Skull Duggery (29 page)

“Believe me, it would have hurt more if you had them in your mouth. Now, until fairly recently, the only times you saw teeth like these were in people whose diet included a lot of stone-ground foods. So Dr. Ybarra, the local forensic examiner at the time, concluded reasonably enough that that’s what it was.”

“But,” said Carl.

“Yes, but. Nowadays-for the last few decades-there’s been another likely explanation for something like this, especially if you find it in a young person, and this guy is fairly young. And that is an addiction to methamphetamine, which is what we’ve got here; one hell of a case of ‘meth mouth.’ ”

Meth mouth, he explained, went along with heavy methamphetamine use. There were plenty of reasons for it. First, the caustic, acidic mix of the drug itself corroded tooth enamel and gum tissue. It also decreased the production of saliva, which made things even worse because saliva both neutralized acids and inhibited the growth of cavity-causing bacteria. Also, the resulting thirst that went along with “dry mouth” often resulted in the consumption of sugary drinks that did their own nasty damage. Add to that the near constant teeth-grinding that was part of the addiction (this was the reason that meth addicts were called “tweakers”) and the result was a toxic stew that could turn the teeth into horrors that looked just like what they had in front of them. Meth mouth. “Well, okay, but how can you be sure that’s really what it is, and not an ancient skull?” Jamie asked. “I mean, if they look the same.”

“Well, they don’t look exactly the same, Gideon said. “With meth mouth, you get a distinctive pattern of cavities that aren’t related to ordinary wear: on the buccal sides of the teeth, for example, and also between the anterior-”

“I think I see where Gideon’s going with this,” Carl said, frowning down at his coffee mug. “The other night, remember, Tony was talking about how he used to have a pal who had a worse problem with meth than he did-”

“Huicho something,” Jamie said.

“And how they got into trouble,” Carl continued. “ A whole lot of trouble was the way he put it.” He put a hand on the skull. “Is this him? Huicho? Is that where you’re going?”

“No, it’s not Huicho,” Gideon said. “You’re close, but not quite there. Look at the teeth again.” He held the skull completely upside down for them. “Count them.”

“Fourteen,” Jamie said after a few seconds, and others murmured their agreement.

“But if he had them all, there’d be sixteen,” Julie said. “And another sixteen in the lower jaw.”

“Right. He’s missing two teeth from his upper jaw. And if we had his mandible, I’d be guessing there were another two missing from that.”

At that an almost visible current of uneasiness passed around the table. They had some dawning sense of where he was going, but couldn’t quite see it clearly yet. Or couldn’t believe it.

“Gideon, are you saying…” Julie said slowly, then gazed quizzically at him. “What are you saying?”

“The missing teeth are the second premolars. They appear to be congenitally missing. This, as you know, is an extremely rare condition… that happens to run in the Gallagher family. Blaze-Tony’s sister-had it. Annie-Blaze’s daughter-you have it. Jamie-Tony’s brother-you have it. Only Tony, or rather the man you’ve been calling Tony for thirty years-didn’t have it. But this man-” He tapped the skull. “He did.”

For a long time they just sat there and stared at him, stared at the skull. None of them could bring themselves to say it, so finally Gideon said it for them.

“This,” he said, his hand resting on the skull, “is Tony Gallagher.”

“No, that’s impossible,” Jamie said with a nervous little laugh. “This is not Tony.”

“This is Tony,” Gideon said.

He gave it a little more time to sink in and then continued. “The missing premolars alone would have been enough to convince me-I mean, the chances of a man with that particular syndrome turning up in the vicinity of this particular little village, who wasn’t a Gallagher relation, are minuscule to say the least. But throw that in with the methamphetamine addiction-which your ‘Tony’ didn’t show any signs of-and then throw that in with the fact that Blaze was murdered, and that Manolo was murdered, and that-”

“ Manolo was murdered?” Annie screeched. “What… how…?”

Gideon had forgotten that they didn’t yet know that part of it. “Okay, forget Manolo, I’ll explain about that later, but there’s also the fact that this guy here didn’t just die; he was murdered too, and his skull was found within a few hundred yards of Blaze’s, and those happen to be the only murders-literally, the only three murders-that have happened around here in the last fifty years, so-”

“No, Gideon, I just can’t buy this,” Carl said. “Look, I’ve been here on the Hacienda for almost forty years. I was here before Tony came back. And there is no doubt in my mind that the Tony who died yesterday was the same Tony who came back and took over in 1979. Believe me.”

