by Don Travis
“It’s not the Four Seasons, but this is where Alfano and his buddy were staying at the time Norville was murdered. I came here to be close to the scene.”
He cleared his throat and got down to business. “So what’s the status?”
After I brought Del up to date, he leaned back in the chair. “You have to turn him over to the FBI. They have a fugitive warrant out for him.”
“I understand that, but I want a little more time with him before I do it. Maybe I can turn him over to Sheriff’s Detective Lonzo Joe. He might be a little more accommodating. Give me better access to his prisoner.”
Del shook his head. “The FBI will claim Lando, and the sheriff will give him up. He’ll let the feds stand the cost. The county can always try him later.”
“Then figure out how to buy me a few days—hell, a few hours—without getting our tails in a crack. It’s not just me. Jazz Penrod and Henry Secatero have also put themselves at risk.”
“I wouldn’t worry about them too much, but I can’t say the same for you. You could lose your license by abetting a fugitive—at the very least.”
“Not if a smart lawyer runs interference.” I looked straight at him.
“You know I’m not a criminal attorney.”
“You’re not totally ignorant of that side of the law, either.”
“Do you know how many things I had to juggle to make the time to come up here?” Apparently recalling I had dropped everything to come to his aid last year when he was blackmailed, he stopped. “That’s not important. Let’s see what we can figure out.”
The only thing we came up with was for Del to contact Gaines the next morning and arrange for me to surrender Lando at an agreed time and place. It didn’t buy me much, but at least it should keep the feds off my back. He would also inform Lonzo of our intent in order to protect us from that jurisdiction too. Gaines wouldn’t be entirely happy about the way this was playing out, but he would go along with it. Plainer was the wild card. Fortunately he and the BLM played second fiddle to the San Juan County Sheriff in the Bisti killing.
My phone burbled. It was Jazz letting me know he’d successfully arrived back at the hogan with supplies and sleeping bags. He swore he was feeling fit as a fiddle and that everything was under control on that end.
Hard on the heels of that call, Aggie rang to let me know he was back in his room. Back from where? Probably a late dinner. I didn’t ask; I merely invited him to join us.
The two men had met briefly when Aggie showed up at the airport, but Del decided to rent his own transportation, so they had done little more than exchange names. Now I watched each take the measure of the other.
Del would first see Aggie as a handsome, desirable man before regarding him as someone involved in the case. Aggie, for his part, treated Del as a potential lifeline, someone to help his brother in a time of trouble. I doubt he even recognized the attorney was gay.
Now that I’d figured out how to handle things, it was time to let Aggie in on the news. “We found him, Aggie.”
He popped up from his seat on the bed. “What? When? Where is he? Is he all right?”
I held up a hand. “He’s okay. A little banged up and a bit confused, but he’ll be fine. Those vets I told you about located him and sat on him until we could pick him up. As to when? Well, early this morning.”
“Early this morning? Before we had brunch?”
I nodded and braced for the explosion.
Flushed from the neck up, he let loose. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about it this morning? What kind of professional are you? You owed me that much, Vinson. We’re not paying you to keep secrets from us.” His nostrils flared in outrage. His dark eyes went flat. “Where is he? You turned him over to the FBI, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t. Not yet. I didn’t tell you this morning because, first of all, I hadn’t seen Lando at the time, which meant I only knew they’d located somebody who resembled him. I wasn’t going to get your hopes up until I knew for certain. Secondly, I genuinely needed your help in slipping that tail. If you thought we’d located Lando, would you have gone along with me on that?”
Aggie gave me a look of exasperation. “No way in hell. Not then and not now. I want to see my brother. Now, Vinson. Now!” Something moved behind his eyes. “That’s why all the questions this morning. You were thinking about keeping me away from him, weren’t you?”
“You’ll have to forgive me if I’m paranoid, but I was afraid you would alter your pattern of behavior and let whoever is so damned interested in Lando know something was up.”
“Bullshit, you just wanted to keep me away until you talked to him.”
He made a conscious and very obvious effort to bring himself under control as I told them both about the incident at the hogan, although I made it seem as if it happened at a cabin in the mountains near Aztec. I still hadn’t done a bug sweep of the room, and the man who assaulted Jazz this afternoon wasn’t necessarily the same party who bugged my car.
“Someone shot at Jazz and chased Henry and Lando? So much for using me to mislead a tail,” Aggie said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, it didn’t work.”
“You’re making an assumption.”
He blinked; his attitude eased. “What assumption?”
“That there’s only one of them.”
“Well….” He faltered. “You mean there’s more than one?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know for certain, but it makes sense. I assume one is your father’s man. You said he likes to cover his bets. But if Santillanes was his PI, Lando thinks the man intended him harm. And Santillanes did put two shots into the Porsche when Lando tore out of the Bisti parking area.”
“The Martinez kid said that happened while the car was parked down there,” Aggie said.
“He said he heard shots close to the house, but he also admitted people were always shooting rabbits and squirrels down there.”
“What did Lando say about it?”
