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

by Nancy Pickard

  She could just hear Charlie Watt’s objections!

  When Bandy pulled up in front of her patio gate again, he indicated that he would retrieve her luggage from her rental car. Mrs. Potter opened the truck door, letting in a small gale of rain and wind. She struggled to get Juanita’s umbrella raised, then trotted over to the wrought-iron gate, left it open for Bandy behind her, and scooted along her flagstone walk to her own front door. Once under the shelter of the long veranda, which was known as a “ramada,” she propped the umbrella against the house. Mrs. Potter didn’t try to fish for her keys in her purse, but grabbed the “secret” key under a potted cactus, instead. “Some secret,” as Ricardo frequently said. Practically every repair person and tradesperson as far as Tucson and half the hired cowboys in Wind Valley knew where to find it and had probably used it at one time or another to fix the toilets, or wallpaper the bedroom, or to wander into the kitchen to pour themselves a cup of coffee while they waited for her to show up for a conference on cattle prices or part-time employment. “Has anybody ever abused the privilege?” Mrs. Potter always demanded of Ricardo when he challenged her “open door” policy, and he had to agree that nobody ever had. The key was handy, that was all, but no secret.

  Mrs. Potter stepped into her house and fumbled for the hallway light switch. There wasn’t time to appreciate the view it illuminated. She crossed quickly to the hall closet, slipped out of her wet shoes and located a pair of fleece-lined moccasins to put on. At least her stockings were still dry. She heard Bandy wiping his feet on the mat outside. When he brought her luggage in, she directed him on down the long hall to her bedroom.

  “Gracias,” she said when he returned.

  “De nada. Buenas noches, patrona, y bienvenida.”

  Good night, Mrs. Potter. Welcome home.

  “Hasta mañana, Bandy. Pray for them.”

  “Sí, patrona. Es la verdad.”

  Yes, ma’am. That’s the truth.

  A crack of lightning and a rumble of thunder punctuated his exit. Mrs. Potter glanced up at the sky, feeling as if God had exclaimed: You can say that again, old man.

  And so she did pray again, briefly, standing there in her slippers with eyes closed, listening to the rain outside the dark house.

  Mrs. Potter opened her eyes to a sight that warmed her worried heart.

  Despite Juanita Ortega’s protests to the contrary, Mrs. Potter’s home looked beautifully maintained, right down to the orange Mexican tiles at her feet, the ones Juanita had said she planned to wax next week before her scheduled arrival. Mrs. Potter suspected that Juanita had been up to the house at least once a week to dust the furniture and plump the pillows, to run the rust out of the faucets and swish a wet rag around the sinks and bathtubs, the appliances, countertops, and toilets, and probably to perform special little tasks without even being asked—like polishing Grandmother Andrews’s good silver, washing the windows, pulling the books out of the cases one by one and dusting them, or vacuuming the draperies.

  Mrs. Potter’s Arizona home was a rambling one-story structure of adobe painted white to match the wall and other buildings outside. If Mrs. Potter had stepped back outside her front door, she could have stood on her trellis-covered ramada and looked around what was essentially a compound surrounded by a white adobe wall. One step down from the ramada was her small green square of irrigated lawn, and a short walk across it was a much smaller one-story building, that one a guest house with two big bedrooms, baths, and walk-in closets. When Lew was alive, they had entertained often. The guest house had been as seldom vacant as a popular motel. Against the inside wall of the compound, and beside the front gate, lay one of her two small rose gardens, which were Bandy’s responsibilities. The second rose garden lay to the other side of the guest house, facing the swimming pool. If Mrs. Potter had stood on her ramada and turned right, she could have walked up onto a covered patio that looked out onto her swimming pool, which she kept at a constant 90 degrees—being more and more sensitive to cold as she got older—and where she took her afternoon swims for exercise. There was just enough room to walk entirely around the rectangular pool. To the east, beyond the outside wall, rose her beloved Rimstone Mountains.

  But all of that lay outside her home.

  At this moment, she was looking within.

