Always Time to Die

by Elizabeth Lowell

“I’m trying to figure something out. Sylvia’s grandmother was Juana and her great-aunt was Isobel, right?”

  “Right. So?”

  “So they were cousins, of a sort.”

  “Not close enough to upset the civil or religious authorities. From what you translated on the death certificate Winifred gave me, Isobel and Juana were only half sisters and might even have been simply cousins. You’d have to be a genealogist to even care about the degree of blood relationship in their offspring. Besides, consolidating the land came first. Ask the royal families of Europe. They raised cousin-marrying to a high art.”

  Dan stared at the screen a moment longer, trying to figure the exact degree of kinship between offspring of half sisters or cousins twice removed. Or was it three times? He shrugged. If Carly decided it mattered, he’d strain his brain over the answer. Better yet, he’d let Carly strain hers.

  “I’ve got the wedding date for A. J. Three, universally known as the Senator, and Sylvia María Simmons y Castillo,” Carly said. “And the four children’s birth dates, plus three death dates for the kids.”

  “Plus the Senator’s death date. Wonder whatever happened to his sisters? He had three of them, right?”

  Carly checked her notes. “Three, all older. I’m saving them for later. Winifred only—”

  “Wants Castillo history,” Dan cut in. “Got it. On to Generation Three, children of the Senator and Sylvia. Whoa. There’s a lot of stuff. Once the Senator became a senator, he couldn’t take a dump without the paper doing a two-page spread.”

  “Now there’s a visual I could live without.”

  Shaking her head, Carly went back to sorting the Sandoval photos on one of the long tables. She’d been so obsessed with recording Winifred’s material that she hadn’t done anything else. Now it was time to see if she could fill in some gaps. While many of the photos weren’t dated, a lot of them had writing on the back. She arranged them in rough order, oldest to newest.

  “Holler when you find something worth recording,” Carly said. “I’ve got all the birth dates for the kids, but I’m really short on photos of Josh. Older brother Andrew got all the camera time. I’m hoping something will turn up in the Sandoval family photos at the yearly barbecue.”

  “Don’t hold your breath. From all that’s been left out of the newspaper, Josh must have been a hell-raiser from the time he could walk.”

  “Too bad there wasn’t more than one newspaper. I’d like to see more of the Spanish and Native American side of the local history.”

  Dan winced at the thought of what more newspapers would have meant in terms of archiving. Even with his nifty, mostly homemade program, the process still took time.

  “The white-bread approach wears thin in the sixties,” he said. “There’s more ink for the hispano politicos, and more hispano politicos in areas that have a big Anglo population.”

  “Thus all the yearly barbecues,” Carly said, lining up the photos. “Taking the pulse of the hispano voters over a rack of ribs and a keg of beer.”

  “It worked. Without support from the hispano communities, the Senator wouldn’t have made it, and neither would his son. Josh Quintrell is the first Anglo governor New Mexico has had in years. It was a close race. Without the Sandovals he couldn’t have made it.”

  “The same Sandovals that run drugs and hold cockfights?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you saying that the governor is involved in the drug trade through the Sandovals?”

  “If by involved you mean getting paid on a regular schedule, probably not. If you mean accepting political contributions and having a damn good idea where the funds came from and how they were laundered, yes.”

  “I haven’t read anything like that in any newspaper.”

  From overhead came the slam of the side door, followed by the sound of footsteps and heavy rolls of paper being moved across the floor.

  Dan glanced at the ceiling and then back at the computer. “You won’t read about laundered political contributions in this newspaper, no matter how many rolls of paper Gus uses up.” Dan shrugged. “Unless someone gets caught dirty with a bag of cash, of course, but it’s not likely. The Quintrell family might be a lot of things that I don’t like, but stupid isn’t one of them.”

  “No wonder Winifred wants to distance herself from them.”

