Dead Weight

by Steven F Havill

  Torrez tossed the black notebook back on the front seat of his car and then straightened up. He was a full head taller than Sam Carter, and he leaned his elbow on the roof of the patrol car and regarded the chairman of the county commission for a moment.

  “He was spending quite a bit of time with Jennifer Sisson. I’d like to talk with him, see if I can clear up a few things.”

  Carter’s head jerked with disapproval. “I guess there are probably a lot of girls that he spends time with, and as far as I know, the Sisson girl might well be one of them. I don’t know. But what did you need to clear up? What kinds of things?”

  “One of the deputies saw your son that night and Jennifer Sisson as well. There’s a chance that they spent some time together. If there’s even a remote possibility that Kenny knows something or heard something, then I need to talk to him.”

  Carter grimaced. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “You guys are really on a wild-goose chase with this one.”

  Torrez and I both looked at Carter with renewed interest.

  “And now why is that, Sam?” I said.

  “Well, Christ, the man got careless and dropped a big tire on himself. Everybody says that’s what happened. Stupid thing to do, working late like that, bad light. Somebody told me they’d been arguing all day, so Jim’s upset. Hell, I can see that. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  “Maybe so,” I mused. “But until we clear up all the inconsistencies, then we’re just going to plod along.”

  Sam Carter, chairman of the county commission and successful supermarket owner, drew himself up to his full five feet, eight inches and painted on his best sanctimonious face, the one he used in commission meetings when some worthy agency was asking for a budget increase. “Just remember, Sheriff, that you’ve got a widow and four children sitting at home. Don’t plod too slowly.”

  “I’m sure they’ll be well taken care of,” I said.

  Carter nodded slowly. “I’m asking the Posadas State Bank to initiate an account for them, so we have someplace to put donations.”

  “That’s good.” I didn’t bother to add that it was going to be interesting to see just how much sympathy and goodwill Grace Sisson’s acid tongue would reap. “She’s got some close friends, I’m sure.” I knew of one, but Taffy Hines didn’t fit my description of a deep-pocketed financial benefactor.

  “Where’s Kenny working this summer? Out of town somewhere?” Bob Torrez asked.

  “Yes, he is,” Sam said. “He’s got just a few weeks left until he goes back to school. He’s working with LaCrosse, over in Deming.”

  “Then maybe I’ll swing by this afternoon, when he gets home. You might tell him I need to talk with him.” Torrez reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a business card, handing it to Carter.

  “If I haven’t seen him by the time you do, have him give me a call.”

  Carter nodded. “OK. I don’t know what he can tell you, but I’ll mention it to him.”

  When Carter had gone back inside, Torrez looked at me and grinned. “You want odds that Kenny Carter knocked up the Sisson kid?”

  “No,” I said. “And I wonder if Sam Carter knows.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Parents are usually the last ones to hear the joyous news,” I said. “And I can’t imagine that Kenny would have gone over to confront Jim Sisson, either. That doesn’t fit what kids do.”

  “It’s interesting that he works for LaCrosse, though.”

  “Which LaCrosse are you talking about?”

  “LaCrosse Construction, over in Deming. Lots of heavy equipment.” He smiled and opened the door of his car. “Good place for a little experience. Maybe the kid’s got some talent with a backhoe that LaCrosse doesn’t know about.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  We didn’t wait for the afternoon. Fifteen minutes after we left Sam Carter and his Dumpsters, we were headed up the ramp to the eastbound interstate and the thirty-minute jog to Deming.

  It wasn’t that Kenny Carter had jumped to the top of any suspect list we wished that we had. But trouble in the Sisson household either centered around or was at least exacerbated by daughter Jennifer. She was their own little tropical depression, waiting to blossom. Kenny Carter was right smack in the eye of Jennifer.

  Years before—hell, decades and decades before—I had been half of the team that coped with four teenagers, including two daughters. And I suppose there had been times when I viewed any teenage boys other than my own who roamed near our home as potential predators who had my daughters’ virtue in their sights.

