The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery

by Nancy Pickard

  “Patrona?”

  Mrs. Potter turned toward the sound of that single word as if toward a lifeline. It was Bandy Esposito, standing beside his little truck, on the shadowed fringe of the crowd. The old hired hand was lame now, from a cowboying accident a few years back, and admittedly not much good for jobs around the ranch anymore, except for tending her flowers and keeping her swimming pool clean. Many of her neighbors—including some of those gathered there at that moment—considered her profligate for continuing to employ him at full salary. But it had never been much of a salary anyway, she considered, even if it did come with free room and with feed for his horse and gas for his truck. If she’d retired him, she’d probably have paid him nearly the same in benefits, and this way he got to feel—and be—useful for a few more years. She turned to him in relief, because she knew that people could turn to Bandy, because he was utterly dependable in many things, even when those “things” declined in number and importance through the years. He had his straw cowboy hat in his hands, respectfully waiting for her attention, but there was a dark urgency in his eyes and in his voice when he uttered the single word again.

  “Patrona.”

  Mrs. Potter excused her way through the crowd to reach him. She paused a few paces away from the old cowboy, in the gravel of her driveway, and said quietly, “Dígame, Bandy, por favor.”

  Tell me, please.

  “Patrona, we do not know you are coming.”

  “Ricardo knew.”

  Bandy shrugged slightly, an expression of futility. “He go out early this morning, patrona, and he no come back. Linda, she is missing too.” Through the years, she and he had managed to communicate nicely, with their own mixture of his poor English and her poor Spanish. But now she tilted her head as if she hadn’t understood him. Missing? she thought. And Linda? Yes, this was bad—might be bad—but it wasn’t the worst she had anticipated. Not yet. She wanted to quiz Bandy, to get all of the facts. But not with this crowd at her back.

  Mrs. Potter turned away from him, to face her neighbors again.

  “It’s thoughtful of you to be here …”

  Che Thomas walked up to her, as if by right of age she had been appointed spokeswoman for them all. Mrs. Potter instinctively reached out her hands, and Che firmly grasped them. “Thoughtful has nothing to do with it, Genia. We’re here because Ricardo called each of us last night and asked us to meet him here at seven this evening. He didn’t say why, and he didn’t tell us you’d be here too. But you know how we feel about Ricardo. If he says jump, we all jump. So, like good little children, here we all are. Only to find out that he’s missing”—Che released Mrs. Potter’s hands and lifted her arms in a wide and elegant sweep as if to embrace the entire ranch—“somewhere out there in the wilderness. What’s going on, Genia?”

  “My dear, I don’t have any idea.”

  Che, ever the organizer—of rodeos, of hunting trips, of great fiestas at her dude ranch—clapped her hands, as if to startle everybody into action. “Well, then,” she said, “let’s all go down to Juanita’s and see what she can tell us.”

  “No,” Mrs. Potter said quickly, and persuaded them that the proper course of action was for them to go home and for her to go alone, with Bandy, to her foreman’s house to call on his wife. Che meant well, she knew, but the last thing Juanita needed right now was this troop of high-powered types stomping into her house and demanding answers! She would find out everything she could from Juanita, Mrs. Potter promised her neighbors, and then she would call them to let them know.

  Che Thomas warmly embraced her, as did the other women—except for Marj McHenry—as they walked with the men toward their ranch vehicles, their pickups, and four-wheel-drive cars.

  “If you need us …”

  “Thank you so much, let’s hope I won’t,” Mrs. Potter told each of them.

  As she drove away, Che Thomas braked long enough to lean out her driver’s-side window and to motion Mrs. Potter over. “This may not be the best time to tell you, but I’ve got a surprise for you, Genia, back at my place.”

  “I don’t want any more surprises, Che.”

  “You’ll like this one.” Then surprisingly, considering the circumstances, Che smiled and winked at her friend. “Trust me. I’ll see that you get it later tonight.”

  “Can it wait, Che?”

  “Well, it’s already waited forty years,” was the mysterious reply. “I guess it could wait a while longer. But I don’t think it wants to.”

