The 27-Ingredient Chili Con Carne Murders: A Eugenia Potter Mystery Read online

  “So, Juanita. What’s it to be?”

  She waited in silence, while across the room Bandy stared at them over the rim of his glass of buttermilk.

  Finally, Juanita spoke, though she wouldn’t meet Mrs. Potter’s eyes.

  “You’re wrong, señora, but I suppose it won’t hurt to take precautions. If it’ll please you. Come into the kitchen. I’ll heat the capirotada while you make your calls.” Her mouth pursed and her eyes briefly closed, so that it appeared that she was forcibly holding back tears. But then she opened her eyes and nodded once, decisively. “Bueno. Venga.”

  Good. Come.

  Behind Juanita’s back, Mrs. Potter glanced at Bandy.

  He shook his head, seeming to share her feelings about Juanita’s behavior. There was also a glint of something else in the old man’s eyes, and Mrs. Potter had an uneasy feeling that it was a deep, deep anger. Did he think that Juanita was endangering Ricardo’s and Linda’s lives by refusing to face the facts? Or had the old man heard them talk about his forced retirement?

  How helpless Bandy must feel, she thought.

  The old man limped after her into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 8

  Juanita started pulling covered bowls out of her refrigerator.

  “Before you do that,” Mrs. Potter said to her, “call your family. Please.”

  “After you’ve finished with your calls.”

  Well, that was capitulation of a sort, Mrs. Potter thought.

  Mrs. Potter began with the county sheriff, as the valley itself had no police force. She’d met Sheriff Ben Lightfeather only once, but he had impressed her as being smart and practical and she knew that Ricardo thought well of him. Many Arizona sheriffs still looked wonderfully the part of nineteenth-century lawmen, complete with ten-gallon Stetson hats, handlebar mustaches, and gold stars pinned to their vests. They were still capable of jumping on their horses and rounding up an actual posse, though they might have a helicopter circling overhead and a cellular telephone at their hip. To look at one of these rugged, handsome sheriffs, you might think that the only thing that had changed in a hundred years was the rifle in his hands: these days, Mrs. Potter had been informed, it could be an Uzi instead of a Winchester. Ben Lightfeather was one of these, a good man by all accounts. Unfortunately, his headquarters was miles away, and he had a lot more territory and population to cover than merely Wind Valley.

  At first he reacted as she expected by pretty much refusing to take seriously that Ricardo Ortega—“of all people”—could possibly be missing on ranchland he knew as well as he knew the back of his horse’s neck.

  “I told you,” Juanita muttered, at the stove.

  The sheriff found it particularly unlikely that both the old man and the young woman were missing. He espoused Juanita’s theory—one of them—that they’d had an accident and were still trying to get back home. “If they’re not back by morning, you go ahead with your search party, Mrs. Potter. My guess is, you folks can do it better than I can, knowing that valley better than I do. You going to organize it yourself, Mrs. Potter, or who?”

  “My part-time hired man, Ken Ryerson.”

  “Well, have him give me a call tonight, and don’t worry about how late it is, either. If I can’t be there, I can still advise him, and I’d be happy to do that. If they haven’t shown up by noon tomorrow, Mrs. Potter, I’ll try to see about getting you some help out there. But I can’t promise much. We’ve got budget and manpower problems—what else is new, right?—and a whole lot of other situations on our backs right now, including three bank robberies and a truckload of Mexican illegals that somebody left to die in the desert.

  “I’m sorry about this, because I’ve got a lot of respect for Ricardo Ortega, and I can tell that you’re all mighty worried about him and that girl. I’ll tell you what, though, I do think that’s probably a good idea you’ve got about leasing an airplane. Helicopter would be even better, what with those twisty mountain valleys you got out there.” Mrs. Potter determinedly closed her mind to the question of cost; it would cost what it cost; she would pay what it took, for as long as she had it to pay. “Obviously, with a plane or chopper, you’ll cover a lot more ground, so to speak.”

  “Can you recommend a service, Sheriff?”

  “Funny you’d need to be askin’ me that question, Mrs. Potter, because Ricardo Ortega was in here not a week ago, wantin’ to know the very same thing.”

  Mrs. Potter felt a flicker of surprise run down her spine.

