“Can’t your prisoner let you in?” What difference would it make if the guy escaped, I thought. He’d probably come back across the border again tomorrow, anyway.
“The back doors can’t be opened from the inside and he can’t get into the front. I’ll just have to wait. You don’t have far to Truth or Consequences. There’s a gas station there where they can fix you up.”
"Thanks anyway, I said."
"You betcha," he replied.
9
BY THE TIME I got to Belen the lightning was flashing in my rearview mirror. When I reached Albuquerque fifteen minutes later, I’d driven through the rain. I stopped at Baja Tacos and got myself a burrito with extra chile and a lemonade to go for lunch. I didn’t need any more caffeine; one cup of Sololobo’s coffee was an all-day buzz, although his burrito for dinner hadn’t lit my fire. No one was at the Hamel and Harrison office eagerly awaiting my arrival; no one was there at all. The swamp cooler sang a solitary tune, the temperature was somewhere between hot and life threatening. There were signs that Anna had been at her desk recently, maybe even this morning. No signs of Brink.
Since cold drinks hadn’t been cooling me down, I gave hot food a try. One of nature’s laws is that the closer you are to the equator the hotter the food gets. The purpose is either to cool you off or to disguise the rancid taste of unrefrigerated meat. The meat in my burrito had no taste, it was filler. The chile was what counted. It was heat-wave-in-August, break-a-sweat chile. Who needed to work out when you had green chile to get the heart and adrenaline pumping? After that burrito my office felt cool, proving that discomfort, like everything else, is relative and that one way you can count on making things look cool is to dip into what’s hot.
Once I’d finished eating and cleaned up, I called Bob Bartel. “Out in the field,” a secretary said. Next on the list was March Augusta, the man who’d sent me to Soledad to begin with.
“What are you doing indoors on an August afternoon?” I asked. “I expected you to be out fly fishing or something.”
“I’ve already been fishing,” he replied, “and now I’m sitting around waiting for you. How did it go?”
“Far be it from me to say who’s responsible, but trouble and Juan got together.”
“Uh oh. What happened?”
I told him.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Some kids cut a chain and set Sirius free and Juan is being charged with not securing a vicious animal?”
“That’s right. That’s Soledad County for you. There’s more. Bob Bartel, the biologist, won’t give Siri back to Juan until he determines whether Siri killed the rancher’s cattle.”
“How is Juan taking it?”
“Great. He put his hands around Bartel’s neck and shook.”
“Oh, God, did he hurt him?”
"No. He was doing his best but Jayne broke it up before any harm was done. There's something I want to ask you ..."
"Shoot."
I wanted to know about Sololobo's drinking, but drinking was a touchy subject with March and me, one we'd had a go-round about before. "What kind of guy is Juan?" I asked.
"He's exactly who he pretends to be."
Subtlety was getting me nowhere. "What I really want to know is does he have a drinking problem? He acts like a recovering alcoholic to me. He drinks coffee all day and has whild mood swings, and I suspect he was hitting the bottle before he attacked Bartel."
“Well, he used to be a mean drunk, and it got him into a lot of the trouble he was in. As far as I knew he stopped. It must have taken something major to get him started again.”
An escaped wolf, a bottle around the house.
“It would have to happen at Jayne’s place,” March said. “She’ll probably see this as an opportunity to bring them back together. Juan told me it was wolves that brought them together in the first place. Jayne was into exotic animals back then and was known all over California for it. It was always said that if you wanted a boa, she was the one to call.”
“I don’t know if I’d say Jayne wants to get back with Juan. I’m not sure I could say what Jayne wants.”
“That’s easy. Jayne wants what’s good for Jayne.”
“That place needs a lot of work. She could probably use a man around—or why doesn’t she just sell off a few acres and use the money to fix the place up if she doesn’t want a man around?”
“She can’t. Her last husband put the ranch into a trust for the Conservation Committee. Technically she got the property in the divorce settlement and can live on it until she dies, but she can’t sell an inch of it.”
“What does she live on?”
“Who knows? Her looks?”
“She’s not the ex-wife who got Juan’s file through the Freedom of Information Act, is she?”
“Yes.”
"You know, only the person who was actually under investigation is entitled to his or her file. Jayne wouldn't have access to what the feds have on Juan unless she was invovled, too."
"It wouldn't surprise me."
“What did she do? Do you know?”
