Ditch Rider (8 page)

“What are Goosebumps anyway?” I asked him.

“Books for kids.”

“What do you like about them?”

“They're scary.”

I thought real life was scary enough, but Goosebumps were a scare, maybe, he felt he could control. “Which one is your favorite?”

“The Beast from the East.”
He fingered the tassel that hung from his handlebars. “Do you think my sister killed Juan Padilla?” he asked.

“She says she did.”

“What do you think?”

It's hard to con a nine-year-old who has just helped you take out the trash, so I told him the truth as I saw it. “I don't know.”

“But you would let her go to jail.”

“It's not jail exactly, it's the D Home and then maybe the Girls' School.”

“She'll be in there with kids who are in gangs and in trouble, right?”

“Right. If she goes. It was her decision to plead guilty, Danny. Hers and your mother's.”

“My sister didn't kill anybody.” His eyes were bright.

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”

“If you're right, let's hope the police find the truth soon.”

Having about as much faith in the police as an adult would, he got back on his bike and pedaled furiously down the street.

“Thanks for helping me with the garbage can,” I called after him.

He
looked back over his shoulder. “It's nothing,” he yelled.

9

S
AIA AND
I met for lunch downtown the following day at Conrad's in La Posada, which was the first hotel in the Conrad Hilton chain. Conrad had been a New Mexico boy. We took a window table, where you can watch the street people stumble by pushing carts piled high with personal junk. There's only a wall of glass between you and them, and I'm always aware how thin a barrier it is, the difference between being a street cat, for example, or the well-fed Tabatoe.

Conrad's was nearly empty, although it used to be packed at lunchtime when the food had a Spanish flavor. But the chef had moved on, doing the Albuquerque chef shuffle, and the food had degenerated into a hot and gloppy mess with a cheese meltdown on top.

“We should have gone somewhere else,” I said.

But Saia dug right in without noticing that the quality of the food had gone south. He had crime-solving on his mind. “I read the police report,” he began. “I'd say your client knew a lot about Padilla's murder but didn't have a clue where the gun was dumped. Detective Jessup says Moran suddenly picked a location when she saw that she was getting close to home and that all the other kids were out of school and watching her.”

I had to give Jessup credit, because that was exactly the impression I'd had when Cheyanne jumped into the field. I'd thought she'd done it out of fear, but Saia seemed to be implying she'd done it for the attention. “The timing was bad, Anthony. She shouldn't have been out there when the other kids could see her with the police.”

“Who knew how long the search was going to take?” Saia asked. “What you have is a witness, Neil, not a perp. I'm going to need more than you've given me to indict Cheyanne Moran.”

“How about putting her in protective custody, then?”

“If she'll be a witness, I'll talk.”

“She won't do that.”

“No deal, then.” Saia was eating soft, talking tough with a mouth full of beans and salsa.

“You're putting a thirteen-year-old girl in a dangerous position, Anthony. You leave her out on the street and she's bait.”

“She always has the option of telling the truth. I'm sorry, Neil, but this perp story isn't cutting it for me. I'm under a lot of pressure to indict somebody for Padilla's murder, but I don't think your client's the one. I don't have the DNA back on the bullet yet and we need to interview some more people.”

“
It's your call,” I said, but his call was leaving me with a low-level anxiety hum. Taos is famous for its hum. There are many people up there who claim they can hear it, but my own feeling about low-level hums is that they come from foreboding and conscience, not from place.

Saia finished his meal and looked down at his empty plate. “It seems that Ron Cade has an alibi,” he said.

“How good?”

“I don't know. The boy who's supplying the alibi is out of town for a few days playing in a tennis tournament and we haven't been able to question him yet.”

“A tennis tournament?”

“That's what Cade says.”

“You'll let me know when you've checked it out?”

“Sure.” Saia looked at his watch and said, “Gotta go.”

He forgot to leave a tip, so I did it for him. I left more for him than I did for me, since he'd eaten his food.

