Son of a Gun (20 page)

One day after school, Danny and I stomped through the bushes in the empty lot by his apartment building. We spotted one of our classmates walking up the street in our direction. Samantha: a tall girl, blond and quiet, whom we rarely noticed except to tease her about her height. She was with her little sister and a friend. Danny hatched a plan: I would hang out in the empty lot, acting casual, distracting the girls while Danny crept through the bushes toward them. When he got close enough, he’d pop up with the gun and scare them.

The plan went south. I overplayed my part, stuck my hands in my pockets and kicked at rocks, might as well have started
whistling. The girls spotted Danny fumbling through the brush and asked what the hell he was doing. But Danny stood up anyway and pointed the gun.

Samantha laughed. “You wouldn’t do it, Danny. You’re too much of a pussy.”

Danny went to the nurse’s office every day to take a pill that kept him calm. In other places he might have been diagnosed with a condition, something with an acronym, but in Tombstone he was hyper. From across the lot I saw his face flush red and knew he was going to shoot them, and in that moment a strange feeling filled me, partly dread and partly glee and partly admiration. I didn’t try to stop him; I just stood there, gaping, as he pulled the trigger. A crack rang off the apartment walls. Samantha cried out in pain and doubled over, grabbing her leg. Danny paused, and I hoped he was done shooting, because I’d already lost the stomach for it. But he fired again, and again and again and again, a volley of shots that came so fast they shared a sound. A scream, another. When it was over, all three girls had been hit and were grabbing at their tiny wounds, crying.

Danny snapped out of his trance and stared at the gun in his hands for a second, then dropped it and ran toward the girls, shouting about how sorry he was. They swore and slapped him. I stood in the empty lot and watched.

Mom was gone somewhere. She might have been with one of her post-Max boyfriends, or she might have been out flying; after Max left, she’d begun taking lessons to get her pilot’s license, said it had always been a dream of hers. All I know is that she wasn’t home when the police car dropped me off.

But she heard. Did she ever. I’d seen her angry plenty, but never quite like this. I held the phone at arm’s length and listened
as she called me a coward and a disgrace. She said she was taking away all of my weapons, my pocket knives and slingshot and BB gun, and she grounded me for a year, although we both knew she wouldn’t be home enough to enforce it. It went on for a solid hour, and I don’t remember everything she said, only:
I’m ashamed to be your mother
.

A few weeks later a cop car drove slowly up our driveway and served me with papers. I was being charged with felony solicitation; one of the girls had said I told Danny to shoot. My mother asked me if that was true. I didn’t remember saying it, although the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like I might have.

I told her I was innocent. She probably didn’t believe me, but she didn’t ask again.

When my court date came she put on a pantsuit I didn’t know she owned, made me wear a shirt and tie, and told me on the drive to Bisbee that I’d better stand up straight and keep my smart mouth shut and at least pretend to be the boy she’d raised.

We waited in this lobby with a bunch of real delinquents, who didn’t have their mothers with them, and who ignored me like the rube I was. When they called my name we went into the courtroom and my mother played the judge a tune about us moving out of state—which startled me until I realized it wasn’t true—and couldn’t he just move this case along, seeing as how it was that girl’s word against her son’s? She turned and pointed at me, and I stood up straight.

The judge asked the prosecution if I had any priors. Somebody said no. He looked over at me for the first and only time, sighed deeply, and said, “Son, if I dismiss these charges, will I ever see you in here again?”

I said no. He banged his gavel and that was that. Mom took me to lunch at a tourist joint on Main Street, where an old
couple at the next table commented on how nice I looked in my tie, and I grinned and thanked them as Mom glared at me across the table.

Danny copped a plea, got probation and community service. I needled him for months about how I’d gotten off easy. Soon our mothers let us out of the house again, and we went back to most of our old habits, but we didn’t shoot anything. That summer, Danny’s mother died in her sleep. I heard he found her there in bed in the morning. When I ran into him on Allen Street the next day, he was a different person, so grownup. I said I was sorry. He said thanks. He said he was moving to Tucson to live with his sister, and that was the last time I saw him.