  Mrs. Potter gave up trying to figure out what anything meant. People were talking in riddles to her this evening, saying nonsensical things—like that Ricardo was missing. Impossible. And Linda. Even more impossible. And forty-year-old surprises were waiting to be unwrapped. Improbable.

  “Don’t worry about Ricardo,” Che commanded as she slipped her gear shift into first. “He’s fine, I’m sure of it. And when he’s back, I want you all to come over to my place for my Wednesday tostada spread; you, Rico and Juanita, and Linda—if she wants to, you can never tell about these teenagers.” Her smile was enigmatic. “And maybe my surprise will be there too.”

  “Che!”

  Her protest was dismissed with a wave. “Hell, if Ricardo can’t take care of himself, there’s no hope for any of us, Genia!”

  And then Che rode off in a small, dramatic cloud of dust in one of the black Ford pickup trucks that were the trademark of her business, along with matching black Jeeps. Each vehicle had the ranch’s brand and address emblazoned on its doors: C Lazy U, Wind Valley, AZ.

  Mrs. Potter stared fondly after her, even as she coughed on the dust. She hoped with all of her heart that things would work out so that she would indeed be able to go with the Ortegas to Che’s on Wednesday night. The tostada spread was famous throughout the valley, and a coveted invitation, because Che always loaded a huge buffet table with an incredible array of food, some of it mundane but some of it quite exotic, from which her guests could build their own, highly inventive, tostada creations. It was also known as Leftover Night, because most of the delicacies were left over from the culinary masterpieces that Che’s professional chefs had cooked for her “dudes” the previous week. The lucky guest on tostada night might create something as simple and traditional as ground beef with shredded lettuce, cheese, and onions, or something unique—and possibly awful—like a caviar tostada or even a liver pâté with spinach and hazelnuts tostado. You never knew what to expect, and that was half the fun of it. Ricardo loved to attend them, and Juanita liked to spy on other people’s recipes. As for Mrs. Potter, she’d be content just to know that Ricardo and Linda—

  “Genia?”

  She squinted into the darkness. “Oh, hello, Charlie.”

  Charlie Watt had remained behind after all the other neighbors had driven away. “I know what’s happened to Ricardo and Linda,” he said.

  CHAPTER 6

  Charlie Watt made his dramatic pronouncement in that quiet, unassuming way he had, which had grown even more so since the death last fall of his wife, Helen. In the bustling, noisy crowd of all of those strong personalities, he’d been practically invisible.

  Mrs. Potter held out her hand and he took it in both of his own work-roughened hands, before bending down to lay a gentle kiss on her right cheek. She could feel that his lips were chapped and his face was closely shaved; she smelled the lime fragrance of his shaving lotion and was suddenly, unexpectedly swept with a sharp, vivid, particular memory of Lew getting dressed to go out to dinner. Looking so handsome, so distinguished. Moving with that peculiarly male energy of his, as if he always had a purpose, a goal in mind. She still missed having that male energy in her life, and no amount of working with sweaty cowboys could make up for its loss. She still occasionally—maybe more than occasionally—missed the fragrance of a clean, well-dressed man, the comforting, flattering feel of his arm around her as they walked out the door to a dinner party.… She blinked Lew away, and gazed at Charlie Watt, who’d been a friend of her late husband�
��s.

  In his dark brown cowboy suit with its embroidered jacket, and his cowboy-cut cotton shirt and bolo tie, and with his brown felt cowboy hat in his hands, Charlie looked ever so much the part of the archetypal Arizona rancher. And he was, actually, one of the few ranch owners left in the valley who lived and worked full-time on his place. Whereas the others, and even Mrs. Potter, were absentee ranchers much of the time, leaving the care of their land and cattle to other hands, Charlie Watt was the genuine article, all year round.

  Now they had both, Mrs. Potter and Charlie, lost a spouse. Her heart ached in compassionate understanding for him. The first year was so hard, and he wasn’t half through it yet.

  “What do you mean you know what has happened to them, Charlie?”

  “It’s those wetbacks of Bandy’s.”

  “Charlie, please …” She glanced at the old hired hand who stood in the shadows.

