The party was in full swing.

Jimmy Burton's finger had been broken catching a football thrown by one of Lolly's grandnieces, the bunkhouse toilet had stopped up twice, Charley Bell was making eyes at Burdger Harris' wife who at 81 was eating it up, much to the consternation of her husband who was looking a lot like a rained on rooster, four kids had been thrown in the pond, Chi Chi Tapia, the chicken shit cowboy (husband to Alicia) had passed out in the hay barn, Top Dog, my triathelete firefighting cousin who lives on the San Carlos Reservation had filled his plate three times, and Prego, the local mechanic who was wearing a muscle shirt featuring the Statue of Liberty was slow dancing with Shiwoye, my Apache grandmother, who was having trouble figuring out just where to put her hands on his naked shoulders.

All that and I'd had close to two inches in twenty-four hours.

That probably doesn't sound like much if you're from Wisconsin, but in Tucson, in early July, it's unusual. Our summer monsoon season starts the end of June and usually doesn't get really cranking until mid-July.

But here it was the fourth of the month and the rain gauges on the ranch had already measured one-sixth of our annual rainfall. Not that I was complaining, for southern Arizona ranchers never bitch about moisture. Still, I was hoping that if rain was in store for Independence Day it could at least hold off until after the barbecue.

As a private eye and the owner of the Vaca Grande Ranch just outside of La Cienega, Arizona, you'd think I had enough to keep me busy without having an annual Fourth of July shindig. Truth is, all of us here on the ranch actually look forward to our parties. They give us the opportunity to enjoy old friends, eat a lot of good beef, and drink a few margaritas. It's good for the ranch, too, as the weeks beforehand find us in a flurry of activity to spruce things up for the fiesta.

We'd been collecting patio chairs and tables from our neighbors all week long and they were scattered out around the pond and in the front orchard. Plastic red and white checked cloths adorned each table and the centerpieces were huge paper flowers that my foreman’s daughter, Quinta had picked up in Nogales.

And what is the fourth of July without the American flag? I'm fanatical about our flag and have considered it my personal mission, on more than one occasion, to go wheeling furiously into assorted businesses and hotels to berate them for flying a tattered, ratty flag. Although I love flying the Stars and Stripes, I take this seriously. I don't want to get home late at night and find it flying, unlit, in the dark, or worse, drenched by a thunderstorm. So the old flagpole in the orchard is only graced with the national banner on special occasions. Like today.

Two one hundred-gallon water tanks, liberated from one of the corrals, were filled to their lips with cubed ice and loaded with Corona, Budweiser and Tres X's beer, wine coolers and sodas. Serape covered folding tables held chips, salsa, guacamole, lemonade, iced tea and huge pitchers of frosted margaritas.

Cars and trucks had been pulling in all afternoon and we'd had to open one of the horse pastures to accommodate everyone. Ranchers, town folk, local business owners, politicians, Mexican cowboys - even a federal judge - along with many of my Apache relatives and friends had all found their way out to the Vaca Grande.

The animals were dressed in their party clothes. Mrs. Fierce and Blue, my two dogs, and Petunia, my cousin Bea's pot-bellied pig who has every indication of becoming a permanent ranch resident, were decked out with red and blue bandanas tied on their collars. They were definitely in the party spirit as they played Hump Dog, or in some cases, Hump Pig, darting in and out among our guests' legs. Every time I looked at Petunia she seemed to be dribbling watermelon out of her mouth. Her passion reminded me of my own for Twinkies.

The pond ducks were out of the water, scooting here and there in hopeful anticipation of someone dropping a crumb for them, and even the horses in the pasture were hanging their heads over the fence attracted by all the activity and the mariachi music.

I found Martin Ortiz, my foreman, and Sanders, one of my dearest friends and neighbor, out behind the hay barn. They were both shoveling dirt off an old piece of tin that served as the lid to the deep pit barbecue. Last night Quinta and I had wrapped forty pounds of assorted beef roasts in tin foil and then tied them in wet burlap sacks. At 4 a.m. Martin and I had dumped them in the pit, on coals that he had started hours earlier.

Now, more than twelve hours later, the results of our labors were being unearthed from the dirt pit.

"How's it going?" I asked, feeling somewhat guilty that the men were doing the work, but also knowing that they considered this pit business their domain.

"Well, Trade, I guess the good news is nobody every drowned himself in his own sweat," Sanders said.

Martin reached into the smoldering pit with his gloves and handed the packages of beef to Sanders who put them into galvanized buckets. The meat would end up in the kitchen where Quinta, and Alicia, a woman I used as a round up cook twice a year, would hand shred it. Shortly thereafter the tender beef would end up on the buffet table along with paper-thin flour tortillas that Alicia and Quinta had made on smoking fifty-gallon drums earlier in the day. Frijoles and green salad tossed with jicama and cucumbers, tomatoes and peppers from the garden would round out the menu.

