by Leo W. Banks
“Nope.” I was stirring scrambled eggs in the frying pan.
“Drug stuff?”
“What else?”
“Them mooks, they’ll shoot anybody. Uh-huh, uh-huh.” As he spoke, Cash swung his head back and forth in a pendulum motion. His owl eyes moved in sync with his head, never settling directly on the listener.
I filled the plates at the kitchen counter and set them down on the table, and we ate. A sheriff’s car roared down the entrance road that leads into Double Wide, turned in front of the Airstream, and continued toward the crime scene on Paradise Mountain. The sound of it in the quiet morning had us all leaning down and looking out the open door as it passed.
I said to Cash, “I noticed that rig you were driving last night.”
“My brother’s Dodge Dart. What about it?”
“That trouble of yours with the stolen trucks. Is that it, or is there anything else I need to know about?”
“Got into some shit in the marines, but that don’t count.”
“The detective working this murder is Benny Diaz. He wants to talk to you.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh.” That was Cash’s all-purpose conversation mover. Anything he wanted to communicate could be done with a double “Uh-huh.”
“You’re sure that’s it?”
“Ain’t done nothing but go to town and fix cars in my brother’s driveway. Sweat.”
A car stopped outside, and Diaz came up the front steps. He flattened a palm on either side of the door and poked his head inside. “I’m looking for Cashmere Miller.”
“Copy that,” Cash said.
“We need to talk outside, if you don’t mind.”
Cash said, “Thanks for the grub, Mr. Mayor,” and walked out the door.
Diaz raised his eyebrows at me. “Mr. Mayor?”
“It was a by-God landslide.”
When Diaz was gone, Opal said, “If I knew he was that handsome, I so would’ve done my toenails.”
SIX
I cleaned the kitchen and made an appointment with a curator at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson. The call came just after 10:00 a.m.
“Mr. Stark, I’m Alice Menendez, Rolando’s cousin.” Panic ran along the edge of her voice. “Rolando’s missing! Do you know where Rolando’s at?”
The words landed on me like a sofa and I almost blurted it out: he’s in my freezer, at least part of him. Alice went on talking, or I might’ve done it.
“Everyone’s so upset,” she said. “He was helping his brother, and he just disappeared.”
“Helping his brother how?”
“In baseball. Fausto pitches in Monterrey, for the Sultans in Monterrey.” The Sultans were a franchise of the AAA Mexican summer league. It looked like Fausto was following Rolando’s lead in the game. I asked how long he’d been gone.
“Two weeks. He told Fausto he needed to take care of some business, and that was the last we heard from him. Nobody knows where he went to, and his phone goes right to voice mail. He wouldn’t just go away like this. Something’s happened.”
I didn’t want to tell Alice what I knew. His parents deserved to hear it first.
“Did he have any business up here?”
“I was hoping you’d know,” Alice said. “We called everyone. Nobody knows nothing!”
“All right, where’s Oscar? Is Oscar there?”
“Oscar’s out working. We sent somebody to find him.”
“You mean at the ranch?”
“No, he lost the ranch, Mr. Stark. Things were bad, money and everything.”
“Sorry to hear it. I know how much he loved that place.”
“He does mining now. He goes for days, and sometimes there’s no signal out there. We’re trying to find him. This is so terrible. Oh, it’s so terrible!”
“What about Natty?”
“She’s here, Mr. Stark. But she can’t talk. She’s too upset.”
I heard anguished voices in the background and Alice Menendez trying to quiet them.
I said, “Was Rolando in any trouble that you know of?”
“No, no, no, everything was fine.”
“I’m talking about cocaine, Alice. Was he backsliding?”
She let a long time pass before answering. “I don’t know. We never talked about that. Maybe he did it a little bit, but I don’t think so. No, no, I’m sure he was clean.”
Alice sounded young, likely a teenager. She talked as if she knew me, and that probably came from family stories. I let her go on because she needed to unload. I was a friendly voice, a well-known American, and she thought I could help.
