”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to ”Journeying is ideally a move toward reeducation, but it’s also a try at escape from our insistent homebound selves, from boredom or from too much to do, not enough quietude, from the mortal coil of who we’ve lately been.
’Where were you last night?’
‘Out.’
‘What were you running from?’
Mechanical civilization, I want to say, and its sources of discontent, the Stuck on the Wheel of Repetition Disorder, or Temporary Blindness, or what might be called the Yearning for Other points of View and Variety Anxiety.”
I recently read Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands, which is part of the National Geographic Directions series, and in the back of the book, there is a list of the other books in the series. I noticed William Kittredge writing about the Southwest and mused to myself...I haven’t read Kittredge since I left Tucson. He’s part of a group of writers who all seemed to gravitate to the states with, to the untrained eye, lots of miles of nothing. I met a lot of these guys and gals while living in Tucson. As they showed up in the pages of this book, I was able to flip through my rolodex of memories to when I first met them. I didn’t know them. Kittredge knew them, but I did have the pleasure of gravitating in their sphere for short periods of time.
There was Edward Abbey, who tried to pick up my girlfriend while I tried to focus him on signing the stack of books I’d brought with me. I could almost see a horse-trade percolating behind the old scalawag’s eyes and half expected him to offer to sign my books but he was leaving with the blonde. There was Charles Bowden, who every time I ran into him seemed to have booze oozing from his pores. He was one of the few chosen to bury Abbey in the desert and took the location to his grave. There was the grizzly bear man Doug Peacock, who always seemed as untamed as the bears he loved. There was the lovely Leslie Marmon Silko, who usually had Larry McMurtry with her. There was Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison, who loved Montana more than the Southwest, but who were just the Northern version of these Southwest writers. He does mention William Eastlake, and I’ve wracked my memories, but I don’t remember ever meeting him.
About four years ago, the wife and I took off for a trip through New Mexico. It was the first Christmas that we didn’t have any family obligations. The kids were out of the house, and my parents were enjoying the hospitality of my brother. The worst snowstorms I’ve ever been in have been in New Mexico, and this was no exception. When we could no longer see the road, we pulled off in Gallup and ended up having a wonderful, leisurely lunch. It’s so much more relaxing to watch it snow through the plate glass window of a restaurant than through an icy windshield. We had a fun time buzzing around New Mexico, recapturing some of that youthful, unfettered exuberance that becomes strangled by mortgages, children, and careers.
I do like to just go sometimes. ”Any sweet striking thing could happen.”
So Kittredge floats around the Southwest, usually with his wife, Annik Smith, in search of experiences, but also hoping to find some wisdom. He meets with Native Americans, many of them ancient, steeped in a lifetime of experiences that helped to hone their views of life. ”I couldn’t stop thinking about the man. He was deliberately seeking isolation. If I went, what would I find? Maybe silence, eternities, and myself among them, with no voices to listen to but the ones in my head. Was that a good idea? Maybe I’d emerge half-crazed and singing, ‘Why don’t you love me like you used to do’ in a loud way, having turned into one of those people who play the radio or CDs and talk on their cell phones and laugh constantly so as to fill the air with something besides what they’re thinking.”
I do sometimes drive my wife crazy when we are on a trip because she loves to blast the radio and I love to listen to the soft whirring sound of rubber on pavement. It’s relaxing to me to luxuriate in silence or as near to silence as we can get in this noisy world. Kansas is a good place for silence, and maybe that and those endless horizons is why I decided to come back here to live. We live in the southwest part of Kansas, and when I stumble upon cactus growing in the pastures, I’m reminded that we aren’t that far removed from the desert here. ”The world is alive to us if we can love it.” I might add...no matter where you live.
”[Doug Peacock] said something to the effect that we can’t remake the whole world in our own image or we won’t have a damned thing but a world made in our own image, and that would be unworkably simple and partways dead. He said humans have to learn humility, and make allowance for otherness. We can kill everything which threatens us, we can defoliate all the jungles, but then we’d be alone. We can’t kill every cat who might come to live in our night. Firepower won’t save us. Humility might.” It would be my guess that Kittredge was trying to remember something Peacock said after the table in front of them was already littered with dead soldiers to be joined by another squad or division of bottles before the night ended. Then there is the waking up the next morning, trying to remember the wisdom shared through the haze of a hangover. I’ve been thinking about humility a lot lately. The political climate has been so distorted by hubris and bluster that it makes me wonder if we can ever get past our own feelings of exceptionalism to find humility again.
This book brought up a lot of fine memories for me. I love the Southwest and worry about the growth of our desert communities that are totally reliant on water coming from elsewhere. I owe a lot to Tucson. I really found myself there. I met my wife there. I discovered how much larger the universe was there. I grew into more of the man I envisioned myself to be there. The desert is a magical place for me, but yours might be mountains or oceans or a cascade of fall trees. Do everything you can to be where you are supposed to be.
”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how”Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how long they’d been lost. One of them wandered back up a peak. One of them was barefoot. They were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked. Their eyes were cloudy with dust, almost too dry to blink up a tear. Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, standing in crowns from their scalps, old because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and Devils, and they were dizzy from drinking their own urine, the poisons clogging their systems.”
In May 2001, twenty-six men crossed the border illegally and entered the corridor of unforgiving desert called The Devil’s Highway. Like with most catastrophic events, it required a series of things to go wrong for something as horrific as this to occur.
Twenty-six men entered. Twelve men emerged.
Luis Alberto Urrea is going to tell you how it all happened, but he is also going to educate you beyond just the facts of this story because the story is larger than just one tragic event. The story is about desperation, heroic efforts, and a lack of understanding by most people who live beyond five miles of the border.
“Raquel Rubio Goldsmith, a tireless crusader for border reforms and more humane treatment of the undocumented: ‘There should be no such thing as an illegal person on this planet.’”
