Dove Season (A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco) (16 page)

As Bobby and I approached her, she looked past us to the blanket-covered body.

“Hey, Gris,” Bobby said. “Thanks for coming out.”

He leaned in to kiss her, but she backed up a step and pushed his face away with an open hand.

“When’d you get shy?” Bobby sounded hurt.

“He knows about us?” Griselda asked, not acknowledging me past the pronoun.

Bobby nodded.

“Let’s get some things straight, Bob,” Griselda said. “I am here on official business. I’m treating this like any other investigation—and the two of you like any other witnesses.”

“Sure,” Bobby said. “I was just saying hi. Your job’s important, I get that. Don’t mean I can’t give my special lady a little sugar.”

Griselda rested her hand on her sidearm, only slightly casual. “No, that’s exactly what it means. No sugar. We’ve talked about this.”

“It kind of hurts me that you don’t want no one to know we’re going out. Am I that bad?” Bobby flashed his puppy eyes.

“Should I let you two talk?” I was already backing away.

“Yes, Bob, you are that bad. You have a reputation with the sheriff’s department. Also with the El Centro Police Department, the Holtville cops, most of the city of Brawley, that dog catcher out in Plaster City, the Border Patrol, the I-8 CHPs, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you were on a Homeland Security watch list. I’m not going to let you impact my job. I’m a short Mexican woman. That don’t put me exactly on the fast track in the department. I can’t let you make it that much harder.”

“Baby,” Bobby tried weakly.

“Baby? That’s what…?” She stopped and took a deep breath. “You called me because you found yourself a dead body. That’s serious. Treat it that way. Most cops’ boyfriends just try to get out of traffic tickets. Moment I stepped out of my car, this became my case. You got to treat me like any other cop.”

“But I hate cops,” Bobby said.

She walked the couple of steps to where I had retreated. Griselda nearly crushed my hand and introduced herself as “Deputy Sheriff Villarreal,” but I had already decided that I liked the name Griselda too much.

“How much did Bobby tell you on the phone?” I asked.

“That you two found a body.”

“Might as well put me down as the one that made the call. If it doesn’t matter. I mean, I’m not trying to lie or nothing, but Bobby—his reputation.”

She nodded. “Name?”

“Jimmy Veeder. James. It’s my house. Now. My dad died. Natural causes. I live here,” I said, nodding my head toward the house.

“Bob told me about your father. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Tell me what happened.”

I gave her the rundown of the morning. How I woke up, no water pressure, went to the pump, found the body. She took notes and cut in with a couple of time-related questions, but mostly just let me tell it.

“Was she alive when you found her?”

“No, she was definitely dead.”

“Then why is she over there? If you weren’t trying to save her, why did you move the body? Why did you take the body out of the well?”

“It’s not really a well. It’s more like a standpipe.”

“Why did you move the body?”

“It didn’t seem right to leave her down there.”

Deputy Griselda’s disappointment laced her slow, steady voice. “You should know better. Don’t you watch TV? Haven’t you ever seen a cop show? You should know. Everybody knows. You don’t move a dead body. Little, stupid kids know that.”

“Bobby told me to leave her. It’s on me. He was the voice of reason.”

“That would be a first.”

“Didn’t seem right. We waited and nobody came. What else can I say? I did what I did.”

“Yeah, and what you did was not only stupid, but illegal. I could cite you.” She shook her head, looking up from her notepad. “I’d tell you, ‘Next time, don’t let that happen,’ but let’s hope there isn’t going to be a next time.”

Griselda and I walked to the body together. When we got within twenty feet, she slapped a backhand into my stomach, making a loud
smap
. It stopped me in my tracks.

“Hang out. I’ve got more questions for you and Bob.” She pointed to where Bobby was sitting on the low stucco wall. I shrugged and joined him.

Bobby and I watched Deputy Griselda put on some rubber gloves. She grabbed a corner of the blanket and took it off the body, setting it to the side. She seemed to know what she was doing. But since I had no clue what she was doing, appearances could have been deceiving. She looked at the hands and then concentrated her attention on the face and head, turning it from side to side, spending a lot of time on the back of her head. Twice she walked to her car to get supplies. She put each hand in a paper bag, holding the bag in place with rubber bands at the wrists.

