Joanna had heard pieces of the story all her life. Butch, hearing about the Bisbee Deportation for the first time, listened with avid interest. “So if the vigilantes were company men …”
“Deputized by Sheriff Wheeler,” Jim Bob interjected.
“… who were the deportees?”
“Where’s that book of mine?” Jim Bob asked. “Bisbee Seventeen, it’s called. That tells the whole thing.”
“It’s out in the garage,” Eva Lou replied. “Along with all the 232
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other books you boxed up because you were going to build a new bookshelf, remember?”
Jim Bob grimaced. “Wobblies,” he said, in answer to Butch’s question. “The IWW. International Workers of the World. They called a strike in July of 1917. According to the company honchos, they were undermining the war effort. The real problem was, the IWW recruited minority members. Back then, Mexicans weren’t allowed to work underground, and they received less pay. Same goes for the European immigrants. They were allowed to work underground, but they were limited to lower-paying jobs. Now it sounds like the IWW
had the right idea, but back then what they were proposing must have been pretty outrageous.”
He stopped then and slammed his open palm on the table with enough force to make the cups and saucers rattle. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “I’m sure it is.”
“What’s it?” Joanna asked.
“The ammunition. The weapons. All of the vigilantes were armed with guns the company bought and paid for. In fact, a couple of people were actually shot and killed in the process of the roundup, but afterward everybody turned their weapons back in, and most of ‘em ended up stored in a safe up in the old General Office in Bisbee.”
“The ammunition, too?” Joanna asked.
“I think so,” Jim Bob replied.
“So where’s that arms cache now? Is it still there?”
“No. Somebody opened the safe and found them when Phelps Dodge was shutting down its Bisbee operation in the mid-seventies. They just divvied the stuff up among the people who worked there. Whoever wanted some, gathered up a gun or two and took them home.”
Joanna’s mind was already blazing on ahead. She had spent 233
part of the night thinking about what Diego Ortega had said about the bigamy-practicing group called The Brethren, the same group Edith Mossman had mentioned several days earlier with regard to her estranged son, Eddie. It was also the group Pam Davis and Carmen Ortega had been investigating. Was it possible Eddie Mossman had murdered his own daughter in order to keep her from telling her story, whatever it was, in front of a camera?
Joanna put down her napkin. “Excuse me,” she said. “But I need to go make a phone call.” And she went outside on the Bradys’ front porch to do it.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, tall columns of cumulus clouds were rising over the hill with its distinctively heart-shaped top that generations of Bisbee kids had called Geronimo. With any luck, there would be another late- afternoon thunderstorm today, and the summer rainy season would be well under way. But right that minute, Joanna’s mind wasn’t on the weather.
She reached Frank Montoya at his newly purchased home in Old Bisbee. “What’s up, boss?” he asked when he heard Joanna’s voice.
Briefly she summarized what she had learned from her trip to Lordsburg the day before as well as what she’d just discovered about the Bisbee Deportation from Jim Bob Brady.
“What do you want me to do?” Frank asked.
“We need to know whether or not Eddie Mossman had access to any of those weapons.
If he worked in PD’s General Office, it’s possible he was given some of them.”
“That was a long time ago,” Frank said dubiously.
“Twenty-five years, at least,” Joanna agreed.
“So finding out could be tough. The people who worked there are likely to be in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. It
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doesn’t sound likely that some old coot in a nursing home would let himself out and then start plugging people with a weapon that’s older than he is.”
“What about a son or a son-in-law?” Joanna suggested. “Or maybe even a grandson?”
Frank thought about that. “Still,” he said, “I’d say the odds aren’t good.”
“How many people would have been working there?” Joanna asked. “Thirty-five? Forty?
Once we have the names, we’ll at least have a place to start, and it could be, when we start talking to them, one of them might be able to tell us something we need to know.”
‘All right,” Frank agreed finally. “I’ll contact PD headquarters in Phoenix first thing tomorrow morning to see if I can track any of this down, but don’t hold your breath.”
“Do we know if the cops in Obregon had any luck contacting Mr. Mossman about his daughter’s death?”
