Whenever those kinds of issues needed to be handled, Delia Chavez Cachora Ortiz was up to the task. She brought to the job of tribal chairman qualifications that included a top-flight East Coast education as well as a prestigious cum laude Harvard law degree. Her curriculum vitae was fine when it came to dealing with intractable bureaucrats. There she found she was often able to out-Milgahn the Milgahn.
Not having grown up on the reservation, however, Delia was less prepared for the day-to-day aspects of doing the job at home-for keeping the peace between the various districts on the reservation; for making sure roads got graded and paved in a timely fashion; for settling disputes over someone picking saguaro fruit in someone else’s traditional territory.
She had also learned that everything she needed to know to do her job most likely wouldn’t show up in official visits to her office, or on the tribal meeting agenda, either. For that kind of in-depth knowledge and insight she needed to be out in public-mingling with the people, learning their concerns, and familiarizing herself with their age-old antipathies and alliances. The only way for her to do that was to go where the people went, and they went to the dances.
That meant Delia Ortiz went to the dances, too, not that she liked them much. She didn’t. For one thing there were far too many of them-usually one a week or so. Depending on whether they were summer dances or winter dances, they were either too hot or too cold, and sometimes, like this one at Vamori, the dance was both too hot and too cold in the course of the same night. They were also dusty and loud and they seemed to go on forever, generally lasting from sundown to sunup. But that’s where she had to be, picking up tidbits of gossip while standing in line at the feast house or talking to the old people who, even in the summer, gathered around the fires to keep warm.
Delia’s mandatory attendance at the all-night dance at Vamori was one of the reasons she had given Lani permission to take Gabe to Tucson for the Queen of the Night party and then, afterward, to spend the night at Lani’s place in the hospital housing compound.
At events like this Delia found it difficult to juggle the dual requirements of being both a mother and an elected official. Gabe was a naturally curious child with a propensity for getting into mischief. It was impossible for Delia to keep an eye on him all the time while someone was trying to tell her about what was going on in Ali Chuk Shon, Little Tucson, or Hikiwoni Chekshani, Jagged Cut District.
Delia was standing by one of the cooking fires and talking to a woman whose husband, a diabetic, was having to undergo dialysis three times a week, when Martin Ramon came looking for her. The serious look on the tribal police officer’s face told her something was badly amiss. Delia’s first thought was that something terrible had happened to Gabe. Everyone knew Lani Walker had a lead foot and drove that little Passat of hers far too fast.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“There’s been a shooting,” Officer Ramon told her. “Four people are dead.”
“Where?” she asked. “Here on the reservation?”
Martin nodded. “Over by Komelik,” he said.
Waving good-bye to the woman, Delia excused herself and followed him. “Let me tell Leo,” she told Officer Ramon. “Then, if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, I’ll go there with you.”
She made her way across the dusty dance floor, dodging between couples dancing their old-fashioned two-step. When she reached the band, she waited until that song ended.
“What’s up?” Leo said, smiling as he asked the question.
“I have to go,” she said. “Something’s wrong at Komelik.”
Without a word, Leo reached for his car keys and offered them to her.
“No,” she said. “You and Richard will need the truck to bring home your instruments. When I finish at Komelik, I’ll have one of the officers take me home.”
She followed Martin Ramon to his patrol car, dreading where she was going and what she was going to see, but incredibly grateful for Leo Ortiz. His automatic reflex of unwavering kindness toward her and toward everyone else was one of the things she treasured about him. And it wasn’t an act, either. He wasn’t one person in public when he wanted to impress people and someone else at home the way her first husband, Philip Cachora, had been.
At one of his gallery openings or when he had been wooing some well-heeled art fancier, Philip had been smooth as glass, Mr. Charm himself. The rough edges had all turned up at home where he had been a lying creep of a drug user and unfaithful to Delia besides. Leo’s life was an open book to her and to everyone else as well.
“Four people?” Delia asked Martin Ramon after she strapped herself into the seat. “Indians?”
“Two are,” he answered. “We’ve got a positive ID on one of them. Thomas Rios from Komelik identified his son Donald. We think the woman is Donald’s girlfriend, Delphina Enos.”
“That new clerk from Nolic?” Delia asked. “The one with the little girl. Is she all right?”
“The little girl is hurt but not that bad,” Martin answered. “Mostly cuts on her feet and on her face. She was found walking barefoot in the desert.”
“By herself?”
Martin nodded grimly. “One of the Border Patrol’s Shadow Wolves found her-a guy by the name of Dan Pardee. He found the four bodies first and then located the little girl a while later. My understanding is that he’s taking her to the hospital in Sells right now so she can be checked out.”
“What about the other two victims?”
“They’re both Anglos from Tucson. Thomas Rios says he gave the man permission for them to be on his land. They came to look at the deer-horn cactus, the Queen of the Night, which was supposed to bloom tonight.”
“What happened?” Delia asked. “Did the Anglos end up having some kind of beef with Thomas Rios’s son and the fight ended up in a shoot-out?”
“No,” Martin said. “That’s not it at all. For one thing, we didn’t find any weapons at the scene. That means someone else is the shooter. It looks like cash and jewelry are missing from the victims’ wallets and purses, so it may be a simple case of robbery. It could also be some kind of drug deal gone bad, although when we talked to Mr. Rios, he said his son wasn’t involved in any of that bad stuff.”
“Maybe these poor people stumbled upon someone else’s drug deal.”
Officer Ramon nodded. “That could be. Four people who were all in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Damn, Delia thought. Something else to give the Nation a bad name and make tourists run in the other direction.
Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona
Sunday, June 7, 2009, 12:10 a.m.
67º Fahrenheit
The first contingent of medical examiner vans arrived on the scene shortly after midnight. Fran Daly herself, Pima County’s most recent chief medical examiner, stepped out of the passenger side of the first-arriving vehicle.
When the previous M.E. had taken his retirement and left the premises, his longtime assistant, Fran Daly, had finally received a much-deserved promotion. A former rodeo rider, she was an odd woman and tough as nails. Even roused from sleep in the middle of the night and with her curly white hair standing on end like so many unruly cotton balls, she still managed to be all business. She was at ease with herself and others. She was also at ease with the job she had to do. Once on the ground, she looked around, shivered, and then reached back inside the van’s front seat to retrieve a windbreaker.
Detective Fellows, the only Pima County investigator on the scene, took Fran in hand and led her around the crime scene, following the same careful pathway Dan Pardee had used.
“We’ve positively identified one victim,” Brian told Fran. “Donald Rios’s father came by a little while ago.”