The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

  Mrs. Potter’s heart went out to Ken. She saw his chin come up stubbornly, and his tone was gruff when he said, “Linda was horseback.”

  “So?” the sheriff retorted. “You know some of these gully washers are strong enough to move boulders, much less a little ol’ girl and a horse. They’d float like rafts on a stream. You have your searchers look farther downstream, Ken, that’s where you’ll find them, sure as shootin’.”

  The young cowboy stared off in stony silence.

  Mrs. Potter slipped quietly back into the Ortega house.

  The volunteers—now aided by the sheriff’s people—did look downstream, until the sun slid down the far side of the western range of mountains at the other end of Wind Valley. They combed every precipitous inch of El Bizcocho and all the acreage around it on every side. They found what looked like ricochet shots off boulders, right up where Patches had done his houlihan, which confirmed the local opinion about hunters, but they found no sign of Linda or Taco.

  It took Arizona Aerials, flying at five hundred feet between two mountains, to sight the young girl’s horse in an isolated mountain pasture.

  “Ken took five of us men out to that far pasture with him to round up that horse,” Charlie Watt quietly told Mrs. Potter after they’d all straggled in for her chili. “We searched for Linda for as long as the light held. We found her saddle and bridle, Genia.”

  “Oh, Charlie!” Mrs. Potter’s hands leapt to her mouth and her heart to her throat. “Where is she?”

  “I wish I knew. We had to practically drag Ken out of that pasture,” Charlie continued, lowering his voice even more, bending over so only she could hear his words. “I swear the fellow would have searched all night if we’d’ve let him. He was hollerin’ like a crazy man—hell, I guess we all were—trying to get her to yell back if she could hear us. But we gave up, we had to.…”

  She patted his arm as if to say, “I know.”

  “It’s not going to do that girl any good,” Charlie said, “to have one of us get hurt up there in those draws and hollers now it’s night.”

  “What did you do with Linda’s saddle, Charlie?”

  “Dunno what Ken did with it.”

  “Shouldn’t it go to the sheriff?”

  “Oh, hell, Genia.” His shoulders slumped and he looked old and tired. “The rain washed it clean, you know that. That saddle ain’t going to tell any tales.”

  “Thank you, Charlie, I just can’t tell you—”

  “Now that ain’t necessary, Genia, so you can just stop that right now before you get started.” His voice had turned gruff. “You think I don’t recollect all those times you sat with Helen at the hospital? You’re good neighbors, and that’s all that I’m tryin’ to be. Now, where’s that famous chili of yours, Genia?”

  She bit back tears of appreciation as she led him into her kitchen. These valley people were so kind, so good, she reflected: how would she or the Ortegas ever have managed this awful day without them? Mrs. Potter glanced over to where a tall, distinguished-looking man with graying hair was ladling chili out of pots on her stove into the bowls held in her neighbors’ hands. And how, she thought, would I have ever endured this day without you?

  As if he’d actually heard her, Jedders H. White suddenly looked over at her and winked. It was a small gesture, probably unnoticed by anybody else, but it bespoke such warmth and understanding that Mrs. Potter had to walk quickly back down the hall and into her bathroom to blink away tears and compose herself for her other guests.

  CHAPTER 18

  They were curious about him, of course, this handsome older man who just appeared in Eugenia Potter’s kitchen, stirring her pots of chili as casually as if he lived there.

  “You a friend of Genia’s?” inquired Charlie Watt in his blunt way, when he grabbed a bowl and walked up to where Jed stood at the stove.

  “I’m staying at the C Lazy U,” was Jed’s reply, offered with a friendly smile and a ladleful of steaming chili.

  “Guest of Che’s, then,” said Charlie, jumping to a correct conclusion, which was also the wrong one. “Where you hail from, you don’t mind my askin’?”

  “Around Boston. Beautiful country you’ve got here …”

  Which was all that Charlie, a proud Arizona native, needed to get him talking about his business and distracted from Jed’s, Mrs. Potter observed. She appreciated Jed’s discretion—no need to get her neighbors all atwitter about “Genia’s old beau”—but she wondered if it was on her behalf or that of his private business with the McHenrys. Well, she didn’t have time to think about that now.… Thank goodness, Jed appeared to be the self-sufficient sort who didn’t need her to introduce him to people or make sure he felt comfortable in the crowd. She had more than enough to do, without having to baby-sit a full-grown man in this crowd.

