Desert Noir (9781615952236)

by Webb, Betty

  “You told me to come down here, see what you guys have found out.”

  “I didn’t mean today and you damned well know it.” He breathed heavily for a few beats then sighed, “Oh, hell, since you’re already here, you might as well pull up a chair. I got things to tell you but remember, kid, you didn’t hear it from me.”

  Which meant don’t let the Police Chief find out.

  I removed a pile of papers from the battered old lounge chair he’d had shipped all the way from Brooklyn and sat down. As I settled in the chair, a puff of dust rose around me, making me cough.

  “See?” Kryzinski snapped, pointing a stubby finger at my chest. “You’re still weak. You’re wobblin’, too.”

  “It’s the chair. One leg’s shorter than the other, has been for years. And if you’d clean up around here every now and then, my cough would go away, too. Now quit your nagging and tell me what the Medical Examiner said.”

  He rummaged through the mess on his desk, and finally found a fat manila envelope. “We’re still waitin’ for the complete toxicology results but already we got something’ pretty juicy.” He held the envelope out to me. “You’re not gonna believe it.”

  I read through the report, at first noticing nothing out of the ordinary. The ugly crime scene photos told me nothing I hadn’t already known, but the preliminary coroner’s report detailed the violence done to Clarice’s body. She had suffered such severe skull fractures that bits of bone punctured her brain, yet those injuries hadn’t killed her. The actual cause of death had been the bloody clog of teeth and pieces of tongue lodged in her airway, asphyxi-ating her as she lay helpless on the floor. While she choked to death, the attack continued, this time with an object that matched the configuration of a tire iron.

  I looked up at Kryzinski. “This guy really wanted to make sure she was dead, didn’t he?”

  Kryzinski nodded. “No shit. Keep readin’.”

  On the second page I found the strangest thing I’d ever come across on any homicide investigation. “What the hell’s this? They found traces of latex on her face?”

  Kryzinski nodded, making his string tie flap up and down. “Maybe she was beaten to death by a lead-filled condom.”

  “Or maybe her killer was wearing latex gloves.”

  “You tryin’ to take the fun out of this? Anyway, now you see why the case against Kobe ain’t lookin’ real tight. Firstly, Kobe wouldn’t have to be worryin’ about leaving his fingerprints in the gallery ’cause there was plenty of reason for his fingerprints to be there. Place was crawlin’ with his crappy paintings. Secondly, that asshole was too drunk to even piss straight let alone do everything the perp did. When we arrested him that night his blood alcohol level was .193.

  “Just between you and me and the lamppost, kid, I can’t see Kobe staggerin’ out of his girlfriend’s house, drivin’ all the way over to the gallery without gettin’ snagged by some hotshot patrol officer, then puttin’ on latex gloves, then beatin’ his wife senseless, then switchin’ over to a tire iron to finish the job, then sneakin’ out of there in broad daylight without anybody seeing him. Sound like any drunk you ever ran into? Shit, when Kobe’s lawyer laid all that out for the judge, he dropped bail from one million to a measly ten thou and Kobe only had to come up with a tenth of that. Hell, half the homeless in Scottsdale got that much hidden in their favorite Dumpster.”

  I sat back, but the chair rocked wildly and I had to lean forward again until it found its equilibrium. “You’re right. This is all a little too cagey for some drunk. I guess that means my former client is off the hook. Now isn’t that nice?”

  Kryzinski snorted. “Not to be too optimistic or anything but maybe the guy is smarter than we think. Try this on for size. Maybe he rigged all this bizarre shit, including being drunk. Maybe he was hopin’ we’d take him to trial and he’d get off. Once acquitted…”

  I finished for him. “…he can’t be tried again.” At times like this, I really missed working with Kryzinski. He was nobody’s fool, which is why he’d been hired away from NYPD and why the Police Chief—an Überyuppie from Yale—put up with his atrocious English and bizarre manner of dress. Kryzinski might not be pretty but he always got the job done.

