Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [80]
Once they started dating, Philip Cachora had somehow parlayed his temporary grant status into a permanent gallery situation, where he was installed as resident artist. He said he had taken the position so he could stay close to Delia. It also gave him a somewhat regular paycheck regardless of whether or not he was producing and selling paintings. There were other benefits in the relationship as well, but Delia was oblivious to those.
The gallery job ended for reasons Delia never quite understood, and they moved into the combination studio/loft apartment on Kalorama Street, but Philip’s paintings seemed to be losing their appeal as well as their patrons. Sales just weren’t happening. At least the money wasn’t there. Finally, insisting he had to do something, Philip bought a used van, loaded his unsold paintings into it, and took it on the road, heading off for a powwow in Montana. He returned home a month later with a credit-card balance full of hotel and meal charges and with most of his paintings still in the van.
A few nights later, Delia returned from work. On the living room coffee table she spied something that looked like a mushroom on a piece of clear plastic wrap.
“What’s this?” she demanded, holding it up.
“Peyote,” Philip answered, snatching it out of her hand. “Maybe you should try it sometime. It might make you less uptight. Besides, it’s a religious thing.”
“It’s also illegal,” Delia pointed out. “I don’t want it in my apartment.”
“It’s your apartment now instead of ours?” he returned.
“It is if you look at who’s paying the bills,” she told him. The moment she said it, she was afraid she had gone too far.
Philip rounded on her in fury. “If you were a real Indian instead of such a stuck-up, straitlaced Bostonian, maybe you’d understand!”
Minutes after that, he was in the bathroom, puking his guts out. He slept on the couch in his studio that night. Much as Delia didn’t want to admit it—especially to Marcia and others who had tried to warn her away from Philip in the first place—she knew it was the beginning of the end. She hung on for a time, hoping things would change and he would get better. That was why, a few months later, it hurt so much to realize that even Aunt Julia, more than two thousand miles away, somehow knew how bad things were and tried to help by sending Fat Crack Ortiz to the rescue. She responded to his offer of help by more or less telling him to take his job and shove it.
Two weeks later, she came home from work early with a migraine and walked in on a disaster that had been ten years in the making. There in the apartment she found Philip passed out in the company of a sixteen-year-old male prostitute. Delia turned around and stormed out of the apartment without waking either of them. She made her way back to her old neighborhood and checked into the Savoy. The next morning, she called in sick and made an appointment to see her ob-gyn, where she underwent a series of tests for sexually transmitted diseases. Then she went back to the hotel to await the results, which wouldn’t be available until the following Monday.
She called no one, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. Instead, she sat in the hotel for the next eighteen hours, staring blindly at the traffic on Wisconsin Avenue and wondering whether or not Philip had contracted AIDS, and if he had, had he already passed it along to her? How long did it take to die of AIDS, she wondered, and how painful was it?
It wasn’t until the sun was coming up the next morning that she found the strength to pick up the telephone and dial Santa Fe information. There were several Cachoras listed, and it took time to jot down all the numbers. When her office opened, she called in sick for a second time. Once it was eight o’clock New Mexico time, Delia dialed one of the numbers she’d been given.
She hadn’t picked that number at random. Several of the Cachoras listed included male names. Delia skipped those, opting instead for M. A. Cachora with no address. That number had to