No Witness

by Warren C Easley

  I knew Ned Gillian only by reputation as a top-notch attorney for those who could afford him, but I felt an immediate kinship. An acrimonious divorce put the worst of human nature on display, and we lawyers were guaranteed a front row seat. “Look on the bright side, Ned. We could be fighting over a couple of kids.”

  He sighed heavily into the phone. I pictured a sardonic smile forming on his face. “A fucking Chihuahua.”

  “Okay, I’ll take this back to Veronica,” I said, “Stay tuned.”

  “Thanks, Cal. I appreciate that.”

  “Look at it this way, Veronica,” I said after I reached my client on the phone a few minutes later, “If you don’t want to lose Cha Cha, you’re going to have to make them an offer.”

  “Like what?” she snapped in a tone laced with petulance.

  “A weekend a month. I think they’ll take it.”

  “God, I want this over with. Okay, a weekend a month, but I get to choose which one. And, Cal, tell them that’s my first and final offer.”

  I told her I’d take this back to Gillian, but he didn’t pick up when I called. I left him a message. By the time I locked up the office and Arch had hopped into the back seat of the car, the afternoon light was dying fast. Although bummed at having missed an opportunity to work on my wall, a blazing sunset out over the Coast Range buoyed me as we climbed into the Red Hills.

  At the gate to the Aerie, I got a call. “Cal? It is Carlos Fuentes. Timoteo told me to call you.” When I inquired about his whereabouts, he went on, sounding apologetic. “I have already visited the man missing from the feast who lives here. His name is Plácido Ballesteros.”

  “And?”

  “He claims to know nothing about the key.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  The line went silent for several moments. “Some men are good at lying, even if they swear by the cross.”

  “Is he one of them?”

  I waited through another pause. “I am not sure, but he would have a good reason to lie to me.”

  “What is the reason?”

  “If he was involved in my daughter’s death, he knows I will crush his neck with my bare hands.”

  “I see. I don’t blame you for feeling that way, Carlos, but such an action would only make things much, much worse for you and your family.”

  When he didn’t respond, I said, “Can you locate the two workers who went to Washington?”

  “Yes, I think so. I have a friend there who can help me find them.”

  “Good. When you find them, you must not contact them yourself. Let me know so we can decide how to proceed. Is that agreeable? I need your word on this.”

  “Yes. I will speak to you first. You have my word.”

  “One other thing, Carlos. I have an investigator who has good contacts in Mexico. Have Timoteo text me all the information you have on these three men, their full names, birth dates, where they came from, and anything else that is known about them. I will ask him to see what he can learn about their backgrounds.”

  After we disconnected, I sat in my car at the gate with the motor idling. Night had fallen, and a light mist flickered in the shafts of the headlights that shone out over the field. Archie, sensing my mood, stuck his head between the seats and nudged at my elbow. I sighed and absently scratched him behind his ears. My blood had risen at Carlos’s comment about garroting someone involved in his daughter’s death, a reaction that made me cringe, but at the same time I could feel his pent-up rage. The law says only the state can exact revenge, not the individual. Yet, I could well imagine how I would feel in this man’s shoes.

  How far would I go if it were my daughter?

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Not a black Kawasaki to be seen,” Timoteo said as we pulled into a parking space at the Tequila Cantina after making a complete circuit of the lot. As we exited the car, a man about Timoteo’s age cruised in on a motorcycle, parked next to a couple of other bikes, and walked into the cantina ahead of us. Timoteo shook his head. “Metallic blue might be mistaken for black, but that’s a Honda, not a Kawasaki. No way you mix those two up.”

  “If you say so,” I quipped. “Could’ve fooled me.”

  He laughed. “Maybe, but the locksmith was definite about the make.”

  The cantina was buzzing with a crowd at the bar and a few late diners sitting at a line of tables along an opposite wall. Travel posters for destinations in Mexico decorated the space above the diners, and a rich female voice sang in Spanish against an acoustic guitar on the sound system. As we approached an arched doorway leading to a back room, we could hear the clink of pool balls above laughter and animated Spanish. I entered the space first, and a hush fell as a dozen sets of eyes swiveled in my direction, including those of the man we’d just seen.

