Closely Akin to Murder (18 page)

Trying not to chortle (and perhaps end up in hysterics), I knelt next to the trunk and examined it for an identifying label. When I found none, I shifted my attention to the suitcases. The last one had a small piece of paper held in place by tape. The writing had faded, but I was able to make out Fran's name and what I dearly hoped was a home address: Rt. 3, Box 77, Phoenix.

“A hot tub might do much to ease Sister Jerome's arthritis,” said a baritone voice at the top of the stairs.

I decided not to congratulate myself on the breadth of my resourcefulness just yet. “I'll keep that in mind,” I replied.

“You may leave Father Filicales's cassock by the door of the church.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“With a donation for the indigent of the parish.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The floor creaked as she left, and only then did I enjoy the luxury of a deep breath. Being accused of murder in Acapulco didn't begin to compare to being caught red-handed (as well as red-faced) in a cloistered convent.

Fran Pickett had been one tough cookie to defy the Reverend Mother, I thought as I sharted up the stairs.

After breakfast, I called the main
post office and asked for the location of Route 3, Box 77. I was advised that the route consisted of Old Madrid Road and the identity of the boxholder was none of my business. I debated whether or not to pack and check out of the hotel. If the road was now lined with convenience stores and parking lots, I'd have no choice but to head for the airport to catch the next flight back to Farberville.

I left my suitcase in the room as a gesture of optimism. After all, I had tracked down the address, which at one time had seemed a task of Herculean magnitude. I'd been humiliated in the process, but I'd survived with a shred or two of dignity left intact—and the Sisters of the Holy Shrine of San Jacinto were fifty dollars richer.

According to my map, Old Madrid Road originated in the south part of Phoenix and at one time might have been the primary route to Tucson. I plotted my course and in less than half an hour spotted the pertinent street sign.

Old Madrid Road didn't dally inside the city limits.
Within minutes, I was squinting at numbers on mailboxes in front of isolated houses. It was easy to understand why Fran had been so desperate to live with her father in Beverly Hills and hang out with mall rats rather than kangaroo rats.

I was running out of mailboxes when I saw a billboard heralding the proximity of the Tricky M Ranchettes. The half-acre “ranchettes” were available for a low down payment and affordable monthly payments. Friendly agents were awaiting my family's arrival with complimentary coffee, tea, and lemonade. No appointment necessary.

I drove through a gate made of railroad ties adorned with horseshoes and antique oddments. The street was as broad as a boulevard, but not clogged with mothers in station wagons and children on bicycles. I quickly deduced this was due to the scarcity of houses; the sole completed one didn't appear to be inhabited. A dozen others were in varying stages of construction, from skeletal frames to half-completed exteriors. There were no workmen or trucks, however, in what amounted to a suburban ghost town.

I followed signs purporting to lead the way to the office, where I was most likely to encounter a friendly agent, a complimentary cup of coffee, and perhaps a clue as to the location of Fran Pickett's home of thirty years ago.

Several streets later, I saw a battered silver trailer under the only tree I'd seen thus far. The tree was not comparable to the stately elms commonplace on the Farber College campus, but it provided a small amount of shade. Beyond the trailer was a lunar landscape of rocks and jutting hills. High above me, buzzards circled, monitoring that which would be lunch when nicely ripened.

As I parked, a pickup truck whipped in beside me in a cloud of dark, odoriferous exhaust fumes. The truck looked as though it had been painted to blend in with the desert behind it, but a closer scrutiny indicated that time and nature were the culprits. The gun rack in the rear window was well equipped with what I supposed were shotguns or rifles.

The woman who got out of the driver's side had not fared much better than her vehicle. She had cropped gray hair and a face so heavily wrinkled and spotted that it resembled a piece of dried fruit. Her tight jeans emphasized her ample rump, and her worn boots and dusty leather hat were not frivolous fashion accessories. I expected to hear the theme song from
Bonanza
as she hurried around the hood of the car.

