But he hadn’t promised not to look into what had happened to Manolo. Sure, at Marmolejo’s insistence, he’d agreed not to probe into “the matter,” but the matter under consideration at the time had been Blaze’s death, not Manolo’s. Marmolejo’s interpretation of this admittedly hairsplitting distinction might differ (would differ, he was pretty sure), but Gideon thought he could talk his way out of it. It was merely a question of semantics, after all, a “what the meaning of is is” kind of thing.
In any case, it was Manolo that he was interested in now. Julie’s conjecture this morning, her “blind guess”-“What evidence is there that he hasn’t been killed?”-had snagged itself a perch in his mind, had clamped there with birdlike little talons, and had been nagging away at him ever since. What evidence was there that he hadn’t been killed, right along with Blaze? The only evidence, if you could call it that, was that his body had never been found, and there were no unaccounted-for remains anywhere in the area.
Except for one ancient Zapotec skeleton, which, as it happened, had been found in the same mine in which Blaze’s skeleton had turned up a decade later. But was it an ancient Zapotec skeleton? Did Dr. Ybarra, educated though he might have been, know what he was doing when it came to something like that?
The odds were that he did. And the likelihood that it was Manolo was pretty minimal, to say the least. Besides, even if it did turn out to be him, there was nothing to be done about it; the fourteen-year statute of limitations would apply. So there really was no point in looking into it. Still, since Gideon was here in Oaxaca anyway, and since he had nothing else on his agenda at the moment…
“This skeleton,” he said, “do you know where it is now?”
“Sure, the man who found it-I wasn’t the chief then, you understand, so I had nothing to do with it, but I remember-the guy who found it, he knew he couldn’t take it back to Canada with him, so he gave it to this guy, Beto, who has a bar in Tlacolula. La Casa Azul.”
“And that’s where it is now?”
“Yeah. Well, the skull is. He has it on a shelf behind the bar, with, you know, a candle on it, and all that candle stuff, all different colors, dripping down over it. I saw it once.”
“I’d like to have a look at it, Flaviano. Could you show it to me?”
Sandoval shrugged. “If you want, sure, but you don’t need me. La Casa Azul’s real easy to find. It’s right on the main street. And the skull, it’s right there on the shelf, where anybody who wants can look at it.”
“But I’m probably going to want to take it down, handle it. And I’d like to see the rest of the skeleton too. Could you at least give Beto a call and arrange that?”
“Sure, you bet,” Sandoval said expansively. “I’m glad to help.” He could hardly believe he was getting out of it so easily. “I do it for you right this minute.”
But it wasn’t quite as easy as that. “He don’t have it anymore,” Sandoval said as he hung up. “Beto, he sold the skull to another guy.”
“Oh boy,” Gideon said softly.
“No, no, you can still see it anyways. This other guy, he runs a museum in Oaxaca, in the city. Beto says he’s got it in a glass case, all cleaned up.”
“Great. And what about the rest of the skeleton, is that in the museum too?”
“No, Beto don’t remember what happened to that. He thinks maybe he threw it out.”
Gideon sighed. still, the skull was the critical element in what he hoped to find out. “Do you know where I can find the museum?”
Sandoval did. The Museo de Curiosidades was located only four blocks from the Zocalo, on Calle las Casas. He had been there once with one of his young nephews who had a ten-year-old’s taste for the bizarre. The boy had heard about the place and couldn’t wait to see it, and Sandoval had taken him there for his tenth birthday.
“It’s a pretty weird place, Gideon,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, shrunken heads, baby mummies, Aztec knives, that kind of stuff. It’s in this rundown old casa, all dark and smelly. Checho, he loved it, but to me it gave the creeps.”
“Sounds like my kind of place,” Gideon said. “I’ll stop in tomorrow morning.”
“No, it’s only open in the afternoon, from noon till four, I think. The guy that runs it, he’s a little strange.”
SEVENTEEN
“They’re not going to investigate it? They’re not going to do anything at all?”
It was the first time Gideon had seen Carl show anything that might qualify as emotion, and he was showing plenty of it. He had risen from his chair and was leaning tensely forward, hands on the table, eyes blazing. An artery pulsed at each pale temple.
Gideon had arrived late for the family dinner, served this evening not in Tony’s quarters, but out on the dining terrace. The feminist professors had gone home, and the only other diners were a Canadian family of three and a lone Albuquerque gallery owner who had come to Teotitlan to buy weavings for his shop. The four guests were sitting inside, so the Gallagher clan had the darkening terrace all to themselves and were already well into dinner when Gideon got there. A buffet had been set up and they all waited politely while he helped himself to a couple of wedges from a clayuda -a crisp, pizza-sized, wood-oven-blackened tortilla topped with beans, sausage, and cole slaw-shrimp enchiladas slathered in now-tepid mole sauce, and a longneck brown bottle of Cerveza Montejo.
However, he could sense their impatience to hear the upshot of his meeting with Marmolejo, and he’d barely sat down next to Julie and taken his first bite of clayuda before the barrage of questions erupted. What did the colonel have to say about Blaze? How did he act? What did he think? Where would he go from here? Would the police be coming to Teotitlan to get depositions or would they all be required to go into Oaxaca? When would the investigation begin?
Gideon managed to down a couple of swallows of beans and sausage and a single swig of beer, then held up his hand to cut them off. It would, he thought, be best to go right to the hard facts. There would be no investigation, he told them in so many words. Blaze had disappeared twenty-nine years before. The statute of limitations had expired fifteen years ago.
That had taken a few seconds to sink in, and then Carl had exploded. “They can’t get away with this,” he was yelling now. “I don’t give a… I don’t care about any goddamn statute of limitations, I’m not just going to let this lie. There has to be somebody else to talk to.”
But he didn’t look as if he really believed it and neither did anyone else. All the air seemed to go out of him and he flopped limply back down. Annie, sitting beside him, covered her father’s hand with her own. Others picked mutely at their food.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Jamie said quietly.
“I know somebody in the policia ministerial,” Preciosa offered in her smooth, queenly manner. She was wearing a flowing, loose, long-sleeved blouse of black silk that made the movements of her arms and veined, long- fingered hands more sinuous and elegant than ever.
Carl looked hopefully at her. “Who?”
Josefa snorted. “Always she knows ‘somebody,’ this one,” the old woman muttered to no one in particular.
“Somebody important,” Preciosa said with barely a contemptuous glance at Josefa. “Somebody with more power than this Marmolejo person, somebody with whom I can say I have a certain amount of influence.”
Tony looked at her admiringly. “She always knows somebody,” he said with a totally different implication than Josefa’s. “Who do you know, honey?”
“His name is Colonel Archuleta, a very old friend of my family, very high in the police, very powerful. Maybe you’ve heard of him. I will speak personally with him.”
Archuleta, Gideon remembered after a moment’s thought, was the corrupt, high-ranking cop Marmolejo had booted out. “I’m afraid your friend’s not there anymore,” he said. “Colonel Marmolejo has replaced him.”
“Ah.” Preciosa gave him a thin-lipped smile, but the look in her turquoise-shadowed eyes told him he had not made a friend of her. Looking at her, he realized with a kind of awe that her rings, and there were at least as many as she’d been wearing the other night, were not the same ones. Those had been set with amethysts to match her purple eye shadow. These were all jade and turquoise, to set off tonight’s blue-green eye shadow. Did the woman
