Heartshot

by Steven F Havill

  “Then I need to see Estelle Reyes, Helen. Right now.”

  “Detective Reyes?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at her watch. “Would she be at the office now? It’s three in the morning.”

  My chamber of tubes and machines didn’t have any windows, so I had to take her word for the hour. “Three a.m.,” I muttered.

  “It’s probably the first decent rest you’ve had in some time, isn’t it? That’s what Sheriff Holman said this afternoon.”

  “Yeah, well, do me a favor, will you, Helen?” I gagged a little and it took several minutes before I could talk. “Call the dispatcher and tell them that I need to see Estelle Reyes.” I stopped again, marshaling my strength. “The minute she sets foot in the door. And tell her to bring my briefcase.” She nodded. That was enough exercise for me. I let myself sink back into the pillow and bedding.

  Later, the voices were an irritation, and I begrudged having to swim back to the surface again so soon. I had been enjoying my personal black void. Two men and Helen were standing near my bed. Even in the subdued light, I recognized Dr. Alan Perrone.

  “Good morning, Sheriff.” He smiled. “Nice vacation you got going here.” The bell of his stethoscope was ice-cold. He straightened up and pushed the instrument back in his pocket. “Sheriff, this is Bob Gonzalez.” I looked at the young man with Perrone. Maybe one year of med school at most. “He’s one of our emergency-room rotation docs from Las Cruces. He was on duty when you came in yesterday.”

  Gonzalez hadn’t taken his hands out of his pockets yet. But I felt as if I were being X-rayed by his unblinking black eyes.

  “What we have planned,” Perrone said, “is a session of complete rest first. We need to build your strength back up. You’ve been pushing pretty hard lately. Personally, I thought you looked like hell that night we worked on your undercover cop.”

  “Everyone goes out of their way to tell me that,” I said, wishing I had the energy to put some gravel in my voice.

  “You might start believing them. We consulted a little with Bud Sprague last night, too. He said the same thing.”

  “Dr. Sprague, you mean?” I asked, and Perrone nodded.

  “Listen,” I said, “I need to see Estelle Reyes. It can’t wait.” I looked at Helen Murchison. “Did you call like I asked?”

  Dr. Perrone didn’t give her a chance to answer, but said, “Reyes is waiting downstairs. She came in about an hour ago.” Perrone smiled slightly. “And she understands that she has to wait. You need to understand that too.”

  “This can’t wait.”

  “I’ll let her come up for about fifteen minutes. That’s it.”

  “How long am I going to have to stay here?”

  “If all goes well, we’ll probably move you out of this ICU room later this morning.”

  “ICU? What the hell am I doing here?”

  Gonzalez wasn’t amused. “You’re here because you fell flat on your face yesterday.”

  “We need to run some tests,” Perrone added. “We need to find out what’s going on inside that old carcass of yours. And you need to start taking care of yourself.”

  “Are you saying I can’t smoke in here?” I asked.

  Perrone just laughed gently. “I’ll send Detective Reyes up. Helen here will wait outside the door with a stopwatch. When the time is up she’ll pitch the young lady out on her ear.” He patted my knee. “And I was sorry to hear about the Salinger boy. That’s rough when a teenager packs it in.” He headed for the door. “Fifteen minutes with Reyes. That’s it. Give yourself an uneventful day and night, and then we’ll see.”

  I nodded weak agreement. Doctors always leave the full story hanging. What else could I do? The two doctors left, and I asked Helen, “What’s Gonzales’s racket?”

  “Dr. Gonzalez is doing his residency in thoracic surgery.”

  “Oh.” I thought I had detected something predatory in the young doctor’s gaze. “Well, he’s not practicing on my thorax, I’ll tell you that.”

  Helen Murchison nodded, and smiled.

  ***

  If Estelle Reyes had been busy plastering her mother’s house when she got the call, there was no sign of it when she padded into ICU. She was dressed in one of her immaculately pressed outfits that might have been customed-tailored. I knew better. She didn’t have any extra nickels to waste on clothes from what we paid her, but her trim, square-shouldered figure made even the cheapest rack clothes look good. She was carrying my briefcase, and there was a red paper seal across the lid seam.

