The City of Rocks Read online

  “I’m not one. Can you tell me who the woman over at his house was?”

  “Woman? He didn’t have no woman.”

  “One answered the door. Hispanic. Pretty, but carrying a little too much weight around the middle.” The description earned me a blank stare. “Probably from across the border. Had an accent.”

  “Shit, everybody around here got accent.”

  “You don’t know her?”

  “Nope. But I know one thing. She don’t have no business in Liver Lips’ place.”

  Chapter 3

  LOPEZ SURPRISED me by agreeing to go check out the mystery woman. Within two minutes we were at Martinson’s front door. No one answered our knock. Lopez fished around underneath a rock beside the step and came up with an old-fashioned skeleton key. You wouldn’t catch me sticking my hand down there. Might find something beside a little scrap of metal.

  The two-room shack was deserted. Liver Lips apparently had done his furniture shopping at the local dump. A ripped and worn sofa. Dingy, once-white stuffing spilled out of both pillows. Threadbare arms ten shades darker than the rest of the couch. A sagging chair and an ancient boom box on a listing, unpainted table completed the décor. Nothing on the bare planking of the walls other than a big calendar still turned to last December.

  The bed was the only piece of furniture in the other room. At first I thought the mysterious woman hid under the covers, but the lump proved to be the mattress piled with a jumble of old clothes.

  While I looked for something that might tell me why the late Liver Lips stole a duck, Lopez searched for something else. After a few minutes, he stood in the middle of the almost-bare living room and swore in Spanish. Then he turned to me.

  “Ain’t no woman here. Sure you seen her?”

  “Talked to her standing right there in the doorway. What were you looking for?”

  “Liver always had a little weed stowed away.”

  “Maybe the woman took it.”

  “Dammit, I coulda used that.”

  I didn’t associate emaciation with pot smoking. Liver Lips and Lopez both looked more like meth users to me, and I told him so.

  He cut his eyes at me. “No way.”

  “I don’t really care. I need to figure out why Liver Lips would steal Mrs. Muldren’s duck.”

  Lopez gave a mirthless laugh. “That what this is about? Old Mud Hen’s duck? That’s rich.”

  At least someone besides me saw the ridiculous side of this affair. “Why would he take her?”

  “Who said he did?”

  “He did. Told me that yesterday afternoon. Said he’d given her to somebody who wanted to play a trick on Mud Hen. But it scared the hell out of him when I asked who wanted him to steal the duck.”

  Lopez’s nod was almost imperceptible. “Yeah. That sounds right.”

  “Does that mean you know who put him up to it?”

  “Don’t mean nothing. Nothing except Liver Lips afraid of his shadow.”

  “I hear Mud Hen’s a tough old bird, but he wasn’t afraid to go after her prize duck.”

  “Look, man. What you want from me? I don’t know nothing about it. He stole her, that’s his business.”

  “I just want to know what you can tell me about him.”

  “Me an’ Liver hung out some, you know, to smoke now and then, but he done his own thing. And I don’t know nothing about no duck stealing. Now I got to go. You coming?”

  “Yeah. Nothing else here. Unless….” I glanced through a filthy window. An unpainted shack stood at the rear of the property. “Unless you want to check out that shed.”

  “Might’s well. But he didn’t never use it.”

  The shed, merely a bunch of boards thrown together and placed on the bare ground without a foundation of any sort, was empty except for a block of wood with an axe imbedded in it. Nonetheless, Lopez was wrong. Liver Lips or someone had used the place recently. There were white chicken feathers on the ground near the bloodstained block. At least I took them to be chicken feathers.

  “Well, shit.” Lopez grinned. “Guess you found old Mud Hen’s duck. Leastways, what’s left of her. Good eating, I bet.”

  I examined the feathers more closely. “These look like chicken feathers to me.”

  “You sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “But not all the way sure?”

  The skinny little bastard mocked me. “Ninety percent.” I pocketed a couple of the feathers.

  “Could be, I guess. Liver didn’t buy stuff in the store if he didn’t have to. He’d boost a chicken now and then.”

