Day of the Dead Page 5

  “You waited a long time to talk about this.”

  Emma nodded. “It was a bad time,” she said. “When it was over, Henry, my husband, said we should just forget about it. It’s not good to dwell on the past.”

  Brandon nodded and said nothing. Emma continued. “But Henry’s dead now,” she added. “I’m Roseanne’s mother, and I want to know.”

  Brandon didn’t look at Emma directly. That, too, would have been considered rude behavior on his part, but as she spoke, he studied her reflection in the entryway mirror. Coming here and digging up the past in the presence of a stranger and a Mil-gahn—a white man—besides, showed a great deal of courage and strength of character on Emma’s part. To do so meant that, in both regards, she was going against hundreds of years of tradition and a lifetime’s worth of teaching as well. He watched as she gripped the handle of her walker as if the plastic-covered metal might somehow help stiffen her resolve in the same way it helped hold her upright.

  “Mr. Ortiz said you belonged to some kind of group that looks into old cases…into old murders.” She stumbled over the last word.

  Other people might have been surprised to hear the word murder stick in Emma Orozco’s throat more than thirty years after the fact. Brandon Walker was not. He knew how events like that—like the death of a child—might disappear from public view after a few days of newspaper and television coverage. But for the parents of a dead child, the loss is permanent, indelible. It becomes the central issue of existence, not just for mothers and fathers, but for sisters and brothers as well; for husbands and wives and children. That sudden death is a watershed. From that moment on, life’s perspective shifts. Everything dates from either before or after. This was as true for Brandon as it was for Emma Orozco; for he, too, had lost a child.

  “Yes,” he supplied in answer to Emma’s comment. “The organization Mr. Ortiz told you about is called The Last Chance, TLC for short. It’s a private organization that was started a few years ago by a Mil-gahn woman named Hedda Brinker from Scottsdale—a woman not unlike yourself whose daughter was murdered in Tempe in 1959.”

  Emma’s dark eyes sought Brandon’s. “Did they ever find out who did it?” she asked.

  “No,” Brandon replied. “That’s what Hedda Brinker was hoping might happen when she started TLC—that someone would finally solve her own child’s murder.” He shrugged. “Maybe someday we will,” he added. “But right now the stated purpose of TLC is to help other people.”

  “People like me?” Emma asked.

  Brandon nodded. “Yes,” he said. “People just like you.”

  “How much does it cost?” Emma asked. “I have some money. I can pay…”

  “It’s expensive,” Brandon answered. “But it costs you nothing. Hedda created a charitable organization that pays all the costs.”

  Emma reached for her purse, an ugly boxy vinyl one with a broken strap and brittle, damaged corners. At first Brandon thought she was going to offer him money after all. Instead, she dug out a ball-point pen and a small spiral notebook—the same kind of notebook Brandon himself had carried during his days as a homicide detective. Emma flipped through the notebook to a blank page. She handed the notebook to Brandon, who rose from his chair to take it.

  “Please,” Emma said softly. “Please write down this nice white lady’s name for me. Tomorrow when I go to Mass, I will say a rosary for her and light a candle.”

  Brandon Walker smiled to himself. He had never met Hedda Brinker. She had died more than two years earlier of congestive heart failure, but he imagined it would have come as a surprise for that “nice white lady” who was also Jewish to know that she was being prayed for and having candles lit by an equally nice Tohono O’odham lady who was a practicing Catholic.

  He handed the pen and notebook back to Emma. She carefully filed both of them away in her purse. She clicked it shut, then waited for some time without speaking, staring once more at the Man in the Maze. Again Brandon Walker was the one who broke the silence.

  “Perhaps you should tell me about your daughter.”

  Emma’s gnarled fingers tightened around the handle of her walker. “Henry and I had two daughters,” she said softly. “The older one, Andrea, we called Mithol-mad—Kitten. The younger one, Roseanne, the shy one, we called Tachchuithch…”

  “Beloved,” Brandon supplied without needing Emma to translate.

