by J. A. Jance
Some of Carlisle’s catchphrases whirled back through her memory just as Gary Ladd had reported them to her. “Write what you know.” “Experience is the greatest teacher.” “If you want to write about it, do it.”
Do it? Do what? For the first time, she allowed herself to frame the question: What was Gary writing? She had never asked to look at his manuscript, had never interfered with his work. That was an act of faith on her part, a self-imposed test of her loyalty. Of course, she had passed the exam with flying colors. She was, after all, Iona Dade Cooper’s daughter. How could she do anything else? She had buried her head in the sand and refused to see anything beyond the fact that the stack of manuscript pages on his desk in the spare bedroom had grown gradually taller. That had been the only proof she’d ever required to convince herself that Gary was working, that he was doing what he was supposed to and living up to his part of the bargain.
But now, trembling with fear, Diana sprang from the couch and went looking for the manuscript. Naturally, it wasn’t there. The Smith-Corona still sat on the desk in the spare bedroom, and the blank paper was there where it should have been, but the manuscript itself was gone. She had seen it earlier in the day, when she’d been straightening up the house. That could mean only one thing. Gary had taken it with him when he left.
Why? she wondered. Why would he?
Diana looked at Brandon Walker across the top of her iced tea glass. She seemed much more composed now, as thought she had made up her mind about something while she was making the sandwiches.
“So why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you come all the way out here? Are you worried about me?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“And you’re convinced, just like I am, that he may come looking for me?”
“Yes,” he said again.
It was true, that was his concern. He could point to no concrete evidence to that effect, but all his cop instincts screamed out warnings that this woman was in danger.
She laughed aloud in the face of his obvious distress. “Me, too,” she said. “At least we’re agreed on that score. Now tell me, if you don’t want me to wear a gun, and if you don’t want me to protect myself, what do you suggest I do?”
“Leave,” he said simply. “Go away for a while. Stay with friends or relatives and give us a chance to catch him. Once Detective Farrell gets going on this case, Carlisle won’t be on the loose for long. He has no way of knowing that we’re already onto him, and if it weren’t for the Indians, God knows he wouldn’t be.”
“What Indians?” Diana asked.
“Two Papagos came to see me this morning, an old blind one and a younger one, an enormous man whose name is Gabe Ortiz.”
“Fat Crack came to see you?” Diana said incredulously.
“His name is Fat Crack? You know him? He’s evidently some kind of relative of the murdered girl.”
Diana nodded. “Her cousin. He’s Rita’s nephew, but I can’t imagine him coming to town to talk to an Anglo cop about this.”
“Well, he did,” Brandon said defensively, “and he brought the old blind man with him. They tipped us off early, so we’re on Carlisle’s trail while it’s still relatively warm. When I left him, Farrell was on his way to Florence to see if he could pick up any useful information—the names of Carlisle’s relatives or friends in the area, for instance, someone he might turn to for help now that he’s out.
“I remember his mother hanging around town during the time when his case was about to come to trial. It seems like she was from north Phoenix somewhere, maybe Peoria or Glendale, but I don’t think she had the same last name. Farrell will try to get a line on her as well.”
“And meanwhile, you want me to run away and hide?”
“Right.”
“Well, I won’t,” Diana declared stubbornly. “I’m going to stay right here in my own home. If he comes looking for me, I’ll kill the son of a bitch! I’ll put a damn bullet right between his eyes.”
“That’s premeditation,” Brandon countered. “If you kill him, you’ll be in big trouble.”
“Too bad.”
“It’s a whole lot more likely, though, that you’ll choke up when the time comes and not have nerve enough to pull the trigger.”
“I’ll have nerve enough,” she replied.
She was determined, tough, and foolhardy. Brandon Walker wanted desperately to talk her out of it. He had only one other weapon at his disposal, and he didn’t hesitate to use it.
“What will that do to Davy?” he asked.
Diana paused and swallowed. “Davy? He’ll be fine,” she said. “He’ll have Rita.”
“Will he? Will that be enough? People already call him Killer’s Child.”
Her eyes flashed with sudden anger. “How do you know that? Who told you?”
“Davy did,” Brandon said, watching as shocked dismay registered on her face.
“You’d better leave now,” Diana said.
Brandon Walker unfolded his long legs from the couch and got up to go, but first he stood for a moment, staring down at her.
“Think about it,” he said gravely. “Davy’s only a boy, Diana. How much of this do you think he can take?”
He paused at the end of the driveway and berated himself for betraying the boy’s confidence, but it was the only possible means of pounding some sense into Diana’s thick skull. Meantime, he looked around him in despair for other signs of civilization. No one else lived anywhere around here, for God’s sake. She couldn’t have picked a worse place. Help would be miles away if and when she finally needed it.
Enclosed behind the forest of cactus and with a high wall surrounding the patio and backyard area, the house had a fortresslike appearance, but appearances were deceiving. Once someone breached that walled perimeter, if the dog were taken out of the picture, for instance, the people in the isolated house would be totally vulnerable. Diana talked a good game, but Walker didn’t believe for a moment that she’d actually use the gun. She would threaten, but then hesitate at the critical moment. Even veteran cops made that potentially fatal mistake at times.
