39
AS I LEFT THE JAIL I CAUGHT A BLURB ON THE FRONT PAGE OF the morning paper in one of the machines outside. I plunked coins into the slot and retrieved the newspaper—an extravagance since my Arizona Daily Star was still waiting to be picked up at the end of the lane.
When I flipped to the Metro section I found Lateef Wise's face staring out at me. He was on the business end of what looked like a chrome-plated shovel, breaking ground for his new day care center. “Heiress' Gift Endows Baby Center” read the headline. Funny he hadn't mentioned the ground breaking yesterday. And during our first meeting hadn't he said he was going to put in the day care center after the estate was settled? Why the rush now?
There was nothing new in the story, but I had to hand it to Wise to get PR on the back of a dead woman. It seemed too soon after Abby's death to be making any press releases about what her legacy would or would not have endowed. It occurred to me that he had a lot of faith and I wondered how he was financing his construction project until the estate was settled.
A few minutes later I stopped at a pay phone at a Circle K on Mission Road and waited ten minutes for a stringy-haired young man to finish convincing what I assumed was a young woman on the other end of the line how much he loved her.
The phone book had been ripped off so I had to call Directory Assistance for the phone number of Baboquivari High School out in Sells. Since Stella Ahil had told me she taught English, I figured she was probably at either the junior high or high school.
Many of the Tucson schools have gone to a year-round schedule and I was hoping that the Sells high school had followed suit. Unfortunately this was not the case and my quarters went for naught as a recording came on the other end of the line.
I punched in Charley's number next.
“Ellis, did you hear—”
“No jokes. I'm at a pay phone melting. Did you get anything on Stella Ahil yet?”
“Yes and no.”
“Great. How about the yes part?”
“You were right, she teaches English at Baboquivari High, but they're down for the summer. I've got a phone number for her.”
I scribbled the number down on a corner of the newspaper.
“But I can't get a twenty on her.” Charley reverted to his old CB jargon, the language he'd spoken before he'd gotten into computers. “She's listed everywhere as a Sells post office box.”
I groaned.
“Wait, there's hope,” he chuckled. “I ran the license plate you gave me. The truck belongs to her nephew Benny Francisco, who lives out in Topawa southeast of Sells.”
“There's good news in all of this, right?”
He gave me an address and directions that he'd pulled off something called mapquest.com. He says it's not only free but will give you a map and written directions to any location in the country.
I thanked him and headed back to Priscilla.
I hung a right at Ajo and headed west, past the saguaro-dotted hillsides of the Tucson Mountain Park and past the turnoff to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, past all the private airplanes at Ryan Field and past Marstellar Road where I frequently team-pen at Bishop's Arena. The saguaros quickly gave way to a grassy plain.
I finally arrived at Three Points. This time, instead of turning south toward Sasabe I kept straight and drove toward Sells.
Now the landscape boasted creosote bushes, probably the only desert plant that can survive not years, but decades of drought. The first bush to settle in the desert after the Ice Age, it's not uncommon for a creosote to live for a thousand years. Its longevity is helped, in part, by the fact that its resin does not appeal to cattle so they leave it alone.
The great white tower of the famed Kitt Peak National Observatory was ahead of me as I drove. After finally convincing the Indians that the facility and its people with the long eyes would not desecrate the sacred peak, the observatory was established in the late 1950s. Situated high in the Quinlan Mountains, it's a great landmark that can be seen from forty miles away.
The highway was dotted with roadside crosses signifying people who had been killed on the road, an old Mexican custom dating back to the eighteenth century. The crosses, or crucitas, usually made of iron or wood, depending upon the deceased's family members' talents, were dressed with bright plastic flowers. Many were paired with small shrines featuring tall glass religious candles bearing pictures of the Virgin Mary. There were more crosses than I'd ever seen along a single stretch of road before, and in an effort to pass the time more quickly, I began mentally counting them. I was up to ten before I passed the Coyote Convenience Store.