  For the first time Emma looked at the Mil-gahn man—really looked at him. He was tall and well-built. His graying hair was cut short. Compared to Tohono O’odham faces, his was sharp and angular, but his eyes were soft and looked at her with a kindness she had not expected from someone who had once been a detective—and a sheriff.

  Fat Crack had told her Brandon Walker was a good man—a white man who could be trusted. She knew that Walker and his wife had a wogsha—an adopted Tohono O’odham child—named Lani. According to Fat Crack, the girl was the spiritual daughter of the Desert People’s greatest medicine woman, Kulani O’oks, a woman who, in a time of terrible drought, was saved from death by the beating of the wings of The Little People, the Bees and Wasps, the Butterflies and Moths. But Emma Orozco had not expected the Mil-gahn would understand or speak her native tongue. Her fingers unclenched. She relaxed her painful grip on the walker.

  “They found her out along the highway beyond Giwho Tho’ag,” Emma said softly. “Someone cut her up and put her in a box.”

  Emma deliberately used the Tohono O’odham word for Burden Basket Mountain. It was a test of sorts, to see how much the Mil-gahn knew.

  “I remember now,” he said, nodding. “The girl in the ice chest over by Quijotoa.”

  It came back to him then, not all the details, but enough. He was still working Homicide for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. When he heard about the case, he was happy the call hadn’t come to him. He’d already been through one ugly reservation-based homicide. A year earlier, a young Indian woman named Gina Antone had been murdered just off the reservation. The trail had led Brandon Walker to Andrew Philip Carlisle, a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, and eventually to one of Professor Carlisle’s star pupils, Garrison Ladd, Diana’s first husband.

  As the investigation closed in, Garrison Ladd had perished in what was mistakenly thought to be a suicide. As far as Brandon was concerned, Carlisle’s slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain had been a less than satisfactory conclusion to the case. It had left a bad taste in Brandon’s mouth. The bitter taste still lingered in 1970, when Roseanne Orozco’s butchered body was found on the reservation, and Brandon had been happy to dodge that particular bullet. Some other investigator—he couldn’t remember exactly who—took the call.

  There were several differences between the Orozco murder and Gina Antone’s. Gina had died off the reservation and at the hands of Anglos. Consequently, the investigation into her death had fallen under the jurisdiction of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Although the actual murder site was never found in the Orozco case, it was assumed Roseanne had died somewhere on the reservation and that she had been murdered by a fellow Indian. Investigations into Indians murdering Indians on Native lands were the responsibility of either the FBI or the local tribal police.

  Brandon Walker remembered that, in the early seventies, there had been a small contingent inside the FBI with the kind of corporate mind-set that preferred shooting Indians to anything else. FBI investigations into reservation murders, unless the perpetrator was Indian and the victim Anglo, were often cursory at best. People went through the motions, and that was it. “Law and Order,” as the Papago Tribal Police Force was sometimes called, was summoned to the scene of the Orozco homicide. Hampered by a lack of three essential ingredients—training, equipment, and money—their subsequent investigation had obviously come to nothing, although Brandon hadn’t known that for sure—not until right then, when Emma told him.

  The Orozco homicide hadn’t been Brandon Walker’s deal. Newly divorced, he’d had his hands full in th
ose years. Money had been short. He had struggled to keep up with alimony and child-support payments by moonlighting as a rent-a-cop on occasion and by moving in with his parents for what they had all erroneously expected would be a short time. With all that going on and with his father in deteriorating health, no wonder he hadn’t kept track of the outcome of each investigation, successful or not, that had, however briefly, crossed his desk.

  “Law and Order thought my husband did it,” Emma said softly. Her quiet words jarred Brandon back to his living room half a lifetime away.

  “Why did they think that?” he asked.

  “Please,” Emma Orozco said, holding out her glass. “Could I have some more tea? Then I will tell you the whole story.”