It begins with why a person from Mexico or Central America or any number of economically depressed countries wants to come to the United States. Usually we can begin with failed economic policies by the country of origin. If there are opportunities where they live, even the shining beacon of America would not tempt most of these people to leave the ones they love to seek a better life elsewhere. They are desperate enough to risk their lives in the hands of coyotes, many of whom are inexperienced boys controlled by criminals.
We, too, have had our share of economic downturns in America. I think about the jobs in Detroit and Cleveland that were shipped overseas, leaving devastated families and communities in their wake. We allow those companies to do that. Those companies find cheaper labor, make more profits, park money offshore to avoid taxes, and still are allowed to sell their products to the very American communities they abandoned. It’s called capitalism and a free market economy, but unfortunately, those heady words associated with freedom only benefit a very small percentage of people. Regrettably, American corporations forget or never knew something that Henry Ford discovered over a hundred years ago: If you give workers security and a living wage, they have more money to buy your product. It becomes a beautiful cycle, involving less profit for the corporation but keeping America’s economy strong from the ground up. So I could lecture Mexico and others of our southern neighbors about many failed policies involving greed, mismanagement, and corruption that have contributed to the immigration issues, but we have plenty of that right here in the good old U. S. of A.
What was most impressive to me about this book is the evenhanded way in which Urrea tells this story. He isn’t here to paint a story of abuse and disrespect perpetrated upon immigrants by border security. He does discuss those incidents, but he also talks about the many people who do their best to save lives and treat people with compassion. One story that really resonated with me was that railroad crews have learned to carry cases of bottled water with them so they can drop water at the feet of those human beings who stagger from the wasteland closer to death than life. The quick responses by the Border Patrol are also very impressive. They aren’t there just to enforce the law, but to save lives. There are abuses. Unfortunately, not all the people attracted to law enforcement jobs are there for the right reasons. Those types of officers call illegal aliens tonks.
Tonk...tonk...tonk. It's the sound that a flashlight makes on the back of a person’s skull.
Urrea also shares some math that might be of interest to most people. My conservative friends and family are always railing about all the social services that illegal aliens are using while they are in the United States. They are, according to these FOX informed people, taking advantage of our system and costing taxpayers millions or, depending on the hyperbolic capabilities of the person,...billions. Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management, conducted a study. ”Mexican immigrants paid nearly $600 million in federal taxes and sales taxes in 2002...Mexican immigrants used about $250 million in social services such as Medicaid and food stamps...Another $31 million in uncompensated health care… That leaves a profit of $319 million.”
Holy shit! Open the frilling border! Obscene profits are the life blood of capitalism, and that is a profit margin that would make even a one percenter’s eyes widen. Talk about a bonanza to be made off of our southern brethren. Not to mention all the goods and services they purchase that contribute to our economy as well. These figures would tell me that stifling illegal aliens is actually stifling our economy.
Of course, nothing is as simple as all that, but still the story is larger and more complicated than what most Americans are being brainwashed into believing.
My father, who is now 80 years old, watches nothing, but FOX NEWS, and he asked me one day...so whatever happened to that caravan? *sigh*
This is the beginning of my reading quest that is in response to the controversy surrounding the seven figure advance given to a white woman for her immigration novel. For the real scoop on that book please read David Bowles’s review. Click to go to the American Dirt Review At the end of David’s review, he provides a list of alternative reading choices that will give you a much more realistic view of the border situation than what was presented in American Dirt.
”It was true that Phoenix had a history of high-profile assassinations, some of them operatically staged message murders. The killers used a truck bom”It was true that Phoenix had a history of high-profile assassinations, some of them operatically staged message murders. The killers used a truck bomb to scatter the remains of the socially prominent gangster Willie Bioff across his neat suburban lawn. They decapitated Gus Greenbaum, the state’s most powerful crime boss, and then turned the knife on his wife. A year before Bolles’s murder, a pair of gunmen from Chicago Heights used a .22-caliber pistol to kill an accountant only hours before he was to tell a grand jury what he knew about land fraud in Arizona. As they stepped over his body, the gunmen dropped a few coins.”
I arrived in Phoenix in 1985, almost exactly 9 years to the day after the Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was murdered. ”He had parked the new Datsun in the fourth space from the left in the front row, where a bundle of dynamite, fixed with magnets to the bottom of the car, just under the driver’s seat, awaited him. Bolles opened the door, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned the ignition key. As he backed the car out of the parking space and put it in a forward gear to drive off, Robinson, watching from the cab of his pickup, stabbed a button on a remote-control device. It ignited a fuse cap in a bundle of dynamite that blew out the bottom and the door on the driver’s side of the car.”
The first meaningful conversation I had in Arizona was with a Phoenix native who couldn’t wait to fill my ear with all of his paranoid conspiracies surrounding the death of Don Bolles. Even with the help of copious amounts of alcohol, I had a hard to swallowing what this guy was pedaling, but the longer I lived in the state of Goldwater Arizona, I started to hear more and more about the shady deals that had engulfed Arizona in the past and still held sway over the present. Paranoia is only paranoia if your wrong.
It turns out my conspiracy obsessed acquaintance was right on the money.
You can’t walk (Nobody walks in Phoenix. The temperature at cement level is like walking on the surface of Mercury.) or drive around Phoenix for very long without going past a school or a building named after Goldwater. He was the Sam Houston of Arizona and was venerated by all levels of society. His disastrous run for the presidency cost the party not only the top spot, but several house and senate seats as well. If you haven’t seen Lyndon B. Johnson’s Daisy commercial that forever changed the scope of presidential elections, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riDyp... It will curl your toes, even now, fifty years later. Johnson won in a landslide. He convinced the American population that Barry Goldwater was a warmongering psychopath.
Well, maybe not a psychopath, but a case could be made that he was a sociopath.
