Desert Vengeance

by Betty Webb

  I didn’t like asking the next question, but it was necessary. “Were you and Jacklyn in each other’s sight all the time?”

  She gave me a hard look. “Every single second.”

  It sounded good, except that they alibied each other, and as such, I took her story for what it was worth: nothing. “Glad to hear that, but you know, I was just wondering—do you think Debbie really believes Wycoff had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance?”

  “She’s always believed that, wouldn’t you? Back then, he lived only a couple of blocks from Debbie’s house, and Lindsey had to pass his place in order to get to school.”

  Nicole was right. I thought Wycoff had grabbed the kid, too. “I can understand her wanting to kill Wycoff, but why would she kill Norma?”

  Nicole’s flawless face twisted with contempt. “I would think that should be obvious. The woman had to know what her husband was like, right? To keep her own nest feathered, she covered up anything connecting him to the crime and alibied the hell out of him when the cops canvassed the neighborhood. Detective Eastman’s not stupid, so she would have figured that much out. As for the legalities, Norma’s murder may not have taken place on Eastman’s turf, but since Brian died up here under the auspices of the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, they’re claiming jurisdiction. The authorities in Pinal County, where the Wycoffs live now—ah, lived—are fighting with Yavapai County over prosecutorial rights as we speak, which adds to the boondoggle. Whichever side wins, Debbie’s in a world of hurt. There could even be two trials, one here, and another down there.”

  I looked at the Hopi Kachina dolls on the bookshelf. From their placement so close together, two of them appeared to be fighting, although one was armed with eagle feathers, the other a gourd. Not for nothing were the Hopi called the People of Peace.

  Nicole heaved a sigh. “Lena, I have less than a week left on my vacation, and then I have to get back to work. Whatever you can do, you’d better do it fast.”

  Considering everything, Debbie couldn’t have dug a bigger hole for herself with a backhoe. That’s what PIs were for; helping the hole-diggers.

  “Did the sheriff’s people search her studio?” I was thinking of the acetylene torch Debbie owned, which could easily have made those eight burn marks on Wycoff’s thigh.

  Nicole nodded. “Yep, with a proper search warrant. Believe you me, I checked every word. Professionally put together, professionally served. Sometimes I miss the days when these small sheriff’s offices didn’t know their asses from a hole in the ground.”

  I tore my eyes away from the Kachinas. “Did they find anything useful?”

  “Among other things, they took away her sculpting tools.” Seeing my expression, she added, “Yeah, her acetylene torch, too. Along with a collection of chisels and knives.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The Coyote Corral was even busier when I returned, but the bulk of the crowd had moved toward the dining area, and the night shift had arrived to help out. Shana remained a dervish behind the bar, while her father kept busy shuttling heaping trays of food from the kitchen. I added to his load with an order of cheese enchiladas and a Diet Coke. Hoping to catch her between drink orders, I took a seat at the bar. Shana was genial enough when she served my Coke, but after that confined her attentions to the other end of the bar and let a different bartender name-tagged LIZ refresh my drink. I didn’t blame Shana for giving me the cold shoulder. If a relative, however unpleasant, had been murdered on my property, making me suffer through a full-on police investigation, I’d feel leery about talking to me, too.

  As it turned out, eating at the bar had its advantages. While sipping slowly at my Coke, I overheard the conversation of the two men next to me. From the tenor of their voices they sounded fairly young but their faces were so weather-beaten they looked older. As I listened, I learned one of them had been at the Corral the night Wycoff had been killed.

  “Never saw Cyril get so wasted,” the skinny man with the red beard said. He had hit on me when I first sat down, but had taken my rejection with good nature. “Puked all over hisself and had to be carried home.”

  “Hell, I’d drink like that if I was married to Roseanne, too,” the burly one replied.

  Red Beard let that go. “Awful thing about Jeff’s trailer gettin’ swept away like that, isn’t it? Not enough left to be salvaged, ’cept some scrap metal.”

