Santa Fe Mourning

by Amanda Allen

  She could hear rhythmic banging on the doors, the patter of pacing feet. “Mostly we just get drunks here, and thieves. Hardly ever murderers.” The policeman sounded hideously excited at the prospect.

  “He is not a murderer!” Juanita snapped.

  “He’s just a child,” Maddie added. No one with any sense could think a skinny teenager could deliver such a fatal beating to a large grown man single-handedly, let alone one’s own father. The policeman just shrugged and opened a door at the end of the hall. It slid back with a rusty scrape. “Ten minutes,” he said and practically shoved them inside. The door slammed behind them, and a key turned in the lock.

  For an instant, Maddie had to ignore the hard, bitter knot of panic that rose up inside of her. Ever since Pete had died, ever since she’d started having nightmares of him trapped in a mud-infested trench, she had hated closed spaces. But she was there for Eddie, the poor kid who had been there for much longer than ten minutes.

  There was only one small, barred window near the low ceiling, lighting a narrow bed, a chair, and a covered bucket in the corner. And Eddie, huddled on the bed, his knees drawn up to his chin, his face pale under the fading bruises.

  “Mama!” he cried when he saw them and burst into tears. He looked scared and overwhelmed and alone, more like a four-year-old than fourteen. Maddie’s heart ached at the sight.

  Juanita ran to him and took him in her arms, rocking him as she murmured soft Tewa words.

  “Have you come to take me home?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Not yet,” Juanita said, “but Señora Maddie has a plan.”

  A plan would be overstating the matter, Maddie thought. She felt just as helpless and frightened as Eddie did. But she would never show him that.

  “I’m finding you an attorney,” she said, sitting down on the other side of him. “Surely he can have bail set when we sort this out. In the meantime . . .” She took a bag of his favorite lemon drops from her handbag and passed it to him. “Tell us what happened. They say one of your friends saw you at the hotel that night.”

  “It had to be Harry, that rat,” Eddie said around a piece of the hard candy. “He works there at La Fonda. We used to be friends, but not since he started trying to get me to help him with—with some stuff.”

  Stuff? “Bootlegging, you mean? Does this Harry help smuggle hooch to the clubs in town?”

  “Eduardo!” Juanita cried. “You know that’s against the rules. Your uncles . . .”

  “I told you I didn’t do that stuff, Ma,” Eddie protested. “I know we could use the money, but I wouldn’t do that. Not after Uncle Diego talked to me last time we saw him. I just play dice sometimes with Harry and the others. Pa had been following me that night; that’s when I decided to turn around and follow him. That’s only fair, right?”

  “What did you see when you followed him?” Maddie asked. “Did you see who did this?”

  Eddie swallowed hard and shook his head. “I didn’t see him get—that. Killed, I mean. I swear it! The police keep saying I must have, but I would have helped him, stopped it. He wasn’t always the best dad, maybe, but he was mine.”

  “I know you wouldn’t have, Eddie,” Juanita said, holding his hand tightly. “But we need to know what you did see.”

  “I saw him talking to someone there on the corner, by the side of the cathedral where it’s dark. It was someone I thought I had seen before. I don’t know his name, but he is a bootlegger. They say sometimes he can find other stuff for people too.”

  Maddie thought of Elizabeth Grover in the ladies’ room. “Cocaine,” she murmured.

  “That’s right. Snow, the boys call it. From Mexico,” Eddie said. “Harry says you can make a lot more money there, more than on Pojoaque hooch. And Dad was talking to him.” His face screwed up, and he kicked out in sudden anger that seemed to drown out the fear. “After the way he treated me, when he thought I was running the gin! It was him doing it, all along. He was mixed up with guys like that, and it got him killed. He must have had snow money, and he let the girls go without new dresses.”

  Juanita looked absolutely appalled. “It can’t be,” she whispered.

  “We don’t know what really happened,” Maddie said. But it sure sounded like it. Bootlegging was usually a harmless enough thing in Santa Fe. They were too isolated for Prohibition agents to bother them much, and everyone knew where to get it, whether you wanted cheap Lightning or French champagne. Hard drugs, on the other hand . . .

