“The officers try to be thorough,” I said mildly.
“If the guard wasn’t on the truck,” Wilton said, “then I’m sure it’s out in the shed. Every time Dennis sees the least little stone nick, he’s got to sand and paint that thing again. He might as well have gotten it chrome plated. It would have saved him a lot of time.” He looked sorrowful. “That truck was his pride and joy, Sheriff. His pride and joy.”
“Could we take a look?”
“Hell, yes. We can go right out through the kitchen.”
We did that, with Dustin Wilton never breaking stride to stop and wonder just why the hell we wanted to see a grille guard, or what difference it made whether it was on the truck or not. DeeDee stayed inside the house. Such was the magic of ignorance, I thought.
The barn was home to Dustin Wilton’s major hobby. Parked in the center of the floor was an ancient truck that was so pretty it took my breath away.
“Look at that,” I said in genuine admiration.
“Nineteen eighteen double T Ford,” Wilton said, and stroked one gracefully curved front fender. “We’ve got some final work to do on the oak racks in the back, and then she’s done.” He patted the metalwork. “Show-quality restoration, frame up.”
“Impressive,” I said.
“And I don’t see any grill guarde…No wait, here it is. He’s getting set to work on it,” Wilton said, as if the truck from which the guard was taken wasn’t a shapeless mess.
The guard was under one of the workbenches, and Wilton bent awkwardly to retrieve it. He grunted and grabbed the edge of the bench to support himself.
“Goddamn back,” he said, and yanked the grille guard free.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.
Wilton shrugged it off. “Twisted it last week doing something stupid.”
“Isn’t age wonderful,” I said, reaching out to accept one end of the heavy guard. The right side was badly bent.
“Someone probably smacked him in the parking lot at school,” Wilton said. He lifted the guard so I could see it, then slid it back under the bench.
“Probably so,” I said, glancing at Estelle. She smiled.
“So,” Wilton said, stroking the fender of the old truck again. “That’s that. What else was it you needed to know?”
“What year did you say this was?” I asked.
“Nineteen eighteen.”
I looked inside the cab. “Wood and metal. No plastic,” I said and turned to grin at Wilton.
“Not a scrap.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “How’s she drive?”
Wilton patted the fender and grinned slyly. “Well, let me put it this way. There have been a lot of improvements in the past seventy-eight years. A lot of improvements. I’ll tell you one thing…if you set out down the road in this, you’d better keep your mind on your business. She don’t have no cruise control.” He laughed.
And no air bags and no seatbelts, I wanted to say. Instead, I asked, “Does your son work with you on this?”
“Oh, yes,” Wilton said. “In fact, I made him a promise. He graduates from college, this sweetheart is his.”
“That ought to do the trick,” I said. “This is a rough time for him. Something like this is good to keep his mind occupied.”
Wilton nodded. “In fact,” I added, “I hope you don’t take offense at an old man sticking his nose in other people’s business, but I’ve got four kids of my own…and some of them went through some tough times, too. For the next day or so, you might want to spend as much time as you can with the boy.”
“Well, sure.”
“I mean even if it involves taking off of work. He’s going to be feeling pretty alone right about now.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So, take him fishing, take him hunting…something like that. You hunt? The two of you?”
Wilton tried to put the manly bluff to it, but I could see it hurt him. “Oh, we used to. A few years back. But these kids get into high school, and I don’t know. Their world is sure different from mine. Different from what mine was, I mean.”
I nodded sympathetically. “Might do him a world of good for just the two of you to pack off in this sweetheart for a week deer-hunting up north. Something like that.”
“Well,” he said, “you know how it goes.”
“I don’t mean to be nosy,” I said, “but I noticed the elk over the fireplace inside, and figured that you two probably got out a lot.”
Wilton scoffed. “Hell, I won that at the club in a raffle.” He grinned sheepishly. “I haven’t hunted in twenty years. And the boy never took to it. I bought him a rifle once, for his twelfth birthday, as a matter of fact. Brand spanking new. Almost a hundred and fifty bucks over at George Payton’s. You know what he did with it?”
