Wind and lies, p.1
Wind and Lies, page 1
WIND AND LIES
Richard Parrish
First published by
Penguin Books
February 1997
TOUGH CALLS
IN A TIGHT SPOT
Could Joshua Rabb believe that his best friend, Ed Hendly, was innocent of bestially butchering Melinda Lopez even though Hendly lied about his shocking relationship with her?
Could Rabb dodge the bullets of a white vigilante group that would do anything and kill anyone to keep up the barriers between Tucson and the Indian reservation?
And could Rabb dare use beautiful Magdalena Levya, who trusted him more than anyone on earth, as bait in a trap that could so easily and horribly Backfire?
Rabb had to make the rough choices—and live or die by them…
Attorney Joshua Rabb lives, loves, and practices law on the razor edge of passion and prejudice that separates the Papago Indian Reservation and the lily-white community of Tucson, Arizona, in 1947. Now he is torn in two when overwhelming evidence seems to condemn his Bureau of Indian Affairs boss and best friend, Ed Hendly, for the savage sexual murder of a beautiful young Indian woman.
Rabb rushes to Hendly’s defense, desperately wanting to believe in his innocence. But as the evidence mounts, Rabb knows he can’t prove anything unless he finds the real murderer. Dare he attempt something so difficult and dangerous—and can he succeed? Maybe. If he’s lucky. If he lives…
“GIVES GRISHAM AND TUROW A RUN FOR THEIR MONEY!”
—Orange County Register
MICHAEL ROBLES,
In Memoriam
December 6,1972-October 31,1996
Innocence, beauty, and youth
Should have no enemy but time.
But we shudder at the truth,
And call a child’s death a crime.
We mourn the passing of the old, death so cold,
The end of earthly life for those who live
Long past their anniversaries gold—
We know they must go, and God we forgive.
But the death of a child we can only helplessly deplore.
He would rather learn from one bird how to sing
Than teach a thousand lions not to roar.
He smiled and the day got bright.
Just a boy looking forward to becoming.
But suddenly he was gripped with blight,
With pain and suffering so benumbing.
Dear God! we cried, don’t let Michael be crushed,
To naught but ashes and dust succumbing.
Don’t let a hospital room be his doom.
Let his spirit burst forth, blossom and bloom.
But our cries went unheeded, our cries so sore.
He would rather learn from one bird how to sing
Than teach a thousand lions not to roar.
His life, so short, so pained, so searching for relief
That could not be found or prayed or bought.
Alas! Innocence, beauty, youth—time’s not the only thief.
They are often by terrible enemies caught.
From us, who loved him for these years so brief,
His joy-filled presence has been stolen.
We stand here now in shattering grief, our eyes swollen.
Yet even with all that, we cry that in the final blink of his eye
We’ll see his soul break free and fly, into God’s arms soar.
He would rather learn from one bird how to sing
Than teach a thousand lions not to roar.
He was untarnished as the stars,
As pure as sleighbells’ merry ring.
The soul that leaves him tugs at ours
As though together, like taut string.
We could hold him with us for all time.
But no. He has gone. Ironic, it is Halloween.
And now alone we face the ghosts sublime.
But we know he’s smiling as we keen.
Eternal life: In our hearts he lives forevermore.
For Michael would rather learn from one bird how to sing
Than teach a thousand lions not to roar.
—Richard Parrish
October 31, 1996
A prophet for this people would be a man,
going about uttering wind and lies, saying,
“I shall preach to you of whiskey and wine.”
—Micah 2:ll
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The decision written by Justice Levi Udall in the fictional Moraga/Leyva v. Peasley is based on his decision in Harrison v. Laveen, 67 Ariz. 337, 196 P.2d 456 (1948). I am deeply indebted to my friend D. Burr Udall for insights about his late father, Levi, his brother Morris, and the Udall family.
