Desert Wind

by Betty Webb

  ***

  Once back in the Trailblazer, I checked the gas gauge. It was still half-full, but since I planned to leave Walapai Flats tomorrow at sunrise, I decided to top off now. I pulled out of the parking lot and headed for the Gas-N-Go.

  The temperatures had cooled. A merciful breeze blew in from California, rolling a vagrant tumbleweed down John Wayne Boulevard. In fact, the weather was so pleasant that for a moment I was tempted to drive one of the back roads leading out of town to the Grand Canyon. Whenever I’d visited the Canyon before, it had usually been to the more popular South Rim, so the opportunity to see it from the other side was tempting. But what point would there be in visiting the Grand Canyon for a mere couple of hours? It would only remind me of how fragmented my life had become.

  The temptation was great, though, so I pulled to the side of the road, killed the engine, closed my eyes, and remembered. Canyons within canyons, mesas thrusting up from the mile-deep Abyss—Vishnu Temple, Wotan’s Throne—the names of ancient gods superimposed upon rock formations that were here long before those gods were called into being, before the dinosaurs, even. A two hundred mile long gorge painted in red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, black, gray, white, impossible beauty in a place that couldn’t possibly exist—but did.

  I wanted to see it again, oh, how I wanted to. But I was here to work, not enjoy myself. Blinking the memory of beauty away, I fired up the ignition and headed for the Gas-N-Go.

  The Trailblazer was still slurping down fuel when a familiar truck pulled up to the tank on the other side of the island. I waved hello when its driver hopped out. Monty looked somewhat worse for wear, with a fat lip and a scrape on his forehead. He was wearing a shirt so ancient and grease-stained the Salvation Army would have rejected it.

  “My, my, if it isn’t the truck killer,” the farrier quipped, sliding a credit card into the pump.

  “Unlike Roger Tosches, your truck’s not dead.”

  The genial look left his face. “You heard about that?”

  “Also that you were the one that found him. Do you mind filling me in?”

  At first I thought he’d clam up, but he didn’t. Even horseshoers talk to humans every now and then.

  “Talk about your day from hell, and it’s only half over. What’s next? The plague? Locusts? First I find Tosches gurgling his life away, then the cops take my shirt and I have to wear my oil rag, then I get stomped by a twelve-year-old mare that should have known better. When I retire I’m goin’ some place there ain’t no horses. New York City, maybe. Nope, they’ve still got them police horses. My luck, one of them would bite me on the ass while I was crossin’ the street. Anyways, I was supposed to shoe a coupla horses at Olmstead’s, but when I turned down the ranch road, there was Tosches, sprawled out next to that big black Mercedes of his. Worst thing I seen since that poor colt over by…” He stopped. “Guess you don’t need to hear ’bout that.”

  “I heard he was still alive when you found him,” I prompted.

  “More or less.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Nothing you’d be interested in.”

  “Try me.”

  “Nothing but gobbledy-gook, mostly stuff I couldn’t understand, except for one word, which might have been ‘bitch.’”

  As in, Life’s a bitch and then you die? Or, The damn bitch shot me? “I take it he didn’t name names.”

  “That would be awful nice for the sheriff, but naw, he didn’t. He didn’t recite no Gettysburg Address, neither. The man was too busy dying.”

  “Do you know anyone who might have wanted to kill him?”

  A harsh laugh. “Better question would be, who didn’t want to kill him? Tosches wasn’t exactly loved around here, but if you want to play guessing games, I’d say maybe his wife. She’s coming in for a pile of cash, and she’s as nasty as a rattlesnake in heat, so I wouldn’t put it past her. Half the people around here gonna be thankin’ the Almighty when they find out he’s dead, ’specially relatives of them men hurt in the Moccasin Peak Mine, and there’s more of them around here than you’d think. They’ve been wantin’ to pop him one for a long time. Even me. I lost a good friend over there before it shut down.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Or it could a been one of them ecology folks shot Tosches. Talk about raping the desert! You been out to that mess they call Sunset Canyon Lakes?”

  “I’ve had the dubious pleasure, yes.”

  “Then you know what I’m talkin’ about.”

  “We’re in agreement there. But back to the crime scene, Monty. Were any shell casings left lying around?”

