Chapter 26

THE GOOD COP DETECTIVE WITHOUT A tie leaned back in his chair, riding its back legs, rearing the fronts, and pushed another photo at me. It showed scrubby oak on Ivy’s hilltop—the rock cairn was clear in the background. Someone had carved letters and a scene on the oak.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I’m for honest observation. “Looks like someone carved something on a tree.”

He folded his arms behind his head. “Eliana Gomez has her own bedroom in the house, but Oscar De La Rosa stays in the bunkhouse?”

“That’s the way I understand it.” I wondered why we were discussing the sleeping arrangements.

“They’re not a couple?”

If Oscar and Vicente and Eliana had been in one of those three-way stories where a bunny gets boiled, so to speak, it could explain a few things. I shook my head.

“I guess I don’t rightly know. Reckon it’d be easy for everyone to assume that, I suppose because they’re the two who work in and around the house, but I think they met here. Hey, aren’t you the one interviewing Eliana?”

“A specialist does polygraphs. Takes a while to prepare for—there’s a preinterview and the attorney is sitting in on that—then the actual test is run a few times.”

I opened my big yap some more. “Ivy wanted her attorney to be here when you talked to me.”

“What do you want?” he asked. “I’d like to talk to you. Do you want to talk to me? Can we talk about mules?”

This, I could do. I leaned forward, nodding eagerly. “I saw a real good-looking john—”

“A john? They’re into prostitution, too?” He looked at his notes, frowned and leaned out the interview room door. “Hey, Mattingly, you know anything about Beaumont managing prostitution?”

A man’s voice came back with, “First I’ve heard.”

He took his time sitting down, then reared his chair again. “Miss Dale, what have you seen or heard?”

“About mules, right?”

“Right.” He nodded encouragement at me. “Drug mules.”

“Drug mules? Oh, you’re … not talking about the sixty-three-chromosome hybrid between a horse and a donkey.”

He frowned. “A donkey?”

Air escaped my sails, my lungs. This conversation was not going my way at all. “You’re not talking about the pig-mules either.”

“Pig-mules?”

“Wild pigs running around these hills,” I said. “From European boars and feral domestics.”

The door opened and the super special agent leaned in to wave Plaid Shirt out of the room. Just outside the heavy door, Super Special asked a question.

“Is she retarded or something?”

There are times when my excellent hearing is not a good thing. A couple of people laughed out there, but then I was rewarded with a comment from a voice I recognized as Ponytail’s.

“The second one.”

“Yeah,” Plaid Shirt agreed, “or something. I’ve seen this before. My sister is one of them.”

“One of what?” Mr. Special Agent asked.

“A horse person. They’re just … different.”

“As in stupid?” Special, My Not-Fan said. “Johns? Prostitution? Beaumonts are cocaine incorporated.”

“That they are. That they are.” Plaid Shirt laughed as he came back in the interview room and gave me a sideways glance.

Thinking about the baggies of salt and sugar in the forge room, I replayed Ivy’s reaction to the find.

I’m such a big, fat hairy idiot that sometimes even a big, fat hairy idiot like me can see it.

What and all with the Beaumonts maybe being busy, big deal drug dealers, no, I guess they didn’t have time to check all their land for disappeared employees. I whistled. Ivy’s hired help did some very odd jobs for her. Had Vicente the herder had another job beyond tending sheep?

My mental note to ask Melinda about a few things kicked in as I stepped into the sunshine outside the building where the local police had their offices. Across the street was a Starbucks, and there was Ivy in the plate glass window, phone in one hand, five-dollar coffee in the other. I whispered to Charley through the few inches of open window on Ivy’s Hummer, “Hang in there.” I texted my mama that I’d be in the coffee shop across the street, then walked over to make it true. Ivy didn’t notice me enter the coffee-soaked air, and I caught her end of the call.

“Well, that is quite concerning. Thank you. You’ll keep on top of this with the others?” Ivy hung up. As I sat down across from her, she gave me a look of triumph.

I asked, “How old would Fire have been now?”

She looked startled by my question and flipped her long hair from the sultry pose it held seconds before, half-draped across her face. “Let me think.” Her nose wrinkled and her lips moved as she counted up the memories. “Thirteen. He was eleven, just bred his last litter when … I thought Vicente took off with him.”