“I do believe you,” Gideon said. “But you see, I don’t think he was really Tony in 1979 any more than he was Tony yesterday.”

“But… no, but…”

“Carl’s right,” Jamie insisted, his face flushed. “Look, Tony was my big brother. When I was growing up he looked out for me; I loved him. Are you saying I didn’t know my own brother?”

“Look at it this way, Jamie. When Tony-the guy we’ve been calling Tony-came back here in 1979 he was a grown man. You hadn’t seen him in almost ten years, right? He’d been only sixteen then. Do you really think you’d know one way or the other whether the man who showed up then was really the same teenager that had left back then… when you were just six years old?”

“Well-okay, maybe not, but my father certainly would have recognized his own-” His face fell. “No, dad had died a little while before.”

“And I’d never seen Tony before he showed up in 1979,” Carl added thoughtfully.

“And I was one year old in 1979,” Annie said, no less soberly.

The three of them were beginning to accept it even though they didn’t want to, but then Jamie perked up. “Wait, wait, wait-Blaze was older than me; she was only a year younger than Tony. There’s no way some stranger could come in and make her believe he was her brother. He’d never get away with it.”

“But Blaze never saw him. She was already gone when he got here,” Gideon gently pointed out. “She was dead by then, although as far as everybody knew, she’d run off with Manolo.”

“Sure,” Jamie said, “but he wouldn’t have known that. How could he take the chance…” The air went out of him. He sagged back in his chair. “Oh. He killed her?”

Gideon nodded. “That’s the way I see it. She was the only one left who could know for sure that he wasn’t really Tony. Well, Tony himself-the real Tony-would have known too, of course. So he got rid of them both, walked in in his place, took over, and was Tony Gallagher for the next thirty years.”

“And the reason he tried to kill you,” Julie said, “was to prevent you from finding out… well, what you found out-that he wasn’t who he said he was.”

Gideon nodded. “It fits, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. I see.” Jamie said miserably.

Annie flung her hands in the air. “Then who the hell was the guy whose hand I was just holding in the hospital? The guy that’s been Tony for the last thirty years?”

“Annie,” Gideon said earnestly, “I do not have a clue.”

“Nor do I,” said Marmolejo, who had been silent and ruminative for some time. “But I believe I know who can provide the answer. Where can I find the woman Josefa?”

“Josefa?” Annie said. “She’s probably in the Casa del Mayordomo, in her room. But what makes you think she would know anything? She’s just-”

“It was Josefa to whom this man willed your beautiful Hacienda, and not his brother, or his brother-in-law, or his niece, or the wife to whom he left everything else. Don’t you find this curious?”

“Well, she’s supposed to be some kind of distant aunt on my mother’s side,” Jamie said.

“Perhaps that’s it,” he said, rising and pocketing the little tape recorder that had been on the table, “but I expect there’s something more to it than that.”BY the time Marmolejo returned half an hour later, considerable inroads had been made into the pastries, and Dorotea had come out with another pot of coffee. Gideon had explained about the drifter’s being Manolo and answered, or tried to answer, a host of questions, but the overall mood was still one of dazed befuddlement.

Colonel Marmolejo, looking well satisfied with himself, took his former chair, daintily ate a cinnamon cookie, ate another cinnamon cookie, and poured himself some coffee.

“Excellent pastries,” he said. “So light, so fresh.”

“Now who’s being tantalizing?” Annie said. “Come on, Colonel, spill the damn beans. What did she tell you?”

Marmolejo, who found Annie amusing, laughed and wiped his fingers on a napkin. “The name Brax-it’s familiar to you?”

“Brax… Brax…” said Annie, frowning. “Yes, it is, but…”

Gideon had the same reaction. Yes, it is familiar, but…

“Josefa was unable to remember his last name,” Marmolejo said. “Something like Stevenson or Halbersam…”

Oddly enough, it was Gideon who got there first. “Faversham!” he exclaimed. “Braxton Pontleby Faversham-Carl, wasn’t that the name of the guy who Tony was going to replace you with back then, but never did? We were just talking about it the other morning.”

“That’s right,” Carl said, and Annie nodded along with him. “Braxton Pontleby Faversham.”

“Well, what about Braxton Pontleby Faversham?” Annie demanded.

