Day of the Dead

by J. A. Jance

  It all seemed plausible enough, but for Larry a smidgen of worry still lingered in the background. He needed reassurance. “You’re sure it’ll be all right?” he asked.

  Gayle unfolded her legs, stood up, and crossed the room. When she reached Larry’s chair, she bent down and gave him a long, inviting kiss. “It’ll be just fine,” she said soothingly. “Now what about something to eat? I’m starved.”

  Knowing food wasn’t the only thing Gayle would need to satisfy her appetites, Larry stood up at once. “I’ll get you another drink,” he offered. “You sit here and relax. I’ll rustle up some food.”

  Larry headed for the kitchen with a smile on his face.

  “Davy?”

  David Ladd sat in his office and wondered who was calling. In his corner office in one of Tucson’s leading law firms he was usually referred to as Mr. Ladd. Lani was the only person who usually called him Davy, but the male voice wasn’t Lani’s. Hesitant, softly inflected words identified the caller as Tohono O’odham, but this wasn’t someone whose voice he recognized.

  “Yes,” he said. “Who’s calling?”

  “It’s Baby,” Richard Ortiz said. “Baby Fat Crack. Mom wanted you to know about Dad.”

  “He’s not…”

  “He died this afternoon,” Richard went on. “The funeral’s Monday afternoon in Sells. Leo and I will be digging the grave at the cemetery in Ban Thak tomorrow, and we wondered if…”

  David Ladd’s heart constricted. He was Gabe Ortiz’s godson, and Fat Crack’s family was offering him the honor of helping dig the medicine man’s grave at the same cemetery where he’d once helped dig the grave for his beloved Nana Dahd.

  “Of course,” David said at once. “What time?”

  “Early,” Richard said. “About six. Otherwise it’ll be too hot. And that friend of yours,” he added, “the one Dad liked so much, who was always hanging around with you…”

  “You mean Brian Fellows?”

  “Yes. That’s the one. If he wants to come, too, he’s welcome.”

  “I’ll call him,” David Ladd said. “I don’t know about Brian, but I’ll be there for sure.”

  Which was why, a few minutes later, when Diana Ladd called to ask if Davy could drive to Phoenix on Sunday to meet his sister’s flight, he had to decline.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he told her. “My morning’s already booked. I’ll be out at Ban Thak digging the grave.”

  “I’m sure Dad will, too,” Diana said. “I already told Wanda I’d come help cook.”

  “What about Candace and Tyler?” Davy asked. “Maybe they could meet the plane.”

  “You don’t think Candace would mind?” Diana asked.

  “I’ll check with her,” Davy said. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to do it.”

  When he finally got off the phone, Davy sat for a long time, staring out at the traffic rushing past on Broadway. He was surprised at how much it hurt to realize that Gabe Ortiz was no more. Rita Antone’s nephew had been an important and beloved part of David’s life for as long as he could remember, and somehow he had assumed Fat Crack would always be there.

  Now he wasn’t.

  Handcuffed in the backseat of the Crown Victoria, Erik rode through the sally port at the Pima County Jail and felt as if he were being driven through the gates of hell. How could this be happening? It wasn’t possible. He’d done nothing. Surely this was some kind of bad dream, but he hadn’t dreamed that a tow truck had hauled his Tacoma off to an impound lot. And it wasn’t a dream that people had swarmed through his house and carried out cartons of supposed “evidence.” Erik had been wide awake when all that happened.

  Fellows stopped the vehicle, got out, and then came around to the side and unlocked the door before helping Erik climb out. He was led through the booking process like a sleepwalker. He’d been sitting on his hands, and they were numb. When it came time for fingerprints, his hands flopped loosely at the ends of his wrists as though they belonged on someone else’s body. And when the booking officer lined Erik up for his obligatory mug shot, he suddenly realized why, in the mug-shot photos he’d seen, the poor stupes always looked dazed and completely bewildered. That was exactly how Erik LaGrange felt right then—bewildered.

  Sometime later, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and hobbling along on a pair of ill-fitting flip-flops, he was shoved into a cell the guard called a holding tank.

