Verdict in the Desert

by Patricia Santos Marcantonio

  Verdict in the Desert

  Verdict in the Desert

  Patricia Santos Marcantonio

  Verdict in the Desert is funded in part by a grant from the city of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. We are grateful for their support.

  Recovering the past, creating the future

  Arte Público Press

  University of Houston

  4902 Gulf Fwy, Bldg 19, Rm 100

  Houston, Texas 77204-2004

  Cover design by John-Michael Perkins

  Names: Marcantonio, Patricia Santos, author.

  Title: Verdict in the desert / by Patricia Santos Marcantonio.

  Description: Houston, TX : Arte Publico Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015050002 (print) | LCCN 2016003355 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558858237 (softcover : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781518500411 (ePub) |

  ISBN 9781518500428 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781518500435 (Pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Mexican Americans—Arizona—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Race relations—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction. | Arizona—Social life and customs—20th century—Fiction. | GSAFD: Legal stories. | Romantic suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.A729 V47 2016 (print) | LCC PS3613.A729 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050002

  The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

  ©2016 by Patricia Santos Marcantonio

  Imprinted in the United States of America

  16 17 18 19 20 21 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  For Daddy

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. Thanks to my friend and critique partner Bonnie Dodge, to Peg Weber at the City of Tucson Parks and Recreation Department for her expertise and to the wonderful people of Arte Público Press, especially Dr. Nicolás Kanellos, for helping me make the story better.

  And thanks to my family for their endless love, support and belief in me: my husband, Jerry, and, daughters Marguerite and Gabrielle. They are my heart.

  1

  Summer 1959

  MARÍA SÁNCHEZ CURRY left small bloody footprints down Lincoln Street. Under the full moon, they resembled a trail of flowers gnarled by the summer’s heat.

  Clenching the image of the Holy Virgin on the scapular around her neck, she flinched as she walked over the dirt road. The slit across her forehead throbbed. Her neck felt pulpy and raw. But the bruises and bleeding were too little punishment. She should have been carrying a wooden cross of splinters and heartache. She should have struggled on penitent knees through a valley of death and bones.

  Jesus. Sweet, sweet Jesus, she pleaded, but didn’t expect any response.

  The long-haired mutt in her arms yelped because she squeezed him hard. She kissed Oscar’s head and cried out. The blood saturating her dress had painted his white fur a dark gray. Wetting her fingers in her mouth, she tried to clean his fur and tasted salt and guilt. She sobbed again, which left her thin knees feeble. Oscar licked her cheek as she wiped her eyes with the edge of her dress. Raising her face to the sky, she blinked. María anticipated judgment to drop on her like an angel’s gilded sword from heaven.

  Nothing happened.

  Closing her eyes in prayer, instead she saw the image of Ben flickering behind her eyelids. She had never seen him so peaceful, especially considering her best kitchen knife had been plunged into the middle of his chest.

  Only a few moments before, María had watched her husband settle into death. Groans and red spittle dribbled out of his mouth. No cuss words or hosannas. Before his eyes became hollow blue glass, they betrayed a hint of surprise that she hadn’t killed him sooner. She begged Jesus to bring Ben back to life and promised to be good from then on. No more disobeying. No more beer. She would be silent and absorb his slaps like water poured in the desert. But there was only the blood that bound them more than vows. So she had begun walking, not knowing where to go. Outside her front door, Lincoln Street was as dark at one end as it was at the other. She held Oscar tight while reciting her own novena of shame.

  María didn’t even notice a Borden city police car rounding the corner.

  Officer Rod Sawyer’s sweaty back produced a sucking sound every time he shifted his weight in the patrol car. And his butt ached. He and his partner had driven around since dinner at Pete’s Café downtown. Sawyer badly wanted a stick of gum because he had belched the hamburger special for the last hour.

  Older and tough as tires, Officer Sam Jones drove their regular patrol route. He tossed his cigarette out the window. “You’re going to have to get use to this, Sawyer. These long, boring nights.”

  “Anything’s better than pumpin’ gas at my old man’s station. At least I don’t have to scrub the dirt from under my nails or clean crap from the toilets.”

  “We got a different kind of crap on these streets.”

  Jones grinned at his own veteran police wisdom. And Sawyer needed to wise up. His younger partner itched for gun battles like the ones the New York cops fought in Naked City. He wanted to chase a speeding car full of criminals, track down killers and rescue slutty women in tight clothes. Sawyer saw himself as Have gun, Will Travel’s Paladin in a blue uniform but without a Richard Boone mustache.

  Jones didn’t blame his partner’s daydreaming. It took the edge off the real police work, which mostly consisted of tagging drunken drivers, handing out speeding tickets and breaking up altercations between wetbacks and white trash.

  Sawyer gripped his gun. “You’d think somebody needed a head busting tonight. Goddamn, it’s slower ’n spit out here.”

  “You’re watching too many cop programs on TV.”