  The sheriff was saying in his baritone drawl, “ ‘Where can I find a reliable pilot,’ was what Ricardo wanted to know. I gave him the same answer I’ll give you, Arizona Aerials. Ask for Tom Fletcher. Or Lucy Dermitt, that’s his wife, she’s a crackerjack pilot too. They’ll charge you an arm and a leg, but at least you’ll still have all your arms and legs in one piece when you land. Damn good pilots. Both of them were in the war—Vietnam—he was a chopper pilot, and she flew commercial transport for a while.”

  “Did Ricardo tell you why he wanted them, Sheriff?”

  “Nope. And I didn’t think to ask. It’s not so unusual a request, Mrs. Potter. I figured he wanted aerial photographs of your ranch, maybe for you. A lot of people want that kind of thing, just to hang on their wall. Like Mrs. Thomas has over to the C Lazy U; only, I think she uses them to map out hunting parties. And I know that Reynolds McHenry got a bunch of them for the whole damn valley back a few years ago, probably even got your ranch in it. Hell of an expensive wall decoration, if you ask me, but then, I’m not paying for it.”

  By the time Mrs. Potter hung up from that call, Juanita was bending over the table with wide-mouthed ceramic bowls of steaming bread pudding in each hand, and Bandy was pulling another chair up to the table.

  Mrs. Potter’s mouth watered at the sight and smell.

  Juanita’s capirotada could pass for either a dessert or a full meal, depending on one’s appetite. Made with half a pound of cheese (a quarter pound each of longhorn and Jack), one whole loaf of raisin bread and a full cup of chopped walnuts, it boasted everything from calcium to fiber, especially when made with multigrain raisin bread instead of ordinary raisin bread. Some people ate it straight, Ricardo liked it with real whipped cream, Lew Potter had preferred ice cream, but Mrs. Potter was always happy to slosh it around in plain old milk.

  Juanita opened a white paper napkin and spread it on Mrs. Potter’s lap as if she were a child. “I’ll bring you a drink. Iced tea all right? You want some milk to go on that pudding?”

  “Please. Why would Ricardo want aerial photos?”

  Juanita didn’t answer until after she had poured milk into a ceramic pitcher, which she set on the table between Mrs. Potter and Bandy. “Photos of what?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s a good question too.”

  “I don’t know about aerial photos. He did buy us a new thirty-five-millimeter camera the other day. One of those fancy ones that shows the time and date on each picture, you know? I said to him, we have a perfectly good camera the kids gave us two Christmases ago, what do we need with this new one?”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said now I wouldn’t have to label our pictures of our grandkids. I said, What? You mean that camera can print their names on the pictures too?”

  “And he laughed?”

  “Oh, yes. That man! He said, no, now we’ll have a permanent record of the date, so we can always tell when the picture was taken, so we’ll know how old the child was. I don’t need a camera to tell me that, I said, you think I can’t tell my own grandkids’ ages by looking at them?”

  Bandy had waited politely for la patrona to pour the cool goodness of the milk over the hot, rich pudding, and then he emptied the rest of the pitcher into his own bowl, until his pudding looked like a brown island floating in a sea of milk.

  Juanita glared at him. “What do you know about this?”

  Bandy only shook his head, hunched over his bowl and dipped his spoon into it.

&nbs
p; “How come you didn’t hear them ride out this morning?” Juanita demanded of him.

  “Durmiendo.”

  I was asleep.

  Mrs. Potter became aware of a low rumbling noise outside, louder even than her stomach (which she appeased with a bite of delicious pudding).

  At that sound, Bandy lifted his gaze to hers.

  Silently, they acknowledged that a storm was brewing, maybe one of those sudden Arizona downpours that flushed the mountainsides and poured into the dry washes as if God had turned the cold water tap on full.

  Juanita didn’t appear to have heard it yet.

  To distract her so that she might have a few more moments of freedom from this new fear, Mrs. Potter blurted the first thing that came into her mind: “I’ll bet Ricardo got bucked.”

  She wasn’t prepared for Juanita’s volcanic reaction to that innocent surmise. Neither, to judge from his agape mouth, was Bandy.