  “When do I get to talk to an attorney?” Erik asked as the barred door locked behind him.

  “Beats me,” the guard replied. “I only work here, but it’s Saturday night. If I was you, I wouldn’t look for it to happen anytime before Monday morning.

  Diana greeted Brandon at the front door with Damsel at her side. “I’m glad you’re home,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” he said, but it wasn’t a convincing response.

  “Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Are you going to want to eat or would you like a drink first? We could probably both use one of those.”

  Brandon nodded gratefully. “A beer would be great.”

  Diana headed for the refrigerator. Just then Damsel made a lunge for Fat Crack’s medicine pouch and managed to snag it out of Brandon’s hand. He rescued the pouch from the dog’s mouth and laid it down on the kitchen counter as Diana returned with the beer.

  “What’s that?” Diana asked, scowling at the worn buckskin packet with its frayed fringe.

  It surprised Brandon to think that in all the years he and Diana had been friends with Fat Crack and Wanda Ortiz, the medicine man had never once shown Diana his treasured pouch—the one that had come to him from Looks at Nothing. Now it belonged to their daughter, Lani.

  “Fat Crack’s huashomi,” Brandon replied huskily. “He gave it to me this afternoon and told me it’s for…” He paused and swallowed before continuing. “It’s for Lani.”

  A glance at Brandon’s bleak face told Diana how much he was hurting. She reached out and laid a comforting hand on her husband’s forearm. “He must have known he was going,” she said quietly. “I’m so sorry, Brandon, but there was nothing you could have done to change that, and nothing Lani could have done, either.”

  Brandon nodded, and then leaned over to hug her close. “I know,” he said. “But it hurts like hell to lose an old friend,” he said. “It really makes you feel your age.”

  Much later, when Diana and Brandon finally sat down to dinner, Brandon barely touched his food while Diana brought him up-to-date on the series of phone calls that had come in as the Ortiz family organized their resources and began planning the funeral.

  “I’m so glad you took the tamales and tortillas back to Wanda,” she said. “She’s expecting a huge crowd at the feast house on Monday. She’ll need them far more than we do. By the way, I canceled dinner with the kids for tomorrow. There’s no way of knowing when you and David will finish up at the cemetery. Brian may even show up to help out at Ban Thak. I’ll be at Wanda’s helping with the cooking.”

  For the first time all evening, Brandon summoned the ghost of a smile. “Don’t tell me you’re going to try your hand at making tortillas? Heaven forbid!”

  Grateful Brandon’s mood had lifted enough so he could tease her, Diana teased right back. “Go ahead,” she said. “Make fun of my tortilla-making abilities if you want. My tortillas may be ugly, but I’m great at washing pots and pans. Something tells me there’ll be plenty of those.”

  It was almost ten o’clock when Brian Fellows dragged his weary butt home to the small house in Tucson’s central area he and Kath had purchased for a song and then brought back from ruin with long hours of sweat equity. He found Kath asleep on the couch with an open library book facedown across her chest. When the hardwood floor creaked under his weight, she sat up briefly but then fell back onto the couch.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you. What time is it?”

  “Late. Once we booked the guy, I went back to the scene and hung out with the CSIs.”

  “You bo
oked somebody? You mean you already caught the guy?”

  Nodding, Brian collapsed into his leather. “Looks that way,” he said. “But still…”

  “Still what?”

  “I don’t have a good feeling about it.”

  Kath put down her book, got up, walked across the room to give Brian a peck on the cheek. “How come? And do you want something to eat?”

  He nodded. “Now that you mention it, lunch was a very long time ago.”

  “Good. I made some chili colorado.” Brian started to follow her into the kitchen. “Stay where you are,” she told him. “I’ll bring you a bowl.”

  Brian leaned back, closed his eyes, and listened as she “beeped” numbers into the microwave. He liked the tranquillity of the life they shared. It was far different from the world he’d grown up in, the constant uproar in the home of his flighty mother, her string of husbands and gentleman friends, and his two juvenile-delinquent half brothers.

