The Wrong Hill to Die On: An Alafair Tucker Mystery #6 (Alafair Tucker Mysteries) Read online

  The Wrong Hill to Die On

  An Alafair Tucker Mystery

  Donis Casey

  www.DonisCasey.com

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright © 2012 by Donis Casey

  First E-book Edition 2012

  ISBN: 9781615954179 epub

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Contents

  The Wrong Hill to Die On

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  The Main Characters

  The Man in the Ditch

  Do You Know This Man?

  Chase Kemp

  Doctor Moeur

  A Bad Winter

  Doctor Addison’s Diagnosis

  Quite a Trip

  Elizabeth

  The White Lady

  A Sharp Exchange

  Dr. Moeur Concurs

  Unnatural Death

  Unlikely Killers

  Tired

  Persuasion

  Villa’s Raid

  Mrs. Carrizal

  Arrivals

  Geoff Stewart

  The Motion Picture

  The Revolution

  An Unpleasant Turn

  Thirst for Justice

  Sunday Morning

  Las Cabras

  Artie

  Interrogation

  High Feelings

  Uncivil Words

  Baseball

  She Has Her Rights

  The Search

  Esmeralda

  Bathtub Boating

  Curandera

  Out of the Ashes

  Beautiful Girl

  Observations on a Killing

  All the News

  Chris Martin

  Outnumbered

  Cindy’s House

  Cindy’s House

  The Photograph

  A Morning Drive

  Rural School

  Hobart Bosworth

  A Hard Rain

  An Honest Bunch

  Questions

  Matt Carrizal’s Restaurant

  An Upsetting Matter

  Money

  Tony Arruda

  Unrequited

  An Inordinately Proud Bunch

  Anything is Possible

  An Afternoon Drive

  Guadalupe

  The Arrudas

  A Nice Place to Rest

  The Yaqui Railroad

  The Cause

  The Sombrero

  Puzzle Pieces

  Clandestine Activities

  Moved Out

  Hiding Places

  Letters

  Disaster for Somebody

  Something Ain’t Right

  A Particular Talent

  Rage

  Speaking of Home

  Ritual

  No Sleep Tonight

  The Morning After

  An Unwelcome Visitor

  A Pale Fantasy

  Pershing

  In for Some Grief

  Levi

  Lily-Livered Creature

  Much Improved

  Eavesdropper

  A Different Cindy

  Cutting Down

  A Turn for the Better

  Sad to Leave a Friend

  The Wayward Note

  The Wrong Idea

  Good Figurers

  Speculation

  I Hope You Die

  The Sonora Gang

  Not This

  Goodbyes

  The Wrong Hill to Die On

  Something Out of Nothing

  Second Chances

  Home

  Alafair’s Recipes, Southwestern Style

  Historical Notes

  The Real People

  More from this Author

  Contact Us

  Acknowledgments

  As always, thanks to my friends at Poisoned Pen Press for their help and patience with this difficult book. Many thanks also to my manuscript readers and critics, Rebecca Burke and Don Koozer. And to Denisa Nickell Hanania, thank you for a great title.

  I must especially mention how tremendously useful newspapers were as I went about researching and writing this book. Nothing is better for getting a sense of daily life and for what is on the minds of people during the time period one is writing about than reading the news reports of the day. Much of my period information came from the Arizona Republican newspaper from December 1915 through the end of March 1916. Since 2012 is the State of Arizona’s Centennial year, several articles conveniently appeared on the early history of the Phoenix area, including Tempe and Guadalupe specifically, in the twenty-first century incarnation of the Republican, the Arizona Republic newspaper. Honorable mention goes to Republic columnist Clay Thompson for his entertaining and enlightening articles on the more colorful and arcane aspects of Arizona history. I particularly want to acknowledge Jay Mark of the Tempe Historical Society for his guidance. Any deviation from historical fact is strictly my own doing.