That I was on the Tohono O'odham Reservation became quickly apparent as I passed turnoffs to places with names like Ali Chuckson, Nawt Vaya, Pan Tak, Haivana Nakya and Chiawuli Tak.
I drove the speed limit since in spite of the fencing on both sides of the road, there were quite a few thin cattle browsing along the verge.
When I finally passed the modern Baboquivari High School I had counted thirty-three roadside crosses. A record for me.
I took the turnoff into Sells, the tribal headquarters and largest town on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. Not exactly a booming metropolis, Sells has grown from a sleepy little Papago village with one of the few reliable water supplies to a town with a modern Basha's supermarket, video rentals and a bank. Papago is still stuck in my brain since they went by that name for hundreds of years until 1986 when they decided that being known as the Bean People wasn't seemly, so the entire tribe opted for a name change to the Tohono O'odham, the Desert People.
Known for their baskets, the prices of which can range from twenty to hundreds of dollars, the twenty-four thousand Tohono O'odham are a scrappy bunch. With no permanent stream or lake on the reservation, both the people and their cattle have learned how to survive long periods of drought, interrupted only occasionally by the miracles of rain. Their huge desert reservation, encompassing almost three million acres, is second in size only to that of the Navajo.
Like many tribes, gambling has come to the Tohono O'odham. While it's certainly brought its problems, it's also helped pull the tribe out of bitter poverty. Their Desert Diamond Casino earns close to $80 million a year, some of which is distributed to each of the tribal members.
Fortunately a farsighted tribal chairman, encouraged by twenty-nine other tribes in the country who have successfully started their own community colleges, managed to earmark some of the casino revenue for such a project. In a few years, the local students won't have to make the long trek into Tucson's Pima Community College. The college will also keep them on the reservation, living comfortably in their own communities.
I studied the directions that Charley had dictated over the phone and turned left at the road fork a short way out of Sells. Now I was on tribal Highway 19 heading south for Topawa.
I drove through the small Burro Mountains and then the road became flat, the country stark and bleak, I imagine much the way it has been for thousands of years. These Indian lands are so unattractive that there was never any real threat of anyone else wanting them, so these reservation boundaries weren't even established until this century.
The people here take advantage of their vast space, and while there are dozens of tiny villages scattered about, there are still some families living in remote outlying areas. I glanced at Charley's directions again, fairly sure that I would find Stella Ahil's nephew living in the general locale of Topawa.
The vistas are long out here, with the naked eye being stretched for mile after endless mile, the flat desert plains and valleys occasionally broken up by hills and mountain ranges. As I drove, I never lost sight of the towering Baboquivari Peak to the east.
If I kept on the highway I'd eventually hit the Mexican border, marked by a barbed wire and wooden fence at the San Miguel gate. When the U.S. bought thirty thousand square miles of land from Mexico during the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, no one considered the people living here. The result was that the traditional Tohono O'odham homelands were split, with thirteen hundred of the tribe's members currently living south of the border.
It's a catch-22, for although members living in Mexico are eligible for tribal benefits—including Indian Health Services—many of them cannot enter Arizona legally since they have no documentation of their birthplace. While tribal members work on getting Congress to authorize passport waivers, the border questioning, hassling and even deportation continue.
As I drove, I noticed that the Tohono O'odham cattle, never plump to begin with, were painfully thin. The bags, even of those few who had calves by their sides, were shriveled and looked as dry as the land. Out here, in a good year, five to eight inches of rain would fall. This was not a good year. Seeing the cross-bred suffering cattle made me think of my own herd.
Twenty minutes later I was in Topawa. Besides the large new governmental complex and the tiny post office, the only other building grouping of any note here is the San Solano Mission and a few white stucco and rock buildings clustered around the old church.
Those mapquest directions were good and I turned right before the mission onto a dusty, rutted road. I drove for a mile or so and then hung another right onto the road where Benny Francisco lived. I drove slowly down the lane, past a few decrepit house trailers with junk-filled yards, rusted cars and faded clothing on the line, past a dead tree that was blooming discarded tires, past a flattened coyote and past two scrawny horses snuffling in the dirt for something to eat.
