I was, of course, out of town that day. At the dentist in Palm Springs. And then afterward I’d gone to Paul Bar because it’s on the way home, and by the time I got to the radio station everything had gone nuts. Inside Edition and People were calling. KTLA wanted me to show them the site, which I hadn’t yet seen for myself. Gary had done a good job on the story for our own station and all I could do was listen and learn.
That night on the air I thought I was saying the obvious: That Francis De Leon had raped and murdered his ex-girlfriend after luring her out to Joshua Tree as a “birthday present” and then turned the pistol on himself. That he’d scoped out the high desert two weeks before he brought her into the national park, close enough to see the traffic on Highway 62 from atop any boulder, and stolen her life. That he’d brought a loaded handgun on a short day hike and used it on the girl he claimed to love. And that his own father had a hunch all this had happened and had spent three months of weekends closely following the search volunteers, so he could be there when the bodies were found and have a chance to spin the story. Not out of any culpability in the crime, but for honor. Family honor, the family name, the family business.
Rape/murder/suicide. And Francis got away with it, by killing himself. And he used our national park, my backyard, as a slaughterhouse.
It was a total outrage and when I finally fell asleep late that night, at least it all seemed obvious.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The headlines were all the same, in the days and weeks to come. Mr. De Leon not only didn’t get arrested for trying to fix the crime scene, but he managed to write the sheriff’s press release.
The couple was found “in a last embrace,” the TV news said, with the gun only being used as a last desperate way to end Emily Tran’s suffering. And then Francis had taken his own life, tragically but also maybe heroically (with his Acura parked an easy mile’s walk away).
They’d been dead for months and were so decomposed that proof of rape or anything of the sort would never appear. So the ding-dongs at the sheriff’s department just went with the sob story. After all, they didn’t have anybody to rough up and arrest, and the DA had nobody to prosecute, so what the hell.
Boy, I wonder who did the embracing. Probably the ex-boyfriend, who murdered his ex-girlfriend, considering that he killed her first, before turning the gun on himself. And after pulling down her pants and raping her. I wonder if she was already dead by then.
The park service public affairs office had the gall to repeat this garbage: The sheriff’s department concluded that Francis De Leon had no intent to harm Emily Tran and that the use of the weapon was an unfortunate result of the couple’s desperation after having been lost for an unspecified amount of time and losing hope.
That’s the dumbest damned thing I’ve ever heard, and I used to cover the police beat full time.
He was her ex-boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend of a beautiful girl who was going somewhere in life, somewhere that didn’t include a security guard and gun nut. He got put in the friend zone. Then he scoped out Joshua Tree, the beloved weekend getaway, dragging his buddy along for the ride. And then Francis De Leon convinced his ex to take a little holiday together in the nice national park, just spend some time together, as friends. He brought a loaded handgun. And once they were a short mile or so down the Loop Trail—which might seem like a very remote location until you remember the little cabins and busy dirt roads and bachelorette parties just beyond—he shot her through the skull and crawled on top of her and shot himself. No harm intended! Just another day hike gone wrong.
This county is something else.
THE SALT CALLS US BACK
BY ALEX ESPINOZA
Salton Sea
It was one of ours who first found her things, along the gray silt and dried-up fish bones near the edge of the Salton Sea. They were simple articles—a pair of sandals decorated with jeweled tortoises climbing along the leather straps, a straw hat with a wide brim, a coin purse with a few dimes and pennies rolling around inside like errant thoughts.
Stuffed in a striped canvas bag, the boy found a thin piece of fabric stained with drops of blood, broken sunglasses, and an envelope with the name REBECCA scrawled in blue ink followed by a string of numbers and letters, dashes, and periods: 68-12.00W-87.01.02.RYZ. She was a woman, no doubt about that. Because of the sandals and the bag, the indiscriminate piece of fabric the boy said was neatly folded.
“Like this,” he told us, mimicking the motion of someone folding laundry. “Very neat. It was a perfect square.”
We wondered how he knew about these things. About perfect squares, how the numbers written on the envelope were strange enough to remember. We wondered all of this to ourselves but stayed quiet as he went on, his sticky hands smelling of maple syrup, his red forehead beaded with sweat we could see as clearly and plainly as the date palms lining the perimeter of the lot where we parked, the place we called home. For now.
“Who is this boy’s mother?” one of us whispered.
Some among us shrugged their shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Yo no sé,” the old woman with the raspy voice and bloodshot eyes replied.
A few of the men smoked and paced back and forth, nervous in that way men always are.
“Go on,” we implored him. “Tell us more. What else?”
None of us ventured out much anymore. We preferred the cool darkness inside our trailers. We drew the blinds, turned fans on, the generators humming along like a swarm of giant hornets. We ate little. We listened to the preachers on the radio and waited for the end to come, just like we’d been taught. Now this boy was telling us a story about these mysterious items left along the banks of that salted sea. Was it a sign? Had she been sent to us by the Divine Presence? Was it a test? Was this boy even real? None of us were certain we even knew where he came from. Maybe he was making it up. Maybe he was lonely and looking for attention. When we asked him where he lived, where he came from, he pointed toward the opened doorway.
