J. Jance - Day of the Dead

“No shit!” she shot back, mimicking his delivery.

“Looking for loopholes?” he asked. She nodded. “In whose favor?”

“In anybody’s favor.”

“And where do you live?”

“Are you saying whoever told you where my office was didn’t also tell you where I live?”

“I’m from out of town.” He grinned back at her. “My sources are good only up to a point.”

She laughed aloud as a waiter refilled her champagne glass with bubbly that had clocked in at more than a hundred dollars a bottle. “If you must know, I live in Glover Park in a town house on Tunlaw Road-1849 Tunlaw Road. I live with a friend from law school, Marcia Lomax. You met her last night at the exhibit.”

“Tunlaw Road,” he repeated. “Sounds very upscale.”

Delia smiled and shook her head. “Not really. Lots of students and young professionals, all of us struggling. The best thing about Tunlaw Road is the name. It’s ‘walnut’ spelled backward. According to a legend I heard, nobody in the District was allowed to name a street after a tree, but somebody slipped that one past.”

Philip raised his glass. “Here’s to Tunlaw Road. I like it, too. I’m always in favor of slipping it to the Great White Father.”

Dinner stretched far into the night. When it was time to go home, Philip invited her to his hotel. Delia shook her head and caught a cab, but on the way home she knew she was smitten. If he asked her out again, she’d go. If he invited her to his room again, she’d probably go there, too.

In the week and a half that followed, they’d had a great time together. She showed him the sights, his credit card provided the meals, and they availed themselves of the king-sized bed in his Dupont Plaza hotel room. Between times, Philip Cachora told Delia stories.

He was a charming and engaging storyteller. Ten years her senior, he had gone to both grade school and the first two years of high school on the reservation, at Topawa and Indian Oasis High School. He told her about going to rain dances and getting drunk on thick cactus-juice wine. He told her about his art and about some of the shows he’d been in. He told her about going to powwows around the country and trying to integrate what he saw there into his art.

Beguiled by his stories, Delia failed to question what he was editing out. Somehow, during that first evening and the whirlwind days that followed, he never mentioned a single one of his three ex-wives or why any of them had left him. And Delia never had the presence of mind to ask.

Gayle was glad Larry had been able to get it up with no difficulty. Once she took care of that item on her to-do list, Larry was out like a light, leaving Gayle free to slip out of bed and prowl around the familiar old house-the house of her childhood. Other than the relatively recent modifications in the basement, little else had changed. Much of the furniture was still the same high-quality and often re-covered highly serviceable stuff Great-Grandmother Madison had shipped by train from Ohio when she arrived at the ranch as a bride in 1901.

Sometime in the early seventies, Gayle’s mother, Gretchen, had replaced the creaking 1950s-era appliances with all new Maytag-brand versions. Gretchen’s once state-of-the-art appliances could now be considered museum pieces, but to Gayle’s amazement, they continued to plug along. As far as she was concerned, they would never be replaced. When the time came, they’d be bulldozed right along with the house.

The ranch had been Gayle’s father’s domain and her mother’s nightmare. He liked living there, while Gretchen preferred the social milieu of her own family’s house in Tucson-the home that was Gayle’s to this day. Had Winston lived, he would most likely have inherited that, just as Gayle had inherited the ranch. But Winston had died in the mid-1980s, and Gretchen, mourning her lost son, had soon followed. That left Gayle with both the ranch and the house in town and with her parents’ model on how to conduct herself.

It was strange for Gayle to realize how much her marriage to Larry Stryker resembled that of her parents-her home in town and his miles away on the ranch. In private, Calvin and Gretchen had made no secret of their mutual loathing, but in public they had maintained a smilingly polite decorum that had held gossipmongers at bay for decades. In their respective lairs, Calvin had kept a steady string of dark-eyed and curvaceous housekeepers, while Gretchen had carried on secret liaisons with several of Tucson’s highborn but decidedly “mannish” women. As for their children? Winston, permanently attached to his mother’s apron strings, had avoided the ranch like the plague, while Gayle, adoring her father, had loathed the city.

It amused Gayle sometimes to wonder what a therapist would make of her incestuous relationship with her father. Supposedly she should have minded, but she didn’t. Conventional wisdom said that she would grow up hating her father, but she hadn’t done that, either. Gayle had resented her mother’s mistreatment of Calvin and was glad to do what she could to cheer him up. Admittedly, she’d been jealous when a new housekeeper would show up, causing Calvin to absent himself temporarily from his daughter’s bed. Gayle supposed that, to some extent, maybe what she did to Larry’s girls-that wonderfully endless supply of lithe brown bodies-was a means of finding redress for the attentions Calvin’s mistresses had stolen from her.

Here in this house, Gayle could see how the way she’d been raised had contributed to what she’d become-smart, pragmatic, unflappable. Both of her parents had provided outstanding role models about what to do when life turned out to be different from what you had expected. Irreconcilable differences plainly existed in her parents’ separate households, but they were never mentioned. Neither was the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E. That simply wasn’t done. If you made a bad choice, my dear, you pulled up your socks, stuck with it, and went looking for fun and entertainment wherever you liked-as long as you were discreet about it.

That was why Larry’s actions with Roseanne Orozco had so infuriated Gayle. It had been anything but discreet, and it would surely have brought the whole world down around their ears if Gayle hadn’t taken definitive action. The same thing almost happened again two years later, when one of Larry’s old poker-playing buddies was caught sticking his dick where he shouldn’t have. To save his sorry ass, he made a plea bargain that included shooting off his mouth about what had gone on in the hospital at Sells and had named names in the process-Larry’s included. As a result, Larry and several other physicians were summarily drummed out of the Indian Health Service.

But what had first seemed total disaster turned out to be not that bad after all. A few calls to one or two of Gretchen’s well-placed friends kept the story from making it into the local papers. Amazingly enough, arcane rules and regulations governing Indian Health Service physicians meant that lists of disciplined doctors were not made available to state or national medical associations, leaving Larry and the others free to practice medicine wherever they chose.

But by then Gayle no longer wanted to be married to a doctor. What had sounded like a great idea when she was in college had lost its allure. She didn’t want to live with someone who had to be on call. She didn’t like Larry’s being out of her sight that much, either. As long as he didn’t have brains enough to keep his pants zipped, she couldn’t risk his going off to work at a hospital or clinic. The Easter weekend interlude at the beachfront hotel in Mazatlan had proved to Gayle Stryker just what she’d suspected about her husband’s sexual preferences and had supplied her with the key to keeping Larry under her complete control.