Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

Behind Cabin One, I found an old guy with a chain saw sculpting four-foot-tall armadillos out of juniper logs. After some compliments on his artwork, and a twenty-dollar bill, he was willing to tell me that Frank Tejeda — “oh yeah, the short spic” — stayed in Cabin Four.

“Hasn’t been around in a couple weeks,” the old man added. “Since that woman, awhile back. That was the last time.”

“What woman?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Ask him.”

Then he revved up the chain saw and went back to expressing himself.

Frank Tejeda’s cabin was unlocked, the inside depressing even by slum standards — one gray room with a tiny bathroom and kitchenette in back, a card table, a chair, and a stripped bed that sagged like a relief map of the California Central Valley. The sink was full of dishes. The back door was a sheet of plywood postered with pages from an old Chinese restaurant calendar. Strewn around the floor were men’s clothes, ammo boxes, beer bottles, and Taco Cabana bags.

It was hard to know, in the disaster area, whether anything was out of place, but I found no suitcase, no gun locker, no valuables. Nothing I would expect to find if Tejeda planned on coming back. Gone about two weeks — about when Alva Cruz disappeared.

I stood in the center of his room, listening to the sounds of the chain saw and the highway, trying to imagine Alva Cruz coming here of her own will. A good-looking young woman with plans to go to college, with a mom who cared about her — surely she wouldn’t hate herself so much that she’d spend the night with someone who lived here.

Then I saw a glint on the floor by the back door.

I knelt to look. A silver earring — an angel — was snagged in the grimy crack between doorjamb and threshold. A long strand of black hair trailed from the hook.

I had to jostle the back door’s makeshift lock to get it open.

When I finally did, I realized the neighbor’s chain saw had been loud enough to cover the sound of a car pulling up — a yellow truck, in fact, parked right behind the cabin, between the back door and the woods of the creek bed.

A short Mexican man stood on the back step, pointing a shotgun at my heart.

He said, “You need to die.”

“Ralph Arguello sent me.”

I wondered what level of hell I’d go to if I died violently with a lie on my lips, but it was a good lie. Ralph’s name had been known to cause hesitation even among psychopaths.

Frank Tejeda furrowed his brow, his finger tense on the trigger.

I could see why nobody had given a good description of him — there just wasn’t much special about him, except that he was short and about to kill me. He had the typical weathered face, the sour demeanor, the dusty flannel-and-jeans look of a hundred thousand guys on the West Side.

Of course, having somebody point a shotgun at you does sharpen your focus. I spent the next eternal second studying Frank Tejeda’s St. Christopher medal, the bloodshot vein like a river delta in his left eye.

“Inside,” he said at last. “Back up slow.”

When we were standing in the bedroom, Frank apparently satisfied I hadn’t brought a date with me, he said, “What’s Ralph want?”

“Alva Cruz.”

The barrel of the gun dipped, but not long enough for me to act. “Who?”

“You picked her up at Angelito’s,” I said. “Halloween night.”

“Hell I did.”

“You didn’t clean up, Frank. You killed her, dragged her out the back — her earring is snagged over there on the doorframe.”

When he looked, I grabbed the shotgun barrel and kicked him in the face.

The gun fired into the wall behind me. Completely deaf, I wrestled Frank to the ground and got my knee between his shoulder blades.

I frisked him, came up with some brass knuckles, a switchblade, and a pack of Chiclets.

“I didn’t do it,” he said. “¡Lo juro!”

“Uh-huh.”

“Take me to Ralph. I’ll tell him—”

“Ralph doesn’t have a damn thing to do with this, Frankie. This is about you and me and a dead young girl you dragged out your back door. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

A little more knee-pressure on his spine and he started yelling that maybe he did know, after all.

I hauled him off the floor and together we took a walk out back.

Alva Cruz was heartbreakingly close.

Fifty yards down in the creek bed, inexpertly wrapped in black Hefty bags, the maid’s daughter was slowly being shrouded with yellow acacia leaves. One pale hand had escaped the plastic. Her fingers curled delicately toward the sky, the nails painted orange in honor of her last holiday.

Cold temperatures had reduced the stench of death, but it was still there — a little stronger than your average roadkill, which the Salado Inn residents had probably mistaken it for.

“You son of a bitch,” I said.

“I swear,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t—”

His eyes slid from my face to the shotgun, which I’d taken the liberty of reloading.

“Shit, man.” He swallowed. “She and me were getting along good that night. I left her before dawn ’cause... ’cause I had a job to do, right? I figured I’d let her sleep. I came back that afternoon, she was dead.”

“How?”