Funeral Hotdish

by Jana Bommersbach

  She got ready for her morning walk, pulling on her University of Michigan sweatshirt this time of year—a tee-shirt with the same logo in warmer months—and was out the door with her homemade cassette tapes. Her walk took her through the historic neighborhoods of downtown Phoenix, the only part of this sprawling metropolis that resembled old Arizona.

  Today she was listening to the driving blues of her friend, Hans Olson, a legend in these parts and a superstar in Europe, even if he hadn’t gotten the kind of nationwide success he deserved.

  His guitar and harmonica and infectious lyrics kept her moving, which was the whole point. Besides Tina Turner and Michael Jackson, nobody could get her ass down the sidewalk like Hans Olson.

  She didn’t hear Hans’ words so much now as the words Rob had whispered in their bed. How she was supposed to “be careful?” Besides the obvious fact of not walking up to the guy and saying, “Hi, Sammy.”

  The words kept swirling. “Be careful…Dangerous.…Please.”

  She was approaching the Burton Barr Public Library on Central Avenue, named in honor of the late Republican lawmaker even Democrats loved, when she heard the gunshot. Joya hit the sidewalk so hard, she bounced. The palms of both hands stung from the impact. Her left knee was gashed and bleeding. Her right knee wore a long scrape, like someone had tried to sandpaper off the skin. Joya realized she was crying, but didn’t know if it was from pain or panic.

  A twenty-something on a bike came to a quick stop, letting his bike drop as he ran to her.

  “Ma’am, are you okay?”

  Did she really look old enough to be called ma’am?

  “I think they’re shooting at me,” Joya hysterically blurted out before she had time to think. It startled not only her, but her Samaritan. His eyes darted around to see if he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Didn’t you hear that shot?” She regained at least some composure.

  The young man shook his head like he was clearing cobwebs. “No. That wasn’t a shot. It was a car backfiring. I saw it. Black smoke pouring out the tailpipe. Cars like that shouldn’t be allowed on our streets. Here, let me help you up.”

  Joya, coming back to her senses, felt foolish—a car backfired! Not an assassination attempt! Jeez, drama queen, let a little helpful suggestion from your boyfriend set you off.

  A security guard from the library rushed up the sidewalk—he’d seen her hit the ground and unlocked the twenty-foot glass door to come to her aid.

  “Are you okay? Oh, my, that’s some nasty bruises. Oh, aren’t you Joya Bonner? Miss Bonner, here, let me help you.”

  The twenty-something looked at her with new respect—she was somebody, but he had no idea who. Somebody who had reason to believe she was a target. He didn’t want to know who she was. He wanted very much to be on his way.

  He gratefully turned the somebody woman over to the library guard, picked up his bike, and rode off. Later, much later, when he realized who she was, he’d understand why she was worried.

  The guard held Joya’s arm as she steadied herself. “Come in—let’s get that blood washed off. You’ve got dirt in that gash.”

  The guard served as a human crutch while she limped into the library that wouldn’t be open to the public for hours. She eased down on a bench in the entryway. The wall was etched with private donors’ names—hers among them. She waited for the guard to return from the restroom with wet paper towels.

  She felt so stupid. So embarrassed. She better buck up like this was nothing. She took the paper towel and swabbed her knee, thanking the guard profusely.

  “I’m such a clumsy cluck,” she told him, hoping he’d been out of earshot for her hysteria. “Trip over my own feet! You’re so kind to help me.”

  “Of course, Miss Bonner. Of course.”

  “You know, I’m coming back here tonight for Dinner in the Stacks.” She tried to sound normal. “I’ve got a new dress. Sure glad it’s long so nobody will see this mess.” She laughed out loud and he chuckled with her.

  Her right knee was already turning blue. The gash stopped bleeding. Her palms still stung.

  The guard could feel her unease and tried to help: “I hear they’re expecting six hundred people tonight. Best ever!”

  “I know. We should raise a lot of money. Lord knows the library needs it.”

