Desert City Diva

by Corey Lynn Fayman

  ‘Kinnie hates me because I was Daddy Joe’s little pet. His little alien with the curly gold locks. Kinnie had it tough after her mama died. She was only ten or eleven when it happened. Daddy Joe expected her to take care of the house, cooking and doing the chores. And she had to look after me, of course, when Daddy Joe was out working. When he got home, he’d sit with me on his knee after dinner, in his office, while Kinnie was in the kitchen washing dishes and stuff.’

  ‘Uh huh,’ said Rolly.

  ‘Not much in the way of child care on the rez back then. Probably still isn’t. We went to school sometimes, but it was kinda sporadic, our education.’

  ‘So you think Daddy Joe only talked about Aunt Betty with you? He didn’t show Kinnie the picture?’

  ‘Not like he did me. That’s what I’m saying. Maybe she saw it a couple of times, but mostly it was me. Daddy Joe treated Kinnie like she was the maid or something. That’s why she hates me.’

  ‘That’s why you left?’

  ‘Kinnie left before me. She was older, though. After she left Daddy Joe had me doing the chores. I couldn’t take it anymore. That’s why I skedaddled. Daddy Joe’s a mean bastard.’

  ‘How old were you when you left?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  ‘Kinnie told me Daddy Joe was going to adopt you, so you could be part of the tribe, but you ran away before he could do it.’

  ‘I never heard anything about that. Wouldn’t have made a difference.’

  ‘She says you would’ve been able to get some of the casino money if you hadn’t left.’

  ‘I don’t care about that. I had to get out.’

  Rolly considered what Macy had told him. It sounded truthful, lacking the usual embellishments. Daddy Joe had told stories, planted memories of Aunt Betty. But why? Daddy Joe was the only person who could tell them, for sure. Daddy Joe was still missing. He might be dead.

  ‘Why’d you come back here?’ said Rolly. ‘I mean, today? Why’d you come back to the house?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘Macy, c’mon …’

  ‘It was something No Pants told me. Kinda freaked me out. Especially after I saw him there, floating up dead. When I was with him before, when we went to Coachella that time, he would get these weird phone calls. It was just these tones, played over and over.’

  ‘Like a modem or fax machine, that kind of thing?’

  ‘That’s what I thought too, like it was one of those robo-dial things. But when Bob and I took you to the hospital and we were sitting in the waiting room, I got a call too. Beep, beep, beep, over and over again. I disconnected the guy but he called back. Again and again. I stopped answering, but then I remembered about Randy No Pants, how he kept getting those calls. I had to talk to him, find out what he wanted to tell me. That’s why I left.’

  ‘OK, but why did you come here, to the reservation?’

  ‘I was freaking out after seeing him dead. And then I thought about Daddy Joe, how he went missing, like maybe he was dead too. Two people I know in one week. It freaked me out. I started thinking maybe there’s a psycho killer out there who’s calling people with this beeper thing as a warning. Like you’re next on the list.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s a person who’s calling, not a computer?’

  ‘You can hear stuff in the background, like those sales calls you get where they don’t pick up right away and you hear the people talking in the room. Except I think it’s outside somewhere.’

  ‘Do they say anything?’

  ‘No. Nobody says anything. You just kind of get this sense that there’s somebody there and then these beeps start going off. I got some on my voicemail. I can play ’em for you if Kinnie ever gives me my phone back.’

  ‘Did you tell Kinnie about this?’

  ‘Sure, I told her. Except for the part about Randy. But I guess you told her about that. I told her she needed to go back and listen to what was on Daddy Joe’s phone machine.’

  ‘That’s why you went to the house?’

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Daddy Joe’s phone machine. When you and I went there the first time, it was blinking like crazy. What if Daddy Joe got those calls too?’

  ‘Did he?’

  Macy nodded. ‘They were on there. The same beeps.’

  Rolly stood up and walked over to her. He reached through the grate, put his hand on her shoulder. She reached up and held it there.

  ‘I’m scared, Waters,’ she said. ‘I’m freakin’ terrified.’

