Desert Lost (9781615952229) (11 page)

Jonah furrowed his blond eyebrows and his bloodshot eyes rolled up to the right, an indication he was either trying to remember or tell a lie. A few seconds later, while the weeping black woman and her baby were being ushered out by a sympathetic-looking female guard, he said, “Guy took me.”

“A man named Guy? Or just some guy?”

“Some guy I picked up, fat little creep. Told him I'd do him free for the ride.” He laughed. “Man, he couldn't drive fast enough. Thought he'd kill us both!”

Mystery number one cleared up. “Then what?”

More furrowing and eye-rolling. “I think…I think I just waited around. Yeah. That's what I did. It wasn't raining in Scottsdale. Is it always dry over there?”

“Prophet Joe ordained it. What were you waiting for?”

“To see her.”

“Your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“How'd you find out where your mother was living?”

“'Cause I lived there with her. Before, that is.”

Judging from Jonah's current condition, he'd been ejected from Prophet Shupe's group at least several months back, perhaps as early as the morning of his eighteenth birthday. This meant that the compound had been there longer than I'd originally believed. How had that happened without someone noticing?

“You mean you waited for your mother to come out of the house? Or out of the compound itself?”

“I don't understand.”

“What do you call the place in Scottsdale where your mother lived?”

“Ho's.”

Somehow I managed not to laugh.
Ho's?
As in ‘whores'
? Probably not. “Are those initials?”

“Yeah, for Heaven's Obedient Servants.” His shoulders gave another big twitch, or maybe it was a shrug. “I hung around near the gate for a couple a hours. Well, it worked out like I planned, 'cause she musta seen me from the house. Came sneaking out, ordering me to go away.”

Planned
, not a good word to use in jail, where every visit was videotaped and recorded. If Jonah had planned his mother's murder, he'd be indicted for Homicide One. The kid was a mess, but even the cynical ex-cop in me didn't see
killer
in his eyes, just misery, although he was trying desperately to hide it by acting tough. Even his contemptuous treatment of me didn't ring true.

“What did you expect to accomplish by going to see her?”

“I wanted her to intercede for me, to talk Brother Ezra into letting me stay there.”

“Against the Prophet's orders?”

He shrugged.

It would be a cold day in hell when Ezra would allow a discarded male back into the compound. Once the Prophet banned a boy, he was forever banned, and nothing anyone could say—especially not a lowly woman—would make any difference. Celeste would have known that, too. But would she, urged on by mother love, have tried anyway?

This was my chance to clear something up. “Is Brother Ezra her new husband?”

“She got reassigned to him, yeah. Long time before we moved down here.”

“How long?”

“Ten years, twelve? I can't remember exactly. What difference does it make?”

I didn't know yet, so I didn't answer. “Back to that conversation. After you asked her, did your mother promise to talk to Ezra?”

He ducked his head, but not before I saw a tear roll down his ruined face. “She just told me to go home. When I told her I d-d-didn't have one, she said ‘That's your problem.' And then…and then she walked away. I, I think I screamed then. It made her turn around and…and come toward me. I didn't know what she was going to do, but I didn't like the look on her face, she looked real
mad
, so I…I pushed her away. Then…then she stumbled. And she fell down.”

I couldn't see his face, but a tear splashed onto the table between us.

“That's it? She fell down?”

His head bobbed. “Hit her head on the sidewalk.”

Jonah's story sounded more and more worrisome. I'd seen Celeste's wounds myself and knew they hadn't been put there by a mere fall. The woman had been struck about the head several times with a piece of wood hard enough to destroy her ear, hard enough and often enough to create a wide depression on the left side of her temple. The medical examiner thought the weapon might have been a two-by-four, not some stray rock lying on the sidewalk; he'd found splinters.

I told Jonah so, but he was still convinced he'd dealt the death blow. His shoulders heaved, a very different movement than his earlier withdrawal twitches. For all his bluster, this was a young man who loved his mother. I wanted to put my arms around him, comfort him, but the gesture would get me yanked out of the visiting room faster than if I'd shouted, “I have a bomb!”

“Listen to me, Jonah. You say that after you shoved her, she fell down and hit her head. Did you pick something up and hit her again?”

“Naw. I…I told her I was sorry.”

“And?”

“Soon as she got up, she said nasty things. Then she slapped me.”

I stiffened, an emotional tell you're never supposed to allow while interviewing a suspect. Fortunately, with his head drooped, he didn't notice. “So she didn't die right then, is that it?”

“Nah. She musta died later. After she went back into the compound.”