  “Winifred would have hated any family her sister married into.” Dan typed rapidly, scanned the screen, and typed again. “Besides, the Castillos are a lot closer to the Sandovals by blood and choice. And it’s not like the Quintrells are the first politicians on the planet to accept laundered money in political contributions. Hell, in the bad old days on the East Coast and in Chicago, the pols didn’t care if the cash was laundered, just so it was plentiful and green.”

  “You have a sour view of politicians.”

  “Realistic,” he corrected. “And don’t forget bankers and lawyers. One runs the laundries and the other facilitates the process. Then they take the squeaky-clean cash and invest it in legitimate enterprises on behalf of the illegitimate. Welcome to the real world, honey, where nothing is the way it seems and everybody’s hand is in somebody else’s pocket.”

  Carly grimaced and kept looking at the backs of photos. Some were dated. Some had names.

  One of the names was J. Quintrell.

  She flipped the photo over, picked up a magnifying glass, and went hunting for the younger Josh. He’d been caught in the act of upending a bottle of beer over another boy’s head. Both young men—teenagers, probably—were laughing and leaning drunkenly on each other. In the background, the Senator watched with a grim line to his mouth. Next to the Senator was another young man, but this one stood straight and tall.

  “I have a feeling Josh went back to boarding school right after this,” she said.

  Dan got up and walked over to Carly. He bent over the table near her, close enough to smell the light spice of her shampoo. He told himself that he hadn’t left the computer just to inhale her unique scent, it was just a very nice side benefit. Like breathing.

  “Good catch,” he said. “If there’s another newspaper photo of Josh before he came back from Vietnam, I haven’t been able to find it, not even in the fifties and sixties stuff I scanned in a few years ago when I was home for three months.”

  “Months? How’d you manage that much time off?”

  “Leave of absence,” Dan said, staring at the rawboned young Josh. “Just like now.”

  “But you’re not in the military.”

  “No. Just clumsy.” He looked at the date on the photo and then went back to his computer.

  “Clumsy,” she said under her breath. “Yeah. Right. I’ve seen professional athletes who are less coordinated. Must have been one mean volcano you climbed.”

  He ignored her and set up a search for the name Quintrell, starting with one week on either side of the date on the photo. Then he skimmed through the articles he’d recalled, clicking from one highlighted Quintrell name to the next. The Senator was most often mentioned, with A. J. IV getting some ink for having graduated from college and then volunteering for the army. He was posted to Fort Benning, Georgia, for ranger training.

  Poor bastard. Wonder if he knew what he was getting into?

  “What was that?” Carly asked.

  Dan realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. Not good. He was getting entirely too comfortable around Ms. Carolina May.

  “A.J. IV was a ranger,” Dan said.

  “Ranger? Are we talking National Park Service and Smoky the Bear?”

  For a few seconds Dan wondered what it would be like to live in a world where the first association with the word ranger was a cartoon figure. “Special Ops.”

  “Ops? Operations?”

  “Yeah. The balls-out warriors.”

  “Another visual I could have lived without,” she said. “Did he make it, or was he a wannabe?”

  “A.J. IV made the grade and the Senator didn’t have a damn thing to do with i
t. The old man was furious that his son didn’t take the cushy admin job in the Pentagon that was all laid out for him.”

  “What article did you find?” Carly took the photo over to where Dan was and began reading the computer screen over his shoulder. “Where does it say that?”

  “Between the lines.”

  She read aloud the section he pointed to on the screen. “‘The Senator, while naturally disappointed that his son passed up an opening at the Pentagon as a public information officer, is very proud that Andrew Jackson Quintrell IV has been accepted into the elite Army Rangers.’ So what are you talking about? It says the Senator was proud.”

  “You didn’t know him. Anyone who crossed the old man paid in blood. Lots of it. I’d love to have heard that father-son screaming match, but it happened before I was born. I’m betting that A.J. told the Senator to go crap in his mess kit. And I’m betting that’s why Josh was invited home from his first year of college abroad, just for the barbecue. It would be the Senator’s way of telling his first son that there was another heir in the pipeline.”

  Carly studied the photo again with the magnifying glass. “So the handsome dude with the rebar up his butt is A.J. IV?”

