“What’s puzzling?” I said. “And sit down for a few minutes.”
She didn’t argue, but crossed the small room and sat in the leather chair by the wall map of Posadas County. Sheriff Holman drifted back into the room and closed the door.
“I had the pickup truck secured in the county shop so I can take another look tomorrow. Maybe you’d take a look, too, sir.”
I sat down, letting the old, familiar swivel chair soothe the tired bones. I’d been standing for two minutes, and that seemed long enough. Estelle was frowning and looking at the fingernail of her right index finger. She picked the cuticle without knowing what she was doing, and at the same time her lower lip pursed out. I’d known her long enough not to interrupt the patient thought process that was going on in that pretty head. Even Martin Holman knew better.
Finally she looked up at me. “Do you remember Ryan House?”
I shook my head. “Marty here told me that House was the one killed. The passenger. But I can’t bring him to mind. Show me a yearbook picture, and it’ll click.”
“It probably doesn’t matter. But that’s right…he wasn’t driving. Dennis Wilton was.”
“So I heard.”
“Ryan House was thrown out on impact. Through the windshield.”
“I saw that,” I said. “But Wilton is all right?”
Estelle nodded. “Physically, I guess. They were close friends. And Wilton is blaming himself.”
“That would be expected,” I said. “So what’s puzzling?”
“Stub Moore, the driver of the lead bus, says that the pickup truck that Wilton was driving passed his bus on a long downgrade. Although the truck was going faster than the speed limit, Boyd said that the speed wasn’t excessive for passing.”
“And then he lost it somehow, and went off the side of the highway,” I said.
“It sounded pretty cut and dried to me,” the sheriff added, but Estelle shook her head.
“Moore said the pickup was half a mile or more ahead of him when he saw the lights just drift off the road to the right.” She swept her hand out in front of her, and then held it suspended in space. “He said it looked like the driver maybe fell asleep.”
“That could happen,” Holman said. “That late at night? Why not.”
“It could, but put yourself in that pickup truck. Sure, it’s late. They’re heading home from an exciting football game. It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive. The boys might have stayed in Sierra Linda for a few minutes after the game to get something to eat. They caught up with the buses somewhere near Baca’s ranch. And a few minutes later, when the bus started into that section of highway that looks like a roller coaster, Wilton decided to pass.”
“What’s your point, Estelle?” Holman asked abruptly. He glanced at his watch.
“Dennis Wilton might not have known the road very well,” I said. “He might not have had occasion to drive it often.”
“That never stopped most teenage drivers from passing,” Holman said.
I hooked my hands behind my head and regarded Estelle. Her thought processes had always amused me, running in nice, true lineal lines from A to B to C. In the eight years I’d known her, I couldn’t recall a single incident of her engaging in idle chatter.
“True.” Estelle nodded. “And think about them passing. Maybe some of the kids in the bus were asleep, but probably most of them weren’t. They’re too wired after a conference win. And the driver said that they were noisy. He had trouble getting them to stay in their seats. So, as the pickup drives by, we’ve got kids looking out the window, probably responding to waves or honks or what have you from the two boys in the pickup truck.”
“Remember last year,” I said, “when one of the Posadas wrestlers hung his butt out the bus window and mooned half a mile of downtown Belen?”
Estelle nodded. “With all that kind of behavior that we expect, it seems odd to me that a minute or so after the pickup pulls back into its lane ahead of the bus, the kid who’s driving just simply falls asleep.”
The room fell silent as both Martin Holman and I regarded Estelle Reyes-Guzman.
“But…” Holman said when the silence stretched too long.
Estelle raised an eyebrow and waited.
“How else?” he added and held up his hands.
“I don’t know how else,” Estelle said quietly.
“What are you going to do?” Holman asked, and he sounded a bit nervous.
