Phoenix Noir (6 page)

I took out my cell phone and snapped as fast as I could while everyone’s attention was distracted. The blood in the water was beginning to eddy away from the floating body.

I nodded to Chloe.

“Be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

I stepped behind a pair of palm trees, and hit 1 on my speed dial.

“Paulie?” I said, low-voiced as I could over the artificial falls. “Where are you?” She was supposed to be at Scottsdale and Shea, shooting a traffic accident; if she was still there …

“Kolodzi?” Her voice was outraged. “Are you calling me from the men’s room? That’s just
gross
!”

“No. Get this—10236 North Forty-eighth Street. Body in the pool.” I saw the fresh-sawed stubs on the palm tree by my face and had a brain-wave. “There’s a ladder lying on the ground out front—” The Mexicans had been trimming the palm trees; I’d seen the dead palm fronds on the curb. “It’d be a killer shot from the roof.” And maybe the cops wouldn’t see her before she got it.

The click in my ear coincided with silence; somebody’d turned off the falls. I pocketed the phone and rejoined the party.

One cop was missing; so was the Mexican woman. The palm tree trimmers were edging slowly toward the side of the house, eyes focused on the cop talking to Cooney. The little blond boy had joined Chloe on the lounger—not willingly.

“I wanna
see
!”

“Knock it
off
, Tyrone! Mom’ll be here any minute! Get back here, I said! The cops are gonna put you in jail if you get
near
that pool!”

“Aw, will not, fuckface!”

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I said. I don’t have kids myself, but I have nieces and nephews. I learned the Voice of Doom from my siblings.

Tyrone gave me a startled glance.

“Siddown,” I said, in the same tone of voice.

He did, muttering “Crap” under his breath.

“See?” his sister hissed at him.

Sirens were coming. I could hear the roar of a fire engine over the scream of an ambulance. 911 was taking no chances.

A minute later, the pool gate clanged open and four EMTs charged in, intent on rescue. One grabbed a pool skimmer and began trying to snag the body with it.

“Hey!” The cop grabbed his arm. “The guy’s
dead
, god-damnit! This is a murder scene!”

“He’s not dead till a doctor says so,” a female EMT informed him.

“Back off!” He’d wrestled the skimmer away from the EMT and stood with it braced like a quarterstaff, daring any of them to mess with his body. “He’s fuckin’ dead!”

“He will be if you don’t let us get him out of there!”

“What. The. Fuck. Is. Going. On. Here?” said a voice behind me. Whoever it was had a pretty good Voice of Doom too; it cut through the argument like a hot wire through ice cream.

I turned to see a tall blond woman in a sun hat, Hawaiian shirt flapping open over a white bikini. Chloe and Tyrone’s mother; the breast implants must be hereditary.

“Cooney!” she barked. “What are you doing? What’s—” She caught sight of the guy in the pool and stopped dead, her mouth hanging open far enough for me to see that one of her molars was gold.

Cooney came trundling over, sweating and apologetic.

“It’s okay, Pammy—”

“Don’t call me Pammy! Who are you?” she demanded, swiveling a laser eye on me. “Are you in charge here? Who’s that in my swimming pool?”

“Tom Kolodzi, ma’am,” I said, offering her a hand. “Do you know the man in the pool?”

“Of course not!” she snapped, taking my hand by reflex. Hers was cold and damp and covered by a latex glove. She let go fast, peeling the glove off with a snap. “Sorry. I was drowning squirrels in the garage.”

“Squirrels?”

“Ground squirrels,” she said through her teeth. “They eat the goddamn plantings. Are they going to get that—him—out of the pool?” Her eyes kept sliding toward the water, where the body had resumed its dead man’s float. Another siren—police, this time.

Slamming car doors and a radio crackle, and the brass was with us. The homicide lieutenant didn’t glance at me, and made short work of the EMTs, who retreated, muttering, under the edge of the patio roof, from which misters had begun to spray. The Mexican tree trimmers had evaporated during the cops’ confrontation with the EMTs. The scene-of-crime people arrived on homicide’s heels, and a police photographer was taking shots of everything in sight, including me and the squirrel-killer. I wanted to look up at the roof to see if Paulie had made it, but didn’t want to draw attention to her if she had.

The dead guy beached, flotsam in a navy-blue wool suit. Everybody leaned forward to look at his face—not least, Pammy.