“
She went back into the compound
? Did you tell the cops that?”

He shrugged. “I can't remember what I told them.”

“Were you using when they interviewed you?”

“I guess so, since I usually am.”

Which meant he had the typical addict's memory problems, remembering bits and pieces of an event, but never the whole. As for context, forget it. Addicts never really knew why they did anything, only that they had. Vic told me that Jonah had been interviewed by Sylvie Perrins and Bob Grossman. From personal experience, I trusted their judgment. Could they have slipped up? Jonah couldn't possibly have given them a credible confession, and a good defense attorney would realize that.

“Tell me, as much as you can remember, about those ‘nasty things' your mother said after she stood up.”

When he finally lifted his head, his eyes were bleak. “It's all so hazy, but I remember her telling me to go away and never come back, to just go live my life and not come bothering her again. She called me a ‘useless piece of deadwood.' Then she slapped me and ran away. She musta died in the construction yard. Or in the house. And it was all my fault because I hit her.” His shoulders began to shake with such ferocity I feared he might fall off the chair.

Before he became completely unglued, I said, “If your mother died inside, not on the street, how did her body wind up a half-mile away? You see, Jonah? You couldn't have killed her.”

His eyes turned wild. “Don't remember, don't remember, don't remember! But I hit Mommy and she died. I killed her for my own purposes, out of my own weakness, not as a pure act of Blood Atonement. I'm unclean! I deserve the flames of Hell, not Prophet Joe's Army!”

With that, over the laughter of the Aryan Brotherhood folks, he shrieked for the guard.

***

Upon exiting from the jail, I took my cell phone from my vest and called Sylvie Perrins at Scottsdale PD. “Jonah's so-called ‘confession' is full of holes, Sylvie, confabulated out of bits and pieces of half-memories. Hell, he didn't even hit her, she just fell down. The last time he saw her she was still alive and headed back into the compound.”

An exasperated sigh. “That's not what he told us. He said he picked up a rock or some wood—he's not sure which, but the medical examiner says it was a piece of wood—and beat the shit out of her. His description was pretty graphic, too, detailed to the nth. Once she went down, he said, he grabbed her by the hair and kept slamming her until her head caved in. He even described the gurgling noise she made as she lay dying. Not only do we have his signed statement to that effect, but we've also got the whole interview on video. Before you ask, no coercion was involved. Hell, he couldn't wait to tell us all about it. You've been out of the department for several years, Lena, and it's obvious you've gone gullible, especially where screwed-up kids are concerned, but here's what's really happening. Now that the little punk has seen what a nasty place jail can be, he's had a change of heart and wants out. He's working you, girl.”

“Jonah's not working me, Sylvie. He simply didn't kill his mother. And he couldn't have transported her body from the scene of the crime to where I found her, because he didn't have a car.”

“That john who picked him up might have helped move the body.”

“Shouldn't you be looking for the john, then?”

“We are. But unless the county attorney says otherwise, we've got enough to take to court even if we don't find the guy.”

“Enough? Please. Where's the murder weapon, then? The one he can't seem to remember was vegetable or mineral?”

“We're looking for it.”

When a cop's mind is made up, it's made up. Especially when she has a signed confession and videotape in hand. Further conversation being pointless, I murmured a polite goodbye and rang off.

Jonah was his own worst enemy. Neither Prophet Shupe, Ezra, nor even Celeste had thought him valuable enough to keep around, so the boy was doing his best to prove himself worthy of their low opinion. Sociologists had a name for it: the self-fulfilling prophecy. Unless someone intervened, the kid's downward spiral would continue until he was either shanked in custody or died on the streets.

In a way, Jonah almost reminded me of Dean Orval Nevitt, although on paper, the two couldn't be more different. Before being overwhelmed by schizophrenia, Nevitt had been a science major at UCLA, while Jonah, like so many church-schooled polygamy kids, probably had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education. Both young men dragged woundedness around with them like a ghost its chains. Their clumsy attempts to free themselves pushed others away. Nevitt's escape was to submerge himself in fantasies about Angel; Jonah escaped to drugs.

Earlier, Madeline had asked how, given such pain and evil in the world, I could continue on in my chosen profession. At the time, I'd given her the easy answer, but now that I'd stopped to think it through, the answer was obvious.

How could I not?

***

The traffic was fierce in downtown Phoenix, so I skipped the scenic route and rode the interchanges back to Desert Investigations. Instead of stopping by the office, I went upstairs to my apartment. Madeline wasn't there, but she'd left a note.

GONE TO ARTIFACTS.

TALK TO YOU WHEN I GET BACK.