  The two of us sat there in silence for a few moments, examining his theory. Then I said, “I don’t know, Kryzinski, it all sounds too Agatha Christie to me. There’s no way Kobe has the smarts or the self-discipline to rig up anything that sophisticated. Maybe there’s some new suspects you’d like to tell me about? Just for old time’s sake, you understand.”

  He gave me a sour look. “We shot our wad with Kobe. Now we start over again.”

  I met his eyes. “Then I’ll do what I can. One nice thing about going private is that you’re not handicapped by police procedure or any hand-tying legalities.”

  His sour look lightened. “You break the law, I don’t wanna know about it. But you come up with anything, you’re gonna share it, right? You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours?”

  “Of course.”

  The chair gave another lurch beneath me and for one horrible moment, the room began to spin. I only managed to remain upright by hanging onto the chair arm.

  Kryzinski jumped up and rushed towards me, grabbing my shoulder with a surprisingly gentle hand. “Hey, Lena! You all right?”

  My vision cleared and I waved him away. “Just a little tired. Maybe you’re right. I probably need to take it a easy for the next few days.”

  On the way back to the office, I decided to ask Jimmy to type up McKinnon’s bill. I’d probably feel better knowing that I’d washed my hands of a particularly ugly piece of dirt named Jay Kobe. McKinnon didn’t have to know that ridding myself of his client wouldn’t end my involvement in the case. Clarice hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death like that. No one did.

  And I hadn’t deserved being shot.

  But when I arrived back to Desert Investigations, my shoulder was screaming with so much pain that I didn’t even go into the office. Instead, I staggered up the stairs to my apartment, popped a Darvon and collapsed across the bed. I slept soundly but not well, seeing Clarice’s battered face in each of my dreams. In one of them—the worst—Clarice aimed a gun at me, and then the ragged hole that had once been her mouth cried, “I’ll shoot her, I’ll shoot her! Just leave me alone!”

  I heard an explosion, felt a streak of fire blaze across my forehead…

  Then I fell into the night.

  I woke up shivering and stared up at the ceiling, where the reflected headlights from cars driving along Main Street played across the textured surface. For a while, I watched the abstract patterns they made, then—my shoulder throbbing again—staggered into the bathroom and swallowed another Darvon.

  It didn’t work. I lay there staring at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

  Chapter 10

  Life—and Desert Investigations—trundled on.

  My morning copy of the Scottsdale Journal informed me that a coyote finally bit the hand that fed it on Via Del Loma Maria, and that the city’s Animal Control officers were patrolling the area in full force armed with tranquilizer guns. As the mayor reassured an assembly of wildlife lovers, the Animal Control officers planned to merely stun the offending coyote, then set it free in a distant location. Even the folks who lodged the original complaint against the toddler-biting coyote had grown alarmed at the uproar they’d caused.

  While Scottsdale city officials struggled mightily to save the life of a coyote, human lives were being lost elsewhere.

  Two hundred miles to the north, a tourist posing for a picture on the edge of the Grand Canyon slipped and fell, bouncing off rock ledge after rock ledge until his body came to rest more than five hundred feet below his horrified friends. To the east, a party of hikers and their guide had been caught by a flash flood in one of the many narrow canyons that etched the desert floor. Eleven were dead, three more were missing and presumed dead.

  Closer to home, two Pima teenagers rid
ing their all-terrain vehicles near the dry Salt River on the rez saw what at first appeared to be a pile of rags tossed behind a mesquite tree. Closer inspection revealed the rags to be decomposed human remains.

  Although Arizona never tops anybody’s list of America’s most violent states, it’s easy to get killed out here. Just a superficial list of our lethal wildlife includes rattlesnakes, scorpions, brown recluse spiders, and bad-tempered javelinas with tusks that could make shish-kebab out of you. Then there is the Arizona landscape itself. If our canyons and mountains don’t get you, the desert is more than willing to pick up the slack. Too many tourists, overcome by the landscape’s natural beauty, lose all common sense and wander off into the desert without enough water—which is one quart per hour in high summer. Take along less and your body might eventually be found moldering under a mesquite.

  Depressed, I threw the paper aside. Jimmy, however, acted as if he was on the top of the world.