  Her chili party, which she had so hoped would be a celebration, was more like a wake. Juanita and her family didn’t come up from the house down the hill, but Mrs. Potter didn’t expect them to. They needed each other and privacy this evening, she thought. Mrs. Potter hoped she was doing them a favor by keeping these well-intentioned neighbors away from them for a little while.

  “I’m concerned about Bandy,” she confided to Jed, when she had his ear for a brief moment. “I asked him into the house, but he won’t come.”

  Bandy Esposito was still outside, stoically going about his chores at the swimming pool and the rose gardens. She had watched from her ramada as, one after another, the people of the valley had come into the compound and immediately noticed the old man as he measured chemicals into the sparkling blue pool, or as he mixed fertilizer or bug-spray beside the roses. She had watched a few of them stride toward him, as if to commiserate with him on the loss of his friend and boss, but there was something about the stiff set of Bandy’s back, the rigidity of his head and neck and shoulders, the fierceness of his face that discouraged them from taking the remaining steps up to him. Respectfully, often with their cowboy hats in their hands, they had all backed away from the old hired hand, leaving him to his chores and to his apparent grief.

  Mrs. Potter did not know who had told Bandy about Ricardo.

  By the time she found him, he already knew.

  They had simply gazed at each other, the hired man and la patrona, and then he had lowered his gaze and turned away first. Mrs. Potter had reached out her hand to grasp his shoulder for a moment, and he had almost looked back at her, but not quite. Instead, he had gently eased out from under her touch and slowly limped away in the direction of his apartment over the garage. She hadn’t seen him again that day until he showed up at his usual time to perform his jobs around her house. Like her other guests, Mrs. Potter respectfully left him alone, but her heart ached for him.

  Inside her house there was at first no talk of anything except Ricardo and Linda, even in the odd moment when Lorraine Steinbach drew Mrs. Potter back down the hall and into her bedroom. By the time Mrs. Potter had closed the door at Lorraine’s gestured request, the other woman had started weeping. Lorraine moved quickly to Mrs. Potter’s bed, sat down on the edge of it, and put her face in her hands.

  Mrs. Potter sat down and put an arm around her, wondering if these tears were for Ricardo. She hadn’t realized that Lorraine and he were close; she’d assumed they were friendly acquaintances. A soft tap at the bedroom door preceded the entry of a third woman, Che Thomas.

  “Bastard,” breathed Che, as she quickly crossed the room to sit on Lorraine’s other side, and took hold of the weeping woman’s hands. Her chic black outfit was dusty now, but she still moved as energetically as if the day had only just begun. “You know perfectly well that he’s not worth crying over, Lorraine, darling.”

  No, Mrs. Potter decided, this was definitely not about Ricardo.

  But, in that, it turned out, she was partly wrong.

  “Did you see them?” Lorraine cried to her friends. “They don’t even try to hide it anymore. He gives her a peck on the cheek, right out in public,
and she giggles at him, like some stupid schoolgirl. Oh, why do they have to make such a fool of me? And of Walt?”

  “Because they are fools, my dear,” said Che.

  Lorraine Steinbach looked up tearfully at Mrs. Potter, who had an irreverent desire to shake the plump little woman until her teeth rattled. “Ricardo told them to quit it, you know. He stopped Gallway one day in the grocery store, right there in the canned soup aisle, and he told Gallway he was behaving monstrously toward me, and if that didn’t faze him, then he ought to know that he was ruining that bitch’s reputation all through the valley.”

  “Ricardo said that?” Mrs. Potter asked.

  “Not ‘bitch,’ that’s my word,” Lorraine said, bitterly.

  Mrs. Potter knew it was never a word Lorraine would have used before this. She’d never seemed like the kind of woman to know the meaning of certain four- and five-letter words, much less ever to use them.

  “What did Gallway say to that?” Mrs. Potter inquired.