  “I like westerns, too,” Sawyer replied in his defense.

  The radio flashed on. “Car 79, we got a report of a domestic at 1287 Lincoln Street. You’re over in that neck of the woods, ain’t you, Jonesy?” The male dispatcher sounded as bored as Sawyer.

  “I know the place. We’re on our way.”

  Sawyer sat up from his slump.

  “Don’t get excited. It’s Ben and María Curry again. Those two fight like cl
ockwork. I’m damn sick of them. A nosy neighbor woman calls when they go at it. Sometimes I feel like running her in, too.”

  Jones turned the corner onto Lincoln Street.

  “There’s a woman down a ways,” Sawyer said.

  “It’s María. She’s probably drunk and beat up.”

  When he got closer, he pounded on the brakes. María looked like a creature formed out of blood. “Oh, son of a bitch.”

  The officers burst out of the car.

  Oscar growled as Jones grabbed the back of María’s dress and pulled her toward the headlights. “I don’t think all that blood came from her head.”

  Through her fear, María dared to smile, because punishment had arrived at last. The men’s eyes were solid with it.

  “What’d you do to Ben?” Jones asked and then let out a hard sigh.

  “What’s wrong?” Sawyer said.

  “She can’t understand more than two damn words of English.” Jones summoned the rudimentary Spanish he had picked up from his years in Borden. He asked her again about her husband.

  She lifted her finger and pointed to the house up the street.

  Grabbing María’s arm, Jones dragged her along to the patrol car. He stopped. “Wait. She’s going to bleed all over my seats. I’ll walk her back to the house. You drive and meet us there, Sawyer.”

  At the house, Jones passed María over to his partner. “Watch her and stay out here.”

  Despite his 270 pounds, Jones hustled when needed. Stepping onto the porch of the house, he wiped the perspiration stinging his eyes. He hated domestics. Couples beat, spit and cursed each other. But have a police officer step in and—bam—they transferred all their venom to him, as if he had caused their problems. Ben was inside, all right. Probably hurt, definitely tight and ready to mix it up as usual. Jones drew his weapon, which gave him confidence.

  Footprints in blood led him through the door. The house smelled harsh from burning chicken. Rounding a corner of the hallway, Jones saw Ben sitting against a wall in the kitchen. The officer lowered his weapon. Ben’s T-shirt was more red than white from the blood that created a shiny pool around the body. The officer counted at least six stab wounds. A black knife handle protruded from Ben’s chest in what was probably the last blow.

  “You ain’t going to fight anybody no more, you dumb son of a bitch.” Jones yelled out the door, “Bring her in!”

  “What a mess,” Sawyer said when he joined his partner. He tightened his grip on María, who shuddered and wept with equal parts frenzy and sadness. Shaking her as if she was a misbehaved child, the police officer found one of the few Spanish words he knew: “Silencio, dammit, silencio.”

  María put a hand over her mouth. With her other hand, she pulled her dog closer.

  “Did you kill him?” Jones asked in halting Spanish.

  She nodded. A ribbon of blood from her head wound had slid down her face.

  Sawyer held María at arm’s length. He guessed she was almost sixty years old, weighed one hundred pounds and measured a little over five feet tall. Tangles of long hair flew out of a salt-and-pepper braid on top of her head. Her eyes shrank to dots in an oval face from all the crying and swelling.

  “How could this little thing topple that big man?” He kicked Ben’s foot and answered his own question. “She managed somehow, because this boy got it good.”

  María started toward her husband. Sawyer tugged her back. “Lady, you did enough.”

  Inspecting the bottom of one of his shoes, Jones spit. He had stepped in the blood. “Damn domestics.”

  2

  AS THE POLICE OFFICERS WERE ARRESTING María Curry, Michael Shaw was pulling a thorn from his palm. He looked up at his father’s guests looking down on him where he had fallen on the grass. Michael laughed at their total lack of humor. Still, his drunken lapse barely generated a fuss in the garden party at his father’s house ten miles from Borden’s city limits. The party guests had seen his antics before.

  On the way to the bar, Michael hadn’t spotted the rosebush, and he stumbled. Although tanked, he instinctively put out his hands to break the fall. He now fully appreciated how those years playing football had prepared him for life.

  When Jenny Shaw saw her husband go down, she gulped air. Her yellow silk dress rustled as she knelt to help Michael to his feet. One stroke of his hand composed his dark blond hair. Straightening, he buttoned his jacket over a once athletic body now in danger of going to seed.

  He handed Jenny a crushed rose. “This is for you.” He laughed at his joke.

  Jenny took the rose, tossed it away and whispered into his ear, “It’s only ten, baby. What’ll everybody think?”

  “That I started drinking at six,” he whispered back.