  Timoteo stepped up next to me. “Hola, amigos,” he said and began to explain in Spanish that we weren’t with ICE, that we wanted to ask a few questions about someone who’s been coming here. “Se llama Luis Fuentes. Es mi hermano.”

  “If he’s your brother, why don’t you ask him?” a man sitting at a round table in the corner with two others replied in English. A smattering of titters broke out in the room.

  “He’s away,” Timoteo said flatly with a hard look I hadn’t seen before.

  I walked across the room, smiled cordially, and stuck my hand out to the man. “I’m Cal Claxton.” Timoteo followed me.

  “Diego,” the man said, leaving off his last name. He casually closed a laptop on the table in front of him, and without getting up, shook our hands with an indifferent grip. The two men with him got up and moved to the side. Maybe a decade older than the twentysomethings around him, Diego was compact with sloped shoulders and thick forearms. He showed a thin smile below dark, hooded eyes. “We haven’t seen Luis for a while. He’s not a bad pool player.”

  “Are some of you friends with Luis?” I asked, scanning the room for a reaction.

  “He liked to play pool, that’s all,” Diego answered in a tone that made it clear he spoke for the group. To a man, they dropped their eyes.

  I persisted. “Did he have any trouble here? You know, fights or arguments with anyone at the cantina?”

  “Nada. We’re just one big happy family.” Diego’s smile remained, but his hooded eyes had gone unfriendly.

  Timoteo stepped forward and cleared his throat, but I extended a restraining arm, took a card from my wallet, and tossed it on the table. “Okay, then. If you think of something, give us a call.”

  We turned to leave, but Timoteo stopped and glared at the assembled group. “¿Por que este hombre habla por tu? Eres ovejas,” he said, then added as we walked away, “Baa, baa.”

  When we cleared the room, I said, “Ovejas means sheep, right?”

  “That’s right. I told those pendejos they were a bunch of sheep.”

  I had to chuckle. Timoteo may have been a Dreamer, but he had a tough side, too.

  We spent another five minutes in the front end of the cantina talking to the bartender, who had wrist-to-armpit tattoos, and a waitress who had mastered the art of looking bored. When Timoteo showed them a picture of Luis, they both recognized him but could tell us nothing else, except that he drank a lot of beer. “What do they do in there besides play pool and drink?” he asked.

  The bartenders face turned blank. The waitress shrugged. “I don’t know. They come in a couple of times a week. It’s sorta like a club or something. Shitty tippers, all of ’em.”

  “What’s Diego’s last name, the big guy?” I asked.

  “Vargas,” the waitress answered. That was all we got, so we left.

  “Oh, shit,” I said as we approached my car. The right rear tire was completely flat with something protruding from it. As Timoteo stood by, I knelt down, gripped a handle wrapped in duct tape, and extracted a flat piece of steel ground to a point and with
a wicked edge. I held it up. “A shiv.”

  “Those bastards,” Timoteo said. “That guy on the Honda knew this was our car. Let’s go back in.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s not. I like your moxie but not the odds. Give me a hand. Let’s change this tire and get the hell out of here.” We had the spare on in a couple of minutes, and as we pulled away, Timoteo said, “I’m sorry, Cal. That was my fault. I shouldn’t have taunted those guys.”

  “That probably wasn’t the wisest move, but we might’ve gotten that shiv regardless of what you said.”

  “You mean it was a warning not to come around asking questions?”

  “Could’ve been. And a prison knife underscores the point.”

  Timoteo smiled with half his mouth. “I didn’t see any prison tats in there. With the possible exception of Diego, those guys are wannabes.”

  Impressed with his insight, I said, “What else did you learn?”