Her preliminary look at the body completed, she walked to the water pump, yelling to us on the way. “Was there any ID? A wallet? A purse? Anything?” Bobby and I shook our heads. She pointed a flashlight and looked down into the cistern. She kept a hand on the ladder, but didn’t climb in. She squinted her eyes, looking around the tall grass that surrounded the water pump and the side yard, and then she walked to me and Bobby.

“I’ll need to get official statements from you and you. Also, I’m going to rope off this area until I can make a thorough search. Including the water pipe she was in. It doesn’t look like there’s a way to drain it, but we can fish the bottom. We may find something. I contacted the coroner’s office on the way here. Someone will be out to retrieve the body. On their time.”

She walked to her car. I followed.

“Can I ask what you think happened?” I said.

Griselda popped her trunk, took a digital camera from a case, and fiddled with some buttons on it. “Too early to say. She’s got a big divot on the back of her head. My guess is that’s what killed her. But hard to say if it was from the fall or before. Not like the edge of the well is low, so it seems like it would be hard to fall in on accident. Does it have a cover?”

“Yeah, usually, but the tarp wasn’t on it this morning.”

“Coroner will get an ME to determine cause of death, autopsy, but that’ll only tell me so much. Whether it was the knock on her head or the water, not much more. Doesn’t look like there was any kind of struggle, but they’ll check the fingernails. It looks suspicious to me. Like someone was trying to hide her.”

“Her name was Yolanda.”

Griselda raised her head from the camera and turned to face me. “You knew her? Yolanda what?”

“I don’t know her last name. I could maybe find out. She was a Mexican. From Mexico. She was…sometimes they have women across the street.” I pointed to Morales Bar. “Mexican girls come over here to make some money some nights.”

“I know what hookers are.”

“I’ve known Mr. Morales since I was born. Don’t want no trouble for him.”

“I’ll ask him some questions, but I’m not concerned about his side business. Did you have a relationship of some kind with this Yolanda?”

“Relationship would be a pretty generous term,” I said. “I knew her.”

“Bob and you were across the street all last night, right? Bob invited me. I was on duty. Some kind of makeshift wake?”

I nodded.

“Was Yolanda present?”

“That’s the thing—I don’t know. She was at the memorial, so I assume she came out,” I said.

“I’m going to need you to tell me what you remember from last night.”

I let out a big breath. “Nothing. I had already drunk too much by the time I got to the bar. I remember walking in the door and waking up on a ditch bank. Other than that, I can’t help you. I was blacked out.”

She nodded. “Luckily Bob drinks like he gets paid for it. If I know him, he’ll have remembered every detail. I have to secure the area, take photos, and essentially do my job. When I’m done, I want to sit down with you and Bob and try to establish a timeline. Get an idea of who was there last night.”

I nodded, looking at the sun still low in the sky. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet.

“Place was packed. Hunters, locals, the funeral people for Big Jack. Most of the Valley was at Morales. Might save time if I just told you who wasn’t there.”

Bobby had been talking for a while, trying to settle his memory and get the events of the night into some semblance of an order. He closed his eyes and moved his hand slowly from left to right.

“Not everyone who was at the reception came out to Morales. And there was like a ton of people at the bar that had nothing to do with Big Jack. Here’s who I remember. Jimmy and me were there. Mr. Morales was behind the bar, a given. His grandson, Tomás Morales, was there too. He had this massive Mexican dude with him. Don’t know his name. Good luck trying to talk to them, but they were the ones that brought Yolanda. Mike Egger was there with a bunch of his guys, like Daniel Quihuis, Israel Ramos, Tony Villalobos, and some other guys who I know by first name or nickname, but you’d have to ask Mike to get their whole names. There was a group of like a half dozen high school kids, four boys and two girls. They weren’t Holtville kids or I would’ve known them. They were mostly white, so probably not up from Calex. Maybe El Centro. Probably figured who’s going to card anyone at a wake, right? So figure them for smart kids. Some random field-workers trickled in and out. Guys with their straw cowboy hats and muddy boots. It’s not like the bar was closed. Mr. Morales was running business as usual.

“With dove season, there were even a couple of out-of-towners ballsy enough to brave Morales. Kind of dudes that wear those pants with like eight, ten pockets on them. Some of me and Jimmy’s high school buds were there: Kirch, Gweez, Scrote, Gooch, Buck Buck, Snout, Thorn, The Train. Maybe a couple more, if I keep thinking. Some of the older generation: Red Fidler, Fritz Rubin, Felipe Zabala. Give me a couple pieces of paper and I’ll make you a big-ass list.

