10.
If you know anything about our town, you won’t be surprised to learn that the middle-aged owner of Los Hombres’ perpetually failing Desert Town Gift Shop, Mrs. Lou Claxton, overheard two off-duty patrolmen, who were not with the corpse dogs, discussing the disappearance of a man named Teddy Redburn and she understood, by stepping a little closer to a certain stand of cholla cactus that shielded her from view but brought her closer to their conversation, that this Teddy Redburn had returned to Los Hombres, which was his hometown, after making his fortune in Las Vegas selling substandard king-sized mattresses. The patrolmen didn’t know for sure, not having heard everything perfectly themselves, but Teddy Redburn might have made an even bigger fortune from gambling. His grandfather practically built the town, but Lou Claxton wasn’t from Los Hombres originally and didn’t know a thing about that time and hadn’t ever paid any attention to the old mansion on the hill. According to the only authorities in Las Vegas, Mr. Redburn’s doctor had diagnosed an early stage of Alzheimer’s in Teddy only two months ago, the patrolmen explained. The authorities stated that Teddy left Las Vegas after selling his factory, home and possessions and driving to Los Hombres, where he wanted to see his childhood home again while he could still remember it and remember who he was. With the temperature hovering above one hundred degrees so late that fall, the likely outcome for the man who had walked out into the desert without water was a quick death somewhere under a mesquite, a palo verde, or a creosote.
After overhearing this conversation, Mrs. Claxton hurried to her shop for privacy and on the way she dug in her big silvery purse, the one with all the shiny rivets on it, for her cell phone. She never remembered to slip the phone in the little pouch which was made for it; that pouch would make it easier to find your phone when you had exciting emergencies like this. Once she grasped the phone and unlocked the shop door, she dialed the number of her only son, Jasper.
“Oh, it’s awful, Jasper. A real sad story,” Mrs. Claxton blurted the moment Jasper said hello. Mrs. Claxton huddled behind the gift shop counter and peered out of the blinds of her shop. “What? What is sad?” Jasper tended eggs and bacon for his lunch. Mrs. Claxton could hear the fat popping and snapping in the skillet.
“An old man came back to town a few days ago. He used to live here and now he has probbly died. He was called Teddy Redburn.”
“I don’t think anyone named Redburn ever lived here, Mom.”
“He did. It was just so long ago that nobody alive now remembers him. That old mansion on Ghost Hat was his granddad’s place! The story of it is all over town. I don’t remember him, but he lived on Ghost Hat Road they say. In that creepy old tumbled-down place. They already proved it in the Recorders. The old man hisself did live here and was raised here and he was up there at night looking at his old wreck of a house. That big whitish adobe up there, where all the kids did used to party? And then he stares at the house and boom, he up and disappeared. Poof. No sign of him and his car was parked outside the Big Gulch Diner? And Miss Ferguson locked up the gallery in town earlier in the evening and saw him standing there in a fine suit and a baseball cap staring at that old wrecked Methodist church on Pennington!”
“Well, what’s the big deal?”
“He had money with him, Jasper. Lots of money!”
“Holy moly. You don’t say.”
“Yeah. I mean scads of it. A crammed bag full of dough. You know Hector Fimbres at the service station near I-10?”
“Yeah. I know him.”
“Well, he saw the bag! And the money! And Miss Ferguson sold this old coot a history book and she also saw the money when he pulled a wad of it out! They both said bills crammed the leather thing with him, the briefcase. Full of bills! Hundred dollar bills! I tell you he had a million with him maybe or at least hundreds of thousands! His cousin–he just had hisself one relative—might be coming down from Denver to see about things.”
“Boy, their gonna find him dead. Yesterday was so hot. Ugh, I don’t wanna be the one who finds him. Yuck. I wouldn’t mind the money, though. Wish I could find one without the other.”
