by J. A. Jance
It wasn’t until the sun was coming up the next morning that she found the strength to pick up the telephone and dial Santa Fe information. There were several Cachoras listed, and it took time to jot down all the numbers. When her office opened, she called in sick for a second time. Once it was eight o’clock New Mexico time, Delia dialed one of the numbers she’d been given.
She hadn’t picked that number at random. Several of the Cachoras listed included male names. Delia skipped those, opting instead for M. A. Cachora with no address. That number had to belong to a single woman living alone. Not surprisingly, a woman answered. “Hello.”
For a moment, the sound of the voice stunned Delia to silence. “Hello?” the woman repeated. “Is anyone there?”
“Ms. Cachora…” Delia began hesitantly.
“Yes. Who is this?”
Delia’s voice trembled. So did her hand. She almost dropped the phone. “My name is Delia,” she said finally. “I wondered if you happened to know someone named Philip Cachora.”
“If we’re talking about the same person,” the other woman answered, “then he used to be my husband, the creep. What about him?”
“I married him, too,” Delia managed. “I was wondering…” She stopped, unable to continue.
The woman on the other end of the line didn’t make it any easier. “Wondering what?” she asked.
“If you’d tell me why…”
It was such a stupid thing to ask. Delia could barely believe she’d done it.
“Why what?” the woman demanded. “You mean why I divorced him? I’ll tell you why-because he liked other people better than he liked me. Philip needs a home base, you see-a place to leave his paint and his easels and all that shit, but when he’s out on the road, honey, he’s also on the make. And he’ll screw anything that walks. Male or female, it doesn’t matter.”
By the time the woman stopped speaking, Delia was sobbing uncontrollably into the phone.
“Oh, my God!” the woman exclaimed. “You just found out, didn’t you!”
Still unable to speak, Delia nodded.
“I’m sorry,” the woman continued. “I know how I felt the day I found out. I wanted to kill him. I should have killed him! If I had, this wouldn’t be happening to somebody else, to you. Are you all right, honey? Do you have any friends there with you, someone you can talk to?”
“I’m all right,” Delia managed. “I’ll be okay.”
“Yes, you will, but it’ll take time. Years, probably. Where are you?”
“Washington,” Delia answered. “Washington, D.C.”
“I wish I knew somebody there I could have come talk to you. That son of a bitch! I’d tell you to sue his ass and take him for everything he’s worth, but I already did that, so there’s not much to take. When he left me, he was dead broke. I got the house and a garageful of paintings, which I’ve been selling, by the way. If you have a chance, at least try to pick up some of the art.”
“He’s not painting much anymore,” Delia admitted.
“Drugs?”
It was as if the woman, this stranger halfway across the country, knew every sordid detail of Delia’s life. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Get out then,” M. A. Cachora advised. “Get out and stay out. And go by the health department and have yourself tested. That stupid bastard is playing Russian roulette, and he isn’t smart enough to figure it out.”
“I already have,” Delia said. “Been tested, that is. I get the results on Monday.”
“Keep my number in case you need someone to talk to in the meantime. My name’s Marcella, by the way. Call me anytime you need to talk.”
“Thanks,” Delia said. “I will.”
But she didn’t call Marcella back, and she didn’t call any other numbers in Santa Fe, either. Delia had found out everything she needed to know.
She stayed on in the hotel all through the weekend. Somewhere along the way she finally realized she was hungry and ordered food from room service. Time moved in incredibly tiny increments. Occasionally she thought about calling her mother and Ruth, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Ruth really liked Philip, and Delia didn’t want to break the spell with a harsh dose of reality. With Ellie, it meant history repeating itself in a new generation.
When Delia returned to the doctor’s office on Monday afternoon, her anxiety level was off the charts. When Dr. Hanley told her she was HIV-negative, the words hardly registered. She left the doctor’s office in a daze and made her way to the nearest pay phone. It took a while to get the tribal chairman’s number, but finally Fat Crack Ortiz came on the line.
“Yes?” he said.
