by Webb, Betty
As Eleanor related this, I thought I saw a brief flash of pain in her eyes. But it disappeared so quickly that it might have been just my imagination.
But Eleanor, although young, had already learned a thing or two from her money-grubbing father. Before agreeing to the marriage contract, she demanded a pre-nupt that would make her an equal partner in Hyath Enterprises, which included, of course, Hyath Development. And in a coup de grace that took my breath away, the attorney, a Phoenician who’d been around the track a few times himself, had added a startling codicil: Whoever filed for divorce first would forfeit three-quarters of the corporation’s profits for a ten-year period following the date of the final decree.
Talk about until death do you part.
“It’s a man’s world and a woman has to protect herself,” Eleanor said. “If it hadn’t been for that eleventh-hour codicil, Stephen would have traded me in for some dumb blond long before now. Maybe even one like you.”
The expression on her face was bleak beyond words. As Gilberto, whose face appeared set in concrete, delivered the prickly pear crepes, I couldn’t help but wonder if Eleanor’s financial security had been worth all the pain.
When she called for another margarita, I had my answer.
I arrived back at Desert Investigations a little after two o’clock, still shaken from the size of the luncheon bill. And just what had I learned? Very damned little. That confession Jay supposedly gave Eleanor sounded like a figment of her malicious imagination. And as for the rest of her ramblings, she hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know.
Except for the sordid details of the Hyaths’ pre-nupt. No wonder the Hyath siblings hadn’t had their own drawn up. With their parents’ marriage as an example, they were probably trying to achieve the exact opposite, no matter how risky the attempt.
The lunch had given me a raging headache, so I told Jimmy I was quitting early. He nodded sympathetically, and I dragged myself up the stairs, swallowed a couple of Excedrin, and jumped into a cold shower. I stayed in there long enough to turn into an icicle, then wrapped myself in a white terry bath sheet and fell across the bed.
After lying there for a while staring at the ceiling, I suddenly felt my eyes begin to burn. Then a tear slid down my cheeks.
I was crying.
But I didn’t know why.
Chapter 19
When I woke up, the shadows in the room had lengthened. I checked the clock and discovered it was almost six o’clock. I’d been asleep for four hours.
At least my headache was gone.
I got dressed and readied my fanny pack for my evening run. The hip was fine and the shoulder hardly twinged at all. It was time to stop babying myself.
So I ran. And ran. And ran. I ran so swiftly that even my friend the blond-faced coyote looked amazed. She followed me for a short while up the slanting side of the Buttes, veering away into the underbrush only after she spotted another runner.
A yellow cloud of pollution hung over the Phoenix end of the Valley, making the Buttes glow with a sick fire. Nonetheless, I sang the Pima Corn Song as if the desert was as pristine as a century earlier, when Pima songs were in the ascendancy, not the twilight.
Then I limped home.
A shadowy figure was waiting for me on the stairs. As I drew my .38 from my fanny pack, a familiar voice floated to me on the magnolia-scented air.
“Shoot me, Lena, and I’ll haunt you for the rest of your miserable life.” It was Dusty.
I don’t love him, I don’t love him…
Ah, who the hell did I think I was kidding? I holstered the gun and walked towards him.
He stood up, his face soft. “I love you, you silly bitch. I’d do almost anything for you.”
Almost? Where was all this unconditional love I kept reading about?
But I opened my arms anyway.
Chapter 20
“On the whole, I prefer CNN,” Dusty said, frowning at Apache Sunset. “The wars are a lot more cheerful.”
“Philistine.”
We’d made love through the evening and half the night. Now it was morning and we were still damp from the shower, sitting wrapped in bath sheets on the sofa, where Dusty was—unasked—playing art critic. “That artist must be nuts.”
“He might be,” I agreed. “That’s the guy Clarice kicked out of her gallery.”
“Gee, I wonder why.”
“He’s pretty good, actually.”
Dusty got up and walked over to the painting, the bath sheet slipping down around his hips. I smiled. He had the best buns I’d ever seen.
