Land of Burning Heat

by Judith Van GIeson

  “I would.”

  Romero stood up. “We’ve set up a meeting with the family after the arraignment to talk about the document and the mezuzah. The OMI says they should have the results of the DNA comparison by then. Can you come?”

  “Yes,” Claire said. She stood up, too.

  “See you at the meeting,” Romero said.

  He knew the way so Claire didn’t walk him out to the exit. She stood in her doorway and watched until he turned the corner.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  SHE ARRIVED EARLY FOR THE ARRAIGNMENT, took a seat and watched the courthouse fill up. Chuy, wearing clean jeans and a T-shirt, escorted his grandmother down the aisle. Tey’s hand resembled the talons of a hawk as she gripped his arm. Manuel was smooth and handsome in a dark suit. He brought his blonde wife who also wore an expensive suit. They sat apart from Tey and Chuy. Lieutenant Kearns and Detective Romero were present, too.

  Peter Beck had only been in custody a short time, but Claire saw a pronounced change in his appearance. He wore a prison uniform. He was pale. His gray pony tail was limp and pencil thin. He had hired a prominent lawyer from Albuquerque.

  The prosecutor, Joe Burgess, was a stocky, athletic-looking man who clapped his hands for emphasis. He seemed confident. And why wouldn’t he be? Claire thought. Premeditation and first degree murder would be difficult to prove, but he was only charging Peter Beck with grand larceny, assault and battery and murder in the second degree. When asked how he wished to plead, Peter replied “not guilty” to all the charges. Claire didn’t hear confidence in his voice. She heard contempt for the charge, for the process, for the court that tried him. He didn’t sound like he ever intended to plea bargain, but she thought he might be better off if he did. The case against him seemed solid. She was sure he would do time, but not as much as he deserved.

  Before he left the courtroom, Peter raised his head high which made his nose seem even more prominent. He turned and scanned the crowd. It would be his last look at his accusers before the trial began. He acted like he wanted to fix them in his brain, take the image back to his cell, examine it and probe for weaknesses. He skipped over Manuel, lingered on Tey and Chuy. Then his gray eyes landed on Claire. He took a deep breath and his nostrils widened. His lips turned into a sneer. She saw no remorse in his expression, only anger that he had been caught. She felt that if she were a student and this were a lecture hall, he would eviscerate her with words, humiliate her and cut her work to ribbons before the class. She hoped Peter Beck would never lecture again. She hoped he would stay in prison for the rest of his life and if there were any further victims of his anger, they would be fellow inmates.

  When the arraignment was over, the family, the investigators, and Claire met in Joe Burgess’s office. Lieutenant Kearns thanked Claire for her help. If he had any doubts about her involvement he seemed to have pushed them far back in his mind.

  Claire sat down beside Tey and took her hand. “I know you’re glad this is all over.”

  “It won’t be over until that dude is locked up for good,” Chuy said.

  “Almost over,” Claire corrected herself.

  “Thank you very much,” Tey said, squeezing Claire’s hand, “for helping us find my Isabelita’s killer. When I saw that man’s eyes I knew he was the one. That man does not deserve to be a teacher.”

  “He deserves to be a prisoner,” Chuy said.

  Manuel Santos came alone to the meeting. He thanked Claire and shook her hand, but his eyes never met hers. She felt he wished she had had nothing to do with this. He would have preferred that Tony Atencio had been charged with the crime and he didn’t have to deal with the weight of his family’s past, that he would rather be known as Manuel Santos the Catholic than Manuel Santos the crypto Jew whose sister was killed over an historic family document. It was a conflict known to split families in two.

  When everyone else was seated, Lieutenant Kearns stood, opened the file he held and said, “I have received the report on the skeleton from the Office of the Medical Investigator. I know you’re all very interested to hear what it says. The Smithsonian and OMI couldn’t establish for sure if he is Daniel Rodriguez or Manuel Santos, whatever name you want to use, but there is a DNA match to Tey. He is definitely your ancestor.”

  “A la,” Chuy said.

  Manuel looked out the window and said nothing.

  “By strontium testing of the tooth enamel the Smithsonian established that your ancestor spent his youth in Portugal in the late sixteenth century,” Kearns said.

  “Does that coincide with what you know about the Rodriguez family history?” Joe Burgess asked Claire.