Sick to my stomach is what I felt. Charley, Fire’s littermate, was thirteen now. That was years older than I’d guessed my dog’s age. I felt like some of my future years with him had just been stolen.

This weekend had whipped me in every way.

Ivy folded her arms and pushed back in her chair, looking like she was about to take on the world. “Eliana is showing deception in her interview.”

“Deception?”

“That’s what they called it. Leonard heard one of the policemen talking to another. They think she’s being deceptive.”

I thought about how Ivy had four employees on her ranch, three in the bunkhouse and one in the big house. I’d only searched three of those four bedrooms. What would have been found in the fourth? I asked, “What would Eliana be lying about?”

“Obviously,” Ivy said, “about Vicente. That’s what they’re interviewing her about.”

I thought about the other things the cops had asked me. No one in this mess ever showed all their cards. I was no different. It didn’t make sense for me to talk to Ivy about the cocaine business. Instead, I asked, “Can you picture Eliana up on that hilltop, burying Vicente?”

Ivy shook her head “She’s not really outdoorsy, likes the indoor work.” Then she gawked out the window. “Oh, my God! What is she doing here?”

Solar walked right in and sat herself down at our table. She wore an ultralight windbreaker like the one Guy wears to run in the rain, over all the stretchy, bright yoga clothes. She plunked down a little brown package that could have been the one Ivy set down in Ol’ Blue Saturday morning.

Ivy’s gawk morphed into a glare. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? The police are right across the road.”

Looking from Solar to Ivy and back again didn’t clear things up for me. A two-door convertible pulled up in the parking slot straight at our table and flashed its headlights. The woman driver wore sunglasses, but I was pretty sure—

Ivy gave the orders. “Solar, get out of here. And take that with you.”

My mama flashed her headlights again. I was safe. I relaxed enough to think and smiled at Ivy who peered at the convertible and pointedly ignored Solar.

After a good long minute or three, Solar took her package and flounced out.

I said, “Eliana made the meals for Vicente.”

Ivy smacked her coffee cup down. “Oh, my God, Rainy, you’re a genius.”

It was a sentence I’d never heard. But Eliana had made breakfast, lunch, and dinner since I’d been in Black Bluff.

Ivy said, “Eliana poisoned Vicente. She put poison in the stew and had someone else bring it up to Vicente.”

I considered the accusation. “Do you figure the person delivering the thermos had no idea or was in on the murder?”

Ivy snapped her fingers. “Oh. Oscar. That explains why he took off. Maybe it wasn’t Eliana who poisoned Vicente. It was Oscar. Oscar put the stuff in the thermos. But, no, Eliana must have been in on it, since she’s failing her polygraph.”

“Where’s Vicente’s money?” I asked.

“What?” Ivy sounded like she was snapping at me, but the espresso machine whirred suddenly, making enough noise that we had to raise our voices to hear each other.

Inklings of ideas that made more sense than at first blush were creeping in on my mind. I sounded them off for Ivy. “You said Vicente didn’t use a bank. You didn’t take him to La Tienda to wire money home to family, like Eliana and Oscar do. So where’s Vicente’s money? What did he spend it on? Where did he keep it?”

Instead of answering me, Ivy answered her phone’s chime. She listened for a piece then said, “Right. Right. Then, get the key back from her. Right. No, my house key. Yes, she has one, she lives there, Leonard. So, get the key back.” When Ivy hung up, she gave me a look like goodbye. “Can you get a ride? Gabe will be in town with Stuckey in another hour or so. I’m swamped. And I have to meet with my attorney, like, immediately.”

I blinked, as dumped as Eliana. But I’d never wanted to be dependent on Ivy. I kept my voice even. “My mama’s here for me. Just let me get Charley out of your car.”

***

These days, my pretty mama was driving a sea-green Mercedes two-door, ragtop lowered. Her fake blonde bob fluffed in the breeze as she peered over her sunglasses at Ivy and me crossing the street. When I got Charley out of the Hummer, my mama watched us in her rearview mirror. Charley was barely at my side when Ivy drove off with careful determination that did not include attracting any attention through aggressive driving. She never chanced a glance toward my mama. It was like two panthers thought about fighting but went back to their own territory.

“Hey, horseshoer.”

I turned. Ponytail’s head poked up from the other side of a row of parked cars beyond hedges at the back of the police building.

“Who’s in the car at Starbucks?” she asked.

“My mom.”

“Good. Take care.”

