Desert Noir (9781615952236) (4 page)

I tried to think like a prosecutor. If Kobe'd been with Alison all evening, he could have hired someone to punch out Clarice's lights. Still, hiring a hit man to beat your wife to death sounded pretty lame, even for Kobe. Hit men ran to .22 caliber bullets strategically aimed above the ear, not battered faces and broken necks. They were professionals carrying out business contracts and usually held no particular animosity towards their victims. Hit men were dispassionate when carrying out their duties. If not, they became victims themselves.

By the time I drove the eight miles east from downtown Phoenix to the Scottsdale city limits and the Jeep shot between the two cave-pocked sandstone buttes which straddled McDowell Boulevard, I'd decided to find out more about Clarice herself. I needed to know if there was anyone besides her husband who hated her enough to beat her to death.

Jimmy no longer hovered over his beloved computer when I got back to the office. Instead, he was relaxing in a deep leather chair, sipping a tall glass of bright pink cactus juice.

“I'm in,” he announced with satisfaction. “Took me less than two hours. A child could do it.” 

Not this child. But as Jimmy launched into an explanation of how he'd hacked past Seriad's security and slashed his way through their encryption system, he did make it seem easy—if you shared his IQ of one-sixty-four. While he droned on I walked over to the small refrigerator in the corner and dumped several cubes of ice into a tall glass. In a nod to clean living, I filled it up with caffeine-free Diet Coke.

I waved away the rest of Jimmy's techno-babble as I felt the happy bubbles dance their way down my parched throat. A healthy burp followed. “You know I don't understand a word you're saying.”

“If you would just try…”

“I have tried and it makes my head hurt. Now, about that other matter we've been working on. What have you come up with?” 

The smug look left his face. “Lena, please understand that computers aren't God in a box. They have to have input. Garbage in, garbage out, right? But it's also true that nothing in, nothing out. You don't have the name of the woman who left you at the hospital. All you've got here is a date and a vague description. Hispanic, about twenty, long black hair in a braid, cotton print dress, sandals. That's it. I've hacked my way through every single hospital file and police report in the state for the two weeks surrounding that date but I just can't come up with anything. It's like you appeared out of thin air.” 

Or from out of state. After all, the woman told the receiving nurse she'd found me lying by the roadway.

“OK. For a minute, let's forget the woman who took me to the hospital. What about my mother? Where is she? Where did she come from? I think you should check whatever missing persons reports you can find, say, in Nevada or Utah, California, or even New Mexico. Or any state where a woman or little girl turned up missing.” 

A woman
. Why hadn't I asked Jimmy to find a
man
and a woman—two parents, not one? Was it because my subconscious knew something my conscious mind refused to face?

Jimmy gave me a sad look before he answered. “It was the early Sixties, Lena. A lot of young women, many of them with children, went missing around then. Young men, too.” 

“Then let's narrow the search to women who went missing within a thousand-mile radius of Arizona.” 

He smiled with perfectly straight teeth courtesy of his Mormon adoptive parents. “I'm already on it. Did you think I wouldn't be?” 

I blushed. Nobody had to convince Jimmy of the importance of identity. Although he knew who his biological parents were, we were both engaged in the same pursuit—chasing down the ghosts of memory. Who were we—really? Was Jimmy a Pima or a Mormon or a combination of both? Who was I? A victim of child abuse or the lone survivor of a family tragedy? As Jimmy had explained during our first meeting when I asked about his unusual tribal tattoo, “You can't know where you're going until you know where you've been.” 

The rest of the day was filled with the usual tasks. I followed up on another of Albert Grabel's referrals and secured a contract from a restaurant chain. The Golden Apple's profits had dipped severely in recent months and they had grown suspicious of a certain manager. The personnel director, hamstrung by state and federal employee's-rights law, could only give me the manager's name, birth date, and social security number. She told me to do my thing and not to let her know what that thing was. What she didn't know about couldn't be testified to in court.

Within three hours, Jimmy had generated a five-page computer print-out listing every address where the man ever lived, the names and histories of his three ex-wives, his ex-neighbors' telephone numbers, his educational background (he had not graduated from college as his application stated—he'd been expelled for cheating during his sophomore year), his entire work history (which included seven jobs he had not listed), a bankruptcy, overdue credit card balances amounting to more than twelve thousand dollars, two convictions in Florida for petty theft, and one conviction in South Carolina for embezzlement. Jimmy even discovered that the man had also amassed a considerable on-line gambling debt.

After a few phone calls to make certain the manager we were investigating was the man on the print-outs, I knew we'd found the source of the Golden Apple's problem. What they would do with this information was their business but past experience convinced me they wouldn't prosecute. They'd just fire him and write on his personnel record that he was “not eligible for re-hire.” The man would then move on to the next job and the next embezzlement.

I smiled at Jimmy. “Brilliant. Now let's wait until tomorrow before we call the Golden Apple. No point in letting them know how easy this is.” 

He smiled back. “A child could do it.”

“That's what you keep saying.”

The next job, an insurance investigation, would take a little longer. Copper State Insurance wanted to know if the woman claiming crippling injuries in a car accident was faking. A cursory glance at the print-out of her recent credit card statements hinted at just that. Of course, there might be a perfectly good explanation why a wheelchair-bound woman living alone might need rock-climbing gear. A gift for a boyfriend, maybe? I studied the print-out closer and discovered the shoes were a size six.

Jimmy went home just after five and I locked up and went upstairs to my overhead apartment, taking my .38 with me. Dusk was more than two hours away, but instead of closing my apartment door behind me, I raised my gun, flipped on the overheads, and slipped carefully through the two rooms, peering behind the shower curtain, into the kitchen pantry, and even into the bedroom's long, dark closet. Inspection finished, I went back to the front door, closed it firmly, and dead-bolted the lock. I'd learned to inspect my living quarters at the age of ten when I'd come home from school to what I thought was an empty house, only to discover that my foster father—my third in as many years—had hidden himself in my closet and I'd locked myself in with him.