I shook my head.
“He loans it to a friend of his who’s going hunting up in Wyoming. The damn fool kid lost it. Can you imagine that?”
“Kids,” I said, and glanced at Estelle. She looked like she didn’t understand English.
I thrust out my hand as if I had all the time in the world. “Mr. Wilton, thanks for your time. We really appreciate it. And like I said, keep a close watch on the boy for a while. These things can be rough.”
He nodded and followed us out of the barn. We didn’t go back in the house, but walked around to the front yard under the glare of a sodium vapor light. DeeDee Wilton didn’t come outside, and I didn’t see Dennis’s face peering through a curtain.
I settled back in the seat of 310 and closed my eyes.
“Well done, sir,” Estelle said, and I opened my eyes and turned to see her smile.
“George Payton’s,” I said and pointed down the road.
Estelle pulled the car into gear. “What do you suppose Mr. Wilton takes for his sore back?” she asked.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.
38
George Payton and I were the same age and damn near the same weight. There the similarity ended. While my blood pressure was finding new and creative ways to bust pipes, George’s personal demons were diabetes mixed with equal parts glaucoma and gout.
I’d known George for twenty-four years. We’d stood in front of his shop on summer afternoons, soaking in the sun, chatting about this and that. And we’d gone for coffee hundreds of times, ducking our heads against the winter chill. We’d both had large families, and now we were both living alone, probably both trying not to think too hard about next week. I’d never been in his house, and he’d never been in mine.
Over the years, George Payton had assisted the sheriff’s department in a number of ways…and what he didn’t know about firearms wasn’t worth knowing.
I’d always suspected that George didn’t need the income from his small gun and tackle shop just off Pershing. There was nowhere to fish within fifty miles—not that distance ever deterred the avid fisherman—and his firearm sales had to be equally slow.
He made exquisite muzzle-loading rifles by hand, maybe one a year. That was his first love.
Now that he was alone, George Payton lived in a small apartment behind his shop. He greeted Estelle and me with a frown and a mumble and waved us inside. His firearm sales records were in large, black-bound ledgers in a bookcase in his office, kept in addition to the yellow federal forms that the ATF demanded.
“Who are you after tonight?” he asked, and he squinted through his bottle-bottom glasses at me. “And you look like shit, as always.”
“Thanks, George. We need to find the serial number of a .22 rifle purchased from you in 1992. Either in late August or early September.”
“Well, that’s easy enough, as long as you know who bought it.”
“We do. At least we know who says he bought it.”
“Well, have at it,” Payton said. He ran a hand along the volumes, pulled 1992 off the shelf, and laid it on the table. Estelle opened the cover and leafed through the page
s, scanning down the left margin. With Payton’s business, the scan didn’t take long.
“September 8,” she said and silently read across the columns of name, address, make, model, and caliber. I held out the copy of Chief Martinez’s report and she read the serial number. I watched the numbers click off, in perfect order.
“Bingo,” I said.
George Payton stood quietly by, his myopic eyes sleepy and uninterested. He didn’t ask again who we were after, and he didn’t invite us to stay for dessert. We were probably interrupting his favorite television show.
We left the shop with the ledger and a copy of the ATF form that Dustin Wilton had filled out four years before.
“The kid lied to his father about the rifle…Either that or the father is making up stories to protect his son,” I said to Estelle when we were back in the car.
“The only trouble is,” she replied, “he could have given the gun to Rudy Davila, or sold it to him. There’s nothing illegal about that. It’s Vanessa Davila’s word against his. And if Vanessa testifies that she saw Dennis Wilton climb out of her brother’s window after the shots, then that doesn’t help much either. He could deny that he was ever there, or he could say that he was there and was trying to talk Rudy out of it. He could say it was an accident and that after it happened, he just panicked.”
“He could say lots of things,” I agreed. “And if he didn’t actually pull the trigger, then the most he’s guilty of is assisting suicide. That’s just a fourth-degree felony in this state.”
