by Louise Ure
Back at the house, I turned on both the swamp box cooler and an electric fan to keep the air moving and went to work. The new coat of paint looked so good in the living room that I continued on into the bedroom, but the quart of ammonia was barely enough to make me feel that the kitchen and bathroom had been cleaned of the Braceros’ presence.
After I’d replaced the locks, rehung the bathroom door and medicine cabinet, and spread a new set of sheets across the foam pad, it began to feel like home. I flopped down on the beanbag chair, opened a beer, and grabbed the phone.
“Department of Corrections? I’d like to be added to the visitor list for one of your inmates. Paula Gammage—I think she’s using the name Paula Chatham now.” I took a long swig of Genuine Draft. “Perryville facility, that’s right.” I gave them all the information they needed to clear me for the approved list.
“Visiting hours are Saturday and Sunday, from nine to three-thirty,” the corrections officer said.
“I’d like to be on the list for Saturday, please.”
It would be nice to catch up with my ex-sister-in-law of America’s Most Wanted fame. She was the only criminal I knew, except for me. Oh sure, there were all those folks I’d been incarcerated with at the county jail while I was waiting for my trial, but I wasn’t sure which of them I could trust. In matters of crime, it’s always best to stick with family.
The next day was October first. I phoned Bonita’s landlord and arranged to pay another month’s rent on the place. I didn’t mention the new locks and new coat of paint. Any goodwill the repairs would have generated would have been offset by the damage to the furniture, anyway.
Arizona doesn’t pay much attention to seasonal change except that October signals a drop back into the eighties for the first time since Easter. I worked out with my homemade gym equipment in the backyard, seeing the bartender’s sneering face and hearing the roar of the Braceros’ motorcycles with each curl. Anger—at them for their bullying and machismo, and at myself for letting it happen—ran through me as I pumped the sand-filled containers again and again. I’d been dipped in rage for three years now, the coating getting thicker and thicker with each injustice, each disappointment, each bit of control seeping away.
Guillermo called three times, but I didn’t pick up. His last message said he’d come by after work. I didn’t want to be here. Getting involved with him and his missing brother had caused both the Braceros and Detective Sabin to come after me. I didn’t want to get any more ensnared than I already was in a situation that was blossoming craziness.
At sunset, I got in the truck, rolled the windows down, and left to find some dinner, settling for cottage cheese and two packages of sliced turkey from the grocery store. Time to get back to my build-muscle-not-fat diet. Time to reduce the cardio and increase the weight lifting. Time to get strong. Be prepared. Time to take charge again.
It was too early to go home; Guillermo might still be looking for me. I drove west through Gates Pass, the city lights a star-studded reflection in my rearview mirror. Descending to the valley floor on the other side, I spotted the plastic flowers and white cross that mark the site of a death on the roadside. Had someone fallen asleep and driven off the edge? Had he walked along the roadside, deaf to the sound of a truck approaching him from behind? Whatever happened, someone had bothered to remember him, to place a sad, plastic reminder of his existence where others could catch it in their headlights and for just a moment, wonder who had left this world, and who he had left behind.
I hadn’t seen a Day of the Dead altar at my parents’ house, but it was probably too early for my mother to have assembled it yet. It wouldn’t be lit until November, although she was undoubtedly mentally selecting the memorabilia, the sugar skulls, the candles that she’d need. The first day of November was to remember lost children and infants. The second day was for adults.
I was eight when she first let me help with an altar. She settled a gardenia in a shallow glass bowl in front of a flinty-eyed picture of her mother. A clutch of daisies became the bed for her sister’s gold hoop earring. It was the first year she marked my aunt Helen’s death.
I added the braided blue collar my old cocker spaniel had worn and a sprig from the potted fern out front he’d liked to pee on. My mother pushed them to the back of the table, keeping the apron of the altar to showcase her own pain.
Maybe she’d put a picture of Bonita on the altar this year. Not that she was dead, but being gone a worrisome distance away was just as bad. That deserved prayer and remembrance, too. I doubt that my mother had ever included any reminders of me.
