Listen to the Mockingbird (23 page)

“Do you remember any blood here?” I pointed at place above the left eye.

Julio puzzled for a moment. “No. Only here.” He made a circular motion above the center of the forehead.

The wound on the man who had fallen against my window might have come from a bullet, but one that only grazed the flesh, not one that killed. Or it might have come from hitting the head on something hard—a board, a rock, even a fist.

I expelled my breath slowly, feeling my heartbeat quicken.

“It is not right?” Julio asked.

“No, no. It’s very right. Very good.” I took the board from him and peered at it intently. “You are a fine artist, Julio.” I took from my pocket the twenty-dollar gold piece I had taken from the chest that morning. At the time I had thought twenty dollars was far too much. Now I thought it was too little. I held it out.

“No,” Julio said, standing up. He brushed his hands on his trousers and grinned. “No pay. Is gift.”

I looked up at him, realizing I had never thought about the owner of the pair of hands and strong arms I paid wages to. I had hardly even thought of him by name, but only as Nacho’s son. I discovered now that I quite liked him.

“Take it,” I said softly. “I want you to have it. You have earned it. You are an excellent artist. As soon as I have time, I will talk to some people in town about you.”

He hesitated, then: “Gracias.” He took the coin and, with his slow, deliberate pace, left the barn.

I turned back to the drawing. How could I have thought this was the same face that had fallen against my window? The eyes in that face had not been so far apart. Now that I looked at the sketch, the two faces seemed hardly alike at all.

I had barely looked at the dead boy’s face that night. I had wanted to avoid seeing it. And since the face at my window and the dead boy in the barn had happened together quickly, my brain had decided they were one and the same. There was a slight resemblance, yes—the beard, the dark hair. But the boy’s beard had been that of a boy, scraggly, not full grown. And the face at my window had worn the thick beard of a man.

I wished fervently that I could describe that other face well enough for Julio to draw it. I was certain now that it was the face of the boy’s killer.

Chapter Twenty-six

Zeke looked up, surprise written across his broad face, when I strode into his office. Then he smiled. “The room and board so good here you decided to move back?”

I was feeling dead serious; but this was the first time I’d ever heard him attempt a joke, so I laughed. “Nope, Zeke,” I said, sliding into the chair next to his desk, “I want to ask you something.”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded. “You just want me to hire you as a cook.”

“I daresay I figured you must have starved without me here to cook for you,” I retorted.

That obviously called for another laugh before I could unroll the cloth on his desk and show him the sketch. His eyebrows pulled down in a perplexed line. “Who’s that?”

“The boy I am supposed to have killed. Kid on the ranch saw him after he was dead, drew him from memory.”

Zeke examined the sketch. “Why you showing this to me?”

“You ever happen to see him?”

After a long perusal of the cloth, Zeke’s pale blue eyes looked up. “Can’t say I ever did.”

“His name was Diego Ramirez.”

Zeke frowned and shook his head. “Don’t know, Matty. One Mex name sounds like another, if you know what I mean. How d’you know his name if you never talked to him? And why you askin’ me about him?”

I skipped the first question. “I’m thinking my best chance to get out of this free and clear, with my land still belonging to me, is to see if I can find whoever did kill this kid. Zeke, there was someone else out there the night the boy was killed. I saw him. For a long time, I thought it was the boy I saw, before he died. But it wasn’t. So I’m trying to find out where this kid was before he got himself shot and whether anyone was with him. And anything else that might help.”

Zeke gave me a look that said only a woman would think of such a peculiar approach. “Good luck,” he said.

999

At Smithers’ barbershop, Simon Trujillo gave me a startled, embarrassed look, as though I had walked into an outhouse full of men. He did most of the barbering for old Ben Smithers. Simon was a thin, nervous fellow; he almost dropped his scissors. I didn’t recognize the man lying in the chair with a towel over the lower part of his face, but the eyes rolled toward Simon as if my presence were the barber’s fault.

“I wonder if you gentlemen would mind taking a look at this picture?”

Simon finally stopped staring, and his head bobbed twice. The man in the chair sat up with an ill-tempered jerk and I recognized Jonathon Mapes, who ran sheep over near Doña Ana. His square face was red where the towel had been softening up his beard for a shave. His hair was the color of rusted iron, wiry curls with a lot of grey. His chin was split by a cleft. There was a sullen look about the jaw; but at sixty-something, he was still handsome.