  Brushing off his tie and jacket, Jenny could do nothing but show her gracious smile and thank her lucky stars. Michael became even more charming when he drank, not violent or messy. Besides, she was not much of a woman if she couldn’t handle a drunken husband. She had learned that lesson from her mother, who had plenty of experience with her father, The Lush. Jenny did frown when she saw Frank and Margaret Hideman staring at Michael. They were ranch people, country club people, rich as her father-in-law people. They actually knew President Eisenhower.

  “Michael, maybe you should rest,” Jenny said loudly enough for the Hidemans to hear. “You know you’re still recovering from a cold.”

  “He’s a little under the weather,” she repeated to the couple in case they hadn’t heard.

  Michael rocked a bit. “Jenny, I’m feeling pretty damn good. Too good for this dirge of a gathering.” His eyes cleared enough to recognize the older couple. “Frank, Margaret. What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen an intoxicated lawyer before? Hold it. Don’t answer, or you’ll tend to incriminate me.”

  The Hidemans melted away in disgust. Michael laughed, this time choking on his spit because he found himself so goddamn funny even if no one else did. Lacking an appreciative audience, he would slip away to his father’s study and drink in peace until it was time to go home. But Byron Piggot cut off his getaway. Piggot the human safe deposit box.

  “Oh hell.” Michael swiveled away, hoping the stout banker got the message.

  Instead, Piggot slapped Michael on the back, making him waver. “Mike, how you doing?”

  “Me, I’m great. You know Jenny.”

  “Hello, Byron.” She batted lots of eyelash.

  “Saw that spill. You okay, Mike?”

  “Michael just had a little accident. He’s dandy.” Jenny gripped her husband’s arm with all the pale pink force she could muster.

  “I hate those goddamn rosebushes,” Michael said.

  Piggot chortled, his pudgy cheeks lifting like a balloon. “What a character. Jenny, you know what people say, don’t you?”

  “No.” She loved gossip.

  “That Michael wins his lawsuits because the women on the jury fall in love with him and the men are afraid of his father.” Starting light and friendly, Piggot’s voice ended low and mean.

  The inflection totally escaped Jenny, who held Michael’s arm even tighter.

  “You don’t have to tell me I’ve got the most handsome man in town.”

  Michael sipped his drink at Jenny’s delight in such an empty thing. Appearance amounted to one more burden he shouldered, just like his last name. Besides, she never really saw him—a man with greased feet staggering up a plate glass hill.

  Piggot’s fat face hardened. “You have to admit you have the world on the veritable string. Right, Mike? Not like the rest of us poor souls who have to work for a living.”

  Putting his arm around the banker, Michael leaned into Piggot, who was a foot shorter. “Byron, I plain forgot you bankers work so damn hard. Foreclosing on poor bastards, counting other people’s money, giving away toasters.”

  Piggot’s gray face darkened. “Excuse me. I see some people I want to visit.” He left.

  Michael called after him. “Come back! I want a new
toaster.”

  “He didn’t mean any harm, Michael,” Jenny said.

  “The fuck he didn’t. I’m drunk, but I can still tell when he’s firing cheap shots at the son of the Martin Shaw. You can’t trust anybody here to tell you the truth, Jenny. Their lips are permanently puckered from kissing ass.”

  Her mouth formed a tiny circle. “You know I don’t like it when you talk that way. All those swear words. You sound crude.”

  Michael groaned. He had come to despise that brainless Betty Boop pout she put on whenever she didn’t get her way. Or how she mangled Broadway songs until he wished Rodgers and Hammerstein would break up their successful partnership. His wife wore naïveté like a suit of iron taffeta. But because of the amount of whiskey he had consumed and because she had no other defenses in this world, he allowed the pout to do its work. He pecked at her cheek. Her body smelled sugary and yielding. An overripe Doris Day.

  “Sorry, Jen.”

  “Want to dance?”

  “No, thank you. I’d rather drink.”

  The pout resurfaced.

  Stepping back, Michael surveyed the crowd. Almost one hundred people milled about his father’s luxuriant garden, hazily lighted by multicolored paper lanterns. Passing silhouettes in and out of the kitchen, Mexican workers kept tables loaded with hors d’oeuvres and distributed drinks to those too lazy to visit the bar. Shaped like the state of Arizona, his father’s birthday cake remained formidable despite many pieces cut away. A six-piece combo played hit parade tunes as stick figures in pearls and ties danced. The occasional cha-cha brought out those adequately loosened by martinis and gin tonics.

  Around the pool, other guests gathered in groups, shifting like chess pieces and exchanging inane chat. Pride at the United States’ additions of Alaska and Hawaii, along with speculation over what to do with all the hula dancers and Eskimo Pies. Worry about the flow of cigars, since Cuba had been taken over by that rebel fellow Castro. Wives giddily wondering how to get a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover now that the post office had lifted the ban. And the usual question of why America didn’t pound the communists into red powder. The guests invited Michael into the conversations with a “What do you think, Mike?” and didn’t bother listening to what he had to say. Not that he had anything to say.