  It was from the Republican and the Muskogee (Oklahoma) Phoenix newspapers that I learned the local reactions to Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, about the epic rains and floods throughout the western U.S. during the winter of 1915–1916 which washed out roads, tracks, and bridges from the Mississippi to the Pacific, many of the particulars of the Hollywood crew’s visit to Tempe, and the name of the Franciscan friar at Our Lady of Guadalupe church in the village of Guadalupe.

  The Main Characters

  The Tuckers

  Alafair: a concerned mother of ten

  Shaw: her husband, just as concerned

  Blanche: their daughter, age 10

  The Kemps

  Elizabeth: Alafair’s youngest sister

  Webster: her husband, a lawyer

  Chase: their son, age 6

  The Stewarts

  Cindy: Elizabeth’s neighbor and best friend

  Geoff: her husband, Webster Kemp’s law partner

  The Carrizals

  Esmeralda: Elizabeth’s neighbor, a talented curandera

  Alejandro: her husband, an importer

  Matt: their son, a restaurateur

  Juana: their daughter

  Elena: their daughter

  Artie: their son

  The Arrudas

  Bernie: handyman, mariachi player, actor, flirt

  Tony: his brother, a cook

  Jorge: another brother

  Natividad: Bernie’s daughter

  The Law

  Mr. Nettles: Tempe town constable

  Joe Dillon: U.S. Marshal

  The Motion Picture Cast and Crew

  Hobart Bosworth: Tambor the Yaqui

  Dorothy Clark: Lucia, Tambor’s daughter

  Yona Landowska: Ysobel, a rancher’s sympathetic wife

  Lloyd B. Carleton: the director

  Chris Martin: the camera operator

  Miss Weston: Mr. Carleton’s assistant

  The Doctor

  Benjamin B. Moeur: busiest doctor in Tempe, Arizona

  The C
lergy

  Fr. Lucius, OFM

  The Critters

  Nina and Chica: two happy goats

  Six unhappy doves

  One disrespectful dog

  Waiting Back in Boynton

  Alafair and Shaw’s other children:

  Martha, age 24, and her betrothed, Streeter McCoy

  Mary, age 23, and her betrothed, Kurt Luckenbach

  Alice, age 21, and her husband, Walter Kelley

  Phoebe, age 21 (Alice’s twin), her husband, John Lee Day,

  and their daughter, Zeltha

  Gee Dub, age 19

  Ruth, age 17

  Charlie, age 15

  Sophronia (Fronie), age 9

  Grace, age 3

  The Man in the Ditch

  He was as handsome a man as Alafair Tucker had ever seen. His unblemished skin was the color of caramel, his thick hair black as a raven’s wing, carefully pomaded and combed straight back from his face. His wide eyes were black as well, eyelashes as long and thick as a girl’s. His lips were parted just enough for Alafair to see the tips of his teeth. Having seen him for the first time just the day before, she knew the dazzling effect those strong, white teeth and full lips had on his smile. He was a charmer all right.

  It was so sad that he was dead.

  Alafair Tucker looked down at the body in the ditch and thought that there is no end of troubles and life is but a vale of tears. The end of this poor man’s life was one more disaster on top of an entire season of disasters—murder and illness, rumors of war, invasion and rapine, and rain and floods worthy of the Bible. She had been glad to see the back of 1915, but thus far 1916 was not shaping up to be any better.

  The dead man’s earthly remains were half submerged in one of the ubiquitous irrigation ditches that crisscrossed the town of Tempe, Arizona, in a relentless, and Alafair suspected, ultimately futile endeavor to keep the desert at bay.

  Perhaps he had drowned. How ironic that would be.

  The irrigation canals probably made sense in a place where it seldom rained. But Alafair’s thought when she had first seen the crisscross of open, water-filled ditches running through the neighborhoods rife with playing children was that here was a tragedy waiting to happen. Not a year passed without news of at least one child drowning in some convenient body of water.

