PAINTED SKULL RANCH
A Fernando Lopez Santa Fe Mystery

Painted Skull Ranch
      Based on the novel by James C. Wilson
      Copyright 2022 by James C. Wilson
     
     
     
      Contact: James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone Press / (505) 988-4418
     
      LOGLINE: The murder of Santa Fe musician Danny Ortiz sends private investigator Fernando Lopez to a mysterious ranch outside Taos, where he encounters illegal drugs, a haunted Penitente morada, and a viper’s nest of deceit and treachery.
      ACT 1
      Santa Fe musician Danny Ortiz is accosted by two men in Cathedral Park while walking home after a gig in downtown Santa Fe. At first the two men appear to be fighting among themselves but then turn on Danny as he approaches, knocking him down and strangling him.
     
      ACT 2
      Private Investigator Fernando Lopez is visited by Oralia Ortiz, Danny’s wife. The Santa Fe Police believe Danny was killed in a robbery, but Oralia thinks he was set up and intentionally murdered and asks Fernando to find his killers. She tells Fernando that Danny was supposed to perform at the Lensic with Austin musician Dallas Longstreet, but that Longstreet cancelled and bolted to a mysterious ranch outside Taos rented by an old friend and drug dealer, Travis Walker. When Danny attempted to bring Dallas back to Santa Fe, he was attacked by two employees who told him to leave and not come back.
     
      Fernando visits the morgue, where he learns from Forensics that Danny had fresh needle marks on his arms, indicating he had been using hard drugs. Fernando is told that Police want to close the case as a robbery gone bad, not wanting to waste resources on a drug addict. Fernando suspects Danny was more than a robbery because his killers didn’t take Danny’s expensive guitar.
     
      ACT 3
      Next morning Fernando heads to Taos to visit this mysterious ranch. He stops first at the Taos County Sheriff’s office to see Sheriff Hank Mathews, an old friend. Hank tells Fernando that the ranch is a two hundred-year-old hacienda owned by Bill Candelaria, the last of the Candelaria family who now lives in Pueblo, Colorado. To Hank’s knowledge there have been no public disturbances or citations at the ranch, called Painted Skull Ranch by its current resident.
     
      Driving to the ranch Fernando sees a Painted Skull on a fencepost at the entrance. He also notices a Penitente morada on the grounds and momento mori images on the ranch house. He first encounters Jerry, the caretaker of the ranch. With Jerry’s help Fernando finds Dallas singing old cowboy songs with Jenny, another ‘guest’ at the ranch, or so Fernando thinks. Dallas is clearly under the influence of hard drugs. Fernando tells Dallas that his friend Danny Ortiz has been murdered and that he might not be safe staying at the ranch, but Dallas refuses to leave. On the way out Fernando is threatened and manhandled by the two ranch hands who attacked Danny, Hal and Tony. They tell Fernando to stay away from the ranch.
     
      Back in Santa Fe Fernando decides to visit Dallas’ wife, Belle Longstreet. Belle is staying in a casita at the exclusive Bishop’s Lodge Resort. When he arrives Fernando is greeted by Paula, Belle’s assistant, a personable and friendly young woman. On the other hand, Fernando finds Belle arrogant and self-absorbed, totally uninterested in news about her husband. Belle says she is in the process of divorcing Dallas, who she calls a reckless drunk and drug addict. Likewise, she refers to Danny as a leech and parasite who had sponged money from her husband for many years. Belle’s two other employees, Larry and Scott, are just as unlikeable.
     
      ACT 4
      In his office next morning Fernando receives a call from Taos Sheriff Hank Mathews. Hank tells Fernando that the body of a young man had been found close to Painted Skull Ranch. The young man appears to have died from a fentanyl overdose, possibly at the ranch. Fernando returns to Taos and the two of them visit the ranch and confront Travis Walker. Travis claims to operate a typical guest ranch, but they suspect he sells drugs to his guests. They find Dallas with Jenny absorbed in what appears to be a drunken romantic fling. Dallas again refuses to leave the ranch.
     
      Fernando returns to Santa Fe only to find a message on his office phone from Paula. Paula says she wants to bring Fernando something that might interest him. When she arrives, she shows Fernando a torn check made out to Danny Ortiz and signed by Dallas. Paula says she found the torn check in the wastebasket in a room occupied by Larry. Paula doubts Larry would have taken the check from Dallas. The other possibility, Fernando realizes, is that Larry took it from Danny, possibly Danny’s dead body.
     
