Santa Fe Mourning

by Amanda Allen

  People who had a grudge against Tomas seemed legion. Maddie jotted them down as she thought of them. Rob Bennett said Tomas had belonged to a rival bootlegging gang and had a few run-ins with Bennett’s employees. But Mavis said Tomas had been against drink, and even Juanita and her brother said his teetotal opinions had gotten him thrown off the pueblo. But even if Tomas had eschewed drink, it hadn’t seemed to make him very sweet-tempered. He’d quarreled with his own family, especially Eddie, as well as with his in-laws. Maybe even Mavis only pretended to like him now. She had said they sometimes dined together, a chance to lace his drink with the poison. So—all the bootleggers in town, the whole pueblo where he used to live, his relatives. Who else had he rubbed the wrong way?

  Maddie tapped her pencil against the page. Someone disliked the man enough to feed him poison, which had made a painful beating fatal. Who had given him the poison? The medium seemed like the obvious choice—the trace of warfarin was in her “tonic”—but if Tomas had gone, she would have lost the money she made helping him look for his lost son. She didn’t seem to be a mad poisoner, just a charlatan. And her bottles were the same as the ones delivered all over town. What if the medium had a friend who was a poisoner? A friend who had a grudge against Tomas and who’d used his trust in Madame Genet against him? The church didn’t like her work. Did the police? What would they do to discredit her and run her out of town?

  Harry had tried to get Eddie to help with the smuggling operation. Eddie had said no, but what if his father hadn’t known that and had been driven into a rage thinking of his son bootlegging? She thought of June the maid and her boyfriend, Mike, who worked at the club. Where did they figure into it all?

  So—there was Tomas’s own family; Juanita’s family, who might want to save her from her great mistake at last; Rob Bennett and his network; Harry and his gang; Madame Genet, for some as yet unknown reason; and Mavis, though Maddie couldn’t figure out why, unless maybe he’d promised to help her in some way and then reneged, which was quite possible. Mavis did have a hard life and felt abandoned by her family. Two separate groups, maybe, who didn’t even know about the work of the other? A poisoner and someone who’d delivered a revenge beating, both of them meeting in one fatal moment.

  Buttercup barked, and Maddie suddenly smelled the acrid tang of burning bread. She looked up, startled, to see clouds of smoke billowing out of the oven.

  “No!” she cried and jumped up to run across the kitchen. It was too late to save her scones, though. They looked like pitiful lumps of coal.

  Maddie sighed and went to the door to look for Eddie, who was watering and weeding in the garden. She had hoped the work would take his mind off everything, but he still looked distracted and terribly young and fragile.

  “Eddie!” she called. “An emergency, I’m afraid. Can you run to Kaune’s for some cakes?”

  * * *

  By the time David and Gunther arrived, she’d managed to cobble together a decent enough tea. A plate of iced cake and cookies from the grocer’s, some small sandwiches with Juanita’s leftover bread and potted ham spread, and even some scones she’d salvaged. She was making a pot of tea, trying to stop Gunther from adding a dollop of rum to it, when Eddie answered the knock at the door to let the handsome doctor in. She had to laugh when she saw he’d even brought flowers. How much more lovely could he get?

  The four of them sat down to dig into the makeshift repast, talking about what was going on in town, general chat, and gossip. Once the cakes were gone, Maddie took out her notebook and went over what she had learned.

  “I’m afraid your handsome writer-waiter seems to be engaged to June the chambermaid and chasing Elizabeth Grover,” she told Gunther. She told them what she had seen at La Fonda, the lovebirds’ half-heard quarrel. “Could they both be working for whoever is smuggling in the drugs and then supplying them to hotel customers?”

  “June, Harry’s sister?” Eddie said. “I’ve never heard of her doing any job but the one at the hotel, making beds and such. She’s never been arrested or anything. But she has been engaged at least three times lately. Harry wishes she’d just settle down. But I’ve never heard of this guy.”

  “Mike. He works at Mr. Bennett’s club,” Maddie said. “And Bennett admits Tomas had some run-ins with his men, but he said it was because Tomas was some sort of business rival, trying to undercut the bootlegging racket in town. Yet your uncle says Tomas was such a teetotaler, it got him into trouble at home.”