  He looked where she pointed. “Handsome, huh?”

  “Hey, they can’t all be tall, dark, and oozing sex like you.”

  Dan wanted very much to bite the tender lobe of her ear but didn’t. If he did that, the next thing he’d do was stick his tongue in her mouth and pretty soon after that they would be rocking and rolling on top of the heavy wooden table.

  And how would this be bad?

  “He sure looks more than three years older than Josh,” she said.

  “Ranger training is hell.”

  “Been there, done that?” she asked.

  “I know some of them.”

  “The, um, balls-out warriors?”

  “Yeah.” In addition to being trained by them, he’d debriefed a lot of special forces types, but that was just one more on the long list of things he wasn’t supposed to talk about, because the men weren’t supposed to have been in the places Dan had been. And vice versa.

  He watched Carly looking at the photo and tried not to think about how good it would feel to have her mouth all over him.

  “Why are you frowning?” he asked after a few moments. Anything to get her talking instead of him fantasizing about stripping her naked and diving in.

  “I’m trying to see the future Governor Quintrell in that rawboned baboon pouring beer over his primate buddy. The eyes are right but the chin looks off. Must be the stubble. He’s got quite a crop of it. Josh’s eyeteeth are just like the Senator’s—that slight overlap that is more a sexy come-on than a flaw. He must have had them straightened later.”

  “Or else had his mouth redone entirely when he hit forty,” Dan said. “A lot of politicians do. In America, bad teeth are equated with poverty and moral turpitude.” He took the magnifying glass and studied the photo. “You’ve got a good eye, Carolina May. That chin isn’t as impressive as Josh’s is today. Gotta love implants and plastic surgeons.”

  “At least he let his hair go gray. A lot of them don’t.”

  “Them?”

  “Anyone, man or woman, who spends time in front of cameras.”

  “Gray is distinguished, haven’t you heard?” Dan said, smiling slightly.

  “Tell that to an anchorman who has someone thirty years younger leaving footprints up his spine. You, of course, would be exempt.”

  He glanced at her. “I would?”

  “Yes. You’re going to be like your mother, dark except for one extraordinary silver streak over your left temple.”

  “I already have the streak.”

  “If five hairs make up a streak, sure.”

  “I have more than that.”

  She pretended to count the gray hairs above his left temple and gasped. “Omigod. Seven! You’re definitely headed for the downhill slide into Viagra-land.”

  Dan was tempted to stand up and show Carly just how wrong she was about the sex pill but didn’t. People were still moving around the storage area above them. At any moment a reporter could come down to the basement to research past newspaper articles. Dan didn’t want Carly embarrassed or inhibited when they made love, biting her lip when she wanted to groan or scream.

  Overhead, someone dragged the tarp aside, lifted the door, and called down. “Dan? You in there?”

  Go away, Gus. “C’mon down, Gus.”

  “How long have you been down there?”

  Too long. Not long enough. “Since breakfast. Why?” Dan said.

  “Then you haven’t heard the news.”

  “What news?”

  Gus appeared on the bottom step. “Sylvia Quintrell finally died.”

  NEW HAMPSHIRE

  NOON, THURSDAY

  33

  GOVERNOR JOSH QUINTRELL SHIFTED ON THE METAL FOLDING CHAIR. HIS EXPRESSION was engaged, interested. Behind the façade, he devoutly wished he was anywhere but in a gently shabby hall full of veterans of foreign wars trying to digest the indigestible, and reminiscing about wars nobody else gave a damn about anymore. Josh would use his service record and purple hearts to reassure voters, especially veterans, but did he talk about it every chance he had? Hell, no. He’d rather dye his hair pink and wear a tutu. Ninety-seven percent of the people in the dining hall hadn’t been shot at, hadn’t been tortured, hadn’t killed; the three percent who had didn’t want to talk about it.

  The chicken salad lunch was truly incredible. They should pass out medals for eating it.

  I’m going to get a doggie bag for my campaign manager, Josh thought as he clapped mightily for a speech that had left most of the hall comatose. Why should he miss all the fun he signed me up for?