  “Besides not to pick a fight when I’m outnumbered?” He exhaled and crossed his arms. “Diego’s the jefe, of course. He ordered that flat tire for whatever reason. It’s weird—they’re not a gang, and they’re sure as hell not a club. But, there’s something more there than just hanging out for a friendly game of pool.”

  “I agree. Did you notice that he closed his laptop when we approached?”

  “Yeah. What’s up with that? After he closed it and shook hands, he laid a forearm on it.”

  “Right. A subconscious protective move. What about Luis? Why do you think he started hanging out there in the first place?”

  “It’s hard to get my head around that. Luis is disaffected like those guys, so they have that in common. But Luis has always been a loner. I can’t see him getting involved with whatever’s going on there. It just doesn’t compute.”

  We drove on in silence for a while. The mist had turned to rain, forcing me to switch on the windshield wipers. I had to agree. Things didn’t compute, at least not yet. But, if Diego Vargas thought flattening my tire with a prison shiv would frighten me away, he had badly miscalculated. And now I knew that my new assistant was no shrinking violet, either, a thought that raised a smile in the dim light of the car. What the hell’s going on in the back room of the Tequila Cantina, and does it have anything to with the murder of Olivia Fuentes?

  Those were questions needing answers.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Carlos Fuentes sat at his kitchen table with a bottle of pulque in front of him. Timoteo and I had just arrived from the cantina, and I agreed to say hello to his father. When I saw him, I knew why his son insisted I come in. With a thick gray stubble and dark half-moons beneath his eyes, he seemed to have aged a decade. The transformation was unsettling. He raised his eyes and forced a smile. “Hola, Cal. Please, sit and have a drink.” I took a seat and Timoteo got me a glass. Carlos poured me some of the white liquid, we clinked glasses, and I took a sip. The liquid was thick, sour, and yeasty, and I had an urge to spit it out. He looked from his son to me. “Did you learn anything tonight?”

  I turned to Timoteo, who took the cue and described the events, putting the best face he could on them. “So, we didn’t hear that Luis had had any trouble there, or made any enemies, but they didn’t like us asking questions,” he concluded and then described the flat tire incident.

  Carlos sipped his pulque. He’d been drinking, but he wasn’t drunk. “Luis has problems, but he wouldn’t waste time on cabróns like that. He must have had a reason to go there.” He grimaced as if holding back tears. “I wish he would come home to us.”

  Timoteo patted his father’s shoulder with tenderness. “He will, Papi, he will.”

  I said, “Anything new on the men who went to Washington?”

  Carlos shook his head. “My friend in the Wenatchee Valley is still looking for them.” He took another sip. “I have learned that Plácido Ballesteros is from El Tecuan, a city south of Guadalajara. It is not that far from where I grew up.”

  I set my glass down, and Timoteo leaned forward in his chair. “Could he be cartel?”

  Carlos shrugged. “Many workers come from the state of Jalisco, so it is proof of nothing. Now that I know what city he is from, I can ask more questions. He arrived just before the grape harvest with the two men who have gone to Washington to pick apples.”

  “He could be the killer,” Timoteo said, his face lit with a mix of hope and rage.

  Carlos sighed and turned to me with a look of resignation. “We shall see, won’t we?”

  I shot a warning look at Timoteo. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s too early to make any judgments.” He nodded and his chin dropped. There wasn’t much else to say. I got up to leave.

  Timoteo said, “Wait a moment, Cal. Let me see if Mamá wishes to say hello.” He went down the hall, and I heard a muffled exchange in Spanish, but the word “no” is common to both languages. “She, um, is too tired right now,” he said when he reappeared. As he walked me to my car, he said, “I knew she wouldn’t come out, but I wanted to shame her, anything to get her out of that damn room. In our family, a visitor is always welcomed by Mamá, usually with food in hand.” He heaved a sigh. “She’s getting worse, Cal, not better.”

  “Have you thought about getting professional help?”

  A bitter laugh. “That’s not going to happen. You don’t know my mother.”

