you?”
“Galloway,” Joanna answered. “Kenneth Galloway.”
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“That’s what I thought,” Sheriff Trotter said. “Is he one of the oldjiggerville Galloways?”
That brought Joanna up short. Jiggerville was a Bisbee neighborhood that had been dismantled in the early 1950s to make way for Lavender Pit. One by one, houses from places like Jiggerville and Upper Lowell had been removed from their foundations, loaded onto axles, and then trucked to other locations in newly created subdivisions around town. Joanna had heard her father talk about those old parts of town, but for Joanna herself they were pieces of local history and lore rather than places rooted in actual memory.
“I think Ken’s from Saginaw,” she said.
“Right,” Trotter agreed. “That’s where Phelps Dodge put the Galloway house when they moved it. And, from what I’ve heard, Ken’s pretty much a chip off all those old Galloway blocks.”
Joanna looked at Sheriff Trotter in surprise. “You know Ken Junior then?” she asked.
“Not directly, but I know of him and of his family by reputation, if nothing else,”
he added. “There was a whole clan of Galloways living in Jiggerville back when my grandparents lived there. Grandpa Trotter was a shift boss-a jigger-in the mines in Bisbee, and Jiggerville was the residential area where most of the shift bosses lived. My dad used to tell stories about living there as a kid-about exploring caves, getting in all kinds of hot water, and pole-vaulting all over God’s creation on agave sticks.
“Dad is one of those old-time, Andy Griffith-type storytellers,” Trotter continued.
“The wonderful thing about his stories is that he never edits out any of the bad stuff he did, including all the scraps and scrapes. And I remember that when 205
ever someone named Galloway showed up in one of Dad’s stories, you could bet he’d be tough as nails and mean as hell.”
Joanna gave a wan smile. “Sounds like Ken’s right in there with the rest of them,”
she said.
Randy Trotter grinned. “That’s something Grandpa Trotter always used to say. ‘The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree!”
It seemed strange for Joanna to be sitting a hundred miles away from Bisbee and hearing about her town’s history.
“According to my father,” Randy continued, “Jiggerville was paradise on earth and the Garden of Eden all rolled into one. It was full of shade trees and fruit trees and lush gardens because back then people could still use the mineral-rich water they pumped out of the mines. There was a trolley stop and a play-field where Dad and his pals played pickup games of baseball and football. Dad said when they had to leave there to move to Lordsburg, he hated it.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“His mother, Grandma Trotter, came from Lordsburg originally. When her mother, my Great-Grandma Clementine Case, took sick, Grandma and Grandpa came back here to look after her. Grandpa had worked in the mines for quite a while, but he got on with Southern Pacific-Sufferin’ Pacific, as he called it-and he worked there until he retired. They built a house next door to Clementine’s. That’s where my dad and uncles were raised. Now, with my mother gone and my father retired from teaching, he lives in Clementine’s House, as we call it. My wife and I live next door.”
“Your father taught school?”
“That’s right. He taught social studies and coached football 206
and basketball right here in Lordsburg. Grandpa said he wanted his sons to work with their brains instead of their brawn, so he made sure they all went to college. It worked, too. Came out with a college professor, a high school principal, and my dad.
Then there’s the black sheep of the family, my Uncle Ned. He owns the Ford dealership up in Silver City and probably makes as much money as the other three put together.”
Just then the outside door opened, and two people walked in-a man and a woman. The man was short and dark but fine-featured and handsome. Despite the heat, he wore a starched white shirt and a carefully knotted tie under an expensive lightweight blue silk blazer and exquisitely tailored camel-colored slacks. On his feet were a pair of hand-tooled snakeskin cowboy boots that Joanna estimated could easily have set him back five hundred bucks.
The woman, two or three inches taller than Joanna, was pushing forty and good-looking.
Her hair was pulled back in a long smooth ponytail. She wore dangling silver-and-turquoise earrings. Silver rings, heavy with chunks of turquoise, decorated several of her fingers. She was dressed far more casually than the man in what looked like freshly pressed Levi’s topped by a cowboy shirt and a Western-cut jacket. She might have been modeling Western attire if it hadn’t been for her boots. Unlike the man’s highly polished snakeskin footwear, the woman’s worn Judson’s bore the dusty sheen and telltale marks of someone accustomed to working in barns and corrals and dealing with the business end of horses and cattle.
Randy Trotter stood to greet the new arrivals. “You must be Mr. Ortega,” he said, holding out his hand. “It’s very good of you to come all this way on such short notice.
And this is Sheriff Joanna Brady,” he added, gesturing in Joanna’s direction. “She’s 207
from Cochise County, Arizona, our neighboring county to the west.”
Mr. Ortega shook hands first with Sheriff Trotter and then with Joanna. “Glad to meet you,” Diego Ortega said gravely.
Randy Trotter continued with the introductions. “And this is Detective Cruikshank, Sheriff Brady.”
