Yet there was a reluctance in him just to walk away from what he’d learned. His curiosity was far from satisfied. There were too many questions, too many puzzling elements; they presented the same sort of challenge as a knotty tax problem, stimulated his desire to work toward a solution, create order out of a certain amount of chaos. Facts were like numbers — shift them around, add and subtract, multiply and divide, try different equations, and sooner or later you could be certain you had the correct answer.
Was Anna Roebuck guilty or innocent of double murder? That was the central question, the central problem. His feeling that almost everybody in Beulah was wrong about her guilt was groundless, even foolish; he had scanty facts and little or no concrete knowledge of the people involved. And yet it remained strong and persistent. Seventeen years as a CPA had taught him to trust his gut reaction to a given situation; in tax and financial matters, at least, it had seldom proven wrong.
The child’s body in the well was its core. He could accept the brutal murder of an eight-year-old, a type of atrocity that happened too often in these violent times; he could accept a mother committing such an act as part of a psychotic episode triggered by the shotgun slaying of a faithless husband. But the rest of it simply did not ring true to him as a mother’s crime. Kill a husband and leave him lie in his own blood, yes; kill a daughter and reclothe her and then drop her body into a well, no. Somebody had done those things, somebody had had a reason no matter how bizarre or insane, but not the woman who’d kept a one-eyed panda bear, her husband’s boyhood watch, and a book on coping with pain and grief. Catathymic crisis be damned; repressed memory be damned. Not Ms. Lonesome.
All right. Then what harm could there be in spending another day or two in Beulah, talking to others who’d known Anna and the circumstances of the crimes? Talking to Dacy Burgess again, or at least trying to. Despite the fact that she’d taken those potshots at him, he found her almost as compelling as her sister, and for some of the same reasons. Product of a place and a way of life so far removed from his own that they might have been from different cultures, yet there were similarities, too, that put them on a mutual level of understanding. Loneliness was one, but he sensed others as well. He felt he would like to know her better. So why not stay and make the effort? It couldn’t be any more unfulfilling than throwing money away on a blackjack table, ogling bare-breasted showgirls on a stage, or trying to find a one-night stand that would only make his loneliness more acute, whether he succeeded or not.
Once he’d made the decision, he felt better. A sense of purpose always buoyed him. In town he stopped at a Western clothing store on Main and bought two shirts, a pair of Levi’s jeans, an inexpensive pair of high-topped hiking boots, and a flat-crowned, dun-colored Stetson. When in Rome. He was enough of an outsider without continuing to look like one. Besides, he would need proper clothing if he intended to return to Death Valley and go tramping around other desert locales.
Thirst tugged at him when he left the store. There were a brace of taverns on this block, but instead he entered a package liquor store and bought two iced cans of Bud. A cool shower and the air-conditioned privacy of his motel room held more appeal than the company of strangers.
A blob of red flickered in the room’s half-light when he let himself in: the message light on the bedside telephone. It surprised him, but not very much. The air conditioner was turned down low and the room was stuffy; he put the unit on high, then opened one of the cans of beer and drank a third of it before he called the office.
Mrs. Padgett answered. “Oh yes, Mr. Messenger. Yes, I have a message for you. Message for Messenger.” She simpered a little, as if she were nervous or keyed up. “It’s from Mr. John T. Roebuck. You know who he is, I’m sure?”
“I’ve heard the name.”
“Well, he called about one. He’d like to see you at the Wild Horse. That’s the casino on Main—”
“Yes, I know, I saw the sign.”
“He’ll be in his office until five.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Padgett.”
“You’re certainly welcome. Ah, Mr. Messenger...?”
“Yes?”
“Is it true about Anna Roebuck? That she killed herself in San Francisco?”
“It’s true.”
“Opened her veins with a butcher’s knife? That’s what I heard. Is that how she did it?”
There was a note in her voice that made him think of a vulture poised over a piece of carrion. He said, keeping his tone level, “No, you heard wrong,” and broke the connection.
They really hate Anna, he thought, dead as well as alive. The whole town. You couldn’t blame them if she was guilty, but she’d never even been arrested, much less charged with the crimes. Judged and tried and convicted by all her neighbors except one, without benefit of even a hearing. Condemned, too, willfully if not in fact, and now that the death sentence had been carried out by her own hand, they were gloating over the bits and pieces of her remains. Like the knitting women smiling and watching heads roll in A Tale of Two Cities.
He finished the beer, tossed the empty can into the wastebasket. His watch said that it was a few minutes past three. Plenty of time: there was no need to rush to see John T. Roebuck. He was pretty sure he knew what Roebuck wanted — the same thing Mrs. Padgett and Sally Adams and Ada Kendall and the rest of them wanted. He’d go give it to him eventually, before five o’clock; he was curious about the Roebuck family and about John T., the big fish in the local pond. But there was someone else he wanted to talk to first: Anna’s only other champion, Jaime Orozco.
In the bathroom he ran the shower until he had a temperature that suited him. He spent ten minutes under it, soaking away the desert grit and trying to work the last of the soreness out of his bruised knee. Dressed again in his new clothing, he had a look at himself in the bathroom mirror. Not too bad. In fact, much better than he’d expected. Not every city dweller could wear Western garb without looking like a refugee from a dude ranch, or just plain ludicrous, or both.
After a brief debate with himself, he left the Stetson in the room when he went out. No use in overdoing it.
Locating Jaime Orozco took a little time and effort. There was no listing for him in the local telephone directory. Mrs. Padgett might know where he lived, but Messenger was reluctant to deal with her again after their phone conversation; he thought it would be better to ask strangers. The first one he asked, a surly attendant at a nearby gas station, either didn’t know or wouldn’t bother to tell him. He made his second stop at a taqueria, but the waitress and cook there were equally uncommunicative — probably because he was a stranger, and an Anglo at that.
It was the clerk in the Western clothing store where he’d bought his new outfit who finally told him: Jaime Orozco lived with his daughter, Carmelita Ramirez, and her family on Dolomite Street. “That’s on the south flats,” the clerk said. “Down past the new high school. I don’t know the number. You’ll have to ask one of the people down there.”
Messenger found the street easily enough. It was unpaved, part gravel and part rutted hardpan, and flanked by a haphazard collection of wood frame houses and small trailer homes, all of them sun-flayed and poor-looking. Chickens and goats and dogs were visible in most yards. All of the faces he saw were Mexican. This was what once, not so long ago, would have been called Mextown or Spictown by the white establishment. Now, with racism forced into a more euphemistic existence, it was “the south flats, down past the new high school” and “the people down there.”
A woman carrying a market basket pointed out the Ramirez home: one of the newer trailers, set inside a neatly fenced yard; a roofed arbor extended out to the rear. In the yard a chubby boy of six or seven was playing fetch with a black-and-tan mongrel puppy. He stopped the game when Messenger opened the gate and walked through; stood peering round-eyed, a well-chewed tennis ball poised in one fist.