Desert Lost (9781615952229) (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

Jail food must have agreed with him, because Jonah looked healthier than the last time I visited. Three squares for seven days had filled out his face, and his withdrawal tics had eased. After telling me about the compound's installation in Scottsdale almost a year earlier, and how he and a cousin had wound up on the Phoenix streets, he launched into a long tirade about Hiram and Ezra Shupe.

“I musta been as stupid as people been saying I was, because I really believed Prophet Shupe was The Living Presence of God on Earth 'cause he says he is, but after a few days in here and hearing what other people got to say about shit like that, I been thinking it's all a crock. Ain't no God, least not one here on Earth, just liars trying to get everybody else's women and money. Brother Ezra, he's just as bad, even meaner than the Prophet. Maybe he's the one killed my mother. Otherwise, how come my little shove killed her? Yeah, I shouldn't a shoved her, and anybody who hurts his momma needs to go straight to Hell like I'm gonna go, but after she fell down, she got right up and seemed okay, wasn't even bleeding. Maybe Crazy Al's right, that it takes a lot more than a shove to kill somebody, even a woman. Is he telling the truth, Miss Jones?”

Since I didn't know Crazy Al, I couldn't trust his interpretation of how much force it took to kill someone, but I trusted the medical examiner's findings enough to reassure Jonah of his innocence. “The M.E. found wood splinters in your mother's head, so the chances that you killed your mother just by pushing her down are slim to none. When I found her, she'd been beaten repeatedly. Remember, you may have given her that shove in front of the compound, but I found her body a half-mile away.”

He shook his head. “That ain't right. Last time I saw her, she was going through the gate, back to that pig Ezra.”

“More proof that you didn't kill her.”

“You swear?”

I raised my right hand. “Swear.”

I gave him a few minutes to cry it all out. Even though his cold-hearted mother had rejected him, Jonah still loved her. His language might have taken on the roughness of the times, but deep down he was still little more than a scared kid who belonged in a remedial reading class, not hustling his ass on the streets. As soon as his tears subsided, I repeated my previous offer of assistance. All I needed was a statement from him that I could take to his court-appointed attorney.

“You tell me what all you want me to say, and I'll say it.”

I held back a sigh. When someone was raised on lies, they lost the capacity to distinguish between fact and imagination, so for the next few minutes I held a crash course on the differences between “I saw” and “I think.” “Tell me
only
what you actually saw with your own eyes. Then we'll go into what you've heard and you suspect. For starters, who might have had a grudge against your mother?”

He looked appalled. “Ain't no one hold a grudge against her! My momma was the kindest, sweetest person ever lived!”

To my way of thinking, kind, sweet women didn't abandon their children just because someone ordered them to, but I wasn't about to say that to Jonah. He felt miserable enough. “Even mothers can have enemies. How about Ezra? Or the rest of the God Squad? She ever have a run-in with any of them?”

“Mama always did what she was told. She stayed sweet, like a good wife should.”

Stayed
sweet
, a polygamist's term for an obedient woman. For all his recent experiences on the street, Jonah still saw the world through a polygamist's eyes. As for the
wife
bit, according to Arizona law, Celeste was no man's wife. She'd never actually been married to either Prophet Shupe or his brother Ezra. Polygamists didn't bother with little details like marriage certificates and state-sanctioned ceremonies, which was why they were usually able to evade bigamy charges. Not that Jonah knew the difference. All he knew was that when the Prophet gave a girl to a man, the girl was that man's wife—until the Prophet changed his mind again, which he so frequently did.

“How did your mother get along with her sister-wives?”

“Perfect.”

“No spats?” I remembered Opal, and her heavy-handed rule over Darnelle and Josie. “Say, over cooking oil?”

“What goes on in kitchens is women's business, not men's.”

“Let me be more specific. How'd your mother get along with Opal?”

“Perfect.”

“With Darnelle?”

“Perfect.”

“Josie?”

“Perfect.”

It was hopeless. The boy remembered only what he wanted to remember. Now that Celeste was dead, he had transformed his mother into an impossibly perfect creature who'd never drawn a disagreeable breath. A woman myself, I knew what hogwash that was. The situation reminded me of the Kurosawa film,
Rashomon
, the story of a rape and murder told through the individual points of view of the people involved: the woman, the bandit, the woodcutter, and with the help of a psychic, even the murdered man. Each person related the events differently, and in the end, the audience was left to puzzle over the ancient question—what is truth?

