Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [56]
Usually when this happened, Larry had done something wrong. Either he’d made some kind of blunder at work or done something Gayle didn’t approve of, and this was her way of punishing him for it. She never told him in advance when she was going to rob him of his latest plaything, and she never did it while he was home. Gayle would come to the house, use her own keys to gain access, and then leave the mess for him to find—and clear away—on his own.
Shaking his head, Larry returned to the kitchen and dumped the food into the garbage. Then he went out to the garage for the power washer he would need to take the bloodstains off the basement’s polished concrete floors and walls.
When she murdered Roseanne Orozco, Gayle Stryker had been cleaning up after her husband. One way or another, Larry had been cleaning up after Gayle ever since.
Gabe “Fat Crack” Ortiz sat in the warm sun and considered his life. By Tohono O’odham standards, he had lived to a ripe old age—seventy-two. More and more he was thinking about what Looks at Nothing had once told him.
“I have lost my sight,” S’ab Neid Pi Has had told his new protégé as they raced toward Diana Ladd’s Gates Pass home in Fat Crack’s speeding tow truck. “I have not lost my vision.”
Only lately had he begun to have a partial understanding of what had happened eight years earlier, when Delia’s great-aunt Julia Joaquin had come to see him. As one of the movers and shakers in the village of Little Tucson, the old woman was ushered into the tribal chairman’s office with appropriate ceremony. Fat Crack had greeted her formally and in their native language. He’d been prepared for a certain amount of small talk, but Julia got straight to the point.
“Do you remember my sister’s daughter, Ellie Chavez?” Julia asked. “And her little girl, Delia?”
Fat Crack had closed his eyes and remembered that little girl with her luminous brown eyes, watching him from the shadows of Sister Justine’s garage as he labored to put the dead Falcon back together. He remembered how, later on, he had heard that Ellie Chavez had finally divorced her husband about the same time she graduated from college. He had also heard rumors that she’d taken a rich Anglo woman to be her lover, but Gabe Ortiz paid little attention to gossip.
“I remember them both,” he said. “I knew them when Ellie was leaving to go to school—left and didn’t come back.”
Julia frowned. “Things were bad between her and Manny. When one of the sisters from Topawa found a way for Ellie to go to college, she didn’t want to miss the chance. I lost track of Ellie years ago, but I’ve stayed in touch with Delia. Her mother has a doctorate now and lives somewhere back east.”
“And Delia?” Fat Crack asked. “The last I heard she was going to law school.”
Julia Joaquin nodded. “She works for the BIA in Washington, D.C.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Fat Crack said. “We need good Indian lawyers in Washington.”
“I’m worried about her, though,” Julia said. “I’m afraid something’s wrong. She’s married now, to that Philip Cachora.”
“Philip Cachora?” Fat Crack repeated. “From Vamori?”
“From Vamori originally,” Julia said. “He met Delia at some fancy party in Washington.”
Gabe Ortiz closed his eyes and considered the odds against such a thing happening. The idea that two people born a few miles apart on the same Arizona Indian reservation would meet, fall in love, and marry in a big city on the far side of the continent seemed highly unlikely.
“Philip Cachora has been gone for a long time, too.”
“Even longer than Delia,” Julia Joaquin agreed. “He went off to Santa Fe to become an artist. And I guess he did, too.”
“Why are you worried?” Fat Crack asked.
“She doesn’t say anything, but her letters are different now,” Julia said. “And since you’re going to Washington…”
When she mentioned that, Fat Crack finally understood part of the reason for Julia Joaquin’s visit to his office. Tohono O’odham tribal chairman Gabe Ortiz,