Free skeletons by Glendon Swarthout Page A

held out a hand. His nails were manicured.
    I gave him the ticket.
    He tore it up over a wastebasket.
    “Thank you,” I said. “You know who I am and why I’m here.”
    “Yes.” His voice was soft, almost melodious.
    “What have you done to find the guy who hit Sansom.”
    “Not much.”
    “Why not?”
    “He is possibly in New Jersey. Sleeping well. Or in California. On the beach.”
    “What happened to Sansom’s car?”
    “We called Hertz in El Paso. They picked it up.”
    “He must have stayed at the Ramada Inn, but they have no registration card for him.”
    “A mystery.”
    “They put me in the same room.”
    “The plot thickens.” He smiled. He had several gold teeth and a pencil mustache.
    “When he was here, did he talk with you?”
    “Yes. He did what you have done. Questioned Judge Vaught, drove up to San Carlos, found out that the transcripts are missing. Then he walked across the street to see me.”
    “And that night—you’re sure it was hit-and-run?”
    “I’m sure. I have seen a hundred of them.”
    “Suppose it–wasn’t. Suppose he dug up something he shouldn’t have and somebody here in Harding wanted him to forget it—permanently. Who might it have been?”
    He frowned. “Me, probably.”
    “You.”
    “I didn’t like him. He was a swell-head son of a bitch. A Jewish chingao.”
    “Anti-Semitic?”
    “There is nothing wrong with being Jewish unless you are Jewish about it. He was. Ego? My God.” Chavez shook his head. “If he wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.”
    “Wasn’t where?”
    “Oh, the world wars, the birth of Christ, the moon landing. If he wasn’t there, they didn’t happen.”
    I had been distracted by six pen-and-ink drawings on the wall behind him. Sensual sketches of full-bodied peasant women fondling babies, manipulating tortillas, caressing melons.
    “Pardon me. Are those Riveras?”
    “They are.”
    DIEGO RIVERAS? In the office of a SHERIFF?
    “I bought them in Mexico City in 1951, for $12.50 each. I have been offered a thousand each.”
    I stared at them, then at him again. His eyes were brown and easy. His hair was black as comedy, with epaulets of gray at the temples which were damned near distinguished. According to Tyler, if anyone had finalized Max Sansom, it had to be Pingo Chavez. Poor girl. She had to be as non compos as her poor mother. If this intelligent, cultured “Little Devil” was a murderer, I was Robert Redford.
    I sat down. The chair was real leather. “When he came to see you—Sansom—what did he want?”
    “What you want. What I could tell him about the two trials, and what happened to the Villistas. He was going to write a book. I told him what I knew. It was not much.”
    “How much?”
    “About the trials, nothing. About the four peons—that they were let go and caught and killed. That some years ago my people buried them near the border and made a sort of shrine. It is called ‘La Casa de la Justicia.’ ‘The House of Justice.’”
    “Justice?”
    “We have our sense of humor, too.”
    “Oh.”
    “If you want to see it, drive down. It is on my ranch. Eleven miles south, toward Columbus. You will see a sign, ‘Los Esqueletos.’ Turn left under the sign and follow the road. It leads to my house.”
    “Did Sansom go there?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe.”
    He offered me a small cigar. I said no thanks. He lit one himself.
    “What I don’t get is this,” I said. “If those Villistas were run down and wasted in 1916, as you say, and Judge Vaught says, why wasn’t something done about it later? Or anytime since? There’s no statute of limitations on murder—I read that in a crime novel.”
    “Nothing was done because they were Mexican.”
    “You’re bitter.”
    “Realistic. And whoever killed them joined them long ago. The men who sat in this chair before me could not track down dead men. Should they have dug up the graves of the guilty and said I arrest you for homicide?” He appraised his cigar