He leaned down and peered at the signature. “George, huh?”
“Yeah. George.”
“The guy who was here when I called.”
“The very same.”
Dusty didn’t ask me if I’d slept with George, just as I didn’t ask him if he’d slept with the redhead. As we had many times before, we just continued in the present, not bothering to discuss what had gone wrong and how we could prevent it in the future. Who knew if we had a future, anyway?
“I’ve got to get back to the ranch,” he said, his voice trailing after him as he headed for the clothes he’d left in a pile by the bed. “I’ve already missed morning feed time, but I left word with a couple of the other guys to help out in case I didn’t make it back. The horses won’t starve.”
I followed him into the bedroom. It was understood that I would never try to talk him into staying once he’d announced he had to leave. “I was kind of starved.”
He turned, his Jockey shorts dangling from his hand. “Yeah, I noticed that. But you’re not now, are you?”
How could I tell him that when it came to sex, too much was never enough? When you can’t allow yourself to love, you still have to reach out, to stroke, to caress, to kiss. “I’m fine now,” I lied.
He smiled. “You look fine. Real fine.”
I smiled back. “You do, too, Cowboy. Y’all come again, y’hear?”
For a brief moment, the sound of his laughter chased my loneliness away.
My morning copy of the Scottsdale Journal informed me that Animal Control officers had finally located the biting coyote’s den and had staked it out. In accordance with the locals’ wishes, they were armed only with tranquilizer guns. They promised to merely stun the coyote, haul it off for rabies quarantine, then release it into the wild a long, long way from Scottsdale.
Not a perfect solution, I thought, but probably the best solution for everyone concerned. If left to its own devices, that coyote would probably wind up getting flattened by a Mercedes someday.
I spent the morning on the phone, putting out fires and rustling up new business. The most rewarding phone call came when I told Brian Meeks that I’d found his runaway girlfriend shacked up with his wife. His hypocritical outrage was something to hear, but I finally calmed him when I said that as far as the divorce courts were concerned, adultery was adultery, no matter with which sex or species.
Of course, that held true for him, too.
He was still thinking about the implications of that when I hung up.
Around lunchtime, when my stomach began to growl, I remembered being at the Hacienda Palms with Eleanor Hyath. Something she said was still bothering me, but every time I tried to remember it, it eluded me. Disgusted with my Swiss cheese memory, I wandered over to a deli and picked up a hot pastrami for Jimmy and a corned beef for myself. As I walked back through the noontime heat, the memory still eluded me, like an itch at the back of my brain that I couldn’t scratch.
The rest of the day was slow, except for the now-routine phone call from Jay Kobe’s attorney, crowing that he had bailed his client out again.
“Isn’t this getting just a little bit boring?” I asked Hal McKinnon. “The cops arrest him, you bail him out? The cops arrest him, you bail him…”
“You wouldn’t think it was boring if it was you sitting in Sheriff Joe’s jail eating green bologna,” he snapped. “Now are you going to help us again o
r not? My client did not do this murder.”
“If he didn’t, it’s only because he’s the luckiest man alive and someone else murdered Clarice before he got around to beating her to death.”
McKinnon begged some more, then finally began to threaten. “Albert Grabel is going to be very unhappy with you.”
He obviously didn’t know that Grabel had called me that very morning and told me that my duties to Jay Kobe had been well and truly performed, and that he wouldn’t hold it against me if I refused to do any more work on the case.
“If I’d known everything about Jay I know now, I’d never have asked you to do this, Lena,” he’d said, his voice heavy with regret. “I’m sorry about the whole thing.”
I was off the hook.
So when McKinnon finished his threats, I smiled into the receiver. “Tell Jay he can stick it, Mr. McKinnon. And you can, too.”
I hung up, vowing never again to do any work for wife beaters. No matter who they were related to.
The rest of the day proceeded calmly, and by the time the little hand hit five and the big hand hit twelve, I was ready to close up shop. I told Jimmy to go home.
“Sounds good to me,” he said. “I think I’ll drive over to Uncle Sisiwan’s, learn a few more Ant Songs, talk to him about painting my truck.”
