by J. A. Jance
It was a weekend where no one got quite what they bargained for—not Ruby, not Oswald, and certainly not Diana Lee Cooper.
Because Toby Walker had essentially stolen a county car, Brandon was reluctant to report it through regular channels. He called Hank Maddern at home and asked for advice.
Maddern’s suggestion was succinct. “Report it,” he said at once. “That’ll get word out to the cars so everybody’s looking. In the meantime, I’ll come over and we’ll see what we can do.”
Leaving Louella with strict instructions to remain by the phone, Brandon escaped from the house and his mother to the relative sanity of Hank Maddern’s Ford F-100. Maddern drove through the neighborhood in ever-widening circles while the younger man brimmed over with self-reproach.
“It’s all my fault,” he fumed. “All of it. I never should have left the damned keys there in the first place, but I just didn’t think about it. In our house, car keys have been kept on that pegboard for as long as I can remember.”
“He’s never done anything like this before?” Hank asked.
“Never.”
“There’s always a first time,” Maddern said with a shrug.
One-handed, he shook two cigarettes out of a pack, passed one to Brandon, and then punched the lighter. “And for Chrissake, forget about whose fault it is. Fault doesn’t matter. By the way, what was your old man wearing when he took off?”
“Pajamas,” Brandon answered. “Red-and-white-striped cotton pajamas.”
“Somebody dressed like that shouldn’t be too tough to find. How were you fixed for gas?”
“Gas? Almost empty, actually. I should have filled before I left the office yesterday, but I didn’t want to take the time. I drove all the way out to Sells and back last night.”
“And didn’t come home until late, either,” Hank added with a mischievous wink. “Did you get lucky?”
“Look, Hank, it wasn’t anything like that,” Brandon said quickly. “Diana Ladd needed help with the boy, that’s all.”
“Until five o’clock in the morning? According to Tom Edwards, five was the last time your mother called looking for you.”
“Great,” Brandon muttered, shaking his head. “That’s just great. A little privacy might be nice.”
Maddern heard the edginess in Brandon’s voice and dropped the subject. “Does your dad have money?”
“With him? A little, maybe, but not much.”
“What kind of credit cards? Any bank cards?”
“No. Mom took those away. The department-store cards as well. He probably has a Chevron and a Shell. Maybe a couple of others.”
“That’s where we’ll start then, with gas stations.”
They headed north on Swan, stopping at every gas station along the way where Brandon knew his father had a working credit card. They went west on Broadway and south again on Alvernon. At a Chevron station on Alvernon south of Twenty-second Street, they finally hit pay dirt. The young Mexican kid tending the pumps remembered Toby Walker well.
“Hey, man, I thought it was crazy. This guy comes in wearing pajamas and no shoes, driving a county car, and wanting to know how to get to Duluth. Where the hell is Duluth?”
“Minnesota,” Brandon said quietly.
“Duluth,” Maddern repeated. “Why Duluth?”
“It’s where he grew up. On a farm outside Duluth.”
The attendant thumbed through the credit-card receipts. “Here it is. Tobias Walker. He took 15.9 gallons of premium and said something about a farm, about going there for dinner. He asked me how to get back over to 1–10, and I told him.”
They drove to where Alvernon intersected with the freeway. “Which way?” Walker asked. “He’s got plenty of gas. He could drive two hundred and fifty miles in either direction without having to stop for more.”
“At least we know what to do now,” Maddern said.
“What’s that?”
“Call the Highway Patrol. If your dad’s out on the freeway, it’s not just our problem anymore.”
Public transportation as known in the Anglo world was nonexistent on the reservation. Hitchhiking was the alternative.
As Fat Crack left Casa Grande for Sells late in the afternoon, he stopped for a hitchhiker just inside the reservation boundary. Fat Crack could tell from the way the man shambled after the truck that he was drunk, but he offered a ride anyway. “Where to?”