  There, in the foyer where she stood, was the carved wooden chest that held the serapes she offered to visitors who came unprepared for cold Arizona evenings. They’d warmed the shoulders of many a guest, some of whom she had dearly loved, others of whom she could have happily strangled with one of those serapes.

  She turned her head and looked to the right, into her dining room, where literally hundreds of guests had sipped and supped during the years when she played hostess for Lew and her children. Mrs. Potter could almost hear the sound of silverware clinking against china, of ice cubes rattling in drinks, of laughter, and of the bass, tenor, and soprano notes of the chords of conversation. From where she stood, she could see Grandmother Andrews’s dining room furniture: there was the hutch and the sideboard of glowing walnut with polished brass hardware; there was the infinitely accommodating walnut dining table, which had been at home in every house she and Lew had ever owned; and the carved walnut chairs with their supple black leather upholstery. Here in Arizona, the General Grant provenance seemed comfortable, serene within white brick walls warmed by a fireplace bordered by Mexican tiles. Swedish ivy spilled luxuriantly from a Chinese bowl in the center of the table.

  Beyond the swinging door on the far side of the dining room was her roomy kitchen, with its cool tile floor and big center rug, and a cozy corner fireplace with a stainless swing-out grill for cooking steaks over mesquite. It had old but reliable appliances and lots of counter space and a round wooden table—on which she liked to place a yellow-and-white checked linen cloth and the soft light of an old-fashioned shaded kerosene lamp for entertaining casually.

  Every room in the house had a fireplace, including the spacious living room, which was down two broad steps from where she stood in the foyer. It was Bandy who kept the log buckets and kindling baskets filled. As she gazed down the steps, her imagination filled the living room with her favorite guests who had gathered there on various occasions over the years for drinks before dinner and then for dessert, if the weather didn’t allow her to shoo them outdoors to the patio or the ramada. She saw Ricardo, dressed in his casual best, answering with grave courtesy even the dumbest of questions that her city-slicker guests might ask him, such as which was the front end of a cow … while Juanita stayed in the kitchen, putting the final flourishes to dinner, and Mrs. Potter fetched refills from the liquor pantry. She’d always been grateful that Ricardo was willing to make himself available to her guests, as they did so dearly love to get a gander at a real live American cowboy. It pleased her to present to them one who was so gallant, so handsome, articulate, and gracious. And it was always generous of Juanita, Mrs. Potter fully appreciated, to allow Ricardo to bask in the glory while she performed the unsung work in the kitchen. Her praises were always sung to the heavens in hallelujah choruses once a meal began. Theater guests—actors and director friends—had even been known to applaud and shout “author! author!” until Juanita appeared, flushed and tight-lipped, but clearly pleased to receive their “good reviews.”

  “Gracias, mis amigos,” Mrs. Potter whispered.

  Mrs. Potter looked into her living room at her wonderful old black grand piano with its collection of family photographs on its broad, reliable back. She glimpsed edges of her own large needlepoint works, which Lew had insisted on having beautifully framed and hung alongside their favorite paintings. Mrs. Potter had always greatly appreciated his pride in her creative endeavors, whether it was cooking for a party of his business associates or designing her own needlepoint patterns rather than buying them ready-made. At first, she’d been embarrassed to have her own work displayed on a wall. But when visitor after visitor complimented them—before knowing she was the artist�
��she had eventually accepted the surprising fact that they seemed to afford almost as much pleasure to the people who viewed them as they did to her when she was creating them. Now they were a source of modest satisfaction to her, not least because they represented Lew’s confidence in her.

  The far southern wall of the living room was solid windows. If it had been day instead of night, Mrs. Potter would have been able to see a grand expanse of prairie rolling all the way to the mountains that formed the border with Mexico. It was a view broken only by her horse barn and corral and by the Ortegas’ home and the garage where Bandy lived. At this time of year, the grass was tall and thick and a lovely platinum color that reminded her of Marilyn Monroe’s hair.

  From the foyer, to her left, was the long hall that led to her small office/study and then to a bathroom and then on to her own large bedroom and bath and a guest bedroom and bath.

  “Genia’s home on the range,” her friends called it.