  “Yes. According to Peter Beck’s book, Daniel Rodriguez spent his childhood in Portugal before the family emigrated to Mexico. Peter’s scholarship in the book has never been questioned.”

  “I’d like to have a copy,” Burgess said. “Can you get me one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you be willing to testify as an expert at the trial?” Burgess asked.

  “I’d be glad to help, but I’m not an expert, just an interested party. I can refer you to some experts.” May Brennan came to mind.

  “I’ll get in touch with you later about it,” Joe Burgess said. He clapped his hands and Kearns picked up the beat.

  “The cross was also dated to the late sixteenth century,” Kearns said. “I’m the first to admit that I don’t know much about history, but it looks like the skeleton is Daniel Rodriguez and he brought his brother’s last words to Bernalillo with him hidden inside the cross.”

  “It’s obvious those are Joaquín Rodriguez’s words, but it’s impossible to establish they were his last words,” Manuel, the lawyer said, already beginning his defense of the family’s Catholicism. “Joaquín’s conversion to Catholicism could have been sincere, and Daniel could have converted to Catholicism, too.”

  It was possible, but Claire didn’t believe it. Tey had too many connections to Judaism. She knew that Catholicism and Judaism were issues that would never be resolved in some families. As the centuries went by and the number of descendants increased, some became devout Catholics, some remained fervent Jews, some were neither. When it came to religious beliefs, there was no proof.

  “A mezuzah is a box with a Hebrew prayer inside, right?” Joe Burgess asked anyone willing to provide an answer.

  “It’s a prayer to keep the house safe,” Tey said.

  Lieutenant Kearns showed them the mezuzah tucked inside an evidence bag.

  “This is the one we found in Peter Beck’s safe deposit box. We need to keep it as evidence, but we should be able to give it back to you after the trial is over,” Joe Burgess said.

  Then Lieutenant Kearns displayed Joaquín’s faded and elegant last words also in an evidence bag. Claire caught her breath; the document was so significant, so old, so valuable. It was incredible it had endured for four hundred years and could still speak.

  “Isabel showed this document to you, is that correct?” Joe Burgess asked Manuel.

  “Yes,” he admitted.

  It was the first Claire had heard of this. She reviewed her conversation with Manuel at the duck pond, wishing she had recorded it on tape. As she recalled he implied there had never been a document, but had he actually said so? She suspected if she replayed the conversation she’d find it was all innuendo, that Manuel was too careful a lawyer to lie to her.

  “It’s the document she showed me, but I knew nothing about Joaquín then. I asked her not to say anything until I could find out more, but May Brennan called Peter Beck and he went to the house. I thought when Tony Atencio robbed the house the document got destroyed in the robbery.”

  Not telling anyone this earlier bordered on criminal activity in Claire’s mind but she supposed that prosecuting Manuel Santos for concealing the truth wouldn’t help the case against Peter Beck.

  “We will need to keep this until the trial is over, too,” Lieutenant Kearns said, displaying the cross, also in an ev
idence bag. It was the cross Isabel had protected when she fell. All together the cross, the mezuzah, and the document were potent symbols of the family’s complicated past and present.

  “As a family, you need to start thinking about what to do with these objects when you get them back,” Burgess said. “My only suggestion is that you put them in a very safe place.”

  “We will do that,” Tey said.

  “We’ll be talking to all of you again before we go to trial. Does anyone have any questions for now?” the prosecutor asked.

  No one did.

  “Okay then.” He gave one final clap. “We’re done here.”

  Detective Romero had sat in the back of the room and kept quiet during this meeting. Lieutenant Kearns hadn’t taken all the credit for solving the crime, but he hadn’t given any to Romero either. Claire caught up to him at the door and walked him down the hall.

  “I hope you get credit for the work you did,” she said. “Your open-mindedness and your availability made it possible to catch Peter Beck. If it weren’t for you, Tony Atencio would still be in jail.”

  “Thanks,” Romero said. “You did a pretty good job yourself.”

  They stood in the hallway, smiling and congratulating each other until Tey came along and tapped Claire on the arm. “Chuy and I are going to visit Isabelita’s grave now,” she said. “Can you come with us?”

  “Yes,” Claire said.

  “We will meet you there.”

