Desert Wind (16 page)

As soon as I could speak, I asked, “And she’s still sane?” more rhetorically than anything else.

“Two-day stay in the hospital following the rape, then back to job, she even wrote about the rape, campaigned for better lighting and a heavier police presence in the neighborhood. She got what she wanted and the instance of sexual assaults dropped. During the terrorist attacks, she continued to work that story, too, even after she found out her fiancé had been killed. She filed an article a day for twelve days, and didn’t take a day off for two months. At Christmas, she took a week’s vacation and came back to Silver Ridge for a week, stayed with a distant cousin.”

“But she’s not staying with her family now.” I frowned, thinking hard. Olivia was working the Black Basin Mine story; I’d already seen evidence of that.

Misreading my expression again, Jimmy said, “Families are odd creatures, Lena. They can hold tight during a crisis, then split apart over something minor.”

Like Jimmy’s.

Time to change the subject. “I was thinking about the mine, not families. Did you get any info on Nancy Donohue?”

It was his turn to frown. “I’m haven’t gotten to her yet, but I will.”

“See if you can find out what kind of insurance policy her husband carried.” I described Nancy’s threadbare furniture and the duct-taped recliner in the den.” I left out her cold heart.

“Sounds promising,” he said. “She wouldn’t be the first woman to kill for money.”

Due to the darkening sky, most people had deserted the park. I checked my watch. Visiting hours at the jail began in twenty minutes.

“Let’s go,” I said. “Can’t wait to start standing in line.”

After I’d stowed my .38 and my digital recorder in the Trailblazer’s glove compartment, we climbed the stairs to the government complex, where my joking premonition proved true. Because most people visited their loved ones after dinner rather than mid-morning, the check-in process took much longer than it had this morning, and by the time we reached the actual visitor’s area, visiting hours were almost over. Also thanks to the later hour, I saw more family visitors—spouses, grandparents, and children—visiting their loved ones. Children being children, some loudly voiced their displeasure at being told to sit down and shut up while Mommy visited Daddy. Fortunately, no screamers sat next to us, just an elderly couple on one side, and a weeping woman on the other.

I’d already warned Jimmy that I had some hard questions for Ted, so conscious of the time constraints, I kept the greetings to a minimum and started right in. Keeping my voice low enough that the kiddies wouldn’t hear, I said, “Ted, did you have an affair with Mia Tosches?”

Behind the Plexiglas barrier that separated us, his eyes flickered from me to Jimmy, who kept his eyes down. I could tell from my partner’s posture he was unhappy with my directness, but the fact that he kept his mouth shut meant that he knew more frankness was called for.

Ignoring my question, Ted asked Jimmy, “Been to see Dad lately? He seemed stressed when he visited this morning.”

“Oh, he’s…”

I cut in. “Ted, look at the clock. We don’t have time for idle chit chat.”

He ignored me again, asking Jimmy how well the head wrangler, in this case, Dusty, was handling the tourists in his absence. Jimmy neither reframed my question or changed the subject. No expert in interrogation, he simply reminded Ted that he hadn’t yet visited the ranch, but planned to do so tomorrow.

All this deflection was to be expected. Indians, even those raised in non-Indian families, weren’t big on discussing their sex lives; they felt it was the height of vulgarity. Squirming with impatience—the clock in the visitor’s room was ticking down—I asked my question again. Again Ted ignored me. Keeping his eyes on Jimmy, he said his attorney had told him there was a possibility that this “material witness stuff” might be made to go away.

“Ted, please,” I pleaded. “We’ve only got ten minutes left.”

For all the good that did me, I could have been turning somersaults on the moon. Ted continued pretending I wasn’t there, kept yakking at his brother about the ranch, the horses, the dudes, the weather.

Until I’d had enough. “Hey! Look at me and tell me the truth. Did you screw, fuck, or whatever, Mia Tosches?” This time I didn’t bother lowering my voice.

Ted, who like most Indians, never used vulgarities, finally looked at me. “Lena, please!”