  The occasional adult as well. She could imagine the last moments of the dead man’s life. Stumbling down an unfamiliar street in the dark. Did he trip on a stone or walk straight into the canal in the blackness of the night? Was he knocked out or simply too stunned by the fall to lift his head out of the water?

  The only problem with that proposition was that he was face-up in a ditch that contained not more than six inches of water. He looked thoughtful, staring at nothing, as though he had been pondering his mortality as he died. He was dressed in a black charro outfit; short jacket, flared trousers studded with silver conchos down the outer seam of each leg, and a gaudy red scarf tied in a bow around his neck. The black sombrero with the elaborate white embroidery around the brim which he had been wearing the night before was nowhere to be seen. Had he fallen into the ditch, perhaps too drunk to save himself? He hadn’t been drunk when last she saw him playing with the band late yesterday evening, singing Mexican love songs, his black eyes flashing with self-confidence as he winked at the ladies. Alafair did not know if Mexicans were any more prone to drunkenness than others, but the ones she had met since she had been here seemed like sensible people and not any more given to overindulgence than anyone else.

  Had she seen him leave the party? Who had he been talking to? Shaw might know better than she, since she had spent much of the evening in the house with the women and he had been out in the back yard with the men.

  Alafair had met so many people at the get-together that she could not keep everyone straight in her mind. What was the name of the man who had said such awful things about Mexicans, how they all ought to be run off back south of the border?

  She bent over and put her hand on the side of the dead man’s neck, though she already knew that he was dead. No pulse. His skin was cold, but then it was a chilly morning. It was hard to tell how long he had been there. She touched his hand. Stiff. It has been a while.

  She straightened, wrapped her coat around herself more tightly and heaved a sigh. She had not wanted to come to this godforsaken town to begin with, this weird, rainless, cloudless, place surrounded by skeletal humps of mountains, filled with hard prickly vegetation and so far from home.

  It was only fifteen yards from the ditch to the front door of the house, yet no one inside had heard anything during the night. Alafair walked back up the bare dirt path through the honeysuckle arbor over the gate and opened the screen door far enough to stick her head inside.

  “Elizabeth,” she said, “would you come here a minute? Don’t disturb the children.”

  ***

  Alafair, her husband Shaw, and Elizabeth stood shoulder to shoulder. Or as close as they could come considering that Alafair was six inches shorter than her youngest sister and close to a foot less lofty than Shaw. They watched in silence as the constable looked over the body in the ditch. Several of the neighbors had become aware of the situation, and those who had not already made their way over were beginning to gather in groups in their front yards. Alafair could see her ten-year-old daughter Blanche watching the action from behind the screen door of the house along with her six-year-old nephew Chase Kemp. The children were under strict orders to stay inside but neither looked very happy about it. Especially Chase. Alafair could see that Blanche had a death grip on the boy’s collar.

  The dead man was small and young, but fully grown. Still, the fact that his life was a bit further along than a child’s did not make it less of a tragedy that it had ended before it should have.

  The constable looked up at Elizabeth. “You know him, Miz Kemp?”

  Elizabeth caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows him, Mr. Nettles. This is Bernie Arruda. He does odd jobs and handiwork for half the families on this street. Him and his brothers Tony and Jorge played music for us at the open house here last night. Bernie and his brothers have a nice little Mexican mariachi combo and for a dollar and eats they will play all night if you want them to.”

  “Y’all had an open house last night?”

  “Yes, sir. My sister and her husband here and their girl just got in from Oklahoma a few days ago for a visit. We had us an open house and a pot luck for them to meet the neighbors yesterday evening.”

  Nettles’ gaze shifted and slid across Alafair to Shaw. “Yes, I read in the Daily News about your adventure getting here, Mr. Tucker. Quite a trip.”

