Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “I have serious doubts about those figures, Tony. This place isn”t in the financial condition it was two years ago, you know. The exchange rate on the dollar, the money we put down the drain on the swimming with the Fishes—”

  “You wouldn’t have lost money if you’d done it the way I said,” Preciosa said hotly.

  “And then the bad publicity we got on the mud bath fiasco; that didn’t help. We’re still paying damages on that.”

  Preciosa impaled him with a ferocious look. “There wouldn’t have been any fiasco, if you had just listened—”

  “Knock it off, you two,” Tony intervened. “How about letting me worry about all that crap, huh?”

  “I was under the impression that worrying about ‘all that crap’ is what you pay me to do,” Jamie said bravely.

  “And you do a hell of a job, bro, a hell of a job,” Tony said, but he was obviously getting bored with the subject.

  Jamie wasn’t interested in compliments. “I have to tell you, Tony,” he said with a fretful, frowning shake of his head. “We are not in good shape, not anymore. I have my doubts about this. I have my grave doubts.”

  Tony responded with a snort of laughter. “You gotta excuse Jamie,” he told Gideon with a doting glance at his brother. “He can’t help it, that”s just the way he is. He was born that way; it”s in his genes. Remember that guy in the old Superman comics? Mr. Mxtlplx or something? With a little black rain cloud hanging over his head wherever he went? That”s my baby brother all the way. There”s always a disaster around the next corner.”

  “You could . . . you could use a few more of those genes yourself, Tony,” Jamie ventured.

  “I sure could!” Tony said happily.

  “What are we all arguing about, anyway?” Carl asked. “You’re the boss, Tony. If you want it, I figure we might as well get used to living with it.”

  More appreciative honking from Tony. “Damn right. Now you’re getting the picture.”

  Clearly, he was used to having his parades rained on and perhaps was even amused by it. It was also clear that none of their opinions on the temazcal were, or ever had been, factors in the decision. The thing was settled, had been settled before he ever brought it up. The Hacienda Encantada would have the first temazcal in the Valley of Oaxaca, or more accurately the first temazcal in a thousand years or so. He would have preferred that they like the idea, but if they didn’t, he’d have no trouble living with the fact.

  He looked up with interest as Dorotea herself led her nieces in bringing in more food. “Hey, here comes the main course,” he said, picking up a knife and a fork in his fists. “Whoa, look at that! Are you kidding me? Is that caguesa? My favorite dish in the whole damn world! Dorotea, you outdid yourself again.”

  Dorotea responded with an ungracious shrug and said something in spanish; “You always did like peasant food,” Gideon thought it was. This was not a woman who went out of her way to butter up her boss. Or anyone else, as far as he could see. Presumably she got away with it on the strength of her famous cooking.

  Indeed, the caguesa turned out to be a pungent and delicious stew of chicken, tomato, and toasted corn, perfectly flavored with garlic and served with melt-in-your-mouth fresh corn tortillas and rice. Once a few spoonfuls had been put away, individual conversations resumed. With Tony and Julie reminiscing about family matters and members unfamiliar to him, he tried conversing with Josefa, who was seated on his left. (“I understand Tony is your nephew?” “Are you originally from Teotitlán?” “Have you always lived here?”) But she was intently focused, first on cleaning her silverware with her fingernails and her napkin, then on eating her meal, and even when he tried the questions in Spanish, the only thing he got out of her other than sís and nos was an unsolicited comment about Preciosa:

  “I bet she no back next year,” she said with satisfaction, jerking her head in that lady’s direction. “She getting old. Look at them hands, all them veins, all them bumps. She get all the face-lifts she want, she still an old lady. Always you can tell from the hands.” As before, the remarks were made, not quite to Gideon, but to some invisible person now a few feet behind him, now just in front of him, sometimes a few feet above him. He wondered if she might not be aware that she was expressing her thoughts aloud.

  In any case, he had to admit (to himself), she did have a point. Preciosa’s veiny, arthritic hands were a good twenty years older than her face. It was the sort of thing he ought to have noticed, or so he thought, but somehow he never did. He revised her age upward to the fifties, probably the late fifties. Well, he’d always had trouble judging a woman’s age, at least when she still had flesh on her bones.