  “Are you loco?” Juanita’s face was fiery with rage. “Ricardo get bucked? Nobody’s as good a horseman as he is, nobody can control a horse the way he can, I can’t believe you said that, it’s an insult to that man, and I resent—”

  “Juanita, good gracious—”

  “El es un viejo,” Bandy muttered, but both women heard him.

  He’s an old man.

  Juanita turned her furious glare on him. “You’re the viejo … y loco!”

  You’re the old man, and crazy to boot.

  Bandy lowered his gaze to his bowl and began to eat again. But Mrs. Potter saw that the gnarled, walnut-colored hands that held the spoon were trembling. And suddenly she saw them all, including herself, as if the light in the kitchen had altered, throwing deep lines onto their faces and painting shadows under their eyes. She saw herself as part of this quartet of people, if you counted Ricardo, who had known each other for so many long years. She saw, as if she had never noticed it before, the wrinkles and creases, the swollen blue veins on the tops of their hands, the eyes that held the wisdom and fear that comes with advancing age. Goodness, was it true, were they old now, all of them? Bandy, all right, yes; but she and Juanita, and Ricardo? A minute ago, she’d felt no more than middle-aged, and their faces, even Bandy’s, had appeared merely comfortable, familiar and loved, but now …

  Mrs. Potter shook herself of the dismaying vision.

  All the same, when she looked back at Juanita and Bandy, she didn’t see them quite the same as she had before. And she was suddenly quite loath to look in any mirror, for fear it might all be true.

  “Ah, señora.” Juanita looked stricken. “Lo siento.”

  “It’s all right, Juanita, I’m sorry if I—”

  Bandy noisily pushed back his chair and got up. The scrape of the chair legs against the tile was accompanied by a crack of lightning that hit close enough to flicker the overhead lamp.

  “Mi Dios!” Juanita nearly dropped the glass she held.

  Bandy grabbed his straw hat from off the back of his chair, and with a nod to both women, limped out of the kitchen. Shortly, they heard the front door slam.

  “Viejo,” Juanita muttered as she picked up his dirty bowl and spoon.

  Mrs. Potter brought the telephone to the table.

  “Shouldn’t use the telephone during an electrical storm, señora.”

  Mrs. Potter ignored her and the danger of lightning coming through the wire. She began calling around the valley to recruit volunteers for the next day’s search party. As she expected, nearly everybody said yes, and those who didn’t expressed sincere regret and good excuses. In between calls, she consumed another helping of bread pudding and a cup of brewed decaf coffee, which Juanita flavored with a pinch of nutmeg. Her last calls were hard to hear because of static, but she didn’t have any trouble with the party line, because everybody cooperated once they knew what she was up to. When she finished eating and phoning she shoved back her bowl, folded her hands on the table in front of her and gazed across at Juanita, who now sat in the place Bandy had vacated.

  “I want to tell you that you and Ricardo have lots of friends in this valley.”

  There was no reply to that, so she took a deep breath, and said, “All right, Bandy’s gone. I’m finished. Now, mi amiga, do you want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

  For a moment, she didn’t think Juanita would tell her.

  But then the other woman broke, in a torrent of words and indignation. “That man wants to retire! Do you believe that? Him and me both, he says, we ought to retire! He says he’s no good anymore, that he’s not doing the job for you that he used to do, that you need somebody younger and more able. I tell him, if he’d get rid of Bandy he could hire somebody to do the job that Bandy’s supposed to do! I tell him, he’s doing his job and Bandy’s and Ken’s too. I tell him, why does he let Ken take on all those jobs at other people’s ranches when we need him here? I tell him, what does he mean we ought to retire? I’m not too old to cook! I’m not too feeble to clean house for you, señora. Por Dios, I’ll still be cooking and cleaning for that man when I’m ninety years old. But no, he wants to move me out of my house, move us clear off the ranch, into town or some retirement village, or someplace, maybe with one of our children. Por Dios! What does he think I’m going to do, ride around in golf carts in Sun City with the rich Anglos—no offense? That man is not old! He’s not feeble. He’s a strong, virile man, I can tell you that, and there’s nothing wrong with his brain or his body, I’m telling you. I tell him that. Over and over, but no, that stubborn man only hears his own voice saying, retire, retire, retire.…”

  “When he called me yesterday, Juanita, he didn’t sound like a man who was ready to give up.”

  “No? He didn’t?”