  They chatted a couple minutes. Joya stood up and tried out her legs, testing if she could make it home on her own.

  “I could get someone to drive you home in a little while—I can’t leave, I’m the only one here, but someone else is scheduled to work in about a half hour.”

  “I don’t live far. I’m going to be okay. See, I can walk just fine. You’ve been so helpful. I thank you so much.”

  She walked as straight as she could while she knew he was still watching, then limped the rest of the way home—wiping away angry tears at her overreaction, her idiocy, and the realization that she was more scared than she knew.

  She wouldn’t mention any of this to Rob—or anyone else. This wasn’t what “be careful” meant.

  Normally after her walk she’d shower, mix up a banana-orange smoothie, drink a pot of French-pressed coffee, do the Saturday Sudoku puzzle in the Republic and then grab her African shopping basket for the Phoenix Farmer’s Market downtown. Today she skipped the market to rest her legs, and steadied her nerves with a shot of Patron tequila. Cactus liquor was medicinal and she needed it today.

  In her recliner, she pushed the remote control to bring up her taped shows: The Young and the Restless, Sex and the City, The Sopranos. Today she’d skip The Sopranos. But if she’d been quizzed on the shows before her eyes, she couldn’t have recited a single plot line. She was busy thinking about Sammy, and Rob’s revelations, and her need to get under control. She felt both thrilled and disturbed.

  Here she was on the verge of a mega story. But to get to it, she had to trust a cop. Personal feelings or not, it was still tough to overcome her natural aversion to trusting a cop.

  For most of America, the police were always the good guys. It was bred as respect for authority, twined with the belief that being on the side of the law was the only place to be. Of course, a steady diet of cop shows on TV showed they were always right, always catching bad guys and always forgiven any transgression because they were the good guys.

  Joya knew there were lots of good cops—Rob was one of them—but she also knew the other side of that story, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Deceit, disrespect for the law, the ends justifying any means, protecting their own no matter what, destroying evidence, choking prisoners, inventing evidence, lying on the stand—these were not the sins most saw when they looked at a cop, but Joya could cite chapter and verse to prove that they were also part of some cops’ DNA.

  Sheriff Arpaio’s publicity stunt over the fake bomb was just the latest evidence. She’d known for a long time that you couldn’t always trust a cop—since she studied what really happened inside the Phoenix Police Department when the Republic crack investigative reporter Don Bolles was assassinated at noon on June 2, 1976.

  Joya was still in high school when he was murdered, but when she moved to Arizona, she attended journalism workshops on his techniques and reporting tips. He’d loved taking new reporters under his wing, and telling his war stories about covering the Mafia and public corruption. He’d once written a series of articles detailing how the mob was moving into Arizona, taking over legitimate businesses, laundering money, killing people who got in their way. He was particularly distrustful of Emprise, the company that ran the dog tracks in Arizona.

  He knew his investigations were dangerous, but that never stopped him. Couldn’t have stopped him. He seemed to revel in the peril—it was the mark of a fearless reporter. But he also felt confident that the unwritten code would keep him out of harm’s way—the mob code that said you never killed a cop or a rep
orter, because the repercussions were too severe. Scare them, beat them up, okay, but never kill them. At least that’s what everyone thought until they killed Bolles.

  Joya always wished she’d known Bolles, that she could have been one of his students. He was one of her idols—right up there with the first “muckraker,” Ida Tarbell. As she nursed her bruised knee and bruised ego this Saturday morning, she thought of how he’d have handled this Sammy story. She smiled, thinking he’d be jumping with glee, much like she was.

  Then she remembered something else they’d taught at those workshops. Don Bolles knew what “be careful” meant, and he took precautions so nobody could ambush him. Joya so clearly remembered that he stuck scotch tape on the hood of his car, always checking to be sure it wasn’t broken by someone tampering with the engine. The tape was still on his white Datsun when it blew up at a hotel in downtown Phoenix. The precaution had been worthless because nobody tampered with his engine. They put the bomb under his car—right under his legs.