  Those days had passed, and both daughters had managed to survive adolescence, early loves and breakups, the stresses of college, and, finally, the early years of their own marriages without putting the family through seven versions of hell.

  The Sissons hadn’t been so lucky, if luck was what it took. The script for Life with Jennifer might have been enough to drive Jim out into the dark solitude of the backyard, where he could take his fury out on something that didn’t talk back.

  I could well imagine that if Jim Sisson had suspicions about Kenny Carter’s relations with Jennifer and if young Kenny had wandered into the yard that night wanting to talk to his girlfriend’s old man, then fireworks could well have followed.

  If that scenario was true, one thing was certain: The boy hadn’t hung around the Sisson premises afterward, holding the grieving Jennifer’s hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen Kenny Carter—and I certainly hadn’t caught sight of him that night when we’d responded to the domestic dispute call. If he’d been there, the Sisson women, Jennifer included, were keeping mum. And that in itself was excuse enough for a chat with the lad.

  I didn’t know Kenneth Carter well. I could pick him out of a crowd of teens, but that was about all. I didn’t know his habits. But he was a connection, tenuous as it might be. State Trooper Mike Rhodes knew a little of the relationship between his nephew and Jennifer, had seen them together enough that it had lodged in his memory. Sam Carter, the ever patient father, would probably be the last one to know—especially since he impressed me as the kind of father who wore pretty solid blinders when it came to his own kid.

  “It’s interesting,” I said to Bob Torrez as we hurtled toward Deming, “that Kenny Carter didn’t work for Sisson.”

  Torrez frowned. “Jim had two employees,” he said. “And bank records show that he was overextended. So I don’t know. One more wage, even at minimum, might have been more than he could take.”

  “How much extended?”

  “For this last financial quarter he had to take out a small loan just to meet the payroll obligations…let alone anything else.”

  “You haven’t wasted any time,” I said.

  “Judge Hobart was cooperative, as usual.” Torrez grinned. “And so was Penny Arguile, at the bank, once the court order was processed that allowed us in to look at the records.”

  “Any big creditors knocking at the door?”

  Torrez shook his head. “It seems to me more like a gradual buildup. Sort of like a rockslide. First a pebble or two, then some bigger, then bigger, then bigger. Pretty soon Jim’s got the whole hillside crashing down on top of him.” He glanced over at me.

  “With some help, of course.”

  “Grace Sisson was concerned about that,” I said. “That new front loader was one of the first things she mentioned when we talked to her this afternoon in Cruces. I would guess the damn thing was a bone of contention between Jim and her.”

  “A twenty-seven-thousand-dollar bone,” Torrez agreed. “God knows what a new machine that size would cost, but a used one is bad enough. The bank records show it’s an ’82 model. Twenty-seven grand for a piece of machinery that’s eighteen years old.” He shook his head in wonder.

  “Did you talk with Penny about that loan in particular?”

  “She said the bank floated the paper with ‘some misgivings.’ They let Jim sign a five-year note, and she said that was longer tha
n the bank likes to go. He asked for ten, but they refused.”

  “So on top of everything else, on top of all his other debts, on top of his payroll, he’s paying out a chunk of money every month for that loan.”

  “Five hundred and twenty-eight dollars and eleven cents, give or take. That’s at nine point seven five percent interest.”

  “Jesus. He must have been planning to move a lot of dirt to pay for that.”

  “Among other things, he was one of the bidders on the village’s project to extend the water line back behind your place, over on Escondido.”

  “That’s nickel-dime stuff, though. A single ditch, maybe a mile of pipe at the most. A few trees to knock over, a little arroyo to fill. That’s if he won the bid in the first place. The profit from the whole job wouldn’t pay for one year’s payments on that machine.”

  Torrez shrugged. “Maybe he was one of those folks who just loved machines.”

