Free Leaning Land by Rex Burns Page B

not yet picked up. The urgent knock of a dog scratching a flea bite bumped against the closed front door.
    “He never spoke to you about anything he might have found out? About anyone who might have been interested in or afraid of what he was doing?”
    “No. If he knew something like that, he never told me.”
    “Did he ever mention the Constitutional Posse?”
    “No!”
    “Do you know anybody who belongs to it?”
    She chewed at her lip. “Some around here probably do—it’s mostly the big ranch owners and the ones who go along with them. Not Rubin—he didn’t have any reason to join up with them.”
    Wager nodded. “Any idea what he was doing over in Squaw Canyon without his truck?”
    A frown pulled her pale red eyebrows together. “I don’t know. I have wondered some about that. But you ought to talk to his brother over on the reservation—Luther. Rubin was always going over there to see him.”
    Wager asked a dozen or so other questions, but they were the same thing in different words and received similar responses. When you didn’t know exactly what you wanted, when you were going by hunch and guesswork, you tried repeating the same thing in two or three different ways. It was one of the basic techniques of interviewing witnesses that Wager had learned over the years. More than once, early in his career, he had found himself unnecessarily delayed until a witness—on a third or fourth interview—brought out something vital that hadn’t been mentioned earlier because, “You didn’t ask me about it that way!” The worst kind were those witnesses who, being helpful, limited their answers strictly to what the detective asked. But Mrs. Del Ponte didn’t seem helpful as much as reluctant—her answers were terse and they all came back to the same point: she knew very little about her husband’s job or even about his life away from Egnarville.
    “Did you or your husband know Larry Kershaw, Buck Holtzer, or Walter Lawrence?”
    “No … Walter Lawrence, maybe. Ain’t he the Indian they found dead on the reservation a while ago?”
    “Yes, ma’am. The other two are the slain federal employees. Your husband would have been asking about them.”
    “Oh.” Then, “No. I didn’t know them. Rubin probably knew Walter Lawrence—everybody on the reservation knows each other. They’re all some kind of kin, mostly.” She shook her head again. “I didn’t know him.”
    “Do you like living here, Mrs. Del Ponte?”
    That question surprised her and drew her eyes from the cheery yellow-and-red plastic swing set dwarfed by the expanse of sagebrush and horizon. “Like it? Well, I reckon. It’s where I’ve lived all my life.”
    “You have family nearby?”
    “My uncle and his wife, but I don’t see much of them. Most of my family’s up near Fruita—in Mesa County. It used to be like this: real pretty and nobody around. It’s grown a lot up there, though.” She added, looking at a future Wager couldn’t see, “Jesse says it’s going to grow like that around here, too. I don’t think I’ll like that.”
    “Who says?”
    “Jesse. Herrera. Owns the store.”
    “You talk to him a lot?”
    She shrugged. “When I go over to the store. The post office is there, too.” She added, and her tone of voice told Wager to make of it what he would, that she didn’t have anything to hide. “Around here, anybody you see you talk to. It’s not like some places.”
    “Do you intend to stay here now?”
    “Well, it’s paid for—” Which was either as far down the road as she had thought or as far as she was willing to let Wager see. He wasn’t sure which.
    “Does Jesse Herrera live around here, too?”
    “Yes.” She wagged a hand over her shoulder. “Over there near the store. Why?”
    “Is he married?”
    “What’s that mean?”
    “Just trying to understand your husband’s life, Mrs. Del Ponte. Maybe something will help explain his death.”
    “Well, you understand this, Detective Whatever