  During the next half hour and another Diet Coke, I learned more about Jeff Somebody’s trailer contents than I needed to know, but when Red Beard and Burley came back around to Cyril Somebody, I sharpened my ears.

  “Didn’t know Cyril was in here the night that guy was offed,” Burley said.

  “That’s because you was outta town visitin’ your daughter, or you’d a been in here drunk on your ass, too,” Red Beard responded. “Good thing he was too wrecked to walk, what with him feelin’ the way he does about them baby-rapers.”

  A silence stretched between them for a moment, counterpointed by the noise around us. Then Burley added, “Too bad about his little girl, wasn’t it? The one that got molested?”

  Red Beard grunted. “She’s livin’ with her mama now, some town in Indiana, I hear.”

  Another silence, then as if they couldn’t bear to talk about Cyril’s little girl anymore, they switched back to the trials and tribulations of Jeff, and the upcoming fund-raiser.

  Cyril.

  I committed the name to memory.

  The caffeine in the Coke was making me jittery, so I pushed my glass away and walked down to the other end of the bar where Shana was taking a breather. She didn’t seem happy at being cornered, but when I suggested a meeting at Casa Genovese the next day, she said in a resigned tone, “Might as well get it over with now. What with everything that’s happened, Mama’s a mess and I don’t want her bothered again.” She jerked her head toward the hallway. “Let’s go into the office. Liz can take care of the bar for a while, but you’ll have to make it quick. The night crowd’s gonna start rolling in soon.”

  The office was in back, halfway down the hall to the rear exit, and it looked like most bar offices everywhere. Banged-up oak desk littered with unfiled invoices and a ratty old computer, two cheap chairs, neon beer signs and a poster of the Budweiser Clydesdales decorating the unpainted cement block walls.

  Once we sat down, Shana again denied leaving the Corral at any time during the night Wycoff was murdered.

  “Look,” she said, a frown line marring her perfect features. “I’ll admit I detested my uncle, but I wouldn’t kill him. Threaten him, maybe, which I confess I did, but when Mom told me what’d been done to him…My God! If you think either me or my dad is capable of doing something like that, you’re flat-out nuts. The sheriff’s people have been all over us for the past couple of days, asking this, asking that, finding out everything about us right down to our shopping habits and movie preferences, and I’m just damned sick of being questioned. Frankly, I hope they never catch who did it.” She flashed me an angry look. “I don’t have to talk to you, you know.”

  “I know, Shana, and I appreciate you taking the time.”

  Mollified, she calmed somewhat. To keep her from returning to her volcanic state, I asked, “What about this Cyril guy, the one who got so drunk that night your uncle was killed? What do you know about him?”

  She started to answer, but just then the office phone rang. Muttering under her breath, Shana reached across the old oak desk and picked up the receiver. Listened. Shook her head.

  “Nope.”

  Shook her head again. “Nope.”

  She listened some more, then snapped, “Look, you’re going to have to quit calling me. Nope means nope, same as ‘Hell no, ain’t gonna happen.’ Get it?” She made a face at the big Budweiser poster hanging on the wall. I doubted it was the Clydesdales that she found disgusting.

  “Nope, no, nada, nein, n
yet, and fuck off, okay? I’m hanging up now.”

  As she lowered the receiver, I could still hear a man on the other end of the line talking. He sounded unhappy.

  “Sorry about that,” Shana said, resettling into her chair. “Gary. My ex. He wants us to get back together and won’t take no for an answer.”

  I wondered if she was enduring a Hank Gunnerston situation. “Bad divorce?”

  She gave me a cynical smile. “The old story, caught him cheating with the art director—we ran a small ad agency down in Phoenix, and the art director was his third, for Christ’s sake!—and I finally had enough even though I was only one semester from getting my bachelor’s in marketing. Dumb timing, yeah, but there you are. Anyway, I grabbed the kids and left, never went back except to pick up their things. Shoulda took the Mercedes while I was at it, but that’s me all over. Act first, think second. So yeah, I guess you could call it a bad divorce. I’m only working here until Gary finds a buyer for the agency and I get my share of the proceeds. Then I’ll see what I can do about partnering with another ad shop back in the Valley and move out of my parents’ house. Dad’s okay, but Mom…” She frowned. “Enough about that. Where were we when my soliloquy about Mr. Pants-Down interrupted our conversation?”