“Sure. Well, that’s why I called you. Listen, when they’re dying from heat stroke they usually throw their stuff away. Now, I want you to go outside. Your place is pretty close to the flats. Do you happen to see any vultures? I can’t see anything from up here at the gift shop, we’re in such a funny, crooked street.”
Jasper slipped on his flip-flops obediently and went out the sliding door. He walked around his son’s tricycle and the plastic Spiderman car and the three toy dump trucks to the broken-down backyard fence. He searched the sky. “No, Mom, I don’t see any vultures at all in the sky. Maybe the coyotes got him. If he’s been out there at all. When did this happen?”
“Five days ago. Vultures spot people, even before the coyotes do. They might find him soon if he’s out there.”
“Well, maybe so.”
“You know what I’m going to do, Jasper?”
“No Mom, what?”
“I’m gonna call that rich lady Mrs. Dent and her husband who buy murder mysteries from me sometimes. She’s the one that loves those criminal investigation shows. You know, those ones with all the corpses?”
“Sure. I like those, too.”
“But she just loves them. She oughtta be excited.”
“Well, go ahead and call her, but what good is she gonna do.”
“I’ll call you back and tell you what she says. I think she might have some ideas after watching all those shows, that’s all. If she doesn’t, I’ll give up.” Lou hung up and searched her phone log for Mrs. Dent’s number. She must have deleted it! She looked out the window again.
Gad! There was that Ona Gonzalez acting peculiarly and scrambling up the road with a stick almost as big as she was. She probed the weeds at the side of the road! Ona was that lady who special-ordered a Quincinera scrapbook—a fancy one, too—for her granddaughter and didn’t like it when it came. I’ll be darned, thought Mrs. Claxton, that horrid lady is already beating the bushes looking for the satchel at the side of the road! It was as obvious as could be, Mrs. Claxton thought, because Ona was peering into the weeds like a nut. She must have heard something about this lost money, too.
Then Mrs. Claxton’s eye caught a movement on the other side of the road and she spotted a couple nearer Pennington! They must be after that satchel, too! Everybody was looking all over the place. She better get Jasper on the ball right away.
She redialed her son. “Jasper, it’s Mom again. I might have deleted that lady’s number. Anyway, I just think you’ve got to search!”
“Well, sure, I could probably search one of the arroyos near me this afternoon,” Jasper agreed.
“All of them,” ordered his mother. “You start searching all of them. Start today and go out tomorrow, too. I tell you go every day until you find him. He’s got a fortune in dough with him.”
“Mom, I’m not gonna be able to search all of them in a day!”
“Listen! Listen, kid! That man had a fortune in a leather satchel or a briefcasey thing, leather, he was carrying it with him! He’d taken out hundreds and hundreds of bills! They’re not saying how much it was, but he was a multi-millionaire. Anyways lots of it was taken from the bank in cash and he got paid in cash for a factory. Can you imagine?”
“What?”
“What we could do with the money! The thing is I found it out, but so did some other people! They’re all out here, too. The search team for sure. A couple of other people, though. I already saw that Ona Gonzalez person, the old lady who owns the beauty parlor and lives on Ghost Hat? She was looking at the side of the road up here!”
“Would I need a dog?”
“Why not! Yeah, if you can get one.”
“Maybe Vince’s German Shepherd?”
“Sure, Vince’s dog will do. Don’t tell him why you want the dog. Get started!”
“Would a metal detector, if the batteries weren’t dead, help?” asked Jasper.
&nbs
p; His question met with a deafening silence from his mother.
“Yes,” said his mother eventually, “yes, dear, a metal detector I suppose might help if it didn’t have dead batteries. The man had a briefcase with him and those have metal clasps. And most men have metal buckles on their belts. But get started! Stop thinking so much! Get yourself started! We got to get the jump on everyone. Think of the money and get yousself started!”
