'Compact,' Hawk said.
We took our luggage, left the other gear on the floor in the living room, and located ourselves in bedrooms. I took a front bedroom where you could overlook the town. There was a double bed with maple headboard and footboard and fluted posts with wooden flames at the top at each corner, a maple dresser and a disreputable looking gray-and-black steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. The windows had shades, but no curtains. Normally when I travel, I don't unpack, but I was going to be here a bit, so I put my stuff in the maple bureau, and went back downstairs. Bernard, Tedy Sapp, Hawk and Vinnie were sitting on the wide porch in the cooling evening, having a drink.
'You want something?' Bernard said.
He had set up a little drink table on the porch, with ice in a bucket. I made myself a Scotch and soda and sat down.
'I guess you've all met.'
'We have,' Sapp said. 'Two more coming?'
'Yeah, driving over from L.A.'
'Desert cools off good in the dark doesn't it,' Sapp said. 'Georgia it's hot all night.'
'Hope the a/c keep pumping,' Hawk said.
'It don't I can fix it,' Vinnie said.
'You know how to fix air-conditioners?' Hawk said.
'Anything,' Vinnie said. 'Cars, machine guns, phones, TVs. I can fix shit.'
We all looked at Vinnie as if he had just come out of the closet. He shrugged. We drank our drinks and sat quietly. The desert air was clear and the stars were bigger than I was used to. A night bird kept chirping something that sounded like 'tuck-a-hoo.'
I felt like singing 'Home on the Range.'
'You hungry?' Sapp asked.
'The drive out was a movable feast,' I said. 'Why would we be hungry?'
'I made a meatloaf,' Sapp said, 'and there's some beans.'
'Well aren't you the homebody,' Hawk said.
'Yeah. Bernie hated my pink apron,' Sapp said. 'Straight guys are so fucking straight.'
'Bernard,' Fortunato said.
'There's biscuits, too,' Sapp said.
Chapter 37
I was in the Chiricahuas County Sheriff's Department talking with their chief homicide investigator. The room was cinderblock. The windows were tinted. The air-conditioning was high. The metal desk and chairs and file cabinet and small conference table were forest green, perfectly complementing the light green walls. All of it was brightly lit by a bank of overhead fluorescents, which perfectly complemented the sunlight coming in through the windows. The chief investigator's name was Cawley Dark. He was a thin, leathery-looking guy wearing starched blue jeans and snakeskin cowboy boots, a white oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a Glock 9, high on his waist just in front of his right hip. On the forest green metal bookcase behind his desk was a big photograph of three teenaged girls clustering around a blond horse with a white mane.
'Buckman was shot three times,' he said. 'With a 9-millimeter weapon. We did an autopsy, couldn't match the slugs to anything. Wife says he was threatened by some people from the Dell. We say, `Who?' She says, `I don't know.' We say, `Would you recognize them?' She says, `Certainly.' '
'Pick up anyone from the Dell?' I said.
Dark smiled.
'Everybody we picked up was from the Dell,' he said. 'It's what we use for a ghetto, out here.'
'And?'
'And she says none of them are the guys. She thinks.'
'Anybody else look at them?'
'Nope.'
'He got shot in the middle of the day on the main street in Potshot and no one saw anything.'
'Amazing isn't it,' Dark said.
'You have any reason to believe it wasn't the way it's been described?' I said.
'Nothing I know says it didn't happen that way,' Dark said.
'But?'
'But nothing I know says it's right.' Dark said. 'You want coffee?'
'No thanks.'
He got up and went to a coffeemaker on top of the file cabinet and poured himself some coffee from a stained pot, and came back and sat down. He took a sip and shuddered.
'Goddamn that's awful,' he said.