      ACT 5
      Fernando decides to question Larry about the check. When confronted, Larry angrily denies knowing about the check and refuses to talk to Fernando. Next Fernando pays a visit to the Drury Hotel, whose windows overlook the area in Cathedral Park where Danny was murdered. He asks the Concierge if he saw or heard anything about the murder. The Concierge tells Fernando that hotel employees saw two men waiting for Danny, which meant the murder was planned. He says the two killers went through Danny’s wallet and then ran off. Later the Night Concierge confirms this, saying also that he saw the two killers run up Palace Avenue to a car waiting for them at the Paseo.
     
      After dinner Fernando receives a desperate call for help from Paula. Belle has found out that Paula gave the torn check to Fernando and fired her for betrayal. After Larry and Scott got rough with her, Paula fled to the Inn on the Alameda. She’s waiting for the two of them to return to the Inn with a non-disclosure agreement they are forcing her to sign. She’s frightened they will harm her.
     
      Fernando rushes down to the Inn on the Alameda and is ready when Larry and Scott arrive. He tells them to leave Paula alone. When Larry throws a punch, Fernando ducks and breaks Larry’s wrist with a small crowbar he keeps in the trunk of his car. Larry drops to his knees, swearing revenge as Scott helps him walk off. After they leave, Fernando helps Paula move to the Residence Inn on Galisteo Streeet. Still shaken, Paula asks Fernando to keep her company for a while. She tells Fernando more unsavory details about Belle, who has gone off to the Sagebrush Inn in Taos for one of her many trysts.
           
      ACT 6
      Next morning Fernando drives to Taos hoping to discover the identity of Belle’s paramour, who turns out to be Travis Walker. Fernando ambushes the two in the Sagebrush Cantina and announces he is trying to figure out which one of them had Danny Ortiz killed. Belle is infuriated and storms off when Fernando suggests that Belle wanted to get rid of Danny because he was taking money from Dallas––and her. Travis denies holding Dallas at the ranch in order to sell him drugs. Travis threatens Fernando and follows Belle.
     
      Fernando drives out to Painted Skull Ranch, but instead of going in he parks across the street and waits. When Jerry, the caretaker, leaves the ranch about five o’clock, Fernando follows Jerry’s pickup to an old gray tumbledown house near Cimarron. He asks Jerry point blank whether Travis is running a drug ranch and if he knows for a fact that Travis is renting the ranch from Bill Candelaria. Jerry is reluctant to talk, when his elderly father comes out of the house in his wheelchair and tells Fernando to get the hell off his land or he’ll be shot. The old man waves a shotgun and Fernando leaves.
     
      With the sun rapidly setting, Fernando stops at Painted Skull Ranch to try again to spring Dallas. He parks behind a patch of chamisa and walks into the ranch. He finds Dallas holed up with Jenny in one of the bungalows on the property. Jenny is lying in bed naked, while Dallas is sitting at a table with several syringes and packets of white powder spread out before him. Fernando bursts into the bungalow and tries to persuade Dallas to leave with him. Jenny tells Dallas to get rid of Fernando. Fernando offers to take Dallas to a rehab facility where he would be safe from his wife, who was divorcing him. Dallas says he knows about the divorce and says his wife is trying to kill him. Before leaving, Fernando grabs as much of the drug paraphernalia as he can carry and runs out of the bungalow.
     
      Outside in the darkness Fernando sees a spinning blue light that takes the shape of a human. The light, whatever it is, disappears into the Penitente morada on the ranch. Fernando follows, managing to open the heavy wooden door and walk into the nave. The long unused morada smells like mold and decay. Fernando walks through the nave, with overturned pews and crucifixes and retablos of the saints hanging from the walls. Up front in the sanctuary he finds a life-size crucifix covered with dust and cobwebs. Fernando catches a glimpse of the blue light again, moving into the side sacristy. Fernando follows, finding nothing but a stone sarcophagus in the center of the room. He tries to slide open the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus. Suddenly he hears the front door open and voices.
     
