I left word for Detective Treadwell, although he’d probably already picked up the phone message that Darren Markson had made it safely to New Mexico.
If that wasn’t Markson’s voice I’d heard on the call, whose was it? Had the car been stolen or had Markson allowed someone to borrow it? If so, it was probably someone Emily Markson knew. She said she didn’t recognize the voice, but why the anger in her eyes?
And what about those bruises? Some were new, but others were already magenta and green. They ringed her wrist and continued up the inside of her arm. If Treadwell didn’t already know about them, I was going to make sure he found out.
The sun was setting amid a braggart’s display of orange and purple clouds over the Tucson Mountains, and the city seemed to take a breath as the air cooled to what passed for Arizona fall temperatures. I called my sister, Bonita, and explained that I was in town.
“Hey, I just booted the rest of the family out so I could pack. We have the house to ourselves.”
“You leave soon?”
“Tomorrow. But no more questions till you get here.”
Bonita had decided almost a year ago to join the Peace Corps, but I hadn’t realized her departure date had grown so near. I stopped to pick up a bottle of champagne on the way over.
She had moved away from our parents’ house when she started college and now rented a tiny, one-bedroom house on a quiet side street in the Fort Lowell neighborhood, an area more likely to have dismantled cars in the front yard than landscaping.
She met me on the front porch.
“You can hear that truck a mile away.”
She was right. The exhaust sounded like a drum solo. But I knew she’d been watching from the porch since I’d called.
Bonita was eleven years younger than me, the youngest of the seven children in our family. “First there was Jessie, then three boys, then three girls” is the way my mother put it, turning me into some androgynous feral child.
The twins, Carlotta and Carmella, were pretty, but not like Bonita, and my brothers’ faces were rough-hewn and craggy. The rest of us were rough drafts, and Bonita the finished novel.
My sister had done some appearance-neutering for this Peace Corps gig, with bangs cut ruler-straight and hair tied back in a loose ponytail. I pictured that blond head, in a circle with heads of coarser, darker hair, all set against the velvet green of a South American rain forest.
“Ready to go?” A heavy-duty backpack leaned against the dining room table, while a wheeled suitcase full of cords, plastic sheeting, and small vials gaped open on the couch.
“What’s this?” I nudged a heavy plastic wedge in the suitcase. It was about the size of a hardcover book.
“A foot-powered generator,” she said. “I’ll get my exercise and power up the laptop at the same time.”
I handed her the champagne.
“Let me see what’s not packed up yet.” She headed to the kitchen, returning a moment later with two jelly glasses and a towel. I took the wire hoop off the bottle, covered the top with the towel, and twisted until it popped.
We clinked rims. “Two years, that’s a long time to be gone,” I said.
“You’ve been gone longer.”
I shook my head. “That’s different.”
We sipped in silence. I was thinking of the past, Bonita quite possibly of the future.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Bonita had never been the biggest risk-taker in our brood. Hell, she probably used both birth control pills and abstinence. And she was my littlest sister. I didn’t want her so far away that I couldn’t take care of her the way I’d done when we were growing up. But I hadn’t been of much help to her for the last couple of years; she’d probably do fine without me.
“Yeah. What else am I going to do with wanderlust and a BA in education?”
And what was I going to do with a rap sheet and a degree in philosophy? You would have thought those studies would have better prepared me to come to terms with becoming a killer, but the ethics of killing were still a muddle to me. If you take a life, does it change you? Yes, in a thousand shadowed ways. Is it worth it? Sometimes.
I’d had plenty of time in jail to crystallize my short-term creed: “Do Unto Others as They Have Done Unto Your Friends and Family.” But that wouldn’t help me much in a job search. I’d been stuttering along as a bartender when my friend Catherine died and I took over her quest. I hadn’t planned murder as a postgraduate degree. I thought I’d settle into some teaching position in a high school—maybe get married, although there was no front-runner on the horizon. By the time I got out of jail, even bartending seemed to require more social skills than I had left.
Bonita finished her thought, not having noticed my lapse of attention. “And after what you went through…” No mention of my guilt or innocence, of course. “Well, I decided that I never wanted to look back at my life and say ‘I wish I had.’”
I was still trying to work through the “I wish I hadn’ts.”
Bonita was kind enough not to continue the thought.