I was looking at her, and saw the blood leave her face and her mist-on tan go yellow. Saw her glance, laser-sharp, at Chloe. Chloe’s mouth fell open, and her mother grabbed her shoulder, fingers digging in, before she could squeak.

“Take your brother in the house, darling,” Pammy said, in a pleasant mommy voice. “He doesn’t need to see this, and neither do you.” Chloe nodded like a robot, and took Tyrone’s hand. He didn’t resist; he’d seen the dead guy’s face too, and was the color of skim milk.

Nobody looks good soaking wet and dead, but this guy probably wasn’t a
GQ
model on his best day. Maybe fifty, with a good-sized gut, long strands of graying hair on a balding head. Weak chin, and a nose that was trying to make up for it.

There was a little black hole in his shirt front. The shirt was white, pasted to his body; I could see the curly black hairs on his chest through the cloth. I looked away in time to see Cooney, who was talking to one of the plainclothes people, glance in my direction and shake his head with a puzzled frown. Time to go.

The dead guy’s chest filled the screen of Paulie’s Mac. The black eye of the bullet hole sat in a vortex of water-swirled chest hair. She zoomed in so all you saw was the hole, then pressed something and the picture went from black-and-white to full color.

“Guh!” said MaryAnne, recoiling.

“Isn’t that cool?” Paulie asked me, ignoring the editor. “See the shades of blue all around the hole?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Really cool.” It was, but my stomach agreed with MaryAnne, who had clamped a hand to her mouth.

“We can’t run that!” she said, removing the hand and then putting it right back.

“I know, I know,” Paulie said impatiently. “Don’t worry, I got plenty more. Thanks for the tip, Kolodzi,” she said, giving me an eye. “I almost died of heatstroke on that roof, but it was worth it.”

She looked like she’d been boiled alive, even after an hour in the chill of the newsroom, but she’d used her time well.

There were some prize-winning shots of the body in the pool, as well as close-ups of Chloe, Cooney, Pam—several focused on her chest—and a heartbreaker of Tyrone, looking small and stricken and not saying “Crap.” Still better, Paulie’d heard everything said on the pool deck.

“Nobody knew the dead guy—or that’s what they said. But look at this.” She tapped a key and a soggy white rectangle popped onto the screen. A zoom in and I could see it was a wad of stuck-together business cards.

Howarth ap Gruffydd, PhD
, one read.
Director, Llangeggel-lyn Botanical Institute.

“Damn,” said MaryAnne. “What the heck is a Welsh botanist doing dead in Cooney Pratt’s swimming pool?”

“Maybe the gardener did it,” Paulie speculated. “He’s gone.”

“What, one of the guys with the ladder?” I asked.

She shook her head, cheeks sucked in to get the last dregs of Mr. Pibb through her straw.

“Nope, those guys were door-to-door palm tree trimmers. You know—cash only, and probably illegal.” A good bet, given the way they’d faded at the sight of the police. “There’s a regular yard guy, though; a guy named John Jaramillo. He should have been there today. But he wasn’t.” She popped the lid off her cup and tilted it up, sloshing ice.

“The cops asked for his phone and address, of course,” I suggested. She gave me a smug look and held out her arm. She’d scribbled the numbers with what looked like eyeliner.

Harvey, the new intern, came hustling in, a sheaf of printouts in hand. I’d sent him to do a quick search on the Pratts.

“I sent a lot of stuff to your e-mail, but I thought you’d like these … Jesus, is that guy dead?” He goggled at the screen, where Paulie’s best shot of Dr. ap Gruffydd had replaced the business card.

“No, it’s a YouTube video of Hillary Clinton after the Democratic primary,” MaryAnne said. “Can’t you tell?”

I made Harvey give me the quickie version on the Pratts, which he did, pausing occasionally to gape at the screen, where Paulie and MaryAnne were busy choosing shots.

Cooney Pratt was a real-estate developer; he’d made his money bulldozing desert and putting up tract homes, having either the good judgment or the luck to get out before the housing market collapsed. Pam was his third wife, occupation: housewife.

“No shit,” I said, eyeing a close-up of Pam’s chest before dropping my gaze back to the paper. The Pratts were rich
and
social; there were several shots of Pam, veneers gleaming, arms linked with two or three other low-cut ladies, laughing their heads off in support of some worthy cause. Harvey had helpfully compiled a list: the Pratts were benefactors of everything from the Phoenix Symphony to the Desert Botanical Gar—

“The Desert Botanical Garden?” I looked up and Mary-Anne’s eyes locked with mine. I shrugged; why not? Where else would you expect to find a botanist?