  Eddie frowned. “It’s true that I never saw him drink. You know he walloped me good when he thought I was smuggling, even though I wasn’t.”

  Gunther took a quick nip from his flask. “And the handsome Mike might be perfidious, but he is also a chatterbox when he’s been purloining the orange blossoms. I was at the club just last night, and he told me Mr. Bennett doesn’t just smuggle in his booze. He makes it himself, top-notch stuff.”

  Maddie remembered headlines when she was in New York of people collapsing and dying in the streets, poisoned by bad booze. “That sounds dangerous. David, could homemade hooch have been what poisoned Tomas?”

  David looked thoughtful. “Possibly. There are so many things that can go wrong with homemade stills, of course. Blindness, insanity. Who knows what people put in their bathtub gin? Yet that’s not what seems to have happened to Mr. Anaya. It was warfarin that showed up in his tests. It thins the blood so it can’t clot. Even a small cut could then be fatal.”

  Maddie thought of the strange equipment she’d seen in Rob’s kitchen, the seemingly random pile of pots and pans and funnels. He’d said it came from his father’s chemist shop, even though he’d told her before that his father was a grocer. It had looked disused, but she wasn’t really sure what a still in use would look like. Maybe that was what he used to make his “top-notch stuff” but something had gone wrong? Yet no one else had died.

  “The warfarin was in the bottle he got from Madame Genet, at least traces of it,” she said. “I just can’t understand why she would do such a thing and thus lose a regular customer.”

  “Maybe she knew him before?” Gunther said. “She could have some grudge against him?”

  “But I can’t figure out how or when. There is the connection to Mavis, though, who’s his cousin.”

  “Maybe she didn’t like him?” Eddie said. “Ma’s family didn’t.”

  “Her bottle was clean,” said David. “Just some herbs and a bit of whiskey. But of course that doesn’t clear her. She could be using the same bottles herself to throw off suspicion.”

  “Madame Genet could also be using Mavis to get to him, if she did have a quarrel with him,” Gunther said. “But no one in town knows who she really is, do they? Even the priest doesn’t know, and the church always makes it their job to know about everyone in town.”

  “Father Malone did seem to only be concerned about the state of his parishioners’ souls if they went in for such hoodoo,” Maddie said. “He said nothing about her bringing in booze.” Though there was something else, something lurking in the back of her mind that she couldn’t quite remember.

  “We’re never gonna find who did this, are we?” Eddie whispered. He buried his face in his hands, his wiry shoulders shaking as if he struggled to hold back tears. “It’s all going to be blamed on me!”

  “No, Eddie,” Maddie said, patting his shoulder. She felt so helpless, so lost. She only wanted to help Eddie, to clear his name so he was free to live the rest of his life. “We will find who did this, I promise. We already know so much more than we did before.”

  And all the things she had learned seemed to confuse her even more. How unknowable another person’s life was, especially when they were gone! But she was determined. She would find out what was happening and free Eddie, if it was the last thing she did.

  CHAPTER 20

  That night, after an impromptu garden dinner with David, Gunther, and Eddie, where Gunther brought out his Victrola and she danced with David under the stars and even Eddi
e laughed and forgot his troubles for an hour, Maddie found she couldn’t sleep. She lay awake in her bed, watching the moon rise in the sky through her window, turning everything over in her mind again and again.

  Surely it all had to fit together somehow. There was something, some detail that she had overlooked. It seemed the harder she tried to grasp for it, the further away it went. She would make a terrible assistant in a detective novel! She was certainly no Watson.

  She closed her eyes and tried to picture the story like a painting, or a tapestry that flowed along, telling its tale. A sort of twentieth-century Bayeux Tapestry.

  Tomas and Juanita met, fell in love, fought her family’s wishes, married, had a child, lost a child, then made a new family with Eddie and the girls. But the loss struck Tomas with some sort of guilt. And then, despite having tried to make a life at their home, they had to leave after Tomas couldn’t stop making waves. She knew the pueblo was a small, close-knit community, one that depended on each person and his or her relationship to everyone else. Had Tomas still been angry with the people who sent him away? Was Juanita? She seemed to have a chance to mend fences with her family now, as evidenced by the recent arrival of her brother.

