The Cinco de Mayo Murder by Lee Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

Joseph. She was already getting her nightshirt out of the drawer.
    We returned to the hotel before ten the next morning and took chairs facing an entrance. The Towers arrived punctually, Mrs. Tower's face lighting up when she spotted Joseph.
    I brought them over to the arrangement of chairs and a sofa around a table and we introduced ourselves.
    “Before we begin,” Bradley Tower said, “I'd like to know how you found us.”
    I explained that I had the file of Heinz Gruner's accident, and their names and old address were in it.
    He looked troubled. “You can just put your hands on a criminal file anytime you want to?”
    “It's not a criminal file,” I said. “It's a police file of the accidental death of a boy I went to high school with. You and your wife reported it. As a matter of fact, I didn't get the file myself. My husband is a lieutenant in the New York Police Department. But nothing in that file is sealed.”
    “I see.”
    “Is there a problem?”
    He and his wife exchanged a glance. I suspected they'd had some conversation about this.
    “I think we're OK,” he said. “What did you want to know?”
    “Anything you can remember about finding the body. Were you going uphill or downhill when you spotted it?”
    “Downhill,” Mary Ann Tower said. “We came around the bend and I looked down the slope and there it was.”
    “She was pretty upset,” her husband said. “Not that I wasn't. But she kind of got faint and I had to steady her.”
    “Did you go down to the body?” I asked.
    “Mary Ann wouldn't hear of it. I wanted to, in case the poor guy was still alive.”
    “You could tell he wasn't,” Mary Ann said. “Even from that distance, you could see the animals had gotten to him. It was awful.”
    “So we knew it hadn't just happened.”
    “What did you do? Did you have a cell phone?”
    He laughed. “That was twenty years ago. There weren't any cell phones then. We hiked down the mountain and went to the tollbooth and reported it. The gal there called a ranger and the police, and a deputy came awhile later. We hiked back up with him to be sure he went to the right place. The ranger led the way.”
    “A lot of hiking for one day,” I said.
    “You bet. But we were in good shape then, right, Mary Ann?”
    She smiled. “Those were the days.”
    “I understand there was a backpack on the trail.”
    “Right. I didn't open it. I figured it was his.”
    “Funny that no one found it before you did.”
    “There aren't always a lot of people on that trail. What time of year did that happen?” he asked his wife.
    “May.”
    “Right. May seventh. They figured he'd fallen a couple of days earlier, Cinco de Mayo, fifth of May. I remember it was real hot, too hot to climb, but we'd been planning that for a while.”
    “Was there anything that you saw that struck you as strange?”
    “The whole thing was strange. I'd never seen a dead bodybefore in my life. I see how he could've fallen, but he shouldn't have. He didn't have his backpack on, so he wasn't weighed down. I couldn't figure what made him fall.”
    “He was from the East,” I said. “He may have gotten dehydrated. You said yourself it was hot.”
    “That's what I said,” Mary Ann declared. “The heat got to him, he felt dizzy, and he fell.”
    “You mean he put his backpack down nice and neat by the side of the trail and then toppled over?” Brad sounded scornful. “I could almost believe it if he had the backpack on. It could've unbalanced him.”
    “Well, we'll never know,” his wife said dismissively.
    “Did you go up that same trail that you came down?”
    “Sure,” Brad said.
    Sister Joseph leaned forward. “Didn't you come upon the backpack on your way up?”
    The couple looked at each other. “I didn't see it,” Mary Ann said.
    “Neither did I.”
    “Could you have missed it?”
    Brad shook his head. “I don't think so. That's not a wide trail. Even if we weren't looking, one of us would've been sure to kick