Skull Duggery

by Aaron Elkins

  “But why would Dorotea quit?” Julie asked. “The Hacienda will still be functioning, won’t it?”

  “Oh sure, but she refuses to work for Preciosa. It’s not just Preciosa herself, either. The Hacienda’s going to be a different place. No more dude ranch angle. She’s already told Pop the horses are going. If he wants to stay on as a general caretaker, he’s welcome.” She looked back at him. “He won’t, of course,” she said sadly. “I’m not sure what he’s going to do.”

  “That’s awful,” Julie said. “What about you? What about Jamie?”

  “She didn’t say. I guess for the moment, we have our jobs. At this point, I’m not sure we’ll want them. As for poor Josefa, she’s out.

  Preciosa told her she’s canned, gave her one week to find someplace else.” Only at this point did Annie’s eyes gleam with tears. “Damn. Now where’s she supposed to go? Who’s going to take her in?”

  While talking, they had continued moving slowly toward the table, and now they could hear what Josefa was saying. “Where I’m gonna go? What I’m gonna do?” she was moaning—as usual, not quite directly at Carl, but at some invisible person somewhere in front of or behind him. She mopped at her eyes with a wadded, grungy handkerchief. “Old lady like me.” Carl had her free hand in both of his big ones and was patting it and making impotent masculine sounds of solace.

  “Oh gosh, this is terrible,” Julie said. “Where’s Preciosa now?”

  “She’s waiting in the meeting room in the old chapel, next to the office. That’s where we’ll meet with the lawyer.”

  Outside, a van pulled up and Jamie climbed out of the driver’s seat. A stern-looking woman of fifty in a severely cut pantsuit exited from the other side. “Here she is,” Annie said, lips pursed, “Señora María Elena García Navarro Sánchez, big-time abogada—our family lawyer. Oh, and look who’s here,” she said as the slide door in back eased open and a gaunt, hard, haggard woman with a cigarette wedged in her mouth climbed wearily down. “Conchita the Nutball—Tony’s wife. Well, sure, why not?—I’m sure she comes in for plenty.”

  Julie stared. “That’s Miss Chihuahua 1992?”

  “Second runner-up,” Annie corrected. “She’s, um, changed a little since then.”

  “Just a bit, I guess. Wow.”

  “I guess that’s what comes of living with Tony,” Gideon said. The truth was, he’d completely forgotten that Tony’d been married.

  The new widow remained beside the van, puffing fitfully at the cigarette, but Jamie and the lawyer came in. Jamie was limping a little, but Gideon saw that he was getting around without his cane now.

  Señora Sánchez did not waste time with greetings. “Who are these two?” She asked, meaning Gideon and Julie.

  “My cousin and her husband,” Annie said. “Julie was helping out while—”

  “They are not included in the will. They cannot be present. I’m sorry,” she told them sternly, “you will have to leave.”

  “Oh, we’re meeting in the chapel,” Annie said. “Preciosa is there already.”

  “Very well. May we go now, please? The will is complex. There are numerous provisions to explain. You are all mentioned in it.” She turned and strode out. Jamie followed, and then Carl, with a final pat on the hand of the disconsolate Josefa.

  “Well . . .” Annie said with a sigh. “Showtime.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on things while you’re all in there,” Julie said.

  “Not necessary,” Annie told her as she headed for the door. “There’s nothing going on. We’ve canceled bookings for the rest of the week, and gotten other lodgings for the guests we have. It’s been crazy here. The police were all over the place yesterday afternoon and they plan on being back today.”

  Señora Sánchez, looking irritated, came back and opened the door. “Didn’t you hear me say everybody? I need to be back at the airport at eleven.”

  “Yes, ma’am, sorry, ma’am,” said Annie. “Here I come.”

  The lawyer glared at the wretched Josefa, who had stayed slumped in her chair, looking as sodden and bedraggled as her handkerchief. “You too. You are mentioned as well.”

  She had to repeat it in Spanish before Josefa understood, and when she did, she looked scared stiff. What new terrors awaited her in Tony’s will? She shook her head no; she wasn’t coming, she didn’t want to know. But Annie came and helped her out of her chair. “Come, dear aunt,” she said affectionately in Spanish, “Tony has left you some money to show his love. Who knows how much?” With her arm around Josefa, they shuffled off together.

