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CHAPTER 27

      NAVARETTE USED Brennan's phone to call El Paso County Sheriff Toad Moressy's office and told them what had happened.

      He suggested they set up a road block as close to El Paso as possible, on the chance that they could intercept the Model A Ford carrying three Mexican nationals on their way back to Juarez. He gave them Rand's description of the three. Then he called the New Mexico State Highway Patrol to keep an eye out for them along the farm road that meandered to El Paso through Mesilla, La Mesa, and Chamberino. His third call was to his own office. He told a deputy to come to Brennan's place right away with all the fingerprint stuff and the good camera with plenty of film. He also told the deputy to call both funeral homes in town to come out in a couple of hours. Ordinarily, law enforcement groups alternated between the two mortuaries, but with two bodies to pick up both were happy.

      After he hung up Navarette said, "Let's go for a walk and see where everybody is."

      They went over to the bunkhouse and found it empty. Then they came back and, walking past the bodies on the porch, they went through Brennan's house, which was neatly kept, with his wife's touch evident in the chintz curtains, the well-waxed floors and needlework bedspread. The house smelled of Brennan's pipe tobacco.

      "Brennan sent them all away, so he and Petrie could have a little privacy with you." Navarette sank into a mohair-covered chair and lit a cigar.

      "I got it all figured out." he said. "Brennan saw Nick Hood traveling through his land to the Organs and got curious. He nosed around his house, and somehow glimmed to the fact that Hood really had found some gold . . . bars of it. He or Petrie staked out the house, and saw him carrying a heavy box that could of held the gold to his car. They followed him down highway 80 until they got beyond Vado and ran him off the road. They shot him and stole it."

      "They insisted right to the end that a masked man had shot Hood and was trying to move the gold into his own car when they just happened along," Rand said.

      "They're liars. Every murderer says he's innocent unless we catch him splashed with blood and a smoking gun in his hand."

      "How did the robbers know about the gold?"

      "Easy. Loose-lipped Petrie, with all the brains of a prairie dog, was celebrating in some saloon and that guy Uribe, whose body we found in the desert, heard him and picked up a couple of more amateurs - the Mexican and the hay truck driver, Jackson, and they robbed Brennan. Then Uribe tried to doublecross his buddies and kill them, but the Mexican did him in instead.

      "Then Brennan and Petrie," he looked slyly at Rand, "- and you, maybe - went out and found where the Mexican lived, and Petrie and Brennan strung him up, but they didn't get the gold . . ."

      "I wasn't there," Rand lied.

      Navarette ignored it. He puffed on the cigar and thought for a moment. "Why would they string him up? Those guys were not above torturing him?"

      "Maybe they did."

      "Granted," Navarette said. "You wouldn't care to fill in that little detail from your own knowledge?"

      "Nope. Remember, I wasn't there."

      "I wish you wouldn't lie. You do it so poorly. To wrap it up, his family came back for the gold and took it to Juarez. They drove up here today to find out where more gold was, since a lot of gold is always better than a little bit, and the kid had a loose wire and killed Brennan and Petrie when they couldn't tell them what they wanted to hear. What do you think?"

      "What about Vandergaard?" Rand asked.

      "He was sneaking around trying to find more gold - which there really was. Then Bobby Diggs nailed him with the hammer thinking it was you. Petrie hired him to get you to keep your mouth shut. Then Petrie went and knocked off Diggs so he wouldn't talk, and also, I think, to steal back the money he paid him."

      "Everything neat and tidy," Rand said.

      "That's the way I like it." Navarette was clearly pleased with himself.

      They went out on the porch, waiting for the Deputy to show up. The sun was hanging about an two inches from a smudge of mountains in the distance. Navarette said he hoped his man would show up with the camera before it got dark.

      Then they saw the plume of dust the Sheriff's Department car made driving toward them, and in a few minutes Navarette was taking pictures and making notes and acting like Sherlock Holmes, except Holmes didn't have a fingerprint kit, and Navarette didn't have a magnifying glass.

      "Joe, you think your man could drive me to town?" Rand asked.

      "What's the matter, Rand. Can't take being tied up for hours, beaten on, and tortured with a cheap cigar?" He laughed and turned to the Deputy. "Take this man wherever he wants to go, then come back here and keep me company." To Rand he said, "Get some rest. Tomorrow I'm gonna take a deposition from you about what happened."

      "I'm staying at the Las Cruces Courts," Rand said.

      "I know," Navarette said.

      "You know everything," Rand said.

      Navarette took a good cigar out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in Rand's shirt pocket. "It takes a smart man to know how smart I am," he said. "Take care, hombre."

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