But even as he worried about her, Walker was struck by the difference between Diana now—defiant and resourceful—and the way she was when he first saw her—broken and worried sick about that bastard husband of hers.
He had driven up to the mobile home in Topawa late in the afternoon of an oppressively hot June Saturday. The sky was blue overhead, but far away across the desert a red wall of moving sand topped by black thunderheads announced an approaching storm.
Diana came to the door wearing a shapeless robe. Her eyes were red, as though she’d been crying. Her face was drawn from lack of sleep and her coloring sallow and unhealthy. When he showed her his ID, she turned even paler.
“Does Garrison Ladd live here?” he asked. She nodded. “Is he home?”
“No. He’s not. He’s gone.”
“Do you have any idea when he’ll be back?”
“No.”
“Are you Mrs. Ladd?”
“Yes.”
“Could I come in and speak with you for a few minutes?”
She stepped aside and held the door for him to come in without asking what he wanted or why he was there. As soon as he saw the crumpled newspaper on the floor, he guessed that she already knew.
He took a small notebook from his pocket. “I’d like to ask you a few questions. Mind if I sit down?”
“No. Go ahead.”
He sat while she remained standing, her arms wrapped tightly around her body as if she were desperately cold, although the cooler was turned off and the temperature was stifling. Outside, the wind kicked up, and the first few splatters of rain pelted against the metal siding.
“Was your husband home last Friday night?” he asked.
“He was out,” Diana answered woodenly. “He went to a dance.”
“Where?”
“One of the villages, San Pedro.”
“What time did he get hom
e?”
“Saturday. In the morning. The dance lasted all night.”
“Did he go by himself?”
“No. His professor went with him, his creative-writing professor from the U., Andrew Carlisle.”
“And did this Andrew Carlisle come home with your husband?”
“No. Gary came home by himself.”
“How did he seem when he came home? Was he upset? Did he act as though something was wrong?”
Diana had been answering his questions as though in a fog. Now, she seemed to rouse herself “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she said evasively.
Brandon played dumb. “Why not?”
“You’re going to trap me into saying something I shouldn’t.”
“So he was upset?”
“I didn’t say that he was fine when he came home. Tired from being up all night and maybe from having had too much to drink.”
“He was drinking?”
“A little.”
Brandon stared meaningfully at the newspaper lying on the floor, its front page crumpled into a wad. He made sure there could be no doubt about where he was looking.
“You’ve seen the paper,” he said. “Did you know the girl?”
In the stricken silence that followed, both became aware of the steady drum of wind and rain on the outside of the trailer. For the longest time, Diana Ladd didn’t answer.
“No,” she said at last. “I didn’t know her.”
“What about her grandmother, Rita Antone? She lives just across the way a few hundred yards.”
Diana nodded. “I know Rita from school, but we’re not necessarily friends.”
“Did your husband know Gina?”
“Maybe. I don’t know everyone my husband knows.”
“Why did he go to the dance?”
“Why does anyone? To eat at the feast, to drink the wine.”
“Is your husband a student of Indian customs?” he asked.
“My husband is a writer,” she answered.
By the time the detective finally left the house, he drove into the teeth of a raging desert storm. Fierce winds shook the car, while sheets of rain washing across the windshield made it difficult to see. Walker had been told that the dance at San Pedro had been a traditional rain dance. It worked with a vengeance, he thought, as he slowed down to pick his way through a dip already filling with fast-moving brown water. Two miles east of Three Points, he was stuck for forty-five minutes at one of the larger dips, waiting for cascading water to recede.
He was still there when a call came over the radio telling him to turn around and go back to the reservation. A pickup truck had been found in a flooded wash off Highway 86 west of Quijotoa. When the highway patrol was finally able to reach the vehicle, they found a body inside—that of a male Caucasian with a single, self-inflicted bullet hole in his head.
That was how Brandon Walker first laid eyes on Garrison Ladd. As he told Davy years later, Garrison Ladd was dead from the bullet wound long before Walker met him.
Rita had hated living with the Clarks.
All that week, no matter what she did, the Mil-gahn woman found fault with Dancing Quail’s work. She didn’t work fast enough, she wasn’t thorough enough, she wasn’t good enough. And all that week, Dancing Quail kept silent in the face of Adele Clark’s angry onslaughts, but she began planning what she would do.
“I’m very unhappy here,” she told Louisa one night as they were getting ready for bed in their stuffy upstairs room. “I must go someplace else to find work.”
“My brother Gordon is in California,” Louisa offered. “I could write and ask him. He might know someplace you could go.”
“How far is California?” Dancing Quail asked.
Louisa shook her head. “A long way.”
“How can I go there?”
“On the train, I think,” Louisa answered.
“Will you write down where your brother is so I can find him?”
Louisa’s eyes grew large. “You would go there? By yourself?”
“I can’t stay here,” Rita answered stubbornly.