  “I wouldn’t count on its being a lot,” Julie said to Gideon. “How sad it all is.”

  “It sure is.” He snapped his fingers, ineptly as usual. “I just thought of something.” He ran to the door. “Annie? Do you happen to know what Manolo’s last name was?”

  He had to wait for her to think of the answer, and when it came, Julie couldn’t hear it. “What did she say?” She asked as Gideon returned.

  Gideon smiled. “She said it was Garcia.”

  WITH nothing to keep them at the Hacienda, they walked down the steep hill to the village and cast about for someplace to get breakfast. Pickings were slim to none, and they ate at El Descanso, where Sandoval and Gideon had had lunch a few days ago: melon juice, pink and frothy; eggs scrambled with beef, onions, tomatoes, and cilantro; fresh, hot tortillas; and coffee. Not quite Dorotea-class, but filling and good.

  On the way out they had to stand aside for a group of six or seven sober, pensive men, mostly older, who were just coming in. The last in the line was Flaviano Sandoval, who looked anything but sober. The look on his face was a combination of happiness and relief, the sublime look of a defendant who has just heard the jury foreman say, “Not guilty.”

  “Buenos días, Chief S—” Julie began.

  Sandoval held up his hand. “Not ‘chief.’ Never again ‘chief,’ gracias a Dios.” He grinned at them. “You now address the executive officer of the village council of Teotitlán del Valle. As of this very morning.” He couldn’t stop grinning.

  “Well, good for you—you made it!” Gideon said, enthusiastically shaking his hand.

  “No more skeletons, no more bones, no more mummies, no more killings,” Sandoval burbled. “What is today’s agenda? Rerouting of the traffic on Avenida Juárez during festivals, and the design of new uniforms for the village band.” He sighed. “It’s wonderful.”

  Smiling, they watched him go to join the others. Gideon shrugged. “What the hell,” he said, “chacun à son goût.”

  Afterward they strolled aimlessly around the town, which seemed wonderfully tranquil and slow-paced after the grit and clamor of Calle las Casas in Oaxaca. There was the occasional car, but there were also burros, and even a team of oxen pulling a wagon. Mostly the traffic, such as it was, was foot traffic: sombreroed men in white; braided, earringed women in their rebozos and aprons, some with bundles on their heads; nobody going anywhere very fast. At one point a troop of uniformed schoolchildren, led by their teacher, passed politely by, many with shy waves, and giggles, and garbled greetings: “ ’Allo.” “ ’Ow you doing, pardner?” “You know him, Brad Pitt?”

  By eleven, the sun was getting uncomfortably warm and they started on the twenty-minute climb up the steep, winding, cobble-stoned hill to the shady protection of the Hacienda. Halfway up it, they had to jump to one side to get out of the way of a black Mercedes that came careening down it, tires squealing on the curves.

  “That’s Tony’s car!” Julie said.

  “And that’s Preciosa in it,” Gideon said, as it rocketed past. “I don’t think she ever even saw us. I hope she doesn’t kill anybody before she gets wherever she’s going.”

  “She didn’t look happy, did she?” Julie mused. “Say, do you suppose Tony didn’t leave her the Hacienda after all?”

  It didn’t take long to find out. When they reached the Hacienda (having first stepped aside again for another, slower vehicle, this one a Hacienda van be
aring Jamie, Tony’s wife, and the lawyer), they found Carl and Annie, looking thunderstruck, sitting at one of the umbrellaed tables on the terrace. Julie and Gideon slipped into a couple of chairs beside them. “So what happened?” Julie asked. “We saw Preciosa driving away. She didn’t look too pleased.”

  Annie was shaking her head. “Tony lied to her. He didn’t leave this place to her at all. He left her some money and a little stock—it was all complicated—and that’s it; I think it comes to around, oh, twenty thousand dollars altogether.”

  “Plus his Mercedes, obviously,” Gideon said.

  “Nope, he didn’t leave that to anybody. Preciosa just took it.”

  “What did the rest of the will say?” Julie asked.