  “He said Ricardo ought to mind his own business for once, or one day he’d find he didn’t have any more business to mind!”

  Over Lorraine’s head, Che and Mrs. Potter looked at each other.

  “What was that supposed to mean?” Che asked.

  Lorraine shrugged, as if in hopeless despair. “Oh, you know Gallway, half of what he says doesn’t make any sense anyway.”

  Mrs. Potter glanced at Che again, and the two friends shook their respective heads. Then Che did what Mrs. Potter was only thinking and which she herself might never actually have done. She took hold of Lorraine Steinbach’s shoulders and turned her around and glared at her. “Do you hear yourself, Lorraine? Did you hear what you just said about him? He doesn’t make much sense, that’s what you said. An old fool, that’s what you’ve called him. Along with idiot, moron, and bastard. This is all true, Lorraine. He is all of those things, and more. So the point is, the question is, what the hell do you care what he does with Kathy Amory? Let him leave you for that little twit. Then she’d have to take care of an old fool who doesn’t make any sense, and you wouldn’t have to anymore! Sounds pretty good to me, Lorraine. Doesn’t that sound pretty good to you, Genia?”

  Mrs. Potter almost smiled, though she was surprised at Che’s words. Che had previously maintained that if Lorraine really wanted to stay with the execrable Gallway, then she ought to do just that. With a raised eyebrow, Mrs. Potter silently inquired of Che: What’s with you?

  She didn’t get an answer, because Lorraine was protesting, over a fresh deluge of tears, “You never have liked him, either of you. He’s my husband, and I love him. Ricardo should never have said that to him, either, because it just made Gallway more determined to do what he wants. I could have killed Ricardo for sticking his nose in—”

  Lorraine stopped, horrified at what she’d said.

  This time Mrs. Potter did speak up. “Oh, don’t be silly, Lorraine, we know what you meant.”

  But did they, really? she wondered.

  Could she and Che, both of whom had been married to nice and normal men who had treated them with respect born of love, could they ever possibly understand what went on in the head of a determinedly mistreated woman like Lorraine Steinbach? Judging by their annoyance and impatience with her, Mrs. Potter—rather sadly—suspected they could not. She was relieved to excuse herself from the tearful scene in the bedroom in order to return to the kitchen to see to her other dinner guests.

  “Thanks a lot,” Che mouthed at her, with a wry smile.

  As the first sad hour passed into the second, the twenty-seven-ingredient chili eventually worked its magic, filling stomachs so that people felt less cold and tired, and soothing their emotions by creating a companionable warmth around the chili pots.

  It was like gathering around a campfire.

  Mrs. Potter’s guests seemed to enjoy taking turns serving chili that night, using the long-handled, deep serving spoons she had stuck in the two big pots.

  “Brilliant idea, Genia,” whispered Che when she returned from the back bedroom. “Takes everybody’s mind off their worrying over that poor girl for a little while.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘woman’?” said Kathy Amory, who stood close enough to overhear.

  “She’s still a girl to me,” Che snapped, and Kathy blushed like a girl herself. “Even if she is eighteen years old. I watched that child grow up and as far as I can tell she’s not done yet. Some females stay girls for a lot longer than others,” she said pointedly, and then shifted her gaze to Kathy’s husband, Walt. “Like some males remain boys for a while longer than most.”

  As Mrs. Potter had predicted to Jed, the “hot pot” of chili went down faster with the men, while the women consumed most of the milder version. Each of the “servers” displayed his or her own distinct style of ladling as well.

  Walt Amory’s style of serving was as quiet and reserved as he was. He merely stood beside the stove and gave people what they asked for.

  His wife was another matter entirely. Kathy Amory’s style was to serve up flirtation along with a bowl of chili. The question “Could you give me a little more of that spicy variety?” might turn into a double entendre. “I’ll give you spicy,” she’d say with a wicked grin. “Hot and spicy, just the way I hear you like it.”

  Only later would Mrs. Potter realize that it wasn’t the way they served her chili that was important, but who was near the chili at any time during the evening.

  Che Thomas dragooned people into third helpings, while Lorraine Steinbach’s style was solicitous.