  I refrained from asking if the art directors had been male or female. “I was asking about Cyril.”

  “Oh, yeah. Cyril Sanders. He belongs in AA, not helping the Corral pay its light bill. If Dad thought it would do any good, he’d eighty-six the poor guy for life, but then he’d just drink some other place and they might not get him home alive like we always do.”

  “Something bad happened to his daughter, I hear.”

  She looked down at her lap, where her fingers were fussing with several turquoise and silver rings, all of Zuni design. “I don’t know anything about it firsthand, because I was still married and living down in the Valley at the time, but from what Dad said…” Then she looked back up at me, her eyes, so hard when she talked to her ex, had gone soft. “Some guy snatched Cyril’s kid on her way to school. Poor little thing was only five. He let her go afterwards, but being traumatized, she couldn’t give the cops much of a description. And Cyril…” She took a deep breath. “He was always a heavy drinker, but after that he could set a record for the number of tequila shots downed in a half hour.”

  Her story jogged my memory. “Wasn’t there a similar molestation incident up here, the one with Luke’s girlfriend? Carolee, I think her name is. Your dad told me her mom’s boyfriend molested her.”

  “Seth. A real creep, that’s for sure. But ‘similar’? Listen, whoever took Cyril’s kid was a stranger, and besides, that happened something like ten years ago, so I don’t see…” Light finally dawned. “Wait a minute. Do you believe Cyril could have…? No. If Cyril thought that Seth had anything to do with hurting his little girl, it would’ve been Seth who was killed and castrated, not my uncle.”

  I found it interesting that she didn’t deny Cyril was capable of murder.

  “Where does he live, this Cyril?”

  The hardness returned to her eyes. “Why can’t you leave him alone?”

  “Because Debbie Margules is sitting in the Yavapai County Jail, that’s why. And I want to get her out.”

  “Debbie? In jail? You can’t be serious!” Her face turned as white as the blaze down one of the Clydesdale’s face.

  “Apparently Debbie didn’t tell the authorities the truth about where she was when Norma Wycoff was killed. They got a warrant to look at her property and came away with certain, ah, items that could have been used in his death.” And emasculation.

  “But she would never…” Ashen now, Shana shook her head. “Debbie Margules is one of the kindest people I know. You’re wrong about her.”

  I watched her carefully as she reached over and picked up an invoice from the desk, pretended to study it for a moment. When she looked back at me, some color had returned to her face although her hand trembled. “That’s too bad. About Debbie getting arrested, I mean. No one in his right mind would believe she killed my uncle, let alone did the other things I hear were done to him. But some people will do anything to protect a child, won’t they?”

  She should know. Choosing my words carefully, I said, “I was surprised when I found out that your mother allowed your uncle to stay on the property, considering the fact that your children were there, too.”

  “Mother never did have any sense where he was concerned.” She looked down at the paper in her hands. Judging from the Clydesdales trotting across the top, it was for beer.

  I did some quick math in my head. Shana was in her late thirties and could possibly have come in contact with Wycoff before he went to prison.

  “Did you ever have any problems with your uncle?”

  “He lived in Scottsdale, we lived up here.”

  “Your mom never took you with her when she visited?”

  “No.” She wouldn’t look at me.

  “You were never alone with him?”

  “No, I said!”

  I found her denials interesting since Mario had told me the opposite—that Grace had taken the young Shana to visit Brian and Norma at least once. But it was time to back away. “Okay. When you were growing up, what did your mother tell you about him?”

  “Only that he went to prison for something he didn’t do.”

  “He pled guilty.”