  “Well, when you sorted everything out,” Annie said, “almost everything went to his wife. The house in Coyoacán, the investment portfolio. . . . According to María, it all comes to somewhere between eight and ten million dollars.”

  “You mean,” Gideon said, “he left nothing at all to you folks? What about Jamie, his own brother?”

  “Not one . . . damn . . . thing,” Carl said. “Hard to believe, especially after all the work Jamie put into this place to keep it afloat.”

  “To say nothing of what you put into it, Pop,” Annie said. Carl was stunned, but Annie was angry. “I can’t believe it. What a miserable, ungrateful, lying creep. And then, what he tried to do to you!” She said to Gideon. “What was that all about?”

  “Beats me,” Gideon said. “I’m hoping Marmolejo can figure it out, but I don’t honestly see much chance; not now, not anymore.”

  “So Tony’s wife now owns the Hacienda Encantada,” Julie said. “How do you think that’s going to play out?”

  “Oh no, he didn’t leave the Hacienda to Conchita,” Annie said, surprised. “What made you think that?”

  “Well, you said she got everything—”

  “I said almost everything. Not the Hacienda.”

  “All right, then who owns the Hacienda? Don’t keep us in suspense.”

  Carl managed a small smile. “Our new boss,” he said, “is la señora Josefa Basilia Manzanares y Gallegos.”

  Julie frowned. “And who is that?”

  Carl’s smile morphed into an easy laugh, in which Annie joined. “It’s Josefa—our Josefa!” She cried.

  For a moment Julie and Gideon were speechless. “But why?” Julie finally said. “I mean, yes, she’s his aunt or something, but after all, Jamie’s his brother, and—”

  Carl answered with a shrug. “Who knows? The will said something about years of faithful service . . . Something like that.”

  “Well, how about that?” Gideon said with a slow smile. “Two hours ago she’s sitting there despondent about being thrown out, and now the whole place belongs to her.”

  “She must be overjoyed,” Julie said.

  “Au contraire,” said Annie. “She’s more miserable than she was before.”

  “Miserable! Why—”

  “The poor old gal’s scared to death,” Carl said. “She doesn’t want to own the Hacienda, she just wants things to stay the way they are. She asked if she could still keep her job if she owned the place.”

  “We told her she could keep it or not keep it, or do any damn thing she wanted,” Annie said. “We told her we could run the place for her, if she wanted—which is what we’ve been doing anyway—and she could live like a queen and get waited on hand and foot. Or she could throw the bunch of us out, sell the place, and live like a queen anywhere she felt like—and get waited on hand and foot.”

  “I’m not sure we got through to her, though,” said Carl. “We spent fifteen minutes carefully explaining everything to her, and she kept nodding her head and mumbling sí, sí, comprendo, like she understood, and then you know what her question was?”

  Annie supplied the answer with an approximation of Josefa’s piteous wail: “But they gonna let me stay in my room, or I gotta move to Tony’s?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  AT a few minutes after one, Gideon stood in front of the small, gated courtyard of the Museo de Curiosidades. The gate was closed and latched, but the padlock had been removed. He lifted the latch and entered the courtyard. Once it had probably been a graceful patio, rich with plants and perhaps a welcoming fountain. Now it looked like the entrance to a junk shop, all weeds, cracked cement paving . . . and junk. On second glance, however, the junk proved to be exhibits, each with a small, faded, foxed, meticulously hand-lettered placard in English and Spanish. To the left of the big oak door of the casa itself was a weathered concrete bust of Kaiser Wilhelm I, complete with spiked helmet: “From the residence of Friedrich Pflegholz, German ambassador to Mexico, 1883-1886.” To the right was the “sacred throne of Axayácatl, emperor of the Aztecs,” an ugly hunk of basalt that an imaginative mind might have construed as being shaped more or less like a chair. Further along, attached to the casa’s wall by a chain, was a wooden “Chinese empress’s bench.”