I brought the conversation back to Ezra, his mother's putative husband. There I struck a nerve. Jonah ranted about Ezra's treatment of his women and children, pausing at one point to describe a particularly nasty beating after Darnelle inadvertently spilled a glass of milk. If Jonah was being straight with me, and I believed he was, he'd witnessed enough violence to support charges of domestic abuse. The women would probably deny they'd been beaten, but the tape Jimmy had made of Prophet Shupe hitting Darnelle might mitigate those denials. In this state, a woman didn't have to press charges against her batterer for the state to prosecute. Of course, getting a conviction when the woman refused to testify was always problematical.

More promising were the names Jonah gave me of the companies that regularly used Ten Spot Construction, and by doing so, employed underage workers. That would bring the Feds in, and the Feds were always interested in prosecuting sources of illegal income.

The best part of my jailhouse visit was in securing Jonah's promise to start cooperating with the investigation. “I'll even talk to the cops right now if you want,” he said.

“Let's hold off on that for a while. I want to call your attorney first and relate this conversation. Then we'll work on getting you out of here.”

Before bringing the interview to a close, I attempted to engage the boy in a discussion about his après-jail release, where he might go, where he might stay. His plan, he told me, was to return to the apartment where he'd been staying with a cousin and several other young men. When I pressed for an address and his cousin's name, he turned cagey.

“Ain't about to bring Mesh…him into this mess. He got enough trouble. I been helping take care of him, and I'm gonna keep on doing that.”

While Jonah's loyalty to his cousin was admirable, it wouldn't fly with a bail bondsman. I knew there was no apartment, no real address. According to the cops, he'd been squatting in an abandoned building with a group of other street hustlers. When I explained this to him, he just shrugged.

“I'll come up with somethin'. Last time I saw her, Mama told me, ‘Jonah, you're old enough and smart enough to take care of yourself.'”

Later, when emerging from the fluorescent-lit jail into the soft twilight, I realized that the more I learned about Celeste, the less I knew her.

But I'd already decided this much: I didn't like her.

Chapter Twenty-four

“You sure this is the right time to be doing this, Maddy?” Jimmy, crammed into the back of my Jeep as we cruised along SR-60, couldn't get over the fact that only two days after Madeline had been kidnapped, she was determined to drive out to the property near Florence Junction.

“The desert is a natural tranquilizer,” she answered.

“Bet you didn't feel like that when you woke up naked out there,” I said, sharing Jimmy's concerns. Madeline needed to be back at the apartment recovering her senses. Not that her senses appeared addled. To the contrary, she exuded a Zen-like calm, as reflected by her tee-shirt-of-the-day which proclaimed, “WHATEVER.” Its orange background clashed hideously with her turquoise wig.

We were headed toward the property Jimmy said his cousin might consider selling to “the right buyer.” In Arizona-speak, that meant he'd sell only if the prospective buyer was an un-annoying type who loved the wide open spaces as much as he did. As we sped along, tall saguaros whipped past us, their arms lifted skyward. In the distance, lavender mountains thrust themselves from the wild-flower dotted desert floor. The March rains had encouraged a profusion of blooms, and vast fields of beavertail cactus sprouted their gaudy pink flowers as a carpet of yellow cream cups and purple owl flower crept toward them.

“Looks just like a painting,” Madeline said.

“Not
your
paintings,” Jimmy grumped from the back. “All those grays and browns. Talk about muted.” He'd only seen Madeline's recent work, not her earlier bright canvases.

Still that beatific smile. “My palette might be broadening soon. Especially if I move out here.”

A while back, we'd passed a desert nursery, where various species of cacti uprooted by storms and construction were stored until they could be sold. Other than that, we hadn't seen any signs of human habitation for miles, unless you counted the big E-Bar-B Ranch sign and the barbed wire fencing that snaked along its perimeter.

Just as I began to think we might have passed the sale property, Jimmy called out, “There! That dirt road up ahead on the left. Pull in.”

I saw only a faintly-visible double rut ending at a deep arroyo. “But it peters out at the wash.”

“Which is why Ernest wants to sell.”

“To the right buyer,” Madeline amended.

I pulled onto the abandoned road. After we'd descended from the Jeep, we stood there enjoying the sweet desert air and spectacular view, which except for a large barn at the far end of the property, continued unhindered all the way to the mountains. The property was as pretty as Ernest had described it over the phone. Saguaros, prickly pear, and cholla dappled the ground. By a happy chance of nature, even more wildflowers bloomed here than at any of the spots we'd passed, perhaps because cattle never got the a chance to gobble up the seedlings.

“Paradise Lost,” I said, thinking of all those hungry cows.

Madeline laughed. “For me, it's Paradise Found.”

