Desert Shadows (9781615952250)

by Webb, Betty

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Then let me make it easy for you, Officer Idiot Jones. American Stain, American Pain. I saw it in the Patriot’s Blood summer catalog they mailed me, the same catalog my book is in. To think that my book, which is so filled with light and truth, will share the same bookshelves as that…as that.…” Even Fetzner’s evil mouth couldn’t complete the sentence.

  If Zach was to be believed, Fetzner’s book would never make it to market. But I wasn’t about to let him know that.

  “Why does that bother you, Mr. Fetzner?”

  He made a sound of disgust. “Have you never seen a publisher’s catalog, Officer Jones?”

  I shook my head. “I picked up a brochure at WestWorld which listed some of Patriot’s Blood’s past titles.”

  “Ah, the past.” He closed his eyes for a second, and somehow I knew that he was remembering the scent of blood, the feel of knife against flesh. I tried not to shiver.

  Fun time finished, he opened his eyes again. “Then let me enlighten you, Officer Idiot Jones. The Patriot’s Blood summer catalog carries pictures of the books, pictures of the authors.” He paused for a moment, and smiled at some memory. “To do my part, I sent Gloriana Whore Alden-Taylor several pictures with close-ups of my body art. But that was before I decided not to let her publish A Man Stands Alone. Or its sequel.”

  “I’m still not clear on that, Mr. Fetzner. Help me out here.”

  Garbage truck noises again. “You cunts are all so stupid.”

  “Mr. Fetzner, I’m warning you.” A corrections officer.

  Fetzner flicked his eyes toward him. “I’m finished with this non-believer. Take me back to my cell.”

  I rose from my chair. “Wait.…”

  But the corrections officers were already hustling Fetzner out the door. As they headed down the hallway, Fetzner called over his shoulder, “Look at the pictures, Officer Idiot Jones. Remove the blinders from thine eyes.”

  Then he raised his fist and shouted, “RaHoWa!”

  Racial holy war.

  Chapter 13

  I took the fast route back to Scottsdale and instead of going straight to my office, headed for Patriot’s Blood. My timing couldn’t have been better. I arrived just as Zach Alden-Taylor, both hands clutching several bags from Baja Fresh, was struggling with the front door.

  “Let me help you with that,” I said, pulling the door open for him.

  He gave me a grateful smile and didn’t protest when I followed him from room to room as he portioned out tacos and fajitas to a surprisingly full office. He’d even brought a taco for Casey, who snapped it up with an ecstatic moan and disappeared under a desk.

  “I called in all of our free-lance editors to tell them about Patriot’s Blood’s new direction,” he explained, handing over a sack to Poor Sandra, who looked even more disheveled than she had yesterday. “Most are pretty happy about it, and some have even put forth a few authors’ names. I’m thinking about adding a few poets.”

  Poor Sandra managed a smile, revealing lipstick smears on her teeth. She looked at Zach adoringly and said, “Poets are too often relegated to small presses, but with Patriot’s Blood’s current clout, we can get them into the public eye.” The other editors nodded enthusiastically.

  As happy as I felt about the change in editorial direction from hate to flowers, or whatever poets were writing about these days, I hadn’t come here for a literature lesson. “Has the copier been fixed yet?” I asked Poor Sandra.

  Her smile disappeared. “The repairman said maybe tomorrow, that we’re getting near the top of the list. I’ll call you when it’s fixed.”

  And the check’s in the mail. “I’d appreciate that.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Zach heading back down the hall to his office, so I left Poor Sandra to her fajita and hurried after him. He didn’t appear to mind as I followed him into his tiny office and collapsed into the ripped Naugahyde chair across from his desk. It took me a moment to realize that I had been able to sit down without removing piles of manuscripts. Then I noticed the cartons stacked against the walls.

  “Moving?” I said, waving at the boxes.

  “Yep. Into Gloriana’s office, one carton at a time.” He held a paper-wrapped taco toward me. “Want one? I’ve enough to share.”

  Not really. After giving the others to his staff, he only had four left, and he was a big man. “I’m not hungry. But you go ahead and eat.”

  “You sure?”

