Natural Causes Page 22

Jack sighed. “Yeah. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Quentin was involved in drug pushing.”

  “If you say so, Jack. Do the Pacoima police have any idea where Jerry is holed up?”

  “Somewhere outside of Pacoima,” Moon said. “That’s where he lived, by the way. Goldblum found out through the Belle Vista desk clerk. Ruiz hasn’t been in his room since Friday. In fact, no one seems to have seen him since he quit his job.” Jack paused for a second. “I’ve got one more thing to tell you. It may make all the rest of this unimportant.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Frank wants to talk to you,” he said. “He spoke to Connie this afternoon. She told him about the Leonard thing.”

  “All of it?”

  “Enough to make Frank nervous,” Jack said.

  “What do you think Glendora wants to talk to me about, Jack?”

  “Can’t you guess?” he said. “Frank doesn’t want trouble. United is his religion.”

  “Do me a favor, then,” I said. “Don’t tell him I was in touch with you. Tear up that piece of paper with the phone numbers on it, and, if he asks, say that I haven’t contacted you yet.”

  “How can I stall him, Harry? He knows you’re in Las Cruces and he’s been calling me every hour.”

  “You can do it, Jack,” I said. “All I need’s another day or two.”

  “For what?” Jack said. “What’s it going to amount to, anyway? It’s ass-covering time, Harry. And you might as well face the fact that the truth about Quentin Dover is going to get lost in the shuffle.”

  “I still want that day,” I said.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said. But from the sound of his voice, I figured that Jack Moon would have been just as happy if the Quentin Dover case had ended that night.

  ******

  I fell asleep after I drank the Scotch. When I woke up it was daylight outside. I opened the curtains and took a look at Las Cruces. There wasn’t much to see. No buildings of more than two or three stories. A few concrete ramps leading to the expressway. The usual number of fast-food joints, their lots empty in the dawn light. And the desert, of course. Brown and scintillant in the white morning sun.

  It wasn’t the naked kind of desert—the sandy Sahara kind. This one was clinging to life—or life was clinging to it. Sage grass, sprouting in rows like lettuce patches. Agave, like fat monstrous flowers. And barbed octillio. I looked for the twisted crosses of saguaro, but I didn’t see any. No barrel cactus, either, although there was lobed prickly pear growing in the dirt beneath my window. In the distance were the mountains—always in the distance, nearer or farther, in the desert. They turned colors as the sun rose. At that early hour of the morning they were a bleached-out yellow—the same color as the sky. But in the evening, they’d purple like ripening fruit.

  I showered and put on some fresh clothes—jeans and a workshirt. Then I went down to the lobby to get something to eat. It was seven-thirty by the clock above the front desk and the lobby was just coming to life. The pool area was roped off and deserted, but the smell of chlorine lingered in the air. A few travelers were sitting sleepy-eyed at the little tables of the cafe. I joined them, sitting by myself, drinking coffee and eating Rancher eggs with chilis and mangos in them. They were good. So was the coffee.

  Around eight-thirty, I walked over to the front desk and asked the clerk how to get to the old town square. She gave me some simple directions. I thanked her and went out to the parking lot. It smelled like the desert outside—hot, dry, and clean. The heat was already starting up. That close to the border, it would probably go well over a hundred by noon. But it wasn’t a sapping heat. It was more like the heat from an open fire. If you moved, it made you warm without burning you. If you stood still for too long, it began to hurt.

  I started the Mustang up and followed the road that ran beneath the concrete ramps of the highway, along the eastern edge of town. To my right, residential streets, full of small ranch houses and Spanish bungalows, led across town. To my left, the desert extended all the way to the El Capitan mountains. There were a few ranch houses scattered on the desert side and a few more at the foot of the mountains. I couldn’t see much of them from the car—just stucco walls and window glass blazing in the sun.