  “Incidentally,” Kath said, returning to the doorway. “We’re not going to Brandon and Diana’s for dinner tomorrow night after all.”

  “How come?”

  “Gabe Ortiz died today,” Kath told him. “I thought about calling you on your cell phone, but I figured you’d be better off hearing the news after you got home.”

  “Damn!” Brian muttered. “What a shame! Fat Crack was a hell of a nice guy. He always treated Davy and me like we were special.”

  “Maybe you were,” Kath said. “Davy called earlier to say you and he are invited to come to Ban Thak early tomorrow morning to help dig the grave. Six A.M. I told him that you were working a case, and I wasn’t sure you could make it.”

  “I’ll be there,” Brian said at once. “It’s an honor to be asked, and it would be bad form not to show up.”

  The microwave sounded in the kitchen, and the mouthwatering aroma of chili drifted into the room. Kath disappeared and returned moments later carrying a tray laden with a bowl of chili, silverware, and a glass of cold milk.

  “The milk’s to soothe the burn,” she told him. “I went overboard on the chili. Now tell me about your case,” she added, resuming her spot on the couch. “You’ve already got a suspect in custody. What’s wrong with that?”

  “It’s just too easy,” Brian replied. “The victim is a little Hispanic girl—maybe fourteen or fifteen—who was hacked to pieces and dumped out near Vail. No identification of any kind, but we’re guessing from clothing left at the scene—clothing she wasn’t wearing when she was murdered—that she’s probably a UDA. Instead of an ID we found a guy’s business card—tucked in among the victim’s effects. The name on the card was Erik LaGrange and a phone number that turned out to be his home number was scribbled on the back.

  “We located his house and went there to see if LaGrange could help us ID her. Instead, I found what looked like blood on the bumper of his truck and more blood on the front-door jamb.”

  “Enough for a warrant?” Kath asked.

  Brian nodded. “Once we gained access to his vehicle, we found lots of blood in his truck, and in the house we found bloody shoe prints in the hallway. There were shoes with blood on them in the bedroom closet and bloody clothes in a clothes hamper with the washing machine sitting right there next to it.”

  “Why didn’t he stick them in the washer?” Kath asked.

  “My thought exactly,” Brian responded. “I sure as hell would have had it been me. But back to the scene, I put in a call to the department. About an hour or so later, while I was waiting for PeeWee Segura to show up with the warrant, a guy in his mid-thirties showed up who turns out to be Mr. LaGrange. He was bloody and looked like he’d been in a bar fight. He claimed he’d been off on a hike in the mountains all morning long and all by his little lonesome. Of course, nobody saw him hiking, so he’s got no alibi, but still…”

  Brian fell silent for a moment and savored the first bite of the piping-hot chili. Temperature wasn’t the only thing that made his mouth sizzle.

  “Does the name Medicos for Mexico ring a bell?” he asked after chasing the chili with a swallow of cold milk.

  “Sure,” Kath replied. “It’s a charity that uses volunteers to provide free medical care for impoverished patients across the line in Mexico. The people who run it, Gayle and Larry Stryker, are big shots around town. He’s a doctor, and she’s practically the first lady of Tucson. Their pictures and names are in the paper all the time, mostly in the society pages. Why? What about them?”

  “Erik LaGrange works for Medicos for Mexico. He’s their development officer and reports to Mrs. Stryker.”

  “What happens now?”

  “LaGrange won’t talk to us without a lawyer. I’m hoping I can pull some strings and get one appointed tomorrow so we can interview him. The county attorney called a meeting tomorrow afternoon to speed up the process. With any luck the grave will be dug before that.”

  “He called a meeting on Sunday?” Kath objected. “That’s our one day off together.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brian told her. “When the county attorney says jump, grunts like PeeWee and me don’t have much choice but to do it.”

  “I love it when elected officials remind us that we’re public servants and need to be treated as such,” Kath grumbled.

  Brian Fellows took another drink of milk and then smiled at his wife. “That’s one of the things I love about you, Kath. When I come home from work with tales of woe, I know I’m talking to someone who understands.”