  Despite what he’d said about needing to leave, Lopez didn’t seem to be in any hurry now, so I pressed him on what he knew about his dead friend. They met when they were both kids harvesting pecans over in one of the Las Cruces orchards. Liver Lips—he had already picked up that nickname—was so skinny and weak-looking he had trouble finding regular work, although Lopez said he was stronger than he looked.

  “Could keep up with me any day.”

  Taking in Lopez’s concave chest and bony shoulders, I wasn’t certain how much of a recommendation that was. According to him, Liver Lips hadn’t finished high school and bummed around doing the best he could to scrape together a living. He worked part-time on some of the area ranches—on both sides of the border—but for the last year, he’d put in some hours at the R&S Auto Repair.

  “He okay guy,” Lopez finished, and again I considered the source. Suddenly he laughed. “Let things get to him, though. You know, under his skin.”

  “Like what?”

  “Loco things. Things didn’t have nothing to do with him. One time he read about a woman up in Montreal, you know, Canada. She in a bar, and the damned ceiling fell on her. Killed her dead. That shook old Liver. Said a man didn’t have nothing to say about his own destino. Things slap a man upside the head without no warning. He kinda quit struggling after that.” Lopez laughed again. “Waiting for ceiling to fall on him, no? Guess it did too.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Well, like that president got hisself elected a while back. Liver claimed whole thing rigged. That hombre Bush lost la gente, you know, the people, but that didn’t make no matter. Big court up there in Washington give it to him anyway. A man ain’t got no chance unless he was born up there in one of them families. You know, with money.”

  “I see. Tell me about his connections across the border.”

  “Don’t know nothing about them.”

  “Don’t give me that. If you’ve known him since you were kids, you know who his contacts were. Where he got his weed or meth or whatever. Give me a name, Lopez. Somebody I can go see.”

  “You go see, you liable to end up like that Canada woman. Something drop on your head.”

  “I’ll take the chance.”

  “Uh-uh. You get Lopez killed too.”

  “I want a name,” I insisted.

  “You already got one. Told you he work at R&S Auto. Go see Zack Rybald. He know Liver as good as anybody. But don’t tell him I give you his name. You gotta promise that.”

  I dropped a nervous Lopez off at his shack and headed back downtown. I’d had the feeling in the hospital emergency room that Liver Lips wasn’t paid to steal the bird. But maybe his meth source threatened to dry up on him if he didn’t do the deed. The same could be true of the pot source, but somehow that didn’t ring true. It was a lot easier to score weed than meth.

  FROM THE outside, R&S Auto Repair didn’t appear to be a mechanic’s shop. The tall wood-framed windows gave it a retail atmosphere. When I entered, however, the shop took on its true definition. Three big vehicle bays opened out onto a wide alley at the rear. Despite the fact it was a Sunday, the place was busy.

  Zack Rybald peered across the counter at me through a pair of granny glasses. He hadn’t reacted when I introduced myself as an investigator and stated my interest. I had the feeling he chose to deliberately misunderstand my inquiry, but he understood perfectly when I asked if
I could record our conversation.

  “You punch that button and there ain’t gonna be no conversation.” Rybald was a stout man in the old-fashioned sense of the word: heavy but solid.

  I put away my portable recorder. I wasn’t above some surreptitious taping—and it’s legal in this state—but the client was an insurance company, and they were always particular about things like that. They wanted everything consented to and documented so it couldn’t be challenged if things went to court.

  Apparently satisfied everything was copacetic, he started answering questions. “Liver Lips Martinson? Yeah, he works here off and on. But he ain’t here. Hell, he ain’t anywhere. Checked out in a rollover on I-10 east of here last night, I hear.”

  “I understand that, Mr. Rybald, but I’m trying to get a handle on the man—who he was and who his associates were.”

  “How come? Nothing but a mediocre mechanic and a worthless human being. What else is there to know?”

  So I invested a few minutes outlining my interest.

  “Old Mud Hen’s raising hell, is she? Well, she sure knows how to do that. And she’s got the muscle to do it too.”

