Lies Come Easy

by Steven F Havill

  “A defensive wound, rather than a wound of hesitation,” Estelle added.

  “If Darrell was having an argument with somebody, and if Derry slept right through everything, it wasn’t much of a shouting match,” Linda said. She turned on the preview window and handed the camera to Estelle so the undersheriff could scroll through the pictures. “Anything else you need before I bundle back home?”

  Estelle took her time as the slide show slid by on the camera’s little viewing screen. Even the displayed T-shirt with the prominent, burned and bloodied hole in the center was featured in ten photos from five angles, front and back. “And the truck will be secured in the county impound, so we can go back to it if we need to.”

  “Toxicology will take a little longer,” Perrone offered. “But I can tell you that the preliminary blood alcohol came in at zero-seven. He’d had a few. And a moderate level of both marijuana and tobacco aroma on his clothes.”

  “What are you plannin’ to do?” Sheriff Torrez asked Estelle.

  “I want to talk with Maria Apodaca.”

  “What’s she going to know?”

  “For one thing, Bobby, it’s hard to imagine her being all that happy about those two blockheads being out half the night with a two-year-old in tow. She would have been after Darrell to take the boy home, especially with the weather threatening.”

  “Yep.” Torrez nodded. “Take somebody with ya.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Just do it,” the sheriff interrupted. Estelle looked at him in surprise. Bobby Torrez so rarely fell back into command mode, especially with her, that on those rare occasions when he did, she knew that something was on his mind. In due time, he might tell her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Where the sun could reach, no trace of the winter scud remained. New Mexico 56 was clear and dry, the sunshine turning roadside grasses into swaths of gold. Each runty piñon or juniper shaded its own little shrinking souvenir patch of snow.

  Lieutenant Jackie Taber kept the Expedition cruising at a lazy fifty-five as they started the long, winding route up the north side of the San Cristóbals. She drove with her left hand locked on the wheel at twelve o’clock, right elbow propped on the lid of the center console, right hand free to manage radio, computer, or phone.

  “You doing okay?” Taber looked across at Estelle, who had been shifting uncomfortably in the seat, trying for a position that didn’t aggravate the ache in her right side.

  “Hard seats,” she replied. “When you talked with Penny, what did she have to say about Al Fisher and his girlfriend?”

  Taber slowed for the first tight switchback. “A little jealousy there, I think. I got the impression that she doesn’t much care for Maria Apodaca. Penny thinks that Darrell spent too much time down there, ‘playing with his brother.’ Either too much brotherly love, or too much enjoying the company of the girlfriend. Take your pick.”

  She made a philosophical grimace. “Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s a nightmare—husband and wife working at opposite ends of the day, a little kid caught in the middle. Day care takes a big bite out of their budget.” She shrugged. “And Penny doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who handles even a little bit of friction very well. She doesn’t think before she engages the mouth—at least not where her husband was concerned. And who knows? Maybe he liked being bullied.”

  They rode in silence for a moment. “Both husband and wife have entry-level jobs,” Taber mused. “Not a lot of income there. And now along with everything else, add a high energy youngster to the mix. Where were they going to come up with five hundred in cash to bail hubby out of the clink after his stupid mistake? So older brother pays the bail, and dollars to donuts says that created even more friction. Penny doesn’t like feeling beholden to her brother-in-law and, being the motor-mouth that she is, makes sure that hubby feels even worse about being such a worthless loser.”

  Ahead of them, the highway sign announced Regál Pass, elevation 8,817 feet. Even here, mere traces of snow reached out from patches of shade. The storm had been more bluster than production. Below them, woodsmoke blanketed the village, an inversion holding the smudge close to the ground. From just beyond the pass, the highway jogged around a towering limestone buttress, and from that vantage point, Estelle could see the tiny Mexican village of Tres Santos, six miles south, along the serpentine, tree-lined avenue of the sometimes stream, the grandly named Rio Plegado…a rio only a couple of weeks each year.