“It’s Delia,” she said quickly. “Delia Cachora. Remember me?”
“Of course.”
“I’m calling about your offer,” she said. “Is the tribal attorney job still available?”
“Yes,” Fat Crack answered. “As a matter of fact it is. Why?”
Delia paused and took a deep breath. “If you’ll have me,” she said, “I’d like to accept the position.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’m glad you’re coming home. Your aunt Julia will be pleased.”
For the five men who gathered in Ban Thak that Sunday morning, digging Fat Crack’s grave was as much a time of remembrance as it was of physical labor. They arrived in four separate vehicles just as the sun cleared the jagged tops of the Tucson Mountains off to the east.
There was little left of the village-only the feast house, a tiny chapel, a few crumbling adobe houses, an equal number of mobile homes, and the parched-earth cemetery. Some of the graves were well tended, marked with headstones or crosses that were decorated with wreaths or vases of plastic flowers. Others moldered in obscurity, with the names of the dead long since obliterated from crosses that tipped precariously in one direction or the other.
Leo and Baby unloaded shovels, pry bars, and a wheelbarrow from the truck. Then they hauled the yellow-and-red watercooler over to the cemetery and perched it on a fence post so it would be close at hand when needed.
Long habit made it easy for the brothers to work without need of extraneous conversation. They had toiled together in their father’s tow-truck and auto-repair business from the time they could each hold a wrench, and they had played in Four Winds, a modestly successful chicken-scratch band, from the time they were in high school. By the mid-nineties, people had teased them about being so e wehem-so together-that neither one of them would ever have room for a woman in his life. Then Delia Chavez Cachora appeared on the scene in her slick Saab 9000, and both Leo and Richard wanted her.
Baby Fat Crack, older than Leo by two years, remembered Delia from first grade at Indian Oasis School years earlier. Baby was shy and reticent, and his understated way of courting was to learn everything possible about her Saab. Leo solved the problem by making himself indispensable.
Delia’s father, Manny, had been brutally attacked with a shovel. Although the medical community diagnosed his paralysis as a result of spinal-cord damage, Delia’s aunt Julia claimed Manny had been stricken by Staying Sickness, one of a group of ailments specific to the Tohono O’odham people. Manny’s particular strain, Turtle Sickness, resulted from a person’s being rude.
Whatever had caused the paralysis, the result was the same. Manny Chavez was a hopeless invalid in need of constant care and supervision. Delia’s brother, Eddie, spent most of his life timed-out on booze. Consequently, despite Delia’s stormy history with her father, his care fell on her-and, because he volunteered for the task, on Leo Ortiz’s broad shoulders as well. When Delia moved from her aunt’s home into a house in what had formerly been the BIA compound in Sells, Leo was there, moving boxes and furniture and erecting a wooden wheelchair ramp so Manny could come to visit once he was finally released from the rehab facility in Tucson. Leo helped Delia find a suitable caregiver for her father, and he helped transport him back and forth to the hospital for various doctor’s visits.
Leo’s constancy and patient wa
y of dealing with her father and with her was so different from everything Delia knew from Philip that she couldn’t help noticing-and falling in love. When the Saab’s turbo hiccoughed and quit, Baby Fat Crack was the one who installed a replacement. And when the compressor for the air-conditioning went out, Baby fixed that as well, but somehow that all went right over Delia’s head. She was too busy with other concerns. Had Baby come right out and said something, she might have realized how he felt about her. But it wasn’t until after her divorce from Philip was final and she and Leo announced their engagement that the full implication of what had happened hit home-for all three of them.
The night before Leo and Delia’s wedding, Fat Crack brought his two sons together and insisted that they sit down and share the Peace Smoke. Only then had they been able to move on and let bygones be bygones. After losing out on Delia, Baby had finally found himself a suitable bride. He and Christine already had one child-a little girl-with another on the way. Now, as the two sons labored together digging their father’s grave, Fat Crack’s spirit was still the glue that held them together-not only his sons, but his sons’ children as well.