  Sitting in the dark at the end of the block, Gayle Stryker listened to her ringing telephone and didn’t answer. Erik was the only person who had this number, and she had nothing to say to him. Instead, she sat in the car and immersed herself in rage—in unmitigated fury. How dare he toss her aside like that? How dare he think he could throw her over in favor of some little baby-producing twit who wouldn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground?

  Gayle couldn’t help wondering who it was—somebody from work, most likely. Where else would Erik have met someone? Maybe it was the new little bitch at reception. What was her name? Denise Something. Just two days ago Gayle had caught the wide-hipped little blonde eyeing Erik and giving his body a casual once-over. Well, if Denise was it, Gayle would be more than happy to send her down the road come Monday morning.

  That was Gayle’s first thought. As the hours passed, that plan changed. Something better came to mind. Today—yesterday now—Erik LaGrange had been on top of the world. He’d had a good job, a company car, and a generous lover who’d taught the naive son of a bitch everything he knew. By tonight—tomorrow at the latest—his life would be hell. His lover would be gone along with his job. With any luck, he’d be in jail and maybe on his way to the state prison in Florence. Gayle wondered how Denise would react to hearing that news. As for Erik? Gayle had every confidence the guys in Florence would teach him a thing or two about screwing.

  Gayle had planned to follow Erik wherever he went, but finally, as the hours drifted by, she realized Erik wasn’t going anywhere. He was in for the night. Still she waited and watched. To do what she wanted, she’d need access to his house, but after five years, she knew Erik almost as well as he knew himself, and she could predict with uncanny accuracy exactly what he’d do.

  Gayle knew what it cost Erik to stand up to her. He’d told Gayle time and again about how his grandmother—his sainted grandmother—had always taken to the hills whenever things went wrong—how she’d taught Erik to do the same thing. And so, as the sun came up that morning, Gayle had reason to hope he would revert to type. She wasn’t disappointed.

  Just at sunrise, she saw him come out of the house in shorts, hiking boots, and carrying a loaded knapsack. When he bypassed his parked truck and headed off on foot, Gayle couldn’t believe her luck. Using his vehicle would make her plan far easier to pull off.

  Gayle waited until he disappeared up the street, but not much longer than that. Then she drove up to the house and used her door opener to slip the Lexus past the parked pickup and into the two-car garage. It took only a matter of minutes for her to gather what she needed. When she left, driving Erik’s Tacoma, none of the neighbors had yet to venture to the ends of their driveways to retrieve their morning papers.

  Like Erik himself, Gayle came and went while the neighbors slept. As she drove away, Gayle could hardly wait for this new adventure to be over—so she could tell Larry all about it.

  Five

  Great Spirit always carries a bag with him. That way, if he wants to, he can make things.

  I’itoi reached up, gathered a great handful of beautiful yellow leaves, and put them in his bag. Then he gathered some of the dark shadows from under the leaves and put the shadows in the bag. He stooped and picked up some of the sunbeams from the ground and mixed the sunbeams in with the leaves and shadows. He added some brown leaves to the bag along with some tiny white flowers. He shook the bag and looked inside, then decided he needed more yellow leaves. This time he reached so high into the trees that he caught some of the blue sky. So bits of blue sky went into the bag along with everything else.

  The children saw I’itoi under the cottonwood trees and came to see what he was doing and to see if he wanted to play. But Elder Brother was tired with all his work. He threw his bag down on the ground, lay down, and put his head on it. And soon I’itoi and all the children were fast asleep in the cool shade of the cottonwoods.

  As Erik labored up the mountain toward Finger Rock, he dodged other hikers by steering clear of the main trail. He struck off on his own, heading for one of the steeper but less-traveled canyons. Once, crossing a ravine, he smelled a distinctly musky odor and knew, without seeing them, that a herd of javelina must be resting in a nearby patch of mesquite and manzanita. Unless startled or threatened, the peccaries—mostly nocturnal, boarlike creatures with coarse black-and-silver fur—weren’t dangerous, but Erik was more than happy to go out of his way to avoid them. Twice he saw coyotes disappear into the underbrush, and once he narrowly avoided stepping on a rattlesnake sunning itself in an open space between rocks.