“We haven’t covered that yet. I only got as far as him leaving Bisti and going back to look for Dana later. When I told him about Dana’s murder, he fell apart. That’s why Del has to buy me some more time. I need to know what happened after that. I promised him I’d find out who killed his friend, and I intend to keep that promise.”
The phone rang. It was Jazz again. “Got a problem,” he announced. “Lando got hold of my rifle and tried to shoot himself. He didn’t do any damage except for a bullet through the roof before Henry got it away from him. Nobody’s hurt.”
“Watch him. Close. You guys up for that?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Aggie went ballistic when I reported what had happened. “Take me to him now.”
“No way. It’s too dangerous. Nobody’s going near him tonight.”
“Now wait a minute. I have a right. You work for me, you know.”
Still playing it safe, I snatched a page from my pocket notebook, scribbled on it quickly, and stuck the note under his nose. It told Aggie to storm out of here in anger, take his own rental unit west on 64 to Fruitland. If I hadn’t caught up with him by that time, he was to wait for me at the edge of town.
He nodded and got to his feet. I handed over the keys to his Jag, and he pitched mine to me. Then he stormed out of the place threatening to fire me, and if that didn’t work, he promised to whip my ass. As soon as he was gone, I gave the note to Del and signed that I needed his keys. I did not want to remove the bug on my vehicle even though it had probably fooled no one this morning.
Thirty minutes later I found Aggie parked at the turnoff to Fruitland. There had been no sign of another vehicle on his tail. In fact, most of the traffic seemed to be going in the other direction, toward Farmington. I had taken a chance in revealing we’d found Lando, but any electronic listener would have been misdirected by my Aztec reference, provided, of course, he didn’t already know it was a lie. That town lay in the opposite direction from the reservation. Of course, if Aggie was not to be trusted
, he was aware of the deception and had had the last half hour to make arrangements for help. I would have to keep a careful eye out for a tail.
I must have startled him when I whipped a strange automobile in front of his parked Jag. He was slow to lower the window, even when I got out of the car with a flashlight. Ignoring him, I spent a good ten minutes searching the outside of the rental for a bug. I found nothing. That was only partial relief. The device could be on the inside if the bulldog was Aggie’s.
Still without speaking, I got back in my car and pulled away. Aggie followed me south. After a quarter of an hour drive over a bumpy track through a surreal nighttime environment, we arrived at the small log shelter. Mindful that Jazz and Henry had a loaded rifle, I gave four short beeps on the horn—our agreed signal—before stopping the car. I checked my watch by the dome light as I got out and waited for Aggie to join me. It was almost midnight.
“Who’s there?” a voice called from the darkened interior of the hogan.
“It’s me, Jazz. Aggie Alfano is with me. Okay?”
“Yeah. Come on in.”
As I followed Aggie inside, the panicked look on Lando’s face made me grab for the Smith and Wesson tucked into my belt.
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Chapter 30
“LANDO!” AGGIE cried. He started forward but halted when I grabbed his arm. My revolver was out of sight at my side. He shook me off and called to his brother. “Hey, man, it’s me.”
“Aggie?” Lando said. His face cleared. He scrambled to his feet from the lotus position and hopped across the small fire laid in the center of the hogan, showing more animation than I had witnessed thus far. “Aggie!”
Heart hammering, I eased the weapon into my belt and covered it with my jacket. The affection between the Alfano brothers was obvious, easing the fear that I’d made a huge mistake in bringing Aggie to the hideout. Nonetheless, while the two Alfanos greeted one another, I motioned Henry over and asked him to go outside and watch for unwelcome visitors.
“Dana,” Lando said in a raspy voice. “Dana’s dead, Aggie.”
“I know. I was there when they found him.”
“F… found him?” The kid’s eyes began to glaze.
I took over the conversation before we lost Lando again. “Aggie and I made sure he was handled with dignity.”
With a hand on his shoulder, I led Lando around the fire and gently pushed him onto the sleeping bag where he’d been sitting when we arrived. Despite this momentary setback, he appeared considerably calmer than this morning—well, technically yesterday morning—and certainly more rational than when he had grabbed the rifle. The brothers had done a good job settling him down. Perhaps it was only a trick of the campfire, but his coloring seemed better, more robust. A couple of discarded paper bags and Styrofoam cartons revealed Jazz had treated them to a meal, probably burgers and fries. Nonetheless, Lando’s movements were still a little jerky.
“You feel up to talking some more?” I asked.
He stared at me without focusing for a moment. “If it’ll help Dana,” he said at length. “You’ll find out who did that to him, won’t you? You promised.”
“I’m going to do my best, and so is Aggie. He’s helped a lot in the investigation.”
Lando picked up a stick and concentrated on stirring the fire before abruptly losing interest in the flames. “What do you want from me?”
I sank down beside Jazz, not directly across the fire from Lando, but obliquely so I could see his facial expressions and body language as he spoke.
“This afternoon, you told me you left Bisti with Santillanes trying to follow you.”
“Santillanes? Oh. The fellow who pulled a gun on me down in the Badlands.”
“That’s right. After you lost him in Farmington, what did you do?”