  Finally meeting my eyes, she said, “Mom told me he was framed, that he’d been the perfect big brother to her. Protective. Honest. Upright. All that denial shit. Over the years she talked about how wonderful he was and wanted me to let him meet Bethany as soon as he got out, to let them get to know each other, that every little girl deserved to have a loving uncle. How’s that for a laugh?”

  I winced. “Why do you think she wanted that?”

  Addressing the Clydesdale poster on the wall, she said, “I’m a marketing major, not a shrink, but my guess is that Mom was still trying to convince herself he was innocent, that he never hurt any child. I think she wanted to use some hoped-for relationship with my daughter to prove that he was as normal as she wanted to believe, not the sicko he actually was. But I wasn’t having any of it. In fact, I told her that if she ever let him anywhere near Bethany that I’d never speak to her again.”

  Shana’s voice, which had started out strongly enough, was beginning to sound like it was coming through gravel, so I decided to give her a breather. “Pretty horses, aren’t they, those Clydesdales?”

  She blinked and looked away from the poster. “I guess. I’m just not into horses.”

  “I used to ride all the time but now I’m too busy.”

  “Too busy isn’t good.”

  “You should know. I’ve seen you tend bar.”

  She brightened. “You ought to see what it’s like in an ad agency. I’m an expert at busy.”

  “Is advertising anything like that old TV program, Mad Men?”

  “Worse.” She laughed again. “And the men aren’t as goodlooking.”

  Now that she had calmed, I eased back to the subject, careful to keep it away from her own possible history with Wycoff.

  “You’re very protective of your children, aren’t you?”

  “Every mother is.”

  But not yours, I wanted to say. “When you warned your mom about letting Bethany near your uncle, how’d she take it?”

  “Not well.”

  “Shana, you know I’ve interviewed her and your father, and I know that she would have taken Bethany out to the Winnebago if Luke hadn’t stepped in to stop her.”

  She looked down at her turquoise rings. “Yeah.” Then she looked back up. “Luke told me.”

  “How did you feel about that?”

  Staring at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world, she said, “How do you think I felt? Still feel?”

 
I started to reply, but she shook herself, and said, “Let’s forget about my mother. She needs help. Or medication. Or something. But it’s over now, thank God, and the creep got what he deserved. But like I said before, there’s no way Debbie or even Cyril was responsible. If I were you, I’d start looking at that redheaded lawyer who’s staying at Debbie’s place.”

  “You know Nicole Bertran?”

  “I’ve served her margaritas. Her and that other gal, Jacklyn, I think her name is. The biker chick always walking around with a pistol strapped to her hip.”

  The average person would consider a gun-toting biker chick more prone to commit acts of violence than an attorney, so the fact that Shana had singled out Nicole piqued my interest. “What makes you think Ms. Beltran might have been involved in your uncle’s murder?”

  “Just something I heard her say.”

  “Which was?”

  Brushing her hair back, she looked down at the Budweiser invoice again. “This is all wrong.”

  “That invoice or the conversation?”

  She actually laughed. “The invoice. But it’s wrong for you to suspect Debbie, too. That attorney, here’s what she said, and the guys who were sitting in the booth next to hers when she said it will back me up. She said that whoever took him out—my uncle being the ‘him’ in question—would be doing the world a favor.”

  I showed my skepticism with my own laugh. “That doesn’t exactly boil down to a death threat, Shana. Plenty of people have said the same thing about other pains-in-their-asses, but they never did anything about it.”

  Eyes narrowing, she leaned forward. “I doubt few of them added that this particular pain-in-the-ass should be castrated prior to being taken out.”

  There was little more I could get out of Shana after that, so I left Coyote Corral after first giving Red Beard and Burley two twenties as a donation toward replacing Jeff Somebody’s washed-away trailer. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I decided Shana had a point. I needed to take a better look at Nicole Bertran. Maybe Brian Wycoff had been in prison when her Candice was taken, but that didn’t mean she had no motive. Shana had been right about something else, too. Anyone who had ever had a loved one molested or kidnapped or killed would be good at bearing grudges. Kill-worthy grudges.