Pale Kings and Princes

“ ’Spect I will,” Hawk said.

Juanita Olmo’s house was a ten-minute drive through the casual snowfall. We saw nothing but one town truck sanding the plowed road, and a young man and woman pulling a child on a sled. The child was so bundled up that its gender was a mystery and in fact its species was only a logical guess.

We pulled up in front of an old frame duplex in the valley behind the mills along the Wheaton River. The siding was red asphalt shingle. There were three cars dusted with snow parked in the unshoveled driveway. One of them was Juanita’s Escort. She answered the door in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. She looked at me and then at Hawk. Hawk was carrying the shotgun. She looked quickly back at me.

“Ptarmigan,” I said. “My friend is a ptarmigan hunter.”

“What do you want,” Juanita said.

“We want to come in and talk,” I said.

“And if I say no?”

“We come in anyway,” I said.

“And if I call the police?”

“We won’t let you,” I said.

Juanita’s face got a little red and her eyes seemed larger.

“Really?” she said.

I stepped into her living room, Hawk followed me and closed the door.

“There are people next door,” she said.

“Yikes,” Hawk said.

Juanita kept glancing at Hawk and glancing away. The flush on her face remained.

“Shall we sit?” I said.

Juanita stared at me. “Yes,” she said. “Of course. We can sit.”

I sat on a tweed chair with wooden arms that rocked on springs against a solid wooden base. It was ugly but it was uncomfortable.

Juanita stood in the archway that led to the dining room. Hawk leaned against the door; the shotgun in his right hand hanging down against his leg, pointing at the floor.

“What kind of gun is that?” Juanita said.

“Smith and Wesson,” Hawk said. “Shotgun. Pump operated, twelve-gauge. Loaded with number four shot.”

“One of the things I could never figure out,” I said to Juanita, “is if you were so fond of Felipe Esteva, why you told me his wife was sleeping with Valdez. It would point me right at Esteva.”

Juanita took a pack of cigarettes from the top of a low deal bookcase and lit one.

“And another thing I couldn’t figure out is when I asked you if you were sleeping with Valdez and you looked at me like you’d just swallowed a golf ball, and bolted, leaving me forlorn outside the ladies’ room.”

“You want coffee?” Juanita said. “I got instant.”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I try to stick to one cup a day.”

Hawk shook his head.

We were quiet then. Next door dimly I could hear a television set.

“Now I find out that Bailey Rogers was sleeping with Emmy Esteva.”

Juanita took in a deep lungful of smoke and held it. Then she let it trickle out through her nose. She didn’t speak.

“And I find out that you knew it.”

Juanita’s face was still flushed.

“Because his wife came to you for therapy and she discussed it with you, and she told you about his affair with Emmy and she told you how he was in Esteva’s pocket,” I said.

Juanita dragged on the cigarette again. It had a long, hot-looking coal formed at the burning end. She seemed to have shrunk in on herself, but her eyes were still very wide and dark.

“So?” Juanita’s voice seemed to come from a deep shaft of silence.

“So now your patient has a dead husband and a dead child, and the Wheaton cops are planning to shoot me. It’s time for the secrets to be told.”

Juanita looked slowly around the room. She hugged herself, her left hand clamped onto her right elbow, the cigarette in her forefingers an inch from her mouth but apparently forgotten, its smoke wisping up toward the dingy ceiling. She looked at Hawk and then at me and again at Hawk.

Hawk said, “Who you tell, Juanita?”

His voice was soft but it wasn’t tentative. Juanita looked at me.

“You tell Esteva?” I said.

The cigarette burned her fingers, she jumped and dropped it and stepped on it on the bare floor.

“You told Esteva the cop was bopping his wife,” Hawk said.

“And Esteva killed him,” I said.

“So it sorta makes it like you killed him,” Hawk said.

Juanita was shaking her head, less in denial of the accusations than in denial that the accusations were happening.

“You told Esteva,” I said again.

Outside the snow had stopped, for the moment at least. No flakes drifted against the windowpanes in Juanita’s shabby living room.

Juanita took another cigarette from her pack and lit it. She inhaled, exhaled, looked at the tip of the cigarette, put the spent match in the ashtray.

“Not first,” she said.

“Who’d you tell first?”

She hugged herself tighter, clamping her right elbow against her side with her left hand.

“Eric,” she said. I could barely hear her.

“Valdez?”

“Yes.”

I waited.

“We were... we were close,” she said. “And he was always asking me if I knew anything that could get him a handle on the cocaine thing.”

I could hear her breath as she paused. Her breath was louder than her voice. The color in her face was deeper. Her eyes seemed unfocused. Her breathing was short.

“And?” I said.

“And I told him what Caroline had told me.” She said it in a rush.

“That he was taking Esteva’s money and sleeping with Esteva’s wife,” I said.

“Yes.”