So what exactly was going on in Arizona that eventually led up to the murder of Don Bolles? The first thing that you need to understand is that organized crime didn’t just exist in Arizona; it controlled Arizona, and at the center of that control was Senator Barry Goldwater.
Most of the dirty dealings in Arizona revolved around land fraud deals, but also extended out to prostitution, racketeering, skimming casino coins, and murder.
A Detective McCracken taped a conversation he had with Prosecutor Berger, and I think it pretty much sums up what was going on and why cases that were made against certain individuals disappeared.
”BERGER: It wouldn’t work, anyway. You find you can’t get the cases filed. You can’t get the work done. Now, cases get thrown out of court, and you don’t understand why, you know?
MCCRACKEN: Yeah.
BERGER: And the reason is very simple. The goddamn lid is on the son of a bitch all the way to the top.”
The Arizona powers-that-be even had conversations about putting a hit on my favorite Arizona politician, Bruce Babbitt, who found himself governor of Arizona by a confluence of strange events. Babbitt was elected Attorney General in 1974. When Governor Raúl Héctor Castro resigned to take an Ambassadorship to El Salvador, Wesley Bolin, then Secretary of State, took his place. Arizona does not have a Lieutenant Governor position. When Bolin died in office, Secretary of State Rose Mofford couldn’t serve as governor because she was appointed not elected to her position. This meant that Babbitt was the highest elected official in the state and thus became the 16th Governor of Arizona. Sometimes a series of strange events can even pry the lid off of a state like Arizona. He was elected to two more terms and eventually served under President Clinton as Secretary of the Interior. I had the honor of buying his books before he left for Washington. He was expected to run against John McCain for Goldwater’s seat, but elected to concentrate on a run for the presidency instead. Babbitt was very popular in the state and probably would have beaten McCain. One wonders, if McCain had lost that election, would Senator McCain have ever existed? I also wonder if Bruce thought it was best that he didn’t win that Senate seat. Would it have simply been too dangerous to continue in politics in Arizona?
I’m grateful that he didn’t get slipped the salt or blown up by a stick of dynamite in his car or plane as other inconvenient people had been. One has to speculate, did he have a conversation with Goldwater and work things out?
Bolles took several agonizing days to die. He named his killers. Some of them were brought to justice. The Bolles case still remains open. Goldwater was agitated by the death of Bolles, which seems to indicate that his iron grip on all these demented assholes raping his state was loosening. He still made sure there was plenty of money available to hush the whole thing up, and when money wouldn’t work, there were other, more permanent means of shushing someone up available. Bolles’s death almost convinced me to change my major to journalism.
Dave Wagner lays it all out, exposes the names of those who were involved, and sketches out the enormous web of intrigue and the outright audacity of these criminals who were allowed to operate in Arizona with impunity.
”All of this happened with the cooperation of otherwise conscientious citizens, public servants, and men of private influence. It was a collective act of fealty from witting insiders for whom loyalty was sometimes indistinguishable from obedience. It was the fruit of a system created by Arizona’s strongest men, for whom impunity was the natural reward of wealth and power.”
”Tell ‘em the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me.”--From the movie Tombstone, written by Kevin Jarre and spoken by Kurt ”Tell ‘em the law’s coming. You tell ‘em I’m coming, and hell’s coming with me.”--From the movie Tombstone, written by Kevin Jarre and spoken by Kurt Russell in the role of Wyatt Earp.
That is one of those lines that always gives me the shivers.
Tombstone (1993) is one of those movies that best embodies the collective knowledge that most of us have about what happened in Tombstone on October 26th, 1881. There are a lot of important moments in the history of the American West, but certainly anybody putting together a list of the most memorable events will invariably have to include the Gunfight at the OK Corral as one of those defining moments that best reflects our vision of the West.
Historians and movie directors are fascinated with this gunfight and the larger than life figures who strode down that dusty street. With any historical event, myth gets wrapped around the facts, but I think what makes the Gunfight at the OK Corral so significant is that, once the myth is unravelled from the facts, the truth is as compelling as the hyperbole. I was scratching my head when I discovered that Tom Clavin’s Tombstone and John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd were being released within a month of each other. Both are writers I enjoy reading, and as an odd coincidence, they both decided to write books on the same subject. Another historian I enjoy, Jeff Guinn, released a book in 2011 called The Last Gunfight, also about the events in Tombstone, that I haven’t read yet. Mary Doria Russell wrote the wonderful book Doc that does for Doc Holliday what Hilary Mantel has done for Thomas Cromwell. Russell wrote a follow up book called Epitaph, which also covers the events in Tombstone, that I haven’t read yet and is supposed to be really good. I’ve also read and enjoyed the excellent books Doc Holliday: The Life and Legend by Gary L. Roberts and Wyatt Earp: The Life Behind the Legend by Casey Tefertiller.
See what I mean about the fascination?
There has been a plethora of riches on the subject of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. It shows the importance that historians have accorded to this event. I will end up reading all these books, but most of you probably won’t feel the need to tread the same ground numerous times, even if the perspectives are different. For me, the OK Corral and the events surrounding it are similar to Custer’s last stand, a source of endless speculation and new revelations.
Tom Clavin, in this book, takes us through the early history of the Tombstone area, from the conquistadors to the end of Wyatt Earp’s vengeful ride. If a few things had happened differently, Tombstone might have been as large as Tucson instead of a ghost town that has become a destination for tourists. Clavin does a great job clarifying some of the issues and situations that lead up to the gunfight. The Earps were in Tombstone to make money, and the last thing they really wanted to do was risk their lives taking on the Cowboy elements, but it became evident to them that they were at more risk continuing to let people like Ike and Billy Clanton and Frank and Tom McLaury shoot off their mouths about what they were intending to do to the Earps to anyone who would listen.
The Earps couldn’t abide it.