  Joya let her mind page through that horrible day, which had been chronicled in newspapers across the nation. Bolles got a call from a dog breeder and small-time hood named John Adamson—he claimed to have information on a new Mafia scheme in Arizona. Bolles should have ignored it. He’d walked away from investigative work when he found his own newspaper wouldn’t push for the reforms that were needed.

  Instead, he was covering the Arizona Legislature—he joked that he’d gone from the sublime to the ridiculous—and, by all rights, should have told this Adamson guy he wasn’t interested.

  But even old dogs still like to hunt, and seasoned investigative reporters are like old dogs. He couldn’t help himself. If there were something new he didn’t know about, he wanted to know. Bolles agreed to the meet, demanding—yet another of his precautions—that it be in a public place. Adamson suggested a downtown hotel, and that sounded fine to Bolles. They’d meet at 11:30. Bolles hung around the hotel for a half hour before he gave up and left to find himself some lunch. That night—his wedding anniversary—he was going to a nice dinner with his wife before they took in the hottest new movie, All the President’s Men. He got into his car and turned the key.

  Bolles lived for eleven days after the bombing, as they amputated one limb after another. By the time he died on June 13, they’d taken both legs and an arm. The entire nation was reeling in disbelief. All the time, the police chief of Phoenix was swearing his men and women officers would find the killers and bring them to justice. The chief had personally made that pledge to the packed Republic newsroom.

  Every story Joya ever read about Don Bolles included the awe that he named his killers as he lay dying.

  “They finally got me. The Mafia. Emprise. Find John [Adamson].”

  It was years before anyone knew that while Bolles lay dying, the police department’s Organized Crime Bureau was purging files on some of these very people, as well as the leading politicians of Arizona. They shredded some files; threw others away; renumbered their file system trying to cover up the deletions. Nobody ever explained why they were protecting the very people Bolles had named in his last cogent breath, but protecting them they were.

  Joya always regretted that she hadn’t discovered the deceit. Her paper’s competition, the Phoenix New Times, broke that story. Besides her own alternative weekly, nobody much cared why there was a purge or what was lost or why the investigative unit had gone to such trouble to cover it all up. The Republic ignored the story—their own guy had been murdered, and they ignored the story! Television stations took their cues on what was news from the Republic, so they were mute, too. Besides, TV reporters in those days were hired for their good looks and stay-in-place hair, not their investigative skills.

  What should have been a permanent stain on the Phoenix Police Department—should have opened up new investigations and maybe solved the question of who ordered Bolles’ assassination—went away because the media didn’t push. Whoever or whatever convinced the Republic to stonewall the shredding assured that Bolles’ murderer went free. Bolles himself would have laughed. “Business as usual,” he’d have said.

  For Joya, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Kill a reporter. Get away with it. She had never trusted a cop since. Her disdain for the Arizona Republic was irreversible.

  Now she was in a horrible position. Could she trust the cop she was dating? Could she trust his higher-ups, who would have to sign off on the deal? Could she trust a law enforcement agency that had betrayed Don Bolles? Sure, those guys were retired now, but did they leave a lingering taint? Could the same kind of corruptions happen today? She had trouble thinking of anything else.

  She was relieved when her heavy eyes led into a long Saturday nap. She dreamed of celebrations, not murder.

  She awoke and scolded herself. “Shake it off, Joya. Shake it off.” She watered plants in the backyard and filled the bird feeders and grabbed a banana before she got herself ready for the library dinner. She dressed in her beaded black gown; she acted like everything was fine.

  ***

  Joya’s usual Sunday had its own rituals, even if they didn’t resemble the way she’d been raised. For the first seventeen years of her life in Northville, North Dakota, Sundays meant St. Vincent’s Catholic Church, a magnificent cathedral with two-story stained-glass windows and elaborate statues of the saints. The Stations of the Cross weren’t pictures on the wall, like in many Phoenix churches, but carved statutes depicting the agony of the crucifixion. As a little girl, she’d loved going into the church alone and kneeling at the communion rail that separated the congregation from the altar and the priest. She’d wanted to be on that altar, to help serve the mass, but girls weren’t allowed. Only altar boys. That had changed, but too late for her.