“Your truck?” I looked out the window at Jimmy’s almost-new Chevy pickup truck. It was a gleaming burgundy, with a metallic gold racing stripe streaking along the side. “I think your truck looks pretty good.”
“Not half as good as your Jeep.”
The pall of pollution that had hung over the Valley for the past few days remained and as I jogged across McDowell and into Papago Park that evening, I noticed that no other runners or mountain bicyclists could be seen. Apparently only mad coyotes and private detectives were crazy enough to jog under such conditions. It was a sad irony that the Valley’s pure, dry air, which had attracted tuberculosis sufferers for decades, was speeding down the same smog-clogged road as Los Angeles. As I squinted up at the yellow-tainted sky, the feeling that I had forgotten something important returned. What the hell had Eleanor Hyath told me that was so important?
The thick air made it hard to breathe, and by the time I reached the Papago Amphitheater at the foot of the buttes, I felt like I’d run twice the distance. The exhaust from the rush hour traffic seemed even thicker up here, and I chastised myself for not being farsighted enough to stay on flat ground. Hoping the old Pima gods would forgive me, I decided to skip the steep climb to my usual perch above the amphitheater and instead dropped down on a rock cement seat. The pollution exaggerated the heat effect, and my skin felt dangerously clammy—a warning sign. Any savvy desert dweller knows that clammy skin can be a precursor to heat stroke. I needed plenty of liquids and I needed them right now.
Which turned out to be a good thing, because reaching around for the water bottle attached to my fanny pack’s belt probably saved my life. I heard the shot from above me and the bullet’s whine almost at the same time, then the concrete just beyond where my head had been a half-second earlier exploded.
Quite literally hitting the dirt, I scooted along on my belly to a broken-off piece of seating and hunkered down behind it. Dust entered my nostrils, making me want to sneeze, but I didn’t dare make a sound. I froze, unmoving, heat stroke a concern of the distant past. At moments like these, when you are paralyzed by terror, time itself seems to stand still. Overhead, a yellow and orange Southwest Airlines jet appeared to hang suspended above the Salt River as it made its way towards Sky Harbor. The traffic noise from below merged into one humming wave of sound, as if some prehistoric monster was making its noisy way through the sandstone buttes.
Time began moving again when a lizard, panicked by the gunfire, or maybe by the big white person lying atop its home, scuttled out from behind the concrete and tore ass towards the underbrush. Released from my terrified paralysis, I hauled my .38 out of the fanny pack. The shooter was hidden somewhere in the rocks above the amphitheater, looking down on me. I couldn’t be in a more precarious position. Raising my head over the sanctuary of the concrete might get me killed, but I couldn’t just cower until he finally scored a bull’s eye. There was an added danger, too. The commuters below us were oblivious to the drama taking place above. If he kept firing, the shooter might kill an innocent driver. Or two. Or three. How many families were in those cars? How many children?
I couldn’t allow him to keep shooting.
Squirming around, I wedged as much of my body as possible behind the concrete and peered carefully over the top.
He didn’t disappoint me.
Another gunshot, another rock exploding. This one even closer.
But I’d seen what I wanted to see, the burst of fire from a gun muzzle. The shooter was tucked away into a dark recess near the gap in the buttes that led to the Eliot Ramada on the south side. I snapped off a quick defensive shot, more to make the shooter realize I was armed than to do any real damage, but my shot missed him by only a few inches. An iron oxide boulder at the edge of the recess exploded. He yelped, but his voice was too distorted by the traffic noise below for me to identify it.
My return fire accomplished its purpose. The shooter realized he was facing an armed adversary instead of a helpless victim, and that changed the entire equation. I heard feet scraping along rock, then the sounds died away as the shooter dove through the gap in the buttes. His footsteps echoed as he scrambled down the other side.
I picked myself up, gun held high, and ran up the amphitheater steps towards the gap.
“Halt! Halt or I’ll shoot!” I ordered.
But I was too late.