  About two miles up the road, I turned right, down one of the crosstown drags. The nearer to the center of town I got, the fancier the homes became. Some of them were very handsome. White haciendas with adobe walls—like thick slices of whole wheat bread—and belltowers and watchtowers rising from their flat tiled roofs. In the middle of town, the road narrowed to the width of an alley and the pavement gave way to cobblestone. I crept along behind a row of very old, weathered one-story buildings. Then I saw the church belfries, soaring above the flat rooftops, and I knew I was behind the town square. I pulled over and parked. A pedestrian alley ran between the buildings. I got out of the car and walked up it to the square.

  There was a promenade in its center, brown with grass, and an old bandstand painted white and red. A cobbled street circled the promenade, running past the row of beaten buildings, in front of the church, then down the other side of the promenade where a second row of one-story buildings formed the third side of the town square. Most of the buildings housed shops—restaurants, silversmiths, antiques stores, a gun shop. The church dominated the square. It was massive, cut-stone, Spanish colonial, with a heavily ornamented portal in front and twin belfries on either side. There were a few steps leading up to it. I didn’t see anyone standing on the stairs, but it was just ten of nine.

  I wandered down the dusty sidewalk, reading the historical markers on the buildings. The store at the far end of the square—away from the church—was built like a stone garrison. It looked very old. The marker on the door said that it had been a jail at one time. At another time, it had been the seat of the New Mexican territorial government. Billy the Kid had been incarcerated there by Marshal Pat Garrett. And, before that, the Gadsden Purchase had been signed in the building. I went in.

  It was an antiques and curio shop now. A rugged-looking woman, her skin weathered by the sun, was standing behind a glass-and-wood display counter, full of silver belt buckles and silver and turquoise Indian jewelry.

  “Was Billy the Kid really jailed here?” I asked her.

  She looked at me disinterestedly. “That’s what the sign says, doesn’t it? He was jailed here before they moved him up to Lincoln county. That’s where he made most of the trouble.”

  I knew a few of the names. Tunstall and Chisolm. I’d heard them in movies or read them in books. But the crowded little room, with its thick stone walls and worn beam ceiling, didn’t look like anything out of a movie. It looked like a provisioner’s store. Small, windowless, full of goods.

  “How old is this building?” I asked.

  “It goes back a long way,” the woman said with a touch of pride. “To the Spanish missionaries. This used to be the chief city of New Mexico. Mesilla was the capital of the territory for a while.” She sounded wistful and a little soured, as if she resented the fact that they’d moved the capital to Santa Fe.

  “He was a right bastard, you know,” she said as I walked back to the door.

  “Who?”

  “Billy the Kid. He was a liar and a killer. All that crap about how the Mexicans loved him? That was just crap. They hated him. They were afraid of him. He was crazy.”

  “I’m disappointed to hear it,” I said.

  “Most people are,” the woman said.

  I walked back up the sidewalk to the church. There was a man sitting on the steps. I couldn’t see him clearly until I got to the head of the square. He was wearing jeans and a white cotton shirt. His hair was glossy black, parted in the middle, and combed down flat on either side of his head. He had a small moustache and a lean, brown, pockmarked face. He wasn’t very big, but he had big muscles in his arms. He looked as if he’d worked hard all his life. There was a mark on his face. I thought it was a birthmark until I walked up to
him. But it wasn’t a birthmark; it was a tiny teardrop, tattooed in fading blue ink at the corner of his left eye.

  “Mr. Ramirez?” I said.

  The man stood up. “I’m Jorge Ramirez.”

  “Harry Stoner.”

  I held out my hand and we shook. I towered over the little man. He couldn’t have been more than five seven or five eight. His white shirt billowed at his belt, as if it were several sizes too large for him.

  “How can I help you, señor?” he said.

  “I’d like you to take me to Dover’s ranch,” I said. “Can you do that?”

  “Of course.”

  “And would you mind answering some questions, too?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” he said placidly. “The ranch is in the hills. We need a car.”

  “We can take mine.”

  “Better take my Jeep,” Ramirez said. “It’s pretty rough road out there.”

  36

  I FOLLOWED Ramirez across the promenade to another walkway that ran between a couple of buildings on the far side of the square. His Jeep was parked in an alley, behind the gunsmith’s shop. It was an open-topped Jeep, with a rollbar on it. It looked fairly beaten.