“Mr. Morales drinks steady behind that bar, but I ain’t never seen him drunk. Not once. He knows everybody and forgets nothing. You charm him, maybe flash a tit, he’ll remember real good for you. Between my list and his, you should be able to name most everyone we know. Everyone except them high school punks and out-of-towners.”

I let the water hit the back of my head and trail down my neck. I watched the gray grit of the morning run down the drain of Bobby’s shower. It would be quite a while before I would feel comfortable using the water back at the house.

I scrubbed the slimy black remnants of the cistern from my skin until it burned, but I didn’t feel clean. I closed my eyes, only to see Yolanda floating just below the surface of that black water. Her lifeless face replaced Pop’s final laugh haunting the disquiet of my mind. Worst-case scenario, the two would eventually merge just enough to drive me bananas. At least I had that to look forward to. I wished I hadn’t seen her dead boob.

What could have happened that ended with Yolanda in the water? She couldn’t have fallen in. Griselda was right. The standpipe was too high to fall in accidentally. Suicide? She didn’t seem the type. Like I knew her enough to make that call.

The more I spun it, the more I was convinced that someone had put Yolanda in there. Not necessarily killed her, but at the least put her in the cistern. Probably killed her, but definitely probably put her in there. Who would do that? Why?

It didn’t really matter. Nothing I could do about it.

Griselda had kept at Bobby and me with questions for another hour. She had searched the scene and photographed every inch of the side yard. She seemed smart, yet realistic. The Imperial County Sheriff’s Office wasn’t big enough to warrant a homicide division, so Griselda was it: the first responder, the evidence technician, and the investigator all rolled into one. I told her everything I knew, except for Yolanda’s relationship with Pop. I didn’t see how that could matter, and I didn’t see how it was any of her business.

Griselda only allowed her pessimism to show through once or twice. She confided that the dead body of an illegal alien didn’t rate that high. Dead Mexicans were too common to chart on anyone’s priority list. However, Griselda was a pro and would let the evidence dictate the investigation.

“All victims deserve the same. Dead is dead, and a crime is a crime. If someone did this, I’ll do everything I can to find them,” she said.

An ambulance arrived while Griselda and Bobby were fine-tuning his list and trying to put some names to some faces. The driver and medical examiner waited in the ambulance with the engine (and the air-conditioner) running until Griselda approached them. I found out later that Imperial County doesn’t have its own pathologist, but farms it out to a few local doctors or brings them down from San Diego. The coroner shares an office with the sheriff, too. I wondered if Andy and Barney let Otis sleep in the jail.

Griselda and the medical examiner toured Yolanda’s body. The ambulance driver turned off the engine and took the opportunity to have a smoke. Having burned through all of mine, I bummed one. He was in his mid-fifties with a red nose that suggested he had a flask within reach. He wore his uniform sloppily and treated his job like most people, counting time, trying to get to the end of the day. I let him talk.

“Soon as it cools down, there’ll be plenty more of ’em. Dead Mexicans. Weird to think that they’re already dead, some of ’em. But they’re out there. Desert’s full of bodies. Out there drying in the sun. Leathering up. In the dunes. In the desert.

“Don’t know what them poor bastards are told when they slip the border. What kind of advice they get. But it’s all bad. ’Cause from the border to the nearest road, it’s fifteen, twenty miles in most parts. In this heat, on a day like today, it’s impossible to carry enough water to travel that distance.

“They’re out there, all right. Gets nice, drops down to low nineties, weekenders’ll start hitting the dunes in their quads, finding corpses left and right. Folks from the city’ll find a family stuck to each other and coyote-chewed. I’ll be out there trying to pick ’em up without them falling apart. ’Fore they turn into dust. They make like a crackling sound when you move them. Smell like pork rinds. Skin like deer jerky, most of the time. You got no idea.

“Here’s something you wouldn’t guess. For being in the desert, we get a lot of drownings. Probably as many drowning as from the sun. From the All-American mostly. Got a wicked undercurrent from what I hear. Some in the Alamo or the New River. Damn nasty. Whenever they find a body in the New River and I’m supposed to go out, I fake a stomachache. Make up a dead relative. Anything. I ain’t going to swim through a river of puke and diapers for no dead Mexican. Give it time—they’ll just dissolve in that toxic shit.