  And had Tomas’s enemies considered him gone for good just because he was made to move—or had they now wanted to make sure of it? How did Mavis fit into that story? She was an outcast too. She said she loved her cousin, but what if it was more complicated than that? If the Anayas had been involved in her leaving—or even just refused to help her after—would she still be angry?

  Maddie thought of how Mavis was when she visited her. Hardened by life, but tearful when she heard about Tomas. Wonderfully hopeful of Madame Genet’s powers to bring her back her lost love, the lost life she’d once hoped for. If she was faking that, surely she’d missed her calling as an award-winning actress. No, Maddie now didn’t really think it was Mavis—poor, downtrodden Mavis—and she’d seen no signs of old enemies from the pueblo stalking Tomas in the time the Anayas worked for her. Not that it meant they weren’t out there, of course. She knew there was much below the surface she wouldn’t be allowed to see. She would ask Juanita more when she returned from the funeral, but she didn’t think anyone would tell her very much else.

  The next figure she saw in her tapestry was the bootlegging scene. Rob Bennett’s flashy club; Mike the waiter and his fiancée, who was Harry’s sister; the Golden Rooster. They all were involved in smuggling alcohol and maybe even the drugs supplied to people like Elizabeth Grover. It was Rob Bennett who’d told her about Tomas’s activities with some rival gang, Tomas’s run-ins with his own men, but that didn’t ring entirely true. If he was teetotaler, as Juanita said, he might very well have gotten into trouble with the town’s purveyors of hooch. And that seemed to be everyone, who got the same stuff in the same bottles.

  Had Tomas really caused them enough trouble to make them go after him? Maybe he’d had some way to disrupt their supply routes or turn their lower-level workers like Harry against them. It seemed possible.

  And where did Madame Genet fit in? Tomas and Mavis seemed to believe in her powers, even take comfort in them. Yet she had popped up in town so suddenly. There didn’t seem to be enough bereaved souls in Santa Fe to make it profitable as a long stop for her, not like in a big city such as Los Angeles or New York. Father Malone had said the church was worried about her spiritual influence—but enough to plant poisoned “tonic” on her to get rid of her? Maddie thought of the Borgias with a laugh. She could see the affable Father Malone paying a visit to Madame Genet, warning her away, but nothing so Machiavellian.

  But could the medium be here for a reason other than séances? Could she be part of the drug ring? Madame Genet was in a good position to know who in town would make a good scapegoat. It would take some knowledge and skill to distill the poison and administer it in such a way to divert suspicion. To make sure Tomas died at a distance in some different way. Mike had said he “didn’t mean for it to happen” that way. Was he the one who beat Tomas up, only to see him bleed to death in that alley?

  Maddie thought of Madame Genet’s small room and went over every detail of it in her mind. The white tablecloth, the crystal ball, the Asian screen, the heavy curtains blocking the light. The pot of tea. The woman’s sparkling rings, her face pale with powder, her piercing gray eyes that seemed to see more than Maddie would wish. The sideboard with the framed photos, the flowering branches in the silver vase. White ones. Could poison be distilled from that?

  She thought of the photos. The little girl with the baby. The same little girl standing outside a shop window in her pinafore. What was it about the shop? Make it a painting, Maddie told herself and focused harder.

  Yes. The window. The letters. When she was looking at the photo, it was only a fleeting moment before Madame Genet interrupted her. Now she remembered those letters. It was a chemist shop with the outline of a snake painted there. A snake like the ring Madame Genet wore? Surely the daughter of a chemist would know what to put into her own tonics to make them lethal? But what did she have against Tomas? If Mavis was right, he was a good customer to the medium.