LOVE, M

As I set the note down, Madeline walked through the door wearing a conservative black pantsuit and carrying a slide case. The only thing that screamed “artist” was the bronze and silver necklace hanging halfway to her belt. A close look revealed stylized rabbits doing what rabbits are famous for.

“Stacy Halford at ARTifacts, had opened for a private client, and after he left, she agreed to look at my slides,” Madeline said. “She liked them a lot, so we might do some business. I also set up some appointments for later on in the week.”

“Business with pleasure.”

She gave me a hug. “Pleasure at seeing my little girl again comes first.”

“Little? I've got two inches on you now!”

We chatted for a few more minutes, until I realized that despite her good news, she hadn't smiled once. “Madeline, is something wrong?”

Here came the smile, although it didn't make it all the way up to her eyes. “I don't know. I've just got a funny feeling.”

“Funny how?”

“Like something's, well, off.”

On my way home from the jail, an element of unease had nudged at the back of my own mind, too, but I hadn't been able to access its source. Normally when I felt this way, I'd either jog or go to the gym and work out until the hard exercise cleared my head enough for the problem to reveal itself. But for now, I hated to spend more time away from Madeline than absolutely necessary.

An idea came to me. “Come to the gym. I have a guest pass that's good for three visits, and you probably need some exercise after that long plane ride and then sitting around talking to me for the past couple of days. I can loan you some workout clothes.”

“Gym? Workout clothes? Sorry, kid, but I share Woody Allen's feelings about exercise. When the urge hits, I sit down until it goes away. You forget that I've been walking around Scottsdale all morning. Other than that, the only muscles I'm really interested in exercising are those in my painting hand, and they're already in fine shape, thank you very much.”

She then turned the conversation to the current state of art across America: the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. Amused by her tales of art frauds and idiocies, I let myself be swept along. If I hadn't let her steer me away from the unease we were experiencing, things might have turned out differently.

For both of us.

Chapter Sixteen

After an hour or so regaling me with tales of her adventures in the art world, Madeline developed the itch to start drawing again. She followed me downstairs to Desert Investigations and positioned herself by the big plate glass window, the better to sketch the tourists strolling by. A few minutes later, however, she tossed her sketchbook aside.

“I can't get into this,” she grumped. “They're all dressed like they buy their clothes at The Gap.”

She herself wore a turquoise wig, paint-spattered cargo paints, and an orange shirt that proclaimed
Stolen From the Department of Homeland Security.

“Sounds to me like a trip to one of the museums is in order,” I said. “How about the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art? It hadn't been built when you lived here before, and it shows plenty of weird stuff. Piles of dyed plant pollen surrounded by machine parts, that sort of thing. Should be right up your alley.”

She shook her turquoise head. “My feet still burn from all that walking I did yesterday. Maybe I'll play a few video games on Jimmy's computer. Think he'll mind?”

“He's a sharer. The individual games aren't password protected, so if you log on with PIMAGAMZ, you'll get your choice of around fifty.”

With that, she settled herself at his desk and fired the computer up. Within minutes, beeps, bangs, and war whoops muted her chuckles. While she was happily occupied, I turned to my own less happy thoughts: who killed Celeste?

Regardless of Jonah's obvious problems, I didn't believe he'd killed his mother, and I was determined to prove it. But how? In ordinary investigations, I would simply interview everyone involved in the case, but with the polygamists hiding behind locked gates, my usual modus operandi would be impossible. Then, remembering my stake-out at Frugal Foods, I wondered if it would be possible to get one of the women alone. If so, who should be my target? Big Dog Opal appeared happy with her place in the polygamy hierarchy, but Darnelle—who'd challenged her over the choice of cooking oil—probably wasn't. Josie, the petite blonde, had appeared the most tractable of the trio, but her probable retardation made her an unlikely candidate for serious questioning. In between fielding phone calls and sending out billing, I mulled over the problem until, just before five, Jimmy walked through the door, looking weary from his long day at Southwest MicroSystems.

I waved, but Madeline greeted him with, “Hey, Cutie!”

Okay, Jimmy was handsome enough with his mahogany skin, russet eyes, and well-defined features set off by the curved Pima tribal tattoo arching over his temple. But
Cutie
?

Jimmy wasn't much on nicknames, so I expected a scowl. Instead, a big smile spread across his face. “See you found my game stash.”

Her smile matched his as she hit ENTER; an onscreen Sioux warrior swung his tomahawk at General George Armstrong Custer. “I didn't know there were such things as Native American video games.”