  Now the railing was gone and the priest faced the congregation—but none of those changes had been enough to keep Joya Bonner a “capital C” Catholic. Still, she had a soft spot in her heart for the church where she made her First Communion, walking down the aisle in a white dress with a white veil, like a bride. There were a dozen pictures of her from that day, and an ornate certificate that her mother framed. St. Vincent’s was the church where she made her confirmation, and where, as a teenager, she dreamed she’d be married.

  But life had taken a different turn. Sundays weren’t spent in church, but with a group of friends over brunch. Little Northville couldn’t hold her like big Phoenix could. For the last decade, she’d worked for an irascible weekly where she had made a name for herself as a journalist no one messed with.

  Still every Sunday, Joya dutifully called home to her folks. Most of the time, she was the one doing the sharing—telling them about her week and what was going on in Phoenix. Their news was usually pretty skimpy—what Grandma was up to and anything new with the aunts and uncles, how Dad’s garden was progressing or if the leaves had turned. It was normally the conversation of people whose lives were going along quite nicely with no traumas to report. But that wasn’t the visit they had this Sunday.

  “You aren’t going to believe the tragedy here,” her mother began and Joya held her breath, praying it wasn’t someone in the family. It wasn’t, but it came close enough.

  “It’s Amber Schlener—Nettie’s daughter? You went to her basketball game last Christmas. Remember?”

  Of course Joya remembered. The Schleners weren’t close relatives, but Gertie Bach was a cousin to her grandma, and Gertie was like a second mother to Amber. The girl had visited the folks’ house many times, and there was no debate that she could net a basketball. Joya expected to hear she’d broken her leg and couldn’t play on this year’s team.

  “What happened?” She shifted the phone from one hand to the other.

  “She’s dead.”

  The words hung like a sinker weight on a fishing line. Joya wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

  “Dead? What do you mean, dead?”

&nb
sp; “She overdosed on dope,” her father said—the man who always cut to the bottom line.

  “Amber was on dope?” Joya yelled into the phone.

  “She wasn’t ON dope, Ralph. She only took it once they said and she died. Friday night at a dance out on the Jacobson place. Her boyfriend’s still in a coma.”

  “WHAT?” None of this made sense. Kids don’t overdose on dope in Northville, North Dakota. They don’t die from taking something once; they don’t even take anything. They get drunk, maybe—okay, they probably get drunk—but that was as far as it would go. Besides, where would somebody in that little town get any dope? There certainly wasn’t a market there, and she’d never heard of a drug dealer who hung around where there wasn’t a profit.

  Dope in Northville? A hometown of garden trinkets, statutes of the Virgin Mary, wooden flower baskets, fiberglass deer, bowling balls covered with glass beads to make a “gazing ball.” A town filled with backyard gardens—tomatoes, beans, beets, cucumbers, cabbages the size of basketballs, zucchini as big as softball bats. She never, ever, thought of that town and saw a dirty drug dealer.

  “This doesn’t make any sense.” Her voice faltered.

  “The town is just devastated,” Maggie Bonner agreed. “The funeral’s Wednesday at St. Vincent’s. Our circle has the funeral dinner.”

  “I’ve got to call Gertie.” Joya knew the old woman would be shattered.

  “Oh, please do, but wait till after the funeral.”

  “Okay, I’ll call her next week. Give her a hug for me.” They were all so far away.

  “They’re doing the visitation at the high school. In the gym. Where she played basketball. I hope that wakes those kids up.” Ralph thought kicks to the gut were a good lesson for the teens of Northville.

  “Start at the beginning,” Joya begged. Maggie and Ralph, talking over one another, filled her in as best they could, but they really didn’t know much. They didn’t remember what kind of dope it had been.