“Welcome to the Tricky M,” she said as she yanked open my door. “I was over at the barn trying to get that lazy son of a bitch to do some work when I saw your car. As I'm sure you noticed, we've temporarily halted construction, but by a year from now, we'll be our own little community of nearly four hundred families on a thousand acres of God's country.” She bent down to peer into the rental car. “You by yourself?”

“Yes, and I'm not a prospective buyer.”

“That's what they all say,” she said, stepping back to allow me to get out of the car. “I've been selling real estate for more than twenty years, and my motto's always been, ‘Buyers are liars.' I worked once with a woman who insisted she needed five thousand square feet, a separate apartment for her mother-in-law, and a pool.” She took my arm and propelled me toward the trailer. “Well, I spent months showing her houses all over Phoenix and Scottsdale. One didn't have adequate closets, another was too close to a busy street, and so forth. Then
she turned around and bought a two-bedroom condo from another agent. I sent her a decapitated jackrabbit for a housewarming present.”

The interior of the trailer was crowded with two desks and numerous straightbacked chairs. The walls were covered with depictions of houses surrounded by verdant grass, flowers, and patio furniture. A fan on a filing cabinet rustled loose papers and rolled-up blueprints. Ashtrays overflowed on each desk, and a wastebasket had reached its capacity at some point in the distant past. Black gunk coated the bottom of the glass coffeepot. As far as I could tell, there were no friendly agents lurking in the corner.

“I don't believe I caught your name,” she continued. “Mine's Trixie. My partner's name is Maisie, so we stuck 'em together and came up with Tricky M.”

“I'm Claire,” I said. “I'm trying to locate an address, but haven't had any luck. Box seventy-seven is all I know.”

“Seventy-seven,” she said, sitting behind one of the desks and resting her boots on the rim of the wastebasket. She took out a charcoal brown cigarette and lit it. “That'd be out this way, but I'm not sure where it is. Who're you looking for, Claire?”

“Part of the problem is I don't know the last name,” I admitted. “A married couple, probably close to seventy years old, who lived here thirty years ago. The woman's first name was Bea. They had only one child, a girl named Franchesca Pickett. She was from the woman's first marriage and kept her father's surname. She'd be in her late forties.”

Trixie blew a ribbon of smoke at the ceiling. “Nobody comes to mind. The Calvos are that old, but the wife's name is Amalia and they had a whole passel of
kids. So did Maggie and Joe Bob Maron, come to think of it. He used to brag that he could put together a whole baseball team. The widow in the last house you passed never had any children. Those are about the only folks who've been living here that long. The banks turned ugly some years back and foreclosed on a lot of folks' property. There were some politicians behind it who'd heard rumors that the interstate to Tucson was going through here and wanted to buy up the land for bedroom communities. Never happened, in case you didn't notice.”

“Is that why you began this development?” I asked.

“Real estate agents hear rumors, too. Maisie and I owned the land, so we decided to go ahead and give it a shot. We got off to a good start, putting in the streets and utilities, completing a model home, but then the savings and loan where we'd arranged our financing failed. The auditors from the government descended like a pack of mangy wolves. There are more liens filed against us than there are crooks in the state legislature. We haven't called it quits, though; we sank every dollar we had in the Tricky M and the only way we're going to get back our investment is to borrow enough to continue the project. Maisie's at a bank right now, trying to arrange something.”

“Was there a house on the property when you bought it?” I asked.

She frowned. “Yeah, but nobody'd lived in it for years and it wasn't worth saving. The first thing we did after we closed the deal was to burn it down. I brought the marshmallows and Maisie brought the champagne. I would have preferred beer, myself. We're not your classic peas in a pod, Maisie and me.”

“Do you recall the owner's name?”

Trixie's frown deepened as she stared over my head. “An old guy, name of Rogers Cooper, who was real touchy if you called him Roger. Seems he was named after his father
and
his godfather. He'd owned the property for years, always dreaming of running cattle so he could play cowboy. Only obstacle was a lack of water. He was delighted to accept our offer. I saw him a couple of years back, driving a Mercedes and wearing a fancy white hat.”