  Shaw Tucker was a tall man with a thick mustache and black hair which was currently in need of a comb. He scrubbed the back of his head with his palm, which made his hair stick up in the back even more than it already did. “Quite a trip it was, Constable. Looks like we are not done with excitement, either.”

  The corner of Nettles’ eyelids crinkled. “Looks like not.”

  Do You Know This Man?

  Shaw ran the back of a finger over his mustache as he regarded the earthly remains of handyman and part-time musician Bernie Arruda. “Do you reckon he drowned?’

  Nettles did not look up. “Could be.”

  “But how?” Alafair wondered. “His head is not under the water and he isn’t even wet in the front.”

  “The water level in these irrigation ditches can change almost hour to hour. There could have been a lot more water in it last night. And if you are not yet familiar with the climate around these parts, ma’am, I guarantee you that it don’t take long to dry out once you’re out of the water.” Still crouched next to the body, Nettles pivoted on one foot so that he was facing a thin, dignified man with a white mustache who was standing a few paces behind the women. “How about you, Mr. Carrizal? Do you know this man?”

  Carrizal gave a tight nod but said nothing.

  Ne
ttles stood up. Perhaps Carrizal would be more forthcoming without an audience. “You folks go on home now.” He pitched his voice to be heard at the back reaches of the still-growing crowd of neighbors. “Y’all seen all there is to see. I’ll come around and talk to everybody later.”

  The crowd reluctantly began to disperse amidst much murmuring before Nettles squatted back down. “Not you, Mr. Tucker, ladies.” He spoke in a normal voice as Alafair and Elizabeth turned to go. Shaw crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his weight to one foot, resigned to doing his duty. But the constable noted that neither woman seemed unhappy to be recalled. A nosy duo. “I have a couple more questions. Mr. Carrizal, stay where you are. I don’t know this fellow. What did y’all say his name is, sir?”

  Carrizal did not look happy at all. “Bernal Arruda. He worked in my son’s restaurant. Everyone called him Bernie.”

  “Where does he live, do you know?”

  “He rented a room behind the restaurant, but I do not think he lived there permanent. I only know him to see him. Our paths have crossed only a few times at the restaurant or around here while he was rebuilding someone’s fence or painting a house. I assume he has family over in the barrio. My son Matt would know more.”

  Nettles nodded. “I’ll go talk with him directly. Ladies, can one of you bring me an old blanket or some such so we can cover this fellow decently until Doc Moeur shows up?” He looked at Alafair when he made the request, which she thought logical. She was a visitor here and unfamiliar with local goings-on.

  Elizabeth relieved Alafair of any anxiety she may have had over deciding which of her sister’s bed linens to ruin. “There is a pile of old blankets and quilts on a shelf in the garden shed, Alafair.”

  As she left, Alafair heard Nettles question his witnesses. “Did him and his brothers all leave at the same time last night?”

  She lifted the bar on the garden shed and entered the small, dim space. The early morning sun filtered in through the gaps in the bare plank walls and painted pale gold stripes of light on the dirt floor. Alafair drew in a breath of the earthy fragrance of soil and burlap, wood and seed, and was immediately sorry that she had. The lovely acrid aroma only made her long all the more for her own garden shed, and home.

  The tattered bedclothes, so faded, torn, and stained that they were beyond any other use, were piled on a shelf to the right of the door just as Alafair knew they would be. She kept her own garden rags in a similar location, as had her mother and grandmother before her. She riffled through the stack and pulled out the largest, least soiled, and most intact blanket remnant she could find, then tucked it under her arm before stepping back outside. She supposed she ought to hurry for the sake of the poor dead fellow’s dignity, but she could not manage it. She could see that the crowd of neighbors had dispersed back into their own yards. Nettles was still squatting down beside the ditch and looking up at Elizabeth and old Mr. Carrizal, who were standing with their backs to Alafair, an arm’s length apart like good neighbors. Shaw had stepped back to stand behind them. Alafair could not see the body of the recently departed over the lip of the ditch.