  “What’s important is that you didn’t do it,” Maddie said. “We’ll have you out of here as fast as we can. In the meantime, I’ll get some blankets and some proper food sent over. Don’t say anything to anyone until a lawyer gets here.”

  The policeman pounded on the door. “Time’s up!”

  Juanita gave her son a quick, firm hug. “Do what she said. I love you, my son, and this will be over very soon.”

  “I’m the man of the family now. I’ll take care of you and the girls as soon as I’m out of here,” Eddie answered, wiping at his eyes. “I’ll get a job and everything. If Dad’s spirit . . .”

  Juanita shivered. “Don’t worry about that. Your uncles will do it all.”

  “We can go back there now, can’t we?” Eddie said. “To the pueblo.”

  There was no time to answer. The door opened, and it was Inspector Sadler who stood there, scowling at them. Maddie remembered how he had dismissed that note she received, and she scowled back at him. There would be no help from any official quarter on anything. “Time to leave, ladies. Now.”

  Maddie took Juanita’s arm and led her past the glowering inspector. They had one more glimpse of Eddie, looking red-eyed and forlorn on his bunk, clutching at the bag of lemon drops.

  “His attorney will be here soon, Inspector,” she said. “I’m sure you will do what’s proper and legal and leave the boy alone until then.”

  She didn’t wait for him to answer, but she could feel his glare burning into the back of her neck as she and Juanita left the police station. Outside, the sun momentarily blinded her after the gloom, and she took a deep breath of the fresh, clear air tinged with piñon smoke from last night’s fireplaces. People hurried by on their usual errands like it was a normal day, like the world hadn’t tilted awry.

  Juanita was silent beside her, her face like marble. They made their way back to the car and climbed in, sitting for a moment as if to get their bearings.

  “It couldn’t have been that way,” Juanita murmured.

  “What couldn’t?”

  “Tomas being involved with things like that. Bootlegging. In fact, he . . .” Her words faded.

  “In fact, what?” Maddie urged.

  Juanita shook her head. “Tomas had his faults, I have to admit that. But drink wasn’t one of them, not now. Whatever killed him—it wasn’t bootlegging.” She bit her lip.

  Maddie started the car and shot out onto the road, turning toward home. She knew Juanita would only tell her what she wanted to know if Maddie gave her time. The Anayas were private about their family matters, even with friends like Maddie. But Maddie did believe that Juanita thought Tomas wouldn’t have been selling drugs to people like Elizabeth.

  But she wasn’t at all sure that his death had nothing to do with bootlegging. Everything seemed to keep coming back to that. Maybe he had tried to keep Eddie from becoming involved, or maybe he had gotten in someone’s way? Booze, and now cocaine, made some people around town big money, and Tomas wasn’t a man to be unobtrusive when he disapproved of something.

  Maddie tried to make her whirling mind settle down, to think who might have done such a thing to Tomas. She was sure it wasn’t Eddie, but what about the rest of the Anaya family, or Juanita’s relatives? Maddie didn’t know enough about them yet, except that for some reason the family never went back to the pueblo. Surely that must mean something had gone wrong, and no one knew how to hurt a person like family. Or maybe Tomas really had been involved in nefarious bootlegging operations or angered s
omeone high up on the criminal chain. Maybe he had friends or enemies even his wife knew nothing about, and it was now up to Maddie to find out about them.

  The most important thing at the moment, though, was to get Eddie out of that awful place.

  She dropped off Juanita at the house and drove around to leave the Duesy with Gunther. She found him sitting in the shade of his front portal, his typewriter set out in front of him but no manuscript papers in evidence. He put out the cigarette he was smoking and waved to her as she stopped the car in its pine-plank shelter.

  “It doesn’t look as if you did too much damage, my darling,” he said as she hurried up the steps to join him. “But it is horribly dusty. What on earth have you been up to? You look positively knackered.”