“No. I met Juan after he got out of jail when he and Jayne were breaking up. He doesn’t like to talk about that period of his life. I think he feels guilty about whatever happened to Jayne even though he went to jail and she didn’t. You’ll let me know what happens next, won’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
******
Montana is the land of big sky and big quiet. I envied March for that, having been aware of an undercurrent of hot summertime sounds on my end while we talked, the throb of the swamp cooler, the high-pitched scream of the cicadas. The cicadas were at it when you got up in the morning, when you ate lunch, when you went to bed at night. It was the kind of annoying sound—like a fingernail scratching a blackboard—that could drive you over the edge, if you were close to the edge. The edge wasn’t exactly in sight, but I’m always aware that it’s out there somewhere and probably closer than you think. My thoughts were interrupted by a booming bass that rattled the bars of my cage—the sound of fifteen grand, or more, parking on Lead. The spiders on the spider plant shimmied, a Bic pen boogalooed to the edge of the desk, rolled over and fell off. No one who was a rock-and-roll teenager in the sixties likes to think she could get to a point in life where she’d find herself screaming at someone else to turn the music down. Even if it was 102 and I was trying to get some work done, did I have to propel myself through the reception area and out the front door yelling, “Turn that fucking music down”? The beat emanated from an immaculate sixties Impala, two-tone turquoise and white with fins, wire wheels and purple biscuit velour upholstery. Fuzzy dice hung from the mirror. The driver, who was wrapped around the chain-link steering wheel, was cute, if you like the type, with a black goatee and a smirk for a smile. My secretary, Anna, was curled up next to him combing her hair. The music got lowered just enough that I could hear her say, “Jeez, what’s the matter with her.”
“Where’d you find stereo man?” I asked once Anna had settled down at her desk and her lunch date had blasted off, crumpling the pavement behind him.
“On the corner of Montgomery and Wyoming.”
“What was he doing? Dancing in the street?”
“You really want to know?”
“I asked, didn’t I?”
“Okay. I wanted to meet some new guys, see, so I stopped my car, put the hood up and looked at the engine. In forty-five minutes fifteen guys stopped.” Considering Anna’s summertime look—short black boots; short, tight size 6 skirt; size 20 hair—that wasn’t surprising.
“Good thing you weren’t on East Central,” I said, where the hookers hang out.
She ignored me. “It’s the best way in town to meet men and there’s always something wrong with my car anyway. They all look at the carburetor, the fuel filter, or the fuel pump and they tell me it’s vapor lock and to wait a few minutes and it’ll go away. You ought to try it sometime.”
“I’ve already got a man who
can fix my car, thanks.”
“I’ll say. Anyway a bunch of them took my number. Stevie was the best looking.”
“What happened to George, the computer salesman?”
“He’s boring,” she replied, looking in the mirror and making a final adjustment to her moussed-in-place hairdo. One slightly out-of-place curl made me wonder if her lunch date had been more than that. If, in fact, it had been a nooner. Anna’s hair didn’t get mussed often. It was a slow day, one boss had been out of town, the other was out to lunch and it was summer, after all, when thoughts turn to sex, even in the middle of the day, especially in the middle of the day. I looked at Anna more closely. She didn’t have the happy cat look of someone who’d had sex in the afternoon, she had the lazy cat look of someone who’d eaten too much and wouldn’t be getting any work done.
“What’s wrong with boring?” I said. “George showed up on time, he has a good job, he drives a Toyota with a normal radio.” Just because I didn’t go for boring myself didn’t mean I couldn’t recommend it to someone else.
“I’m only twenty; I want some excitement.”
“Remember that excitement at twenty can lead to poverty and teenage dependents at thirty-five,” I lectured.
“I don’t see you settling down with Mr. Right and you’re not poverty stricken,” she said.
“I’m not rich either. And since when have I become a role model anyway?”
“Hey, you’re the boss.”
“Right,” said I.
******
The Kid came for dinner. I made Margaritas and Chile Willies, his favorite, a mixture of blue corn tortillas, salsa and Monterey Jack cheese. I served it with a jícama and carrot salad on my coffee table. The Chile Willies were hot and gloppy, the jícama was cool and crunchy. While we ate I told him about Juan and the wolf.
“Why does this guy have to show the wolf off like some animal in the circus?” the Kid asked.
“He’s trying to educate people so they’ll leave the wolf in the wild alone,” I answered.
“He has to make a pet out of him to do that?”
“I wouldn’t say Sirius was a pet. Juan has trained him to be comfortable with people, but not to be a pet.”
“Too bad he didn’t get on the wolf path when he was free and go to Mexico. He’d be safer there.”
“That path still exists?”
“Sí, only people use it now instead of wolves. Lobos are very smart and they always find the best path. Because they go so far they have to be very careful of the feet. When you cross the desert the wolf paths are the best ones to follow.” The Kid paused, sipped at his Margarita, continued. “Before I came here I lived with the Norteños in the Sierra Madres. They had a wolf that somebody shot. She didn’t walk good and could not take care of herself so they tied her up. They had chickens and the chickens were always disappearing. It couldn’t be the wolf, they said, because the chickens were too far away from her chain, but one day I watched her. She pushed her food in her dish to the end of her chain and she left it there, went back and waited in the shadows. When the chickens came to eat the food, she came out and ate them, the feathers, the feet, everything.” The Kid shook his head in admiration. “It’s a beautiful animal.”
It was a long speech for him and when he was done he went back to his dinner. If eating and sleeping with enthusiasm are a sign of mental health, then the Kid is a paragon. You could add working—working hard came naturally to him; he had, after all, grown up in Mexico. And if you threw in loving, well, he hadn’t been bad at that either.
“They call men who cross the border alone lobos, too,” he said when he’d finished eating. “Did you know that, Chiquita?”
“No.”
“Wolves don’t like to be alone. They will travel hundreds of miles to find another. How did you sleep in Soledad?” he asked.