  “Like the ones we found when that asshole took potshots at you? No such luck.”

  “Tell me about the car. Were the doors open?”

  “Driver’s side was. And before you ask, nah, there wasn’t any bullet holes in the windows, so I’d say he was outside standing next to his car when he got shot. Why the idiot would get out of that cushy thing to stand in the dust is anybody’s guess. If it’d been someone else, I’d guess they stopped to admire the scenery, but not Tosches. He wouldn’t know pretty if sat on his eyeballs.”

  “Sounds like he stopped to have a conversation with someone.” I heard a click from the direction of the Trailblazer’s gas tank, alerting me that the tank was full. As I returned the gas nozzle to the pump, I said, “By the way, Monty, I talked to the sheriff about Deputy Stark this morning.”

  “Didn’t get anywhere, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  He spat on the ground. “Sheriff Alcott is Ronnie’s cousin on his momma’s side.”

  Most small towns were seeped in nepotism, so I wasn’t too surprised. “Is that why nothing’s been done?”

  Another spit. “Didn’t say that. For all his fancy ways, Alcott’s not a half-bad sheriff, and I’m guessin’ he’d like to throw that little turd off the force. But knowin’ Ronnie, he’d sue. These days with Granny Government breathin’ down our necks, you can’t fire some jerk-off just ’cause you suspect he beats the crap outta his wife.”

  “Too bad. I was thinking that Stark’s wife might be more receptive with a woman. Maybe I could drive over to her place, talk to her woman to woman, convince her there’s another way to live.”

  He gave me a level look. “There’ll be hell to pay if Ronnie catches you talkin’ to Connie.”

  “Stark’s guarding the Tosches crime scene.”

  After Monty gave me the instructions to the house, I asked about the cars I might expect to see in the driveway.

  “All they got is a silver 2006 Pathfinder. She don’t have a car of her own. When she needs to do some shoppin’, she drops Ronnie off at the police station and picks him back up in the evening, but this ain’t the day she grocery shops. If there’s a silver Pathfinder in the driveway, my advice is to drive on by. You get to tangling with him, he’ll only take it out on her soon’s you leave. Don’t want that, do you?”

  No, I didn’t. I thanked him and drove off.

  Ronald and Connie Stark lived in a dusty tract optimistically named Willow Brook Lane, located on the outskirts of town. Most of the one-story houses were unlandscaped, but a few brave homeowners had planted spindly bushes and even spindlier trees. The Starks hadn’t made the effort, so their yard was nothing but dirt and rocks. Given that every blind in the house was closed, the whole setup looked depressing, but at least no silver Pathfinder snarled at me from the driveway. In case Deputy Smiley Face decided to drop in for a spot of face-thumping, I turned around and drove to the other end of the street, where I parked the Trailblazer behind a tractor-trailer. Then I walked back to the forlorn house and knocked on the door.

  No answer.

  I knocked again.

  Still no answer.

  I remembered what Monty told me about the Starks being a one-car family. There were no stores or businesses within walking distance; Connie Stark hadn’t taken her four-year-old for a long hike to pick up toilet paper. Based on my experiences with battered women, almost
all of them secretive and isolated, I figured she hadn’t dropped in on a neighbor for a friendly chat, either.

  I knocked again, harder this time, and yelled, “Connie, if you don’t answer the door by the time I count ten, I’m calling the police!”

  The door jerked open so quickly I knew she had been listening on the other side. Both her eyes had been blackened.

  “Go away,” she whispered in a voice as raw as a wound.

  “Not until you talk to me.” Pointing to her eyes, I said, “When did that happen, last night? Or this morning before he went to work?”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Right. You went to bed feeling perfectly fine, and when you woke up, you had two shiners. That must have been one hell of a dream. Did your daughter have a bad dream, too?”

  “Annalee’s fine. Go away.”

  “Not until I see her.”

  “One look, then you’ll go away?” Fear leaped out of those terrible eyes.

  “Hmmm.” I hoped she’d take my noncommittal murmur for consent.

  She did, and opened the door further. “Come in quick. I don’t want anyone to see.”

