What did they find?”
“Couple of old Playboy magazines and a bottle of gin.” The sergeant went back to grinning.
“Anything else?”
“If you mean, ‘Did they find the evidence they were looking for?’—they didn’t. Kind of pissed them off that they spent so much time digging around these dirty old offices and came up with nothing.”
“So you knew what they were looking for?” Ray was beginning to feel a little tired of the sergeant’s silly grin.
“Oh, yeah. They told me.”
“Do you know where those files might be?”
“No idea. If I was going to guess, I’d say Sheriff Jackson took them with him when he left. Maybe he buried them up yonder in the Colorado part of those mountains.” The sergeant seemed to think that was funny. He chuckled.
Ray and Tyee took a table at a nearly vacant IHOP. They ordered coffee, sat back and went over what they’d learned.
The first lesson was, “The sergeant may be decent at his job, but he’s really damn annoying.” Ray frowned.
“So I noticed,” Tyee agreed. “I thought it was our job to be annoying.”
“You really are a wiseass Indian, do you know that?”
“White Man Leader has permanently lost his sense of humor,” Tyee observed. “Should have brought Happy with us.”
That made Ray smile. “Sorry. Yes. I really do miss my dog.” He began to laugh.
Tyee laughed along with him, he also missed Happy. Then he steered their attention back to the subject. “Hoover may be annoying, but I think he might be right. Based on timing alone, I’d bet Jackson did take those files with him to Colorado. Did you see all the stuff up there? I’d bet you money the feds have done nothing with it and it’s all still out there.”
Ray nodded. “Yeah. I was thinking the same thing. If you know what we know then it’s obvious, and that means that Trujillo might have come to the same conclusion. That may be where he went. I think we need to call the FBI, see if they have gone through all that stuff, and, if they have, find out if the documents are still there.”
“We need to get some of those mobile phones,” Tyee suggested, “so we don’t have to go looking for pay phones anymore. I hear they’re getting prett
y cheap now.”
Ray knew how much Tyee loved new technology, but resisted. “A mobile phone means people can call you all the time. I can’t imagine a worse set of circumstances.” He got up to look for a pay phone.
Tyee folded his arms and sighed.
Ray came back after some minutes, took his seat, and said, “Might want to rethink that mobile phone idea. Called Agent Crawford and what did he do but answer on his mobile. No receptionist, no switchboard or message machine. Pretty neat, I guess.” He still wasn’t sure he wanted one, however. “He said they had made a superficial search of the stuff and put together an inventory but had not examined anything in detail. They’re still not sure who it all belongs to. The material could be evidence in a crime, but Crawford was not sure—which indicated it was a pretty low priority for them right now. They hired some private security guards after the Colorado State Police left, but other than that they’re basically just waiting until they know how all of that crap might be involved in any potential crime. I told him we thought the sheriff might have taken a large crime file with him and that it’s most likely still there. He didn’t offer to do anything about it himself, but he said he was okay with us searching through the mess if we want; but we shouldn’t take anything away without contacting him first. I told him I’d call him back.”
Tyee started whining. “There were boxes all over the place up there. That could take forever. Besides, the drive’s a killer. An hour or more to get there, and another hour to bounce our butts through the mountains.”
Ray sat back to think. “Still, I do think it’s logical that Jackson would have taken the evidence with him. And, no, given all that we need to do here, I don’t want to spend days rummaging through who knows how many old boxes up in the middle of nowhere, where we might find nothing.” He paused. “Maybe at this point, we give Trujillo a bit more time. If he did go there, and he isn’t crooked, maybe he’ll find those files and bring them back.”
Tyee shot Ray his “You don’t really believe that, do you?” look.