This novel is not about Mormons. It is about a fictional cult which utilizes the Book of Mormon and the Doctrines and Covenants in distorted ways. I once saw a cartoon in a magazine, can’t remember which one. It was of the Devil sitting on his throne, surrounded by a dozen little devils about to be sent upstairs to attempt to pervert mankind. The Devil says, “Remember, quote plenty of scripture.”
Chapter 1
Even though it was just late April, it was over a hundred degrees, and heat shimmered off the asphalt highway, making the road appear to have liquefied under the blowtorch sun. The great saguaros were in bloom with their waxy white blossoms, and the unusually long and heavy winter rainy season had resulted in an explosion of wildflowers on the huge Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson. Bell-shaped scarlet penstemon, red skyrockets, and white thistles called eryngo grew thickly along the road. The hills were studded with clusters of brittlebush that looked like small black-eyed Susans. It was a sight that Joshua Rabb never tired of seeing. Before coming to Tucson almost two years ago with his daughter, Hanna, and son, Adam, he had lived his entire life in the asphalt and concrete of Brooklyn, New York, except for the war years spent in Europe. The Papago Reservation was about a million miles away from Crown Heights, and in Europe he hadn’t noticed much of the scenery. He had been too preoccupied just trying to stay alive.
He slumped in the passenger seat of Edgar Hendly’s spiffy 1947 Ford sedan, kind of a celery green color, and stared out the side window.
“Looka them clouds over there,” Edgar said, jutting his chin toward the Baboquivari Mountains just a few miles to their left. “It’ll be pourin’ by the time we start back.”
Joshua shrugged. The car hit a pothole in the narrow asphalt highway, and both men bounced high on the front seat.
“I’m more worried about getting there alive than a little rain,” Joshua mumbled. “I thought this road was getting resurfaced last month.”
“Couldn’t get it done. Rained so damn much in March and the first part of April that the bed never dried out enough to put the blacktop down.”
The Ford hit another pothole, and Edgar fought the wheel to keep the car from swerving. Joshua looked at him and frowned. “Better slow down or we’ll end up in a ditch.”
“Naw,” Edgar said. “That stretch was the only real bad part. I wanna be able to start back by four o’clock, or we’re liable to be pinned down by the storm that’s comin’.”
Joshua slumped deeper into the car seat and tried to stretch out some of the stiffness from the long drive. He was tall and strongly built. His left arm was missing, and the stainless steel prongs of his mechanical arm emerged ominously from the sleeve of his tan linen suit. His hair was straight and brown except for patches of gray at the temples, and he usually combed it straight back from his widow’s peak. Today, however, in the scorching heat it hung limply over his forehead. His bright blue eyes studied the Sonora desert.
He had come to Tucson back in June 1946 because the doctor at the veterans hospital in Brooklyn had told him that the gunshot wound to his lung had healed but left potentially troublesome scar tissue.
New York weather was giving him bronchitis, which would probably become chronic. But even more debilitating than his physical wounds had been the emotional ones. His wife, Rachel, had died in an auto accident in December 1944, but Joshua hadn’t even been aware of it as he lay in an army hospital in Antwerp recovering from wounds he had suffered at the Battle of the Bulge. He had been a captain with the 109th Infantry Regiment in Diekirch, Luxembourg, pinned down by a machine-gun battery and what seemed to be the entire panzer korps of the Nazi army. For reasons he would never fully understand, he had crawled over the snow to within forty feet of the battery at the edge of the skeletal, winter-ravaged forest and hurled a grenade into it. Then he’d sprayed the three German soldiers with the entire clip of his Thompson submachine gun. When he became fully conscious again, he was lying in a bed in the army general hospital in Antwerp, Belgium., with a bullet wound in his left thigh and the four small toes of his left foot frostbitten so badly that they were shriveled and discolored like tiny prunes.