  NINETEEN

  The Memorial

  Kinnie Harper strode into the holding area. She stopped in front of Rolly’s cell.

  ‘They found Daddy Joe’s car,’ she said.

  ‘Where was it?’ said Rolly.

  ‘Over near In-Ko-Pah,’ said Kinnie.

  Kinnie pulled a key from her belt and opened the door to Rolly’s cell. ‘Your lawyer called,’ she said. ‘I told him I’d let you go if you helped me out with something.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘We need to go someplace. You tell me what you know when you see it. It’ll save your lawyer having to come out here and post bail.’

  ‘Max said it was OK for me to do this?’

  ‘It’s up to you. Your choice. That’s what he said.’

  ‘Can I call him?’

  ‘Sure. If you want.’

  Rolly stood up and walked out of his cell.

  ‘What about me?’ said Macy as they walked past her cell. Kinnie stopped and gave Macy the evil eye.

  ‘You got a lawyer?’ she said.

  ‘Did you listen to those messages on Daddy Joe’s phone machine – those beeps?’

  ‘Yeah. I heard ’em. You think that means somebody wants to kill you?’

  ‘Yes. It’s just like I told you. Somebody’s after me.’

  ‘In that case, the safest place for you is right here.’

  ‘You’re such a bitch, Kinnie. Did you talk to Vera at the restaurant yet?’

  ‘Yeah. I talked to her.’

  ‘So you know Daddy Joe was there. You know I got an alibi.’

  ‘I still got you on breaking and entering.’

  ‘Come on, Kinnie. It’s my house as much as it’s anybody’s.’

  ‘You had no right to be in there, not without me or Daddy Joe letting you in.’

  ‘Waters, can’t you do something? You know I’m right.’

  Rolly looked at Macy. He didn’t say anything. He followed Kinnie into the office. She motioned to a chair across from her desk. Rolly sat down.

  ‘If you’re wondering, I’m just keeping her until the Imperial County Sheriff shows up.’

  ‘They don’t really think she killed that guy, do they?’

  ‘I don’t care what they think. They want me to keep her here.’

  Kinnie picked up a photograph from on top of her desk and passed it to Rolly.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  ‘I found it in Daddy Joe’s files,’ she said. ‘From the UVTs crime scene.’

  Rolly looked at the photo. It was a room in a house. There were bodies on the floor of the room, so close to each other they looked like they’d been stacked.

  ‘You notice anything?’ said Kinnie.

  Rolly looked at the photo again. He looked past the bodies at the walls of the room, into the corners. He found it.

  ‘There’s a whole row of them,’ he said. ‘Diddley bows.’

  ‘Here’s something else,’ said Kinnie, pushing a yellow sheet across the desk. It was a receipt from the San Diego Sheriff’s office. Rolly had one like it in his files back home, from the confiscated property auction the sheriff ran twice a year. He’d bought a black Paul Reed Smith guitar there once for two hundred bucks. Daddy Joe had also purchased something at the auction, almost fifteen years ago. The receipt listed it as a homemade one-string guitar.

  Kinnie took the documents from Rolly and put them back in the folder. She stood up. ‘There’s something else I want you to see,’ s
he said. ‘We gotta take the truck.’

  ‘What about Macy?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘You aren’t just going to leave her here, are you?’

  ‘She’ll be OK. She’s got Bert.’

  ‘Who’s Bert?’

  ‘The guy in cell one. Bert’s pretty friendly once he’s slept things off. She’ll remember him from high school.’

  ‘You’re not concerned about what she said?’

  ‘You really buy that stuff? That somebody wants to kill her?’

  ‘Daddy Joe’s missing. And this No Pants guy is dead. You don’t think those phone calls are connected?’

  Kinnie looked at Rolly a moment, as if to make sure he was serious. She turned her head, put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. A door in back corner of the office opened. A man stuck his head out.

  ‘Yeah, boss?’ he said.

  ‘Manny, I’m gonna be out a little while. You see anybody suspicious hanging around, you go on lockdown and radio me right away.’

