Privileged to Kill (7 page)

10

We didn’t spend long with Dawn Paddock. I got the impression that her reaction to our presence was to protect her turf. It was neat turf, with precisely lettered labels and color-keyed folders, filled with whatever information school nurses collect in their off moments between patching up the losers of hallway brawls. But she had never met Maria Ibarra. She had no records, immunization or otherwise, for the girl.

“You know,” Ms. Paddock said, and stuck a pencil into her hair bun as if that ended that, “we can’t force them to bring in their records.”

“I understand that,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said quietly. “How long does the school generally give them? Before they’re no longer admitted.”

“To get their shots, you mean? Well, the state says that if they don’t have up-to-date immunization records, they can’t be allowed in school, period. Not one day. But…” And she hesitated and shrugged.

“But obviously they are,” I said.

“If nothing is forthcoming in a week or two at most, then we call the parents and have them come in and pick up their child. We tell the parents face-to-face that the child may not return until we have a note from the physician stating that their immunizations are current.”

“And that wasn’t done with Maria Ibarra?” I asked.

“Not yet.” She turned and scanned the files again in the open top drawer of the cabinet, her fingers pausing in the I-J-K section. “As you can see, I haven’t even received the registration papers on the young lady. I don’t have a folder for her. When I do, then the process starts.”

Estelle was frowning, maybe at Paddock’s cheerful implication that someday she would receive a file folder on Maria Ibarra. “It seems like it should be a straightforward process,” she said.

“It would be very simple if all children had responsible parents,” Ms. Paddock said. “But they don’t.”

“Or parents at all,” Estelle muttered, and she turned quickly toward the door. I thanked Nurse Paddock and followed Estelle out into the hallway. She leaned against the wall, her shoulder against one of the lockers. Down the hallway a solitary student disappeared into one of the classrooms and then the place was quiet. Estelle squinted at the floor as if she were counting the polished tiles.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She blinked a couple of times and then shut her eyes. “I can’t believe this,” she said finally. “A child is murdered sometime early in the evening, but no one calls to report her missing.” She tipped her head back and stared at the white acoustical ceiling tiles. “And then we come here and find that their records of this girl are all but nonexistent. They don’t know who she was living with, or where, or anything else.” She turned to glare at me. “Do you think that they would have bothered to put her on the absentee list today if her body hadn’t been found?”

“I’m not sure that’s fair, Estelle.”

Her laugh was bark short. “Neither is being murdered.”

The door behind me opened and interrupted my reply. The nurse beckoned. “There’s a call for you on line one, sir. You can take it in my office if you like.”

Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t moved a step when I rejoined her.

With a hand on her elbow, I started down the hallway. “They think they found Miguel Orosco,” I said. “I know who they found, and I hope to hell they’re wrong.” Estelle looked puzzled, but fell in step.

***

We drove into the gravel driveway of the Ranchero mobile home park. As the crow flew, the place was less than a quarter mile from my own home on Guadalupe Terrace. But that quarter mile was a world away. The manager of the park, if he was home, didn’t come out to greet us.

At the far end of the park, beyond the last trailer, I saw Sergeant Torrez’s patrol car. As we idled to a stop, Torrez got out and pointed toward the interstate embankment behind the hedgerow. That wasn’t what he meant, though.

“Somebody lives back there?” Estelle asked as we got out of the car.

“The wrong Orosco,” I said wearily.

Three enormous cottonwoods shaded the postage stamp of land where Manny Orosco lived behind the Ranchero mobile home park, separated from the park’s patrons by a thick, unkempt hedge of scrub elm, locust, and cactus.

Over the years, Manny had squatted here and there around Posadas, living with his bottle in complete, alcoholic contentment until someone became irritated enough at his presence to evict him. I never thought much about him, guessing that most villages had their own version of Manny Orosco’s adventures.

The Ranchero manager had started to erect a tall board fence across the back of his property to close out both the eyesore of Manny’s camp and to help cut down on the continuous drone of the interstate. He had three posts in the ground for starters. The fence was a long-term project, so Manny must have been keeping to himself, not bothering the park patrons.