  Late afternoon sun cast hard, long shadows, and the border fence’s barbed wire winked. Estelle could remember when the fence had first been just four strands of wire, more just a demarcation than a prohibitive boundary. Her late Great-uncle Reuben had told her about the days when there had been no wire at all at the crossing. Now the port of entry, a squat featureless block structure, squatted on the border just yards beyond the adobe church. The Mexican counterpart, tan adobe with bright blue trim and a host of Mexican flags, guarded the two-lane dirt road that ran toward Tres Santos and then Janos, twenty-five miles farther south.

  The latest census had revealed that thirty-seven people still populated Regál. Estelle knew that living there required a certain stubborn streak of patience, since the village had changed little in the past hundred years…maybe even less than the undersheriff’s birthplace across the border, tiny Tres Santos.

  In Regál, there was no gas station, no bank, no convenience store, no school. Just the obligatory church, the whitewashed Iglesia de Nuestra Señora that was more a simple chapel, or capilla, than a full service church. The nearest grocery shopping was down south in Janos, with all the complications the officious border crossing forced on folks. Or thirty-eight miles northeast, in Posadas. The nearest clinics were Francis Guzman’s clinic in Posadas, and his partner’s satellite clinic in Janos.

  Most of the time, the distance and the seclusion didn’t matter to the residents of Regál—most of them, most of the time, saw their isolation from the crazy modern world as a blessing to be treasured. A few had embraced satellite-bounced internet, and the UPS driver was on a first-name basis with all of the internet shoppers.

  When there were enough participants to warrant more than a front porch gathering, the Iglesia de Nuestera Señora was the community epicenter for bake, produce, yard, and rummage sales, with its generous graveled parking lot right along the well-traveled highway.

  The border fence, ugly chain-link with a roll of razor wire on top, passed within a hundred fifty yards of Maria Apodaca’s family compound, situated on the western border of Regál just below the first jumble of rocks skirting the base of the San Cristóbal foothills. “Compound” was the operative word. Solomon Apodaca, Maria’s father, was an artist with cement, and over the years his perimeter wall, five feet high and gaudily decorated with a veritable museum of artifacts, had grown to enclose almost an acre of lush gardens where he, his wife, Isabel, and daughter, Maria, nurtured the growth of enough food to feed an army. The wall that Solomon had built kept deer out of the corn, beans, and squash, and was the subject of continuing border wall jokes among the village residents.

  Solomon’s passion grew along the inside perimeter of the garden wall, where with its artistic serpentine form, any combination of sun and shade was possible. His collection of cabernet sauvignon wine grape varieties, now at twenty-one specimen vines and counting, was a vintner’s delight—cabernet sauvignon petite, lafite, petite Bouschet, vidure, Breton, noir…on and on they went, and Solomon Apodaca delighted in the role of tour guide.

  The Apodaca grapes grew abundantly with his constant nurturing, producing sufficient crops to make small batches of the dark, fragrant, and mostly undrinkable wines that only Solomon loved.

  The solid wooden gate, intricately carved and festooned with winter-dead squash vines, yawned open. Solomon Apodaca stood with one hand on the heavy wooden latch as if he’d been carved there. Short and burly, he favored s
uspenders rather than a belt to hold up his jeans, and his white shirt was bright enough to be hard on the eyes.

  He pushed back his black baseball cap and stepped close to the Expedition as Taber eased it to a stop.

  “I saw you coming down the hill,” he said. “I figured you’d be coming this way.” His voice was a gruff baritone, raspy from too much unfiltered pipe smoke. He leaned down and peered across at Estelle. “Good to see you again, Señora Guzman. We don’t see so much of you since Reuben is passed.”

  “It’s my loss, Señor Apodaca.”

  “Life has a way of intruding,” Apodaca said. “And who’s this?” He touched Jackie Taber’s shoulder.

  “Solomon, meet Lieutenant Jackie Taber. She’s been with us for nine years now.”

  Solomon looked puzzled. “Nine? And all that time…” He shook his head sadly as he shook Jackie’s hand. “But listen. I know you have work to do.”

  “We need to speak with Maria,” Estelle said.