“He’s clever,” Estelle said.
“Tell me something,” I said and twisted sideways in the seat. “There’s something about Vanessa Davila that makes you want to believe her story, hook, line, and sinker. What is it?”
“It’s just that there’s too much rage there,” she said. “If Dennis Wilton had nothing to do with her brother’s death, I don’t think Vanessa is bright enough to make up a story like that. And there wouldn’t have been any reason to. Not after four years.” She thumped the heels of her hands on the steering wheel. “I think she sees something in all this that we don’t see, sir.”
“She sees Dennis Wilton in school every day, for one thing.”
“I wonder what he’ll do,” Estelle said.
“Who?”
“Wilton. You know, if we’re right, he’s sailing along on a cloud of self-confidence a mile thick. It’s been four years since the Davila case was closed, with a no-questions-asked ruling. And he’s gotten his share of sympathy from the wreck last night. This is about the time he’s feeling invincible.”
I watched Estelle’s face as she guided the patrol car back into the parking lot of the sheriff’s office. She pulled 310 into the slot, pushed the gear lever into park, and turned toward me.
“In order to collect any evidence about the sedative, we’re going to have to show our hand, sir. We don’t know where the drug came from, but if it was close at hand, my first guess is the Wiltons’ medicine cabinet. There’s the possibility that Ryan House got it himself. We don’t know. As soon as we start digging into that, there are going to be some very unhappy people. More so than there are right now.”
“You want Wilton now?”
She nodded slowly. “We’ve got Vanessa Davila’s story. We’ve got someone caught in a lie about a rifle…either Wilton or his father. We’ve got a lie about a seatbelt. We have the bent grille guard. We have Wesley Crocker’s statement that the vehicle that struck him was a pickup truck, and that he saw it earlier in the day with two occupants, and that he can identify it.”
“Pieces, pieces, pieces,” I said. “I don’t want this kid on hit-and-run, or failure to report a death, or assisting a suicide. If he popped Ryan House’s seatbelt buckle with the intent of sending him through the windshield, then he’s guilty of murder.”
“Yes, sir. We can’t prove the seatbelt yet, but we’ve got plenty of ammunition to set up a powerful bluff. We have enough evidence to talk Judge Hobart and the DA into an arrest warrant. That will give us some time. We can see how Wilton reacts.”
“He’s arrogant enough that it should come as a pretty powerful surprise,” I said with satisfaction.
“And we need the time,” Estelle said. “If it was Dennis Wilton who gave old Manny Orosco a spiked bottle of wine, it may take us a day or two to track down the liquor sales.”
I looked at her with astonishment. “You think he might have done that, too?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”
“What would be the point?” And I knew the answer at the same time the question left my lips.
“If Dennis Wilton never intended for Maria to come home alive that night, it makes a lot of sense. Drunk as Orosco was most of the time, he still might have been able to identify a face.”
“But Wilton couldn’t have been certain that the bottle would have killed the old man.”
“No. But at the very least, it would have made him so drunk he wouldn’t have remembered a thing. And that’s all part of the kick. Wilton takes his entertainment where he can.”
“You’re not painting a very pretty picture, Estelle.”
“No, sir. And none of it is what Maria Ibarra hoped to find when she came here.”
39
At 9:07 that night, Thomas Pasquale parked his patrol unit on the west end of Grant Avenue where it T’d into Sixth Street, a hundred yards away from the Wilton residence. I hoped that would be far enough away to keep him out of trouble.
Deputy Tom Mears parked at the east end of Grant. With those two officers as bookends, Posadas Police Chief Eduardo Martinez, Sheriff Martin Holman, Sergeant Robert Torrez, Estelle Reyes-Guzman, and I arrived in front of the Wilton residence without fanfare or notice.
The chief had voiced neither misgivings nor surprise when we filled him in. Ever cautious, he rode with Bob Torrez on this particular call, leaving Tom Pasquale in the dark at the end of the street. I got the impression that the sooner the mess was cleaned up and he could sit back down in front of his television set, the happier he would be.