  “You’ll sure go to some length to avoid work, sir,” Estelle Reyes said. She laid the briefcase on the foot of the bed.

  “How about that, eh?” I said, feeling better already with her in the room. I pulled the sheet up a little to cover my potbelly.

  “You startled ten years out of my life when you came around the end of that building. I was walking across with Sheriff Holman and Bob Torrez, and there you came, flying on one wing. You crashed right in front of us.”

  “One of my better performances. Anyway, we don’t have much time. I want to hear what you found.”

  Reyes sat on the side of the bed. She looked down at her fingernails and silently chewed on her lip. Finally she said, “It seems a damn strange place for a kid with as much to live for as Scott Salinger to commit suicide, sir.”

  “I agree. No place makes sense. You’ve talked some with Amy and his folks?”

  She nodded. “I mean, he had a view of the city dump. And if he went up there in the dark, he could see the lights of Posadas, but there are more picturesque places.”

  “That’s what the coroner said.”

  “Over the years, you’ve probably investigated—what, about a dozen suicides all told?” She looked sideways at me.

  “Something like that.”

  “And I’m willing to bet that your experience supports what I’ve read. People who destroy themselves usually do it at home…right in the middle of their misery. Have you ever known one who went out into the wilderness? I’m not saying it never happens, but it seems strange to me.”

  I nodded and tried to adjust the goddamned tubes. “And the Consolidated boneyard was not a haunt of Salinger’s,” I said. “Still, you never know what goes through a kid’s mind.”

  “True. But there’re a couple things about this case that bother me. I sort of wondered if you had seen the same things, because you evidently moved the body some.”

  “I lifted the gun,” I said. “I checked the body for an exit wound.”

  “There wasn’t any. Bob Torrez says that’s not unusual for hollowpoint ammunition, especially the lighter-weight bullets. Did you have a lot of trouble freeing his fingers?”

  I shook my head. “No. His thumb was in the trigger guard, but I didn’t have any trouble. His fingers were more or less in a relaxed position.”

  “Odd that a heavy Magnum like that wouldn’t recoil back.”

  “They don’t jump all that much,” I said. “Not enough to fling the gun away, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You’d just think that someone who was wound up tight enough to shoot themselves would be gripping that gun pretty tightly, is all. I mean, no matter what decision they make, no matter how resigned they are, there’s got to be some apprehension. The grips of that gun were wood, with sharp checkering. There was little indenting on the skin of his palms or fingers.” She shrugged and pulled a manila envelope off her clipboard.

  “Doc Clark was talking with me, too. He said he’d mentioned the same thing to you.” She pulled out a thin pack of five-by-seven photographs and held one up for my scrutiny. Salinger’s T-shirt had been cut away, and it was obvious that most of the blood was below the ragged, dime-sized hole in the center of his chest. “That track isn’t just from cotton soaking like a wick,” Reyes said, pointing at the stain that marked a straight line from wound to collarbone.

  “That’s what Clark said.”

  “And then there’s this,” Es
telle said, and found the photo she wanted. It was a close-up of the right shoulder of the T-shirt, taken from the rear. The fabric wasn’t torn, but it was scuffed. Estelle handed me another picture, this one of the victim’s shoulder. A small scrape, just a mild abrasion of the skin was visible. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t have thought anything about that, but I also found this.” She held out another photo. “That’s a piece—small, I admit—of asphalt. A little pebble.” I looked at the picture and frowned. “This is where it came from.” The photo she handed me this time showed the right side of Salinger’s head. A pencil was holding a spray of hair out away from the skull, and another pencil pointed at the fragment of paving in situ next to the skin. “My guess is that he fell backward. His head hit the ground pretty hard. The ME will have more for us, I’m sure. But he hit his head hard enough to imbed that gravel in his scalp. I could see the mark.”

  “Good work, Estelle.” That’s all I could think to say.

  “On the victim’s lower back is some paint residue.”

  “I saw that.”

