Free At Ease with the Dead by Walter Satterthwait Page A

and that one of her friends was killed. A woman.”
    â€œYeah? And?”
    â€œThe story is that, afterward, she went out with the Jivaro war party on its revenge raid. She found the man who killed her friend and she killed him. And then she took his head.”
    â€œUh-huh,” I said. “And does Hogarth believe that?”
    â€œHe does, as a matter of fact. He’s spoken with another anthropologist, one who did fieldwork with the Jivaro in the fifties. A man named Lewison. Lewison told Jack that the Jivaro were still singing songs about the tall white woman who took heads.”
    â€œWell, look, Rita, even if that’s all true, it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to her when she was eleven years old.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “But before you have dinner with her tomorrow you might want to ask her what’s on the menu.”
    The thought of Alice Wright as a headhunter was a fairly diverting one. I lay there for a while, wondering about it.
    I wondered, first, if it were true. Under the proper circumstances, she’d said, anyone is capable of murder. Had she been speaking from personal experience? The “tall white woman” detail in the Jivaro songs seemed persuasive. But then, maybe the Jivaro were a bunch of zanies who thought that slandering anthropologists was a nifty thing to do.
    I wondered, if it were true, how she’d felt about taking a life. I wondered if she’d ever told anyone about it.
    I wondered what a Jivaro song might sound like. Did it have a good beat? Could you dance to it?
    But all this mental activity wasn’t enough to stop a sharp splinter of guilt from jabbing occasionally at the back of my soul. I hadn’t told Rita that Lisa Wright would be there at dinner tomorrow night. I hadn’t told her about Lisa Wright at all.
    Later, as I was falling asleep, three different images kept tumbling over each other in my head. The first image was of the young girl prowling round and round the empty house. The second was of the same person, older now, a woman in a khaki skirt and blouse, swinging a big bright machete down through the air to hack a muscular brown neck. The third was of another woman, this one in jeans, smiling as she brushed a strand of black hair away from big bright cornflower-blue eyes.

7
    O n Thursday morning, when I went outside to the Subaru, I discovered that all four of its tires were flat. Each had been slashed through the sidewall.
    I reported this to the overweight woman behind the counter at the front office. She received the news with admirable aplomb: She tapped cigarette ashes into a Cinzano ashtray and told me that these things happened. It was the Mexican kids, the pachucos. They go out and they get stoned, sometimes they get nasty. They all carry knives, I was lucky it was only the tires that got slashed and not my belly. She was sorry, it was a tough break, but didn’t I read the sign?
    She jerked her thumb over her shoulder: THE MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR DAMAGE TO ANY GUEST’S VEHICLE .
    Yeah, she said, there was a gas station up the street, and a car rental place farther along.
    None of the other tires in the lot had been slashed, but I didn’t attach much importance to that. The only people in El Paso who knew where I was staying were Alice and Lisa Wright. I could picture Alice using a machete on a human neck, but not on an automobile tire. I couldn’t picture Lisa using a machete at all. And there was no real reason for them, or for anyone else, to attack me by way of the Subaru.
    Probably the woman was right. Probably it’d been done by kids, Hispanic or otherwise. Or by grownup morons. New Mexico and Texas were still bickering over Rio Grande water rights. Maybe the New Mexico tags on the station wagon had gotten someone’s dander up.
    It was nine o’clock. If I hurried, I could still make my ten o’clock appointment with Martin Halbert.
    At the gas