Wyatt Earp’s good friend from his Dodge City days, Bat Masterson, was in Tombstone to lend a helping hand. He received a telegram before October 26th warning him of a perilous situation involving his brother Jim. He’d already buried one brother in Dodge and didn’t want to bury another, and so he promptly left to go help his sibling. If there was one thing the Earps could understand, it was the importance of brotherly affection. It gives me chills though to think that, if Masterson had remained, he would have made that walk down the street to destiny with Wyatt, Virgil, Morgan, and Doc.
Clavin also paints a vivid picture of Johnny Behan, the sheriff of Tombstone, who told Virgil just before the gunfight that he’d disarmed the Clantons and the McLaurys. There was bad blood between Johnny and Wyatt. They desired the same woman, Josephine Marcus, AKA Sadie Mansfield. I’d like to say that Sadie was her stage name, but it was the identity she assumed when she was knocking boots with whatever man had the coin to pay for her time. She must have had that something something. I like the way Virgil’s wife Allie described her: ”Her charms were undeniable. She had a small, trim body and a meneo of the hips that kept her full, flounced skirts bouncing. Sadie was an attractive woman with thick, dark hair, vivid black eyes, and was well endowed.” How about Allie’s use of the word meneo?
Wyatt Earp biographer Stuart Lake wrote: ”Johnny Behan’s girl was the key to the whole yarn in Tombstone.” I don’t buy that, but there is no denying that her presence and the rivalry for her affection did add some spice to the conflict.
The problems between Earp and Behan were much more than just rivalry for the affections of a woman.
Wyatt had made a deal with Johnny regarding the race for sheriff. Wyatt, ever practical, had suggested that he would drop out of the race if Behan would make him his deputy. Behan won the election and promptly reneged on the agreement. It became one of those situations where anything the Earps were for Behan was against. Behan must have been one smooth talking son-of-a-bitch because he always managed to land on his feet and also made a habit out of fucking his friends’ wives. Screwing around with one friend’s wife is one thing, but when it becomes several it certainly indicates that Behan considered it a sport. If Behan had been a more trustworthy fellow, he could have stopped the gunfight well before it escalated into violence.
Virgil was the only official law officer involved in the gunfight, and Donald Chaput, in his biography of Virgil Earp, makes the case that Virgil should have been the most famous Earp. I would agree that Virgil does get short changed, and I think that, if Wyatt had been shot instead of Virgil, history would have anointed Virgil with a large part of the fame. Part of the mystique of Wyatt is that he was the only person in the Gunfight at the OK Corral to emerge unscathed. He was also the man, while Virgil was recovering from wounds received after the fight, who went on the vengeance trail to avenge the killing of his brother Morgan. There was a point where Wyatt and his “posse” were ambushed by Cowboys and Doc was sure that Wyatt had been cut to pieces, but all the bullets missed him. It was like something out of a Matrix movie. A heel was shot off his boot; his clothing was tattered with bullet holes, and his saddle horn had been shot off.
[image]
Newton is not pictured, and even though he is considered the quiet Earp, he was the first sheriff of Garden City, Kansas. Newton was the oldest, followed by James, Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan, and Warren was the youngest. They looked so much alike that people referred to them as peas in a pod.
There was just something larger than life about Wyatt Earp. All the Earp brothers, even those older than him, deferred to Wyatt. The Earps were in Tombstone because Wyatt asked them to come. I’ve always been fascinated with the bond these brothers shared. Their “wives” (the Earp version of marriage was whoever they were living with at the time) often felt excluded because they could never feel as close to their husbands as the brothers felt to each other. When the younger brother Morgan was shot in the back while playing pool and died, the situation in Tombstone went from dire to intolerable. Wyatt felt that the only justice for his brother existed outside the law.
Clavin does an excellent job laying out all the facts and discussing the myths. If you are looking for a starting point to learn about the Gunfight at the OK Corral, this is a great overview that also includes an expanded history of Tombstone itself. ”This is where a lifetime of trouble began.”
So strap yourself in, and know that, whatever book you choose to read about Tombstone, you are in for one helluva ride.
”You’ll get up and dress while she slipped into the short pink silk robe that she retrieved from a hook in the closet. As she belted the robe, you’d t”You’ll get up and dress while she slipped into the short pink silk robe that she retrieved from a hook in the closet. As she belted the robe, you’d take an envelope out of your pocket and leave it on the table next to the bed. She’d hug you close and give you a long lingering kiss. She’d tell you how much she enjoyed it, and how she couldn’t wait to do it again. Then she’d walk you down the stairs to the front door, give you one last soft kiss, and send you back out into your real life.
Of course you knew it was mostly an act. But at the moment, drawing the door closed behind you, you absolutely didn’t care. You were conscious only of the fact that you hadn’t felt this good since the last time Jennifer had worked her magic on you and that you wouldn’t feel this good again until the next time.”
Three men are murdered, and Detective Sean Richardson and his partner, Maggie McClinton, have no leads. There is nothing discernibly obvious that connects the three men until a very fit, tall, blonde woman, who looks like a candidate for Miss Arizona, walks into Richardson’s office and gives them what they so desperately need...a lead.
Miss Jennifer Bryan, AKA Gina Gallagher, knew all three victims. They were clients. She doesn’t sell flowers, nor does she sell real estate or life insurance. No, as Jennifer Bryan, she sells her time. She is an exclusive escort, pulling down $700 an hour. She doesn’t just pat their hands and hear about their troubles or be the arm candy for a dinner date with business associates.
She is a bit more hands on with her services. She has sex with them. At $700 an hour, she must be very, very good.
So you could say she is an exclusive, meaning a small clientele, hooker or prostitute, but those words are not easy to associate with Jennifer Bryan, and they certainly don’t fit the delightful workout trainer, Gina Gallagher. She is class. Jennifer is the seemingly unattainable dream, a beautiful woman who wants to have sex with you. For an hour, you can pretend if you wish. She can provide the girlfriend experience with all the trimmings of kissing and heavy petting. She is a woman that a man can easily become obsessed with. For an hour she can make you believe you are special. It is a natural tendency when we find something really wonderful that we want it to be ours and ours alone.