She said Rolando had gone to Monterrey in April to help Fausto train in advance of the Sultans’ opening game and stayed on. She gave me Fausto’s contact information. I heard Natty wailing in the background and Alice trying to calm her.
Alice kept saying, “Stop it, Natty! You’re being so crazy today! Que lastima!” Then to me: “I have to go!”
“Alice, are you still there?”
“Yes, yes…Natty, please…don’t be that way! Yes, I’m here, Mr. Stark.”
“Have Oscar call me. Soon as he comes back, he needs to call me.”
Alice said okay. Then: “Mr. Stark, please, help us find Rolando? Promise you’ll help us find Rolando?”
“Yes. I promise.”
I felt like the world’s biggest heel. They deserved to know. But I was counting on the problem working itself out in a hurry. They’d find Oscar, he’d call me, and I could reveal the terrible truth—the part of it I knew, anyway.
SEVEN
As soon as I hung up with Alice, I left a message with Fausto. At 11:00 a.m., I started the Bronco and hit the horn and Opal hurried out her front door carrying her easel and a small gear bag. She did pencil sketches on the sidewalk in downtown Tucson. She wore a floppy white sunhat with a plastic red rose tucked under the black band.
The trip was sixteen miles. The first five crossed empty desert before climbing into the Tucson Mountains. The road was steep and winding. The mountain slopes were covered with massive multiarmed saguaros, the tallest ones marking the sky.
In the tightness of the pass, with the saguaros crowding both doors, it felt like driving through an alternate world populated by staring, spiny green monsters.
After the peak, the view opened to the city itself, a panorama of glaring sunlight, dust, asphalt, and sprawl. What a strange sight: a million people mashed into a valley of sand and scorpions, a flat, scorching-hot, slow-moving college town of flip-flops, palm trees, drifters begging from street corners, the look of easy southwestern charm, the world’s unquestioned leader in back-in parking.
Throughout its history, Tucson has never had water, money, jobs, or shade, but that hasn’t stopped the people from coming and the bulldozers from roaring. And when nobody was looking, the drug goons slipped into town.
The city sits along a cartel distribution network that moves every drug you can name through its streets and to every city and town in the country. But some of it stays behind, and that means shootouts over missing shipments, deliveries not made, promised payments that get lost or diverted, and retribution must be taken.
Those are matters of profit and loss, matters of real substance, although the trouble doesn’t need to stem from substance. It can be as pointless as a sidelong glance at a south-side traffic light, one gang member bracing a rival. It gets messy. A lot of blood gets spilled. You can read all about it in the gang graffiti written across the bridges and buildings of the city.
The drug trade has burned a hole through Tucson’s innocent heart.
I drove east into town on Speedway Boulevard. Opal’s best work spot was outside the convention center, where she could hit up downtown workers, and whatever visitors happened to be around in July.
She sold her portraits for $20 apiece. On good days she left with $200, assuming she didn’t give away money. If someone walked by with a weepy story, she’d peel off a $20 bill and hand it over.
Pulling
up to the curb, I said, “Don’t be giving away your cash, understand?”
“I’m gonna make money, not give it away.”
“I’ll pick you up. Say around five.”
“Ten-four, Mr. Whip.” She had trouble getting out of the Bronco. She juggled her sketch gear and somehow got wedged in the door. She was built like a fullback with broad shoulders and plank legs.
Just as she got one foot on the ground, a gust of wind nearly stole her hat. She squealed, got it back, set her duck feet onto the pavement, stumbled against the curb, and mashed her free hand down on the hat before it flew away again.
She yelped, “I meant to do that!” Then she yanked her pants out of her crack and scooted down the sidewalk.
EIGHT
I drove east of downtown to the edge of the University of Arizona campus and parked outside the Marriott Hotel. The parking meters give you fifteen minutes for twenty-five cents. I coughed up four quarters, figuring that should be enough to get what I needed from Tork Mortenson at the Historical Society.
