Closely Akin to Murder

by Joan Hess

  As I parked, a pickup truck whipped in beside me in a cloud of dark, odoriferous exhaust fumes. The truck looked as though it had been painted to blend in with the desert behind it, but a closer scrutiny indicated that time and nature were the culprits. The gun rack in the rear window was well equipped with what I supposed were shotguns or rifles.

  The woman who got out of the driver’s side had not fared much better than her vehicle. She had cropped gray hair and a face so heavily wrinkled and spotted that it resembled a piece of dried fruit. Her tight jeans emphasized her ample rump, and her worn boots and dusty leather hat were not frivolous fashion accessories. I expected to hear the theme song from Bonanza as she hurried around the hood of the car.

  “Welcome to the Tricky M,” she said as she yanked open my door. “I was over at the barn trying to get that lazy son of a bitch to do some work when I saw your car. As I’m sure you noticed, we’ve temporarily halted construction, but by a year from now, we’ll be our own little community of nearly four hundred families on a thousand acres of God’s country.” She bent down to peer into the rental car. “You by yourself?”

  “Yes, and I’m not a prospective buyer.”

  “That’s what they all say,” she said, stepping back to allow me to get out of the car. “I’ve been selling real estate for more than twenty years, and my motto’s always been, ‘Buyers are liars.’ I worked once with a woman who insisted she needed five thousand square feet, a separate apartment for her mother-in-law, and a pool.” She took my arm and propelled me toward the trailer. “Well, I spent months showing her houses all over Phoenix and Scottsdale. One didn’t have adequate closets, another was too close to a busy street, and so forth. Then she turned around and bought a two-bedroom condo from another agent. I sent her a decapitated jackrabbit for a housewarming present.”

  The interior of the trailer was crowded with two desks and numerous straightbacked chairs. The walls were covered with depictions of houses surrounded by verdant grass, flowers, and patio furniture. A fan on a filing cabinet rustled loose papers and rolled-up blueprints. Ashtrays overflowed on each desk, and a wastebasket had reached its capacity at some point in the distant past. Black gunk coated the bottom of the glass coffeepot. As far as I could tell, there were no friendly agents lurking in the corner.

  “I don’t believe I caught your name,” she continued. “Mine’s Trixie. My partner’s name is Maisie, so we stuck ’em together and came up with Tricky M.”

  “I’m Claire,” I said. “I’m trying to locate an address, but haven’t had any luck. Box seventy-seven is all I know.”

  “Seventy-seven,” she said, sitting behind one of the desks and resting her boots on the rim of the wastebasket. She took out a charcoal brown cigarette and lit it. “That’d be out this way, but I’m not sure where it is. Who’re you looking for, Claire?”

  “Part of the problem is I don’t know the last name,” I admitted. “A married couple, probably close to seventy years old, who lived here thirty years ago. The woman’s first name was Bea. They had only one child, a girl named Franchesca Pickett. She was from the woman’s first marriage and kept her father’s surname. She’d be in her late forties.”

  Trixie blew a ribbon of smoke at the ceiling. “Nobody comes to mind. The Calvos are that old, but the wife’s name is Amalia and they had a whole passel of kids. So did Maggie and Joe Bob Maron, come to think of it. He used to brag that he could put together a whole baseball team. The widow in the last house you passed never had any children. Those are about the only folks who’ve been living here that long. The banks turned ugly some years back and foreclosed on a lot of folks’ property. There were some politicians behind it who’d heard rumors that the interstate to Tucson was going through here and wanted to buy up the land for bedroom communities. Never happened, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Is that why you began this development?” I asked.

  “Real estate agents hear rumors, too. Maisie and I owned the land, so we decided to go ahead and give it a shot. We got off to a good start, putting in the streets and utilities, completing a model home, but then the savings and loan where we’d arranged our financing failed. The auditors from the government descended like a pack of mangy wolves. There are more liens filed against us than there are crooks in the state legislature. We haven’t called it quits, though; we sank every dollar we had in the Tricky M and the only way we’re going to get back our investment is to borrow enough to continue the project. Maisie’s at a bank right now, trying to arrange something.”