Brandon dropped Diana off outside Wanda’s mobile home in Sells and then headed for Ban Thak. He arrived at the cemetery just after Davy and just before Brian. Brandon knew he was late. Baby and Leo had already dug down to knee level. Leo was down in the hole whaling away with a pickax while Baby stood on the surface leaning on a shovel.
He wiped his dusty hand off on his jeans before accepting Brandon’s proffered handshake. “Thanks for having us,” Brandon said.
Baby nodded. “Grab a shovel,” he said. “We’ll take turns.”
The younger men worked faster, and although Brandon shoveled steadily and was a little winded, he had nonetheless accomplished almost as much when his turn was over. Standing on the sidelines, catching his breath and listening to the others joke and tease, he remembered what Fat Crack had told him once-that as a young child, Looks at Nothing had told Rita Antone she would be a bridge between the Anglo world and the Tohono O’odham. And it was true. Years after Rita’s death, here were five men of different generations and races-Rita’s great-nephews, Brandon Walker and his Mil-gahn sons, who weren’t really his sons at all-working together in a blending of harmony and friendship that would have been unthinkable years earlier.
“Why so late?” Leo asked Brian. “Were you hanging around with that cute red-haired wife of yours?”
“I overslept,” Brian admitted. “I was out late last night working a case and didn’t set the alarm.”
“What kind of case?” Davy asked.
“I’m sure it’ll be on the news again today if you missed it last night,” Brian said, making conversation. “Some guy hacked a little Mexican girl to pieces and tossed her out in the desert.”
Brandon had stepped over to the fence to take a drink from the cooler, but the words stopped him. “What do you mean, hacked to pieces?” he asked.
Brian put down the pick and came out of the deepening hole while Davy went in to shovel up loosened dirt. Brian wiped his face and neck with a grimy hanky before answering.
“Just that. It was brutal. The murder weapon’s most likely a machete. Her limbs were whacked off at the joints. A woman hiking near Vail yesterday morning found the body in bags strewn along the railroad tracks.”
Brandon Walker’s heart constricted. It was nothing scientific-nothing he could take to court or turn in on a written police report-but instinctively he sensed a connection between this new case and an old one, between this new dead girl and Roseanne Orozco from 1970.
“Why do you ask?” Brian continued.
Brandon Walker knew that his close connection to Brian Fellows had often been a detriment to Brian’s career within the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The passage of time had made most of that go away, and Brandon didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize Brian’s future by bringing their relationship back to the fore. He knew that if he and TLC were to solve a case that the Pima County Sheriff’s Department had left hanging, Brian Fellows had better not be anywhere nearby when the shit hit the fan.
“There was another case like that a long time ago, a couple of years after I started working Homicide,” Brandon said carefully. “It happened out here on the reservation. The victim’s name was Roseanne Orozco. A highway worker found the body near Quijotoa. She’d been chopped to pieces and left in an ice chest. People called her the ‘Girl in the Box.’ ”
“I remember hearing about that,” Leo said. “I was just a kid. Grandma always used to tell us if we weren’t good, we’d end up chopped to pieces and in a box the same way she was.”
“Probably no connection,” Brian said. “There wasn’t any ice chest this time. This girl’s body was in garbage bags and left out in the open in the desert. Besides,” he added, “when did that homicide happen?”
“It must have been 1970 or so,” Brandon answered. That wasn’t entirely true. Brandon had gone over his notes with care. He knew exactly when it was, but he wasn’t about to say so. And since this was nothing but a hunch, he wasn’t going to push it.
“There you go,” Brian said. “The suspect we’ve got in custody wouldn’t even have been in kindergarten in 1970. Unless he set out to be a serial killer very early on…”
J. A. Jance
Day of the Dead
Eighteen
They say it happened long ago that an Indian man and his woman loved their baby very, very much.
The mother took very good care of her little one. She kept the baby with her all the time. Even when the woman went to work in the fields, she took her baby with her. She never left her in the care of someone else at home.
The other babies of the village grew strong and fat and cried and pulled things. But this baby never ever cried. All day she lay in her cradle and slept or smiled but never cried.