“The Gate,” the man said. “I just got outta jail, and I want to get drunk. It sure was bad in there.”
For an Indian, this was a talkative drunk. Fat Crack found himself hoping his rider would pass out and sleep until they reached Sells.
They drove past the turnoff to Ahngam. “Do you know Eduardo Jose?” the rider asked.
Fat Crack nodded. Eduardo Jose’s bootlegging exploits were legend.
“His grandson’s sure in big trouble,” the man continued. “They brought him in to the jail this morning. For raping and killing a white lady.”
“That’s too bad,” Fat Crack told him.
They drove for several more miles in stony silence. Both of them knew full well that Indians who went to jail for raping white women didn’t generally live long enough to see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a penitentiary.
“He bit her,” the man said much later. “What kind of a sickness would make him do that?”
But a stunned Fat Crack didn’t answer right away. “You say he bit her?”
The man nodded. “Her wipih,” he said. “Her nipple. Almost off. One of the deputies told a cook, who told some of the others.”
The hairs on the back of Fat Crack’s neck stood erect under his gray Stetson. He had heard once before about someone who did that to women, a killer who bit off his victims’ nipples. It had happened to Gina, his cousin. Supposedly, Gina’s killer was dead.
The cab of the tow truck was suddenly far too small, and the hot air blowing through the opened windows took Fat Crack’s breath away.
Just as Looks At Nothing, despite his blindness, had known unerringly where to find the shady grove of trees, Fat Crack knew at once, despite the fact that Gary Ladd was dead, that there was some connection between this dead woman at Cloud Stopper Mountain and his cousin, found murdered in the charco of deserted Rattlesnake Skull Village seven years earlier.
Unable to do anything else about it, Fat Crack tightened his grip on the steering wheel, and he began to pray.
Diana must have slept. When she woke up, it was early evening. She dressed hurriedly and guiltily, worrying about what Davy was up to.
She found him on the living-room couch. She could see his head over the back of the couch and see Bone’s long, curving tail sticking out from in front of it.
“Are you hungry?” she asked, pausing in the doorway.
Davy didn’t look up. He was working on something in his lap, staring down intently, lips pursed, shoulders hunched, brow furrowed.
“What are you doing?” Diana asked when he didn’t answer.
She walked up to him and peered down over his shoulder. His lap was full of whitened yucca leaves. In his hand was the small awl Rita had given him for his birthday.
“What in the world are you doing with Rita’s yucca?” Diana demanded. “You know you’re not supposed to touch those.”
Davy looked up at her, his eyes filling with tears. “I’m trying to make her a basket,” he said. “But I don’t know how to do the center.”
10
WHEN HE LEFT the storage unit, Andrew Carlisle took with him only the hunting knife. The blade had been honed to a razor sharp edge, which years of careful storage hadn’t dulled. The knife was big enough to be deadly, but small enough to conceal in the brightly colored summer bag among his other purchases.
Back in the Valiant, he drove to the Reardon Hotel off Fourth Avenue. He had checked his bank balance and found that he didn’t have as much cushion as he wanted. Once finished with Diana Ladd, he would disappear. He needed cold hard cash, running money. He want
ed it quickly and from a quarter where no questions would be asked.
When it came to not asking questions, the seedy Reardon suited his purposes admirably. Carlisle had heard about the hotel and bar and its singular clientele from some of the other residents of the joint.
Joint. Thinking about Florence in that jarring bit of jargon always brought a mental smile to Carlisle’s Ph.D.-trained ear. Phraseology wasn’t all he’d picked up in prison, not by a long shot. There were always lessons to be learned in that all-male, survival-of-the-fittest environment where sex was a valuable commodity, a bargaining chip. It was a milieu that regarded small men as prized possessions, and Andrew Carlisle was a small man.