“Remember that flash flood five, eight years ago? Tore through west of the Valley. Out in the Yuha. Like a river rapid, no time for the water to soak into the sand. When the rain finally stopped, we found fourteen illegals in a dry wash just north of Mount Signal. Their bodies stuck and sunk in the mud. Some you could only see a hand, sticking up like that. It looked like a fucking battlefield. Bodies strewn. That’s what they were, strewn.”

I put on my unwashed suit and tie for the second day in a row, doing my best to shake the dust from the ditch bank off the jacket. It stank of alcohol sweat, but I only owned the one suit and there was no time for dry-cleaning. I was the only invitee to the burial and Pop wouldn’t have cared, but I felt better in a wrinkled, smelly suit than my other option: jeans and a T-shirt.

I walked through the first floor of Bobby’s house. His bachelor pad was surprisingly clean for a guy like Bobby. I made a mental note to give Bobby some shit for owning throw pillows that matched the armrest covers. I found Bobby making some cold burritos in the kitchen.

He looked over his shoulder and said, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to forget to eat.”

I took a seat on one of the folding chairs at the table. “I can’t believe I completely blacked out. I got nothing from last night. Not even images.”

Bobby put a burrito in front of me, went to the cupboard, and found a bag of tortilla chips. He tossed them on the table. He grabbed two beers from the fridge, cracked one open and took a long pull. I left mine on the table. I looked inside the tortilla to find
carnitas
, cilantro, onions, guacamole, and salsa.

Bobby said, “I remember, but only what I saw, you know. Just my angle. I’ll probably remember more stuff when I stop trying to remember. Hard to say. The place got pretty crazy as the night went on. Lot of people. Lot of stuff happening in each corner. I got a better memory of who was there than what happened. I was making my own mischief.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“She didn’t fall in. No fucking way. She may’ve jumped, but she couldn’t’ve fallen. Even jumping is kind of ridiculous. The Ash runs right behind Morales, and that’s a huge canal. She wanted to drown herself, why’d she ruin your bathwater? My guess, someone chucked her in there.”

“But who would do that?”

“Some asshole. Who knows? Could be anybody. Doesn’t take much. Everyone’s capable of killing.”

“You really believe that?”

“Maybe not you, but you’re a puss.” Bobby laughed. “Most people? Yeah, they could kill. Why would you think any different? You ain’t one of them people that think people are basically good?”

I bit into my burrito. The cold meat was delicious. I wasn’t up for a philosophical debate with Bobby about the nature of man, so I changed the subject. “Her family should know. Know she’s dead. Know what happened.”

“Griselda got her name. Her first name, at least. Probably more than they got for most of them they find. The county does a pretty good job. Best with what they got. There was a big thing in the
I.V. Press
about how they work with Mexico, tracking people down. Dental records, DNA, all that shit.”

“I’m going to call Tomás. Him or that Alejandro guy might know her full name. Or could maybe find out. Might know her people. Tell me how to get hold of them.”

“Tell you? You mean tell Griselda, right? This ain’t on you, Jimmy.”

“She was found dead on my land. She was up here because of Pop. It may not be on me, but I had something to do with how she ended up.”

“You looking for a hobby? You got a farm to worry about now. Griselda’s good at her job. Don’t get all
Rockford Files
on me.”

“Just thought if I could help, I would.” I finished the last few bites of my burrito. The meat hit the spot, filling a void I hadn’t been aware of.

“You’re going to have to tell me eventually. How did you and Deputy Sheriff Villarreal get so chummy?” I gave Bobby a big grin.

Bobby laughed. “She busted me. No surprise. I was on an official Bobby Maves escapade. I deserved it. I’ll be the first to tell you when I got it coming, and I had it coming. She was cool about it though. Too long a story to start from the beginning, but a series of unfortunate and escalating events led me to the point where Griselda pulled up next to me in her roller. Me, bare-ass naked from the waist down, being chased by a three-legged German shepherd through a sugar beet field. Her, laughing her ass off and making fun of my dangle.”

“If I hadn’t lived through some of them, I’d think all your stories were bullshit.”

“Ask her. She saved me. Three legs or no, that dog had it in for my junk. Thought it was a kielbasa.”

“Or a Vienna sausage.”