  “Was there a house on the property when you bought it?” I asked.

  She frowned. “Yeah, but nobody’d lived in it for years and it wasn’t worth saving. The first thing we did after we closed the deal was to burn it down. I brought the marshmallows and Maisie brought the champagne. I would have preferred beer, myself. We’re not your classic peas in a pod, Maisie and me.”

  “Do you recall the owner’s name?”

  Trixie’s frown deepened as she stared over my head. “An old guy, name of Rogers Cooper, who was real touchy if you called him Roger. Seems he was named after his father and his godfather. He’d owned the property for years, always dreaming of running cattle so he could play cowboy. Only obstacle was a lack of water. He was delighted to accept our offer. I saw him a couple of years back, driving a Mercedes and wearing a fancy white hat.”

  “Rogers Cooper,” I said as I took out my notebook and wrote down the name. “I guess I’ll stop at the houses along the road and see if anyone remembers the family, then try to find this man in Phoenix.”

  She jabbed out her cigarette, stood up, and held out her hand. “Good luck, Claire,” she said as she squeezed my hand with enough pressure to make my knuckles pop. “If you ever decide to retire to Arizona, just give me a call and we’ll have you in your own ranchette in no time. You can swim at the community pool, play pinochle in the recreation center, take classes in watercolor painting and macrame, and enjoy the companionship of—”

  “Goodbye, Trixie,” I said, then fled to the car before she could pull out a contract and a pen. As I drove away, I saw her truck bouncing down a dirt road behind the trailer. Hoping the gentleman in the barn was busily doing whatever one did in barns (nothing I cared to envision), I found my way back to the gate and stopped to contemplate what I’d learned.

  Rogers Cooper could have been Fran’s stepfather. Trixie had made no reference to a Mrs. Cooper, which was discouraging in that I was fairly sure wives had to sign documents when property was sold. It was possible that Fran had remained in contact with Cooper and he would know of her whereabouts. There might be a lot of Coopers in the telephone directory, but no more than one with such a peculiar first name.

  The woman in the first house peered at me through a dirt-encrusted screen while I explained why I’d knocked on her door. In the background, I could hear the typically earnest conversation of soap opera characters discussing the ramifications of someone else’s infidelity.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head, “I never knew the names of anyone out here. Didn’t care, neither.”

  The door closed in my face. No one was home at the next, and the third had been vacant for some time. The few people I spoke to claimed ignorance of Rogers Cooper or family with a daughter named Fran. Eventually, I arrived back in Phoenix and drove to the hotel.

  Rogers Cooper was not in the telephone directory, and information did not have him listed. Those hiding under an initial proved to be Rene and Roseanne. It didn’t much matter, I told myself as I closed the directory. The Rogers Cooper connection was as flimsy as Caron’s excuse for the melange of dirty dishes under her bed. I’d merely speculated that he was the stepfather; he could have bought the property from Bea and her husband anytime in the last three decades.

  But the idea of leaving without having spoken to him annoyed me. If I was finally forced to concede defeat, I wanted to be able to say I’d followed every lead, no matter how implausible. Wishing I’d read more priv
ate eye fiction, I took out all my notes and thumbed through them. When I arrived at the page Ronnie had written about Fran, I reread it carefully for some tiny clue I’d overlooked thus far—although I’d pretty well memorized it: petite, dramatic features, long hair, some Spanish, living on a ranch with her mother and stepfather when not in the grasp of the Sisters of the Holy Swine.

  My eyes returned to the description of the stepfather. “Retired army officer and an alcoholic,” I read aloud, then put down the page and tried to figure out how to utilize the scanty information. If he was alive, he still fit the first category and was apt to fit the second, too. Alcoholics Anonymous was hardly the sort of organization to offer the names and addresses of its members. A veterans’ group, on the other hand, had no reason to keep secret its roster.

  I opened the telephone directory and found a number for the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars. Fran’s stepfather (whether Rogers Cooper or someone else) would have been of an age to have participated in World War II, the Korean War, or even the early, unofficial years of the Vietnam War. All were distinctly foreign.

