Privileged to Kill (12 page)

“Would you recognize the girl’s companion if you saw her photograph?”

“Probably. She was really chubby, you know?” He held up his hands around his face. “Almost perfectly round, like a bowling ball. Perfect teeth. Smiled a lot. Giggled a lot. Looked like she probably had fleas.”

“Fleas?”

“Well, you know what I mean.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but didn’t press the matter.

“Elliott, thanks. We’ll be back with a yearbook to see if you can give us an I.D. In the meantime, if you happen to think of anything else, let us know.” I handed him a business card, just in case he didn’t have the energy to look through the phone book.

I left the store thinking it was time to give my son Kenyon a call, even though the official date of Thanksgiving was still a month away.

18

I rang Glen Archer’s doorbell at five minutes after ten that night. Under normal circumstances, he would have attended the out-of-town football game. The day was anything but normal, and the principal was about out of starch.

According to our dispatch records, he’d called the sheriff’s office on the hour, requesting updates. We hadn’t been able to give him much. I was sure that the good folks down at the twice-weekly
Posadas Register
were calling him hourly, too.

The doorbell chimed once before Archer snatched it open.

“Thank God,” he said, and I could see his wife behind him. She was hugging a sweater around herself, her hatchet-thin face set in lines of concern. Mrs. Archer looked as if she were counting the days until her husband’s retirement. “What have you got?” Archer asked. He waved me in impatiently. “Come in, come in.” Estelle remained in the patrol car.

“That’s not necessary, Glen. We do need to see a yearbook, though. We need to borrow one.”

“Last year’s?”

I nodded and stepped inside so he could shut the door.

“I tell ya,” Archer said, “when I retire, I’m going to burn everything I own that has to do with education.” He walked into his living room and motioned for me to follow. “Then I’m going to buy a big, oceangoing yacht. That way I won’t have to live by the side of the road and be a friend to man, as the poet says. I’m getting damn sick of it.”

“Would either of you two like something?” Mrs. Archer said. She hovered in the doorway to the kitchen. One hand had released its grip on the sweater and held a glass with amber liquid and ice. It looked good.

“No thanks,” I said.

Archer knelt by the bookcase in the corner and selected the last in a long row of high school yearbooks. “Here you are,” he said. “You don’t have a set of these down at the sheriff’s department?”

“No. But about fifteen years ago, we did buy a new dictionary.” I grinned. “We like to keep up, you know.”

Archer looked at me sideways and cocked an eyebrow. He waved at the couch. “Sit, sit. You have to look at it somewhere, and this is more comfortable than your office.”

“I’d like to, but we can’t,” I said. “We don’t know who we’re looking for, but we’ve found a possible witness to make an identification.”

“Someone who was seen with Maria Ibarra, you mean?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, good luck. And would you call me the minute you know something? I don’t care what time of day or night it is.” He followed me back toward the front door. I promised Archer we’d keep him posted, and I stepped back out into the night air. The light breeze felt good.

I settled back in the car seat and looked at the yearbook during the few seconds that the dome light was on. On the cover, superimposed across some sort of modern art design that looked like a geranium squashed by a car, was the single word
Promises
.

“Back to the store?” Estelle’s quiet voice asked.

“Back to the store. Maybe we’ll get something positive. That way there’ll be a tidbit to throw to Marty Holman. Otherwise his ulcers will keep him up all night.”

The process was easier than I would have imagined. Elliott Parker was still behind the counter, still reading his magazine, still pleasantly vague. He accepted the yearbook without comment and flipped open to the first section of photographs…the class of 2000, the current crop of freshmen at Posadas High School.

In less than two minutes, he said, “That’s her, right there.”

He spun the book around and pushed it toward me, keeping his index finger on the third photo from the left in the second row from the bottom.

Staring up at me was a blurry image that could have been anybody or anything. I cursed while I fished out my glasses. While I was fussing, Estelle found the name that corresponded with the photograph. With my bifocals on, the image sharpened and became Vanessa Davila.

Elliott Parker’s earlier description was accurate. Vanessa Davila was as round as they come, with a wide mouth, great pudgy cheeks, dark eyes almost hidden behind heavy brows, and a forehead that narrowed up into her hairline so that her head looked like an overweight teardrop. While most of the photographs on the page showed amorphous little kids with too many teeth and strange hair, Vanessa’s photo promised an imposing figure. Her shoulders jutted out platform-straight, right out of the picture.

Her smile was sweet enough. She looked as if she were about to be handed a bag of jelly doughnuts. She also looked tough enough that if you didn’t give her the doughnuts, she’d break your arm.