“I want to talk with Dennis Wilton some more,” she said. “I want to hear what he has to say. And the bus driver gave me names of some of the kids who were riding on that side of the bus, kids who would have seen the pickup go by. I suppose it’s entirely possible that the two boys were half asleep when they cruised by the bus. I just find it strange that the very act of passing a game bus wouldn’t stir the adrenaline just a little bit and keep them alert for a while longer.” Estelle pushed herself out of the chair. “I asked the parents for a blood test and they agreed. We didn’t need to go through the hassle of a court order. We’ll see what those results say.”
“You think they might have been on something?” I asked.
“It’s possible. We didn’t find anything like that in the truck, but it’s possible.”
“Do you think they were drinking?” Holman asked.
“Maybe. I couldn’t smell anything, but you never know. I don’t think the doctors would have given Dennis Wilton a sedative if he’d been drunk.”
“That would make it vehicular homicide, if he was intoxicated,” Holman said.
“Yes, it would, sir.”
He sighed loudly. “Jesus Christ,” he said and looked heavenward. “That’s all we need. First the girl, now this.”
I had been gazing at Estelle during the exchange, watching her expression. She turned and when our eyes met, I knew that she’d told us most of what she knew. Most.
The anticipation did more for me than ten cups of coffee. I pushed myself out of the chair and said, “One case at a time. Dennis Wilton isn’t going anywhere. We caught up with Vanessa Davila and she and Mama are waiting for us upstairs. Let’s go chat with them for a few minutes. Then we’ll take a look at that truck.” I turned and smiled at Martin Holman. “Then maybe we can have a domestic knife fight or two. Maybe even a rabid dog. Spice this evening up.”
Holman looked long suffering. “It’s three ten in the morning,” he said. “The evening was shot to hell a long time ago.”
“You’ll get used to that, Sheriff,” I said.
24
Vanessa Davila cried. It didn’t matter what the question was, or who asked it. She cried. Sometimes the tears leaked out from tightly squinched eyelids while she bit her lip. Sometimes her body heaved and the tears flowed openly. At one point she got the hiccups so badly that I could feel the floor jolt every time one of the spasms shook her.
Sheriff Holman fetched her a glass of water, but she ignored it.
At first I handled the tears by simply pushing the box of facial tissue close to Vanessa’s elbow and waiting. She ignored those, too. For the first ten minutes, Estelle did most of the talking, and most of it was in Spanish, between Estelle and the girl’s mother. Vanessa Davila didn’t utter a word.
She didn’t answer questions about her relationship with Maria Ibarra, nor about her activities that night. She would have known about the girl’s death, given the efficient way that word travels around a school. It was impossible to believe that she could not have known. Still, she had elected to go to the football game anyway. Perhaps that was her way of grieving for a lost friend.
She wouldn’t tell us how she got to the game, or how she got home. The list of students riding the spectator bus included fifty-five names, and none of them was Vanessa’s. I was impressed. No witness called to testify in front of a senate subcommittee ever stonewalled any better.
I watched the girl’s face closely, and what I saw was pure misery. I’d watched my own four kids grow up, and a time or two there had been
an emergency when something was really wrong, not just a minor ouch where the tears came and went. Vanessa Davila was being wrenched this way and that by her own private hell, and she had elected to keep it to herself. Most kids weren’t that tough.
She didn’t nod answers, she didn’t use her hands. She didn’t focus on the picture of Maria Ibarra that Estelle slid in front of her. She just sat and waited us out while the tears flowed.
During a silence while Vanessa ignored a question from her mother, I glanced at the wall clock. In another two hours it would be dawn. Posadas would wake up and folks would have a lot to talk about. A little girl whom few of us knew had died a lonely and dirty death; the man she’d been living with had poisoned himself with a lethal alcohol mix; a harmless itinerant had been the victim of a hit-and-run; and one of the community’s top students had tried to fly through solid rock. The past twenty-four hours were something of a record for the tiny community.
At least we’d won the football contest. I gazed at what was left of Vanessa Davila and wondered how she’d managed to sit through the game, because it wasn’t the thrill of victory that had reduced her to jelly.
Her mother began another set of rapid-fire exhortations with the word basta sprinkled through it and I held up a hand.