  I shifted against the seat belt so I could rest my right elbow on the windowsill. “And young Kenny? What do we know about him?”

  “We know that if he’s very lucky, he might graduate next year. He’s about a year behind, give or take.”

  I looked at Torrez with surprise. “I didn’t know that.”

  “An active social calendar.” Torrez grinned. “According to the principal, the kid has taken about all the vocational courses the school has to offer.”

  “Which isn’t much.”

  “No. But that means Kenny’s stuck with taking stuff like history and English and science if he wants to graduate.”

  “Well, gee, what a shame,” I said. “And probably math…and stuff. How unfair can you get. He can’t just weld himself out of high school. At least he’s stuck with it so far. He hasn’t dropped out.”

  “So far.”

  “And Jennifer Sisson is going to be a sophomore.”

  Torrez nodded. “If she stays in school.”

  “They’ll be a cute couple along about February,” I said. “What other names do we have?”

  “Jim Sisson’s two employees. Aurelio Baca has been with him for almost ten years and Rudy Alvaro is going on three. Both good, steady men. I don’t know too much about Baca except that he’s on a green card and lives just across the border, in Palomas. He’s got his own small plumbing business that he runs down there, on the side.”

  “And Rudy?”

  “He used to work for the village before he went over to Sisson’s. He’s one of my wife’s cousins.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me,” I said. “Did both men work Tuesday?”

  Torrez nodded. “Baca left for Palomas at about ten after five. Rudy was still finishing up a few things over at the Randall job at six. He went straight home from there. He helped Jim trailer the front loader.”

  “Did he come back to the yard to help him take it off?”

  “He told me that Jim said he didn’t need to come back to the yard, that Jim thought that he could do it just fine by himself.”

  “So nothing about either Baca or Alvaro piques your curiosity,” I said. “No loose ends?”

  Torrez shook his head. “Not a thing.”

  “Had Jim ever missed a payroll?”

  “Nope. The Sissons have been rotating their utilities for a while—make the phone wait a month, then make the electric stand in line—but they’ve paid both Baca and Alvaro each week.”

  “Huh.” I let my head slump back against the headrest. In the distance I could see the flat spread of buildings that marked Deming. “You think we’re wrong about this?”

  “About Sisson’s death not being an accident, you mean? Not a chance, sir. Not a chance.” He glanced in the mirror and let the car drift into the right lane.

  “People have been crushed accidentally by things like that before.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure they have. Heavy equipment thinks up all kinds of neat ways to kill the operator. And if Jim had been found right close to the machine, maybe crushed up against the axle or something, I might have believed it. But not this way. The distances don’t make sense for it to have happened solo. My gut feeling is that someone took an opportunity, figuring that any investigation would just take the easy route. Big machine, dangerous wheel and tire combination, careless chain hookup. A dozen ways an accident could happen. But…” He stopped and thumped the rim of the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “If I’m wrong, you can let Leona Spears have the job in November.”

  “Don’t say that, even in jest,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  LaCrosse Construction was as large and evidently successful as Jim Sisson’s firm was small and struggling. The LaCrosse headquarters was a low, white stucco building about the same size as Sam Carter’s supermarket, a stone’s throw from the railroad track on the east edge of town.

  Behind the building loomed the stone crusher tower where LaCrosse brewed its own batches of concrete. Dotted around the crusher like small mountain ranges were enormous piles of sand, gravel, crusher fines, even shiny black asphalt. Off to the west were thousands of railroad ties, neatly bundled, the old creosote fragrant in the hot sun.

  Four concrete delivery trucks, their huge revolving drums sparkling clean and white, were parked fender-to-fender, with room for another half-dozen in the row.

  “Some bucks here,” I observed. “LaCrosse probably does more miles of highway each year than any five of his competitors.” I cranked my neck around, surveying, the huge yard behind the office building. “Not a soul here, either.”