  ‘Suspicious, like how?’

  ‘Oh, you know, trained assassins, death squads, anything like that.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mr Waters here thinks we got a high-security risk in back.’

  ‘Wow. OK.’

  ‘You remember Macy, right?’

  ‘Your little sister, with the eyes?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s her in the tank. Opposite Bert.’

  ‘You got your sister in the tank?’

  ‘Just keeping her safe from herself. Keep an eye on things, will you?’

  ‘Sure, boss.’

  Kinnie turned back to Rolly and raised her eyebrows to confirm his approval. He nodded, raised himself up on his crutches and followed her out of the office. They climbed into Kinnie’s truck.

  ‘Where are we going?’ said Rolly.

  ‘Over to Beatrice House,’ said Kinnie. She pulled out onto the main road.

  ‘Macy said you don’t have jurisdiction off the reservation,’ said Rolly.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Kinnie. ‘Doesn’t mean I can’t take you there and show you something.’ She adjusted the air conditioning and picked up speed. Rolly tugged on his ear and stared out the window. Dry blades of grass passed in battered clumps by the side of the road, quivering in the wind like frayed nerve ends of the cracked earth.

  ‘That place where they found Daddy Joe’s car,’ said Rolly, ‘that’s the same exit you take for the Desert View Tower, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I was out there the other night,’ he said. ‘After our gig at the casino.’

  ‘I had a feeling that might’ve been you,’ Kinnie said. ‘I talked to the owners.’

  ‘What did they tell you?’

  ‘Said a couple of crazy musicians showed up yesterday morning, with this story about some guy in a rocket ship who gave them the runaround, took some fuses out of their truck. They would have thought you were high, except somebody dropped the fuses through their mail slot that same morning.’

  Rolly nodded. ‘What kind of car does Daddy Joe drive?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s just an old Toyota.’

  ‘Blue?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We saw a blue car that morning. I think it was a Toyota. It pulled out on to the road, when we were standing around, trying to figure out what to do. We tried to flag the guy down, but he drove away.’

  ‘You get a look at the driver?’

  ‘Not enough to tell anything. He was too far away.’

  ‘That’s the back road,’ said Kinnie. ‘To get down to the gold mine.’

  They rounded a curve in the road. The casino came into view. Rolly opened the window and rested his arm on the frame. The truck interior felt oppressive. He needed to feel the outside air on his skin, in his eyes. They passed the casino and left the reservation. Kinnie turned in at the sign for Beatrice House. She stopped at the gate and entered some numbers in a keypad attached to a post by the side of the road. The gate opened. Kinnie drove through it and over the hill.

  A white wood fence ran along the road as they descended to the mesa. A pretty white house sat behind the fence. Another gate blocked the driveway to the house.

  ‘That’s Beatrice House,’ said Kinnie. ‘The people that bought the place, they tore down the old one, the one where the UVTs died. They built this place, brand new for the girls. It’s for unwed teens, ones that got pregnant and don’t have family, on their own.’

  They passed the house and continued down the mesa.

  ‘You see across the canyon there? That’s Daddy Joe’s house.’

  Rolly looked across the canyon and spotted the house. The Tioga was still parked there. Kinnie continued down the road to the narrow end of the mesa. She pulled up next to a circle of concrete. Two black iron benches had been set inside the circle, facing a granite tablet about four feet high. They climbed out of the truck.

  ‘I remember the UVTs being out here on the mesa,’ said Kinnie. ‘I could see ’em from our house. Every morning and every night. I’m not sure what kind of music you’d call it, but you could hear it over to our place. They’d line up in pairs and start banging away on those diddley bopper things.’

  ‘Diddley bows,’ said Rolly. ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘I thought you might want to read the names,’ said Kinnie, indicating the marble slab.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just read the names.’

  Rolly crouched down by the monument, read through the names. He found one of interest.

  ‘Wanda Ozzie,’ he said. ‘Is she related?’

  ‘Eric Ozzie’s mother,’ said Kinnie. ‘I looked it up in Daddy Joe’s files, after Ozzie called him.’

