Messenger smiled at him. “Hi there. Can you tell me if Jaime Orozco lives here?”
The boy just looked.
Didn’t speak English? No, it was probably just that he was shy. Might be easier to talk to in Spanish. Messenger had had two years of elective Spanish at Berkeley; he dredged around in his memory for long-stored words and phrases.
“Por favor, niño. Es esta la casa de Jaime Orozco?”
That produced a tentative grin. “Sí. Mi abeulo.”
“Esta aquí ahora?”
“Por ahí fuera.” The boy gestured. “En el patio.”
“Gracias, niño. Muchas gracias.”
Messenger went around to the rear of the trailer. A pair of weathered, picnic-style tables with attached benches and two mismatched lounge chairs were arranged under the arbor. A man sat propped on one of the chairs, reading a newspaper; there was nobody else in sight. When he saw Messenger he lowered the paper, folded it carefully, and set it on a nearby table — all without taking dark, sad eyes off his visitor.
“Señor Orozco? Jaime Orozco?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
Messenger had expected a much older man: Reverend Hoxie’s use of the word “retired,” the chubby little boy saying Orozco was his grandfather. The man on the lounge chair was no more than fifty-five, lean and fit-looking, with eyebrows like clumps of black brush and cheeks and forehead crosshatched by dozens of lines and furrows, as if a bas relief map of a section of desert landscape had been graven there.
“Sit down, Señor Messenger.”
Messenger went to a bench connected to one of the picnic tables. “I guess I’m getting to be well known in Beulah. Even dressed like one of the natives.”
“I thought you might come,” Orozco said gravely. “Anna Roebuck had no other friends here.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Were you her friend?”
“I wanted to be. I tried to be.”
“But it was too late when you met her.”
“Much too late.”
The trailer’s rear door opened, releasing the aroma of cooking meat and peppers; a heavyset woman in her late twenties stepped out onto a tiny stair landing. Orozco introduced her as his daughter, Carmelita. She acknowledged Messenger with such thin-lipped disapproval that he felt she’d been watching and listening at the curtained window beside the door.
“A cool drink?” she asked him. “Beer, water?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
“Papa?”
“No.” When the woman had gone back inside, shutting the door harder than was necessary, Orozco shook his head and said, “Not even Carmelita.”
“Not even... oh. She doesn’t agree with you that Anna was innocent.”
“We have had arguments.” Orozco shifted position, wincing slightly, and Messenger realized that his right leg was stiff, the foot — encased in a slipper — oddly bent inward at the ankle. When Orozco saw him looking at the leg he reached down to rub it with his fingertips. “No one told you about this, eh?”
“No. What happened?”
“An accident. Nearly two years ago. My horse stepped in a rabbit hole while I was chasing a stray cow. He broke a leg, I broke an ankle. He was the lucky one, I think.”
“Lucky?”
“They shot him. Me they took to the hospital.”
“I’m sorry.”
“God’s will,” Orozco said, and shrugged. “Have you talked to Dacy Burgess?”
“This afternoon. She doesn’t agree with you, either.”
“Yes, I know. But at least her heart isn’t filled with hate. Did she cry for Anna?”
“She cried. A little, anyway.”
“Good. I cried too, a little.”
“Why are you the only holdout, Señor Orozco? What makes you so certain she was innocent?”
“She came to see me after it happened. She swore her innocence with her hand on the Bible. Before God in the mission church, she swore. She wouldn’t have lied to God.”
I wish I could believe in God, Anna’s innocence, anything at all with that much absolute certainty.
“Does it surprise you to hear that she was religious? She was, in her own way, even though she didn’t go to church. Even though she...” Orozco shook his head and left the sentence unfinished.
Messenger finished it mentally: Even though she committed suicide. Mortal sin in the Catholic faith. Take your own life and you’re forever denied entry into the Kingdom of Heaven. If there was an afterlife, he hoped the Catholics were wrong and God was big enough to forgive an act of desperation by an already tortured soul.
He asked, “Then who is guilty? Who murdered her family?”
Orozco shrugged. “Dave Roebuck had enemies, more than most men.”
“The women he had affairs with?”
“Men as well as women. He was a bad one.”
“Bad how? Drinking, fighting?”
“And stealing.”
“What did he steal?”
“Horses, cattle. Two hundred dollars in cash, once.”
“Was he ever arrested, prosecuted?”
“Arrested, yes, several times. Punished, no.”
“Who had the biggest grudge against him, the best motive for wanting him dead?”
Another shrug and a spread of the hands, palms up.
Messenger asked, “What about Joe Hanratty? I was told he and Roebuck had a fistfight a week before the killings.”
“Hanratty is a violent man when he’s had too much whiskey. But he was at John T.’s ranch that day, working with Tom Spears.”
“Spears and how many others vouched for that?”
“Only Tom Spears.”
Which wasn’t quite what Reverend Hoxie had told him. “And I’ll bet the two of them are friends.”
“Yes. But the sheriff and the state police were satisfied that they told the truth.”
“What was the fight about? A woman?”
“Hanratty’s sister.”
“One of Dave Roebuck’s conquests?”
“Yes,” Orozco said, “but Hanratty knew about it weeks before the fight. Lynette made no secret of it.”
“Lynette. There’s a Lynette who works as a waitress at the Goldtown Café.”
“Lynette Carey. She is Hanratty’s sister.”
“Did Hanratty provoke the fight with Roebuck?”
“Those who were there say he did.”
“What set him off?”
“No one knows. He walked into the Hardrock Tavern, called Dave Roebuck a dirty son of a bitch, and punched him in the face.”
“Hanratty wouldn’t tell why?”
“No.”
“Not even to the law?”
“He said he was protecting his sister.”
“From what, if the affair was common knowledge?”
Orozco spread his hands again. “It was finished by then. Lynette had stopped seeing Dave Roebuck.”
“Why?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“Is it possible she killed him and Tess?”
“No, it wasn’t Lynette. She has a child of her own, a year older. She would never harm a child.”
“One of Roebuck’s other women then. Maria Hoxie?”
“The daughter of a man of God? No.”
“Maria did have an affair with Roebuck?”
“So he claimed. It may have been a lie. The girl is a good Christian. Reverend Hoxie taught her to embrace God from the first day he brought her here.”
“Brought her?”
“She was an orphan. His wife couldn’t have children, a great sadness in his life. When she died he brought Maria from the Paiute school in Tonopah and raised her as his own.”