  I could hear his stomach growl. I hoped mine wouldn’t attempt a duet. “I’m sure.”

  He took a big bite of a taco, and a stream of salsa spilled out onto the manuscript he’d obviously been reading. He didn’t bother to wipe it away. “I wanted to move everything all at once, but it’s not working out that way. There’s too much to do. The coroner will be releasing my grandmother’s body in a couple of days, so I have to get the funeral on track. And informing her pet authors that we’re changing editorial direction has been a nightmare. They’re not taking it well.”

  I briefly wondered how many other publishers in the United States would take a nibble at their manuscripts. None, I hoped.

  “Listen, Zach, I just had an interesting experience with one of your authors.” I filled him in on my visit to the Arizona State Prison.

  “The really weird thing is that we have more pre-orders for Fetzner’s anti-female screed than any other book in the catalog,” he said, when I had finished. “Frankly, that scares me to death. But I can tell you why Fetzner was disillusioned with Gloriana. No, on second thought, let me show you.”

  He put his taco down on the manuscript and scrabbled around in one of the cartons. When he didn’t find what he wanted, he stuck his head out of the office door and yelled, “Sandra, could you bring Ms. Jones a copy of the summer catalog?”

  In a minute, Poor Sandra, a trace of red sauce hovering around her mouth, thrust a catalog into my hands.

  “Anything else?” she asked Zach.

  “Enjoy your lunch.”

  “Sure.” With a bleak smile, she returned to the reception area, trailing a scent of garlic and cheese.

  “Page eighteen,” Zach told me between bites of his taco.

  When I turned to the page, I understood why God’s Avenger wanted to change publishers. American Stain, American Pain was a scholarly treatise on slavery, and the caption under the author’s photo explained why he was uniquely qualified to write it. George Willard Harris, Ph.D., professor emeritus of the Black Studies Department at Alabama State University, was the African-American descendant of two Alabama slaves. The short bio beside his picture said that he now owned the plantation where his great-great-great-grandparents had lived in bondage. He was in the process of turning the former slave quarters into a slavery museum.

  I looked up from the catalog at Zach, who was now blotting his mouth with a page from the manuscript. “I don’t understand. Given her usual material, why would Gloriana publish a book like this?”

  “Why not? She had a talent for picking books that sell, and this one certainly will. Dr. Harris’ work is not only scholarly, it’s actually readable, which is more than you can say for most Ph.D.s. In fact, he is one of the only Patriot’s Blood authors I plan to retain. I still want to continue with a certain amount of Americana.”

  “But, Gloriana.…He…he’s African-American!”

  Zach seemed amused. “Your point being?”

  “My point being the obvious. Why would a woman with Gloriana’s views on race publish the work of a black man, however scholarly? And why would a black man pick her as his publisher?”

  “You’re making the same mistake everyone does about my grandmother. You’ve seen our titles and have jumped to the conclusion that Gloriana was a racist. And that would be incorrect. Color was irrelevant to her. She chose her authors according to how much money she estimated they could add to the coffers. And that was strictly so she could pump money into that decrepit Hacienda.”


  Maybe Zach was right, but Gloriana had taken the racism of others and funneled it into her cynical business. Which was worse? Honest hatred? Or cold greed?

  Zach threw the remnants of his lunch into a waste basket, along with a soiled page from the manuscript. Then, evidently realizing what he’d done, he pulled the page back out and attempted to wipe it down. The salsa stains remained.

  Poor author.

  Oblivious, he continued. “As for Dr. Harris, I’ve talked to him. He knew his writing style wasn’t convoluted enough for the standard university press, so he tried the big publishers in New York. He was offered a contract at one house, but the deal fell through during a merger. His book went homeless.

  “Then his agent brought it to Gloriana, and she called him up and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Look, Dr. Harris is a man of the world. He told her he figured publication with Patriot’s Blood was better than no publication at all, and at least the work would get read, which was all he really wanted.”

  I don’t know which shocked me the most: Gloriana turning out to be a mere money-grubber, or a black scholar allowing his work to be included in Patriot’s Blood’s catalog. I said as much to Zach.