  As the temperature warmed, Erik sat on a rock ledge, sipped water, mopped sweat from his brow, and watched a pair of A-10s circle lazily over the valley before settling in to land at Davis Monthan. The pilots knew just where they were going. Erik had no such delusions.

  Tucson had always been home to him. His grandmother had raised him here. His mother had been a girl when Grandma Johnson brought her daughter and her disabled World War II vet husband to Tucson so he could be cared for at the VA hospital. But both of Erik’s grandparents were gone now. So was his mother. As for his father? Erik had no idea where he was or whether the man was alive or dead. Erik still had a few friends in town—grade school and high school buddies who had grown up here and had never left. But with no remaining family connections tying him to Tucson, and without his job, Erik would need to find some other place to live and work. Looking over the city-filled desert below him, he felt a clutch in his gut. He loved this place and didn’t want to leave. Would he be like Grandma when she had moved away from Lake Superior’s Isle Royale—leave and never return?

  One night when Erik was five or six, after Grandma came home from her job as a checker at Safeway, Erik had asked her about that while they ate supper. Through the years he had heard her tell countless stories about her childhood on Isle Royale. To Erik it always sounded like a magic, idyllic place—one he wanted to see with his own eyes.

  “Couldn’t we go back there sometime?” he asked. “Just to visit?”

  “Oh, no,” Grandma said. A wistful cloud of sadness wafted across her face. “It’s different now—a national park—nothing at all like it used to be. No one I knew still lives there.”

  “But if it’s a park, couldn’t we go look at it?” Erik had insisted. “I could see where you used to play on the rocks and pick berries.”

  Grandma had put down her fork, reached over, and pulled him to her. “No,” she said. “Sometimes you have to leave the past in the past. Otherwise it hurts too much.”

  Hunkered down on the flank of the mountain, Erik LaGrange could see how that might be true for him, too. Once he left Tucson, he wouldn’t be coming back. If he didn’t burn all his bridges, Gayle Stryker was sure to do it for him.

  She had cut him out of the herd at a big-donor alumni function where, as a lowly junior-grade University of Arizona fund-raiser adrift in a sea of movers and shakers, Erik LaGrange had been keeping a suitably low profile.

  “So who are you?” she had demanded, walking up to him with a drink in one bejeweled hand and with her other hand resting provocatively on a curvaceous hip. “I suppose you’re the son of somebody important,” she added with an ironic smile.

  Some of the U of A’s most
well-heeled graduates were milling about La Paloma’s glitzy ballroom. In Tucson, men seldom fought their way into tuxes, but the University of Arizona’s Alumni Association’s President’s Ball was a notable exception. Tuxes were out in force and bolo ties banished. Among the sparkling collection of women dressed in their designer best, Gayle Stryker was the hands-down standout. Her crimson floor-length gown was set off by an emerald pendant big enough to choke a horse. A cloud of silvery-blond hair encircled a perfect face, and the woman’s figure was nothing short of amazing.

  “Nobody’s son,” Erik had stammered with far more truth than he intended. Even without benefit of her name tag, he had known Gayle Stryker on sight. In a roomful of major donors, Gayle and her husband, Dr. Lawrence Stryker, were in a class by themselves. Disturbed by the woman’s unblinkingly frank scrutiny, Erik found himself trying to guess her age, but the ministrations of one or several very talented plastic surgeons made that difficult. She could have been forty-five. He would learn later that she was actually twelve years older than that.

  “I work here,” he murmured.

  “For the hotel?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered. “For the alumni association, I mean. The development office.”

  She smiled. “In that case, since my husband already gave at the office, I don’t suppose you’d mind getting a lady a drink.”

  “Of course not. What would you like?”

  “A margarita,” she said. “Blended. No salt.”

  When Erik returned with the margarita, he found Gayle deep in conversation with U of A president Dr. Thomas Moore himself. Not wanting to intrude, Erik tried to linger unobtrusively in the background, but Gayle had reached out, grabbed him by the elbow, and dragged him forward.