“Mrs. Davila, I don’t think we’re getting anywhere,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off her daughter. The mother subsided, and I leaned back in my chair, rapping my ring lightly on the edge of the table. It had been a long time since I’d been a practicing parent, and none of my four youngsters had strayed very far from the straight and narrow. Still, barring a family tragedy, I could think of only one reason for a fourteen-year-old to be so consumed by grief.
“Vanessa,” I said, “how well did you know Ryan House?”
Vanessa answered that question, but not with words. The name caught her off guard, and she sucked in a quick breath at the same time that her eyes closed. The flow of tears increased to a gusher, and she buried her head in her crossed arms, her thick black hair cascading around her face.
I nodded. “Well, well,” I said quietly.
“Sir?” Estelle asked.
I glanced at the detective and saw that she was frowning at me. If I was one step ahead of her, it was the first time in days. The late hours were really catching up with her.
“She wouldn’t go to a football game feeling like this,” I said. “She won’t tell us who she rode with, but she either saw, or heard about, the wreck.” I gestured toward Vanessa, whose head was still down on the table. “And she heard that Ryan House had been killed.” And when I mentioned the name, Vanessa flinched. It wasn’t much, but Estelle saw the slight hitch of the left shoulder and the snuffle from down under.
The girl’s emotions had opened a door for us, but that was the extent of her cooperation. She obviously had learned early on, and learned well, that if adults gave her a hard time, the simplest solution was just to refuse to talk to them.
We pursued her apparent acquaintance with Ryan House for several minutes without progress. Finally there appeared to be nothing else to say. I turned to the girl’s mother.
“Ma’am, if we let your daughter return home with you, are you going to be able to keep her there?”
Mrs. Davila started to say “What?” but thought better of it. She couldn’t meet my gaze and looked at Estelle instead.
“We’re going to need to talk with her again,” I said. Mrs. Davila’s chin started to quiver and tears came to her eyes. “We need to know that she’s available.”
The woman’s response surprised me. Instead of apprehension, I saw a glimmer of relief in her tear-filled eyes. “She never does what I ask,” she said. “I can’t make her mind me.” She looked at her daughter. “But she’s a good girl, mister.”
That sounded more like something said in self-defense than from any basis in truth, but I nodded sympathetically. I had my glasses on, and I tipped my head so I could scrutinize the older woman’s face through my bifocals. “Those facial bruises, Mrs. Davila. How did you get those?”
“Oh,” she replied, and her hand crept up to her face. “I fell down,” she added, and then stopped. She wasn’t a good liar. Her daughter had lifted her face from her hands and was busy wiping her eyes. Every now and again, she shot her mother a glance, just a quick look to keep tabs on the situation.
“Maybe,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, her voice almost a whisper, “maybe it’s all just too much.” She reached out and touched the back of my hand lightly, a soothing gesture that couldn’t have been lost on anyone. “Before the Davilas go home, maybe I can talk with Vanessa for just a few minutes alone?”
I pulled at my earlobe and grimaced. “Hell, why not.” I stood up and gestured toward Mrs. Davila. “Let’s give the detective a few minutes alone with Vanessa, ma’am. It won’t hurt.” I glanced at the girl in time to catch her gaze. “Of course, it probably won’t do any good, either, but it’s one last chance for her.”
With great shuffling of papers, the sort of thing lawyers do before a trial begins, we cleared the room, leaving the five-foot-six-inch, 110-pound Estelle Reyes-Guzman with five-foot-seven, 210-pound Vanessa Davila.
When my back was turned, I couldn’t help grinning, because I knew the two were no even match.
25
I was as surprised as Estelle Reyes-Guzman was baffled. “The girl just won’t say a word,” she said. Estelle had spent another twenty minutes with Vanessa, and then another session with mother and daughter before giving up in frustration. Matron Aggie Bishop stayed with the pair for a few minutes until Estelle, Holman, and I could figure out a game plan.