  “I feel rather knackered.” She sank into one of his cushioned wicker chairs and took off her blue cloche hat to let the cool breeze ruffle her hair. She thought again of cutting it off, especially if she was going to rush around town like she was in a Perils of Pauline film.

  “Well, here. Have some iced tea, and tell your Uncle Gunther all about it.”

  Maddie gestured toward the typewriter. “Aren’t you working? I don’t want to interrupt.”

  Gunther waved her words away and poured out a drink from the pottery pitcher on his desk. “Plenty of time for that later. I would much rather hear about what you and my car were up to today.”

  Maddie sipped at the wonderfully cool drink and told him about her trip to Sunmount to see if Dr. Cole could help with the problem of Tomas’s funeral rites.

  “Not that man with the lovely English accent you met on the train?” Gunther exclaimed.

  “The very one.” Maddie sighed at the thought of the doctor’s blue, sad eyes.

  “My dear, how clever of you to go see him again so soon!”

  Maddie laughed wryly. “Yes. So romantic to ask him such a gruesome favor. He was quite nice about it, though, and agreed to help me right away.”

  Gunther sighed. “That’s the English for you. So civilized.”

  “But then I had to tend to something not so civilized. I had to go to the jail.”

  “Darling! Were you speeding in my car that much?”

  “I only wish that was it.” She told him about Eddie’s arrest. “So I need to find out if you know any good lawyers. We need to get the poor kid out of there.”

  “Poor young Eddie. He always seems like a nice one—for a temperamental teenager that is.” Gunther lit another cigarette and frowned thoughtfully into the plume of smoke. “I can’t think of anyone right now, but I know who would.”

  “Oh, yes!” Maddie cried. “Olive, of course. She knows positively everyone in town.”

  “Exactly. I saw her heading to the museum this morning, getting ready for that new exhibit. You should take a couple of your paintings down there. She’s been after you to contribute something for ages, and a little bribe never hurts. I’m sure she could find you someone top-notch.”

  Maddie finished her drink with a sigh. It looked like a long day would be even longer. But Gunther was right. Olive did know everyone.

  CHAPTER 10

  Maddie walked to the art museum across the street from the old Palace of the Governors and near the shady plaza. When she and her cousin Gwen had been making their way across the country toward California, poring over guidebooks at every stop along the way, they’d become quite excited at the mention of a “palace.” She’d expected something like the castles she’d seen as a girl, touring Europe with her parents, all brocade corridors and crenelated towers.

  But this old Spanish palace was nothing like that. It was a long, one-story adobe structure built around a large shady courtyard, with a pillared portal in the front where artisans sold their jewelry and pottery to eager tourists. The Victorian wrought-iron railing along the flat roof, which had been added to make the style more “modern,” was in the process of being removed to take it back to its older, more unique appearance. A few people milled about in the shade of the portal, but it was quiet at that hour.

  The small warren of rooms inside had once held exhibitions by local artists, but the number of artists had outgrown the old, drop-ceilinged space and made a new museum a necessity. It had only been finished in 1919, yet it looked much older, as if it had always been there on that corner, with its pueblo-like rounded walls and towers.

  Maddie hurried across the plaza, which was also quiet at that hour, with only a few old men gossiping on the iron benches around the obelisk of the war memorial and dogs sleeping in the shade. In the evening, it would be filled with young men and girls, eyeing each other as they promenaded, maybe even flirting a bit under the close watch of stern chaperones. Just as she had once danced with awkward young swains at cotillions and tea dances as her mother looked on from the gilded chairs along the walls.

  Maddie was sure the plaza was a much more fun social setting than the ballroom at Sherry’s Restaurant, but she had no time to linger. She hurried up the steps into the museum, her portfolio tucked up under her arm.

  Compared to the quiet afternoon outside, the museum was all aflutter. Workmen hurried past with ladders and buckets of paint, getting the walls ready for the new exhibit. Like the exterior, the interior had been made to look like an old pueblo, all cool stone floors and adobe walls. But there was still the scent of newness about it, from the pine wood planks of the floor and the dark ceiling vigas to the sharpness of the fresh paint.