“Rogers Cooper,” I said as I took out my notebook and wrote down the name. “I guess I'll stop at the houses along the road and see if anyone remembers the family, then try to find this man in Phoenix.”

She jabbed out her cigarette, stood up, and held out her hand. “Good luck, Claire,” she said as she squeezed my hand with enough pressure to make my knuckles pop. “If you ever decide to retire to Arizona, just give me a call and we'll have you in your own ranchette in no time. You can swim at the community pool, play pinochle in the recreation center, take classes in watercolor painting and macrame, and enjoy the companionship of—”

“Goodbye, Trixie,” I said, then fled to the car before she could pull out a contract and a pen. As I drove away, I saw her truck bouncing down a dirt road behind the trailer. Hoping the gentleman in the barn was busily doing whatever one did in barns (nothing I cared to envision), I found my way back to the gate and stopped to contemplate what I'd learned.

Rogers Cooper could have been Fran's stepfather. Trixie had made no reference to a Mrs. Cooper, which was discouraging in that I was fairly sure wives had to sign documents when property was sold. It was possible that Fran had remained in contact with Cooper and
he would know of her whereabouts. There might be a lot of Coopers in the telephone directory, but no more than one with such a peculiar first name.

The woman in the first house peered at me through a dirt-encrusted screen while I explained why I'd knocked on her door. In the background, I could hear the typically earnest conversation of soap opera characters discussing the ramifications of someone else's infidelity.

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “I never knew the names of anyone out here. Didn't care, neither.”

The door closed in my face. No one was home at the next, and the third had been vacant for some time. The few people I spoke to claimed ignorance of Rogers Cooper or family with a daughter named Fran. Eventually, I arrived back in Phoenix and drove to the hotel.

Rogers Cooper was not in the telephone directory, and information did not have him listed. Those hiding under an initial proved to be Rene and Roseanne. It didn't much matter, I told myself as I closed the directory. The Rogers Cooper connection was as flimsy as Caron's excuse for the melange of dirty dishes under her bed. I'd merely speculated that he was the stepfather; he could have bought the property from Bea and her husband anytime in the last three decades.

But the idea of leaving without having spoken to him annoyed me. If I was finally forced to concede defeat, I wanted to be able to say I'd followed every lead, no matter how implausible. Wishing I'd read more private eye fiction, I took out all my notes and thumbed through them. When I arrived at the page Ronnie had written about Fran, I reread it carefully for some tiny clue I'd overlooked thus far—although I'd pretty well memorized it: petite, dramatic features,
long hair, some Spanish, living on a ranch with her mother and stepfather when not in the grasp of the Sisters of the Holy Swine.

My eyes returned to the description of the stepfather. “Retired army officer and an alcoholic,” I read aloud, then put down the page and tried to figure out how to utilize the scanty information. If he was alive, he still fit the first category and was apt to fit the second, too. Alcoholics Anonymous was hardly the sort of organization to offer the names and addresses of its members. A veterans' group, on the other hand, had no reason to keep secret its roster.

I opened the telephone directory and found a number for the local chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars. Fran's stepfather (whether Rogers Cooper or someone else) would have been of an age to have participated in World War II, the Korean War, or even the early, unofficial years of the Vietnam War. All were distinctly foreign.

After concocting a charmingly simplistic lie, I took a deep breath and dialed the number. The man's voice that answered was gruff and exasperated, as if I'd dragged him out of a hot tub where he'd been entertaining naked women. In his dreams, anyway.

“Is this the VFW?” I asked.

“Ain't the NCAA.”

Rather than play games, I said, “I'm trying to find a dear old friend who lives in Phoenix. He's not in the telephone directory, but he may be a member of your organization. I was hoping you could—”

“What's his name?”

“Rogers Cooper.”

There was a pause. “Don't know him, but the name's familiar. Hold on.”

I held my breath as well as the receiver as I grabbed my notebook and a pencil. Rogers Cooper wasn't about to walk into the hotel room, but he was much closer than he'd been ten minutes earlier.