  “Actually it’s an insurance company who’s raising hell. Do you have any idea why Martinson would steal a duck?”

  “To piss Mud off would be my guess. They didn’t get along. Liver Lips used to work for the Lazy M.”

  Rybald reaffirmed Martinson’s reputation as a loner and said he knew of no woman in the man’s life. In fact, he showed more curiosity over the identity of the female who answered my knock this morning than why a rancher would insure a duck.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” he said when I posed the latter question. “Mud does things her own way. Always has, always will. She ran that ranch even when Ren was alive. Ren—that was Reingold Kurtz, her husband.”

  “Kurtz?”

  “Yeah, Muldren’s her maiden name.” He chuckled. “Hard to picture Millicent as a maiden. At any age. She went back to it when old Ren got stomped to death by a bull ten years back.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the family.”

  “Hell, everybody in this part of the country knows about that family. Ren was a state representative for twenty years before the accident. There ain’t nobody over thirty who hasn’t gone to him for one thing or the other up in Santa Fe.”

  “Tell me about Martinson’s connections across the border.”

  He reacted like I’d poked him in the eye. His head reared back, and he squinted through his ridiculous glasses. “What do you mean? I don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Liver Lips worked for you, and he didn’t strike me as the sort of man who held his cards close to his vest.”

  “Some of them, he done. Otherwise he’d find himself in a pickle.”

  “Like being run off the interstate?”

  “What? You mean that accident wasn’t no accident?”

  “Don’t mean anything of the sort. Just trying to make sure I understood what you meant.”

  “Look, fella, there’s some things a man don’t talk about out loud down here. And what goes on along the border is one of them. I got work to do. You want that Impala out there on the street tuned up, you come back. Otherwise, leave me alone.”

  Chapter 4

  EVERY TIME I talked to someone about Liver Lips Martinson, the subject of the M Lazy M invariably came up. Of course, the ranch’s prize duck had been stolen, so maybe that was natural. Nonetheless, time now to go get some answers from old Mud Hen herself—Millicent Muldren. But first I wanted to see if Officer Garza could tell me anything about Rybald. The mechanic had closed down awfully fast when I asked about Liver’s across-the-border associations.

  I flagged Garza down on the sidewalk in front of the Deming Police Station. He waited with the usual frown on his face as I got out of the Impala. When I asked about Zack Rybald, his swarthy face went even darker.

  “I’m gonna lasso that SOB one of these days. I figure he’s a big part of the drug trade around here, but I can’t lay a hand on him.”

  “He’s protected?”

  “That’s some of it,” he admitted. “He’s careful, but he’ll trip up one of these days. If you run onto anything, let me know.”

  “Deal.”

  He looked over my left shoulder and waved. I turned and saw a tall man exiting the café directly across the street. “Somebody you oughta meet.” He whistled and beckoned, offering no explanation until the man crossed the street and walked up to us.

  “Glad I saw you, Bert. Mr. Vinson, this here is Bert Kurtz from down on the Lazy M. Bert, Mr. Vinson’s a private investigator asking about Liver Lips.”

  “What’s your interest in Liver?” Kurtz asked in a pleasant baritone. He plucked a battered black Stetson from his head to run his hand through a shock of curly brown hair. A lanky, good-looking man of around thirty, he had reddish-brown eyes my mom would have called autumn leaf.

  “I’ve been asked to look into the theft of your mother’s prize duck.”

  “Go shake Liver Lips until his teeth rattle, and he’ll give her up.” He gave a lazy smile. “Or point me in his direction, and I’ll do it for you.”

  “Ain’t had a chance to tell him yet,” Garza said.

  “That won’t get us very far,” I said. “Martinson’s dead.” I told him about the wreck west of Las Cruces but didn’t let on it was a suspected homicide.

  “Well, crap. I guess that puts an end to that.” Bert slapped his hat against his leg and set it back on his head.

  “Makes it harder, at any rate. I need to talk to your mother and see the setup down there. I intend to drive down to the ranch tomorrow.”