  His fifth night on stakeout had netted him the Big One—an infrared videotape of the wheelchair-bound accident victim heading out her front door just before dawn, climbing gear slung over her back. He’d followed her to the Peralta Trailhead, located at the base of the Superstition Mountains, where he’d videotaped her climbing a rock face so steep it earned even his admiration.

  “Whatever else she is, she’s got guts,” he said, handing me the videotape. His saddle-colored face glowed with the pride of a job well done.

  I picked up the phone to call Copper State Insurance, but while I listened to the ring, said, “It’s nice that you can find some admirable qualities in her, but remember, your cute little mountain-climbing grifter is one of the reasons insurance rates are so high.”

  “How did you know she was cute?”

  Men. “I guessed.”

  Still looking puzzled, Jimmy returned to his computer. In the past week, we had picked up four more new accounts, and Jimmy was now trying to break into an investment banking firm’s security system. For once, though, the company’s encryption system had him stymied.

  After delivering the good news to Copper State Insurance, I busied myself with the other accounts—two more insurance investigations, and a missing person’s case. The mistress of the CEO of a big department store chain had disappeared, taking with her the man’s wife’s diamond necklace, which he had allowed her to “borrow.” He wanted me to find her and the necklace before his wife realized it was missing. Which is another way the rich are different from you and me. How can the average woman not notice her diamond necklace is missing?

  No new leads emerged in the Clarice Kobe murder case, but I was unwilling to drop it simply because Jay Kobe was no longer my client. I missed waving at her in the morning as she unlocked her gallery door, waving to her again in the evening as she locked up. I missed her who-gives-a-shit smile, her caustic bon mots. I missed guessing whether she was wearing a Versace or a Zandra Rhodes. Minor things, yes, but I was learning that it was often these small gestures and my automatic and unthinking responses to them that contributed so much to the comfort of my life.

  My shoulder still throbbed, albeit less viciously—especially now that Arizona’s monsoon season had arrived. As I reviewed my notes on the Kobe case, a roll of thunder announced the arrival of another storm front making its way up from Mexico. I figured we had about one week left before the rains began in earnest and—God help us—the humidity began to match Mississippi’s.

  Slapping the Kobe file shut, I said, “Hold down the fort, Jimmy. I’m driving up to the San Carlos Reservation before the weather gets too bad.”

  He turned around, a surprised look on his face. “Why do you want to mess around with those Apaches? Or are you planning to hit the casinos?”

  Throughout the nineteenth century, Jimmy’s tribe, along with all the other Arizona tribes, had been continually harassed by the Apaches. Before Geronimo surrendered to General Miles in 1886, the Apaches raided and terrorized the Pima, the Maricopa, the Navajo, and the Tohono O’odham—not to mention the Anglos and the Mexicans who lived along the border of the old Arizona Territory. But, as I reminded Jimmy, the Apaches hadn’t been on the warpath for years. They’d found another way of getting their revenge on the Anglo settlers who took their land—casino gaming.

  Ever since the Arizona legislature okayed casino gambling on the reservations, the Apaches had operated some of the finest casinos east of Las Vegas. In some cases affixed to high country ski resorts, the Apache casinos were elegant watering holes where instead of losing your scalp, you could lose your shirt. But I was no gambler. Gambling was another pastime, along with drinking and smoking, that I’d always been afraid to try. Who knew what kind of addiction-prone DNA rattled around in my genes?

  Jimmy was familiar with my fears, so I set his mind at rest. “Chill, Kemosabe. I’m just going up there to talk to George Haozous.”

  This appeared to alarm him even more. “Not the artist?”

  “The very one. Apparently he had a big fight with Clarice just before she got killed.”

  Jimmy frowned. ”You’d better be careful. I don’t like what we’ve heard about him. That fight with Clarice…”

  “Relax. I just want to check him out. There’s probably nothing to the story, just somebody getting mad and saying things they didn’t mean, that kind of thing.”

  He was still frowning when I left the office.