This Indian mother carefully arranged the ropes for her baby’s nuhkuth, which, in the old days, was the soft cradle all Tohono O’odham mothers used to make to protect their precious babies. Over the ropes she put her softest blankets. She used extra ropes and extra blankets. When she took the baby to the field with her, she was so carefully wrapped that the nuhkuth looked like a big cocoon. And the mother always made sure that wherever she left her baby girl, it was nice and shady.
The grave was dug before it got hot. The five men drove into Sells, where they gratefully tucked into a breakfast of fresh tamales and paper-thin, hot-off-the-griddle tortillas. Brian and Davy stayed only long enough to eat, then they both headed back to Tucson. While mostly female visitors trooped in and out of the house to pay their respects to Wanda, Leo and Baby held court outside. They gathered visiting menfolk around Baby’s baby-his blue 1983 Ford F-100 with its chromed-out valve covers and air cleaner and its oddball, low-powered 232 V6 engine. To a man they all marveled that anyone in his right mind would ever buy such an underpowered vehicle. Baby told them that the original owner, up in Phoenix, never drove it faster than thirty-five.
Tired of talking trucks and thinking Diana might be ready to head home, Brandon ventured inside to check. To his surprise, he found her busily wrapping corn husks around hunks of uncooked masa filled with meat.
“How soon before you’ll be done?” he asked.
“Not for a while,” she said. “Are you in a hurry?”
Brandon was, actually. Yesterday he had learned something concerning the Roseanne Orozco investigation that he was eager to follow up on today. He wanted to get started, but Diana, who spent most of her time in the solitary occupation of writing, seemed to be at home in the company of this group of industrious women.
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. I’ll wait outside with Leo and Baby and the others.”
For a time Brandon watched a collection of children play makeshift soccer on the cleared dirt field between the compound’s collection of houses and the mini-mart and auto-repair buildings along the highway. No doubt the kids had all been coached
about the solemnity of the occasion, but childish natural exuberance could only be suppressed for so long. As they chased the ball back and forth, Brandon remembered when Lani was that age.
He had loved standing on the sidelines of her soccer matches, watching her jet-black ponytail plume out behind her as she raced up and down the field. Neither Tommy nor Quentin had been into sports. Besides, Brandon had been working too many hours when they were little. He had missed out completely on that part of their growing-up years, which probably accounted for his determination not to miss that time with Lani. He made it his business to be there for her-every game, every school program or play, every parent-teacher conference.
Brandon glanced at his watch and shook his head. If he’d known he’d be done in Ban Thak this early, he would have volunteered to collect Lani from the airport rather than sending Candace. Lani gave every evidence of adoring her nephew, but Brandon knew that the two-year-old-spoiled by both his doting mother and grandmother-could be annoying on his best days. With Fat Crack’s death weighing heavily on her heart, Brandon suspected Lani wouldn’t be up to dealing with Tyler’s antics. Besides, Brandon regretted missing out on a few private hours with his daughter. Now that she was grown, father-daughter times when it was just the two of them were rare. As soon as Lani arrived home, she’d be drawn into the funeral preparations and events. It might be days before Brandon had some time alone with her.
One of the mothers broke up the soccer game by summoning the children to come eat. Left at loose ends, Brandon considered his options for a moment and then made up his mind. He went back into the kitchen, where Diana was still wrapping tamales.
“I’ll be back in a while,” he told her. “I need to run an errand.”
“Where are you going?”
“To talk with Emma Orozco,” he said.
Brandon Walker remembered Fat Crack telling him once that, as part of a grant from Arizona State University in the early nineties, all existing health records from the Indian Health Services hospital in Sells had been fed into computers. The study had been intended to learn how Tohono O’odham longevity compared with that of other ethnic populations. It was also a way of assessing and keeping track of which diseases on the reservation accounted for which deaths. That study-with records from as far back as the fifties-along with money from tribal casino operations, was one of the reasons the hospital at Sells now had its own kidney dialysis center.