Finally I pulled up to a tired gray slump block house, its front yard adorned with a huge wooden play center with a nifty fort on top, swings and a plastic slide. There were a few scattered children's toys in the dirt yard— what looked like an old faded Fisher-Price farm barn, a bald doll missing her left arm, and child-sized Melmac plates and cups along with a huge satellite dish, one of the old kind.
I was hoping that Benny Francisco, if he was home— his wife if he was not—could tell me where I could find his aunt. She hadn't been exactly forthcoming when I'd seen her in the Baboquivaris so calling her to alert her to my visit was the last thing I wanted to do. Unfortunately, this was my only hope before I'd have to make that phone call.
I opened the ratty aluminum screen door and knocked on the bleached, blistered wood of the front door. All I could hear as I stood there waiting for someone to answer was the steady hum of the swamp cooler.
Although my long hair was swept up in a ponytail, it was hotter here than in Tucson or La Cienega and as I stood there, I could feel the sweat begin to pool under my collar. While I'd taken a good swig of water before leaving the truck, my mouth was dry again. It really was too damned hot to be out hunting people in Topawa, Arizona.
The door opened slowly and as it did I was surprised to find myself facing none other than Stella Ahil. A small toddler-sized child with brown skin and matching eyes was clinging to her baggy cotton shorts.
“Hello again,” I said, stunned that it would be this easy.
She squinted, as though she was trying to place me.
“Trade Ellis. I met you out in the Baboquivaris.”
“Oh, right.” She didn't sound all that thrilled to see me.
“I'm wondering if I might talk to you.”
Somewhere in the bowels of the house a baby cried.
“I'm baby-sitting. I don't have time.” She started to close the door but I stopped it with my hand, earning a splinter in the process.
“It's really important, Mrs. Ahil.” I had no idea if she was married or not, but thought this a prudent form of address. “I can't go away.”
She sighed deeply and I could see the acquiescence in her face. “All right then, come in.”
The toddler gave me a wary look as I followed Stella into the house. Then he walked over to the television and turned up the volume before settling onto a beanbag in front of a cartoon.
“I have to get the baby,” Stella said and it sounded like a good idea to me, since the wailing infant and the television had a most unpleasant concerto going on.
She returned with a plump dark-haired baby whose screams had now diminished to whimpering status. I followed Stella into the kitchen where she retrieved a bottle from the refrigerator, put it in a plastic sleeve full of water and popped the whole thing in the microwave, all the while jiggling the hungry child on her hip.
“I visited my client,” I began saying while we waited for the microwave to finish. “And he remembers seeing your truck out in the mountains.”
The microwave timer went off and Stella Ahil grabbed the bottle, shook it, and expertly tested it on the inside of her wrist. Satisfied that it was not too hot, she plopped it into the delighted baby's mouth.
“He described it to a tee.”
She gave me a blank look. “I don't have a truck.”
“Right. I meant your nephew's truck. Benny's Nissan.”
She grunted.
I waited a minute before asking, “You were out there that night, weren't you, Stella?”
A long sigh escaped her mouth and she finally nodded. “We left when we heard the sirens. When you saw me, I came back for the fruit I'd left behind.”
“We?”
“A friend was with me.”
“Did you park in the same place?”
She rotated the bottle in the baby's mouth. “Just up from there, on the far side of the pond.”
I searched my memory banks for a visual image of the stock pond. The berm on the far side would have prevented anyone coming in from the southeast, the direction of J.B. and Abby's camp site, from seeing Stella's saguaro camp.
“You saw something, didn't you?” It was a gut hunch.
She nodded, but would not look at me.
“You were parked close to the tank, maybe even within the quarter-mile limit. There was a full moon.” I was talking to myself as much as to her. “J.B. and Abby were parked not far away. They came in from drinking, they were partying. There was no need for them to be quiet, after all no one was around.”
I watched her impassive face, but it told me nothing.