  After concocting a charmingly simplistic lie, I took a deep breath and dialed the number. The man’s voice that answered was gruff and exasperated, as if I’d dragged him out of a hot tub where he’d been entertaining naked women. In his dreams, anyway.

  “Is this the VFW?” I asked.

  “Ain’t the NCAA.”

  Rather than play games, I said, “I’m trying to find a dear old friend who lives in Phoenix. He’s not in the telephone directory, but he may be a member of your organization. I was hoping you could—”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Rogers Cooper.”

  There was a pause. “Don’t know him, but the name’s familiar. Hold on.”

  I held my breath as well as the receiver as I grabbed my notebook and a pencil. Rogers Cooper wasn’t about to walk into the hotel room, but he was much closer than he’d been ten minutes earlier.

  “Yeah,” the man said, “I knew I’d seen the name. You want Cooper, look for him out on Hayden Road. I don’t have a number, but you can find him right across from the Salt Cellar Restaurant and catty-corner from a place called the Auto-Plex or some fool name like that.”

  I babbled out my gratitude, hung up, and pulled out the map. Hayden Road was in Scottsdale, a suburb of Phoenix. It appeared to be a major thoroughfare, but surely I could find the restaurant and Auto-Plex without too much difficulty.

  And I did, but across from the restaurant and catty-corner to the car shop was a sprawling green expanse with winding roads, well-tended shrubbery, and engraved marble slabs. If the joker from the VFW was to be believed, Rogers Cooper either worked at Green Acres Cemetery or was buried there. It wasn’t much of a toss-up.

  I drove around for a while, randomly searching for a gravestone with Cooper’s name. There was no alphabetical order, but instead what seemed to be a first-come-first-served approach to the plots. The relentless sunshine had faded sprays of plastic flowers to near translucency, giving them an appropriately ghostly effect. A few framed photographs were bleached into blurs.

  I finally acknowledged that my chances of happening on one particular grave were slim, at best. I found an office and asked the woman behind a desk for the location of Rogers Cooper. She consulted a file, took out a photocopied map, and drew a tidy X on a rectangle near one corner.

  I eyed the file. “Would that have information about the next of kin?” I asked.

  She was a good deal less forthcoming than the Reverend Mother. “Yeah, but you can’t look at it.”

  I took the map and trudged back out to the car, wondering why carrots kept being dangled in front of me and then snatched away at the fateful second as if the entire citizenry of Arizona had entered into a conspiracy. The Mexicans were equally guilty. Just once, I thought as I drove toward the grave, it would be nice if someone simply handed me information that was accurate and comprehensive. It would also be nice if Caron voluntarily cleaned the bathroom and gave up speaking in capital letters, or if Peter stopped pressuring me to make a commitment.

  My disposition was not sunny as I parked and went to find the mortal remains of Rogers Cooper. He was off by himself in a somewhat neglected corner, and no flowers or photos decorated his stone. He’d been born on December 12, 1916, and died on February 27, 1966. Neither Fran Pickett nor her mother was kneeling in the grass, sobbing into a handkerchief.

  I wrote down the dates and found a shady bench to sit and think. Trixie had made a mistake when she claimed to have seen Cooper in a Mercedes; unless the car had been used for a casket, he’d not been behind the wheel of anything for a long while. His house had been burned down with whatever had been left inside it. There were no ashes to be sifted, no half-burnt letters or address books to be reconstructed.

  And I didn’t know if he was the person I’d been seeking, or was just a frustrated cowboy from the city. At least Mrs. Cooper was not resting alongside him. I was too bruised from running into dead ends to deal with discovering that her first name had been Bea—and she was beyond answering my questions.

  It occurred to me that I could determine if he’d been married when buried—if I could find a copy of his obituary. I took a final look at the headstone, then left him to rest in peace and drove out onto Hayden Road. I’d planned to go back to the hotel and call the local newspaper about their files (after all, it had worked so well in Acapulco), but I happened to spot a bookstore in a row of art galleries and souvenir shops. Its magnetic force was irresistible, as was the parking space directly in front of it. Rogers Cooper had been waiting since 1966; the particulars of his life and demise could wait a little longer while I replenished my reading material.