  “The most interesting thing is what I found this morning.” She looked at me, and I could see the excitement of the chase in her eyes. “There were powder marks on the outside of his left arm. The outside.” She pointed to her own arm, and then handed me a picture. “They don’t show up well. I asked the ME to take some that would. And to make sure to run the NAA tests there, too. I think that the gun was fired more than once.”

  “No shit?”

  She nodded. “I talked to Mr. Salinger yesterday afternoon.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “It’s rough for them. But Scott’s father said the gun is his, and that he hasn’t loaded anything but jacketed hollowpoints for that revolver since he bought it more than four years ago. So it would be unusual to find lead residue in the bore, wouldn’t it? If it only shot brass-jacketed bullets?”

  “I would think so, unless the gun was so badly out of time that it shaved the lead tip before the slug got into the bore.”

  “The cylinder timing is almost perfect.”

  “Was there lead in the barrel?”

  “Yes. I asked the crime lab in Santa Fe to do me a rush-rush. That’s what they said.”

  “Rush is right. How’d you get the gun up there so fast?”

  Estelle Reyes looked sheepish. “Sheriff Holman almost went into orbit when he heard. I had Bob Torrez take it.”

  “He drove it up?”

  “No. Jim Bergin flew him up. I wanted an answer, and fast. A guy up there owes me a favor or two. We printed the gun, and he took powder samples. The only results I got back so far are the prints—they’re all Scott Salinger’s—and the positive test for bore lead.”

  My forehead was flushed, and the weariness was competing with my attention. Helen Murchison was going to tackle Estelle any minute. “So tell me what you think happened.”

  “There’s a lot of unanswered questions, sir. But if I had to write a script, it would go like this. I think Scott Salinger walked into the middle of something. He parked just off the edge of the road. Whoever it was somehow either talked the gun out of Scott’s possession, or took it from him without a struggle that left marks…unless that’s where the lightly skinned shoulder and head bruise came from. Then the killer shot Salinger. There’s a very small powder-burn corona around the hole in the T-shirt. It looks like the revolver barrel was almost actually touching him. The body was moved to behind the shed, and whoever it was had the brainstorm of making it look like a suicide. Maybe whoever it was knew the Salinger kid, knew that he was depressed. Maybe whoever it was even knew Salinger had talked about suicide.”

  At that point, Helen opened the door. Without breaking stride, Estelle turned and held up a hand. “Two minutes, Ma’am. Please close the door.” Helen did so without question. I was surprised at the steel in Estelle’s voice.

  “Whoever it was plopped him down behind the shed, scuffing his lower back against the building. Then the killer got smart…too smart. He wanted the NAA to be positive. But he couldn’t shoot the gun again with Salinger’s ammunition. As dumb as we are, we’d notice two rounds missing. My guess is that whoever it was had a gun of his own. If it was any thirty-eight caliber, it would work. And that’s the most common cartridge. So he took out a round, put it in Salinger’s Magnum, folded the grips in the boy’s hands and fired once off to the side. He pops open the cylinder, takes out his casing and puts the live round back in. Closes the cylinder and his tracks are covered. Real cute.”

  “One cold son of a bitch, if that’s the case,” I said quietly.

  Estelle Reyes got up. “That’s for sure. Gayle said you wanted your briefcase. I sealed it.”

  “No need, Estelle. In the top pocket is an evidence bag. The contents were in Scott Salinger’s back pocket.”

  Estelle snapped the seal and opened my briefcase. “In the top pocket,” I repeated, and she pulled out the small bag. She held it up and frowned.

  “This was in his back pocket?”

  “Right side. About an inch of it was protruding. That’s why I saw it. When I moved the body forward, I saw it there.”

  She turned the bag over and over, puzzled. “A piece of wood and a piece of what looks like plastic.”

  “Junk.”

  “Why would he pick it up and put it in his pocket?”

  “If he was intent on suicide,” I said, “I don’t think he would.”

  Estelle relaxed back on the edge of the bed, leaning on one elbow. “It wasn’t suicide,” she said flatly. It was the first time either of us had come right out and said it. “And that leaves us only two choices for something like this. Somebody put it in Scott’s pocket, maybe after the shooting, maybe before. Why, we don’t know. Or Scott picked it up and put it there himself.”