  He gave up on talking to Josefa and tuned back in to the conversation between Julie and Tony. “I used to envy you all so much,” Julie was saying. “I would have given anything to have grown up here on the Hacienda, the way you and Jamie did.”

  Tony, who had been guzzling steadily but seemed no drunker than before (nor any less, either), paused in shoveling stew into his mouth and gave a low, gravelly laugh. “Like Jamie, maybe, but not like me.”

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  Tony looked puzzled. “You mean you don’t know the story? Of my misspent youth? Sure, you do.”

  “No, she doesn’t, Tony,” said Carl, who was sitting on Julie’s other side. “Don’t you remember? She was just a wide-eyed kid back when she was working summers here. We all figured there was no point in loading all that baggage on her. You did too. So no, she doesn’t know, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s still no point.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Disappointed, Tony went back to eating.

  “Now, wait a minute, you two,” Julie said, putting down her fork. “Just you wait one cotton-pickin’ minute. I am no longer a wide-eyed kid, and I am certainly not innocent. I am a worldly, experienced, married woman. You should hear some of the things Gideon talks to me about. If there’s something about this family that I don’t know about, I want to hear it.”

  “Aw, Julie . . .” Carl began, and Gideon could see from her suddenly frozen expression that she was kicking herself, having suddenly realized that it might have to do with Blaze, a subject she now knew to be so painful to Carl. But it didn’t, as Tony made clear.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said, perking up. “Time you found out what a hell-raiser your Uncle Tony was. Which reminds me, you’re plenty old enough to drop that ‘Uncle’ shit now—hey, sorry, pardon my language. Anyway, it makes me feel a hundred years old, besides which I’m not your uncle in the first place, I’m your—” He scowled. “What am I to her, Gid? Anything?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Gideon said. “Carl is her uncle, and you’re Carl’s brother-in-law, so that would make you her . . . nothing. You’re not genetically related, and while some cultures would have a formal name for the relationship, we don’t.”

  Tony nodded his satisfaction. “See? I’m nothing,” he said to Julie. “Plain old Tony.”

  “You’re on,” Julie said, clinking glasses with him. “From now on you’re nothing to me; plain old Tony.” She was on her second beer, and the buzz was showing a little. There was something about beer that had always gone quickly to her head. “Now let’s hear the story.”

  “Okay. First of all, I was a confirmed dope addict by the age of twelve . . .”

  She laughed, thinking he was joking, as did Gideon.

  “No, I’m serious,” Tony insisted. “Jamie, was I a dope addict or not?”

  “You were a dope addict,” confirmed Jamie, who was sitting two seats down, on the other side of Carl. “But it wasn’t your fault, Tonio. What happened to you was a damned shame. You were just a little kid, how could you know what was going on?”

  “Thanks, Jaime, I appreciate that.”

  Gideon had noticed earlier that they sometimes used the Spanish versions of their names when they were feeling affectionate or familial. Tony was Tonio, Jamie was Jaime, Carl was Carlos, Annie was Anita. “Bu
t the truth is the truth. Julie, Gideon, you’re looking at the man who was the world’s youngest speed freak. However, let me point out that from that point on in my life . . . from that point on, I went rapidly downhill.” Another brief, rolling, belly-shaking laugh, but not as hearty as his earlier ones. This man sure laughs a lot, Gideon thought. It wasn’t hard to take in small doses, but he’d be hell to live with. “Seriously, I was, like, nine years old when it started; ten at most.”

  He was looking at Julie and Gideon as he spoke, but once again he was really addressing the table at large. This time he had their honest attention. It might have been a familiar story to them, but apparently that didn’t make it any less engrossing.

  “You see,” he said, “as a kid, I was kind of overweight.”

  “You mean, as opposed to now?” Julie asked with a giggle. She was a little under the influence, all right.

  “Hey, watch your mouth!” Tony said, reaching out to tousle her hair. “No, I mean really overweight.” He puffed out his cheeks to illustrate. “Remember, Jamie?”

  “Not too well,” Jamie said. “When you were twelve, I was only three years old.”

  “Oh yeah, I keep forgetting,” Tony said. “It’s because you’re always acting like my older brother, not my younger brother. Anyway . . .”