“Okay.”
“You didn’t have that dream?”
“No.”
“Not once?”
“No.”
He stood up but it wasn’t to go into the kitchen and help with the dishes. “I think I go home now,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The dream is gone. You can sleep alone.”
“Well, yeah, I can, but that doesn’t mean you have to go home.” I’d been spending too much time thinking about other people’s sex lives. It was time to put some energy back into my own. Was that because the dream had gone, because I’d put some distance between me and my memories of a killer or because I’d put some distance between me and the Kid? Who knew? I did know that for the first time in months I was feeling a hormonal surge. My surges have a way of expressing themselves in monosyllables. “Kid,” I said, “why don’t we…”
He knew what I meant. “You want to do that, Chiquita?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have any of those things.” He meant condoms.
“That’s okay. I do.”
“Okay, Chiquita, vamos,” he said.
******
It was a night like no other, followed by a day like most at Hamel and Harrison, full of real estate and divorce, the urge to settle down succeeded by the urge to hit the road. The swamp cooler wheezed. Bob Bartel did not call me back. Brink kept his cool by staying home. It was one of those quiet Friday afternoons when the phone doesn’t ring and the mail is junk. It’s a chance to catch up on your paperwork, if you’re into paperwork. It was a chance for my body to catch up, too, on some missed sensations. I don’t know if anyone ever takes sex for granted, but you can get more or less accustomed to it. When you’ve been away, however, your body kind of replays the moments and hums and glows. That’s what was I doing, drawing on my yellow pad, wondering if the Kid was humming, too, when the phone rang around four.
It was Juan Sololobo and trouble had found him once again. “It’s bad this time.” he said. “Worse than ’68.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to bring my mind back to the rotten reality of the law.
“Bob Bartel,” he said.
“What happened?”
"His truck went off the road last night on the west side of Soledad Pass, rolled down an embankment and burst into flames."
"Shit."
"He's dead."
"Oh, God, not Bob Bartel," I said.
"Hang on. It gets worse. The cops think it wasn't the fire or the accident that killed him. It was the bullet shot through his head. Can you guess who they want to blame it on?"
"Don't tell me."
“Me,” Juan Sololobo said.
“How do you know that?”
“Ohweiler came by wanting to know where I was last night.”
I’d already been to court once for Juan, which made me his attorney of record. Ohweiler had no right to question Juan without my permission and he had to know I’d never give that permission. He wasn’t the brightest guy in the world, but he’d know that. He was taking advantage of Juan’s ignorance of the law and/or his propensity for doing things he shouldn’t. Juan should have remained silent and refused to answer questions. He should have asked for his attorney. “You didn’t tell him anything, did you?”
“I told him that I was home in bed with Jayne.”
“Anything else?”
“No. He pissed me off when he started talking about Bill Wiley. What right does he have to go poking around my past?”
“Juan, I’m your lawyer, remember? You’re paying me to represent you. That means you don’t talk to the police about anything ever, I do. Got it?”
“I was telling the truth.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Legally all Juan was required to do was give his name. Anything else would be deemed coercive and inadmissible, fruit of the poisoned tree, in court—if it got to that. But that didn’t mean that Ohweiler wouldn’t find some other way to use it to his advantage. Dealing with the police is bad enough. Dealing with your clients can be even worse. I took a look at my calendar, saw a weekend c
oming up. “I’ll be back down there Monday. In the meantime you’re not to say a word about this to anybody.”
“All right,” he said.
Next I called Sheriff Ohweiler and got into pissed-off attorney voice. “I’m Juan Sololobo’s attorney of record and you have no right to question my client.” I could see Ohweiler sitting at his desk in his sheriff’s suit breaking a sweat. Because I had gotten tough? Or because it was 102?
“You got nothing to worry about,” Ohweiler said. “You got a client that would rather lie than eat. He started lying from the minute he gave us his name. Juan Sololobo. Hah! We know he’s Bill Wiley.”
“What have you got on Bob Bartel’s death?” I asked.
“What we got is that someone was trying to make it look like an accident, like Bob was coming home from White Sands or somewhere and fell asleep. A witness saw the truck go over the embankment at 1:30 A.M. and someone in motorcycle gear trying to hide beside the road.”
“What did the medical examiner say about the head wound?”
“It was clean like it came from a high-powered rifle, not a handgun. Bob’s wife says he never came home from work. She called me around eight lookin’ for him. Wasn’t much I could do in the dark but check the bars and Bartel never hung out in them.”
“What reason do you have to suspect my client?”
“He had a motive. Bartel took his wolf. And he damn near killed him for it a few days ago. You saw it yourself.”
I’d seen somebody get shaken up. I hadn’t seen anybody get damn near killed. Other than the principals, there’d been only two witnesses: Jayne and me. Had Bartel gone to the police? I doubted it. “How do you know that?” I asked.
“Bartel told Frank Boyd, his supervisor.”
“Hearsay,” it came out automatically. “Inadmissible.”
“Ma’am, it’s hotter than Hades in here and I got an investigation to conduct. You got any more questions?”
The Wolf Path Page 9