Dead Weight Read online

  Deputy Thomas Pasquale, one of our department’s youngest officers and certainly our foremost hot-rod, had garnered his share of scathing mention by citizens, despite a couple of well-publicized occasions when he’d been nothing short of a goddamn hero. It all went with the turf.

  More than once I had given him a dressing-down reminiscent of the recruit ass-chewings I had delivered countless times during twenty years in the marines. To his credit, young Pasquale took the corrections in stride and learned from them, after a fashion.

  Regardless of what he did on duty, his living habits were none of my business, and I had no intention, despite what I had told Carla Champlin, of placing myself in any formal fashion between Thomas Pasquale and his landlady. I had told Carla that I would talk with Thomas, and that was a promise easy enough to keep.

  After the cool of Carla Champlin’s house and tea, the heat inside the car was enough to take my breath away. The patrol car started, hesitated, and then settled into a rough idle as the air conditioner compressor kicked in. I winked a trickle of sweat away from my left eye and jotted a quick entry in my log, then tossed the clipboard on the seat and pulled 310 into gear. It promptly stalled.

  I cursed a string of abuses as the engine cranked rapidly with that high-pitched, jingling sound of a motor well past its prime. With the windows buzzed down, I waited for a few seconds and tried again with the air conditioner off, and this time was rewarded as the engine caught.

  Three blocks later, at the intersection of 6th and Bustos, a small yellow idiot light on the dash flickered on, the temperature needle hovered in the red, and the engine sighed into silence once again. I drifted the car over to the curb and stopped. Several abortive efforts to start the damn thing produced only an additional sheen of sweat on my forehead.

  As if she’d been listening, Gayle Torrez’s mellow, cool voice said, “Three ten, Posadas. Ten-twenty.”

  “Three ten is disabled at the corner of Bustos and Sixth,” I snapped into the mike, and then took a deep breath before I added, “Call Manny at the county yard and tell ’em that he’s got a dead one that needs the wrecker.”

  “Ten-four. And, three ten, there’s a gentleman here who’d like to speak with you.”

  “Ten-four,” I said, and rummaged through the litter on my front seat to find my cellular phone. I punched in the number and Gayle answered on the first ring.

  “Just a moment, sir,” she said to me, and I could hear voices in the background. I heard Gayle say to someone else, “No, sir, this is fine. He won’t mind,” and then another voice said, “Sheriff?”

  “This is Gastner.” I wondered what it was that I wouldn’t mind.

  “Sheriff, this is Arny Gray. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  I laughed. “That depends, Doc. What can I do for you?”

  “I’d sure like to talk with you for a bit,” Arnold Gray said, and his voice dropped a couple of decibels.

  “Well, I’m a captive audience at the moment,” I said, and wiped a trickle of sweat off the end of my nose. If I didn’t make a move soon, I was going to be a puddle. The nearest business was just a few steps away, and I knew that Kealey’s Kleaners and Laundry was air-conditioned. I started to heave myself out of the car.

  “I heard your radio call,” Gray said. “Let me swing by there and pick you up. Then we can have a glass of iced tea or something at the Don Juan.”

  Dr. Arnold Gray, a chiropractor whom I had always thought to be the smartest of the five county commissioners, leaped several notches upward in my estimation.

  “That is, if you’ve got the time,” he added.

  “I’ve got the time. I’m right at the intersection of Sixth and Bustos, beside the dry cleaner’s. I’ll be looking for you. And I appreciate this, believe me.”

  “Won’t be but a minute,” Gray said, and switched off. I took the phone and locked the car, the sun hard on my back as if someone inside Kealey’s were holding the pressing table to my shoulders.

