J. Jance: Day of the Dead

“You waited a long time to talk about this.”

Emma nodded. “It was a bad time,” she said. “When it was over, Henry, my husband, said we should just forget about it. It’s not good to dwell on the past.”

Brandon nodded and said nothing. Emma continued. “But Henry’s dead now,” she added. “I’m Roseanne’s mother, and I want to know.”

Brandon didn’t look at Emma directly. That, too, would have been considered rude behavior on his part, but as she spoke, he studied her reflection in the entryway mirror. Coming here and digging up the past in the presence of a stranger and a Mil-gahn-a white man-besides, showed a great deal of courage and strength of character on Emma’s part. To do so meant that, in both regards, she was going against hundreds of years of tradition and a lifetime’s worth of teaching as well. He watched as she gripped the handle of her walker as if the plastic-covered metal might somehow help stiffen her resolve in the same way it helped hold her upright.

“Mr. Ortiz said you belonged to some kind of group that looks into old cases…into old murders.” She stumbled over the last word.

Other people might have been surprised to hear the word murder stick in Emma Orozco’s throat more than thirty years after the fact. Brandon Walker was not. He knew how events like that-like the death of a child-might disappear from public view after a few days of newspaper and television coverage. But for the parents of a dead child, the loss is permanent, indelible. It becomes the central issue of existence, not just for mothers and fathers, but for sisters and brothers as well; for husbands and wives and children. That sudden death is a watershed. From that moment on, life’s perspective shifts. Everything dates from either before or after. This was as true for Brandon as it was for Emma Orozco; for he, too, had lost a child.

“Yes,” he supplied in answer to Emma’s comment. “The organization Mr. Ortiz told you about is called The Last Chance, TLC for short. It’s a private organization that was started a few years ago by a Mil-gahn woman named Hedda Brinker from Scottsdale-a woman not unlike yourself whose daughter was murdered in Tempe in 1959.”

Emma’s dark eyes sought Brandon’s. “Did they ever find out who did it?” she asked.

“No,” Brandon replied. “That’s what Hedda Brinker was hoping might happen when she started TLC-that someone would finally solve her own child’s murder.” He shrugged. “Maybe someday we will,” he added. “But right now the stated purpose of TLC is to help other people.”

“People like me?” Emma asked.

Brandon nodded. “Yes,” he said. “People just like you.”

“How much does it cost?” Emma asked. “I have some money. I can pay…”

“It’s expensive,” Brandon answered. “But it costs you nothing. Hedda created a charitable organization that pays all the costs.”

Emma reached for her purse, an ugly boxy vinyl one with a broken strap and brittle, damaged corners. At first Brandon thought she was going to offer him money after all. Instead, she dug out a ball-point pen and a small spiral notebook-the same kind of notebook Brandon himself had carried during his days as a homicide detective. Emma flipped through the notebook to a blank page. She handed the notebook to Brandon, who rose from his chair to take it.

“Please,” Emma said softly. “Please write down this nice white lady’s name for me. Tomorrow when I go to Mass, I will say a rosary for her and light a candle.”

Brandon Walker smiled to himself. He had never met Hedda Brinker. She had died more than two years earlier of congestive heart failure, but he imagined it would have come as a surprise for that “nice white lady” who was also Jewish to know that she was being prayed for and having candles lit by an equally nice Tohono O’odham lady who was a practicing Catholic.

He handed the pen and notebook back to Emma. She carefully filed both of them away in her purse. She clicked it shut, then waited for some time without speaking, staring once more at the Man in the Maze. Again Brandon Walker was the one who broke the silence.

“Perhaps you should tell me about your daughter.”

Emma’s gnarled fingers tightened around the handle of her walker. “Henry and I had two daughters,” she said softly. “The older one, Andrea, we called Mithol-mad-Kitten. The younger one, Roseanne, the shy one, we called Tachchuithch…”

“Beloved,” Brandon supplied without needing Emma to translate.

For the first time Emma looked at the Mil-gahn man-really looked at him. He was tall and well-built. His graying hair was cut short. Compared to Tohono O’odham faces, his was sharp and angular, but his eyes were soft and looked at her with a kindness she had not expected from someone who had once been a detective-and a sheriff.

Fat Crack had told her Brandon Walker was a good man-a white man who could be trusted. She knew that Walker and his wife had a wogsha-an adopted Tohono O’odham child-named Lani. According to Fat Crack, the girl was the spiritual daughter of the Desert People’s greatest medicine woman, Kulani O’oks, a woman who, in a time of terrible drought, was saved from death by the beating of the wings of The Little People, the Bees and Wasps, the Butterflies and Moths. But Emma Orozco had not expected the Mil-gahn would understand or speak her native tongue. Her fingers unclenched. She relaxed her painful grip on the walker.

“They found her out along the highway beyond Giwho Tho’ag,” Emma said softly. “Someone cut her up and put her in a box.”

Emma deliberately used the Tohono O’odham word for Burden Basket Mountain. It was a test of sorts, to see how much the Mil-gahn knew.

“I remember now,” he said, nodding. “The girl in the ice chest over by Quijotoa.”

It came back to him then, not all the details, but enough. He was still working Homicide for the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. When he heard about the case, he was happy the call hadn’t come to him. He’d already been through one ugly reservation-based homicide. A year earlier, a young Indian woman named Gina Antone had been murdered just off the reservation. The trail had led Brandon Walker to Andrew Philip Carlisle, a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, and eventually to one of Professor Carlisle’s star pupils, Garrison Ladd, Diana’s first husband.

As the investigation closed in, Garrison Ladd had perished in what was mistakenly thought to be a suicide. As far as Brandon was concerned, Carlisle’s slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain had been a less than satisfactory conclusion to the case. It had left a bad taste in Brandon’s mouth. The bitter taste still lingered in 1970, when Roseanne Orozco’s butchered body was found on the reservation, and Brandon had been happy to dodge that particular bullet. Some other investigator-he couldn’t remember exactly who-took the call.

There were several differences between the Orozco murder and Gina Antone’s. Gina had died off the reservation and at the hands of Anglos. Consequently, the investigation into her death had fallen under the jurisdiction of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. Although the actual murder site was never found in the Orozco case, it was assumed Roseanne had died somewhere on the reservation and that she had been murdered by a fellow Indian. Investigations into Indians murdering Indians on Native lands were the responsibility of either the FBI or the local tribal police.

Brandon Walker remembered that, in the early seventies, there had been a small contingent inside the FBI with the kind of corporate mind-set that preferred shooting Indians to anything else. FBI investigations into reservation murders, unless the perpetrator was Indian and the victim Anglo, were often cursory at best. People went through the motions, and that was it. “Law and Order,” as the Papago Tribal Police Force was sometimes called, was summoned to the scene of the Orozco homicide. Hampered by a lack of three essential ingredients-training, equipment, and money-their subsequent investigation had obviously come to nothing, although Brandon hadn’t known that for sure-not until right then, when Emma told him.