The building, catty corner to the hotel, looks like a mausoleum from the street and gets worse inside. Mortenson waited in the basement, which was part storage area and part office space. His particular hole in the wall was dusty, echoing, and freezing cold in contrast to the outside air. The air conditioner bellowed nearby.
When I appeared in his doorway, Mortenson came around his desk with a hearty greeting. “I hope you didn’t have trouble finding me.”
“Not at all,” I said. “You give good directions.”
“Some people get lost coming down here. Not the state budget cutters. They know right where to go.” He motioned to a chair opposite his desk. “Have a seat, have a seat.”
Mortenson looked to be near retirement. He was thin, wiry, and academic, born to sit in a cluttered office wearing corduroy and soft shoes. He had a fuzzy white mustache that wanted to crawl into his mouth. He moved with vitality and clearly loved what he did, which was talking about the past.
He held up a book, The Fever: Discovering Gold in Arizona Territory, 1863–1895. The cover image was a period black-and-white of a grizzled miner holding a gold nugget over his head.
“You indicated you were interested in learning more about gold mining at Paradise.” He held up the book. “I wrote this underappreciated epic twenty-two years ago and had to dig it out to refresh my memory. It’s remarkable what you forget over time. Are you a writer, Mr. Stark?”
“Of record books.”
He gave me a blank stare. Mortenson had no idea who I was, and that was refreshing. I didn’t have to go back through any stories or explain what I’d been doing since I fell off the earth.
“Well, I can tell you there were two major claims up there, the Katharine Anne and Glory Town.” Mortenson opened his book and looked at me. “Don’t you love the names?”
“By glory, I’m guessing they mean money.”
“The commonality through time, yes.” Mortenson flipped to the page he wanted and dragged his finger down as he read, his nose almost against the paper. “I wish I could give you figures, exact dollar amounts. It’s difficult to estimate, and of course most of the official reports were exaggerated for investment purposes. Well, for swindle purposes.”
“But they were paying mines?”
“Indeed. The yield on that mountain was substantial.”
Mortenson kept reading. He mumbled along with the words. With one hand, he shielded his eyes against the overhead light. “Hmm, certainly an interesting history. Lots of violence, I’m afraid. They had issues with bandits, and that area being so remote, why, law enforcement was ineffective. Just getting out there took hours.”
He looked at his text again. “I see here the first three owners were murdered outright, and several successors simply disappeared.”
“When did the loads play out?”
“The main veins were plundered to nothing by the early twentieth century or thereabouts. But even today you can still find gold up there, assuming you know how to retrieve it.”
“The dream never dies,” I said.
“The awesome power of gold. It’s made fools of men through history and continues to do so. I’m told there’s a new bunch working up there now. They’ve started a digging of some sort. They’re not welcoming to visitors either.”
“You’ve been up there?”
“Some friends have, and they got a frosty reception,” Mortenson said. “They were approached by men wearing hip artillery, as they say, and the message was, ‘Get lost.’ I’m part of a group called the Rich Hill Gang. We travel to old mines and make a day of it. Have a nice lunch, tell stories. We’ve been concentrating on the borderlands recently, but I didn’t make that particular trip.”
Mortenson got a dreamy look and folded his hands behind his head. “What a marvelous piece of history. Are you familiar with the story of Rich Hill?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. I read a lot.”
“Cheers to you. There aren’t many of us left.”
Rich Hill was in the mountains near Wickenburg, west of Phoenix. In 1863, when Arizona was open frontier, the mountain man Pauline Weaver led an exploration party into that country. In a basin at the top of what came to be called Rich Hill, the men found chunks of gold lying on the ground. News of the find spread and attracted adventurers to the Territory.
I said, “They called that basin the potato patch. Lincoln wanted Arizona’s gold to help save the Union.”