  The Poisoned Pen, as the store was called, was exactly what I wished the Book Depot could be, but the limitations of the Farberville book-buying population precluded a store specializing in mystery fiction. After I’d found some paperbacks to keep me occupied on the flight home, I took them to the counter and asked for directions to the newspaper office.

  “The Arizona Republic’s downtown,” the woman said, spreading out a map. “If traffic is minimal and you don’t get lost too often and you don’t run into construction, it’ll take about half an hour.”

  After listening to complicated and confusing directions, I said, “Maybe I ought to call first. I don’t want to drive all that way and be denied access to their morgue. If they have one, that is.”

  “The public libraries have back issues on microfilm. Would you like directions to the nearest branch?”

  I wrote down the information, paid for the books, and thanked her. It was tempting to linger in the genteel milieu and swap stories about the frustrations of dealing with the publishing industry, but I stoically returned to the car and drove to the library.

  The back issues were on microfilm, as avowed by the sagacious proprietress of The Poisoned Pen. I scrolled to the issue most apt to have Rogers Cooper’s obituary, tried the following one, and found it amidst lengthier accounts of more prominent citizens. Rogers, aged 50, had died at his residence from a self-inflicted injury. He had been a master sergeant in the army and served in Europe and Korea. After his retirement from the military, he’d owned an appliance store in Phoenix. He’d been a member of the VFW and a Mason. He was survived by his wife, Beatrice; a stepdaughter, Franchesca; and a brother, James F. Cooper, of Flagstaff.

  “Self-inflicted injury,” I said under my breath, provoking a dirty look from a pink-haired woman across the table. This injury had occurred less than two months after Fran and Ronnie had been snatched into the hostile clutches of the Mexican legal system. I scrolled backwards, searching for an article about his suicide.

  It merited only a few sentences. Police officers had been called to the residence on Old Madrid Road by Mrs. Beatrice Cooper, who’d discovered the body upon returning home from a trip. The coroner had declared the death to have resulted from a single gunshot wound to the head. A handgun
registered to Cooper had been found at the scene, along with a note. There was no evidence of an intruder.

  Well, I’d found Fran’s stepfather and knew his present whereabouts. I also knew where the family had been living thirty years ago, as well as Bea’s legal name at that time. A librarian steered me to a collection of telephone directories from around the state. I wasn’t especially surprised when I failed to find a listing for Beatrice Cooper—or James F. Cooper—in any of them.

  The Reverend Mother at the convent had said she’d had no communication with Bea after the Christmas trip to Acapulco, so there was no reason to consider a plan to break into her office and rifle her files. The idea of breaking into the office at Green Acres Cemetery did not appeal; being nailed by a night watchman would lead to unpleasant complications with the local constabulary. And it was obvious I had no talent for such activities.

  That left Trixie at the top of my list. She’d known Rogers Cooper to some extent, but not well enough to remember his wife’s name. The sale of the property must have taken place sometime after Fran left to join her father in Acapulco in the middle of December of 1965 and before her stepfather’s death at the end of February. If the latter had been delighted by the sale, his euphoria had faded when the proceeds went to bribe Mexican judges and wardens. Could his suicide have been motivated by Fran’s involvement in the crime? It didn’t make much sense, I decided. She hadn’t disgraced his family name and there’d been no publicity in the United States. Her failure to return home could have been explained with a vague story about a new boarding school.

  Trixie’s partner Maisie might have better recollections of Bea Cooper. I mentally rearranged my list to reflect this, waved at the pink-haired woman, and left the library. I read one of my new paperbacks over a sandwich and a glass of iced tea, then drove out Old Madrid Road to the Tricky M (aka the Cooper homestead). Rather than listen to the radio, I entertained myself imagining Caron’s reaction if I announced we were going to live on a ranchette in the Arizona desert, where we could have cowettes and sheepettes to mow the lawn. If Maisie’s memory was no better than Trixie’s, the opportunity to tease Caron might arise within twenty-four hours, I thought as my grin wavered. Ronnie would be forced to rely on a private investigator—or concede and pay the extortionist. Peter would be sympathetic but privately pleased.