“Over there,” he said. “My father and I walked for days. We found your trailers. The gray man in the green truck took clemency on us. Invited us into the flock once was passed the Test.”
We knew the Test. Some of us in that very room had invented it. It was a way of knowing if a person was on the Righteous Path. If they passed it, then they were part of our movement.
“And your father?” one of us inquired. “Where is he?”
“Last seen eating some of the wild weed on the other side of the highway.”
We nodded collectively. The man had gone on a pilgrimage. He was probably deep into the desert now, seeing visions and talking to the ghosts of his past.
“How long has he been away, your father?” we asked.
“A few days now.”
We sympathized with the boy then. We knew that the pilgrimage was only supposed to last a few hours at the most. The father not coming back at that point meant he never would. He would be lost now, speaking in riddles to the hot wind and cacti.
The boy was our responsibility. That’s how it works among our clan. And his father missing and now this discovery his boy had just made, well, it was clearly all connected. We just didn’t know how yet.
Some said it was the salt and brine that brought her back. We thought it was something else entirely. We saw it as the omen we were waiting for. A dead body floating in the polluted water like that? What else could it be?
A sacrifice.
The Divine required it.
And we were meant to bear witness.
To watch it all unfold. To tell it then wait for the next sign to reveal itself: the Fire that would cleanse.
She had once been blond. That was for sure. That we knew right away. The yellow strands of hair were visible through the water’s grit. We gathered around our television sets, and some of us even went so far as to venture out, stumbling over the sand and silt. We stood at the edge of a broken dock jutting out toward the fetid sea like
a severed finger. She surfaced in the middle of the afternoon, when the sun is the hottest and blanches the entire area. Everything is white, the moisture sucked dry from every living thing roaming out there, among all that nothingness, terrifying and beautiful at once.
The body bobbed up and down, and we could see the arms extended out as if they were in supplication, begging for something only she could see. Her back was pale, wrinkled as tree bark, and her toenails were painted pink. Some of us thought of rose petals, the soft kisses of the children we were forced to abandon once we heard the Calling that led us out here. Still others among our group laughed and cursed, said she was a sinner. A filthy whore who got what she deserved for not heeding the signs the way we had.
“The police,” someone stated.
A line of cars, sirens blaring, flashing red and blue, came up over the small embankment. Then there was an ambulance and a white van.
“Who called them?” the boy asked.
“The hippie artists,” we said.
They began appearing with more frequency over the past few months. They smoked pot and had tattoos and piercings all over their faces and bodies. They dressed in rags and built elaborate bonfires and danced naked in circles in the middle of the night. Those of us designated to do the shopping saw them at the small grocery store on the southeastern edge of the lake. They bought cases of water, rolls of toilet paper, matches, twine, canned beans, and neon-colored energy drinks.
“Vagrants,” the store clerk told us. “Don’t like these artists. Ever since they been coming around, things in these parts have gotten funky.” He looked at us, smiled. “You folks are all right. God-fearing. Make no trouble. Call no attention to those of us out here who’d rather be left alone.”
We smiled. The men adjusted their suspenders, smoothed out their button shirts. The women pressed their skirts down and tightened their white head scarves.
It was one of them, for sure. They were probably out on the lake at sunrise, paddling along in one of their makeshift rafts constructed of discarded driftwood and frayed bits of twine. They probably saw her body, panicked, pulled out their cell phones, and called the authorities.
This was why we kept such distractions—things like phones and computers—to a minimum. They only worked to pull us away from the important tasks of prayer, fasting, and preparing for the Day.
We only had our television and radio with the one station we were instructed to listen to. There, in secret codes delivered by the preachers, we received our information.
The police officers stepped out from their cars, their guns clipped to their oversized belts, their black boots slick as oil. They wore puffy jackets even though it was hot. They strung up yellow tape. The medical examiners wheeled out a gurney from the back of their van as two men in a boat paddled toward the shore. Among the folds of the tarp we could make out her wet strands of hair, the web of veins poking from the thin pink membrane of her scalp.
The two men jumped out of the boat as it reached the shore. They wore rubber boots and gloves, and they hoisted the tarp containing the body out and onto the shore.
Her mouth was agape, her eyes open, the sockets empty, no doubt picked out by the wild birds who sat on the rocks and splintered telephone poles, watching us with sinister intentions. Her breasts were pale and flat, and the flesh made a rhythmic slapping sound as the men inched her farther and farther away from the edge of the water and up a small embankment, not too far from where we stood, clustered together, peering at the strange and foreign spectacle. Her belly was distended. Exposed like that, under the glaring desert sun, it looked like a giant egg, something a prehistoric creature would have laid. A series of black bruises dotted her arms and her right index finger was missing.
“The missing finger,” one of us muttered.
