Blue Lonesome (10 page)

“That’s right. And if that’s the way it was with Anna, then maybe it all came back to her in Frisco. She couldn’t live with it so she killed herself.”

“I can think of another possibility,” he said.

“For killing herself? What else is there except guilt?”

“Innocence. She couldn’t live with the pain of her loss, or the knowledge that whoever did murder her husband and daughter would go unpunished.”

“They why’d she run in the first place?”

“Guilt isn’t the only thing that makes people run.”

“Right. Cowardice is another.”

“And hopelessness is a third,” Messenger said. “She might not have seen any hope in staying and fighting alone. From what I’ve gathered, the people around here didn’t give her any hope.”

“Me being one of them.”

“I’m not trying to lay any blame on you, Mrs. Burgess. I’m only doing what you’ve been doing, offering a possible explanation.”

“You’re offering bullshit, as far as I’m concerned.” She was angry again; the inner fire made her eyes shine and sparkle like sunlight on glass. “Anna was guilty and you coming around and saying otherwise isn’t gonna change the fact. You don’t know a goddamn thing about her or me or what it’s like to live and die in this country. Go on back to the city—that’s where
you
belong.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you—”

“Did a good job of it, mean to or not. Go on, get out of here. You and me are finished talking.”

“Not quite. There’s something else you should know.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Your sister had quite a bit of money when she died. Fourteen thousand dollars. The authorities impounded it when they couldn’t trace next of kin.”

“Blood money,” Dacy Burgess said. “Dave’s and Tess’s life insurance policies. Company had to pay off when no charges were filed against Anna. And now you’re gonna tell me I’m entitled to it, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, I don’t want it. Lonnie and me don’t want it, you hear me?” She was on her feet, the cords in her neck bulging, the bones in her upper chest as sharply defined as hatchet blades. “You tell the authorities to keep it, give it to the homeless, do whatever they want with it. Tell them Dacy and Lonnie Burgess don’t want a dime of Anna Roebuck’s fucking blood money!”

S
LOW, HOT DRIVE
back to Beulah. He spent it brooding about Anna, Dacy Burgess, the situation he’d walked into here. Logically, what he ought to do now was to check out of the High Desert Lodge and then drive on down to Vegas; he’d get there in plenty of time for a little blackjack, dinner, perhaps a show. What more could he do in Beulah? He’d found out what he’d come to find out, fulfilled his good-citizen’s obligation to Anna’s family. The only responsibility left to him was to notify Inspector Del Carlo of the Jane Doe suicide’s true identity, and he could make that call from Vegas today or tomorrow.

Yet there was a reluctance in him just to walk away from what he’d learned. His curiosity was far from satisfied. There were too many questions, too many puzzling elements; they presented the same sort of challenge as a knotty tax problem, stimulated his desire to work toward a solution, create order out of a certain amount of chaos. Facts were like numbers—shift them around, add and subtract, multiply and divide, try different equations, and sooner or later you could be certain you had the correct answer.

Was Anna Roebuck guilty or innocent of double murder? That was the central question, the central problem. His feeling that almost everybody in Beulah was wrong about her guilt was groundless, even foolish; he had scanty facts and little or no concrete knowledge of the people involved. And yet it remained strong and persistent. Seventeen years as a CPA had taught him to trust his gut reaction to a given situation; in tax and financial matters, at least, it had seldom proven wrong.

The child’s body in the well was its core. He could accept the brutal murder of an eight-year-old, a type of atrocity that happened too often in these violent times; he could accept a mother committing such an act as part of a psychotic episode triggered by the shotgun slaying of a faithless husband. But the rest of it simply did not ring true to him as a mother’s crime. Kill a husband and leave him lie in his own blood, yes; kill a daughter and reclothe her and then drop her body into a well, no. Somebody had done those things, somebody had had a reason no matter how bizarre or insane, but not the woman who’d kept a one-eyed panda bear, her husband’s boyhood watch, and a book on coping with pain and grief. Catathymic crisis be damned; repressed memory be damned. Not Ms. Lonesome.