“I drove around, you know, until I thought it was safe to go back for Dana.”
“How long was that?”
“I don’t—” Lando’s voice started to rise, but he caught himself and calmed down. “I don’t know. I started back that same day, but when I turned off the highway onto the dirt road, I saw that car. That Santillanes fellow.”
“Did he see you?”
Lando nodded. “He turned around and chased me.”
“He turned around? He was ahead of you on the road? Headed for Bisti?”
“Yes.” Lando’s attention was beginning to wander. What terrible thing sent his mind off-kilter when he got too close to it?
“But you outraced him again, right? And then what happened.”
“I drove around some more, but I thought I saw him on the street near the motel, so I headed out of town—south but not back to Bisti.”
“Out toward Halmstead Road?”
“I don’t know where that is.”
“That’s about four miles south of the Trail’s End. That’s where you left the Porsche, remember?”
“Oh. The place where I parked and slept. The place with the trees and the white horse.”
“You went to sleep while Dana was stranded out on the desert somewhere?” Aggie said.
I shot him a look. “Lando didn’t go to sleep. He passed out. I’m surprised the cops didn’t pull him over for drunk driving. He had a concussion from that blow on the head Santillanes gave him.”
“Concussion,” Lando parroted. His expression lightened. He’d probably been struggling with the same guilty thought Aggie had blurted aloud. “I had a concussion. A concussion.”
“That’s right. It wasn’t your fault, Lando.”
That raised the question of whether the kid was still concussed. Should we get him to a hospital? I eyed Aggie. I knew what his response would be. Throw Lando into the Mitsu and get him home to the family doctor. I mentally shook my head and resumed my questioning. But I’d keep a sharp eye on Lando. “What time did you go back to Bisti again?”
“Dunno. It was dark, but it was getting light by the time I got there.”
“Was that third car, the one you told me about, still there?”
“Uh-uh. There wasn’t anybody there. I spent hours looking all over that spooky place. Calling Dana. Looking for him. He wasn’t anywhere.” Lando put both fists to his head and rocked back and forth. Then he fixed his gaze on me, and for the first time, I got a sense of the real Lando Alfano. “Where did you find him?”
“It wasn’t anywhere you would have looked, and we had help finding him. The important thing now is to tell us the rest of the story. What did you do next?”
“Drove. I went back to the motel but was afraid to check in. I figured that’s where that man… uh, Santillanes would be waiting.”
“Why not go to a different motel?” The question earned me another shrug. “You filled up your gas tank that day, didn’t you?”
“How did you know?”
“I located the Giant station where you bought gas.”
“You found the station?” He sounded like a child reacting to a magician’s trick.
“Yes. And so did Santillanes.”
“How?”
“Canvassed both sides of Main a mile in either direction. It was your car that gave you away. Everyone remembered your orange Boxster. What did you do next?”
“I called the motel a couple of times to see if Dana had left a message. He hadn’t.”
Melissa had neglected to mention that. Or perhaps she wasn’t on duty at the time.
“Mostly I just drove around looking. I went back to Bisti twice. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just kept driving around—everywhere.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Aggie open his mouth. I shook my head. It wasn’t the time to ask the question I knew was on his lips. We needed to stay on neutral ground until we had everything Lando could remember. Then we’d ask the hard questions.
“You went back out on Halmstead Road the next afternoon, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess. To that same place, anyway, if that’s Halmstead Road.”
“Why?”
“I thought maybe Dana’d show up there. We’d been there before. It was a nice place we found by accident one day. You know, big, shady trees. A turnout on a curve that was sorta private, and it had a green meadow across the road. We sat for an hour one day watching that white horse running in the meadow.”
“So you went back there hoping Dana would remember it. Then what happened?”
“There was an arroyo that ran off to the south we’d explored one day. Dana said it would make a good hiding place. A whole army could hide in there, is the way he put it. So… so I thought maybe he was there. I walked clear down to where it goes under the highway bridge. There was no sign of him. When I got back to the Porsche, Santillanes’s car was parked behind mine, and he was going through my glove box. I sneaked back into the gully, but when I heard him following my footprints, I panicked and ran down the arroyo. He stumbled around looking for me, but I found a rocky place that didn’t leave prints, so he didn’t find me. After he passed, I went back to the car. But I couldn’t find my keys. He must have taken them because I’m sure I left them in the ignition.”
Taken them and then replaced them later. Petey Martinez had said they were in the ignition. Had the PI been watching from concealment when the Cruz brothers stole the Porsche? One thing was clear. Santillanes had Lando and Dana in his sights for quite a while because he knew about their special place on Halmstead Road.
“Why didn’t you hot-wire the ignition?” Jazz asked. “That’s what I’d have done.”
“That guy came back too soon and spotted me. All I had time to do was grab my backpack and run. He was blocking the arroyo, so I jumped the fence and took off through the field. I managed to lose him, but I guess I lost me too. When it got dark, I didn’t have any idea where I was. I wasn’t feeling so good. My head hurt, and I was hungry and thirsty. I finally fell asleep in some bushes.”