Steven Havill: Dead Weight

Gray regarded me thoughtfully. “This is between us,” he said, and I frowned impatiently. We hadn’t gone out of our way to make it a public meeting, unless we invited JanaLynn to sit in when she returned with the tea. She arrived and set the two extra-large, perspiring glasses in front of us.

“Anything else, sir?”

I waved a hand. “No, nothing. We just need some peace and quiet for a while.” I grinned at her, and she touched my shoulder.

“I’ll be out front if you need me.”

The two of us were left in vinyl-padded silence. I sipped the tea, and it was wonderful, as usual.

“So,” I said.

Gray took a deep breath, leaving his tea untouched in front of him. “How well do you know Thomas Pasquale?”

“Uh,” I groaned, and sat back hard enough that I thumped against the seat. “Now what?”

“I’m serious. What kind of fellow is he? I don’t know him except to say hello.”

“He’s a local boy,” I said. “Worked the village PD for a while as a part-timer. Applied to our department a handful of times and each time was refused, mainly on my say-so.”

“And why was that?”

“Way too immature.”

“But you eventually hired him.”

“Yes. It’s been three years, going on four. He’s grown up a lot. Still eager, sometimes way too eager.”

“Ambitions?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What’s he want out of life? FBI? Some big department?”

“As far as I know, Posadas is his life. His family’s here, and he’s never mentioned anything else to me. Not that I pry much. He seems content working here. There are always surprises, of course.”

“Huh,” Gray mused. He looked down at the tea for a long minute and I let him think uninterrupted. I had all day. I knew the commissioner would get where he wanted to go eventually. “You ever hear anything about his finances?”

“His finances are none of my business. Or yours,” I said.

Gray grinned. “I appreciate that. But if Deputy Pasquale were in some kind of financial trouble, you’d know about it, probably.”

It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t respond. Gray finally took a sip of his tea, grimaced, and reached for the sugar. “This is what I got,” he said, but made no move other than letting the sugar slide smoothly out of three packets. He swirled the tea, pulled out the spoon, and placed it on the table-all little preparatory gestures as he wound up to tell me what was on his mind.

“This is what I got,” he repeated, and reached in his pocket. He handed the white number-10 envelope to me, holding it by one corner. There was no stamp, just the name Dr. Arnold Gray typed in the address spot. It had been zipped open with either a letter opener or a knife. I looked inside and saw the neatly folded message. Laying the envelope to one side, I spread the message out, well away from my sweating glass of tea. It was typed, just a few lines:

Commissioner: you need to know that one of the Posadas Deputies Thomas Pasquale is hitting up on Mexican nationales when he stops them for routine traffic checks. In five instances that we have documented, he has collected an average of $100.00 each.

A concerned citizen

“Christ,” I muttered, and read the thing twice more, then adjusted my glasses and peered more closely at the typing. “Single-strike typewriter, or word processor,” I said. I looked across at Arnold Gray. His expression was pained. “This didn’t come in the mail.”

“No. Under the door of my office when I got there this morning.”

“Just this envelope?”

He nodded.

“Huh,” I said, for want of anything better.

“Do you believe it?” Gray asked.

I almost snapped out an unthinking response, then stopped. “Do you?”

“I’m not much for anonymous notes,” Gray said. “What worries me is why that note was written in the first place, and written to me, of all people.”

“You’re a county commissioner.”

“But why not to you? You’re sheriff. You’re Tom Pasquale’s boss, not me.”

“The implication there is pretty clear,” I said more offhandedly than I felt. “Obviously whoever wrote this note thinks that I’m in on the deal.”

“Oh, sure,” Gray laughed and sat back, some of the strain going out of his face. “I can see that. You don’t speak enough Spanish to make yourself understood beyond ‘I’ll have a burrito.’”

“That’s cruel,” I said.

“I can just see you, standing out in the dark, negotiating with a vanload of Mexican nationals,” Gray said.

“I don’t see Tom Pasquale doing that, either,” I retorted. “But they claim documentation. Either they have it, or they don’t. If they have it, why the hell not come forward with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You trust me with this?” I picked up the note. What I really felt like doing was crumpling it up and sticking it in the Don Juan’s trash with all the uneaten refried beans and rice.

“Of course.”

“Did you make yourself a copy?”

Arnold Gray gave me a look as if I’d stuck a fork in the back of his hand. He didn’t dignify the question with an answer, and I moved his name even farther up the list to “favorite people” status.

Dr. Arnold Gray dropped me back at the modest flat-roofed two-story structure that Posadas grandly called its Public Safety Building. As I walked inside, a trash can by the pay phone reminded me that my first inclination, to tear the anonymous note into shreds before it could do any damage, was probably a good one. The whole idea of someone sanctimoniously tapping out a little message that could ruin either a career or a life made my stomach churn.

But I wasn’t naive, either. In a department with a dozen employees, there was always an off-chance that one of them wasn’t as pure as the driven snow.

When I walked in, Gayle Torrez glanced up from her desk. Hell, I’d known her since she was a skinny twelve-year-old. She’d started working for the Sheriff’s Department when she was eighteen, had been with us for a decade, and was now married to Undersheriff Robert Torrez. If the note rang true, was she in on the scam? Was he?

I dropped the white envelope in my center desk drawer and slammed it shut until I could figure out what to do about the damn thing. After taking a minute to straighten my face so the anger wouldn’t show, I strolled out to Dispatch. Gayle was on the phone, the pencil in her right hand doodling little spirals on the scratch pad. Every once in a while, she’d stop spiraling and the pencil point would tap a few times on the pad as she listened.

“Sure,” she said. I leaned against one of the black filing cabinets and waited. The pencil tapped another series. “Sure.” She nodded. “I know it does.” I took a deep breath and looked off into the distance. “Let me pass it on to the village for you. Maybe they’ll listen to me.” Gayle sat patiently through another long string and nodded as if the nod were carried over the wires. After a few more noncommittal pleasantries, she hung up.

“Another dog,” she said, jotting in the big logbook by her elbow. “You’d think it would be too hot to bark.” She looked up at me. “What’s wrong, sir?”

“Wrong?” I asked.

“You looked peeved,” Gayle said.

“The damn car, I suppose,” I replied, and she accepted that with an understanding nod. I pushed myself away from the filing cabinet. “I need the dispatch logs for last month.”

“Just June’s?” She reached across to the steel bookcase under the window and pulled a slender black volume off the shelf. I took it and started back to my office.

“No calls for a while, all right? And when Bob comes in, I’d like to chat with him.”