  He spread his salsa-stained hands. “Ah, well. Publishing makes for strange bedfellows. Another point in Dr. Harris’ favor came when she discovered that his family had entered the country not long after the Plymouth Brethren—albeit in very different transport. They got here so early that she considered them also to be Founding Fathers, although lamentably unrecognized. Remember, it was heritage Gloriana cared about, not race. You wouldn’t believe the number of lectures on genealogy I had to endure as a child. My poor father probably went through the same thing, too, which helps explain why he married my mother. It was an act of rebellion.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Because.…”

  “Mom’s grandparents immigrated from Lithuania right after the second world war. Just a bunch of Johnny-Come-Latelys, Gloriana called them.”

  Johnny-Come-Latelys. I wondered if that was what my parents were, too. “If she disapproved of your mother, why didn’t she stop the marriage?”

  He chuckled. “Dad was as headstrong as she was, that’s why. Oh, she tried. She threatened to disinherit him, the whole works. But in the end he always did exactly what he wanted. That’s what Alden-Taylors do. These days, anyway. Somewhere along the way we acquired a little more backbone than our famous ancestor.”

  Ah, yes. The “Speak for thyself, John” guy. “So did she disinherit him?”

  “Of course not. He was an Alden-Taylor, and a male. What really upset her, though, wasn’t the Lithuanian business, but the fact that her son married a maid. I think she’d been hoping to link up the Alden-Taylors with another old family. Maybe the Astors, although they’ve snubbed the Aldens for centuries. Some old quarrel over a goat.”

  “Wait a minute. Your father married a maid? Whose? Your grandmother’s?”

  He shook his head. “No, my Aunt Lavelle’s. Mother was working for her, which is how she met my father. They fell in love. Gloriana was furious about the whole thing, but in the end she must have decided that the grand Alden-Taylor heritage was strong enough to override those servant-class genes. Besides, after my parents were killed, she no longer had anyone else to leave Patriot’s Blood to except Aunt Sappho and Poor Sandra. Sappho’s refusal to have anything to do with the company worked against her, and Poor Sandra, well.…She’s just a niece.”

  “How about your aunts? Lavelle and.…”

  “Lavelle and Leila,” he said.

  “Don’t they get anything?” I remembered what Owen had told me about Gloriana threatening them with some sort of legal action.

  He didn’t answer, merely wrote an address on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Why don’t you ask them yourself?”

  I looked down. An address in Phoenix’s Arcadia district. “Could I have their phone number? I’d prefer to call first.”

  A wry smile. “Don’t bother. They won’t answer the phone, but they’ll be there. They never go anywhere.”

  ***

  After stopping off at Baja Fresh for some tacos of my own, I drove to Arcadia, a small neighborhood tucked between Scottsdale and Phoenix proper. Although the area was a former orange orchard, developers had long since uprooted most of the trees. Now long ranch houses rambled over spacious lawns that soaked up the Valley’s precious store of water. Attractive enough, perhaps, if you overlooked the fact that Arcadia seemed to be trying to pretend it was the lush Midwest or East, anywhere other than Arizona.

  Gloriana’s sisters lived in a multi-gabled monstrosity that reminded me of Hawthorne’s sinister House of Seven Gables. On closer inspection, I realized the house’s apparent size was merely an illusion. For all its dormers and meandering shingled roof, it was little larger than the typical Arcadia spread.

  Unlike the other houses in the neighborhood, it appeared ill cared for. Several shingles had disappeared from the roof, and fading blue paint blistered the trim and door. Old-fashioned paper blinds, ragged at the edges, shuttered every window, hinting at gloom within. The garage leaned at a slight angle away from the house, making me worry about the safety of whatever it sheltered. Locusts hopped through the lawn, while two dying orange trees—remnants of the old orchard—drooped their branches in depression.

  I parked my Jeep at the curb and walked up the weed-strewn cobblestone path to the house. A paper note taped to the screen door greeted me. Scrawled in wobbly script were the words: NO SOLICITORS—THIS MEANS YOU!