Once he understood that exploitation was inevitable, he surrendered willingly and made himself available to the highest bidder, to partners who could make the physical pain and mental degradation most worth his while. He closed his mind to the reality of it even while it was happening, and learned to stand outside himself during the blowjobs and the rest, to calmly total up the privileges each encounter would give him, all the while keeping score of what the outside world would owe him once it was over—the world in general, and Diana Ladd in particular. Every blowjob, every bloody submission, had its price.
Carlisle registered at the Reardon Hotel under an assumed name. The guys in Florence claimed the queers at the Reardon to be easy pickings for an apparently willing stranger. Prison gossip suggested that the closeted homos who frequented the place were always interested in a new piece of tail. Male-to-male prison trysts were a necessary evil, but legitimate fruits, people who lived that way because they chose to, were looked down on with absolute contempt by the convicted felons in the Arizona State Prison.
Carlisle had listened avidly to tales about the Reardon and other such places. He listened and drew his own conclusions, deciding how such men might fit into his long-term planning. Now, he was ready to transform plan to action.
He dressed carefully, applying makeup and adjusting the wig in a practiced manner. He’d done it before, in Florence, at the behest of one of the prison’s head honchos, a man the inmates called PS, short for Peeping Supervisor. PS, a voyeur par excellence, enjoyed arranging private amateur theatricals. Scripts usually called for an ersatz conjugal visit in which inmates played both female and male roles. Brutally forced sex often came into play in these dramatic sketches, with PS and his buddies gaping from the sidelines.
PS was high enough in the prison hierarchy to be able to make suitable arrangements for the shows, including times, places, and appropriate costumes for all performers. Since PS was also in charge of inmate work assignments, plums of which were handed out on a strict patronage basis, his presentations never lacked for volunteer performers.
Carlisle, lusting after a choice inmate-clerk assignment that would give him access to both typewriter and postage, auditioned for PS in private. His enthusiastic performance allowed him to be drafted into the ensemble. Due to small stature, which made costuming him as a woman fairly easy, Carlisle was typecast in female roles. He enjoyed himself immensely. Not the sex per se. Women characters were, by definition, victims. What happened to the “wife” was often physically unpleasant, but Carlisle managed to discover certain psychic rewards.
One was a sense of kinship to his scholarly roots. He had always been struck by Elizabethan drama, by the complex female roles that, during Shakespeare’s time, were performed by male actors. Carlisle considered himself capable of doing justice to King Lear’s Regan or to Lady Macbeth. He shrugged off typecasting ragging from other inmates because he saw his performances as a challenge. It wasn’t his fault that those other ignorant bastards were too dumb to realize he was playing a part in an ancient and ongoing tradition.
His relationship with PS and his theatrical accomplishments provided the cushy job as Mallory’s inmate clerk that had been his initial objective, but there was one additional benefit as well. Seeing the effect the playacting had on PS and his like-minded cronies gave Andrew Carlisle a powerful sense of validation. He found it amusing to observe the audience’s reactions, to see the rapt attention on their stupid faces and hear their ugly sounds of approval. They liked seeing someone stripped and brutalized before their very eyes. They probably would have liked doing it themselves if they’d just had guts enough, which they didn’t.
And that was where the validation came in—from knowing there was no difference between him and those bastards in the audience, between the jailer and the jailed, between the acknowledged perpetrators of crime and violence and those who, theoretically, were dead set against it.
Not all the corrections folks were like PS and his pals. Compared to PS, Mallory was a damned Eagle Scout, but between the bad apples and the criminals, there was hardly an iota of difference. If anything, the inmates maybe had a bit more guts since they had demonstrated the courage of their convictions and had balls enough to act on their baser impulses. But then again, they were also dumb enough to get caught.
Dumb enough to get caught once, Carlisle added to himself as he examined the effect of his cross-dressing in one of the Reardon’s deteriorating bathroom mirrors. Once, but not twice. He’d see to it.
For almost an hour, Diana joined Davy on the couch, and the two of them tried to pull together the center coil of Davy’s basket, but the slick pieces of cactus sprang apart again and again. Diana had been in the same room while Rita started hundreds of baskets. Now, the Anglo woman berated herself for not paying closer attention. When Rita did it, the process seemed totally effortless. Finally, Diana gave up.