  A chemist shop. Maddie sat straight up in bed. Of course. Rob Bennett also had a father with a chemist shop—or a grocer, depending on the day. What if he and Madame Genet were in league? What if they’d both decided Tomas was too much trouble and had to go? Would Tomas have been able to disrupt the flow of business enough to make murder worthwhile? He had been very rough with Eddie when he’d thought his son was involved with smuggling. Maybe he did that with more of the young errand-runners, perhaps in a runaround way to atone for the loss of his other son?

  Maddie thought of the strange equipment in the kitchen of the club. Surely it was indeed a homemade still, yet it had looked so much more intricate than the ones her friends kept in their basements in New York. Maybe it was a chemist’s equipment. Something to do with Madame Genet’s childhood shop. If only she had taken a better look at the stamps on the back of the contraption when she was in Rob’s kitchen . . .

  She had to see, to make absolutely sure before she took such evidence to the police. That arrogant inspector wouldn’t listen to her otherwise. He might very well not believe her anyway, but she had to try. She had to find a way to make him listen.

  She rolled over to peer at the clock on her bedside table. Almost three. Surely the club would be empty, and no one would come in for several hours. She could pop in, take a look at the still, maybe get some kind of sample David could test against the tonics, and then pop out again.

  She felt a quiver of anxious excitement deep in her stomach as she pushed back the blankets. Surely she was crazy to be getting out of her comfy bed in the middle of the night to go prowling through town! But it was a crazy thing she knew she had to do if she wanted to end this quickly.

  She swiftly dressed in a pair of black wool trousers and an old navy-blue pullover of Pete’s. She pinned up her hair and tucked it under a black cap.

  As she put on her sturdiest lace-up boots, Buttercup peeked out from under the sheets and gave a whine.

  “I know,” Maddie whispered to her. “You have to stay here, my girl. I’ll be back before the sun rises.” Just in case, she took out Pete’s old service revolver and some ammunition from her dressing table drawer.

  Buttercup went back under the covers, and Maddie made her way to the kitchen. She was sure Juanita kept a torch there for the too-frequent times when the electricity went out. She found it in the cupboard and quickly scrawled a note for Eddie in case he woke up before she was home.

  The night was perfectly still in that deep, dark hour, the only sound the wind through the trees and the faint, ghostly cry of birds in the distance. All the houses and shops were still shuttered and blank as she made her way through the streets. It didn’t feel quite real, as if she moved in a dream, the familiar world distorted around her.

  She made her way down narrow, winding side alleys, trying hard not to think of Tomas a
nd what happened to him in just such a place. It was so silent, the air seemed to hum with the quiet. A bird swooped down overhead, and she nearly cried out.

  She forced herself to take a deep breath and kept walking. She couldn’t go back yet.

  The club building was just as quiet as the rest of the town, the revelers all gone home to sleep off their Pink Ladies and orange blossoms. The doors were locked, of course, but Maddie found a small window at the back that she could wiggle open. She pulled herself up and over the ledge and tumbled to the tile floor of the kitchen.

  She sat up slowly, holding her breath as she listened carefully. Just more quietly.

  She turned on the torch and tiptoed through the empty room, past stacks of pots and pans, racks of glasses, and a basket of dirty linen. Just an ordinary kitchen.

  The still was where she last saw it—in the back alcove, seemingly untouched. Yet as she shined the light over it, studying the details, she caught a whiff of something herbal, almost earthy. It reminded her of the “tonic.” Was this really used to make the stuff then? What else was concocted there?

  Maddie found the faint mark on the back of a metal funnel she remembered glimpsing before. It was rather tarnished and faded, the letters too faint to read. Yet she could see the image of a twisted snake. Some sort of business trademark?

  It did indeed look like the one on the window in Madame Genet’s old photograph. And the ring she wore. An old family piece, she had said.

  “I know I said to visit the club anytime, Mrs. Alwin,” a voice said behind her. “But this is an inconvenient hour.”

  Maddie’s heart leaped precipitously to her throat, and she gasped. Feeling like a 100 percent chump for not paying attention, she pulled out Pete’s service revolver and spun around to face Rob Bennett.

  He wore his pristine white shirt sleeves, his hair slightly rumpled, a faint smile on his face that was more frightening than fiery angry. And the gun he held was smaller, newer, and more accurate than hers.