Is that what is going on here? Is this a case of obsession turning to murder?
Richardson, who lost his wife a short time ago, is not immune to her charms. Is he more attracted to Jennifer or Gina, or really can one separate the two? To be with one, ultimately you have to be with the other. It can become rather confusing, and Gina has at least one ex-boyfriend out there who had difficulty seeing Gina as someone separate from Jennifer. He becomes suspect #1, but as Richardson and McClinton dig further into this case and as more men are killed, they start to realize that there are several suspects and plenty of potential perpetrators, but who is doing what?
James L. Thane does a wonderful job developing the characters. We find ourselves worrying about Richardson, sitting at home in the dark, drinking scotch, listening to music on headphones in his empty apartment. We puzzle over how McClinton can possibly make a relationship work with a minister who has two kids when she isn’t even a little bit religious herself. Truly, one of those circumstances that if you marry the man, you marry his job as well. I really like Gina Gallagher, not just because she is beautiful and sexy, but because she is likeable and truly nice person caught in a horrible situtation. I found myself hoping she would prove to be girlfriend material for Richardson, even with the obvious complications. Making these characters real is what makes us even more invested in the plot. We worry about them. We speculate about them just like we do our real friends. As men continue to die, we can see that the killer is spiralling closer and closer to the center of this loosely connected universe...Gina Gallagher.
Can Richardson discover the truth in time?
The twists and turns and red herrings will keep you guessing until enough pieces snap into place and the face in the puzzle is revealed.
”In Arizona you can live with a woman who wants you to commit murder, and be worried about losing her. You can start to think, subconsciously at first”In Arizona you can live with a woman who wants you to commit murder, and be worried about losing her. You can start to think, subconsciously at first and then maybe more deliberately, of murder as not all that bad, compared to the alternatives. You can work it out logically….”
Russell Macky is an investigative reporter who has made powerful enemies with his exposés. Arizona is still very much the wild, wild west with high crimes and misdemeanors being a regular part of doing business. Macky is well aware that, just fifteen years before, an ambitious young reporter for the Arizona Republic named Don Bolles had been murdered with a car bomb in 1976. I remember when I first moved to Arizona in 1985 that people were still buzzing about the mafia hit on Bolles. Corruption and the old boys network are in firm control of politics, and any business deal large enough to matter has to be approved by someone connected.
Macky isn’t one of those crusading journalists interested in rooting out the truth. Fortunately, finding out the truth dovetails with his primary interest of breaking the next big story that will land him a Pulitzer and a better job on a bigger paper.
He decides that taking down THE JUDGE is his ticket out of Tucson. The Judge is a product of another era and doesn’t see anything wrong with doing exactly what he wants to do when he wants to do it.
”One of those judges, pinching every ass around the courthouse and never crossing his legs and coming in with a hangover to sentence drug users to the max while relishing the contradiction, the kind you expect to be wearing a Magnum and getting a blow from some pretty and impressionable ambitious law clerk under his robes during a trial.”
That type of behavior isn’t going to get a guy in much trouble in the 1990s. The fact that he raises pitbulls, not as pets or for guarding his house but for dogfights,...now that will get a guy jammed up. Most people love puppies, and the last thing they want to think about is dogs being forced to fight to the death. Bringing down the famous judge could be Macky’s magic carpet ride out of Tucson and into a cushy job in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York. To get the judge, he isn’t going to be able to play strictly by the book. Macky knows he might have to bend some rules, but once he meets Alice Malone, with her own bone to pick with the judge, he realizes that breaking the rules is even more stimulating than bending them.
”Some of what happened I can blame on Arizona. The awful heat made it harder for both of us to act the least bit civilized. I’d look at her on the seat next to me and see the beads of sweat collecting along her upper lip and glistening on her chest and belly and legs and I’d smell her sweating like the animal she was. Like we both were. The heat was building up in me and it was hard to think about anything but taking her, really taking her, and if I ever did it wasn’t going to be any of this good-loving in the songs--it was going to be bad-loving, and she knew it and wanted it, and the longer we delayed the more bad and better it would be.”
Macky will have to find a way to survive the not so subtle sexual manipulations of Alice, escape vicious dogs intent on planting a real Arizona Kiss on his keister, stay out of the hands of the crooked police, avoid the battering that the judge’s goons want to administer, and somehow write the story of his life.
Needless to say, this book brought back some fond and disturbing memories of my time in Tucson. Tucson was/is a corridor for drugs coming up through Mexico, and there are plenty of badass people acquiring and hauling that contraband further north. Not to mention the coyotes bringing people illegally across the border. It was a town full of yuppies and rich college students on one side of town and nefarious characters on the other side of town. A person did not have to look far to get into more trouble than what one could handle. Corpses were found in the desert on a regular basis, and the irrefutable fact was that there was always room for one more. Ray Ring vividly captures all sides of the culture in Tucson against a backdrop of tough dialogue and gritty situations that make this novel a feisty ode to the hardboiled mysteries of the past.
”’Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than malice,’ he read, and kept going. ‘One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be,”’Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of good than malice,’ he read, and kept going. ‘One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by the use of force.’ Here he looked up and nodded at me as if I represented said use of force. Then he looked down at the book again. ‘Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.’ Carlo looked up at me and finished the quote by heart. ‘For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than a malicious one.’
‘What if the person is both stupid and malicious?’ I asked.
‘Then I believe you’re screwed,’ Carlo said mildly.”
The famous Clutter murders so vividly, indelibly imprinted on the American public by the Truman Capote classic In Cold Blood have always been of particular interest to the retired, but still very active, ex-FBI agent Brigid Quinn.