“Shoplift mostly candy, does she?” I asked, and Estelle elbowed me and frowned. “Sir…”

“Sorry,” I said. “Are you sure that’s her?”

“Absolutely,” Elliott said. “How could I mistake her?”

“And she was with Maria several times? You heard them speak to each other?”

Elliott nodded.

“They spoke Spanish?”

He nodded again.

“Do you understand Spanish?”

He shook his head.

“Is there anything else about her that you know? Where she lives, or who her parents are, or a boyfriend, or anything like that?” Elliott Parker’s head wobbled one last time. He was not a well of information, but he’d given us a start.

I closed the yearbook and rapped it on the edge of the counter. “Thanks, Elliott. We’ll be in touch.” He was still standing behind the counter when we left, probably not caring a lick whether we were ever in touch or not.

On the second visit, Glen Archer met us at the door before I had a chance to reach for the doorbell.

“Success?” He held the door open.

“We have a picture for you to look at, anyway,” I said. I opened the yearbook and indicated Vanessa Davila. “Do you know her?”

Archer’s reaction was an immediate grimace. “Uh,” he said. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Vanessa is not one of our rising stars, Bill. I imagine that the instant she turns sixteen, she’ll be history as far as we’re concerned. And probably just as well.” He closed the book. “You know her.”

“I do?”

“Or at least you know the family. Remember when her brother killed himself four or five years ago?”

I frowned. “I should, but I don’t,” I looked at Estelle. She shook her head, and I was glad I wasn’t the only one drawing a blank.

Archer continued, “He gave us more than our share of trouble, although I wouldn’t have wished an end like that on him. Anyway, his sister is something else, too. She’s absent from school more than she’s present, which I assume is a plus as far as her teachers are concerned.”

“It appears Maria Ibarra linked up with her,” I said.

Archer nodded. “I’m not surprised. Vanessa likes to have lots of friends in attendance. That’s usually how we see her…in the hallway, the nucleus of a clot of girls, heads together, giggling.” Archer grinned with resignation.

“Is she related to the Davilas who run that little used bookstore over on Goff?” Estelle asked. She was seated on the arm of the sofa and was leafing through papers in her briefcase.

“That’s her aunt, Orofina Davila.”

“And her parents?”

Glen Archer frowned and looked at the floor. “It seems to me that her mother lives down in that trailer park by the interchange.”

“That makes sense,” I said to Estelle, and then added, “Is there a father in all this mess somewhere?”

“If there is, I’ve never met him,” Archer said. “When we have a conference for disciplinary problems, which is pretty routine with Vanessa, we see either the mother, or likely as not, the aunt. Not that seeing either one of them makes any difference one way or another.”

“Do you know if Miss Vanessa was in school today?”

“Ah, I don’t recall…”

“She’s wasn’t, sir,” Estelle said, and both of us looked at her in surprise. She held up one of the papers from her collection. “She’s on the absentee list we picked up earlier. She was also absent yesterday.”

I straightened up and Glen Archer handed the yearbook back to me. “You might need this.”

“I’ll get it back to you.”

Archer waved a hand in dismissal. “We have more. Start your collection with that one. In fact, Monday morning I’ll have the librarian send over a complete set. All the way back to whenever the first yearbook was invented.” Archer grinned painfully, wishing his day would end.

***

Each time I settled into 310, it seemed that the seat back hit me just a little bit harder. This time, I took a deep breath, counted to five, and let it out slowly, squinting out through the windshield at the stars. After a minute I realized that Estelle was sitting quietly, watching me.

I turned to look at her and shrugged. “What do you think?”

“About what, sir?”

“About what’s-her-name here,” and I tapped the yearbook. “Or anything else, for that matter.”

“I think I’d like to talk to her. I’d also like to know who was in the vehicle that drove by the convenience store when those five kids were on the sidewalk.”

“That shouldn’t be hard to find out. At least one of the kids will talk. Eddie Mitchell can do that in between everything else. Just give him that list of names Pasquale gave us.”

“Three-ten, PCS.”

Estelle reached for the microphone and I said, “You know who that is.”

A faint smile touched Estelle’s dark face as she keyed the mike. “PCS, three-ten.”

“Three-ten, ten-nineteen.” Dispatcher Ernie Wheeler’s voice was neutral, and I shook my head. I reached over and took the microphone from Estelle.

“PCS, that’s negative. We’ll be another hour. What do you need?”

“The sheriff wants to speak with you, sir.”