Sanders, a bucket in each hand, started dancing a lively jig in tune with the Mexican music that was wafting out from the mariachi band performing out near the pond.

"Cuidado, pinche," Martin warned. "You drop that and the boss lady will have your huevos."

On my way back to the pond I ran into Lolly MacKenzie, from the Singing Star Ranch down in the San Rafael Valley near the Mexican border. She’d been a good friend of my parents so I’ve known her since I was a child.

"Great party." She tipped her margarita glass in my direction. "But then yours always are."

"Nice bracelet," I said, teasing her for the fresh cast she was sporting on her left wrist.

"Ranch patrol," she said with a wan smile. "We were out checking boundaries the other night and I tripped in a gopher hole."

I didn’t have to ask what she was checking for. I knew. The papers had been full of stories about hordes of Mexican illegals pouring into Arizona. Since the Border Patrol was desperately short of agents, some of the ranchers had taken matters into their own hands and were patrolling their own land, detaining illegals, sometimes at gunpoint, when they caught them. A few shots had been fired, but so far no one had been killed. Realistically, it was probably just a matter of time.

The ranchers’ actions had pissed off the Mexican government who was screaming bloody murder about how the rancher vigilantes were putting the U.S./Mexico relationship at risk. Right. If they’d taken care of their own people, they wouldn’t be leaving home. In a lot of ways it was sort of like the cattle business. If your cows were happy on their home pastures, they’d seldom leave. Hell, I guess that’s true of all us, not just Mexicans and cows.

The problem had gotten so bad that the Cochise County sheriff had requested that Governor Hull deploy the National Guard to help out the Border Patrol. She’d refused to send the guardsmen miles from their jobs and homes. As far as I knew, the Santa Cruz County sheriff had kept quiet.

"Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it." Lolly said. "What with the cut fences and stolen saddles and tools. We’ve lost two bulls and I won’t even go into the discarded Pampers, plastic milk cartons, piles of poop or the ’65 Chevy that was left on the ranch."

"Well, unfortunately there’s probably not much of a solution. People have been traveling that corridor for hundreds of years."

"It’s bad down there, Trade. Real bad. The whole thing’s going to blow sky high one of these days."

"I’m sorry to hear that, Lolly. I guess maybe we’ve created a monster, giving them jobs."

"If they were just coming for us, it would probably still work," she said, acknowledging that a lot of ranchers in the past had used illegal help. "But now, it’s really gotten out of hand."

We walked over to my Aunt Josie where I left her since the two of them hadn’t seen each other in a long time.

I was refilling my margarita glass when my cousin Bea sidled up to me. "Did you see Clayton Bowen?" She asked in a low voice.

"He's here?" I was surprised. Although Bowen had been invited to the party, he'd also buried his wife last week and I really hadn't expected to see him today.

"Well, it is an election year."

"Bea!" There was an edge to my voice. My cousin, who was a television newswoman, was sometimes a bit more caustic than I. "Besides, he doesn't have much opposition," I relented.

Clayton Bowen had represented Arizona's fifth congressional district for three terms. After knocking off an elderly, long term Congressman who had held the seat for years, Bowen had done his constituent work and appeared to be in little danger of being forced from his office any time soon. He'd had no Republican opposition in the primary and with a whining, liberal college professor who had just been caught propositioning an undercover officer in the men’s room at Himmel Park, he was probably assured of a free ride into yet another term of office.

Bowen was also the cattleman's friend in Congress. He'd come to our defense on more than one occasion when forest service grazing permits had come under fire. While I couldn't say we were warm, close personal friends, I did have a lot of respect for the man and was happy to have him in my camp.

"Nothing new on that, huh?" I asked Bea.

She shook her head and filled her glass. "Looks like a burglary gone bad."

A week earlier Marjorie Bowen’s bludgeoned body had been found in her laundry room by her next door neighbor. Her bedroom had been ransacked and, upon the Congressman's immediate return from Washington, it had been discovered that most of Marjorie's jewelry, along with an old coin collection that had belonged to her father and a new DVD player were missing. What was interesting is what hadn't been missing – a silver tea service and sterling flatware for twenty, a stunning Diane Maroscia bronze and two original oil paintings – one by Sam Wisnom, the other by Anne Coe. The police had quickly dubbed the theft the work of amateurs; the murder an unfortunate sudden addendum to what had started out as a burglary agenda.

"How are my peas in a pod?" My uncle's huge arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me in close to his thick body as his other raked in Bea. He was right about the peas thing, for Bea and I are often mistaken for twins, although she's a year younger. We're both thin, 5' 7" and have thick black curly hair. Hers is cut in a stylish bob for her television work, while mine runs wild halfway down my back. Sort of that sexy, disheveled bedroom look, although my current sex life rivals that of the Virgin Mary's.