Louisa wrote her brother’s address on a scrap of paper, which Dancing Quail tucked inside the leather case. “What about Mrs. Clark?” Louisa asked. “What will she say?”
“She won’t know until after I am gone.”
Dancing Quail surprised herself when she talked so bravely, but a river of courage flowed into her from Understanding Woman’s medicine basket. She was determined that once more she would have that basket as her own.
She waited impatiently for the next occasion when she would be scheduled to dust the basket room. At the appointed time, she took the other medicine basket with her, concealed under her apron. When she finished dusting, the new basket, now empty, had been exchanged for the other.
That very night important guests came to visit the Clarks and were shown through the basket room. Breathlessly, Dancing Quail waited to see if the switch would be discovered, but it was not. No one opened the glass case. The Mil-gahn woman either couldn’t tell or didn’t notice the difference in quality between the two medicine baskets.
Two days later on Thursday, girls’ day, the domestic workers’ traditional afternoon off, Rita declined Louisa’s invitation to visit the park. Instead, she stayed behind. First she cut off her long braids, hiding the clipped hair in her leather case. Then, with her hair cut short and taking only the precious medicine basket with her, she made her way downtown. Going to one of the few stores that catered to Indians, she bought a set of men’s clothing, telling the clerk she was buying it for her younger brother who was coming from the reservation to visit.
Dancing Quail took her purchases and slipped away into an alley where she donned the new clothing. At first it felt strange to be wearing stiff pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and heavy shoes, but she soon got used to it. That night, with the help of two young men, Papagos she met in the train yard, Dancing Quail headed west on a slow-moving, California-bound freight train.
It was hot on the train, and noisy, but not nearly as frightening as it had been long ago as she headed to Phoenix from Chuk Shon for the very first time. Dancing Quail told the two Indian boys she was traveling with that she was going to join her brother in California. A job waited for her there in a place called Redlands.
Each time the train slowed for a station, the Indians would jump off and hide so that when the railroad police—the boys called them bulls—checked, no one would be there. Then, as the train started up again, they would run and jump on it. Sometimes the three were alone in the car. Sometimes other travelers—mostly Mexicans but also a few other Indians—joined them.
For a long time, they rode and talked, but late that night, when the towns and stops got farther apart, Dancing Quail found herself growing sleepy. She was dozing when she felt something pressing against her. Opening her eyes she found another Papago, smelling of alcohol and very drunk, trying to unfasten her pants.
“Stop,” she hissed. “Stop now.”
“Mawshch,” he whispered back. “You are promiscuous. You want it. If you did not, you would not be here.”
But she didn’t want it. What she had done with Father John was one thing. That she had wanted to do, but this was different. Struggling away from him in the swaying, noisy boxcar, she groped inside her shirt and found the medicine basket. She pried off the tight-fitting lid as he came after her again.
In addition to the items that had been there originally and the ones she had added from the other basket, there was now one other item—the owij, the awl, which Dancing Quail used to make her baskets. Her trembling fingers sought the awl, found it, and clutched it in the palm of her hand.
Her attacker reached for her again, grabbing her pants, fumbling them down over her hips, but as he leaned over her, thinking her helpless, he felt something hard and sharp press painfully into the soft flesh at the base of his throat. He grunted in surprise.
“Pia’a,” she whispered fiercely. “No!”
<
br /> When he didn’t back off, she increased the pressure on the awl. Any moment, she would cut him, and then what would he do? Cry out? Kill her? She should have been terrified, but Understanding Woman’s spirit was still strong inside her.
For a long time, they stayed frozen that way in the darkened boxcar, with him above Dancing Quail, pinning her down, and with the awl pricking his neck. Finally, he pulled away.
“Ho’ok,” he said, backing off. “Monster.”
But it didn’t matter to Dancing Quail what he called her, as long as he left her alone. Once he was gone, she pulled her pants back up and refastened them. She lay there then, wide awake, waiting for morning, afraid to close her eyes for fear he would come after her again.
Finally, as the orange sun rolled up over the rocky, far horizon, she did drift off for a little while. She woke up with a start a few minutes later. The awl was still clutched firmly in her hand. Only later did she realize that the arrowhead had disappeared from the opened basket.
Andrew Carlisle waited until he was sure his mother was asleep before he crept out of the house. He drove until he found a pay phone at an all-night Circle K. His hand shook as he dialed the old, familiar number and then waited to see if it would ring. It had been so many years, perhaps the phone had been disconnected by now, perhaps the system no longer worked.
The telephone was answered on the third ring. “J.S. and Associates,” a woman’s voice said.
He plugged the required change into the phone. “I’m an insurance investigator,” he said. “I’ll be in town tomorrow, and I need a copy of a police report on the double. I don’t want to have to wait around for it once I get there.”
“Have you done business with our firm before?”
“Yes, but it’s been several years.”
“Are you familiar with our new location?”
“No.”
“We’re on Speedway, just east of the university, in a house that’s been converted into offices.”
Just the thought of being close to the university made Carlisle uncomfortable. He was always afraid of running into someone he knew.