I could see why the Ranchero manager had started the fencing project. Those cottonwoods were the only touch of grace for the spot that Manny Orosco called home. Behind those trees was a ditch that, before the interstate had been bladed through, had been part of the Arroyo Escondido. On the far side of the junk-filled ditch was the upsweep to the interstate right-of-way. Orosco had found himself a tiny sliver of land on which to squat. A week’s research in the county courthouse might have turned up the original owner of the land, but I wasn’t willing to place bets.

Orosco’s home was a delivery truck, the tall boxy kind with slab windshield halves favored by tool vendors and package delivery firms. Its driver’s-side glass had been replaced with cardboard, but that didn’t matter. Its driving days were over.

“You’re kidding,” Estelle Reyes-Guzman said. Torrez wasn’t, of course, even if he knew how.

“I think you’ve got the wrong Orosco, Bobby,” I said.

“You know who lives here?” Estelle asked.

“Sure,” I said. A narrow path led through the tangle of underbrush. I stepped into the clearing by the truck and stopped. The old vehicle sat nearly level, a stack of boards supporting each corner of the suspension. Its broad, windowless flanks had faded to a blotchy pattern of muted camouflage.

“He’s home?” I asked, and Torrez nodded.

“Eddie Mitchell found him, sir,” he said.

“That wouldn’t take much looking,” I snorted. “And Eddie thinks this is where the girl was living?” I didn’t wait for an answer, but circled around to the rear double doors. One of them was ajar and I pushed it open.

Manny Orosco was either dead or sleeping through the first half of another day. He lay on what had once been an army cot, a blanket wadded up under his head. The cot was jammed against one wall. Above his head was a row of metal bins welded to the bulkhead, low enough to knock him senseless if he arose suddenly. But he wasn’t apt to do that. A rap or two wouldn’t have hurt his pickled brain anyway.

I stepped into the truck, surprised that the place didn’t smell worse than it did. His mouth open and a wet spot on the rough blanket under his head, Manny Orosco lay on his left side, curled up tightly. If he’d had his thumb stuck in his mouth, he’d have looked like a fifty-year-old infant.

“Mr. Orosco?” I said loudly. I might as well have been talking to the truck. I touched his neck and felt a ragged but strong pulse. His breathing was even and gentle.

“A late riser,” Estelle said from the doorway.

I nudged the bottle of cheap sherry that stood corked near the cot. There were a couple of ounces left. “And then he can have breakfast,” I said.

I stood up, holding one of the wall bins to steady myself. The truck was stuffy and dark. “No running water, no electricity, no nothing,” I said as I surveyed the interior of the truck. I made my way forward, toward the cab. In one corner just inside the sliding front door was a dark mound, maybe Manny’s laundry for the year.

The front door was closed. I tried the latch and the door slid back easily, letting in a flood of light. I stood for a moment, one hand on the bulkhead just behind the driver’s seat, trying to make sense out of what I saw.

It wasn’t laundry that was in the corner. The neatly folded blanket rested on top of a pad made from an old, quilted bedspread. It would have made a nice bed for a pet spaniel.

I bent down with a grunt and picked up a spiral notebook and what looked like a math textbook.

“Son of a bitch,” I murmured. “Accommodations for one more.” I flipped open the notebook and even my tired old eyes had no trouble reading the neat, angular script.

“Maria Elena Ibarra, period six. Mr. Wilkie.” I looked up at Estelle and added, “Problem set 5.” I extended the notebook toward her.

“I thought you said…”

I dropped the notebook and math book back on the blanket. I felt like I had to vomit, and I stepped quickly out of the old truck, nearly losing my balance. I steadied myself against the warm metal.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Yeah, fine,” I lied. “And I was wrong about Manny Orosco, too. Or Miguel, or whatever his name really is.”

“What was the girl doing here?” Estelle stood by the back door, refusing to enter. Manny Orosco slept on.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe Manny bought himself a young wife.”

“That’s not funny, sir.”

“Indeed it’s not. Neither are any of the other possibilities.” I motioned to Sergeant Torrez. “Call an ambulance to pick up Mr. Orosco. As soon as the docs say he’s detoxed enough to understand you, take him into custody. Charge him with felony child abuse for starters. If the hospital doesn’t think it’s wise to have him go cold turkey in a cell, make arrangements for a secure room at the hospital. I don’t want him crapping out on us.”

I took a deep breath and pushed myself away from the truck. “As soon as he’s coherent, let me know.”