“
If
you don't sleepwalk into that arroyo and break your neck.” Jimmy walked over to the edge of the new ravine carved out by last winter's unusually torrential rains. Ending at a culvert under the highway, the deep fissure began several hundred yards to the northeast, where it had been birthed by the main arroyo that snaked to the west. Between those two sometimes-rivers lay this isosceles triangle of land with the highway at its base. Both ravines looked so perilous that Jimmy's cousin had erected a double thickness of barbed wire to keep his cattle from falling in.

As I scanned the landscape, I noticed the lack of houses, trailers, or any other signs of human habitation. “It's awfully lonely out here, Madeline. Would you feel safe?”

A wry smile. “There I was in your apartment, in the middle of beautiful downtown Scottsdale, minding my own business, and thus—at least theoretically—perfectly safe, when all of a sudden three masked men broke in and…”

I sighed.

“You see, Lena? Safety is relative, not absolute. Now let's check out that barn. It's the right size for a living space-cum-studio.”

In a phone call the evening before, Ernest Sisiwan had told Madeline that the barn, which he'd built last spring, had originally been meant for hay storage. But then the rains came, cutting it off from easy access to his ranch. One-and-a-half stories high and with a good-sized loft, the barn was now little more than an empty rectangle resting on a cement foundation.

“It even looks like a studio,” Madeline said. It was obvious her mind was already made up.

A few minutes later we were in the sprawling living room of the E-Bar-B ranch house as Madeline went over paperwork with Ernest and Bess Sisiwan.

“No new construction,” Ernest said. “All you can do is fix up what's already there.” Due to his Anglo mother, his face wasn't quite as dark as Jimmy's. His children's faces—I counted five, ranging from a toddler to a pre-teen—were even paler, due to their own Anglo mother. Bess Sisiwan, a cheerful thirty-something with auburn hair, appeared thrilled at the prospect of getting rid of the unusable tract, especially given the amount of money Madeline was prepared to pay. Contingent upon the sale of the New York house, of course.

“I need lots of glass on the barn's northern exposure.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Ernest rumbled, making a note on the contract. Like Jimmy, he was a big man with a soft voice.

“And I'll want to put sealant on the wood siding to keep it from rotting.”

“As long as you don't paint it purple, you have my blessings.” Another note.

The property turned out not to be as isolated as we'd thought. The Sisiwans' ranch house was less than a mile away, although hidden on the other side of a gentle rise and further disguised by a row of cottonwoods. If for some reason Madeline ran into trouble, help was just down the road. And if she became lonely, the Sisiwans said she could drop by any time, although she might get drafted to haul around a few hay bales.

“To the side of that desert nursery you passed on the way here, there's a small coffee shop where the locals get together,” Bess added, pulling a fussy toddler onto her lap.

Madeline looked up from the contract she was studying. “What locals?”

Bess smiled. “Oh, you'd be surprised how many of you artist types live out here.”

At that, Madeline signed the contract without further ado.

***

After dropping Jimmy off at his trailer on the Pima reservation, Madeline and I continued on to my apartment above Desert Investigations. Within minutes she was on the phone to a New York real estate broker friend. While they talked, I realized it was time for me to straighten out my own living situation.

The relationship with Warren being effectively over, it was time to return the few things he'd left in the bedroom closet: a pair of jeans, two tee shirts, an expensive-looking silk sport coat. Then there was the key to that damned Paradise Valley house; it still dangled on my key ring. I folded Warren's clothes into one of the unused packing boxes I hadn't yet carted down to the Dumpster, started to punch in his number on my cell, then killed the call. Just looking at the sport coat brought a lump to my throat. Best to get things over with.

I called out to Madeline, “Be back in an hour.”

She look briefly, gave me a wave, then returned to her phone conversation.

The sun reached its zenith as I steered up the narrow road leading up to the house. Pool parties were in full swing, including—as it turned out—at Warren's place. But no children's voices floated over the pool fence to me, just those of several raucous adults. Were the twins inside? I'd miss them, I belatedly realized. Well, it couldn't be helped. Perhaps I'd be able to see them after one of
Desert Eagle
's production meetings.

I shifted the carton into one hand and used my key to open the pool gate. “Warren, I brought…”

I stopped.

A bikinied blonde with impressive breasts lounged on a chaise next to Warren. The fact that she vaguely resembled me didn't make the moment any less painful.

When Warren's eyes met mine, there was no apology in them nor any accusation. He'd already moved on. It was time for me to do the same.

“I brought your things,” was all I said.

“Including the key?”

I held it up.

“Good. Leave everything there.”

I started to say something, then stopped. Warren's love life was his to handle as he pleased, but I hadn't realized he'd get started again so quickly.

.