  Rolly looked up at Kinnie. She nodded and put her hands on her hips.

  ‘I got this weird flashback,’ she said. ‘When I heard Ozzie’s voice on the answering machine, I remembered this time at the house, when I was a kid. It was night. Some guy came over, sat with Daddy Joe in the living room. He was a black guy. I was pretty young, you know. You don’t see many black people out here, living on the rez. Only on TV.’

  ‘You think it was Ozzie?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it until a coupla days ago, after I heard the message. Daddy Joe had people showing up all the time, all hours of night. Part of being a cop.’

  ‘Is that what you wanted to show me?’

  ‘There’s some other names, too,’ Kinnie said. ‘The ones after Ozzie.’

  Rolly read the names. Tom Parker. Gladys Parker. He looked up at Kinnie.

  ‘Randy Parker’s parents,’ she said. ‘They died here too. He was only a little kid. I think that’s why he visits with Daddy Joe sometimes. Because of his parents. They’re both kinda obsessed.’

  ‘What do they talk about?’

  ‘Where the gold went, I think. People were always asking Daddy Joe about that, thinking he had something to do with it – the gold that was missing. Some people straight out thought he stole it.’

  ‘Why would they think that?’

  ‘The amount they found didn’t add up, you know. That was pulled from the bank accounts. It came out in the trial. That Gibbons guy was taking money out, converting the cash into gold. He said it was for the aliens or something. They took that lady to court. Some of the relatives sued her. She ended up having to sell the place to settle with them.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Dorothy Coasters. She owned the place – all this land. She got some kind of immunity for testifying against Gibbons. Didn’t protect her in the civil court, though. She took people’s money. They gave it to her when they joined the UVTs. That’s why they sued her. She said she didn’t know where the money was, that Gibbons or somebody took it.’

  Rolly closed his eyes. He felt exhausted, overwhelmed with the information. There was too much to take in, about Ozzie and Randy Parker, the whole UVT disaster. It was like a huge tangle of tumbleweeds had piled up in one corner of his brain. And
Macy was caught in the tumbleweeds. Daddy Joe, too. Maybe Kinnie. And the bird-call man. They all needed to find a way out.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Kinnie.

  ‘What’s that?’ Rolly asked.

  ‘Check out the other side of the slab. The sheriff called me about it this morning.’

  Rolly lifted himself up on his crutches. He walked around to the back. A word had been spray-painted on the reverse side of the granite slab, sprayed across the date etched in the stone.

  TEOTWAYKI.

  The damn word was everywhere.

  TWENTY

  The Return

  An Imperial County Sheriff’s car was parked outside the tribal police station when Kinnie and Rolly returned. They found the detective sitting inside, nursing a cup of coffee and shooting the breeze with Officer Manny. Kinnie let Macy out of her cell and listened in while the detective interviewed both Macy and Rolly. There’d been no further identification of the man who died in the hot springs other than the colorful moniker he’d gone by in Slab City. Everyone knew No Pants was dead. No one knew who he was.

  The interview took twenty minutes. Afterwards, Kinnie followed the detective out to his car and re-entered the office five minutes later. Rolly and Macy signed some release papers, then she drove them out to Daddy Joe’s house. She made sure they both got in the Tioga and followed them down the road until they’d left the reservation. Rolly’s gimpy leg made it difficult for him to drive, so Macy took the wheel. Her mood seemed to lift as they headed back to the city, back where she could be DJ Macy again, no longer the insubordinate, outcast little sister. Back in the city, she wasn’t the only alien. There were plenty of them, with weird haircuts and tattoos.

  ‘So Waters, whatta’ ya think now?’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Macy Starr. You planning to dump me? Get rid of this crazy, scheming bitch?’

  ‘I’m not going to dump you.’

  ‘Professionally or personally?’

  ‘Neither.’

  ‘You think we’ll have sex again?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Yeah. Me neither. We might never be able to live up to last night. Situational sex. That’s my thing, I think. You think you’ll ever settle down with somebody?’