They had three of the pictures I’d sent from my cell phone up now, discussing which one to use.

“That one,” MaryAnne said, pointing. She had one eye closed, the other squinting. “What if we zoom it?”

“Crap up close is just close-up crap,” Paulie said, shaking her head. She zoomed it, though. Her hand hovered for an instant, then dropped again to zoom out.

“Maybe the other way? Yeah. Yeah, that’s better.”

The shrinkage didn’t improve the definition, but the picture now was arresting. The body hung like a jellyfish, doing its dead-man’s float in the midst of a distinct red nimbus.

“Jesus,” I said. MaryAnne was making approving noises, and Paulie took my remark as praise for her artistic acumen too, but that wasn’t why I’d said it. I sighed.

“Subpoena time.”

Paulie put a possessive hand on the computer in reflex.

“Run it first,” I said, and she relaxed a little. “But I have to call; the cops can estimate time of death from that.” I touched the screen, at the edge of the blood cloud. “Look. I don’t know if he drowned or died from the gunshot, but if it was the shot, it didn’t kill him right away. He bled a lot after he went in the pool.”

“So?” said MaryAnne.

“So you put any liquid in any other liquid and don’t stir it, the first liquid will still move—slowly—at a constant rate. Diffusion?”

From wariness to blankness. I sighed.

“You can figure out what that rate is, roughly. The pool water wasn’t disturbed until the waterfall came on; the cloud of blood was intact—and you can see the edges of it in the photo. So you can tell about how long it would have taken for blood to spread that far through the water after it stopped pumping out of Dr. ap Gruffydd.”

“They teach you that in the Boy Scouts, Kolodzi?” Mary-Anne asked.

“High school physics. We need to give it to the cops,” I repeated. “You want to do it, M-A? Or me?”

She shook her head.

“You. They’re gonna want to talk to whoever took the picture. See if you can trade it for an unofficial time of death. Then see if the Desert Botanical Garden is missing a visiting botanist. Fast.”

I didn’t see a patrol car in the DBG parking lot, but a small knot of employees was clustered between the Membership table and a glass-fronted Admissions booth, talking excitedly—the cops were here.

“Director’s office?” I asked the woman at Membership, polite but authoritative. “I’m here about Dr. ap Gruffydd.”

She was flushed from the heat, but pinked up even more with excitement.

“Oh! Oh. Yes, of course. I think they’re all at the main office, that’s up behind Dorrance Hall—go past the cactus and succulent houses and turn right, there are signs. Oh, no—wait!” She snatched a sheet of little purple stickers, each one adorned with a butterfly, and affixed one carefully to my lapel. “There you are.”

I thanked her, and flashing my purple butterfly at the gate, went in. It wasn’t just the employees who were buzzing; the trees were full of cicadas, and the whole place hummed like it was electrified.

A big thunderhead passed over, and I breathed shade, grateful. The monsoon rains were coming, but not here yet. I passed the cactus and succulent houses, side-by-side series of huge metal arches covered with steel mesh, and wondered whether they were a lightning hazard; I could see the flicker of heat lightning over the Superstitions to the east.

I shucked the jacket I’d worn to impersonate authority. My shirt was sweat-soaked, but dried almost instantly; clouds or no clouds, the humidity was maybe six percent. Yeah, it’s a dry heat. Meaning that instead of being poached when you walk outside, you’re flash-fried.

I turned up the Quail Path and blinked at something—a cactus? It had stickers—that looked like an orgy of underfed octopi, skinny bewhiskered tentacles writhing over twenty square feet of ground and up into the branches of the nearest tree. And that wasn’t even the weirdest thing I passed.

The administrative offices were in a discreet building above a little café with an enclosed patio. I was about to crash the party when I caught a glimpse of the Scottsdale homicide lieutenant from the Pratts’ pool deck and went down to the café instead.

I bought a bottle of water and asked the girl behind the counter if she knew where Dr. ap Gruffydd’s office was.

“Oh, are you with the police?” she breathed, excited. “Isn’t it just
awful
?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you know the doctor?”

“Oh, not really.” She looked torn between regret and relief. “He’d only been here three months or so, and he wasn’t around most of the time because he kept going down to Tucson to see people about orchids—the Mexican government wouldn’t let him go in anymore, something about his visa, so he’d have these orchid hunters come meet him at the border.”