“Indian kids have computers, too. Plus Game Boys, Xboxes, PlayStations, Wiis, and all the rest. By the way, it's
Indian
, not Native American.
Anyone
born in this country is a Native American, which includes you and probably Lena. Most of us red folks prefer the ‘Indian' designation, regardless of Christopher Columbus' confusion.”

“Consider me corrected.” With a nod, Madeline hit ENTER again and Custer went kersplat. “Score one for the good guys.”

“We scored considerably more than one that day.” He proceeded to tell her the Indian side of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, which differed considerably from the U.S. Army version. Madeline responded with appropriate “oohs” and “aaah.” Their relaxed camaraderie surprised me. She was so Bohemian, and Jimmy…Well, Jimmy was Jimmy. My business partner. My friend. My almost-brother. But Jimmy wasn't quite thirty, and Madeline was, what, almost sixty? What could they possibly have in common?

Fortunately, Madeline derailed this odd train of thought before it could get too far down the track. “Lena, Jimmy tells me he hasn't eaten since breakfast, and he's willing to pop for an early dinner. How about it?”

My carnivorous heart dropped. “Vegetarian cuisine?”

“How about Casino Arizona, over on the Rez?” Jimmy suggested. “Plenty of veggie dishes for the pure at heart, but for you and me, the whole barnyard.”

Since my targets wouldn't show at Frugal Foods until ten, I readily agreed.

Casino Arizona was less than a ten minute drive from Desert Investigations, on the western edge of the Salt River Pima/Maricopa Indian Reservation. Designed to resemble the maze in an old Pima creation myth, the casino's exterior was circular. Inside, it contained the standard gaming offerings, but also a showplace theater, and a restaurant so esteemed by the gourmet magazines that even non-gamblers drove over from Phoenix to partake of its Indian/Southwestern fusion offerings.

With Madeline in mind, we opted for the enormous buffet. While she piled her plate with veggies, Jimmy and I snuck over to the roast beef on the cutting board, with a stop at the seafood bar along the way.

As we chatted over dinner, my earlier suspicions about the two proved wrong. My foster mother, never able to have children of her own, had such strong maternal leanings that she naturally gravitated to people decades younger than herself. While she sat next to me, her hand constantly touching mine, her eyes yearned after the small children in the dining room. Why was it that some women, brutal women, foolish women, even women who knowingly married violent felons and child molesters—like one of my other foster mothers had done, to my grief—could pop out one child after the next, while decent, loving women like Madeline could not?

Nature was pitiless.

While I nibbled on a fat shrimp, I asked, “Madeline, once you were cancer free, why didn't you adopt?”

“I tried a few times, but with my health history, the more trustworthy agencies turned me down,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Since I didn't have the funds to go to China or Malawi or any of those other places people are adopting from now, I started doing volunteer work with children at the crisis nurseries. Sometimes art therapy, sometimes I just held them while they cried.”

“Art mirrors life,” Madeline had once told me, as she tried to coax me into painting away my nightmares. Perhaps if I'd been able to stay with her, that particular form of art therapy might have worked, and I'd be a more content woman today. As it was…

I remembered the way her canvasses had looked then, huge oils bursting with color and light. Madeline had never been a fan of realism, believing that with the invention of the camera, the purpose of art needed to evolve from the mere representational to visions less hindered by what was popularly perceived as “reality.” The best contemporary art, she'd explained, portrayed an object's
inner
life, not confining itself to the object's outward shape. Her own bright canvases revealed her own psyche: spontaneous explosions of pure joy.

“They're all about you, my pretty little Lena,” she'd once said, while I gazed at them. But even then I knew that the paintings were about the great heart of Madeline.

I thought back to the slides she'd shown me yesterday. Blacks. Grays. Browns. The brightest color had been small smears of muddy ochre, as if shadows threatened to eclipse the light that struggled to break through.

Art mirrors life
.

I put down my fork and hugged her.

“What was that for?” she asked, surprised.

“For saving my life.”

Without my memories of her unconditional love and the belief that it might someday be found again, I might never have overcome the horrors that followed once I'd been removed from her home.

She hugged me back. “It was nothing.”

“It was everything.”

***

After dinner, Jimmy and I switched cars. He drove my too-recognizable Jeep home to his trailer on the Pima rez, while Madeline and I climbed into his Toyota and went back to my apartment. We spent the next couple of hours at the kitchen table, guzzling decaf and talking about the past, with me editing out the rougher segments of my life. She didn't need to carry that burden.

During one of my more edited tales, she interrupted me. “That's all very interesting, but I'd like to know if you're ever going to do anything about those nightmares of yours.”