By the time I reached the gap, I heard the roar of a motor from the ramada parking lot. I looked down just in time to see a silver Taurus round the corner on two tires and head towards Phoenix.
Chapter 21
Once home, I called Kryzinski and told him what had happened. He cursed for a while but finally shut up when I promised to go down to the station first thing the next morning and file a report. Then I stripped my grit-embedded clothing off and stepped into the shower. While I hadn’t felt anything while scooting around in the amphitheater, my breasts, stomach, and knees proved to be scored by tiny cuts. I looked like someone had dragged me through a cactus patch backwards. But hey, at least there were no new bullet holes. After toweling myself off, I dabbed some antiseptic ointment on the worst of them and counted myself lucky.
When I finally wandered back out to the living room, I noticed that the message light on the phone was blinking. Dusty, I bet. Smiling, I hit the “play” button.
But it wasn’t Dusty.
Dulya Albundo’s voice floated out to me. “Miss Jones, I need to talk to you again. I’m working at Julio’s tonight, and should get off at ten. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
I frowned.
At ten in the parking lot. Did the woman think I was an idiot?
Then again...
At 9:30 p.m. I walked into Julio’s, sat down at the bar, and ordered a glass of iced tea. It being late on a week night, the restaurant was nearly deserted. In the dining area, I could see Mrs. Albundo making small talk with the last dinner customers as they slid out of a booth. I saw the man hand her a twenty. No wonder she made the two-hour commute.
When the bartender informed me they were closing, I walked into the dining room and tapped Mrs. Albundo on the shoulder. The polite smile on her face faded when she saw me.
“Miss Jones, I thought I said I would meet you in the parking lot.”
“I’m allergic to dark places.”
She didn’t know what to make of that, but it didn’t seem to bother her as much as I thought it might. “We cannot talk here. We must go somewhere else.”
“How about some more caffe latte?”
That seemed to please her so as soon as she was finished in the kitchen doing whatever it is that waitresses do, I escorted her out to the Jeep I’d left parked directly under a
tungsten light. I kept a close watch on the shadows, but I saw nothing other than a stray cat rummaging through the Dumpster. On the soft night’s breeze I could smell magnolia and garlic.
“Where is your truck?” Mrs. Albundo said, when she saw the Jeep. “The truck with the wonderful air-conditioning.”
Was she just trying to cadge a free ride back to South Phoenix? Funny, she hadn’t seemed the type. “Oh, that was just a loaner. This is mine. I was having it painted when we talked before.”
“What are those designs on it?”
As we traveled south on Miller Road, I gave her a short course on Pima mythology. It didn’t seem to me that she really was all that interested, but I noticed that she did her best to keep me talking. I’d seen this sort of thing before. It usually stemmed from a guilty conscience.
The espresso bar was still open, so we found a seat near the back. She ordered another bagel with veggie schmear with her caffe latte. I did, too. She kept me talking until our orders arrived and I decided to end her clumsy manipulation.
“Now, Mrs. Albundo, I want to know why you wanted to see me tonight, and don’t tell me it’s because you wanted to learn all about Earth Doctor.”
She stared into her steaming cup. “I should have told you before.”
I said nothing. Sometimes it’s best just to wait. Was I going to get a confession?
The caffe latte appeared to fascinate her. She watched the steam curl upwards as if it were protoplasm about to coalesce into earthly form. Who did she expect to see? The ghost of her mother? A visitation from the Madonna? I was almost ready to prod her again when she finally spoke.
“I think my cousin was the person who carried you to the hospital that night.”
A woman sitting at a table by the window laughed and the man with her leaned over and whispered something in her ear, making her laugh even harder. The counter man watched them both, his expression bland. He was wearing an ASU T-shirt and a lame attempt at Coolio’s hair style—four thick braids sprouting from his head all directions. I preferred corn rows, I decided. Corn rows with beads. Even Afros were nice as long as they weren’t too extreme. I wondered if Afros would ever come back. I hoped so. Some of these rapper-influenced hair styles verged on the hilarious. I missed grace. I missed beauty.