      “Who’s there?” someone shouts in the darkness. Desperate, Fernando looks for a way out of the morada. He spies a small window at the back of the sacristy, breaks the glass, and crawls out. His pursuers, the two ranch hands, shoot at him as he runs back to his vehicle.
     
      ACT 7
      When he arrives at his office next morning Fernando finds a message from Paula saying Scott wants to talk with him. So Fernando returns the call and sets up a meeting with Scott at the La Fonda Bar that afternoon. Scott does his best to convince Fernando that Larry was the one who hurt Paula and possibly killed Danny Ortiz. Scott says Larry disappeared the night Danny was killed and didn’t come back to Bishop’s Lodge until later. Fernando is suspicious.
     
      Later that morning Hank calls to inform Fernando that Dallas has died from an apparent drug overdose. Fernando returns to Painted Skull Ranch, where local media have gathered to cover the story of the death of a nationally known musician. Amidst the chaos at the ranch Fernando encounters caretaker Jerry who is devastated because Travis has just fired him. Jerry complains about his firing, explaining that he had been Bill Candelaria’s caretaker for years without complaint. He hands Fernando a handwritten note, which Fernando deposits in his pocket to read later.
     
      Inside the ranch house Hank questions Travis about the drugs he provided Dallas. Travis denies supplying Dallas, but Hank informs Travis that Belle Longstreet has just identified Dallas at the morgue and told investigators that Dallas did not have any drugs in his possession before coming to the ranch, that Dallas had been clean for years. Travis is furious, sensing a betrayal. Travis’ hired hands, Hal and Tony, deny all knowledge of the drugs.
     
      Later Fernando and Hank go to Michael’s Kitchen, their favorite Taos restaurant. Over dinner they discuss the case, including Jerry’s remarks about Bill Candelaria. Fernando remembers the note Jerry handed him. The note reads: “Check out the old ranch dump behind the house. Just follow the dirt road from the parking lot around behind the morada. Look in the arroyo.” Fernando and Hank agree to meet tomorrow morning to check out the dump and search the ranch for drugs. Given the late hour, Fernando decides to spend the night in Taos and checks into the El Pueblo Lodge.
     
      ACT 8
      Hank and his deputy Roy pick up Fernando at the El Pueblo next morning. At the ranch they follow the dirt road around behind the morada, where they find an old cemetery built alongside an arroyo. Thanks to arroyo cutting, the banks of the arroyo have eroded, collapsing some of the graves and exposing several bones and skulls.
     
      Farther up the road they find the old ranch dump. They are surprised to find a burned out automobile in the dump. They assume the automobile was what Jerry wanted them to see, but why? Fernando and Roy climb down into the arroyo to examine the automobile and discover why: the auto has a Colorado license plate, which suggests it belongs to Bill Candelaria, the absentee owner of the ranch who lives in Pueblo, Colorado. They look through the wreckage but don’t find any human remains. Then Fernando remembers the stone sarcophagus he saw in the ranch morada.
     
      The three of them go back to the morada and force the door open. Fernando leads them through the morada to the sarcophagus in the dark sacristy. They struggle but finally remove the heavy stone top, which slides off and shatters on the floor, making a loud noise. Inside the sarcophagus they find the decaying body of a thin elderly man with gray hair placed on top of a set of dried bones. The dried, blackened holes in the center of elderly man’s chest indicate he died of gunshot wounds.
     
      Leaving the morada they are ambushed by Hal and Tony, the two toughs who work for Travis. Roy suffers a gunshot wound to his thigh, but during the exchange of gunfire that follows Fernando wounds Hal and Hank kills Tony. Travis fires at them from the back porch and then takes off in his Audi after Hank tells him he’s under arrest for the murder of Bill Candelaria and for supplying illegal drugs to his guests. Earlier Hank had learned from Belle, who continues to finger Travis, that Travis keeps the drugs in a trastero in his office.
     
      Hank calls in an APB on Travis. Hank figures Travis is heading for I-25 and intends to go either south toward Albuquerque or north toward Denver.
     
      ACT 9
      Later that afternoon a sighting come in from a janitor named Benny Alvarez at the Saint James Hotel in Cimarron, just down Highway 64 toward I-25. Hank tells Fernando to beware, because the Saint James is the most haunted hotel in the Southwest. Built in the 1870s on the Old Santa Fe Trail, the Saint James was a stopping point for Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Wild Bill Cody and others, a veritable who’s who of the American West. Some 26 documented murders have occurred at the Saint James.
     