  Underneath this dangled yet another piece of paper, a yellow flier uncomfortably reminiscent of one I’d recently seen. When I looked more carefully along the street, I could see the same yellow sheets fluttering from other doors. The National Alliance strikes again.

  I peeled the flier away and found a slightly different message from that left at Zach’s and Megan’s house. My, the Nazi scriveners had been busy.

  In big Gothic letters the flier proclaimed: MILLIONS OF NON-WHITE ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE POURING INTO THE COUNTRY RAPIDLY CHANGING THE PURE COMPLEXION OF OUR POPULATION AND THE QUALITY OF THE CIVILIZATION OUR ANCESTORS BUILT.

  Complexion? I wondered how ineffectual a person’s life could be when his only claim to fame was his complexion—something he’d been born with, not accomplished. Talk about your basic underachiever.

  As I had done at Zach’s house, I stuffed the flier into my carry-all. No point in troubling Gloriana’s bereaved sisters with the thing.

  I pressed the doorbell, but heard no sound. Out of order? I opened the unlocked screen and rapped on the edge of the heavy door with my knuckles. Nothing. I waited for a few seconds, then rapped again, louder. When no one answered, I counted to fifteen, then repeated the process with both hands.

  In response to my thundering, the door finally opened and two elderly women peeped out. They stared at me through oyster-colored eyes.

  The twins were identical, with a much stronger resemblance to Sandra than to Gloriana. Their dazzling white hair sat piled on their heads in identical top-knots, and faded twin house dresses hung loosely from their bony frames. But they were easy to tell apart thanks to the bruise one sister sported on her cheek.

  “Leila and Lavelle Alden-Taylor?” I asked. “Your nephew sent me.”

  They looked at each other briefly, then began to close the door.

  I hurriedly stuck my foot in the opening and flashed my private detective’s I.D. “I’m Lena Jones, a private investigator, and I want to ask you some questions about Gloriana.”

  “Who?” The twin with the bruise.

  I frowned. “Your older sister. Gloriana Alden-Taylor.”

  “Sorry, she passed away.” The other twin, with no glimmer of sadness.

  Had she purposefully misunderstood me? “Look, can I come in? The sooner we get this over with, the sooner I’ll go away.”

  They looked at each other again, nodded in unison, then stepped back from the door.

  I hurrie
d inside before they changed their minds. As soon as I was through the door, a fug of stale air enveloped me, and I wondered how long it had been since the windows had been opened. Looking around, I saw that unlike most Arizona homes—which tended to be filled with sunshine and soft, Southwestern colors—the interior of the twin’s house aped its exterior depression. Fusty gold-flocked wallpaper darkened the large living room, a darkness only intensified by the deep avocado carpeting. While the carpet’s color might have been decades out of date, it looked almost new due to the plastic runners that crisscrossed it. The same care had been taken to protect the furniture. Plastic slipcovers glimmered on matching settees and armchairs.

  I had seen homes like this before. Such hyper-protection usually meant one of two things: extreme frugality, or encroaching poverty. Which was true in their case?

  For all its careful preservation, the house wasn’t quite clean. Dust covered every object in the room.

  My assessment of the twins’ housekeeping skills hadn’t gone unnoticed. “Maid’s day off,” No Bruise cackled, as the two settled together onto the sofa. Uninvited, I lowered myself into a matching chair nearby. Plastic crackled around me.

  “Don’t you mean maid’s year off?” Bruise. “Perhaps if you were less demanding.…” When No Bruise threw her a dirty look, she fell silent.

  I didn’t care about their help problems. “As I said, I’m investigating Gloriana’s murder, and I hoped you’d be able help me fill in some blanks, Mrs. uh.…”

  “I’m Lavelle,” Bruise said, plucking a piece of lint from her frayed collar.

  “Sandra’s mother?”

  Lavelle flicked the lint onto a plastic runner. “Yes, I am, not that you’d know it from how seldom the girl visits.” The whine in her voice hinted at long practice.

  No Bruise sounded more assertive. “I’m Leila, and I have no children to break my heart, thank god. But Miss Jones, we really don’t see the need for your visit. According to our information, that handyman of hers has already been arrested.”

  We. Our. The usual speech pattern of twins.