A line of people stands in the courthouse lobby, waiting for passports and name changes, to get married and divorced. A rack of official forms hangs on the wall. One is the state of Arizona’s
Marriage Handbook
, distributed in English or Spanish to anyone applying for a marriage license. I take one and browse the table of contents. The second half of it is about divorce.

I knew Ray was married when he met my mother, but the stack of papers I find by running his Social Security number makes the picture clearer: he and his wife of twelve years had three kids and were in bad financial straits, fifty grand in debt, their home and only vehicle in repossession. Their divorce records include his typed affidavit:
In August 1999 I separated from my family. At that time I was employed as a police officer with the City of Tombstone. I knew my tenure with them would be ending soon due to my mental and physical stability
. At the time, I hadn’t known Ray was unstable—he told me he quit because of politics—and if he was, it seems like a strange thing to mention in a divorce
affidavit. That’s not the only mystery: at the end of his statement he says that he expects his financial situation to improve shortly, because he plans to move to another state to pursue better job opportunities. If he and my mother were planning a move, they never told me about it. I wonder if she told him to say that, trying the same trick that worked on the judge who dismissed my case.

The last paper in the stack is my mother and Ray’s marriage license, which is almost as tacky as the courthouse, all baroque borders and ornate fonts. She was forty-three, on her fifth marriage; he was thirty-four, on his second. They must have been given the handbook. As I wait for copies to be made, I thumb through it. The handbook contains sections on “Addressing Economic Issues,” “Taking Responsibility for Raising Children,” and “Learning Effective Confrontation.” I guess Ray never read it. It also has sections on “Protecting Yourself from Domestic Violence” and “Making a Personal Safety Plan.” I guess Mom didn’t read it either.

The first Cochise County sheriff was Johnny Behan, a political ally of the Clantons. When Behan was elected, he crawfished on a deal to make Wyatt undersheriff, and so began a long feud. Wyatt stole Behan’s girlfriend, Josie, who would later become Wyatt’s third wife. Behan tried to arrest the Earps after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but Wyatt refused to be arrested. After the Earps left town, Behan fell out of favor in Tombstone and lost his reelection bid. To the extent that history remembers him, it’s as a blowhard and a crook.

Behan’s former office moved to Bisbee with the county seat. The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office now occupies a complex across town from the courthouse, far from the tourist district, at the base of the Mule Mountains. The building is muted and
modern, painted a myriad of tans, windows tinted, a pole outside with two flags flapping in the wind. I check in at the desk and walk straight to the bathroom, where I splash water on my face and check myself in the mirror. I’m already sweating through my shirt, and the wrinkles webbing the sleeves make me wish I’d bothered to iron it. I take a few deep breaths, walk out the door, and almost run into a man in uniform.

He greets me by name and shakes my hand. It takes me a second to realize that this is Freeney, the detective who handled my mother’s case. I remember him as tall and lanky, mustached and brusque—in my memory he resembles Wyatt Earp—but instead he’s shorter than me and powerfully built, handsome and clean shaven, so friendly it’s a bit disarming.

As he leads me down the hall, Freeney asks about the drive to Bisbee, and cracks a joke about the photo radar unit down the street, says he hopes I wasn’t speeding. He turns into a spacious office overlooking the tail end of the Mule Mountains and motions to a chair across from his enormous desk. I take my notebook out of my pocket, sit, and wonder if this was a bad idea. This big office full of plaques—Freeney’s been promoted, probably several times, and it reminds me how long it’s been since he handled the investigation into my mother’s murder. How can I expect him to remember the details of a long-cold case when I didn’t recognize him in the lobby?

A few nights before I came to see Freeney, I was lying on the guesthouse floor, sweating and drunk and alone, wondering what the hell I was doing in Arizona, following cold trails to find men who didn’t remember anything worth knowing. I was sick of other people’s memories. The copies of Brian’s documents lay unread on the coffee table, full of facts and
dates and names. I did a shot of tequila to steel myself, then sat on the floor and read it all.