  “I’m pretty sure she’s home. She and that boyfriend of hers, they bought the old Chavez place across the way.” He ducked his head at Estelle. “You know the one. It’s that place built right into the rocks, just across the way.”

  “I knew they were living there. I didn’t know that they had purchased it.”

  “Just this fall, they did that. You know how kids are these days. They want a place of their own.” He made a face. “I keep telling Maria that she should make herself an honest woman and marry that kid, but these days? And why that place, I don’t know. They’re so close to the rocks, there’s no good ground for a garden or anything.” His weathered face brightened. “Maybe they can raise goats or something.”

  His face wrinkled, and he gazed off into the distance toward Mexico. “A terrible thing about the boy’s brother. I just heard that from Maria today.” He shook his head slowly, and then looked down at Estelle. “It’s a sad thing when a young man decides that’s the only way out, you know.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Solomon nodded judiciously. “It runs in families, you know. That’s what I’ve heard.” He held up an index finger. “But you should have a glass of wine before you go. The noir was abundant this year, and sugared early. My wife says it’s the only wine I’ve ever made that’s drinkable. How about that?” He grinned. “But if they don’t like it, it’s more for me, you know.”

  “We’re going to have to take a rain check, Solomon.”

  “Take a bottle with you and share it with your husband the doctor. He’ll agree with me.”

  “Next time, maybe.” Jackie Taber let the car drift forward a little, and Solomon Apodaca stepped back.

  “You two come back soon, and you’ll see. The noir is spec-TAC-u-lar this year.” He beamed a smile of colorfully stained enamel, and slapped the window sill near Jackie Taber’s shoulder. He waved toward the village. “Maria is home now, I think.”

  “Thank you, Señor.”

  “Just across the way” was actually nearly two hundred yards, past Madrid Alonzo’s mobile home and hound dog runs, and coming up on the spreading junk yard that hid Lupe Gabaldon’s ancient adobe. The “old Chavez place,” now home to Al Fisher and Maria Apodaca, was a tidy little adobe which, like several other homes in Regál, had incorporated some of the bus-sized boulders that gravity had sprung loose from the mountain behind the village. Convinced that his boulder of choice would roll no further, old man Chavez had used it as the back wall of the house, extending outward with adobe blocks.

  The house had stood empty for half a dozen years after Aaron Chavez missed a corner up on Regál pass, he and his wife taking flight in their aging Oldsmobile. By the time Al Fisher had acquired the place from a uninterested daughter who’d long since found life to her liking in Tucson, the adobe cottage was home to packrats, banner-tailed kangaroo rats, lizards, jackrabbits, and at least one gigantic bull snake who enforced peace and quiet among the inhabitants.

  Jackie Taber maneuvered the Expedition through the ramshackle stockade fence and stopped behind Fisher’s diesel Ram pickup. A large, white plastic water tank dominated the truck’s bed, a few gallons still visible inside it. The upper fill line indicated a three-hundred-gallon capacity.

  “A pint’s a pound. A lot of weight when that thing’s filled,” Taber observed.

  Somewhere deep in the house, a small dog yapped and as the two officers stepped through the open yard gate, Maria Apodaca appeared in the front door, deftly keeping the little dog inside with one foot.

  “Hi!” she greeted with a broad and beautiful smile. Estelle knew that Maria had certainly seen her thirtieth birthday, but had the undersheriff not known, sixteen or seventeen would have been a good guess. “Al is somewhere up the hill,” she said, and then looked deeply sympathetic. “Losing his brother has been hard for him. Really hard. It would be for anybody, huh? I mean, it just makes me sick.”

  She smoothed an errant shock of black hair away from her thin face. Taken singly, Maria Apodaca’s features wouldn’t have won any beauty contests. Her eyes were set too closely together, separated by a proud aquiline prow of a nose. One eye drifted slightly to the left when she looked straight ahead. Her mouth, with full lips that curved in a delightful S-shape, one end up, one down when she smiled, housed a full compliment of teeth, none of them particularly straight, but all of them Hollywood white.