  ***

  Archie was waiting on the front porch when I arrived at the Aerie. I felt agitated and decided to walk it off. It had stopped raining, and a lopsided moon appeared through a thin gauze of clouds. We hadn’t gotten far before Archie stopped dead, his ears came up, and he dashed across the field, disappearing into the darkness. I heard a commotion, and he began to bark. I called after him. He was probably chasing either deer or coyotes, but I worried about a cougar, the one animal in the Red Hills capable of harming him. “Archie,” I called out again, “come here, boy.”

  “He’s right here,” a voice called back. It was the voice of Zoe Bennett. I walked across the field and joined them. “He just scared the hell out of two deer. I was taking the garbage to the compost bin when I caught a glimpse of the encounter. Archie’s quick, but the deer are quicker.”

  “He knows he can’t catch them. It’s pure sport for him.”

  She laughed and moved into the light of a solar lamp on the gatepost. She wore a blue scarf around her head, and the soft light lit one side of her face, illuminating a pearl earring.

  “You’d make a good model for Vermeer,” I said.

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed again as she touched one of the earrings. “Oh, these. They are pearl, you know. I opened another 2012 Le Petit Truc tonight. Want some?”

  “Does Gertie know about this?” I said with mock seriousness.

  “No. And if you tell, you won’t get any.” Her eyes got big, and she covered a big smile with her hand. “Oh, God, that came out wrong.”

  I gave her a teasing look. “Freud lives.”

  “Oh, shut up.” We both laughed, and she regained her composure. “Actually, Gertie asked me to open it tonight and insisted on half a glass with her dinner.”

  “That’s a good sign.”

  She exhaled in frustration. “The truth is she overdid it yesterday and had quite a bit of pain last night. Today was a lot better. She’s sleeping now.”

  I left Archie on the porch with a firm command to stay and followed her into the kitchen. She poured our wine, and we sat across from each other at Gertie’s kitchen table. After clinking glasses—me for the second time that night—she studied me for a few moments. “Something’s up, Cal. I can see it in your eyes. Want to talk about it?”

  “Are we on the clock?”

  “Of course.”

  I drank some of my pinot. “This beats pulque all to hell,” I began and then went on to unpack the recent events.

  “You�
��ve made good progress,” Zoe said when I finished. “The killer was the guy on the motorcycle, then?”

  “Possibly.”

  Zoe sighed. “Sent by someone from Carlos’s past? Is that still a possibility?”

  I shrugged. “That hasn’t been ruled out.”

  She shook her head and closed her eyes for a moment. “God, the guilt, if that’s the case. I can’t imagine.”

  I traced a scratch on the table with a finger and blew a breath out. “Yeah, it could be a ticking time bomb for the family, what’s left of it.”

  Zoe sipped her wine and looked at me for a moment over the rim of her glass. “Truth will out, Cal.”

  “I know. That’s more or less what I told Carlos.”

  “Maybe the mother will find it in her heart to forgive him, if it comes to that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What about the police? When do you bring them in?”

  “Good question. I think I’ll wait until Carlos finds the two workers in Washington, then decide how to handle it.”

  “How’s the mother doing?”

  “Getting worse, according to Timoteo.”

  Zoe’s brows lowered, and a couple of vertical creases formed on her forehead above her nose. “I was afraid of that. I, ah, did a little research. There’s a Spanish-speaking grief counselor in Salem. I checked him out. I can give you his number.”

  “That was thoughtful. Thanks. I told Timoteo they should get help, but he doesn’t think Elena would ever agree. I’ll pass this on, though.”

  She paused and regarded me. “What about you, Cal?”

  I blew out another breath. “I’m okay. Scenes from that night come back at odd times, and I dreamed about it last night.” I stopped there, realizing I’d probably said too much.

  She kept her eyes on me. “Want to talk about that?”

  It was a reasonable request but complying would require admitting that the death of Olivia Fuentes had resurrected the ghost of my deceased wife. That wasn’t a place I wanted to go. I forced a smile. “It’s fine. I, uh, just need a little time.”