“Yes,” said a few others.
“It’s a sign,” said the first one. “Something’s coming.”
We bowed our heads then lifted them, closed our eyes, and turned our faces to the sun before walking across the gravel lots, past the abandoned homes and boarded-up shops toward our settlement.
They identified the body. Her name was Judith Arnold. Sixty-three years of age. A widow with a son and daughter. We heard them on the radio, their voices low and quivering. They asked the public for help in finding their mother’s killer.
“We are distraught,” the daughter said, in between sobs.
“We are begging you,” the son added. “If anyone knows anything, please come forward.”
More information surfaced as the days passed, as we listened and tried following the clues, looking for the sign we needed that would indicate our final departure.
She had been stabbed repeatedly in the stomach, chest, and back. The coroner’s office said there were strange words carved into her thighs: EROT, VALKUM, MEDCOLIUM.
“Evidence suggests the victim was assaulted and killed elsewhere and then brought here in an attempt to hide the crime.”
The medical examiner spoke, said the water in her lungs didn’t match what was typically found in the waters of the sea. “We discovered different minerals suggesting she wasn’t drowned here,” he explained.
There were trace elements of iron oxide, barium, copper, and magnesium.
“The victim was drowned, stabbed repeatedly, and had her skin lacerated. All of this postmortem,” the examiner said.
Police presence grew in the area in the days that followed. We saw the squad cars parked out in front of the grocery store, by the gas station and convenience store, and out near the empty unpaved streets.
“I’m telling you,” the store clerk said as we did our shopping, “it was one of those artist freaks. Likely did some ritual bloodletting. Now the cops are all up in our business. Who knows what else they’ll find? Who knows how long they’ll be here?”
He was angry.
“They said she was killed elsewhere,” we explained. “They dumped her body here.”
“Bullshit,” he replied, then apologized. “I shouldn’t have said that to you holy types.”
We smiled and forgave him.
Who here among us has not sinned or committed an afront to His Holiness, after all?
The police continued their inquiry. We watched as they kept patrolling the area. They, in turn, watched everyone and everything going on around us. They must have been pressured by the woman’s family. A private investigator was hired, a young man with a pair of thick-framed glasses and neatly ironed collared shirts was seen wandering up and down the lakeshore. He took pictures on his phone and spoke into it from time to time. We wondered who he was talking to.
“He’s recording what he sees,” the boy told us.
“How do you know?” we asked.
“I was standing a few feet away, behind a pile of rocks, and I listened,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“Any word from your father?”
“No,” he replied. “It’s like he vanished into the air.”
He wasn’t a bother, and we all cared for him. We fed him, made sure he had clean clothing and that he attended the sermons we held each Friday evening in the tent.
Of course, we were bothered by the fact that his father had not come back. And some of us even went so far as to suggest that a search party be formed so that we might go out there and try to figure out where the man had gone. But we were not equipped to take on such risky endeavors, so we left it at that. And we tried never to talk about him.
We saw that investigator roaming around outside our property. He stood by the front entrance we’d erected when we first came. It wasn’t really an entrance. It was just two piles of stones stacked together. It was clear, though, to anyone passing by that this was a residence, a specific location, maybe even a home. He waved at one of us.
“Hello?” he hollered. “Can I approach?” He held his arms up as if he were surrendering.
We stopped what we were doing, and one of us said, “You may pass, young man.”
He was sw
eating, and we could see damp circles of perspiration underneath his armpits. He said he’d been hired by the victim’s family and was working closely with the county sheriff’s office to investigate the death of the woman named Judith Arnold.
“What a tragedy,” we said. We shook our heads and lowered our gazes.
“What do you all know?” He held a small pad and pencil.
“Only what we’ve heard on the radio. That’s all.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. A real tragedy. Shame.”
“May He bring her peace.”
The man glanced around, taking in the trailers and vans where we slept, the old chairs and rusted drums, the broken crates and strips of tarp we’d found and made our own. We had our washbasin, the small tubs where we bathed, the outdoor firepit where we sometimes cooked our food or sang hymnals and spirituals to His Holiness.
“So, am I to understand that your group is something of a religious sect?” he asked.
“We are an order,” we explained. “We don’t like terms like sect or cult. Of which we are neither.”
“I see. I apologize,” he said.
“What is it you seek?”
The man cleared his throat and said, “How many of you are there?” He waved with his pen.
We blinked, paused, thought for a moment. We could see the suspicion in his eyes. “Our numbers are great. We are many working as one.”
“Okay, okay.” He scribbled things down in his little notebook. “Do you all live here?”
“We’ve lost some along the way, but yes. All of us here make up the congregation.”
He nodded, took a handkerchief out from his shirt pocket, and wiped the sweat from his pink forehead. “Is everyone accounted for? Nobody missing?”
We thought of the boy, his father.
The investigator waited for our answer. Some of us shuffled our feet. Still others glanced away.
“Everyone is here.”
Palm Springs Noir Page 24