“That’s who the person you’ve been calling Tony for thirty years was,” Marmolejo replied. “Braxton Faversham.”IT had taken very little effort to get the details out of Josefa-who was not exactly who they thought she was either, although Josefa really was her name. At first she had tried to stick to the cooked-up tale that she was Tony’s (and Jamie’s) aunt by marriage, the widowed wife of the brother of their mother Beatriz, but she had quickly gotten herself flummoxed in a maze of evasions and prevarications. And then the real story, as much of the real story as she knew, came tumbling out. In 1979 she had been a prostitute in Oaxaca “A prostitute!” Annie cried, delighted. “Our stodgy old Josefa, stumping around the place in her sensible shoes? Is that a hoot, or what? Can you just picture her-”

“Annie…” Carl said darkly.

“Oops, never mind,” Annie said.

Josefa had been thirty-eight in 1979, old for a hooker, even in Oaxaca, and she was facing a dismal future. Already she’d been reduced to street pickups of drunks and kids, when she’d run into Brax outside a bar. He was almost penniless, but charming enough-a real American cowboy-to talk her into putting him up for a couple of weeks in her fifty-peso-a-night room, in addition to providing him with her customary services. Both of them outcasts, they’d become close and Brax had admitted to her that he’d been released a month earlier from the Reclusorio Oriente prison in Mexico City, where he’d served five years on multiple petty crime charges, and was in Oaxaca waiting for his friend Tony Gallagher, who had been let out only a couple of days earlier. They had met as inmates a year earlier and had become friends, two lost gringos in a Mexican hellhole.

But things were about to change, Brax said. Tony had learned that his father, who owned a horse ranch near Teotitlan del Valle, had died a year earlier. He had left the property to Tony, so despite knowing next to nothing about ranching and not having been anywhere near Teotitlan for almost ten years, Tony was coming to take it over. And his best pal Brax, who had grown up on a horse ranch in Oregon, was going to manage the place for him. It was a chance at a new life, a wonderful opportunity for Brax, who couldn’t return to the United States because he was wanted for failure to pay child support. According to Josefa, he had pleaded with her to marry him and come live with him on the ranch, but desperate as she was, she had refused; she was almost fifteen years older than he was, and in any case, she knew marriage wasn’t for her.

“Do you suppose that part’s really true?” Julie asked. “About his wanting to marry her?”

“I don’t know,” Marmolejo said. “I have no doubt that at this moment she believes it.”

“Now is that weird or what?” Annie said. “Can you imagine Josefa married to Tony?”

“To Braxton Faversham, actually,” Jamie pointed out.

“That’s right, I’m still trying to get my head around that. I keep forgetting that I never even met Tony Gallagher.”

“Interestingly enough,” said Marmolejo, “Josefa did. But she despised him on sight. ‘Un hombre brutal,’ she called him. She also said-” (and this he accompanied with a deferential bow in Gideon’s direction) “-that he had horrible breath, horrible, rotten teeth.”

“That he did.” Gideon had his palm resting on the skull. “You’re lookin’ at ’em now.”

“She knew the ranch hand, Manolo Garcia, as well,” Marmolejo continued. “He had just been fired from the ranch, and his jaw was wired shut, and he had no place to go, so on Brax’s urging, she allowed him to use her room for a few days too, even though she was frightened of him-another rufian, just like Tony. He and Faversham talked and talked over bottles of tequila, secretive discussions from which she was excluded. And then, one day, to her delight, Manolo was gone, and so was Tony. They had vanished.”

“Killed,” Carl murmured. “By Faversham.”

“It would seem so, yes.” Marmolejo paused to slowly consume another cookie, anise this time, and to collect his thoughts before continuing.

Whether Faversham had planned it all ahead of time, or had come up with the idea in Oaxaca, Marmolejo was unable to say, but somewhere along the line he had formed an audacious new plan. He had learned a great deal about the ranch and about the Gallaghers from Tony during their years in prison. And Tony himself, after all, had not been seen at the ranch since he’d been a teenager; now he was a grown man whose hard life had left him much changed. What if Faversham “became” Tony and showed up at the ranch to claim his inheritance? They were about the same age, they both had brown hair and brown eyes, they both tended toward overweight. Would the Gallaghers really know the difference? Certainly not Tony’s younger brother, Jamie, who had been a kid when he’d last set eyes on Tony. His father surely would have known his son, but his father was conveniently dead. That left Tony’s sister Blaze… who would therefore also have to be conveniently dead for the plan to work. Tony, of course, would have to go too; that went without saying. Thus…