She has a theory, one completely unsubstantiated by any evidence. You might call it a hunch or a gut instinct that comes from analyzing hundreds of crime scenes. She believes there was a third perpetrator involved with the Clutter murders. The music of the murder scene is playing discordantly. There seems, in her mind, to be an instrument missing from the crescendo moments of the symphony of blood.
This is my fourth adventure with Brigid, and though I’m sceptical of her theory, I have learned to trust that a string that she can’t resist tugging is usually a string attached to something substantial that will change the course of an investigation.
The other niggling concern is the murder of the Walker family, shortly after the Clutter murders, that has similarities to the murders in Kansas. This happened in Florida, Quinn’s old stomping grounds, and Richard Hickock and Perry Smith just happened to be in the area at the time. The Walker case remains to this day unsolved. There was no tangible evidence to put Hickock and Smith in the frame of the Walker murders, and they had more than enough evidence, including confessions, to convict them in Kansas. You can’t execute men twice, but then if they did kill the Walkers, wouldn’t it be nice to give the friends and families, not to mention suspects, in the Walker case closure?
Truman Capote mentions the Walker murders in his book, but those murders have a relatively brief appearance considering the magnitude of the crime and the real possibility that Smith and Hickock had some connection. As a writer, the circumstances begged to be investigated, but Capote was more than half in love with Perry Smith and was more concerned about presenting a sympathetic view of Smith to the detriment of the thuggish view he presented of Hickock.
Carlo DiForenza, ex-priest and current husband of Brigid, has a six degrees of separation connection to the Clutter murders. He was the protege of the priest who read Hickock’s last confession.
Wait a minute. Read it, as in a written last confession?
Anybody else feel the little hairs tingling on the back of their neck?
Brigid has had a lifelong obsession with the Clutter and Walker murders, and here finally is the potential for a groundbreaking clue in what really happened. Will Hickock confirm her crazy theory?
Does that confession still exist?
As Brigid starts to investigate the real possibility that there may exist a document that will explain the gaps in the original investigation, her car brakes quit functioning on a winding road, and their house in Tucson is burgled. Brigid is starting to believe that her theory is right and that the third person is intent on keeping her from finding and revealing the truth. What is unnerving is, the person is proving to be malicious and stupid in equal measure.
The previous three Brigid Quinn novels had more humor entwined within the serious moments of the plot. In the acknowledgements in the back, Becky Masterman mentions that she had the help of three editors from different publishing houses in editing the book. This book certainly has a different feel than the other books. I still enjoyed the book very much, but felt like Masterman’s normal witty asides had been toned down somewhat. I missed those moments where I’d be grimacing/laughing at something irreverent that Brigid was thinking or saying. Maybe the mixing of a nonfiction event with fictional events changed the tone of the novel as well.
You can read this book by itself, as many reviewers have done, but you would certainly be missing out on an opportunity to really get to know Brigid. I had this feeling that I should read the books in order, and I am so glad I did. I want to thank St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books for sending me an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. The publicist targeted me to review this book because I’d read and reviewed In Cold Blood. Your enjoyment of this book will definitely benefit from having read In Cold Blood. If you don’t have time or interest in reading Capote’s book, I would suggest that you at least read the wikipedia entries for the Clutter and Walker murders before reading this book. I don’t mean to give readers of this book homework, but I do want you to fully appreciate the nuances and significant reveals of the case as it unfolds.
”The first execution I attended wasn’t by lethal injection but by Old Sparky. That’s what they affectionately call the electric chair at Raiford Penit”The first execution I attended wasn’t by lethal injection but by Old Sparky. That’s what they affectionately call the electric chair at Raiford Penitentiary in the northeast part of Florida. It was in 1980, a few years after the death penalty was reinstated across the country. They had come up with the lethal injection cocktail by that time, but you were allowed to choose your method of dying.”
I was really struck by Brigid Quinn’s thoughts as she sat there passively and watched this man die. As an FBI agent, she had been trained to protect people, and as she observed these people methodically going about their business of killing this man, there was a part of her that felt that she was supposed to intercede.
A primary directive was being overridden by a law stipulating that, beyond judge and jury, we are also executioners. ”Thou shalt not kill.” In the same book, it also says, ”an eye for an eye.” Which one do you choose? Brigid had doubts, but being an indoctrinated law enforcement officer, she doesn't oppose the death penalty. In fact, in the course of her duties, she has had to be judge, jury, and executioner, all in a matter of moments.
I’d feel better about all of this if we at least knew for sure we were executing the actual perpetrator of the crime. One lawyer in the book said that he could clear over half the death row inmates if he had DNA evidence, which didn’t exist when they were convicted. If that is true, that makes my blood run cold.
Marcus Creighton had days to live. His appeals have run out, and with the new Timely Justice Act, the executions of death row inmates in Florida have been sped up exponentially. Brigid’s old friend from Tucson, Laura Coleman,has tugged on some of the loose ends in the case to see if she could find anything that would create enough reasonable doubt to delay his execution. Brigid has come back to Florida to see her dad. His health has deteriorated; a lifetime smoker, his lungs were like tissue paper. Brigid believed that Creighton was guilty, but she couldn’t help getting drawn into the case. For one thing, it becomes a distraction from the problems with her father, and she also wanted to help her friend.
There developed this tug and pull on her time between spending potentially the last few moments with her father or trying to save a man from execution. There is a certain amount of helplessness associated with both these endeavors. She found herself caught between a governor who didn’t want to seem soft on crime and a grim reaper who waited for no one.
There was a really big nagging concern in the Creighton case. His wife was murdered in his house, but what happened to the kids? Three kids were never found, dead or alive. So if Creighton committed the murder, what did he do with the kids? Who else had reason to want his wife dead? His mistress? A loan shark reminding him of his vig? Was that tied in somehow? As Brigid and Laura continued to overturn rocks in the case, rocks that were shifted many times before, I started to think to myself, what the hell really happened?