I unrolled the cloth and laid it in Mapes’ lap.

“Looks like a Mex,” he growled. “What about it?”

“This kid died in my barn last spring,” I said. “I’m trying to find out if anyone knew him.”

“Not likely,” he fumed. Then his eyes sharpened and ran over my face like knives. “I heard tell it was you killed him.”

“No,” I said, trying to keep the rush of anger out of my voice. “I certainly did not kill him. Apparently, someone thinks I did because I was arrested for it; but my foreman told Zeke that he saw me in the house about the same time this boy was shot, so Zeke knows I couldn’t have done it.” I hoped Zeke in fact did believe Nacho.

“So, what do you care whether anyone saw him?” Mapes growled.

“Seems to me it would be best all around if we found out who did kill him.”

Mapes flung himself back down in the chair and clamped the towel over his face. Then he jerked the towel away again and pitched it toward the sink behind Simon. “Dratted thing’s cold now.” He fixed me with a stare. “Never saw him. And I don’t want you botherin’ my boys. They ain’t seen him, neither, and they got work to do. Anybody comes to my spread uninvited gets a bead drawn on ’em.”

“That’s right friendly,” I said. I knew a lot of folks didn’t much like Mapes, but it wasn’t just his mean mouth. A creek ran through his land and he had dammed it. The creek only ran summers and didn’t carry much water even then, but the air was often still in summer, too still to stir a windmill. Then, ranchers without springs like mine had to depend on creeks. Anybody below Mapes’ land had nothing to rely on except whatever water they had pumped up in the winds of February. One of Mapes’ men might have seen the kid in town or stopped him on the road, but I decided I’d head out his way only as a last resort.

I turned to Simon. “How about you?” The little man was obviously intimidated by his customer and probably wished I were on the moon—or anywhere but there. His eyes flicked back to the sketch. I took it from Mapes’ lap and held it out. “Please,” I said. “Take a good look. Did you see him? It would have been in January or early February. Did he come in for a haircut or a shave? Or did you happen to see him around town?”

“I think maybe I see him,” Simon said slowly, still staring at the sketch. “But I am not sure.”

“Where?”

“Not here. That I would remember. In the plaza. By Garza’s.” The general store.

“Please. Think carefully. Was he coming out of the store? Was anyone with him? What was he doing?”

Simon thought about that. “He was coming from the bank. Or maybe the saloon. I notice him because he was walking very fast. The heel of his boot, I think it come off and he almost fall.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“There was another man, yes. Not with him, but I think maybe he try to catch up with this one.” Simon pointed to the sketch.

“Did he catch up with him?”

Simon nodded. “When this one fall, he take his arm.”

“What did the second man look like?”

Simon thought about this a long time. Finally, he shook his head. “I do not know. I do not remember. I am not even sure the other is the same as this one.” He jabbed the drawing. “It is a long time ago. We have many strangers in town since then.”

“Just the goddam Confederate army,” Mapes grunted. “Hot up that damn towel, Simon, and let’s get on with it.”

Simon hurried to do as he was bid; and I, knowing my welcome was wearing mighty thin, at least with Mapes, thanked both men and left.

999

In front of the bank, thick vigas supported a roof that extended all the way to the hitching posts. The building, like most of the others that lined the plaza, resembled a squat, heavy-browed peasant peering toward the dusty square in the center. The single window was barred but the bars were wood, and anyone with a good saw could have cut through them in minutes.

Jeremy Neuman was a rather stodgy fellow with closely cropped pale-brown hair and a chin as free of stubble as a baby’s. I’d seen him a few times around town; but as I didn’t trust banks much, I’d put no money with him.

He wore the only starched shirt I had seen in some time and a neat little string tie at the collar. He looked up and blinked watery blue eyes at me from behind the lenses of his little round spectacles. He had the look of a man who was born at about the age of forty-six and never aged further.

“Ma’am?” He managed to make the single word sound remotely suspicious.

I unrolled Julio’s cloth drawing. Neuman frowned and recoiled as if I’d drawn a pistol. “It’s just a picture, Mr. Neuman. Have you ever seen this man?”