While tearing open a kitchen drawer looking for fresh batteries, and cursing about them always disappearing, Jasper told his wife everything his mother had divulged to him. She retreated to the bedroom and phoned her best friend who lived at the edge of town. Her best friend phoned several other best friends who did the same themselves. Later in the day, Mrs. Claxton found the phone number of her rich client and told her about the Redburn mystery. She didn’t provide any ideas about the case, but she disclosed the facts to five other people. Ultimately, about fifty more people resolved to hunt for the satchel themselves.
Mysterious cars filtered into town over the next few days. Most of these brought people into Los Hombres who had heard about the lost money from friends of friends. Though some came with the idea that they would search the town itself, others planned to hike into the desert to look for Teddy.
Georgie Rios got wind of the arrivals when she drove to the grocery for some milk and she noticed lots of cars on the streets. El Gigante Grocery store had a special on milk, so she selected two cartons there and headed for the checkout.
“He had Alzheimer’s,” a lady standing in the line in front of Georgie could be heard saying as Georgie walked up.
“Who did?” asked another woman.
“The guy who disappeared. And everybody’s saying he had a satchel of money with him!”
“Really!”
“And nobody knows where he left it.”
“It’s another abduction!” said Jan Jansen, joining the line. Occasionally she stocked up on yogurts to feed her gut bacteria.
“Another? What do you mean?” asked the checkout lady.
“Haven’t you read about what’s been happening in the capitol?”
“You mean the official state gun?” asked the lady near the front. It was now her turn at the checkout. She dropped her hand basket on the stack.
“No! I mean the alien abductions! There’ve been several encounters and abductions!” Jan said excitedly. “My sons and I are planning to look for the landing site this weekend! No one will ever see that Alzheimer guy again, because he’s with them. They’ll probably do research on the disease and send us a cure through ESP to a scientist!”
You can understand that Georgie suppressed a smirk as she listened to that wild conjecture from Jan Jansen. When she got to the front of the line, she paid for her purchases. Outside the grocery and all the way to her house she observed knots of people standing around on the sidewalks and in the park gazing out at the flat land between Los Hombres and the border with Mexico. They shook their heads ominously. With all those people standing around, Georgie figured she ought to be able to sell some bags of popcorn! She drove home hurriedly and made the decision to hitch her popcorn machine to her SUV and tow it down to Pennington across from the church. She’d parked there before and not been told to move away. She would sell popcorn on a Friday since out-of-town crowds had arrived. Later, she’d send someone up to the parking lot on the top of Ghost Hat to see if there was much business up there.
Now the Ford Fairlane became important, and people were trying to remember anything they could about that darn car and where it went. Three other people recalled seeing the car, but more importantly seeing its skinny, bearded driver. They had radically different and conflicting versions of him, but the main thing they remembered was not seeing his valise full of money! Two had actually seen its occupant, and spoken briefly to him. None of those claimed to have seen the satchel with its bundles of money stacked high in the inside. So what had he done with it?
For some, the answer they devised was he had to have gotten rid of it in town in the arroyos or old buildings. A few people started digging.
“He’s here! He’s here!” Hans Zwilanski’s wife was dancing around with the baby on her hip. “Daddy’s gonna get interviewed by the news.”
“Are they really out there?” asked Hans. He didn’t want to talk to the news particularly. What he wanted was to think about what happened. He wanted to think about that old guy and his money.
“Sure looks like it!” Hans wife twirled around with the baby and made it giggle.
Hans got up from the couch. “I thought the police were all I was gonna have to talk to.”
“It’ll be fun,” his wife cajoled him.
“I guess so.”
“You didn’t see much, did you?” she asked.
“Not much actually.”
“Okay, they’re coming to the door.” She opened it quickly with an enormous smile on her face. Hans came up behind her, looking sullen.
A young Hispanic man with a goatee trotted up the path to their two front steps. “We’re from Channel 2 in Sierra Vista. Are you Hans Zwilanski?”
“Yeah. I’m Hans.”
“We understand you have information about the disappearance of Theodore Redburn, the Alzheimer’s victim?”
“Yeah, well, I guess so,” Hans said, stepping around his wife and briefly cupped and stroking the back of his infant son’s head.