From the Starbucks lot, Charley and my mama and I watched Ivy’s attorney drive away from the police station. I figured Eliana was still inside, with no one in her corner. It stunk.

Mama managed to not look thrilled when Charley and I both piled into her car. She wanted to tell me all about the new part she’d gotten in a modern western where she’d play the plucky ranching woman—she’d sold them on her massive familiarity with horses.

“You haven’t been near a horse since I was five.”

“Practically yesterday. Now tell me what you’re wearing—”

I cut off her questions by raising my cell, and waved her toward the Beaumont ranch while I got Melinda on the line, and my mama went on about how my Daddy was pulled over near Black Bluff, waiting to see if we needed him to come into town. Only because my folks were heading up north for my wedding was I able to have them handy when I needed them.

Mel had to listen for a while to get caught up to speed. Not enough time. I hit the high points, including having just been interviewed by the local police. “She sent her attorney in with the gal, Eliana, was going to send him in with me, but I guess the cops were talking to both of us at the same time and the lawyer couldn’t be in two places at once.”

“Why’d she send her attorney?”

“I suppose because she’s got a snootful of cash.”

“Shit fire,” Melinda said. “If it’s her attorney, then the man is working for Ivy Beaumont, not the interviewee.”

“Can he do that?”

“I think he did do that,” Melinda said. “Might not hold up in court or church.”

“Farting in a rain suit don’t make you a balloon,” I explained. I saw my mama wince. Then I told Melinda all about the detective and his buddy, Mister Special. It was a great way to fill my mama in at the same time.

Wow, the looks she shot me while I gave Melinda the scoop about all I told the cops and all they asked me while I was behind those heavy doors. And my arm got slapped when I twisted my ponytail into a stick with my left hand, holding the phone in my right.

Melinda asked, “So, you thought you weren’t free to leave the police interview?”

“Guess not.”

“Then it was custodial interrogation without Miranda and nothing you said can be … wait a minute. Have you done anything?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know that Guy is …” The connection crackled but I finally caught Melinda saying something about mules and then, “You ought to get out of there.”

“We’re either getting Ol’ Blue started or towed in the next hour.”

The connection kept cutting in and out as my mama got us nearer and nearer the Beaumont ranch. But I heard enough to get the gist. Melinda’s theory was that the police had turned Solar, figured the girl was wearing a wire, and was supposed to have made Ivy incriminate herself on the drug business. Mercy.

“I’m losing you, Mel.”

There was no answer, just silence. Mama filled the air with recriminations of how I should have never set foot on Milt Beaumont’s property.

She asked, “Now which one of all these people you mentioned is it who did in the poor man you found on the hilltop? The young woman they have down at the police station?”

I wondered if there could be another explanation for Eliana failing a lie detector test. What if she felt guilty about something else? I thought about the store where Oscar wired money home to Jalisco. Did Eliana wire someone else’s money? Vicente only had seventeen dollars in his wallet. He had no expenses and had earned a steady wage for a long time.

A big pickup with dually exhaust roared by us, raising a dust cloud as it charged the Beaumont ranch. Robbie Duffman. My mama peered at the white rental car at the side of the road. The ranch’s open front gate loomed ahead.

“I should talk to the dude in that car,” I said. “His uncle is the one who worked on the ranch and died here. Been avoiding it.”

“How did he die?”

“Pretty sure he was poisoned,” I told her.

“Accidentally?” she asked. “People do that. Maybe someone buried him at his home, a peaceful thing. But now that you discovered it, it looks bad, so they’re afraid to say anything.”

The notion of accidental poisoning started me to thinking about the bracken fern and horsetail back home in Butte County, john-songrass and locoweed where I’d grown up. There’s worse things, for horses and people, like oleander and castor. There were plenty of natural poisons growing in the dirt. I could be all wrong about the Compound 1080 answer. A natural death?

Maybe no one had any ill intentions, and someone buried a shepherd where he was happiest.

Suppose Vicente’s burial had been an act of kindness.

“Pull over, Mama.”

She probably thought I was going to be sick. She braked hard enough for me to open the door and step out. The soil crunched under my feet, bitterly dry on the road edge.

If my heebie-jeebies were to be believed, someone was watching over me, like the song says, but not in a good way. I figured the time for a talk with Sabino Arriaga was way overdue. We needed to settle up.

I hadn’t been honorable.