I never made that mistake again.

Finally feeling safe, I nuked some ramen noodles and ate them while I watched the rape and pillage on CNN. It always comforted me to know that things were much worse elsewhere. By the time the sports segment came on, a black bar had appeared at the top and bottom of the thirteen-inch screen. Letterboxed football? I got off the couch and thumped the TV a good one, but the black remained. I switched it off. Now I needed new everything.

I looked around at my beige living room. When I say beige, I mean it. Courtesy of the former tenant—a tax preparer who left everything but his clothes—the carpet was beige, the sagging sofa was beige, the occasional chair was beige, the dinette was beige, and the walls were beige. Even the plastic faux pine coffee table was beige. The only spots of color in the entire apartment were the few items I'd brought with me—the Two Gray Hills Navajo rug hanging over the couch, a yellow-and-black striped clown kachina doll lounging on the window sill, and the black satin toss pillow with red embroidered lettering that said, “Welcome to the Philippines.” I'd stolen it from my fourth foster home because they were nice people and I wanted something to remember them by.

Or was that the fifth foster home? Over the years, I'd lost count.

The living room held several other items which differentiated it from a Motel 6—an old phonograph turntable and next to it, a rack of vintage blues albums I'd begun collecting in my early days at Arizona State University. I owned the usual, of course—Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf. But I'd also accumulated an admirable collection of the less famed blues masters—Lightnin' Slim, Jimmy Anderson, Lazy Lester, Whispering Smith, Elmore James, Big Joe Turner, Mississippi Fred McDowell.

I put some Leadbelly on the turntable. As he moaned “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” I wondered for the hundredth time why this music moved me so. I was white, had lived in Arizona all my remembered life, and I'd never traveled east of Texas. Yet the plaintive songs of these old Black men from the Mississippi Delta filled me with a familiar ache nothing else could. Had I heard this music as a child?

My ramen finished, I tossed the Styrofoam cup into the beige trash can. While Leadbelly wailed his suspicions, I went into the bedroom to change into a T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes. After strapping a pedometer around my ankle, I went back to the kitchen, filled an insulated bottle with ice water, and tucked the water and my .38 into the special fanny pack I kept on the counter. Then I let Leadbelly rest and went out the door.

At a jog slow enough to prevent further injury to my hip, I headed west on Main Street, then south on Sixty-Eighth Street, and west again on Thomas to Sixty-Fourth. By the time I crossed McDowell Road and headed past the shadows of the giant double buttes at the entrance to Papago Park, I was slippery with sweat but no longer cared. Serotonin hummed along my brain synapses, making me as high as a red-tailed hawk on a windy day.

Papago Park was a thousand-acre oasis of sage and sand surrounded by an urban ocean of concrete. Home to the Phoenix Zoo and the Desert Botanical Gardens, its natural beauty was somewhat blemished by the hiking and biking trails that criss-crossed over the site of the old Hohokam Indian village long since reduced to rubble. Over the years pot hunters—those thieves of time—had stolen everything of value and the only artifacts left were a petroglyph here, a crumbling wall there. The Hohokam were gone now and their descendants, the Pima, had been pushed onto the reservations to the east and south.

Now the park itself was being threatened by city planners who wanted to replace the desert with soccer fields and tungsten lighting. This bothered Scottsdale's Anglos more than it did the Pima, because the Pima had always believed impermanence was the way of the world.
Everything
changes, they claimed, even the gods.

After Elder Brother wrestled power away from Earth Doctor, the disgruntled creator of First World took refuge in the Underground. Some Pima believed the entrance to the Underground was located in a cave in the Superstition Mountains thirty miles to the east. But on evenings like this, when I thought I could hear the echo of a medicine man's wooden flute in the wind that whispered down the buttes, I sided with those Pima who believed the entrance to the Underworld was right here in the park.

And now the city fathers wanted to pave it shut.

Some day, the Pima warned, when the outrages against the land became too extreme to be born, Earth Doctor would re-emerge from his hiding place and wash away Second World like he did the first, with a mighty flood. The fact that we weren't already swimming never ceased to amaze me.

Even though the temperature in the park still topped one hundred degrees, today my usual route was congested with joggers. A southerly breeze carried discordant traffic noise up from Van Buren Boulevard. Annoyed, I broke away from the crowd and jogged past the big cave called Hole-in-the-Rock towards Hunt's Tomb, the gleaming pyramid that housed the body of a former Arizona governor. When I reached the base of the butte where the tomb sat, I stopped to catch my breath and gulp some water. Thirst quenched, I jogged across the through-park highway, then west up the slope to the giant twin buttes. Slowing to a walk, I picked my way across the loose rock as I climbed higher in elevation until I reached the old amphitheater nestled between the buttes. Utterly winded, I sat down on the stone steps and chugged some more water. Now I needed to climb higher. Paying no attention to the jagged rocks that tore at my hands, I scrambled to the top of an outcropping that rose above the amphitheater. As far as I was concerned, this was the best seat in the park.

The skyscrapers of Phoenix lay to my west, sizzling under the first intimations of a gaudy sunset. To the northeast lay the luxurious homes of Scottsdale. East of Scottsdale's city limits sprawled the corn and cotton fields and dusty rancherias of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Reservation. I squinted my eyes, but in the glimmering dusk, I couldn't quite see Jimmy's house, let alone the traditional dome-shaped limb-and-brush hut he'd built and where he sometimes communed with the old Pima gods. Beyond the rez rose the pale lavender peaks of the Superstition Mountains where, as legend claimed, the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine awaited rediscovery.