Martin Holman had spent the afternoon searching through high school student notebooks with Glen Archer and later in the afternoon had visited with Ryan House’s parents again. According to the sheriff, they told the same story over and over again…the boy always wore his seatbelt. Always.
Holman looked at the Wiltons’ house as we pulled to a stop. He shook his head in disbelief. “You just never know, do you,” he said. Torrez parked behind us and I waved him over as I got out of the car. Holman looked at the shotgun that the sergeant carried and then at me. “Do you really think—” he started to say, then bit it off.
“I don’t think we’re going to have any problems, but you might want to cover the back,” I said to Torrez. “Chief, if you’d stay here and take care of the radio, I’d be obliged.”
Martinez ducked his head, not in the least offended at having his turf turned upside down. “Gayle Sedillos is on dispatch tonight, so you won’t have any trouble,” I added, and Martinez nodded. He held the mike in his right hand, and I could see a tremor—whether from age or anxiety, I didn’t know.
We made our way up the front walk, and somewhere a couple of houses down a dog started barking. After a couple of half-hearted yaps, he gave up.
With the front door at arm’s length, I counted to ten while I scanned the neighborhood and listened, holding my breath. I pushed the doorbell. Inside I could hear voices, but couldn’t tell if it was the television. No one answered the bell, and I pushed again. This time, faintly, I could hear the chimes inside.
We heard the deadbolt snick back and then the door opened. Dustin Wilton’s eyebrows shot up when he saw the three of us. He looked past us to the two patrol cars.
“What’s going on?” he asked. He looked at Holman. “Sheriff, I haven’t seen you around in a while. You campaigning?” He glanced at his watch.
“Mr. Wilton,” I said, “we need to talk with your
son.”
“He’s asleep.” He said it as if he expected my reply to be, “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry. We’ll come back.”
“Then you’ll need to wake him up, sir,” I said. Wilton frowned and I added, “May we come in?” I gestured toward the interior with the antenna of my handheld radio.
Dustin Wilton didn’t move, and his bulk effectively blocked the doorway. “Tell me what this is about,” he said.
“Mr. Wilton, we need to talk with your son about the death of Ryan House last night. And about the death of Maria Ibarra the night before.”
“My son had nothing to do with that,” Wilton said, with the kind of instant denial that came with the turf of being a parent.
“We need to talk with him, sir,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said, but Wilton ignored her.
“Dustin, don’t make this harder than it has to be,” Sheriff Holman said. He stepped forward and pulled open the screen storm door. “You know that we wouldn’t be here if we had the choice.” The sheriff sounded confident and in control…and surprised the hell out of me.
Wilton backed up a step and made a hopeless gesture with his hands. “Shit, come in, then. You’d think things weren’t hard enough.”
He turned and shouted toward the living room, “Dee, get Denny out here.”
DeeDee Wilton appeared and looked at us intently. “What is it?”
“More red tape,” Wilton said. “These guys have a burr up their ass and can’t wait until tomorrow. They need to ask Denny some more questions.”
“He’s asleep,” DeeDee said.
“Yeah, yeah. They heard that already. Go wake him up.”
DeeDee Wilton was gone for only a moment, and when she returned, she said, “He’s up. He’s just getting dressed.”
For thirty seconds or so, we waited in the foyer, both parents casting expectant glances down the hall, both wanting to see their one and only appear toussle-headed, sleepy-eyed, and innocent from his room. The wait was long enough that I thought more than once about Sergeant Torrez, standing out in the dark behind the house, shotgun cradled in his arms.
It was the first time since the truck crash that I’d seen Dennis Wilton. I remembered his calm face from Friday morning in Glen Archer’s office. He walked down the hallway toward us, dressed in sneakers, jeans, a white T-shirt, and a Posadas Jaguars jacket. I sensed Estelle Reyes-Guzman shifting position at my right, but I didn’t take my eyes off the youngster.
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