  ******

  Claire took her time as she walked out to her car in the parking lot. One remaining question she had was the kind of vehicle Manuel Santos drove. She knew it wasn’t the SUV that ran her off the road, but she wanted to know if Chuy had been telling her the truth when he told her it was gray. She was relieved to see him step into a gray SUV and drive away. It was one less lie to ponder.

  ******

  When Claire got to the cemetery, Chuy was helping his grandmother step down from his truck. She heard the traffic whiz by on the Interstate and the sign at the trailer lot flap in the breeze. They walked to Isabel’s grave at Tey’s leisurely pace. It took discipline to slow down and walk as slowly as Tey did, but once Claire made the transition she felt the benefits. She no longer heard or saw the Interstate. She had time to focus on what was close up, time to remember and look back at the past. Getting the cemetery to reveal its secrets was like turning the pages of a book. She saw the red cloth flowers on Isabel’s grave. Claire knew now they hadn’t been put there by Tey. They stood in front of the tombstone for a few minutes while Chuy remembered the past.

  “Isabel, Manuel, and I saw that mezuzah in the closet when we were little,” he said. “We wondered what it was, but it seemed like a secret of the house so we put it back. We saw you lighting the candles and blowing the smoke around, Grandma. We remembered you and our father and uncles chanting in a language we didn’t understand. Sometimes we wondered if we were Marranos. That was before Manuel became so Catholic.”

  “Did you tell your father this?” Tey asked.

  “No. It was like it was your secret.”

  “I wish I had told Isabelita before she died. It’s something the women pass on.” Tey touched the tombstone. “My precious, why didn’t you come to me when you found that paper?”

  “I’m sure Manuel told her not to,” Chuy said. “He didn’t want anybody else to know.”

  “That’s the way the Catholics are,” Tey said. “They only know one truth. It’s too bad we have to bury our people here with them. I’m telling you this now, Chuy, because who knows if I will be alive when we get that paper back. I want you to give it to Claire. I want UNM to keep it. I don’t care who knows about us now.”

  “Okay, Grandma,” Chuy said.

  “We’ll take good care of it,” Claire said. “I promise.”

  “I know you will. Now I want you to show me what you discovered at the other Isabel Santos grave.”

  They walked across the graveyard keeping to Tey’s measured beat. They passed the graves of the soldiers who died in Vietnam, Korea, World War II and World War I, the children who died too young, and the couples who were juntos para siempre. They passed the section where the nuns were buried and approached the place where the jackrabbit lived and the gravesites were marked by wooden crosses lying on the ground. At the edge of this section they found the grave of Isabel and Moises Suazo.

  Claire pointed out the six petalled flower. “It could be interpreted as the symbol of the Star of David,” she said. “And the faint carving of a candelabra—that could be a menorah. I sketched the flower and the symbol in the middle and I faxed it to Harold Marcus at the Smithsonian. It could be a stamen in the flower but he interpreted it as a shin. That’s the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the first letter of shema, the prayer Jews say.” Claire hoped she was getting the essence of what Harold told her if not the literal meaning. “It means ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’”

  “Adonay es mi dio,” Tey said. “He is with me when I walk along the way. I love him with all my heart.” She’d been holding a pebble in her hand and she placed it on Isabel Santos de Suazo’s tombstone.

  The sound the stone made resonated. Claire thought of the millions of years it took to turn sand and water into stone, how ancient the Hebrew prayers were, how timeless Adonay.

  They walked slowly back to Isabel’s grave. Tey picked up another pebble and placed it on top of her tombstone.

  “Descance en paz, mi nieta,” she said.

  Claire heard the flapping sound. It was only the breeze lifting and dropping the edge of a sign, but to her it had the echo of the beating wings of time.

  THE END

  You can find more of Judith Van Gieson’s mysteries as ebooks:

  The Stolen Blue: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#1)

  Vanishing Point: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#2)

  Confidence Woman: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#3)

  Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#4)

  The Shadow of Venus: A Claire Reynier Mystery (#5)

  North of the Border: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#1)

  Raptor: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#2)

  The Other Side of Death: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#3)

  The Wolf Path: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#4)

  Lies that Bind: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#5)

  Parrot Blues: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#6)

  Hotshots: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#7)

  Ditch Rider: A Neil Hamel Mystery (#8)