  His cell phone vibrated against his waist. He glanced at the call window, saw that it didn’t list a number, and went to the message function. No voice message, just text. He punched in commands and wondered what had been so urgent that it had to break in to his campaign time.

  Words scrolled across the tiny window: THE SENATOR HAD SECRETS WORTH KILLING TO KEEP. STOP INVESTIGATING CHARITIES.

  Josh thought about it.

  He thought about it some more. As the second speaker was talking about our brave boys overseas he decided to stop investigating charities on the ranch end.

  Then he’d light a fire under the New York accountant’s ass and wait to see what crawled out from under the rocks.

  QUINTRELL RANCH

  THURSDAY EVENING

  34

  THANKS TO BAD WEATHER IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, THE GOVERNOR’S PLANE HAD BEEN late landing in Santa Fe. Sylvia Quintrell’s memorial service would be delayed until the governor’s helicopter arrived.

  Carly didn’t mind. Over Dan’s protests, she’d driven out early in her newly cleaned and shod SUV, eager to interview Winifred on various subjects, including the possibility of the Senator’s illegal offspring. Dan had followed her in his own truck. The extra hour delay before the memorial service had given Carly more time to talk with Winifred—and to prepare herself for another poet-mangling effort by the good minister, who was hovering in the hallway near Winifred’s suite like a car salesman looking for a live customer. Dr. Sands hovered with him. He hadn’t wanted Winifred to exert herself talking.

  Winifred had told him to get out.

  Silently Dan handed Carly another photograph for Winifred to look at. The box of plastic sleeves and forms that the airline had misplaced had been waiting at the ranch when he and Carly arrived for the service. While she talked with Winifred, he put various photos and documents between sheets of the clear protective plastic.

  Winifred coughed. The sound was husky and dry, shallow, like her breathing. Dan had heard unhealthy noises like that in places where war or plain governmental incompetence kept antibiotics from reaching hospitals and villages. He wasn’t a medic, but he really didn’t like the sound of her breathing. He knew pneumonia was most dangerous when the ches
t was tight, not when the lungs loosened.

  “Are you sure you should be talking, Miss Winifred?” he asked gently.

  She ignored him and peered through reading glasses at the photograph Carly was holding out. Normally Winifred wouldn’t have needed—or admitted that she needed—glasses, but she was too tired to struggle tonight.

  “Andrew,” she said. “Grammar school.”

  Carly filled in a label, peeled it from its backing, and stuck it to the plastic sleeve. Dan handed Winifred another sleeved photo.

  “Victoria. After Pearl Harbor. She was seven.”

  Carly entered the data and labeled the photo.

  “Victoria. On D-Day. Polio. Killed her before—she was ten.”

  “You need to rest,” Carly said quickly.

  “I need—to die,” Winifred said.

  Grimly Carly sorted through the pictures she’d selected for positive ID by Winifred. She’d hoped to find some of Josh and Liza after they were ten, but so far she’d come up empty. All the school and professional photos were of Andrew and Victoria. Family snapshots had stopped after Victoria died. The closest thing to group photos Carly had found after 1944 were the yearly political barbecues. Often as not, neither Sylvia nor the children attended—or if they did, there weren’t any photographs to prove it.

  The Quintrells weren’t what Carly would call a close family. No surprise there.

  When the photographs ran out, there was a list of names. “These are the Senator’s possible children,” Carly said in a low voice. “That is, these children were born to women within ten months of a probable liaison with the Senator. None of the birth certificates list the Senator as a father. Often they list another man, but you asked me to ignore that, correct?”

  Winifred nodded curtly and took the list. Eleven names stretching over a period of sixty years, but most of them were clustered around the years before the Senator became a senator.

  Jesús Mendoza. María Elena Sandoval. Manuel Velásquez. Randal Mullins. Sharon Miller. Christopher Smith. Raúl Sandoval. Maryanne Black. Seguro Sánchez. David McCall. Suzanne Fields.