  We parked in front of a windowless white doorway, immediately behind a late-model white Ford three-quarter-ton truck with the blue oval logo of LaCrosse Construction Company on its doors.

  The sun bounced off the white building as I stepped onto the sidewalk, a solid blast of heat and light that made me gasp. I opened the door to a second blast, this one straight from the Arctic. Lacrosse hadn’t wasted time or space with foyers or receptionists sitting prettily at desks. Instead, we entered the building and found ourselves in a hallway with offices to either side, all but one of the doors closed.

  The door had no sooner thudded closed behind us, locking in the frigid air, than a chunky woman appeared from the first door on the left.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, and grinned as if we’d just made her whole day. “Don’tcha wish we’d get some warm weather soon, eh?”

  I smiled. “Nice in here, though.” I stepped forward and extended my hand. “I’m Sheriff Bill Gastner from Posadas County. This is Undersheriff Robert Torrez.”

  She pumped first my hand and then Bob’s. “And I’m EllenFae LaCrosse. What can we do for you?” She had that air of bustle and self-confidence that went with the name. A door opened farther down the hall, and two men wearing hard hats appeared and then walked away from us down the hall without a backward glance.

  “Mrs. LaCrosse, we need to visit with Kenny Carter, if that’s possible. We won’t take much of his time.”

  “Kenny?” She looked down at the floor for a moment, hands on her hips. She was short and stubby, maybe on the downside of fifty, with smooth, creamy, flawless skin that hadn’t been baked to leather from a lifetime of sitting outdoors on machinery.

  “Kenny Carter,” I said. “He’s one of your summer kids.”

  She looked up, grinning. “Oh, for sure I know who he is. God, we’ve known his family forever. No, I’m just trying to remember where he was working today. I think he’s over on Route Eleven.” She reached out a hand as if I were drifting away and she needed to reel me back in, “Let me go double-check.”

  “We’d appreciate it,” I said.

  She turned and bustled off, disappearing through the same doorway the men had used a moment before. She was gone not more than twenty seconds before reappearing and beckoning us into the inner sanctum.

  The office was a sea of desks, computers, and drafting tables. Two men were in conference at one of the tables, and they glanced up at us with mild curiosity.

  E
llenFae LaCrosse led us to a large map of Luna County that was spread out on one of the tables. “The crew he’s with is right here,” she said, and with a shapely finger traced New Mexico 11 south out of Deming. “Just a couple miles the other side of Sunshine,” she said, and grinned again. “They’re putting in a road off to the east, up to that fancy horse barn that the Gunderson group is building.”

  “That should be easy to find,” I said.

  She rolled up the map efficiently and thrust it in a boot on the side of one of the tables. “We like to keep the high school kids a little closer to home,” she said. “That way there’s not so much travel time for ’em.”

  “I’m sure they appreciate that,” I said.

  “Well, it works for us,” Mrs. LaCrosse said. “He’s a nice boy, and a hard worker, if that’s the sort of information you’re looking for.”

  I nodded. “We appreciate that,” I said, and Bob Torrez and I followed her out of the room. More as an attempt to forestall the blast furnace outside for a few more seconds, I stopped with my hand on the knob and turned to EllenFae LaCrosse. “How many kids do you folks hire during the summer season?”

  Without hesitation, she said, “Right now, we have eight kiddos working for us. And that’s a full contingent. They’re good workers, but you know the labor laws. We’re so restricted by insurance and what all about what we can use them for that we have to be kind of careful.” She smiled again. “I know that a lot of the guys like Kenny. He’s a quick study. I know that Pete’s made him an offer to go full-time just as soon as he graduates.”

  “Great opportunity,” I said.

  She nodded. “We’re always on the lookout for the good ones,” she said. “And we’ve known Kenny for years, of course.” Her brow furrowed slightly. “It’s none of my business, I know. But I hope he’s not in trouble of some sort.”

  “We just need to chat with him, ma’am. He might be a possible witness to an incident that needs to be cleared up, is all.”