  Slender with perfect posture, shoulders so square that a drill sergeant would have coveted them, and just enough body curves to no doubt set young Al Fisher’s heart pounding, Maria Apodaca combined fetching looks with a honeyed voice. She beckoned them toward the door. “Did you want me to jog up the hill and find Al for you?”

  “No, thanks. Actually, we came to talk with you, Maria.”

  “Oh.” She looked uncertain. “Well, come inside out of the sun. I saw your car over at Dad’s. He didn’t try to poison you with his wine, did he?”

  “He did,” Estelle laughed. “We resisted.”

  “On the other hand,” Maria said, “I have some wonderful iced tea. How about that?”

  “Perfect.” They followed her into the cool home, and the tiny dog, a cross between a Chihuahua and something much smaller—a chipmunk, perhaps—decided not to bark, since she had nowhere to hide. She settled for her doggie bed in the kitchen, guarding a handful of doggie biscuits.

  The tiny house had only one partition, serving to offer some bathroom privacy. All the rest of the area, including living room, dining room, and bedroom, were an open commons. A queen-sized bed was charming with a vintage quilt, and snugged against the nearest wall was an antique rolltop desk that was open to reveal a laptop computer. Cables led to a printer on its own tiny table beside the desk.

  A large wood stove dominated one wall that appeared to be continuous, solid boulder, and Estelle could feel the gentle heat that radiated from the cast-iron stove. To one side of the outside door, a modest Christmas tree had been decorated on the wall farthest from the stove. The overall effect of the home was one of cozy intimacy.

  In a moment, Maria brought them each a glass of dark iced tea, with a sprig of wild mint on the edge. She didn’t offer sugar or other additives. “Are you warm enough? We let the fire go out because it gets so warm in here, so fast. It has to be just about a blizzard outside for us to keep the stove going all day. For a little while yesterday, we thought we were going to catch it. But the storm pooped out.”

  “That’s a beautiful set-up,” Jackie Taber said. She ran a hand across the boulder’s surface near the stove. She turned and smiled at Estelle. “Still warm and cozy.”

  “I think Mr. Chavez built the house around that rock.”

  “Good thing he didn’t have to move it far.” Taber held a hand close to the stove, then tapped the cast iron. “Holds heat a long time.”

  “Maria, we need to talk with you about Friday,” Estelle said. “Friday night, in particular, when
Darrell Fisher visited here.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Maria set her own glass down carefully, and then she turned to face Estelle expectantly, settling onto a straight-backed chair near the bed.

  “About what time was that?”

  “He came right about five-thirty. It was already dark, especially with the snow coming. He came just in time for dinner.” She smiled self-consciously. “That’s sort of a family joke. We say that Darrell can smell my Mexican food from thirty miles away.”

  “Who was with him, if anyone?”

  “He had little Derry with him. See, Penny works nights at the hospital, and they can’t afford a sitter all the time. So, wherever Darrell goes when he’s not tied up with work, so goes Derry.” She smiled. “He’s a doll, isn’t he?” She twisted and pointed at a two-cushion love seat not far from the stove. “He played for a little with White Fang, and then they both curled up there to snooze. I mean,” and she grimaced, “it got kinda late.”

  “White Fang is…”

  “The dog.” She nodded in the tiny creature’s direction. “She’s afraid of everything and everyone, except Derry, I think.”

  “What time did they leave?”

  “Oh, gosh. It was right around midnight, maybe a little before. Maybe around eleven-thirty. Derry woke up, kinda cranky like little kids get. You know. I was a little short with the boys for not paying attention. I mean, Darrell still had to drive back to town, and the weather wasn’t all that great.”

  “Did you see Darrell at any time after that? After he and Derry finally left?”

  “No.” Maria sighed. “Al got up early on Saturday—I don’t know how he does it after being up half the night. Anyway, he said that he was going pig hunting over in Texas. He’s got a favorite spot just over the border, in the breaks along the Red River. See, he wanted Darrell to go, too, but Darrell said he couldn’t.”

  “That’s why Darrell came over Friday night? To tell his brother that he couldn’t go along?”