“It was a still June night and we all know how sound can carry across the desert. Even if you'd been asleep”—I was remembering the cots out in the open air—“their noise could have awakened you.”
She set the bottle down on the counter and threw the baby up on her shoulder where she patted its back in an effort to get a burp out of it.
“I'm pretty close, aren't I, Stella?”
She gave a slight nod of her head.
“I don't have it exactly right, though, do I?”
She disappeared with the baby and returned a minute later.
“Let's go outside where I can have a smoke,” she said, opening the dirty sliding glass door to the barren backyard. She left it open so the evaporative cooler would blow out, giving us some small comfort from the day's heat.
We stepped out onto a tiny cement porch that harbored a washing machine. A cardboard box was on top of it with tiny mews coming out. I glanced inside and saw a thin gray tabby cat nursing three tiny kittens.
Stella lit her cigarette and threw the match out onto the dirt.
“My friend heard them. I slept through it. But they were too far away and he couldn't see them.”
Invisible was a man. Interesting. I kept quiet.
“After a while things settled down and he went back to sleep. A little bit later a car woke him up. He said it sounded like it was coming up the road we were on. He could hear it, but there weren't any lights.”
I nodded, again remembering the full moon. If someone were driving very slowly up the old dirt road, they could navigate without headlights.
“He has trouble sleeping, my friend, so after that he got up, had a cigarette, and that's when he saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The light in the desert. He saw someone with a flashlight walking through the desert toward them.”
“Toward J.B. and Abby's camp site?”
She nodded.
“He was curious about what was going on so he climbed up on the tank and watched the light walk across the desert. Then he lost it.”
“He was probably wondering what was going on,” I said, encouraging her to continue her story.
“Yes. He said it wasn't long until he saw the light again. He waited and watched it for a long time as they made their way through the desert.”
They. She'd said they.
“He thought maybe it was something to do with drugs, and that's why the car had come in without lights and why the man had walked across the desert to the other place with a flashlight.”
“He saw a man?” My impatience was getting the best of me.
“I'm getting to that. As the flashlight got closer to the pond, he slipped behind the berm of the tank and took cover under a hackberry bush. The man came into the pond and he was carrying something on his back.”
I was suddenly aware that I was holding my breath.
“He walked right into the pond and when the water got to his chest, he pulled the thing off his back and pushed it out in front of him and held the bundle underwater.”
“Did she struggle?”
She shook her head. “We didn't know it was a woman until we heard it on the radio the next day.”
“He couldn't tell. There was a moon, but it wasn't light enough to see his face.”
“Was he huge?” I was thinking of Lateef Wise, who was almost a giant. If Stella's friend hadn't seen the face, he probably wouldn't be able to identify the carrier as a black man.
“I don't know. I didn't ask him.”
“I need to talk to your friend.”
She shook her head. “That's impossible.”
“I have to, Stella. A woman's been murdered and he's an eyewitness to what happened.”
She continued shaking her head.
“Is he married?”
“Heavens no.” She was shocked that I'd consider that she'd carry on with a married man. “It's nothing like that.”
“He's got to come forward and tell the police what he saw that night.”
At the mention of the police her eyebrows shot up. “No police. He didn't see anything.”
“Stella, look, you're an educated woman. You teach English at the high school. You must know how important this is.”
She thought about this for a minute and then made her admission. “He's illegal.” She gave me sad look. “You know how that would turn out.”
Ah, there it was. Her invisible friend was an illegal alien, most likely a Mexican man who had come up for a better job. The last thing he'd want to do was make his presence known to the authorities. He'd be deported in no time flat. No wonder he'd been invisible in the Baboquivaris. He was ducking La Migra, the Border Patrol. And of course he would have been cautious, sleeping lightly, which is why he'd seen the murder.
“Cripes.” My mind raced. Would the cops give him immunity on the immigration issue in exchange for his testimony about what he saw at the Baboquivari stock pond? I had no idea. It was something I'd have to explore.
As I left Stella Ahil I was simultaneously thrilled with my discovery and stumped by how in the hell I was going to exploit it.