  “All right, illegal aliens then, whatever you want to call them. I’ve told Ricardo a thousand times to keep out of that damned business. You know I have.”

  “Why, it’s not a business for him, Charlie. He doesn’t make any money from helping them, in fact I suspect he gives them money out of his own pocket, he and Bandy. You know perfectly well that it’s personal with them, more like a mission.”

  “That don’t make it right. It’s illegal, plain and simple. He’s been going against the law of this land, and doing it for years. I’ve threatened to report them both to immigration, and I may yet do it, especially if I’m right about this. It’s not only illegal, it’s an immoral practice, you ask me, encouraging those poor people to risk their lives coming over the border. And it’s dangerous for all of you, which I’ve tried to hammer into Ricardo’s thick skull, but he always thinks he knows better. Not every man who comes over those mountains is a nice fella, Genia. Some of them are pretty damned desperate. They could be criminals, robbers or murderers, just as likely as not. They could have caught Rico and Linda out on the range, took ’em for likely robbery victims, or God knows what else, killed ’em on the spot, and buried their bodies where we’ll never find ’em. Maybe they wanted Rico’s wallet. Maybe they wanted the horses. I hate to say it, but maybe they wanted her. Old man and a girl, they’d look like easy pickin’s. Hell, I hate to say it, but they’d be easy pickin’s. Ricardo thinks he’s tough as he ever was, but I know how I feel when I get up in the morning, and I’m still a few years younger than him. Unfortunately, and you know I mean this sincerely, Genia, I think this business is going to prove I’m right, much as I wish I wasn’t.”

  Somehow, he’d managed to say all that without sounding self-righteous, which was why it was easy for Mrs. Potter to reach out again to squeeze one of his big, callused hands. “I also hope you’re wrong.”

  “Well, hell, I didn’t mean to frighten you, Genia.”

  “I’m already scared to death, Charlie.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve got to say I’m glad to see you, Genia. You’re early. Said you’d be gone six weeks and here you are. Only been four.” And then he inquired politely, “What brings you back so soon?”

  She looked up at Charlie Watt—in his cowboy boots he was a good six inches taller than she—and thought, How like you, Charlie, to ask the one question that nobody else thought to pursue because they were all too busy talking while you were over there just listening. They’d known each other a long time. Lew Potter had respected Charlie’s ranching wisdom and used to say that the best piece of advice he ever took was to hire Ricardo Ortega on Charlie Watt’s say-so. Mrs. Potter had been a regular visitor to Helen’s hospital room in Tucson before that kindly woman died of cancer. So Mrs. Potter started—easily and naturally—to tell Charlie the truth.

  But then a hesitancy, a reluctance, came out of somewhere, and she held her tongue.

  Mrs. Potter knew from experience that she couldn’t lie worth a darn. And certainly not to the paragon of probity who stood so tall and quiet in front of her. Charlie was renowned throughout Wind Valley as an honest man, just like Ricardo. If you counted out too much change to either one of them in the grocery store, they’d return the excess to the penny. If you dropped a bale of hay on the highway as you were trucking it home, they’d load it up and chase you down until you got it back again. Peas in a pod they were, in many ways, although they were never close friends. Mrs. Potter had wondered why, observing their natural and matching affinities for honor and efficiency. She’d put it down to a surplus of tact on the part of Ricardo, his way of respecting the one enduring difference between them—which was not that one was Latino and the other Anglo, but that Ricardo was a ranch employee, albeit an honored one, while Charlie Watt was a ranch owner. In the social strata of the valley, that still made a difference to some people, and she guessed that Ricardo—courtly, old-fashioned Ricardo—was one of them.

  She didn’t know if it mattered to Charlie.

  “It was time,” she said simply.

  “You’re gone too much,” he said, as if agreeing with her.

  “Maybe you’re right, Charlie—about that.”

  When he loped off to his truck, she wondered why she had prevaricated. What possible harm could there be in telling Charlie—or anybody—that she’d flown home on the spur of the moment because Ricardo asked her to?