”Florida. It’s a wet heat.”I had to laugh out loud when I read that line. When I lived in Tucson, and it was 106 in the shade, we used to tell visitors, no, no, it’s fine. It’s a dry heat.
Brigid is this dimitive, 59 year old woman with a shock of white hair. She doesn’t look threatening, well, unless you happened to meet her eyes, and then something glittering in there might give you pause, but guys who were used to their height and weight winning a fight before it ever gets started would think, this was going to be an easy woman to intimidate.”While I waited, the older woman in the booth across the way looked at me with a sour little smirk that said I was in for it now. The two men who had been arguing at the counter arrived at my table and pulled out chairs on either side of me. Looked like we were going small-town noir.” Does that sound like a worried woman to you? I’ve become very fond of Brigid Quinn, but I didn’t feel even an ounce of anxiety for her. All that weight and height she lacked was what she was going to use against them.
Small-town noir, Becky Masterman tickled me with her hardboiled language.
The tension continued to ratchet up as time became the enemy of Brigid’s father and for Marcus Creighton. Brigid’s mom was also, understandably, seemingly going off the rails, but maybe she was just redefining herself or maybe even finding herself for the first time. The prospect of a life undefined by her husband was scary, but also liberating...which carried its own share of guilt. As we all know, it is hard to be happy and even harder to find happiness without doubt or shame wrapping barbed wire around our contentment.
”The fact is, you may think you know someone else’s story, but you don’t. How can you, when you don’t even know your own? Maybe we’re all mysteries that can’t be solved.”
I think we all worry about being understood, but maybe we should spend more time trying to understand ourselves than wailing about the fact that others don’t understand us. There are some pretty heavy themes in this book, with the scrutinizing of the death penalty and the myriad of emotions that compose our relationships with our parents. As always, Masterman lightens up the plot with humor and self-deprecating asides that make Brigid Quinn, even outside the confines of Arizona, a joy to spend time with.
“When you first come out to this part of Arizona you think Good grief, it’s all fifty shades of beige, but you’re wrong. On this late afternoon in spr“When you first come out to this part of Arizona you think Good grief, it’s all fifty shades of beige, but you’re wrong. On this late afternoon in spring the rosy glow the setting sun cast on the Catalinas in the distance made me think of my friend Mallory’s wisdom, ‘When the mountains turn pink, it’s time for a drink.’”
I can still remember the first time I saw Tucson, Arizona. I was moving there from the scorching concrete and unnatural green grass of Phoenix to finish my English degree at the University of Arizona. To my skeptical eye, the whole city looked to me as if it were one sandstorm away from disappearing forever. It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the place. The natural desert lawns possessed more nuance and more beauty than any expanse of green lawn could ever achieve. By the time I visited Phoenix again, it resembled an alien landscape, one in which humans were trying to turn a desert into Ohio.
Ex-FBI agent Brigid Quinn is happily married to Carlo and quietly starting up a private investigation operation. She has had to accept the fact that the concept of being retired escapes her. As her friend Mallory Hollinger likes to joke, her tombstone will read...never took lunch. Brigid might be passed her prime physically, but there is certainly nothing wrong with her mind. Well, there wasn’t anything wrong with her mind until she starts having hallucinations.
”I saw Carlo. I saw him smile his usual bad-boy smile. Then I saw his flesh drop away, turning the smile into the grin of a skull.”
What the hell?
One of their pugs becomes deathly sick. It seems he had been licking a Colorado River Toad, but something, well a lot of things about it, doesn’t add up.
Everything was peachy, and now everything seems to be going wrong.
What’s changed?
Oh yeah, her seventeen year old niece, Gemma-Kate, moves in.
The problem with teenagers is that it is difficult to tell the difference between typical head spinning on their shoulders behavior and say psychotic behavior. Even Brigid, who is an expert on criminal behavior, has difficulty really deciding if Gemma-Kate is reasonably normal or sees other human beings with the same importance as a used Kleenex. ”To her you are one of three things: an amusement, useful, or in the way.’
”It’s hard to recognize the devil when his hand is on your shoulder. That’s because a psychopath is just a person before he becomes a headline.”
Normal people, when they see the flesh melt off the face of their husband, would be checking themselves into the nearest psychiatric ward, but Brigid is far from a normal human being. She is determined to continue on her hallucinatory journey until she discovers what is really going on. She is also trying to work the case of a drowned teenager, and it doesn’t take long for that case and her own problems to intersect.
Teenagers, you can’t live them, and you can’t kill them. Or can you?
Another amusing adventure with one of the most inspiring detectives I’ve run across in a long time. 59 is the new 39. Brigid will convince you that, whatever age you are, you can make the universe notice you are still alive and kicking. I can’t wait to read the third installment: A Twist of the Knife.
There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal”I’ve sometimes regretted the woman I’ve been.
There have been so many: daughter, sister, cop, tough broad, several kinds of whore, jilted lover, ideal wife, heroine, killer. I’ll provide the truth of them all, inasmuch as I’m capable of telling the truth. Keeping secrets, telling lies, they require the same skill. Both become a habit, almost an addiction, that’s hard to break even with the people closest to you, out of the business. For example, they say never trust a woman who tells you her age; if she can’t keep that secret, she can’t keep yours.
I’m fifty-nine.”
Retired FBI agent Brigid Quinn is living a quiet life (on the surface) of reflection with her husband, Professor Carol DiForenza, AKA Prefessor, in a beautiful home in Tucson, Arizona. In the evenings, she dissects the cop shows, to the amusement of her husband, as she points out the things they get wrong and the things they get right. She is often distracted by the news. ”I wrenched my mind into the kitchen, bent on being that trifecta of Betty Crocker, Donna Reed, and last year’s centerfold.” Serial killers? Not her job anymore, but at one time they were all she thought about. As far as living up to the trifecta, well those clothes are not conducive to kicking someone’s ass.