  “Why?”

  She tossed the bag back in the yawning briefcase. “Who knows? Good citizen picking up litter?”

  “Just this, and not everything else that trashes up that mesa?”

  “When we find out what it is, or what it was, maybe we’ll have part of the answer,” Estelle said. “Did the doctors say how long they were going to keep you cooped up here?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “What do you plan to do next?”

  Estelle hesitated. “It’s got to be somebody in town,” she said. “That’s what I think. I’m proceeding on the assumption that, one, it was murder,”—she ticked off a finger—”and, two, it was somebody from around here. Or at least somebody very familiar with the area.”

  “And you’ve given up any thought of its being suicide?”

  “It wasn’t,” Estelle said immediately. “NAA and ballistics will confirm that. But for right now, I want that between you and me. I haven’t told anybody else.”

  I frowned. “That’s going to be a rough road for the family.”

  “Yes, it is. But I think it’s to our advantage. Everyone I’ve heard talking assumes it was a suicide. I’m thinking we can just leave it that way for a while…just a few days. We might catch somebody off guard.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think I want to jerk the Salinger’s chains like that, Estelle. They’ve got to know.”

  “If they know, so will everyone else.”

  “I think we can give them more credit than that.”

  The door opened and Helen Murchison marched in. She didn’t give Estelle a chance this time…and next to Helen, Detective Reyes looked like a junior high school cheerleader. “Out,” she said. “It’s been far too long.” She began checking me and my machines.

  As my cheerleader moved toward the door, I said, “Talk to them, Estelle. Convince them of the importance of going along with you. And if they want to talk to me, encourage that. We’ll just find a minute when Helen here steps out to lunch, if I’m cooped up in here that long.”

  “Lie back and shut up,” Helen said cheerfully. “It’s obvious you’re going to be trouble.”

  Estelle swung the door open. “I see you’re in goo
d hands, sir. I’ll keep you posted.” She held up my briefcase. “I’ll let you know what the junk is.”

  I waved. Helen Murchison sniffed her disapproval. I guess I wasn’t supposed to feel better.

  Chapter 20

  They had promised to move me, and while I waited for that grand event, I drifted off. When I woke, the room was quiet and lonely, save for the patient, faraway hum of the machines above my head. No clock, no watch, no window—it could have been midnight or noon of July Fourth or Christmas. The chemicals still dripped into my veins. I felt like cloudy water.

  “Ugg,” I said, and shifted position. I wanted a cigarette. Was there enough oxygen in the room that if I lit up I’d risk blowing the side of the building out into the parking lot? Either that or Helen would knock me through the wall herself. I examined what I could see of the darkened ceiling. The room, a twilight tomb, was depressing. What were all the damn white curtains for? To remind the patient of heaven?

  The fuzzy, disoriented, floating feeling had to be from the drugs. Or was that what dying felt like? Scary notion. Did things just fade to black without any awakening? Was death a special fade? Was its approach recognizable? Morbid. I couldn’t help it. My brain kept casting back for other memories. What had Art Hewitt thought, as he lay on his back in the village park? When there’s time like that, did the mind unwind slowly? Could the person feel things gradually coming apart, gradually shutting down? Did Scott Salinger have a couple of seconds of conscious thought after the Magnum shredded his heart? Or was it simply like a light switch…one instant full on, the next instant full off—permanently off, main line cut and wires removed? Who the hell knew? In frustration, I kicked the sheet that covered me. I wasn’t going to lie there any longer and torture myself. I twisted my neck and this time found the buzzer cord. By moving carefully, I could flex my left arm, tubes and all, and press the button.

  I waited about thirty seconds and repeated the call. And repeated. And repeated. Maybe the button wasn’t connected. The door was open, even though I couldn’t see it through the curtain. I heard activity of some kind down the hall, and I pressed the button again for good measure. A shadow materialized first, and then one of the nurses pushed the curtain back. She regarded me soberly for a second, saw that there was no panic on my part, and then smiled.