      Wary, Fernando and Hank head to the Saint James, where they find Travis’ gray Audi parked out back behind the hotel’s dumpster. They figure Travis is trying to swap cars before proceeding in order to travel undetected. Inside, the desk clerk tells them no one by the name of Travis Walker has checked in, only two single men, Fred Duda and Mike Banks. They check on Fred Duda first, who turns out to be an elderly Billy the Kid enthusiast. When they knock on the door to Mike Banks’ room, they are greeted by two gunshots that splinter the door. Travis manages to climb down from his second-floor balcony and takes off in his Audi, with Fernando and Hank following. Instead of the interstate, Travis heads back down Highway 64 toward Taos.
     
      As they drive along Highway 64 Hank spots Travis’ Audi in the driveway of the old gray house where Jerry and his father live. Hank turns around and proceeds down the driveway. As they approach the house they see Travis lying in the driveway beside his Audi, with Jerry jumping up and down next to him and Jerry’s father sitting in his wheelchair on the porch and waving his shotgun. Jerry runs out to greet Fernando and Hank yelling that his father has shot Travis. The father thought Travis was trying to steal Jerry’s pickup, when in fact Travis wanted to trade for it. Fernando wrestles the shotgun out of the father’s hands while Hank calls for an ambulance. The ambulance takes Travis to Holy Cross Hospital in Taos, where he is put on twenty-four hour watch until he can be transported to jail.
     
      ACT 10
      Fernando returns to his office in Santa Fe where he finds two messages on his answering machine. The first is from Larry: “You’re a dead man, Lopez.” The second is from Oralia Ortiz, informing him that she was unable to pay his fee. When Fernando steps outside to go home, Larry is waiting for him, his right hand heavily bandaged from their previous confrontation. Larry shoots at Fernando, but misses wildly because he’s a right-hander using his left hand. Fernando warns him and then, when that doesn’t work, shoots him in his left hand and tells Larry to get the hell out of town before he changes his mind and calls the police.
     
      After Larry drives off, weaving unsteadily down Canyon Road, Fernando goes back inside his office and opens a Modelo to calm down. The Modelo doesn’t help. He broods about Belle, the mastermind behind everything that had transpired in this sordid affair. She’s set up Danny and then Dallas and then Travis. She’d played all of them, even Fernando, and she was going to get Dallas’ money and get away with everything.
     
      Enraged, Fernando jumps in his Cherokee and races out to Bishop’s Lodge Resort. He barges into Belle’s casita and finds her in bed having sex with Scott. When Fernando confronts Belle, she responds angrily:
     
      “Let me tell you something. Danny was a lowlife, a no account musician who lived off my husband. My Husband was a reckless, undisciplined drunk and drug addict. And as for Travis, he’s a cheap con-man, a grifter. He stole from my husband—and me—for years. They all deserved what they got.”
     
      Fernando calls her a “cheap, high-rent hooker” and a murderer, because she drove the getaway car the night Larry and Scott killed Danny Ortiz. When Scott protests that Fernando can’t prove that, Fernando says he can and will take all the evidence that he and the Taos County Sheriff have collected to the Santa Fe Police.
     
      Belle asks Fernando what he wants to keep quiet. Fernando tells her to write a one hundred thousand dollar check for Oralia Ortiz, who is eight months pregnant and desperately needs the money. She quibbles, but in the end writes a check for seventy-five thousand.
     
      ACT 11
      The next morning Fernando gives the money to Oralia Ortiz, who is stunned. He tells her he is not sure who killed Danny, because both Larry and Scott were involved in the attack. Either one, or both, could be the actual killer. He also tells Oralia that Belle was also involved. Belle was not only the instigator, wanting to retrieve a check Dallas had written Danny, but the driver of the getaway car. Oralia thanks Fernando and walks out of his office.
     
      AUTHOR’S NOTE: Opening credits, Visual: the camera pans from a painted human skull on a fence post to the front of an adobe hacienda with memento mori images on the door and then to the rooftop cross on an adobe Penitente morada. Title Card: Welcome to Painted Skull Ranch, Taos, New Mexico.