All right. Then what harm could there be in spending another day or two in Beulah, talking to others who’d known Anna and the circumstances of the crimes? Talking to Dacy Burgess again, or at least trying to. Despite the fact that she’d taken those potshots at him, he found her almost as compelling as her sister, and for some of the same reasons. Product of a place and a way of life so far removed from his own that they might have been from different cultures, yet there were similarities, too, that put them on a mutual level of understanding. Loneliness was one, but he sensed others as well. He felt he would like to know her better. So why
not
stay and make the effort? It couldn’t be any more unfulfilling than throwing money away on a blackjack table, ogling bare-breasted showgirls on a stage, or trying to find a one-night stand that would only make his loneliness more acute, whether he succeeded or not.

Once he’d made the decision, he felt better. A sense of purpose always buoyed him. In town he stopped at a Western clothing store on Main and bought two shirts, a pair of Levi’s jeans, an inexpensive pair of high-topped hiking boots, and a flat-crowned, dun-colored Stetson. When in Rome. He was enough of an outsider without continuing to look like one. Besides, he would need proper clothing if he intended to return to Death Valley and go tramping around other desert locales.

Thirst tugged at him when he left the store. There were a brace of taverns on this block, but instead he entered a package liquor store and bought two iced cans of Bud. A cool shower and the air-conditioned privacy of his motel room held more appeal than the company of strangers.

A blob of red flickered in the room’s half-light when he let himself in: the message light on the bedside telephone. It surprised him, but not very much. The air conditioner was turned down low and the room was stuffy; he put the unit on high, then opened one of the cans of beer and drank a third of it before he called the office.

Mrs. Padgett answered. “Oh yes, Mr. Messenger. Yes, I have a message for you. Message for Messenger.” She simpered a little, as if she were nervous or keyed up. “It’s from Mr. John T. Roebuck. You know who he is, I’m sure?”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Well, he called about one. He’d like to see you at the Wild Horse. That’s the casino on Main—”

“Yes, I know, I saw the sign.”

“He’ll be in his office until five.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Padgett.”

“You’re certainly welcome. Ah, Mr. Messenger …?”

“Yes?”

“Is it true about Anna Roebuck? That she killed herself in San Francisco?”

“It’s true.”

“Opened her veins with a butcher’s knife? That’s what I heard. Is that how she did it?”

There was a note in her voice that made him think of a vulture poised over a piece of carrion. He said, keeping his tone level, “No, you heard wrong,” and broke the connection.

They really hate Anna, he thought, dead as well as alive. The whole town. You couldn’t blame them if she was guilty, but she’d never even been arrested, much less charged with the crimes. Judged and tried and convicted by all her neighbors except one, without benefit of even a hearing. Condemned, too, willfully if not in fact, and now that the death sentence had been carried out by her own hand, they were gloating over the bits and pieces of her remains. Like the knitting women smiling and watching heads roll in
A Tale of Two Cities
.

He finished the beer, tossed the empty can into the wastebasket. His watch said that it was a few minutes past three. Plenty of time: there was no need to rush to see John T. Roebuck. He was pretty sure he knew what Roebuck wanted—the same thing Mrs. Padgett and Sally Adams and Ada Kendall and the rest of them wanted. He’d go give it to him eventually, before five o’clock; he was curious about the Roebuck family and about John T., the big fish in the local pond. But there was someone else he wanted to talk to first: Anna’s only other champion, Jaime Orozco.

In the bathroom he ran the shower until he had a temperature that suited him. He spent ten minutes under it, soaking away the desert grit and trying to work the last of the soreness out of his bruised knee. Dressed again in his new clothing, he had a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Not too bad. In fact, much better than he’d expected. Not every city dweller could wear Western garb without looking like a refugee from a dude ranch, or just plain ludicrous, or both.

After a brief debate with himself, he left the Stetson in the room when he went out. No use in overdoing it.

LOCATING JAIME OROZCO
took a little time and effort. There was no listing for him in the local telephone directory. Mrs. Padgett might know where he lived, but Messenger was reluctant to deal with her again after their phone conversation; he thought it would be better to ask strangers. The first one he asked, a surly attendant at a nearby gas station, either didn’t know or wouldn’t bother to tell him. He made his second stop at a
taqueria
, but the waitress and cook there were equally uncommunicative—probably because
he
was a stranger, and an Anglo at that.