It was not until weeks later that they had told him of his wife’s death. But the war was still on, and he was still mobile, so the hospital commander had given him a wooden cane and pinned a silver star on his chest and gold-colored oak leaves on his epaulets, and he had been attached as JAG officer to a rear unit of Patton’s Third Army as it swept through Germany into Czechoslovakia. He was already almost crippled by fear for what Hanna and Adam were going through, trying to cope with the death of their mother while their father was off in Europe getting shot. But the prison camp at Medzibiez, Czechoslovakia, had really crushed his soul. It was a concentration camp with piles of emaciated dead behind four barracks filled with the cadaverous bodies of hundreds of once-people only b arely clinging to life. Shards of charred bones of his own people lay in heaps in front of a line of ovens in a small cinder block building next to the camp headquarters.
A few days later, on a patrol for S.S. troops in the forest, Joshua had been shot in the chest and the left arm. These wounds were not so quickly repaired as his leg and foot. By the time he got out of the veterans hospital in Brooklyn, the war had been over for several months. He still vividly remembered the frightened gray-hyacinth eyes of thirteen-year-old Hanna and the terrified blue eyes of ten-year-old Adam when they came with Grandpa and Grandma Rabb to the hospital to pick him up.
So much had happened since then. He had accepted a job as part-time legal officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and as chief of the federal Office of Land Management in Tucson. It was a fifteen-hour-a-week job which paid only $129 a month, but it came with a little adobe house right across from the San Xavier del Bac Papago Reservation six miles south of Tucson, and he was permitted to use his office in the BIA to attempt to create a private law practice.
Four months ago, Joshua and Hal Dubin’s daughter Barbara had set their wedding date for June 20. They would move into a house owned by Hal near downtown Speedway. But at least for the time being, Joshua hadn’t given up his job with the BIA and the OLM, partly because he needed the money, and partly because he had grown deeply attached to Edgar Hendly, the superintendent of the BIA, and to the Indians who came to him for help. In fact, he had come to the poignant realization as the months passed that perhaps even more than the Indians needed him to help them, he needed them to help give his life some meaning, other than just the quest for money and things which inevitably became the major motivating factor in the lives of most men.
It wasn’t that he was altruistic. That had a false ring to it, like the pronouncements of Dewey and Truman running for president. No. From his own experiences, he had simply come to understand people’s pain. “Haud ignara mali, miseris succerere disco,” a Poor Claire nun had once said to him. “Not a stranger to misfortune, I have learned to succor the downtrodden.”
“Ya sure ya got alla the papers we need to serve on that asshole?” Edgar asked, looking at Joshua for reassurance.
Joshua stirred and straightened up slowly in the seat. “We’ve got everything but legal jurisdiction,” he said. “Quit worrying.”
“When ya see this guy, ya’ll start worryin’ too. He’s right outta Moby Dick, Ahab, ya know, the crazy ship captain who cain’t think a nothin’ but killin’ a big white whale.”
Joshua grinned. “Why, Edgar, I didn’t know you were so literary.”
Edgar was short and portly. He combed a few strands of gray hair across his bald pate with his fingers. Despite the heat he was wearing a rumpled gray wool suit and an oft-washed white dress shirt with a frayed collar which made his neck bulge. He chuckled. “Well, actually I ain’t real literary. I read the Classic comic book version a Moby Dick. Frances bought it a year ago fer Jimmy to do a book report.”
Joshua slapped his knee and laughed. “Well, this guy isn’t after white whales.”
“Ya don’t think so?” Edgar frowned histrionically. “Wait’ll ya take a gander at his number one wife, Miriam. If she ain’t a white whale, I don’t know who qualifies.”
Joshua laughed again. “You ought to go on the road with Abbott and Costello.”
“When ya see ‘em, ya’ll know I ain’t jokin’,” Edgar said. “They came to my office ‘bout three months ago, when they first started buildin’ out here. They called theirselves ‘Sister-wife Miriam and the Prophet Josiah.’ They didn’t bother to tell me at the time about all the little girl wives. Alls they said was they wanted to put up a Mormon meetin’ hall so’s they could minister to the Indins’ souls. Well, hell, I didn’t see nothin’ wrong with that, and the BIA don’t interfere with the buildin’ a churches on the Res. But that ain’t what these folks’re about. It ain’t souls that ol’ Josiah’s after.”