******

Later that afternoon I called Sonia at Sandia Indian Bingo and passed on what Saia had said. Her response to my information was, “Shit.”

“Keep Cheyanne at home,” I advised.

******

When I got home after work Tabatoe was in my herb garden getting stoned on catnip and making me feel like the neighborhood drug dealer except that I wasn't getting paid for it. While Tabatoe purred and rolled in the dirt, the gray cat slinked around the corner switching its long tail and stepping lightly on silent paws. It snuck up behind Tabatoe at a leisurely pace, and when it was ready it pounced. Tabatoe let out a howl and raced down the driveway. I picked up a muddy running shoe and threw it at the gray cat. “Get out of here,” I yelled. It took off, too, but when I looked out the window an hour later it was back again chowing down. A territorial battle had been fought in my herb garden, and the gray cat had won. My turf was now its turf, too.

I began to see it often, racing down my driveway, standing on the windowsill silhouetted against the glass while I was in the bathroom, pacing the courtyard's adobe wall, guarding my catnip and flicking its long gray tail. It seemed like an omen or a threat, always present, always edgy, always wanting something from me. The catnip didn't make it roll contentedly in the dirt. All the weed did was reduce its hunger pangs. When I complained to the Kid, he told me to feed it.

“
If I feed it it will never go away,” I said.

“At least it won't look so hungry,” he said.

******

The following night I woke up when my neighbor's motion detector light flickered, went off, came back on again. My skylight was as bright as the moon and the light was turning the tree above it into a dancing shadow. The Kid groaned and pulled a pillow over his head. I lay still and listened. Except for my low-level anxiety hum, the night was very quiet; even the cicadas had ceased to scream. But the silence was filled with potential, and the potential I heard turned my spine to slush. I felt as if weights were pushing me deep in the bed.

There was a pounding on the street door. I jumped barefoot out of bed, ran across the bedroom, the living room and the courtyard. The gray cat stood on top of the adobe wall arching its back. “Get down,” I yelled. I yanked open the door but found nothing on the stoop. All I saw was the streetlight turning weed shadows into stilettos. I looked up and down Mirador Road, but I didn't see a car, a bike, La Llorona or anything else in motion. The cat obeyed my command and jumped off the wall, and the motion detector light flickered off. I began to wonder if it wasn't the cat that had turned the light on in the first place and whether the pounding at the door had been a paranoid dream. I was about to go back to bed when I heard the squeal of a wounded animal on the far side of the courtyard. I stepped out the door and walked gingerly around the corner; my feet were still bare and the ground was full of prickers. I wondered whether I was going to find a victim of the gray cat or the victim of a human being. I found Cheyanne curled up in a ball between a piñon and the wall.

“Help me,” she whimpered.

“Can you walk?”

“I think so.”

I took her by the arms and lifted her up. She was smeared with blood. It came off on my hands when I touched her, although in this light it looked more like dark water than red blood. I took her hand and led her through the courtyard into the living room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the bricks and the floor.

“What happened? Were you shot?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Cut.”

I took her into the bathroom and tried to stop the bleeding with a towel. Pieces of dried grass fell from her hair to the floor. She cried when I touched her, but I needed to find out where the blood was coming from if I was ever going to stop it. It seemed to be mostly face wounds, which bleed badly and could scar a girl for life. One towel soaked through and I grabbed another.

“
Who did this to you?” I asked.

Her answer was a familiar refrain. “Don't make me tell you that. If I tell you they'll kill me.”

“Where's your mother?”

“At the casino.”

It wasn't as deep in the night as I'd thought if Sonia was still at work.

“And Leo?”

“He's at the trailer. Don't tell him. Please.”

I'd taped some gauze to the worst cuts and got a better idea of what she looked like, which was worse than any of the nightmare looks teenagers create for themselves. Her hair was stained redder than raspberry Jell-O. Her cheeks were dirty, her eyes were swollen nearly shut.