  The young lady behind the counter at the cleaner’s looked teary-eyed, as if she might have been sniffing the cleaning fluid. Maybe it was just midsummer allergies or a wrenching romance novel that she’d been reading. She smiled brightly and nodded at me.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I’ve got a ride coming to pick me up,” I said, and waved at 310. She looked out the window, puzzled. “It broke down,” I added. “If you see anyone trying to steal it before the wrecker gets here, wish ’em luck for me.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  I didn’t know her name, and although her name tag said Judy, that didn’t ring any bells. Royce Kealey had owned the place for all of the thirty years I’d been bringing my weekly load of shirts there, and I knew Judy wasn’t family. Trying to know every living soul in a tiny village became an occupational hazard after a while. If I worked at it hard enough, I could be a walking gazetteer of who was who in Posadas County, New Mexico. Not that it all mattered much in the great scheme of things.

  “Would you like a drink of ice water or something?” Judy asked, and I shook my head.

  “You’re a sweetheart for asking, though,” I said.

  In less than two minutes, a white Continental slid to the curb. I turned to the girl as I headed toward the door. “Thanks.”

  “You have a nice day, Sheriff. Come back and see us.” She sounded as if she really knew who I was, and that puzzled me even more.

  Arnold Gray touched the electric door lock button of the Continental just as I reached the curb.

  “Hot, eh?” he said when I opened the door.

  “It’s a dry heat,” I replied as I slid into the cool leather. I slammed the door, and the armrest cracked my elbow hard enough to make me wince.

  “So’s the Sahara,” Gray said, and pulled the Continental away from the curb. “Patrol car broke, eh? Just like you said it would.”

  I grinned. “You’ve got a good memory,” I said.

  Two meetings previous, I’d given the county commission hell for not allowing adequate funding for four new vehicles beyond the one already in the budget. Somehow, the concept of police cars actually wearing out was a novel idea, even though every county in the United States went through the identical process on a routine basis.

  Two of the commissioners, Gray and Janelle Waters, had been in favor of spending whatever it took to buy the new units. They were a minority.

  “How many miles on that thing now?” Gray asked cheerfully.

  “A hundred and eighty-seven thousand,” I said, and reached out a hand for support as we wafted into the parking lot of the Don Juan de Oñate Restaurant, just six blocks west of Kealey’s Kleaners. “I’m the only one who drives it,” I added. “I don’t let any of the road deputies use it.” We pulled into a parking place in the shade of the building. “I move slowly enough that it can keep up with me…most of the time. But you didn’t take time out from cracking bones to talk about old cars. What can I do for you?”

  Arnold Gray frowned and shoved the car into park. “Let’s go inside and find a quiet corner.”

  In midafternoon of a July Tuesday in Posadas, that wasn’t hard to do, even in the most popular restaurant in town.

  The place was cool as a refrigerator, and the bright yellow plastic booth benches were downright cold. I slid in until I could turn sideways and lean against the dark wood wainscoting.

  Even as I came to a comfortable halt with one arm stretched out across the back of the booth, JanaLynn Torrez appeared around the partition.

  My undersheriff’s cousin grinned but otherwise refrained from mentioning that I’d left that very spot not an hour before.

  “What can I get you gentlemen?”

  “Two iced teas?” Gray said, glancing at me. I nodded.

  She disappeared, and Arnold Gray leaned both forearms on the table. He had either hemorrhoids, gas, or something serious nagging at his insides. I pulled my arm down from the booth and straightened up, attentive and serious.

  “So what
gives?” I asked.

  “God, I hate this,” Gray said, and grimaced. He looked off to the right at the empty tables surrounding us.

  I shrugged. “Just say it, then.”

  Gray regarded me thoughtfully. “This is between us,” he said, and I frowned impatiently. We hadn’t gone out of our way to make it a public meeting, unless we invited JanaLynn to sit in when she returned with the tea. She arrived and set the two extra-large, perspiring glasses in front of us.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  I waved a hand. “No, nothing. We just need some peace and quiet for a while.” I grinned at her, and she touched my shoulder.

  “I’ll be out front if you need me.”

  The two of us were left in vinyl-padded silence. I sipped the tea, and it was wonderful, as usual.

  “So,” I said.

  Gray took a deep breath, leaving his tea untouched in front of him. “How well do you know Thomas Pasquale?”