  “No, he sounded like the old Ricardo.”

  “Old!” Juanita raised her hands in the air. “I hate that word!”

  “What makes him think he can’t do the job anymore?”

  “I don’t know! He’s been so secretive lately.…”

  When Juanita didn’t go on, Mrs. Potter prodded her. “How’s that?”

  But Juanita seemed to wrap a cloak of privacy—or secrecy—around herself, and would only say, “I don’t know, he won’t talk about it.”

  And neither will you, Mrs. Potter thought.

  “Could it have anything to do with his disappearance?”

  “He hasn’t disappeared, I keep telling you. Could what have anything to do with it?”

  “These secrets of his.”

  “I didn’t say he had secrets.”

  “You said he’s been secretive.”

  “He just won’t talk to me, that’s all.”

  “Has he talked to anybody else?”

  “Well, he talked to you, yesterday, didn’t he?” And suddenly, there was deep hurt in Juanita’s voice. “And you say he talked to the Amorys and Charlie Watt and Che and the Steinbachs and even the McHenrys. He talks to all of you, but not to me, not to his own wife—”

  They both jumped at the sound of a truck horn outside. Mrs. Potter was surprised at Bandy, at the rudeness of his summoning her back outside by blowing his truck horn. He, who’d never been other than the soul of Latin courtesy, honking for her? Juanita, calling her loco? Ricardo, claiming he wanted to retire? What had gotten into everybody while she was absent? Had they all gone loco?

  But it was late and Juanita looked exhausted.

  Before Mrs. Potter trotted out into the rain with a borrowed umbrella, Juanita said, “I make them carry full canteens. He laughs at me, but I make him do it anyway. Linda too.” At the sound of her granddaughter’s name, Juanita’s voice cracked and her eyes filled for the first time. Mrs. Potter ached to embrace her, but waited instead for this proud woman to win her struggle to control her emotions. When Juanita spoke again, Mrs. Potter couldn’t detect so much as a tremor in her voice. “This time of year, I make them carry rain slickers with them all the time, rolled up behind their saddles. Tonight, por Dios, they will be thanking me.” She looked out at the rain, n
ot appearing to hear Mrs. Potter’s hurried “adios.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Lo siento, patrona.”

  As soon as Mrs. Potter climbed into his truck, Bandy apologized to her for honking. His hand slipped, he told her.

  “I hate to leave her alone tonight,” Mrs. Potter confided to him, over the metallic sound of the rain on his truck. They pulled out of Juanita’s drive and into the dirt road—rapidly becoming a mud path—that led back to Mrs. Potter’s compound. Five fingers of lightning crackled in the sky east of them, illuminating the entire range of Rimstone Mountains for a dramatic moment. The sandstone formation known as El Bizcocho stood out as if in bas-relief.

  Bandy nodded his understanding, but kept his usual silent counsel.

  “I feel as if I’m abandoning her,” she added.

  After another few silent moments, in which Mrs. Potter felt a need to bridge the night with words, even if he didn’t, she asked a question she rarely voiced. “Is anyone staying with you, Bandy?”

  She meant, as he knew, illegal aliens. His “nephews.”

  “No, patrona, no ahora.”

  No, not now.

  “Bueno,” she said. Mrs. Potter rarely inquired about the thin, dark, frightened young men she glimpsed now and then hurrying along a back country road, trying so pathetically hard to be invisible. Ricardo had long ago hinted it was better not to ask. As far as Mrs. Potter knew, no women had ever taken refuge with her old hired hand. She thought about those women who fled north, and wondered whether they left children behind or brought them along. Who provided shelter for those “nieces” of the road? They were so vulnerable, men, women, and children alike. Vulnerable to the weather, to illness, to their own empty bellies. Vulnerable to unscrupulous, even murderous operators who promised jobs that never materialized. Vulnerable to the border patrol who were charged with an impossible task, like trying to plug a leak with a cotton ball. Mrs. Potter knew that she didn’t make the border patrol’s job any easier with her tacit approval of Bandy and Ricardo’s activities, but she and Lew, when he was alive, had always tended to view it as humanitarian aid, like the underground railroad that sheltered runaway slaves during the Civil War. And so the Potters had never interfered with what was obviously a moral imperative for their ranch manager and their hired hand.