Steven Havill: Before She Dies

“Have fun,” I said. “And when she asks for details about either Tammy Woodruff or Sonny Trujillo, just tell her I’ll have a statement sometime today.”

“Yes, sir.”

The door closed and I played with a pencil for a few minutes while I framed my thoughts. “When the ambulance arrived, was Trujillo showing a pulse? Were there any signs that he was responding?”

“No, sir. I continued CPR until Deputy Abeyta arrived. He relieved me and worked until the EMTs arrived a few minutes later. Neither of us could find a pulse, and from the time I started CPR, Trujillo never took a breath on his own, sir. I knew he was gone.”

“And after the ambulance arrived, you called Sheriff Holman, me, and Estelle.”

“Yes, sir. I called you first, then Estelle. And then the sheriff.”

“Sonny wasn’t living at home. Did Holman call the Trujillos?”

“He said he would try to locate them, sir.”

“And did someone call from the hospital to let you know that Trujillo had, in fact, been pronounced dead?”

“Yes, sir,” Gayle said softly. “Estelle called.” She scanned down the page. “At four-twenty.”

“Just before I walked through the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gayle, I hope you know that you did everything you could.” She looked down at the floor. “These things happen,” I said. “We can’t have an ambulance on standby for everyone on the planet at every minute.” I glanced at the wall clock. “You can be sure that Sheriff Holman will be stopping back here when they’re finished at the hospital.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Gayle and I talked about inconsequential things until I was sure she was all right. Then I left her alone in my office so that she could write out a detailed statement without interruption of what she had just told me.

Out of habit, I walked upstairs and checked on Tammy Woodruff myself. She was curled in a tight fetal position, sleeping the deep sleep of the truly drunk, still hours away from the dawn of a new day and the new life she’d made for herself. She’d missed all the excitement, and that was just as well.

Try as hard as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to feel too sorry for Sonny Trujillo. As I trudged back downstairs, I did wonder how Frank Dayan was planning to bolt this entire mess together for his newspaper. It would be easy to misunderstand the incident at school with Trujillo, and just as easy to make a cesspool out of his death…even though he’d been given medical assistance for his bruised nose before he was jailed.

The back door opened and Sheriff Martin Holman walked in. Usually, he was as dapper as they come, impeccably dressed and with a catalog of just the right things to say poised at his lips. Like the talented used car salesman he had once been, he could convince almost anyone of almost anything at almost any time.

This wasn’t one of those times.

He saw me and said, “Jesus, Gastner,” as if that just about covered it.

Sheriff Holman sputtered, ranted, and barked for about five minutes, and I listened without comment. Finally he stopped, took a deep breath, and looked sideways at me.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Sure.”

He walked over and toed the door of his office closed. “So what do you think we ought to do?”

“First of all, Martin, it doesn’t really matter what the newspaper does or says in all of this. We have no control over them.”

“I know that.”

“Then don’t worry about it.” He looked heavenward and I added, “From what Gayle tells me, from the way she describes the incident, it sounds more like Trujillo had a heart attack than anything else. An autopsy will show for sure. And second, if Sonny Trujillo’s parents decide to sue us, and they probably will, that’s what the county attorney is for. They don’t have a case, but they can do what they want.”

Holman shook his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

“Fine. Let’s take one thing at a time. Now, if it wasn’t a heart attack, Trujillo’s death was probably avoidable.” Holman looked pained, but I ticked the points off on my fingers. “Yes, we could have had a deputy with him the entire night, baby-sitting. And yes, we could have checked him into a hospital for observation, even though a physician said that it wasn’t necessary and gave us a signed release. And yes, we could have done a lot of things that we didn’t do. But we didn’t. We assumed that he was intoxicated, which he was, and that he’d sleep it off.” I shrugged. “Just like millions of other drunks before him.”

Martin Holman picked at a perfectly manicured fingernail until he realized what he was doing. He thrust his hand in his pocket. “You know what worries me?”

“No.”

If Holman hadn’t looked so pained, I would have smiled. He’d been back less than a week from another one of those ten-day seminars that tries to teach administrators some aspect of the convoluted criminal code. As he was discovering, it wasn’t really the letter of the law that mattered.

Holman walked around his desk and sat down in the overstuffed leather chair with a thump. He motioned to the swivel chair. “Sit, sit, sit,” he said. “You just stand there like some calm Buddha. It makes me nervous.”

I let pass his comment about my considerable girth. “I don’t dance well,” I said.

The sheriff smiled ruefully. “I wish to hell I had your nervous system.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I mean, I don’t give two craps if I win the election in November or not.” He held up both hands and hastily retreated from that ridiculous remark. “Well, that’s not true. I do care. But I want to do what’s right in this mess. And you’re going to have to give me a hand. I mean, you’ve got a zillion years of experience in these things.”

“Right,” I said. “That’s why the newspaper has a picture of me breaking a fat kid’s finger and punching him in the nose.”

“He was twenty-one, wasn’t he?”

“Twenty-two.”

“Should he have been in the hospital? I mean, really? I don’t care what the doctors said. What do you think?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Martin. He didn’t die because of any injuries from the brawl. He choked to death on his own vomit. Either that or his heart got insulted once too often. Sure, his nose was probably a little bit plugged. But hospitals don’t admit patients for broken noses and cracked fingers. It’s as simple as that. And if Dayan wants to make a story out of nothing, I guess that’s his department.”

“That’s what worries me,” Holman said with finality. “Having a prisoner die in the county lockup isn’t exactly ‘nothing,’ as you put it. But maybe Dayan will have the good sense not to run it on page one. The classified section maybe. But see, everyone knew Trujillo and his record, and quite a few of them probably will think he got just what he deserved. But the others…” He picked up a pencil and tapped a dozen dots on his desk blotter. “Did Trujillo have the booze with him at the game?”

“I have no idea. I’m sure no one else does either.”

Holman took a long, deep breath. He looked at me for a minute, assessing. “You normally don’t cover games, do you?”

“No. The deputy who took the job has the flu. Or did have.”

“What prompted you to unload your gun before going in the gym?”

I shrugged. “The odds of running into armed felons inside a school during a basketball game are pretty remote, Marty. If I needed a loaded weapon, it would take only seconds to put the shells back in the gun. The most likely thing to happen during a game is just what did happen…a scuffle. The last thing I want is to have some high school kid jump on my back and grab a weapon out of its holster.”