“Cut the crap. I’m going to sit here and recite every synonym for ‘fuck’ I can think of until you tell me the truth. Bone, hump, schtup…”

Jimmy, another clean-mouther, lowered his head and moaned softly.

“Did you play hide the kielbasa, respond to her booty call, screw…”

Ted raised his hands, as if to ward off demons. “Lena! Watch your…Oh, heavens, your language. There are children present!”

“Knock boots, do the wild thing, the mattress mambo, get lucky, grab some ass…”

“We only did it once!” Ted yelled so loudly that most people in the visitor’s room turned to see what was going on. The older kids looked thrilled.

When I smiled and waved, everyone except for the teenagers went back to minding their own sad business, and I returned to mine: questioning a reluctant client. Lowering my voice, I said, “Good thing you fessed up before your brother here fainted. Now that we’ve got the schtupping out in the open, tell me, why just once?”

“Because she was married!” Ted hissed.

“She was married the first time you screwed her.”

“You don’t understand. She…she…”

I could see where this was headed, so I cut him off at the pass. “If I hear one more man whine about some woman whose evil wiles overcame his own innate purity I’m going to puke. As soon as I’ve finished puking, I’ll resume my list of synonyms. Look, Ted, I’m not asking for a detailed account of who did what to whom, however entertaining that might be, but I want to know how the situation started and how it ended. I especially want to know why after your romantic interlude, Mia Tosches now hates you enough to lie to the cops about that altercation at the Gas-N-Go, which is what got you locked up in the first place.”

Admission finally made, Ted explained what led to their encounter, but the tale he told wasn’t much different than those I’ve heard before. After several weeks of group riding lessons at the ranch, Mia requested a private tutorial. Since giving private lessons to the folks living in Sunset Canyon Lakes was nothing new, Ted hadn’t given this a second thought.

“I should have been more alert when she said she wanted to work on her trail riding skills,” he admitted. “Most private lessons are given in the ring.”

“So you took her out on the trail. Then what?”

He tensed again, then lowered his head and mumbled, “Well, you know that bend by the river, where the trail veers away from the road and there’s a bunch of cottonwoods that…?”

“Don’t know it, don’t want to. Hurry this along. I still have a few synonyms left.”

A deep inhale. “When we reached the cottonwoods, Mia said she was feeling dizzy and needed to dismount and could I help her. So I…” He swallowed.

“You jumped down, helped her dismount, I get it. And you stayed real close, so you could catch her if she fainted, right?” I wasn’t being sarcastic. When I’d first met him at that pow wow, Ted carried an air of gallantry that I’d found refreshing in this jaded age.

“Something like that. She kinda slumped against me so I put my arms around her, you know, to hold her up, but…”

“But things progressed from there. Because she’s really hot.”

“Yes.” He stared at the floor as if something fascinating was going on down there.

“Okay, so after the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ what happened?”

“We, uh, we got back on the horses and rode back to the ranch.”

I could imagine the conversation they’d had along the way, but I had him repeat it as well as he could remember. It was always possible that she could have been so het up by his wonderfulness that she’d confessed all her sins.

Still staring at the floor, he said, “She told me she wanted another, uh, private lesson next week, well, that would be this week, wouldn’t it, but I said I was busy. She didn’t want to hear that, kept pushing and pushing, so I finally had to tell her that, um, what happened had been a mistake, that she was a wonderful person and under other different circumstances I’d want to see her again, take her someplace nice like she deserved, but since she was married that our, uh, that this had better be the end of the, um, private lessons.”

“Her response was?”

“She said I’d be sorry.”

Mia told the truth there. Ted was sorry. Sorry for his moral lapse, sorry for the clumsy way he’d handled the aftermath, and especially sorry he’d wound up in jail separated from his family and his job. Regardless of all that sorry, he still sat on the other side of a thick Plexiglas partition, waiting to be hustled back to his cell. Not that I was being judgmental. I’d done plenty of stupid things in my own life. Everyone has, and most of us get by with it—at least on this wicked Earth—but Ted’s fall from grace had resulted in consequences that hardly fit his crime.

“This happened on what day, Ted?”