“The Paradise story is similar,” Mortenson said. “There’s an old wagon road that comes up from the Mexican border, crosses Highway 86 around Three Points, and keeps going north to Paradise. The first settlers reported finding nuggets lying out in the sun along that last section of road. They called it the Glory Road. All they had to do was pick them up, and it was fast horses and choice beef to the end of their days.”
That sounded like my kind of work.
Mortenson spread a map across his desk. “The nuggets were gone quickly, of course. You’ll still find drifts and shafts up there, and I’m sure you know the difference. A shaft goes down into the ground and a drift sideways, usually into a mountain slope. There are buildings at the summit as well, a town if you will.”
He nosed the map. It showed most of southern Arizona. Tucson and its environs took up the largest portion, with Nogales on the border sixty miles south.
He used a finger to find Highway 86, also known as Ajo Way. It began on Tucson’s south side and ran due west, away from the city’s last homes. He pinpointed the start of the wagon road from the border up to Paradise Mountain.
On the map, it showed as a series of staggered blue dashes, meaning “stay away unless you have four-wheel drive.” There were no markings to note the intersection of Highway 86 and Glory Road as it proceeded north.
But the map was laid out in square-mile sections. I counted twenty-five from Tucson’s city limits to the intersection.
I asked Mortenson the names of his friends who were hustled off the mountain.
“What say I give them a call first, if that’s okay. Protocol, you know.”
“I should tell you that the men your friends met up there might’ve been part of a smuggling operation.” I told him about the mountain being taken over by narcos and the body on the trail.
He shot back in his chair with saucer eyes. “Did you say murder?”
“Afraid so. Up close. A hit.”
“Well, well. It appears the Old West is making a comeback up there.”
“Something like that.”
“Names, names, yes. I’ll do it right now.” He grabbed his cell, brought up his contact list, and pushed a button to make the call. While he waited, he dropped the phone to his shoulder and said confidentially, “They were shaken up for sure, but I think they’ll talk to you.”
He made two calls and left two messages, after which he grabbed a pair of glasses, put them on, and immediately pulled them off and tossed them back onto the desk. “I have to admit, th
is is quite exciting. I’m tickled to have an actual blood mystery to unravel.”
I had to get out of there before Mortenson had a stroke. He let me borrow his book and promised to call as soon as he heard anything.
NINE
It was still early, a few minutes past 2:00 p.m. I wanted to give Opal more time to make money, and that was partly self-interest. She owed me two months’ rent.
I went upstairs to the research library, a silent, dusty room with long tables and chairs, old-fashioned card catalogues, and computers. The librarians wait behind the main desk, and when you tell them what you want via the required form, they disappear into the cavernous rooms in back to retrieve it. They serve it to you like a box lunch.
I was curious about Gila monsters and Opal’s remark that their breath would set you on fire. I like legends and folklore and had time to kill. The Gila monster is a venomous orange-and-black lizard that can grow to twenty inches in length. I doubt any inhabitant of Arizona’s natural world has been the subject of more crazy stories.
The librarian’s folder swelled with them, random newspaper clippings from the nineteenth century to the present.
I looked for something that might explain Opal’s fire-breathing claim, and there it was. The story likely stemmed from the common superstition that the Gila monster’s breath was searing hot, foul, and routed through its anus.
Reading that, I let out an involuntary yip of laughter that broke the library’s church-like silence. The people around me stared with squinty-eyed disapproval. I considered explaining but thought better of it. Talking about a lizard’s blazing rear end was unlikely to calm anyone.
Some of the material in the folder cited more contemporary scientific sources, and was in fact true. Gila monsters inject their venom by taking hold of the part they object to—say, your prying hand—and grinding on it with their teeth. The best way to loosen the grip is to stick a pen in its mouth. If you don’t have a pen, I guess it’s not your day.
But the odds of having to take such action are slim. In recorded history, human deaths from Gila monster bites number a handful or two. They’re fundamentally polite creatures that retreat when anyone comes around, only getting aggressive if bothered in some way.