The call went out from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office dispatcher at 4:26 p.m. on September 19, 2001, a warm and windy Wednesday in southeastern Arizona: the Tombstone marshal was reporting a dead body near Gleeson. The man who’d found the body—Bob, my mother’s friend—had shown up at the marshal’s home to report it. Gleeson was county jurisdiction, so the marshal had called it in to the sheriff. Bob said it was hard to give directions to the property, that he’d have to show someone. Sheriff’s deputies Cash and Martinez responded: Cash to the marshal’s house, and Martinez to the Gleeson area, where he waited for further instructions. Martinez contacted dispatch to request a medic.

Cash picked up Bob and drove east on Gleeson Road. Bob told the story of how he’d found the body. En route to the scene, they met with Martinez, who followed them to a residence located on an unmarked dirt road. The road forked and they turned west down a driveway marked with a red octagonal sign that said “WHOA,” which my mother and Ray had put there as a joke. The property had one permanent structure, a shed, as well as a travel trailer, a horse corral, a horse trailer, and a boat covered by a tarp. Bob said the body was in the travel trailer. The deputies parked nearby. Cash told Bob to remain in the vehicle while the deputies assessed the scene.

The trailer’s only entrance faced west. Cash and Martinez approached from the north, moving along the west wall. Cash tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. The deputies called out “Sheriff’s Department” and got no response. They entered the trailer.

Inside, the deputies observed a white female lying facedown on a bed. Her feet faced north and her head faced south. She
was unclothed and what appeared to be dried blood ran from her left shoulder down her arm. Her head rested on a wooden shelf or headboard, and more blood was visible on the back left side of her head, as well as a large pool of blood on the wood. The body showed signs of lividity.

An assault rifle, possibly an AK-47, was propped barrel-up against the wall on the left side of the bed. Cash walked down the hall and found a bolt-action rifle in the bathroom. Martinez noticed a crossword puzzle book near the body. He got the impression that she was reading it at the time of her death. A call came over the radio that an ambulance was on scene. After verifying that nobody else was in the residence, Cash and Martinez exited.

The ambulance couldn’t make it up the driveway, so the medics walked from the gate. They were advised of the situation and told to disturb the body as little as possible. Martinez accompanied them inside the residence. The medics confirmed that lividity had set in and that there were no signs of life. They found what appeared to be two puncture wounds in the left shoulder blade and another on the left side of the woman’s head. The medics contacted Tucson Medical Center for a field pronouncement. She was pronounced dead at 5:36 p.m.

While the others were inside, Cash searched the surrounding area for more victims, but found none. The medics and Martinez exited the trailer, and Martinez asked Cash to photograph the body. He reentered the trailer and took four Polaroids. The officers taped off a perimeter to establish a crime scene and radioed dispatch to report a possible homicide. Cash spoke with Commander Russell and asked him to respond to the scene. A crime scene tech was called in, as was another detective.

More Cochise County sheriff’s personnel arrived over the course of the next few hours. A search warrant for the premises
was requested, granted, and executed. Two detectives were assigned to search the outbuildings; another sketched and measured the trailer; others took video and 35 mm photographs; and one took digital photographs and assisted in finding evidence. Freeney arrived on the scene. He would lead the investigation from then on, including interviewing us a few days later.

He did a walk-around of the structure and saw no signs of forced entry and no indications of a struggle on the ground outside. He noted the weather conditions—clear skies and a temperature in the high fifties—and the lighting: the detectives used flashlights inside the trailer, and exterior lights powered by a generator. The scene was photographed, videotaped, diagrammed, and processed for fingerprints; meanwhile, Freeney assessed the condition of the body. He noted fly activity and deduced from blood seepage and lividity that she had been lying on her left side, facing the window, prior to death. He surveyed the trailer, which was unkempt and cluttered, and collected and logged potential evidence, including four .25 caliber shell casings, miscellaneous papers and pictures, a computer, and bottles of prescription medications. He told the tech to process the front door for prints. None were found.

Freeney called the medical examiner for permission to remove the body and received it. People from the funeral home arrived just after midnight. Upon removing the body, they discovered that the gunshot wound to the head was in fact multiple wounds. Freeney finished processing the scene and left an evidence receipt on the counter, along with a copy of the search warrant. The detectives did a final walk-through and left the scene at 1:08 a.m. on September 20.