“Will you help me here, sir?” Estelle asked. “I’d like to take this place apart one small piece at a time. There have to be some answers in there.”

I nodded. Some answers would be a welcome change.

11

Maria Elena Ibarra had lived inside the old truck for an indeterminate period of time. That’s what an hour of meticulous searching told us. We didn’t know exactly when she’d last been there, or for how long she’d been a full-time resident of one of the village’s more dismal corners.

After Estelle took hair samples from the bedding, she bagged the quilt and blanket. The material wasn’t fresh from the cleaners, but it was tolerable.

“She’d have to curl up like a cocker spaniel to fit on that bedding,” I muttered, but Estelle looked almost relieved.

“At least she wasn’t sharing the cot with the drunk,” she said. “Better to curl up in any corner than to put up with that.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said, realizing as I said it that Maria was long past caring.

Where the girl had attended to the other of life’s functions that most of us performed with some privacy was another question to which there were no obvious answers.

Hung from the aluminum frame of the driver’s-side window were changes of clothing, kid-sized. The two wire clothes hangers seemed like an unexpected luxury. None of the clothing was freshly laundered, but it would pass casual inspection. “She favored blue,” I said and unhooked the hangers and handed two blouses to Estelle. “What’s the label say?”

Estelle ruffled the collar and cocked her head. “One is from Price World, and that could be anywhere in the Southwest.” She opened the other collar. “This one was made in Mexico. What about the slacks?” I unhooked the single pair of dark blue slacks from the window track and handed them to Estelle. “Mexican,” she said after a glance.

“And that’s it,” I said. Estelle handed the sacked collection to me to hold and then bent over and retrieved a small plastic bag that had been shoved down beside the driver’s seat. She opened it and scanned the contents.

“Not quite all. There are maybe three pairs of socks and a change or two of underwear here.”

I added that to the collection while Estelle contorted herself downward in the door well so she could see under the driver’s seat. “Here we are,” she said with interest, and then added, “huh.”

“Do you want another evidence bag?”

“Yes.” After a minute she turned slightly to one side so she could swing her arm free. I held out the clean evidence bag and into it she dropped a chunk of fried cherry pie, the kind sold in any convenience store anywhere in the country. The wrapper was neatly folded over the open end.

“I don’t know of a teenager alive who only eats half of something like that and stashes the rest for later,” I said.

“Maybe she didn’t know for sure when her next meal was coming,” Estelle said quietly. “And maybe no one told her she could get a free lunch at school.”

“The only food Orosco believed in was alcohol,” I said.

She nodded and pointed at the piece of pie with her lips, like an Indian. “The date on the wrapper is current. Maybe somebody will remember her buying it.” She shifted position and grunted. “This was her private spot.” She handed me a twenty-four-count bottle of aspirin with less than a dozen tablets remaining.

“Pie and aspirin?” I said.

“Ah, there’s some more stuff here.” And one by one, the contents of Maria Ibarra’s stash went into the evidence bag. One nail file, nearly new. Half a card of bobby pins. One small tube of toothpaste, hardly squeezed. That made sense, since we didn’t find a toothbrush. A plastic cup showed traces in the bottom of what might have been cola. The price bar-code label was still on the underside.

“I think that’s it, sir,” Estelle said, and she took another minute to probe under the broken seat’s springs with her flashlight. I leaned back against the bulkhead and shook my head.

“A talented little girl,” I said.

“Sir?”

“To survive like this, even for a couple weeks. What kept her from just running?”

“Nowhere to run to.” Estelle pushed herself upright and looked askance at me. I made no effort to move, and she held out a hand for the bag. “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes,” I said. I stepped past her, down to the sliding door. “Just disgusted. Hell, this is not much more than a good shout from my place across the way.” I waved a hand toward the south. “I’ve got more room in my smallest closet than there was in this kid’s master bedroom.”

She reached out a hand and touched me on the arm, one of those feather-light grace notes that Estelle used instead of speech. “I’ll get my camera,” she said, and she walked back toward the patrol car. I grunted and followed, head down.

“I’ll sit in the car and try to get my thoughts together while you finish up,” I said. But, by the time Estelle had made Kodak happy with her last roll of film, I hadn’t made much progress adding anything up.