“Well, put him on.” I was willing to bet that that wasn’t about to happen, since Martin Holman went tangle-tongued any time he got within hollering distance of a radio. I would have lost. Holman’s voice was too loud, and I could picture him leaning over Wheeler’s shoulder, mashing down the talk bar.

“Three-ten, ten-nineteen.”

I glanced at Estelle. “He’s pissed,” I said.

“Well, sir, you told him ten minutes at the hospital, and it’s been more than an hour.”

“It won’t hurt him to be patient. Vanessa Davila is the first person we’ve found who might have been with Maria Ibarra in the past twenty-four hours. She might be able to tell us something. We can’t afford to let her slip away.”

I checked my watch. In another hour, the town would come alive with postgame madness, particularly if the Posadas Jaguars had won. “Let’s find Miss Davila,” I said.

I keyed the mike. “PCS, three-ten will be ten-seven at the Ranchero Mobile Home Park.”

Ernie Wheeler signed off, and even as he was saying “Ten-four, three-ten,” I could hear Martin Holman’s angry voice in the background. I hung up the mike. “Let’s go find Vanessa,” I said.

Estelle turned 310 south on Bustos and the street’s wide, windswept expanse looked particularly empty and bleak. She glanced over at me, but whatever she was thinking, she kept to herself.

19

The Posadas telephone directory told us that Teresa Davila lived at 100 Escondido Lane. She was listed under Teresa…not Bobby and Teresa Davila, or whatever her once-upon-a-time husband’s name was. The address was painted on the gate of the Ranchero Mobile Home Park.

As the tires of 310 crunched on driveway gravel, I scanned the rows of trailers. One or two of the twenty-four units had lights burning in the windows. Otherwise the park was dark, with a single sodium vapor light near the entrance. To the north and well above the level of the park, traffic droned by on the interstate, a constant infusion of noise.

A single light burned in the first trailer, where Taylor Boyd had his office.

“I’ll go in, sir,” Estelle said, and parked in front of Boyd’s trailer.

I watched her walk over to the porch and go up the steps two at a time, nimble as a teenager. About the fourth time she pressed the bell, I saw a light go on in the back. A moment later, the front door opened and a wash of light flooded out. Boyd’s T-shirt was stretched over a belly bigger than mine, and his boxer shorts somehow defied gravity.

He looked out at our car, frowned, and then squinted at the identification that Estelle held up. Finally he stepped out on the small porch and pointed toward the far end of the park. “About three trailers down,” I heard him say. Estelle didn’t buy the “about” and said something to which Boyd replied, “That’s right, the blue-and-white one.”

He said something else that I couldn’t hear even with Estelle’s window down.

He went back inside and before Estelle had reached 310, the light in the back of his trailer switched off.

“The blue-and-white one,” I said.

“Right. In slot three. But he doesn’t think they’re home.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” I said. Sure enough, the blue-and-white mobile home in the third slot was dark. There was a porch light fixture, but no bulb. Estelle cranked the spotlight around and illuminated a sorry hulk of a car that was parked next to the trailer, both back tires flat.

“My turn,” I said. I didn’t take the steps two at a time. In the harsh light from the spot, I watched where I planted each foot. There were only three steps up to the door, and I was glad of it. I rapped on the door, feeling the light-gauge metal bend under my knuckle. Estelle turned off the spotlight so my eyes would have a few minutes to adjust.

No one answered my knock, so I pressed the doorbell. I was surprised to hear it chime bright and cheerful inside. Just after my finger pressed the bell for the second time, I heard a light thud from inside the trailer, and then a voice.

I turned to look at Estelle and nodded.

If I had been Teresa Davila, I’m not sure that I would have opened my door at that hour to a fat stranger on my front porch. But she did and looked up at me with unfocused eyes heavy from sleep. Not counting about a hundred pounds, I immediately saw the family resemblance. Vanessa Davila was a young, heavyweight version of her mother.

I stepped back away from the screen door so she could see past me to the patrol car.

“Mrs. Davila?”

“What you want?” Her voice was flat and featureless.

“Mrs. Davila, I’m with the sheriff’s department. Is your daughter home?”

“What?” She said it as if I were speaking Dutch or Greek.

“Your daughter? Vanessa?”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Nothing is wrong with her, ma’am. We just need to talk with her. Is she home?”

“No, she’s not home yet.”

“Do you know where we can find her?”

“What do you want?” This time a touch of late-night crankies tinged her voice.

“We need to talk with her.”