On Friday I called Deke Treadwell and told him I was heading back to Phoenix for the weekend, to wrap up the loose ends of my life.
“How can we reach you if we need to?”
“You have my cell phone number.”
“I mean, where can we find you? Where will you be staying?”
That was a little too much supervision for my taste. They may have thought I was somehow involved with Markson’s and Felicia’s deaths, but so far I wasn’t charged with anything. Treadwell would have to settle for vague.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll find something cheap once I get up there.”
I was on the road by seven the next morning, in order to be at the prison when visiting hours started.
Traffic was light and I made it all the way to Chandler before I needed a refill on my coffee. Then it was a straight shot through Phoenix and another twenty miles west to reach the prison.
The Perryville complex, the largest female-inmate prison in the Arizona system, spilled over both sides of the road, but the part I was going to was the giant octagonal razor-wired section on the east. I pulled into the parking lot and followed the signs for arriving visitors.
The waiting room was packed with parents, children, and spouses, all craning to see the next inmate admitted to the visitors’ room. One ruddy-cheeked father counseled his six-year-old daughter on the finer points of prison protocol. “Remember to tell Mommy how much we miss her and how beautiful she looks.” The little girl nodded solemnly.
It took twenty minutes for Paula to come through the door and I hardly recognized her when she did. Much like my own jailhouse metamorphosis, Paula had become tauter, stronger. She was no longer the soft-spoken blonde who had swapped recipes and diet advice with me.
She was only twenty-seven now, but it looked like she’d added a decade’s worth of tough and smart in the three years since I’d seen her.
We got permission to go out to the exercise yard and took seats at an unoccupied picnic table.
“Sorry I wasn’t around for your trial,” I said. Paula had struck a plea deal about halfway through her trial, which made perfect sense given the evidence lined up against her. It would have been hard to stick to a not guilty plea when the America’s Most Wanted cameras found you in bed with the escapee, wearing the top to his orange prison scrubs as a nightie.
She smiled. “Nor I yours.”
“How’s it going in here?”
She shrugged. “There’s a good Bible study group. And I got on that team of inmate firefighters—we were working all summer on the wildland fires.”
I’d read about their efforts to help staunch the giant fires that had raged across Arizona, blackening fifteen thousand acres of land and turning what was already hot dry earth to ashes. They used a Marine cadence when they marched: “Standing tall and looking good. Ought to be in Hollywood.”
“Martin would be proud of you.” When they were married, Paula had been the perfect firefighter’s wife, but hadn’t taken an interest in the field herself. What she had taken an interest in was redeeming prison penpals from their evil ways.
“What about Dixie?” I asked. Sam “Dixie” Chatham was her current husband and the bank robber she’d risked her freedom to bust out of jail.
“We write a lot. I’ll be out in sixteen months”—she rapped her knuckles on the table—“but he’s got another six years. I’ll be waiti
ng for him.”
I waved away a fat-bodied bee that thought we should have picnic supplies in front of us and looked around for a shadier spot to sit. Every place with more than a square inch of shade had already been claimed.
“I hope it works out.” That was a lie, but I knew how important lies could be to you on the inside. Sometimes even something that slippery was enough to get you through the day.
“Paula, I need to get a gun.”
I let it sit there, just as bold and stupid and crass a request as it was.
“Oh Jessie”—she started shaking her head—“you aren’t in some kind of trouble again, are you?” Counseling me as if I were the prisoner and she the right-thinking do-gooder stopping by on an autumn morning with reading material, advice, and a sense of superiority.
“Maybe. But it’s not of my doing. The gun’s for protection.”
“How am I supposed to help you get a gun?” she whispered, gesturing to the other inmates, the razor wire, and the guards stationed at the corners of the yard.
“You and Dixie, you know people.”
“Yeah, and they’re all in prison.”
“There’s got to be somebody on the outside. Who did Dixie deal with?”