  “Uh,” I groaned, and sat back hard enough that I thumped against the seat. “Now what?”

  “I’m serious. What kind of fellow is he? I don’t know him except to say hello.”

  “He’s a local boy,” I said. “Worked the village PD for a while as a part-timer. Applied to our department a handful of times and each time was refused, mainly on my say-so.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Way too immature.”

  “But you eventually hired him.”

  “Yes. It’s been three years, going on four. He’s grown up a lot. Still eager, sometimes way too eager.”

  “Ambitions?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “What’s he want out of life? FBI? Some big department?”

  “As far as I know, Posadas is his life. His family’s here, and he’s never mentioned anything else to me. Not that I pry much. He seems content working here. There are always surprises, of course.”

  “Huh,” Gray mused. He looked down at the tea for a long minute and I let him think uninterrupted. I had all day. I knew the commissioner would get where he wanted to go eventually. “You ever hear anything about his finances?”

  “His finances are none of my business. Or yours,” I said.

  Gray grinned. “I appreciate that. But if Deputy Pasquale were in some kind of financial trouble, you’d know about it, probably.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t respond. Gray finally took a sip of his tea, grimaced, and reached for the sugar. “This is what I got,” he said, but made no move other than letting the sugar slide smoothly out of three packets. He swirled the tea, pulled out the spoon, and placed it on the table—all little preparatory gestures as he wound up to tell me what was on his mind.

  “This is what I got,” he repeated, and reached in his pocket. He handed the white number-10 envelope to me, holding it by one corner. There was no stamp, just the name Dr. Arnold Gray typed in the address spot. It had been zipped open with either a letter opener or a knife. I looked inside and saw the neatly folded message. Laying the envelope to one side, I spread the message out, well away from my sweating glass of tea. It was typed, just a few lines:

  Commissioner: you need to know that one of the Posadas Deputies Thomas Pasquale is hitting up on Mexican nationales when he stops them for routine traffic checks. In five instances that we have documented, he has collected an average of $100.00 each.

  A concerned citizen

  “Christ,” I muttered, and read the thing twice more, then adjusted my glasses and peered more closely at the typing. “Single-strike typewriter, or word processor,” I said. I looked across at Arnold Gray. His expression was pained. “This didn’t come in the mail.”

  “No. Under the door of my office when I got there this morning.”

  “Just this envelope?”

  He nodded.

  “Huh,” I said, for want of anything better.

  “Do you believe it?” Gray asked.

  I almost snapped out an unthinking response, then stopped. “Do you?”

  “I’m not much for anonymous notes,” Gray said. “What worries me is why that note was written in the first place, and written to me, of all people.”

  “You’re a county commissioner.”

  “But why not to you? You’re sheriff. You’re Tom Pasquale’s boss, not me.”

  “The implication there is pretty clear,” I said more offhandedly than I felt. “Obviously whoever wrote this note thinks that I’m in on the deal.”

  “Oh, sure,” Gray laughed and sat back, some of the strain going out of his face. “I can see that. You don’t speak enough Spanish to make yourself understood beyond ‘I’ll have a burrito.’”

  “That’s cruel,” I said.

  “I can just see you, standing out in the dark, negotiating with a vanload of Mexican nationals,” Gray said.

  “I don’t see Tom Pasquale doing that, either,” I retorted. “But they claim documentation. Either they have it, or they don’t. If they have it, why the hell not come forward with it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You trust me with this?” I picked up the note. What I really felt like doing was crumpling it up and sticking it in the Don Juan’s trash with all the uneaten refried beans and rice.

  “Of course.”

  “Did you make yourself a copy?”

  Arnold Gray gave me a look as if I’d stuck a fork in the back of his hand. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer, and I moved his name even farther up the list to “favorite people” status.