The Kid appeared at the bathroom doorway. “I think we should take her to the hospital, chiquita,” he said, which was all right with me. I'd already used up my limited knowledge of first aid. Cheyanne didn't protest, so we bundled her into the backseat of my car. When we passed the double-wide I saw that Leo's truck was there, that Sonia's car was not and that no lights were on. The Kid drove the Nissan through the canyons of downtown taking the corners like a race car driver. We had a good excuse for speeding if anyone stopped us, but nobody did.

We took her to the ER at Presbyterian. The doctor wore green scrubs and looked as if he'd seen too many wounds already that night. Lines were weary rivulets running down his face. After he examined and x-rayed Cheyanne he came out and talked to me.

“What's your relation to the victim?” he asked. “Mother?”

It was the first time I'd ever been accused of that. “Lawyer,” I said.

“She'll be all right. No gunshot wounds, broken ribs, fractured skull, punctured lungs or other organs. I sewed up the gashes in her head, cleaned up the scrapes and bruises. She wasn't raped, you'll be glad to know.”

“Good.” The question of whether she was still a virgin went unasked and unanswered.

“Usually at this time of night it's gunshots: revolvers, rifles, semiautomatics, automatics. You name it, we get it. It's good training here for the next time the country goes to war. We don't see knife wounds so much anymore.”

“That's what it was?”

“That's what it looks like to me. I called the police. They're on their way.”

The cop who came over and took photos wanted to release Cheyanne into the custody of her mother, not her lawyer, but Sonia had already left the bingo parlor and could not be reached at home because she'd disconnected the phone. A police car was dispatched to pick her up.

The Kid, Cheyanne and I sat on a bench outside the ER and waited. Cheyanne, who was neatly
bandaged
and subdued, saw Sonia striding down the hallway before I did. “Uh-oh,” she mumbled, staring into her lap. “Is she gonna be pissed.”

Sonia did seem to be surrounded by a red aura of anger. When the Kid saw her expression he stood up, turned his back and walked down the hallway. “What in the hell have you done now?” Sonia yelled at her daughter.

“Nothin',” replied Cheyanne. “Somebody did somethin' to me. See?”

“You didn't get beat up inside the trailer, did you?”

“No.”

“Wasn't Leo watching you?”

“He was watching television. I went to bed.”

“How'd you get out?”

“Through my window.”

“Why'd you do it? Why'd you get yourself into this mess?”

“I had to talk to somebody.”

“Are you going to tell me who beat you?”

“No.”

The Kid signaled me from the end of the hallway. He had driving on his mind, so I interrupted the mother/daughter dialogue, which was nastier than any lawyer dialogue I'd ever been involved in. “Cheyanne needs to talk to the police tomorrow,” I said. “Do you want to meet me at the police station or do you want me to take her?”

“Take her,” Sonia said.

“Are they going to believe me now?” Cheyanne asked.

“It's possible,” I replied.

Leaving the daughter to the mother's not-so-tender care, the Kid and I drove home through the empty streets. It was the middle of the night, we were on the road, it was a good place to have a heart-to-heart and we came about as close as we ever did.

“You think it's a good idea to leave the girl with a mother like that?” the Kid asked me.

“Maybe she's not the best mother, but she's the only mother Cheyanne has. Besides, this could be the last night they ever spend together.”

“She's going into detention?”

“I hope so,” I said. “Her life's not worth much on the street.”

When we got home I picked the pieces of grass off the bathroom floor, put them in a Ziploc bag and stashed them in my desk drawer. Cheyanne had left bloody palm prints on the wall and the tile, but I was too tired to wash them off. The Kid and I went back to bed, although—for me anyway—not to sleep.

10

W
HEN
I
PICKED
my client up in the morning to take her to the police station she was holding the baby doll Miranda in one arm and her fat cat Tabatoe in the other. She kissed them good-bye, put them down and patted Danny's hair. She didn't have a single word or gesture for Leo and her mother, who stood in the doorway and watched us go.