  As I got in, I asked him how far away the ranch was.

  “Ten miles. Not far.”

  “And where’s the airfield in Las Cruces?”

  The man pointed south. “Same direction. ‘Bout five miles.”

  “Did you pick Dover up at the airfield this weekend?”

  He nodded. “On Friday night.”

  “Do you know why he came to Las Cruces?”

  “He came about the ranch,” Ramirez said. “We talk about it last week. It gave him a lot of trouble, with the floods and all. He made up his mind he was gonna sell it.”

  “And that’s what he came here for?”

  “Yeah,” the man said. “He tol’ me last week he’d got a buyer. A rancher from Texas.”

  I sat back on the Jeep seat. “Did he sell it?”

  Ramirez nodded again. “I think so. On Saturday. He didn’ want to sell it—I’m sure. But...” Ramirez spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “You were his overseer?”

  “Yeah.” He started the Jeep up and we took off with a lurch.

  The wind was too loud to hold a conversation over. So I just sat back and took in the view. Ramirez drove east to the road I’d been on, turned south onto it, and headed away from town toward Mexico. There was a mountain range on the southwest horizon. Eight miles down the road, Ramirez turned onto a dirt lane that led to the mountains. There was a ranch built on the side of one of the foothills. Even at a distance, I could tell that it was a big spread. A dry wash ran past it, coming down the mountainside and cutting across the desert floor. The dirt of the wash was yellow and cracked. The Jeep shook as we crossed over it. The ranch house was a quarter of a mile further down the road. Ramirez pulled up in front of it. There was a “For Sale by Owner” sign stuck in the yard, with a “Sold” sticker pasted over it.

  I stared at the sign for a second. I didn’t know if it was my pride or my mean streak, but I felt cheated.

  “He came all that way to sell his house?” I said. “That’s what this was all about?”

  “What what was all about?” Ramirez said politely.

  I shook my head. “It’s not important. Did Dover do anything else while he was in town—other than meet with the buyer from Texas?”

  “I don’ know. I didn’ see him after I picked him up at the airport.”

  I stared at the house again. It was an elaborate thing for such a remote spot. Full of plate glass. Modern A-style, rather than the traditional Spanish of the haciendas in Mesilla. There was a pool behind it, covered with a tarp. And a tennis court, fenced in wire.

  “How much did he get for it?” I asked Ramirez.

  “I don’ know. A hundred and fifty thousand, maybe. That’s what he was asking. He was taking a beating, man. It cost him a lot to fix the place up after the last flood.”

  “Who was the buyer, do you know?”

  “He say a man named Clark. Gene Clark. Big rancher from El Paso. He wanted a place to spend the winter—some place close to home.”

  “Did you meet this guy?”

  “No. I don’ see him. Señor Dover said he was gonna meet him at the ranch.”

  A gust of wind kicked up a spout of dirt at my feet, as if someone had taken a shot at me with a rifle.

  I felt a little like I’d been shot at. “For chrissake,” I said aloud.

  “You wouldn’t have a key to the place, would you?”

  Ramirez shook his head. “Senor Dover took the keys.”

  “Chrissake,” I said again.

  I walked back to the Jeep, Ramirez tagging along beside me.

  “Do you know how to get in touch with Clark?”

  He shook his head. “Señor Dover handled it. All I do is pick him up and take him back to the airport.”

  “Might as well take me back to Mesilla then,” I said. “I guess I’ll have to get in touch with Clark from there.”

  “Yes, Señor,” Ramirez said.