  The San Carlos Apache Reservation is situated on a high plateau only ninety miles east of Scottsdale, but it could be another country. When I left Route 60 at Globe and turned onto Route 70, I left behind me the dramatic tree-lined Salt River canyons and climbed onto an endless vista of scrub-sprinkled wasteland sizzling mercilessly underneath a hard blue sky.

  My pink Jeep blasted past the luxurious Apache Gold Casino, but as I took the turnoff onto West 9, the injustice of the old Indian treaties became apparent. For more than a century the Apaches been forced to live on the largesse of the American government. This proud tribe of hunters and raiders had been confined to a landscape so barren, so battered by never-ceasing winds and spring floods, that growing crops or even running cattle was next to impossible. And jobs? Don’t make me laugh. There was no industry within sixty miles of San Carlos. And no banks, no offices, no fast food outlets, no supermarkets, and no lawyers within twenty-five miles. No buses or taxis, either.

  How well the government’s “program” worked was evident by the tumbledown shacks I passed as I drove along Highway 6 as it meandered its way around rain-washed gullies and eroding hillocks. Most of the shacks weren’t wired for electricity, so their residents had built brush-roofed ramadas to sleep in during the 100-plus degree summer nights. How they could sleep with the desert wind howling around them, I’d never know.

  But lately, life for the Apaches was looking up. Here and there among the hardscrabble homes a few new stucco houses testified to the increased standard of living the casinos were bringing the tribe.

  As I drove into the small village of San Carlos itself, I spotted a group of fierce-looking Apache teenagers hunched against the wind near the Project Head Start building. Ignoring their stares, I eased the Jeep down the bumpy road and into the parking lot of the Reservation Police headquarters. Inside the building, two uniformed officers who had been conversing in Apache switched immediately to English.

  “Can I help you?” the taller one said in a softly accented voice. He easily topped six feet and his mahogany skin reflected the ravages of years of burning sun and hard wind. Like other Apaches I had met, his short-cropped raven hair was thick and glossy, a hairdresser’s dream. Male pattern baldness was unknown among the tribe.

  “I’m looking for George Haozous,” I said, showing him my private investigator’s license. While he studied it, I checked out the name patch on his breast pocket. Ronald Gudizeh.

  Officer Gudizeh’s eyes narrowed at me. “You realize that you have no authority here, Miss Jones.”

  “When it comes right down to it, I really don’t have any aut
hority anywhere and I’m well aware of that, Officer. But I would like to question Mr. Haozous about a murder that took place in Scottsdale a couple of weeks ago.”

  The other officer, an older man with a huge barrel chest, said, “The Clarice Kobe case.”

  I must have let my surprise show because Gudizeh said, “Oh, we get the newspapers up here on the rez, too, Miss Jones.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  His face relaxed into a smile. “I’m sure you didn’t. This your first time up on the rez?”

  Suitably chagrined, I said, “All I need is directions to his house. If he wants to talk to me, fine. If not, that’ll be fine, too.”

  The shorter man laughed. “We’ll see if you still feel that calm about things after you’ve met him. George is…” He turned to Gudizeh. “How would you describe George’s temperament?”

  Officer Gudizeh grinned. “Irascible. That’s how I’d describe it, Pete.”

  “Good word. Appropriate, too.”

  In the end, it was Pete who told me how to get to George Haozous’s house, but as I started towards the exit, Officer Gudizeh called after me, “Before he slams the door in your face, tell him Pete and Ronald sent you over. It might at least get you a slower door-slam.”

  I thanked them both and left. Returning to the parking lot, I found my Jeep surrounded by the same teenagers I’d noticed earlier in front of the Project Head Start building.

  “Well, I think it’s cool,” one of them, a boy of about fourteen, said. His shining, shoulder-length hair was held back by a multi-colored sweatband that proclaimed in Day-Glo letters, ROCKY

  POINT, MEXICO.

  “But pink? Jeeps are righteous wheels, not Barbie cars.” This from a girl who looked enough like the boy to be his older sister.

  When I approached them they stepped back, but a tall, thin boy wearing jeans baggy enough to stuff two like-sized teenagers into said to me, “The steer horns are great but maybe you should consider another color?”