“And you saw the man that disappeared?”
“I think so. There was an old man sitting on the porch.”
“Did he have a briefcase with him?”
“He did. Yeah. There was a briefcase.”
“And did you think the briefcase was full of money?”
“I thought so. Yes. He had it open and I thought bills were piled up in it.”
“We want to record you saying exactly that. Can you do it for TV?” The reporter was smiling broadly.
Hans wife began jiggling and clapping hands with their son. “Daddy’s gonna be on TV!” she said crazily. Hans frowned. He didn’t like her whipping their son around because the baby’s neck seemed too weak.
“Okay. I guess. I could do it,” Hans agreed, trying to contain his wife’s dancing with a “calm down” gesture as he left.
“We’d like the mansion in the background,” said the newsman as he lead Hans across the street. “Is that okay?”
“Sure, okay.”
“Let’s step across the street. My cameraman here will set up the shot then I’m going to ask you the same questions I just asked.”
“Sure.” Hans walked with his hands in his pockets.
Squinting into the morning sunlight, Hans stood waiting on the sidewalk for the cameraman to set up the shot. To think properly about this Teddy thing would take time and quiet. He was contemplating something he wanted to think about, but it was vague right now and he wanted some time to himself. He’d have to get the interview over first.
Rather mindlessly, he answered the newsman’s questions. When it was over, he shook hands with the reporter and went back inside the house, listening to the man record a short ending to the news item.
“Well, you heard it here. This resident of Los Hombres did see Theodore Redburn and remembers him having the satchel with him.”
Hans’ wife was thrilled that the news had actually interviewed her husband, and she couldn’t stop chattering about it all afternoon and during dinner. But the more Hans thought about it, the more he wished he hadn’t said a thing about what he’d seen. He began brooding, and then suddenly he had an inspiration. It was a good idea about that satchel and he didn’t want anyone horning in on him finding it.
The clue he figured out was that the car had come back up to the old house. Both the man at the Big Gulch who saw Teddy go down in the arroyo and the lady who lived out at the mobile home area had not seen the satchel in Teddy’s hands. Sure, Hans reread the article in the paper in which, in direct quotes, neither of them mentioned the satchel! Wouldn’t they have not
iced a satchel in his hands? And he had heard a car that sounded like an old Ford engine come back up to the house! It was good luck to have heard that. He was probably the only one who had and he hadn’t told a soul! Maybe Teddy did get rid of his satchel at the house! And Hans thought he knew where, too. But did anyone else have the same set of clues? That was what was bothering Hans. He thought he knew where the satchel was hidden, but only digging would give him the answer and he couldn’t do that in daylight.
Well, you know this was going nowhere, because the satchel sat in a pile of weeds.
11.
The search party looking for Teddy Redburn reconvened the next morning after finding the immigrant. By then, the body of Josephino Armenta was being prepared to be conveyed to the morgue in Tucson along with his belongings.
The search party’s plan was to continue in the direction the dogs would lead them and hope the hounds would be able to hit on the trail of Teddy Redburn again from where they had discovered poor Mr. Armenta.
“That was bad luck,” said the commander. “Just a strange coincidence that someone’d died in the same direction we were searching. What’re the odds of that happening?”
“Well,” began an earnest young patrolman who had volunteered for the search party, “I’d say the odds are pretty good. We’re getting a lot of immigrant deaths in desert south of here. I would say the chances are fairly high if you start looking for someone in the desert, you’re going to find some dead immigrants. Just speaking of odds.”
The commander studied this patrolman ruthlessly for a period of time that was clearly longer than necessary, or polite.
“Is that the entire extent of the comments from the peanut gallery,” the commander said finally, dating himself with several of the younger patrolmen, one of whom made the sign of a jerk-off behind his back and set a bunch of men snickering.
The search party resumed and the hounds exuded confidence for almost a mile on a path near to where the migrant’s body had been found, but slightly east. After an hour of walking, the dogs grew agitated near the side of an arroyo.