Deputy Eddie Mitchell arrived less than a minute after we called him, and he and I strung a yellow crime scene ribbon around the pathetic truck and the immediate grounds. When we were ready to leave, Estelle started toward the passenger side of the patrol car. I waved her away. I didn’t want to drive. That would mean I would have to pay attention to the world. I plopped down on the passenger seat and gazed out the windshield.

We drove out of the mobile home park, and my eyes shifted to the right-side rearview mirror. By tipping my head a bit, I could see the tangle of trees behind us and glimpse a faint hint of yellow here and there.

“Sir?”

I realized with a start that Estelle had been talking to me. She turned the patrol car onto Grande Avenue and we headed toward downtown Posadas.

“Do you have any ideas?” she said again and I pulled myself out of whatever reverie I’d been in.

“No.” I knew that I sounded curt, but that was it. I had nothing. “I’ve got lots of questions, that’s all.”

“It should be simple enough finding out how the girl came to be linked up with Orosco. Maybe he really is her uncle. When he dries out a little, we’ll get some answers.”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said, and Estelle shot a quick glance at me.

“No, I’m serious, sir,” she said. “There’s a possibility that her family in Mexico just sent her up to live with him, maybe assuming that he was well-off or some such.”

“Or some such,” I said. “You think they just packed her in the back of a truck under a load of watermelons and told the driver to dump her off when he got to the Posadas overpass?”

“Remember last year?”

“Yes, I do remember last year. I remember it very well.” And anyone would have who’d smelled the stench when the young state police officer and I had pried the back door open on a van that he’d stopped just across from the motel on the east edge of town. I’d been sitting in the motel’s café at the time, drinking iced tea. I saw the stop and knew damn well what was coming, even if the rookie trooper didn’t.

By the time the van was unloaded, there had been nineteen confused, sweating, frightened aliens lined up on the shoulder of the interstate awaiting the friendly escort of the U.S. Border Patrol. Three more inside the van awaited the coroner, because heatstroke had killed them deader than desert sand.

Estelle turned onto the street in front of Posadas General, and as she guided the car into a slot in staff parking, I saw Sheriff Martin Holman’s brown Buick parked in one of the doctors’ spots.

I turned in the seat and rested a hand on the dashboard. “Tell you what,” I said, and then stopped. With one eyebrow cocked, Estelle waited for me to finish the thought. “Why don’t you drop me off at home.”

“Sir?”

“At home. There are a couple of things I’d like to take care of, and sure as hell Manny Orosco is going to wait. Even if your husband pumps him dry, he’s not going to be coherent for quite a while.” I looked across at the Buick. “And I don’t feel like talking to Marty right now. I’m not ready to answer stupid questions.” I turned and grinned at Estelle. “I feel too stupid myself at the moment.”

She pulled the patrol car in reverse without a word, and in five minutes we turned onto Guadalupe Terrace.

My five acres were overgrown with gigantic cottonwoods and brush, shielding my sprawling adobe house from neighbors and noise. I had always thought of the place as a perfect hideaway for an old insomniac like myself. I did my best thinking either there or in a patrol car, and this time the patrol car wasn’t working.

Estelle stopped the car in my driveway. “Is there anything in particular you want me to do beyond…?”

“Beyond what you’re already going to do? No. I’ll get in touch with you after lunch. By then Francis should have something definite for us about what killed the girl. Maybe we can ream some sense out of all this.” Estelle didn’t argue with me and she didn’t pry. I got out and she backed the patrol car out of the driveway. I couldn’t help noticing that she waited until I’d stepped through the front door before driving away.

I closed the heavy, carved wooden door behind me and let the silence and coolness seep in. Diving back in the burrow was all I could manage at the moment. I couldn’t remember ever being so angry that I couldn’t think straight.

I took off my Stetson, closed my eyes, and rubbed a hand on the stubby bristle of gray hair on the top of my head. Against one foyer wall, its legs resting on elegant Mexican tile, was an old hand-carved wooden bench that had been made years before by Estelle’s great-uncle. Folded neatly on one end was an inexpensive Zapotec rug. I used the rug as a place to sit when I pulled on my boots by the door and from time to time in the winter as a seat cover in my Blazer.

As I tossed my hat on the bench beside it, I reflected that the rug was about twice as big as Maria Ibarra’s sleeping pad.