She caught me up on family news while she jammed rolled-up socks between the solar shower and shortwave radio in the suitcase. The “carbon-copy” twins, Carlotta and Carmella, were both married, one living in Flagstaff and the other in San Diego. Of the three boys—Lincoln, Martin, and John (our own assassination trifecta)—Bonita only had new news of John, who had re-upped and was now stationed at Camp Pendleton. Martin and Lincoln had turned down our father’s career as a cop and had both gone into the fire department instead. Bonita said nothing had changed; they were still happily divorced (Martin) and happily married (Lincoln).
I didn’t ask any questions that I didn’t already know the answers to.
I told her about taking the call from Darren Markson’s car and the request to play the tape for his wife.
“So that’s what finally got you back to town. I didn’t see anything about it in the paper.” It was a nonconfrontational response. She’d been too often snake-bit by my lies to buy wholeheartedly into anything I said.
“It was probably too late for the morning papers, and it’s just a stolen car. Tucson’s got plenty of those.”
She tucked in the flaps on a bulging carton beside her. “Martin’s going to come by and get my car and these boxes, but my rent goes through the end of the month, if you want to stay for a while.”
“What am I going to do in Tucson?”
“I don’t know. Maybe check in with the folks?”
“You know I can’t do that.”
But there were a few questions about Markson I wanted to ask, and one place I wanted to visit in the daylight. I didn’t even know who the victim was here. The bruised wife? Darren Markson? Some unrecognizable voice on the other end of a call for help? Emily Markson and her too-slick lawyer were hiding something and now they’d made me part of that subterfuge.
“Mind if I spend the night?”
I took Bonita to the airport the next morning, giving her my favorite talisman, a small chunk of eucalyptus heartwood carved into the shape of a quail. I didn’t tell her that it had taken me that whole eight months in jail while I was waiting for the trial, scrabbling at it with my thumbnails to bring it to life. Digging…scraping…worrying at it night after night, instead of piercing my own flesh. The quail was fat and round and smooth in my hand. I gave it a farewell rub.
“Go on, take it. It’s better than a St. Christopher, better than any patron saint. It protects female travelers heading south.”
She tilted her head, much like the quail itself, to let me know she wasn’t buying my story but still tucked the bird into the smallest pocket on her jeans.
I left her in front of the Aeroméxico counter for the first leg of her flight to Bolivia, and watched her image grow small in the rearview mirror. The patron saint of I Wish I Had.
From the airport, I looped southeast around the city, out where the streetlights and golf courses finally lost out to the Rincon Mountains and the Saguaro National Park. Just west of those foothills, I reached the location where Markson’s car had been rear-ended.
I’d been right about the creosote out here. I could see the rooftops of a new housing development in the distance—the wood beams still raw—but from shoulder height down, there was nothing but sagebrush, thorny stickers, and a not-often-used dirt road.
I got out of the truck and eased the door shut behind me. I knew I was generally in the right area, but I couldn’t picture Markson’s car here, couldn’t imagine the skritch of thorny bush against his door. Couldn’t hear the desert wind I’d heard last night.
I walked farther north, toward a massive cottonwood tree that listed toward the arroyo like a dowsing rod. It stood fifty or sixty feet high, proof that this dry wash had once run full and that there remained enough water under the sand to sustain life. The tree had branched into three separate trunks down near its base, giving it a wide and low canopy of leaves like a sombrero.
Close to the shadow of the tree was a sprinkling of red glass. Markson’s taillight?
I’d have to stop thinking of him as Markson, if what his wife said about the phone call was true.
I was surprised that the officer had spotted the car at all, as hidden as it would have been in the middle of the night by the brim of that leafy hat.
I expected to see crime scene tape ringing the area, decorating the branches of the cottonwood like a homicidal Christmas tree, but there was nothing. No car. No police notice. And no blood that I could see.
Lots of footprints, though. Hard-soled shoes, cowboy boots, and sneakers. The cops must have all been male; none of the prints looked small enough to be a woman’s. There was one set of small, bare prints that looked almost childlike. Probably a dog or a wildcat. I couldn’t read tracks for shit.
Two sets of tire marks were clear, although the dry, hard-packed sand didn’t tell much of a story about them.