  “Sure. You’ll be welcome. Plan on spending the night. We’ll give you a meal and a pillow, especially if you’re trying to find Mom’s pride and joy. Or you can come back with me now. I’ve finished my business in town. Gonna head out pretty soon.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll get down there on my own. Probably tomorrow morning. Did your father build the ranch from scratch or inherit it?”

  “Neither. Mom’s family started it at the turn of the last century. Her grandfather, old Rudolph, and his brother started building the spread when New Mexico was still a territory. Muldren family legend says Rudolph’s brother, Yancy, was the lazy M. Anyhow, my grandfather was Rudolph’s son. He inherited the ranch and built it up some. Mud’s added to it since she got her hands on it.”

  Mud. So even her family used that nickname. “How big is the spread?”

  “A little over a hundred fifty thousand acres. It takes a lot of territory around here for a cow/calf operation.”

  That meant the Lazy M maintained a permanent herd of cows and heifers to breed and produce a spring crop of calves to put up for sale. Some other rancher raised the calves and sent them to a feedlot to be fattened up for slaughter.

  “What kind of security do you have?”

  “A couple of big, mean Dobermans patrol the place at night. Other than that, not much. Some intruder lights over the garage and front entrance. A thirty-thirty beside the bed and a revolver under the pillow.”

  “No cameras, alarms, that type of thing?”

  “No, although some of the vehicles are alarmed.”

  “With everything that’s going on down on the border these days, you might want to think about beefing things up,” Garza said.

  Bert shook his head. “It may come to that, but there’s never been trouble at the headquarters… day or night.” He thought that over a moment. “Well, except when Liver Lips stole Quacky.”

  “Is the ranch a crossing point for illegals?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, big-time.”

  After reassuring me I’d be welcome, Kurtz excused himself and left. I tarried a few minutes longer to pick Garza’s brain about the man.

  He told me Bert Kurtz was well known to the DPD, and not just because of him being an important rancher in a neighboring county. He was also a brawler. Apparently, Bert didn’t even need to get drunk
in order to mix it up. When the mood took him, the man just liked to fight. When I suggested he should have taken up boxing instead of ranching, Garza informed me Kurtz had been a local ring champion while at NMSU getting his degree in ranch management. He also confided Bert had been picked up for speeding and DWI a couple of times in his jazzy Corvette. His money and Mud Hen’s influence had gotten him off with only a couple of slaps on the wrist.

  I SPED down Highway 11 toward Columbus. It wasn’t the quickest route to the Boot Heel country, but the town had once played a dramatic part in a clash between two nations, and as a history buff, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to sop up some of that flavor. Besides, it was getting late in the day for a drive over into Hidalgo County to the M Lazy M. I planned on remaining overnight in the little village named for Christopher Columbus just north of the border across from Palomas, Mexico.

  The Impala breezed south over a landscape reminiscent of the drive between Deming and Las Cruces: flat, high desert terrain broken by blue-shadowed mountains in the distance. Heat waves rising off the asphalt were pleasantly hypnotic.

  Columbus was an official twenty-four-hour POE—Point of Entry—between the two nations, although it sits about three miles north of the actual demarcation line. Border City is where the crossings actually occur. Its proximity to the Mexican state of Chihuahua is what gave the place its brush with history.

  The actual story is long and convoluted, as well as highly controversial. Two revolutionaries, Venustiano Carranza and Francisco Villa, better known as Pancho, tossed out a dictator named Victoriano Huerta and then turned on one another. A Columbus merchant and arms dealer by the name of Ravel supposedly sold defective ammunition to Pancho Villa. When the guerilla demanded a refund, the merchant reputedly told him the Ravels no longer dealt with Mexican bandits.

  On the morning of March 9, 1916, one of Villa’s generals attacked Columbus with more than 500 men. The twenty-four-hour invasion burned down a significant portion of the town and killed fourteen American soldiers together with ten residents. Another eighty or so revolutionaries were dead or mortally wounded. Various claims were made, so no one will ever know the true extent of the casualties. The raid led to General John J. Pershing’s punitive expedition deep into Mexico.