Steven Havill - Privileged to Kill

Glass and hot coffee sprayed into every corner of the kitchen. The string of oaths was painful for the gentle Crocker to hear. I bit off another curse and stood silently regarding the mess on the floor, on my shoes, even on the Navajo rug that lay just beyond the step down into the living room.

“You really ought to call someone,” Wesley Crocker said.

“What I need is a goddamned maid,” I replied. The broken glass seemed very far away. “Shit,” I added, and went into the pantry for the sponge mop, broom, and dustpan. I managed to sweep the most lethal of the glass shards into the dustpan, surprised and not a little alarmed at how useless my right hand had become. I opened the cupboard door under the sink and missed the trash can with the dustpan. The broken glass cascaded back onto the floor at my feet.

I rested with my hands on the sink, a posture that had become familiar to me. Wesley Crocker watched the performance in silence. Without looking up, I said, “How about a beer?”

“No, no,” Crocker said hastily, no doubt imagining the havoc I could wreak with a zip-top can. “No, beer and I don’t get along so well.” And then, like a recording, he added, “But I still think you ought to call someone.”

“I dropped the goddamned coffeepot, for God’s sakes. Why should I call somebody?” I regarded the mess again, the lake of coffee puddling nicely on the vinyl flooring, various tributaries and extensions and inlets spreading here and there, some of them scuffed into lines by the broom.

“To find out what to do,” Crocker said.

I looked at him and frowned. “What’s to do is clean up this mess.”

“You have a seizure like that, you got to take care of yourself.”

I stared at him. “I didn’t have a seizure,” I said with more irritation than necessary, partly because I knew that Crocker was right. It didn’t take a doctor from the Mayo Clinic to figure out what a flash headache with loss of consciousness and partial numbing of one side meant. That didn’t mean I had to dwell on it.

I glanced at the stove clock, then at my wristwatch. Estelle had had all afternoon, and there was no way of telling what I had missed by napping away those hours.

The telephone was only a step away, and I picked up the receiver, ready to punch in the number. My mind was blank. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t do any good. I had called Estelle Reyes-Guzman so many times that I hadn’t even bothered to write her number in the back of the phone directory.

“Shit,” I said again. The Reyes-Guzman number wasn’t listed, not surprising considering their occupations. Even if it had been, my reading glasses were on the nightstand beside my bed, now about a thousand miles away. Instead, I punched the number for the sheriff’s office. Ernie Wheeler was working dispatch.

“Ernie,” I said. “Is Estelle in her office?”

“No, sir. I think she’s home.”

I chuckled. “What the hell is her home number?”

Wheeler didn’t make an issue out of his boss’s senility, but just rattled off the number. I reached for a pen to write it in the back of the book where it belonged.

“Wait a minute,” I said, but Ernie Wheeler could have waited for an hour. My right hand refused to drive the pen, and I made a pathetic series of hen scratchings. With another curse, I tossed the pen across the counter. “Thanks, Ernie,” I said and hung up. I quickly punched in the number before it seeped out through the holes in my head.

Francis Guzman answered the phone with his characteristic “Yup?”

“Francis, is Estelle home?”

“Sure, Bill. I think she’s out in the kitchen hatching something with Irma. Hang on a minute.”

“No, wait,” I said, then hesitated. “Don’t bother her.”

“Can I give her a message?”

“No, that’s all right. Listen…” I stopped. “While I’ve got you on the phone…” I fumbled and stumbled, finding it harder to talk with the professional side of Francis Guzman than it was to mop up coffee-and-glass soup. “I, ah, passed out in the bathroom a while ago, and-”

“You did what?”

“Well,” I said offhandedly, “I think I got up from a nap a little too fast or something. Next thing you know I’m lying on the floor, looking at the bottom of the sink.”

“And that’s it?” His voice was calm, the sort of tone he would use to talk patients into letting him crack open their chests and switch hearts.

“Pretty much. I got some tingling in my right hand. Can’t seem to hold on to anything.”

“Stay put,” he said, and then before I could ask him what he meant, he added, “Here’s Estelle, by the way.” I heard mumbling in the background for a few seconds, and then Estelle’s soft, melodious voice came on the line.

“Sir,” she said, “Ron Bucky called me this afternoon, about an hour ago. The hair sample that Bob Torrez collected from the steel frame of the bleachers matches Maria Ibarra’s.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “How could it match hers? I thought Bob found the hairs higher up than what her head would be.”

“Unless she was being carried, sir. That’s what it looks like. And it fits. If they carried the body from a vehicle to under the bleachers, it’s not surprising that in the dark they’d crack a head somewhere along the way.”

“Too bad it wasn’t their own,” I said.

“The most interesting thing is the blood workup.”

“No, the most remarkable thing is that Bucky got someone to come in and work on a Sunday,” I said.

“Saturday, sir.”

“Whatever. What did they find out?”

“Maria Ibarra was clean. No drugs, no traces, nothing. No alcohol, even, which surprises me. Dennis Wilton was clean as well. No alcohol, no nothing.”

“And let me guess. Ryan House was…” I stopped to let Estelle fill in the blanks.

“His blood showed a moderate dose of temazepam.”

“What the hell is that?” I asked.

“It’s a sedative. Francis says that it’s similar to Valium. The sort of thing someone would take if they couldn’t sleep.”

“Prescription?”

“Most likely.”

“That’s interesting, because this morning I made some house calls.”

“So I understand.”

I stopped short, amazed yet again at the workings of a small town’s communication system. “Who did you talk to?”

“I saw Maryanne Scutt at the drugstore.” Estelle chuckled. “She said her daughter was scared to death.”

“She should be,” I said. “That accident was a horrible experience.”

“No, I mean of you.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m crushed. I was perfectly civil.”

“I’m sure you were, sir. What did you find out?”

“A whole handful of kids sitting on the left side of the bus saw Dennis Wilton’s truck pass by. Every one of them said that Ryan House was sleeping.”

The phone went silent.

“Every one of the kids I talked to, Estelle. The Scutt kid even remembers seeing the seatbelt holding Ryan’s jacket in place. He was using the jacket rolled up as a pillow. One of the other kids remembers seeing a patch of fog on the passenger-side window, right in front of Ryan’s mouth. Where he was breathing.”

“So he was sound asleep.”

“And helped on by the temazepam, no doubt,” I said. “I wouldn’t…” and I stopped at the sound of the doorbell.

“Someone’s here,” I said. “Can you hang on a minute?”

I rested the receiver on the phone directory, shaking my head at the interruption.

“You want me to get it?” Crocker called from the living room.

“No, I want you to sit still,” I said. By the time I had reached the foyer, the front door was already opening. Dr. Francis Guzman stepped inside.