  Anyway, Vincent Gallagher, Tony’s father, had been distressed, maybe obsessed, over his son’s weight, Tony explained. The senior Gallagher had dreamed from the beginning that Anthony, his firstborn, would inherit and run the ranch some day, and a waddling, three-hundred-pound cowboy didn’t fit the picture he had in mind. He had tried all kinds of remedies and had finally taken Tony to a weight-reduction specialist in Oaxaca, a doctor who had prescribed what was then the trendiest, most up-to-date reducing drug available: methamphetamine.

  By the time he was eleven, he was well on his way to being hooked. Vincent sent him away for treatment, first to a rehab facility in Mexico City and then to one in Pennsylvania. Both times the cure had been pronounced successful; both times he had relapsed. By the second time, the use of meth had become a little more widespread, and Tony took up with another kid from a nearby village who had also developed addiction problems.

  “Huicho,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Huicho Lozada. Now there’s someone I haven’t thought about for a long time. Jesus, he was in worse shape than I was, but we were both meth heads, plain and simple,” he said. “Tweakers. And we got ourselves into a lot of trouble on account of it. I mean, a whole lot of trouble. Not as much as I got into later—now, that was real trouble—but enough.” His mood had darkened. The others had grown more grave as well, except for Preciosa, who was smiling possessively at him, almost like a mother at her child.

  He had run off at sixteen, unable to live with either the unavailability of the drug or the unrelenting pressure from his father about shaping up and eventually taking over the ranch. And then had come the “real” trouble. Life on the streets and in the twilight worlds of Oaxaca, of Miami, of Tijuana, of Cleveland; wherever a supply of methamphetamine could most easily be gotten. More than once he’d awakened in the gutter—literally—or in some filthy doorway, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there. He had robbed and been robbed, he had beaten people up and been beaten up, he’d been arrested five or six times—he couldn’t remember how many or even where. And he’d been convicted and jailed twice, both times on drug charges, once in Las Vegas for sixty days, and then in Mexican prisons for almost four years, from the time he was twenty-one until he was twenty-five.

  “How horrible,” Julie said. “That must have been . . . I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

  “Sure you can,” Tony said. “Just think about what you’ve heard about Mexican jails—you know, movies, TV—and what frigging nightmares they are. Okay? Got a mental picture? Now multiply it by a hundred. That’ll give you a small idea. I’m here to tell you, once you survive that, you can survive anything. The only good thing was, I could still get meth on the inside, at least for the first two years, when they had me in Tijuana, and that was all that mattered—although, trust me, you don’t want to know what I had to do for it.”

  But even that dismal comfort came to an end when he was transferred to the infamous Reclusorio Oriente, the high-security prison in Mexico City, for the last two years of his sentence. There it was either lick his addiction cold turkey or commit suicide. More than once he had been on the very edge of the latter, and of his sanity as well, but an older fellow prisoner, a grizzled Mexican double-murderer serving a life sentence, had taken an interest in him. It was thanks to that old convict’s kindness, Tony said, that he not only survived the ordeal, but eventually walked out of prison free of drugs and determined to stay that way. And he had.

  Tony’s story had taken them through coffee and a simple, luscious dessert of plátanos asados—soft, tiny grilled bananas with cinnamon and cream, served family style.

  “That’s quite a story,” Gideon said, helping himself to another couple of bananas and dousing them with cream. “It’s not often that people can turn their lives around like that.”

  “I’ll say,” said Julie. “I had no idea, Uncle Tony. I mean plain old Tony.” She reached over to give his hand a squeeze.

  “Well, I don’t want to brag,” Tony said, “but, what the hey, it’s true. I did come a long way. And I owe it to two people: Lalo Arenas—the old guy in prison; he’s dead now—and my father. My father—” He knocked twice on the table for emphasis. “My father never lost faith in me. Never.”

  “That’s so,” Jamie put in. “I was only a kid, but I remember, while you were gone all those years, Dad used to tell us—Blaze and me—‘Don’t you worry about your big brother Tony; he’ll be all right. He just has to get it out of his system, that’s all. He’ll be back.’ ”

  “Yeah,” said Tony quietly (for him). “Dad was great. He died while I was in jail, you know, and when I found out he left the ranch to me, I couldn’t believe it. I mean, talk about faith. There I was, rotting away in this hellhole, a loser through and through. I hadn’t even bothered to get in touch with him for years . . . and he trusts me with his precious ranch.”