He didn’t bother to look at it closely. “Mexicans do not generally use banks,” he said coldly.

“But I’ve seen Mr. Garza coming from here, and Mr. Castillo.” There were several Mexican merchants in Mesilla.

“They are older,” Neuman said frostily, as if age transcended race. “That is obviously a young Mexican. I don’t believe a young Mexican fellow has ever set foot in this bank.”

“Okay.” I rolled up the drawing and left, doubly certain that I had been wise to keep my money at home.

999

The general store had the smell of a brand-new barn, before the odors of dust and aging fodder overcome the aroma of wood and leather. Wooden buckets stacked in towers flanked one side of the door, a table full of bright yellow Mexican dishes stood on the other. A man who looked like he needed a bath more than he needed one of the tin cups he was examining seemed to be the only customer.

Garza was sitting on an upended barrel next to the counter where people paid for their purchases. I picked my way around sacks of cornmeal and wooden boxes of nails. He stood as I approached, a mere wisp of a man, probably wiry and quick when he was young but now stooped at the shoulders so that he had to cock his head sideways to look at me. Bushy eyebrows seemed about to take over his face.

Garza and his brother had opened the store the same year people had come to Mesilla in hopes of a land grant. The brother had up and disappeared with their serving woman sometime before I arrived in the valley. Or so I had heard.

There was another, smaller general store in Doña Ana; but sooner or later, most anyone who spent any time at all in the Mesilla Valley came to Garza’s for supplies.

“Good morning,” I sang out cheerily.

“Si, si, it is, it is,” he agreed in a gravelly voice and waited. Long years of dealing with people had given him the patience of Job.

I unrolled the cloth and asked my well-rehearsed questions. He left his perch on the barrel. Despite his spine, which seemed to have fused stiffly at the shoulders, his movements were quick. His hand darted out and took the sketch from me.

“Ah,” he said. “This hombre, he is from México.” He pronounced it Meh-he-co, with the accent on the first syllable.

“You know him?” I asked quickly.

“No.” He shook his head, the bushy eyebrows drawn down around the beak of a nose. “He come in the store and we talk a little, I think.”

“When?”

“Many month ago, I think.” Then he shook his head. “No. He was not from México. His mama and papa come from México. He say he was born here. He come back.”

“From where?”

Garza cocked his head at an odd angle and studied the dusty vigas, the round rafters that held up the roof of his store. “Texas, I think. San Antonio, maybe.”

“Was he with someone?” I asked and held my breath.

“I see no one.”

So much for that. I thanked him and turned to go. I’d already opened the door when I remembered something and turned back, but the old geezer who had been examining the tin cups was in my path. He smelled as bad as he looked.

“Yo’re huntin’ someone?” he asked.

Trying to stay out of the path of his breath, which reeked of onions and whiskey, I showed him the sketch.

He nodded. His face was so filthy the grime seemed to crack when he moved. Wisps of greasy dark hair stood out at all angles from his head. He jabbed a dirty finger at the drawing. “That’s the kid was staying at San Juan. Sure enough, it is.”

“Where is San Juan?”

The old man raised a bony shoulder. “Tortugas, San Juan. Where them Injuns is.” He poked the sketch again. “I seen him. Said him and his friend had a fallin’ out an’ he was puttin’ up there.”

I leaped at his words. “Friend?” I asked urgently. “What did the friend look like?”

“Dunno,” the codger grunted. “Just he said there was two of ’em.”

Garza had returned to his post by the cash register. I walked back and stood in front of him. “Did he buy anything, Mr. Garza? The boy who said he was born here?”

“Si.” Garza’s head gave several stiff little bobs. “He buy a money bag. No, no,” he said to my stunned expression. “A little bag. To wear here.” He pointed to his throat.

Behind me, the door opened, and I turned to see who had entered but glimpsed instead the disappearing figure of a woman. I frowned. I hadn’t thought anyone else was in the store. “Was that Isabel Tolhurst?”

Garcia’s head was bobbing; his face bore a look of tolerant concern. “Si. Señora Tolhurst wishes for new dishes. But she has not the money.”

Chapter Twenty-seven