A crack of thunder turned both of their faces toward the rapidly gathering slate gray cumulus clouds to the south.
“Shit,” Edgar grumbled. “Don’t know if we’re gonna be able to beat this som bitch.”
Joshua hadn’t used a cane in a long time. His left foot had long since lost its tenderness, and he had learned to walk evenly and without a limp. But today he brought along the gnarled mesquite limb cane that Adam had so carefully carved as a gift for his thirty-ninth birthday last year. He used the cane now on those rare occasions when there was a possibility of trouble. Usually someone looking for a fight would be daunted by Joshua’s size and stainless steel hand.
But at times it was advisable to have the cane along as well. This was one of those times.
He was worried that the BIA lacked “standing” to be the plaintiff in a trespassing action without the Papago tribe being co-plaintiff. But this was a very touchy matter involving religion, and the tribe might well balk. So Joshua and Edgar had decided to try it this way first, hoping that the cult would just put its tail between its legs and fade into the sunset without a court fight.
They drove slowly through Sells, sixty miles west of Tucson on the Big Res, and the tribal headquarters of the Papago Reservation. Actually, there were two Papago reservations in southern Arizona. The “Big Reservation” was almost three million acres, a hundred miles east to west at its widest point and reaching north from the Mexican border almost eighty miles to below the town of Casa Grande. The other reservation was San Xavier del Bac, below Tucson and just seventy-one thousand acres. Over ten thousand Papago Indians lived on the reservations.
Sells was little more than a shanty town, small adobe and saguaro rib and tin and tarpaper shacks with a few yellowed stucco government-constructed buildings and the small redbrick BIA in the center. Edgar turned south on the dirt road toward the Mexican border. The road skirted the small peaks that formed the Artesia Mountain range, and Edgar pointed at the half dozen wooden buildings that had recently been erected a hundred yards west of the road.
“That’s them,” he said.
The car rumbled jerkily over the rocky ground. Other vehicle tracks in the mud had dried and formed hard-ridged ruts in the otherwise barely discernible trail to the settlement. Behind and beside the buildings were huge fields. Indian boys were plowing furrows, pulling hand plows strapped around their shoulders as though they were oxen.
“It’s the big one,” Edgar said, pulling the car in front of the longest of the six buildings. “Josiah Porter has his office in here next to the meetin’ hall.”
They got out of the car and walked into the meeting hall. There were two women sweeping the crude wooden floor in front of a raised platform at the rear. They were both wearing long dresses of coarse gray homespun cotton and large bonnets of the same material.
One of the women looked up, startled, and ran to the side of the room. She knocked on a door, and a voice from inside boomed, “Come!” She went inside and closed the door behind her. The other woman continued sweeping.
Joshua and Edgar walked to the door of the side room. It opened forcefully as they reached it, and a huge man stood framed in the doorway, filling it almost completely. He looked to Joshua like what he had always imagined an Old Testament patriarch would be: in his mid-sixties, a curly gray beard reaching all the way to the middle of his chest, thick black eyebrows over deep-set, imperious eyes, a barrel chest. Amos the prophet chastising the people for their sins, Micah excoriating them for their waywardness. The only thing that differentiated the Old Testament patriarch from this man were the clothes: a black suit grayed by time and desert dust, a once white heavily starched shirt buttoned at the collar, a vest of the same grayed-black wool stretched tautly over his ample girth, and mud-caked black brogans.
“Why do you come here?” the man asked, his voice a deep stentorian rumble. He fixed Edgar with a hard frown. “I have told you twice to stay off my land.”
“This isn’t your land, pal,” Edgar said, assuming an air of authority, and his speech lost the easy western slang he usually used. “This is Papago land under the supervision of the BIA, and you’re trespassing.”
Joshua handed the papers he had prepared to the man, but the man’s arms remained at his side, and he made no move to take them. Joshua dropped them at the man’s feet.