“How about some dinner?” she asked, stretching.
“What kind?” Davy asked. “The tortillas are gone. I already checked.”
“Rita’s not the only one who can cook around here, you know,” Diana told him.
“Can you make tortillas?”
“No.”
“Popovers?”
“Well, no.”
“See there?” Davy returned glumly, and went back to working on the elusive basket.
Chastened, Diana retreated to the kitchen. Davy was right, in a way. She had got out of the habit of cooking. That was something Rita handled, and the older woman was much better at it than she was. There didn’t seem to be any sense in rocking the boat.
Now, though, she looked through her larder, surprised by some of the things she found there. She settled on hot chocolate. She remembered hot chocolate as a cold-weather drink, one her mother would make for wintertime Sunday-night suppers. Iona Cooper had served steaming mugs of hot chocolate accompanied by slices of toast slathered with homemade jam. There were always hunks of sharp cheddar cheese sitting on a platter in the middle of the table. Iona Dade Cooper’s hot chocolate, cocoa as she called it, had been anything but ordinary. It wasn’t remotely related to the new versions that came dried and in envelopes.
One at a time, Diana gathered the necessary ingredients—chocolate syrup, sugar, salt, canned milk, and vanilla—mixing them as her mother once had, with a glob of this and a pinch of that. When the ingredients were all in the saucepan, she stood stirring it absently over the gas burner, remembering the sudden role reversal after her mother’s return from the hospital. She remembered the myriad cups of hot chocolate she had made for her mother, for both of them, in those last few months before the cancer had cheated Iona Dade Cooper of even that small pleasure.
After Iona’s diagnosis, Gary returned to Eugene, while Diana dropped out of school—temporarily, she thought—to stay home and care for her dying mother. Someone had to do it, and Max wasn’t up to it. The process had taken two full semesters.
At first Gary came over on weekends to spell her a little, but that happened less and less often as the months wore on. It was too long a drive, he said. It took too much time away from his work. And Max Cooper didn’t hang around much, either. On those rare occasions when he was there, Diana resented his being in the way and underfoot. When he started staying away, Diana barely noticed his increasingly prolonged
absences. She was only too happy to have him out of the way.
Gradually, Diana’s world shrank until it encompassed only her mother’s room with its hospital bed and cot, the bathroom, and the worn path in the linoleum that led from the bedroom to the kitchen. The days and nights became almost interchangeable except that sometimes, during the day, the endless hours were punctuated by someone from town stopping by with a covered dish.
Iona Cooper had always been a private person, but now the barriers between mother and daughter melted away, leaving them far more intimate than either of them wanted. The forced intimacy deprived them both of dignity as Diana learned to do things she never thought herself capable of—giving shots, caring for her mother’s most basic needs, cleaning her, feeding her.
Pain, her mother’s enemy, became Diana’s mortal enemy as well. She fought it with whatever puny medications the doctors allowed her. Hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, she battled the pain by engaging her mother in countless hours of conversation. Sipping hot chocolate, Diana and her mother talked for months, weeks, and days on end while the blessed periods of respite between one dose of pain medication and the next grew ever shorter and shorter.
“Why?” Diana asked one day. She had heard Max come in and stumble his way upstairs to his own room, bouncing off first one wall and then another, cursing drunkenly under his breath.
Iona’s eyes opened and fixed on Diana’s face. “Why what?” She had heard her husband, too. The lines of communication between them were all too open. Both mother and daughter knew what the other meant.
“Why did you stay all these years? Why didn’t you leave?”
Iona shook her head. “Couldn’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Damaged goods,” Iona answered. Turning her face to the wall, that was all she would say, and since turning away was all she had left, her only shred of privacy or self-determination, Diana respected the gesture. She didn’t intrude, and she didn’t ask again.