“She knows she doesn’t have to talk,” the sheriff said in one of his rare moments of clear thinking. “There’s nothing we can do to her, and she knows it.”
Estelle watched as I poured the last cup of what passed for coffee out of the pot. “Sir, did anyone actually see her at the game?”
“I don’t know.” I spooned in creamer and watched it swirl on top of the oil slick. “Her mother said she went. No…I take that back. She said she thought that Vanessa had gone with the crowd. That’s the only word we have.”
“Oh,” Martin Holman said, and it was close to a groan. “Now we’re saying she may not even have gone to the football game? That she was just roaming around town? What do we have to do, interview two hundred kids now to find out something as simple as that?”
“Maybe so, Martin,” I said, and tossed the plastic spoon in the trash. “That she went to the game is an assumption on our part, and not a particularly bright assumption, either, as it turns out.”
Holman frowned. “Why is it so important, anyway? Do we suspect this girl of anything? Do you think she had a hand in what happened to Maria Ibarra?”
“It’s possible.” I grinned at Holman. “If we knew what actually happened to Maria, we’d be farther ahead.” I sipped the coffee, and then tossed the remainder in the trash can. “It would be more fun that way…actually making progress before the snow flies.”
“It doesn’t look like she’s ever going to tell us,” Holman said. “Vanessa Davila, I mean.”
“Unless it begins to suit her purpose,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said.
Holman blinked at her, then snapped his mouth shut when he realized how stupid he looked. “I don’t follow,” he said.
“Well, Martin,” I said, and sighed long and loud. “Think of things from Vanessa’s position. If she’s just mourning the death of a good friend-Maria Ibarra-then talking to us isn’t going to do Vanessa any good. There’s nothing we can do to make her feel better.”
“And if she knew Ryan House, then she’s mourning him, too. And there’s nothing we can say or do to help,” Estelle added.
“But I’ve never seen a youngster just sit and ignore the world like that,” Holman said. “God, if either of my daughters were caught up in trouble, they’d babble out such a string of stuff that it’d take a week to sort things out. But this gal…she just sits there and
ignores us. It’s almost like she’s got something she’s guarding from us. Something important that she doesn’t want us to know.”
Estelle nodded, and I saw the ghost of a smile touch her face. “Exactly, sir.”
“Do you want someone to watch her for a while?” I asked. “Find out where she goes and who she sees?”
Before Estelle had a chance to answer, Holman yawned and shook his head, trying to clear the cobwebs. “You mean like a tail? Surveillance?” I nodded. “That’s expensive,” he said. “And for a fourteen-year-old kid? It seems like a waste of time.”
“That’s what we’re good at…wasting time,” I said. “It won’t hurt, and it’ll give Tom Pasquale something to do.”
“Why him?” Holman asked.
“For one thing, it’ll do his ego good,” I said. “He’ll enjoy playing secret agent man after spending a night at the hospital listening to Wesley Crocker snore. For another thing, I don’t want to spare one of the deputies. We don’t have enough manpower to go around as it is. And third, if Pasquale does the stakeout, the village will eat his overtime, not us.”
Holman grinned. “By all means, then.”
I glanced at my watch. “Give Pasquale a call at the hospital and fill him in. Tell him to use his own car, and to be discreet. If Vanessa slips out, we don’t want to interfere in any way. We just want to know where she goes and who she sees.”
Estelle nodded and left to telephone the good news to Thomas Pasquale. I chauffeured mama and daughter home, and when I opened the door for them to alight at their trailer, I said, “Are you sure you don’t have anything you want to tell us?” Vanessa didn’t bother to glance my way. She trudged up the steps to the trailer, opened the front door, and disappeared inside.
I handed one of my cards to Mrs. Davila. “Call me if you think of anything.” She accepted the card, but my hopes didn’t soar.
Dawn was beginning to streak the sky when I pulled into the graveled driveway of the county maintenance yard. I saw Estelle’s unmarked car parked over by our secure garage and I pulled 310 in beside it. The lights were ablaze inside, and I opened the heavy galvanized steel door.
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