"Great party, Trade." He gave me a peck on the forehead.

"Thanks, Uncle C." Charles Borden, Bea's father, was a detective with the Pima County Sheriff's Department. "We were just talking about Marjorie Bowen."

"Terrible thing. God, we're getting a lot of that."

"Burglaries?'

"Drug stuff. Most crime is related to drugs in one way or another. It's just a damned shame that she wasn't with her husband in Washington that week. It would have been an in and out and no one would have gotten hurt."

Twenty minutes later I found myself sitting in a cheap plastic patio chair on the far side of the pond next to Congressman Bowen. He wore pleated dress pants with what looked like new ostrich skin boots; his lanky form erect in the small seat. He was a good looking man in an indoors sort of way with a ready smile featuring huge white teeth and bushy eyebrows crawling like caterpillars above his hound dog brown eyes. At 47 his just graying temples setting off his carefully razor cut muddy brown hair.

"Lovely shindig, Trade."

I smiled at his choice of words. Clayton Bowen was one of those people who would immediately take on the accent of the person he was talking to. In the blink of an eye he could drawl, talk cowboy or plumber or welder or British nobleman. I doubted whether he'd ever used the word shindig in his life.

"You know, a lot of people will probably criticize me for coming here."

"Oh, I don't think so."

"No." He held up a pale, manicured hand. A major matrix of blue veins rested just below his skin. "I understand that. Understand that they might think it disrespectful to Marjorie and all." He shuddered. "But work's all I have now. It's the only thing that's keeping me from going crazy."

"Well, if it helps you get through the pain, I don't think anyone should criticize you for that, Clay."

He nodded and stared at his hands, which were now cradled, in his lap. "She was everything to me. Why would anyone want to kill her?" His turned his doleful eyes on me. "Why?"

I had no answers.

"I met her when I was running for Congress that first time. She had just been elected the head of the Arizona Federation of Republican Women. What a dynamo." He exhaled sharply. " We were married a week after I was sworn into Congress."

It didn't take a genius to do the mental math. They'd been married a little over six years. Marjorie had been a young widow with a child when she'd married the Congressman.

"How's her son taking it?"

The minute the words tumbled out of my mouth I wanted to rope them and pull them back in.

Bowen raised one of his bushy eyebrows. "Josh?"

Not knowing what else to do since I'd opened this track of conversation, I nodded.

"He was arrested on cocaine possession a few months ago. He's in Los Hijos. They didn't let him out for the service."

I’d missed Marjorie’s funeral and too late I remembered her son’s arrest. He’d ended up in a paramilitary type private juvenile institution down near Sahuarita.

"I'm sorry." I said.

Bowen shrugged. "He's just a confused kid, and now this." He buried his face in his hands.

We sat there quietly for a few minutes until I heard the eggshell crack on the Congressman's head. His head whipped around, not unlike John Connelly in the Zapruder film, as he launched himself from the patio chair and fell on his knees in the grass, wrapping his hands around his head. Although things happened so suddenly, I was still struck by his quick, protective reaction.

Fine bits of painted, broken eggshell, glitter and brightly colored confetti - really shredded funny papers - sprinkled his hair and shoulders.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry." Rainbow, a former New York hippie, now la Cienega's most popular restaurateur, towered over our chairs, the bright colors of the tissue paper framing the broken cascaron in her hand almost matching the tie dyed skirt she was wearing. "I didn't mean to scare you to death." Extending her empty hand, she helped Arizona's representative to the Fifth Congressional District to his feet.

Clayton Bowen leaned over and ran his hand through his hair, freeing bits of confetti from his hair. Then he brushed his rear end in an effort to dislodge the grass collected there. I noticed serious grass stains on the right knee of his dress pants as he struggled to regain his composure. "Boy, that's a hell of an entrance you've got." His lips twitched in what looked like an effort at a halfhearted grin.

"I've been dying to meet you," she gushed. "And I wanted it to be memorable."

"Well, it was all of that."

I crossed my eyes. Rainbow, in addition to being a great cook, is also one of La Cienega's most liberal denizens. I suspected that given the chance, that she and Clayton Bowen could get into some pretty good political discussions. They probably wouldn't even have to go much farther than a discussion on how to boil water before they’d disagree.

"I'd love to talk to you about the Small Business Administration," Rainbow said.

The Congressman retrieved his fallen glass. "If Trade will excuse us and you promise not to bombard me with any more of those damned things, maybe we can chat while I refresh my drink."

I gave them a little wave and watched as they walked back to the bar.

From any angle, Clayton Bowen was an imposing figure. But from my viewpoint, as he walked away, I was struck by the set of his shoulders. Although they were very square and very broad they had a lot to carry. A murdered wife and a dope dealing incarcerated stepson.