She waited so long that I didn’t think she’d answer me, then said, “Go see Herman Prosky. He sells turquoise—onyx—in Quartzsite.”
I knew the town. It was about 100 miles west from where I was now, across some of the most desolate land God had ever squatted over. “But the big gem show is in February. Will he be around?” Anybody with a lick of sense would have left Quartzsite by April and not come back until December.
“He runs the hamburger stand in the off-season. Tell him ‘Paula remembers Ajo.’”
“What does that mean?”
“That’s where I bought the guns off him for Dixie’s breakout.” During her trial, Paula had never given up the name of the guy who sold her the guns. He owed her for that, and maybe I could be the way he paid her back.
I brushed off the seat of my pants as I stood up. “Thanks, Paula.”
“I’ll be praying for you.”
Chapter Nineteen
It took less than an hour and a half to get to Quartzsite. Not even the highway patrol wanted to spend time on that road, so I was safe speeding. Sure, it was the multilane highway between Phoenix and Los Angeles, but it was also the hottest, ugliest stretch of road in the state. Featureless flat desert rolled away in all directions. No vegetation higher than your knees, and even that was parched and gray.
I didn’t have a temperature gauge in the truck but my bare arm out the window confirmed that October temperatures had not yet arrived in La Paz County. God’s country, my ass.
In winter, the little town of Quartzsite swells from its usual population of two thousand to over a quarter of a million, playing host to one of the largest RV-based snowbird communities in the world, and holding nationally known gem and mineral shows. By July it is a hellish ghost town.
I cruised up and down the main strip twice, then chose the most disreputable-looking hamburger stand of the three that were available.
A gaunt, stray dog panted in the shade of a Dumpster and a Gila monster warmed itself on a flat stone next to the front door. Its bands of black and pearl scales looked like something on offer at the gem show. I pulled open the warped screen door and crossed the three feet from the entrance to the counter. A double helix of fly-studded paper twirled overhead.
“Herman Prosky around?” I asked the heavyset man who was scraping the grill.
“Who’s asking?” He didn’t look up from his task.
“Paula Chatham asked me to stop by and say hi. Says she remembers Ajo.”
“Ajo?” He finally looked me in the eye. “That doesn’t mean nothing to me but ‘garlic.’”
“Well, literally, yeah, I can see what you mean.” Ajo did mean “garlic” in Spanish. “Paula said you might be able to help me out with something.”
He put down the spatula and approached the counter, wiping greasy hands on an already spotted apron. “You a cop?”
I shook my head. “Farthest thing from it.”
He detoured around me on the way to the front door, locked the screen, and turned the sign around to read BACK IN 15 MINUTES. I followed him through the kitchen and out the back door.
His used-to-be-mobile home sat dead center on a square concrete pad behind the burger joint. If it had been a fried egg, my mother would have applauded the placement. He held the door open for me and I preceded him up two steps and into the trailer. It smelled the way Herman looked—old, unwashed, and greasy.
“Whadda ya need?” he asked, closing the door behind him. The smell grew stronger.
“I’m looking for a gun.”
“Really? I thought you were here for a Tootsie Roll pop.” He snorted, then opened the tiny refrigerator and pulled out a beer without offering me one. “So, what’ll it be?”
“Something small.”
Prosky sat down at the built-in U-shaped dining table and yanked up the seat cushion on the rear bench. Digging out a rolled towel, he unfurled it on the table.
“Ya got yer Colt, yer Ruger if you like .45s. This is the best bargain today.” He pointed at a short-barreled revolver with a white plastic grip that looked about as durable as cotton candy. “An RG .22. I can let you have it for a hunnert and seventy-five.”
He didn’t see any spark of interest in my eyes, so he dug deeper into the bench seat and came out with another towel, this one wrapping a longer shape. “How about a rifle? I’ll give you a better price on this Ruger Mini-14 than you could get at Wal-Mart.”
“What’s that?” I asked, spying a familiar shape in a fold of cloth under the rifle.