  As soon as I got back to the hotel, I called El Paso information and asked for Gene Clark’s number. They didn’t have a listing for him, under Gene or Eugene or G. or E. I thought about calling Seth Murdock to see if he knew anything about Clark, but I was almost certain that he didn’t—Dover hadn’t mentioned him or the sale of the ranch to his lawyer. He’d just told Murdock that he was involved in some business deal. I couldn’t really understand that—why he hadn’t told Murdock about the ranch sale. I could see why he wouldn’t have mentioned it to his mother or to Marsha. Connie, particularly, wouldn’t have had a hard time putting two and two together, especially if Dover had been as sentimentally attached to the place as Murdock had claimed. She knew that her son was having problems on ‘Phoenix’; the sale of the ranch would have tipped her off to how serious those problems really were. But Murdock was a different case. He didn’t know about ‘Phoenix.’ In fact, he’d been urging Quentin to unload the New Mexican property. There was no reason not to let him in on a possible sale, unless Dover’s pride had kept him from admitting to Murdock that he’d been right about selling the ranch.

  I didn’t really believe that. No more than I really believed that Dover had taken all of those extraordinary precautions just to disguise the sale of some property. True, it was a large sale—a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, according to Ramirez. But Dover was well over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. Between the mortgage payments on his estate house and his mother’s condo, fifty grand wouldn’t have bought him much time.

  I decided to phone around in Las Cruces, anyway, to see if a bank or savings and loan or realty office recognized Clark’s name or knew about the sale of the ranch. I went through the Las Cruces phone book. There were only a couple of dozen banks and realtors. It took me two hours to make the calls. No one I spoke to knew anything about Clark. No one even knew that Dover’s ranch had been for sale. All of them recognized Quentin’s name and said some sad word about his death. They seemed to have liked Dover in Las Cruces—that’s about all I learned. Ramirez seemed to have liked him, too. I remembered that Connie Dover had accused Ramirez of fooling around when he visited Cincinnati. But after meeting the man, I doubted it. Ramirez didn’t look like the type who fooled around at anything. He struck me as being a tough little New Mexican cookie. But then most of the people I’d met or talked to in Las Cruces seemed hard-boiled and tough.

  At two o’clock, I gave up on my phone survey and decided to drive back out to the ranch. I thought there might be something inside the house that would lead me to Gene Clark—if there was a Gene Clark. I wasn’t quite ready to write him off as another one of Dover’s inventions, aimed, this time, at keeping his overseer from knowing what he was really up to on Saturday. But I was leaning that way.

  It was scorchingly hot outside by that hour of the day. I could feel the heat rolling off the parking
lot as I walked to my car. The tar was soft and sticky underfoot. I rolled down the car windows, opened the doors, switched the air conditioner on full blast and started the Mustang up. When I could get inside the car without breaking into a sweat, I rolled the windows back up and took off, down the long dusty road on the eastern side of town.

  It took me ten minutes through the desert to get to the turnoff. I babied the car across the dry wash and pulled to a stop in front of the ranch. The tires kicked up a mighty cloud of dirt. I waited for the dust to settle, then got out and walked up to the front door. The door was set in a low brick wall; a triangular picture window ran above it to the tent-shaped roof. I rattled the door but it was locked. Then I stepped back and tried to look into the high window. There was a heavy curtain hanging across it. I walked around to the west side of the house and continued along the brick wall to the back yard. There were a couple of smaller windows in the back wall and another door. I tried the door but it, too, was locked.

  There was no way in, unless I broke a window or jimmied a door. I thought about it for a moment and decided that it was worth the risk. What I needed was a large rock or piece of timber. I scratched around the back yard looking for a crowbar. Eventually I settled on a long metal pole I found on the deck of the pool. I picked it up and took it back to the house. There were two small windows on either side of the rear door—probably bathroom or kitchen windows. I picked the one to my right and tapped it with the pole. The glass was thick and I had to whack it a couple of times before it shattered. I knocked all the loose glass out of the casement with the pole. Then I went back to the pool, sat down on the deck in the shade of a palo verde tree, and waited.

  The window glass hadn’t been wired or taped. But there might have been a vibration-sensing or photoelectric device connected to some alarm system that ran through the underground phone lines to the Las Cruces police department or to a private security firm. I gave the cops fifteen minutes to respond to the alarm. No one showed. I waited another five minutes just to be sure, then I walked over to the window and boosted myself in.