  But with Ricardo and Linda gone, that word “home” felt as if it were missing some letters. On this night, the ranch felt too large for just Juanita, Bandy, and herself, and the house felt too big for one woman living alone. Which was why Mrs. Potter felt awfully glad at that moment to hear the doorbell ring.

  CHAPTER 10

  The tall cowboy who stood under her porch light didn’t smile when she greeted him. He was clad in a dripping black rubber rain slicker that covered him from his neck to the ankles of his denims, below which the feet of his cowboy boots showed, their light tan leather darkened to brown by the rain. His cowboy hat was covered in a plastic rain wrap, of a kind manufactured especially for the purpose.

  “Ken! Any luck?”

  “No, ma’am. Juanita sent me up here, okay?”

  “Yes, I told her to. Come in, come in.”

  Ken Ryerson, the part-time hired hand on Las Palomas, slouched through her doorway as if he carried the weight of the ranch on his broad young shoulders. He was thirty years old, but the years of working cattle in the sun and wind had carved lines into his good-looking face that added at least five years to his appearance, and on this night he looked as if he’d aged a few more. If someone had told Mrs. Potter that this six-foot, blond-haired, mustachioed cowboy she had employed for twelve years was actually fifty years old, she’d have been tempted to believe it. Ken didn’t work only for Las Palomas, but also filled in at other ranches in the valley, keeping an eye on things for owners like the Amorys and the Steinbachs, who were often more absentee than resident. Mrs. Potter knew without asking that he’d had a long, hard day of performing chores for them and for others, even before setting out on his fruitless search for his main boss.

  Ken hung up his slicker on the coat tree in the foyer. When he removed his hat, Mrs. Potter could tell by his matted, sweaty hair and by the ground-in dirt where his hat pressed into his forehead that he’d been outside for hours, long before it started to rain. Her imagination gave her a quick, vivid picture of Ken in his blue stretch pickup truck, his driver’s window rolled down, and him leaning out, squinting through his sunglasses into the countryside, looking for some telltale sparkle of metal, or some other sign of the missing pair. What with the caked dirt on his face and his customary dark tan, Ken Ryerson, the son of hard-shell Southern Baptists from Kentucky, could have passed for one of Bandy’s “nephews” that night, she thought. Until, of course, you got a glimpse of the white-blond hair under the hat. Even his Fu Manchu mustache drooped from the rain, and instead of looking its normal blond with platinum streaks, it was soaked to a dark and nondescript shade of brown. Ken Ryerson looked, in the lingo of the valley, as if he’d “been rode hard and put away wet.”

  “Come on into the kitchen, Ken.”

  He trudged after her, his boots dragging on the tile floors, clearly too tired to talk unless he had to. She motioned him into one of the chairs around the big round kitchen table, and he sank into it like a man on the edge of a bed, and placed his arms on the table, up to his elbows. He leaned his head forward and laced his fingers together at the back of his neck, and groaned. Then he stretched, and finally sat up about as straight as a tired man could be expected to do.

  “What will you have, Ken? Would you like a beer? Coffee? Coke?”

  His lips barely moved. “Beer.”

  Mrs. Potter crossed her fingers that there would be at least a Dos Equis lurking in the recesses of her refrigerator. She sighed in relief when she found an entire six-pack, and she slid a bottle out of it.

  “In a glass?”

  “Bottle.”

  She removed the cap the old-fashioned way, with an ancient Coca-Cola bottle opener that was attached to the underside of one of her cabinets. As she passed the beer to him, she asked, “Are you hungry?”

  He shook his head, slugged down some beer.

  Mrs. Potter sat down at the table with him.

  After a minute, he stopped swallowing beer. His chest lifted in a sigh. He glanced at Mrs. Potter, then looked down at the beer bottle and he began to roll it between his palms, back and forth, back and forth. “Well, I been every place I could think to go ever since Juanita told me they was missing. Hell, I honked, I hollered. I kept looking even when I couldn’t see past my goddamned, excuse me, headlights.”

  “I know you’ve tried hard.”

  “I ain’t seen a sign of ’em.”

  “Juanita says maybe they’ve gone to a cattle sale.”