It was the clerk in the Western clothing store where he’d bought his new outfit who finally told him: Jaime Orozco lived with his daughter, Carmelita Ramirez, and her family on Dolomite Street. “That’s on the south flats,” the clerk said. “Down past the new high school. I don’t know the number. You’ll have to ask one of the people down there.”

Messenger found the street easily enough. It was unpaved, part gravel and part rutted hardpan, and flanked by a haphazard collection of wood frame houses and small trailer homes, all of them sun-flayed and poor-looking. Chickens and goats and dogs were visible in most yards. All of the faces he saw were Mexican. This was what once, not so long ago, would have been called Mextown or Spictown by the white establishment. Now, with racism forced into a more euphemistic existence, it was “the south flats, down past the new high school” and “the people down there.”

A woman carrying a market basket pointed out the Ramirez home: one of the newer trailers, set inside a neatly fenced yard; a roofed arbor extended out to the rear. In the yard a chubby boy of six or seven was playing fetch with a black-and-tan mongrel puppy. He stopped the game when Messenger opened the gate and walked through; stood peering round-eyed, a well-chewed tennis ball poised in one fist.

Messenger smiled at him. “Hi there. Can you tell me if Jaime Orozco lives here?”

The boy just looked.

Didn’t speak English? No, it was probably just that he was shy. Might be easier to talk to in Spanish. Messenger had had two years of elective Spanish at Berkeley; he dredged around in his memory for long-stored words and phrases.

“
Por favor, niño. Es esta la casa de Jaime Orozco?
”

That produced a tentative grin. “
Sí. Mi abeulo.
”

“
Esta aquí ahora?
”

“
Por ahí fuera.
” The boy gestured. “
En el patio.
”

“
Gracias, niño. Muchas gracias.
”

Messenger went around to the rear of the trailer. A pair of weathered, picnic-style tables with attached benches and two mismatched lounge chairs were arranged under the arbor. A man sat propped on one of the chairs, reading a newspaper; there was nobody else in sight. When he saw Messenger he lowered the paper, folded it carefully, and set it on a nearby table—all without taking dark, sad eyes off his visitor.

“Señor Orozco? Jaime Orozco?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Messenger had expected a much older man: Reverend Hoxie’s use of the word “retired,” the chubby little boy saying Orozco was his grandfather. The man on the lounge chair was no more than fifty-five, lean and fit-looking, with eyebrows like clumps of black brush and cheeks and forehead crosshatched by dozens of lines and furrows, as if a bas relief map of a section of desert landscape had been graven there.

“Sit down, Señor Messenger.”

Messenger went to a bench connected to one of the picnic tables. “I guess I’m getting to be well known in Beulah. Even dressed like one of the natives.”

“I thought you might come,” Orozco said gravely. “Anna Roebuck had no other friends here.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“Were you her friend?”

“I wanted to be. I tried to be.”

“But it was too late when you met her.”

“Much too late.”

The trailer’s rear door opened, releasing the aroma of cooking meat and peppers; a heavyset woman in her late twenties stepped out onto a tiny stair landing. Orozco introduced her as his daughter, Carmelita. She acknowledged Messenger with such thin-lipped disapproval that he felt she’d been watching and listening at the curtained window beside the door.

“A cool drink?” she asked him. “Beer, water?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Papa?”

“No.” When the woman had gone back inside, shutting the door harder than was necessary, Orozco shook his head and said, “Not even Carmelita.”

“Not even … oh. She doesn’t agree with you that Anna was innocent.”

“We have had arguments.” Orozco shifted position, wincing slightly, and Messenger realized that his right leg was stiff, the foot—encased in a slipper—oddly bent inward at the ankle. When Orozco saw him looking at the leg he reached down to rub it with his fingertips. “No one told you about this, eh?”

“No. What happened?”

“An accident. Nearly two years ago. My horse stepped in a rabbit hole while I was chasing a stray cow. He broke a leg, I broke an ankle. He was the lucky one, I think.”