  But Mrs. Potter suddenly knew that she wasn’t going to say a word about that, at least not yet. She only wished she knew why. Every now and then her own impulses were something of a mystery even to her. She’d learned to trust them, however, which is what she did now. Although, she reminded herself, she’d also trusted her intuition about Ricardo, and look: he wasn’t dead, he was only missing.

  Only missing.

  “Thank you for waiting, Bandy,” she said to the man standing off to the side.

  Silently, he escorted her into the passenger’s seat of his own truck, and got her settled before he slammed the door. Had he understood any—or all—of what Charlie Watt had ranted about? Mrs. Potter suspected Bandy had. But other people’s opinions had never seemed a major concern of his—or he’d never have continued to care for those “nephews” everyone around here worried about.

  When Bandy walked around the front of the vehicle, Mrs. Potter noticed that he was limping badly. He had to pull himself up behind the wheel, and his breath whistled through his teeth as he lifted his injured leg into the cab. She knew better than to express sympathy, but she felt it for him, nonetheless, particularly as her own arm was aching too.

  What a pair we make, she thought, the walking wounded and the barely walking wounded.

  As he started the pickup, she wondered if he missed riding horseback; did he ever long for a rough gallop across the range? It would be agony for him now. This truck—she patted the green vinyl bench seat—was probably as good as things could get for him. Ricardo had seen to it, by suggesting that the ranch purchase one of the small, tough new models for Bandy, the kind ordinarily favored by teenage boys. It had an automatic gear shift, so he wouldn’t have to press in a clutch with his crippled left leg. Disabled though he was, this truck meant that Bandy could still navigate roads and pastures. So he had his apartment, his truck, and of course, the obligatory rifle in its rack in the back window, which was all he ever seemed to want. If there’d been anything else he lacked, Ricardo would have managed to obtain it for him, she felt sure. Especially as there was still a little guilt there, she guessed, because it had been on Ricardo’s orders that Bandy had roped the calf that pinned and crippled him. Mrs. Potter still felt sick at the memory of Bandy’s poor knee, twisted and broken unmercifully, along with his left hip. Undeserved though the guilt might be—such injuries were an acknowledged and accepted risk of cowboying—Ricardo would still feel it, and hoist its responsibility onto his own shoulders. Without Ricardo, what would become of old Bandy? Mrs. Potter didn’t even want to consider that thought, not yet. She waited until they were moving back down her driveway, toward Juanita’s house, before she spoke.

  “Qu
é posa, Bandy?”

  It was the old sixties refrain that her children had repeated until she finally got over thinking of it as rude: What’s happening? What’s happening, man? This time it wasn’t a casual inquiry.

  “No sé, patrona.”

  I don’t know, he told her.

  “Ricardo left home this morning, and hasn’t returned?”

  “Es la verdad.”

  That is the truth.

  “And Linda?” The enormity of these potential twin calamities threatened suddenly to bear down on her like a freight train. She thought of her own children, her own grandchildren. “She’s missing too?”

  “Sí, señora.”

  “Comprendes Charlie?”

  Did you understand what Charlie was saying?

  The old man pulled down the corners of his mouth and shrugged as if to say he hadn’t. But Mrs. Potter wondered. Where his “nephews’ ” safety was concerned, Bandy had ears like a desert rabbit and a miraculously improved grasp of the English language. She wondered if the tense set of his grizzled jaw had only to do with the missing Ortegas, or maybe a little to do with his feelings about Charlie Watt’s accusation.

  “Oh, Bandy.” She reached over to touch the old man’s arm. He glanced over at her, and she thought she saw an awful sadness in his eyes, and a dread that surely matched her own. “What shall we do?”

  “Es terrible,” the old man said.

  As he drove her to the house where Juanita and Ricardo Ortega had raised their five children, his little truck bouncing over the dirt road, Mrs. Potter reflected that only the sea was comparable to the desert for the utter blackness of its nights. It seemed ironic to her that the driest and wettest topographies on Earth could engender profound feelings of loneliness. And what if one were hurt, alone and defenseless in this wilderness? It would be like being adrift in a rudderless boat on a great dark sea.