“She loaned me a pair of county-issues and let me sleep it off in the drunk tank. Didn’t file charges, which was cool. So I took her out to dinner.”

“And what does she see in you exactly? She appears to be an intelligent, focused, and serious woman. In law enforcement to boot.”

“What can I say? Opposites attract. Least for now.”

“The novelty of dating a cop wearing off?”

“No, I’m not even bugged by her whole ‘you can’t tell anyone we’re dating’ thing. That makes total sense. Look at me.”

“So, what is it?”

“It’s her,” Bobby said, looking to the photos of his two daughters on the wall. “Dude, as much as you think I’m some kind of alcoholic child—which is mostly right on—I’m half a grown-up. I work. I pay bills. Shit, I got two kids. Even if I never see ’em. The kids scare Gris more than my rep. When she came over here the first time and saw them pictures of me with the girls, it queered the deal a little. I think she’s got a thing about commitment. I like her. I hope it works out. But shit, I ain’t exactly got a winning record.”

From the way Bobby ended the story, I took that to be the end of that conversational thread. I nodded and gave Bobby a manly slap on the shoulder. A pathetic excuse for camaraderie, but it’s all I had.

Bobby had to check on his fields, so I asked him to drop me off at the cemetery.

Terrace Park Cemetery would not have been my choice as a final resting place. First off, no grass. Also, no trees. Finally, no flowers save for a twisted wall of oleander on the northern edge. Overlooking a scrubby ravine formed by the Alamo River, Terrace Park looked like a fine place to dump a body, but a strange place to put a headstone. A modern Boot Hill for the dead that don’t care and the families that want to make visiting a one-time affair.

My pant legs gathered dust as the Bobcat excavator’s claw started a fresh hole in the hard, dry earth. Dissonant scraping sounds echoed within the shallow canyon until the shovel finally found purchase and began digging Pop’s grave. Pop’s plot was right next to my mother’s, and I glanced at her stone with curious ambivalence. Barbara Veeder. I wanted to feel more, but I had never met her. My mother was a name and a photo on the living room wall. No memories. Only stories. We had no shared past, except for the tragedy of my birth.

I stood with four Mexican men, all of us with our hands in our pockets. We watched the Bobcat’s progress. Five men staring at a hole. Pop’s overpriced coffin sat in front of us. I felt hungover, hot, and overdressed.

“
Su familia
?” one of the Mexican men asked.

“
Mi padre
,” I said.

“
Mi más sentido pésame
.” He crossed himself. The other men nodded.

“
Gracias
,” I said, acknowledging each man with eye contact and a nod.

The Bobcat finished its work. A textbook empty grave, four by eight by deep. An organized pile of dirt and clay to one side. The digger lit a smoke, but remained in the small seat of the excavator, his job half-finished.

The men ran two thick canvas straps under the bottom of the coffin and used them to carry it. At the edge of the grave, they stopped and looked to me. I could see their muscles straining.

Realizing they were waiting for permission, I nodded. Slowly they lowered the coffin into the ground. I wanted to tell them to lift with their knees, as it seemed they were letting their backs do most of the work. But I remained silent in the spirit of the moment.

While it felt final, it mostly felt empty. For lack of a better word, it felt dead. All the ceremony one attached to death didn’t make dead any different.

I would’ve watched the gravediggers fill in the grave, but watching the Bobcat do it lacked gravity. I chose to walk around the cemetery until the job was done. Glancing at headstones, I recognized a number of last names. Nobody I knew, but ancestors of classmates and neighbors, many and most still Holtville residents. New generations had cropped up, but it was obvious that if one was born in the Imperial Valley, the odds were that the person was still there. Whether alive or dead.

A path cut through the wall of oleander at the northern edge of the cemetery. Having never been to that section and naturally curious, I walked down the path, avoiding any direct contact with the poisonous vegetation. Every part of the oleander plant is toxic, so of course it would be all over the Imperial Valley.

The path opened to a forty-acre field, an isolated extension of the cemetery proper. There appeared to be graves, but no headstones. Instead, single red bricks marked each plot. I leaned down and picked up one of the bricks. It read, “Doe M-9-28-08-004.” I set it back in the exact position that I had found it, matching the corners to the displaced dirt. There were hundreds of bricks and room for hundreds more.

“
Cementerio de pobres
,” a voice behind me stated. “What they used to call a potter’s field.”