I looked toward the Mr. Coffee, wondering if I should fire up another pot of decaf. “What nightmares?”

She put down her cup. “Oh, sweetie, I could always tell when you were lying, because when you did, you looked away. Besides, last night I heard you crying and talking in your sleep. I got up to comfort you like I always did, but you stopped before I reached you. So I went back to bed and let you sleep.”

With Madeline in the bedroom and me on the sofa, I'd thought she wouldn't be disturbed by my always-troubled dreams. Apparently I'd been wrong. “Could you understand what I was saying?”

“Mostly the same sorts of things as before. Riding on a white bus. Seeing your father in the woods surrounded by a group of crying children. Your mother, with the gun in a hand.” For a moment she didn't meet my eyes. When she finally could, she asked, “Did you ever find out what really happened that night? It's hard for me to believe that a child as trusting and loving as you came from an abusive home.”

Trusting and loving when she knew me, maybe, but the next foster home changed everything, possibly forever. Warren's face flickered briefly through my mind; I made him go away. “No, Madeline. I never did. My memory was probably clearer then than now.”

She rose to pour herself another cup of decaf, bringing the pot—the evening's second—down to the halfway mark. Upon sitting back down, she said, “Not necessarily. Remember, you were still recovering from the damage your brain had suffered, and much of the time the things you said didn't make sense. Oddly enough, considering that your mother shot you, the worst of your dreams were centered around your father.”

“What did I say about him?”

When she answered, her dark eyes were troubled. “That he was dead. That he'd been shot to death along with the rest of them.”

The hairs rose along my arms. “
The rest of them
? What did I mean by that?”

“You were never specific. I contacted your social worker and he checked with the police, but there'd been no report of any unsolved killings that matched your descriptions. Not in Arizona, not in any other state.” Her eyes shifted to the scar on my forehead. “But you'd been shot. No doubt about that.”

When Jimmy and I had dug through years of Arizona newspaper microfiche, we'd struck out, too, which had made me wonder if whatever tragedy my dreams revealed might have happened somewhere else. And perhaps they'd happened in secret and were never reported. But that didn't make any sense. How could numerous people, most of them children, disappear off the face of the earth without someone noticing? It was so unbelievable that I was tempted to believe my nightmares were merely dreams, with no grounding in reality.

But I couldn't believe it. “Tell me exactly what I said. Don't leave anything out, even if it doesn't make sense.” With a shock, I realized that I'd demanded the same thing from Jonah.

When she took another sip of her coffee, her hand shook; so much for the process of decaffeineation. “It all came in bits and pieces, you understand. You were only around four when you were shot, so your power of recall—even in dreams—was short on hard facts. For instance, you never mentioned where those shootings took place, or what time frame they happened in, so neither the social worker nor the police had anything to go on. You just talked about everyone being in the woods—your mother, your father, and all the other people, whoever they might have been. And you seemed to be describing a series of shootings, not just one event. There was the shooting on the white bus that almost killed you, but before that, several shootings in the woods. You mentioned something about bodies being dumped in a big hole, or maybe it was a quarry. I couldn't be sure. While you were mumbling about all this in your dreams, you'd cry about all the dead people.” Her already-troubled eyes grew more so. “You cried the hardest over the children.”

My god, what had I seen?

“Another thing.”

“What?”

“One day, when Brian was playing some old ‘78s on my stereo, you began to sob. It was the first time I'd ever seen you cry while you were awake. In fact, you cried so hard that I had him put the album away.”

“Which album was it?” Although I suspected the answer.

“Something by John Lee Hooker, you know, that blues guy. And the song was, ‘Will the Circle Be Unbroken.' At first I thought the subject matter might have been the problem, you know, families separated by death. But before the album got to that particular cut, you'd already approached the turntable and were staring at it with the oddest expression on your face. Lena, could your father have been a musician?”

Not long ago I'd had a dream so real I knew it was an actual memory: my father stood near microphone, playing guitar, while to his side John Lee Hooker himself growled out “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

“Probably,” I answered. “Maybe even a blues musician, a guitarist. Jimmy and I searched through Hooker's discography to see who John Lee's regular backup players were, but we never found anyone whose name meant anything to me. Looking through old pictures on the Internet didn't help, either, because most were publicity shots. The photos taken at the little dives John Lee played at earlier in his career tended to be of such poor quality that most of the musicians around him were little more than blurs. I'm guessing my father was just a local guy who sat in on a set for that one appearance, the one I remembered.”

Her eyes lightened with hope. “But it gives you something to go on, right?”