“Oh, this little thing?”
It was a twin to the LadySmith I’d used to kill Walter Racine, but this one had deep red, burled wood instead of the hard, black rubber grip that one had. It looked like Prosky was holding a beating heart in his hand. I had to have it.
“How much?”
He named a figure that was triple the retail price, but I wasn’t in the market for retail. I got him to knock it down fifty bucks and throw in a box of bullets and a little switchblade with a five-inch double-edged sticker and called it quits.
It was already almost three o’clock and the sun was doing its worst. I bought a bag of ice and two big bottles of water for the trip back home. More than a hundred degrees and sunset was still four hours away.
I dunked a handkerchief in the melting ice and wrung it out loosely, leaving in the small chips of ice that had gathered in the folds. I sighed as I wrapped it around my neck.
I’d be back in Tucson by dark.
The setting sun turned the sky from persimmon to bruise. My mind spun with the tires. I still had so many unanswered questions. Who had buried a note with my name in Markson’s grave? If the note was in Felicia’s handwriting, then Markson might have been alive as much as two days after the attack. Where had he been? And if he was already dead, why hadn’t they buried him?
Treadwell should know by now whether the paint on Carlos’s car matched Markson’s. But where was Carlos and why did he have a child’s seat in his car?
Emily Markson’s role in this wasn’t clear, either. She’d lied to the cops about her husband being in New Mexico on the night of the attack and she was fooling around with her lawyer-neighbor. That, plus the bruises on her arms and the cryptic e-mail I’d seen signed “A” about meeting someone at the arroyo, left too many gaps in her story, too.
And what about that creepy Paul Willard, hooked into this both by his affair and by Felicia’s internship? I could understand if he wanted to get Markson out of the way, but what did Felicia and her boyfriend have to do with that?
It was only eight o’clock by the time I got back to Tucson. Not too late to check in with my friendly local cop.
Deke Treadwell’s house was only a mile from my parents’ place, tucked into one of the side streets behind th
e Arizona Inn. I pulled up at the curb and shut off the engine. In case the neighborhood wasn’t as safe as it looked, I locked the new LadySmith in the toolbox in the back of the pickup.
All the lights in the house were on, although I couldn’t hear any noise from inside. I passed the squat, fat palm tree by the front porch and was greeted by the smell of pot roast.
“Jessica? Is that you? My, you’ve changed.”
Mary Louise, Deke’s wife, hadn’t changed at all. Her hair was still iron-filing gray, in tight curls like a poodle’s around her face. Her arms were open in welcome.
“Come in! Come in! It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen you.”
I guess Deke hadn’t been passing along the news of my arrival in Tucson any more than my brother Martin had.
“Hi, Mrs. Treadwell. I hope I’m not interrupting dinner.”
“Nonsense. We have plenty. Come along.” She swept me through the tidy living room—plastic coverings on the armrests, plastic ficus in the corner—and into the kitchen.
“I thought you were up in Phoenix,” Deke said, putting down his fork.
“I got back earlier than I expected.” He gestured me to sit, and I pulled out the chair next to him at the small round table. Mary Louise put a plate loaded with carrots, potatoes, parsnips, and fork-tender beef in front of me. So much for my promised diet.
“Biscuits, Jessica?” she prompted.
I’d come by to pump Deke for information, but that could wait. I wasn’t about to turn down any of Mary Louise’s cooking. I had fond memories of evenings spent here eating macaroni and cheese and mustardy potato salad, but what I most loved her for were the deliveries of chocolate-chip cookies and lemon bars to me in jail. The sweet treats rarely made it past the guards, but just the thought that she had come by with them made my days easier.
We talked the silly superficialities of weather and whereabouts until our plates were empty and cleared away. “Why don’t you two go sit in the living room and I’ll clean up,” Mary Louise said, sensing our unspoken need.
We ignored the living room and headed for the aluminum glider on the back porch. Deke took up three-quarters of it and I let his feet set the rocking pace.