The thing is, ”your past doesn’t die. Hell, it doesn’t even wrinkle.” Her past comes calling at her door in the form of some of her former colleagues, telling her they got the Route 66 Killer. There are a lot of regrets tied up around this case for Brigid. The thought that they might finally have the bastard is balm for the crease this case left in her soul. Those regrets will never heal, of course, but they might get easier to live with. ”Only suckers believe in closure.”
Floyd Lynch is caught driving around in his rig with a mummified corpse as his co-pilot? I won’t even speculate about what goes on when Floyd puts Barry White on in the evening and pops the cork on a bottle of Chablis.
Brigid is brought into the case as a courtesy and for her legendary insight. Little does she know that her role will quickly move from interested bystander into lead detective, but you need to keep that on the QT. A retired FBI agent looking into a case is not exactly kosher with the bosses back in DC. Soon someone is trying to kill her (not unusual for her); she has seriously mucked up things with Carlo (truthfulness might have been a factor) and alienated all her colleagues working the case.
”’Do not go gentle into that good night. Howl, howl...or rage, rage...against the dying of the light.’
This is Brigid Quinn, a woman of a certain age, raging.”
She is a force of nature, and it is my distinct pleasure to have met her. Lie to her at your peril. She will sniff out a lie like a bloodhound with a snoot full of bloody shirt. She is forthright. She is hilarious. She has a flexible morality scale. She is tough. She is savvy. She might be over the hill by FBI standards, but she certainly isn’t buried under it. I have to say, I haven’t had a fictional woman show me such a good time in a long time. I also adore the setting of Tucson. It brings back a lot of fond memories of my time living there.
The really good news is, there are three more books in the series. The fourth book is about the In Cold Blood Murders which happened practically in my backyard, so I might have to hop in the car with her for that one.
I can already hear her saying, “Buckle up Buttercup. You are in for a ride.”
”As the sun slipped from the sky, the McDowell range stood out in sharp relief to the east, the mountains a deep purple in the advancing dusk. Above m”As the sun slipped from the sky, the McDowell range stood out in sharp relief to the east, the mountains a deep purple in the advancing dusk. Above me, the sky faded slowly from a cobalt blue to a pale gray. To the West a bank of clouds gradually dissolved from a light pink to a brighter orange and then to a blazing crimson before finally draining out to a gunmetal gray and then disappearing altogether as the darkness descended over the Valley.”
I lived in Arizona for ten years and had the pleasure to spend significant time in Flagstaff, Mesa, Phoenix, and most of all Tucson. The sunsets were spectacular and made more so by the very brown haze that often hung over the Valley. I knew several people who visited Arizona and never went back to the states they came from. They were even willing to take major pay cuts to make the transition happen. It is a seductive place, and since I left, I think about it often.
Unfortunately, the sunsets and the picturesque desert scenes are as susceptible to crime as any other large metropolitan area. Phoenix is enjoying that mild, beautiful, winter weather that has snowbirds flocking to Arizona from Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, etc., but an insidious presence has descended on the Valley, a man intent on revenge. He is finally free as a bird, but he doesn’t feel free. In fact, he feels like he has been destroyed by an injustice, and he knows who needs to pay. ”Freedom’s just another word for having nothing to lose.”
It all begins with the kidnapping of Beverly Thompson and the murder of her husband. Who is the target? That is the first question that Detective Sean Richardson would like to have answered. We get the chance to see real police work as Sean and his partner Maggie McClinton take a handful of slender leads and try to puzzle out what is significant and what is just distracting them from the main line of enquiry.
This reminded me of the time, a few years ago, when I served on a jury, which is actually a fascinating opportunity. People really shouldn’t work so hard to get out of performing jury duty, although after reading this book they might not be so encouraged. The interesting thing for me was watching lawyers enter evidence that was salacious in detail, but really had nothing to do with the actual crime that was committed. When I was sequestered with the jury, I was appalled at how easily the jury members were distracted by details that had nothing to do with the crime we were prosecuting.
A good policeman can’t really throw out any “evidence,” but at the same time, he can not be distracted by elements that will cost him valuable time, especially when he is trying to find an attractive, successful, white woman who has gone missing. The pressure is enormous to produce results quickly, to not only have a chance to save the victim but to quiet the clamoring of Richardson’s politically conscious supervisors and the inquisitive, condemning press.
The other underlying issue is the state of Sean Richardson’s mind. His beloved wife was in a car accident that has left her in a coma. Machines are keeping her alive, but even though Sean knows what his wife would want him to do, her family is doing everything they can to keep him from pulling the plug and letting her finally receive peace. Can he focus on a high profile case with all those distractions lurking in the background of his every thought? His new partner Maggie, an African-American, also has her own ongoing problems as she tries to work her way through a system still mired in sexism and racism.
They are both powder kegs, vulnerable to the right spark to explode into one of those colorful sunsets so much admired.
The cat and mouse game, though really it is much more serious than what that language would imply, between Beverly Thompson and her captor certainly adds even more tension to the plot. The relationship that develops between them, based on violence and tenderness, produces more than one shiver from this reader.
As more bodies continue to show up with the same modus operandi, the team becomes more convinced that the kidnapping and the murders are connected. The question is, with the victims unconnected in any way, how are they being selected for execution? They are missing the lynchpin revelation that will finally springboard them to a final and deadly confrontation with a most insidious killer.
James L. Thane was good enough to send me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. He brings the backdrop of this mystery to life with his descriptions of the Valley of the Sun. His characters are fully fleshed and very human, with their weaknesses and strengths equally exposed. The tension is palpable as the statistics for recovering a kidnapping victim get more dire with each passing day, and with our bird’s eye view of the killer, the reader feels every bit of that tension as we see the degradation of the killer’s final slender attachments to any kind of empathy. We fear his slide into untethered madness. I have the other two books in this series and plan to queue them up soon. I want to see what underbelly of the Valley Thane will guide me to next.
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