  Olive Rush stood in the midst of it all, directing the workmen and the young apprentices who were hanging the new paintings in the galleries. The artists all got studio space at the back of the museum in exchange for the work and hurried about their tasks to get to back to their canvases sooner.

  Olive was quite unmistakable, a tall, spare, thin woman with a paint-splashed smock over her pleated Navajo velvet skirt and tunic, her plain face surmounted by the wrapped folds of a scarlet turban.

  “No, no, not there!” she was saying to a young man who perched high on a ladder, hanging a scene of pueblo natives gathered around a bonfire on a starry night, the sky streaked with lavender and velvety black behind them, a girl on a turquoise horse in the background. It was definitely one of Olive’s own, Maddie thought; no one else had a modernist style quite like that. It hung next to a few images of adobe interiors and shimmering aspen trees by a man named Berninghaus from Taos. “It’s too big to hang there; it will overwhelm the smaller ones. I meant it for over the fireplace.”

  She suddenly spun around and dropped her gesturing hands when she saw Maddie standing there in the doorway. “Madeline! I see you’ve taken my advice and brought some of your work to display at last. And just in time too, as the next show opens in just a few weeks.”

  “I did bring a couple of things to show you,” Maddie answered. “But I mostly came to ask your advice.”

  “Of course, of course, but first things first. Let’s take a look at what you have there.” She snatched the portfolio from Maddie and led her into a smaller gallery, one where light poured from the tall windows and gleamed on the works already hung there. A painting by Olive that Maddie had seen before, an oil portrait of the San Ildefonso pottery-making couple Maria and Julian Martinez, hung on the wall next to a case of their glossy, distinctive black-on-black pottery. It shimmered like the most polished jet.

  “What do you think of them?” Olive asked, gesturing to the display. She had always been a great advocate for the local native art, organizing exhibits at the museum and sending it to galleries in the East where they often gained much acclaim. “I just went out to San Ildefonso last week. The Hendersons loaned me their car. This batch has only recently been fired. Glorious, aren’t they?”

  Maddie studied the collection of pottery closer, the etched designs of serpents and circles within circles. The black was perfectly dark, shimmering like the night sky. “They are stunning.”

  “Mrs. Martinez is quite a wonder,” Olive answered. “Did you know she can fire dozens of pots and plates
at a time, and none will crack? Everyone else is afraid to fire more than two or three. The beauty of her work should be known everywhere.”

  Maddie completely agreed. She glanced up at the portrait of the woman wrapped in her shawl, a baby on her lap. The Martinez family was from San Ildefonso, just like the Anayas. She wondered if they knew each other or even if Olive, who so often traveled around to the different pueblos collecting such objects for the museum, might have heard something there.

  Olive unwrapped Madeline’s package and held the canvases up to the light. Madeline had only brought two small pieces. One was of the mountains in the distance at sunset, the purple shadows of them outlined in shimmering pinks, corals, and golds. The other was of Buttercup sitting in Maddie’s own garden, surrounded by the riot of colorful flowers, the tan adobe wall of the house behind them. Olive studied them with a silence that made Maddie nervous, a small frown on her face as she turned them one way then another.

  “I know they are quite simple compared to Mr. Parsons or Mr. Baumann,” Maddie said, fidgeting a bit. Sometimes her parents’ comments still ate at her confidence. Ladies were only meant to be amateur artists, doing little sketches in their spare time, never putting themselves forward.

  “Nonsense! Your sense of color and light is most extraordinary, Madeline,” Olive said stoutly. “They will be perfect to hang in the first alcove. You’re sure to sell them immediately. Are you certain you don’t have more ready? Something larger?”

  Maddie thought of the half-finished portrait of the twins, which reminded her of poor Eddie’s plight and the questions she meant to ask Olive. “No, not yet.”

  “Oh, well, it’s a start. At least I can see that your confidence is growing, just as mine did when I was young and finally went to Paris. Before that, my parents were sure I shouldn’t live on my own, let alone try to make a living with art.” She propped the paintings up with another group waiting to be hung in the display. “Now you said you have a favor to ask?”