“You want to talk with Vanessa, you come back in the day time.” She started to close the door.

I heard the door of the patrol car open and saw Mrs. Davila’s eyes dart down to focus on Estelle as she approached.

“Who is this?”

“This is Detective Estelle Reyes-Guzman, Mrs. Davila.”

“Is she the one who needs to talk to Vanessa?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Estelle stopped with one hand on the thin aluminum railing and her left foot on the first step.

“Señora Davila,” she said, and her voice was soft and musical.
“¿Vanessa…no esta aqui?”
She made it sound as if it were really too bad we were missing the girl.

Mrs. Davila answered in a flood of rapid-fire, slurred Spanish that was far beyond my limited vocabulary. Estelle grimaced and then shrugged.

“Tal vez—”
she started to say, and the woman interrupted her.

“Mas tarde, anoche,”
she said.
“O quizas manana, no se.”
She glanced at me, then back at Estelle.
“¿Esta la joven en un aprieto?”

Estelle smiled and shook her head. “No, I don’t think she’s in trouble,” she said in English, and Mrs. Davila’s hand crept up toward her throat, clasping the collar of her nightgown. “But we need to talk to her.”

“Is it about that little girl…”

Estelle nodded. “Yes, señora. We think that Vanessa might have seen her sometime yesterday.”

Mrs. Davila nodded vigorously. “They plan to go to the game tonight. But now, I don’t know…” Her voice drifted off in that delightful habit where the speaker expects the other person to supply the necessary details. But we didn’t know details, in any language.

“She went to the game anyway?” I asked, not bothering to add, “Even though her best friend just choked to death?” I didn’t say it for two reasons: Mrs. Davila didn’t need to hear it, and we didn’t know yet what the relationship had been between Maria Ibarra and Vanessa Davila.

“That’s what she said,” Estelle answered, and then to Mrs. Davila,
“¿Es posible fue con varias amigas?”

The woman didn’t know, or wouldn’t say, whether her daughter had gone to the game alone or with a mob, and it was apparent that she really didn’t care…or if she did, she was so far from being able to do anything about it that she had given up long ago. We left it at that, and we didn’t promise to return…although I had a feeling Mrs. Davila would be seeing much more of us before it was over.

I settled back in the car and looked at Estelle. “I think it’s interesting that the girl comes and goes as she pleases, when she pleases. Mama didn’t seem the least bit uneasy about not knowing when the kid was coming home.”

“Oh, she’s uneasy, all right,” Estelle said, and swung the car around.

“She is?”

“Sure. But what can she say? What can she do? If she says anything to her daughter, she’d probably be beaten even worse.”

“Whoa,” I said, puzzled. “Beaten worse than how?”

Estelle shot a quick glance my way, and when she accelerated out onto Escondido, the back tires chirped. “You didn’t notice the bruises?” she asked.

I frowned. “No. I couldn’t see her well enough.”

“Especially around her left eye. A nice shiner.”

I hadn’t noticed that, and I began to wonder what else I wasn’t seeing. For a couple of blocks I just sat, staring out the side window at nothing. “Christ,” I said finally. “Remember when it used to be simple? Somebody would rob a store, and we’d chase ’em. Remember that? Or they’d have too much to drink and crash into a tree? Nice simple stuff like that.”

“It hasn’t been like that for a long time, sir.”

“A very long time. Too long.” I shook my head. “A horse, gun, and badge, just like Crocker said.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Do you want to go back to the office now?”

“Sure. Why not.” What I really wanted to do was go home and go to bed. I picked up the microphone and rapped it against the dashboard, beating out a soft cadence of frustration. “So you think the girl beats her own mother?”

“Nothing would surprise me, sir. That’s the simplest explanation.”

“And the most depressing. What other explanations have we got, other than that maybe the mother makes a habit of walking into doorjambs?”

“A boyfriend, maybe.”

“At her age?”

“Sir…” Estelle said in the tone that she reserved for the times when my Stone Age heritage was showing. “Sir, boyfriends are possible at any age. But bet on the girl.”

“She’s big enough,” I said.

“Yes, she is. And Mrs. Davila doesn’t look like she’s capable of putting up much resistance.”

I keyed the mike. “PCS, 310 is ten-eight, ten-nineteen.”

Ernie Wheeler acknowledged, and I wondered if Sheriff Martin Holman was still standing behind him, waiting. It wasn’t like Holman to stay up during the night shift unless he absolutely had to. He preferred to meet the public refreshed and well rested, like any good salesman. I didn’t have any news to make him sleep any easier.