But it did put the lie to one theory. There was no way a car would have been stuck in this caliche-hard soil. Those voices I heard were not trying to free a car, they were fighting.
The day was already hot enough that even my five-minute sortie had given me snail trails of sweat down the side of my face.
I headed deeper into the shade of the cottonwood. Checking the ground for anthills, snakes, and tarantulas, I squatted down, then leaned back against the thickest of the three trunks. What had they been fighting about? And, whoever it was in Markson’s car, where had he gone when it was over?
A hot wind rustled the branches above me and flayed green leaves drifted into my lap. I looked up. About twenty feet up there was a fork in the branch of the middle trunk. And dead center of that fork was a lighter patch of wood—bone white and cleared of foliage.
Scaling the base of the trunk was easy, but transferring to the upright middle trunk was more difficult. The dark gray bark, so deeply cracked that it looked as if it had been caressed by a tiger, crumbled as I climbed. I braced my back against one limb and my feet against another, shimmying up like a chimney-rock climber.
Once above the fork, I could see the raw wound on the top of the limb. The thick, fissured bark was gone, as were most of the surrounding leaves. In their place was a two-inch strip of newly peeled wood, bristling with shreds of something that looked like hemp or thick hair. I pulled several of the strands from the surrounding bark where they’d been caught, wrapped them in a Kleenex, and stuffed them into my pocket.
I imagined trying to throw a rope up and over that notched branch in the dark. Not an easy task on a moonless night. Those leaves on the ground may not have been the result of a desert wind. Maybe they were testament to the number of times someone swung a rope before it caught, and held, and finally did its job.
Foot by shaky foot, I climbed down the tree and reclaimed my place against the trunk. Had I heard a beating? Or was it a hanging?
My mind filled in the details. The creak of a strong fiber pulled taut. The hollow thump of pipes and boards striking flesh. Grunts from the assailants. Groans from the dying man. It fit the sounds I’d heard, but the police hadn’t found any facts to prove it.
Hell, I’d always had an overactive imagination.
A twig snapped behind me, on the other side of the tree. I jumped up and peered around the trunk.
At first it was just a flash of white, then a delicate hand snaked around a branch at eye level.
I grabbed the wrist and yanked.
“Ay! Dios! Don’t hurt me!”
She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen, hair as black as a crow’s wing, and eyes wide with fear. She scooted away from me on her butt.
“I won’t hurt you. You just scared me.” I gave her plenty of backing-up room. “What are you doing out here?” There was no sign of a car in the direction she’d come from.
“Walking…taking a shortcut…”
“From where?”
She fluttered a hand to the southwest, an area with no immediate housing or car traffic.
“What’s your name?”
“L…Luisa.”
“I’m Jessie.” I stuck out my hand. She grasped it for a tentative shake, but I tightened my hold and pulled her upright. She shuffled her feet and swatted the back of her jeans with pebble-studded hands. My guess was that her name did start with an “L,” but that was where the truth had hiccupped.
Had she really just taken a shortcut? Maybe she was looking forward to the shade of this one giant tree after a half hour’s walk across a brutal stretch of desert.
She was too well dressed to be a recent border crosser, with her tight jeans and clean, white Pep Boys T-shirt. Her chest was so small that Manny, Moe, and Jack evinced only smirks instead of their usual toothy grins. And the Mexico border was a full seventy-five miles away anyway; she wasn’t crossing here and hiding from La Migra.
Wherever she had come from, it was a long, hot walk. Hell, even the closest bus route was a good mile and a half away.
Sweat dripped down the sides of her face, her sandals were covered with dust, and there were melon-sized wet patches under her arms. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but it wasn’t clear whether that was sadness or a sign of fear. On the other hand, the thrust of her chin and the cant of her elbows definitely said defiance.
“You can’t keep me here, you know.”
“I’m not trying to keep you here.”
She looked left and right and finally straight ahead at the tree. I followed her gaze up the central trunk to that juncture where the bark was scraped to a bone color. A single tear coursed down her face now, mixing with the sweat.
The spell was broken when a rooster tail of dust appeared over her right shoulder, from the direction of the road. One car, and coming our way. Luisa turned back toward the sound. We could both see the police car’s lights above the sagebrush.
“Please. Please don’t say anything.”
I glanced again at the approaching car. When I turned back, she was gone.