“They’re all dead, Mr. Jeffs,” says Mendez. “Last chance to do this the easy way.”
Jeffs spreads his big hands on the bar counter, towering over the detectives. Leans in.
“Go to hell. Both of you. You can’t frame me.”
Gale leaves cash and a good tip, checks to make sure Vern and Mindy aren’t looking, cups the shot glass in a paper napkin and slips it into his pocket.
Back home, he brushes the shot glass with dragon’s blood fingerprint dust — his favorite from his latent fingerprints training.
Three clear prints emerge as the brush lightly passes, one of them a nice, fat, Vern Jeffs’s thumb.
Gale smiles, sips his bourbon, shoots close-ups of the prints and sends them to Osaka to check against the utensils used by Tarlow and Jeffs when they had the Chinese dinner in Tarlow’s Newport Beach house.
Gale then fills out the warrant request form for Judge Carl Schmidt, based on Vito Pesco’s descriptions of the two vehicles in the Cottonwood Creek Campground. One, a new Suburban belonging to Bennet Tarlow III and the other an older Econoline registered to Vernon Jeffs.
Also based on Amanda Cho’s claim that she saw Jeffs with Tarlow the evening before his death.
On the .22 bullets in Tarlow’s head.
And the .22 casings at the kill site.
Give me that gun, Carl, he thinks. The Honorable Schmidt being the Superior Court’s most law-and-order judge.
He’s about to send the request form to Judge Schmidt when his phone buzzes.
“Lew Gale.”
“This is Geronima Mills, returning your call about Wildcoast. Sorry to call so late but I was having a nightmare and woke up thinking that I owed you a call. Frank’s brother. Are you a private or a real detective?”
“Both.”
“Clever.”
“I’m in charge of the case.”
“Do you have a suspect yet?”
“None.”
“Are you trying me on for size, based on my openly hateful reels and videos?”
“Exactly.”
“Try no further, Mr. Gale. The Tarlow family and company have been squatting on Acjacheme land since 1865, when the queen of Spain signed a land grant over to Mexico, who raped and pillaged a little, then sold the land to Bennet Tarlow’s ancestors. Now the Tarlow Company wants to build a city for millionaires there, with no repatriations for the so-called Juaneño Nation, no consideration for our sacred land, culture, religion, or language. For ten thousand years. And certainly no respect for the people themselves. We at Stopwildcoast will do just about anything to keep that hideous thing from ever existing. But. We are not in favor of shooting Bennet Tarlow dead.”
“That post of yours about burning him at the stake and eating his face got my attention, Ms. Mills. And the fact that one of your X tags is Killwildcoast.”
“We live in an age of stagecraft and performance.”
“What do you do in real life?”
“UCI Library. Fifteen bucks an hour.”
“Do you own a twenty-two-caliber semiautomatic handgun?”
“I do. Aluminum, and rose colored. Sold to me as a ‘chick’ gun. Was one used on Tarlow?”
A beat while Gale’s brain whirs.
“We don’t know,” lies Gale. “The lab is working up the firearms and toolmarks.”
“But surely you know what caliber.”
“Yes, a twenty-two. Do you know Vernon Jeffs?”
“I do not.”
“Did you know Bennet Tarlow?”
“I’ve seen him come and go from his company headquarters in Newport Beach. Lately, in a new blue Suburban. I’ve never gotten to shake his soft, puffy hand.”
“Where were you on the evening he died?”
“Which was?”
Gale fills her in.
“Beats me.”
“Get your calendar,” says Gale. “Tell me where you were.”
Geronima Mills’s phone clacks down, and Gale hears the tap of fingers on keys.
“Hmm... Mom’s house. Here’s the number.”
“How come you haven’t been back to school since the murder?” he asks.
A catch of breath, then: “I’ve had enough of Frank and the Grizzlies. They roar but they don’t act. They’re casino chasers. Half of them have little or no Native blood at all.”
“Do you?”
“Half Acjacheme. The unrecognized. Like you and Frank.”
“So, you’ve dropped out?”
“Of college, not the world. I’ll fight Wildcoast tooth and nail. Like the mountain lion that half ate Tarlow. Good luck finding who killed him.”
“Good luck to you, too, Ms. Mills.”
“Have you arrested anyone for slaughtering the Laotians?”
Gale’s heart sinks every time he thinks of those young men, all in their early twenties, according to Coroner Bachstein.
“Not yet.”
“Buy me a drink sometime.”
“Why?”
“I want to know who you are.”
“Maybe.”
Gale hangs up, toasts his laptop with a shot of bourbon, then hits the send button, launching his warrant request to Judge Schmidt.
Showers and gets into bed.
He hears Luis Verdad’s Acjacheme-accented Spanish voice in the rattling of the pages:
Bernardo has always smiled at Magdalena and tries to be near her when she is in our lean-to or grinding the acorns on the boulders. Now he is fearful that we will find her.
Water Dog came upon a smell the next day and took off into the brush. I didn’t know if it was a lion, or turkey or quail or the rabbits he loves to chase and eat.
We were farther than we had ever been from the mission. Just over the mountains was the Cahuilla tribe, very fierce ball-and-stick players who my father said hated the Spanish and refused to belong to a mission.
We Juaneños have gone to war with the Cahuilla many times. And with the Luiseños, and the Gabrielinos and even the Chumash from the north.
Wars are generally fought over insults, stolen rabbits, or an old disagreement that has not been resolved.
In a war, each side has thirty to fifty male warriors. A level meadow is chosen for the battle. The two nations face each other from half a kilometer apart, bows and arrows ready. Behind them are thirty to fifty females on each side, who are arrow guardians. They chase after the enemy arrows when they fly in and do not hit a man. Then collect the arrows and give them to the men when they run out.
The arrows are used when the warriors are approximately one hundred steps apart but some of the stronger archers commence before. The arrows are very thin and fast but you can see them coming. But if there are many arrows you can’t see them all. Most archers don’t try to avoid the arrows because they are too busy shooting their own arrows, or receiving fresh arrows from the arrow guardian women, who sometimes have to pull an arrow from a wounded or dead man.
The war is over when one side retreats. Wounded enemies are sometimes given water and food and medicine, sometimes captured and taken home, sometimes killed with clubs and hatchets, and occasionally beheaded. The heads are kept as trophies and decorations for our vanquech, or sacred enclosures. These temples we build far away from the mission, hidden in dense vegetation because all Acjacheme beliefs, language, dancing, and history are forbidden. Those found in a temple are arrested and taken to the mission jail near the soldiers’ barracks, and often whipped.
After a battle, the victorious Indians go back to their hidden vanquech and dance for up to three days, stopping only to eat rabbits and deer and many birds and sometimes lizards and large grasshoppers. The food is not cooked in any way, as they taught us at the mission, but torn by teeth and knives. The blood is swallowed and thanks is given to Chinigchinich, one of our gods. The Spanish have taught us how to cook food but our traditions survive in secret.