He finally looked up at me, but it took an effort. “Last Wednesday. I was so worried about what she might do to get back at me that I drove around all night, thinking. The next night, too. That’s the real reason I don’t have an alibi.”

“Did you drive up to Sunset Point, by any chance?”

“No. Basically, I just drove around in the desert. There are some roads out there you can handle if you’re in a big truck or a four-wheel drive vehicle. I remember being out by Mitten Mesa for a while.”

“Anything else?”

“Sorry. That’s about it.”

Jimmy, tired of letting me do all the talking, said, “Didn’t you say Dad visited you this morning?”

Ted nodded. “And every morning, regardless of what’s going on at the ranch.”

An expression of sorrow briefly crossed Jimmy’s face. Ted was the favored son; Jimmy only tolerated. Their conversation returned to small talk and remained that way until an announcement came over the loudspeaker that visiting hours were over. With relief I headed out the door, leaving Jimmy behind to say an extended farewell. While the other visitors surged through the lobby, I sat down on a bench and waited.

People with the rare good fortune to never have had a loved one or friend incarcerated tend to type those families as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals or, during their more compassionate moments, victims of downward genetic drift. But that’s hardly the case. Besides committing murder, thievery, and mayhem, everyday men and women could wind up in jail for sundry non-violent crimes—failure to pay parking tickets, lewd language in public places (here’s looking at you, kid), even mouthing off to a police officer who was having a bad day. None of these encroachments against the public good said anything about the quality of the offenders’ families, all of whom were swept along with them for the bumpy ride through the justice system. This included spouses, children, parents, extended families, friends, and employers. Passing by me were red-eyed women; elderly folk in wheelchairs, their hands shaking with palsy; children asking why Daddy couldn’t come home with them; and morose parents wondering where they’d gone wrong.

Another reason I hated jails was because by their very pre-trial nature, the innocent bunked with the guilty, addicts were incarcerated instead of treated, and the scum of the earth mingled with folks who’d merely been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As the glum horde passed by, I noted a sheriff’s deputy in the hallway ushering them into the night. Tall, sandy-haired, big smile. Friendly and outgoing, he nodded to the elderly and chucked the children under their chins. He looked familiar, but at first I couldn’t figure out where I’d seen him. He wasn’t one of the officers I’d dealt with on my earlier trips to the jail. Then, when he grasped a wobbly senior by the arm to steady him, it clicked. Officer Smiley Face was the bully in the park.

While I was still assimilating this, Jimmy appeared beside me. “Did anyone ever tell you you’ve got a dirty mouth?”

“Look at that cop,” I whispered. “The one by the door.”

Jimmy’s back stiffened. “Oh, no.”

“Let’s get out of here, but don’t catch his eye. In case his wife does wind up asking for help, we don’t want him to know we’re connected to Ted.”

We separated before approaching the door. Solitary blonde, solitary Indian, nothing but the old same old. Blonde with Indian, memorable. Our caution paid off, because at the door, the deputy winked and said to me, “Pretty night, isn’t it, ma’am? Almost as pretty as you.”

I nodded and said to a well-dressed woman beside me, “Hope it cools off soon, don’t you?” I hoped he’d think I was with her.

“Damned desert never lets up.” The woman blotted her face with a lace-bordered hanky. “I miss Oregon.”

I continued our casual comments as we walked down the steps. At the curb, too late for the bully cop to notice our separation, she headed for the parking lot while I found a place in the shadows and waited for Jimmy.

“That poor woman,” he said, after arriving at my side.

Yes. That poor woman. Few cops are batterers, but those that are can find themselves protected by fellow officers who in other instances are admirably quick to enforce antibattering laws. In the first place, cops are good at covering up their own violence because they’ve learned from the pros. But even when cop buddies can’t help but notice, other factors can come into play. As a former cop myself, I know how much we have to rely on our partners, because we so often battle life-and-death situations together. It’s the us-against-them mentality, and when you’re that close, you can ignore an instance or two of bruised knuckles. The person riding with you in the squad car is the same person watching your back when you enter a drug den where shots are being fired.