That was where they found the second body. Although not of Teddy, unfortunately, again. Does it surprise you?
“Another goddamned dead immigrant! Sheesh!” exclaimed the commander.
“What?” asked a dog handler who’d only arrived.
“We have to stop again and deal with another body.” He began sending GPS data to the ambulance and coroner’s Jeep.
“What is this?” exclaimed another searcher in exasperation.
“It’s a lady. I think,” said someone.
“They must have been in a group! The one we found yesterday lasted the longest. Now we’re finding the others. There could be more. Maybe someone’s alive out there,” the commander said.
“Well, where’s Teddy Redburn?” asked another searcher.
“Who?”
“The guy we’re looking for. The Alzheimer’s guy who went walking off!”
“Boy, he picked a bad time to disappear. The desert is full of dead people this weekend!”
“I don’t know what to say. We’re going to push on and make sure the coroner’s person gets here. I’ll leave some more people here. Kagel and Gunt. You’re redeployed here. This is getting to be ridiculous.”
“You don’t say,” said Kagel.
“I’m sorry I brought you out here,” the commander said.
“No, no. Not at all. I mean we found these people.”
“Yeah. These people.”
After receiving several more desperate and demanding phone calls from his mother, Jasper Claxton studied a map and chose several arroyos he might search that weekend. He called his friend Vince who had a German Shephard and asked if he might borrow the dog. It seemed logical that a dog might at least bark if Jasper was walking near any deceased people. The only problem was Jasper didn’t know how best to ask for the dog. Maybe a pretend hunting trip or just a desire to own a dog in the future would work? He liked the later idea best. He would claim to be thinking of buying a dog and tell Vince he wanted to take the dog out with him to see if it would be fun to hike with a canine companion.
It was easier to get the dog than Jasper thought it was going to be. Vince didn’t voice any hesitancy about the idea.
Jasper had only a vague notion of what that dog was like. Hadn’t it been a rather wild dog, come to think of it?
The brilliant idea Hans Zwilanski had about the lost money was that Teddy might have crawled around under the old mansion and dug a hole to hid the satchel for safe keeping. Nobody mentioned him going to a bank, Hans reasoned, so maybe he buried the treasure in town in his house! And the one place he could probably have dug without attracting too much attention was under his very own mansion home on the porch! Because the mansion was built into the side of a hill, you could walk under parts of the surrounding porch.
Hans made sure to get his wife good and tired late that day by asking her to do little things for him as though he was the one who was tired (he said being interviewed had worn him out and she believed him!), but when she suggested bed, he said he was going to stay up late playing on the PS4, which wasn’t true. She fell asleep pretty quickly. Then Hans went to work!
Hans unlocked the front door carefully and stood waiting to see if his wife stirred. Once he felt secure, he stepped out. Now the dark mansion was waiting for him; he only had to close the door behind him. Then he was standing on his teeny porch. He shuffled quickly down the steps and walked to the sidewalk in front of his house. A quick jog and he was across the street and heading for the mansion.
He had a small flashlight in his pocket, but he was hoping not to use it. There weren’t many houses close enough to see the light, but it wasn’t worth it to take a chance and have someone realize he was searching under the porch.
Hans stopped when he got to the mansion. It was a spooky looking place, clinging to the side of the rocky hillside with dark, broken windows. Hans took a long careful look to make sure he saw no one on the street. Then he dropped down at the side of the hill and crept under the porch. He started looking methodically around the base of the porch footings for any sign of digging. He crawled the whole front side of the porch on his belly and then began on the side wings of the porch near the house foundation. He was about to give up when he saw an area of darker, looser dirt.
Sure enough, it was there! There seemed to be a spot with freshly dug earth! Hans made certain of what he was seeing by feeling carefully with his hands and even smelling the earth. In the desert, dirt from far under smelled a little different than surface soil.
The next night he vowed to return and start digging right there!