  His mustache twitched in a brief display of scorn. “She don’t really think that.”

  “Or she says, maybe one of them is injured, and the other one is trying to get both of them back home.”

  This time he looked up at her and held her glance. “If Ricardo got bucked, Linda’d’ve come on back here to get me, ’cause she couldn’t’ve lifted him by herself. No way she could get him ahorseback once he fell off. And what’s she going to do otherwise, build her a Indian pallet?” His quick frown of scorn flickered again, then disappeared.

  Mrs. Potter decided quickly that a man this tired had to be hungry as well, and that he was just too cowboy-polite to say so. She got up while he was talking and quietly rummaged in her cupboards until she located some canned soup she felt pretty sure he might like: black bean. Maybe she wouldn’t have fresh onion to dice on top of it, but she could add a little sherry and maybe a touch of garlic salt and onion salt from the seasoning bottles she kept in the refrigerator door. Cold beer and hot black bean soup with a plate of oyster crackers.… Surely they were fresh in their tin … yes … and at least it would give him something to do besides dwell on his failure to find his boss and Linda. She poured the canned soup into a chili bowl and set it in her microwave to warm. While she moved about efficiently, she listened and asked questions.

  “If it was her got injured,” Ken was saying, “Ricardo’d’ve had her back here by now.”

  “What do you think has happened to them, Ken?”

  He took another swig of beer before saying, “Hunters.”

  “Oh, no.” Mrs. Potter involuntarily raised both hands to her heart. She discovered in that moment that Ken wasn’t the only exhausted person in her kitchen: her own brain had failed to kick in that most frightening possibility. Hunters! They were always a hazard on a ranch, on practically anybody’s ranch, anywhere. The mountains were often full of them, in legal season and out. There was never a season for hunting within the fences of Las Palomas, not even for pleading, cajoling, crack-shot friends of the family. Lew hadn’t approved of the danger to livestock or people, and neither did Ricardo. As for la patrona, she understood the thrill of a chase, but she figured it wasn’t quite so exciting for the animal on the other end of it, and so she happily upheld her late husband’s stern dictum: No hunting; violators will be prosecuted. Or fired, as had been the case with a couple of part-time hired hands a few months back. There’d been harsh words between Ricardo and those two men. There were always those hunters—like those quickly unemployed cowboys—who didn’t bother about such niceties as hunting seasons or
licenses or even fence lines that were clearly posted.

  “Hunters are the most likely bet, seems to me,” Ken said. “But if that’s what happened, we’ll never find ’em. Some hunter ever shoots me by accident or otherwise, he’s going to hide my body so he don’t get found out. Lots of places to hide a body out there, Mrs. Potter. Caves, for one. Stick ’em way back in one of those little caverns, hell, nobody’s ever gonna know, nobody’s ever going to find ’em.”

  The bell on the microwave went off, causing them both to jump like a hunter’s startled prey.

  Mrs. Potter removed the bubbling soup from the microwave and put the bowl on a matching plate. Around that, she arranged oyster crackers. They looked far too dainty for the brawny cowboy at her kitchen table, but they were all she had. She poured a generous dollop of sherry into the soup, sprinkled on the onion and garlic salt, mixed it all together, and sniffed. Yes, that would do. Mrs. Potter slid a soup spoon from the silverware drawer, grabbed a paper napkin from a holder atop the refrigerator, and put it all down in front of Ken Ryerson. Seeing that his bottle was empty, she fetched a second beer. By the time she had it opened, he was crumbling oyster crackers into the soup.

  “Careful, Ken, it’s still hot.”

  “Got any jalapeños, Mrs. Potter?”

  “Of course, how could I forget them?” Indeed, Mrs. Potter chided herself, I have been away too long if I’ve forgotten that you don’t serve a ranch hand a meal without plunking down jars of jalapeño peppers, Tabasco sauce, and ketchup on the table. It didn’t matter if the meal was a hamburger supper or a breakfast of fried eggs, a cowboy was sure to want to “hot it up” some more. She fetched all three and then watched Ken utterly destroy the careful balance of her delicate seasonings. So much for expensive sherry, she thought, I may as well have used vinegar!