  The house was clean, but at the same time, it was a shambles. As cheerless as an abattoir, almost every piece of furniture in the living room had been damaged in one way or another. Two seat cushions on the brown velveteen sofa had been slashed, and stuffing leaked like blood. A matching armchair with a broken foot tilted to one side. Head-sized dents decorated the off-white walls. The guilty air smelled like Pinesol and beer.

  “Mrs. Stark, show me your daughter. Now!”

  She was used to following orders. Shoulders hunched and arms crossed tightly against her chest, she hurried down a narrow hall, me right behind her.

  Annalee’s room looked nothing like the rest of the house. Painted shell pink, it was furnished with white-and-gold “princess” furniture—bed, chest, toy box—and not one piece had been broken. The little girl sat at a desk, drawing a picture of a dog. At least I thought it was a dog. Maybe it was a horse. Or an elephant. When she saw me, she said, “You’re the lady at the jail. You gave Mama a card that made Daddy mad.”

  “I’m sorry it made your daddy mad. Did he hit you, too?”

  She shook her head. “Daddy never hits me. He just hits Mama.”

  I pointed to her cast. “How did you break your arm?”

  “I fell off the swings at the park. It hurt really, really awful and Daddy got so mad at Mama that he spanked her.”

  Deputy Smiley Face might beat the crap out of his wife, but I did believe that he hadn’t touched his daughter. Not yet, anyway. Turning to Connie, I said, “We need to let Annalee finish her beautiful drawing. Shall we go back in the living room?”

  “You said…”

  “I know what I said.” For emphasis, I took her by the elbow and guided her out of the room like you would a blind person, which in a way she was.

  I nudged her over to the sofa, where she took a seat on the one cushion that hadn’t been slashed. Settling myself on the lopsided armchair, I began my lecture, reeling out statistics on how many American women per year wound up in the morgue because of violent partners. I talked about safe houses and how they sheltered battered women and children. I told her how common it was for batterers to transfer their hostilities from their partners to their children, and how often the children wound up in the morgue, too. I told her everything I knew, said everything that could be said, and still she looked at me with unseeing eyes.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “Ronnie loves Annalee.”

  “He probably loved you once, too, and look how that turned out.”

  She shook her head so fiercely the sofa rocked. “He’d never touch her.”

  “If he kills you, she’ll wind up in Child Protective Services.”

  “You don’t understand,” she repeated. “It’s only that I, well, I do a lot of dumb things like burning dinner or not cleaning right or forgetting to make lunch and it frustrates him. If I was more careful, everything would be fine. I’ve promised to try harder. Ronnies’ a good man. A good, good man. The absolute best. I’m lucky to have a man who cares enough to want his wife to be the best she can be.”

  She was quoting him.

  “Connie, do you still have my card?”

  Her silence was the answer.

  I pulled another card from my carry-all. “Put this where he can’t find it, under the rug, taped to the back of the toilet, wherever. When you decide you’ve had enough or when he graduates from you to Annalee—and he will—give me a call. I’ll get you some help. And for God’s sake, when help arrives, tell the truth!”

  No response. Just that unchanging, unseeing stare.

  ***

  Once I returned to my car, I had to sit there until I’d collected myself. Connie’s numbed terror had stirred up my own past.

  My sixth foster home.

  Mrs. Putney had decided to pull out of the foster care system, so CPS sent me to live with Norma and Brian Wycoff. My sixth foster parents had been taking care of the state’s unwanted children for years, and on paper they looked perfect. Mr. Wycoff owned a small printing company and was active in community affairs. Mrs. Wycoff, a full-time housewife, volunteered every Thursday afternoon at a nearby church.

  Every Thursday afternoon Mr. Wycoff left work early and raped me.

  I was nine years old.

  Three decades later the memory of my own numbed terror still haunted me, so I sat in the Trailblazer until my breathing returned to normal and my hands stopped shaking. Forcing myself calm, I pulled away from the curb and headed back into town. Unless something changed, Connie Stark was doomed, but she was too damaged to realize it. Unable to protect herself, she wasn’t strong enough to protect her daughter.

  Just like Mrs. Wycoff.

  While driving past the county complex, I remembered a person who might be able to do something about Deputy Smiley Face: Olivia Eames. Swerving at the last second, I pulled into the parking lot behind Ma’s Kitchen and rummaged through my carry-all until I found her card.