  If these were the guy’s come-on exhibits, Gideon thought, it was no wonder he doesn’t seem to be getting much in the way of visitors. Beside the door was a sign in English and Spanish that informed visitors that the entrance fee was thirty pesos and instructed them to ring the bell. Gideon did, and the door swung open to reveal a vestibule in which the man they’d seen yesterday sat at an old office desk, clacking away at a many-carboned document on an ancient, upright, manual Remington typewriter. Sr. Henry Castellanos-Jones, said the nameplate at the front of the desk.

  “Yes?” he said, not pleased to be interrupted. He was wearing the same rusty suit, the same narrow black tie that he’d worn yesterday. Even sitting down, he had the suit jacket tightly buttoned.

  “I’d like to see the museum.”

  “It’s thirty pesos. I have no change.”

  “That’s fine.” Seeing no receptacle, he laid the bills on the desk.

  “Would you like me to give you a tour? The fee is two hundred pesos.”

  “No thanks, I’d just like to wander, if that’s all right.”

  “The choice is yours, but a tour would add a great deal to your visit.”

  “No thanks.”

  The man’s thin lips turned down. “Very well. Please start in the room to your left, the drawing room, and continue around. That is the established pattern for the traffic flow.” He returned his attention to his typing.

  Gideon did as he was told, although he could see from the empty rooms ahead that traffic flow wasn’t going to be a problem. The place was much as Sandoval had led him to expect, reeking of mildew and mold, probably from the old upholstered furniture and grungy carpets that appeared to be leftovers from the last person to reside there. The plastered walls were cracked and dirty, the ceilings water-stained and sagging. Lit mostly with low-wattage Tiffany-style lamps in various shades of brown, it was like walking around under a mushroom. Or inside a mausoleum.

  Most of the exhibits, and there were many, were on dark, Victorian-era tables or in glass-fronted bookcases, and whatever else Gideon might say about them, he was ready to admit that it was the most eclectic and idiosyncratic museum he’d ever been in. The shrunken heads (actually, goatskin fakes) that Sandoval had told him about were there, and the Aztec stone knives (knockoffs, and poorly done at that) as well. There was also the withered brown arm and hand of “The Assassin Pedro Mendoza, Who Killed Beloved Governor Ocampo in 1901.” This event rated an entire display case for itself. Along with the arm was the governor’s ruffled shirt, complete with holes and blood, and the dagger that did the deed.

  In general, though, the exhibits were more pedestrian, if no less odd: a “letter cancellation machine made in 1848, in use until 4/4/1911”; a “metal hamburger mold, circa 1931”; an “1860 Ashley Archimedean Eggbeater.” If there was a pattern to the displays, Gideon couldn’t make it out. The eggbeater shared a case with a “Czechoslovakian machine pistol from the Great War.” The hamburger mold was housed with a porthole from a sunken ship and a “cr
ystal ball used in crystal-gazing, late 1800s.”

  His quarry was in a glass-fronted case in the second room he came to, the former dining room, on a shelf shared with a baby shark in a Mason jar and a three-masted schooner made of matchsticks. It was only the skull—no mandible—and it rested in a saucer filled with straw. The legend beside it said “sacrificed Zapotec princess,

  1,000 years old.” Gideon had to kneel to look it in the eye, so to speak, and even when he did, there wasn’t much he could tell about it. It was male, not female—the supraorbital ridges and robust mastoid processes told him that much. There were streaks of green, blue, and red color here and there, probably the remnants of the colored candles that had once been mounted on its crown. The teeth, nestled in the straw, couldn’t be seen. Was it really old enough to be Zapotec? That he couldn’t tell.

  There was a huge, irregular hole in the left side of the skull, involving parts of the frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal bones. He was certain that this “open defect,” as it was called in the bland jargon of forensic science, was postmortem. Bone is pretty much the same color through and through, so if it had been inflicted at the time of death its edges would have been the same color as the rest of the skull. But the edges of this “defect” were distinctly paler than the rest of the skull, indicating that the bone had been exposed to the elements for some time before the break occurred and the defect had nothing to do with the cause of death.

  He returned to the desk out front, where the man was now struggling with another set of copies, trying to get the dog-eared carbons to go around the roller.

  “Excuse me. You have a skull in the old dining room—”

  “The Zapotec princess,” he said without looking up.

  “Yes. I wonder if it would be possible to take it out of the case. I’d like very much to have a closer look.”