  “You were his firstborn,” Jamie said. “He loved you. From the day you were born, you were the one who was going to inherit.” If there was any resentment behind the words, Gideon couldn’t see it.

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Tony said with a wondering shake of his head. “And his trusting me like that was what really turned me around. I had to deliver. Still, it was a little tricky when I first came back. I still feel bad about . . . I mean, I feel like part of it’s my fault that—” He shot a brief, wary glance at Carl. “Well, never mind, doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Your fault that what?” asked Julie, not nearly as perceptive as she would have been without the beers.

  “I said never mind, okay?” Tony barked at her, abruptly, surly.

  He slapped his napkin down on the table and stood up. “Shit. Look, it’s been a hell of a long day. What do you say we call it a night?”

  “BUT what did I say?”a stricken Julie asked Gideon as they walked back to their room in the cool night air.

  “Julie, I have no idea. Well, some idea—it had something to do with Carl; I could see that much.”

  “It must have been something about Blaze, then,” Julie said, shaking her head. “Honestly, I don’t remember everybody being so sensitive before. You really have to watch your step around here, don’t you?”

  “Like walking on eggshells,” Gideon agreed. “All the same, I think the guy owes you an apology. That was really uncalled for.”

  “Oh,” she said, sighing, “that’s just Tony. It’s just the way he is.”

  ELEVEN

  EVERY forensic anthropologist will tell you, and every homicide cop too, that after a while you become hardened to looking at the remains of murder victims; you can divorce yourself from them as once-living human beings and view them simply as cases, clues,
evidence. When you go home at night, you put your thoughts of them aside and relax or get on with other things.

  With one exception. No one ever gets used to looking at murdered children. No one manages to completely overcome the internal shudder of sadness and horror—of despair at the wickedness of people—when dealing with the remains of a murdered child. There is always a desire for vengeance mixed in with it too—for justice, certainly, but mostly, if you are being honest, for vengeance. You want to do every possible thing you can to put the bastard away. Forever. And if he should resist arrest and get the bejesus beat out of him by somebody his own size, well, gee, wouldn’t that be a shame?

  These were very much Gideon’s feelings as he stood looking down at the contents of the one-by-three-foot fiberboard carton containing Caso Número 08-Teo dV 1-1, now tenderly laid out by him on two sheets of newsprint atop the desk in one of the unoccupied cubicles at police headquarters, a few yards down the corridor from Marmolejo’s office. The carton had been waiting for him when he arrived, and when he removed the lid, a single glance had convinced him that Orihuela had been right in classifying the remains as those of a teenager; the bones were small and gracile, and at least some of the epiphyseal unions were incomplete. Not as unsettling as a baby would have been—a baby, so utterly trusting and defenseless, was the worst—but plenty bad enough; a fresh young life, innocent and unworldly, barely started and bursting with promise, cut off before it could be lived.

  In this frame of mind he thought it best to put off opening the neatly folded brown paper sack labeled cráneo, in which the patent evidence of murder would be found. In merely lifting it out of the carton, he had been made aware of the fragile, shattered pieces inside, crackling like so many broken eggshells. Better to work his way slowly up to that.

  He pulled up the stool that had been provided at his request, had a sip of Marmolejo’s excellent espresso that had likewise been provided, put the sack to one side and settled down for a closer look at the rest of the skeleton. Score another one for Dr. Orihuela: he could tell the difference between a right and left clavicle and even between a right and left fibula. One might think any physician, especially a forensic pathologist, would be able to do that, but one would be wrong. Yes, an orthopedic surgeon, say, had better be familiar with every muscle insertion point, every foramen, every fossa, on the human tibia. But as for differentiating between a right one and a left one, they had available to them a foolproof, sublimely simple method for doing it: the right one was the one in the right leg, and the left one was the one in the left leg. Medical doctors simply aren’t trained in working with bones that don’t happen to be enclosed in bodies and at least roughly in their appointed place, and why should they be? When would a doctor have to deal with an isolated, bodyless bone? Never. That was what anthropologists did.