  A few seconds later I had her on the phone.

  When I told her about Connie Stark, Olivia’s response was mixed. Words of surprise, but delivered in a tone that made me wonder if something about Stark had already pinged her reporter’s radar. “Are you talking about that big sandy-haired deputy, kind of good-looking? Smiles too much?”

  “The same. Connie’s covering up for him, and the sheriff says that unless she files a complaint, there’s nothing he can do.”

  “She won’t, though. Battered women almost never do. Psychologically speaking, they’re too messed up. Every now and then one snaps out of her fog long enough to make the call, but even then she usually winds up dropping the charges, so the whole cycle starts all over again. You can’t expect trauma victims to act sane.”

  I couldn’t have summed up the situation better myself. Connie Stark’s vicious husband had made her flat-out crazy, crazy enough to pretend her child was safe.

  Olivia wasn’t finished. “Here’s the problem, Lena. I’m swamped. I’ve already got a couple of stories in the hopper, the mine opening and something else. Now I’ll have to follow up on the Roger Tosches killing, too, because he owned the damned mine. The chances of my editor buying into a story about a Walapai Flats cop who’s only a suspected batterer are very, very slim. To sell it to him, I’d have to pitch it more as a feature, maybe even a series, with stats, quotes from local and national experts, the whole megilla. Organizing something like that takes time, and time’s the one thing I don’t have.”

  “When are you going back to New York?”

  A pause. “I’ll leave as soon as I’ve finished my articles.”

  “No firm date, then. Maybe you could tack on a few extra days. Don’t they call those kinds of stories ‘evergreens,’ stories that are always worth reading?”

  I heard a bitter laugh. “Not these days. In this economy most people are having such a hard ti
me just making it that they don’t want to read about domestic abuse. They’d rather read about some Hollywood star going to rehab for the eighth time.”

  “Please, Olivia.”

  A longer pause this time. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  On that note, we said goodbye. For some reason—maybe it was hope alone—I believed that Olivia might succeed where I’d failed.

  But her mention of the Black Basin Mine opening reminded me of all that mountain-moving equipment I’d seen and their probable cost. For Tosches to pay that much out of pocket months before he’d see any profit, the amount of money he expected to eventually make had to be enormous. Maybe it was time I found out how enormous.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the desert, good air-conditioning can never be overrated. Neither can spa-quality bath salts semi-dissolved in cool water. As soon as I closed the motel room door behind me, I stripped, leaving a trail of dusty clothes from the door to the bathroom. I spent the next few minutes soaking in the tub, enveloped by the scent of lilacs. After washing away the day’s accumulation of sweat and sadness I dried off and wrapped myself in the thick terry robe so kindly provided by the Covered Wagons management. Then I wandered over to the desk and opened my laptop.

  I’m no Jimmy Sisiwan, so it took several false starts before I figured out which keywords would bring up the results I needed, but I finally got the hang of it. Typing in URANIUM+PRICE on Google landed me on a site that said high-grade uranium could sell for more than one hundred dollars per pound, and that uranium production from one mine alone could amount to as much as fifty thousand tons per year. And that, as they say in the ’hood, was one hulluvalot of Benjamins.

  My success in coming up with uranium’s cost-per-pound gave me confidence, so I typed in COLE LAVEEN. It would be interesting to find out how the Black Basin partnership would shake down now that Tosches was dead. Mia Tosches might inherit the entirety of her husband’s share, but Laveen wouldn’t be left empty-handed. I was under no illusion I’d be able to hack into legal documents like Jimmy could, but I might find out a few things about Laveen the man. Unfortunately, all I came up with was PR-type fluff. According to his bio, Cole Laveen had been born August 12, 1953, in Akron, Ohio. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Business School, married his high school sweetheart, and fathered six children. For two decades Laveen served as chief financial officer for a Fortune 500 company. He was an Episcopalian, a member of the Lions Club, Kiwanis and Rotary, and sat on the boards of several philanthropic organizations, including the Arizona Humane Society, Big Brothers and Sisters, and the Florence Crittenden Home. As for closet skeletons, if he’d ever received so much as a parking ticket, it didn’t show up on any site I visited.