  Charlie Watt took over the spoons from Lorraine, and his style was a serious and honest one. “Yes, Genia’s chili is always plenty good, but I do believe the best chili I ever tasted was at a little roadside café outside of Houston one time. It was just beans and onions and grease, if I recall exactly. No tomato sauce like this here. Everybody puts tomato sauce in chili, like it was the eleventh commandment or something, but there’s no real reason for it. I remember President Harry Truman had a favorite chili place in Kansas City—I ate there one time, called Dixon’s Chili—and they never used no tomato sauce that I recall.” And to the person to whom he was saying all this: “Nice-looking black-and-white shirt you got on, Gallway, even if it does make you look like a pregnant zebra.”

  When Bandy Esposito stepped up to the pots, having finally come in from the yard, there was a sudden eager flow of hired hands to the stove, as if the valley’s part-time cowboys had been shy of approaching their employers for food. But they didn’t hesitate to stick their bowls out to Bandy, especially the ones of Spanish descent, who appeared to be trading jokes and asides with the man who was the oldest one of them in the valley. Ken Ryerson took over from Bandy when the old man slopped chili onto the kitchen floor once too often, and then the younger women in the crowd seemed to find sudden excuses to make their way back to the stove for refills.

  Early on in the evening, even Gallway Steinbach took a turn, although he didn’t get much business, Mrs. Potter noted. Hardly anybody appeared to be very hungry if it meant they had to approach “Gallstones” for a helping of chili. But the crackers went fast during his reign at the stove, as did the carrot and celery sticks, the coffee, iced tea, and beer. Feeling sorry for him, Mrs. Potter put him to work filling empty margarine tubs with chili so that any guest who wanted leftovers might take some home, maybe for the children or for a late-night snack, or for lunch the next day. She noted with some exasperation that Gallway didn’t bother to put the lids on any of them, but just set them out all over her countertops, a fact that seemed important to her only later. Mrs. Potter would have covered them herself, but she was too busy chopping extra vegetables to refill the crudités trays.

  Her guests miraculously recovered their appetites when she retrieved her apron from around Gallway’s waist and stepped up to take a turn at serving the chili herself.

  Her personal style was to coax her guests gently out of their sad weariness by getting them to tell her a
bout their favorite chili recipe, or to encourage them in their wild guesses about the twenty-seven ingredients of her Country Friends’ recipe.

  “Soy sauce?” hazarded Kathy Amory.

  “Soy sauce!” Che Thomas snorted. “What do you think this is, Chinese chili? But there’s chili sauce, right, Genia?”

  “Right, Che.”

  “And I think you’ve got two kinds of peppers in here.”

  “Yep.”

  Che grinned. “Not going to tell me what kinds, are you? Well, smarty, that’s easy anyway. Red. And green. So there.”

  “That’s three out of twenty-seven,” observed Jed from the sidelines. “You only have twenty-four to go, Mrs. Thomas.”

  “I found a bit of black olive in mine,” Kathy said, but timidly this time, with a cautious glance at Che. And sure enough, the older woman laughed at her. “Soy sauce and black olives! Now, who in the world would put black olives in chili?”

  “I would,” Mrs. Potter said, with an oh-so-innocent smile for her friend. “Kathy’s right.”

  Nobody guessed the two different kinds of meats and they only guessed the beans when she helped them along by telling them there were two varieties. They did well on the herbs and spices—Che even guessing the oregano and cilantro. And then Jed made a confession.

  “I like the sour cream,” he said.

  Mrs. Potter smiled at him. “Told you so.”

  It was the oddest thing, she thought, but he and Marjorie and Reynolds McHenry behaved all evening like total strangers who wanted to remain that way, and not at all like potential business partners looking forward to a dinner together the next evening. Mrs. Potter was extremely curious to know the reasons behind the odd behavior: was their deal as “hot” as her chili, and so secretive that they couldn’t even let on that they knew each other? She wondered if perhaps Jedders H. White had been a bit disingenuous, a bit overly modest, about his “little” White Research firm, and about the importance of the electronic gadgets his “little” company manufactured?