  “Right,” she told him. “Now finish your chili. If you’re going to be at Coyote Sitting digging a grave at six tomorrow morning, you need some sleep.”

  Kath had the right idea. They went to bed soon after that, but Brian had a hard time falling asleep. When he did, he woke up time and again. He kept having the same dream over and over, one filled with black plastic garbage bags overflowing with bloodied body parts.

  Sixteen

  Leo Ortiz snored the night away while Delia Ortiz tossed and turned. Years of living in the Anglo world left her ill suited to deal with death in the same undemonstrative way people handled it on the reservation. Leo and Baby Fat Crack had both loved their father and respected him, but they accepted his death with quiet fortitude and dealt with the logistics—getting a casket, making arrangements with a mortuary, and digging the grave—in the same unruffled fashion. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Leo slept so peacefully. He hadn’t been at war with his father. Delia had been. Guilt over the unresolved issues between her and Fat Crack kept Delia wide awake into the wee hours—that and the unrelenting kicking of the restless infant inside her womb.

  Wanda Ortiz’s reaction to her husband’s death was much like that of her two sons. It had happened, and now she had things to do. Once the funeral and burial were over, all the attendees would show up at Ban Thak for the customary feast. Considering Fat Crack’s standing in the community, not only as a former tribal chairman but also as the acknowledged siwani—chief medicine man—both events would be widely attended. That required lots of food—and a good deal of organization. There were hundreds of tamales and tortillas to be made; vats of chili and beans to be cooked. To that end, Wanda Ortiz had summoned her daughter from Tucson, her two daughters-in-law, and any other able-bodied female relatives to appear at the family compound the next morning ready for a day’s worth of non-stop cooking.

  Before Delia had returned to the reservation seven years earlier, she had never made a single tamale or tortilla. Aunt Julia had tactfully suggested that it might be a good idea for her to learn; Delia had resisted. It reminded her of the fading poster that still hung in the hallway of Ruth’s house outside Cambridge. It showed a photo of Israel’s first and so far only female premier, Golda Meir. The caption under the photo said “But can she type?” That had been Delia’s position as well. As tribal attorney, it didn’t seem necessary for her to know how to make tortillas and tamales. In D.C., the lack of those skills had never been a problem.

  She had been annoyed when tribal
chairman Gabe Ortiz, at Aunt Julia’s instigation, had shown up on her doorstep to offer unsolicited advice about her personal life. She’d been astonished when he offered her the job of tribal attorney, but she suspected that was only a thinly disguised smoke screen for her interfering auntie’s private agenda—that Delia should dump Philip Cachora and come home to the reservation. Delia had turned the job down cold.

  She had fallen hopelessly in love with Philip Cachora, and she was determined to keep him. She had met Philip at the grand opening of a show at the National Gallery, an exhibit of works by what they termed “Emerging Native American Artists.” After growing up as an urban Indian, Delia was increasingly uncomfortable with the phrase Native American. Educated in the best private schools Ruth Waldron’s Boston pedigree had wangled, Delia saw life through essentially Anglo eyes. For her, the words Native American conjured up pictures of loincloth-wearing savages.

  She went to the gallery opening with her friend and roommate, Marcia Lomax, who worked for the Department of Justice. They went on a pair of free tickets given her by Delia’s boss. They expected to show up, have a few drinks, nosh on the free food, and then go to a movie.

  Delia and Marcia were standing and chatting in front of a massive full-length oil portrait of a handsome Indian man with much of his face obscured by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. He wore a tattered straw cowboy hat—a Resistol—and an equally tattered American flag wrapped around him like a toga. The piece was called Promises.

  “Well, ladies,” a pleasantly deep male voice said. “Have you figured out what it means?”

  Delia turned from the portrait to the voice and did a double take. The painting seemed to have come to life, reflective sunglasses and all, although the straw hat had been replaced by a huge black felt Stetson and the flag by a designer tuxedo. As far as Delia was concerned, the affectation of wearing Ray•Bans inside meant two things—trouble and phony.

  “I take it we’re looking at a portrait of the artist as a young man?” Delia asked.