  Chapter Three

  Dr. Arnold Gray dropped me back at the modest flat-roofed two-story structure that Posadas grandly called its Public Safety Building. As I walked inside, a trash can by the pay phone reminded me that my first inclination, to tear the anonymous note into shreds before it could do any damage, was probably a good one. The whole idea of someone sanctimoniously tapping out a little message that could ruin either a career or a life made my stomach churn.

  But I wasn’t naive, either. In a department with a dozen employees, there was always an off-chance that one of them wasn’t as pure as the driven snow.

  When I walked in, Gayle Torrez glanced up from her desk. Hell, I’d known her since she was a skinny twelve-year-old. She’d started working for the Sheriff’s Department when she was eighteen, had been with us for a decade, and was now married to Undersheriff Robert Torrez. If the note rang true, was she in on the scam? Was he?

  I dropped the white envelope in my center desk drawer and slammed it shut until I could figure out what to do about the damn thing. After taking a minute to straighten my face so the anger wouldn’t show, I strolled out to Dispatch. Gayle was on the phone, the pencil in her right hand doodling little spirals on the scratch pad. Every once in a while, she’d stop spiraling and the pencil point would tap a few times on the pad as she listened.

  “Sure,” she said. I leaned against one of the black filing cabinets and waited. The pencil tapped another series. “Sure.” She nodded. “I know it does.” I took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. “Let me pass it on to the village for you. Maybe they’ll listen to me.” Gayle sat patiently through another long string and nodded as if the nod were carried over the wires. After a few more noncommittal pleasantries, she hung up.

  “Another dog,” she said, jotting in the big logbook by her elbow. “You’d think it would be too hot to bark.” She looked up at me. “What’s wrong, sir?”

  “Wrong?” I asked.

  “You looked peeved,” Gayle said.

  “The damn car, I suppose,” I replied, and she accepted that with an understanding nod. I pushed myself away from the filing cabinet. “I need the dispatch logs for last month.”

  “Just June’s?” She reached across to the steel bookcase under the window and pulled a slender black volume off the shelf. I took it and started back to my office.

  “No calls for a while, all right? And when Bob comes in, I’d like to chat with him.”

  “He’s home ri
ght now if you need him,” Gayle said.

  “No,” I answered quickly and shook my head. “Just whenever he comes in this afternoon is fine.” Gayle didn’t ask what I wanted with the dispatch logs, my privacy, or her husband, and I felt better. Gayle Torrez worked hard at being the best dispatcher I’d ever met, making her a perfect match for her husband. Undersheriff Torrez worked the four-to-midnight shift, as well as twenty or thirty other odd hours during an average week. He avoided the boredom of working the day shift whenever he could.

  Back in my office, I slumped back in the cool of my old leather chair, swung my feet up on the corner of my desk, and browsed through the logs. The volume included April, May, and June, and I concentrated on the last month, assuming that if there was any validity to the charge against Pasquale, the incident that had precipitated the note would be a recent one, not something from the distant past.

  The logs were simple, black-on-white abbreviations of any activity that included radio conversations with the patrol officers. But their nebulous character could be frustrating. On June 3, for example, an entry read: 18:36, 303, 10-10. That was followed by 18:59, 303, 10-8.

  Deputy Thomas Pasquale’s vehicle was 303, and at 6:36 p.m. civilian time, he had announced that he was out of service, at home, no doubt engaged in something as exciting as eating a sandwich. Twenty-three minutes later, he was back in service—and there was no way to determine from the log where he was or what he was doing.

  After studying the log for half an hour, I looked at my legal pad jottings. During the twenty-two days that he had worked in June, Deputy Pasquale had called in 137 requests for vehicle registration checks…the sort of routine action a deputy took when he stopped an unfamiliar vehicle for a traffic infraction or because something in the driver’s manner had piqued his attention.

  A rate of six or seven registration checks a night was average. On one extreme was Undersheriff Torrez, who might request one check a week; on the other, rookie Deputy Brent Sutherland, with us for three months, whose idea of a good time was running routine checks at three in the morning on cars parked in the Posadas Inn parking lot, down by the interstate.